had largely given way to charm less unlovely structures of concrete.
Today, such street names as the rue des Vignoles seem laughably out of
place in the downtrodden urban milieu.
The trip to Paris had been nerve-racking; every incidental glance seemed
to hold meaning, the very impassivity of les douaniers, the customs
officials, seemed a possible subterfuge, a prelude to arrest. But Anna
had experience with the balkiness of international alerts, knew how the
bureaucracies of each border authority impeded the efficient execution
of security directives. She wasn’t surprised that they’d slipped
through. She also knew that, next time, it was a good bet they
wouldn’t.
Only in the near anonymity of the dense-packed RER from De Gaulle did
they start to relax. Now Anna and Ben emerged from the Gambetta metro
stop, walked passed the large Maine, or courthouse, and down the rue
Vitruve to the rue des Orteaux. They turned right. Opposite them, to
either side of the rue des Vignoles, were several narrow streets that
followed the precise layout of the vineyards that they supplanted.
The area around Charonne, just south of Belleville, was among the least
proto typically Parisian of Parisian neighborhoods, its denizens as
likely to be Africans, Spaniards, or Antilleans as French. Even before
recent waves of immigration, however, it had long earned the scorn of
the city’s bourgeois. It was a place where the poor and the criminal
classes were seen to have congregated, a place where the
insurrectionists of the Paris Commune, fueled by the disarray of the
Second Empire, found populist support. A place of the disaffected, and
the neglected. The twentieth arrondissement’s one claim to fame was the
cemetery du Pere La chaise, a forty-four hectare garden of graves;
starting in the nineteenth century, Parisians who would never otherwise
deign to visit this arrondissement, let alone live there, agreed to
consign their bodies there after death.
Dressed in the casual attire of American tourists, Anna and Ben took in
their surroundings as they walked: the aroma of falafel stands, the
thudding rhythm of North African pop spilling from open windows, street
vendors hawking tube socks and dog-eared copies of Paris Match. The
people on the street came in every color, and spoke in a variety of
accents. There were the young artists with complicated body piercings
who no doubt saw themselves as the legitimate successors to Marcel
Duchamp; there were immigrants from the Mahgreb hoping to earn enough
money to send to their relatives in Tunisia or Algeria. The smell of
pot or hashish, rich and resinous, wafted from the occasional alleyway.
“It’s hard to imagine a corporate honcho retiring to this sort of
neighborhood,” Anna said. “What, did they run out of beachfront
properties at Cote d’Azure?”
“Actually, it’s nearly perfect,” Ben said, reflective. “If you wanted
to disappear, there’s no better place. Nobody notices anybody else,
nobody knows anybody else. If for some reason you wanted to stay in
town, it’s the most heterogeneous place you’ll find, thronged with
strangers, new immigrants, artists, eccentrics of every persuasion.” Ben
knew this city, as Anna did not, and his familiarity gave him a measure
of much needed confidence.
Anna nodded. “Safety in numbers.”
“Plus you’re still near local mass transit, a maze of streets, a fast
train out of town, and the Peripherique. A good setup when you’re
planning multiple escape routes.”
Anna smiled. “You’re a fast learner. Sure you don’t want a job as a
government investigator? We can offer you a salary of fifty-five
thousand dollars and your very own parking space.”
“Tempting,” Ben said.
They walked past La Fleche d’Or, the red-tile-roofed restaurant that was
perched over a rusted ghost track. Then Ben led the way down another
block to a small Moroccan cafe, where the air was humid and fragrant
with various couscous dishes. “I can’t vouch for the food,” he said.
“But the view has a lot to recommend it.”
Through the plate glass, they could see the stone triangle that was
rue des Vignoles. Seven stories high, the building occupied a
freestanding island surrounded by narrow streets on three sides. Its
facade was stained dark with automotive exhaust and dappled with acidic
bird droppings. Squinting, Anna could make out the anomalous remains of
decorative gargoyles; erosion from the elements made them look as if
they had melted in the sun. The marble ledges, ornamental revetment,
and parapets seemed the folly of a long-ago builder, a throwback to an
era when some still harbored up market dreams for the arrondissement.
