The policeman studies Tristan’s passport. “You are Monsieur Charron?”
“Yes.”
“Tristan Charron?”
“Yes.”
“Your ticket and boarding pass, please.”
Tristan takes his travel wallet from the pocket inside his jacket and the two gendarmes ask him to step aside. They study his ticket closely: Air France, vol 64. Paris (CDG) à New York (JFK). 8 Septembre, 1987. Embarquement: Porte 12. Their eyes move from his passport to his face and back again. Evidently, his identity does not convince. They leaf through pages, studying stamps and dates. “You travel very much,” they say, “Monsieur Charron.” There is something odd about their tone, something odd about the innuendo with which they seem to invest his name. Mock deference, he decides. But why? He has been stopped at random in the airport concourse, seemingly at random. He has thought of demanding to know on what grounds—after all, he is in Paris, not Prague—but he knows that this tactic, when deployed with the French gendarmerie, will not be helpful.
He cranes his head in order to see the Silk Route shop, he sees someone spinning the wheel of scarves, he sees a little girl in a blue coat with a woman who, for a moment, looks vaguely familiar to him, though he cannot remember why, he sees several men looking for last-minute presents for wives and girlfriends, but Génie—or the woman who looks like Génie—is no longer visible.
She has a gift for disappearing, a genius for it.
When she resurfaces in dreams or in memory, she is always leaving the little hotel on rue de Birague and crossing the Place des Vosges, which is why, when he saw her there two days ago, he did not trust his senses. The fourth arrondissement is permanently imbued with her presence, and so he thought he had magicked her up, particularly since he is still disoriented and jumpy. He has just returned from Prague where a manuscript hidden in his suitcase was found. The manuscript was confiscated. The writer of the manuscript, a novelist, is now in prison. Tristan himself was detained for a night and interrogated, but then released. Nevertheless, he is still shaken, and high-anxiety levels spawn fantasies. He knows this. He knows how shining messengers can appear and point to a doorway. DELIVERANCE, the doorway is marked.
Hence, when a vision of Génie appears as soon as he is safely back in Paris, he knows better than to follow phantom temptation. Even so, watching her cross the Place des Vosges, he restrains himself with great difficulty.
Instead, in the afterglow of his vision of her, he dropped into the tiny office out of which he runs Editions du Double. He tried to check galleys, he worked on drafts of new press announcements, he gave his assistant a list of bookstores to call. His assistant handed him a week’s worth of messages—faxes and telephone memos—but he stuffed them into his briefcase without looking at them. His ability to concentrate was poor. He needed sleep. In Prague, he had spent the entire night harshly illuminated, looking into a sunspot from which questions had streamed like electrons. He had to go home and sleep. He dreamed he was back in the interrogation cell and Génie appeared like a patch of shade on the sun. Follow me, she said, vanishing.
He woke the next morning feeling light-headed. He shaved and went to his office and worked for several hours. He left for a midmorning espresso in Place des Vosges and saw Génie again (or saw her double.) This time, he followed discreetly, but in the crowded Métro station of Bastille, he lost her. That was yesterday.
Today he saw her for the third time.
“We must ask you to step aside,” the policemen say, “into this room.”
They ask questions, he answers. Is Interpol involved in this? he wonders. Is this coincidence, or is this about Prague? He tries to watch the concourse through a slender glass panel. The police are waiting for an answer. “Monsieur?” they prompt.
“There must be an explanation,” he says, pondering the triple apparition of Génie. Perhaps, given the oddities of time and space, given surreal linkages that have been scientifically vouched for, perhaps molecules of past events continue to coalesce around their original points of occurrence, although in some other dimension. He believes a trick of the light or the memory can reassemble them.
“You seem very agitated, monsieur. Something distracts you?”
