The Snow Kimono (41 page)

He was one of them, Jovert said. Katsuo. One of the men standing in the semicircle
at the rear of the bus. It was he who saw Hiroshi’s clenched and bloodied hand rise
up out of the
muddy water, gasping for air. Sachiko couldn’t possibly have seen that.
She was with the women and children on the far side of the road.

Omura was nodding.

Don’t you see? It would have been exactly what Katsuo would have done.

Pieces began to fall into place. Jovert could see Katsuo going to Sachiko’s village
dozens of times, disguised, just to catch a glimpse of her. He would already have
been obsessed with her after that first night. Of course he would have ensured he
was on the bus bringing her down to him.

It couldn’t possibly have been Sachiko who told him, he said. It
had
to be him. And
then, when they got to Osaka, at the bus terminal, the man who was standing in the
stairwell of the bus, while Hideo went to get their luggage. The businessman who
rescued her. That must have been Katsuo. He was watching over her.

Jovert did not stop there. There was one other thing he had figured out.

He was here, too, wasn’t he? he said to Omura. Here in Paris. When Katsuo disappeared
that time, after the publication of, what was it?

The Chameleon
, Omura said.

The Chameleon
. The chameleon, Jovert repeated. You said he was away for years, isn’t
that what you said? He was standing looking at Omura now. He was here, wasn’t he,
Professor Omura? In Paris?

There was a moment of silence while something other than Omura decided what his answer
would be.

He was. Yes, Inspector, he was.

In my apartment?

Omura didn’t answer immediately. He reached for the teapot, poured some more tea
into his cup.

I looked up the tenancy records, Jovert said. This morning, at the real-estate office.

Omura still did not answer him. Instead, he waited, as though he were weighing up
the consequences of what he was about to say.

Yes, he said.

So you weren’t waiting there for me, were you?

What do you mean, Inspector?

The night you picked up my keys. That night you said you were waiting for me. It
wasn’t
me
you were waiting for, was it?

I’m not sure I follow, Inspector?

You weren’t waiting specifically for
me
, he said testily. You were waiting for whoever
lived in my apartment. So that, perhaps, if luck was on your side, you might get
inside, look around. At the apartment your former friend had lived in.

I was waiting for you, Inspector.

But only because it was my apartment.

Oh, I see, Inspector. The coincidence thing again. As if it didn’t matter who lived
there now? As if anyone would do.

He drew on his cigarette.

Auguste Jovert, recently retired Inspector of Police, who
finds out he has a daughter
he’s never known two days before I knock on his door. That’s just coincidence, is
it? He leaned back against the kitchen wall. How very interesting, Inspector. How
very western.

He took a sip of tea.

No, Inspector, it was you I was waiting for. As soon as I found out you were a former
Inspector of Police, I knew. It was preordained. It was meant to be. The unfolding
I had been waiting for, for so long, had at last begun.

But you knew he stayed here, in my apartment, all those years ago.

Of course. He told me. Paris. Rue St Antoine. He told me how he loved seeing the
golden-winged boy soaring over the city. It was why he had taken the apartment. So
bizarre, so surreal. He told me about the lift. He told me how much he enjoyed walking
around the Paris streets at night, knowing that he could be walking in Victor Hugo’s
footsteps. Kawasimodo. How they still inhabited them. The Marais. The swamp. If only
you knew what that meant to us—the swamp.

But I
could
have been anyone, Jovert said. And all this stuff about finding the right
person, the person through whom we see our own lives—it’s all nonsense, isn’t it?

I don’t know, Inspector. You tell me.

Chapter 46

WHAT happened in the days and weeks that followed this conversation, Jovert no longer
remembered. He was sure there were still plenty of other questions he had forgotten
to ask Omura. But he had to get his own house in order first. Decide whether he was
going to Algiers to find Mathilde, or not.

He awoke at some unknown dark hour. The room pulsed with a soft, amniotic glow. He
had been dreaming, but about what he knew not. He lay for a moment, watching the
pattern of the lace curtains magically appearing and disappearing on the ceiling.
Shadowed tree limbs, clouds, flying birds, all suspended in an alien aqueous sky.
His rectangled bedroom window now a beating membrane, delicate beyond belief, like
some veiled, thin-veined living thing.

