“Do you have cigarettes?” I asked.
“What brand?”
“Craven.”
“Ah, no. No English brands.”
She showed me the tray with the cigarettes.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take Americans.” I chose two packs at random and gave her a hundred francs. She opened one drawer, then another. She couldn’t find the change.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “Keep it.”
I went down the stairs, and when I left the building the car was gone.
I waited on the sidewalk of Quai Cassini. Neal must have gone to get gas somewhere nearby and not found a station. The car would reappear before me any minute now. As more time passed, I felt increasingly panicked. I couldn’t stand there waiting. I paced up and down the sidewalk. Eventually, when I looked at my watch, it was almost two o’clock in the morning.
A loud group of people left Restaurant Garac. Car doors slammed, engines started. Some people continued their conversations along the quay. I heard their voices and the sounds of their laughter. Down by the edge of the water, shadows were unloading crates and slowly stacking them near a pickup truck with its lights off and a tarp over the back.
I walked over to them. They were taking a break, leaning against the crates and smoking.
“You didn’t see a car just now?” I asked.
One of them looked up at me. “What car?”
“A big black car.”
I needed to talk to someone, not keep it all inside.
“Some friends were waiting for me in a black car, there, by the building. They left without telling me.”
There was no point trying to explain. I didn’t know what to say. Besides, they weren’t listening. Still, one of them must have noticed my terrified face.
“A black car? What kind?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the make of the car?”
He probably asked to see if I was drunk, or crazy. He looked at me suspiciously.
“No, I don’t know the make of the car.”
It was terrible not to know even that.
I walked up Boulevard de Cimiez. My heart had practically stopped. From a distance, I could make out the dark mass of a car parked in front of the balustraded wall of the Neals’ villa. When I got closer I saw that it wasn’t the car from earlier but the one with the diplomatic plates.
I rang the bell again and again. No one answered. I tried to push open the gate but it was locked. I crossed the street; the part of the house I could see over the wall was dark. I walked back down Boulevard de Cimiez and went into the phone booth at the bend in the road, by the Majestic. I dialed the Neals’ number and let it ring for a long time. But no one answered, any more than they had at the gate. So I went back up to the villa again. The car was still there. I don’t know why but I tried to open the car doors one by one; they were all locked. The trunk too. Then I rattled the gate, hoping it would open. No luck. I kicked the car, and then the gate, but there was nothing I could do. Everything was closed, I couldn’t find any way in, make any contact with anything. It was all locked and sealed shut, forever.
Just like this city, through which I walked back to the Sainte-Anne Pension. Dead streets. Cars few and far between, and I looked at them all, one after the other, but none of them was the Neals’. They all seemed empty. Passing the Jardin d’Alsace-Lorraine, I saw a black car the same size as the Neals’ stopped at the corner of Boulevard Gambetta. Its motor was running. Then it turned off. I went over to it but couldn’t see anything through the tinted windows. I bent down and almost pressed my forehead against the windshield. A blonde was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, her breasts against the steering wheel and her back to a man trying to press himself against her. She seemed to be trying to fight him off. I had already started to walk away when a head appeared out a lowered window—a man with his dark hair combed back:
“Like what you see, you voyeur?”
Then a raucous laugh from the woman. Its echo seemed to follow me the whole length of Rue Caffarelli.
The gate of the Sainte-Anne Pension was locked and I thought I would never be able to get this one open either. But I braced myself and pushed with all my strength and eventually it opened. On the walk in the dark garden I had to feel my way to the back stairs.
When I went into the room and turned on the light, I felt comforted at first, since Sylvia’s presence was still so vivid there. One of her dresses was draped over the back of the leather armchair; her other clothes were hanging in the wardrobe, her overnight bag still sitting there. Her toiletries hadn’t vanished from the little white wooden table next to the sink. I couldn’t resist taking a smell of her perfume.
I lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and turned off the light, with the idea that I’d be able to think better in the dark. But the darkness and silence enveloped me like a shroud, and I felt like I was suffocating. Little by little, this feeling gave way to one of emptiness and desolation. Being alone on that bed was unbearable. I turned on the bedside lamp and quietly told myself that it wouldn’t be long before Sylvia was back in this room with me. She knew I was waiting for her. So I turned the lamp back off, the better to listen for the grinding noise of the gate when it opened and the sound of her footsteps coming down the path and up the steps.
I was nothing but a sleepwalker, moving back and forth from the Sainte-Anne Pension to the Neals’ villa. I rang the bell for a long time without anyone answering. The car with the diplomatic plates was always parked in the same place, by the gate.
The Neals’ number appeared in the Alpes-Maritimes phone book next to the listing: American Consulate Office, 50-bis Boulevard de Cimiez. I called the American embassy in Paris and asked them if they knew about a Virgil Neal living in one of their buildings, 50-bis Boulevard de Cimiez, Nice. I said he had disappeared overnight and that I was worried about him. No, they had never heard of any Virgil Neal. The Château Azur villa on Boulevard de Cimiez was a residence for embassy employees but had not been occupied for several months. An American consul was about to move in there. I would have to direct any further questions to him.