It was the way she walked, that was what caught his eye, that strange lopsided gait, the way she could never quite keep to a path or straight line, the way she veered left. It’s a political compulsion, she used to joke, though she was embarrassed by seeing everything on the slant. It’s your genius for going astray, he always countered, ton génie pour t’égarer. On her passport, an Australian one, she is Genevieve Teague, but he has always called her Génie. She can materialize like smoke from a dream. He can rub a memory and there she is. So now, three days in a row, three times in the same place: he has to admit this is improbable, though even so he has postponed returning his passport to the locked safe in his room. The passport has remained in his vest pocket ever since Prague in case he sees her again, in case he needs suddenly to take a taxi to the airport and shadow her to London or Rome or Timbuktu.
His third sighting has been less than—what?—three hours ago (if he were to measure time in the normal dimension): he saw her crossing the Place des Vosges pulling behind her a small carry-on suitcase with wheels. In the stone arcade on the southern side, near the Victor Hugo museum, she stopped to listen to a black musician playing jazz. A small crowd had gathered. Tristan watched from behind a stone pillar. The man was playing Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” on tenor sax. Tristan found this coincidence so extraordinary—his first gift to her had been a Duke Ellington cassette, her first to him had been Thelonious Monk, and “Caravan” had been on both tapes—that the music seemed to him proof positive his grasp on reality had slipped. He saw Génie step forward and drop coins in the sax player’s hat, and then he followed her down the rue de Birague, past the little hotel, two stars, at Number 12, where they first made love. She paused there. Or was this something his own wishful thinking made her apparition do? He saw her enter the bistro on the corner of rue Saint Antoine. He hovered behind a fruit and vegetable barrow and watched as a waiter brought an espresso. Just as he was working up the courage to cross the street and sit at the vacant table next to hers, someone took a photograph. Probably, to the tourist, the scene seemed quintessentially French—interior of a bistro in the Marais—but Tristan had the uneasy and no doubt illogical sense that the intention was to keep a record of the woman who looked like Génie. Apparently the woman thought so too. She slid a twenty-franc note under her saucer and left abruptly. Tristan followed her to Place de la Bastille. When she descended into the Métro and then up into the street again at Place de l’Opéra, he was a discreet shadow. He watched covertly as she boarded the Roissybus. He hailed a cab.
“Airport,” he said, agitated. “Can you stay close to the bus?”
A flashbulb popped. A tourist leaned in close to the rear window. There was a video camera in the tourist’s hand and it spoke with a soft clicking whir.
The cabdriver laughed. “Is it a movie?”
Was it? Tristan wondered. He felt dizzy. He had an uneasy sense of déjà vu. But whose movie was it?
“You’re not at risk of becoming a star,” he said irritably. His hands were sweating. He needed to know whether he was hallucinating or not. Simply that. His heartbeat had gone erratic. He felt light-headed, he felt something like a clamp above his ribs. “My heart,” he said, clutching at his chest in alarm. “Cas d’urgence. Don’t lose the bus.”
The driver laughed again. “Vraiment une affaire de cœur, monsieur? Ou de queue?” Either way, the cabdriver promised—truly a matter of the heart, or one of lust—he was the right man for the occasion. He drove through every red light. He reached the Air France terminal as the Roissybus was spilling travelers and luggage like swill.
“She is there, monsieur?” he asked.
Tristan could not see her. Then he could. But was it Génie?
From some angles, Tristan felt quite certain; from others, less so. She had changed her hairstyle. She was thinner. Five years had passed since he had seen her—since they lived together; since she vanished—yet often during those years, especially in the beginning, he would think he saw her. He would follow a woman through crowded streets, and then … Excuse me, he would say, but the woman never resembled Génie at all, not up close, and he would feel worse than a fool. Pathetic, he would think. I’m pathetic. He did not want to make a public clown of himself at the airport.
He tipped the cabdriver lavishly and then hovered near the Air France desk watching as the woman who looked like Génie checked in. She did not check her bag. When she moved off to study the big departures/arrivals board, he tried to stay discreetly close but mishap derailed him. Fifty Japanese tourists surged like floodwaters rising. Tristan was awash. He was trapped. The tourists gazed up at the monitor. Aah, aah, aah, they sang in little high-pitched riffs as the numerals blinked and changed. The tourists all wore matching red shoulder bags and each bag bore the logo of the rising sun. Tristan found himself face-to-face with a woman wearing white gloves. She was dressed in a bright red suit with a rising-sun pin in her lapel and she held a sign high above her head with her white-gloved hands. FUJI TRAVEL, it said in Japanese characters and in English. WE FOLLOW THE RISING SUN. Her dawn-seekers pressed close in a jostling circle.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” Tristan said.
