The first action he took, therefore, was to wrap the jacket around one of the small cinder blocks used at the boathouse to prop open the doors on windy days, and tie it up with nylon boat twine, which would take years to rot. He then dressed, seized a broom, and went out to sweep the dock. At the edge, he inconspicuously dropped the weighted jacket into the water, which he knew to be about twenty meters deep beyond the dock, with a strong, scouring current. He carried the broom and swept in case there were distant traffic cameras across the river.
Instead of a taller, heavier, dark-haired man of between thirty and fifty, in a bright orange-yellow jacket, leaving the boathouse and exiting onto the street would be a man of lesser build in his middle seventies, with thick hair that was blonde and white. Leaving a place he had habituated for more than half a century, he would be dressed in a blue blazer. The blazer had come through for him in that it was made of a certain kind of fabric that simply would not wrinkle. The boast of the manufacturer was that you could stuff it into a thermos, if you could find one big enough, pour in hot water, leave it for a week, and it would come out as good as new and ready to wear. Why do this would be anyone’s guess, but the point was made, and despite the fact that it had been in the river the perfectly pressed blazer was an important element in disguising Jules as himself. Thus transformed, he would be anything but the man who had had the confrontation on the bridge, although of course he was.
Before he got dressed, he inspected himself. He had bruises on his arms and shoulders but his face was clear and he had no cuts or abrasions whatsoever, meaning he had left no blood. His hair had been matted by the rain tight against his head, so there was little chance that a hair had flown away as, when it is dry, it can. Nor had he left anything on the bridge or the Allée, for he still had everything he had had with him. At his age, the bruises would take two weeks to disappear, but none was visible as long as he was dressed. There were no cameras on the road near the boathouse. This he knew because he often parked longer than he should have, and in judging his chances of getting a ticket he had taken into account the lack of surveillance. Of course, there were cameras all over the place, and had someone actually dissected his comings and goings they might see that he had not returned home that night, and that his outerwear had changed while he was still out and about.
But there were millions of people in Paris, and the skein of their transit was a tangle of a billion threads. It would take an impossible brilliance or amazing luck to focus on his whereabouts specifically, especially given that he didn’t resemble the man the witnesses would describe. All he had to do now was walk calmly into Paris as if nothing had happened, buy a newspaper, sit in a café, read while having breakfast, and take the train home. The trick was not to shake and not to flutter, and, if he did, never to let anyone see.
WHEN HE GOT HOME he was tired because he had walked to l’étoile to get the A line west. In Saint-Germain-en-Laye he had picked up something to eat, and now, with a sandwich and a bottle of beer, he sat on the terrace. The sun began to burn away first the clouds, and then the mist that had lingered over the Seine far below.
Not long before, it seemed, a young family of three had moved into these splendid quarters. The wife was vital, quick, statuesque, and erotic, but what was most wonderful was the way she loved her child. It would remain the most beautiful thing Jules had ever seen. Watching Jacqueline with Cathérine gave him a purpose and defined his life. He knew that educated people, who strove above all not to be commonplace, would mock his feeling that the child was an angel. Once, and only once, he had innocently and happily declared it. The robotic contempt that had ensued had spurred him to strike back. “You think it’s trite?” he asked. The unspoken answer was absolutely clear. “And that angels are only an embarrassing figment of the medieval imagination? Let’s stipulate, then” – the person he was addressing was a lawyer – “that there are no such things. But we do have evidence that for thousands of years people have believed in pure and blessèd intermediary beings close to God. So, what do you think fed their perfervid imaginations? Where did they get the idea? What were their models?
“Children, of course. And when a parent describes his infant as an angel, he’s referring to the source and inspiration of the word. The children came first, and the word, with all its connotations, is truly specific to them. It’s an accurate, exact, and original description with which one flatters the Pope’s angels by associating them with one’s child. And why must you react with such bile to such a lovely and wonderful thing even if it isn’t true?”
When Cathérine was an infant even Shymanski had been fairly young and his children not yet old enough to be horrible. Jules could run fifty kilometers then, and row twenty almost as fast as an Olympian. He was flush with his new academic appointment, and would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night to write down music that came to him in dreams. In summer they traveled throughout the Mediterranean, light and on the cheap, and they were sunburnt, well rested, always near the sea. When Cathérine was a little older, they went to the Atlantic beaches of the Gironde. Paris in the fall was the most glorious place in the world. Jacqueline had a gray Chanel suit that she had bought for her lecturing. To see her in it took her students’ breath away. And, famously, for her hour they hardly stirred in their seats.
At least as he now remembered it, life had been close to perfect, but then it began slowly to erode – imperceptibly at first and now almost gone, with a few years left of shortness of breath and difficulty sleeping as his body predictably and inevitably failed. But perhaps he could make one last reach, for Luc. That was his task, the last run, now more complicated than ever.
After the war, when he was still a child, Jules had no desire to live, and thought of death as his sole comfort. As he grew older, the will to survive was welded inextricably, in a slowly forming braid, to his love of beauty. Just the streets of Paris, the way they flowed pleasurably one into another, and the musical life of a city that was itself a musical composition seduced him at first modestly and then irreversibly.