The Wide World, page 39
Was the accent Dutch? Scandinavian? She spoke in short bursts. If François did not help her out, they would be there all day.
“You want to know whether the magistrate would be prepared to take your testimony anonymously, is that it? For your name to be covered by the secrecy of the judicial investigation…”
The young woman nodded.
“Who was with you at Le Régent, Nine?”
It was cruel, and it was intended to be, he wanted to discomfit her a little. But when she did not answer, it was François who felt embarrassed, so, to save face, he took out a notebook and a pen and laid them on the table. She did not watch what he was doing, she was staring at his face, she could not take her eyes off him. François was beginning to feel uncomfortable.
“Did you see something that might relate to the murder?”
“No, nothing! That’s why I didn’t go to the… You see…”
When she spoke like this, spontaneously, the accent was more noticeable, though still hard to pinpoint.
“And your… And the person who was with you?”
“Nothing… we heard a woman scream and we left the cinema as fast as we could, like everyone else.”
If François understood why Nine had not initially gone to the police, he had no idea why she had come to see him today. Nine blushed, and the fingers holding her cup trembled.
“Because of your friend?”
François could not resist coming to her aid once more. She nodded. The rest did not matter to him. Things had gone sour between Nine and her lover, the guilt of not going to the police had come between them, she wanted to rid herself of the burden.
Behind the counter, a waiter dropped a glass which shattered on the floor. “Fuck!” Like the other customers, François instinctively turned to look. The young woman also turned, but with a quick, wary movement, as if she feared being recognised.
“All right,” said François as she turned back to him. “I’ll go and talk to the magistrate and try to persuade him to keep your identities secret. But you do understand that your friend… that he will also have to appear before the magistrate?”
She understood.
My God, her eyes…
“If I can get him to agree…” François said.
“What if you can’t?”
“Then you stay in the background. Besides, if you have no new information about the crime, it won’t make any difference.”
“And if you can persuade him…?”
He wished he could say: “If I persuade him, you sleep with me, you spend the night with me.” The very thought of it brought a lump to his throat.
“What will I owe you?” said Nine.
A quid pro quo. François gave a half-smile.
“You can pay for the coffees.”
She seemed flustered. Every favour implies some form of recompense, but François was making it impossible for the young woman to pay her debt. They were both embarrassed. François got to his feet.
“Do you have a number where I can leave a message?” he said, dropping some small change onto the saucer. The situation was so awkward that she did not even offer to pay.
She hesitated, glancing towards the terrace then back at him, like someone who has considered a response but is still hesitant.
“If you don’t have a number or an address,” François said irritably, “you can call me tomorrow at the newspaper.”
He was furious that she had asked him for a favour and given nothing in return.
“You won’t have to compromise yourself.” He could not resist the barb.
She held out her hand. François took it reluctantly. If only to feel the touch of her hand, to take something from her.
37
The urge to hurt her
“Out of the question!” snapped the magistrate.
But he was disconcerted to see François calmly accept his verdict and head for the door.
“Wait,” the commissaire murmured in his girlish voice.
François paid him no heed and walked out.
“Stay where you are!”
The magistrate scuttled after him and caught up with him in the hallway, followed by the commissaire with his purposeful stride.
“This woman is obliged to give a statement! It’s… it’s…”
He searched for the word, turned to the commissaire who was unwilling to help him.
“It’s mandatory!”
“Very well,” said François, “go tell that to the witness.”
“But I don’t know who this person is! I’ve never met her!”
Again, he turned to Commissaire Templier for support but the officer simply stared at him, which made the magistrate all the more uneasy. François headed for the stairs.
“You can read her testimony in Le Journal…”
“Wait!”
Again, the magistrate hurried after him, this time overtaking François so he could block his path.
“You have no right!”
François glanced briefly at the commissaire, who was clearly amused by the whole episode.
“What exactly do you expect from their testimony, Monsieur le Juge? Here I am offering you the two missing witnesses on a plate. But these two witnesses were seated in the middle of a row.”
The magistrate screwed up his eyes. He pictured the cinema on the day of the reconstruction, the two empty seats in the middle.
“Do you really think they would force the whole row to get up so they could go and murder Mary Lampson?” François said. “Do you really think they might have seen what people sitting closer to the toilets missed?”
Juge Lenoir was at his most touching when utterly out of his depth. At such moments, his features took on the bovine bewilderment one might expect to see on the face of the archetypal village idiot.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” François said. “Le Journal will publish these witnesses’ story, making it clear to our readers that their names have been changed to protect their privacy. And you can read their witness statements at the same time as our readers.”
Once again, the magistrate realised that he was beaten.
The re-enactment at Le Régent had not been a success; the one with Servières had been a fiasco. The fates were against him.