“You should not be with us,” the woman reproved. “You do not have a Fuji bag.”
“I’m not with you,” Tristan assured her, fighting free. But he had lost sight of the woman who looked like Génie.
He felt foolish. All he had with him was his briefcase. He bought himself an espresso, sat on a high stool at a coffee counter in the upper concourse, and began going through the week’s messages. He ignored the phone memos—anyone important would call back, he figured—and turned to the faxes. When he got to the third item, the demitasse in his hand lurched violently and a cord of black coffee rose like a question mark. It quivered in the air for a second, then made a dark asterisk on the fax.
Tristan, the fax read. Arriving Friday. Same return flight as you. Génie. He noted the date and time of reception. When the fax arrived, he was in Prague. He was in a cell in Prague, dreaming of Génie. Same return flight as you. What on earth did she mean?
He looked at the next fax: from his printer in Singapore. He thumbed quickly through several more: from his distributor, from a magazine running an article on one of his authors, from a translator, and then …
The fax had reached his office that very morning. Tristan, he read. Sorry you did not show up for the rendez-vous at our hotel, no. 12, rue de Birague. Am flying back to New York on September 8, AF 64, which leaves at 1600 hours. If you can make it to CDG in time, we could have a drink for old times’ sake.
The message was unsigned, but Tristan knew what he knew.
Who else but Génie could use the hotel on rue de Birague as code?
He looked at his watch: ten minutes past noon. Why would she come to the airport so early? Why would she come here four hours before her flight? He shoved everything back into his briefcase and ran to the Air France desk, bumping into people, slipping on squashed pommes frites, being frowned at and rerouted by someone in uniform. A red sea of shoulder bags parted, and he passed through unscathed.
There were, he discovered, only five seats left on Flight 64 to New York. “Grâce à Dieu,” he said fervently and bought a ticket. How many bags was he checking? None. “Je n’ai pas de bagages. I have nothing but my briefcase,” he said.
“Only a briefcase, monsieur?” The ticket girl laughed and shook her head. “C’est étonnant!” she said. “You are not the first. These days people travel around the world with almost nothing. I do not understand at all. The Australians especially.” She shook her head. “I do not understand these Australians. I ask myself if they spin clothes out of air.”
“You have someone else on this flight who travels light?”
“There was a woman with an Australian passport and nothing more than a carry-on. For me,” the girl said—she made a fetching little moue with her lips—“for a Frenchwoman, this is not possible. Chez nous, la mode compte trop, n’est-ce pas?”
Tristan smiled.
“I say to her: ‘Not one baggage à enregistrer, madame? Not one single baggage when you have traveled so far from Australia?’ And she tells me that she is living now in New York. ‘Quand même,’ I tell her, ‘c’est pas normal.’ ‘Cas d’urgence’, she explains to me. She does have a suitcase, but she has left it at the hotel, because she has decided to leave suddenly. She says that in the suitcase there is rien d’important. Exactement ça, monsieur. Rien de conséquence. Can you imagine?”
Now he knew for sure. How is it possible, Génie, he once asked, to lose a suitcase?
She said: If it doesn’t hold anything that matters, how can you call that a loss?
But how is it possible, he persisted, to travel as much as you do with so little?
How is it possible to live, she had countered, with so much stuff that you can’t pick up and move on like that? She’d snapped her fingers. Besides, she laughed, I’m a genie, right? When you live in a lamp, there’s not much room.
Now that he had a ticket for her flight, he did not want to wait until boarding time to find her, but at Charles de Gaulle Airport, overclotted, perpetually under construction and expansion but chronically short of space, you could lose your own shadow, he thought irritably.
