The Mystery of Henri Pick

by David Foenkinos

  Driving to Rennes on the motorway, he obsessed over the scratch on the car. Brigitte was going to take it very badly. He could always deny responsibility. He could say he’d found the car in that state; that someone had scraped her car and hadn’t even left a phone number. Case closed. It was perfectly plausible. But he felt sure that she wouldn’t believe him. He was exactly the kind of man who scratches a borrowed car. He could promise to get it fixed, but how would he pay for it? The precariousness of his finances complicated all his relationships with other people. It was why he’d had to borrow a car in the first place. If he’d had enough money, he’d have been able to rent one—and to insure it up to the hilt.

  As he drove, he thought about the last few months. He wondered where the spiral of failure would take him next. He had left his bourgeois apartment and now lived in an attic room in a chic Parisian apartment building; at least the address allowed him to keep up appearances. Nobody else would know that he had to take the emergency stairs instead of the lift. The only person he’d admitted the truth to was Brigitte. After several weeks of being together, he had not been able to hide the reality from her any longer. During those weeks, he’d refused to invite her to his place, to the point where she’d begun to suspect that he was married. She was actually relieved to discover the truth: Jean-Michel was broke. That didn’t matter to her. She had brought up her son on her own, and had never relied on anyone else. When she found out the truth, Brigitte smiled: she always fell for skint men. But as the months passed, it became an inconvenience.

  As he approached Rennes, Rouche tried to forget about the scratch and all the problems in his life, and to focus on his investigation. He felt alive as he drove; sometimes, you have to let a landscape unfold before your eyes in order to be certain that you exist. Obviously, he wasn’t investigating a murder or a series of disappearances in Mexico,1 but he did have to uncover a massive literary fraud. As he hadn’t driven for a long time, he decided to take a break. Finally feeling happy, he drank a beer at a petrol station, and thought about buying a chocolate bar. In the end, he opted for another beer instead. He had promised himself that he would drink less, but this was no ordinary day.

  It was mid-afternoon when Rouche arrived in Rennes. Without GPS, it took him another hour to find Joséphine’s shop. He found a parking space just in front of it: for him, this was more a symbol than a concrete fact. He couldn’t quite believe it. That empty parking space gave him a disproportionate feeling of joy. For years, every time he happened to drive, he would spend ages searching for somewhere to park before finally pulling up in a space reserved for deliveries, which left him stressed out all evening. Today, everything was different. Rendered quite emotional by this new order of things, he messed up his parallel parking and scratched the car again.

  His joy quickly faded and the reality of his depressing condition stared him in the face. Now there was no way he’d be able to persuade Brigitte that it wasn’t his fault. The likelihood of being hit by strangers twice in the same day was pretty low. Unless he invented a malicious enemy: someone who’d deliberately vandalized his car because of his investigation. He wasn’t sure he could judge the credibility of this scenario. Why would anybody want to warn him off the investigation of a phantom author hiding behind a dead Breton pizzeria owner?

  3

  To give himself courage before taking the first step in his investigation, Rouche decided to go for a beer in the bar across the street. After finishing the first one, he immediately ordered its little sister, an expression dear to the hearts of French drinkers who hide the reality of their spiralling alcoholism under this sweet and tenderly ironic phrase.

  A few minutes later, he went into the shop. He looked more like an old pervert there to ogle the lacy knickers than a romantic husband intending to buy his wife a gift. Mathilde, the new salesgirl, walked over to him. Despite a master’s degree in business, she’d had great trouble finding steady employment. After a series of temporary jobs, she’d finally been given a permanent contract. She owed this stroke of luck to Henri Pick. The media frenzy around the book had provided so much publicity for Joséphine’s lingerie shop that she’d had to hire an assistant. As it happens, Mathilde had read The Last Hours of a Love Affair and found it very sad. But she was the kind of person who cries easily.

  “Hello, how may I help you?” she asked Rouche.

  “I’d like to talk to Joséphine. I’m a journalist.”

  “I’m sorry, she isn’t here.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “I’m not sure. But not today, I think.”

  “You think or you know?”

  “She said she was leaving for a while.”

  “That’s pretty vague. Could you call her?”

  “I already tried. She’s not answering.”

  “That’s strange. A few days ago, she was all over the press.”

  “No, it’s not strange. She warned me in advance. I think she just needs a break.”

  “A break,” he muttered to himself. This sudden disappearance struck him as very odd.

  At that moment, a woman in her fifties entered the shop. The salesgirl asked her what she wanted, but she didn’t reply. Blushing, she glanced at Rouche. He realized that he was responsible for her silence. Clearly, this woman had no desire to talk about her lingerie needs in front of him. He quickly thanked Mathilde and left the shop. Not knowing what else to do, he sat down at the terrace of the bar across the street.

  4

  At the same moment, Delphine and Frédéric were finishing a long lunch. She’d worked so hard recently that she was finally taking some time for herself—and for her favourite author. He had criticized her for spending less time with him, although that didn’t mean that he didn’t enjoy those solitary periods (one of his many paradoxes). According to Frédéric, being part of a couple was not just about spending time together.

