‘What the hell is he on about?’ asked Vandoosler senior.
‘He’s preaching,’ said Mathias. ‘And why not? There’s no curfew on public speaking.’
‘Moving up the ladder of time, as I was saying, we jump over antiquity and land straight in the glorious second millennium, with the contrasts and the audacity of the Middle Ages, that’s me on the second floor. Next the age of decadence and collapse, contemporary civilisation. This one,’ said Marc, shaking Lucien by the arm. ‘Up on the third floor, bringing the strata of history and the staircase proper to an end, with the shameful Great War. Even further up, we have the godfather who continues to disrupt the present day in his own special way.’
Marc stopped and sighed.
‘You see, Mathias, even if it might be more practical to have Lucien on the first floor, we can’t mess about with chronology and disturb the layers as set out by the staircase. The ladder of time is all we have left. We can’t upset the staircase which is the only thing we have managed to keep in good order. The only thing, Mathias. We can’t destroy it!’
‘Quite right,’ said Mathias gravely. ‘That is not to be countenanced. We have to carry the Great War up to the third floor.’
‘If I might interject at this point,’ said Vandoosler senior in his mild voice. ‘You’re all as pissed as each other, and I would really like you to haul the Great War up to his correct layer of history so that I can reach the dishonourable stages of the present day where I lodge.’
To his great surprise, next morning at eleven-thirty, Lucien watched as Mathias got himself ready, after a fashion, to go to work. The final stages of the evening-and in particular Juliette’s offer to employ Mathias as a waiter-had completely passed him by.
‘Well,’ said Mathias, ‘you did embrace Sophia Siméonidis, twice, to thank her for singing. That was a bit familiar of you, Lucien.’
‘No memory of that at all,’ said Lucien. ‘So now you’ve signed up for the Eastern Front, have you? And are you going off with a song in your heart and a flower in your rifle? Don’t you know that everyone thinks it will all be over by Christmas, but in real life it takes longer?’
‘You really were pissed last night,’ said Mathias.
‘Keep the home fires burning. Good luck, soldier!’
XII
MATHIAS DUG IN ON THE EASTERN FRONT. WHEN LUCIEN WASN’T teaching, he and Marc crossed the line and ate their lunch at Le Tonneau to encourage him, and because they liked it there. On the first Thursday, Sophia Siméonidis ate lunch there too, as she had every Thursday for years.
Mathias operated steadily, carrying cups one by one, not trying to balance everything at once. After three days, he had worked out which was the customer who ate crisps with a fork. After a week, Juliette was giving him leftovers from the kitchen, and dinners in the disgrace had improved as a result. After nine days, Sophia invited the other two to share her Thursday lunch. The following Thursday, sixteen days later, she failed to appear.
Nobody saw her on the next day either. Juliette anxiously enquired of St Matthew if she might have a word with the ex-commissaire, after closing the restaurant. Mathias was rather put out that she called him St Matthew, but since the old man had used these ridiculous names the first time he had introduced his three fellow residents, she couldn’t think of them in any other way. So after closing Le Tonneau, Juliette accompanied Mathias to the disgrace. He had explained to her the chronological division of the lodgings, so that she would not be shocked that the oldest resident lived at the top of the house.
Out of breath from climbing the four flights of stairs so quickly, Juliette sat down opposite Vandoosler senior, who listened attentively. She seemed to like the evangelists, but to value even more the advice of the former commissaire. Mathias, leaning against a roofbeam, thought that in reality she was rather attracted by the features of the elderly ex-policeman, and this somewhat annoyed him. The more attentive the old man became, the more handsome he looked.
