Arthur was mollified at her not getting home, delighted to have lunch bought him instead, and only produced an interminable argument about poisonous tourist restaurants in the town. It must be very lavish indeed; Chinese food – all right, agreed on that but it would take him some time because of the bicycle. Arlette, with time to kill, ambled up the Rue des Hallebardes, supposedly reserved for the stroller on foot but still full of delivery vans.
The old town of Argentoratum, squeezed in the loop of the 111, became Strasbourg and was cut off on the other side by the fortified moat of the False Rampart. It has been split by broad modern roads, creating naturally a howling desert: the Place Kléber, desiccated concrete lid of an underground car-park, has no character left at all. Still, around the cathedral, while the Students, the Jews, or the Goldsmiths would not recognize the narrow medieval streets named for them, the proportions have not altered much. Little heaps of gaudily painted metal on rubber wheels replace the domestic dungheap, but the way is still obstructed, upsetting the city Fathers. The municipality hereabouts has made coy beginnings at a pedestrian sector. If it can steel its timid heart to make this universal as far as the waterside, where it speaks vaguely of planting greenery, the old town can be nursed back to life. Painfully, and expensively. But given devotion … much like the children Arlette had had to re-educate, after falling off their motorbikes. The end of the autumn was doing its best; a radiant warm day, perfect temperature for pottering. There were lots of German tourists having a shopping spree with blissful heavy marks at prices pushed up to compensate. You can buy some pretty things in the tourist district round the Rue des Hallebardes. You’d almost think you were in the Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich. On a day like this, with no smelly wet coats or umbrellas, Bay Street in Nassau after a cruise ship gets in.
Her eye was caught by something she’d seen that very morning. A car of extravagant Italian elegance, racing red, a little dusty from country roads. Mr Taglang’s good customer. Retail outlet hereabouts – to be sure, the flower-shop on the corner. Tourists are not going to buy cut flowers much; an awkward parcel to carry around or leave in a hot car. But they’re often taken with that cute little pineapple-palm, or growing your own coffee on a windowsill in Wiesbaden. She stopped by the window, and watched a stout mum having a mauve orchid pinned to her bosom, with much merry laughter, by a smiling girl in a pretty apple-green overall. Business was being done. Arlette looked at agreeable Carven clothes next door, without bothering about the price tags. Lunch was quite expensive enough as it was. Didn’t even bother with a rose for Arthur’s buttonhole: he’d be wearing that horrible corduroy jacket. She hurried on up to the Rue des Etudiants, or she’d be late. In fact he was already tucking into the white wine. Inclining, tiresomely, to be frivolous and gibber on about butterfly stew: she put a stop to this.
‘I asked you out because I’m serious, and this is serious, or so I’m growing steadily convinced. I need your judgment, and advice.’ Arthur looked serious, and listened carefully, and rubbed his hair, and ate through an enormous meal, and sent the boy for more tea, without getting his wits too clouded.
‘Hm, this is getting altogether too much like eccentric English professors, detecting away while playing those games, Unreadable Books and Impossible Heroines: I’m getting perilously close to cliché in my behaviour and this is too close. Take it to the police.’
‘Who’d be pardonably sarcastic about detectives. There’s no evidence at all. Just try and make it add up.’
‘Well, one might say that the likeliest form of felony for a chap like Demazis would be white-collar crime, fiddling the paperwork. Jumps to the eye in a business like that, there’s lots of invoicing, export licences, juggle-juggle from one country to another. Typically Dutch; they buy carnations in Nice and flog them to the English, much to the fury of the French. Sounds piffling, but plainly there’s a lot more money in flowers than you or I think.’
‘Must be stronger than that. And what’s the connection with this art boy?’
‘How do you know there’s any connection at all? Just because he has some potted plants in his living-room; doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘Look, he said to me, did you see one of my posters, and I thought posters he’d designed. There are these small ones for exhibitions, and of course they go round persuading shopkeepers to stick them in the window. Scotchtaped to the door of that flowershop, a print of the Rue de la Bain aux Plantes or whatever, one looks at these things idly without taking them in. I was at the door here almost before I remembered it.’
‘Pretty loose connection. As you say, they ask shops to tack up notices for painters’ shows.’
‘But if you’re a graphic artist, isn’t there some technique in falsifying documents you might be good at?’
‘Now I’m with you. Like washing cheques. Not laundering the funds, but literally, effacing the print with acid or something to fox the computer.’
‘Or just the ink. What is it removes ballpoint? And forging fresh figures.’
‘And milking the business that way? And maybe he was on the verge of being caught and killed himself? It seems farfetched. And what you say of this Taglang – he sounds an unlikely candidate for any complicity.’
‘The thing that to my mind links these people together is that they’ve all so much money. This piffling boy, just out of art school. Place loaded with bottles of champagne. I wished I’d sneaked a look in that big fridge.’
‘Got it cheap from some yobbo who knocked over a supermarket.’
‘Arthur you’re not taking me seriously.’
‘Not really, no. I think perhaps you’re taking yourself too much so.’ He started quoting, in a special tone of voice. ‘University type, forty-three, divorced, tender – no, gentle or perhaps sensitive – and joyous, sense of humour, romantic, loving life intensely – to the full might be better – not taking himself seriously … this is all plainly me.’
‘What is it?’ patiently, aware that Arthur was trying to sidetrack her.
‘It’s a phony advert a fella put in the heart-to-heart page of the Nouvel Observateur. “Wishes to encounter Young Woman, twenty-five to thirty-five.”’ He had hauled out one of his torn slips of paper. “‘Intelligent and agreeable physique, to make of her a friend, a comrade, a lover, while awaiting better still if the atoms hook together. Bobonnes, emmerdeuses, timorées, contractées, aigries please stay away.” The others are easy but how would you translate “bobonnes”?’
She gave it thought and then suggested ‘Wifeys’.
‘Not bad. As the fellow says, while awaiting better. Chap got ninety-eight replies and made a neat little book of them.’
‘Are all those awful things me? Wifey, timid, uptight, hungup, embittered, oh yes, and emmerdeuse, how does one translate that?’
‘One doesn’t even try. You are not in the least bobonne, nor these other things. Emmerdeuse? – yes, occasionally. As now. My advice is drop it. You’ve lots of more suitable business. What did you do with the lesbian woman by the way?’
‘Told her it didn’t interest me; I’m not a marriage bureau or a lonely hearts club. There’s a woman who is, and she says nine phone calls out of ten are enquiries about group sex, and she finds it most discouraging. I’m not, by the way, about to get discouraged. I don’t believe the fellow’s distributing drugs, I mean it’s too obvious, the artist’s studio and dressed up like that. Far too much of a cliché. But how do they all get so rich?’
‘The way we stay poor, by having nasty talents we haven’t, which is why we find them nasty. Women are all the same,’ said Arthur gloomily. ‘They invite you out to lunch, ask your advice, don’t take it: what I want to know is, do they pay for the lunch?’
‘Dutch treat,’ said Arlette nastily. ‘Stick to what is it – Unreadable Heroines. Come across something interesting and all they say is Drop It, as though you were a dog.’
‘I’m giving you good advice you know,’ said Arthur mildly, ‘but I might have known you wouldn’t take it. Too obstinate. Where are you going now?’
‘Home to be a housewife.’ Men! A lot of use they were …