On the next day, Thursday—the ninth of August she would recall later—Serge accompanied her to her next meeting with Pasdeloup at Les Hérons Rouges.
The café was fuller than usual—a delivery of coffee to draw in the punters and a front-page topic of discussion to keep them there: a second atomic bomb dropped on Japan. Nagasaki. Yet another city no one had ever heard of that would never be forgotten.
Serge joined in, standing at the bar as everyone stated one or other variation on the obvious—“it’s all over but the shouting,” “the Japs have got to give in now,” or the more rhetorical “whatever this new bomb is, why don’t they just blow the shit out of every city in Japan and have done with it?”
When Pasdeloup appeared and sat opposite her, Serge left the bar and introduced himself in exchange for a limp handshake and she knew at once that Georges was in his alternate mode, that he would stammer through their common bond and repeat himself endlessly.
Serge caught the waiter’s attention, summoned a bottle of vin rouge, and tried small talk.
“So, Georges. What do you do with yourself these days?”
“What?”
“I meant have you returned to your old job?”
“My old j . . . j . . . job?”
“Well, you must have had a job before . . .”
“B . . . b . . . before what?”
“Before . . . the war.”
“Ah . . . the war . . . I d . . . d . . . died in the war, you know.”
“You died in the war?”
“I died in Auschwitz and no one noticed.”
Georges had a point. As a survivor she knew what he meant and, clearly, Serge did not. And the alarm bells that rang in her head as Georges spoke were not ringing in Serge’s.
He produced the gun as quickly as he had produced the little cross with which he had stabbed himself. He tilted his face upwards, placed the tip of the barrel beneath his chin, and blew off the top of his head.
Even as Serge reached out for his hand Georges’s body was toppling backwards with the chair, the head flapping loosely, showering blood like a wet dog shaking itself after being out in the rain.
She had not known that men could scream like women, until they did. In moments, the bar was empty, men and women alike running for the street.
Serge pulled her to her feet, put his lips to her ear.
“Go with the crowd. Go home. Do not look back. You cannot afford to get mixed up in this. You were never here. Remember. You were never here.”
She ran all the way to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, then she slowed to a sobbing pace and sobbed all the way home.