Babylon

by Yasmina Reza

  “We’re going to take you into custody and read you your rights.”

  I wasn’t too clear what that meant. Nor what it had to do with Pierre. But I was too tired to try to understand.

  “You’re connected to a locksmith business?”

  “Companies give us these freebie pads to advertise.”

  “Oh, I see . . .”

  “On actual cases, we work with some contract outfits. That doesn’t stop other ones from sending stuff over all the time.”

  “What does a glazier do for you?”

  “Nothing. The companies do both kinds of things. They give us pens and calendars too . . . the calendars are a good deal because they work as stationery too. It’s smart!”

  He dug into a chest pocket and pulled out a blue and white Bic pen with a different logo printed on it. “Pen from the competition . . . I won’t give it to you, there’s no point because they’ll be taking everything away from you at the station anyhow.”

  “The company’s looking to get outside customers that way?”

  “Bah—no idea. It’s advertising . . . Wait, I’ve got another one . . . The point is to advertise. That’s fine with us, seeing how we don’t get any more equipment than the police force in like Moldavia or someplace . . .”

  I liked this boy’s placid way, his indifference to my situation. A plumpish young man the age of Emmanuel, with beardless skin and a shaved scalp. He had big light eyes, slightly reddened. He did me good. I was tempted to drop my head on his shoulder. Through the window, I tried to make out the door of the building. The angle was bad and the streetlight made it hard. I looked up, toward our apartment. There was still a light on in the Manoscrivi place. In our flat everything was dark, but I couldn’t see the bedroom window, it looks out the other side. I thought about the cat slapped down somewhere in there, and wondered where I should put the useless glasses lined up on the buffet. How to explain that insanity with the glasses? Once I’d calmed down about enough chairs I’d felt compelled to run through Deuil-l’Alouette and take the bus to the discount store to buy five packs of wineglasses, two of them large size, specifically for Burgundy reds, plus two boxes of champagne flutes when I already had the Elegance flutes in the house. The glasses waiting on a silly little tablecloth, those glasses made for multiple uses as if we spent our time with people who were sticklers on matters of etiquette and whom my acquired bourgeois standards demanded that I satisfy, those glasses that would never find any space in any cabinet, not to mention all the ones that would be coming out of the dishwasher—those glasses assailed me, coagulated into a monstrous image and formed a mass of anguish. It was, I thought as I scanned the busy parking lot, that insanity of worry and anticipation that attacks the elderly. Getting stressed out by a hypothetical problem. My mother used to take out her bus ticket two blocks before she got to the stop. She would walk with the ticket held out in front of her, pinched in the fingers of her woolen glove. Same thing for her money on any line in a shop. It could happen to me, doing that. Got to prepare for all eventualities, map the terrain. When my mother went to spend a few days with her cousin in Achères (a direct ride from Asnières) the suitcase was already on the floor, open and carpeted with a few items a week ahead. I do that too, on a scarcely more sensible schedule. Two cars arrived at almost the same time. Some men got out. A sort of cluster formed around the door. I said, “Who are they?”

  “The criminal justice officer and the PTS.”

  “The PTS?”

  “The forensics police.”

  The cluster came apart. Two uniformed officers headed over toward us. The others went into the building. The guys in jeans and leather jackets came right back out, they hurried toward the unmarked car. I caught a glimpse of Jean-Lino, smaller than the rest of them, in his Zara jacket and his pleated trousers. The doors slammed and the car took off with the lights and the noise.

  Those clusters come together, come apart. You could describe men’s life like that. We too set out in the Police Emergency car. In the shopwindows I saw us passing with the flashing light and the siren howling. There’s a certain unreality to seeing yourself being transported at top speed, like seeing your own speeding train reflected in another one. At the station house, I was taken downstairs to a mezzanine. I was set on an iron bench that had handcuffs welded to it. Now I had only a single hand attached. I waited awhile there and then they took me into an office, they told me I had the right to remain silent, to see a doctor, a lawyer, to alert my family. I asked them to call Pierre. I said I had no lawyer and that they could call whoever they wanted. A woman searched me again and took a scraping from the inside of my mouth. In the corridor she asked if I wanted to go to the toilet before I was put into jail (jail!!). The primitive stand-up Turkish latrines. I said to myself, A few hours ago you were slicing an orange cake in your flowing party dress. I went into the dilapidated cell with a bench at the rear. There was a mattress on a linoleum floor with an orange wool blanket folded on it. The woman told me I could rest a little while I waited for the lawyer, who’d be coming at around seven o’clock. She closed the door with an extravagant racket of locks and latches. The wall that gave onto the corridor, including the door, was entirely glass with bars. I sat down on the bench. Was Jean-Lino somewhere in the place? And poor Lydie in her suitcase . . . with her scarf on crooked and the crazy hair, the rumpled skirt . . . All those ornaments turned useless from one minute to the next. The red Gigi Dool pumps tossed into the grave. A colleague of Pierre’s died a month ago. Etienne had phoned to tell Pierre but he got me instead. He asks, “You know who Max Botezarlu is?” “By name.” “He just died, instantly, a stroke in the Metro.” “A good death,” I said. “Oh really—you’d like that kind of death for yourself, would you?” “Yes.” “You wouldn’t want to see it coming, prepare yourself, like in La Fontaine, Feeling death was coming he brought together all his dear ones?” “No. I’m afraid of the deterioration.” There was a silence at the other end of the line and then he said, “Still, it’s better to die with people around you. Or actually maybe not.” I put the orange blanket over my knees. It scratched. I pulled together the edges of Lydie’s coat as a liner.

