Ten twenty-two… Eleven-sixteen… The rain stopped, then started again. Slowly, one by one, the hours passed by. I dozed intermittently. The front seat of a Renault Cinq doesn't make much of a bed, but it will do.
15
I passed a busy night.
There were four drunks, a couple of cat fights, a whore who found it hard to take no for an answer, and even a flic who shined his light in the window and asked for my papers. All in all, I didn't get much sleep… though no one came near the big yellow car. Around four o'clock the city seemed to drift off, lulled into drowsiness by the distant hum of trucks on the autoroutes and the peripherique, but an hour later deliveries started to the cafes, and soon afterward the working people of the quartier emerged. In Paris, as everywhere else, the poor are always up before the rest of us. Early-shift workers cycled through the rain, old women, bundled up in heavy coats and with kerchiefs on their heads, trudged off to their jobs as domestics in the big hotels, and an old man in a blue serge jacket took up his position at the kiosk on the corner. By six, the sidewalks were crowded. By six, even exhausted, unshaved, out-of-cigarettes men who'd slept all night in their cars had got up and stretched. I walked over to the quai and the stairway that led down to the water. A gray haze of drizzle hung over the Seine. On some of the barges, life was stirring — a smudge of smoke, the thump of a pump — but La Trompette seemed to be slumbering on. For the time being, that was fine by me. I crossed the street, found a cafe, and began drinking coffee.
By seven, I felt halfway human, except for the beard, and began wondering what I was going to do, since Hamilton didn't strike me as an early riser and probably wouldn't show for hours. But almost at once, I got a surprise: the boyfriend appeared. He even seemed fairly perky, popping up from the stairway and then darting briskly through traffic. I wondered if I should follow him; but then that question became moot, because he came straight over to the cafe where I was sitting. For a second, I was worried that Hamilton might be tagging along behind, but he ordered right away and settled down to eat alone. It was easy to watch him — he was only half a dozen tables away, but he opened a paper and began reading it closely. I put his age at nineteen or twenty. Tall. Slim. A lean, elegant face but with a rather boyish lick of hair that kept falling into his eyes. He was wearing a brown leather jacket and jeans and a pair of Nocona boots, and he was very tanned: Mr. Franco-California, you might have called him. But, as so often happens with European imitations of American styles, the very sincerity of his efforts produced something quite different from the original. In this case, it was a rather appealing innocence. Five years ago, he'd been full of rock 'n' roll and movie stars; now, after his night with his older American lover, he was trying hard not to be too shocked by himself. Lighting a cigarette, he shook out his paper, and when the waiter brought his coffee and croissants, he deigned to acknowledge them with only the slightest of nods. Deftly, he stubbed out the cigarette, then began eating slowly, looking about the room as he did so… for an instant, his glance touched mine, but then passed on, quite normally. He seemed perfectly calm: if Hamilton had communicated any of his problems to him, he wasn't showing it.
As the boy ate, I pondered. Hamilton was up to something, I was sure of that, so I was reluctant to give up my watch on the quai. On the other hand, the boy might be important too. Hamilton had called him immediately after seeing me, and there was also the question of the car. Presumably Hamilton had enough sense to understand that his own was too dangerous to drive, and last night I'd been half expecting him to use the Dodge for a midnight flit; and he might still do that. Or he could send the boy off on errands. It was this that created the potential dilemma… and in point of fact it arrived just after eight. Folding his paper, the boy pressed a button on his watch. Informed of the time to the millisecond, he then rose and headed out of the cafe. I hesitated… and if, in the end, I decided to follow him, I was very tentative. Only back to the barge. To the car — he might meet Hamilton there. Or…
He stepped onto the quai
The sidewalks were crowded, and out on the street Paris was "accommodating itself to the automobile" — to use President Pompidou's immortal expression — just like Newark, New Jersey: with a traffic jam that jostled and banged and grumbled for miles. Heading up the Quai des Grands-Augustins, the boy continued onto the Quai St.-Michel, then turned up the Rue St.-Jacques. He was going to his car; I took a shortcut and beat him to it. Hamilton wasn't there, but I hadn't really expected that — he was probably still in bed. I decided to string along a bit more and started the Renault, so its engine was already warm as the big Dodge coughed in the damp. Backing out of the alley, he squealed his tires — another California touch — rand sped away. Doubling back onto St.-Germain, he crossed the river by the Pont de Sully and continued onto the Boulevard Henri IV — in the traffic, there was no trouble following him; and even when we got out of it, you would have been hard-pressed to lose that huge splash of yellow. Forty minutes later, I pulled up to the curb of the Avenue Foch in St.-Mande, an eastern suburb just outside the city proper.
I didn't know the place, but I knew lots like it: streets of old, solid stone apartments behind black wrought-iron fences; very quiet; the curb jammed with cars, including some Peugeots and Citroens and one carefully maintained MG. The yellow Dodge was out of place, but as I watched the boy go into one of the buildings, I had the feeling that this was where his parents lived.
I never found out if that was true, but he was back inside of twenty minutes, carrying two soft suitcases. Throwing them into the trunk of the Dodge, he now led us onto the peri-pherique. He went east as far as Gentilly and then turned into the Boulevard Jourdan, a big street that runs through one of those areas that all cities have to put up with: a bare, barren expanse that was dotted with big hospitals and other institutional structures. The principal example here was the Cite Universitaire, a huge educational complex where the French put a lot of their foreign students, housing them in maisons built in the appropriate national style — the Thai house, for example, is like a little pagoda. Turning onto one of its access roads, California Jacques headed for a parking lot.
I almost didn't follow — I assumed he was going to a class or was visiting someone. But why the bags? The question intrigued me just enough to wait a moment, engine running, by a loading bay in behind one of the buildings. Sure enough, he appeared about three minutes later. And he didn't go into the school. Striding quickly, he crossed a stretch of dead lawn and headed out to the street. Getting out of my car, I followed him across. There was a Metro station here, but he didn't go into it, instead cutting across the corner of a park, finally coming out at the entrance of a small side street. Only when
I saw the name of this street did I finally understand. It was Hamilton's street. I almost couldn't believe it. I'd already formed a low opinion of the man, but this was incredible. Despite what I'd told him, he'd let the boy come here — must have asked him to… and clearly hadn't told him there was any danger, for now, with no attempt at deception, he turned into a doorway. I had a sudden spasm of guilt, but then told myself that it was still unlikely that Subotin had made it to Paris, and I crossed over the street to a cafe-tabac. Five minutes, I thought; I'll give him that long. But even five minutes is a long time for your conscience, and when that five minutes was up, I gave him five minutes more… and two minutes and twenty-six seconds later, he appeared.