The Red Notebook (13 page)

To search for a woman using her stolen handbag for clues. None of the men she had known would ever have embarked on such an enterprise. Not her father, not Xavier. That said … she was sure Xavier would have taken the things out of a discarded handbag and looked at them, but would he have managed to track down their owner without ID or a phone? Just how had Laurent managed to trace her all the way back to her apartment, in fact? William said he had heard the bell, opened the door and found him standing on the landing. Laure was certain that nothing in her bag – apart from the purse – had her name on, still less her address. He said he had tried to phone several times – yes, her number was in the phone book, but he would have had to know her name to find it. All he had to go on was the Modiano book with the dedication inside. And that would only have provided her Christian name. Even using the patience and skills of deduction of a first-rate detective, he still wouldn’t have known her surname. He had gone so far as to pick up her strappy dress from the dry-cleaner’s, no doubt by matching the date in the diary with the one on the receipt – well observed, but no one at Aphrodite Dry-cleaner’s knew her surname or where she lived.

Come to think of it, I don’t know any more about him than he knew about me at the beginning: I’ve got nothing but a Christian name to go on, mused Laure as she got into the bubble bath she had run herself. The cat leapt up onto the side of the tub and posed statue-like in one corner, without taking his eyes off her.

‘You saw him, you know all about him. Tell me something,’ she pleaded.

The cat narrowed his golden eyes and stared at his mistress. Laure was reminded of the Egyptian goddess Bastet – Belphégor had adopted exactly the same pose. She closed her eyes. She had dreamt of this moment over the last few days in hospital, telling herself that as soon as she slipped under the orange-blossom bubbles, it would all be over. The scorching-hot water and foam surrounded her breasts and then her neck as she let her head slide down the tub until her ears went underwater. All outside noise was muffled and she found herself enveloped in warm, cocoon-like silence. Out of habit, she slipped her hand between her breasts but there was nothing there. Since the gold chain had snapped, she no longer wore anything around her neck. The little red enamel Fabergé egg pendant inherited from her mother was now safely stowed in a bedroom drawer. As for the Egyptian cartouche, she had attached it to her key ring.

Laure opened her eyes and pulled herself upright. The cartouche with the hieroglyphics. That was the one object that bore her surname.

Chloé looked at her father; he seemed to be put out and absent. He could not stop looking at the shelf of cat food, particularly the display of five blue packets of Virbac – ‘Adult cat –
au canard,
with duck’. Claire wasn’t in Paris, and Bertrand was at a photographic shoot. Laurent had been called in to help with Putin’s annual visit to the vet. The cat was on Chloé’s lap in his basket, giving intermittent little growls that Chloé immediately silenced by running her fingers along the wire. Perhaps she had been harsh when she told him the other night that he had been an idiot to terminate the bag saga in that way. She had been so disappointed that the whole beautiful search which she had participated in a little had ended with a letter to which Laure would not be able to respond. Laurent had been immovable. No, he shouldn’t have put his telephone number or email address at the end of the letter. He had to disappear, and cover his traces; on no account did he want to find himself having to answer the quite legitimate questions that the owner of the handbag would have for him. Perhaps it was excessive masculine caution. Or a misunderstanding of feminine psyche and its needs? Laurent had taken a route that not only offered an elegant solution but had also closed down the affair for ever.

‘Was there a cat over there too?’ said Chloé. It was as if she was referring to a far-off land where he would never go again, like those exiles who recall the land of their birth.

‘Yes,’ said Laurent seriously.

‘What was he like?’

‘Black.’

‘And what was the name again?’

‘Belphégor,’ replied Laurent.

‘Not the cat’s, hers.’

‘Valadier.’

‘Putin,’ said the vet loudly, coming into the waiting room.

Two ladies with little dogs looked up from their magazines and exchanged glances. One of them raised her eyebrows in consternation; the other shook her head.

‘Poor cat,’ one murmured.

As soon as he was out of the basket, Putin looked fierce and hissed at the vet.

‘He’s always so happy to see me,’ commented the vet, trying to sound jolly. ‘He’s a great advertisement for our profession, your cat.’

