Out of the Dark (5 page)

Van Bever got out of the car, leaving the door open. I thought I saw Cartaud's hand brush Jacqueline's knee, but it might have been an illusion caused by the semidarkness.

She had said good-bye to me, very quietly. Cartaud had favored me with a noncommittal good-night. I was clearly in the way. Standing on the sidewalk, Van Beck had waited for me to get out of the car. And he had shaken my hand. 'One of these days in the Café Dante, maybe,' he'd said.

At the door of the hotel, I turned around. Van Bever waved at me and got back in the car. The door slammed. Now he was alone in the rear seat.

The car started off in the direction of the Seine. That was also the way to the Austerlitz and Lyon train stations, and I thought to myself that they were going to leave Paris.

Before going upstairs to my room I asked the night clerk for a telephone book, but I wasn't quite sure how to spell 'Cartaud,' and I found listings for Carrau, Cartaud, Carrault, Cartaux, Carteau, Carteaud, Cartcaux. None of them was named Pierre.

I couldn't get to sleep, and I regretted not having asked Cartaud some questions. But would he have answered? If he had really gone to dental school, did he have a practice now? I tried to imagine him in a white dentist's smock, receiving patients in his office. Then my thoughts returned to Jacqueline, and Cartaud's hand on her knee. Maybe Van Bever could explain some of this for me. I slept restlessly. In my dream, names written in glowing letters were marching by. Cartau, Cartaud, Cartault, Cartaux, Carteau, Carteaud, Carteaux.

I WOKE UP at about eight o'clock: someone was knocking on the door to my room. It was Jacqueline. I must have had the haggard look of someone who hasn't slept well. She said she would wait for me outside.

It was dark. I saw her from the window. She was sitting on the bench across the boulevard. She had turned up the collar of her leather jacket and buried her hands in her pockets to protect herself from the cold.

We walked together toward the Seine and went into the last café before the Halle aux Vins. How was it that she was sitting there, across from me? The night before, getting out of Cartaud's car, I would never ha\'e dreamt this could happen so simply. I could only imagine spending many long afternoons waiting for her in the Café Dante, in vain. She explained that Van Bever had left for Athis-Mons to pick up their birth certificates so that they could get new passports. They had lost the old ones during a trip to Belgium three months earlier.

She showed no sign of the indifference that had troubled me so much the night before, when I found them both with Cartaud. She seemed just as she had been before, in the moments we had spent together. I asked her if she was over her flu.

She: shrugged. It was even colder than yesterday, and she was still wearing that thin leather jacket.

'You should get a real coat,' I told her.

She looked into my eyes and gave me a slightly mocking smile.

'What do you think of as 'a real coat'?'

I wasn't expecting that question. As if she wanted to reassure me, she said:

'Anyway, winter's nearly over.'

She was waiting for news from Majorca. And she expected to be hearing something any day now. She hoped to leave in the spring. Obviously, I would come with them, if l wanted to. I was relieved to hear her say it.

'And Cartaud? What do you hear from him?'

At the mention of the name Cartaud, she frowned. I had spoken in an ordinary tone of mice, like someone talking about the weather.

'You remember his name?'

'It's an easy name to remember.'

And did he have a profession, this Cartaud? Yes, he worked in the office of a dental surgeon on the Boulevard Haussmann, next door to the Jacquemart-André Museum.

With a nervous gesture, she lit a cigarette.

'He might lend us money. That would be useful for our trip.'

She seemed to be watching my reaction intently.

'Is he rich?' I asked her.

She smiled.

'You were talking about a coat, just now… Well, I'll ask him to give me a fur coat …'

She laid her hand on mine, as I had seen her do with Van Bever in the café on the Rue Cujas, and brought her face close to mine.

'Don't worry: she said. 'I really don't like fur coats at all.'

In my room, she drew the black curtains. I'd never done so before because the color of the curtains bothered me. Every morning the sunlight woke me up. Now the light was streaming through the gap between the curtains. It was strange to see her jacket and her clothes scattered over the floor. Much later, we fell asleep. Comings and goings in the stairway brought me back to consciousness, but I didn't move. She was still sleeping, her head against my shoulder. I looked at my wristwatch. It was two o'clock in the afternoon.

As she left the room, she told me it would be best not to see each other tonight. Van Bever had probably been back from Athis-Mons for some time, and he was expecting her at their hotel on the Quai de la Tournelle. I didn't want to ask how she would explain her absence.

When I was alone again, I felt as though I were back where I had been the night before: once again there was nothing I could be sure of, and I had no choice but to wait here, or at the Café Dante, or maybe to go by the Rue Cujas around one in the morning. And again, on Saturday, Van Bever would leave for Forges-les-Eaux or Dieppe, and we would walk him to the métro station. And if he let her stay in Paris, it would be exactly like before. And so on until the end of time.

I gathered together three or four art books in my beige canvas carryall and went downstairs.

I asked the man standing behind the front desk if he had a directory of the streets of Paris, and he handed me one that looked brand-new, with a blue cover. I looked up all the numbers on the Boulevard Haussmann until I found the Jacquemart-André Museum at number
158
. At
160
there really was a dentist, a Pierre Robbes. I wrote down his telephone number, just in case it might be useful: Wagram
1318
. Then, with my beige carryall in my hand, I walked to the English bookstore by Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where I managed to sell one of the books I was carrying,
Italian Villas and Their Gardens
, for
150
francs.

