Due Preparations for the Plague (12 page)

“Someone took a photograph,” he tells Françoise, angry.

“That’s what tourists do,” she says.

“No. This was different.” There have been other times and they come back to him. “Someone is following us,” he says.

“That’s ridiculous.” Paranoia or jealousy on his part, Françoise implies. But then, later, sometime during the two years of their not-very-satisfactory relationship, she lets slip that her father has connections with the American Embassy. “Papa had it brought in for me in a diplomatic pouch,” is what she says of a butter-soft leather briefcase he admires. “It’s from Bangkok.” She is afraid of her father. She waves Tristan’s questions aside. “He’s American,” she says. “He was stationed here in the late fifties. He took up with my mother then, but he always played fast and loose with her. He comes and goes.”

Tristan asks sharply, “He’s a diplomat? Or CIA?”

“He does research for the American government, or the military, or something. He travels. I don’t know. I pay no attention to his life. We have no time for him, my mother and I.”

“But he pays for your apartment,” Tristan says. It is small and elegant, in the seventh arrondissement, near Les Invalides, and though they meet there from time to time for assignations, he has never stayed the night.

“Who told you that?” She is annoyed with him, and alarmed.

“You did.”

She lights a cigarette and inhales. Her fingers tremble slightly. “He’s a control freak,” she says. “He pays because he thinks he will know where I am. Which is why I don’t often stay there. I let my friends use it.” She inhales hungrily. He sometimes thinks she must live on smoke and wine.

He asks quietly, “And where do you stay when you are not in your apartment near Les Invalides and not with me?”

She busies herself with stubbing out her cigarette, but then lights another immediately. “I stay with my mother,” she says. “Or with various friends.”

“I see.”

It is her elusiveness and her intensity which attract Tristan. Her possessiveness flatters him. Her jealousy at first excites him but then irritates him.

“I can’t stand not knowing where you are,” she tells him. “I saw what that did to my mother. My father was never around, but he always wanted my mother to be waiting when he showed up,” she says. “Just waiting for him. He always wanted to know where she was. He would call her twice a week and if she wasn’t there …! It drove her crazy after a while.

“She said he needed her because she would do things that his American wife would not do. There is no spice in American sex, he told her. With American women, there is only baby-food sex. No flavor, no danger, no risk.

“Then leave your American wife, my mother told him.

“And he told her: American women are for marrying and daytime, Frenchwomen are for the night. You are my danger. You could be used against me for blackmail. That is what excites me, and that is why I need to know where you are.

“Now you see me, my mother told him, and now you don’t. You won’t know where danger is coming from.

“She wouldn’t sleep with him again, she wouldn’t see him, but she knew he always had other women. He always kept his dangers on the side.”

Back then, a decade ago, Tristan had a sense of her father in some shadowy but powerful role. The knowledge had made him uneasy. After that, especially in the apartment near Les Invalides, he found it increasingly difficult to rise to the carnal occasion. A flashbulb would go off in his mind. He felt watched.

He has not the slightest idea what Françoise does with her life these days. When they meet by chance, he is perfunctory and anxious to get away. He finds himself imagining her father’s watchdogs hovering around her, keeping tabs on her and on him. The last time was maybe three months ago and she was with some woman—her roommate, she said; an American student on exchange—and she’d introduced them, and then she’d asked—

Two images unexpectedly coalesce in his mind and match exactly, and light comes off them. He’d seen Génie at the Silk Route boutique, he’d seen a child in a blue coat with a woman who looked vaguely familiar … that woman was the American student who’d been with Françoise.

Did that mean something?

How could that mean anything?

And then there was another bizarre meeting, how far back? Ages ago, seven years ago, one of his earliest visits to Génie’s place in the thirteenth arrondissement, before they both moved to his apartment in the fourth. They had pushed through the great wooden door off Avenue des Gobelins, crossed the courtyard, and pressed the timer switch in the dark stairwell of
escalier A.
Before they reached the second floor, the light went out, and two people, descending, almost collided with them.

“Tristan!” came the voice of a woman from out of the dark.

