I read every email carefully, but they said nothing to me. They usually contained a string of numbers, sometimes some capital letters, and they were never more than three lines long. I had plenty of time for thinking between plings. One terrifying thought which struck me on the very first day, and which made the whole thing feel a lot less fun, was that I might be a pawn in some kind of terrorist network. A network that had chosen La Défense as its next target. The area seemed quite plausible as a target: the largest business district in Paris, where many French and international companies had their head offices.
I started to google how terrorist organisations operated, which just fuelled my sense of dread. They frequently make use of isolated cells, which are both independent and often unaware of each other; the individual typically doesn’t even know why he or she is carrying out a particular task. I tried to keep a cool head. Tried to tell myself that these were just innocent emails I was forwarding. It would have been different if I was running between suburban basement storerooms with various liquids or tubes of gas. I don’t know how many times I had to force myself to see the situation as it really was. One thing was clear: Monsieur Bellivier didn’t want anyone to know where he was, and that was why the emails were being forwarded.
Emails can easily be traced, and if I’d had more computer expertise I might have been able to find out who laposte92800 and Monsieur Bellivier were, or at least where they were. If laposte92800 wished Monsieur Bellivier ill and I was the intermediary, that meant I was also in the firing line. If that was the case, and I was being drawn into a terrorist organisation, surely the identity of the person forwarding the emails would never come out? Not even the man who had shown me to the office knew my name. But on the other hand, maybe that was how they worked. Maybe even they didn’t know who their colleagues were. Areva was one of the tallest buildings in the business district, which could mean it was an attractive target. But then why put the person forwarding the mail at the very top of that target?
Eventually, I calmed down enough to go for the first lunch of my new job, at McDonald’s. I knew I wouldn’t see any of my colleagues there – old or new. I kept an eye on the time as I sat there with my fish burger, as though someone were expecting me back at the office. No one was, but I had a job to do all the same. The contract specified that lunch was from 12.00 to 13.30. Five minutes before the end of my lunch break, I was back in my room. I closed the door and locked it behind me. The terrorist idea had evaporated a bit while I was at McDonald’s. No emails had come in during lunch.
I had almost finished the Paris article, but I wasn’t particularly happy with it. I had more exciting things to do than write articles about tourist attractions. I heard the first pling of the afternoon. This time, it was a short string of numbers, plus the words ‘inc VAT’. That was easy enough to work out, but surely terrorists didn’t bother with VAT or tax returns, I thought. Only a few more emails came in that afternoon, which gave me a chance to make the final revisions to a piece on the political situation in the country. I spent the last hour at my desk looking out at the Sacré-Cœur.
The last pling of the day arrived. Two letters, AF, followed by a string of ten letters and numbers. Something about the combination seemed familiar to me, but then I started to doubt myself. Though I didn’t quite know why, I noted them down on my phone. A quarter of an hour to go. In a few minutes’ time, I would face up to reality. Sit alongside the living dead in the metro. And in an hour, I would collect my son from holiday club. All those things that make us human beings feel secure, but which also make us so incredibly vulnerable. No more plings arrived. I switched off the computer, locked the door and walked to the lift.
I thought that I had overcome all the obstacles by then. That any difficulties would arise when I arrived at the office, not when I left. My pass behaved itself, the green light lit up. The foyer was almost empty. Nobody was coming to work at that time of day, nor leaving, unless they had a meeting somewhere.
‘Madame!’
I immediately knew it was me the receptionist was shouting after, but I didn’t want to believe it. Everything had started so well. Was it about to come to an abrupt end? I stopped and looked down at my shoes. The white marble floor made them seem a different shade of red. I turned. The receptionist smiled.
‘Don’t forget these, madame.’
She handed me a beautiful bouquet of flowers.
‘For me?’
I instantly knew I had made a mistake. I shouldn’t have seemed surprised, but I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. Sometimes we react instinctively.
‘Yes, they’re lovely, aren’t they?’ she said.