  Delphine was concentrating on her career. She received more and more phone calls these days from people congratulating her or trying to headhunt her. Other publishers saw her as one of those editorial geniuses who have a natural talent for sniffing out successful books and trends before everyone else. Sometimes she felt embarrassed at being the centre of all this attention; eventually, she felt, people would realize that she was still a little girl and her cover would be blown. For now, though, Henri Pick’s book was closing in on sales of 300,000, a figure that far surpassed anybody’s hopes.

  “In ten days, Grasset is throwing a party to celebrate Pick’s success,” Delphine announced.

  “Well, they’re certainly not going to throw a party for my book, given how low its sales were.”

  “It will come. I’m sure you’ll win a prize for your next novel.”

  “It’s nice of you to say so. But I’m not from Brittany, I don’t make pizzas and, worst of all, I’m alive.”

  “Stop it…”

  “It took me two years to write my last book. I must have sold about 1,200 copies, including my family, my friends, and the books that I bought myself to give as presents. And then there are all those customers who bought it by accident. And the passers-by who took pity on me when I was doing a signing in a bookshop. In fact, if you only take real sales into account, I’ve probably sold a grand total of two books,” he concluded with a smile.

  She couldn’t help laughing. Delphine had always liked Frédéric’s self-mockery, even if it sometimes verged on bitterness.

  “Meanwhile, this farce just gets bigger,” he went on. “Did you see that several publishers are sending interns to Crozon? They’re hoping to discover another hidden genius. When you think about the hopelessly crap books that we saw there, it really is a joke.”

  “Let them waste their time. It doesn’t matter. What I care about is your next book.”

  “Actually, I wanted to tell you that I’ve got the title.”

  “You’re kidding? That’s great news!”

  “…”

  “So what are you waiting for? Tell
me!”

  “It’s going to be called The Man Who Told the Truth.”

  Delphine looked into Frédéric’s eyes but said nothing. Didn’t she like it? In the end she stammered something about it being difficult to judge a title until you’d read the book. Frédéric promised that she would soon be able to read it.

  A few minutes later, he asked her to take the afternoon off. As on their first date, he wanted to go for a walk with her, and then make love. Delphine pretended to hesitate (and that is probably what he most hated), then announced that she had too much work, especially with the party to organize. He didn’t insist (and that is probably what she wanted him to do) and they separated in the middle of the street with a peck on the cheek that was supposed to contain the promise of a deeper, more intense kiss to come. Frédéric watched her leave, staring at her back in the hope that she would turn around. He daydreamed that she would give him one last sign, a gesture that he could take with him while he waited for their next encounter. But she didn’t turn around.

  5

  Rouche spent the afternoon on the terrace of the bar, numbing himself with beer after beer. His investigation had begun with a dead end and he didn’t know what to do. The night before, he had imagined himself as the bold knight of French literature, and it had given him the feeling that his life was finally becoming worthwhile again. But he had run into an uncooperative reality. Joséphine was nowhere in the vicinity, and nobody knew when she would return. He couldn’t dismiss himself as a mediocre investigator, because he hadn’t even had the chance to get started; he was a racing driver whose car had broken down on the starting line.2 For years now, everything had been collapsing beneath his feet, and there was nothing he could do about it: fate continued to conspire against him. Alcohol tends to provoke either an enthusiasm of variable lucidity or a series of dark, pathetic visions. The liquid you consume finds itself at a crossroads in your body, and it has to choose; inside Rouche, it had chosen the negative path, enlivened with a hint of self-deprecation.

  Thankfully, he’d just received an email from the Grasset press department inviting him to a party to celebrate Pick’s success. He’d found it quite funny, reading that message while he was trying to track down what he suspected to be a hoax; but that was not his principal feeling. The main sensation the email gave him was a simple happiness at being on the guest list, since this meant that he had not been completely forgotten. Month by month, he had been invited to fewer and fewer such occasions; the end of his power had entailed the end of his social life. He was no longer invited out to lunch, and certain press officers with whom he’d imagined he was quite friendly had turned away from him, not because they had anything against him but out of simple pragmatism: there was no point wasting their time with a journalist whose influence was clearly waning. His joy at being invited made him smile. He remembered how he used to groan at the excessive number of parties he was supposed to attend. In his decline, he was learning to love what he had formerly taken for granted.

  Calmly drinking his beers, he had watched the ceaseless ballet of women coming and going from the lingerie shop. He’d imagined each customer undressing in the changing room, not in a lustful way, but more as a sort of innocent daydream. He thought it would surely be possible to understand the secrets and psychology of women by watching them buy underwear. This was one of his innumerable afternoon (alcohol) theories. When the last customer had left, Mathilde came out and locked up. It was then that she noticed the man who had questioned her hours earlier about her boss sitting in a bar on the other side of the street. Free of inhibitions by now, he gave her a big, friendly smile, as if they were old friends. The young woman was rather surprised by this striking transformation from the awkward, withdrawn person she had met before.

