The Snow Kimono (30 page)

He tapped on the passenger-side window.

Thibaud stubbed out his cigarette, leaned across, unlocked the door.

It’s good, Thibaud said, looking at his unruly hair, his glasses, his elbow-patched
jacket. You could be a prof. He bent forward to see his shoes. Yes, very good, he
said again, nodding. Unrecognisable.

Thibaud checked the rear-view mirror, put the car into gear, pulled out. Down the
narrow street. A few streetlamps coming on. The paling sky.

I’m sorry, Thibaud said, when the air began to thicken.

Jovert did not reply. Silence, he knew, was a useful tool. People didn’t like silences.
They waited for them to fill. Or filled them for you. What had General Saressault
said?
In an empty set, everything is possible
. One’s worst imaginings. The death
of a loved one. A child. Your own. The as-yet-unuttered truth.

An empty set—an occupied cell.

Yes, there was something exquisite about silence. Which now began to fill the car,
until it began to suffocate them. Or one of them. Thibaud wound his window down.

Then they were turning into the street, the one he was not meant to know about, that
led down to the harbour. It was already busy. The shops reopening. People beginning
to re-emerge. Thibaud slowed the car.

Again? Jovert said. Nice to see you, again.

I know, sir. I know. It was stupid.

Thibaud raised his hand from the steering wheel, pale palm up, as if the answer to
his dilemma lay out there on the street.

But Jovert was watching the men walking ahead of them. Walking as though the car
weren’t there. As though it were invisible. As though they were invisible.

Do you think she knows?

Madeleine’s not stupid, Thibaud. It was the first thing she asked.

And?

Slow down, he said.

He leaned forward, scanned the buildings to his right.
A nondescript, dust-covered
Citroën crawling down the broken street. The wake of men behind them seemingly what
propelled the car forward. Shops, cafés, hole-in-the-wall shoe-repair places, tobacconists,
car clutch-plates, glass wares, coffee beans, dust-filled kitchen utensils—most with
their owners sitting on stools outside, studying the broken pavement at their feet.

Is this it? Up ahead?

Yes.

Thibaud slowed almost to a stop. The car rose and fell now on the potholed roadway
like a tiny barque.

Okay. Pull over.

Thibaud pulled the car up onto the cracked pavement. Men spilled out around them.
It was quiet now. Jovert had experienced this before, many times. An oasis of newly
minted silence in an otherwise swirling street. No one talking. No one looking their
way. The men streaming past them might come close to the car, but not one of them
would touch it. Everybody knew.

Jovert could see the burnt-out shop front. The blown-out brickwork. The neatly circular
black after-image stamped on the surrounding walls. The footpath. A few fragments
of uncollected glass still glinting in the afternoon sun.

How many dead?

The owner. Hamid. Two customers. Two children playing outside. His. Seven injured.
One still critical.

Hamid. Didn’t I recruit him? Two years ago. A bit more. Just before GS left. Didn’t
we bring him in?

GS?

General Saressault.

Okay.

And Hamid?

Yes, we did. We brought him in. Once. In July ’57.

And?

Useful. Very useful.

Jovert sat in silence. You could read an explosion, its blast trajectory, its detonation
pattern, distribution, the way its haloed scorch-mark radiated out: all perfect,
a textbook example—this explosion ‘roseate’. Professional, perfectly judged, beautiful.

He did the calculations. No more than 120 grams of the new
plastique
. The ‘drop’,
the ‘gift’, the ‘visitor’, whatever you wanted to call it, placed just inside the
door. The blast crater shallow. The sphere of influence—out, up, and in. It was this
that killed, the compression echo: being hit first from the front, then, a millisecond
later, from behind. In an enclosed space the shock wave shredded whatever was in
between. You didn’t need shrapnel, just physics, to kill.

He looked up through the windscreen, at the wall above them, then leaned across to
scan the surface of the adjacent wall. The pit marks high up on the façades, the
pits not deep—glass fragments, rubble, nothing significant. The lower wall clean.
But you could see where the damage started. A kind of low-tide line about a metre
up. Scatter marks above this. There must have been a car parked where they were.
And one just outside the shop. Theirs? To concentrate the blast.

He could see it now: cars parked either side of the street;
the drop, two couriers,
one a customer, asking for something, directions, the cost of a repair; the other,
a friend, waiting just inside the door, one hand in his pocket, smoking. At the counter—thank
you, thank you, you have been most helpful. The double handshake. Then the quick,
stiff-bodied bow. Did they see the two children? Would it have mattered? The collateral
benefit immeasurable. Pragmatic. The message unambiguous.

He was sure he knew who did this. He recognised the signature. Its unsentimental
precision. Its telltale logic. He’d seen this perfection before. Not that he would
ever find out. Their mantra: don’t ask what you don’t need to know.

But Hamid had been one of his. What had happened in the time he’d been away? Why
wasn’t he told?

Do they know I’m here?

No, this is just between you and me.

Which is the way it will stay.

A car horn sounded behind them. Jovert turned to look back through the rear window.
But it wasn’t for them. A waiting hand cart. A car behind it. Who had not seen them.

He turned back to watch the faces of the Arabs walking up towards them. How some
were caught by surprise by the sudden blockage in front of them. He saw how they
looked unthinkingly up. How they saw first the car, then the men in it. Then quickly
looked away. This endless flow of men passing unimpeded around them, an invisible
boulder in an uphill stream.

And this
wasn’t
one of ours?

No, sir. Not that I know. Paris is worried—about later. If any of this gets out.

You wouldn’t tell me if you knew, would you?

No, sir.

It looks like one of ours.

No response.

