Suspended Sentences (14 page)

The object drew attention to itself one more time, a few years later. I had ended up taking Annie’s advice to write in a notebook, every day: I had just finished my first novel. I was sitting at the bar of a café on Avenue de Wagram. Next to me stood a man of about sixty with black hair, wearing glasses with very slender frames, whose appearance was as immaculate as his hands. For several minutes I’d been watching him, wondering what he did in life.

He had asked the waiter for a pack of cigarettes, but they didn’t sell any in that café. I offered my crocodile-skin case.

“Much obliged, Monsieur.”

He extracted a cigarette. His gaze remained fixed on the crocodile case.

“May I?”

He plucked it from my hand and turned it over and over, knitting his brow.

“I used to have the same one.”

He handed it back and looked at me more closely.

“They stole our entire stock of this item. Afterward we stopped carrying it. You have here a very rare collector’s item …”

He smiled. He had managed a fine leather goods shop on the Champs-Elysées, but was now retired.

“They weren’t satisfied with just those cases. They emptied the entire store.”

He leaned his face closer to mine, still smiling.

“You needn’t think I suspect you in the slightest … You would have been too young at the time.”

“Was it that long ago?” I asked.

“A good fifteen years.”

“And were they ever caught?”

“Not all of them. Those people had done things much more serious than breaking and entering.”

Things much more serious. I already knew those words. The trapeze artist Hélène Toch in a
SERIOUS ACCIDENT.
And later, the young man with large blue eyes had told me:
SOMETHING VERY SERIOUS
.

Outside, on Avenue de Wagram, I walked with a curious euphoria in my heart. It was the first time in a long while that I felt Annie’s presence. She was walking behind me that evening. Roger Vincent and Little Hélène must also have been somewhere in the city. In the final account, they had never left me.

Snow White disappeared for good without giving notice. At lunch, Mathilde said:

“She left because she couldn’t stand looking after you, blissful idiot!”

Annie shrugged her shoulders and winked at me.

“That’s a stupid thing to say, Mom! She left because she had to go back to her family.”

Mathilde squinted and gave her daughter a nasty look.

“You don’t talk to your mother that way in front of the children!”

Annie pretended not to listen. She smiled at us.

“Did you hear me?” Mathilde said to her daughter. “You’ll come to a bad end, just like Blissful Idiot here!”

Annie shrugged again.

“Take it easy, Thilda,” said Little Hélène.

Mathilde looked at me and pointed to the bun on the back of her head.

“You know what that means, don’t you? Now that Snow White is gone,
I’ll
be looking after you, blissful idiot!”

Annie walked me to school. She had put her hand on my shoulder, as usual.

“Don’t pay any attention to what Mom says … She’s old. Old people talk nonsense.”

We had arrived early. We waited in front of the iron gate to the playground.

“You and your brother are going to sleep for a night or two in the
house across the street … you know, the white one. We’re having some people come live at our house for a few days …”

She must have noticed my worried look.

“And anyway, I’ll be staying with you … You’ll see, it’ll be fun.”

In class, I couldn’t concentrate on the lesson. My mind was elsewhere. Snow White had gone, and now we were going to live in the house across the street.

After school, Annie took my brother and me to the house across the street. She rang at the small door that opened onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. A brown-haired woman, rather corpulent and dressed in black, opened for us. She was the housekeeper, as the owners of the place never lived there.

“The room’s all ready,” said the housekeeper.

We went up a flight of stairs lit by electric lights. All the shutters in the house were closed. We followed a hallway. The housekeeper opened a door. The room was larger than ours, and there were two beds with brass bars, two grown-up beds. The walls were covered in light blue patterned wallpaper. A window looked out onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine: those shutters were open.

“You’ll like it here, kids,” said Annie.

The housekeeper smiled at us. She said:

“I’ll make you breakfast in the morning.”

We went back down the stairs, and the housekeeper showed us the ground floor of the house. In the large living room, with its closed shutters, two crystal chandeliers shone bright enough to blind us. The furniture was cased in transparent slipcovers. Except for the piano.

