by Ruth Brandon
‘Fine, so there was a reason. And I thought, since you knew him, you might know what it was.’
He still didn’t move, but the colour rushed to his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
I didn’t believe him. Was that a bead of sweat on his fore-head? He knew all right, but he wasn’t telling. Why not? Because someone had told him not to? If so, no prizes for guessing their name. As for the leverage, that was easy. In France, museums are part of the state. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Are you accusing me of lying?’
‘Of course not. But if something should happen to strike you . . .’
He shook his head and said, ‘You’ll just have to accept it,’ then added, so softly I could hardly make the words out, ‘otherwise you’ve seen the kind of thing that happens.’
Someone else had said that. Trying to remember who, I temporized. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do.’ He was definitely sweating now, no doubt about it. He got up from behind his desk and held the door open for me. ‘I don’t think there’s much more I can tell you. I’m sorry. Goodbye.’
I marched out past Madame Desvergnes, who kept her eyes demurely on her keyboard. I hoped Charlie wouldn’t take his annoyance, if that’s what it was, out on her. It seemed unlikely. Not much doubt who was the boss there.
I glanced at my watch: twelve fifteen. My next appointment was at twelve thirty. If I walked fast, I should just make it.
On the way, I remembered who’d used that phrase about seeing the kind of thing that happens. Manu. It had been Manu.
When I’d rung his number last night, expecting either absence or the man himself, to my surprise a woman’s voice had answered. For a moment I was disproportion-ately thrown – but why shouldn’t an attractive young man have lady friends? I pulled myself together and said, ‘Sorry to disturb you, I wanted to speak to Manu Rigaut.’
‘I’m afraid he doesn’t live here any more,’ said the voice. ‘But I can give you his new number, if you want.’
‘That’s very kind. If you would . . .’ Obviously, now that Juliette had died, he’d been thrown out of his cushy digs.
Manu duly answered the new number. He didn’t ask where I’d got it, nor did he sound particularly surprised to hear from me. As before, he merely acquiesced. I asked for his new address, and he told me 14, quai des Grands Augustins.
This was a part of Paris I knew well from the days when we used to visit our grandmother. Our mother had often taken us for walks along here on the way to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes. Sam and I used to fantasize about what went on in the various buildings we passed, and when I got there I realized that number 14 was one we had particularly noticed. It didn’t go straight up like its neigh-bours but was prettily domed on the top two storeys, in a gentle curve of silvery lead. As I remembered it had been the home of a rich princess that a mad scientist was holding for ransom up in the roof behind the dome. And the scientist’s lair, it turned out, was exactly where Manu lived. ‘Take the lift,’ he said, as he buzzed me in. ‘I’m on the top floor.’
The ancient lift wheezed and groaned up to a landing with two doors. Manu was waiting outside one of them. We hesitated between the formality of a handshake or the slightly more familiar double kiss: I solved the problem by kissing him. These days, I was all but part of the family.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Had you any particular reason for this, or is it purely a friendly visit?’
‘A bit of both.’
He opened the door a little wider. ‘Come in. Or shall we go out? I don’t usually bother with lunch, but there’s a brasserie a few doors down if you’re hungry.’
‘I’m always hungry at lunchtime.’
We ordered steak and chips and a couple of beers. I said, ‘I thought you lived in the rue d’Assas.’
‘I did.’
‘Not any more?’
‘No, now I live here.’
‘It belonged to your uncle, right?’ The address had been niggling me all morning, but when I’d turned into the quai I’d remembered.
He nodded.
‘Won’t you have to move once the estate’s settled?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It belongs to me now.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Lucky you.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
He didn’t seem inclined to say much else. We concentrated on our steaks. When we’d finished he said, ‘Thanks, that was great. So. I’ve got to go somewhere in a bit. It might interest you. You can come, if you want.’
‘That’s very kind,’ I said, laughing. ‘Where to, exactly?’
‘You’ll see when we get there . . . It’s not for a while, though.’