I HESITATED for a moment before the building at
160
Boulevard Haussmann, and then I stepped into the entryway. On the wall, a plaque listed the names and floors in large printed letters:

Doctor P. Robbes P. Cartaud

3
rd floor

The name Cartaud wasn't written in the same lettering as the others, and it seemed to have been inserted sometime afterward. I decided to try the office on the third floor, but I didn't take the elevator, whose cage and glass double doors shone in the semidarkness. Slowly I climbed the stairs, practicing what I would say to the person who came and opened the door – 'I have an appointment with Dr. Cartaud.' If they showed me in to see him, I would take on the jovial tone of someone paying a spur-of-the-moment call on a friend. With this one small difference: he had only seen me once, and it was possible that he wouldn't recognize me.

On the door there was a gilded plaque with the words:

DENTAL SURGEON

I buzzed once, twice, three times, but no one answered.

I left the building. Beyond the Jacquemart-André Museum, a café with a glassed-in terrace. I chose a table with a view of the front door of number
160
. I waited for Cartaud to arrive. I wasn't even sure he meant anything to Jacqueline and Van Bever. It was only one of those chance meetings. They might never see Cartaud again in their lives.

I had already drunk several grenadines and it was five o'clock in the afternoon. I was beginning to forget just why I was waiting in this café. I hadn't set foot on the Right Bank tor months, and now the Quai de la Tournelle and the Latin Quarter seemed thousands of miles away.

Night was falling. The café, which was deserted when I sat down at my table, was gradually filling up with customers who must have come from the offices in the neighborhood. I could hear the sound of a pinball machine, as in the Café Dante.

A black car pulled up alongside the Jacquemart-André Museum. I watched it absently at first. Then suddenly I felt a jolt: it was Cartaud's. I recognized it because it was an English model, not very common in France. He got out of the car and went around to open the left door for someone: it was Jacqueline. They would be able to see me behind the glass wall of the terrace as they walked toward the building's front door, but I didn't move from my table. I even kept my eyes fixed on them, as if I were trying to attract their attention.

They passed by unaware of my presence. Cartaud pushed open the front door to let Jacqueline go in. He was wearing a navy blue overcoat and Jacqueline her light leather jacket.

I bought a token for the telephone at the bar. The phone booth was in the basement. I dialed Wagram 1318. Someone answered.

'Is this Pierre Cartaud?'

'Who's calling?'

'Could I speak to Jacqueline?'

A few seconds of silence. I hung up.

I MET THEM, her and Van Bever, the next afternoon at the Café Dante. They were alone at the far end of the room, at the pinball machine. They didn't interrupt their game when I came in. Jacqueline was wearing her black pants, narrow at the ankles, and red lace-up espadrilles. They weren't the kind of shoes to wear in winter.

Van Bever went to get some cigarettes, and Jacqueline and I were left alone, facing each other. I took advantage of the moment to say:

'How's Cartaud? How was everything yesterday on the Boulevard Haussmann?'

She became very pale.

'Why do you ask me that?'

'I saw you go into his building with him.'

I was forcing myself to smile and to speak in a lighthearted voice.

'You were following me?'

Her eyes were wide. When Van Bever came back, she leaned toward me and said quietly:

'This stays between us.'

I thought of the bottle of ether – that filthy stuff, as she called it – that I had shared with her the other night. 'You look worried …'

Van Bever was standing before me and had tapped me on the shoulder, as if he were trying to bring me out of a bad dream. He was holding out a pack of cigarettes.

'You want to try another pinball game?' Jacqueline asked him.

It was as if she were trying to keep him away from me.

'Not right now. It gives me a migraine.'

Me too. I could hear the sound of the pinball machine even when I wasn't at the Café Dante.

I asked Van Bever:

'Have you heard from Cartaud lately?'

Jacqueline frowned, probably as a way of telling me to stay off that subject.

'Why? Are you interested in him?'

His voice sounded sharp. He seemed surprised that I had remembered Cartaud's name.

'Is he a good dentist?' I asked.

I remembered the gray suit and the deep, resonant voice, which were not without a certain distinction.

'I don't know,' said Van Bever.

Jacqueline was pretending not to listen. She was looking away, toward the entrance to the café. Van Bever was smiling a little stiffly.

'He works in Paris half the time,' he said.

'And other than that, where does he work?'

'In the provinces.'

The other night, in the café on the Rue Cujas, there was a sort of awkwardness between them and Cartaud, and, despite the mundane conversation we'd had when I sat down at their table, it had never gone away. And I found that same awkwardness now in Jacqueline's silence and Van Bever's evasive replies.

'The trouble with that one is he's hard to get rid of,' said Jacqueline.

Van Bever seemed relieved that she had taken the initiative to let me in on the secret, as if, from now on, they no longer had anything to hide from me.

'We don't particularly want to see him,' he added. 'He comes chasing after us …'

Yes, that was just what Cartaud had said the other night. They had met him two months before in the Langrune casino. He was alone at the
boule
table, playing halfheartedly, just killing time. He had invited them to dinner in the only restaurant that was still open, a little up the road in Luc-sur-Mer, and had explained to them that he worked as a dentist in the area. In Le Havre.

'And do you think it's true?' I asked.

Van Bever seemed surprised that I would express any doubt about Cartaud's profession. A dentist in Le Havre. I had gone there several times, long ago, to board a boat for England, and I'd walked through the streets near the docks. I tried to remember arriving at the train station and going to the port. Big concrete buildings, all the same, lining avenues that seemed too wide. The gigantic buildings and the esplanades had given me a feeling of emptiness. And now I had to imagine Cartaud in that setting.

'He even gave us his address in Le Havre,' Van Bever said.