After dinner, we went out with Annie. We were wearing our pajamas and our bathrobes. A spring evening. It was fun to wear our bathrobes outside, and we walked down the avenue with Annie, all the way to the Robin des Bois inn. We wished we would run into someone so they’d see us walking around in our bathrobes.

We rang at the door of the house across the street and, once again,
the housekeeper opened up and took us to our room. We got into the beds with the brass bars. The housekeeper told us her bedroom was downstairs, next to the living room, and we could call her if there was anything we needed.

“And anyway, Patoche, I’m right nearby,” said Annie.

She gave us each a kiss on the forehead. We had already brushed our teeth after dinner, in our real room. The housekeeper closed the shutters and turned off the light, and the two of them went out.

That first night, we talked for a long time, my brother and I. We would have loved to go downstairs to the living room on the ground floor to look at the chandeliers, the chairs in their slipcases, and the piano, but we were afraid the wood of the staircase would creak and the housekeeper would scold us.

The next morning was Thursday. I had no school. The housekeeper brought us breakfast in our room, on a tray. We said thank you.

Frede’s nephew didn’t come that Thursday. We stayed in the large garden, near the façade of the house with its French doors and closed shutters. There was a weeping willow and, way in back, a bamboo wall through which we could make out the terrace of the Robin des Bois inn and the tables that the waiters were setting for dinner. We ate sandwiches at noon. The housekeeper made them for us. We were sitting in the garden chairs with our sandwiches, as if for a picnic. That evening the weather was warm, and we had dinner in the garden. The housekeeper had again made us ham and cheese sandwiches. Two apple tarts for dessert. And Coca-Cola.

Annie came round after dinner. We’d put on our pajamas and bathrobes. We went out with her. This time, we crossed the main road at the bottom of the hill. We met some people near the public garden, and they looked surprised to see us in our bathrobes. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and her blue jeans. We walked past the train station. It occurred to me that we could take the train, in our bathrobes, all the way to Paris.

When we returned, Annie kissed us in the garden of the white house and gave each of us a harmonica.

I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard the rumble of a car engine. I got up and went to the window. The housekeeper hadn’t closed the shutters, just drawn the red curtains.

Across the street, a light was on in the bow window of the living room. Roger Vincent’s car was parked in front of the house, its black convertible top folded down. Annie’s 4CV was there too. But the sound of the motor came from a canvas-covered truck idling on the other side of the street, near the wall of the Protestant temple. The motor shut off. Two men came out of the truck. I recognized Jean D. and Buck Danny, and the two of them went into the house. Now and then I saw a silhouette pass in front of the bow window of the living room. I was sleepy. The next morning, the housekeeper woke us carrying the tray with our breakfast. She and my brother took me to school. On Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, there was no sign of the truck or Roger Vincent’s car. But Annie’s 4CV was still there, in front of the house.

When I got out of school, my brother was waiting for me all alone.

“There’s nobody home at our house.”

He told me the housekeeper had brought him back to the house a little while ago. Annie’s 4CV was there, but no one was home. The housekeeper had to go do the shopping in Versailles until late that afternoon and she had left my brother at the house, telling him that Annie would be back soon since her car was there. My brother had sat in the empty house, waiting.

He looked happy to see me. He even laughed, like someone who had been afraid but was now relieved.

“They just went to Paris,” I reassured him. “Don’t you worry.”

We walked up Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. Annie’s 4CV was there.

Nobody in the dining room or the kitchen. Or the living room. Upstairs, Annie’s room was empty. Little Hélène’s as well. So was Mathilde’s, in the back of the courtyard. We went into Snow White’s room: maybe she had come back after all. But no. It was as if no one had ever lived in those rooms. Through the window of our bedroom, I stared down at Annie’s 4CV.

The silence in the house was frightening. I turned on the radio and we ate the two apples and two bananas that remained in the fruit basket, on the sideboard. I opened the back door. The green bumper car was still there, in the middle of the courtyard.

“We’ll wait for them,” I said to my brother.

