The Black Notebook (13 page)

Is this woman Mme Dorme? Every time, I wake up asking myself that question, but there's never an answer. She is mentioned in Langlais's file, which provides only a few insignificant details. No photo of her: “. . . alias Mme Dorme, first associated with Paul Milani at ‘number 4' Rue de Douai . . . Manageress of Buffet 48 and of Étoile-Iéna . . . Said to have purchased several racehorses fifteen years ago . . . Departure for Switzerland, date unknown . . .” Faceless, like the dead body they took away in a car parked in front of the building. It was about one in the morning, according to the deposition by the concierge at 46-bis. He personally opened the carriage entrance to let them through. There were four of them. He, the concierge, had no idea the man was dead; one of the people carrying him out said only that he'd taken ill and they were bringing him to Lariboisière Hospital. Why Lariboisière? It was far away, on the other side of town. In reality, according to the information Langlais had pieced together, they had driven the corpse “home” so that he could officially die his peaceful death, without anyone ever being wise to the fact that it had happened in a ground-floor apartment at 46-bis Quai Henri-IV. For several months the concierge had noticed many people coming and going from that apartment, starting at about nine p.m. and continuing all night long. He often heard music in there, he said, but that night there wasn't a sound. You must have been there with the one they call “the victim”—they never give the man's name. And yet, at the bottom of a page, one can see that the name had been typed in, then later erased. Two letters are still barely visible: an
S
and a
V.
So that night, you were in the apartment with the unknown man, a few other people—a “small gathering,” the report states—and the woman called Mme Dorme. The concierge heard two gunshots, just before midnight. After about ten minutes, he saw two men and two women leaving the apartment, followed by “a young lady” whom he describes in rather precise detail: she had been a frequent visitor to the apartment over the past several months, he had spoken with her several times, and she regularly picked up mail addressed to her under the name Mireille Sampierry. That was you. The four others arrived roughly an hour later to carry that nameless, faceless man out to the car parked in front of the building. One individual present that evening—a certain Jean Terrail—testified that it was you who fired the gun, but that the weapon belonged to the stranger, and he had threatened you with it “brutally and obscenely.” No doubt he had been drinking. He's no longer around to say. It's as if he had never existed. We can suppose that you managed to wrest the gun away from him, that you fired, or else that the shots “went off by themselves” because you made too sudden a movement. Two stray bullets? They found the slugs in a room of the apartment in the course of their investigation. But who let them in? Mme Dorme? Not much about you in the file. You were never born in Casablanca, as you had told me one evening when we were talking about Aghamouri and the others at the Unic Hôtel who had “close ties” with Morocco, but quite simply in Paris during the war, two years before me. Born of an unknown father and Andrée Lydia Roger, at 7 Rue Narcisse-Diaz in the sixteenth arrondissement. Mirabeau Clinic. But sometime after the war, they report, your mother, Andrée Lydia Roger, was living at 16 Rue Vitruve in the twentieth. Why that detail, and why the sudden plunge from the affluent sixteenth arrondissement to the squalid Charonne district? Perhaps only you could have explained. There is no mention of your brother Pierre, whom you often talked about. They know that you had lived on Rue Blanche under the name Mireille Sampierry, but they don't say why you used that name. No reference to your room at the Cité Universitaire or the American Pavilion. Or to Avenue Victor-Hugo. And yet, I often accompanied you there and waited for you behind the building with two exits. And you always returned with a wad of cash, and I wondered who had given it to you—but that, too, was something they hadn't noticed. Nothing about the little apartment on Avenue Félix-Faure, either, or La Barberie. They know that you took a room at the Unic Hôtel, according to information provided by “Davin,” but they did not seem in much of a hurry to question you, which would have required only a short wait in the lobby, or a simple telephone call from “Davin” to alert them to your presence. They must have dropped the investigation without much ado, and in any case, by the time I was summoned by Langlais, you had already “disappeared.” It's down on paper. Disappeared like Mme Dorme, whom they were unable to track down in Switzerland, assuming they even tried.