He squinted at her in the gloom, and then someone pressed the timer and the light came on again. “Françoise!” he said.

“You two know each other?” Génie asked.

What a weird coincidence, he had thought then. With the whole of Paris to choose from, two women whom I know intimately live in the same building. Off the same staircase. It bothered him. Someone pushed the light button again and he stared at Françoise and her friend. Her sexual tastes, he concluded, had changed since her days at the Sorbonne. She preferred bookish types then, intellectuals. This boyfriend had a street-smart swagger and macho style. He was Egyptian, perhaps? Algerian? He threw Tristan an insolent smile that Tristan translated as:
If you touch her, I kill
. And then the boyfriend spoke to Génie. “
Ton ami?
” he asked, and Tristan turned in outrage, ready to strike, because of the intimate pronoun. What impudence.

Génie put her hand on his arm. “Ignore him,” she murmured. “Don’t give him what he wants.”

“Why did he use
tu
?” Tristan demanded. His jealousy often flared up like a rash. He knew his possessiveness bothered Génie, and sometimes amused her, but he could do nothing about it. “Why was he intimate with you?” He had to know.

“Because he could tell it would annoy you,” Génie said.

The policemen are watching Tristan intently. He becomes aware that he has clenched both hands into fists. “I have been involved with many women, monsieur,” he says lightly, relaxing his hands. “They are all a mystery to me. When it comes to spying and interrogation, any one of them could put Torquemada to shame.”

One of the gendarmes gives a short sharp laugh. The other remains expressionless. “Why would a publisher fly to New York when he will meet with American colleagues at Frankfurt next month? Why would he do this?”

Tristan shrugs. “I told you. A whim.”

“
Une tocade.
”

“Yes.”

“The same flight as your Algerian writer who canceled. The same flight as the writer from Belgrade.”

“What? Which writer from Belgrade?”

“The one you met in Prague.”

Tristan puckers his brows. “I met several writers from Belgrade. Which one do you mean?”

“Which ones did you meet with, monsieur?”

“You will have to give me a legal reason,” Monsieur Charron says carefully, “for why I am required to answer that. The physical safety of those writers could be at stake.”

“Physical safety is an issue which concerns us very greatly, monsieur, especially on a flight which includes a Jewish writer from Belgrade, a Jewish string quartet, and a group of Israelis traveling to a conference on Yiddish literature. A very interesting and unusual flight for a publisher who claims to have no politics.”

“You’re joking.” Tristan stares from one face to the other. “You’re not joking?” He marvels at this.

“Of course, you will claim you are going to the conference in Yiddish literature.”

“In fact, I knew nothing about it,” he says. “Though it certainly interests me. I’d like to have details.”

“No doubt, monsieur. No doubt you would. But you will have to give us a more honest answer for why you suddenly decided on this flight.”

Monsieur Charron makes a
moue
with his lips and turns up the palms of his hands. Three can play cat and mouse, he thinks, and truth is always the best defense, especially since they will not believe it. “For the oldest reason of all,” he says. “I am a Frenchman. I saw a woman.
J’ai une tocade pour elle
.” I’m crazy about her. Still.

“Thank you, monsieur. The Australian travel writer, the woman whose code name is Geneva. We know this. It is a point in your favor that you acknowledge the connection.”

“Code name? She has a code name?” Tristan asks, dumbfounded.

“One more thing, Monsieur Charron. You are no doubt aware that the woman Françoise Galette, with whom you had a former association, also canceled her reservation for this flight.”

“What?” Tristan feels dazed.

“Several hours ago,” they tell him. “By telephone. She canceled her flight.”

“I don’t believe this. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Clearly
someone
, monsieur, has the key to these riddles. You may go now.”

Tristan is startled. The sudden dismissal seems to him even stranger than the interview.

As he leaves, flanked by his interrogators, three people emerge from the small room next door: two uniformed men and a woman.

“Génie,” Tristan says, stumbling, and one of the gendarmes lifts a restraining hand.

The woman stares at him, disbelieving. “Tristan!”

