5
The cats slunk off into the half-light to search the galley for the tin of tuna Perdu had already set down for them.
‘Hello?’ called Monsieur Perdu. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m not looking for anything,’ croaked Max Jordan.
The bestselling author stepped tentatively forward with a honeydew melon in each hand. His obligatory earmuffs were riveted to his head.
‘Have the three of you been standing there long, Monsieur Jordan?’ asked Perdu with exaggerated sternness.
Jordan nodded, and a blush of embarrassment spread to the roots of his dark hair.
‘I arrived just as you were refusing to sell my book to that lady,’ he said unhappily.
Oh dear. That was rather bad timing.
‘Do you really think it’s that terrible?’
‘No,’ Perdu answered quickly. Jordan would have taken the slightest hesitation for a yes. There was no need to inflict that on him. What was more, Perdu honestly didn’t think the book was terrible.
‘Then why did you say I didn’t suit her.’
‘Monsieur … um …’
‘Please call me Max.’
That would mean that the boy can call me by my first name too.
The last one to do so, with that chocolate-warm voice, was—.
‘Let’s stick to Monsieur Jordan for the moment. Monsieur Jordan, if you don’t mind. You see, I sell books like medicine. There are books that are suitable for a million people, others only for a hundred. There are even medicines – sorry, books – that were written for one person only.’
‘Oh, God. One person? A single person? After all those years of work?’
‘Of course – if it saves that person’s life! That customer didn’t need Night right now. She couldn’t have coped with it. The side effects are too severe.’
Jordan considered this. He looked at the thousands of books on the freighter – on the bookshelves, on the chairs and piled on the floor.
‘But how can you know what a person’s problem is and what the side effects are?’
Now, how was he to explain to Jordan that he didn’t know exactly how he did it?
Perdu used his ears, his eyes and his instincts. From a single conversation, he was able to discern what each soul lacked. To a certain degree, he could read from a body’s posture, its movements and its gestures, what was burdening or oppressing it. And finally, he had what his father had called transperception. ‘You can see and hear through most people’s camouflage. And behind it you see all the things they worry and dream about, and the things they lack.’
Every person had a gift, and his happened to be transperception.
One of his regular customers, the therapist Eric Lanson, whose surgery was near the élysée Palace and who treated government officials, had once confessed to Perdu that he was jealous of his ‘psychometric ability to scan the soul more accurately than a therapist who suffers from tinnitus after thirty years of listening’.
Lanson spent every Friday afternoon at the Literary Apothecary. He relished Dungeons & Dragons fantasy, and would attempt to elicit a smile from Perdu by psychoanalysing the characters. Lanson also referred politicians and stressed members of their administrative staff to Monsieur Perdu – with ‘prescriptions’ on which the therapist noted their neuroses in literary code: ‘Kafkaesque with a touch of Pynchon’, ‘Sherlock, totally irrational’ or ‘a splendid example of Potter-under-the-stairs syndrome’.
Perdu saw it as a challenge to induct people (mainly men) who had daily dealings with greed, abuse of power and the Sisyphean nature of office work into the world of books. How gratifying it was when one of these tormented yes-men quit the job that had robbed him of every last drop of singularity! Often a book played a part in this liberation.
‘You see, Jordan,’ said Perdu, taking a different tack, ‘a book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.’
‘I get it. And my novel was the dentist when the lady needed a gynecologist.’
‘Er … no.’
‘No?’
‘Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some … well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful void. Like a short, torrid love affair.’
‘So Night is one of literature’s one-night stands? A tart?’