I guess what Paris doesn’t know, Paris doesn’t know…And the
plastique
, where is that
coming from?

Tunisia. Morocco. The FLN.

You mean, if it’s them.

Who knows? You saw how easy it was to bring something in.

What about the widow?

She says she doesn’t know us.

Jovert took one last look out the window.

Okay, he said. I’ve seen enough.

Thibaud released the handbrake. The car rolled forward. The men in front of them,
in their ancient robes, with their walking staffs, did not move aside. It was as
though the car, with the two of them inside, were some recently captured exotic animal
they were leading down to God knows what at the foot of this stinking hill.

He hated to think of what would happen if everything really got out of control. To
date, it hadn’t been a war. Not really. That was why they were there, to make sure
that that kind of chaos never took hold.

Does she know that you were here? Thibaud asked.

Madeleine?

Yes.

I don’t think so. I told her I knew your father, that you were one of my star pupils.

I didn’t know that, Thibaud said.

What?

That you knew my father.

Didn’t he tell you?

No.

Jovert was looking through the windscreen at the men again, at how their dark heads
seemed to float on a strange, undulating wave in front of them.

Well, I did, Jovert said. I knew him well.

A small van blocked the roadway ahead. The space was tight. Thibaud manoeuvred the
car up onto the footpath. Two old men playing cards gathered up their stools, went
inside. Jovert felt the small resistance of the abandoned coffee glass against the
tyre, heard the tiny splintering detonation.

Merde.

They could have got out. Seen what had happened. But what was the point? The tyre
was either punctured, or it wasn’t. They’d soon know. And the two old men would have
long since disappeared.

I’m sorry, sir, Thibaud says again after a while. It was stupid of me.

Don’t worry, Thibaud, he says. It’s not a problem. You and I have never had this
conversation. And I have never been here.

The car bumps down the uneven pavement. There is no one walking towards them now.
It is only backs you see. You had to admire these people, how efficient their communication
systems were, how quickly bad news spread.

Chapter 31

THEY said the city was a labyrinth. But it wasn’t true. If it had been, it would
have been easy. No, it was a maze, a confusing series of cross streets, folded-back
laneways, cul-de-sacs, blind alleys, dead ends. There was a time he could have walked
to his ‘office’ in the Villa les Tourelles from the house blindfolded without missing
a step. But not now. It had changed. Or perhaps his memory had changed it for him.
Whatever the case, now, in the library, once he stepped inadvertently off the beaten
track he was lost. The unremembered was so much more vast than the remembered ever
was.

They sat, in the beginning, in the evening, at the small wooden table on the balcony,
each with their glass of wine, reading their papers, writing their reports, the music
from the old city insinuating its way up through the night, curling lovingly around
the pencilled minarets, through the snippets of half-heard conversation, up and over
the high, white walls, to them, like
the smoke rising from the mosquito coil in front
of them. From time to time, they watched the intermittent progress of a freighter
entering the harbour. Another. The fitful, distant reverberations of exploding shells
oddly comforting. Sometimes, a helicopter would sweep up over them, impossibly low,
impossibly fast, the urgent hollow thwop-thwop-thwop of its rotors slicing the music
into ribboned pieces.

They’re busy tonight, Madeleine would say. Did you know?

Hmm? Noncommittal. Still reading.

I’m only joking. And she would nudge his leg gently under the table.

Sometimes, when he knew in which direction to look, what time, when he remembered,
he would wait for the first far-off night-sky glow. He always counted. Could not
help himself. The time it took for the faint reverberation to reach them. One, sometimes
two. Three hundred and forty metres a second. Three seconds a kilometre. Forty-five
seconds—fifteen kilometres. A minute—twenty. Each soft boom a piece of history already
written. By soldiers he knew. Sometimes commanded. It was like looking into the clear
night sky, at the thousands and thousands of other tiny beating worlds that surrounded
them. Except that what was written out there was written millions of years ago.

He’d glance up at Madeleine, at her lamp-lit frowning face. Her chin hunched on one
bent-back hand, a pen in the other. Her eyes reading.

They’re busy tonight, he would hear her say.

Now, then, a long time ago.

See, he
was
good at this. He
had
been there. On the balcony. With Madeleine again.
In the Bibliothèque Nationale. Except that the chair opposite him was empty.

Chapter 32

LATER, much later, he realised he had married her because she had somebody else’s
laugh.

She’d called him Jo-Jo when he was eight. His uncle’s mistress. His father’s brother.
The younger son, who had done so well.

My little Jo-Jo. How’s my little Jo-Jo today?
Mon petit beau
. My beautiful, beautiful
boy.

He’d met her in Paris. Once or twice. She talked to him. She took the time.

Or at his uncle’s summer house.

I saw you this morning, Jo-Jo. Kicking the ball. Fixing the firewood stack. Lying
on the timber table. Staring up at the sky. What were you thinking, Jo-Jo? Come on,
you can tell me.

Crouching down, her two hands on his two knees. She would look into his eyes as though
something was swimming there. He remembered her mouth. Her lovely, slow-breathing
summer dress. Her skin. How he ached for her.

Sometimes she called him Gusto. Augusto.
Our
Gusto?
Mi
Gusto. And she’d cuff him
on the chin.

When she got bored, she’d say, Come on, Jo-Jo. Let’s go. Get out of here. Won’t you,
please?

As if there was any doubt.

I’m off, she’d say.
Con mucho Gusto
. Or,
Con mi muchacho, Gusto
. With my gorgeous
gallant beau. We’re going for a walk.

And she’d get up. She would leave with him, hand in hand, his family’s tabled faces
turned towards the door. Her laugh as sharp as darting swallows, as if it was she
who had set them free.