On Leave (14 page)

A man came into the room, smiled at the young woman, and sat down next to her. He was around forty, with thinning hair at the front and a gold tooth glinting from the side of his mouth like a fang when he smiled. The barman came in his wake, bearing two glasses of spirits and a dish of sugar lumps.

“This is the right place?” Lachaume asked Valette in a whisper.

Valette was sure.

They watched the young woman out of the corner of their eyes, and she also glanced at them while her friend told her some long story, whispering in her ear.

“Maybe the guy is waiting for Lasteyrie as well?” Valette mouthed.

The man did indeed seem to have his eye on them while he was talking to the young woman, with his fat hand resting on her shoulder.

“Do you think so?” Lachaume responded after a pause.

“It's like an English joke,” Valette said, with a forced laugh.

“Which one?”

“Two Englishmen walked into a bar…” Valette began, but at that point the party door creaked open at the push of a gray seal winkle-picker, closely followed by the bottom of a gray-blue pinstripe trouser leg without turnups. The shoe kept nudging the creaking door, while its owner appeared to be detained on the other side by a chance conversation. A last kick pushed the door wide open, and Lasteyrie appeared in full in a magnificent pinstripe suit, carrying a handy-sized suitcase that he quickly slid behind the bench seat once he'd glanced at the woman and the balding man.

“How's it going, lads?” he shouted, giving his right hand to Lachaume to shake and using his left to pinch the cheek of Valette, who whistled with admiration. “Life is great, right?”

Then he turned toward the partition wall, cupped his hand to his mouth, put his clenched hand on his hip, put on a comical sideways posture, and shouted, “Hey, boss! Bring it on! Limelight!”

Two neon tubes lit up one after the other.

“Thank you!” Lasteyrie shouted back, giving a little bow, with his hand on his chest, like a performer in a music hall.

“You don't look like you're enjoying yourselves!” he said as he sat astride a chair facing Lachaume and Valette. His small, dark, and shining eyes darted from one to the other and farther afield, to the girl, to the balding man, to the billiard players at the back. “So you splurged and had a good time? Tell us all about it, for heaven's sake!”

“How about you?” Valette said. “Have you had a good time?”

“Like crazy! And I ain't gonna stop now!… You're welcome to come along,” he added, with a glance at the blond woman, who smiled back.

Lachaume was quite certain, in any case, that Lasteyrie, the woman, and the balding man were well acquainted. It was intuitive, but there was no room for doubt. It all looked very fishy: the place, Lasteyrie's jolliness, and especially the suitcase that he'd slipped between the wall and the bench. Lachaume could see the handle if he leaned to the side.

“Are you moving house?” he asked.

“Yep,” Lasteyrie said, ogling the young woman. “I'm looking for a perch. I'm just a weeny sparrer of no fixed … And don't you laugh!” he concluded, though nobody had done anything of the sort.

Lachaume thought it sounded like some kind of code.

“What about the match?” Valette said. “We need to get tickets first…”

“We've got time,” Lasteyrie interrupted. “Time for a drink. Boss!”

He clapped his hands to summon the waiter, and without pausing turned toward the young woman and carried on clapping. Then he bowed his head and explained, supposedly to his companions:

“I'm applauding Lady Love! I mean the True and Only Lady Love: the one that comes to a man free of obligation!” He raised his index finger. “Free of military obligation, that is. Discharged from duty!”

The balding man smiled.

“You're not being kind to your soldier friend.”

“Oh, him,” Lasteyrie responded, glancing at Valette. “He's fighting the Hundred Years' War.”

“What about you?” the bald man asked. “You got fallen arches or something?”

“I've finished!” Lasteyrie declared, laughing for no obvious reason.

The waiter came with glasses of rum.

“What about the basketball?” Valette said. “We'd better get a move on.”

“We've got time,” Lasteyrie said. “These things always start late. Then there's the anthems.”

It seemed a good enough reason, and Valette quieted down.