There was a cold breeze blowing through the foyer. The café wasn’t the only place with efficient air conditioning.
The stems made my hands feel wet and sticky. They were red, carnation-like blooms with delicate green foliage for decoration. The flowers made me feel like I was under surveillance, as though Monsieur Bellivier had decided to follow me home. I didn’t want that. There was no card, no sender’s name on the bouquet. Just a label announcing the florist they had come from. Everything had felt so good on my first day in the new job, until the flowers came into the picture.
My feet were sticking to my high-heeled shoes as I turned off the avenue. The flowers were upsetting me so much that I just had to get rid of them. The easiest thing would have been to dump them straight in the nearest bin, but that felt wrong somehow. It wasn’t just the idea of throwing away beautiful, fresh flowers, I also felt like doing so would come back to haunt me in some way.
A paranoid thought had taken root. The bunch of flowers was like an anonymous relay baton. I had been given it by the receptionist, who in turn had doubtless received it from Monsieur Bellivier, and now it was my turn to hand it on. A bit like the emails. But it wasn’t just the thought of giving flowers to the dead that made me turn off the avenue and into the cemetery; it was also the prospect of a little breathing space before I went to pick up my son. A way of coming back to reality. Death reminded me of life.
The woman in the security hut gave me a nod as I walked into the Jewish cemetery. Over the past year, guards had been introduced to all Jewish cemeteries in the city after a number of graves were vandalised following the terrorist attacks. The bouquet transformed me from an anonymous visitor into a plausible relative.
I walked aimlessly among the graves. The dry leaves crunched beneath my feet, a sound otherwise associated with autumn. The heat seemed to recede the deeper I walked into the cemetery; the cold gravestones were worthy adversaries of the heat. I had wandered through the cemetery so many times before, but I had never paid so much attention to the detail. If the dead person was a Jewish woman who had married a non-Jew, her maiden name was also given on the headstone, a reminder of her origins. But there were no Jewish symbols. No Stars of David or menorahs on the gravestones. Nor was there any Hebrew script, just crosses of all kinds, plus dates of birth and death.
The large family tombs towered up like small, uninviting playhouses of stone. Many of the graves seemed abandoned, and a dignified covering of moss had grown over them. Others boasted flowers, fresh that day. There was nothing sad about the abandoned graves, in fact it was the opposite: they looked beautiful in the attire nature had given them. It was the graves adorned with plastic flowers that made me feel uncomfortable. They looked both abandoned and false. Someone had remembered the dead purely out of duty, taken action only to ease their own guilty conscience. Plastic flowers never withered or decayed, making them as dead as an object can be. When I left the cemetery that day, there was a beautiful red bouquet on the grave of a certain Judith Goldenberg.
My mornings differed, depending on whether I had my son or not. My ex-husband couldn’t take any leave that summer and I couldn’t go on holiday straight after I had been off sick, so my son had to spend his summer at holiday club. I think he liked it there, or at any rate that was what I convinced myself; I lacked the energy to consider anything else
. If I asked him what he thought of his summer days, he just shrugged. It was during the mornings that my questions came. I was too busy to ask them during the day, and by the evening I was too tired. That was when my emotions welled up instead.
The next morning, I asked myself whether I had done the right thing by taking on the assignment. My son gave me a funny look every time I came into the kitchen, wearing a dress one moment and a pair of trousers the next. I don’t know if he gave much thought to all these changes of outfit, but if he told his father about my new morning routine, my ex would assume I’d met someone. But that was neither here nor there.
The swing doors didn’t cause any problems on my second morning. The receptionist gave me a smile. What did she know about my work? What did she know about me, or about Monsieur Bellivier? I decided not to dwell on it. I would never be able to find a natural, risk-free way to broach the subject with her. The minute I entered the office I could see someone had been in there after me. I couldn’t say exactly how I knew until I hung up my coat and sat down at my desk. The wastepaper bin had been emptied, the chair set unnaturally straight. Even the window had an extra gleam to it. Someone had come in to clean.