I don't know whether they botched the case or whether the information they keep in their archives on thousands upon thousands of people is always this incomplete, but I confess I was underwhelmed. Until then, I'd always believed they “probed minds and hearts,” that their files contained the most minute details of our lives, all of our paltry secrets, and that we were at the mercy of their silence. But what do they really know about the two of us, about you, apart from those stray bullets and that phantom corpse? In the deposition they made me sign beneath the formula “seen and approved,” I say almost nothing about you. Or about myself. I told them that we'd met not long before, through a Moroccan student at the Cité Universitaire, and that you were hoping to enroll at the Censier branch of the university. And that we saw each other for barely three months in the Latin Quarter and around Montparnasse, amid the earnest students and old painters with curly hair and velvet jackets who frequented the area. We went to the movies. And to bookstores. I even specified that we took long walks around Paris and in the Bois de Boulogne. As I answered those questions in that office on the Quai de Gesvres, I heard the clacking of the typewriter. Langlais was typing it up himself, with two fingers. Yes, we also went to the cafés on Boul'Mich, and, not having much money, we sometimes ate in the student cafeteria at the Cité Universitaire. And since he had asked how I spent my free time, wanting, he said, to “get a better sense of our personalities,” I ended up giving him other details: we frequented the cinematheque on Rue d'Ulm and were planning to sign up for the Jeunesses Musicales. When he asked about Aghamouri and the Unic Hôtel, I felt I was on slippery ground. We had met Aghamouri at the Cité Universitaire cafeteria. I honestly thought he was just another student. Moreover, I had gone to pick him up after his classes at Censier several times. No, I would never have guessed he worked for the “Moroccan secret service.” But, anyway, that was none of our business. And the Unic Hôtel? No, no, it wasn't Aghamouri who had brought us there. I had heard they let you go upstairs at the Unic even if you were a minor, which I was. That's why we took a room there from time to time, my girlfriend and I. I noticed that Langlais did not type that answer, and that all my lies were apparently of little interest to him.

“So, if I understand you correctly, Ghali Aghamouri never introduced you and your girlfriend to these individuals: Duwelz, Marciano, Chastagnier, and Georges B., alias Rochard?”

“No,” I said.

While pecking at the keys with his two index fingers, he recited the sentence in my stead: “The aforementioned Ghali Aghamouri never introduced me to Duwelz, Marciano, Chastagnier, and Rochard. My girlfriend and I merely saw them in the lobby of the hotel.” Then he smiled at me and shrugged. Perhaps he thought the same as I did: that all these petty details did not especially concern us. Pretty soon, they would no longer matter in our lives. He remained pensive for a long while, his arms folded behind his typewriter, head lowered, and I thought he had forgotten me. And, in a gentle voice, without looking at me, he said, “Did you know your girlfriend did time in La Petite-Roquette two years ago?” Then he smiled at me again. I felt a pang in my heart. “It wasn't all that serious . . . She was there for eight months . . .” And he handed me a sheet of paper that I forced myself to read over very quickly, because he was holding it between his thumb and index finger, and I was afraid he would snatch it back. Lines and words danced before my eyes: “. . . shoplifting in several luxury department stores . . . was picked up on Avenue Victor-Hugo carrying a crocodile-skin handbag . . . ‘I would go into a store without a handbag. Once inside, I'd choose one and walk out with it . . . same for the coats.' ”

He put the sheet on his desk without giving me time to finish. He seemed embarrassed to have shown me such a document. “It wasn't all that serious,” he repeated. “Kid stuff, really . . . kleptomania . . . You know what they say about kleptomania?” I was amazed that the interrogation had suddenly taken such an ordinary turn, almost like a friendly chat. “A lack of affection. You steal what nobody ever gave you. Was she lacking affection?” He stared at me with his large blue eyes, and I had the impression that he was trying to read my thoughts, and succeeding.

“Now, of course, she's mixed up in something much more serious . . . It happened three months ago . . . Just before you met her . . . There was a homicide.”

I must have gone very pale, since the blue eyes that he'd trained on me took on an expression of concern. He seemed to be studying me.

“Of course, we could always consider this an accident . . . two stray bullets . . .”

