It was always the same. Whenever you got into a taxi in Paris, you ended up either with a political radical who would hold forth morosely about the state of the grande nation and the uselessness of all politicians while underlining his views by banging the steering wheel or you would get an amateur philosopher. Our man from Senegal was obviously one of the second type. “But couldn’t we go a bit faster?” I urged. “It’s really very important.” I put my hand meaningfully to my heart.
The Senegalese turned around to me and grinned. “Okay, boss,” he said. “You say. I drive tack-tack.”
I wasn’t really sure if “tack-tack” was a kind of war cry or the Senegalese version of “zigzag,” but in any case, a few minutes later we were hurtling at breakneck speed through the narrow one-way streets of the government quarter toward the pont de la Concorde in order to get to the right bank of the Seine. I leaned back and watched the obelisks flashing past until the driver, his hand hard down on the horn, jumped a light that was just turning red.
A pedestrian jumped aside in terror, and for a moment I saw his enraged face appear in the car window and then vanish again. “Old people think street belong them,” my driver said, unimpressed. “We still nearly had green.” Traveling at the same speed, he turned to me again, and the car lurched and skidded dangerously. “At home, proverb say: ‘Old man should stay in hut, or lion eat him.’ ”
“Our proverb says: ‘You should always look where you’re driving!’ ” I said in terror.
“Ah. Ha-ha. You good man. That damn funny.” He laughed loudly, as if I’d made a joke, but at least he was now looking at the road ahead again.
We continued along the rue Royale, all its lanes jammed with traffic, and then we finally turned into the somewhat quieter rue Saint-Honoré. I sighed with relief and sank back in my seat again.
Linda Leblanc, one of the few people who could definitely reveal where Mélanie was living at the moment, worked in the bar of an old grand hotel in Paris. And unlike Fontaine, the surname Leblanc was relatively uncommon.
Of course, the hotel could also have been the Meurice, Fouquet’s, or the Plaza Athénée, but as things stood, I figured I might just as well try my luck in the Ritz first of all. At least I already knew the Hemingway Bar.
A few minutes later, my taxi stopped on the place Vendôme. The driver looked at his watch and nodded with satisfaction. “Was good fast, yes?”
I gave him the most generous tip I’d ever given in my life.
There wasn’t much going on in the Hemingway Bar at this time, not yet anyway. I stood in the entrance for a moment and looked around. Behind the bar, the bartender stood rattling his shaker enthusiastically before pouring its pink-hued contents into a cocktail glass and decorating the rim with a skewer of fruit.
Two waitresses were leaning on the bar. One of them tripped lightly over to me as I sat down underneath a photograph of Hemingway at his typewriter in his home in Cuba. I recognized her again immediately. It was the young woman with the dark chignon that Allan had said moved like a ballet dancer.
She gave me a professional smile. “Bonsoir, monsieur. What can I get you?”
I leaned forward to read her name tag. Melinda Leblanc. Linda. Bingo!
Thanks, Melinda. I heard Allan Wood’s voice and my head began to buzz.
“Monsieur?” Melinda gave me a questioning look. “What would you like me to get you?”
I leaned forward over the table, rested my chin in both hands, and looked up at her. “How about an address?”
Thirty–one
After I had introduced myself to an astonished Melinda Leblanc as Alain Bonnard, her smile vanished. “Oh,” she said. “You’re him!” Her voice sounded anything but enthusiastic.
“Yes,” I said with some irritation. “I’m him. You are Mélanie Fontaine’s friend, aren’t you?” She gave a barely perceptible nod. “Thank God,” I said with relief. “Listen, you have to give me Mélanie’s address. I’ve been searching for her for weeks.”
Linda eyed me coolly. “I don’t have to do anything at all. I don’t think Mélanie is particularly interested in seeing you again—after all you’ve done to her.”
“No!” I hissed. “I mean … for God’s sake, I know what you’re getting at, but it’s all just a terrible misunderstanding. I haven’t done anything at all. Please help me!”