“
C’est vraiment toi
,” he says. “
Je t’ai vraiment vue
.” It really is you. I really saw you. He reaches out to touch her, and she lifts her hand to meet his. Their fingertips brush. His tongue feels thick and clumsy in his mouth. “
Comment vas-tu?
”

“
C’est toi
, Tristan,” she says sadly, as though some interminable inner argument has been resolved. “I might have known.”

So now Tristan appears, in custody, flanked by men in uniform, after three days of making appointments and not keeping them. Genevieve has never been certain if he lives by the rules of disorder or by a design so labyrinthine that even he, perhaps, has forgotten the way out. To how many codes has he lost the key? She herself has a habit of losing things: countries, suitcases, people dear to her. She thinks of herself as carrying a virus of bereavement. She thinks it is in her genes. She thinks that she must have been born with it since she began losing people so early: first her parents, then the vagabond uncle who carted her round on his photo shoots.
Me and your dad
, he used to tell her,
me and your dad, we never could stand to gather moss. It’s in the Teague blood cells, Gen. We’ve got restless blood. Our hearts don’t pump if they have to stay in one place.
Inconsiderately, he swooped into a crevasse with his Leica. He was on assignment with a mountain-climbing team when this happened, and Génie was in school in Australia. She remembers the way the headmistress beckoned from the classroom door. She remembers the way the other girls looked at her, then looked at each other. In boarding schools, news travels by the twitch of an eyebrow. She remembers that she knew instantly, before the headmistress spoke. She knows that any door can open into nothing. She is loss-prone. The defect is like malaria: lurking about in the blood, dormant sometimes, flaring up without warning.

She has cultivated the habit of leaving before she is left—this is her security system—but sometimes in the middle of a night the erratic beat of her heart will wake her. She will be alone in a room somewhere, it could be anywhere, she cannot usually remember which country, not at first. She hears nothing but the crazy syncopated riffs of her heart which sings Billie Holiday songs.
In my sol-i-tude …
If she were to disappear, who would notice?

Perhaps the
Wandering Earthling
would print a two-line obituary.
Over a year since traveling freelance writer Genevieve Teague … missing, presumed killed in an accident … no known family … her detailed itineraries will be sorely …

And if Tristan—scavenging publisher, voracious reader of books—were to come across this brief item?

She likes to think he would be briefly stricken. She likes to think he would regret the last argument, the last ultimatum. She likes to think he would remember that they once promised each other in writing, half seriously, half in jest, that even if both had moved on to other lovers, they would still come back like lightning,
comme une traînée de poudre
, if urgently summoned.

“In fifty years, if you call me, if you say: I am in danger at the end of the world,” Tristan had written extravagantly on a card that came with three dozen roses, “
pouff! En un clin d’œil
, in an eye blink, I am there.”

Génie had sent back a bottle of vintage wine with a lampshade affixed, a handwritten note taped to the shade. “Simply say
I am in extremis
while rubbing the lamp, and abracadabra: Génie appears.”

The memory of this exchange comforts her on desolate nights and on those nights when the phone rings in dreams but is always dead by the time her hand finds it. Faxes from Europe also arrive in dreams, as well as in the small hours of night, and once upon a sleepless predawn in the August of 1987 she hears the high hum of her machine and watches a fax uncurl itself like a tongue.

Dear Génie: I am in extremis. Will you come? Love, Tristan.

P.S. Please reply by fax to number above.

This is the way it happens: a certain name, a certain phrase, a face in a crowd—minute, unpredictable things—and she can feel grief in her finger joints, armpits, groin. It breaks out like a fever. It swells and throbs, a contagion of loss. So she tries not to miss anyone. She tries not to get close to anyone she might come to miss. She works long hours, she stays on the road, she keeps moving, and moving on, she keeps changing one unlisted phone number for another, she does her best to be unreachable and to gather no moss.

But two lines had slipped through this obstacle course.

She managed to wait a whole hour, then she sent a reply.

Dear Tristan: Of course I will come. Evidently, from fax number, you must still be in Paris. Same address? Can I have a week to make necessary arrangements and find a cheap flight, or is it too urgent? Love, Genevieve.

