Paris Is Always a Good Idea (26 page)

“Don't give up, Monsieur Sherman,” Cathérine had whispered furtively to Robert as they parted. “My daughter is sometimes a little difficult, but she has a heart of gold.”

The woman with the heart of gold was visibly nervous when they parked that Saturday outside the white villa with the dark-green shutters at about four o'clock. And Robert himself felt a certain excitement. He was holding his big leather shoulder bag with the two manuscripts in his lap. What was awaiting him in this house? Was there something his mother had concealed from him?

Rosalie pulled a little too hard on the hand brake and took a deep breath. “So, this is where it gets exciting.
On y va!
” she said, nodding to him. “And, as I said, leave the talking to me.”

“Okay, okay. You don't have to tell me every two minutes.” They got out and walked through the front yard. The gravel crunched softly under their feet; the air was warm and smelled of grass. In the distance they could hear the hum of a lawn mower. A bird twittered. A perfectly normal Saturday afternoon in Le Vésinet on a warm, late-summer day in September. Outside the dark-green front door they looked at each other once more. Then Rosalie raised her hand and pressed the brass doorbell that was set into the wall on the right-hand side.

A bright
ding-dong
rang out from inside the house. Shortly afterward they heard light, shuffling steps and the clicking of walking sticks.

Max Marchais opened the door. His gray hair was combed back and his beard neatly trimmed. His face seemed to Robert to be a little more gaunt than in the author's photograph in the book. The eyes lay deeper in their sockets: the strain of the last weeks was clear to see.

“Rosalie—how nice of you to come.” He stood in the doorway, resting on his crutches, and gave her a warm smile. Then his eyes looked toward Robert, questioning, but completely friendly.

“Oh, you've brought someone with you?” He took a step backward to allow them in.

“Yes. I'm sorry. I … I didn't know how to explain it to you on the telephone,” said Rosalie. “This is Robert, a … a friend of mine … well, yes, he's become one, I mean … and we … we wanted … I should…”

She was floundering, and Robert saw a smile flash across the old man's face.

“Oh, please, my dear Rosalie, that's no problem at all. You don't have to explain anything. I have eyes in my head, even if my eyesight is beginning to go.” He looked Robert up and down with obvious approval. “Your friend is naturally just as welcome here.”

Robert saw that Rosalie was about to protest, but the old man had turned round and was walking gingerly on his crutches in front of them toward the library. The big glass sliding door of the living room was open, and on the terrace they could see a table set for coffee, shaded by a big white umbrella.

Marchais went out onto the terrace and waved them over.

“
Venez, venez,
there will be enough cake for everyone. Excuse me, but I must sit down. I'm still a bit shaky on my legs. I'm sure Rosalie has told you about my unlucky accident.” With a sigh of relief, Marchais sat down in one of the wicker chairs, propping his crutches against the table.

Hesitantly, they followed him. Robert looked challengingly at Rosalie, but she just shrugged her shoulders and hissed something at him that was probably meant to be “soon!”

“So: you're Robert. Are you American?” asked Marchais guilelessly after he and Rosalie had also sat down. He looked toward Robert, who was sitting opposite him, and Robert had to admit that the tall bearded man—though at the moment looking a little helpless—had at first glance something about him that encouraged you to trust him.

Uncertain, he looked quickly over at Rosalie, who was sitting between him and Marchais and wasn't saying anything. It looked as if he was going to have to do the talking after all.

“Yes, that's right,” he answered firmly. “I'm Robert. Robert Sherman.” Good grief, he sounded like some kind of imitation James Bond. He watched Marchais attentively: his face showed no visible reaction. “I think Rosalie has already mentioned me to you.” From the corner of his eye he saw Rosalie, who had just picked up the silver coffeepot to pour the coffee for them all, involuntarily freeze.

