He decided to go back to his office on foot and they walked down boulevard des Batignolles on the sunny side of the street. Bellune said nothing and seemed preoccupied. She asked him lots of questions, which he didn’t answer. Eventually she asked him if there was something worrying him.
“No, not at all. Nothing.”
They turned left at the corner, onto boulevard Malesherbes, and Bellune, glancing distractedly at the buildings, suddenly stopped in front of a tiny town house whose door and one single window made it look like a dollhouse.
“Look. How funny.”
His slight accent, which was never really noticeable except when he spoke her name — Odile — was suddenly thicker. She stood next to him and looked at the building too, without understanding what it could be that had so struck him.
“It’s so funny. Do you know what it was, back then? The Austrian consulate general.”
“Really?”
“Yes. The Austrian consulate general…”
He was lost in his memories. With a very gentle gesture he put his hand on her shoulder and said, as if talking to a child, “One day, I reported to this building. The first year I lived in Paris. Austria already no longer existed. But there was still an Austrian consulate general.”
He lowered his voice, the same way you read Sophie’s Misfortunes to a little girl in a conspiratorial tone of voice, to enthrall her more.
“So I walked into this building, which was the Austrian consulate. And they told me I had lost my Austrian nationality. The end. No more passport either. So I went to Parc Monceau and sat down on a bench.”
He took her by the arm and, after one last look at the building’s black façade, pulled her toward the park gate.
They sat down on a bench, near a sandbox where children were playing. He didn’t seem to want to go back to his office right away.
“We should stay outside in the sun for a bit.”
“Yes, good idea, Odile.”
The story he had started to tell her seemed a little vague to her, and she would have liked him to give her more details, but he leaned his head back on the bench and, eyes closed, offered his face to the sun. She would have liked to know, for example, if he had sat on this same bench that afternoon, back then, after his visit to the consulate general of an Austria that no longer existed.
•
She rang the buzzer several times in a row. Nobody home. Since she had a key to the apartment, she opened the door herself.
She called out but he didn’t answer. The apartment was silent. Bellune must have stayed late at the office.
There was a large envelope on the table in the living room, with her name written on it in red pen. She opened it. It contained the rest of the flexi-discs of her two songs and a letter.
My dear Odile,
By the time you read this, I will have ended my life in a room at Hotel Rovaro, avenue des Ternes. I have lived in that hotel for a long time. I had just come from Austria. But it would take too long to explain and I don’t want to bore you.
I’m optimistic about your record. Go see Dauvenne or Wohlfsohn for me, ÉTOile 50–52. They’ll help you.
With love, and, as it says in a song from my youth, Sag’ beim Abschied leise “Servus.”
Georg
Don’t stay in the apartment, they might bother you with all kinds of questions.
She didn’t have the strength to stand up, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the piano, where a ray of sun lit up part of the keyboard. She thought about the afternoons by the piano with the old Austrian, Bellune’s sometime secretary, who taught her the songs and even played her the overture to Hawaii Rose for fun. She stayed sitting in the leather armchair with the large envelope in her hand.
The telephone rang but she didn’t move. The ringing went on for a long time, then, in the silence, the ray of sunlight slid along the gray carpeting.
•
The phone rang again. This time, she went over and picked up.
“Hello?”
“Who’s this?”
It was a man’s voice, nervous.
“A… a friend of Monsieur Bellune’s.”
“Wait. Hold on, please.”
The man was talking to someone. She heard a murmur of voices.
“Hello, is this Georges Bellune’s residence?”
A more muffled voice than the first. She hung up. She used to walk past the Trocadéro gardens. The same way every evening, for two months. The gardens. The quay. The arch of the Bir-Hakeim bridge. She remembered the Trocadéro’s aquarium, which she had gone to see with him, and the stairs they had taken to get back up onto boulevard Delessert. He had remarked that the neighborhood was built on several levels, on a hillside, which was what gave it its particular charm. And the nights on the deck, those remarkably mild December nights after the snow had fallen — nights when they would try to penetrate the mysteries of the windows and rooftops they could see nearby.
•
She asked to see a phone book in a café and looked up the hotel’s address, then walked up avenue des Ternes.
When she reached the right number, she saw an ambulance and a police car parked on the sidewalk and several uniformed policemen talking to each other. They were gathered in front of the entrance to the hotel. Two men came down the stairs and she quickly turned away. She had recognized one of them: the fat blond from the other time, the one who had used her as bait in Gare Saint-Lazare. The previous week, she had gone to the Galvani police station to sign the deposition, and he had given her back her passport.
She ran, without daring to look back, afraid of seeing that the fat blond man really was following her, like those shimmering blue flies you can’t get free of, that cling to your face or your hands. She was sure that if it was him lurking around there, it meant Bellune was really dead.
•
She sat at a café table in the passageway connecting Gare Saint-Lazare with the Hotel Terminus. She looked out the window, down at the street and the people leaving the station and waiting at the taxi stand. A vague idea of taking the train, leaving Paris as fast as she could, had guided her steps here, and she remembered the fat blond’s remark: In the end you always wash up in Gare Saint-Lazare, at the bottom of the pit.
It was dark. A monotonous coming and going between the concourse and the café. People gulping down a drink in a hurry and leaving to catch their commuter trains. Down below, they tumbled into the taxis by ones and twos but the line at the stand never got any shorter. She alone was motionless in the middle of all this restless activity.
She ordered a kir, the same as the other time with the fat blond man. She forgot why she was there. Her head was spinning from the people sitting down, getting up, sitting down, from the din of the concourse. How long had it been since she had slept? She no longer saw anything around her except blurry silhouettes, big moving blotches, while insects buzzing around her ear drowned out little by little all the other sounds.
•
Brossier had lowered the window of his compartment and leaned his head out.
“I’ll call you at Hotel Langeac the day after tomorrow, Louis. Around five.”
The train shuddered into motion. Brossier, leaning out the window, gestured urgently: five fingers of one hand. It clearly meant: “Don’t forget, five o’clock.”
Louis walked back to the concourse. It was too late to go have dinner at rue de la Croix-Nivert. He was heading for the stairs out of the station when he noticed, to his left, the little café in the glass passageway. He went in, sat down, and ordered a café au lait and two pieces of bread.
There were no other customers this late. Except one girl at a table in back who seemed to be asleep, her forehead resting on her folded arms. Louis saw only her brown hair.