“Well, well,” she replied grimly, “a misunderstanding. Mélanie’s version sounded somewhat different.”
“Then listen to my version,” I pleaded. “Please! Give me ten minutes, and I’ll explain everything. I simply have to talk to Mélanie. I … Good grief, don’t you understand? I love your friend.”
Love is always a good argument. Linda looked at me searchingly for a few seconds as if trying to decide whether her response would be favorable or not. Then she went over to the bar, exchanged a few words with the bartender, and signaled for me to follow her.
It took a great deal of persuasiveness on my part to convince the woman with the dark chignon that my intentions were good and to coax the address out of her—that address which was so important to me—together with a promise not to warn her friend in advance under any circumstances.
The fifteen-minute conversation—both quiet and excited—we had on a sofa only a few yards from the Hemingway Bar revealed that the name Alain Bonnard was far from music to the ears of Linda Leblanc. Admittedly, Mélanie had concealed from her friend the fact that the actress Solène Avril was her sister, but she had told Linda that she had fallen hopelessly in love with the owner of the Cinéma Paradis, who, in the most outrageous manner, had taken up with another woman only a few days after their first date.
“Mélanie had been going on about it to me for weeks. She kept talking about this incredibly nice cinema owner whom she didn’t dare talk to. I was so glad when the jerk finally got around to chatting her up—oops, sorry!”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Carry on.”
The day after my date with Mélanie, Linda had returned to her apartment in the rue de Bourgogne, where her friend was waiting for her with an ecstatically happy cat, breakfast, and great news.
I clearly remembered how indecisive Mélanie had looked outside the front door, the hesitation that made me hope for a moment that she was going to ask me to go inside with her. But it hadn’t been her apartment. And the next day, her friend was coming back from her vacation. So Mélanie had said good-bye to me with unspoken regret. And I had lost all trace of her.
“Then when she got back from Le Pouldu a week later, she was devastated,” Linda continued. “It was all over; the cinema owner had found another woman. At least that’s what she said. How could I have guessed that all her unhappiness was based on a stupid newspaper article? And some traumatic experience she’d had as a girl. She presented it as if it were a proven fact that she’d been deceived. Anyway, she just sat on my sofa, sobbing that she’d never ever set foot in that damn cinema again.”
Linda shook her head in bewilderment. “I tried to talk to her, suggested that she should try to sort the matter out directly with you. But she just kept on saying that she knew how it would all end. It had already happened to her once before. She was totally out of it, and so I thought it was best not to keep on at her about it. I had not the slightest clue that Solène Avril’s her sister. I didn’t even know that she had a sister at all! Mélanie doesn’t like talking about the past.”
Linda looked at me with a shrug of the shoulders. She could, of course, distinctly remember Solène Avril coming into the Hemingway Bar with Allan Wood. She even thought she could vaguely remember me.
It was only later that she’d read in the papers that Allan Wood was shooting some scenes from his new film in the Cinéma Paradis. But like all of us, she’d been unaware of the connections and assumed that the cheating cinema owner Alain Bonnard, whose cinema was enjoying all that press attention, was sleeping with a different woman.
“My goodness, how complicated it all is,” she said as, at the
end of our conversation, she gave me an address in the eighth arrondissement, not far from the pont Alexandre III. “Mélanie loves that bridge so much that she sometimes walks to work just so she can stop and look over the parapet for a moment. Did you know that?”
I nodded. “Yes—on our very first date, she told me about the pont Alexandre.”
Linda smiled. “What I mean to say, Mélanie is a very exceptional girl. Very strong-willed. And she’s so vulnerable. You must promise me that you’re going to make her happy.”
“There’s nothing I’d like better,” I said. “If I can only get to see her.”
“You might actually have run into her when you were making your inquiries in the rue de Bourgogne, because she works in a little antiques store in the rue de Grenelle. It’s called A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Perhaps you passed it sometime?”
I put the note away with a smile.
