‘Sounds like a good haul,’ comments the Khedive. He lights a cigarette, jerks his nose towards the ceiling, and blows smoke rings. Monsieur Philibert has sat down at the desk and is flicking through the notebook. Probably checking the addresses.
The others go on talking among themselves. ‘Let’s dance some more. I have pins and needles in my legs.’ ‘Sweet music, that’s what we need, sweet music.’ ‘Let everyone say what they want to hear, all of you! a rumba!’ ‘“Serenata ritmica”.’ ‘“So stell ich mir die Liebe vor”.’ ‘“Coco Seco”.’ ‘“Whatever Lola wants”.’ ‘“Guapo Fantoma”.’ ‘“No me dejes de querer”.’ ‘Why don’t we play hide-and-seek?’ A burst of applause. ‘Great! Let’s play hide-and-seek!’ They burst out laughing in the dark. Making it tremble.
Some hours earlier. La Grande Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne. The orchestra was mangling a Creole waltz. Two people came into the restaurant and sat down at the table next to ours. An elderly man with a pearl-gray moustache and a white fedora, an elderly lady in a dark blue dress. The breeze swayed the paper lanterns hanging from the trees. Coco Lacour was smoking his cigar. Esmeralda was placidly sipped a grenadine. They were not speaking. This is why I love them. I would like to describe them in meticulous detail. Coco Lacour: a red-headed giant, a blind man’s eyes sometimes aglow with an infinite sadness. He often hides them behind dark glasses, and his heavy, faltering step makes him look like a sleepwalker. How old is Esmeralda? She is a tiny little slip of a girl. I could recount so many touching details about them but, exhausted, I give up. Coco Lacour and Esmeralda, their names are enough, just as their silent presence next to me is enough. Esmeralda was gazing in wide-eyed wonder at the brutes in the dance band. Coco Lacour was smiling. I am their guardian angel. We will come to the Bois de Boulogne every night to savour the soft summer. We will enter this mysterious principality of lakes, wooded paths, with tea-houses hidden amid the dense foliage. Nothing here has changed since we were children. Remember? You would bowl your hoop along the paths in the Pré Catelan. The breeze would caress Esmeralda’s hair. Her piano teacher told me she was making progress. She was learning musical theory through the work of Josef Bayer and would soon be playing short pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Coco Lacour would shyly light a cigar, shyly, as through apologising. I love them. There is not a trace of mawkishness in that love. I think to myself: if I were not here, people would trample them. Poor, weak creatures. Always silent. A word, a gesture is all it would take to break them. With me around, they have nothing to fear. Sometimes I feel the urge to abandon them. I would choose a perfect moment. This evening, for example. I would get to my feet and say, softly: ‘Wait here, I’ll be back in a minute.’ Coco Lacour would nod. Esmeralda would smile weakly. I would have to take the first ten paces without turning back. After that, it would be easy. I would run to my car and take off like a shot. The hardest part: not to loosen your grip in the few seconds just before suffocation. But nothing compares to the infinite relief you feel as the body goes limp and slowly sinks. This is as true of water torture as it is of the kind of betrayal that involves abandoning someone in the night when you have promised to return. Esmeralda was toying with her straw. She blew into it, foaming her grenadine. Coco Lacour was puffing on his cigar. Whenever I get that dizzying urge to leave them, I study each of them closely, watching their every movement, studying their expressions the way a man might cling to the low wall on a bridge. If I abandon them, I will return to the solitude I knew in the beginning. It’s summertime, I told myself, reassuringly. Everyone will be back next month. And indeed it was summer, but it seemed it dragged on in a strange way. There was not a single car in Paris. Not a single person on the streets. Sometimes a tolling clock would break the silence. At a corner in a sun-drenched boulevard, I thought that this was a bad dream. Everyone had left Paris in July. In the evenings, they would gather one last time on the café terraces along the Champs-Élysées and in the Bois de Boulogne. Never did I feel the sadness of summer more keenly than in those moments. July is the fireworks season. A whole world, on the brink of extinction, was sending up one last flurry of sparks beneath the foliage and the paper lanterns. People jostled each other, they spoke in loud voices, laughed, pinched each other nervously. You could hear glasses breaking, car doors slamming. The exodus was beginning. During the day, I wander through this city adrift. Smoke rises from the chimneys: people are burning their old papers before absconding. They don’t want to be weighed down by useless baggage. Rivers of cars stream toward the gates of Paris, and I, I sit on a bench. I would like to join them in this flight, but I have nothing to save. When they’re gone, the shadows will suddenly loom up and form a circle around me. I will recognise a few faces. The women are heavily made up, the men have the elegance of Negroes: alligator shoes, brash suits, platinum rings. Some even have a row of gold teeth on permanent display. Here I am, left for the tender mercies of dubious individuals: the rats that take over a city after the plague has wiped out the populace. They give me a warrant card, a gun licence and tell me to infiltrate a ‘ring’ and destroy it. Since childhood, my life has been littered with so many broken promises, so many appointments I did not keep, that becoming a model traitor seemed like child’s play. ‘Wait there, I’ll be right back. .’ All those faces seen for one last time before darkness engulfs them. . Some could not believe I would desert them. Others eyed me with an empty stare: ‘Are you really coming back?’ I remember, too, that peculiar twinge of regret whenever I looked at my watch: they’ve been waiting for me for five minutes, ten, twenty. Maybe they have no yet given up hope. I would feel the urge to rush off to meet them; my head would spin, on average, for an hour. Grassing people up is much quicker. A few brief seconds, just the time it takes to reel off names and addresses. An informer. I’ll even become a killer if they want. I’ll gun down my victims with a silencer. Afterwards, I will consider the spectacles, key rings, handkerchiefs, ties — pitiful objects that are insignificant to anyone but their owner and yet move me more deeply than the faces of the dead. Before I kill them, I will stare fixedly at one of the lowliest parts of their person: their shoes. It would be wrong to think that only a flutter of hands, an expression, a look or a tone of voice can move you at the first sight. The most moving thing, for me, are shoes. And when I feel remorse for killing them, it is not their smiles or their virtues I will remember, but their shoes. Anyway, doing dirty work for corrupt cops pays well these days. I’ve got money spilling out of my pockets. My money helps keep Coco Lacour and Esmeralda safe. Without them I would truly be alone. Sometimes I think that they do not exist. That I am the red-headed blind man, that tiny defenceless girl. A perfect excuse to feel sorry for myself. Give me a minute. The tears will come. I’ll finally know the pleasures of ‘self-pity’ — as the English Jews call it. Esmeralda was smiling at me, Coco Lacour was sucking on his cigar. The old man and the elderly lady in the dark-blue dress. All around us, empty tables. Paper lanterns someone forgot to hang out. I was afraid, every second, of hearing their cars pull up on the gravel driveway. Car doors would slam, they would slowly lumber towards us. Esmeralda was blowing soap bubbles, watching them float away, her face set in a frown. One bubble burst against the elderly lady’s cheek. The trees shuddered. The band struck up the first bars of a czardas, then a fox trot, then a march. Soon it will be impossible to tell what they’re playing. The instruments hiss and hiccup, and once again I see the face of the man they dragged into the living room, his hands bound with a belt. Playing for time, at first he pulled pleasant faces as through trying to distract them. When he could no longer control his fear, he tried to arouse them: made eyes at them, bared his right shoulder with rapid, twitching jerks, started to belly-dance, his whole body trembling. We mustn’t stay here a minute longer. The music will die after one last spasm. The chandeliers will gutter out.