We wandered back to the apartment. The space behind the dome was every bit as splendid as Sam and I had imagined it all those years ago. The door gave on to an entrance hall, with parquet floors and cream and gold-painted panelling, from which a door opened into a large salon, similarly parqueted and painted, that overlooked the river. The outside wall was gently curved above the three windows that framed the spectacular view; the inner ones were covered with bookcases interspersed with pictures, including a magnificent Poussin landscape with a temple and a scatter of nymphs and fauns, doubtless the booty from Russia. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘Wow,’ Manu agreed.
He wandered restlessly around the room, nervously pulling books from the shelves and replacing them. The summer had tanned him, his grey eyes burning out even more insistently from the even brown of his skin and hair: a beautiful young man. But there was no spark there. Perhaps he wasn’t interested in women. Perhaps he wasn’t interested in anyone, full stop. There was something hollow about him. Where he’d lived before, his grand-mother’s house in rue d’Assas, had felt quite impersonal, like a very expensive hotel. This, by contrast, was very much someone’s home. Not Manu’s, though. Perhaps he’d grow into it.
He made us some coffee, and I noticed he was left-handed. ‘Your grandmother was too, wasn’t she? I seem to remember noticing.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, it runs in the family. Antoine, too.’ He sighed. ‘She said you’d been to see her.’
I waited for him to say something more – about the exhumation, about my part in the whole affair – but he fell silent and looked sad. Eventually he added, ‘She liked you.’
‘I liked her. I was very sorry to hear she’d died.’
‘She was old, I suppose.’
I said cautiously, ‘Lucky for me I got to her in time.’
He nodded. Perhaps, like me, he was thinking of the circumstances in which he’d given me her address, for he suddenly asked ‘So how’s your exhibition going?’
‘Not very well. First your uncle wouldn’t lend the pic-ture I wanted, and then your father tried to stop your grandmother lending hers. And now it’s his, so that’s that. He seems to have it in for me, your papa. I really can’t imagine why.’
‘Ah, my papa . . .’ He pulled out a big, thick, heavy book – it looked like a dictionary – and stood weighing it in his hands, as though considering how far and hard he might be able to throw it. ‘Believe me, you’re not alone. I some-times think he hates the whole world. Including me.’
‘You?’
He nodded. ‘Especially now. He was furious about this place. I think he thought maybe there was something between me and Antoine, and that this was a kind of pay-off. That I was some sort of tart.’
‘Was there?’
He shook his head. ‘Nope. Not that it would be any of his business if there had been. We were just fond of each other. Friends, you know? I miss Antoine so much. My father can’t understand that. He doesn’t have friends, just people he does or doesn’t control. He doesn’t do emotions. They’re too complex. You’re either for him or against him. And if you’re against him you’re an obstacle to be got out of the way. I’ve often thought he’s actually autistic. High-grade, but autistic. I think maybe he was jealous of Antoine and me
– we had something he thought he should have had, but he couldn’t manage it. Another reason to hate us.’
‘They didn’t get on?’
Manu shook his head. ‘Not even as children, apparently. Antoine was always the favourite, and my father was always jealous of him.’
I thought of Helmut Kopp.
‘What about the place in rue d’Assas? Is that yours too?’
He shook his head. ‘Fortunately, not. Though there were some bad moments when we were waiting to know what was in my grandmother’s will. I really think he’d have gone mad if that had fallen into my lap too. Killed me or something.’
I thought this perfectly possible, but it seemed tactless to say so. Just because people are rude about their relatives doesn’t mean you can be, too. Instead I blandly confined the conversation to property. ‘So that’s his now? The little house?’
He nodded. ‘They can’t decide what to do with it. My mother wants it for her town house, but my father wants to rent it for lots of money to Americans. Or sell it. He never has enough money. The amount they get through . . . I expect she’ll win, though. She usually does. It’s not much fun being married to papa, but she makes sure it’s a comfortable sort of hell.’ So that must have been his mother I’d spoken to. ‘Why are you so interested in my family, anyway?’
