The Way I Found Her (30 page)

When we got to
Radiologie
we found a waiting area with a few chairs and plants arranged around a square of green carpet. There were two doors, both closed, leading off from it.

We went up to the desk. I felt more afraid, suddenly, than I'd felt in Carmody's office. I wanted to hold on to Moinel's arm. It was as if I expected there to be mines under the carpet. But Moinel was calm. He sauntered. When our turn came to talk to the receptionist, he said politely that we wanted to clarify a small clerical detail. ‘On Tuesday, 7th August,' said Moinel, ‘a Mademoiselle Valentina Gavril had an X-ray appointment with Dr Bouchain. Were you the receptionist who checked her in?'

The receptionist was young, with short fair hair and a freckled face. She wore an earring in one ear.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I check in hundreds of people every week.'

Moinel took out the photo of Valentina we'd brought with us and showed it to the girl. In the picture, Valentina's blonde hair was tied with a red ribbon.

‘This is Mademoiselle Gavril,' said Moinel. ‘Do you remember her?'

The receptionist looked hard at the picture and said: ‘No, I've never seen her.'

‘So,' said Moinel, ‘it wasn't you who told Madame Gavrilovich on the telephone that you had admired Mademoiselle Gavril's dress?'

‘I'm sorry. I don't know what you're referring to.'

Moinel kept cool and calm. ‘What we need to know is whether she kept that appointment or not,' he said. ‘That's all.'

‘Are you members of the family?' asked the receptionist.

‘No,' said Moinel. ‘We are friends. But the information is extremely important.'

Unlike the women at Main Reception, this person didn't know Moinel. She didn't smile at him or ask him how he was doing. And now, all she said was: ‘This is confidential information. I can't give out any information of this kind, I'm afraid.'

‘Just let me stress,' continued Moinel, ‘that we wouldn't ask this for trivial reasons. We understand your code of confidentiality, but this is, as I say, a very urgent matter.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I have no authority. I can't help you.'

‘What authority do you need?'

‘Permission from a doctor, or—'

‘Fine,' said Moinel. ‘Fine. Let's go, Louis.'

We walked out of the waiting area and along the corridor a little way. I noticed we'd come to what looked like the day room of a geriatric ward, with men and women on zimmer frames standing completely still, like garden forks stuck into the earth.

‘Wait here,' said Moinel in a whisper. ‘I'm going to find some “authority”.' And he danced off towards an elevator, leaving me with all the old tottering people, who, one by one, looked up from their zimmers and stared at me.

I sat down on a plastic chair and folded my arms. I did some chess moves in my mind to stop myself staring back. I was playing Black, and White had just captured my only remaining rook, so it was looking difficult. We could exchange queens, but I was too much material behind to go into an endgame. I just got a bright idea – knight to bishop seven, check – when I saw that an old man was slowly zimmering his way towards me. He was smiling, and when he got near to me he stopped and fumbled in his trouser pocket for a handkerchief, and then he began waving the handkerchief, like people used to wave things at departing ocean liners.

White's king was just coming out of the corner and I could feel the game begin to turn round, but the old man was right by me now, so I had to look up at him. His smile was turning into a weepy kind of laugh and a tear started to roll down his cheek. ‘Henri . . .' he babbled. ‘Henri . . .'

I shook my head. ‘Non,' I said. ‘Louis. Je suis Louis.'

‘Ce n'est pas Henri?'

‘Non, Monsieur. Je m'appelle Louis.'

‘Je croyais que c'était Henri. Mon petit-fils.'

‘Non. Je suis desolé . . .'

‘Oh non, je vois maintenant . . .'

With great pains, he executed a three-point turn with his zimmer and slowly walked back to the place where he'd been standing. He dropped the handkerchief he'd been waving, but he didn't notice. Other old people clustered round him, consoling him. No one picked up the handkerchief.

I got up and went out into the corridor. I couldn't focus on my chess game any more. I hoped the day would never come when Bertie mistook some other boy for me and waved at him in a hospital day room. I thought, you must know life has got really bad when you can't recognise the people you love any more.

