Such Fine Boys

by Patrick Modiano

  He lit a cigarillo. I felt embarrassed and kept my eyes fixed on his signet ring and sausagelike fingers. He walked to the window overlooking the alley and planted himself in front of the black, opaque glass that reflected the ceiling lights. There, at a slight distance, the window served as his mirror. He slowly straightened his tie.

  “What are you up to, Alain? Are you staying over?”

  “Yes, I’m staying over,” Charell said curtly.

  “I think I’ll go take a spin around the neighborhood to see if there’s any game . . .”

  What sort of game was he talking about? What kind of strange hunt could one indulge in around the Gare du Nord?

  “You want me to bring you back some game, Alain?”

  He smiled, framed by the door to the foyer.

  “No, thanks, not tonight,” said Charell.

  Still smiling, the other man gave us a wave of his right hand, the one with the signet ring, and disappeared.

  The entry door slammed.

  “He’s an odd duck,” said Charell. “I’ll explain about him . . . Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Yes, yes, a drop of coffee. It’ll do us all good . . . Just give me a moment—I’m going to run a bath for my wife . . .”

  He went into the next room, leaving the door ajar. The black girl turned onto her left side, her head tilted and her cheek flattened against the edge of the couch. Soon I heard water running in a bathtub.

  I stood up and went to the window. Human forms were staggering out of a bar. Soldiers on leave? Others were rushing, suitcase in hand, nearly getting themselves flattened by the cars and taxis screeching to a halt in front of the station. What kind of game could that guy have been talking about?

  Over there, in the urine-smelling alley where Charell and I had emerged when we left the station, the girls were still standing by the fence, like lookouts. The white stain of a jacket, perhaps Duveltz’s.

  “Can you turn off the bath, Alain?” a woman said from the next room.

  Charell’s wife? He hadn’t heard and the water continued to run. I felt like leaving the place, quietly, but that wouldn’t have been nice to Alain.

  I sat down again on the couch. The black girl stirred in her sleep and rested her bare foot against my knee. A chunky bracelet circled her ankle. The dog had awoken and clumsily padded up to me.

  “You see how Rue de la Ferme has changed?” Charell said to me. “My parents’ house is gone. So are the riding stables. Are you cold, darling? If you like, we can go back inside . . .”

  He took off his jacket and draped it delicately over his wife’s shoulders. We had just finished dining on the balcony of their apartment in Neuilly, on Rue de la Ferme.

  Suzanne Charell had brown hair and blue eyes. Right away I liked the gentleness of her face, her cheekbones, her graceful bearing, and her straightforward manner. Alain had told me she often went riding, and that had won me over completely: I’ve always had a soft spot for women who go in for that sport.

  And I was in fact thinking about horses as Suzanne served coffee and evening fell, a rather mild evening for early October. In the days of Valvert, on our Saturdays out, Alain would invite me to his house. I got off the metro at Pont de Neuilly, then followed Rue de Longchamp to Rue de la Ferme. Charell’s parents lived in a townhouse, a kind of Trianon, framed by a close-cropped lawn like a velvet jewel case. Alain would take me across the street for a riding lesson. We were friends with the instructor’s son, and we helped the boy and his father inspect the horses one last time before dinner—they called it the evening stable check. On Sunday mornings, very early, we rode on the street down to the Seine. The banks and the Ile de Puteaux were smothered in blue fog. Along the quays, white barriers and spiral staircases beneath the branches provided access to the barges, schooners, and small cargo vessels moored there in perpetuity, serving as houseboats.

  “Have you known Alain a long time?” Suzanne asked.

  “It’s going on twenty years, eh, Patrick . . . ?”

  We had met in the school infirmary, where we’d been admitted for the flu. The windows of our room looked out on the Bièvre, and at night we heard the murmur of the waterfalls. The nurse’s name was Meg. She checked on us in the afternoon. We both had a crush on her and wanted to stay in that room as long as possible. Meg had served in the Indochina War and been one of the few women, along with Geneviève Vaudoyer, to jump with a parachute.

