In the kitchen, Berri got to his feet; I heard him open the door. And then the scent that had troubled the foxes — whatever it was — must have passed on, for soon they fell silent again.
14
I arrived in Paris on the ninth of November.
If you're lucky, that can be one of the city's best months, but not this time. I flew Montreal-Mirabel to Paris-Charles de Gaulle, but only exchanged one rainstorm for another; and Paris was worse, the rain wind-driven and unremitting. On the bus from Roissy to Porte Maillot, the city swam mistily beyond the streaming window like a bad film director fading to somebody's memories. But maybe that was the best way to look at the place. Montmartre, Clichy, the dix-septieme—as we moved around the peripherique, the beltway that runs around Paris, the rain softened the purple swirl of the diesel fumes and blunted the high-rise towers, transforming them with the gentle blur of an Impressionist's gaze. Inevitably, I thought of my mother, realizing that she'd never see the city again. But then she'd never looked at it with much illusion. "Paris is very beautiful," she used to say, "but if you live there, it only seems a city like all the others — a place where no one ever has enough money."
At the aerogare, I reserved a car with Hertz for later that afternoon, then went into the Metro. Getting off at Chatelet, I let the moving sidewalk whisk me under the river — past the usual gauntlet of beggars — to Place St.-Michel. Now I was on the Left Bank, the Latin Quarter, and despite the touristy resonance of its name, this has always been the part of the city where I've felt the most comfortable. This too goes back to my mother. Her family originally came from Lyons, and they'd only moved to Paris, fulfilling her own mother's dream, when she was fourteen. "It was all for Maman," she used to complain, "the whole thing — moving, the big house near the Pare de Monceau, a new car. For me it just meant I lost all my friends. I never really felt the city was mine till much later, at the Sorbonne." Only then, as a student on the Left Bank, had she been truly happy, and this was the Paris she always remembered and had taught me to love. It hadn't changed much; a hint of doner and souvlaki mingled with the traditional smells of bread and tobacco, but the student kids, even this early in the day, were still going into the cinemas. Head down, I stayed tight to the buildings and let my feet find their own way through the warren of streets around St.-Severin until they brought me to the Pension Mull. Shaking myself off in the gloomy cafe underneath, I saw that it hadn't changed either, though a couple of video games were scattered among the pinball machines and there was a new color television over the bar. Totally lacking in atmosphere, it was a place tourists never came to, but that was all right with Madame: she catered to the poor immigrants and pensioners who lived behind the scenes of the tourist spectacle and who coveted, rather than sneered at, the new. I'd first used this place as a student, and now it was a habit, with the added virtue, this trip, of complete anonymity. After two glasses of rouge at the bar, I went up to my room. Stretching out, I could feel the wine begin to merge with the jet lag and in five minutes I was asleep.
I awoke at two-thirty, still tired and with a headache from the wine; but the frigid douche at the end of the hall woke me up, and a brisk walk up to the Opera got my blood flowing again. American Express is right at the corner; outside, like so many mangy cats, the anxious, indigent young awaited money from home, while inside there was the smell of new carpet and a pretty Vietnamese girl to serve me. I cashed a check, paid my account, and left the cafe's number for Hamilton. It was four by the time I was finished. I decided to go on to Hertz and pick up my car, but I was back in the cafe, drinking Suze, by five.
For the next hour, I tried not to be nervous; but I was. I didn't think Subotin could have got here before me, but it was possible, and it was also possible that Hamilton, reconsidering, had decided to ignore my warning — or, panic-stricken, had taken a flit. But he hadn't. At twenty past six, the barman waved me round to the phone.
"Thome?" His voice was low and tense, but he had himself under control. "I hope I haven't kept you waiting. I put off calling Amex till the very last moment to give you as much time as possible."
"That's all right. Where are you?"
There was a slight hesitation, but of course he had to tell me. "A cafe on the Quai des Grands-Augustins. The Cafe Raymond."
"All right. I assume you've kept away from your place."
"Don't worry, Mr. Thome. I've been a good boy. I was out of there twenty minutes after you called, and I haven't been back."
I didn't like him; he didn't like me. Somehow, that was clear at once.
"Stay where you are," I said. "It'll only take me ten minutes or so."
"I'm the old man at the bar, drinking Stella."
The quai was just a five-minute walk. It was dark now, and the rain was a persistent, cold drizzle. Behind me, Notre-Dame lifted up through the mist like a poet's dream, and lights dimly glowed in the obscurity of the Palais de Justice. Traffic along the quai was heavy and irritable, and on the sidewalks the crowds jostled sullenly, full of that malice which the French use to preserve their egos against the mass.
The cafe, when I reached it, was nothing speciaclass="underline" a big room crowded with after-work drinkers, tiny plastic tables and orange plastic chairs, a lot of smoke, and the harsh, staccato beat of rapid French. Hamilton was at the bar, and I recognized him at once, though I would hardly have described him as an old man drinking beer. He was a tall, handsome man with very shiny silver hair. This hair was a trifle long, and there were unruly little tufts of it behind his ears and at the nape of his neck, and as he looked up from his glass, he reached back, in an automatic gesture, to smooth them. I couldn't be sure of his age — in my parents' generation, but on the younger side of it, and he had that glow of comfortable, prosperous health that spelled "early retirement." He was dressed in a rough gray fisherman's sweater and gray wool pants, the effect casual but quietly stylish; a senior civil servant on his day off, you might have guessed — he probably sailed, and if he didn't, he rode or he climbed.
And I still didn't like him.
I wondered why. He was a "spy," of course; a "traitor." He was also a liar. He accepted trust, then betrayed it. Yet you could say the same of Berri and I'd felt sympathy for him. Maybe it was because Berri had paid… not just in the beating he'd suffered, but in the wider sense of having accepted responsibility for what he'd done. He'd dwelled on it, reflected upon it, paid a price in terms of his own self-esteem. But not this man. I watched him as he lit a cigarette. Blowing smoke down at the bar, he leaned back slightly and used his right hand to brush a flake of ash from the front of his sweater. Very cool; very self-satisfied; but then he cast a quick glance over his shoulder and I could see the anxiety in his pale, watery eyes. And for some reason those eyes offended me; their anxiety seemed insatiable, even greedy, glittering with selfishness. Only with reluctance did I now move toward him. All at once he was aware of me, but before he could get up or say anything, I began talking rapidly to him in French. There was, I thought, no reason why we should draw attention to ourselves unnecessarily. To give him credit, he played along nicely, and after a moment, quite casually, he got up from his stool and I followed him out.