“Come here,” Lasteyrie suddenly said, putting his hand on Valette's shoulder. “Closer. I'm not going to shout. You see this bar? Well, you can bring a chick here. Between six and eight on weekdays the back room's usually empty. But I'm going to show you something. You sit on the bench like the guy and his girl, only on the other side. From there you can see in the mirror if anyone's coming in from behind you, from the billiard room, and through that gap there you can see if the boss or anyone is coming through the main door. Got that?”

“Yes,” Valette said. “What are you telling me that for?”

“No reason,” Lasteyrie said. “Just a handy tip. Gratis and for free.

“I hope you know the taxiphone trick, at least?” he went on in a whisper. “Come closer, both of you. It's worth knowing … You put in the token, you dial, and when it rings, instead of pressing button A, you hit the box on the left. Guaranteed result: your token comes back out, but you get the call. That trick gets you free calls for life for just thirty francs.”

Valette opened his eyes wide.

“Want me to show you?” Lasteyrie said.

“Wow!”

“So who are we going to call?” Lasteyrie asked.

They sat opposite each other with dreamy eyes, trying to think whom they could call. Lachaume tried as well, to help them out, as if he were joining in a children's game. And suddenly Paris seemed so unknown to him that his heart shrank. Lasteyrie saved the day.

“The talking clock,” he said. “That's the whore we need. She says yes to everybody.”

“Watch my kit bag,” he added, to Lachaume. “It's got all my worldly wealth inside.”

So off they went to call the talking clock.

To keep better watch on the suitcase—at least that was his excuse—Lachaume hauled it up onto the bench. “I see,” he said to himself. “It's heavy.” He took the thought no further. At any rate, he didn't admit to doing so, except to say to himself, in these exact words: “If anyone knows how to go underground in Paris, then it's Lasteyrie.”

They were already back from the phone trick.

“It's incredible, what he does!” Valette whispered to Lachaume.

“You can show him later,” Lasteyrie said so seriously that Lachaume was suddenly sorry he hadn't thought it worth getting up to see. After all, they're twenty-year-olds, just kids, he said to himself. But he was at sea.

“Work out how much I've already saved you!” Lasteyrie said insistently. “And don't say I'm not a brother.”

“Whoever said you aren't a brother?” Lachaume said.

Lasteyrie shrugged and waved two fingers in a strange gesture the others didn't recognize. It looked like an incomplete salute.

“Come on!” Lachaume repeated. “Who said that?”

“All right, all right,” he drawled. “Don't get upset on my account … Keep your eyes peeled instead.” He nodded toward the girl and the bald man.

What was happening was quite manifestly the slow start of a love affair. When each lent a light to the other, they stroked hands. You could reckon the time it would take (Lachaume thought so, anyway) to get from stroking a hand to stroking a neck, and the next, and the next. The man wasn't in a hurry. Perhaps he was relying on time to improve his fat face in the girl's eyes and to change the golden fang gleaming on one side of his mouth into a delicate pearl. Perhaps he was shy and awkward. But what Lachaume thought beautiful about this almost ridiculously ill-matched pair was the amount of time they had before them, and between them. For the gentleman had no military obligations!

Astride his chair Lasteyrie raised a finger and lectured:

“Forty years old. Bachelor. Strong as an ox. Watch out, my good man! Five or six years down the road and you'll still be good enough to serve in the Desert TA and patrol the highway somewhere between Tank 5 and Aïn Séfra. So watch out! Hurry up and get married and have lots of kids. Because,” he added, turning to the young woman, “each child is worth two years' deferment of military service. Look to it, ladies and gentlemen! Get to work ASAP!”

“Take a taxi!” Valette added, trying to be witty.

The man was furious.

“You think that's funny?” he yelled, making as if to stand.

“No,” Lasteyrie said, with a half-bow. “I wasn't joking. Just giving friendly advice. Word of honor.”

The owner opened the door a chink and, like a good manager, tried to quiet things down without taking sides.

“All right, all right,” Lasteyrie sighed. “You're just an ungrateful…”

“And just who are you talking about?” the bald one shouted.

“I was referring to Paris,” Lasteyrie said. “I was saying Paris is thankless.” And he hummed an old Maurice Chevalier refrain:

Adieu, Paree!