  “Do you still know how to work a movie projector?” Charell asked me.

  After Daniel Desoto was expelled, I had gotten Mr. Jeanschmidt to make Alain my co-projectionist. Twenty years already . . . And yet, moments earlier, something from that time had still been floating in the air. Rue de Longchamp and Rue de la Ferme were deserted and silent. On the corner, a modern café had replaced the Lauby, with its mahogany paneling, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the fading clop of hooves and the murmur of leaves from the woods, to catch the scent of shadows and hay from the stables.

  “What was Alain like twenty years ago?” Suzanne Charell asked with a smile.

  “Very blond and skinny. We used to call him Aramis.”

  “This one here was Athos,” said Charell. “The dreamer.”

  What had become of his parents? His father, with his saffron-yellow hair and mustache, looked like a major in the Indian Colonial forces. Had they disappeared, like their lawn and their Trianon? I didn’t dare ask.

  “Hey, do you remember when my father took us to the Comédie Française to see Madame Sans-Gêne?” Alain said.

  Suzanne Charell had lit a cigarette and was looking steadily at me.

  “Do you still ride, Suzanne?” I said to break the silence.

  “Not much anymore.”

  “You know, Suzanne is a neighborhood girl . . . She grew up right near here, on Rue Saint-James.”

  “I might even have seen you, twenty years ago,” said Suzanne. “But you wouldn’t have noticed me. I was too little . . . I’m six years younger than Alain . . .”

  “We might have passed Suzanne in the street, back in the day,” I said.

  Charell burst out laughing.

  “And what would the three of us have done, eh?”

  “I would have invited you to play hopscotch with me,” said Suzanne.

  They had moved nearer each other, and in their eyes I read their liking for me, but also a kind of helplessness, an unease, as if they were seeking the words to ask for my help or confess something.

  That summery night, I had decided to return home from the Charells’ on foot. I walked at random, sorry that I hadn’t asked Alain more questions, but a kind of torpor had come over me: the entire evening I’d spent with them in the twilight of the balcony had a dreamlike haziness. And again, down the empty streets of Neuilly, I thought I heard the clop of horses’ hooves and the rustle of leaves from twenty years ago. Stables . . .

  I had reached the corner of Boulevard Richard-Wallace, in front of that curious Renaissance construction called the Château de Madrid. A black automobile pulled up beside me:

  “Patrick . . .”

  Alain Charell poked his head through the lowered window. He hadn’t shut off the engine.

  “Patrick, will you come with us to the Gare du Nord?”

  Sitting next to him, Suzanne stared at me strangely, as if she didn’t know me.

  “Come with us to the Gare du Nord!”

  His pupils were dilated. The two of them were frightening to look at.

  “You know I can’t. I have to go home . . .”

  “You really can’t come with us?”

  “Another time.”

  “All right. Another time, then.”

  He had said it curtly, bobbing his head like a disappointed child who has been refused a sweet. He hit the gas and the car sped down Avenue du Commandant-Charcot. I started walking again. A few moments later, my heart leaped. The car had stopped about fifty yards ahead and its black coachwork gleamed in the mo
onlight. Charell got out, leaving the door open. He walked toward me.

  “You really can’t come to our place at Gare du Nord? I’d be so happy if you did . . . Suzanne, too . . . She really likes you . . .”

  His lips sketched a smile.

  “We’d feel a little less alone—you know?”

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, just as he used to shove them into the pockets of his blazer back in school. When he did, Mr. Lafaure, our chemistry teacher, would scold him for “hunching his back.”

  “But, Aramis, what goes on in that place, anyway?”

  I tried to adopt a jocular tone.

  “We . . . get together with friends . . . If you can call them friends . . . You get caught up . . . I’ll explain . . .”

  He smiled. He gave me a big thump on the shoulder.

  “Obviously, it’s not the same ambiance as the riding stables on Rue de la Ferme . . . Those were good times, eh, old man? . . . Phone me sometime . . .”

