Authors: Antoine Laurain
William answered.
‘I rang several times but no one picked up so I came round to leave a note,’ said Laurent, taking the envelope out of his coat pocket.
William looked at him.
‘So you don’t know … No, of course, you couldn’t have known,’ he said, flustered.
‘Is there something I should know?’ Laurent murmured.
‘Take off your coat and sit down. Will you have a drink of something – whisky, vodka, orange juice, Martini Rosso? I’m on Martini.’
‘Martini then,’ said Laurent.
‘Perfect, I’ll be right back.’
William disappeared off down the corridor. Laurent hung his coat on the hook in the entrance hall.
The hall was dimly lit and on one of the walls he noticed a series of landscape oil paintings. These small pictures, dating from the nineteenth century, had been hung above a pedestal table. Bucolic lake or forest scenes with one thing in common: the absence of people. Just the natural setting and an impression of silence. Above the paintings, there was a box frame containing one of those metallic-blue butterflies whose name was on the tip of his tongue. On the table, a dish held a dozen golden antique keys. He picked one up. It was just like any other key that might have opened doors in days gone by, only it had been gold-plated,
as had all the others in the bowl. Laurent thought of Bluebeard and the golden key that opened the door to the room of dead wives. Hearing William’s footsteps coming back down the corridor, he put it back.
‘There you go. I filled it halfway and put two ice cubes in – I hope that’s how you take it.’
Both men sat in the sitting room, Laurent on the sofa and William facing him on a chair.
‘Laure’s fine,’ he began, before immediately back-pedalling. ‘Well, what I mean is … it could have been a lot worse. When did you last see her?’
Laurent pretended to think about it.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not important,’ cut in William. ‘Something happened on the night of the 15th. Sorry, I’m not being very clear, but what I can tell you is that Laure was mugged. She had her bag stolen, she hurt her head, she’s in a coma at the moment, but they think she’ll wake up.’
‘She’s in a coma?’ Laurent echoed.
‘Yes, and she’s taking her time waking up, but it should only be a matter of days now. I saw the doctor again yesterday and he’s confident.’
‘So that’s why no one answered the phone …’
‘Yes, and her mobile’s missing, of course, along with her wallet and her bank card. They’ve taken two thousand euros out of her account; I found out when I rang the bank, but it should be covered by her insurance, and anyway that’s not what matters.’
‘No, it’s not what matters,’ mumbled Laurent.
‘The important thing is that she wakes up,’ William went on. ‘I’ll give you the details of the hospital and the ward she’s on.’
‘I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to visit, I’m not really family,’ Laurent said awkwardly.
‘Neither am I.’ William shrugged. ‘Anyway, now that she doesn’t have her parents or husband any more, she doesn’t have any family as far as I can tell, apart from her sister who lives in Moscow, and her friends.’
‘You’re right,’ said Laurent. ‘No husband any more,’ he repeated.
‘She told you about it?’
Laurent took a chance. ‘Yes.’
William shook his head and took a gulp of Martini.
‘It took her a long time to get over it.’
Laurent said nothing.
‘You met her quite recently?’ William went on.
‘Yes, not long ago …’
Laurent let his gaze wander around the living room, taking in the frames and books, a fireplace filled with logs waiting to be lit, a Venetian glass ceiling light, a modern lamp, a large mirror with a very elaborate gold frame.
‘Where? If you don’t mind me asking …’
‘In my bookshop. I’m a bookseller.’
‘That makes sense,’ William smiled. ‘A few weeks ago, she bumped into a well-known author. She happened to have one of his books in her bag and asked him to sign it for her – she must have told you about that.’
‘Yes, it was Modiano, near Odéon; it was raining.’
‘Exactly. We were finishing off a project at the Senate. You seem like a nice person – I’m glad,’ William added after a pause.
Laurent got up.
‘Sorry, I just need to stretch my legs.’
‘Yes, of course,’ murmured William.
Laurent went over to look at a large framed photo. William and Laure were standing at the highest point of the roof of the
Opéra Garnier. Dressed in overalls, they were perched either side of the statue of Apollo holding up his golden lyre to the avenue below. They were both pointing at the lyre as they smiled at the camera.
At last, Laurent could see her face. Laure’s hair was swept back by the wind, and it was possible to tell that her eyes were a light colour. There was the beauty spot to the right of her upper lip, and a chain around her neck with the hieroglyphic pendant hanging from it. She had delicate hands and wore a blue bracelet around her wrist. Now the mist had lifted and her features were in sharp focus. Her face was both different and very similar to the one he had imagined.