I'm leaving for the countree …

He couldn't keep still, and his black eyes darted all over the place.

“By the way,” he said, “you can forget about the basketball. It's ten-thirty-five.”

Lachaume and Valette moaned and groaned and checked the time twice over, but Lasteyrie was right. They were saying farewell to the game they had loved and played—Lachaume for Paris University, Valette for the Workers' Sports Federation (Lasteyrie always added an obscenity, as he'd played for the Olympic Club at Billancourt). Three clubs and three logos that had been the subject of passionate arguments not so long ago. And wasn't basketball the very basis of their friendship? They remembered that day in Koblenz, long ago, when they'd got all the basketball players together. Now they talked about the game as if it were someone who'd introduced them to each other and then died; they lowered their voices as if they were leaving a cemetery.

“And we became proper buddies!” Valette nodded. “Buddies like most people don't have…”

There was a special quality to the silence that reigned between them at that moment. Lasteyrie put his head in his hands and stroked his sideburns without thinking.

The young woman and the man stood up and left the room. As she went out, she gave Lasteyrie a smile. And as soon as the door swung closed behind the couple, he shouted, “Forward march! She's all wrapped up.”

“What about the guy?”

“She's going to give him the slip, obviously … Forward march! Forward march!” he repeated, seizing his case by the handle.

Lachaume and Valette fell in, but at the last moment Lasteyrie seemed to hesitate. His eyes swept the room, then he drummed two fingers on the aging leatherette of the bench seat, shrugged, and with the same two fingers made that half-salute that his friends still didn't really understand.

“Forward!” he said as he kicked the door open.

They followed the couple at a distance as far as Boulevard de Grenelle. The dark façades of the buildings were illuminated by lights from the windows of the elevated metro thundering past over their heads. It was drizzling, and the streets were empty as they usually are on the day after a bank holiday.

Lasteyrie gave Lachaume his case to carry and put himself between his two chums, putting his arms in theirs, making them speed up or slow down, and now and again he put all his weight on them so as to emphasize what he was saying by stamping the pavement with the heels of his gray sealskin moccasins.

“Just you wait,” he would say. “They'll part, she'll pretend to go into the metro station, and as soon as the bloke is out of sight, she'll come back out in a flash … And what's she going to say when she sees my mug?

“What she will say,” he went on in falsetto, “is this: I forgot my gloves … And, like a greenhorn, you'll just have to go…”

“Where to?” Valette asked.

“To fetch her gloves,” Lasteyrie said. “No way out of it.”

“Why should he?” Lachaume asked.

His early suspicions had been reawakened. It sounded like a put-up job.

“Milady has her dignity to consider! Her gloves must be retrieved!”

“But why does Valette have to go and get them?” Lachaume asked.

Lasteyrie stood still.

“My oh my, are you thick!” he said, with his fists on his hips. “I am making a supposition,” he went on pedagogically, “that the chick, once she's given her bloke the slip, will toddle back. I'm telling you, she'll invent absolutely anything so as not to have to say she came back for you. Got it?”

“Okay,” he continued, leaning on his buddies' arms. “When a bird gives you that kind of blarney, the trick, don't you see, is to come over all eager, Duke of Windsor–style. You go look for the glove like you're sure you're going to find it. When I was a kid and just beginning, I tried to be smart. I would put my arm around the bird's waist and say, Who cares about your glove or your scarf (it was one or the other) since we're together now, and other rubbish of that kind, and I got a slap in the face more than once, I can tell you! Oh! Paris chicks!” he said, stamping his heels. “What a pretentious bunch! They're not nice! You just can't imagine … If you marry one, she'll go on pretending she really had lost her glove, and on her dying day she'll still insist it was true. But maybe it's better that way, isn't it? Anyway, I used to like it,” he concluded hoarsely. He stopped to clear his throat.

“What did you like?” Lachaume asked.

“The whole lot of 'em,” he said, with half a salute. “Basically, you're a pair of novices,” he went on, taking them by the arm. “Don't argue, I know what I'm talking about. You had your nose in your books, and you, boy-o, you were in the Scouts.”