He simply nodded. He could not even summon the strength to say the word “yes”.
She did not call Le Journal, instead she came to the office. François spotted her standing on the opposite pavement, nervously twisting the handles of her handbag. But this time she did not approach him, but waited for him to cross the street. She stared at him with that singular intensity.
“Excuse me…”
At the sound of her voice, François felt his stomach lurch.
“The magistrate has agreed to hear your testimony in camera,” he said, “and he has guaranteed you can remain completely anonymous.”
He could not help but add:
“Assuming that no charges are brought against you.”
“What do you mean ‘no charges’?”
“I know what you said to me. I don’t know what you plan to say to the magistrate.”
It was cruel, but he could not suppress the urge to hurt her.
“I’ll tell him exactly what I told you.”
“In that case, you’re fine.”
He waited but nothing came. Then, after a long silence:
“Thank you so much.”
About time too!
“You’re more than welcome. Goodbye.”
Mathilde had an authoritarian streak that François found infuriating. Beneath her apparent indifference, he thought, was an overbearing woman. It was sheer bad faith on his part. Mathilde simply wanted to have sex, and, as always at such times, she was very persuasive, as François knew from experience.
“I prefer your body to your mind,” she said. “It’s your body I’m talking to now.”
As she said this, she leaned over and François felt a rush of desire. He tried to pull away, but Mathilde interpreted this as flirtation. And she was not entirely wrong: François did give in, but that simply made matters worse, since Nine’s face floated between them, making any attempt to give up futile.
“Right,” said Mathilde, getting up from the bed.
She slipped on her skirt and her blouse, she smiled at him. None of this was of any great importance.
“I’d better be going.”
“Wait a minute!”
François pulled her close and she yielded to his embrace, squirming a little as she pulled on her coat and planted a kiss on his lips. As he watched her leave, he was not sure whether he was relieved, frustrated or sad; it was all very confusing.
In his mind was the last image of Nine, a woman who had given him only a nickname, he did not know her real name, nor where she lived. He knew absolutely nothing about her, and this fact served only to fuel his fascination. François was deeply frustrated. He felt caught between two mysteries: an enigmatic young woman and a set of indecipherable initials.
Things were spiralling out of control. He was still reeling from his brother’s brutal, disquieting death; Hélène had returned to her saturnine ways and was more irritable and more volatile than ever; his investigation into the piastre scandal had gone nowhere; and now Mathilde was clearing out.
She had brought along a bottle of Muscadet – “For afterwards!” she said – but it had not been opened. It would be lukewarm now, but François didn’t care. Not being much of a drinker, by the third glass his head was spinning.
He turned off the lights and lay down, the dark room pitched and rolled, several times he had to sit up to stop the room from spinning – was he going to throw up?
The image of Nine danced before his eyes. He wanted this woman so much it was ruining his life. He got up and walked around for a little, struggling to keep his balance. He was not drunk so much as lost. The image of Nine’s face gave way to the set of initials Étienne had given him, which he had desperately tried to decipher.
As often with men who think more clearly when they write, François had scribbled down the sequence of letters over and over, so often it had become an almost unconscious act. He pulled his notepad towards him and, having pouring himself a cup of coffee, set about writing them again: E, N, P, R, D…
“Shit!”
An inattentive gesture sent his cup crashing to the floor. He got up, fetched a sponge, wiped the floor and picked up the shards. By now, he was in a foul mood.
He sat down again and stared at the pad.
E, N, P, R, D…
The sudden revelation was like a slap in the face. His clumsiness over the cup had interrupted his flow, but now forced him to see the letters as a different sequence.
E, N, P, R, D.
He tried to remember what Étienne had said. “At least five public figures involved in the scam…” François struggled to marshal his thoughts. Who had told Étienne that these initials represented five people? Why had he jotted down the initials in groups of two – was it something that Étienne had said? Because if not, there was a different possible sequence: “E. N. – PRD.” and “F. A. – MSR”, and that was a very different kettle of fish.
Now that this doubt had occurred to him, and given that he could not precisely recall the brief, panicked phone call with Étienne, this new sequence suddenly seemed self-evident.
PRD: Parti Radical Démocratique.
MSR: Mouvement Social et Républicain.
Two political parties in government.
In an instant, François was rifling through the old chest of drawers where he kept various bits and pieces in a disorganised jumble. Somewhere in here was a Civil Service Directory. It was probably not up to date. Governments rose and fell – France was on its fourth government of the year – while ministers came and went in the blink of an eye. Even so, it might prove useful… François rooted through the drawers, taking out handfuls of documents he might just as well have thrown in the bin. He knew it was a long shot, but he wanted to be sure. He tipped everything out onto the floor. Searching sobered him up a little. Then, finally, he found it.
The 1946 Almanac. Not so old.
