“And what’s your real name?”
“Marie. But that was far too unspectacular for me. And little Marie from the ground-floor flat in Saint-Germain no longer existed, anyway. So I just reinvented myself.” She grinned. “I hope I haven’t destroyed all your illusions now.”
“Not at all.” I waved dismissively. “Fontaine’s a very nice surname, too.”
And I meant what I said. I really did like the name. The only problem I had with the new surname was that hundreds of Parisians were named Fontaine. It was one of the commonest French surnames, even if, regrettably, no one in the building on the rue de Bourgogne had been named Fontaine. Even my resourceful friend Robert would have had to put all the students in his faculty to work to comb through the Paris phone book. That is, if Mélanie Fontaine was actually in a phone book. Perhaps, like so many people today, she only had a cell phone. Although I found it easier to imagine her with an old black Bakelite telephone to her ear than a smartphone. Searching for a Mélanie Fontaine was not exactly going to be a piece of cake.
Solène seemed to have read my thoughts. “Don’t worry, Alain,” she said. “If necessary, I’ll find her through my aunt. Mélanie was there, as you said, just a little while ago. I’m sure Aunt Lucie will have her address.” She wrinkled her forehead. “Although Aunt Lucie did remarry after my uncle died. I hope the name will come back to me.” She sighed in comic desperation. “Don’t be afraid—I’ll get hold of it somehow, even if I have to get on a train and go to Le Pouldu. Perhaps I should do that anyway. My family’s not that big, after all.”
Solène, whose name was actually Marie, was quite animated by the thought of finding Mélanie. “I’ll find her, you’ll see,” she said several times.
“Thanks, Solène.” For me, she would always be Solène.
When I left her in the early hours of the morning, she hugged me tight. “It’s done me good to talk about it … after all these years.” She looked me directly in the eye. “Do you know, Alain, I don’t believe it was just a stupid coincidence that we met. I came to Paris to shoot the film. But I really came because I was homesick. I thought so often about the early days and my sister as I walked along the familiar old streets and alleys of Saint-Germain, and I wondered what she was doing. I went past our old home and looked to see what the name on the ground-floor flat was. I went to my parents’ grave and told them how much I miss her. How much I miss Mélanie, I mean. And now I have the chance to make up for all the trouble I caused back then. This time, I’m not going to destroy anything.” She shook her head determinedly. “This time, I’m going to make sure that my sister gets the man she loves. And who loves her,” she added.
I found that very touching.
“And now, off you go.” She gave me a little kiss on the lips. “But in my next life, I can’t guarantee anything.”
“In your next life, I’m sure you’ll have a brother.”
“Exactly,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “One like you.”
At the end of the long hotel corridor, I turned around once more. Solène was still standing there, watching me go. She was smiling, and the glow of the ceiling light caught her blond hair, making it gleam.
A few moments later, I walked out onto the place Vendôme. Paris was waking up.
Twenty–nine
All that love waits for is opportunity, Cervantes once said. All I was waiting for was the opportunity to take the woman I loved in my arms, and I was not very good at it. Waiting, I mean. Who likes waiting? I’ve never met anyone who does.
I spent the next few days in a state of happy and excited turmoil, which reminded me of the impatience you feel as a child just before Christmas, walking past the living room door, hoping to catch a glimpse of your presents. I began counting the hours. I’ve very rarely looked at my watch quite so often.
So far, I hadn’t heard anything from Solène except for a cryptic phone call—interrupted by loud crackles on the line—telling me it wasn’t easy but she was staying on the ball. She was shooting a picnic scene in the Bois de Boulogne and the signal wasn’t very good.
In order to have something to do, I’d leafed through the Paris phone book under the letter F. The result was, as I might have expected, depressing. It began to look as if Solène would really have to go to Le Pouldu to find her aunt Lucie.
Robert found the whole story sensational. “What a story,” he said. “She’s a great girl, that Solène—I’d really like to meet her. Don’t forget, Alain, you owe me a favor.” My friend was also firmly convinced that he’d provided the decisive clue because he’d had the idea of writing the list of men’s names beginning with V.
