The Snow Kimono (4 page)

When Jovert awoke later that morning, his bedside light was on. He reached for his
cigarettes, saw the crumpled photograph waiting for him beneath the lamp. He picked
it up. Smoothed it out. Her face looked back at him now through a web of pale, thin
creases.

He lay there thinking. About the photograph. About the night before—Omura. He tried
to recall, exactly, what Omura had said, what he had been wearing, every floating
gesture of his hand, every intonation of his voice. Most of it he could retrieve.
But when he tried to recall what Omura had said to him after he had turned to walk
back down the snow-covered path, he could not.

He leaned over, flicked the ash from his cigarette into the cup on his bedside table.
Once again, he circled back. And once again he found himself teetering on the brink
of the same abyss, staring into the same void. All he could see before him was the
image of Omura and his little daughter walking down the path, away from him. He watched
them recede into the falling snow, until they disappeared.

He lay in his bed, the smoke from his cigarette curling lazily towards the ceiling
the only thing in the room that moved.

It had been winter when Jovert first saw the apartment. Early evening. The agent
had been late. Jovert was forced to wait in the cold.

When he finally arrived, the agent, an astonishingly fat man, grasped his hand. He
was wearing a voluminous olive-green suit. His cheeks were flushed. He had begun
to sweat.

The Metro, the Metro, he said, pointing to the stairs.

The man would not look Jovert in the eye. Instead, his mad gaze seemed to bounce
off him. Jovert watched it skid across the road and up the wall of the building opposite.

The apartment? Jovert said.

Yes, yes, the apartment, the man said. He spoke to Jovert’s shirt front, ran a finger
around his damp collar.

Then they were inside, waiting for the lift.

The apartment opened directly onto a sitting room. It was larger than Jovert had
expected. On the far side of the room, beyond two glassed doors, a small balcony.
Two old, once elegant leather sofas sat facing each other. A frayed Oriental carpet,
its reds and blues muted in the lamplight. Against one
wall, an enormous, squat-legged
cabinet, the dimpled grey surface of which looked as though it had been carved from
elephant hide.

The advertisement had said:
Apartment for sale. As is.

There were two bedrooms. A small, dated kitchen.

Then they were out on the balcony.

The view, the view, the agent was saying. Jovert nodded. He had heard it all before.

He had turned distractedly to look in the other direction. It was then that he saw
it, the thing that would make all the apartment’s charmlessness seem irrelevant,
temporary, surmountable. Two hundred metres away, suspended against the dimming,
sickle-mooned sky, hovered the floodlit image of a golden-winged youth, fleeing,
Nijinsky-like, across a dark and chimney-potted plain.

Of course, he thought, the Bastille Column. The Spirit of Liberty, Dumont’s gilded
youth standing naked on top of it. He remembered a school assignment he had written
about it. How the statue had almost toppled to the ground when it was being hoisted
into place, the boy’s golden wings useless against its fall.

He stood looking at this magical form, at its newly polished wings, the boy’s triumphantly
upraised torch, the broken chains that had once shackled him, the six-pointed star
above his head. Here was a different kind of Icarus. Permanently frozen, improbable,
ludicrous perhaps, but magical nonetheless.

Victor Hugo lived nearby, the agent was saying.

I’ll take it, Jovert said.

The agent stopped talking.

You will? he said.

Bewildered, he turned to look in the same direction as Jovert.

I see, he said.

But he didn’t, hadn’t, and probably never would.

Now Jovert was standing in the bathroom, leaning down, looking at his face in the
mirror. He ran his hand across his stubbled chin. He pulled each eyelid down, examined
the whites of each eye. He touched the wound where his head had hit the gutter. He
pictured the impact, his head rebounding silently off the curb’s concrete edge, the
broken-fleshed furrow slowly filling with blood, saw its first small overflowing,
saw the first crimson drop drop to the roadway. The wound had crusted over now. He
ran the tips of his fingers cautiously across its jagged surface.

He sat on the edge of the bath, undid the brace on his knee. The swelling had begun
to subside but the bruising looked worse than ever. It reminded him of something
by Monet.

Fifteen minutes later he was back in his living room, drawing the curtains aside.
It was early, the sky churlish. Banks of cloud the colour of egg white hung low and
flat on the horizon. In the guttered lee of the dome of St Paul’s sat a row of dismal
pigeons.

