Marie hurried over with Céline’s fur and helped her on with it. It was only when Céline strode out the door that Gorski noticed pale clay mud spattered on her shoes and the hem of her coat.
Later, Gorski sat in Le Pot until Yves pulled down the shutter on the door. The salesman from the table next to the WC in the Restaurant de la Cloche was drinking whisky at the counter. Neither acknowledged the other’s presence.
Twenty-one
Raymond pushed open the heavy wooden door of 13 Rue Saint-Fiacre. Inside, it was cool and dark. A little sunlight filtered through the filthy window on the first-floor landing. There was an aroma of simmering stock. It reminded him of the smell that often greeted him from the kitchen when he returned home from school. Raymond mounted the stairs, his right hand on the worn banister. As he climbed, the stairwell became lighter and warmer. He could not imagine his father’s heavy tread on these steps. Nor could he imagine that he had ever entered any of the apartments behind the shabby doors that he now passed. He pressed the buzzer of the apartment on the second floor: Duval. For no particular reason he had decided that this was where Delph lived. Delphine Duval had a ring to it that none of the other names did. He had recited it under his breath on the train. His heart was beating quickly. Raymond passed his hand through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead. After a few moments, a woman spoke through the door: ‘Who is it?’ She had an attractive, low voice. Perhaps it was the woman with the green belted raincoat.
‘I’m looking for Delph,’ Raymond replied. There was a nervousness in his voice. He had not thought about what he was going to do or say. Only that he needed to see her.
‘Delphine? She lives upstairs.’
‘Thank you,’ said Raymond. ‘Which apartment?’
But the woman’s footsteps were already retreating.
There was a large skylight above the top landing and several plastic basins had been positioned to catch dripping water. He knocked on the door to the left. There was silence and the sound of a shuffling walk, then the skittering sound of claws on floorboards. This was the apartment of the old woman with the wheezing pug who went out daily to buy her vegetables.
Raymond called an apology through the door. ‘I’m looking for Delphine,’ he said.
‘Opposite,’ the old woman replied through the door. Her steps receded. The dog barked half-heartedly. So it was Comte. Delphine Comte. He smiled at the notion that he had so convinced himself that her name was Duval. The woman he had spoken to on the telephone must be her mother. He knocked on the door. A few moments silence then, just as next door, the sound of footsteps. He recognised the voice of the woman immediately. ‘One moment.’ she called. ‘Who is it?’
He heard the sound of a chain being slid into place. Raymond did not know how to reply. The door opened a few centimetres. The first thing Raymond noticed was how small the woman was. Her eyeline was only just above the door chain. He instinctively stepped back a pace, so as not to intimidate her.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ said Raymond. ‘I’m looking for Delph. For Delphine.’
Even before he finished his little speech, the woman’s face had broken into a wide smile.
‘You must be Raymond,’ she said.
The door clicked closed and he heard the sound of the chain being unfastened. Raymond was confused, then pleased: Delph must have mentioned him to her mother. And not only that, she must have done so in favourable terms. The door opened and the woman was still smiling at him. She was around forty. Her eyes were blue and twinkling. A brightly coloured kimono was fastened around her waist. Around her neck was a pendant with some kind of Eastern symbol.
She held out a firm hand and said: ‘I’m Irene. But, of course, you know that already.’
Raymond shook hands with her. Then she appeared to think better of this formal greeting and clasped his shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks. Her hair smelt of cinnamon or some other spice. She released him and invited him inside.
The tiny hallway was chaotic. Coats and jackets bulged from hooks. An overflowing shoe-rack prevented the door from opening fully. Raymond recognised the boots Delph had been wearing at Johnny’s. The walls were crammed with Chinese and Indian prints in mismatched frames, some of an erotic nature. As soon as he entered, Raymond had had a strong sense of déjà vu. Perhaps it was the sound of the voice he had heard on the telephone.
Irene saw Raymond looking at a print on the wall. A couple were engaged in an acrobatic sexual act. Irene stood beside him.