I read all the newspapers, especially those from the area, including the Italian ones. I went through the local news items with a fine-toothed comb. One of them jumped out at me. On the night Sylvia disappeared, a German car, an Opel, black, with Paris plates, had gone off the part of the road known as Chemin du Mont-Gros, between Menton and Castellar, and crashed into a ravine. It had caught fire. They had discovered two bodies in the car, charred beyond recognition.
I detoured down the Promenade des Anglais and went into a large garage, just before Rue de Cronstadt.
I asked one of the mechanics if he happened to have an Opel in the garage.
“Why?”
“Just because . . .”
He shrugged. “There, in the corner, all the way in the back.”
Yes, it was the same kind of car as the Neals’.
I tried to revisit everywhere we had been with the Neals, hoping to find a trace, a thread that might lead me somewhere. Or maybe I would see them walk in with Sylvia, like in those movies that you have to rewind on the editing table to tirelessly reexamine the details of the same sequence. But the instant I’d walked out of Garac with the two packs of American cigarettes in my hand, the film strip had torn, or else reached the end of its reel.
Except for one night, in the Italian restaurant on Rue des Ponchettes where the Neals had arranged to meet us the first time.
I had chosen the same table as on that day, next to the giant fireplace, and the same chair. I was hoping that by returning to the same places, remaking the same gestures, I would eventually rejoin the invisible threads.
I had asked the woman who ran the restaurant and all the waiters if they knew the Neals. None of them recognized the name, even though Neal had told us he was a regular there. The customers were talking loud and the noise was oppressive, to the point where
I no longer knew why I was there, or where I was.
The events of my life gradually blurred before dissolving altogether. There was nothing left but that moment, the people eating dinner, the giant fireplace, the imitation Guardis on the wall, and the murmuring of the voices . . . Nothing but that moment. I didn’t have the courage to stand up and leave the room. No sooner would I have passed through the door than I would have slipped into the void.
A bearded man came in with a camera on a shoulder strap, bringing in a breath of cold air from outside. I was suddenly jolted out of my stupor. It was the photographer with his velvet jacket and the face of an art-school student, the one who patrolled the sidewalk in front of the Palais de la Méditerranée and who had taken a picture of the Neals, Sylvia, and me. I kept that photo in my wallet at all times.
He made his rounds from table to table, asking the diners if they wanted a “souvenir photo,” but none of them said yes. Then it was my turn. He seemed to hesitate, probably because I was alone.
“Photo?”
“Yes, please.”
He raised his camera, and the flash blinded me.
He waited for the picture to dry between his fingers and looked at me with a certain curiosity.
“Alone in Nice?”
“Yes.”
“Tourist?”
“Not exactly.”
He slipped the photo into a little cardboard frame and handed it to me.
“That’ll be fifty francs.”
“Would you like to have a drink?” I said.
“Sure.”
“I used to be a photographer myself,” I said.
“Ah.”
He sat across from me and put his camera on the table.
“You took a picture of me once before, on the Promenade des Anglais,” I said.
“I don’t remember everyone. It’s a never-ending parade of people, you know.”
“Yes, a never-ending parade.”
“So, you used to be a photographer too?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“Oh, a little of everything.”
It was the first time I had been able to talk to someone. I took the photograph out of my wallet. He glanced distractedly at it, then furrowed his brow.
“Is that one of your friends?” he asked, pointing to Neal.
“Not really.”
“Imagine that—I used to know him back in the day. But I haven’t seen him for years. I didn’t even realize I was taking his picture that day. They all go by so fast . . .”
The waiter brought us two flutes of champagne. I pretended to take a sip, while he emptied the glass in one gulp.
“So, you knew him?” I said, without hoping for much from his answer, since I was used to things slipping away before my eyes.
“Yes. We used to live in the same neighborhood when we were kids. In Riquier.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“What was his name?”
He thought I was testing him. “Alessandri. Paul Alessandri. Is that the right answer?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the photograph.
“And what is Alessandri up to now?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “I hardly know him.”
“The last time I saw him, he was a bull-herder in the Camargue.” He looked up and said, in a tone ironic and solemn at once: “That’s some bad company you’re keeping, my friend.”
“What do you mean?”
“Paul started out as a bellboy at the Ruhl. He worked as a currency exchanger at the city casino, then as a bartender. He went up to Paris and I lost sight of him . . . He did some time in jail . . . If I were you, I’d be careful.” He fixed his small, piercing eyes on me. “I always try to warn tourists.”
“I’m not a tourist,” I said.
“Oh, you live in Nice?”
“No.”
“Nice is a dangerous town,” he said. “You meet some bad people here . . .”
“I didn’t know his name was Alessandri,” I said. “He called himself Neal.”
“Ah. What was that name you said?”
“Neal.” And I spelled it for him.
“Well well, Paul is calling himself Neal? Neal . . . That was an American who lived on Boulevard de Cimiez when we were kids. In a big villa. Château Azur. Paul used to have me over to play in the villa’s gardens with him. It was right after the war. His father was the gardener there.”
