Le Mariage

by Diane Johnson

  She took the key chain and flashlight and went back, resolved to watch intently for developments.

  After hearing about Anne-Sophie’s ordeal, Estelle d‘Argel hurried via the metro Porte de Clignancourt to Anne-Sophie’s stand to reassure herself that Anne-Sophie was intact and calm, and to provide motherly solace. Her novel-writing line of work had taught her to value experiences, but, like all mothers, she didn’t want her children to have to have them. Like all daughters, Anne-Sophie was glad to see her mother and embarrassed when she turned up here at work. With this mother in particular, Anne-Sophie tended to feel washed out and clumsy. Estelle was small, expensively dressed in knits and scarves, was occasionally photographed or written up, went on TV, and hadn’t a clue about Anne-Sophie’s chosen calling. She also had an aversion to horses. She kissed Anne-Sophie and studied her.

  “Ames telephoned me. It’s blood we’re smelling, isn’t it?” Estelle said. “Even today, the smell of blood. Like boudin noir. Was that where it happened, over there? ” The police had set a stepladder decorated with yellow tape in the doorway of Boudherbe’s depot. “How can you bear it?”

  “I think you’re smelling Yvonne’s rillettes,” Anne-Sophie said, noticing her neighbor beginning to set out the lunch.

  “Teem didn’t come out here with you?”

  “I didn’t want him to, Mother. I wanted to just face it by myself.”

  “Still, shouldn’t he have insisted? This terrible thing you’ve gone through!”

  “I just want things to get back to normal.”

  “I’d take you to lunch, but I have a rendezvous I can’t change,” Estelle said. “This visit is just to reassure myself.”

  “Really, Maman, I’m fine, it’s fine.” Though it wasn’t really. She kept remembering the strange blackness of blood, and a cry she had heard, perhaps? The death cry of Monsieur Boudherbe just now returning to her mind.

  “Look at this little flashlight I’ve found, with the same name as Tim’s on it! Can you keep it for me?” she said, thinking it might be better for Estelle to carry it away, for fear it was a clue unfairly linking Tim to the crime scene—or something.

  At five-thirty, just when things were winding down—shutters closing, the scrape of chairs and tables being dragged into the stalls, carts and wagons collecting in the alleys to take away the deliveries, last-minute negotiations, and she herself putting her horse figurines back in the vitrine and retiring the little table where they had stood to attract horse-minded strollers (English, often)—then she saw, she was pretty sure, the same American who had discovered Monsieur Boudherbe sidle along the passage and quickly, furtively, dart through the door that led to the stairway.

  Her immediate feeling was joy or glee at this deepening of mystery, this complication, added to the events of yesterday, seeming to ensure prospects ahead of interesting drama, and questions beginning with: Why had the American gone up in her attic? Who was he? What had he to do with the murder of poor Monsieur Boudherbe? An American man of unusual beauty, about her age. Her eyes had caught his—he had large brown eyes, like a horse, long hair and a shadowed jaw, and muscular shoulders. She did not think he had anything to do with the murder, but he had undeniably been on the scene of it, and here he was still, and no one but her had seen him sneak upstairs.

  Her first impulse was to call someone, Pécuchet or one of the many policemen still milling around in Monsieur Boudherbe’s depot, unless they’d left for the day, as it appeared. Her second impulse was to wait a little while—she didn’t have to be home quite yet—to see if he came down again, and if it really were he. The third was to go up there herself. Though she knew she oughtn’t to do that, the situation had an allure, as if she, Anne-Sophie, were the center of these events swirling around. Very little had happened to her in life, she sometimes felt, at least since she stopped competing in the dressage, when she was nineteen, and went to university instead. People assumed that getting engaged was something happening to you, but it didn’t exactly seem that way to her, not an end in life in itself, but only the inevitable march of predestined events. The prospect of catching a murderer—a fugitive at least—had an element of thrilling danger. She should act, she knew.