Lucien, back from Reims where he had been giving a well-paid lecture on ‘The Stalemate on the Western Front’, asked for a summary of the facts. Sophia had not reappeared. Juliette had been to see Pierre Relivaux, who had said not to worry, she would be back. He seemed concerned, but quite confident. Which gave one to think that Sophia had explained where she was going before leaving. But Juliette couldn’t understand why Sophia had not told her. It bothered her. Lucien shrugged. He didn’t want to upset Juliette, but after all Sophia was under no obligation to tell her everything she was doing. Juliette however insisted. Never before had Sophia missed a Thursday lunch without telling her beforehand. She always had a special dish, veal casserole with mushrooms. Lucien pulled a face. As if the veal and mushrooms would matter, if there was some sudden emergency. For Juliette, of course, the veal with mushrooms did matter. And yet Juliette was an intelligent woman. But that was the way of things, wasn’t it? Obsessed with one’s own little preoccupations such as veal with mushrooms, one ends up saying silly things. She was hoping that the old commissaire could get more out of Pierre. Although she had understood that Vandoosler was not exactly above reproach.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘once a policeman always a policeman.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Marc. ‘A flic who has been thrown out of the force might turn anti-flic, or monster.’
‘Doesn’t Sophia get fed up eating veal every Thursday?’ asked Vandoosler.
‘No, not at all,’ replied Juliette. ‘And she even has her own way of eating it. She lines up her little mushrooms, like notes on a stave, and eats her way through them bar by bar.’
‘An orderly woman, then,’ said Vandoosler. ‘Not the sort to vanish without explanation.’
‘If the husband isn’t worried,’ said Lucien, ‘he must have good reasons, and he’s not obliged to tell us about his private life, just because his wife has walked out and failed to eat her veal and mushrooms. Let it go. A woman has the right to go away for a bit if she wants to. I don’t see why we should be chasing after her.’
‘All the same,’ said Marc. ‘Juliette is thinking about something she’s not telling us. It’s not just the veal that’s bothering you, is it, Juliette?’
‘No, it’s not,’ she replied.
She appeared a pretty woman, as the glancing light from the attic windows fell on her. Having hurried up the stairs, she had taken no thought for her appearance. As she leaned forward, with clasped hands, her dress fell loosely open, and Marc noticed that Mathias had positioned himself in front of her, transfixed. It was worth it, he had to admit, for the glimpses of pale skin, rounded curves and bare shoulders.
‘But if Sophia comes back tomorrow,’ Juliette went on, ‘I’d feel awful to have been gossiping about her with neighbours who hardly know her.’
‘We may hardly know her, but we are her neighbours,’ Lucien pointed out.
‘And then there’s the tree, ‘Vandoosler reminded them gently. ‘The tree makes it more important to say something.’
‘Tree? What tree?’ asked Juliette.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Vandoosler. ‘Perhaps you could first just tell us what you know?’
It was hard to resist the old flic when he spoke in this tone of voice, and Juliette was no exception.
‘Well,’ Juliette began, ‘she came over from Greece with her boyfriend. He was called Stelios. According to Sophia, he was a loyal, protective sort of man, but as far as I could see he was a fanatic, an attractive but temperamental guy, who wouldn’t let anyone near her. He watched over Sophia, guarded her, kept her close. Until, that is, she met Pierre and walked out on her guardian angel. Evidently this caused the most awful drama, and Stelios tried to kill himself, or something like that. Yes, that’s it, he tried to drown himself, but it didn’t work. Then he ranted and raved and made threats, but finally he went off and she didn’t hear from him again. That’s all. Nothing really remarkable. Except the way Sophia talks about him. She never seems to feel safe. She thinks one day Stelios is going to come back, and that will mean big trouble. She says he’s “very Greek”, brought up on Greek tragedies and that’s something that never goes away. Sophia says we forget that in the olden days the Greeks were really a big deal. And then, oh, about three months ago, or a bit more, she showed me a postcard she’d had, from Lyon. It just had a star drawn on it, not even very well drawn. I couldn’t see what was wrong with it, but it upset her. I thought it meant a snowflake or Christmas, but she was convinced it meant Stelios, and that it wasn’t good news. It seems that Stelios was for ever drawing stars, because the Greeks had been good at astronomy and all that. But nothing happened, so she forgot about it. That’s all. But now I’m wondering, well, whether she’s had another card. Maybe she was right to feel afraid. Things we can’t understand. The Greeks, after all, they were something special.’