I crossed Place Masséna. The police prefecture was a little farther up, past the construction fence around the site of the old municipal casino where Paul Alessandri had been a currency exchanger. What did that mean, “exchanger”? I paced back and forth, looking at the buses entering and leaving the bus station. Then I went through the archway in one swift move, as though I was afraid I might turn back.
I asked the man sitting behind a desk in the lobby which department handled disappearances.
“What kind of disappearance?”
I was already sorry I was here. Now I would be asked all kinds of questions and would have to give detailed answers. Evasive replies wouldn’t work. I could already hear the monotonous clicking of the typewriter.
“A missing person,” I said.
“Second floor. Room 23.”
I wanted to take the stairs instead of the elevator. I went down a light-green hallway lined with odd-numbered doors: 3, 5, 9, 11, 13 . . . Then another corridor forked off perpendicularly to the left. 15, 17, 23. The globes on the ceiling cast a glaring light on the door, making me blink. I knocked several times. A sharp voice told me to come in.
A blond man with glasses, rather young, was resting his elbows on a metal desk, arms crossed. Next to him was a little white wooden table holding a typewriter in a black plastic cover.
He indicated the chair opposite him. I sat down.
“It’s about a friend who disappeared a few days ago,” I said, and I heard my voice sounding like somebody else’s.
“A friend?”
“Yes. We had met two people, who invited us out to a restaurant, and after dinner she disappeared with them in an Opel . . .”
“Your girlfriend?”
I was speaking very fast, as though I expected to be interrupted at any moment and I didn’t have a second to spare to explain everything.
“Since then there’s been no word. The people we’d met claimed their names were Mr. and Mrs. Neal, living in a villa on Boulevard de Cimiez belonging to the American embassy. Plus they drove a car with diplomatic plates, which is still parked in front of the villa . . .”
He was listening to me with his chin in his hand, and I couldn’t stop talking. I had kept all these things to myself for so long, without any chance to confide in someone.
“Neal wasn’t his name and he wasn’t an American like he claimed, his name is Paul Alessandri and he’s from Nice. I found that out from one of his childhood friends who’s a photographer on the Promenade des Anglais and who took a picture of us.”
I took the photograph out of my wallet and handed it to him. He took it carefully between his thumb and his finger, like the wing of a dead butterfly, and placed it on his desk without looking at it.
“Paul Alessandri is the third from the left. He was a bellboy at the Hotel Ruhl. He went to jail . . .”
He pushed the photo toward me with the tips of his fingers. He couldn’t be bothered with it. And Paul Alessandri, whether he had spent time in jail or not, held no interest for him.
“My girlfriend was wearing a very valuable jewel . . .”
Everything was about to be turned on its head. I only had to give a few more details and a phase of my life would be over, right there in the police prefecture. The moment had come—I was sure of it—when he would take off the black slipcover and move the typewriter onto his desk. He would slip a sheet of paper into it, turn the squeaking roller. Then he would look up at me and say, in a gentle voice: “I’m listening.”
But he didn’t m
ove, didn’t say a thing, his chin still in the palm of his hand.
“My girlfriend was wearing a very valuable diamond,” I repeated, in a firmer voice.
He still said nothing.
“This Paul Alessandri, passing for an American, had spotted the diamond my girlfriend was wearing and even offered to buy it . . .”
He had sat up straight and put both hands flat on the table, like someone wanting to bring a conversation to a close.
“This is about a friend of yours?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re not related to her, then?”
“No.”
“The name of our department is Family Tracing Services. If I understand you correctly, this individual is not a member of your family.”
“That’s right.”
“In that case . . .”
He spread his arms with ecclesiastical sweetness, in a gesture of powerlessness.
“Besides, I’ve seen a lot of this kind of disappearance, you know. Usually runaways. How do you know your girlfriend didn’t just feel like taking a trip with this couple? That she won’t send word before long?”
I still had the strength to mutter: “I read in the paper that a car, an Opel, crashed into a ravine between Menton and Castellar.”
He rubbed his hands together with the same ecclesiastical sweetness. “There are any number of Opels on the Riviera that crash into ravines. You’re not saying you want to try to track down all the Opels in and around Nice that crash into ravines?”
He stood up, took my arm, and brought me to the door with a firm but courteous grip. He opened the door.
“I’m sorry. There’s really nothing we can do for you.”
And he showed me the sign on the door. After he closed it, I stood there for a moment, paralyzed, stupefied, under the globe of light in the hall, staring at the blue letters: “Family Tracing Services.”
I found myself back in the Jardin Albert I, feeling that now there was no one who could help me. I was angry at the police functionary for his lack of concern. He hadn’t for a second tried to help me, hadn’t offered me a lifeline or shown the most basic professional curiosity. He had discouraged me when I was just about to tell him everything. Well, too bad for him. It wasn’t a routine matter like he thought. It wasn’t. It was his own fault he’d missed out on a good chance for a promotion.
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