I still felt a bit weak from my night of passion, so I slumped down in the corridor, waiting for Moinel to come back. I knew I'd have to wait quite a long time. Alice had told me that when she arrived here with Valentina, no doctor was to be found for twenty minutes. In English hospitals, you could wait all night lying on a trolley before any doctor came to see you. You could probably die on the trolley and no one would notice.

Moinel returned after ten minutes. It was like he had special privileges with the staff of this hospital. A woman doctor was with him, and when they got level with me Moinel stopped and the doctor went on into the waiting area of
Radiologie
. ‘OK?' Moinel said.

I told him about the grandfather with the hankie. He said: ‘The villain of the story is the boy, Henri, who never comes to visit.'

The woman doctor had a heart-shaped face. Ingrid had told Carl that this was what girls longed for – to have heart-shaped faces. Around the heart was a lot of straight, shiny black hair and you could imagine all the highly tuned brain circuitry underneath it.

She came back to us quite quickly. She shook my hand and she led us to a different waiting area further down the corridor. We sat down on some comfortable chairs and she said: ‘There may or may not have been some confusion. It looks, on the register, as if Mademoiselle Gavril's name has first been ticked and then the tick has been crossed, like this.' She got out a piece of paper and drew a cross and showed it to us. The lines of her cross were curled at the bottom; it looked almost like a little running man, but without a head.

‘But if there was a tick,' she said, ‘which is what is put when a patient arrives, it was put there in error. The cross firmly indicates that Mademoiselle Gavril did not keep her appointment.'

‘OK . . .' said Moinel.

‘I suggest you leave the photograph with the receptionist,' said the doctor. ‘She may not recognise her, but can show it to her colleagues. There's no law of confidentiality preventing them from remembering a face.'

We nodded. I got out the photo again. It looked as if it had been taken at a fancy-dress party. I looked at it while Moinel and the doctor talked. The doctor's voice had a crack in it which, if I had been ill, I knew I would have found soothing. While I gazed at the ribbons in Valentina's hair, the doctor held Moinel's fingers in hers and asked him how he was and he said: ‘Perfectly all right, darling. Thank goodness. When I'm not, you'll be the first to know.'

Then the doctor had to rush away. Doctors are always in transit, never staying. They drink tea standing up. Moinel smoothed his hair and we walked back to the
Radiologie
reception area.

A different receptionist was sitting at the desk. She looked up and stared at us as we came in. She had a pale face that looked as if it had never seen the sun.

I let Moinel be in charge. He took the photo of Valentina and leant across the desk and showed it to this new woman. ‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘for taking up your time, but I want to leave this photograph with you. I need to know if you, or any of your colleagues, have ever seen this person in the waiting area here. We believe she was here on Tuesday last, the seventh—'

‘No,' said the receptionist. ‘I've never seen her.'

‘Fine. Please ask your colleagues if they saw anyone like this. Her arm was in a cast and we think she would have been wearing a black-and-white dress . . .'

I could tell the receptionist didn't want to take the photo, but then she snatched it out of Moinel's hand and put it face down on her desk. Reluctantly, she scribbled down Moinel's telephone number, then she suddenly looked at him and said: ‘Etes-vous police?'

Moinel smiled. ‘No,' he said. ‘Do we look like flics?'

Something nagged me as we walked back down the long corridors to the exit, but I didn't know what it was. I thought it might swim into my mind during our taxi ride back to the rue Rembrandt, but nothing came, only a mild sadness at the loss of the photograph. I kept wondering where Valentina had bought the red ribbon and who had taken the picture.

When I came in, Violette was there. She'd decided to wash down all the cupboards in the kitchen and she was standing on the worktops, so what you most noticed about her were her legs, which weren't thin like her arms, but big and strong. Under her overall, she was wearing an orange skirt. She said: ‘I want all these cupboards looking good for when Madame comes home.'