P.S. How on earth did you track down my number?

For a week she checked her fax machine compulsively, every few hours. There were no further messages from Tristan. She called his apartment in Paris. That is to say, she called a number that was once, and perhaps was still, the number of his apartment, of their old apartment, in the fourth arrondissement. An answering machine spoke to her. A woman’s voice announced in brisk French:
You have reached Jean-Luc and Sylvie. We are not available at present to take …
Genevieve hung up.

She called his publishing house. The receptionist had never heard of Monsieur Charron. She had only been there a few months, the receptionist explained. She put Genevieve through to one of the editors. Tristan Charron had not been with them for several years, the editor explained. He had his own small publishing house now, she could not remember the name, but he was doing quite well. He was specializing in translations, she thought she remembered; in introducing non-French writers into France. She had seen favorable articles in
Livres-Hebdo
, in
Le Nouvel Observateur
, in other trade magazines. Probably Agence France could locate him.

Genevieve checked her fax folder to read Tristan’s message again. Already, on the shiny thermal paper, it was fading. She put on a track suit and went running. She ran for five miles, until the stitch in her side grew sharp and filled every cranny of thought. She showered and wrapped herself in a towel and called half a dozen acquaintances and arranged a dinner party. Not until the day after the party did she fax a query to Agence France, and not until two days after that did she receive the address and phone number of a small publishing house: Editions du Double. When she called, an assistant answered. Monsieur Charron was at a festival in Prague, he explained, but if madame would like to leave a message … “Just tell him that Génie called,” she said, “and that—” But then she changed her mind and declined to leave any word.

Prague? Then how could he have faxed her from Paris?

The next morning another message arrived.

Dear Génie: Can you be here next Friday? Take a night flight; you’ll get in before the traffic and I’ll meet you at eleven hundred hours precisely in the bookstore of the Hôtel de Sully. Do not enter from rue St. Antoine. Go through Place des Vosges, the south-west corner, into the courtyard-garden in the rear. The bookstore is on the main floor. It will be crowded with tourists, and therefore safe. Communication is not easy, nor is meeting. If I’m late, wait for me.

If you can stay 3 days, we can fly back to New York together. I have meetings set up. I’ll be flying on September 8, Air France 64. Try to book the same flight.

Love, Tristan.

Where the sender’s number was usually displayed, there was nothing but a string of zeros. She tried sending a reply to the same number as last time, but the fax would not go through. She called the small publishing house and left a message. “Tell him Génie called. Say I’m coming.” She made reservations and faxed Editions du Double.

Tristan: Arriving Friday. Same return flight as you. Génie
.

She had arrived in Paris, as requested, on Friday morning, three days ago. She had taken the Roissybus from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Place de l’Opéra, then the Métro to Bastille. She had walked to Place des Vosges and waited in the bookshop of Hôtel de Sully. She had browsed. She had skimmed a facsimile edition of the sketches of Viollet le Duc for the restoration of Notre Dame. She had pondered his design for the delicate wooden spire between the towers, and for the pulpit. She read his notebook entries on the restoration of the Sainte Chapelle. She read of the speed with which that exquisite little church had been built, she read of its progress all the way from idea in the mind of Louis IX to filigreed spires and rose window and glowing glass, all achieved in the space of three years, the entire Gothic jewel box completed by 1248.

It can hardly be imagined
, Viollet le Duc wrote,
how this work, so astonishing in the multiplicity and variety of its details, the purity of its execution, and the beauty of its materials, could have been accomplished in so short a time.

It can hardly be imagined, Genevieve thought, that such an urgent request for a meeting, with instructions so precise as to time and place, could remain so nebulous, so uncertain of fulfillment, after so long a time. She browsed more art books. She read more than she really cared to know about architectural detail in the Musée Carnavalet, Madame de Sévigné’s town house just a stone’s throw from where Genevieve now stood. She could have dazzled a soirée with the ideas of its designer, Pierre Lescot, and with the social gossip of 1550. After one hour, she left the bookstore through the rear exit. She sat, perplexed and anxious and irritated, on the low stone wall beneath a spreading chestnut in the Sully garden. A youthful employee from the bookstore came out after her.

