I didn’t quite know what to answer. I repeated:
“You’ve been keeping an eye on me?”
He smiled, and I recalled that back then he had shown me some kindness.
“Yes . . . Keeping an eye . . . It was sort of my job . . .”
He looked at me, knitting his brow, as he had the previous century in his office on the Quai de Gesvres. Apart from his gray brush cut, he had not changed much. It wasn’t very warm in that part of the café near the windows, and he had kept on a gabardine coat that might have dated from the time of my interrogation.
“I don’t suppose you live in this neighborhood . . . or I would have seen you before . . .”
“No, I don’t live in the neighborhood,” I said. “And I haven’t been back here in ages . . . Since the time of Quai de Gesvres . . .”
“Will you have something to drink?”
The waiter was standing at our table. I nearly ordered a Cointreau, in memory of Dannie, but I had no money on me and felt embarrassed at being treated.
“Thanks, I’m fine,” I stammered.
“Oh, go on . . . Order something.”
“An espresso.”
“Same for me,” said Langlais.
There was a moment of silence. It was my turn to break the ice:
“Do you live in the neighborhood?”
“Yes—always have.”
“I did, too, when I was younger. I knew this area well . . . Do you remember the Clair de Lune?”
“Of course! But what were you doing at the Clair de Lune?”
His tone was the same as at my interrogation, back then. He smiled.
“You’re under no obligation to answer. We’re not in my office anymore.”
Through the café window, I could see the part of Place d’Italie that hadn’t changed under the sun and blue sky. I felt as if he had questioned me only the day before. I smiled back.
“And where should we pick up the interrogation?” I asked.
He, too, was feeling the same thing, I was sure of it. Time had been erased. Not a day had gone by between the Quai de Gesvres and Place d’Italie.
“It’s funny,” he said. “There were several times when I tried to get in touch with you . . . I even called your publisher once, but they wouldn’t give out your address.”
He leaned toward me and squinted.
“Mind you, I could have found your address if I wanted . . . It was my job . . .”
He again had the same gruff tone as on the Quai de Gesvres. I couldn’t tell whether he was joking.
“Only, I didn’t want to bother you . . . or give you cause for alarm.”
He nodded, looking like he wanted to add something. I waited with folded arms. It was as if our roles had reversed and I was the one behind the desk, about to begin the interrogation.
“So, here’s the thing . . . When I retired, I took two or three case files with me, as souvenirs . . . and among them was the file on the people who were the reason why we summoned you to Quai de Gesvres . . .”
He spoke sheepishly, almost shyly, as if he had just made a compromising admission that might shock me.
“If you’re still interested . . .”
I thought I must be dreaming. A man had just sat down at a table near the window in back, and was punching in a number on his mobile phone. Seeing that object confirmed that it was no dream and that the two of us were here, in the present, in the real world.
“Of course I’m interested,” I said.
“That’s why I wanted your address . . . I was going to mail it all to you.”
“Odd characters,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently . . .”
I wanted to tell him why this case file, which was nearly half a century old, still interested me. You have lived through a short period of your life—day by day, without asking any questions—under strange circumstances, among people who were equally strange. And it’s only much later that you can finally understand what you lived through and who those people really were, on condition that someone finally gives you the key to decipher a coded language. Most people aren’t in that situation: their memories are simple, straightforward, self-sufficient, and they don’t need dozens and dozens of years to clarify them.
“I understand,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts. “This file will be a little like a time bomb for you.”
He looked over the bill. I was truly embarrassed not to be able to offer to pay. But I didn’t dare confess to him that, that morning, my credit was insufficient.
Outside, on the sidewalk around the square, we were still and silent, Langlais and I. Apparently he didn’t want to part company right away.
“I could just hand you the file . . . No need to mail it . . . I live right nearby . . .”
“That would be very kind of you,” I said.
We circled Place d’Italie, and he pointed to a high-rise on the corner of Avenue de Choisy.
“That’s where the Clair de Lune used to be,” he said, indicating the ground floor. “My father took me there a lot . . . He knew the manageress . . .”
We started up Avenue de Choisy.
“I live a bit further down . . . Don’t worry, I won’t make you walk for miles.”
We arrived at Square de Choisy. I had a clear recollection of this public garden, which looked more like a park; of the large redbrick building called the Institut Dentaire, and of the girls’ school way in back. On the other side of the avenue, after the high-rises, were modest houses of the type I remembered. But how much longer would they be there? Langlais had stopped in front of a small building on the corner of a blind alley, with a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor.
“I won’t ask you to come up . . . I’d be too ashamed . . . It’s a pigsty up there . . . I’ll just be a moment . . .”
Alone on the sidewalk, I pondered the leafless trees in Square de Choisy and, farther on, the dark red mass of the Institut Dentaire. That building had always struck me as an anomaly in this park. My memories of Square de Choisy were not memories of winter, but of spring or summer, when the foliage on the trees contrasted with the dark red of the institute.
“What were you daydreaming about?”
I hadn’t heard him come up. In his hand was a yellow plastic folder. He held it out to me.
“Here . . . Your case file . . . It’s not very thick, but it might interest you.”