They say that Paris is always a good accomplice when it comes to making romantic dreams come true. My first impulse was to go to Mélanie that very second, to ring her doorbell and surprise her. I was already standing on the place Vendôme, waving for a taxi, when I suddenly felt uncertain. Was it really such a good idea just to drop in on Mélanie without warning in the middle of the night? Who knew if she’d even open the door to me. Perhaps she would simply refuse to believe me if I just turned up at her place and told her through the intercom that I had nothing to do with her sister. After all, she had seen me in the Georges with Solène.
I gnawed at my knuckles and thought. Just don’t lose your nerve now, Alain, I urged myself. Don’t do anything rash. I had Mélanie’s address; that was the most important thing. Any further steps should be carefully considered. Perhaps it would be better to go and see her the next day at the antiques store, better prepared and armed with a huge bouquet of flowers. At that moment, although it was no longer important, I remembered the name of the owner. It was Papin. Papin, not Lapin, as I’d thought at the time. I laughed hysterically.
The taxi driver had rolled down his window and was looking curiously at me. “Alors, monsieur—what’s up? Are you getting in?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said. What I needed now was not a taxi, but advice from an ally.
It was only when I went to call Solène that I noticed that my cell phone was no longer in my jacket pocket. I’d probably left it in the café. That was annoying, but not disastrous. I looked up at the windows of the grand hotel. I’d manage without a telephone. Luckily, I was, for once, in the right place.
“Alain! You again!” exclaimed Solène in surprise as she opened the door of the Imperial Suite. “We mustn’t let these nighttime visits become a bad habit!”
She smiled and stood aside, and I went in.
“You won’t believe it,” I said. “I know where Mélanie lives.”
Thirty–two
The following day was the longest day of my life. But in my memory, the bittersweet anguish of waiting and my anxiety—partly arising from a small remnant of doubt—is already beginning to fade. That’s how people are. When something ends well, they forget all the rest. And I’m no exception.
Solène had been right about everything, and I was glad I’d followed her advice, even if I found it difficult at first. After all, it was I who had found out where Mélanie lived. But it was not to be me who went to the little antiques store in the rue de Grenelle just before the lunch break the next day.
Solène had implored me to let her go first. “It’s only when all the old stories have been gotten out of the way that we can start anew,” she had said as we sat on the sofa in her suite, plotting like a pair of conspirators.
So Solène was to be given the first chance to hash things out with her sister. She would explain everything to her, and then that was where I would come in. We’d agreed that Solène would call me when she’d spoken to her sister. I’d remembered just in time that I no longer had my cell phone, and so I gave Solène the number of my landline.
Early that morning, I’d left my apartment to buy flowers for Mélanie. My heart hammered as I chose twenty sweet-smelling, delicate pink tea roses and bore them happily home. I put them in water and then sat down on the sofa with my telephone to wait for Solène’s call.
I realized, of course, that it could take quite some time for the sisters to talk everything over. Between men, a thing like that would be dealt with relatively quickly with a few brief words and a handshake, but women are obsessed with details and always have to discuss everything very minutely. I tried to read the papers a bit, but I quickly saw that what was going on in the world in general was not of the slightest interest to me.
Noon came, the afternoon dragged on, and the telephone was silent. I made myself one coffee after another. My heart was beating irregularly. Orphée sniffed at the roses.
At four thirty, I checked the phone to make sure it was actually working. At five o’clock, I was seized by an unutterable sadness. All of a sudden, I was sure that the meeting of the two sisters had ended in an unimaginably dramatic scene, and that there was no hope for me, either.
At five thirty, I leaped up from the sofa and prowled up and down in the living room. No one needed that long to talk things over, not even two women.
“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” I shouted, and Orphée shot under the armchair, peering out fearfully from beneath it. I cursed Solène’s idiotic idea, I cursed myself for not going straight to the rue de Grenelle that morning, and finally, in an attack of hopeless despair, I snatched the roses out of their vase. “Oh, what’s the point? It’s all finished,” I said, and stuck them headfirst in the wastebasket.