He wasted no time going back to his desk but sat cross-legged on the floor, feverishly reading through the list of members of successive government. It was a task that required a meticulous eye, something he felt ill equipped to deal with after a failed attempt at sex and three glasses of lukewarm white wine.
He was still thumbing through the pages when Hélène came home.
“Are you all right?” he said.
She looked deathly pale.
“It’s nothing, I’m just tired.”
A facile excuse. François went back to his almanac.
Hélène reeked of booze.
Everything was falling apart.
“What are you doing?” she asked, but seemed uninterested in his answer. She went to her room, threw her coat on her bed, then went out to the toilet where she threw up.
In the métro, there had been a man reading Le Journal. On the visible part of the page, Hélène had read:
NEW SMASH-AND-GRAB BY “PHARMACY GANG”
One dead in place des Ternes robbery
When Hélène did not come back from the toilet, François began to worry. He needed to do something. What the hell was going on?
Just as he was about to get up, he was stopped short by the line immediately above his finger.
Edgar de Neuville – Parti Radical Démocratique.
“E. N. – PRD.”
Edgar de Neuville, sixty-four, brief stint as Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs two years earlier, but as François read on he discovered that Neuville had spent a decade with the Department for Colonial Affairs in Saigon.
“What are you doing?”
Hélène reappeared, having rinsed out her mouth. There was a knot of fear in her stomach, but she tried to put on a brave face. What time was it? She glanced at the clock. Four o’clock. She had had no lunch, her stomach was empty and aching.
François read aloud:
“Félix Allard – Mouvement Social et Républicain. F. A. – MSR.”
Allard had spent five years as Secretary General of the French High Commission in Indochina.
Hélène peered over his shoulder.
“Is it to do with Étienne?”
François explained what he thought he had worked out. It was a curious tableau: brother and sister, both a little drunk, staring at a series of initials like some code they hoped to crack, a code that might have led to their brother’s death.
“I need to think,” said François.
He still felt unsure. Hélène’s face was pale and haggard.
“You’re not feeling too good, are you?” he said gently.
Hélène huddled close to him; she was shivering.
She fretted about the dead man in the place des Ternes pharmacy.
About Bernard de Jonsac.
Had she been involved? Everything was a blur.
“I miss Étienne so much,” she said softly.
François hugged her tighter.
38
Oh, what a shame!
François did not expect André Baron to sit on his hands after their brief conversation about private banks – he knew how jealously the man guarded his territory. What he did not know was where the counterattack would come from. Baron himself? Denissov? In the end, it came from Malevitz.
“Did you go to see Baron?” snapped the head of department. “What kind of bullshit are you playing at?”
His furrowed black brows gave him a satanic air that could be terrifying to those who did not know him. François had decided to say as little as possible. If this was a scoop, he was not about to let anyone take it from him; if it was nothing, he wouldn’t look like a fool.
“I’m working on something, but it’s early days.”
“Is it one for us?”
Although “us” referred to the general news desk, it could be heard as an extension of the “royal we”. Malevitz firmly believed that the news desk was the heart and soul of Le Journal, and in this he was not entirely wrong. The concept of “human interest stories” was one of the innovations Denissov had brought back from the USA. “Readers want stories they can identify with, stories about their lives – only worse,” was how he had put it. It was Malevitz’s job to unearth and write up the stories that regularly made the splash headline, the stories that captured the public imagination. As a result, Malevitz considered himself to be the heart and soul of Le Journal.
“Possibly,” replied François. “I’m not sure yet.”
This was the sort of answer every news editor despised.
“That’s tough, because it’s your job to be sure. So, if you’re not sure, you move on, got it?”
François shrugged defeatedly.
All right.
“Where are we on the Lampson story?”
This was the one story where Malevitz acknowledged that his junior was doing a “good job”. François had regularly managed to get stories that ran over several editions, and the other major papers had never managed to catch up. François explained to Malevitz that two of the missing witnesses had come forward, but he quickly added that it was a boring story of adultery between boring people and was probably not worth the column inches.
“On the other hand, Juge Lenoir did say something stupid,” said François. “But I don’t know if we can print it…”
“If we printed all the dumb shit that man said, we’d have him on the front page every day. What was it this time?”
It was a deeply unprofessional move from François; in an attempt to downplay the magistrate’s interview with Nine lest Malevitz decide to run with it, he was deliberately trying to amplify a minor detail.
“The last witness. The magistrate is convinced that ‘he’s our man’.”
François was truly gifted. This phrase “the last witness” reeked of printing ink. Malevitz’s eyes lit up.
The comment had been made in the judge’s chambers. Nine and her lover had already given their statements, and François had come to check that there was no new information. Secretly, he hoped he might get to see Nine, and especially her lover – he wanted to see the look on the man’s face.
