Ясмина Реза - Babylon

“Did the people at your party witness anything? Any strain between the couple? They will certainly all be questioned.”

“I don’t know . . . I myself did witness something but I don’t know if I should mention it . . . I don’t know what he will want to say . . .”

“Careful here, madam, because if you give any impression of not cooperating and excluding some things in order to protect him, you move into an area . . .”

“Well at one point, the conversation turned to a matter that she took very seriously—I tell you this, Counselor, even though it could seem silly—the conversation was about free-range chickens. He made fun of her because she’d asked a waiter in a restaurant if the chicken they serve was allowed to roost—that is, if it had lived a normal life, that kind of thing . . . He was trying to make the rest of us laugh with this story, and after that you felt a kind of chill between them.”

“You’re supposing that the conflict began over that.”

“It’s possible . . . She scolded him, when they got upstairs, for humiliating her in company. The argument got poisonous, and at a certain moment—I can’t explain, he’d do it better than I can—she gave the cat a kick . . . He grabbed her, he squeezed—”

“You’re telling me that they quarreled when she stood up for animal welfare, and he killed her because she kicked the cat.”

“I think the animals weren’t the point. I mean, they weren’t basically in opposition on . . . When a couple quarrels, opinions often serve as an excuse . . . I don’t believe she meant to harm the cat. He meant to hurt her, not kill her. Maybe she died of a heart attack. He’s not a criminal, he’s a very gentle man.”

“It’s not in your interest to advocate for him.”

“I’m only saying it to you.”

“All right, but it’s not smart to take up his cause. You have a neighborly connection that turned into a friendly connection. You go to his aid to keep him from fleeing his responsibilities because you think that would be worse. Period. You must understand that what you’re suspected of is complicity and concealing a body.”

“What do I risk?”

“You’ve never been convicted. You have a profession. Everything depends on what he says. Your husband has been notified?”

“Supposedly, yes.”

“What is he going to say? . . .When you two went up there, why didn’t you demand that he call the police right away?”

“We did demand it. Well, my husband did.”

“And you went back down to your flat even though he hadn’t called?”

“He said he wanted to be alone, that he needed a little time. My husband, suddenly, decided that we had no business there, that we’d done our duty and that it wasn’t up to us to call the police. And we went downstairs.”

“By the way, what was the reason Monsieur Manoscrivi came down to your place after killing his wife?”

“I think he couldn’t stay alone . . .”

“Do your colleagues at work know of his existence?”

“No.”

“At your party your behavior wouldn’t have given the least—”

“No.”

“The young woman neighbor couldn’t say there was anything ambiguous about your behavior . . . Were you far apart from each other when she saw you?”

“Yes. I mean, a normal distance.”

“ . . . The police suspicion may consist in this: that it’s the neighbor’s arrival that forced you to notify the police, and that that was not your original intention. How do you counter that?”

“What would I have been doing there in slippers and pajamas, with nothing . . . ?”

“How much time elapsed between when you were downstairs and when you notified the police?”

“A half hour . . . Not even. The time it took to convince him to go up to get the cat and put it in our apartment.”

“Still, it’s the neighbor’s presence that led him to agree to turn himself in.”

“I can’t say otherwise.”

“Did you often go to his apartment?”

“Almost never. Maybe once. Today yes—that is, yesterday, I went up with Lydie, to get some chairs. She was lending me chairs for the party.”

“Good. You’ll undergo questioning. Which won’t necessarily be easy, it’s possible they’ll play on your nerves a little and that two people will question you at the same time, because there may be a suspicion of complicity not in the criminal act but in the aftermath. That you tried to conceal the body, and so on. So be careful during that segment. What you say will matter. I don’t see them holding you for more than twenty-four hours. If Monsieur Manoscrivi corroborates your version and if your husband gives no information that . . . he says nothing that might lead to any confusion, you’ll be out by this evening.”