  He returned with nervous steps to the car. The door slammed. He waved good-bye through the lowered window. And I, standing on the sidewalk, felt that I hadn’t been very kind to my childhood friend. After all, if it meant so much to them, why not go with him and his wife to the Gare du Nord?

  One night at around eleven o’clock, I was awoken by the ringing telephone.

  “Patrick? It’s Alain. Am I bothering you?”

  “No, no, no bother,” I said in a pasty voice.

  “Could you come meet Suzanne and me? It’s really important . . . We need to see you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At Gare du Nord.”

  “Gare du Nord?”

  I felt devoid of will, about to be swept up by the tide, as in a bad dream. And maybe it was just a bad dream.

  “So, are you coming?”

  “Yes, I’m coming.”

  “Thank you, Patrick. We’re on Rue de Dunkerque, in front of the station. In a brasserie next to the Terminus-Nord hotel. Did you get that?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s called ‘A l’Espérance.’ Did you get that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come right away. It’s urgent.”

  He had said it in a whisper, just before hanging up.

  I went inside. The white light hurt my eyes and I felt stifled seeing all those people eating there, squeezed in by tens, twenties, as if around a communal or banquet table. The waiters zigzagged in the narrow gaps between tables, and an accordion player, perhaps there by mistake, mechanically fingered his instrument, its music smothered by the clamor of shouts and orders that rose and subsided. I navigated my way through the tables, peering at the scarlet faces of the diners, most of whom were shucking shellfish, white napkins tied around their necks.

  Suzanne and Alain were sitting at the end of a long, empty table, in a corner at the back of the room. The numerous dishes had not been cleared away. I sat down next to Alain, facing Suzanne. She was wearing a man’s raincoat that was too big for her, its collar up.

  “Thanks for coming, old man.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder and leaned on me. Suzanne raised her empty eyes to me, and I was alarmed by the pallor of her face. Was it the light that made her look so pale, or, by contrast, the black leatherette of the bench?

  “What do you think of this place?” Charell asked in a falsely jovial voice. “One of the last authentic Parisian brasseries.”

  I had to lean closer to hear his voice. It was as if all those people talking too loudly around us were celebrating a wedding.

  “Something to eat?”

  I had set down next to me the present I’d wanted to give Suzanne Charell for the past several days, a handsome volume about equestrian sports that I’d found at a bookstore on Rue de Castiglione. But the gift struck me as ludicrous here in the back of this brasserie, before Suzanne’s strained, white face.

  She gripped my wrist and squeezed it hard.

  “Please forgive me . . . I’m not feeling well . . . Not well at all . . .”

  “Are you feeling ill, darling?” asked Charell.

  She was deathly pale. Her head dropped like a stuffed doll’s and she instinctively threw her arm forward to cushion her forehead.

  “Don’t worry, old man,” Charell said to me. “It’s going to be okay.”

  He lifted Suzanne by the shoulders and pulled her toward the door of the toilets. I followed them with my eyes. They walked slowly, her arm clinging to Alain’s neck so as not to fall, raincoat floating about her like an old dressing gown. The noise in the room swelled. At one of the next tables, someone, a man with close-cropped hair, stood and proposed a toast, his forehead lathered in sweat. I looked down. Our tablecloth was spattered with wine stains, remnants of the diners who had been there before us, and the plate in front of me still held leftovers of head cheese.

  Suzanne and Alain returned. He was holding her around the waist and she was walking more steadily. They sat down. Suzanne’s face had regained some of its color but her pupils were strangely dilated. Alain’s as well. She smiled beatifically.

  “That’s much better, isn’t it, Suzanne?” said Charell.

  “Oh, yes . . . So much better . . .”

  “What if we go back to the apartment? Will you come with us, Patrick?”

  Once outside, Charell proposed that we walk around the block. It had rained and the air was warm. Suzanne walked between us, holding each of us tightly by the arm.

  We turned onto Boulevard Denain, a calm, tree-lined artery that avoided the agitation and tumult around the station. An empty bus was standing waiting, its driver having fallen asleep at the wheel. Hawaiian guitar music wafted from the entrance to a movie theater beneath the portico of a building.