“Sherman?” The old man shook his head. He obviously didn't remember. He took his cup and raised it to his lips. And then he suddenly put it down, as if he'd choked. “Sherman—you are Sherman?” he repeated, and a deep furrow of anger appeared between his silver-gray eyebrows. “You are the impertinent American who accuses me of plagiarism and wants to sue me?” He sat up in his wicker chair and looked at Rosalie in annoyance. “I don't understand.… What does this mean, Rosalie? Why have you brought this madman to my house? Are you trying to insult me?”

“Hold on a moment! No one here is mad, Monsieur Marchais. I certainly am not,” interrupted Robert. “We just have a couple of questions for you. And anyway, I have the original manus—ouch!” With a pained expression Robert reached for his left shin, which had just been given a violent kick under the table.

Marchais looked in confusion from one to the other as Robert rubbed his sore leg and Rosalie turned fiery red.

“I can explain everything,” she said.

Marchais stared at her incredulously. “Are you going to tell me that you've taken up with this guy?” He shook his head in disbelief.

“No … yes.” The color of Rosalie's face changed astonishingly quickly. “It's not what it looks like,” she said cryptically.

“So what is it then?” asked Marchais.

As if to gather strength for the long explanation that was to follow, Rosalie hastily took a large gulp of her café crème. Then she put her pretty cup with its fine flowered pattern firmly down on her saucer.

“Monsieur Sherman's manner may occasionally be a bit presumptuous—but he is definitely not mad,” she began. “He's simply looking for the truth, because the story of the blue tiger connects with him in a very … well … personal way.” She cleared her throat. “And as far as this whole story is concerned, we have come across some … um … more than puzzling factors.”

“We? Are you now in cahoots with this ignorant American to collect evidence against me?” Outraged, Max Marchais took a deep breath, looking contemptuously at Robert.

This guy Marchais can be really arrogant,
thought Robert.
Typical Frenchman. They always think they're better than everyone else. God knows why.
He found it hard not to intervene, but Rosalie gave him a pleading look.

“So do you also now doubt that I wrote the story?” Marchais laughed in disappointment.

She shook her head. “Not at all. I am even absolutely certain that you wrote it.” She nodded in the direction of the library. “On the old Remington that's there on the cabinet, wasn't it?”

Marchais narrowed his eyes and frowned. You could see the whole business working on him. Finally he looked at Rosalie with a displeased expression.

“So that was you! You typed that text on my machine? I don't understand what this is all about. What sort of stupid game are you playing with me? I'd like an explanation. At once!” He slammed the table with the flat of his hand.

They'd thought of everything as they so hurriedly left Marchais's house, fleeing Madame Bonnier—but they'd forgotten that sheet of paper, thought Robert. Marchais must have been quite surprised to find it.

“I have to confess something to you, Max,” said Rosalie. “That day when I brought you your things in hospital I came back here later, because I'd found something that I had to show to Robert. We were in your house, Max. We got in through the terrace door.”

And then she told him—not in strictly chronological order—about the events of the past three weeks.

How Robert, after his first appearance in her store, had come back once again. How he had told her about his mother and the fact that she had told him the story of the blue tiger every night when he was a child. About the typewritten manuscript he had in his possession. About the box that had fallen off the wardrobe, and how she'd found the carbon copy. How she'd suddenly realized that the dedication could not have been for her, Rosalie (at this point Marchais blushed a little); how she'd called Robert and they had later compared the two manuscripts in the library. That they were completely identical, and that they'd then had the idea about the typewriter. “And that's how we established that the story had been written on the old Remington.”

Rosalie nodded to Robert, and he took the two manuscripts out of his bag and put them beside each other on the table. Then they both looked at Marchais, who was sitting intently in his wicker chair and had grown ever more silent.

“Why didn't you say that this story had been written many years ago? Why did you let me believe that the dedication was for me, Max? It took a while, but when Robert finally told me his mother's name, I understood at last whom the story was actually meant for.”

Marchais stared fixedly at the two manuscripts without answering. Then he turned to Robert.

“And what is your mother's name, may I ask?” His voice sounded fragile.

