The Way I Found Her (26 page)

‘Oui?' he said.

I said it was Louis calling. I began to explain that there'd been a burglary in the apartment, but I'd hardly got started before I heard Carmody laugh.

‘We are the “burglars”, Louis,' he said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘We obtained the correct authorisation to search Mademoiselle Gavril's apartment. Her mother, Madame Gavrilovich, oversaw the operation and we assumed she had remembered to warn you and your mother. We have simply taken away the computers and some related material for investigation. It will be returned in due time, but we think it might yield some clues.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Are you sure it was you?'

Carmody laughed again. ‘Yes. Quite sure. I think we left everything tidy.'

‘No, you didn't,' I said. ‘You moved the furniture around and you left Valentina's shoes in a pile and you made soot come down the chimney . . .'

‘Oh, please accept my apologies.'

It pissed me off a bit that Carmody was mocking me. I said crossly: ‘How's my mother going to work without her computer?'

‘Don't worry,' said Carmody. ‘Her computer will be returned tomorrow.'

There was a silence then. I wanted to ask Carmody what the peculiar smell was in the apartment, but at that moment I thought, it might be some kind of chemical dust used in fingerprinting. If they'd dusted the vacuum cleaner and the polisher, they could have found perfect prints of Violette's hands.

‘I'm sorry you were frightened,' said Carmody after a while. ‘Are you alone? Is that it?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'm alone, except for Sergei.'

‘Who is Sergei?'

‘He's a dog.'

‘Ah.' Then Carmody cleared his throat and said: ‘Louis, where is your father?'

Alice came in at six forty-five. She'd been out for almost seven hours. She said she'd been reading in the Luxembourg Gardens. She told me she'd discovered they kept bees there, in little hives with pagoda-shaped roofs. She said she'd lost all count of time.

She found me in Valentina's room, going through her shoes and putting them all back, in pairs, into her wardrobe. Some of the shoes had a faint smell to them, of Valentina's scented feet. Some silver ones, in particular, and before Alice got in I'd lain on the rug in Valentina's bedroom with one silver shoe held to my nose and had an orgasm without touching myself, just by pressing against the carpet. I imagined her naked foot, with its scarlet toenails pushed into my crotch, rubbing me slowly. ‘Come on, darling,' she whispered, ‘come on.'

Alice helped me tidy the rest of the flat. She didn't know what I'd been doing on the floor of Valentina's room and I didn't know what she and Didier had done, out in their private sky. We cleaned in silence, not even talking about Carmody's untidiness.

When Alice knew her computer had been taken, she just said: ‘Well, they won't find anything in it – only Valentina's novel, as far as I've got with it.'

‘What else is on the hard disk?' I asked.

‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Absolute blank zero. Whatever was on there has been wiped.'

I watched her. Her nose and cheeks looked red from sitting in the sun. I thought, perhaps they made love in that park that's built on a mound of slaughterhouse bones?

When we sat down in the salon, I said: ‘Everything's getting frightening, isn't it?'

She sat on the Louis XVI sofa again. It was like she was trying to make the apartment hers. She put her freckled arms up behind her head and looked at me. ‘Do you want to go home?' she asked. ‘Do you think that would be best?'

‘No,' I said.

‘Perhaps I should talk to your father and see if he thinks you should go back to England?'

I knew that when Alice referred to Hugh as ‘your father', she'd put him into some far-away compartment of her heart, like he was a stranger in the street. I said: ‘I'm not going back till they find Valentina.'

‘I think Hugh may want me to send you back.'

‘Then don't tell him what's happened.'

‘We have to tell him.'

‘No, we don't. Not yet. Carmody told us to tell no one. We don't have to tell him till it's over.'

We neither of us knew what I meant by ‘over'. I stood by one of the windows, looking at Alice, watching her brain cells struggle with all the alternative meanings of this word.

‘In September, you'll have to go back,' she said.

‘So will you.'

‘Not necessarily. I may have to stay and finish the work. It depends on whether the book can be finished or not.'