  In the end, she did nothing, Monsieur Martin, the gardien, passed through locking the stair corridor, as he always did at the end of the day, so the American was stuck up there, if she wasn’t mistaken, and couldn’t get out unless he jumped from a window. Anne-Sophie rolled down her shutter and walked with Nathalie Serre to where she had parked her Mini. She turned once, in case she could catch him watching from the window of the loft; but there was no one.

  Making love later that night with Tim, just for a moment over his shoulder she saw that empty window and expected to see the dark face.

  9

  Hotel Le Mistral

  Anne-Sophie had dropped Tim off at the Gare du Nord on her A way to the puces. From there he walked round to the Hotel Le Mistral to talk to the young Americans whose plight he had heard about from Clara Holly. He was thinking that this could be a story either for CNN (Dream Trip to Paris Turns into Nightmare) or for Reliance (American citizen, deprived of passport, held without charges on flimsy grounds). He hoped that the young woman would turn out to be pretty and photogenic. With no idea of her name, he had to rely on the good nature of the desk clerk, who at first resisted, as was typical, saying that there were dozens of Americans registered in the hotel, how should she know which one he wanted? Trouble, police, only been here two days? he persisted. Finally, with a kind of surly smirk, she allowed as how it must be 204. He then tackled the problem of convincing the occupant of 204 to come down and talk to him. Why should she? She did, though, plainly having no idea about her privacy rights in this situation, or was perhaps responding trustfully to his American voice.

  “I heard about your situation from Clara Holly.” He smiled as winningly as possible. “It sounded interesting, an interesting piece for my paper, but also I wondered if I could actually be of help?”

  “You could, but I don’t even know what’s happening,” she said. A small, worried-looking girl in her twenties, with hair the color of maple syrup, and transparent skin, and a kind of malnour ished, ethereal quality, less robust than he imagined the usual Oregonian. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and wire granny glasses. She had a bad limp; her little pelvis was tilted like a roof, probably from a deformed hip. Something about this was shocking: He realized you didn’t see Americans limping or deformed very often, orthopedists having intervened in their cradles.

  In answer to his questions, she explained that she had surprised herself by not being panicked or desperate through all this, until now when she could feel panic coming on. It wasn’t her personal safety that worried her. What could happen to a woman, middle-class and American, even in France? She was trying to maintain a certain center of confidence in her general human status, white, innocent of murder, possessor of a legal passport (though it was gone), with access to money and the phone number of a respected local woman who could speak French, and at the moment a roof over her head that the French police would prevent her from being kicked out from.

  Yet indignation and fear swelled her throat when she really faced it. You heard of American tourists being put in Turkish prisons, drugs planted on them, executed in Singapore or wherever—though not in France. She had gone over in her mind all the worse things she’d seen, albeit only on television—stacks of Rwandan corpses, festering Bosnian graves, skulls unearthed from cornfields, blood-spattered shacks in Mexico, Algeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kurdistan, Turkey, Iraq, where the terrorists or police forces had stormed in, automatic weapons spraying the occupants.

  “Clara Holly said she’d pay for the room,” Delia said.

  Tim asked, “How did you get along with Clara Holly, is she nice?”

  “Fine,” said Delia. “Better than I expected.” He could see she hadn’t actually liked Clara Holly that much. Why not?

  “It might have been her fur coat,�
� said Delia, as if divining the question. “Okay, I was surprised that an Oregon native of Clara Holly’s age would wear the skins of dead, endangered animals. But of course I know that attitudes differ in Europe, and also that there is no logical moral difference between fur coats and shoes.” She sighed.

  Tim went over her story, not mentioning his connection to it via Anne-Sophie, but she had little to add to what he knew already. Other concerns came out, in an aggrieved rush: How can people sleep in Paris? Horns, sirens that warble in a way that vibrates the nasal passages, loud car alarms setting themselves off in series, like jungle messages being passed along. Enormous clashings of broken glass, as if tons of bottles were being crushed, cars, voices laughing under her windows, motorbikes starting up.

