“Everyone’s leaving Paris because it’s Friday,” Arnaud said. “Why don’t they leave on Thursday night? What’s the difference?” He was irritated and jumpy.
“People don’t like to drive in the dark,” Duvalier answered. “Especially older people, who can’t see as well. I’ve heard they can’t smell as well either.”
“Then they should leave on Thursday morning. They don’t have jobs.”
“Why don’t you tell them that? The next time Hollande speaks, push him from the lectern and command old people to leave for vacation on Thursdays. Mussolini could have done it. Putin could do it. Why not you?”
Traffic started moving again, and because Saint-Germain-en-Laye was not far, soon they were pounding on Shymanski’s gate. Claude was south of the house, planting flowers, in his element, his hands in the loam, and the best loam it was, for billionaires can afford to buy the very finest dirt – light but perfectly dense, of the consistency of a good chocolate cake and the color of dark English bridle leather. Flowers that grew in it seemed to detonate in the air like the bloom of fireworks. The perfection of a well-planned and tended garden is a message that says life has purpose. So when Claude heard them he said, “I’m not answering. To hell with them.”
Duvalier, however, was as stubborn and as resourceful as he looked. That no one answered he took as a challenge, and kept at it for ten minutes. Then he got Arnaud to knit his hands together and give him a boost. Arnaud was so strong that he was able to extend his arms straight up and support Duvalier standing on his palms, like a circus acrobat. Duvalier easily saw over the wall. “He’s in the garden,” he said.
“Lacour?” Arnaud asked in a strained voice.
“The gardener. Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! You!”
Claude threw down his spade, spat, and started toward the gate. When he got there and opened it, he was not happy. “Why didn’t you call for an appointment?” he asked impolitely.
“We don’t have to call for an appointment,” Duvalier said. “We’re the police.”
“Yeah yeah yeah. Calling for an appointment would be efficient, and, I forgot, you’re the police, so you can’t. What do you want?”
“Lacour.”
“You missed him.”
“He left?”
“Yes he left. That’s what ‘you missed him’ means. He went out this morning. He’ll be back.”
“When?”
“In the afternoon sometime. He goes out every morning, even in winter. He exercises like a maniac. He swims, he lifts weights or something, and runs. He’s crazy, because he’s way too old for that. Then he gets the paper and reads it in a café. Then he comes home. Like a clock.”
“Which was he doing today?”
“I don’t know. Usually he does them all, unless there’s so much snow on the Long Terrace that he can’t run.”
“Can’t you tell by what he was wearing?”
“He runs and swims in the same shorts. I didn’t see if he was carrying his goggles. They help you see underwater. That’s how they can take pictures of fish on television. Start at the pool in the park if you want to look for him. We have a pool here, and Shymanski is gone. But when Shymanski lived here, out of respect for him and his family, Lacour never swam in it. He used the municipal pool instead. When he comes back, if you haven’t found him, I’ll tell him you were here.”
“Don’t,” said Arnaud.
“Why? Is this serious?”
“Just don’t.”
“There is no law …” Claude began.
“Yes there is,” Duvalier informed him, “and you can go to jail.”
“I’m not afraid of jail.”
“I am,” Duvalier said. “I’ve seen what jail is like. If I were you or anyone else I’d be very afraid of jail. You like food? Be afraid of jail.” As they were leaving, Duvalier turned back and asked, “Who’s Shymanski? Shymanski the industrialist? This is his house?”
AMINA BELKACEM WAS numbingly pretty even as she aged, and her face did not in the slightest cease to convey goodness and love. With the same driven, breathless trepidation Jules had felt when he walked to élodi’s house, Amina returned via the Passage Livry to the hidden square where she had discovered that in the few minutes in which he had shown her around his office, and even before that – at first sight – she had fallen in love with Jules.
In near-adolescent delirium she imagined marriage, happiness, and contentment. But as she had lived a long life, she knew that she had to take one cautious step at a time. If he found her in a place he frequented, it would be obvious but also a touch deniable. She hoped that if he thought as she did he would return there at roughly the same time they had met. So she sat down at a little table and, when the old man came out, ordered tea. After he brought it to her she opened the newspaper and didn’t read it. Instead, as she stared at it, other things passed before her eyes.
Because her father was a Muslim and her mother a colon, apart from a few secret, tearful visits of the grandmothers, both families had rejected their children forever. Though Algerian by birth, her parents had met in the Paris Resistance during the war. It mattered little to them then and afterward that he was Muslim and she a Catholic. They lived in Algeria with great difficulty until, when Amina was seven or eight, the war there drove them out. Life in France was hardly easy. Her father was attacked on the street, Amina spat upon in school. Partly because her only friends were books, she never relinquished first place in her class.
But as she grew it was not enough to be alone and first. She had to have something to love independently and apart from her parents. She chose for that the inexact but intense memories in which the emotion and contentment of childhood were recollected in colors and sensations.
“I can bring you an umbrella, or help you move to the shade,” the old man who owned the bar said. She was in direct sun and even from inside his café he had seen that her arms glistened with hundreds of sparkling droplets, and her fresh white blouse was beginning to cling to her transparently. “It’s extremely hot, you know: you can get sunstroke.”
“I’ll be cooled by the breeze,” she answered.
“There’s no breeze here. Only in winter when the wind is strong. They enclosed it. There was a time when I couldn’t keep up with the customers. They came from the street that is now on the other side of those buildings.”