Due Preparations for the Plague (11 page)

“The Australian woman,” he asked the ticket girl. “Did you see where she went? I’m going to Australia on business soon, and I’d like to ask her advice.”

“She went that way, monsieur.” The ticket girl pointed to the escalator going down to the underground concourse. “
Bonne chance, monsieur
.”

He searched every bar and bistro and bookshop in that subterranean limbo without seeing her. Though the flight was not for hours, he concluded she must have gone back up to the check-in level, must have gone through security already. He was on the up escalator, his field of vision extended, when he caught a glimpse of her, below, still on the underground level. She was at the limit of the concourse, at the point where it sucked itself into a long tunnel that led to the domestic terminals. He felt suddenly weightless and free. He believed, for a moment, he could fly. He ran back down the up escalator.

Weaving between the fast-food tables, he lurched against a man who was holding a baby in his arms. A little girl in a blue coat screamed. He swerved to avoid a man with bucket and mop. He could still see Génie. She was examining the scarves on a turnstile at a Silk Route boutique.

That was when he was stopped and taken into a small room.

“It should not be a difficult question, monsieur.”

“What?” He blinks at the policeman. “Uh …” He waits for a prompt, but his interrogator offers no help. “I’m sorry. What did you ask?”

“We are very interested in the reason for so much travel.”

“So much …?” He plays the sentence back to himself and finds he knows the answer. “My work. My work requires a lot of travel.”

“You have just returned from Prague.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“On business. There was a literary festival. I’m a publisher.”

“And before Prague, Germany.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The Frankfurt Book Fair is next month. I had to make arrangements in advance for our display. As I told you, I’m a publisher.”

“Ah yes. So your papers claim. We have not heard of this publishing house.”

“No. I would be surprised if you had.” Monsieur Charron makes an effort not to give offense. “I don’t imagine that the kind of book I publish would interest you.”

“What kind of book is that, Monsieur Charron?”

“Not the kind you can buy at airports.” He avoids direct comment on the reading habits of the gendarmerie. “Highbrow,” he says, with a rueful apologetic shrug.

“Ah, yes, of course. Literature.” The policeman makes the word sound lascivious and faintly
louche
.

“
Belles lettres
. Yes.”

“And this festival in Prague. Why does that interest you?”

“I publish several East European writers in translation.”

“Ah yes, of course. You meet with the translators.”

“No. I meet with the writers. The translators all live here in Paris.”

“They have close ties, of course, with Eastern Europe?”

“The translators? I suppose. I know nothing about their personal lives. They freelance for all the publishers, big and small.”

“And you are small.”

“Very small.”

“But distinguished, naturally.”

Monsieur Charron raises his eyebrows, but says nothing.

“And yet, in spite of this smallness, there is always money.”

Tristan frowns. “You seem to have heard of me after all, gentlemen.”

“We are making an assumption,” one of the gendarmes says, “because of so much travel.”

“Like all small literary houses, I survive on smoke and mirrors and cultural grants.”

“Grants from foreign governments?”

“When I’m lucky. Also grants from our own Ministry of Culture.”

“To visit Prague these days, monsieur, one must either have close contacts with the Communists or with the dissidents, who have close ties to certain dissident groups in France. Your books, monsieur”—and there is definitely a provocative innuendo, an edge of contempt—“your very literary books, they all have political topics.”

“Not usually, no. Or not in any ordinary sense. I publish fiction.”

“Oh, of course, fiction. And Algeria. Why Algeria?”

“I have a couple of Algerian writers. They live in Paris.”

“Algerians in Paris have a violent record, monsieur.”

“A handful of Algerian extremists do. None of them writers, as far as I’ve heard.”

“They have many sympathizers, monsieur. So what is the reason for your visit to Algeria?”

Tristan raises his eyebrows. “I’m not going to Algeria.”

“Ostensibly not, monsieur, as we see from your ticket. Though one of your Algerian writers, the woman, who was originally scheduled for this flight, appears to have been in some confusion about its destination. She has since canceled her reservation, but we intercepted a communication of hers.”