  “I’m stuck here I guess till I can get a passport, but nobody tells me anything,” she complained.

  “What about your companion?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she blurted out after a pause thinking about it. “He’s disappeared. I’m not worried for myself....” A new set of fears tumbled out in the grammar of old films. Arrested maybe? Maybe in France they don’t permit you a phone call? Torture, Amnesty International, films of ragged men in undershirts, cigarette butts clamped in their moist derisive lips, defying brutal guards. Tim could read her concerns: Would her so-called friend really leave her just sweating here, passportless, speechless, moneyless?

  Never, she said. Gabriel would never do that. That she was sure of, after what had happened between them.

  Even without experience it was easy to tell police when they came in, their movements slower than normal, eyes not synchronized with the movements of their shoulders but slanting off at odd angles around them. These police were unmistakable even though well dressed in European tailoring. Tim assumed they were French detectives, but it turned out they were Americans. Delia got up as soon as she saw them inquiring at the desk, turning their heads toward her. Tim followed her, intending to help with the language, but there was no need.

  “You’re Miss Sadler, I guess? I’m Frank Knowles and this is Frank Durkin. FBI. Both Franks. We’ll be Frank with you.” He smiled professionally. “European special section.” He flashed a badge at her, exactly as on television. She peered dutifully. “Guess this isn’t what you had in mind on your vacation.”

  “It wasn’t a vacation, exactly,” she began. “I’m ... I have a brother Frank too.”

  “An era of Frankness.” They all laughed and grimaced. “Not really our thing to look after tourists in trouble, but you’re in a special fix.”

  “Did the French police call you?”

  “Right.”

  “Then you know my personal fix is really that my passport was stolen! I went right to the consulate and filled out the papers and they were getting my records from the States, and I am to go back to get it Monday, but now ...”

  “We put a hold on it,” said Durkin, “at their request. You can’t get it Monday, not until they decide you aren’t involved in their thing. We cooperate with these French requests and vice versa, most of the time.”

  “We’ll get you to tell us the story,” said Knowles, and went to sit with her on the lobby chairs. She repeated the story Tim had heard, the flea market, her friend Gabriel Biller, then the man with his throat cut.

  “So where is Mr. Biller?” Knowles asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “He’ll be back.”

  “We should talk to him too. His dealings with the victim. When did he leave?”

  Here Delia paused, either counting the hours or deciding to lie, or not knowing. For such a puny little person and inexperienced’ traveler, she seemed to have a certain moral stoutness, Tim thought.

  “I haven’t been paying attention. Too busy—telephoning the U.S. and trying to straighten things out. I hope you can help us.”

  “You didn’t see him go?” Skepticism.

  “We aren’t ‘together.’ ” Her voice bracketed the word. “We’re just traveling together.”

  “Let’s get a little background here,” one of the Franks said in an equable voice. “What exactly are you doing here?”

  They didn’t seem to object to Tim listening, nor did Delia, as they drew out some of her history. Not drew out, exactly, for she seemed artlessly comfortable talking to them, the Americanness of the two visitors outweighing the fact that they were FBI men. She didn’t mind telling her story yet again: business trip, to buy linen napkins, and wanted to go to the Louvre. At one point she had to excuse herself to take a phone call from Oregon—it was her partner Sara saying she’d sent emergency money, eight hundred dollars via American Express, all Delia’d have to do is go to American Express. Delia thought she had explained she wasn’t supposed to stir. However, this seemed a surmountable problem. It was a relief to hear Sara’s normal voice from America.

  She was an antique dealer, she explained to the two agents named Frank, with a stand in a mall in Sweet Home, Oregon, a kind of big warehouse in a shopping center, where a number of dealers banded together. She and her partner, Sara Towne, dealt in old linen, green china, baskets, potpourri, flowers, that sort of thing, and hoped one day to have an entire shop in a fancier location—Lake Oswego or even downtown Portland.