I did leave in the early evening. Pierre came to get me. He had been questioned during the afternoon. I handed over the long coat. I was free. In all likelihood, Jean-Lino confirmed that he acted alone. Now he had disappeared, dragged down some dark hole. In the car Pierre was sullen. Instead of comforting me. He looked tired and sad. He told me that he didn’t like this whole business. I said I don’t see how anyone could possibly like it. He asked me what I had actually done.

“I did what I said I did. Nobody can understand how you managed to go to sleep,” I said.

“I’d had too much to drink. I was done in.”

“You didn’t mention the bathroom?”

“You really think I’m some jackass.”

“I was afraid you would, to keep me in the clear . . .”

“You helped him?!”

“No!”

“Explain to me about the suitcase. Really explain it.”

“I lent Lydie the suitcase to move some stuff to her office.”

“When?”

“I don’t know . . . A couple of days ago.”

“So he sees a suitcase in his house, he says to himself, Ah, good size, I’ll put my wife inside.”

“I couldn’t foresee that.”

“My Delsey suitcase!! Shit!”

“I’m sorry . . .”

“And nice job with the cat. I nearly had a heart attack. There would have been two corpses last night.”

A little before the police phoned him, he had got up to look for me around the apartment. In the entryway he’d stepped on something soft. It was Eduardo’s tail, sticking out from beneath a chest. The beast had let loose a strident howl. Terrified, Pierre had pressed the light switch and discovered the cat, muzzle flat to the floor, the rest of his body pulled back under the chest, staring at him with terrified eyes. When we got home to the parking lot, I raised my head. I looked up at the building. At our floor, at the one above. I thought, There’s nobody at all up there. The mimosa branches waved gently. I said, “Who’s going to take care of the plants?”

“What plants?”

“Lydie’s plants.”

“Nobody. The apartment is sealed.”

I was stunned. The mimosa, the crocuses, the buds, all that new life I’d seen the day before in the array of unmatched pots. And I saw her again, leaning into her little patch of garden, taking the inexpressibly white crocus between her fingers to hand it to me. We got out of the car. I saw the Laguna still parked in the same spot. The lobby was empty. As impersonal as ever. We took the elevator. Our apartment was impeccable. Pierre had cleaned the kitchen. He’d cleared a space for the litter box and the table was set for two. I had not expected that kindness. It was all I needed to start me crying.

I don’t know how many times I was interrogated after that. The detectives from the police headquarters, the ones from the crime squad, some kind of personality investigator (he used some other title but I’ve forgotten it; I didn’t understand if he was investigating my personality or Jean-Lino’s), the examining magistrate. As to the sequence of events, always more or less the same questions. With a few variants: Why did we offer the suspect a cognac instead of going to help his wife? Had we touched the body? (Fortunately I had put the scarf on her, I also said I’d touched her legs while Pierre took her pulse.) The magistrate, whom I liked, asked me—in these terms—how it happened that my husband saw fit to go off to bed, when he had just discovered his neighbor’s dead body? And of course the question the lawyer had asked kept coming back in various forms: What would you have done if the third party had not arrived on the scene? But the terrain that lawyer Gilles Terneu had not explored, and which everyone tried ad nauseam to get me to take on, was the terrain of my life. What was she all about, this Elisabeth Jauze, née Rainguez in Puteaux? That’s called The Full Identity, it seems, in police language. Everything you ever carefully buried must be brought back to life. Everything you’ve crossed out you must write again, in tidy lettering. Childhood, parents, youth, school, good choices and bad. They examined my life with ridiculous zeal. That was my impression—a ridiculous determination to manufacture a false picture. A little sociology packet they’ll put into the dossier and that will say nothing. The justice system will have done its job. For me, it brought back images I was unaware had stayed around somewhere—the bar in Dieppe, the big dormant limo decorated for the carnival and set going again in the fog—I didn’t know I was still carrying them with me. You can’t understand who people are outside the landscape. The landscape is crucial. It’s the landscape that is the true filiation. The room and the stone as much as the segment of sky. That’s what Denner taught me to see in the pictures they call “street photography”: how the landscape illuminates the man. And how, in return, it is part of him. And I can say that this is what I’ve always liked about Jean-Lino—the way he carried the landscape inside him, without guarding against anything.