Patrick Modiano - Paris Nocturne

The bumper bar and one of the mudguards were damaged. There were probably a lot of sea-green Fiats in Paris, but this one certainly bore the signs of the accident. I took my passport out of the pocket of my sheepskin jacket. It contained the folded piece of paper that Solière had made me sign. Yes, it was the same licence plate number.

I looked in through the window. A travel bag on the back seat. I could have left a note under the windscreen wiper, giving my name and the address of the Hôtel Fremiet. But I wanted to get to the bottom of it there and then. The car was parked right in front of the restaurant. So I pushed the pale wooden door and went in.

Light fell from a wall lamp behind the bar, leaving the few tables arranged along the walls on either side in darkness. And yet, I can see these walls clearly in my memory; they are draped with very worn, red velvet that is ripped and torn here and there, as though, long ago, the place had been quite lavish, but no one went there anymore. Apart from me. At first I thought it was well after closing time. A woman was sitting at the bar wearing a dark brown coat. A young man, the size of a jockey and the look of one, was clearing the tables. He looked askance at me.

‘What can I do for you?’

It would take too long to explain. I walked towards the bar and, instead of sitting on one of the stools, I stopped behind her. I put my hand on her shoulder. She turned around with a start. She stared at me, astonished. There was a large graze across her forehead, just above the eyebrows.

‘Are you Jacqueline Beausergent?’

I was surprised by the detachment in my voice; I even had the impression that someone else had spoken for me. She gazed at me in silence. She lowered her eyes; they lingered on the stain on my sheepskin jacket, then lower down, on my shoe where the bandage was dangling out.

‘We’ve already met at Place des Pyramides…’

My voice seemed even clearer and more detached. I was standing behind her.

‘Yes…Yes…I remember very well. Place des Pyramides.’

Without looking away, she gave a slightly wry smile, the same — it seemed — as the other night, in the police van.

‘Why don’t we sit down…’

She gestured to the table closest to the bar, which was still covered with a white tablecloth. We sat opposite each other. She put her glass down on the tablecloth. I wondered what kind of alcohol it contained.

‘You should drink something,’ she said. ‘Something to warm you up. You’re very pale.’

She said the words with great seriousness and even a kind of solemn affection that no one had ever shown towards me until then. I felt embarrassed.

‘Have a margarita like me.’

The jockey brought me a margarita and then disappeared through a glass door behind the bar.

‘I didn’t know you’d left the clinic,’ she said. ‘I’ve been away from Paris for a few weeks…I’d planned on finding out how you were.’

It seems to me now, after decades, that it was very gloomy in that place where we’d found ourselves sitting face to face. We were in darkness, like in an eye clinic where they hold up lenses of different strengths in front of your eyes so that eventually you can make out the letters, over there on the backlit screen.

‘You should have stayed longer at the clinic…Did you escape?’ She smiled again. Stayed longer? I didn’t understand. The letters were still very blurry on the screen.

‘They told me to leave,’ I said. ‘A Mr Solière came to find me.’

She seemed surprised. She shrugged. ‘He didn’t tell me about it. I think he was afraid of you.’

Afraid of me? I would never have imagined frightening anyone.

‘You struck him as quite strange. He’s not used to people like you.’

She seemed embarrassed. I didn’t venture to ask what it was exactly that constituted my strangeness in the eyes of this Solière.

‘I came to see you two or three times at the clinic. Unfortunately, it was always when you were asleep.’

I hadn’t been told about these visits. Suddenly, a doubt crossed my mind.

‘Did I stay long at the clinic?’

‘About ten days. It was Mr Solière’s idea to have you taken there. They wouldn’t have been able to keep you at the Hôtel-Dieu in the state you were in.’

‘That bad?’

‘They thought you had taken toxic substances.’

She said these last words very carefully. I don’t believe I had ever heard anyone speak to me so calmly, with such a soft voice. Listening to her produced the same soothing effect as reading The Wonders of the Heavens . I couldn’t take my eyes off the large graze across her forehead, just above her eyebrows. Her clear eyes, her shoulder-length chestnut hair, the upturned collar of her coat…Because of the late hour and the darkness around us, she looked just as she had in the police van the other night.

She ran her index finger along the graze above her eyebrows and, again, she gave her wry smile.

‘For a first meeting,’ she said, ‘it was a bit of a shock.’

She stared straight into my eyes in silence, as if she was trying to read my thoughts — I had never before experienced such attentiveness.

‘I thought you purposely chose that moment to cross Place des Pyramides…’

That’s not what I thought. I had always resisted the pull of vertigo. I would never have been capable of throwing myself into the void from the top of a bridge or from a window. Or even under a car, as she seemed to believe. For me, at the last moment, life was always the stronger force.

‘I don’t think you were quite yourself…’

She glanced again at my sheepskin jacket and the split moccasin on my left foot. I had tried my best to reapply the bandage, but I mustn’t have looked very prepossessing. I apologised for my appearance. Yes, I was quite keen to look human again.

She said in a quiet voice, ‘All you have to do is change your sheepskin jacket. And perhaps your shoes, too.’

I felt more and more at ease. I confessed that I had spent the last few weeks trying to find her. It wasn’t easy with a street name but no number. So I had looked all over the neighbourhood for her sea-green Fiat.

‘Sea-green?’

She seemed intrigued by this adjective, but that was how it had been described on the report that Solière made me sign. A report? She wasn’t aware of any report. It was still in the inside pocket of my sheepskin jacket, so I showed it to her. She read it, frowning.

‘I’m not surprised. He’s always been wary.’

‘He also gave me some money.’

‘He’s a generous man,’ she said.

I wanted to know what the link was between her and Solière. ‘Do you live on Square de l’Alboni?’

‘No. It’s the address of one of Monsieur Solière’s offices.’

Whenever she said his name, it was inflected with a certain respect.

‘And Avenue Albert-de-Mun?’ To my great shame, I sounded like a cop who throws in an unexpected question to unnerve a suspect.

‘It’s one of Monsieur Solière’s apartments.’ She wasn’t fazed in the slightest. ‘How do you know about this address?’ she asked.

I told her that I had met Solière the other day in a café and that he had pretended not to recognise me.

‘He’s very distrustful, you know. He always thinks people are after him. He has a lot of lawyers.’

‘He’s your boss?’

I immediately regretted asking the question.

‘I’ve worked for him for two years.’ She answered calmly, as if it were an entirely ordinary question. And it was, surely. Why search for mystery where there is none?

‘That night, I was meeting Monsieur Solière at Place des Pyramides in the lobby of the Hôtel Régina. And then, just as I arrived, we had our…accident.’ She hesitated before saying the word. She looked at my left hand. When the car knocked me down, I grazed the back of it. But it was almost healed. I hadn’t put a dressing on it.