“He didn’t give her that life. But I can promise you the filmmaker never forgot her.”
I could see from the bar into the lobby, the same lobby my subminister Platon passed through to the hotel’s salon, to have his hair dyed (or someone else’s hair dyed, or synthetic hair dyed). Platon had brought his mistress from Vincennes to this hotel, but not regularly. The rooms were quite expensive.
Lucien was on his third martini. I was counting. One more and he would pass out when we returned to the apartment. Meaning I could work or sleep unmolested.
I was also on my third martini, but I hold my liquor fine (except I get a bit of insomnia from overdrinking, nothing that can’t be fixed with American sedatives).
Lucien and Serge both looked over as a group entered the bar: an ancient man, a middle-aged woman, and four young adults.
“It’s Claude Perdriel,” Lucien said, as the man came over to say hello to him.
There were polite introductions. He and his family were here for a late meal in the bar, having just flown in from the Maldives.
Family friends, Lucien explained as a waiter seated them on the other side of the room. Claude Perdriel had started a magazine, Lucien said, Le Nouvel Observateur. He was in his eighties. His wife was in her forties.
The idea of living one continuous existence for that many years baffled me. He looked vigorous and healthy despite his age, despite having just flown in from the Maldives.
“What’s his secret?” I asked.
“Money,” Vito said.
“His money is no secret,” Serge said. “He made it in bathroom fixtures.”
“A tub and toilet man,” Vito said.
Vito said this was what he loved about the Hotel Meurice. You never knew whom you’d see. Politicians—last time it was former prime minister Lionel Jospin—and shady neocon pundits, Bernard-Henri Lévy with his shirt torn open to the waist.
“He gets them tailored without buttons,” Serge said. “A shirt, for Bernard-Henri Lévy, is just two shiny draping panels of fabric that pool together at his navel.”
“The Hotel Meurice is like a theater stage,” Vito said, “where we watch the important men of France order a very expensive hamburger.”
“That’s what Pascal ordered when I met him here,” Lucien said.
“Pascal Balmy hangs out at the Hotel Meurice?” Vito asked. “He’s supposed to be jumping turnstiles in the metro. Or smashing bank machines. What was he doing here?”
“The same thing we’re doing here, my love,” Serge said. “Watching Lucien greet the captains of industry, otherwise known as his people.”
“It’s the same for Pascal,” Lucien said. “He and I were sitting here, and two judges and a minister walk in. They come over, shake hands with Pascal, cordial and familiar. Friends of his father’s. None of these people are strangers. The most powerful people in France come in here. And Pascal’s connected to them whether he likes it or not.”
I looked over at Claude Perdriel, just in from the Maldives, eating with his good-looking family. I watched the impeccably suited older men in club chairs, leaning forward, conversing in pairs.
These men ran industrial conglomerates. Any of them might have bought up land in the Guyenne, which could turn them a huge profit. Or cause them a huge loss, if the state’s infrastructure project was halted.
The men in this bar were exercising their social connections to the judges and ministers who also came here, to advance their economic interests. And no doubt these men advanced their interests in other ways too. By hiring consultants and spies. By keeping close track of those who threatened their interests, like the contacts who had hired me were keeping close track of theirs, contacts who were concerned with the remote Guyenne Valley, so curiously concerned with a minor bureaucrat who was not of their league.
I looked around the Hotel Meurice bar at these various men, casual, discreet, with an air of refinement, of insulation from harm. My thought was that any of them could have been behind this job, could have been my true and actual boss.
And if my secret bosses were not here in this bar tonight, right now, they might as well have been. Because this was what the people I was working for looked like. This was who they were.
VI
GET LUCKY
IN 1939, LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, writer, physician, war hero, invalid, anti-Semite, and author of novels full of grammatical ellipses (a punctuation mark meant to simulate, or so he claimed, the sound of “hissing”), was hired as a ship’s doctor on a French passenger vessel requisitioned to transport troops between Casablanca and Marseille.
This was before France surrendered to Germany. Céline loved Hitler and secretly rooted for the Germans, but he was bored and so he signed up to help the war effort against them.
I’d read about this one morning at the kitchen table of the Dubois house, from a torrid biography I’d found in a cupboard, a six-hundred-page volume that was puffy from water damage. On its cover was a garish photo. It was Céline, but he looked like an actor in a made-for-TV movie about some swashbuckling historical figure.
Céline was on his third round-trip excursion, performing medical duties on the passenger ship, when it rammed a British torpedo gunboat near Gibraltar. Céline’s ship was going full speed as it plowed into the gunboat, which exploded in a fireball. The collision was an accident; the torpedo boat was piloted by France’s official allies.
Does it matter to the consequences if something is “an accident”? The torpedo boat sank, and everyone on board drowned. Céline’s passenger ship was fine and kept going.
That is what I would call very good luck. It was the kind of luck one could never count on or expect, to T-bone a gunboat and, boom, keep going. But I seemed to be having pretty good luck myself.
I’d been on watch for Robert the Terrible, with no new encounters, thinking I’d effectively scared him off. I imagined him trying to find a way to mention to Agathe that he had taken out a life insurance policy on her.
And then Lucien informed me that Robert was in a hospital in Limoges, in some kind of diabetic coma. Lucien had spoken to Agathe, who reported this.
I thought of his pointy eyeballs.
It was true he had not looked well, I said, adopting a compassionate tone.
Agathe told Lucien that Robert had been in kidney dialysis. His health was now in a state of collapse, and Agathe didn’t know what was next. A priest was being summoned to the hospital.
I almost felt God was smiling down on me. A coma. Limoges (Limoges was hours from here). But since there is no God, it was luck, pure luck.
Robert was gravely ill. And Agathe would be tied up at his bedside.
