Patrick Modiano: Young Once

They continued their discussion, sometimes drifting away from the van, and she wondered every time if they were going to come back. Maybe they had forgotten about her? The two policemen, for their part, dozed off. The fat blond man and the other man came back to the van again, talking very loud.

She thought it would go on all night and that she should go to sleep like the two cops. But the blond man leaned in through the van door.

“You can get out.”

The other man was standing a few feet away, leaning on his cane.

“I’m not going to give you back your passport now. You’ll have to come get it tomorrow, at two o’clock. Understand?”

He told her the address of the police station in the seventeenth arrondissement.

She walked straight ahead, without daring to turn around, sure that the two men were staring at her back. When she reached avenue de Villiers, she heard the sound of the police van’s engine as it hurtled past her.

A café was still open at place de la Porte-Champerret and she wanted to phone Bellune and tell him everything, but she didn’t have the courage to ask the cashier for a token.

A gap in the line of buildings: boulevard Bineau. She was at a flat open area at the edge of the city.

All it would take would be to walk down the boulevard, through the gap, toward Neuilly, and it would be like pulling herself up out of a swamp and reaching the open air.

But she went left, crossed the courtyard of the large apartment complex, and walked up the stairs. In her room, she stretched out on the bed and fell asleep at once, without even getting undressed or turning the bedside lamp off.

•

Louis woke up with a start. Someone was knocking on the door to his room very loudly.

“Rise and shine! It’s Brossier. I’ll wait downstairs.”

He got dressed quickly and went downstairs without even combing his hair. Brossier was leaning on the front desk.

“Let me take you to breakfast.”

It was still dark out. Barely seven o’clock. They walked into a café on rue de Vaugirard, where the waiter was just finishing putting the chairs on the floor around the tables.

Brossier dipped his buttered toast in the café au lait and gulped it down with a voracity that surprised Louis. He was wearing a new hat that was the same kind as the old one, with the same reddish feather stuck in it. His coat looked new, too: loden, like the hat.

“Not bad, this coat, hmm? You need one like this… You’d look great. I’ll take you to Tunmer’s. You can’t wear my old gabardine forever… Sorry to get you up so early, but I’m leaving again, for five days… To the southwest… I’ll arrange things for you when I get back.”

He slipped some bills folded in four into Louis’s hand.

“Here’s your pocket money. And don’t forget, when I get back you’ll start work. I’ll introduce you to that friend I told you about…”

He looked at his watch and seemed preoccupied.

“If you want to reach me, you can leave a message at Hotel Muguet, rue Chevert, in the seventh. They’ll give it to me. Hotel Muguet… INValides-0593.”

He wrote the phone number down on a piece of paper.

“Let’s plan to meet up in five days, at the same time, at the Alcyon de Breteuil on avenue Duquesne.”

What could he be going to buy or sell in the southwest? Louis wondered. Tires maybe? The idea made him want to laugh. Yes, tires.

•

“You worked for a year at Paris Perfume, on rue Vignon?” the fat blond asked.

“Yes.”

“Why aren’t you working there anymore?”

She lowered her head, and noticed that her stockings had a run.

“I called them. It was nice of them not to press charges. Then again, shoplifting a few tubes of lipstick at your age, it’s not so terrible. No, no… Don’t worry…” His voice had become soft and gentle. “Did you know that your mother had a file back then?”

A file. What did that mean? He handed her a sheet of paper with her first and last name written on it, her date of birth, and the words “Father unknown.” Below that, her mother’s first and last name. She read phrases at random: “The party was living by her wits… affairs… black market… Pacheco’s mistress during the German occupation… Questioned by the department, Quai de Gesvres, September 1944… Deceased in Casablanca (Morocco), February 14, 1947, thirty-two years of age…”

“We have a good memory.”

He propped his elbows on the black plastic typewriter cover and smiled kindly at her. But she found his smile frightening, and the run in her stockings seemed to her like a wound that kept her from fleeing the room.

•

“Your move,” the fat blond said.

She crossed the hall of the railway station and went into one of the waiting rooms. Empty. She sat down and started flipping through a magazine, trying to soothe her nerves.

After a while, people started to come in and sit down. It was rush hour. The commuter trains unloaded their passengers while the crowds of people who had spent their day working in Paris pushed onto the departure platforms. This inverting of the hourglass would last until eight at night.

It would be easy to lose herself in this mass of people, to escape the surveillance of the fat blond man and the other two, and get on a train, it didn’t matter which. But one of the plainclothes policemen came into the waiting room, sat down next to the door, and buried his nose in a newspaper, paying no attention to her.

Before long, all the seats were full. She looked around, keeping her eyes off the policeman. Exhausted faces, people waiting for their trains. A woman gave off a smell of face powder that mixed with the smell of cold tobacco. On the back wall, there was a white and sky-blue colored poster, with a skier gliding alone in the middle of a huge expanse of snow that reflected the sunlight. And the words: HOLIDAYS IN THE ENGADINE.

A man outside the waiting room pressed his forehead against the glass door. Would she ever get out of this aquarium? Someone next to her stood up and left the room. The man looked at her through the glass. After hesitating a moment, he came in and sat down in the empty seat, and the edge of his coat brushed against her knee.

“Do you have the time?”

His voice, high and squeaky, didn’t go with his square face and crew-cut hair. He was wearing a bow tie.

Before answering him, she glanced quickly at the plainclothes policeman, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

“What train are you waiting for?” the man asked her.

“The train to Cherbourg, at nine.”

“Me too. What a coincidence. Would you like to have a drink while we wait? It’s almost an hour.”

His voice was getting more and more high-pitched, but he also had a strange way of forming his words, as though his mouth were covered in vaseline.

“If you want…”

He walked fast, without letting her out of his sight. The plainclothes policeman followed them at a distance, off to one side.

“Let’s have a cup of tea away from the station. I know a quiet place…”

It was dark. He opened a car door. A DS-19. Then, in a sharp tone: “The place isn’t far, but it’d be quicker to drive.”

He drove down rue d’Amsterdam.

“You’re… a student?”

“Yes.”

“What do you study?”

She didn’t know what to answer.

“English.”

His hands on the wheel. A bit pudgy, and white, and entirely hairless. He was wearing a wedding ring. Before sitting down in his car, he had taken his coat off and folded it carefully. His suit was navy blue, his bow tie gray.

He took rue Saint-Lazare and looked from side to side.

“Funny, this neighborhood… I don’t like this neighborhood.” His lips pursed.