Whether it’s by the autoroute or the national highway that you head for the south of Spain, whether you cross the border at Hendaye or Béhobie, you must pass through San Sebastián. After Ferrer had driven through somber industrial wastelands, skirted oppressive blocks of Francoist architecture, and asked himself numerous times what he was doing there, he suddenly entered the large, unexpected seaside resort. It was built on a narrow strip of earth, on either side of a river and a mountain that separated two nearly symmetrical bays, this double indentation tracing an approximate omega, a woman’s bust that pushed into the inland regions, two oceanic breasts corseted by the Spanish coast.
Ferrer parked his rental car in the underground lot near the main bay, then registered in a small hotel in the center of town. For a week he walked down wide, calm, airy boulevards, attentively washed, lined with serious, light-colored buildings; but also down short, narrow streets, also swept with care, dark and overhung with narrow, nervous buildings. Palaces and grand hotels, bridges and parks, baroque, gothic, and neogothic churches, spanking new arenas, huge beaches flanked by a thalassotherapy spa, the Royal Tennis Club, and the casino. One more solemn than the next, the four bridges were paved with mosaic tiles and laced with stone, glass, and cast iron, decorated with white and gold obelisks, wrought-iron streetlamps, sphinxes, and turrets bearing royal monograms. The water of the river was green veering to blue as it threw itself into the ocean. Ferrer haunted these bridges, but more often he strode up the promenade that trimmed the conchoidal bay, the center of which was occupied by a little island topped with a minuscule castle.
For days on end he wandered around like this, with no particular goal other than a chance encounter, trying to inventory all the different neighborhoods. He ended up tiring of this city that was both too large and too small, where you were never sure where you were even while knowing it all too well. Supin had given no further indication other than the name San Sebastián, accompanied by a hypothesis with limited probability. Whether the antiques thief was actually living there was anybody’s guess.
At mealtimes, Ferrer mainly frequented the many bustling small bars of the old town where you can eat all sorts of things while standing at the counter and where you’re not obliged to take your solitary nourishment seated at a table, which can be so demoralizing. But this, too, grew tiring: Ferrer finally came across an unpretentious restaurant near the port where his solitude was less of a burden. He called Elisabeth at the gallery every afternoon, and at night he went to bed early. Still, after a week his undertaking struck him as hopeless. Looking for a stranger in a strange town made no sense at all, and discouragement overtook him. Before thinking about returning to Paris, Ferrer would spend a few more days in this city, but without crisscrossing it in vain, preferring to doze away his afternoons in a deck chair on the beach when the autumn weather allowed, then to kill his last evenings alone at the bar of the María Cristina Hotel in a leather armchair, facing a glass of txakoli and a full-length portrait of a doge.
One evening, when the entire ground floor of the María Cristina was invaded by a noisy party of conventioning oncologists, Ferrer decided to go instead to the London & England Hotel, an establishment only slightly less tony than his, whose bar had the advantage of large airy windows overlooking the bay. The ambience that evening was much calmer than at the María Cristina: three or four middle-aged couples sitting in the common room, two or three men standing alone at the bar, little movement, few comings or goings. Ferrer sat all the way at the end of the room, near one of the large windows. Night had fallen. The lights of the coast were reflected in wavy columns on an ocean of oil, where twenty-five light-colored silhouettes of pleasure craft rested in peace near the port.
Now depending on how your eyes focused on them, these windows allowed you to see either outside or into the immobile common room by a rearview effect. A movement soon appeared at the opposite end of the bar: the revolving door turned on itself for a moment, disgorging Baumgartner, who went to lean against the bar next to the single men, his back turned to the bay. Distantly reflected in the window, those shoulders and that back put a crease in Ferrer’s brow. His eyes gradually focused more and more closely on them, then he finally stood up from his seat and approached the bar with a cautious step. Stopping six feet away from Baumgartner, he hesitated a moment, then went closer.
“Excuse me,” he said, lightly posing two fingers on the man’s shoulder, causing him to turn around. “Well,” said Ferrer. “Delahaye. I thought as much.”