“The Australian woman,” he asked the ticket girl. “Did you see where she went? I’m going to Australia on business soon, and I’d like to ask her advice.”
“She went that way, monsieur.” The ticket girl pointed to the escalator going down to the underground concourse. “Bonne chance, monsieur.”
He searched every bar and bistro and bookshop in that subterranean limbo without seeing her. Though the flight was not for hours, he concluded she must have gone back up to the check-in level, must have gone through security already. He was on the up escalator, his field of vision extended, when he caught a glimpse of her, below, still on the underground level. She was at the limit of the concourse, at the point where it sucked itself into a long tunnel that led to the domestic terminals. He felt suddenly weightless and free. He believed, for a moment, he could fly. He ran back down the up escalator.
Weaving between the fast-food tables, he lurched against a man who was holding a baby in his arms. A little girl in a blue coat screamed. He swerved to avoid a man with bucket and mop. He could still see Génie. She was examining the scarves on a turnstile at a Silk Route boutique.
That was when he was stopped and taken into a small room.
“It should not be a difficult question, monsieur.”
“What?” He blinks at the policeman. “Uh …” He waits for a prompt, but his interrogator offers no help. “I’m sorry. What did you ask?”
“We are very interested in the reason for so much travel.”
“So much …?” He plays the sentence back to himself and finds he knows the answer. “My work. My work requires a lot of travel.”
“You have just returned from Prague.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“On business. There was a literary festival. I’m a publisher.”
“And before Prague, Germany.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The Frankfurt Book Fair is next month. I had to make arrangements in advance for our display. As I told you, I’m a publisher.”
“Ah yes. So your papers claim. We have not heard of this publishing house.”
“No. I would be surprised if you had.” Monsieur Charron makes an effort not to give offense. “I don’t imagine that the kind of book I publish would interest you.”
“What kind of book is that, Monsieur Charron?”
“Not the kind you can buy at airports.” He avoids direct comment on the reading habits of the gendarmerie. “Highbrow,” he says, with a rueful apologetic shrug.
“Ah, yes, of course. Literature.” The policeman makes the word sound lascivious and faintly louche.
“Belles lettres. Yes.”
“And this festival in Prague. Why does that interest you?”
“I publish several East European writers in translation.”
“Ah yes, of course. You meet with the translators.”
“No. I meet with the writers. The translators all live here in Paris.”
“They have close ties, of course, with Eastern Europe?”
“The translators? I suppose. I know nothing about their personal lives. They freelance for all the publishers, big and small.”
“And you are small.”
“Very small.”
“But distinguished, naturally.”
Monsieur Charron raises his eyebrows, but says nothing.
“And yet, in spite of this smallness, there is always money.”
Tristan frowns. “You seem to have heard of me after all, gentlemen.”
“We are making an assumption,” one of the gendarmes says, “because of so much travel.”
“Like all small literary houses, I survive on smoke and mirrors and cultural grants.”
“Grants from foreign governments?”
“When I’m lucky. Also grants from our own Ministry of Culture.”
“To visit Prague these days, monsieur, one must either have close contacts with the Communists or with the dissidents, who have close ties to certain dissident groups in France. Your books, monsieur”—and there is definitely a provocative innuendo, an edge of contempt—“your very literary books, they all have political topics.”
“Not usually, no. Or not in any ordinary sense. I publish fiction.”
“Oh, of course, fiction. And Algeria. Why Algeria?”
“I have a couple of Algerian writers. They live in Paris.”
“Algerians in Paris have a violent record, monsieur.”
“A handful of Algerian extremists do. None of them writers, as far as I’ve heard.”
“They have many sympathizers, monsieur. So what is the reason for your visit to Algeria?”
Tristan raises his eyebrows. “I’m not going to Algeria.”
“Ostensibly not, monsieur, as we see from your ticket. Though one of your Algerian writers, the woman, who was originally scheduled for this flight, appears to have been in some confusion about its destination. She has since canceled her reservation, but we intercepted a communication of hers.”