‘I’ve got a copy of the same picture at my place,’ said William. ‘It was taken a few years ago. We did half of Apollo’s lyre each.’
Next to the photo was another, smaller one of Laure, this time surrounded by five colleagues. They were all standing on the roof at Versailles, holding up their tools. She was wearing black sunglasses. Here again, there was gilding all around. It was beginning to make sense to Laurent: the keys in the entrance hall, the monuments, the job at the Senate William had mentioned. What they all had in common was gold.
‘She doesn’t wear the pendant with the hieroglyphics any more,’ remarked Laurent.
‘She attached it to her keys instead,’ said William, swallowing another mouthful of Martini. ‘It was a gift from a client in Egypt eight or ten years ago. Everyone who worked on the job got their full name spelt out in hieroglyphics. I lost mine. We’ve been all over the place together; she taught me everything I know. Laure’s the best gilder out there.’
‘Laure,’ whispered Laurent, but whether he meant to say her name or that of the metal,
l’or
, he wasn’t quite sure.
‘Listen, I’m really sorry to ask,’ William went on, ‘but I have to go to Berlin for a couple of days, for work. Is there any chance you could look after Belphégor?’
Looking for a woman to return a handbag was one thing, settling down in her flat when she wasn’t there, with her cat on his lap was another. The evening after William had asked him, he had opened the apartment door with the spare key William had given him – unnecessary since he already had the original. After giving the cat his food in the kitchen, Laurent poured himself a Jack Daniel’s. He swallowed a mouthful of the smoky-tasting liquid. The bourbon warmed him up, filtering through his veins and relaxing his muscles. He went through to the sitting room and looked around, feeling as if he were there clandestinely or rather as if he were not really there at all. There are places where it is so peculiar to find yourself that you can’t help thinking that your mind is playing tricks on you – that you are daydreaming and will soon wake up. What if there were another Laurent? A Laurent who was at home right now, in the apartment above the bookshop attending to his daily chores: replying to emails, preparing dinner, reading a new book.
Laure’s apartment, with its sitting room and its deep sofa, its parquet floor covered with rugs and its carefully positioned lighting, was a delicious cocoon. In front of one of the windows there was a weeping fig whose branches stretched to the fireplace. Belphégor had happily adopted his evening visitor. He ate up his duck-flavoured cat food, then settled unhesitatingly on Laurent’s
lap, immobilising him on the sofa. It’s an honour that cats bestow on you, as he was all too aware, his daughter’s cat Putin never having deigned to sit on anyone – the most you could hope for was an intense stare that was vaguely reminiscent of his namesake in the Kremlin.
Before the cat had bestowed this honour, Laurent had wandered about the sitting room. The impression of ‘reading a letter that’s not addressed to you’, as Guitry put it, was even stronger than when he had opened the bag. The apartment was itself like a sort of giant bag with thousands of nooks and crannies, each one containing a tiny portion of its occupant’s life. Carrying his glass of bourbon, Laurent had gone from one object to another and from the table to the photograph. One section of wall was entirely taken up with a large bookcase with several shelves which held nothing but art books – some of them recent, others very old ones that she must have collected over the years. Architecture, painting – gilding of course – but also sale-room catalogues. At the end of one shelf there were several books by Sophie Calle, including one of her poetic masterpieces,
Suite Vénitienne.
In 1980, for purely artistic reasons, Sophie had decided to follow men in the street randomly and without their knowledge. On these long perambulations, like a private detective, she took black-and-white pictures of the men from the back in various locations. Strangers that she followed for entire afternoons. One day she had spotted a new prey, but he escaped her and disappeared into the crowd. That evening by chance the man was introduced to her at a dinner. He told her that he would soon be going to Venice. Secretly Sophie Calle decided to resume her tailing of him – to follow him incognito even down the little alleyways and
rii
of Venice. From that escapade Sophie had
created a logbook of 79 pages and 105 black-and-white pictures, with an afterword by Jean Baudrillard. Sophie’s shadowing had come to an end when the man had turned round, recognised her and spoken to her. Although it didn’t quite end there, because Sophie arranged to get to the station in Paris a few minutes before him to take a last picture. But all the tension and magic of the quest had vanished the moment they had spoken. The return to reality had signalled the end of the affair.