‘Are you interested in Oriental art?’ she asked. ‘We’ve so much to learn from each other, don’t you think?’
Raymond did not know whether she meant the East and West or she and him. But he nodded earnestly. She led him through a beaded curtain into the kitchen. This room was every bit as cramped and cluttered as the hallway. Two large rubber plants stood sentry at the door. Along the window sill, herbs grew in a wooden box. Every surface was piled with magazines, sketchbooks and letters. Above the stove, a shelf was stacked with boxes of tea. A small wooden table was set against the wall with three mismatched chairs. A cat was asleep on one. Raymond congratulated himself on correctly imagining this one detail. On the wall above the table was a large corkboard pinned with photographs, postcards and various notes.
The woman shooed away the cat and told Raymond to sit, which he did, placing his satchel on the floor by his feet. She put some water on the hob to boil. On the ceiling above her head was a brown tidemark, where at some point there must have been an ingress of water from the roof.
‘You’ll have some tea, won’t you, Raymond?’
The situation was puzzling. Even if Delph had mentioned him, it hardly explained the warmth of the welcome he had received. The heel of his left foot was trembling, making the coins in the pocket of his trousers jangle. He put his hand on his knee to stop it. Despite his bewilderment, he could not help but find the woman charming.
‘Yes,’ he replied. When she gestured towards the array of boxes, he said that he would have whatever she was having. She pondered the assortment.
‘I think this calls for ginseng,’ she declared eventually.
Raymond watched her prepare the tea. She had a slender figure. Her robe was of black silk, with a pattern of dragons embroidered in red and gold. It was secured beneath her neat bosom with a silk tie. She flitted around the tiny space with precise, efficient movements.
‘Is Delphine here?’ It was perfectly obvious that she wasn’t, but he wanted to remind her of the reason for his visit.
‘Delphine? Oh, no.’
Raymond asked if she would be back soon.
Irene glanced at a clock on the wall. ‘I don’t imagine so. She’ll be starting work.’
She placed the teapot on a cork mat on the table and fetched two cups from the drainer. She sat down and gazed fondly at Raymond.
She shook her head. ‘You’re so like him,’ she said. She brushed a tear from her eye with the back of her index finger. Then it struck him: amid the rising aroma of ginseng and the herbs on the window sill, there was the dark tang of pipe tobacco.
Raymond got to his feet, knocking his chair against the wall behind him.
‘He was here, wasn’t he?’
‘Of course,’ said Irene. She smiled sympathetically. ‘Isn’t that why you’ve come?
‘He was here the night of the accident?’
Irene glanced down at the table, nodded sadly. She began to pour out the tea, as if all this was no more than small talk. Her composure had a soothing effect on Raymond. He resumed his seat. The apartment now seemed pervaded by the aroma of his father’s tobacco. And yet it was impossible to picture him—so stiff and formal—in this cosy, cluttered apartment. He couldn’t stand disorder. Raymond looked at Irene Comte: his father’s mistress. She did not seem in the least disconcerted by the situation. She sipped her tea, holding her cup in both hands, and sat back in her chair. Raymond gave a little shake of his head. Questions flitted through his mind, but he did
not know if it was appropriate to ask them.
Instead, it was Irene who spoke: ‘I knew as soon as you called that you’d come.’
‘How did you know it was me?’ said Raymond. He was embarrassed to recollect the stupid telephone call he had made.
Irene laughed. ‘Raymond, you sound exactly like him. You look like him. You act like him.’
She reached across the table and, gripping him gently by the chin, turned his face to profile. ‘That nose,’ she said. Raymond jerked his head away, as if there was a fly on his face.
Irene laughed again. ‘That’s exactly what your father would have done.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ said Raymond. ‘Why didn’t you say who you were?’
Irene pursed her lips. She adopted a more serious tone. ‘As I recall, you didn’t give me much chance. And, in any case, your father never wanted you or your mother to know about me. It wasn’t my place to tell you.’