Tristan stares at them. “I don’t know what this is about,” he says. “I have met the writer herself only once. We discussed Camus.”
“You are aware that she has ties to the extremists?”
“No. I find it hard to believe. In any case, I don’t concern myself with the politics of the books I publish. She wrote a fine novel.”
“About a little Arab boy who grew up in the eighteenth arrondissement.”
“I must compliment you, gentlemen,” Tristan says dryly. “You are very well read.”
“In the novel, the Algerian is sent to a French prison where he causes a riot.”
“It is about his sexuality,” Tristan says. “Not his politics.”
“Ah yes. His violent sexuality. And your earlier visits to Algiers?”
“I’ve never been to Algeria.”
“And Morocco?”
“Morocco? The last time I was in Morocco I was a child on summer vacation with my parents.”
“I’m afraid we must ask you to come with us, monsieur.”
“But I don’t understand. What is this about? My Algerian writer?” It seems to Tristan, now that he looks around, that there are many more police than usual at the airport. “What’s going on?” he asks.
“Precautions, monsieur. Standard precautions.” He is required to accompany the gendarmes for quite some distance down the long tunnel that leads to parking, and then down another level in an elevator, and then along a corridor that turns several times and seems to be without end. In the small interrogation room, the policemen lock the door. “We note, Monsieur Charron, that you have purchased your ticket to fly to New York only within the last hour. Why is that?”
Will I tell them the truth? he wonders. Will I say: Because of a woman. Because yesterday I saw a woman I had not seen for five years. Because today, and yesterday, and the day before that, I saw a woman in the Place des Vosges … no; I think I saw a woman I once knew intimately. But the night before that, I was roughed up in Prague and so it is possible—and he tries to imagine himself admitting it—it is possible that I have summoned her up out of loss and desire.
He is not about to mention what happened in Prague.
Will he say: I bought a ticket because I just received a secret message from this woman. I have no idea how it reached me, but I am ludicrously superstitious (it comes from my Catalan grandmother, and I seem unable to cure myself, even though I would die of intellectual shame if the proclivity were made known in the publishing precincts of the boulevard St. Germain); because I am superstitious, and three times is a sign.
He frowns. How do they know he has just bought his ticket? The airlines report last-minute purchases? But if so, how could they learn so much about him so quickly? They were watching the ticket desks for him? Because of his Algerian writer? Because of Prague? Because of the manuscripts from Eastern Europe which he has published under pseudonymous names? Minimal research would tell them that publishers—in certain circumstances, for their own protection, by design—know few details about the personal lives of their writers. So they have been following him, then, but for how long? He recalls the click of the camera in Place de l’Opéra.
“We are waiting for an explanation, Monsieur Charron.”
“I was not aware,” he says angrily, ill-advisedly, “that French citizens have to give a reason for travel.”
“In exceptional circumstances, monsieur, French citizens are answerable to the law.”
“And how do I come to be an exceptional circumstance?” Monsieur Charron demands.
“We are not at liberty to disclose, monsieur, the particular details of the exceptional circumstances. But we advise you to give us the reason for this very sudden decision to fly to New York.”
“So soon,” the second policeman says, “after you met with certain writers in Frankfurt and Prague.”
“And so quickly after your Algerian writer canceled her reservation,” the first one reminds, “for this flight.”
“I know nothing about that,” Tristan says.
“So what is your reason for choosing this flight, monsieur?”
“No reason,” he says. “A whim.”
“Ah.” They exchange a significant look. They inspect his passport again. “A whim. As in your name.”
“That’s right,” he says, amused. “Une tocade.”
“Tristan Tocade Charron. A curious name, monsieur.”
“Is it? Tocade is my mother’s family name.”
“We have reason to know, monsieur, that this is a code name.”
Monsieur Charron stares at them. “What?” He waits for a laugh, and when no one laughs, he begins to expect the gendarmes to levitate. He begins to expect the small table in the room to float. He begins to think Génie will rise out of somebody’s pocket like cigarette smoke. He begins to think he should get up and walk out of this dream. He stands.
