Vango (29 page)

There were a lot of people, and it was all fairly chaotic. As a result of Voloy Viktor’s being kept in the building, there were all sorts of checks and controls in place. Tempers were being lost. And meetings were running late.

Ethel looked around her.

Among the shambles she could see: a mother with her three children, a lawyer sucking on a peach pit, a ticket puncher from the Métro, a redheaded man wearing earplugs so as not to be disturbed while he read, a builder’s mate holding a pink summons and asking everybody to read it back to him, tourists who had lost their suitcases, a well-heeled couple who had been burgled, widows of men who had been murdered, elderly gentlemen who looked as if they had been waiting since the previous century and might in fact be stuffed, and a nice-looking man in a suit with, at his feet, a suitcase marked:
DRAT THAT RAT! — PEST CONTROL AND RAT CATCHING
.

Ethel glanced at the clock. Once again, she had told her hosts that she was off to see her elderly aunt in the Île de la Cité.

The Camerons had changed their tune since that unforgettable night at the theater. They hadn’t mentioned Ethel’s sudden disappearance during the intermission of
Romeo and Juliet
. When she had explained to them that she’d felt slightly ill and had stepped outside to drink some homemade lemonade at the end of the street, the Cameron parents had winked at their son and said, “It’s an emotional time!”

And Tom Cameron, looking very pale next to Ethel, had wished that the ground would swallow him up.

Ethel had reported to reception. She knew that Boulard was back. This had been confirmed by the police officer behind the counter.

The same man had just called out a name. And each time this happened, the red-haired man opposite her conscientiously removed his earplugs, stood up, put his book facedown so as to keep both his seat and his place, and headed over to the officer.

“Which name did you call?”

“Madame Poirette!”

“Ah. Not me, then. Thank you.”

And back he went to sit down again, poking the wax earplugs into his ears with his thumbs.

The man with the pest-control suitcase was sitting right next to Ethel, and the pair of them smiled at this charade as if they were at a puppet show.

The man didn’t really look like a rat catcher.

Another police officer entered and paced around the waiting room, looking for somebody. He stopped in front of Ethel’s neighbor.

“Are you the gentleman from Drat That Rat!?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“We’ll come and get you in ten minutes. The superintendent isn’t in a good mood. He says it’s really not the day for it, plus nobody let him know. But I’m very glad you’re here.”

Then he lowered his head and whispered, “The place is crawling with them down there. All the rats of the Seine come to cool off here every summer. I promised the superintendent you wouldn’t disturb him. I’ll be taking care of you.”

“Yes. It’ll only take a few moments. I’ve got a stunning new product.”

Ethel took the opportunity to tackle the police officer directly: “Do you know if Monsieur Boulard is seeing people today? I’ve asked someone to let him know I’m waiting. I haven’t heard anything back.”

“He’s not in his office for the time being. We’ll keep you posted.”

Ethel had already been waiting for at least an hour. The police officer moved off.

“I’d be better off catching rats,” she remarked to the pest-control expert.

“Yes, it looks as if I’ll be let in ahead of you. I do apologize.”

The man was charming. He had a natural poise. Only his peasant’s hands were testimony to a life that hadn’t been spent in high society: he must have seen the world a bit before moving into pest control.

One of the children belonging to the mother sitting in the corner near the window started playing with an old man’s walking stick, mimicking a Charlie Chaplin film that had just come out.

“Don’t be silly!”

Chaplin’s mother grabbed him by the ear. He gave the walking stick back to its owner and returned to his mother’s skirts, like a good little boy.

Ethel’s neighbor had also watched this scene. They were disappointed when the show came to an untimely end.

Ethel nudged the man’s suitcase with her foot.

“You’re not really in the rat trade, are you?”

He started laughing and declared, as if confiding in her, “No, of course not, dear child. It’s all a camouflage. . . . The truth of the matter is I’m a hermit monk on the trail of arms dealers!”

They laughed together. She was staring at him closely.

“I can tell you’re not what you appear to be,” whispered Ethel. “Who are you?”

The man seemed bothered by this.

“Who are you?” Ethel teased him again. “Who are you?”

He fell quiet.

Zefiro was paying attention to everything. He was trying not to let his curiosity get the better of him. It was all very disorienting. He was emerging from fifteen years on a lost rock in the middle of the Mediterranean.

But he had already said too much to this girl. He had to stay one step ahead. Invisible lives depended on him.

The best would have been to enter 36, Quai des Orfèvres accompanied by Vango. As a duo, the rat catcher and his assistant would have been less easy to spot. Viktor’s spies were looking for a lone man.

But no matter how hard Zefiro had tried to explain at the entrance that he couldn’t do without his assistant, the security officer had been adamant: the sidekick had to stay outside.

In the end, Zefiro had told Vango to wait nearby, close to the bird market, in their van with
DRAT THAT RAT!
emblazoned in gold letters against a black background.

He was glad he’d brought the boy with him. He hadn’t put up much of a fight when Vango had insisted, because this way they could warn the monastery if something went wrong. And if the padre was captured by Viktor, the monastery would instantly have to be dissolved.

“Who knows if they’ll be able to make me talk?” Zefiro had confided in Vango on the boat coming over. “I’ve got no idea what my levels of resistance are like. I might end up revealing Arkudah’s existence.”

Which was why, in the waiting room at the Quai des Orfèvres, Zefiro couldn’t afford to let his guard drop for a second.

He was keeping a particularly close eye on the reader with the earplugs. He didn’t trust him. For all he knew, it might be the ideal way for this man to sit in the waiting room and focus on everything that was going on.