“Ruth,” he replied. “My mother's name was Ruth. Ruth Sherman, née Trudeau. And I found the original manuscript among the papers she left me.”

“Among the papers … she
left
you?” The old man was clearly taken aback. “Does that mean she's no longer alive?”

Robert nodded, once more feeling the tightness of the throat that still affected him when he talked about his mother's death. “She died earlier this year. At the beginning of May. A few days after my thirty-eighth birthday. She had cancer. It all happened so quickly.” He gulped and smiled sadly. “As things do in life. She'd always wanted to come back to Paris with me. To the Eiffel Tower. I was there with her once, you know, as a little boy. And then all of a sudden it was too late.”

Marchais turned pale. He was silent for a while and his gaze went blank. His eyes, which in the sunlight suddenly seemed almost glassy, were focused on a point that seemed to lie far off in the depths of the garden. Beyond the hydrangea bushes, beyond the old stone wall, beyond the little town of Le Vésinet, and perhaps even farther away. Infinitely far away.

“Ruth,” he repeated then. “Ruth Trudeau.”

He held his bent index finger to his lips and nodded several times.

Robert felt his heart beginning to beat faster.

“So you knew her?” Rosalie asked cautiously. “We've been wondering the whole time how it could be that Robert's mother never mentioned you, and yet the story of the blue tiger was so important to her. How did she come to have the story? What happened back then, Max?”

Marchais didn't answer.

For a few minutes they sat round the circular table without speaking—the golden-yellow tarte tatin remained untouched. It was as if time had stood still.

When Max Marchais cleared his throat, they looked up.

“They say,” he began, “that every episode of our lives, no matter how small, contains everything—what we have left behind us and what lies before us. So if you ask me what happened back then, I can tell you: Everything. And … nothing.”

He looked into Robert's eyes, which began to waver. “Yes, I knew your mother. Loved her, even. But it was only later that I realized how much.” He reached for his coffee cup, his big liver-spotted hand shaking unmistakably. “I had a bad feeling straight away when I brought the blue tiger back to life. But please believe me when I say that the story means a great deal to me as well. It could be that it was a big mistake to let it out of its old box. But perhaps it was the best idea of my life. Because otherwise you two wouldn't be sitting here, would you?”

Marchais seemed to have regained control of himself. He looked warmly at Rosalie, and then fixed his gaze on Robert.

“Ruth's son,” he said with a shake of the head. “I never thought I'd ever hear anything about Ruth Trudeau again. And now I'm meeting her son, who found
The Blue Tiger
in Paris purely by chance and is insisting on his rights to it.” He smiled. “In one respect you are actually right, Robert: it is not in fact my story.”

Robert and Rosalie looked at each other in astonishment.

“To be precise, I should never have published it. Back then in Paris, I gave it to a young woman as a gift—to your mother. That was a long time ago, and yet sometimes it seems to me as if it were only yesterday.”

 

Twenty-seven

That afternoon Max Marchais took a trip through time. It led him back to Paris in the seventies. To a young man who hung around in the cafés, smoked too many cigarettes, and earned his living as a freelance editor for a daily paper. And to a young American woman with blond hair and sparkling green eyes who had been sent to Paris for the summer vacation by her parents and who had a hopeless sense of direction.

Max himself was surprised by the onslaught of images that flooded his retinas. He was so caught up in his own story that he hardly noticed the looks of the two young people, who were listening to him spellbound.

“I got to know Ruth because she'd gotten lost,” he said. “I was sitting in a café not far from the rue Augereau, where I was living at the time in a two-room apartment on the fourth floor. It was really quite small compared with this splendid villa”—he raised his hand and indicated the house behind him with a smile—“but my goodness, what parties we had there. I often had friends there, and sometimes a girl, and when you woke up in the morning and looked out of the window, the first thing you saw was the Eiffel Tower looming in the sky a couple of streets away. That's something I never had later on—that magnificent view.” He leaned back, lost in thought. “Sorry, I'm getting carried away—if you start to conjure up the past, all these memories flood back.…”