“I wasn’t living in France then.”
“Oh... A demented man we arrested...”
He went on with the conversation but I had lost interest.
“... who killed himself by jumping through a window like this one, but in another office, across the hall...”
My eyes drifted around the gray bureaucratic surroundings. Two little rooms leading into one another that opened onto a neon-lit corridor. A different world from mine, shabby and hostile.
“He’d just made a full confession...”
The walls, whose neutral paint had seen better days, were covered with administrative documents, maps, and war trophies. A few elegant watercolors too, but only behind Sydney. Probably painted by him.
“The bars were put there right after.”
There was a light-starved green plant in a corner, a rack of walkie-talkies charging, several metal cabinets topped by boxes of whiskey, exclusively single malt — the denizens of the place were clearly connoisseurs — and six cluttered desks, each with its aging PC that had replaced the typewriter of yesteryear.
“How long have you been living abroad?”
Not forgetting the three cops. The one facing me, Sydney, a little guy with a double-breasted suit too large for him and a pipe; the one on my right, at the keyboard, whose first name was apparently Yves, tall and thin, slightly bent, wearing jeans; and the last one behind me, still silent. I hadn’t heard his name, but since he was wearing a purple shirt with the logo of a polo player, I mentally dubbed him Ralph from the start.
“Seven years.” And finally, me. I was there too. At least physically, because otherwise I felt unconcerned. I was experiencing all this remotely, with the feeling of not being fully there in the stale back rooms of the famous 36, Quaides Orfèvres, headquarters of the Paris Robbery and Homicide Division, trying to unscramble what had happened that night.
“In London?” Sydney motioned with his chin to Yves, signaling him to be prepared, while I answered him with a silent nod. “Monsieur Henrion... Valère, right?”
Another nod. Valère Henrion. A strangely familiar name. Mine. In the mouth of a stranger, a police officer to boot. Reality check. I looked at my shackled hands. The gravity of my situation suddenly struck me, and I nearly choked. This was not a friendly interview. These guys were treating me like a suspect. I swallowed. “Don’t I have the right to a counsel?” Pitiful.
Sydney flipped through my passport. “You sure do a lot of traveling.”
It wasn’t a question, and his voice had lost all of its weary warmth. He pointed his nose at me. “The lawyer comes later, first we talk between us. This loft, Place de la Bastille, the place where we found you, who owns...?” He didn’t finish his sentence.
“It belongs to a friend, Marc Dustang. He let me borrow it for a few days.
“Very nice of him. Doubt if he’ll do it again soon.” Smile.
For a moment I flashed on Marc’s room and its light walls splattered with red.
“And where is this Marc Dustang?”
“In New York for two weeks.”
“For?”
“Business, I guess.”
“And you, you’ve come to Paris for what?”
I sighed, feeling tension mounting inside of me, annoyed at the idea of what was about to follow. I wanted only one thing: to shut myself up in the dark and get my ideas straight. “To work. I just came back from Fashion Week in Milan and I cover the one in Paris right after. September through October is a pretty busy season for me. All the fashion capitals are buzzing, I work a lot.”
“You’re what...? Oh yes, sound... designer?” Sydney waited, looking at my nervous right leg, which was jumping uncontrollably.
Again I conceded. “That’s right. I create the sound tapes for the runway shows. Sometimes I do set mixes for designers’ private parties.”
“And the money’s good?”
“Not bad, yes.”
“That’s how you met Mademoiselle Ilona...” he consulted his notes, “Vladimirova? She was also part of that crowd, right? And not just that one.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Come on, Monsieur Henrion, you want me to believe that you didn’t know how your girlfriend made her living? Even we know it. I see here” — he pointed to his PC monitor with his index finger — “that she’s already met some of our colleagues a few times.”
“She was not my girlfriend, and no, I didn’t know it.” I was having difficulty talking about her in the past tense. “We didn’t know each other...”
At my back, Ralph snickered.
“Really.”
Sydney gave me a condescending smile. “The two of you were kind of intimate for people who didn’t really know each other. Unless you paid to screw her, which would mean that you knew perfectly well who you were dealing with. What am I supposed to think?”
I looked for words to answer him but only managed to spit out the banal truth. “Listen, I met this young woman last night for the first time in my life. I’d heard about her, but I’d never seen her before.”
“Ah, and who told you about her?”
“Her best friend, one of my exes.”
“Her name?”
“Yelena Vodianova.”
“You’ve got a thing for Russian babes, Valère.” Ralph invited himself into the discussion. “Model too, I suppose?”
I nodded without turning around or rising to the taunt.
“Where does she live?” Sydney took things in hand again.
“Yelena? In Milan. She’s married with a kid. She still works the catwalk and sometimes we meet in the fashion show season. I told her that I had to spend a few days in Paris, so she asked me to make contact with Ilona.”
“Why?”
“To give her a gift. Missed her birthday, I guess, or something like that.”
“What sort of gift?”
“I don’t know. It was wrapped and I don’t like poking into other people’s business. I can only tell you that it wasn’t very large. Or very heavy.” With both hands I indicated the shape of the box, about twenty centimeters long, ten across, and ten thick.
“And you didn’t ask your Yelena what kind of gift it was?”
“No.”
“You’re not very curious.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Or very careful.” Ralph again, aggressive. “She could have had you smuggling dope on the sly. Sure you don’t know anything about the contents of this package? It’s not too late to—”
“Yes. I’m sure. And I have no reason to mistrust my ex-girlfriends.” This answer, a stupid and gratuitous challenge, sounded hollow even to me. If I ever got out of this hornet’s nest, there wasn’t a chance I’d trust anyone ever again.
“You have this girl’s number?”
“In my cell phone, under Yelena.”
Sydney located the phone among my personal effects on his desk. He tossed it to Ralph, who went into the next room.
“So you made contact with Ilona, and then...?”
“We met in the 11th arrondissement.” I saw myself entering that bar near the Cirque d’Hiver, where Ilona had said she’d meet me at 11 o’clock, the Pop’in. It was full of noise and smoke, a young crowd, very hip, in the midst of a pop rock revival. As background music The Von Blondies were singing “Pawn Shoppe Heart,” a piece I’d used to close a show two years earlier. And there she was at the counter, perched on her Jimmy Choo high-heeled sandals, the latest black leggings, a denim miniskirt, a white blouse open over a sequined tank top, under the de rigueur military jacket. She was talking with the bartender without really paying attention to him, her elbow resting on a pink motor scooter helmet, with her pale blue gaze outlined in black towering over the room. Not difficult to recognize; Yelena had shown me a photo of her.