Tristan stares at them. “I don’t know what this is about,” he says. “I have met the writer herself only once. We discussed Camus.”

“You are aware that she has ties to the extremists?”

“No. I find it hard to believe. In any case, I don’t concern myself with the politics of the books I publish. She wrote a fine novel.”

“About a little Arab boy who grew up in the eighteenth arrondissement.”

“I must compliment you, gentlemen,” Tristan says dryly. “You are very well read.”

“In the novel, the Algerian is sent to a French prison where he causes a riot.”

“It is about his sexuality,” Tristan says. “Not his politics.”

“Ah yes. His violent sexuality. And your earlier visits to Algiers?”

“I’ve never been to Algeria.”

“And Morocco?”

“Morocco? The last time I was in Morocco I was a child on summer vacation with my parents.”

“I’m afraid we must ask you to come with us, monsieur.”

“But I don’t understand. What is this about? My Algerian writer?” It seems to Tristan, now that he looks around, that there are many more police than usual at the airport. “What’s going on?” he asks.

“Precautions, monsieur. Standard precautions.” He is required to accompany the gendarmes for quite some distance down the long tunnel that leads to parking, and then down another level in an elevator, and then along a corridor that turns several times and seems to be without end. In the small interrogation room, the policemen lock the door. “We note, Monsieur Charron, that you have purchased your ticket to fly to New York only within the last hour. Why is that?”

Will I tell them the truth? he wonders. Will I say: Because of a woman. Because yesterday I saw a woman I had not seen for five years. Because today, and yesterday, and the day before that, I saw a woman in the Place des Vosges … no; I
think
I saw a woman I once knew intimately. But the night before that, I was roughed up in Prague and so it is possible—and he tries to imagine himself admitting it—it is possible that I have summoned her up out of loss and desire.

He is not about to mention what happened in Prague.

Will he say: I bought a ticket because I just received a secret message from this woman. I have no idea how it reached me, but I am ludicrously superstitious (it comes from my Catalan grandmother, and I seem unable to cure myself, even though I would die of intellectual shame if the proclivity were made known in the publishing precincts of the boulevard St. Germain); because I am superstitious, and three times is a sign.

He frowns. How do they know he has just bought his ticket? The airlines report last-minute purchases? But if so, how could they learn so much about him so quickly? They were watching the ticket desks for him? Because of his Algerian writer? Because of Prague? Because of the manuscripts from Eastern Europe which he has published under pseudonymous names? Minimal research would tell them that publishers—in certain circumstances, for their own protection, by design—know few details about the personal lives of their writers. So they have been following him, then, but for how long? He recalls the click of the camera in Place de l’Opéra.

“We are waiting for an explanation, Monsieur Charron.”

“I was not aware,” he says angrily, ill-advisedly, “that French citizens have to give a reason for travel.”

“In exceptional circumstances, monsieur, French citizens are answerable to the law.”

“And how do I come to be an exceptional circumstance?” Monsieur Charron demands.

“We are not at liberty to disclose, monsieur, the particular details of the exceptional circumstances. But we advise you to give us the reason for this very sudden decision to fly to New York.”

“So soon,” the second policeman says, “after you met with certain writers in Frankfurt and Prague.”

“And so quickly after your Algerian writer canceled her reservation,” the first one reminds, “for this flight.”

“I know nothing about that,” Tristan says.

“So what is your reason for choosing this flight, monsieur?”

“No reason,” he says. “A whim.”

“Ah.” They exchange a significant look. They inspect his passport again. “A whim. As in your name.”

“That’s right,” he says, amused. “
Une tocade
.”

“Tristan Tocade Charron. A curious name, monsieur.”

“Is it? Tocade is my mother’s family name.”

“We have reason to know, monsieur, that this is a code name.”