He rolled onto his side. The green-glow digits of his bedside clock were gone. He
reached for his lamp, pushed the button. No light came on. He closed his eyes, put
a thumb and forefinger to his eyelids. But his head still beat in time with his beating
room.

He stood by the intermittent window. Pulled one corner of the curtain aside. It was
snowing. Large feathered flakes floated down through the darkness into the cupped
light of the streetlamps below. It was as if the light were conjuring them, as though
stillness itself were falling. Once and for all.

There are two police cars angled across the laneway below with their headlights on.
On the pavement, an ambulance, its lights flashing. Wave after wave of reddish light
surges up the walls of the building opposite. Jovert watches it fall back to the
pavement and spill towards the roadway. This is how he comes to see it, the fallen
figure lying in the gutter, snow settling on his coat, his legs, his hair. Softly,
as if each individual flake is being placed there. And he knows.

He will go down in a minute, he thinks. There is no hurry. Not now. It no longer
matters. He watches one of the medics retrieve the gurney from the back of the ambulance.
Another is on his two-way radio. Next to him, a policeman, smoking.
Fox-tailed plumes
of breath escape his mouth and then slip away into the night.

Just before the corner, he finds Omura’s hat leaning against the wall, rocking back
and forth on its rim. As if it could not bear being there. As if it is already in
mourning.

Jovert speaks to the young policeman. He’s wearing thick glasses. There’s snow on
his cap, his shoulders. It turns out he knows him, vaguely, from years ago. His father
one of his former colleagues.

Inspector Jovert?

Gilles! he says. How are you?

Gilles shrugs, looks across to where Omura is lying.

Jovert remembers him as a boy. Unhappy. Withdrawn.

And your father?

You know, he says. He’s my father.

Yes, he does. He remembers well.

The policeman, Gilles, looks uncomfortable. He glances at his cigarette.

It’s okay, Jovert says. He touches him on his arm. I’m no longer working. That’s
all over now.

I heard, the young policeman says. He takes one last puff of his cigarette. Flicks
the butt into the snow anyway.

Their breaths are fogged. It is much colder down here than he had anticipated. He
pulls his coat around him.

Gilles rubs his gloved hands together.

I’d better go and help Jean-Paul, he says.

The ambulance officer is still retrieving things from the rear of the vehicle.

Jovert stands for a moment looking across to the snow covered form lying in the gutter.

I know him, he says.

Oh?

Yes, he’s one of my neighbours, a friend. His name’s Omura. Professor Tadashi Omura.
He used to teach at the Imperial University in Tokyo.

He wonders if he could ask Gilles for a cigarette. He looks up into the darkened
sky. They’re both looking up now, staring into the darkness, their eyes blinking
as the snow comes streaming down. It’s falling more heavily now. The top of Jovert’s
building is barely visible. It could easily not exist.

I saw him, he says. From up there. From my window. I live up there. This is my building.

The two of them are still looking up into the dark swirling sky, as if they are both
contemplating what Jovert has just said, what it could possibly mean.

Omura is alone now. Lying in the snow. He could be sleeping. But when Jovert goes
over to him, steps out onto the roadway, he sees that Omura’s eyes are open. He could
be looking down the
snow-filled alleyway, as if, having seen the ambulance approaching,
having seen its flashing lights, heard it pull up, its engine stop, he is still waiting
for them, wondering what they’re doing. He can’t stay here.

His head is resting on one of his arms. The other is outstretched, as if pointing
to something. Jovert follows the line he might be indicating. Then he sees it—the
fallen notebook. It lies in the snow, in the gutter, almost completely covered. A
few minutes more and it would have disappeared. Jovert looks around. The policeman,
the medics, are still busy at the rear of the ambulance. He bends down, picks it
up. Brushes the snow off it. Puts it in his coat pocket. He thinks of that night
after the fireworks, of returning home on his crutches, seeing Omura outside his
building, flipping through the notebook until he finds the page. He sees Omura holding
it up to his face, tapping it with his fingertip. Then bending down myopically to
punch his code into the panel beside the door.