The next morning, Tuesday, November 16, memory has completely returned. The digital clock down by the foot of the bed says 5:58. There are about two minutes left before the child wakes up, two minutes in which to find a solution, to clear away as much as possible of the debris strewn around by the previous day.
Viviane gets up and goes over to the cradle. With the tip of an index finger, she nudges the mobile attached to one edge by a curved metal stem. It’s a little merry-go-round of lions and giraffes, the former suspended one notch above the latter, which therefore seem safely out of reach. But if you nudge the mobile a bit harder, the animals now not only turn around but dance up and down as well, which means anything can happen. The child opens one eye. Surprised to see her mother already there, she forgets to cry.
After leaving her with the sitter, Viviane heads straight for Boulevard de la Chapelle. She’s wearing a houndstooth ensemble beneath her gray coat, the clouds are streaming away precisely parallel to the railway tracks, and everything seems very organized. She takes the 5 line in the métro, which drops her off six minutes later at République, where she switches to the 8 line bound for Créteil-Préfecture. It’s obvious: the murder weapon must go back where she found it. Of course one can simply get rid of it in the Seine, but it’s always when one goes to dispose of the incriminating evidence that a witness just happens to pop up, luckily for the law. Yes, the knife must go back to Julien’s place, to the shelf where it has slept ever since it arrived, instead of resting quietly in a kitchen drawer from which one would remove it, once a week, to dissect the Sunday roast.
Emerging from the métro at Michel-Bizot, Viviane takes Rue de Toul to Louis-Braille. Number 35 is a middling-size apartment building constructed sometime during the 1970s. She crosses the small garden, pushes open the door, and runs into the concierge washing the floor beneath the mailboxes.
Ah, Madame Hermant, how nice. Imagine, I just saw your husband yesterday evening. With someone. Don’t worry, she’s much too young for him. Be patient and he’ll come back, believe me, and crawling, too.
Thank you, thanks, Viviane stammers in confusion. I was wondering if he’d left any mail in the box.
Um, no, I think he took it up. But I still have the key for upstairs. If you like, we can go take a look.
Viviane couldn’t have asked for more, to be invited in without appearing to have her own key. She carefully avoids the damp area where the mop has passed while the concierge looks in her lodge for the keys and then follows her upstairs, where she opens the apartment door without a qualm, as if she spent every day snooping around empty premises. She peeks under both a cushion on the sofa and the TV schedule in the kitchen, then announces without further details, well I’m going to look around in the bedroom. Viviane hurries down the hall after her, then nips into the second bedroom. While the other woman inspects the master bedroom, Viviane puts the knife case back.
Aha, looky here, crows the concierge on the other side of the wall. Joining her, Viviane sees that she has picked up, at the foot of the bed, a scrap of shiny plastic that might well be a condom wrapper, but once the concierge has unfolded it, disappointment: the contents were simply chewing gum. Viviane shows her the old slippers snatched up from the back of the closet to justify having lingered in the other bedroom: I thought I’d pick these up as long as I’m here. Oh, go right ahead, dear, whyever would you leave that man any presents, after all. They finish touring the apartment; there is no mail anywhere. Viviane leaves the concierge to lock up. Thanks anyway, Madame Urdapilla, it was really nice to see you.
Then she walks to Place Félix-Éboué, where she orders a plain ham baguette sandwich and a sparkling water in a brasserie—no, give me a glass of wine instead, white, yes, that’s fine. Outside the glass-enclosed terrace, the eight bronze lions of the fountain spit out water like lamas. Tiring of the lions, Viviane chews on a bite of sandwich, spots a copy of a daily paper lying on the end of the counter, and stops chewing.
Flipping through the front pages of Le Parisien, of no interest to her, she stops at page thirteen, which has news-in-brief items, then homes in on the lower left column headed “Homicide”: “A secretary kills her ex-boyfriend.” Nothing to be learned there. The thirty-nine-year-old woman was questioned three hours after the incident in her home in Normandy. Detectives know their job, they’re specialists in this kind of amateur murderess. So what are the police doing? It’s half past twelve. The doctor has been dead since yesterday evening and must have been found quickly—a patient, a worried wife stuck with the leg of lamb and parsley potatoes getting cold. There would have been weeping and wailing; a neighbor would have rushed to the scene of the crime and dialed the emergency number in front of the wild-eyed widow.
Sooner or later, the phone will ring: a detective would like to know how Viviane spent her evening, why she asked for an urgent appointment, because the patient who was there with the doctor that morning when he took the call will have reported their conversation. All they had to do was go through the doctor’s address book to find out with whom he was speaking; you’re so stupid, Viviane, really so stupid, you should have taken his phone, it was right there on the desk, you remember that perfectly.
Before folding up the paper, she consults the horoscope on the last page: “Love: Something is changing in your relationship. Success: You might find yourself at a kind of turning point. Health: A little nervous tension.” She drains her glass and leaves the brasserie, considers taking the métro, then decides to proceed on foot. She walks and thinks faster and faster beneath the methodically aligned clouds overhead. With a bit of luck, the police will be swamped with work. And anyway, the success rate in homicides is what?—80 percent according to government statistics, not counting judicial errors, so that makes at least a 20 percent chance of going scot-free she thinks as she goes along Rue Faidherbe and Rue Saint-Maur. Besides, there is no criminal record or motive, and the doctor considered her such a boring patient that his files can’t possibly contain anything suspicious. Viviane goes around the Hôpital Saint-Louis on its north-northwest side. About five hundred feet to the right and she’s back at Place du Colonel-Fabien, and now it’s a straight shot home, and now in the pocket of her big gray coat the phone begins to vibrate.