Laurent was looking at photos of animals pinned on the wall. Between a husky and a Norwegian cat, there was a black cat, still as a statue, staring into the lens and apparently waiting patiently.

Laure took a seat outside a café and ordered a noisette. Had she been a smoker, now would have been the moment to light up with that air of concentration adopted by all nicotine consumers as they take their first drag. Twelve bookshops, and not a single Laurent matching his description. She went back to her notes of William’s account: fairly tall, slim, light-brown hair, mid-forties, brown eyes.

The previous evening, she had made a list of all the local bookshops, immediately striking off L’Île en Livre and Fleur de Mots where she bought books regularly and knew all the staff either by name or sight. She was working on the basis that the thief had probably not crossed the whole of Paris to dump her bag, and therefore there was a strong possibility Laurent worked in the immediate area, or at least within the same arrondissement. The waiter brought Laure her coffee and she poured in a sachet of sugar. She had started with Au Fil des Pages, a bookshop five streets from where she lived.

‘Hello, bit of a strange question, but do you by any chance have a bookseller called Laurent working here?’

Laure had asked the same thing no less than eight times, softly and with an apologetic smile. In the end she met a total of four different Laurents. The first time the blonde girl answered, ‘Yes, of course, I’ll just call him down,’ she felt her stomach flip. The girl came out from behind the till and disappeared between the shelves.

‘Laurent,’ she called up the stairs. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’

‘He’s coming,’ she told Laure on her return, before moving on to serve the next customer.

A man in his forties with light-brown hair and little steel-rimmed glasses came down to greet her.

‘Hello, great to meet you at last!’ he exclaimed, holding out his hand. ‘Did you find it OK?’

Laure went quiet for a moment, feeling a little flustered. Then, holding his gaze, she smiled and told him actually it had not been plain sailing.

‘Tell me about it,’ he agreed, sounding exasperated. ‘Since they started the roadworks in the middle of the crossing it’s become much harder to spot us, but you got here, that’s the main thing. I’ll show you where the paperbacks are,’ he said, motioning for her to follow him. ‘You have to keep a close eye on them because these are the ones that get nicked, but you know all that. Your other section is just on the table here and on these five shelves: crime. You said in your email you were very familiar with American crime writers, which is great, but I’m keen on French detective novels too. What have you read recently?’

Laure stared back at him.

‘You must have the wrong person,’ she said, smiling in confusion.

‘
The Wrong Person
?’ asked the bookseller, frowning. ‘No, I don’t think we do have that one. Who’s the author?’

The poor man didn’t have a clue about the business of the bag and the cat and Laure backed out of the shop, muttering her apologies. There were no booksellers by the name of Laurent at L’Enjolivre, and none at La Compagnie des Mots, L’Arbre à Mots or La Belle Plume either. The owner of Le Chat à Lunettes, on the other hand, smiled broadly at Laure’s question.

‘Laurent …? That’s me.’

The only thing was he was in his sixties, with white hair and glasses with sky-blue plastic frames. Laure found herself giving another garbled account of how her bag had been returned to her by a bookseller called Laurent, who had fed her cat but left no address for her to contact him.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m being very clear,’ said Laure, making a mental note to leave out the bit about the cat from now on, because it was all getting way too difficult to explain to a complete stranger who had no idea what she was going on about.

‘No, no, it’s perfectly clear to me. I can think of far more complicated stories about bags and cats,’ the bookseller replied. ‘Take this one, for example. Listen carefully: On my way to Notre-Dame, I see a man with seven wives. Seven wives each with seven bags. And in each of those seven bags, seven cats. Seven cats with seven kittens each. How many are going to Notre-Dame?’

‘… Forty-nine times forty-nine, plus seven women, plus the man … A lot,’ replied Laure.

‘No,’ said the bookseller, ‘not a lot. The answer is one. I’m the only one going to Notre-Dame; as for the man, the women, the bags and cats, we’ll never know. You lose, but don’t worry, no one ever gets it right. Lunch?’