As for the girl to his right, he refused to believe that she could be with the enemy. Even a monk who’d been faithful to his vows for thirty years and who had resisted the charms of fifty nuns at the Abbey of La Blanche in Noirmoutier, couldn’t help but find this young woman irresistible.

He felt her elbow nudging him.

“I think this time it’s for you,” she said.

But it was for her.

“You see, my child. You’re going first after all.”

From a distance, before she went through the door, she repeated her question: “Who are you?” mouthing the words without a sound escaping her lips. She smiled.

Zefiro had heard her first name being mispronounced in a French accent by the officer as “Heh-tel.” It sounded like “Hey, tell!,” which seemed to be just what Ethel was trying to make him do: blow his cover.

“I’ve got very little time,” Boulard warned Ethel as soon as she sat down opposite him. “I’m expecting someone. I might be called away at any moment.”

He appeared to be nervous.

“I’ve known you be more gentlemanly, Superintendent. Our housekeeper, Mary, asks to be remembered to you.”

Boulard had no answer to that.

He was trying to find where to put his legs under the table.

Mary, the housekeeper he had met at Everland, kept writing him letters in English. He would read them at night with a magnifying glass and a dictionary before hiding them in the curtain lining so his mother wouldn’t find them when tidying up his bedroom. Modesty prevented him from writing back.

Madame Boulard would stop the concierge, Madame Dussac, as she was bringing up the mail. They spent hours talking in the stairwell. When these letters arrived, with their British stamps and their scent of faded rose, Marie-Antoinette Boulard used to explain to the concierge that her son was corresponding with Scotland Yard, the flagship of the British police.

This was what Boulard himself had told her, to justify the frequency with which the letters kept coming.

And so his mother and the concierge would stare devotedly at the envelope, picturing the proud figure of Sherlock Holmes leaning over his table as he stamped his seal, in a cloud of pipe smoke.

“He’s an important man, your son,” Madame Dussac concluded.

And even when there was a little heart drawn on the back of the envelope, they put it down to the legendary sentimentalism of the English.

“Have you got any news for me?” Boulard asked Ethel.

“Yes, Mary is doing well, she’s —”

“I’m talking about Vango Romano,” interrupted the superintendent, blushing.

“What about you?” Ethel fired back. “Have you got any news?”

“Not really. I’m convinced he’s far away by now.”

Boulard couldn’t have been further from the truth. Vango had never been closer. He had just leaped onto the roof, a few meters above them.

“Don’t tell me that a yearlong investigation hasn’t turned up any results,” said Ethel.

Boulard rubbed a cheek.

“I have to confess, I’m dealing with some very big cases at the moment.”

“And what about a nineteen-year-old kid who kills an elderly priest on the eve of being ordained himself and who then gets shot at in front of thousands of people in the center of Paris — doesn’t that count as a big case?”

“No, Mademoiselle, not at all,” the superintendent exploded as he stood up. “That is not the heart of the matter! I care about that murder as much as my old hat. I’m sitting on that murder as I’m sitting on three quarters of all the crimes in Paris. The real issue here is to find out where that boy comes from, when no one has the first clue about him despite the fact that he seems to know everybody.”

Boulard was pacing from one end of his office to the other, waving his arms and banging into files and pieces of furniture.

“The real issue is Vango Romano’s true identity. That’s the mystery that interests me. And that mystery is the only reason I’m not giving up on this whole wretched inquiry. When it comes to murder, there are enough murders in this city every day to keep thirty-six Superintendent Boulards busy! Do you understand, my little lady? Thirty-six Superintendent Boulards! But I’ve never met a single Vango Romano before.”

“I’m not your little lady,” said Ethel, on the verge of tears.

“I’m sorry, I . . .”

Boulard collapsed into his chair and in so doing flattened his hat.

“I’m a bit overworked,” he went on. “I didn’t mean to. . . .”

The superintendent was looking at her. There were tears forming in the corners of her eyes. Ethel really was crying.

“If there were thirty-six Superintendent Boulards, I would throw myself straight out of the window,” she said, sobbing.

The two of them fell silent.

Boulard opened a drawer and took out a large white cotton handkerchief, which was perfectly clean. He always had these at the ready, ironed on Sunday afternoons by his mother, for those who dropped by his office.

There had been so many tears in forty years in this room. Boulard’s job depended on the grief of others.

Sometimes he felt as if he spent his life swimming lengths in a great lake of tears. And the worst thing was that without the dramas, the people in mourning, the destinies felled, Boulard’s life would be dry, and he would find himself all alone trying to swim backstroke on the parquet.

Ethel took the handkerchief.

Just then, they heard something that sounded like an explosion. Boulard’s door sprang open as a result of an almighty kick.

Lieutenant Avignon came flying into the office.

When he saw Ethel, he tried to pull himself together. He turned to Boulard.

“Superintendent . . . Superintendent, he’s downstairs. . . .”

“Who is?”

“The . . . the . . . the rat catcher. . . .”

Ethel sat bolt upright.

Boulard was trying to decode what was being said. He screwed up his eyes.

“The rat catcher?”

“The one . . . the one you’ve been expecting. . . .”

Avignon stared at the superintendent. Was the penny ever going to drop?

“Yes, the one you’ve been expecting . . . the man you asked us to . . .”

“My God!” exclaimed Boulard, leaping to his feet. “I’m coming.”

He rushed over to the door. Ethel was stunned. So she wasn’t the only person on whom that rat catcher had made such a big impression.

“This is an emergency. I do apologize, Mademoiselle. Good-bye.”

He told Avignon to follow him. And disappeared.

Once outside, Ethel walked along the river as far as the Pont Neuf, stopping in the middle of the bridge under a street lamp. She climbed over the handrail and got onto the small ledge that jutted out over the eddying Seine.