“Madame,” he said. “You left this behind.”

“I didn’t buy anything,” she said. “It must have been someone else.”

“I saw you put it down.”

“You are mistaken,” Genevieve said.

“Then you may have it anyway, madame,” the young clerk said graciously, “because I saw how much you loved this book, and how can I find the person who actually left it?”

He set the book beside her on the wall. It was a small monograph, lavishly illustrated, many plates in full color, on the subject of the stained glass in the Sainte Chapelle. A piece of notepaper was inserted as a bookmark at the rose window page. On the paper, a message was typed:

Difficulties. Will explain. Tomorrow, same place, same time.

Yesterday and again today: same place, same time, same routine more or less (
Excuse me, madame, you dropped something
…), slightly different note on the second day, and on the third:
May need to meet at airport
. Did this have anything to do with Tristan? The notes were unaddressed and unsigned.

And the faxes? She began to wonder if yearning, tamped down, swept out of sight, had summoned them up. If they were real, on the other hand, anyone could have sent them. But why? And who, other than Tristan himself, could possibly know that an urgent message, phrased in a certain way and bearing his name, would bring her immediately to Paris? Well, she supposed, his old girlfriend Françoise would know, but Françoise would have ceased to care years ago, and would have no possible way of locating Genevieve.

And if Tristan himself did send them? Suppose he was watching from somewhere, trying to reach her, begging her to wait? What possible reason could there be?
In extremis
: What did that mean? What kind of crisis was he in?

She sometimes wondered if he had a completely separate underground life, or indeed several other lives. There had been occasions when the thought came to her that he might work in Intelligence, presumably for the French government, though once he had said something that made her think his relationship with the American government was unusual. If it weren’t so complicated getting a green card for you, she had said, we could live in New York. It wouldn’t be so complicated, he said. I could call in my chips. What do you mean? she asked, and he said, Nothing. I’m joking. An old girlfriend of mine used to claim her father could get Carlos the Jackal a green card if she wanted him to. Which old girlfriend? she had asked. Do you mean Françoise? And he had looked startled. I forgot you knew her, he said.

At other times, Genevieve had thought that he might have ties with some shadowy organization on the wrong (but not disreputable) side of the law, some kind of classy white-collar dubious borderline thing: the smuggling of art, perhaps. Or something more noble: the smuggling of manuscripts out of totalitarian countries. This thought had crossed her mind whenever she herself took on another assignment for Caritas, ferrying private letters out of regions where the postal service was closely monitored or where war interfered with it unduly. Mothers wrote to sons and daughters who had gotten away; husbands in the democratic West sent secret letters back through iron and bamboo curtains to wives and children; sweethearts separated by the horrible accidents of history sent burning promises back and forth. She never told anyone, not even Tristan, that she worked for Caritas. She thought of the work as personal and compassionate, not political, but too many small and ordinary lives behind too many dangerous barriers depended on secrecy. It was quite possible, after all, that Tristan was doing the same sort of thing.

She also pondered his possible clandestine activities on those occasions—they sometimes seemed to her oddly frequent—when street photographers had taken photographs, not of Tristan and Genevieve solely, nor even centrally, but of street scenes, courtyards, sidewalk cafés, with Tristan and Genevieve in the frame. Probably this sort of thing happened constantly in Paris, a city where tourists outnumbered residents in summer, though it seemed to her to happen more frequently when she was with Tristan. And there was always an aura of the clandestine: she never knew if the reasons were rational or not.

On the second day, after Tristan failed to appear, she made contact with Caritas and a meeting was arranged in the tropical greenhouse of the Jardin des Plantes. The Caritas woman handed her a copy of
Le Monde
. Between the obituaries and the sporting triumphs of
les bleus
, letters on thin onionskin paper were interleafed. Génie could detect no difference in texture between the paper of the letters and the pages of
Le Monde
.