Vango (20 page)

“No, thanks, I’ve got to go.”

He stood up and left.

To pay for her ice cream, the girl piled up her coins on the table, a pile as tall as the column in the Place Vendôme, and then she left as well.

The doorman nodded at her. “Good evening, Mademoiselle Atlas.”

The head receptionist greeted her as she walked past.

The baggage handler turned the revolving door for her. “See you soon, Mademoiselle Atlas.”

Outside, the valet repeated the same words.

She didn’t respond to any of them.

Ever since she was a little girl, they had all insisted on calling her Mademoiselle Atlas, which she found ridiculous.

She wandered off into the square.

Her real name was the Cat.

The Cat had met Vango eighteen months earlier, on December 25, 1932, at three o’clock in the morning, between the second and third levels of the Eiffel Tower.

The place, the date, and the timing weren’t the most propitious: the final meters of the Eiffel Tower, on Christmas Day, at three o’clock in the morning. But up there, where there’s only one route, there’s a far higher chance of meeting other climbers than lower down, where the tower’s four legs multiply the options.

“Hi.”

“Hello,” answered Vango. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

Vango wasn’t the sort to engage in small talk during his nocturnal escapades, and on the rare occasions when he’d encountered people on the roof of the Opera, in the clock at the Gare de Lyon or, years later, in the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, he had hidden before anyone could see him.

That night, the first thing that struck him was the Cat’s age. She looked like a little girl on a seesaw in a children’s playground. Except that she was sitting two hundred and twenty-five meters up, astride a metal arch.

Despite the cold, the Cat wasn’t wearing gloves.

It took a lot to get her to admit to being thirteen.

“Do you come here often?” asked Vango.

“Reasonably,” she replied, her gaze cool.

Which meant this was the first time.

“Would you like to continue together?”

“I’m just having a bit of a rest, thanks.”

Breathing heavily in the freezing air, she exhaled little round clouds of white steam.

“Right.”

Vango made a show of continuing his ascent. At this height, the paintwork had flaked beneath the frost. He had to check every handhold so as not to slip. He turned around again.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Vango hated insisting like this, but the girl didn’t seem comfortable. She didn’t answer. He lowered himself and took another look at her. She was wearing a silk scarf that was too long for her, so she’d wound it five or six times around her slender neck. The steel crossbars that framed them both weren’t well lit.

“Your left foot’s hurting you,” he pointed out.

“No.”

And then she asked instinctively, “How did you know?”

“Can I take a look?”

He took her foot, and she let out a yelp.

“You’ve sprained your ankle.”

“And?”

“Can I help you move from here?”

She stared at the lights in the distance and shrugged, like a polite child being offered a sweet.

“Yes, please.”

Carefully, he took her on his back. They could hear an owl, very close by. From the way she held on to his shoulders, he could tell that this girl was just like him, that she had known how to climb before she could walk.

“I’m guessing you don’t want to take the steps,” he said.

“No.”

They both knew that on the stairs there was a guard with a scary black dog whose teeth glowed in the dark.

“All right.”

He started climbing.

“Where are you going?”

“Didn’t you want to go higher up?”

“Yes . . .”

She was warming to him.

“So let’s go, then.”

“Fine. Whatever you say.”

They stayed at the top of the tower until sunrise.

Vango got out some bread, which they shared. Seagulls came to screech around them. They played with Vango.

“Do you know them?” the Cat asked, fascinated.

Vango was watching them closely. Looking up from down below, a ring of feathers circling in the red of the rising sun would have been visible at the top of the tower.

Vango pointed at an owl hovering just above them.

“That one, yes, I’ve seen her before, where I come from, a long way away from here.”

The young girl tried not to show her surprise.

They could make out the forests beyond the city’s outskirts, and the Cat even claimed to be able to see the sea.

“Perhaps,” said Vango.

“Over there, look.”

Clouds were stretched across the horizon.