He made himself a pot of coffee. He carried first it, then a cup, out onto the balcony.
Below him, where the street curved around to Place de la Bastille, a solitary green-and-white
street-cleaning machine was crawling along the curb. The monotonous drone of its
engine floated up to him. A man, tall, thin, North African, wearing overalls and
a cap, carrying a long green-bristled broom, was jiving along beside it.

It occurred to him that to see his inability to recall what Omura had said the night
before—after he had turned to walk back down the path—as a gap, a void, was the wrong
way to see things. What he should do was not to search for what had dropped out of
his memory, but to look more closely at what had come so insistently to inhabit it—the
image of Omura and his little daughter standing on the snow-covered path.

He spent much of the rest of the day moving from his balcony to the kitchen, to the
sofa, to his bedroom, smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking about this. About
the letter, the accident. Omura. He picked up the photograph from his bedside table,
put it down, picked it up—stared into her eyes.

As the day wore on, he became more and more convinced that later that evening Omura
would appear outside his door once again, unannounced and uninvited. In his present
frame of mind, Omura was the last person he wanted to see. He decided he would go
to watch the Bastille Day fireworks after all. Besides, he had just remembered—it
was his birthday. He was sixty-three.

Chapter 3

THAT evening, at nine, Jovert picked up his keys from the kitchen table. He put on
his coat, gathered up his crutches, and stepped out into the corridor. He could hear
the clack-clack-clack of a typewriter coming from the floor beneath him. As the lift
descended, the sound rose for a moment, then drifted away above his head.

On the darkening street, the same mist-like rain. It had been like this for almost
a week now. Clumps of people were moving beneath the saffron-haloed streetlamps.
He joined the slow tide drifting Bastille-wards in the cataracted light.

Ten minutes later he was standing under the awning of Le Bar l’Anise. Chairs knelt
like penitents against the polished rims of the tabletops outside. Through the window,
he saw that the café was still only half-full.

When he opened the door, the sudden sound of people
talking, laughter, a glass breaking,
flooded past him. A group of men at the far end of the bar looked over at him, nodded.
He recognised some of their faces. They were former colleagues, from Special Operations
Branch—riot police, anti-terrorists, bomb disposal. Normally they’d be padded up
like armadillos. Now, in civilian clothes, they appeared almost weightless. He saw
them take in his crutches, saw them filing this piece of information away, for later,
for tomorrow, for when he wasn’t there. Did you see Jovert? On crutches? Not sorry.
Some people
never
forgave you. Besides, you retire. Things change. You’re no longer
one of them. It was almost a treacherous act to leave. More treacherous. He was surprised
how quickly the phone had stopped ringing. If it ever had.

He chose an empty table by the window and ordered a bottle of Gigondas. Daudet, the
owner, tall, thin, thin-faced, in his fifties, with bulging, hurt eyes, came over.

Daudet was an old acquaintance. Two years earlier his only son had been killed in
a freak car accident. There had been a police investigation. A gun found hidden in
the glove compartment. There was some issue about what his son had been up to. Jovert
had helped it go away. There was nothing to find, in any case. A gun—hidden? Not
hidden? Who knew whose it was? It could have been anyone’s. Unregistered, untraceable.
No criminal record. Nowhere to go.

A year ago, he’d heard that Daudet’s wife had died. Of grief, cancer, resignation?
He didn’t know. He remembered her—vivacious, dark-skinned, part Dutch, part Indonesian.
A mole above her right eye. She had always been friendly to him: Hello, Mister Inspector
Jo-Jo. You like a table? How is business? If only she knew.

Now he looked around the bar. Gone were the shadow puppets from the walls, the gamelan
music, the advertisements for Bintang beer. Only the name had remained unchanged.
Le Bar l’Anise. Some people never knew.

So, Daudet said, picking up one of his crutches. Citroën?

Jovert laughed.

No, he said. It was a Fiat.

Ah,
les Italiens
. And let me guess. He didn’t stop.

No, he stopped, Jovert said. He stretched out his leg. It’s nothing really. A scratch.
It could have been worse.

Yes, Daudet said. He could have been Swiss.

He gave a short laugh, flicked his tea towel over his shoulder. He leaned down and
picked up Jovert’s bottle, topped up his glass.

We don’t see much of you these days, he said. I heard you had retired.

Jovert nodded.

You know, I never thought I’d see the day. Jovert, Inspector of Police, retired.
It’s hard to believe.

He shrugged. What could he say. He had never thought he’d see the day himself.

Life, Daudet said, and walked off.