“You see,” he said. “All you have to do is proceed systematically and you find the solution. Keep me in the loop. The suspense is killing me.” And it was killing me, as well. When I wasn’t working in the cinema, I walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg to calm down. I sat around in cafés, looking dreamily out the window. I lay motionless on the sofa at home, staring fixedly in the air until Orphée leaped up on me, meowing reproachfully. I spent every free minute picturing my reunion with Mélanie. Where it would be, how it would be, what she would say, what I would say—I fantasized the most magical and sublime dialogues. Those days, I would have been the perfect scriptwriter for a romantic movie. There was only one question I didn’t ask myself: Would our meeting take place at all?
The late show at the Cinéma Paradis was Design for Living—an Ernst Lubitsch comedy based on the popular two men and one woman scenario, and as I put up the old posters with Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper, and Fredric March, I thought that if the film were ever to be remade, Solène Avril would be the ideal casting choice for the blond bombshell played by Miriam Hopkins: a woman unable to decide between two men, both in love with her, and both actually good friends, who ends up deciding to take both. She would surely have liked the famous last line: “It’s a gentlemen’s agreement.” As a rule, gentlemen’s agreements between men and women are not kept. I smiled. In our case, the design for living had worked out differently, but as with the old Lubitsch comedy, I was sure that everyone would be reconciled. I was hoping for a happy ending.
I decided that I’d ring Solène again that evening to ask her if there were any news. Then I took out my cell phone to see if I happened to have missed a message. But of course I hadn’t.
I hadn’t divulged the details of the crazy story of two very different sisters and the unwitting owner of a little art cinema to Madame Clément and François, but I had not been able to conceal my lovesick state and my constantly changing moods from them during the past couple of weeks. Euphoric infatuation, proud excitement, complete helplessness, and deepest depression were now followed by a phase of irritable nervousness.
In his laid-back way, François contented himself by raising his dark eyebrows as, for the fifth time that day, I came into the projection booth, hummed, and fussed around the cans of film and finally knocked over his cup of coffee.
Madame Clément was not that patient. “What on earth is the matter with you, Monsieur Bonnard? I can’t stand it. Have you got ants in your pants or what?” she said in her blunt way as I kept tidying the program flyers over and over again, looking frequently at the display of my cell phone as I did so. “If you’re just going to get in the way, why don’t you go off and have a drink somewhere?”
“Don’t be impertinent, Madame Clément,” I said. “I can stand where I like in my own cinema.”
“Of course you can, Monsieur Bonnard.” Madame Clément nodded resolutely. “But not in my way, please!” With a sigh, I decided to follow her advice.
As the cinema began to fill up for the six o’clock performance of Little White Lies, I went out into the street, lit a cigarette, took a couple of steps with my head down, and bumped into a couple who were heading for the entrance of the Cinéma Paradis arm in arm.
“Oh, pardon,” I muttered, and looked up.
A woman with curly dark hair and a businessman—this time without h
is briefcase, and clearly having lost a considerable amount of weight—wished me good evening.
“Bonsoir,” I replied, nodding in confusion because the two of them looked so unashamedly happy. The dark-haired woman stopped and tugged her companion by the sleeve. “Shouldn’t we tell him, Jean?” she asked, and turned to me without waiting for an answer.
“You’re Monsieur Bonnard, the owner of the Paradis, aren’t you?” she asked.
I nodded.
“We wanted to thank you.” She beamed at me.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “What for?”
“For your cinema. The Cinéma Paradis is to blame for our falling in love.”
A blind man would have noticed that they were in love.
“My goodness!” I said. “Well, I’ll be … I mean … that’s just wonderful!” I smiled. “That’s the nicest thing that can happen to you in a cinema.”
They both nodded happily.
“We couldn’t get tickets that evening because the cinema was sold out … We’d both really been looking forward to the film and then … no tickets.”
