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.”