“ ‘L’automne,’ ” he said, and recited:
Un cheval s’ecroule au milieu d’une allee
Les feuilles tombent sur lui
Notre amour frissonne
Et le soleil aussi.
“Yes, that one,” she said, her voice wistful, looking into her wineglass. “And the one about the sun disappearing behind the Grand Palais, and my heart following it.”
He recited:
Comme lui mon coeur va disparaitre
Et tout mon sang va s’en aller
S’en aller a ta recherche.
“How do you remember them?” she asked softly.
“It was the kind of schooling I had, old-fashioned provincial teachers, lots of things to learn by heart,” he said. “I can still recite Napoleon’s speech at the battle of the Pyramids about how forty centuries looked down upon them. Come on, enjoy your soup while it’s hot,” he said, changing the mood. He knew it wasn’t his schooling that made him remember the poems. It was reading and rereading them aloud on wintry evenings as Gigi slept before the fire and thinking of Isabelle in the hospital with her thigh smashed by a bullet.
“They weren’t crazy, those teachers. A pity we’ve lost all that.”
“I must have been one of the last generation to be taught that way.” He removed the empty soup bowls and came back with the casserole. He raised the lid and the scent of thyme and rosemary from the bouquet garni he’d made began to fill the room. He excused himself and went out to his herb garden, turning on the outside light to pick some of the new parsley that was emerging. As he returned, Bruno smiled at the sight of Gigi slipping out past him to patrol the grounds, pausing by the chicken coop with his ears up and one paw raised, a good sentry going on duty.
He tore up the green leaves to sprinkle them on each of the plates she had served.
“This looks wonderful and smells better,” she said. “I can’t think when I last had navets. It reminds me of my childhood. Is that where the word navarin comes from?”
“Some say it comes from the battle of Navarino against the Turks, but I prefer to think it comes from the navets. You can use any spring vegetables but if you don’t include navets, then it’s not a navarin,” he said, pouring the red wine from the carafe. “Tell me more of your life in Paris. I can’t really imagine it.”
“There hasn’t been much of it. Not long after I started in the minister’s office, I was sent to Luxembourg to get into the bank accounts of that mysterious food company that turned out to have been set up by our own defense ministry. You remember that?” She began to eat. “This food is wonderful, and this wine. It’s your usual Pomerol, no?”
He nodded. “It’s the ’03, from the heat-wave year, so it won’t last much longer.”
“Mmm… delicious. After a month or so in the office they deployed me to London to liaise on joint operations against illegal immigration, and then I got shot at Arcachon and was in the hospital for nearly two months. I could still be on convalescent leave, but I was bored and they let me come back to do office work.”
“Friends?” he asked, and offered her a second helping. She shook her head, but held out her glass for more wine.
“Some from school and childhood who’ve moved to Paris,” she said. “Some other women who were at the police academy with me and a few colleagues in the office, that’s about it. There’s a book club at the ministry that I’m thinking of joining, and I go to a lot of movies, usually the version originale to improve my English.”
“And where do you live? You gave me the address, but what’s it like?”
“Just a single bedroom apartment off the rue Beranger, near the boulevard Voltaire in the Troisieme. But I have my eye on a small house, one of a row of artists’ studios with lots of glass, just off the rue de la Tombe- Issoire near the Metro Alesia. I went to a party there and fell in love with the place, but I can’t afford it yet. If you come and visit me, I’ll take you there to see it and walk you round the parc Montsouris.”
“Not named after our own Communist councillor, I imagine,” Bruno said. “He always asks after you, by the way. You made a conquest there.”
“A Communist admirer, just what my career needs.” She smiled. “There’s another Prevert poem, not in the book I gave you, about two lovers embracing in a tiny second of eternity, one morning in a winter’s light in the parc Montsouris of Paris.”
“A poem for every occasion,” Bruno said, smiling.
She reached across and touched his hand. She sat straight up, swiftly changing her mood as if by an act of will. “And I recognize this cheese, it’s the one your friend makes.”
“Stephane’s Tomme d’Audrix, and some mache from my garden to go with it.”
“I haven’t eaten like this since last summer. In the hospital, it kept me going, remembering dishes you made.” She paused. “I have to go back in a couple of months. They want to use plastic surgery to make my thigh look better. I can’t stand looking at it.”
Bruno nodded, trying to understand. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Yes, and I’ll have one of my rare cigarettes, if you don’t mind.” He gestured permission and she lit a Royale filter. He rose and went to the dresser, opened the drawer and pulled out an ashtray and a half-empty pack of the same brand and put them on the table beside her.
“I found the cigarettes after you left. There were moments when I was even tempted to smoke one.” He took the plates into the kitchen. He had barely started to make coffee when he heard her come in behind him and say his name softly.
He turned, and she raised one side of her skirt. She unhooked her stocking from the garter and rolled it down to her knee to reveal the savage crimson scar and the crater in her flesh, the thigh markedly thinner than the other as if the muscles had withered.
“Other than doctors and nurses, you’re the only one who has seen this,” she said, a catch in her voice that was almost a sob and an appeal in her eyes that he could not ignore. Her other hand reached out to him. “Oh, Bruno…”
Instinctively, he knelt swiftly and kissed the scar, the marks of the stitches still obvious. His hand gently stroked the side of her thigh, and he could feel under his fingers the parallel scar of the exit wound on the back of her leg. He felt her hand touch the back of his head, her fingers curling in his hair. She was whispering his name. He rose, and saw that her eyes were closed and her lips were trembling. Very softly, he kissed them, picked her up in his arms and carried her to his bed, aware only of her heart beating fast against him and the passion of her mouth against his own.
31
He had woken alone. She had left just before midnight, leaving him to his tousled bed and memories of her rolling the stocking back up and fastening it again to the garter belt so that all he saw was the whiteness of her flesh, the darkness of her eyes and nipples and the glorious geometry of black and white, pubis and stockings, that stretched so invitingly below her trim waist. Before he slept, he had taken down the Prevert and read again.
And now with Gigi trailing along behind, he was astride Hector, glowing from the gallop that his horse had unleashed along the ridge, as if Hector understood Bruno’s strange, almost magical mood of contentment and energy, the pistol he so seldom wore now thudding a tattoo against his hip. Descending to lift Gigi onto his horse’s back once more, Bruno let Hector again pick his way across the ford at the river. He waved a greeting to the sergeant from the CRS who sat high on the back of one of Julien’s mares, his machine pistol braced on his thigh.
“We just got confirmation,” the sergeant said, as Bruno let Gigi down to earth again. “The meeting’s being shifted here. They’re putting up the wind sock and painting the big H for the helicopter now. They found a crude bomb in the conference room, behind some new plasterboard. Sticks of dynamite and a digital timer, they tell me. A good job we got that Semtex before the terrorists did.”
How the hell could that have been done, and by whom? Bruno tried to remember the security arrangements