The businessman blinked behind his glasses. “She was disappointed. I was disappointed. What were we going to do with the evening now?”
“And then he invited me for a coffee and we discovered that we’d both been coming to the Paradis for a long time. Although I hadn’t really noticed Jean before.” She laughed, and I thought of how she’d always come to the afternoon performance alone with her little daughter.
“That’s how we got to know each other. Jean was very unhappy because his girlfriend had left him. And I was also in a crisis because I’d discovered that my husband had been cheating on me with another woman. We sat there and talked and talked and … well, now we’re together. And all because of cinema tickets we couldn’t get. Isn’t that an incredible coincidence?” She laughed, as if she still couldn’t believe it.
I nodded. Life was full of incredible coincidences. Who should know that better than I?
In the café near the cinema, an old acquaintance was waiting for me. That is, he wasn’t actually waiting for me, but, as he so often did, he had gone there to drink a glass of wine before the late show, and he looked up briefly as I entered.
It was the professor, and we exchanged nods before I went and sat at one of the little round tables. I had no real idea what I should order—my coffee consumption had gone through the roof in the last few days, or even weeks. If I went on like this, I was soon going to have a stomach ulcer.
“Vous voulez?” The waiter wiped the table energetically, brushing off a few crumbs.
Nothing better occurred to me. In crisis situations, there is nothing like a coffee.
“Un café au lait, s’il vous plaît,” I said. When the big white cup of hot coffee was standing in front of me, I took my cell phone out of my pocket. It was eight o’clock and gradually getting dark. I hoped that Allan Wood had finally stopped shooting his picnic scenes in the Bois de Boulogne and that I would be able to reach Solène.
She answered straightaway, but there was no real news. Solène had asked around again in their old neighborhood, but among the people who still remembered the Fontaine family, none was able to say where Mélanie had gone to live after her return from Brittany. Solène had rejected the idea of trying to contact all the Fontaines in Paris. “We can always still do that,” she said. “But at the moment, that would waste too much time. Fortunately, we do have other options.”
“One option?” I objected.
“But one that has every prospect of success. I’m doing all I can, Alain. Don’t you think that I want to see my sister again as soon as possible? But we’ll probably have to be patient until the weekend; I don’t think I can get away before then.”
I groaned. “But that’s another three whole days!”
“I’ll go to Le Pouldu this weekend,” said Solène. “Don’t worry, as soon as I’ve found my aunt, we’ll find Mélanie, too. It’s just a question of time now.”
I sighed deeply and drummed on the pale marble tabletop with my fingers. I would really have liked a smoke.
“All this waiting around is driving me crazy. I have a really funny feeling, Solène. We’re so close now. I just hope nothing goes wrong at the last moment. Your aunt could fall off a ladder and break her neck. Or Mélanie could be on a cruise and meet some stupid millionaire, and then I’d be out of the running for good and all.”
Solène laughed. “You watch too many movies, Alain. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard that so many times. I hate all this optimism. You’re just like my friend Robert.”
“Robert? Who’s that?”
“An astrophysicist who loves women and never lets anything spoil his good mood,” I growled, having to admit that that was true. I’d never known Robert to be in a bad mood. “He’ll keep on saying that everything will be all right when he takes a parachute jump and his canopy doesn’t open!”
“But that sounds wonderful,” said Solène. “I hope you’ll introduce me to him sometime.”
“All in good time,” I said. “At the moment, we’ve still got to find Mélanie.”
As I put the cell phone down beside my cup, I caught the professor’s gaze. I nodded an apology. When you use a cell phone, you end up bothering the whole world with your private business, as if you were sitting in your armchair at home.
“Are you trying to find someone?” The look in his clear blue eyes was full of sympathy. “Excuse my just talking to you like this, but I couldn’t help hearing your conversation.”
He gave me a friendly smile. And I suddenly had déjà vu. There had been a previous occasion when I’d just chanced to be sitting in this little café with the professor. Then he had wished me good luck. That had been several weeks earlier, when I’d spoken to Mélanie for the first time.