  After smiling at her, Rouche waved in a way that might equally have suggested that he was wishing her a good evening or inviting her to join him. Mathilde could choose whichever option she preferred. Before we reveal her decision, however, one important fact must be explained: she didn’t know anybody in Rennes. The higher the unemployment rate, the more easily people move away from home; and so, in times of economic crisis, it wasn’t rare in cities to find entire crowds of lonely people. So she walked over to Rouche.

  “You’re still here?” she called out.

  “Yes. I thought maybe she’d pop back this afternoon,” he said, to justify his presence.

  “Well, she didn’t.”

  “Did she call you?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to have a drink with me?”

  “…”

  “Surely you can’t say no to me three times in a row!”

  “All right,” said Mathilde with a smile.

  The journalist stared at her in mild shock. It had been a long time since a strange woman had agreed to have a drink with him, spontaneously, without any professional obligation. He’d tried to be humorous, but he hadn’t really expected it to work; so perhaps it was true that you were more likely to succeed when you had nothing to lose. He should pursue his investigation in that spirit. Just keep going, without thinking about the need for a result. But there was a consequence to this: she was there now, sitting next to him. So he was going to have to talk to her. Well yeah, he hadn’t asked her to join him so they could share an awkward silence. But what should he say? What were the right words for this kind of situation? It didn’t help matters that, from the moment when she agreed to have a drink with him, Rouche had started thinking how beautiful she was. This only increased his anxiety. It was too late: he had to be funny, interesting, charming. An impossible trio. Why the hell had he asked her to sit down? What an idiot! And how could she have agreed to have a drink with a man capable of scraping the same borrowed car twice in the same day? Yes, she had to take her share of blame for the present moment. While he thought all this, he masked his anguish with little fake smiles. But Rouche sensed that Mathilde could read all his emotions in his face. He had become incapable of pretending.

  Thankfully, the waiter turned up just then. Mathilde ordered a beer, while Rouche asked for a Perrier, thinking that it was time to make a U-turn on the liquid road and head back towards sobriety. To avoid another embarrassing silence, he returned to the subject of his investigation.

  “So you don’t know where she is?”

  “No, I told you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Are you a journalist or a cop?”

  “I’m a journalist, don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. Why, should I be?”

  “No! No, not at all.”

  “Joséphine said she’d had enough of being interviewed. But it was very good for the shop.”

  Rouche didn’t know what to say to this, so he just left a silence in the middle of their conversation. The tribulations he’d been through had robbed him of all social artifice. His face, too, had been transformed by his difficulties, changing cynicism to uncertainty, erasing the hard, severe frown lines to leave behind the face of a frightened boy, which inspired in others a blend of trust and pity. Mathilde, feeling exactly this combination of emotions, decided to tell him what she knew.

  6

  It had all begun about ten days earlier. Joséphine had come to the shop one morning looking very excited. A peculiar sight: she was standing completely still, yet you would have sworn that she was jumping for joy.

  Mathilde, whose experience of her boss prior to this moment was of a woman who, although far from cold, was not the effusive type, was surprised to discover a new facet to her personality; Joséphine now seemed animated by an energy more typical of Mathilde’s twenty-something friends. And, like any young person experiencing a feeling of exaltation, she could not keep it to herself. She felt compelled to tell all to the first person she encountered: her young salesgirl.

  “It’s incredible. I spent the night with Marc! Can you believe it? After so many years…”

  Mathilde, unsure how seriously to take this declaration, opened
her eyes wide. She had a certain talent for appearing enthusiastic. In fact, her reaction was primarily provoked by the astonishment of hearing such intimate confidences from the mouth of her boss, a woman she barely knew. She kept this same expression on her face as she listened to Joséphine go off on a long monologue.

  So Marc was her ex-husband, who had suddenly left her for another woman. She’d found herself alone, since her two daughters had also left to open a restaurant in Berlin. With hindsight, that had perhaps been the hardest thing to bear: solitude. But it was her fault. She hadn’t wanted to see friends, and particularly not any who had known her and Marc as a couple. Everything that reminded her of her lost marriage was painful. And in almost thirty years together, the memories had spread almost everywhere. In Rennes, she had to avoid all the neighbourhoods where they’d been out together, and that reduced the city to a tiny perimeter. Her despair was intensified by this prison-like geography.

  But then he called her. When she answered, he said simply: “It’s me.” As if the legitimacy of that phrase was indestructible. In two words, he resurrected their intimacy. When two people have been together for a long time, they stop using each other’s first names. After a few banal phrases about the passing of time, he admitted: “I saw you in the newspaper. It’s crazy. I can’t get over it. It did something to me.”

  “…”

  “Incredible, that story about the novel your father wrote. I never would have believed it…”

  “…”

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  Yes, she was there.

  But, for the moment, she was incapable of speaking.

  It was Marc, talking to her on the phone.

  In the end he suggested they meet up.

  She stammered her agreement.