“Oh,” Jules said. Slightly scared by her declaration, though it was delivered with only traces of bitterness, Jules then took her around the little office the way a bellboy gives hotel guests a tour of their room. “You have to turn this thing here,” he said, pointing to a valve at the side of the radiator, “to regulate the heat. But steam escapes, so you must do it with a rag. They haven’t fixed it since de Gaulle.
“Monsieur Gimpel, the custodian, is a communist, which he will let you know every time you speak with him. If you ask him to attend to something he’ll tell you he can’t, but then he does. Except the radiator. That’s for the engineers, he says, as if there’s a picket line around it.
“To open the window, you have to bang the top of the frame with the heels of your hands because it swells shut, but that always works. In winter, I move the desk a meter to the left, or otherwise by mid-afternoon the sun shines in your eyes. There’s not much else.” He paused. “Sandwiche Miche is popular for emporter if you want to eat at your desk, but if you go left from it and down the first alley, there’s a bistro that hasn’t changed since before the war. It’s quiet, simple, and the food is good. What’s your specialty?”
“France and its wars of the twentieth-century. The little ones in Africa that continue to this day, the Great War, the Second World War, Vietnam, Algeria, the Cold War. Although people generally and even historians tend not to think of it this way, France suffered through, and its history was shaped by, more than a hundred years of war.”
“Do you know Vietnamese?”
“No. German, Italian, and Arabic. And English. I lived in America for fifteen years.”
“Where?”
“California.”
“I was in California, recently. It’s like taking drugs,” he said, “although how do I know? I’ve never taken drugs.”
“You’re exactly right. It’s because its past is as thin as ether. The dream that surrounds you there is from hypoxia. It kills brain cells, fairly slowly, but by the end even the nonagenarians carry around skateboards.”
“Well,” Jules said, pulling himself away, though he wanted to talk to her forever, “I have to go. I hope you have a productive time here. It’s a good place to work.” He paused. “I’ve been here most of my life.”
All the way home, he pictured her face and remembered her perfume, her hands, the cloth of her suit, and the way she moved.
WHILE JULES HAD BEEN cleaning out his office and had met Amina, Arnaud and Duvalier had arrived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Jules had just left and the gatekeeper wasn’t there either, having cut the lawns and begun a five-day vacation. For the first time in many years, the great house was empty, except for Jules, who slept on the floor of his bare apartment. In the main residence most of the hundreds-of-millions worth of paintings and other valuables had been removed, but everything was still alarmed to the hilt.
They waited. With nothing to do at home, and because he was so unsettled after he met Amina, Jules wandered around Paris and arrived home in the dark long after Arnaud and Duvalier had given up for the day.
“He’ll show. He’s not going anywhere,” Duvalier had said. “We’ll come back tomorrow, early.”
“I can’t,” Arnaud said.
“What do you mean, you can’t? We have our case, maybe. An arrest hardly means a conviction, and he may even be innocent. But it looks good.”
“I have to go to the dentist to get an implant.”
“What’s the matter with you? This thing is like neurosurgery.”
“A tooth is not so easy,” Arnaud said, pulling back his left cheek to expose a prominent gap among the rear molars. They’re going to put a titanium plug into my jaw. It’s almost general anesthesia. I can’t drive or carry a weapon for two days, and if I still have to take hydrocodone, I’m off for as long as I do.”
“We need you for this even though he’s an old man. He’s seventy-five but capable of taking down three much younger men with knives, and I don’t want to call in anyone else, because it’s our case. I don’t know the cops in Yvelines and what they might do. It’s a murder case so they might send in a SWAT team, which would be ridiculous and demeaning. Okay, it’s not in our jurisdiction, but we can bring him in for questioning – we have the order – and when we cross the line into Paris ….”
“I know.”
“Promise me that no matter how much it hurts you won’t take any pills after day two. We’ll get him then.”
“All right.”
“Meanwhile, let’s go home. We didn’t have to rush up to Honfleur, but that’s the way it is. Sometimes I wish I worked in a bank.”
THE WEATHER TURNED COOL for a day or two as the heat wave broke. Paris was to have a short respite before the virtual sirocco that had been blowing across it returned, but now it was remarkably like Denmark, Sweden, or Scotland in August – high, bright sun; cool air; and sparkling, dappled light. Newly cut lawns were cold to the touch. At night in the chill, people dressed as if for the excitement and relief of autumn. Paris awoke.
And so did Jules, his mind and memory working with concentration and illumination. He knew he was irrational and in love with a woman with whom he had spent all of fifteen minutes. He was as much in love as he had been with élodi, but this was different because it was possible, because Amina knew what he knew, because separately they had come to the same place in their lives. He said to himself that he was just crazy, that she could not have possibly fallen in love with him as he had with her. It was a lesson he had learned many times over, in many infatuations. And yet he could not help but continue to believe that she had.
As he concluded his affairs – the forwarding address at the Post Office, the last bills to be paid, the final items removed from the apartment so that now everything he possessed would fit in a small rucksack – a strange thing happened.
The music he was able to summon in full fidelity took on a life of its own, contrary to his will. He had structured much of the past, and especially these last days, on the Sei Lob. As it had been for seventy-one years, it was still his magical and forgiving path into another existence, God’s voice lifting away heartbreak. It would be the accompaniment to that which would close the circle and make the past once more the good and beautiful world that a child remembers for a time after he has emerged from it with inchoate knowledge of the perfection from which he has been separated (or, sometimes, ripped), a memory that fades in the crib and for which there are no words.