“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You’re an American.”
“Manning. He was here before he was killed, he was supposed to have met you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Madame Clermont.” The accent was flat; no attempt was made to alter the broad American interpretation of the French he spoke. “He met you at four in the afternoon and he was killed the next morning and his body was dumped in the Seine. He had been with you and then he was killed. Does that suggest any reasonable line of questioning?”
She sat down in a brown chair across the room from him. The lights in the front room remained off. The fading light of day illuminated the shambles of the room in shades of purple; it might have been a battlefield in miniature. Across the dim room, each could see the shape of the other. And their eyes: they could see their eyes clearly, even in the half-light. Jeanne stared at him, and it seemed the color of her eyes changed from moment to moment, green to gray to deep blue and back through the narrow spectrum.
“Who are you?” she said.
“Devereaux,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. I knew him.”
“William? When did you know him?”
“After the first time.”
“The first time?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight.”
“Where are you from?”
“Did you kill him?
Silence again. She stared at him for a moment before speaking. “No. I would not kill him.”
“No matter what?” Again the winter-hard smile, the unyielding probe of the flat, surging voice. Like a knife repeatedly stabbing, again and again, without anger and without mercy.
“You have no right to question me.”
“It’s not a matter of rights. You knew about Manning, didn’t you? Who told you?”
“William was a journalist from—”
“Don’t say that,” Devereaux interrupted. “It’s a lie, and we can’t start from that base. You knew what Manning was.”
“Did you find out what I was from destroying my room?”
“Nothing is destroyed.”
“Well, what did you learn in my possessions?”
“Your possessions are meticulous. As though you didn’t exist. No souvenirs, no keepsakes. Everything has been stripped from your things, as though you did not exist.”
“I do not need possessions,” she said. “Not to know that I exist.”
“Manning was a spy. He came to spy on you.”
She did not blink; she stared at him.
“You knew that.”
“Who are you?”
“I gave you a name and it doesn’t mean anything. I knew Manning a long time ago.”
“And me,” she said.
They paused.
She said, “I’m sorry he’s dead.”
“Yes. Well. That’s over,” Devereaux said.
No, she thought. I am not sorry he is dead. I am broken by it, but there will not be tears or grief or the horror of revealing these things to a stranger.
“When they found him, he carried something,” Devereaux said.
“How do you know what he carried?”
“I took it from a policeman. From a man who said he was a policeman. It was a photograph, an old picture taken when he was a lot younger. He must have taken it from your rooms when he searched them. It was a souvenir.” The last words were uttered with an ironic tone, as though the word “souvenir” was meant in both the English and French senses of a keepsake and a remembrance of a past event.
“I don’t understand you,” she said quietly.
“He black-bagged your apartment, he must have. It was standard procedure. It must be where he got the photograph.”
She was perfectly still; her eyes revealed nothing, not the soul and not the grief behind them. She stared at her own thoughts: William!
He took out the photograph and handed it to her. She held it and look at it in the dim light. They were standing together before the Tuileries. He seemed so awkward, bantering with the photographer, the monkey of a photographer who had danced around them and complimented her with extravagance.
All those years, she thought with a sudden rush of sadness. It was as though all her memories were dying colored leaves on the branches of a maple tree and now blown away by the first chill wind of autumn.
She touched the edges of the photograph to frame it better in memory, to control the grief rising in her. She must not look at it. Firmly, she gave it back to him.
“Manning was a fool.” His voice came harshly to her thoughts.
“Why would you say that?”
“When he left you in 1968, he was in love with you. He nearly quit the game. He talked about you, he sounded like a child when he talked about you. He told me he had loved you and betrayed you. And so they sent him back again to do the same job fifteen years later. Only now he didn’t get the chance to betray you.”
“I loved him.”
Devereaux waited for her to speak again, but her statement had surprised them both to silence. She had never thought she would tell that to anyone. Her grief was for herself, and now this stranger had pulled it from her and displayed it.
“When did you know him?” she said when she thought her voice would not betray her.
“In Saigon. After he was here.”
“And what did he say?”
“What I told you.”
“You were his friend.”
“No. Not a friend. He wanted to tell me, he wanted to tell someone.” Devereaux’s voice altered; it was softer now, it was as though he were understanding something for the first time. “You can’t tell anyone. You’re in the Section, you don’t have friends, everything you do is done in secret. You lie, and you close up your life like closing up rooms of a house after you use them. He had to tell me, but I wasn’t his friend.”
“But you’re here,” she said.
“I was sent here.”
“But why?”
“To find out what happened to Manning.”
“Only that?”
“Yes,” Devereaux said.
“You told me that he couldn’t tell anyone,” Jeanne said. “You described yourself.”
Devereaux stared at her. “No. Not myself. I just understood him.”
“Because you could never tell anyone,” Jeanne said.
“He was not my friend.” Devereaux got up and went to the French windows and looked down at the narrow length of rue Mazarine. “We were in a bar in Saigon and got drunk. He felt remorse about you. It wasn’t his fault, it was the Section. He was too young for the job, too much of a romantic. They should have known he would have fallen in love with you.”
“What should he have done?”
He turned, surprised. “Quit,” Devereaux said. “He should have gotten out. Then.”
She smiled. “And come back to me? And gotten me out of prison? And married me, made me an honest woman? And lived happily ever after?”
Devereaux now was silent.
“Who is romantic, Monsieur Devereaux?” Her voice was suddenly weary. “I was in their hands, there was nothing he could have done.”
“So he did the next best thing,” Devereaux said. “He suffered and came back after fifteen years to martyr himself.”
“To betray me again, you said it.”
“No. Not this time. I think I understand that now. It wouldn’t have happened again.” He said it softly.
“That is your romance,” she said.
“No. But you were willing to use him this time, weren’t you?”
“Yes. That’s part of it. It had to be done. I didn’t ask him to come back.”
“And you set him up to kill him.”
“No. Not William. Just to say that means you don’t understand.”
“Who are you, Jeanne?”
“I cannot say. Not now.”
“You must.”
“I work for the government of France.”
“Manning wasn’t killed because of that,” Devereaux said.
“That’s too cruel of you to say.”