Monsieur Charron stares at them. “What?” He waits for a laugh, and when no one laughs, he begins to expect the gendarmes to levitate. He begins to expect the small table in the room to float. He begins to think Génie will rise out of somebody’s pocket like cigarette smoke. He begins to think he should get up and walk out of this dream. He stands.

“Please sit down, monsieur.”

He laughs uneasily. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

“You have been involved with a woman who works in Intelligence.”

“I have?” Tristan Charron laughs again. “You mean my Algerian writer.”

“No, monsieur. You know who we mean.”

They watch him impassively, waiting. The strangeness of the last twenty minutes now strikes him as ominous. A woman who works in Intelligence? Not Génie, surely? Certainly it cannot be Génie. The idea is ludicrous. But then again, what would be a more perfect cover than teaching English as a second language, on call around the world as it were, her clients often politicians, corporate leaders, the children of presidents? And is that what she really does? Is that a financial backup for the travel writing, or vice versa? Is the travel writing simply a hobby, an amusing sideline, as she has claimed? Or is it a complicated mask, this endless updating of information for some wildly successful publisher of guides for the footloose? He has considerable professional admiration for the
Wandering Earthling
series, a global success story from a shoestring operation, and an Australian one at that, of all the unlikely …

When he thinks about it, there has been a lot of talk, a lot of speculation in the publishing industry. How could this dark horse have come so far so fast? Who is bankrolling the series?

He tries to imagine Génie as the Wandering Earthling gathering data of an altogether different sort. He tries to imagine her as the bearer of messages from one government leader to another, messages transferred in coded grammar exercises in an English-as-Second-Language class. It does not seem probable.
The rain in the Ukraine falls mainly on the hijacked plane
.
Do you think the weather is propitious
?
I do not think so, we do not think so, they do not think the weather is propitious
. Tristan does not think any of this is likely.

The Génie he knows, or knew, could go astray between the Pont Louis Philippe and the Pont Marie. She could get lost in the Métro for twenty minutes between getting off the train and finding her way up to the street. She could be waylaid by children in a courtyard, or by an old man walking home with a baguette. “What could you possibly talk about for so long?” he would ask, exasperated. “To total strangers!”

“Imagine,” Génie would say. “All his life, that old man has been a
randonneur.
Just last year, he hiked for three days in the Pyrenees. He’s eighty! And he gave me the name of a farmhouse where hikers can stay.”

The idea of Génie gathering information that would matter to anyone other than a low-budget traveler is absurd. Then again, why had she disappeared?

Well, he knew the answer to that.

She disappeared because he had given a stupid ultimatum. I cannot live with a travel writer, he had said. I cannot live with a woman who is so often
not
in my bed. When you are gone, I wonder who you are sleeping with at night. I cannot sleep. It is intolerable, it torments me. It is not normal for a woman to live like that. He had been violent with jealousy. He had thrown things across the room.

You make me feel caged, she had said. You are right, she said. So much distrust is intolerable.

Either you stop being a travel writer, he shouted, or you leave.

And she had left. She had vanished without a trace.

But she left because he had been stupid, not for espionage. Surely not? No. Not Génie. Then who?

“You know who we mean, monsieur,” the policeman repeats. “You know very well.”

Does he? Nothing is making sense. Nothing much has been making any sense at all since Prague.

He suddenly remembers Françoise, whom he still bumps into from time to time. Long ago—well, a decade ago, when they were both students at the Sorbonne—it had often seemed to him that they were followed. A jealous former boyfriend, he assumed. A single moment comes back now with a force that winds him. They are in a bistro on the rue Clovis, behind the Panthéon, and Françoise has provocatively raised her skirt. She slides two fingers under the top of her stocking. Her suspender makes a small snapping sound against her skin. She does this demurely. She wears stockings and suspenders solely because he has asked her to, but she makes it clear that the request irritates her, and so she punishes him, teasing him in public. Under the bistro table, he slides his hand up her stockinged thigh. And then there is the soft pop of a flashbulb. But when he turns, all he can see is a bland-faced American tourist with a camera.