“Please sit down, monsieur.”
He laughs uneasily. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“You have been involved with a woman who works in Intelligence.”
“I have?” Tristan Charron laughs again. “You mean my Algerian writer.”
“No, monsieur. You know who we mean.”
They watch him impassively, waiting. The strangeness of the last twenty minutes now strikes him as ominous. A woman who works in Intelligence? Not Génie, surely? Certainly it cannot be Génie. The idea is ludicrous. But then again, what would be a more perfect cover than teaching English as a second language, on call around the world as it were, her clients often politicians, corporate leaders, the children of presidents? And is that what she really does? Is that a financial backup for the travel writing, or vice versa? Is the travel writing simply a hobby, an amusing sideline, as she has claimed? Or is it a complicated mask, this endless updating of information for some wildly successful publisher of guides for the footloose? He has considerable professional admiration for the Wandering Earthling series, a global success story from a shoestring operation, and an Australian one at that, of all the unlikely …
When he thinks about it, there has been a lot of talk, a lot of speculation in the publishing industry. How could this dark horse have come so far so fast? Who is bankrolling the series?
He tries to imagine Génie as the Wandering Earthling gathering data of an altogether different sort. He tries to imagine her as the bearer of messages from one government leader to another, messages transferred in coded grammar exercises in an English-as-Second-Language class. It does not seem probable. The rain in the Ukraine falls mainly on the hijacked plane. Do you think the weather is propitious? I do not think so, we do not think so, they do not think the weather is propitious. Tristan does not think any of this is likely.
The Génie he knows, or knew, could go astray between the Pont Louis Philippe and the Pont Marie. She could get lost in the Métro for twenty minutes between getting off the train and finding her way up to the street. She could be waylaid by children in a courtyard, or by an old man walking home with a baguette. “What could you possibly talk about for so long?” he would ask, exasperated. “To total strangers!”
“Imagine,” Génie would say. “All his life, that old man has been a randonneur. Just last year, he hiked for three days in the Pyrenees. He’s eighty! And he gave me the name of a farmhouse where hikers can stay.”
The idea of Génie gathering information that would matter to anyone other than a low-budget traveler is absurd. Then again, why had she disappeared?
Well, he knew the answer to that.
She disappeared because he had given a stupid ultimatum. I cannot live with a travel writer, he had said. I cannot live with a woman who is so often not in my bed. When you are gone, I wonder who you are sleeping with at night. I cannot sleep. It is intolerable, it torments me. It is not normal for a woman to live like that. He had been violent with jealousy. He had thrown things across the room.
You make me feel caged, she had said. You are right, she said. So much distrust is intolerable.
Either you stop being a travel writer, he shouted, or you leave.
And she had left. She had vanished without a trace.
But she left because he had been stupid, not for espionage. Surely not? No. Not Génie. Then who?
“You know who we mean, monsieur,” the policeman repeats. “You know very well.”
Does he? Nothing is making sense. Nothing much has been making any sense at all since Prague.
He suddenly remembers Françoise, whom he still bumps into from time to time. Long ago—well, a decade ago, when they were both students at the Sorbonne—it had often seemed to him that they were followed. A jealous former boyfriend, he assumed. A single moment comes back now with a force that winds him. They are in a bistro on the rue Clovis, behind the Panthéon, and Françoise has provocatively raised her skirt. She slides two fingers under the top of her stocking. Her suspender makes a small snapping sound against her skin. She does this demurely. She wears stockings and suspenders solely because he has asked her to, but she makes it clear that the request irritates her, and so she punishes him, teasing him in public. Under the bistro table, he slides his hand up her stockinged thigh. And then there is the soft pop of a flashbulb. But when he turns, all he can see is a bland-faced American tourist with a camera.
“Someone took a photograph,” he tells Françoise, angry.
“That’s what tourists do,” she says.
“No. This was different.” There have been other times and they come back to him. “Someone is following us,” he says.