  “And your friend? The other dealer?”

  “Sara?”

  “The person you came here with.”

  Gabrie! Biller, rare books, prints, documents. He’s not so happy with the location either, since the casual book buyer isn’t after his level of things, but more and more the collectors find him, and with the Internet he can be anywhere.“

  “Does a lot of work on the Internet, does he?” asked one Frank. Something in his tone, Tim saw, now affected her and qualified her candor. Something worried her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really know the details of his business. Plus the Internet’s a mystery to me.”

  “You said he did business on the Internet.”

  “I’ve heard him say the Internet has revolutionized the rare book business. Before, you had to mail catalogues all over.”

  “Would you happen to have a catalogue?”

  “Why don’t you look on his website?” said Delia, wiggling, not liking this now. “His name’s Biller.” She spelled it. “I’m really not privy to his affairs.”

  “He said he was going to change money, that was when, what time? ”

  “I don’t know, I’m still kind of jet-lagged.”

  “This morning?”

  “Last night, I think, or early this morning.”

  “You think? And he hasn’t come back.”

  “I wouldn’t know, maybe he has.”

  “Wouldn’t you have expected to see him?”

  “I was upset and went to bed.”

  “You didn’t see him? Didn’t eat dinner together?”

  “We had an early dinner, that’s when he said he’d need to change money.”

  “So you don’t know if he slept here last night?”

  Suddenly she didn’t like his tone, or something scared her. Her teeth clamped her lower lip, her eyes sought Tim’s.

  “I was just wiped out and went to bed about ten,” she said.

  “I guess you know that your government can’t protect you under these circumstances. Accused of a crime, the foreign government takes over,” said Frank Knowles.

  “I’m not accused of a crime?” Delia asked, suddenly bewildered. How could she be?

  “Their rules apply. I hope you know that. But we do what we can.”

  Tim suddenly felt a wave of chivalry. “You could help get her passport for her,” he said to the FBI men.

  When he had said this, one of the Franks, Knowles, who seemed to be the point man, studied him with a look of special concentration, as if memorizing his face for a later lineup. “Who did you say you were with?”

  Tim listed his credentials.

  “Why are you interested in little miss here, Mr. Nolinger, what’s the story here?” he said,
suddenly unpleasant.

  “Just as a person who could help,” Tim said. “We have a mutual friend. I thought I could help, get her passport, speak French, whatever she needs. My girlfriend was there yesterday at the flea market.”

  “Speak French, do you?” as if it were seditious and unbecoming. “Ask the desk clerk to let us into his room. You could tell her we’re friends, needing to get something from his room.”

  “I don’t think she’ll do that,” Tim said. “You’d have to get an order.” He noticed that Delia was looking at them in surprise.

  “Ask her.”

  Tim went over to the desk. The clerk had been watching them the whole time, and probably had formed her own opinion about the meaning and tone of their conversation in the corner of the lobby. He smiled as persuasively as possible and repeated the request.

  “Impossible,” she said, as Tim had expected. He was just as glad.

  “Fuck it, these Frogs just have a thing against cooperation,” Frank Knowles snapped.

  “When Mr. Biller comes back, give us a call, will you?” said Frank Durkin, handing Delia a folded paper. “Meantime we’ll see what we can do vis-à-vis your passport. They’ll let you charge your food here?”

  “It’s more of a snack bar,” Delia said. “But, yes.”

  “Okay, we’ll be talking to you,” said the other Frank, and they left, leaving Delia sitting in the lobby.

  Tim lingered kindly, concerned for her dinner and who she would talk to, but finally took his leave. He wrote out several phone numbers for her, approximately describing his whereabouts in the next couple of days, in case she needed help or thought of something he could do to help. Not much of a story here yet, he reluctantly decided, but the girl had caught his interest. So had the presence of the FBI.