Her eyesight was good. You would expect no less of a cat.

Neither of them shared their life story.

He dropped her off in front of her house in the morning.

“Why are you called the Cat?”

“Because if I’m not at liberty to prowl, I suffocate.”

Vango smiled.

“Don’t laugh. I really do suffocate.”

“I’m laughing because it’s given you a taste for luxury. Your home looks pretty big to me.”

They were standing in front of a beautiful house at the bottom end of the Champs-Élysées.

“The rooms aren’t bad. But I live up there.”

She looked up. A hammock could be glimpsed hanging between two lightning conductors on the roof.

“I’m claustrophobic.”

“Pleased to meet you! I’m paranoid.”

They smiled and shook hands, and she hobbled off.

From that day on, they spent many nights on the Paris skyline. She taught him how to slide down the roof of the Théâtre du Châtelet and how to venture into the flies above the dancers during a performance.

He showed her the Saint-Jacques Tower, close by. An obsessive security guard spent all night long patrolling it. This was a game for them. They had to climb seventy-seven meters in under ninety seconds, which was the time it took the caretaker to walk all the way around. Once they were up there, they could see the winding Seine with its islands; they could see the ship of Notre Dame standing out in a sea of gray rooftops.

They became friends without knowing anything about each other. Sometimes they would accompany each other back home. But both of them only knew the front door of where the other lived. And this door would close again without them being able to glimpse, through the gap, any hint of the rest of their lives.

One day in April, Vango didn’t show up. After a few hours of waiting, the Cat stood at the main entrance to the building where she knew he lived. From the caretaker’s expression when she asked, “Could you let Monsieur Vango know that the Cat is waiting for him,” she immediately realized that something was wrong. She narrowly missed the police.

During the hours and days that followed, she tried to figure it out.

From positioning herself nearby, listening at the entrances to cafés where those conducting the investigation were sitting, she was able to piece together the story.

Her first surprise was to discover that Vango was training to become a priest. She didn’t know any priests personally, she barely knew what that life involved, but she certainly couldn’t imagine a priest hanging upside down off the Eiffel Tower or sleeping in the park trees, as the two of them had often done.

She was almost less shocked to learn that he was accused of having killed a man. Perhaps he had his reasons. And anyway it was none of her business. Now she understood why he hadn’t come, and that was all she wanted to know.

And so she thought that she would be able to pick up her everyday life again.

But one night, lying in her hammock, she felt something in her ribs.

It wasn’t a pain exactly, but it climbed up as far as her chest and shoulders. She turned over on to one side, then the other. She sighed. She took a few steps in the darkness, on the roof.

She watched the flame in a streetlamp flickering.

After a while she crossed her arms, clutched her shoulders, and sighed again. Perhaps this was what books referred to as loneliness.

It was something she had never experienced before.

The Cat had grown up alone.

She had three much older brothers. The last one had left home the day after she was born. They were all over thirty-five now, which to the Cat was the age of her ancestors in the family’s oil paintings.

She was the offspring of her father’s second marriage. Her parents were very busy. They lived in three cities at the same time, never emptied their suitcases, and even kept their fur coats on when they popped home to give her a kiss.

She had been through twenty-two governesses, who’d had the bad idea of calling her Mademoiselle Atlas and of wanting to make her stay inside the walls of the house. The last one had fallen from a tree, trying to catch her.

The Cat had ended up taking up the post herself. She had become her own governess. The twenty-third.

But never, in all her fourteen years, had she experienced loneliness. Not even when the seventh governess had locked her in a cupboard all night long to stop her from sleeping on the roof, nor even when she’d spent a year in a sanatorium in the mountains because she was sick, had she ever really felt alone.

And now this idiot Vango had knocked her armor right off, with a din that sounded like the clattering of saucepans.

The Cat decided that she had to find him in order to settle the score.

And so she moved into the small bell tower at the Carmelite seminary and waited for him. She didn’t want to stray too far from the site of the drama. She was convinced that this was the only spot where she’d be able to find something out.