I shrugged and nodded. In the intimate atmosphere of the café, the professor suddenly seemed like a dear and trusted old friend. “Yes,” I said with a sigh. “But that’s a very long story.”
The professor put down his paper and looked at me attentively. “One of the few advantages of old age is having a lot of time. If you like, I’d be glad to listen.”
I looked into the wise eyes of this old man whom I didn’t actually know and thought that my story would find a good listener in him. So I began to tell my tale, and the professor leaned toward me, put his hand to his ear, and listened carefully to what I said.
“You actually know her,” I said, interrupting myself at one point. “It’s that young woman in the red coat, the one I had a date with the other week. You saw her in the cinema that evening, in the foyer, remember?” I sighed. “My goodness, I don’t know how often I went to that house in the rue de Bourgogne because I was sure she lived there. I had walked her home, after all, right into the courtyard, where there’s an old chestnut tree. But she wasn’t there, and none of the people who live in the building had seen her. I was beginning to despair of my own sanity.”
I took a sip of my coffee, and saw the professor raise his eyebrows in astonishment. “But she was in the rue de Bourgogne,” he said slowly. “I’ve seen her there myself.” He nodded, and at first I could hardly believe my ears. “I know the building with the chestnut tree,” the professor continued. “It’s opposite a stationer’s shop, isn’t it?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, feeling the adrenaline filling every fiber of my being. “Yes! So it is … But how …” I faltered.
“Once a week I visit an old friend in the rue de Bourgogne. We’ve known each other since our university days, and he’s since gone almost completely blind. His name is Jacob Montabon. And sometime at the end of March—I believe it was just before your rendezvous—I met the young woman on the stairs, and we exchanged a few words. She told me that she was staying in her friend’s apartment for a week to look after her cat. She was really delightful.”
And that was when the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle finally began to
fit together to make the whole picture. I thought of the big black cat with green eyes that had jumped down from the chestnut tree into the courtyard that evening, and I almost gave a yell of triumph. I thought of the apartment door on the second floor behind which I’d heard the angry meowing of a cat. I thought of a cat that would only ever drink out of flower vases. Mélanie’s friend’s pet. The friend who worked in the bar of a grand hotel. I thought of the nagging voice of Monsieur Nakamura assuring me that his neighbor was never there in the evenings, and that when she did come back late at night, she always thoughtlessly let the door slam.
It was the night owl! The night owl was Mélanie’s friend who could never go to the cinema with her on Wednesdays because she was working. And her name was … Once again I could see Monsieur Nakamura in front of me.
“Leblanc!” I blurted. “Her friend’s name is Leblanc.”
The professor thought for a moment. “Yes, I do believe that’s what she said—Leblanc. Linda Leblanc.”
I leaped up and hugged the professor. Then I rushed to the door.
“Hey! Monsieur Bonnard. You’ve left your cell phone behind,” he shouted after me. But by then, I was already out on the street.
Thirty
“Wait here—I’ll be right back!” I shouted to the taxi driver as we stopped outside the building in the rue de Bourgogne. I jumped out and pressed the bell next to the nameplate engraved with the name Leblanc like a madman. No one answered. I’d already thought that would happen, but I wanted to be absolutely sure.
I tore the rear door of the car open and fell into the backseat. “Let’s go,” I shouted. “To the Ritz, please. Vite, vite! Get a move on!”
The taxi driver, a dark-skinned Senegalese who didn’t seem to understand the word quickly, looked at me with his big, wide brown eyes and smiled broadly. “Why people in Paris always so damn hurry?” he said hoarsely, changing calmly into second gear. “You not miss appointment, but miss everything else in life.” He rolled his eyes meaningfully. “In my home is proverb: ‘Only who walk slow see important thing.’ ” Nodding with self-satisfaction, he crawled along the rue de Bourgogne.
The Secret Paris Cinema Club Page 21