We were both reluctant to part company. I would have liked to invite him to lunch.
“Please don’t take it the wrong way that I didn’t ask you up . . . It’s a tiny apartment that used to belong to my parents . . . Its only plus is the view of all those trees . . .”
He gestured toward the entrance of Square de Choisy.
“We were talking about the Clair de Lune before . . . The manageress was murdered over there, in the park. You see . . . That redbrick building . . . the institute . . .”
He was lost in a painful memory.
“They dragged her over to it . . . They shoved her against the wall and shot her in the back . . . And afterward, they realized they’d made a mistake.”
Had he witnessed the scene from his window?
“It happened after the liberation of Paris . . . A whole bunch of them had commandeered the building . . . bogus Resistance men . . . Captain Bernard and Captain Manu . . . and a lieutenant whose name I’ve forgotten . . .”
I hadn’t known these details when I used to walk through Square de Choisy, years ago, to wait for a childhood friend to come out of the girls’ school.
“One shouldn’t stir up the past too much. I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing by giving you that file . . . Did you ever see the girl again? The one with all the aliases?”
At first I didn’t understand whom he meant.
“The reason why we questioned you. What did you call her?”
“Dannie.”
“Her real name was Dominique Roger. But she had other names, too.”
Dominique R
oger. Perhaps it was under that name that she went to collect her mail at the post office. I had never seen the name on the envelopes. She jammed the letters into her coat pocket immediately after reading them.
“Maybe you knew her as Mireille Sampierry?” asked Langlais.
“No.”
He spread open his arms and looked at me with eyes full of compassion.
“Do you think she’s still alive?” I asked him.
“Do you really want to know?”
I had never put the question to myself so plainly. If I were being honest, the answer would be, No. Not really.
“What’s the point?” he said. “You can’t force things. Maybe someday you’ll run into her in the street. We found each other, you and I . . .”
I had opened the yellow plastic folder. At a glance, it seemed to contain about ten sheets.
“You’d be better off reading that with a clear head . . . If you have any questions, give me a call.”
He fished in his inside jacket pocket and handed me a tiny calling card bearing the words: Langlais, 159 Avenue de Choisy, and a telephone number.
After taking a few steps, I turned around. He hadn’t gone back inside. He remained standing there, on the sidewalk, watching me from a distance. He would surely keep his eyes on me until I disappeared at the end of the avenue. Back when he practiced his profession, he must have gone on many stakeouts on winter days just like this one, or at night, his hands thrust into the pockets of his gabardine coat.
“One shouldn’t stir up the past,” Langlais had said as we were parting company, but that winter morning I still had a long walk ahead of me before reaching home at the far end of Paris. Was it really by chance that I’d found myself in Place d’Italie after more than twenty years and that the ATM had spat out a slip of paper saying, “We’re sorry. You have insufficient credit”? What was there to be sorry about? I was happy that morning, lighthearted. Nothing in my pockets. And that long, steady walk, with occasional rest stops on public benches . . . My only regret was that I didn’t have my black notebook. I had made a list of the public benches of Paris over the course of various walks: north-south, east-west—those benches that, each time, marked a pause where one could catch one’s breath and daydream. I no longer saw a very clear distinction between past and present. I had reached Les Gobelins. Since my youth—and even my childhood—I had done nothing but walk, always in the same streets, to the point where time had become transparent.
I entered the Jardin des Plantes and sat down on a bench in the main alley. Only a few passersby, owing to the cold. But it was still sunny, and the blue of the sky was my confirmation that time had stood still. I needed only to sit there until nightfall and study the sky to discover the few stars I could name, without really knowing if I was correct. And entire passages would come back to mind from my bedside book at the time of Rue de l’Aude: Eternity by the Stars. Reading it helped me wait for Dannie. It was as cold back then as it was on this bench in the botanical gardens, and Rue de l’Aude was covered in snow. But despite the cold, I leafed through the pages contained in the yellow plastic folder. A letter was appended to them, signed by Langlais, that I hadn’t noticed earlier when I had peeked into the folder and he had said to me, “You’d be better off reading that with a clear head.” The letter was barely legible, no doubt dashed off in his apartment before he came back down to hand me the file.
Dear Sir,
I retired from the Force ten years ago, which means that I was still working in Vice and Homicide while you were writing many of your books, which I read with unflagging interest.
I naturally remembered your visit to my office on Quai de Gesvres, for an interrogation when you were very young. I have a good memory for faces. They often used to kid me about it, saying that even if I’d only seen someone once in the street, I could recognize him from behind ten years later.
When I left the department, I treated myself to a few souvenirs from the old Vice Squad archives, among them the incomplete file on you that I have long wanted to send you. That day has come, thanks to our meeting earlier.
Please be assured of my discretion. Moreover, I believe you wrote somewhere that we live at the mercy of certain silences.
Most cordially yours,
LANGLAIS
PS: To further reassure you: the investigation related to these documents has been definitively closed.
