Emma gave him an address in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, on Rue Nollet. “Closest metro stop is Place de Clichy,” she said. “Hugo, are you going there now?”
“Yes, why?”
“No reason. Sometimes I have the urge to tell you to be careful and I don't always know why.”
“Because in a former life you were my mother?”
“If I'd been your mother, Hugo, I would have been reincarnated as a saint, not a secretary.”
“But you are a saint, didn't you know?”
“Oh hush. Anything else you need me to do?”
“No,” he said. “No doubt I'll call you tomorrow for something.”
“No doubt,” she said, and rang off.
Hugo walked back onto the Quai de Conti. He looked toward Jean Chabot's stall and saw two gendarmes talking to him. Thank you, Claudia. He resisted the urge to trot across the street and eavesdrop, or butt in completely, and instead turned east and headed alongside the sluggish roll of the river, walking toward the metro stop at Les Invalides, which, if memory served, would take him directly to Place de Clichy station. And the thirty-minute walk would give him time to come up with some sort of plan.
After exiting the metro station at Place de Clichy, Hugo walked northwest on Rue Biot against the traffic into the Seventeenth Arrondissement, which sat just to the west of the hopping Montmartre area. The Seventeenth was one of those truly French parts of Paris that rubbed shoulders with, but never quite got to know, the tourists who shuttled between the Place Pigalle, the Sacre Couer, and the arrondissements that sit either side of the Seine. A business hub since the 1970s, only the most avid historian would travel to this part of Paris and recognize the village of Batignolles, where in the 1870s painter Edouard Manet and his groupe des Batignolles captured the busy cafés and local parks on canvas.
As he walked, he noticed the windshield wipers of a few cars ticking back and forth, but under hat and coat he felt no rain. He spotted a small park on his left, the direction he wanted to go, and crossed the street toward it.
He pushed open a waist-high gate and heard it squeak as it swung shut behind him. The metal latch clattered, catching the attention of two Arab men playing chess on a nearby bench. They quickly returned to their game — he was of no interest to them. A gravel path led him between two rectangles of brown grass, each bordered by the entrails of lifeless plants, inert but preserved by the Paris winter.
The grass soon gave way to a large square of gravel where half a dozen men played or watched petanque, some standing and some sitting. The eldest, a stooped little man with an impossibly red nose, stood just inside a small green shed and brewed coffee, a line of tin mugs on a table by the door. Another of the men, as French as a postcard in his blue beret and baggy canvas pants, turned his palms upward to gauge the rain. Unimpressed by the feeble spatter, he went back to the game. A row of players awaited their turn on one of the worn park benches, cooing and nodding their approval of the action like a row of pigeons on a tree branch. Wraiths of smoke greeted Hugo as he approached, the pungent, raw aroma of unfiltered tobacco so much more pleasing to him than the sharp, clinging smell of the thin cigarettes smoked in the bars and clubs of the Fifth Arrondissement.
Hugo watched the game, too, for a moment, wondering if he could tell anything about these men from the way they spoke and what they wore. He gave up after a couple of minutes, amused by his own pretensions. All he could tell was that they were content and that they hoped that the sun might eventually come out.
The park let him out at the corner of two streets, the larger one being Rue de Dames. Diagonally across from him, kitty-corner as his grandmother would say, was Rue Nollet. Like a thousand other streets in Paris, it was part residential and part business, apartments stacked three and four high on top of stores, and the occasional heavy wooden door leading to a courtyard surrounded by more numerous, and more expensive, apartments. There were few people on the street — lunch and the chill bluster of the afternoon had seen to that.
He looked for number twenty-three and found it sandwiched between a bakery and a small store selling handmade linens from Provence. He stopped at the window of this store and looked in, trying not to think about Claudia and which design of napkins she might like. As if either of them were the napkin-buying type.
The door Hugo wanted was dark red, and beside it was a brass plaque, screwed into the brick, announcing it to be the home of the Syndicat Des Bouquinistes De Paris. A piece of paper with neat, flowing handwriting let visitors know that the bell was broken and that they should let themselves in.
Hugo did so.
Inside, a long staircase led up to the offices of the SBP. He took his hat off and started up, the thick carpet on the stairs making his entrance a silent one. At the top was a landing where the carpet turned into creaking floorboards, old but polished and a little slick underfoot. An unmanned desk sat to his left, guarding the two closed doors of the SBP. He walked up to the desk, looking for a bell and listening for the sound of voices or typing. He heard a phone ring and the door on the left swung open. A dumpy, middle-aged woman with a beehive hairdo bustled out carrying a stack of letters. He thought she hadn't noticed him but, without looking up, she dumped the mail on the desk and said, “Oui monsieur?”
Hugo gave his name and broke into his clumsiest French. “I am a journalist, American, and wanted to write an article about the bouquinistes.”
It wasn't much of a plan but he couldn't play the policeman and, in his experience, the only people who could ask questions without raising suspicion were cops and journalists.
“You should make an appointment and speak with Monsieur Gravois,” she said, still avoiding eye contact.
“Monsieur Gravois, yes,” Hugo said. “The thing is, I'm only in Paris today and tomorrow, then I head to Belgium. Chocolates and beer.” He shrugged. Americans. What can you do?
“Un moment, s'il vous plait,” she said, apparently unimpressed by chocolates, beer, or Americans. She looked over her shoulder at the door she'd just come through, then at the phone on her desk, then at Hugo. She stood and walked back to the door, knocked tentatively, and listened for a response. Hugo didn't hear it but she did, and she slipped into the room and closed the door behind her, as if an unwelcome dog were trying to follow. Or an unwelcome visitor. A minute later she opened the door wide and stood holding it, bidding Hugo enter.
When he did, Hugo got two surprises, only one of which he chided himself for. The first came when he saw the man behind the desk, the bald head and gaunt features, the large eyes staring at him and ready to take in everything about his visitor, but giving nothing in return. Bruno Gravois was the man who had slapped Chabot.
The second surprise was the office itself. Three metal filing cabinets stood against the wall opposite the door, each drawer labeled in neat type, and to his left Gravois sat behind a desk that knew no clutter. Two sheets of paper lay on a blotter, and as Hugo moved closer Gravois laid his pen down between them, his movement as deliberate as that of a surgeon. No computer that Hugo could see, not even a telephone. Three prints hung on the wall, two placed precisely over the gaps between the filing cabinets and the third behind the desk, and as far as Hugo could tell, squarely in the middle. The book case to the right of the doorway was full but not stuffed, and even a brief glance told Hugo that every book had been placed according to its category.
Gravois rose and narrowed his eyes just a touch, trying to remember where they'd seen each other before. Hugo pictured their sidewalk stand-off and scrolled his mind back over their encounter, remembering nothing that would directly contradict his journalist story. He decided to take the initiative, to make it a non event.