The building, unremarkable in most ways, breathed the gentle decrepitude
of neglect and indifference.
“According to my source, Peyaud, he’s known as “L’Ermite.” The hermit.
He lives on the entire top floor. Makes noises from time to time, so
they know he’s there. That and the deliveries he gets–groceries and
the like. But even the delivery boys have never seen him. They drop
off the stuff in the dumbwaiter, and collect their francs when the
dumbwaiter comes back down. The few people who pay him any mind at all
pretty much dismiss him as a real eccentric. Then again, this place is
populated with eccentrics.” He tucked into his lamb tagine greedily.
“So he’s reclusive.”
“Very reclusive. It’s not just the delivery boys he avoids–nobody’s
ever seen him. Peyaud talked to the woman who lives on the ground
floor. She and everyone else in the building have decided he’s an
elderly, paranoid, morbidly shy rentier. A case study in advanced
agoraphobia. They don’t realize that he owns the building.”
“And you think we’re going to make an unannounced visit to this possibly
unhinged, possibly paranoid, possibly dangerous, and certainly disturbed
and frightened individual, and he’s going to pour us some decaf and tell
us whatever we want to know?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all.” Ben gave her a reassuring grin. “It
might not be decaf.”
“You have boundless faith in your own charm, I’ll give you that.” Anna
looked doubtfully at her vegetarian couscous. “He does speak English?”
“Fluently. Almost all French businessmen do, which is how you can tell
them apart from French intellectuals.” He wiped his mouth with a flimsy
paper napkin. “My contribution is, I got us here. You’re the
professional; you’re in charge now. What do the field manuals say? What
do you do in a situation like this–what’s the established modus
operandi?”
“Let me think. The MO for a friendly visit with a psychotic whom the
world believes to be dead and who you think holds the secret to a
menacing global organization? I’m not so sure that one’s in the field
manual, Ben.”
The lamb tagine started to weigh heavily in his stomach.
She took his hand as they stood up. “Just follow my lead.”
Therese Broussard gazed sullenly out the window, down at the foot
traffic on the rue des Vignoles seven stories below. She gazed as she
might have gazed at a fire, if her chimney hadn’t been plugged with
concrete years back. She gazed as she might have gazed at her little
television set, if it hadn’t been detraquee for the past month. She
gazed to sooth her nerves and alleviate her boredom; she gazed because
she had nothing better to do. Besides, she’d just spent ten minutes
ironing her large, baggy undergarments, and needed a break.
A heavy-set, doughy-faced woman of seventy-four with piggy features and
lank black-dyed hair, Therese still told people she was a dressmaker,
even though she hadn’t cut a piece of fabric in ten years, and even
though she was never particularly accomplished at it. She grew up in
Belleville, left school at the age of fourteen, and was never pretty
enough to count on attracting the sort of man who would support her. In
short, she had to learn a trade. As it happened, her grandmother had a
friend who was a dressmaker and who agreed to take the girl on as an
assistant. The old woman’s hands were stiff with arthritis, and her
eyes had grown dim; Therese could be helpful, though the old woman–Tati
Jeanne, Therese was encouraged to call her–always parted with the
paltry few francs she paid her each week with an air of reluctance. Tati
Jeanne’s already small clientele was dwindling, and with it her
earnings; it was painful to have to share even a tiny amount with
someone else.
One day in 1945, a bomb fell near Therese as she was walking down the
Porte de la Chapelle, and, though she was physically unharmed, the blast
entered her dreams at night and stopped her from sleeping. Her nervous
condition only worsened over time. She would start at the slightest
noise, and she started to eat voraciously, whenever she could find the
food to stuff herself with. When Tati Jeanne died, Therese took on her
remaining clients, but it was scarcely a living.
She was alone, as she’d always feared, but she had also learned there
were worse things: she owed Laurent that much. Shortly after her sixty