“That’s ridiculous.” Paranoia or jealousy on his part, Françoise implies. But then, later, sometime during the two years of their not-very-satisfactory relationship, she lets slip that her father has connections with the American Embassy. “Papa had it brought in for me in a diplomatic pouch,” is what she says of a butter-soft leather briefcase he admires. “It’s from Bangkok.” She is afraid of her father. She waves Tristan’s questions aside. “He’s American,” she says. “He was stationed here in the late fifties. He took up with my mother then, but he always played fast and loose with her. He comes and goes.”
Tristan asks sharply, “He’s a diplomat? Or CIA?”
“He does research for the American government, or the military, or something. He travels. I don’t know. I pay no attention to his life. We have no time for him, my mother and I.”
“But he pays for your apartment,” Tristan says. It is small and elegant, in the seventh arrondissement, near Les Invalides, and though they meet there from time to time for assignations, he has never stayed the night.
“Who told you that?” She is annoyed with him, and alarmed.
“You did.”
She lights a cigarette and inhales. Her fingers tremble slightly. “He’s a control freak,” she says. “He pays because he thinks he will know where I am. Which is why I don’t often stay there. I let my friends use it.” She inhales hungrily. He sometimes thinks she must live on smoke and wine.
He asks quietly, “And where do you stay when you are not in your apartment near Les Invalides and not with me?”
She busies herself with stubbing out her cigarette, but then lights another immediately. “I stay with my mother,” she says. “Or with various friends.”
“I see.”
It is her elusiveness and her intensity which attract Tristan. Her possessiveness flatters him. Her jealousy at first excites him but then irritates him.
“I can’t stand not knowing where you are,” she tells him. “I saw what that did to my mother. My father was never around, but he always wanted my mother to be waiting when he showed up,” she says. “Just waiting for him. He always wanted to know where she was. He would call her twice a week and if she wasn’t there …! It drove her crazy after a while.
“She said he needed her because she would do things that his American wife would not do. There is no spice in American sex, he told her. With American women, there is only baby-food sex. No flavor, no danger, no risk.
“Then leave your American wife, my mother told him.
“And he told her: American women are for marrying and daytime, Frenchwomen are for the night. You are my danger. You could be used against me for blackmail. That is what excites me, and that is why I need to know where you are.
“Now you see me, my mother told him, and now you don’t. You won’t know where danger is coming from.
“She wouldn’t sleep with him again, she wouldn’t see him, but she knew he always had other women. He always kept his dangers on the side.”
Back then, a decade ago, Tristan had a sense of her father in some shadowy but powerful role. The knowledge had made him uneasy. After that, especially in the apartment near Les Invalides, he found it increasingly difficult to rise to the carnal occasion. A flashbulb would go off in his mind. He felt watched.
He has not the slightest idea what Françoise does with her life these days. When they meet by chance, he is perfunctory and anxious to get away. He finds himself imagining her father’s watchdogs hovering around her, keeping tabs on her and on him. The last time was maybe three months ago and she was with some woman—her roommate, she said; an American student on exchange—and she’d introduced them, and then she’d asked—
Two images unexpectedly coalesce in his mind and match exactly, and light comes off them. He’d seen Génie at the Silk Route boutique, he’d seen a child in a blue coat with a woman who looked vaguely familiar … that woman was the American student who’d been with Françoise.
Did that mean something?
How could that mean anything?
And then there was another bizarre meeting, how far back? Ages ago, seven years ago, one of his earliest visits to Génie’s place in the thirteenth arrondissement, before they both moved to his apartment in the fourth. They had pushed through the great wooden door off Avenue des Gobelins, crossed the courtyard, and pressed the timer switch in the dark stairwell of escalier A. Before they reached the second floor, the light went out, and two people, descending, almost collided with them.
“Tristan!” came the voice of a woman from out of the dark.
He squinted at her in the gloom, and then someone pressed the timer and the light came on again. “Françoise!” he said.
“You two know each other?” Génie asked.
