“If you want…”
He walked fast, without letting her out of his sight. The plainclothes policeman followed them at a distance, off to one side.
“Let’s have a cup of tea away from the station. I know a quiet place…”
It was dark. He opened a car door. A DS-19. Then, in a sharp tone: “The place isn’t far, but it’d be quicker to drive.”
He drove down rue d’Amsterdam.
“You’re… a student?”
“Yes.”
“What do you study?”
She didn’t know what to answer.
“English.”
His hands on the wheel. A bit pudgy, and white, and entirely hairless. He was wearing a wedding ring. Before sitting down in his car, he had taken his coat off and folded it carefully. His suit was navy blue, his bow tie gray.
He took rue Saint-Lazare and looked from side to side.
“Funny, this neighborhood… I don’t like this neighborhood.” His lips pursed.
“Look at that. Disgusting.”
A woman was waiting under the rue de Budapest arcade and, behind her, a group of men were standing by a hotel’s front door.
“Don’t you think that’s disgusting?”
Since she didn’t answer: “You realize, if you were a girl like that… Disgusting, isn’t it?”
He turned onto rue de Londres.
“They take all comers. Poor girls…”
“Is it far, where you’re taking me?”
“No. It’s right here. Poor girls.”
She decided to get away at the next red light. Suddenly he turned left into a small, deserted, very narrow alley that looked like a private driveway. He stopped. She tried to open the door but it was locked.
“Wait a minute, I want to show you something…”
She anxiously pushed the door handle again and hit the window with her shoulder.
“No, no. Don’t bother, I have the key.”
He turned around and placed a black briefcase on the backseat. He opened it and took out a large brown leather-bound album, then put the briefcase away again.
“Here, look.”
He opened the album. Carefully glued onto its pages were the kind of “special” photographs that twins with red, pockmarked faces used to peddle on the sly on boulevard de Clichy. He turned the pages carefully, with one finger, as though they were the pages of a missal.
“Look… This one… is… my favorite…”
A woman in a black velvet eye mask, in profile, was sucking a faceless man’s penis.
“Do you like her?”
He had let go of the album. He grabbed the back of her neck. She struggled but he held her tighter and tighter. He pinned her to the back of the seat with his right shoulder, reached back with his left arm, and opened the glove compartment.
“Wait… I have to take my precautions…”
He held up a half-unrolled condom, a few inches from her face.
“You don’t mind, do you? I’m afraid of diseases.”
He gripped her tighter and tighter and she tried to get free. He pushed her down onto the seat and she felt his whole weight on top of her.
“It won’t last long. Don’t move…”
All she could see was his gray bow tie, beating against her eyes.
“Don’t move… It’ll be quick…”
But one of the car doors opened. Someone pulled the man out of the car by his jacket collar. She sat up and the fat blond man helped her get out.
They had shoved the man against a wall, between two high, locked shutters, and as he gesticulated wildly one of the plainclothes policemen was slapping him over and over with the back of his hand. They dragged him to their car, parked at the entrance to the alleyway.
“I’ll be right there,” the fat blond shouted as the other two pushed the man into the car.
Then, looking a little embarrassed, he went up to her.
“That’s that. We can go have a drink, if you want.”
The door of the DS-19 was still open. He closed it, after picking up something from the backseat.
“He forgot this.”
The fat blond showed her the bow tie, then shoved it in his pocket.
They sat down at a table in a nearby café, on rue de Londres.
“Two kirs!” the fat blond ordered.
She drank hers down in one gulp.
“Have another.”
He had taken the bow tie out of his pocket and, while he fidgeted with it, told her about the man that he and his colleagues had just apprehended, “thanks to her cooperation.” An engineer, from Bois-Colombes. It had taken three months to track him down… He had almost killed a young German girl like that, the bastard.
She was hardly listening, still upset by what had just happened. And the two kirs in a row she had drunk made her light-headed.
“Another kir? Sure, come on. I’ll have another too.”
He knew it would end at Gare Saint-Lazare. From long experience, going back to when he’d started with the force in this neighborhood. Saint-Lazare was the lowest place in Paris, a pit, a kind of sinkhole. Everything slips down into it eventually. You just have to wait. Once they were swimming around in the swamp of Saint-Lazare, you could hook them like a pike. It had been proven true again.
“Tomorrow you’ll give a deposition. They’ll throw the book at that nut and I’ll give you back your passport.”
He stood up, heavily.
“Same address, all right? For the deposition. Tomorrow, two o’clock, at the Galvani police station. Then you can forget this ever happened.”
He gave a vague smile and left the café in one smooth stride. He had forgotten the bow tie on the table, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it.
In the end, what had happened didn’t matter at all. She wouldn’t even tell Bellune about it. She ordered another kir. Someone behind her was playing pinball and she heard the voice of a singer she liked, someone all the jukeboxes were playing that year, a flat voice, muffled, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, soaked up by the smoke, the jingling of the pinball machines, the murmurs of conversation, the splutter of the coffee machines, and the night on the square outside where the windows of the Royal Trinité Hotel glittered.
Only one thing mattered. They would give her back her passport.
•
Finally, one afternoon in his office on rue de Berri, Bellune introduced her to two men: an obese, almost bald man with a black briefcase in his hand, and another with curly blond hair and hollow cheeks. Berne and Sardy, songwriters. They had written four songs for her and Bellune handed them the music-publishing contract, which they signed.
During the whole following week, she learned the songs with an Austrian pianist Bellune had known back at the time of Hawaii Rose, whom he sometimes used as a kind of secretary. When she knew the songs well, Bellune chose a date for the recording session.
He went with her into the studio. She recorded the songs in two afternoons. Then he had several test records pressed with her four songs on them, “flexi-discs” as they were called. That night, she listened to them at his apartment, and she could hardly believe that when she put the disc on the record player, the voice she heard was her own. Bellune encouraged her, saying over and over that her voice on it sounded perfect, her contract was practically signed already. One of the songs was called “The Birds Return”; the chorus of another song began: “I threw my heart into the waves.”
•
He had wanted to bring in one of the flexi-discs with her songs himself, and she was waiting for him near the record company, in a little street running alongside the Gaumont Palace.
When he returned, he told her that “the wheels were turning” and that he would definitely get a positive response back within a week. Then she could sign the contract.