‘So he came here every Tuesday?’
‘Every Tuesday.’
‘And at other times?’
Irene shook her head sadly. ‘Bertrand liked to keep things in their compartments. Even me.’
There was an ashtray on the table. Raymond took his cigarettes from his jacket pocket.
‘May I?’ he said.
‘Of course.’ When he had put the packet on the table, she took one and lit it. They looked at each other through the rising smoke. When it came down to it, it did not seem to matter much. Raymond rather liked the idea that his father had spent time with this agreeable woman. It was pleasant to be in this funny little apartment, with its curious smells and mishmash of junk. It could barely be more different from the house on Rue des Bois. He asked how long his father had been coming there.
Irene smiled her pleasant smile. ‘A long time,’ she said. ‘Since before you were born.’
Raymond indicated that he would like to hear more. Irene blew out a long stream of smoke. He had the impression that she was not in the habit of smoking. She crossed her legs, rested her bare foot on Raymond’s shin, and began talking.
She had been well aware of Bertrand’s reputation when she started working for Barthelme & Corbeil. It was shortly after he remarried. For the first few months, he behaved very correctly. Then one afternoon, when Maître Corbeil had gone out to meet a client, Bertrand invited her for a drink. It was about time they got to know each other better, he had said.
‘You have to remember, Raymond, that I was barely twenty. Your father was a very handsome man. And he had a certain way of looking at you. I was under no illusions about what he meant by a drink and in the event we went straight to the Hôtel Berlioz. There was no discussion. We both understood what we were doing.’ Raymond walked past the Berlioz every day on the way to school.
After that, their liaisons became a more or less regular thing. If he sent her out on a certain errand, it was their code that she should go to the Berlioz and wait for him there. Afterwards, they might drink a bottle of wine on the tiny balcony of the room. It surprised her how unconcerned he was about the possibility of being seen, but passers-by never raised their eyes from the street below. ‘He had,’ she said, ‘an air of invincibility about him.’
Irene told her story without a hint of bitterness, and as if it was all perfectly conventional.
‘Of course, things changed when Delphine came along,’ she continued. ‘That was when he started coming here.’
Raymond felt a coldness creep over his skin.
‘But what about her father, Delphine’s father?’ he said. ‘Didn’t he object?’
‘Her father?’ she repeated.
‘Yes,’ said Raymond.
It was Irene’s turn to look confused.
‘Bertrand is her father,’ she said. ‘Was her father.’
Raymond stared at her. A sad expression passed across her face and she lowered her head. Raymond said nothing. Once, when he was ten or eleven years old, he had been cycling around the Petite Camargue when a low-hanging branch had struck him on the head and knocked him off his bicycle. He now felt a similar sensation. He had difficulty drawing breath. Irene took a paper handkerchief from a box on the table and blew her nose. When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes. Raymond gazed past her to the brightly coloured boxes of tea on the shelf. He had never seen so many varieties of tea. His father hated tea.
‘I always wanted you and Delphine to meet,’ Irene was saying. ‘I suppose the one good thing about this, about the accident, is that you will.’
She seemed shocked when Raymond got to his feet. She asked him what the matter was. Raymond batted his mug across the table. The sudden movement sent the cat scurrying from the kitchen. Raymond snatched up his satchel and followed the cat from the room. He became tangled in the beaded curtain. Some of the cords came away in his flailing arms. Wooden beads scattered across the floor. Raymond freed himself and kicked over one of the rubber plants.
Irene stood in the middle of the kitchenette repeating his name in a soothing voice. He fumbled with the locks on the inside of the front door and then threw it open. He lost his footing on the first flight of stairs and landed on all fours on the landing below. The right knee of his corduroy trousers ripped. Irene called out to him from the doorway of the apartment, imploring him to come back. He put his fingers to where his forehead had struck the concrete. It was grazed, but there was no blood. He picked himself up and looked back at Irene. She extended an arm towards him and again appealed for him to come back inside. Raymond shouted an obscenity at her.
