It was still raining when they reached street level, but it was the last dregs of mid-afternoon drizzle, and the grey blanket of the sky was punctured by odd-shaped splashes of pastel blue. After all that happened underground, the mundane continuation of city life—the constant welter of pedestrians and vehicles—felt to Auger like a peculiar kind of insult. She waited until the official had returned to his subterranean world, locking a gate behind him, before speaking to Floyd.
“I don’t know where to begin,” she said, addressing him in English now.
“You can begin by thanking me. I got you out of a fix down there.”
“That fix wasn’t any of your business. What were you doing, following me like that?”
“I wasn’t following you,” Floyd said. “I just happened to see you in trouble.”
“You just happened to see me. Of all the Métro stations in the city, you just happened to be passing the time of day in Cardinal Lemoine?”
Floyd shrugged. “Well, not exactly.”
Auger started walking away from him, raising her hand in the probably vain hope of catching a taxi. In her state, they were more likely to speed up than slow down.
“Where are you going?” Floyd asked, his tone reasonable.
“Anywhere but here. Anywhere I think there’s a chance I won’t be followed by a nosy man in a shabby raincoat.”
“Is that how they teach you to show gratitude in Dakota?”
She swung around, teetering a little on her heels. The pavement beneath her was slick and slate-coloured with rain. “I’m not ungrateful,” she said, glaring at him, “but my gratitude ends here. Now please walk away, or I’ll have to call the police.”
“In your state? I’d like to see you try.”
A taxi sped by, making a special point of sluicing her with dirty brown rainwater. “Just get away from me,” she said, screwing up her face as the water seeped into her shoes. “We concluded our business this morning. Or don’t you remember the nice termination fee I gave you?”
“Some of that termination fee just bailed you out of trouble,” Floyd replied.
“I wasn’t worried about him. I was handling things perfectly well until you barged in.”
“He was right, though, wasn’t he?” Floyd looked at her with an amused expression. He had very deep wrinkles around his eyes. He was a man who either laughed a lot or cried a lot.
“Right about what?”
“You did go into that tunnel. There’s no point denying it—I had a tail on you from the moment you left my offices.”
“I noticed her,” Auger said. “I hate to break the bad news, but she isn’t very good.”
“She’s cheap. The point is that she saw you duck into that tunnel, the one our friend claimed you just came out of.”
“I thought you said you weren’t following me.”
“And I wasn’t. Not personally. But given what I’d learned, I wondered if it might be… informative to sit and wait in Cardinal Lemoine.”
Gradually, she felt some of her anger abating, or perhaps being put away for later use. In a softer voice she said, “Why exactly did you help me? You had nothing to lose by letting that man hand me over to the authorities, which is most likely exactly what he would have done.”
“Nothing to lose,” Floyd said, “except that they’d never have got to the bottom of whatever it is you’re up to.”
“And you think you have a better chance of that?”
“I’m halfway there,” he said.
“Well, that makes two of us,” she said, sotto voce.
“I’m sorry?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re a bad man, Wendell, but I do know that this isn’t something you want to get involved in.”
He narrowed one eye. “Now that’s hardly the kind of thing you should say if you want me off your case.”
Another taxi made a concerted effort to drench her. She stepped away from the kerb, closer to Floyd. “But why are you on my case? I told you who I am. I explained all about my sister.”
Floyd took out a narrow sliver of wood and placed it between his teeth. He bit down on it, making a dry cracking sound. “You did, and it sounded mighty plausible. For about thirty seconds.”
“Then why did you let me walk out of your office with the tin?”
Floyd winked at her. “Have a guess. And while you’re at it, why don’t I drive you somewhere you can get warm and dry and put some colour back into your cheeks?”
“Thanks, but I’ll take my chances with the taxis. Failing that I’ll walk, or construct some sort of raft.”
“My car’s just around this corner. I can take you to your hotel or to my office. Either option would offer you a change of clothes and some warm water.”
“No,” she said, turning away from him again.
Just at that moment, a heavy truck roared past pushing a tidal wave of toffee-coloured water along the road ahead of it. Auger let out a little shriek of exasperation as a filthy spray enveloped her from head to foot. As the truck veered past, the driver offered a consolatory wave of his hand, as if everything that had just happened was an act of divine fate far beyond his own control.
“Take me to the hotel,” she said. “Please.”
“At your service,” Floyd replied.
From Cardinal Lemoine, Floyd took Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel boulevards, until he reached the nexus of intersecting streets around Montparnasse. The few patches of clear sky that had emerged a little while ago had shrivelled away again, as if deciding that the effort simply wasn’t worth it. The rain had stopped, but the entire city huddled under a swollen mass of ominous clouds that seethed and circulated overhead like so many prowling wolves.
“You have to understand things from my point of view,” Floyd said, glancing at his passenger in the rear-view mirror. He seemed to be taking his chauffeur duties very seriously and had insisted that she ride in the back, where there was more room. “I was taken on to solve a case. It doesn’t matter to me that the man who hired me is now dead. Until the case is closed, I have a duty to find out what happened. All the more so now that my partner is under suspicion of murder.”
“But I already told you—” she began.
“You already told me a pack of lies designed to get me to hand over the box,” Floyd said. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?”
“I’d keep your eyes on the road if I were you.”
He ignored the remark. “Take this business about you and your sister coming from Dakota.”
“What of it?”
“You might have fooled Blanchard, but your accent isn’t anything I recognise. I’m not even sure you’re American.”
“You obviously don’t know your own country very well.” Auger shifted in her seat, rearranging the damp folds of her coat. “By your own admission, you’ve been in Paris for twenty years. That’s easily long enough to have become out of touch.”
“If you’re from Dakota, then I’m far more out of touch than I thought.”
“I can hardly be blamed for your ignorance. Tanglewood is a very small community and we have our own way of doing things. Have you ever met Mennonites, or Amish, or Pennsylvania Dutch?”
Floyd steered the car on to boulevard Edgar Quinet, skirting the huge cemetery at Montparnasse. “Not lately,” he said.
“Well, then,” Auger said, as if this settled the matter conclusively.
The play of cloud-filtered light across the cemetery illuminated a huddle of mourners taking turns to cast flowers into the open pit of a grave. Their umbrellas merged into a single black canopy, like a private thundercloud.
“Well what?”
“If you’d met any of those people, I’m sure you’d find their accents and manners just as out of the ordinary as my own. Small communities breed their own ways.”