  “Well then . . .” In the storage room where I meet with the lawyer everything is gray. The floor tiles, the walls, the table, the chairs. Everything. The two chairs are bolted to the floor and so is the table. No openings. Hideous lighting. Earlier I’d had a small carton of orange juice and a dry cracker. Gilles Terneu, lawyer. He had long pepper-and-salt hair brushed back, and a neatly barbered mustache-beard arrangement. A well-groomed man, my mother would have said, who banked on his coiffure from the moment he woke up. I was slightly embarrassed by my Kitty pants and fur slippers, but mostly by the coat that only reached to my forearms. He opened his briefcase, pulled out a notepad and a pen. He said, “Well then . . . Madam, do you know why you’re here?” I might be exhausted, but still I knew why I was here. I recounted the events. Well, I mean, the minimal official version.

  “What exactly are your ties to this man, madam?”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “Madam, you do know that we have a criminal matter here. The investigations to be carried out will be very thorough. Into your life as well. Do not think that at this stage you can conceal things. They’ll come out sooner or later.”

  “He’s a friend.”

  “A friend.”

  “He’s a neighbor who’s become a friend.”

  “Did you suspect anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you were watching through the peephole.”

  “When my husband suggested he should call the police, I’d felt he was hesitant . . .”

  “You weren’t sure he’d call the police . . .”

  “No, I wasn’t completely sure he would call the police . . . And when I saw the elevator going down . . . and since I hadn’t seen anything or heard anything outdoors, when I was also looking out the window . . .”

  “You were in y
our nightclothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your husband? He didn’t hear you go down?”

  “My husband was sleeping.”

  “Is he still sleeping?”

  “I don’t know. I asked them to let him know.”

  “Does your husband have his doubts about your relationship with this man?”

  “No. No, no.”

  “We don’t have much time, ma’am. We have a half hour and you’re going to be—when you leave this interview—you’ll be questioned by the police, probably even confronted with your neighbor, Monsieur . . .”

  “Manoscrivi.”

  “Manoscrivi. Obviously, one hopes that the two versions do not contradict . . . Do you think he might say something different?”

  “No . . . There’s no reason to.”

  “Good. The advice a lawyer gives, as a general rule, is to say as little as possible to the police so as not to be caught up later in one’s own statements. Still, your version seems plausible, it’s possible that you will have some interest in speaking. That is, in going into some detail. But, madam, I call your attention to the fact that what you say here will later be used as an initial statement of truth to contest what you say later.”

  “It is the truth . . . There is one thing I haven’t mentioned . . . which changes nothing but I want to tell everything . . . Actually there are two things . . . Downstairs, when I was downstairs in the lobby trying to persuade him to call the police, we ran into a neighbor . . .”

  “Someone you know?”

  “Yes, a girl I say hello and goodbye to—she’s the daughter of—”

  “Wasn’t she surprised to see you at three in the morning?”

  “She said hello, she looked as if she was coming in from a party . . .”

  “The tenants in the building know you and he are friends?”

  “I couldn’t say. Yes probably.”

  “Did she look surprised?”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “The situation was fairly ordinary . . .”

  “Ordinary. She seemed eager to get out of the rain, she went right into the elevator, the whole thing took two seconds. We just crossed paths . . . And the other thing is, after calling the police, Jean-Lino Manoscrivi wanted to put his cat someplace safe. So we went back to his apartment, picked up his cat, and put it in our apartment. His cat is in our place now.”

  “You seem to be awfully concerned with this man’s life . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And you say that the relationship is only one of friendship.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t think you might have left some trace of a relationship that could seem different in nature from what you describe?”

  “No.”

  “You never exchanged emails, for instance? Your sites will be checked.”

  “Never any emails.”

  “And he . . . you don’t think he might harbor some feelings . . . you believe you’re on the same wavelength?”