Despite being interrupted by plings several times an hour, I got more done than usual. I polished off an article and gazed out of the window. There were a couple of military vehicles out there, driving back and forth. From where I was sitting, they looked like my son’s toy cars. They were most likely there to lull people into a false sense of security, a belief that they were keeping tabs on the terrorists.
‘Madame!’
Yesterday’s finale to the working day was repeated. I turned and took the bunch of flowers with a smile and managed to utter a thanks. Today’s bouquet contained some delicate blue flowers, fighting for space with a few yellow ones. The only thing that really troubled me about my assignment was this daily conclusion. And the thought that every day would end in this way made me feel a little sick. I suddenly felt as if I’d been running too fast. Was there something I’d missed here? Something I should have realised or noticed? Who did people usually give flowers to? The winner of a competition, someone whose birthday it was, someone they loved, someone who’d died …
I sat down on the edge of the fountain by the entrance to the metro and then the thought struck me: I was the only one coming out of Areva carrying a bunch of flowers. I stuck out from the crowd. Anyone armed with the knowledge that I was carrying a bouquet would be able to spot me easily. The flowers were to identify me. I looked all around. Paranoia began its gentle caress and then quickly took over my entire body. Without really thinking it through, I climbed up onto the slippery, wet rim of the fountain. It would do as a platform. I held up the bouquet as high as I could. It was my only means of giving myself some kind of advantage. Demonstrating that I’d worked it out; that I knew what the flowers were for. Hopefully the ritual could end now, and with it the paranoia might also subside.
The blue and yellow flowers found a new owner, too. This time, a living one. A heavily pregnant woman was engrossed in a phone call. She had a pained look on her face. I waited until she finished the call. She glanced at her watch and seemed to be thinking.
‘Hello, excuse me, would you like these?’
I held out the flowers. She looked at them and then straight at me.
‘No,’ she eventually said. ‘Why would I?’
‘My lover gave them to me, but my husband’s going to be here any minute and I thought I’d give them to somebody rather than just shoving them in a bin.’
‘Yeah, that’d be a shame. They’re beautiful.’
‘Take them. Always nice to have flowers on a day like this.’
‘Well, thanks. And good luck … with your husband.’
When I looked back over my shoulder a few moments later, I saw she had nonchalantly put down the flowers beside her. Maybe she didn’t appreciate them after all. Not that it mattered. The vital thing was for me to get rid of them, without throwing them away. Where they ended up was less important. What mattered was to convince myself that they’d ended up in good hands.
The next morning, I woke with a start. I thought I knew why I had recognised the combination of letters and figures in one of the emails. I went into the kitchen and found my purse. The man in the apartment opposite was awake. He had cancer, the concierge had told me. It probably wasn’t the cancer itself keeping him awake, but his fear of it. I watched him pacing to and fro between his kitchen table and the radio. Nervously, I compared my Air France frequent flyer’s card with the string of numbers and letters I had noted down on my phone. There was no doubt. It was probably a membership number from the Air France loyalty programme.
I felt sick. Why couldn’t it at least be a members’ number from a supermarket chain? Air France, an airline company, caused the terrorist associations to come flooding back. Though it was perfectly possible, of course, to take a flight without planning to blow the plane from the sky. My neighbour moved over to the window with his cat in his arms, stroking it gently on the head. His fear, his anxiety soothed my own. What were a few matching numbers compared to looking death in the eye every night?
It takes Mancebo a while to work out why his chest hurts. The memory of the accident is all mixed up with Madame Cat’s green eyes as he hauls himself out of bed. He has woken before the alarm goes off, but even so he feels rested and ready to face the day and his two jobs. Before he goes into the bathroom he turns the clock forward fifteen minutes so that it won’t ring. He’s never woken of his own accord before, and Fatima would think it was very strange if the alarm clock rang and her husband was already up.
