The Years of Fire (31 page)

He got up and left to make his last two deliveries. The fourth customer lived on rue Rachel, not far from La Fontaine Park. Charles walked quickly, since the distance was considerable and he was walking into a cold wind. A man with long, black hair carrying a package tied with string came out of a sidestreet and turned in Charles’s direction. As they passed, the unknown man gave him a crisp smile, vaguely menacing, exposing as it did the man’s long, yellow, widely spaced teeth. Charles stopped and looked after him, surprised. Why had the man smiled at him? Had he perhaps recognized a fellow criminal? Or had something amused him about the way Charles was dressed? He looked down at his clothes, saw nothing remarkable about them, and continued on his way, perplexed.

Ten minutes later he arrived at a two-storey building of grey stone fronted by a tiny square of grass, at the centre of which grew a young apple tree, already half bare of leaves. A long, curved stairway touched the top of the tree. He climbed it and rang the doorbell of an apartment on the second floor.

He waited for a moment, checking his list of addresses to make sure he was at the right place, then the door opened and a young woman stood before him. She was wearing a blue satin dressing gown and looked at him sleepily. She seemed to him the very embodiment of Scandinavian beauty, almost a cliché: long blond hair, blue eyes, straight nose, large mouth with prominent lips sensually curved. Only her slightly plump figure kept her from being the perfect Hollywood icon.

“I’ve come from René De Bané,” Charles said, intimidated.

“I know. Come in. I’ll get the money.”

Her voice, her pale, languid face, expressed such sweetness that he was frozen in place.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said, drifting into the somewhat sparsely furnished living room. “I was asleep.”

She disappeared. Charles stood in the doorway, looking about the room. Red sofa and chair, coffee table, candle-holder, all clean, modern lines. It looked like a photo in a decor magazine. The sanded hardwood floor, with no rug or carpets, sounded a note of sadness. Charles wondered if the extraordinary softness that seemed to dwell in this beautiful woman came from the drugs she was taking. Who could tell? He certainly wasn’t foolish enough to ask her.

She reappeared with an envelope in her hand, gliding lightly across the floor in the loose undulations of her dressing gown. He noticed her feet, shod in tiny pink slippers with tiny blue buckles; he imagined they were ravishing.

“I’m a bit short,” she murmured with a smile behind which lurked a tender supplication. “I’ll make up the rest next time, I promise.”

“All right, no problem,” he said, turning red, even though De Bané had
expressly told him never to give credit to anyone, even if he had to take back the merchandise.

He took the money.

“Have you been working for René a long time?” she asked, absently tightening the cord of her gown.

“Yes, long enough,” he said, lifting his hand to the doorknob, impatient to be on his way before his blushing became unbearable.

“Good night, and thanks,” she murmured, smiling again.

He went down the stairs and breathed in great gulps of fresh air, relieved to find himself alone again. He was one of her enemies, he told himself, and she was so kind, so gentle, so disarmingly vulnerable. No one was forcing her to take drugs, it was true, she’d made her own choice; but he was helping her to do it. And for what? For the most selfish of reasons: to make money.

A passage from a novel he had read a few months earlier came back to him suddenly, one in which a woman was compared to an angel. The image had made him smile. He’d found it exaggerated, sentimental, old-fashioned, almost ridiculous. He’d seen a few girls and women in his life, and none of them, no matter how desirable or gentle they had been, had made him think of an angel (assuming such a thing as an angel existed). Well, tonight that was exactly the word that came to mind. He felt as though he had just spoken to an angel, a fallen angel, true enough, and one that he was helping to keep down. He suddenly felt like returning to the apartment, giving her back her money and taking the envelope he’d given her, persuading her to give up the deadly habit that would surely ruin her life and hasten her death.

But he kept hurrying down the street, head lowered, eyes focused on the dead leaves, the cracks in the sidewalk, the bits of cellophane and plastic and paper that swept by and reminded him that everything was headed for dissipation and destruction.

He made the last delivery and was home by nine o’clock. Céline was just taking her coat from the hall closet to go out on an errand.

“Where are you coming from?” she asked him.

He usually liked the affectionate, open smile she always gave him, but tonight it seemed tense, and her eyes were worried. Was his face betraying his thoughts? Had Henri been talking to her? Surely not. There was no reason for him to do so. But she sensed something was wrong, that much was clear. Sooner or later she would learn everything. Better that she learned it from him. “I’ve just come from killing an angel, Céline,” he said to himself. “It’s one of my favourite hobbies. And if you only knew how well it pays!”

“Where was I?” he said, looking away and taking off his coat. He paused, then said, “I’ll tell you one of these days.”

With Boff at his heels snorting with excitement, he went into his room, where his school books awaited him, and shut the door. He tried to concentrate on homework, but the Blond Angel kept appearing in his mind. In her own way she had made an impression on him as vivid as that of the Black Goddess when he was fourteen. But this time it was remorse that tortured him, not love. He had to talk to someone. Should he call Blonblon? How would he respond to his moral decline? But who, then?

He was in this state of hesitation when there came a light tap on his door.

“It’s me, Céline. Am I disturbing you?”

“Come in,” he called, surprised and slightly annoyed.

“You’re studying? Sorry, I can come back later.”

“No, no. Come in, it’s okay.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed Boff’s head when he came over to greet her.

“Papa and Mama have gone out to a movie. I don’t know where Henri is. I felt like talking to someone.”

“She feels the same way I do,” Charles thought. He smiled, intrigued. This didn’t sound like her. “She’s here to find out where I’ve been.” His promise to tell her “one of these days” must have seemed too vague.