Laure politely declined the offer from ‘the cat with glasses’ and went on with her search. She encountered another two Laurents on her way: a tall, dark man with close-cropped hair and a short man with a greying beard. As she neared the end of her list, she made do with opening the door and glancing around the shop floor. None of the staff at these bookshops matched the description William had given. The three at L’Arc en Mots were all women, and there was only a blonde woman sitting behind
the till and a tall boy with a goatee at Le Cahier Rouge. La Boîte à Livres was run by a pair of men, but neither fitted the bill. She was about to stake her bet on Mots Passants, where a man in his forties with light-brown hair was bending down to look at a computer screen, when the telephone by his side began to ring. He picked it up.

‘Good afternoon, Mots Passants,’ he said, before immediately adding, ‘No, it’s Pierre …’

Even if Laurent had found the bag around here, his bookshop was not necessarily nearby. He might very well live in this arrondissement and own a bookshop on the opposite side of town. It was also perfectly conceivable that he had only been passing through the area. The thief could have driven off after the mugging, perhaps jumping on a scooter parked a few streets away. He might even have taken the Métro and dumped her bag ten stops away. She wondered what Sophie Calle would have done with a story like hers. Something infinitely more poetic than the afternoon she had just endured, that was for sure.

Laure slowly resigned herself to the idea that the game was up, the trail had gone cold and she would never meet the stranger who had quoted Modiano, fed her cat and written: ‘I’m sorry to have intruded so far into your life. It wasn’t my intention.’ She placed her mauve bag on her lap, took out the purse she had bought the day before and picked out the correct change. Returning it to the bag, her fingers brushed against her lucky red dice. Will I meet Laurent the bookseller one day? she asked silently, and then she dropped the two dice onto the white marble table. A wry smile crossed her lips. If fate was optimistic, as the numbers suggested, the reality was anything but. She picked up her Montblanc pen and one by one crossed out the names of the twelve bookshops in her red notebook.

In the large glass-fronted office on the first floor, Chloé looked at the director of the Ateliers Gardhier in silence.

‘It’s an eighteenth-century frame, typical of its time. The gold is very faded,’ murmured Sébastien Gardhier, inspecting the frame of the little still life. ‘You’ll have to come back in a month. I hope your parents are not in too much of a hurry?’

Chloé shook her head. ‘Can I go and see the people working in your studio?’

Sébastien smiled at her. ‘Yes, you can. You can also ask them some questions, but above all you must watch closely. That’s the first thing: you have to look,’ he said, raising his index finger. ‘So off you go and keep your eyes open,’ he added, walking her over to the stairs.

‘It’s horrible, that frame,’ she had said the previous evening at dinner.

Bertrand followed her gaze as far as the little picture on the wall. ‘Don’t say that, Chloé,’ he replied, cut to the quick. ‘That picture means a lot to me, it comes from my father.’

‘It’s not the picture that’s horrible,’ Chloé murmured, ‘it’s the frame. Look, it’s all tarnished.’

‘That’s true,’ Betrand conceded. ‘It certainly wasn’t always like that.’

The picture was of a lobster in the middle of a fine still life. Chloé explained that the mother of one of her school friends was a gilder; perhaps she could take it to her?

‘The picture isn’t a priority,’ said Claire evasively.

‘Now it is,’ cut in Bertrand portentously. ‘I’m delighted that Chloé is taking an interest in one of my possessions. Tomorrow morning, Chloé, you can take it down, we’ll wrap it up together and you can take it to your friend.’

‘It might be expensive,’ said Chloé in a little voice, pretending to get out of it.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Bertrand, still in that tone that brooked no refusal. ‘I can easily afford to have that frame gilded.’

Chloé nodded then announced she was going to get the dessert from the kitchen.

Claire looked at Bertrand. ‘I appreciate you doing that,’ she said softly. ‘Thank you.’

‘You know,’ said Bertrand, helping himself to some wine, ‘underneath her rebellious façade, I think your daughter has the makings of a real little homemaker. She’s going to surprise us.’

A first name, surname and profession. It had only taken Chloé four minutes to find Laure Valadier’s work address.

In the silent studio seven gilders were at work. The first one she came across was a young man with bleached, shaved hair. She quickly eliminated the men: him, the bearded one with grey hair chewing his unlit pipe, and the short one with gelled hair. A dark-haired woman with a ponytail turned to her and smiled.