Pleased with his solution for the clock, Mancebo tramps into the bathroom and pulls up his white nightshirt in front of the mirror to see if the crash has left any mark. There’s no sign of it on his skin. It’s all inside me, Mancebo thinks.
Before leaving the apartment, he stands in the middle of the room and studies his wife, who is still sleeping deeply. He quietly wonders why she was out so early the previous morning. But he has neither the time nor the inclination to spend any longer thinking about it, he has a lot to get done today. He can’t let a single minute go to waste if everything is to go to plan. His white lie has left him with a bashed-up van, but it still runs and that’s the main thing. He checked yesterday after filling in all the insurance papers with the police and the taxi driver. The problem now is making sure no one in his family sees the broken headlight.
God wanted to punish me, Mancebo thinks. The Almighty gave me the lie I created. He pulls on his cap. Now he really does need Raphaël’s help.
The air is heavy. It’s going to be another hot day, he can feel it as he loads his wares into the van at Rungis. Mancebo sets off back towards Paris. The traffic hasn’t built up yet, and he puts his foot down a bit further than usual so he can get to his first task. It’s a one-off, but still vital for his ongoing work. It will help him do his new job in a correct and professional way. He’s going to buy a notebook.
He turns onto Avenue d’Italie and drives deeper into the 13th arrondissement. He knows the area, but not anyone who lives there, and that’s exactly why he has chosen it for the purchase of his notebook. The 13th arrondissement is home to lots of Chinese people, people that Mancebo doesn’t like doing business with because he finds it hard to understand what they say. Their French sounds like a foreign language to his ears, but on this occasion he has no choice.
Mancebo gets out of the van. In the few minutes he saved by driving faster than usual he now needs to find a notebook. He walks down the street. Chinese banks, clothes shops, grocery shops, and a video-rental place, its front window cluttered with Chinese martial-arts films. But they’re all shut. The Chinese aren’t awake yet. He’s on the verge of giving up when he sees a man and a woman dragging boxes in front of an open door. He moves closer and sees red and black bags in the window. Towards the rear of the shop, he glimpses some porcelain hares and a picture of an electric waterfall.
‘Good morning, I wondered whether you have any notebooks?’
The Chinese couple look at Mancebo in alarm, and then at each other in the same way. They’re not used to seeing an Arab in their neighbourhood at this time of day, particularly not one asking for notebooks.
‘We not open yet.’
‘No, I can see that, madame, but I need to buy a notebook, don’t you sell them? It doesn’t matter what it looks like, but one with hard covers, if possible?’
‘It’s not allowed,’ the woman replies, since the man seems unable to speak at all, or not in French anyway.
I knew it, Mancebo thinks, I shouldn’t have got mixed up with others.
‘Not even a little notepad?’
‘It’s not allowed.’
‘It’s not allowed? What do you mean, madame?’
Mancebo is starting to feel indignant. In all his years in the shop trade he’s never told a customer that something isn’t allowed. What service!
‘I mean, it’s not allowed. We only sell to companies, wholesale, not like you, monsieur, private person, only large quantities, not retail. Not one little book, many.’
Mancebo pulls up outside Le Soleil for his usual morning coffee, but he’s not alone in the van. He’s accompanied by three boxes of lettuce, two boxes of green and red apples, several kilos of carrots, five small trays of raspberries and seventy Chinese notebooks. The old clock behind the bar reads 08.36. Mission completed.
It’s Friday, which means that the Paris streets take on a faster tempo. The city’s inhabitants want to get everything done before the weekend, and they hurry everywhere they go. The streets fill with people who have to get everything done after work but before dinner. That includes an aperitif with the friend they didn’t find time to see during the week. Tariq always tries to do business with the authorities on Friday afternoons. His theory is that the bureaucrats, otherwise dry and strict, loosen their ties after the glass of wine they enjoy with their Friday lunch. Meaning that things generally go his way.
Waiting for Monsieur Bellivier Page 5