‘Because they’re interesting,’ I said, which was certainly true enough. ‘Not many people’s fathers get to be President.’
He shuddered. ‘Pas possible. If people only knew . . .’
‘So why don’t you tell them, if you feel so strongly? It’d be easy enough. Every journalist in France would be fighting to talk to you.’ I thought of Olivier, and then of Delphine. Not such a good idea, perhaps.
He shook his head and looked at his watch. ‘Time to go.’
We left the apartment, creaked down in the lift, then set off at a brisk trot along the pavement. I scurried to keep up with his long-legged stride. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see when we get there.’
We turned into a side street with a parking garage, and took the lift to the fifth level. Manu led the way to a silver Mercedes. Not this season’s model, but still, a surprisingly lush if rather middle-aged vehicle for so young a man.
‘Was this your uncle’s too?’
He nodded and got on with the business of manoeuvring it down the ramps. We crossed the river and drove north towards Montmartre, then through St Denis towards the banlieue, the ring of suburbs whose poetic names – Mantes-la-Jolie, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Villiers-le-Bel – sit so ironically with today’s grim reality. I tried to chat, but Manu, preoccupied with his thoughts, or perhaps simply with the nerve-racking business of manoeuvring through the traffic, did not reply.
At half past three we arrived at what seemed to be our destination, in a town whose name I hadn’t registered as we turned off the autoroute. We drove through a labyrinth of grubby streets beside some railway sidings, fetching up in a district of dilapidated high-rises and heavily fortified shops, where veiled women hurried along the broken pavement and groups of loitering African and Algerian boys, unwanted debris of a dead colonial past, clustered around bus shelters and in rubbish-strewn stretches of unkempt grass. Manu seemed to know his way around – had obviously been here before. I wondered what had brought him – sex? The only other middle-class whites I could imagine in these streets would be social workers, and I certainly didn’t see Manu as one of those.
We parked just off a shabby main street containing a municipal-looking hall. I noticed Manu didn’t bother to lock the car. Perhaps he didn’t care, or maybe he thought locking it simply a pointless gesture, no defence against the marauding youths. We joined a stream of citizens evidently headed for some event, and I noticed a poster informing us that at four o’clock today the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Jacques Rigaut, was due to address a public meeting in the hall. A cluster of blue police vans parked a little way down the street were presumably connected with this event – a visible presence intended to discourage trouble or stifle it should it occur. That there was potential for trouble was clear. At some point the groups of boys would get too big, or too close, the police would spill out of their vans and there’d be a full-scale confrontation of the kind they’d been rehearsing in the woods at St Front. For the moment the boys kept their distance, but groups of them were gathered everywhere you looked. For them Rigaut was the enemy, which of course was exactly why he had chosen this particular venue. His message was addressed to the other inhabitants of this place, the ones who’d been here before the tower blocks came, who inhabited leafy villas a few streets away and lived in terror of the roaming boys. If there was trouble so much the better – his support would only increase. I was surprised, at first, that the authorities had allowed him to speak here – such a person in such a place was so unequivocally inflammatory. But they prob-ably had little choice in the matter. Rigaut, as Minister of the Interior, was ultimately responsible for law and order, and if he chose to come here it would be almost impossible to prevent it.
At the door, formidable-looking bouncers scrutinized all comers. It was pretty clear what – or who – they were looking for. No black or brown person would attend a gathering like this unless they had trouble in mind. Not that any seemed very keen to penetrate the cordon – they confined themselves to watching from a distance. The people in the hall reminded me of the marchers I’d seen near the Voltaire that day with Olivier, respectable small shopkeepers and functionaries, all lily-white. From time to time the bouncers stopped someone and conducted a random search. They stared at us, as they stared at everyone, and Manu stared back. They eyed him with what might have been suspicion or astonishment – his resemblance to his father was unmistakable – then nodded him through. I followed in his wake, head well down, wishing I wasn’t there. If Manu had told me before we set off where we were headed, I certainly wouldn’t have come. That, I imagined, was why he’d kept his mouth shut. Though why should he want me there? As a witness? To what? I couldn’t think why he’d come – he must know exactly what his father would be likely to say, and it wasn’t as if his hatred needed stoking. Or perhaps it did: perhaps he was trying to pump himself up for some confrontation, intended to embarrass Rigaut in some way. In which case the very last thing I needed right now was to be sitting beside him. If I wasn’t careful my passport would be confiscated again on some pretext – suspected terrorism, perhaps.