What a weird coincidence, he had thought then. With the whole of Paris to choose from, two women whom I know intimately live in the same building. Off the same staircase. It bothered him. Someone pushed the light button again and he stared at Françoise and her friend. Her sexual tastes, he concluded, had changed since her days at the Sorbonne. She preferred bookish types then, intellectuals. This boyfriend had a street-smart swagger and macho style. He was Egyptian, perhaps? Algerian? He threw Tristan an insolent smile that Tristan translated as: If you touch her, I kill. And then the boyfriend spoke to Génie. “Ton ami?” he asked, and Tristan turned in outrage, ready to strike, because of the intimate pronoun. What impudence.
Génie put her hand on his arm. “Ignore him,” she murmured. “Don’t give him what he wants.”
“Why did he use tu?” Tristan demanded. His jealousy often flared up like a rash. He knew his possessiveness bothered Génie, and sometimes amused her, but he could do nothing about it. “Why was he intimate with you?” He had to know.
“Because he could tell it would annoy you,” Génie said.
The policemen are watching Tristan intently. He becomes aware that he has clenched both hands into fists. “I have been involved with many women, monsieur,” he says lightly, relaxing his hands. “They are all a mystery to me. When it comes to spying and interrogation, any one of them could put Torquemada to shame.”
One of the gendarmes gives a short sharp laugh. The other remains expressionless. “Why would a publisher fly to New York when he will meet with American colleagues at Frankfurt next month? Why would he do this?”
Tristan shrugs. “I told you. A whim.”
“Une tocade.”
“Yes.”
“The same flight as your Algerian writer who canceled. The same flight as the writer from Belgrade.”
“What? Which writer from Belgrade?”
“The one you met in Prague.”
Tristan puckers his brows. “I met several writers from Belgrade. Which one do you mean?”
“Which ones did you meet with, monsieur?”
“You will have to give me a legal reason,” Monsieur Charron says carefully, “for why I am required to answer that. The physical safety of those writers could be at stake.”
“Physical safety is an issue which concerns us very greatly, monsieur, especially on a flight which includes a Jewish writer from Belgrade, a Jewish string quartet, and a group of Israelis traveling to a conference on Yiddish literature. A very interesting and unusual flight for a publisher who claims to have no politics.”
“You’re joking.” Tristan stares from one face to the other. “You’re not joking?” He marvels at this.
“Of course, you will claim you are going to the conference in Yiddish literature.”
“In fact, I knew nothing about it,” he says. “Though it certainly interests me. I’d like to have details.”
“No doubt, monsieur. No doubt you would. But you will have to give us a more honest answer for why you suddenly decided on this flight.”
Monsieur Charron makes a moue with his lips and turns up the palms of his hands. Three can play cat and mouse, he thinks, and truth is always the best defense, especially since they will not believe it. “For the oldest reason of all,” he says. “I am a Frenchman. I saw a woman. J’ai une tocade pour elle.” I’m crazy about her. Still.
“Thank you, monsieur. The Australian travel writer, the woman whose code name is Geneva. We know this. It is a point in your favor that you acknowledge the connection.”
“Code name? She has a code name?” Tristan asks, dumbfounded.
“One more thing, Monsieur Charron. You are no doubt aware that the woman Françoise Galette, with whom you had a former association, also canceled her reservation for this flight.”
“What?” Tristan feels dazed.
“Several hours ago,” they tell him. “By telephone. She canceled her flight.”
“I don’t believe this. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Clearly someone, monsieur, has the key to these riddles. You may go now.”
Tristan is startled. The sudden dismissal seems to him even stranger than the interview.
As he leaves, flanked by his interrogators, three people emerge from the small room next door: two uniformed men and a woman.
“Génie,” Tristan says, stumbling, and one of the gendarmes lifts a restraining hand.
The woman stares at him, disbelieving. “Tristan!”
“C’est vraiment toi,” he says. “Je t’ai vraiment vue.” It really is you. I really saw you. He reaches out to touch her, and she lifts her hand to meet his. Their fingertips brush. His tongue feels thick and clumsy in his mouth. “Comment vas-tu?”
“C’est toi, Tristan,” she says sadly, as though some interminable inner argument has been resolved. “I might have known.”