  “That I can’t say, but he’s never shown anything . . .”

  “There’s no material evidence that could imply that this is a romantic relationship even though you declare it a—”

  “None.”

  “For instance, your husband has never been jealous of the relationship?”

  “Never.”

  “You have no reason to help this man in an act that could be a criminal act?”

  “None at all.”

  “You’ll be asked the question: You learn your friend has killed his wife . . . How far would you go if he asked you to help him?”

  “He didn’t ask me to help him.”

  “If he had asked you to . . .”

  “ . . . Help him how?”

  “No, ma’am. There you have to say: ‘I did not help him, the proof is, I urged him to call the police.’ Who called the police? Was it he or you?”

  “Both of us.”

  “What does that mean, both of you? Who was holding the receiver?”

  “He was. I dialed 17 and handed him the receiver . . .”

  “Ah! You dialed 17.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you hadn’t run into the neighbor, would you have dialed 17?”

  “ . . . Yes . . . of course.”

  “Madam, you must not hesitate on this point.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Now then. You knew he was in the process of fleeing . . .”

  “No, I did not know that.”

  “It was when you went downstairs that . . .”

  “When I saw the elevator blinking, I called out. I called out, and since I got no answer even though the car was just below my level and I knew I could be heard, I opened the stairwell door. I heard footsteps running down. I know my neighbor takes the stairs and that no one else uses them. I thought something odd was going on. I went down myself, I opened the lobby door and saw him pulling the big suitcase out of the elevator. Then I did understand what was happening . . . Because I saw the enormous bulging suitcase . . . But as I was going down I had no idea what to expect . . .”

  “Except that you were expecting the police who didn’t arrive.”

  “Yes . . . But it could have been someone else in the elevator . . .”

  “And so you right away said ‘Stop!’”

  “Yes. No, I said, ‘What are you doing? What’s in the suitcase?’”

  “Even before you ever saw the young woman neighbor, you’d immediately tried to persuade him not to flee.”

  “The first thing I did was grab the purse, he was holding a purse and there was a coat lying on top of the suitcase, I took the bag and the coat, I said, ‘What are you doing, you’re crazy!’ And then the neighbor came in . . . that made it easier, the neighbor . . .”

  “He told you his wife was in the suitcase? . . .”

  “No. I don’t recall . . . It was implicit.”

  “And you had no trouble persuading him . . .”

  “I had no trouble, uh . . . No . . . I had no trouble per-suading him.”

  “But if you hadn’t been there he would have left?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “For him, the neighbor made the difference? If the neighbor hadn’t turned up, you wouldn’t have managed to persuade him?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “No.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Three years.”

  “A relation of friendship.”

  “Friendship.”

  “With some intimacy . . . some confidentiality?”

  “No . . . We use the formal vous with each other.”

  “He told you about his problems with his wife?”

  “No. He didn’t have any. I mean I don’t think so. He never spoke of any.”

  “What are your relations with his wife?”

  “Very cordial. She came to my party. It was very pleasant.”

  “You like her?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “How does it work, in a couple, when a person is friends with one of the two? You’re sure there was no . . . You don’t think there could have been some jealousy on her part, given the connection between the two of you?”

  “He told me a little about what happened after the party and I had nothing to do with . . .”

  “Nothing to do with it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That was the first time you’d invited them over?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “So, a separate relationship between this man and you, and one not based on . . . intimacy, on confidentiality.”

  “No.”

  “Based on what, that relationship?”

  “It involved some confidential talk, yes, but about matters in the past . . . Childhood, our respective childhoods, life in general, but we never talked about our marital situations. We’d already spent ti
me together, the four of us. Lydie sang in jazz clubs, it was her hobby, and Jean-Lino took us to listen to her. We all have good memories of it.”

  “So then: a relationship with nothing hidden about it . . . Madam, I permit myself to insist: Do not play lightly with that. Should it develop that the relationship is not what you describe, there could be problems.”

  “Our relations are clear.”

  “Your husband will be questioned. He’ll confirm the nature of the connections you’ve had with this man?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re affirmative: you rule out any expression of jealousy on your husband’s part? You know very well that a friendship between a man and a woman can—”

  “No. No jealousy.”

  “Excuse me for asking the question, ma’am, but have you ever had any involvement with the penal system before?”

  “Never.”

  “And your husband?”

  “No.”

  “And your neighbor?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “For my husband and me, I’m sure.”

  “And you have complete confidence in that man?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was your reaction when you learned that he had killed: . . . You were frightened for him? You were worried for him??”

  “Yes.”

  “But you think that the reasons he had, and that he gave you, can prevail before the law? In the courts? You thought it was best for him to turn himself in?”