The hall had a platform at one end and the inevitable town-hall rows of tubular steel and canvas chairs. To my horror Manu marched resolutely towards the front. The front row seats were all reserved, but he made his way to the centre of the second row. I’d have left then, had I known where we were or how you got out of it. But there definitely wouldn’t be any taxis, and I didn’t fancy waiting for a bus under the eyes of the bus shelter’s habitual occupants, nor sitting alone for who knew how long in the car. I hoped it would still be in working order when we got back to it. Meanwhile all I could do was to tag reluctantly along in Manu’s wake, and try to pretend I wasn’t there.
Circumstances, however, were against me. Our row was empty except for us: the hall, as always, was filling from the back. As Manu no doubt intended, Rigaut couldn’t fail to notice us. I said ‘Can’t we sit a bit further back?’
‘Further back? Why? Don’t you want a good view?’
I was still havering between leaving or moving to a less conspicuous seat when a stir in the crowd announced the day’s main attraction and the Minister marched on to the stage. A claque at the back applauded: he acknowledged them with a raised hand. I waited for a catcall, but none came – this was a gathering of true believers. His gaze raked the audience: it settled briefly on us, but he remained expressionless. He was briefly introduced (as though we didn’t all know who he was), and began to speak.
He gave what was clearly his stock speech, though now with detail appropriate to this bleak urban venue – dangerous streets, not enough jobs, the threat of uncontrolled
immigration, the mob at the gates. It was old stuff – every-one there had heard him say it a thousand times. But as everyone knew, the words were beside the point. This wasn’t a policy meeting. The real statement was his presence. He was their ally, he was with them in the continuing war against the threatening boys outside. That was what they wanted to know, that was why they would vote for him when the time came.
Beside me, Manu tensed. Whatever he’d come for was clearly about to happen. Then there was a noise – a sort of muffled roar – from outside, and as everyone turned to see where it had come from, a stone shattered one of the dirty windows that dimly lit the hall’s left-hand wall.
Was that it? Had he had some warning that there would be a riot? There was a moment of shocked silence, then a buzz. Rigaut, whose speech was drawing smoothly to a close, added a coda about deprivation being no excuse for crime. ‘The only thing to do with this rabble is sweep them off the streets, and with your help, that’s just what we shall do,’ he said, as another stone hit the window. A journalist at the far end of the front row feverishly noted down this last sentence, congratulating herself, no doubt, on being on the spot as the news broke.
I noticed Manu’s hand – his left hand, the one beside me – sneak towards his pocket. And suddenly (idiotically, my head rang with Mae West’s old line – Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?) I knew why he’d been too preoccupied to talk while we drove, why he’d kept his coat on even though the hall was so warm – why we were there. I grabbed his wrist and held on to it as tightly as I could – if I couldn’t make him drop whatever it was he was holding, I could at least prevent him aiming it.
He fought to free himself from my grasp, and since he was stronger than me, eventually succeeded. But by then the moment had passed. Rigaut had vanished, no doubt to take his place beside the police, ready for the television cameras that would soon be here, and another man – the one who’d introduced him – was standing in his place, telling us that fighting had broken out, that the building was a target, that the rioters had petrol bombs, that the Minister was anxious no one should be hurt, and that we were all to leave by the back exit. In an orderly way, he added, but everyone was too busy pushing their way towards the gangways to hear him.