Laure owned a first edition – very difficult to find and also very expensive. Novels occupied another shelf. Laurent noticed several Modianos, some of them small paperbacks, some of them large format. Just to make sure, he pulled some of them out to check whether any of them were signed. There were also thrillers – English, Swedish, Icelandic – and Amélie Nothomb’s books, several Stendhals, two Houellebecqs, three Echenozes, two Chardonnes, four Stefan Zweigs, five Marcel Aymés, everything by Apollinaire, an old hardback of
Nadja
by Breton, a paperback of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, then some Le Clézio, a dozen Simenons, three Murakamis, and a few of Jirô Taniguchi’s graphic novels. The books were in no particular order, Jean Cocteau’s
Poésies
sat next to Tonino Benacquista’s
Saga
, which in turn was beside Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s
La Salle de Bain
, then there was a very thick leather-bound book with gold lettering on the spine. Laurent took it down from the shelf.
It was a photo album, probably at least a hundred years old, with thick, gold-edged pages. The first photographs were from the 1920s, showing men with pencil moustaches and women in the outfits and hairstyles of the era.
Uncle Edward, Aunt Florence, family reunion – Christmas 1937
had been written in pencil under the pictures. The twentieth century advanced with the pages. In one photo from the 1970s a little girl with light-coloured eyes
stared into the camera. She was holding a soft toy, a fox, and a Siamese cat was watching her. The little girl had a beauty spot above her upper lip.
Laure with young Sarbacane and Foxy.
Laure with her parents, Laure as a young girl, Laure on holiday with her sister Bénédicte. Laurent felt he had no right to be turning these pages, yet the desire to see the now familiar face in each of the photos was too strong for him. He was about to close the album, when he came to the last page. After that there was nothing; everything ended in 2007 with an article clipped from a newspaper. The article showed a picture of a man with short hair smiling as he posed beside the Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. ‘Xavier Valadier (1962–2007), our colleague and friend, was killed in Iraq on 7 December. Xavier Valadier’s photographs were viewed the world over …’ The text ended with ‘We will never forget you, Xavier, and our thoughts are with your family.’ This was the man that William had referred to, and who was in one of the photographs in the envelope he’d found in the bag. Laurent put the album back in its place and went into the adjoining room.
The study was in darkness and he felt for the light switch. Fluorescent lighting flickered above a shelf high on the wall then stabilised. He saw other shelves with many DVDs and even some old videos, a large flat screen sitting on the floor and on the mantelpiece a CD player and a turntable. Thirty-three-inch records and CDs were piled up on the parquet. There was a mixture of classical music, rock and pop. No separation of genres here either; David Bowie was with Rubinstein, Radiohead and Devendra Banhart with Glenn Gould and Perlman. In the large mirror over the mantelpiece, postcards from all over the world were stuck between the gilt frame and the glass. Laurent did not touch any of them. On the desk, a computer and its keyboard,
a jumble of pens and a notepad. A collection of twenty dice, all showing six. A roll of the dice will never eliminate chance, murmured Laurent just as a soft shadow passed between his legs. The cat. Who immediately jumped onto the black leather desk chair, then onto the table, nudged Laurent’s face with his nose, then looked down at the lined-up dice. With the tip of his paw, he pushed two of them onto the floor, then looked at Laurent and immediately did the same with the next two dice.
‘Don’t do that, stop now,’ Laurent told him, kneeling down to pick up the dice. The cat continued to push them with the end of his paw as soon as Laurent retrieved them. ‘No, no, we’re not going to play that game,’ chided Laurent. He took the cat in his arms, closed the study door and then put him down again. The cat invited him to follow him to his mistress’s bedroom. The room was all white, in contrast to the rest of the apartment, and its diffuse feeble light gave it the look of an igloo. An old wardrobe, a framed photograph of a red sky. On the radiator there was a toy fox, a little shabby, obviously the ‘Foxy’ of the photograph. The cat jumped up on the bedspread to show that it was also his bed and that he had the right to curl up on it whenever he wanted, which he proceeded to demonstrate. Together they visited the bathroom, with its black and gold enamel tiles. And on the shelves dozens of bottles, beauty products, creams and shampoos. Laurent picked up Pschitt Magique: ‘New-generation micro peeling with biological action and no abrasive particles – transform your skin texture in exactly twenty seconds’. He put it down to breathe in the scent of a black bottle of Habanita. His eyes were wandering over this private intimate universe when his mobile rang, causing the cat to streak off towards the sitting room.