Then the phone rang.
“Alain?” Solène’s voice sounded tearful.
“Yes?” I said huskily. “Why didn’t you call? What’s going on?” I ran my fingers nervously through my hair. “Have you seen her, or what?”
Solène sniffed down the line and then burst out in tears. “Oh, Alain,” she wept.
Oh, Alain! That was all. Good grief, I sometimes hate women! I’d been agonizing on the sofa for hours in a state of extreme tension, I was close to having a heart attack, and all this woman could say was, “Oh, Alain!”
What had happened? Had they not been reconciled? Had Mélanie’s old hatred been too strong? Had Solène arrived too late? Had Mélanie perhaps jumped off the bridge by then? Or had she held one of those old pistols to her brow and pulled the trigger?
I forced myself to remain calm. “Solène,” I said firmly. “Tell me what happened.”
“Oh, Alain,” she sobbed again. “It was so awful. I’m totally wiped out. Mélanie has just gone home and I’m on my way back to the hotel.” She breathed in with a sob. “It’s our nerves, you know. We shouted at each other so loudly. We wept. But finally we made up. Everything’s all right again.” She made a sound somewhere between laughing and crying. “I just can’t stop crying, Alain …”
She went on sobbing, while I sank to the floor beside the wastebasket in relief.
I was never to find out what had passed between the two sisters in those unimaginably long hours before they finally made their peace after ten long years with a tearful embrace. Only one thing mattered to me: Mélanie wanted to see me. That evening at nine o’clock, she’d be waiting for me on the terrace of the Café de l’Esplanade.
Thirty–three
There are wishing places in life; places where you wish for something, places where you find yourself, places that leave nothing to be desired. I may be biased—that’s certainly the case—but for me, the pont Alexandre III is just such a place. Paris has many bridges, some of them very famous. But that old bridge with its wonderful candelabra, with the four tall pillars on which gilded horses seem to be flying in the air, with all its dolphins and cherubs and sea gods dancing playfully beneath the stone parapet seems to me to be different from any other bridge that I know.
If you live and work in Saint-Germain, you very rarely go there. Of course I’d driven over the pont Alexandre, b
ut I’d never taken the trouble to stop and get out. And I had never crossed the old bridge on foot—not until that day when I was to see Mélanie again.
After Solène’s call, I had carefully taken the roses out of the wastebasket and put them back in the vase again. I knew the Café de l’Esplanade. It was not far from the pont Alexandre, on the corner of the rue de Grenelle and the rue Fabert, and when the weather’s good, you can sit there well into the evening, looking out over a splendid view.
It was six o’clock. Still three hours to go till my meeting with Mélanie. That was definitely too long. I couldn’t think straight, and I wandered about in the apartment, my restlessness growing every minute. I went into the bathroom and looked searchingly in the mirror. The bruises around my left eye were fading. I went back into the living room, sat on the sofa, and closed my eyes for a moment. A short while later, I leaped up again and put on a fresh shirt for the second time that day. I shaved again, put on aftershave, combed my hair, looked for my brown suede shoes, and, just to be on the safe side, put my jacket on again.
As I got ready, more nervously and carefully than I ever had done in my life, I imagined Mélanie doing the same somewhere on the other side of the Seine. Orphée sat on the bureau in the hall, attentively watching all of my movements. She seemed to sense that something was different than usual. Her calmness made me even more nervous.
And then I had an idea that seemed to suit my impatient mood very well. Why should I stay in the apartment any longer anyway? It was a beautifully mild evening, and I would just go and intercept Mélanie on the way. I was sure that she’d walk to the Café de l’Esplanade over her favorite bridge. How lovely it would be if I was there on the bridge waiting for her.
I took the roses out of the water. Two of the opulent pink blooms were a bit crumpled, but the rest had survived being crammed in the wastebasket.
The Secret Paris Cinema Club Page 22