As I leafed through the file, I came across civil status records, reports, interrogation transcripts. Certain names jumped out at me: “Aghamouri, Ghali, Pavillon du Maroc, Cité Universitaire, born 6 June 1938, in Fez. Alleged ‘student,’ attached to the Moroccan security forces. Moroccan Embassy . . . Georges B., alias ‘Rochard,’ medium brown hair, straight nose, prominent bulge. Anyone with further information is asked to notify this department, Turbigo 92-00 . . . Before this court appeared the individual henceforth named Duwelz, Pierre. Seen and approved by the accused . . . Chastagnier, Paul Emmanuel. Height 5'11". Drives automobile Lancia no. 1934 GD 75 . . . Marciano, Gérard. Distinguishing marks: scar ¾" in length beside left eyebrow . . .” I flipped through the pages quickly, trying not to linger on any one sheet and each time fearing I would discover a new detail or record about Dannie. “Dominique Roger, alias ‘Dannie.’ Under the name Mireille Sampierry (23 Rue Blanche), alias Michèle Aghamouri, alias Jeannine de Chillaud . . . According to Davin’s information, resides at the Unic Hôtel under the name Jeannine de Chillaud, born in Casablanca on . . . She had her mail sent to a general delivery address, as attested by the attached registration form issued by P. O. Branch 84, Paris.”
And at the bottom of the pages held together by a paper clip: “Two projectiles struck the victim. One of the two projectiles was fired point-blank . . . The two slugs corresponding to the two spent shells were found. The concierge at 46-bis Quai Henri-IV . . .”
One evening, we had gotten off a train, Dannie and I, at the Gare de Lyon. I think we were returning from that country house called La Barberie. We didn’t have any luggage. The station was packed. It was summer and, if I remember correctly, the start of the holidays. We left the station without taking the metro. She didn’t want to return to the Unic Hôtel that evening, so we decided to walk to my place on Rue de l’Aude. As we were about to cross the Seine, she said:
“Would you mind if we make a small detour?”
She led me along the quays toward Île Saint-Louis. Paris was deserted, as it often is on evenings in summer, and it marked a contrast with the crowds in the Gare de Lyon. Very little traffic. A feeling of lightness, of vacation. I had written that last word in capitals in my black notebook, with a date: July 1, the date of that evening. I had even added a definition of “vacation” that I’d seen in a dictionary: “An act or instance of leaving or nullifying; a time of respite.”
We followed the Quai Henri-IV, which in fact is mentioned at the bottom of that page in Langlais’s file, a page on which it is clearly specified that a “homicide” had taken place. She stopped at one of the last addresses, number 46-bis, the same address as on the page—I verified it the day I met Langlais, twenty years later. That day, I merely had to cross the bridge from the Jardin des Plantes.
She headed toward the carriage entrance, then paused for a moment:
“Would you do me a favor?”
Her voice sounded shaky, as if she found herself in a danger zone where she might be caught unawares.
“Ring at the door on the ground floor and ask for Mme Dorme.”
She looked at the ground-floor windows, their closed metal shutters. A dim glow filtered through the slits.
“Do you see a light on?” she asked in a whisper.
“Yes.”
“If you see Mme Dorme, ask her when Dannie can call.”
She seemed tense, and perhaps was already regretting her initiative. I think she was tempted to hold me back.
“I’ll wait for you at the bridge. It’s better if I don’t stay here in front of the building.”
And she indicated the bridge that slices through the tip of Île Saint-Louis.
I went through the entrance and stopped in front of a huge double door on my left, made of light-colored wood. I rang the bell. No one answered. I could hear no sound behind the door. And yet, we had seen light peeking through the slits in the shutters. The timer on the hall light ran out. I rang again in the dark. No one. I stood there in the dark, waiting. I sincerely hoped that someone would finally open the door, that the silence would be broken, and that the lights would come back on. At one point, I pounded on the door with my fists, but the wood was so thick that it barely made a sound. Did I really pound on the door that evening? I’ve so often dreamed of that scene since then that my dream has become confused with reality. Last night, I was in total darkness, unable to orient myself, and I was pounding on a door with both fists, as if I had been locked in. I was suffocating. I awoke with a start. Yes, once again, the same dream. I tried to remember whether I had pounded like that on that distant night. In any case, I had rung several more times in the dark, and I had been surprised by the sound of the doorbell, both brittle and crystalline. No one. Silence.
I groped my way out of the building. She was pacing back and forth on the bridge. She took my arm and gave it a squeeze. She was relieved that I was back, and I wondered whether we had just been in danger. I told her that no one had answered the door.
“I never should have sent you in there,” she said. “But sometimes I still think things are like they were before . . .”
“Before what?”
She shrugged.
We crossed the bridge and followed the Quai de la Tournelle. She kept silent, and it wasn’t the moment to ask questions. Everything here was calm and reassuring: the ancient building façades, the trees, the lit streetlamps, the narrow streets that spilled onto the quay and reminded me of Restif de La Bretonne. Many pages of my black notebook were filled with notes about him. I didn’t even feel like asking her anything. I felt light, carefree, happy to be walking along the quay with her that evening, repeating to myself the name Restif de La Bretonne, with its soft, mysterious cadence.
The Black Notebook Page 9