With a weary movement, he rolled a blank sheet into his typewriter and asked, “Did your girlfriend ever talk to you about an evening that took place last September in an apartment on 46-bis Quai Henri-IV in Paris?”

I answered in the negative, and once again I heard the clacking of the typewriter. Then another question: “Did your girlfriend ever explain to you why she was always changing her name?” I had not known this detail, but even if I had, I wouldn't have been overly surprised. I, too, had changed my forename and falsified my birth date to make myself older, of legal age. Anyway, I knew her only as Dannie. As he typed my answer, I spelled out the name, recalling my mistake when we'd first met.

“Have you had any word from her since she disappeared, and do you have any idea of her current whereabouts?”

That question made me so sad that I couldn't speak. He answered for me, pecking at the typewriter keys with his two fingers: “I have had no word from my girlfriend since she disappeared, and I assume she went abroad . . .”

He interrupted himself:

“Did she ever mention a Mme Dorme to you?”

“No.”

He thought for a moment, then continued aloud, still typing with two fingers:

“. . . that she went abroad, probably in the company of the above-mentioned Hélène Méreux, alias Mme Dorme.”

He heaved a sigh, as if he had just rid himself of a burdensome chore. He handed me the sheet.

“Sign there.”

I, too, was relieved to be done with this.

“It's a routine investigation that's been dragging on for months,” he said, as if to reassure me. “They'll almost certainly bury the case . . . The victim supposedly died of natural causes in his home. I hope there won't be any fallout for you. But you never know . . .”

I tried to find a few friendly words before taking my leave.

“You type up the depositions?” I asked. “I was under the impression they were all taken down by hand, back in the day.”

“That's right, they were. And most of the inspectors at the time had beautiful handwriting. And they composed their reports in flawless French.”

He led me down the hall and we descended the stairs together. Before parting company, at the doorway that opened onto the quay, he said:

“I gather you've started writing as well. By hand?”

“Yes. By hand.”

They tore down La Petite-Roquette. In its place stretches a public park. When I was about twenty, I often used to visit a certain Adolfo Kaminsky, a photographer who lived in one of the tall buildings across the street. His windows overlooked the hexagonal prison with its six turrets. It was the same period as when you were incarcerated there, but I didn't know that at the time. The other night, I waited at the front gate of the prison, opposite Kaminsky's building, and they let me in. They led me to the visiting room. They had me sit before a glass screen, and you were sitting on the other side. I was talking to you and you seemed to understand me, but although you moved your lips, pressed your forehead against the glass, I couldn't hear your voice. I asked you questions: “Who was Mme Dorme? The phantom corpse from Quai Henri-IV? And the person you often went to see in the building with two exits while I waited?” From the movement of your lips, I could see that you were trying to answer, but the glass between us muffled your voice. The silence of an aquarium.

I remember that we often strolled in the Bois de Boulogne. It was late in the afternoon, on days when I had to wait for her behind the building on Avenue Victor-Hugo. I will never know why she exited on that side and not through the main entrance, as if she were afraid of running into someone at that time of day. We followed the avenue up to La Muette. As we walked on the path along the lakes, I felt as if a weight had lifted. So did she: she said she'd like it if we could live in a room in one of those rows of buildings bordering the woods. A neutral zone, cut off from everything, among infrequent neighbors whose language we couldn't understand, so that we wouldn't have to talk to them or answer their questions. We wouldn't be accountable to anyone. Eventually we would forget those black holes of Paris: the Unic Hôtel, La Petite-Roquette, the ground floor on the quay with its corpse, all those evil places that made both of us walk on eggshells.

One late afternoon in October, the sky was already dark, and around us wafted a smell of dead leaves, wet earth, and stables. We were walking along the Jardin d'Acclimatation and had arrived at the edge of the Saint-James Pond. We sat on a bench. I was brooding about the manuscript I'd left in the country house. She had told me we could never go back there. It would be dangerous. But she didn't specify what sort of danger. She had kept the keys to the country house, as she had the ones to the apartment on Avenue Félix-Faure, though she should have given them back a long time ago. I suspected she might have made copies, unbeknownst to the owners. No doubt she was afraid someone would catch us in the house like thieves.