“Are you finished your homework?” he asked, not knowing what else to say.

“Almost. I still have my French to do. It’ll only take me fifteen minutes. French is one of my better subjects. Like it is for you.”

She sighed, looking down at Boff and scratching behind his ear. The dog sighed too, and pressed against her leg, eyes half closed in ecstasy.

“I feel at loose ends tonight, I don’t know why. I don’t like it.”

“Me too. It happens sometimes.”

Her openness touched him. There was something else, as well, something physical that pushed the image of the Blond Angel to the back of his mind and replaced it with a new mixture of pleasure and nervousness. For the first time he clearly pictured himself taking Céline in his arms, hugging her and kissing her passionately. He had to cross his legs.

“Whenever I feel like this,” Céline continued, without seeming to notice his discomfort, “I run a really hot bath, slide down into the water up to my neck, and try to clear my mind of all unpleasant thoughts.”

Now he imagined her lying in the tub, her lovely legs stretched out, her arms floating gently, her face perfectly relaxed, eyes softened in a dream state. Ravishing.

“Hmm,” he said, also feeling the urge to confide. “I have a different method. Two different methods, in fact.”

He told her about Amélie Michaud’s Christmas Room. He’d never told anyone about it before, except Blonblon, and Marlene one day when he was feeling low. Céline listened to him, entranced by the strange story. She made him describe the room in minute detail and begged him to ask Amélie if she could see it.

“And what’s the other method?” she asked.

This one he’d never told anyone about, and he hesitated to speak of it now. But she urged him with such insistence that he gave in and opened one of the secret doors in his heart, being careful, however, to describe it as one of his childhood methods, one that he hadn’t resorted to for a very long time. He told her about the little yellow dog, the heroic efforts he’d made to save its life at the daycare; he described its death, and the cherry tree under which he’d buried it fourteen years ago. When things had become really unbearable (not often, perhaps, but unforgettable when it happened), he’d gone to sit near its grave, and the gentle presence of the dog – he imagined it, of course, he wasn’t crazy enough to believe in its
actual presence – seemed to hover about in the empty yard, and each time he had felt mysteriously comforted by it. Under that cherry tree he’d always found the solution to whatever problem was troubling him.

Céline’s face took on a thoughtful expression that he hadn’t seen before. He was flattered. She asked him the address of the daycare and said she would visit the little yellow dog the next day – as long as Charles didn’t mind, of course.

“You don’t need my permission.” He laughed. “I don’t own the place, after all …”

They went on talking for a long time. Céline told him about things that happened at school, what she was reading, about her friends and what they were into, often quite different from the things that interested her. She talked about her plans for the future (she wanted to become either a nurse or a schoolteacher, but really dreamed of being a doctor). Then she told him some of the things that caused her concern: she was very worried about her father, and the fact that her mother was becoming more and more irritable as her work at the hardware store wore her down, and the state of open warfare that existed between herself and her chemistry teacher. Charles thought she was leading up to asking him questions and was immediately on his guard.

But all she did was ask him how he was feeling, and she put the question with such faith and affection that his suspicions soon faded away.

“Me? Hmm. Things could be going better, I suppose, but I guess they aren’t so bad. You know what? For some time now I’ve been thinking about living alone, in an apartment by myself. It’s not that I don’t like living here, but I sometimes need to be alone, I don’t know why. It’s just a gut feeling I get.”

She looked disappointed and sad.

“What would you live on?”

“I don’t know.”

It was getting late and she had to get back to her homework. She said good night and was leaving the room when he caught her arm, then leaned towards her and kissed her on the cheek.

They looked at each other and laughed, both of them turning red, and then she left.

When he went to bed he felt a delicious contentment pervading his body, as though he had just accomplished something difficult and good. But when he woke up in the middle of the night the Blond Angel was back in his thoughts, smiling at him with an air of gentle reproach. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked himself, exasperated with his own sense of guilt. “I’m not forcing her to take those bloody pills!”

His tossing and turning woke up Boff, who looked at him worriedly.

“All right, go back to sleep, old thing,” he said, petting him. “You’re not the one who’s done something wrong.”

After an interminably long discussion with himself, during which he alternately agreed with and violently opposed his own rationalizations, he fell into an exhausted slumber, just as a thin shaft of sunlight was falling on Hachiko.

A few days later he met with René De Bané to settle his accounts; the sudden trip must have been a profitable one, because De Bané looked happy, relaxed, even seemed to have put on weight, and was his usual amiable, cheerful self. Charles told him with some trepidation that the young woman on rue Rachel owed him money, but to his great surprise De Bané didn’t become angry; all he did was give a sigh of resignation.

“Brigitte, Brigitte,” he said. “Always the same old story.… Okay, I’ll go see her. What can you do, eh? She’s an artist, for Chrissakes.”

Charles asked about her and learned that her name was Brigitte Loiseau and that she was an actress. Like most performers, she was struggling frantically to rise above obscurity, and in the meantime was living a very hard life.

“An actress?” Charles repeated. He felt a surge of admiration.

The Blond Angel’s wings had suddenly become much larger in his mind. Brigitte Loiseau … what a pretty name! He imagined she must be
enormously talented, have a profound and complex sensitivity, be obsessed by an ideal that was all but impossible to reach. Poor woman! With all the discouragement of all the things that got in her way, no wonder she took drugs. But he believed that success waited around every corner. If only he had had more courage he’d have gone to her and smothered her with encouragement, assured her that a woman as beautiful and talented as she was would sooner or later be adored by everyone.