I helped her with this task. The cupboards looked clean, but when you began to wash them you discovered they were dirty. While we worked, Violette told me that since getting the news about her work permit she was making an effort to resume Pozzi's toilet-training. She said everything changed when you knew you had a future.

When the kitchen was done, I got Violette to help me search Valentina's room for the back-up disks I thought might be in the apartment somewhere, if Carmody hadn't taken them. I knew they could be in the safe, but it was still worth looking for them, because we had Alice's computer back now and, if I found them, I could run the GOH file through that. I said to Violette: ‘If we find that file, we'll know the whole story of Gail O'Hara,' and Violette shook her head and replied: ‘The whole story might be too terrible for us to bear, Louis.'

We went through Valentina's bedroom wardrobes, all six of them, shelf by shelf and drawer by drawer. We found thirteen musical boxes, some as small as a matchbox, and some quite large and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Each one was on a different shelf, among different pieces of clothing, and each one played a different song –
La Mer, Les Feuilles mortes, La Vie en rose, Je ne regrette rien, Sur ma vie
 . . . The smallest one played
La Marseillaise
so quietly, it sounded like it was a little marching song for mice.

Violette loved the musical boxes. She stroked the mother-of-pearl with her velvety hands. We set them in a line along the carpet, and opened all their lids at once. Then we moved down the line on our elbows and knees with our bums in the air, listening. Violette's bum stuck up much higher than mine. I said it was possible to imagine you were moving down a corridor where pianists were practising in tiny rooms, like Alice had told me she'd done at school. Her friend Jean had been a better pianist than Alice. Jean could play one and a half Mozart piano sonatas and Alice could only play one. She would hear this half-sonata stealing through the sound-proofed wall and weep with fury.

We didn't find any disks. A sea of underwear frothed round us on the floor and spilled over the line of musical boxes. Some of the bras looked too small to contain Valentina's tits and could have belonged to another part of her life, when she was thinner. I wondered if she'd bought all the stuff herself or whether her lovers, like Grisha, had gone round department stores picking out knickers and camisoles and suspender belts and carrying them back to her in miniature carrier bags. And then I thought, if she's alive, if I ever see her again, I'm going to get her a present. It won't be underwear. It will be something she's never seen before. And she will turn to me and say: ‘Oh, darling, I thought there was nothing new in the world, but I was wrong!'

Alice found us sitting in this surf of knickers, playing the
Marseillaise
. She said: ‘Lewis, what on earth are you doing?'

‘Searching,' I said. ‘Did Carmody call?'

Violette lowered her head and closed the musical box lid. I could tell she was in awe of Alice, as if Alice were a parakeet from a forest in Benin, who might suddenly fly at her and start pecking her face.

‘What are you searching for?' said Alice.

‘Did he call?' I said.

‘No. No one called. Only Hugh. You're making a terrible mess of this room. Why?'

I felt like saying: ‘If you were my chosen ally, I'd tell you everything, but you're no good as an ally because of your guilty secret.' But I didn't say this. There was a bit of me that was afraid to be pecked by the parakeet, too. All I said was: ‘I need to find Valentina's back-up disks. To follow a hunch I have . . .'

‘I expect the police took them,' said Alice.

I shrugged. ‘I don't think so,' I said. ‘They weren't in the desk or in the bureau; that's the stuff they took.'

‘Well,' said Alice, ‘I need to talk to you, Lewis. I think we should go out.'

We took the métro to Jussieu. I thought the catalpa trees might be turning yellow by now, but they were just the same, green and clattery in the shallow breeze.

Alice didn't say much on the journey, but when we came into the Jardin des Plantes and passed under the statue of the lion eating the human foot she took my hand and said: ‘I had a long conversation with Hugh this morning. He's worried about you. He thinks I should send you home.'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘He said he's been worried ever since you asked him to send Elroy.'

I pulled my hand away. There are times in a life when you imagine lowering your parents' heads into a rock pool and holding them there until their bodies go still.