Time passed. The hands on the kitchen clock said twenty minutes to two. It was time to go back to school. But I couldn’t leave my
brother all alone. We sat down, facing each other, at the dining room table. We listened to the radio.

We went outside. Annie’s 4CV was still there. I opened one of the doors and sat in the front seat, in my usual spot. I rifled through the glove compartment and carefully inspected the back seat. Nothing. Except an empty cigarette pack.

“Let’s walk up to the chateau,” I said to my brother.

The wind was blowing. We walked along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. My friends were already back in school, and the teacher would have noticed my absence. The more we walked, the deeper the silence grew around us. Beneath the sun, that street and all its houses seemed deserted.

The wind gently ruffled the tall grass in the meadow. The two of us had never ventured here alone. The boarded-up windows of the chateau provoked the same anxiety in me as in the evenings, coming back from our walks in the woods with Snow White. The chateau façade was dark and threatening in those moments. As it was now, in midafternoon.

We sat down on the bench, where Snow White and Little Hélène used to sit back when we climbed the branches of the pine trees. The silence still hovered around us, and I tried to play a tune on the harmonica Annie had given me.

On Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, we saw, from afar, a black car parked in front of the house. A man was at the wheel, his leg sticking out from the open driver’s-side door, and he was reading the newspaper. At the door to the house, a gendarme in uniform stood very stiff, with a bare head. He was young, with short-cropped blond hair, and his big blue eyes stared into the void.

He started and looked at my brother and me, his eyes wide.

“What are you doing here?”

“This is my house,” I said. “Has something happened?”

“Something very serious.”

I felt afraid. But his voice was trembling a bit as well. A truck with a crane turned the corner of the avenue. A bunch of gendarmes hopped out and attached Annie’s 4CV to the crane. Then the truck started up again, slowly towing Annie’s 4CV behind it down Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. That was the part that hit me hardest and made me feel the worst.

“It’s very serious,” he said. “You can’t go in.”

But we did go in. Someone was on the phone in the living room. A dark-haired man in a gabardine coat was sitting on the edge of the dining room table. He saw my brother and me and came toward us.

“Ah … Are you them? … The children … ?”

He repeated:

“Are you the children?”

He pulled us into the living room. The man on the phone hung up. He was short with very wide shoulders, and he wore a black leather jacket. He said, like the other one:

“Ah … It’s the children.”

He said to the man in the gabardine coat:

“You’ll have to take them to headquarters in Versailles. Nobody’s answering in Paris …”

Something very serious, the gendarme with the big blue eyes had said. I remembered the newspaper clipping that Little Hélène kept in her wallet:
TRAPEZE ARTIST HÉLÈNE TOCH IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT.
I kept behind her to watch her walk. She hadn’t always had that limp.

“Where are your parents?” the dark-haired man in the gabardine coat asked me.

I tried to find an answer. It was too complicated to explain. Annie had said so, the day when we’d gone together to see the principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school and she’d pretended to be my mother.

“Don’t you know where your parents are?”

My mother was acting in her play somewhere in North Africa. My father was in Brazzaville or Bangui, or somewhere farther still. It was too complicated.

“They’re dead,” I told him.

He flinched. He looked at me, knitting his brow. It was as if he was suddenly afraid of me. The short man in the leather jacket stared at me as well, with worried eyes, his lips parted. Two gendarmes entered the living room.

“Should we keep searching the house?” one of them asked the dark-haired man in the gabardine coat.

“Yes, yes … Keep searching …”

They left. The dark-haired man in the gabardine coat leaned toward us.

“Go play in the garden,” he said in a very gentle voice. “I’ll come see you in a little bit.”

He took each of us by the hand and led us outside. The green bumper car was still there. He stretched out his arm toward the garden:

“Go play … I’ll see you in a little bit.”

And he went back inside the house.

We climbed the stone steps to the first terrace of the garden, where the grave of Doctor Guillotin was hidden under the clematis and Mathilde had planted a rose bush. The window to Annie’s room was wide open, and since we were level with that window, I could see that they were searching everything in Annie’s room.