  We sat down on a bench. I held the book out to Suzanne.

  “Here, this is for you.”

  She looked at me with her dilated pupils, holding shut the collar of her raincoat. She was shivering.

  “Thank you . . . Thank you very much . . . That’s so thoughtful of you . . .”

  She laid the book on her knees.

  She turned the pages and the three of us looked at the illustrations in the dim light. Suzanne and Alain still had that strange smile on their lips. They seemed lost in a dream.

  After a while, Suzanne rested her head on my shoulder. They surely didn’t want me to leave, and I suddenly thought we might spend the entire night on this bench. On the other side of the empty street, from a tarpaulin-covered truck with its lights out, two men in black leather jackets were unloading sacks of coal with rapid, furtive movements, as if on the sly.

  Sometime later, a small notice in one of the evening papers:

  Last night, an industrialist from Neuilly, Alain Charell, 36, was wounded by two gunshots in a furnished apartment at 126 Boulevard Magenta, where he was with his wife and several friends. According to witnesses, the shooting was accidental. The victim was taken to Hôtel-Dieu hospital.

  They asked me to wait in a hallway with pale green walls, at the end of which was Charell’s room.

  The door opened. It wasn’t the nurse but the black girl, the one who’d been sleeping on the couch the first time Alain had taken me to the apartment on Boulevard Magenta. She was wearing an elegant fitted suit, and I couldn’t help thinking it belonged to Suzanne.

  She sat down next to me and handed me an envelope.

  “Alain asked me to give you this . . . He can’t see you today . . . He’s very tired.”

  I opened the envelope and read:

  My dear Athos,

  I have nothing to do in here but think about the days when things were better for us, when we were both in the school infirmary, getting the royal treatment from lovely Meg . . .

  What a strange slope it’s been these past twenty years, that has gradually led me from that infirmary to this hospital.

  I’ll explain.

  Yours,

  Aramis.

  We walked out of the hospital, the black girl an
d I. She had tethered the huge dog with curly fur to a shrub. I helped her untie the leash.

  “Is this your dog?”

  “No. It belongs to Alain and Suzanne, but I’m looking after it.”

  She smiled at me.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  She seemed reluctant to answer.

  “It was bound to happen . . . They’ll let just anybody into that apartment.”

  She shrugged. She didn’t want to say any more.

  “Have you known them long?” I asked.

  “No, not very long . . . They’re doing me a favor . . . Letting me stay at their place.”

  Perhaps she didn’t trust me. After those gunshots, there would surely be an inquest.

  “And what about you, have you known them long?”

  “Alain is a childhood friend.”

  The dog walked about ten yards ahead of us, looking back now and again to verify we were still there. We had stopped talking, just walked beside each other. Yes, that tweed suit she was wearing was the one I’d seen on Suzanne Charell.

  As we came to the Porte Saint-Denis, I suddenly realized that the huge, curly-haired dog would guide us, with its heavy, indolent step, all the way to the Gare du Nord.

  XII.

  Why did Marc Newman and I go so often to lay a flower on Oberkampf’s tomb?

  Behind the bunker rose an old wall, sheltered by clumps of rhododendrons. Newman scaled it first and dropped to the ground. Then he helped me climb down, supporting me by the waist. The enclosure was on lower ground, and the same wall, on the other side, was more than two yards high, and perfectly smooth.

  It was like climbing down to the bottom of a well. It was cool on hot days, in that little garden where Oberkampf took his final repose. The bunker’s shadow extended over the clumps of rhododendrons and the wall. Lower down, the leaves of a weeping willow half-concealed the tomb of Oberkampf, whose very name suggested water from a well, or black marble shimmering in the moonlight.

  Newman had discovered this secret cloister, and we didn’t dare ask Pedro whether it belonged to the Valvert estate; each time we ventured out, we never knew whether we’d have the strength to scale the wall in the opposite direction.