If this guy was somehow watching me, I was going to put a stop to it right now.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m putting fuel in my car,” he replied. “I drive it, which causes the tank to empty. Then it has to be refilled.”
“I saw you in Vantôme,” I said.
“Vantôme? I have been to Vantôme. But not frequently.”
He put the nozzle back in its resting position on the pump and closed his gas cap.
“Are you following me?” I asked.
His smile did not change. Mild, inscrutable. The kind of smile that could drive a person to rage.
“But why would I follow you?” he asked in a soft voice, as if he had lowered it so others would not hear.
“You tell me,” I said.
“You’re a stranger to me, madame. I have no recollection of you. I have never followed you. I do not know you. But I think I know your type.”
“What type is that?”
“You are paranoid,” he said with a demonically neutral smile.
He got into his car and started it, commencing that hideous movie music. As he drove away, I realized he was correct about my mild and temporary paranoia, which had already lifted.
I felt relieved. I felt glad. Glad to be paranoid instead of followed and watched.
Today was Thursday, and instead of translation work at Le Moulin, we were all involved in planning. The fair was two days away. The Moulinards would set up a staging area from which to descend onto the D79 after Platon arrived.
“How on earth will this guy not know about the protest?” Aurélie asked a group of us at lunch.
Because French intelligence is withholding that vital information from him, I did not say.
I was leaving lunch when Pascal pulled me aside. He asked if I’d heard anything more from Hélène de Marche.
I said I had not.
He asked how long I’d worked for her, and where she lived.
As I answered, I saw the little boutiques of Vincennes, the nannies pushing strollers, the young people walking dogs for hire, all of which I’d observed, and so I was able to insert myself in a familiar scene and depict it casually. I described my days, my route through the park, where I ate my lunch, the bookstore I stopped in sometimes, before I got on the metro to go back to Lucien’s.
I was doing a lot of work, more work than I should have to. But I felt Pascal wanted this display from me, needed to believe he could trust me.
He listened as I rehearsed my dog walker’s bona fides. My Vincennes bona fides.
“It’s strange,” he said, just as I thought my trial was over, and I could relax.
It would have been nice to have another beer. I’d put some in my car.
“What is?” I asked.
“It’s a striking coincidence. Platon coming here. And you knowing about it.”
“What I’ve always appreciated about this concept of coincidence,” I said, “is how it reifies our search for causality, our need to establish logical connections among disparate events.”
Pascal himself was always making these kinds of statements, magisterial claims that didn’t mean anything if you examined them.
He bit his lip, thinking on this.
“But one thing I’ve come to understand as causal, not a coincidence,” I went on, “about the people whose dogs I walked, about a certain layer of Parisian society, and honestly, about what I have gotten myself involved with—Lucien, his family, and frankly you’re part of that world, Pascal—what I’ve come to understand is that when people like you and Lucien know someone powerful, it’s not a coincidence at all.”
“I’ve never tried to hide what I come from,” he said.
“You know judges and captains of industry. While I know some woman who waits for a lowly bureaucrat. Actually, I know her dog.”
The comment about the dog made him laugh. But as I said it, I saw myself bending down on a winter sidewalk to pick up dog shit. Working part-time for some bimbo way out in Vincennes. While Pascal sat snug in the bar at the Hotel Meurice and I thought, Fuck you, Pascal.
“Having you here has meant a lot to me,” Pascal said.
Like most people, he was unable to read minds.
“You’re good at transposing our ideas and, frankly, I like having you around. After this book will come another, we have a lot of the material for it already. All we need is to convince Lucien to give up on the mediocre and compromised world of film, see it for what it is, and move here.”
Lucien and I would come and live on the commune, he said. René and his crew would build us a house.
Perhaps Lucien and I would have children, Pascal said. I might discover an aspect of life, and of myself, that was waiting to emerge.