This didn't seem fair to me: Hugh and I starting our school terms and Alice staying on in Paris alone with her lover. I said: ‘You can't do that. Think of Dad.'

‘I do think of him,' she said. ‘But Dad's very happy on his own. Can't you sense it in his letters?'

I said I thought he was only happy now because he was working on his project and because he had Bertie and Gwyneth with him. I said he was having a kind of second childhood, but in the autumn he'd have to be grown-up again and then he'd want us to go home. I expected Alice to say this was a stupid notion, but she didn't: she laughed loudly and brightly, like people laugh at old sitcom reruns on TV. Her laugh was like a bell, echoing all through the empty flat, trying to summon other laughter that wasn't there.

A wind began to sigh in the evening. In the streets, you could hear the café awnings rattling. On the pavement of the rue Rembrandt, I saw some yellow leaves flying along, like the ones I'd noticed at Nanterre, and when I went up to my room I felt more than ever like François, lying in his attic alone after Meaulnes has left, listening to the wind in the plane trees, except this was a warm wind and the wind at Sainte-Agathe always seemed to be cold.

At about one o'clock, I got up to pee. I didn't put on the light, but stood in my bathroom peeing by the reflected street light, and gradually, in the semidark, I became aware of a noise I'd never heard before: the door behind the clothes rail – the door to the locked room – was rattling.

I didn't flush the lavatory, but stood still, almost without breathing, and listened. It was as if the catch was loose in its metal socket, letting the door move very slightly, as the wind from the open window caught it. As I crossed the bathroom and moved aside the rail of Valentina's coats and dresses, I suddenly knew what I was going to discover: the lock had been forced by Carmody's men. And when I turned the handle of the door, it opened.

The attic was a junk room, just as Valentina had said. A lot of the junk must have come from the Gavrilovichs' café, long ago. There was a red-and-white awning, folded up. There was a huge Wurlitzer jukebox, an old billboard advertising Dubonnet, stacks of dusty bentwood chairs, an oven. But there was also a bed. The bed was against the wall, under the window, across which the curtains were still drawn. It looked tidy and ready for use, with a faded yellow bedcover thrown over it and a bedside table near it with a lamp and an ashtray. In the ashtray, there was a single cigarette butt, with a tipped end.

And there was a kind of pathway through the junk that led directly from the door to the bed. You could imagine the occupant of the room moving things around, so that he or she didn't have to step over the oven in the middle of the night. I didn't blame them. I'd never shared a room with an oven. I thought, that's one way to measure whether someone is poor or not – if they have to share their room with a kitchen appliance.

I crossed to the bed and sat on it and looked at everything. There were stacks of boxes round the walls and when I got up to examine them I saw that Carmody's guys had only ripped open a few of these and then given up. They contained a mountain of Valentina's books. On the covers were garish pictures of damsels wearing tall hats and knights in armour on white horses flying through dark forests in the moonlight. You could just hear the
brigadiers
from the commissariat sneering and saying: ‘Nothing here, Inspecteur. Only what appear to be medieval romances.'

And then they would have moved on, past a café umbrella stuck into a stone, a pile of red and blue curtains, two medieval-looking typewriters, a wire plant holder, a toolkit and a roll of carpet, to the Wurlitzer, where the titles of old songs, typed and numbered, were still faintly readable:
Chanson d'amour, La Bohême, A Whiter Shade of Pale, Que c'est triste Venise, Milord
. I stood by it, selecting numbers. But the records were gone and I didn't recognise any of the titles. I needed Valentina to tell me what they sounded like and which ones were her favourites in the old days of the Café des Russes.

I liked the Wurlitzer. I wouldn't have minded sharing a room with it. The body of it was a candy-pink kind of colour and you could tell it weighed about a ton. Hugh once said technological progress could be measured in weight alone. He said by the time I had children of my own, a CD player might weigh less than a daffodil.