Nothing happened for three days.

The memory of the murder had, little by little, become diluted.

On the fourth night, someone started playing the foxtrot on the organ below her. She didn’t know that it was Raimundo Weber, the Capuchin caretaker, who was resuming his nocturnal concerts after a brief period of mourning. Life went on.

The following day, the police came to empty the victim’s bedroom. A large van drove off with a desk, a chair, a few boxes of books and notebooks. Five boys from the seminary sluiced down the floor and the walls, before opening the window so that the memory of Father Jean would evaporate.

By the fifth night, the Cat was beginning to think she was too late.

It was a very mild night, partly because a May breeze filled the city with the scent of cherry trees, and perhaps also because Weber was playing more peaceful music than usual on his organ. It didn’t consist of more than four notes, but he was playing them in a magical order that changed with each new musical phrase.

The Cat strained an ear.

Someone was ringing, by the grille at the entrance to the seminary.

Weber was too heavily under the music’s spell to hear anything.

Judging from the appearance of the person waiting behind the grille, the Cat realized this was an unusual visit. She had only seen priests, nuns, a bishop, seminarians, and policemen entering on the other days. But this person was wearing a street urchin’s cap. He was carrying a black case as well as a leather briefcase, like the students in the Latin Quarter.

The Cat was watching him. He might give up if nobody answered his ringing, which would be very frustrating for her.

So she slithered down to the bottom of the roof and looked in through a window that gave onto the chapel. Weber only seemed to be half conscious. His small body was motionless, hunched over the instrument, but his great big hands were spread wide like bats dancing over the keyboard. He had moved on from the four opening notes now. From the deepest to the most high pitched, he didn’t want to leave a single note unplayed.

The Cat flung her blanket like a fishing net. She glided a bit under the dome before landing on the organ pipes, which started wailing like a sick elephant. In a flash, Weber emerged from his musical ecstasy. He could hear someone calling out. He jumped up off his stool and exited the chapel, muttering, “I’m coming, I’m coming. . . .”

The hem of his dressing gown trailed over the courtyard cobbles.

He peered through the grille and saw a young man on the other side.

“Are you lost, my boy?”

“Good evening. I’m a boarder at the school across the way, on Rue Madame. I’m locked out. Could you find me somewhere to sleep?”

“To sleep . . .” repeated the Capuchin monk, biting his lip.

Weber patted the keys in his pocket; he seemed to be bothered about something.

“Normally, I would have opened up for you. . . .”

He glanced around and whispered, “But I’ve been asked to be extra careful. There have been some things happening. . . .”

“I’ll leave very early,” the boy promised in a Russian accent.

“I believe you, my son, but I have my orders.”

The boy nodded.

“Under normal circumstances . . .” Weber went on.

“I understand. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”

The boy headed off down the sidewalk.

“Hey!”

Raimundo Weber called him back. The boy returned to the grille.

“What have you got in that case?”

“What case?”

“There, in your left hand.”

“Nothing. A violin.”

Weber inserted the key into the lock. He opened the door.

“A violin?”

The caretaker shook the boy’s hand.

“Do you play?” He was eager to know.

“Yes.”

“Zing zang zang zaaaaaang.”

Weber was singing and miming on the sidewalk.

“Ziiiing . . .”

He was looking questioningly at the boy.

“
Zaaaaang zooing . . .
Do you recognize that?”

“Shostakovich,” the boy declared.

Weber almost leaped into his arms.

“Are you Russian?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me.”

The Cat saw him ushering the boy inside and leading him over to the chapel. Weber climbed back up to his organ. He started playing a new piece of music.

“Take out your violin!”

They played together for an hour.

It sounded like a village feast day in Stromoski, Siberia. Even the kneelers wanted to dance. At the end of that hour, an exhausted Weber slid down between the organ pedals, dead to the world.