He careered down the remaining flights of stairs, threw open the main door and emerged from the darkness of the stairwell into Rue Saint-Fiacre. He came to a halt, confused, as if he had alighted on the platform of the wrong station. The philatelist was pulling down the metal shutters of his shop. He starting coughing and a cylinder of ash dropped from the cigarette that was hanging from his mouth. The young man with the long face who had followed him onto the train in Saint-Louis was standing in the arched entrance opposite, smoking a cigarette.
Twenty-two
Gorski parked in a space a few streets to the west of Quai Kellermann and got out of his car. He kept an even pace, not wishing to draw attention to himself. In order to reduce the possibility of running into Lambert, he approached Veronique Marchal’s building from the opposite side of the police station in Rue de la Nuée-Bleue. Nevertheless, he was uneasy about encroaching on Big Phil’s turf. He reassured himself, however, with the thought that a chance encounter was far less likely in a city the size of Strasbourg than in his home town.
He paused at a kiosk to call the station in Saint-Louis. Earlier that morning, Roland had called him to report—almost tearfully—that he had lost Raymond Barthelme. Gorski had been dismayed, but he suppressed the urge to rebuke him, instructing him only to do his best to find him.
Schmitt answered Gorski’s call in his usual irritable tone and went on to wearily relate that Roland had called in again to say that the ‘so-called subject’ had been relocated and had gone to the railway station.
‘And do we know where he went?’ Gorski asked.
‘He didn’t say.’
‘When was this?’
‘When was what?’ Schmitt replied.
‘That Roland called.’
‘I don’t know. Half an hour ago, maybe more. Do you expect me to write everything down?’
Gorski hung up. He resisted the temptation to stop off for a snifter in the bar with the zinc counter, calculating that his presence there might well be reported back to Lambert, and proceeded directly to Mlle Marchal’s block.
Even though he must have put his eye to the peephole—Gorski had seen it darken— Weismann opened the door on the chain. Gorski creased his face into a smile. The historian looked at him suspiciously.
‘Inspector Lambert told me that I was not to discuss the case with anyone,’ he said.
‘Absolutely,’ said Gorski. ‘And I hope you haven’t done so. However, given your
great importance to the case, he asked me to go over the details of your evidence before you make your statement to the examining magistrate.’
His words had the desired effect and Weismann unfastened the chain. Gorski stepped inside. There was the usual powerful odour of cologne.
‘You must forgive my circumspection, Monsieur—’
‘Gorski,’ he reminded him. ‘Chief Inspector Gorski.’
‘Ah, yes, Gorski,’ he repeated, as if the name failed to meet with his approval.
Weismann led him into the study. The air there was stale. Gorski had the feeling that the windows had not been opened in years.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t had any journalists knocking on your door,’ said Gorski.
‘I have,’ replied Weismann proudly. ‘But I didn’t utter a word to them.’
‘Good man.’
As on the first occasion that Gorski was here, the two men stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor. Apart from the chair behind Weismann’s desk, all the available seating was piled with books and papers.
‘Of course, I understand that you’re a busy man,’ said Gorski. He picked up a book from the top of a pile and turned it over. ‘An interesting period, I understand,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know a great deal about it.’
‘It’s quite fascinating,’ said Weismann. ‘But somewhat neglected. I assure you, Inspector, you are not alone in your ignorance.’
Weismann then embarked on a lecture on the history of the Alsace during the Reformation. The historian became quite lost in his monologue, retrieving books and papers as he spoke to illustrate his points. His enthusiasm for his subject was endearing. His initial wariness gave way to something approaching charm. After ten minutes or so, Gorski interrupted.
‘I can certainly see why you are so renowned in your field,’ he said.
Weismann smiled sadly. ‘I’m afraid your colleague somewhat exaggerated my status,’ he said. ‘And vanity prevented me from correcting him. My work is published in monograph only.’
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