I was wondering whether the Wurlitzer could ever be made to work again and where all the records had gone, when I noticed that on its pink body, on the left-hand side, there was a tiny little dial and a lever. I knelt down and tried to turn the lever. I thought that if they'd put this door on the Wurlitzer, the records might be inside. But the lever wouldn't move. Then I saw why. The dial was a combination lock. Valentina had turned the jukebox into a safe.

There was a tiny dusting of white powder, like talcum powder, on the floor directly underneath the lock. I assumed from this that Carmody had found it and dusted it for prints. What I couldn't tell was whether he'd worked out the combination and looked inside, where the plunder of Valentina's visits to Cartier must lie.

I began to spin the dial, trying combinations at random. In certain movies, safe-breakers can crack number codes just by putting their ears to the lock, as if the lock were a human voice whispering to them, but it's never explained to you how this works. The only kind of movies that I like are ones where you understand exactly how everything works. If I were a scriptwriter, I'd spend a lot of time on research into the material world.

When the safe didn't open and didn't open, I started to wonder how much Valentina's jewellery was worth. It had to be a lot. I thought I would say to Carmody that if a ransom demand came, all we had to do was blow the safe and hand over the jewellery. And then, when Valentina was back again, sitting at her dressing table while I brushed her hair and she put on her lipstick, she would say to me: ‘I think I shall wear the sapphire-and-diamond earrings tonight, darling,' and I'd tell her they were no longer there. I'd say: ‘We bought your life with them. You'd be in your grave now if it hadn't been for Cartier.'

I had a dream that Valentina
was
in her grave, but still alive, trying to breathe in the tiny bit of air between her nose and the coffin lid. I was digging in heavy, wet clay, digging with my hands trying to reach her. As I dug, I called out: ‘It's OK, Valentina! It's Lewis. I'm going to get you out!' But I kept on and on digging down and down and found nothing.

I woke up to the sound of hammering. I thought I was in my dream and the hammering was Valentina in her box under the earth, but then I realised it was morning and what I could hear was Didier on the roof.

It was quite early. I got dressed and climbed out of my bathroom window and I noticed that the wind had dropped and the trees in the street were still.

Didier was wearing a black T-shirt with an African mask printed on it. It didn't look faded like his other clothes, but brand-new, as if he might have bought it at the Richard Lenoir market. I thought, if Violette gets sent back to Benin, this is the kind of job she'll have to get – working in a T-shirt factory. I imagined her walking to work through miles and miles of dust.

I asked Didier why he hadn't been on the roof the day before. I watched him closely while he answered. He didn't take his eyes off the slate he was hanging. ‘I was ill again,' he said. ‘This flu keeps returning when I'm not expecting it.'

I didn't say: ‘I know that's a lie. I know you're having a love affair with Alice.' Instead, I told him my dream about Valentina in her coffin, and when I described her hammering on the lid he took off his glasses and wiped some sweat from his face. ‘What are the police doing about it?' he asked.

‘There was a raid,' I said.

‘A raid?'

‘Yes. They searched the apartment and took lots of things away. Everybody's under suspicion, including me and Alice. And you.'

When I said this, he put his glasses back on again and shook his head. I could tell he didn't believe a word I was saying. The clever bit of Didier's mind could see right through me. It could see far more of me than my mind could see of him.

And he didn't want me there, asking him questions. He seemed serious today, sort of sad or depressed or something. His bird tattoo looked as if it was breathing its last breaths as the pulse in his neck vein ticked. I thought, perhaps it's all over with Alice. It was Angélique who came along and destroyed it . . .

‘Who's Angélique?' I said.

‘Who do you think, Louis?' asked Didier, without looking at me.

‘I don't know. Your new girlfriend?'

‘My wife.'

I'd known this the moment I'd seen Angélique, but it shocked me then and it still shocked me. I should have been pleased that Didier-the-Bird wasn't all alone and free to snatch my mother away from her former life and break my father's heart, but somehow all I felt was disappointment.

I couldn't think of anything to say. I just hung about there, saying nothing, and Didier ignored me and worked on.