Once he was done laughing with surprise and exclaiming in disbelief, Mediouri said yes, he could find out what they wanted to know. But it wouldn’t be quick. He would need to contact some former friends, and those friends might need to contact some people themselves. The process couldn’t be rushed, and he couldn’t promise a result. Rachel should wait for him to contact her.
“Don’t tell Alan,” she said to Magda the next day.
“So far there’s nothing to tell.”
Two weeks earlier, it had been cold enough to wear a winter coat; four days earlier, spring had been near enough for that coat to be worn open; today, on the morning of the second of May, it was warm enough for a man to sit outside in only his blazer and smoke a cigarette. Rachel knew this was the case because that was precisely what Gédéon Naquet was doing when she and Magda arrived at Les Deux Magots. He sat beneath the restaurant’s green and white awning at a table near the door, his chair angled so that he could keep an eye on the computer Rachel could see through the window behind him.
“We want to catch him off guard,” she had said when Magda suggested they contact Naquet to arrange a second meeting, so she was gratified by his start of surprise when he realized who was standing in front of him. But he recovered quickly, half rising with a smile and inviting them to join him.
“Monsieur Naquet.” Rachel scraped her chair as she sat down. “We’re here because we spoke to the owner of the LaLa Lounge.” Had it been the owner? Well, Naquet would never know if it had or hadn’t been. “I showed him your author photo, and he told us that you were at Guipure’s birthday party.” She cut him off as he opened his mouth. “Not outside, but inside the club itself.”
Naquet was a quick thinker. “What is a pair of filmmakers doing questioning the owner of the LaLa Lounge?”
But Magda was a quicker thinker. “It was the scene of Guipure’s death. Of course we were going to go there as part of our research.”
Outfoxed, Naquet put down his cigarette and crossed his arms. “Yes, I was at the party, but so what? Roland invited me. I forgot: he did call, after the collection showed. He suggested I come to the party.”
Magda raised her eyebrows.
“He did,” Naquet said sulkily. “He said we could talk there.”
Magda folded her hands on the tabletop, leaning forward and looking him in the eye. Her lips made the shape of a smile. “Monsieur Naquet, let me explain. Rachel and I are trying to be filmmakers. We thought the story of Roland Guipure’s life would make a wonderful documentary. Then the police said Roland had been murdered, and we thought the story of his life and death would make a wonderful documentary. But then we did some research, and in the course of that research we found out that you were at the party where Guipure was murdered, even though you told us you hadn’t had any contact with anyone at Sauveterre since Guipure went into rehab. And now you are claiming, in a very unconvincing tone, that you forgot that Guipure had contacted you after all and invited you to that party—that you forgot you were there on the night of his death. I think you can see why we might feel that your story would make an even better documentary.”
While she had been reading Knight’s Forensic Pathology and taking Approach to Agency Marketing online, had Magda been taking Approach to Interview Techniques? Rachel felt her own throat go dry, and Naquet drew on his cigarette so hard that she expected to see it burn up to the filter. He stamped it out, then lit a new one with a shaking hand.
“I can see why you’d think that,” he said at last, “but you’d be wrong. All right, Roland didn’t contact me. But I meant what I said about thinking there was a great book in his recovery. And I thought—I thought if I could just talk to him, I could make him see it that way. But Madame Fauré would never put me through, and he never answered my e-mails. Then I read on Quelles Nouvelles that he was holding a big party for his fortieth at the LaLa Lounge the next night, and I—” A flush crept up his face. “I waited outside and asked someone going in if I could be her plus one. I—I gave her fifty euros to do it.”
“And?”
Naquet snorted “And much good it did me. There must have been two hundred people in the place. The only time I even saw Roland was once when I spotted him hugging his sister, and that wasn’t until around two in the morning. Then he vanished again. I waited another hour, then went home. The next day I got an alert telling me he’d died outside the club.” He pulled on the new cigarette and exhaled. “I suppose I must have walked by him on my way home and thought he was a clochard.”
He said this not with pity or even disgust, but rather in the tone of a man trying to figure out how he might develop that detail into a marketable story. Rachel felt a strong desire to be out of his company.
Magda must have felt something similar, for they stood up at the same time.
“What do you make of his story?” The sun had begun to shine as they walked back down the Boulevard Saint Germain. Rachel noticed that the Deux Magot’s curious little outdoor island—a covered dining area walled in by shrubbery and set in the middle of the Place Saint Germain des Prés—was entirely filled, and when she looked at her watch, she was surprised to see that it was lunchtime. The smell of butter from the crêpe kiosk a few meters away banished the memory of Naquet’s cigarette smoke from her nostrils, and the attention she’d need to weave in and out of the hungry pedestrians hurrying to find a place to eat distracted her from the disgust she’d felt in his company. Still, she waited until they were close to the Sèvres portique, the extraordinary ceramic archway created to showcase the skills of the Sevres porcelain company for the 1900 World’s Fair, before she replied. She had forgotten the portique in her gloomy assessment of the Boulevard Saint Germain after their first meeting with Naquet, and as they drew closer, its art nouveau beauty, combined with the green scent of the garden next to the Église Saint Germain, restored her to rationality before she replied.
“It could be true. He certainly seemed to legitimately believe that he could have convinced Guipure to work with him.”
“And to be legitimately angry that he didn’t get the chance to ask him.”
“On the other hand, if you were a murderer, you’d probably work hard to be seen as legitimately something else.”
By this time they had turned onto the Rue de Seine. Rachel paused in front of the glossy blue front of an antique bookshop, where the window displayed a medieval manuscript open to an illuminated picture of Romulus fighting Remus. The tips of their swords had been gilded, and behind them the hills of Rome were a wash of verdant green. Why did art always depict murder so elegantly? There was never any of the confusion or grotesqueness of the real-life act, just an obvious murderer tidily and simply killing an obvious victim.
“What are you thinking?”
“Oh, just aimless thoughts about death.” She took Magda’s arm and continued down to where the Rue de Seine became the Rue de Tournon. This turned right into the Rue de Vaugirard, which eventually led to Rachel’s own street. At least geography offered direct routes to the goal.