“Did they often argue?”
“No,” she replied. “It was unusual, I suppose.”
Verlaque asked, “The report stated that your late husband and Agathe Barbier also argued earlier that day. Do you know what about?”
Mme Pelloquin made a tsk-tsk sound and waved her hand in the air. “No idea. It could have been anything. They were probably arguing about Valère: Valère the tortured writer. Valère the literary darling.”
Verlaque ignored the woman’s poorly concealed jealousy and asked, “You didn’t see or hear anyone go up on deck after Agathe did?”
“No, and we were rocking so much I actually didn’t fall asleep. She wasn’t up there very long when Alphonse came running down the ladder, calling for help.”
“When was the last time you saw Valère Barbier?”
She paused and answered, “It must have been at my husband’s funeral in 2001.”
“You’ve had no reason to see M Barbier since then?”
She said, “Why would I? We had nothing in common after my husband died.”
Verlaque wondered why an esteemed publisher would marry such a woman. Pelloquin had published not only Barbier but also other great novelists of that generation. Why marry a woman who openly claims not to care about that world? But Ursule Genoux had referred to Alphonse Pelloquin as an opportunist.
“Agathe’s death was not my husband’s fault,” Mme Pelloquin said. “Alphonse was a fine sailor, Judge . . . Judge . . . what did you say your name was?”
“Verlaque. Thank you, Mme Pelloquin,” Verlaque said. “You’ve been . . . very helpful. I’ll see myself out.”
Verlaque walked down the five flights of stairs. On the third floor, an apartment door opened and an elderly woman looked out. Verlaque said hello, and she quickly closed the door. “Welcome to the 16th arrondissement,” he whispered. He looked at his watch and saw that he was ahead of schedule. Marine would still be at the Sèvres museum. He walked out onto the narrow cobbled street, only a stone’s throw away from the busy Trocadéro.
He’d take a taxi to Le Hibou in Saint-Germain, where he could sit outside and smoke a cigar. It was an overpriced café popular amongst Left Bank literati and one where the people watching merited the five-euro espresso.
While walking toward the taxi stand at Trocadéro, he thought Mme Genoux’s assessment of Mme Pelloquin was very appropriate. Was the secretary also correct in her mistrust of Alphonse Pelloquin?
Marine quickly walked across the pont de Sèvres, rushing to get to her favorite museum. It was cool on the bridge; a breeze wafted up from the Seine, and she forced herself to stop. She leaned on the railing and gazed at the river: a dozen or so houseboats were tied to the shore near the museum, and she wondered what life was like in a floating house in a city on the water. Was it a paradise, but cheaper than an apartment in central Paris? Or was it a nightmare, full of mildew and who knows what floating by your bedroom window? On this warm summer day, she leaned toward the former opinion—today houseboat living looked magnificent. The boats were a few minutes away from a Métro stop, and they had communal gardens and parking, a rarity in the city. She imagined the owners having barbecues and parties on the river, like in a Renoir painting. The men mustached, the women with parasols.
A few minutes later she was inside the museum. She had called ahead, using her still-existent professor’s ID, which allowed her to set up an appointment to look at Agathe Barbier’s archives. But before that, she quickly took a turn around the museum’s vast rooms filled with ceramics from throughout the ages: Italian Renaissance majolica to delicate, hand-painted seventeenth-century Sèvres porcelain coffee services to contemporary clay sculptures like Agathe Barbier’s. In one of the last rooms, Marine looked at a white Picasso vase with a fawn-like face drawn in dark-blue glaze and handles like ears. In the middle of the room was one of Barbier’s giant terra-cotta pots; it seemed to guard the Picasso plates and vases that were displayed behind glass. Marine remembered reading that the two had worked near each other in Vallauris, and she wondered how well they had known each other. Marine looked at her watch and turned around to make her way back to where she had seen signs for the archives.
Luckily, Verlaque snagged the last available seat on Le Hibou’s terrace, an end table convenient for a cigar smoker, as he had only one neighboring table, to his right, where two young women discussed a recent translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry while chain-smoking Marlboros. He smiled and lit his Predilecto, a gift from Fabrice and Julien via Cuba, and was thankful that at least in Paris discussions like the one on his right still occurred.
He ordered an amber-colored Belgian beer and sat back and watched the crowd. It was a little after five, and their TGV was at seven. He and Marine could have dinner on the train—the microwaved risotto wasn’t bad, he’d had it before—and be in Aix by ten.
The women to his right finished their coffees and signaled to the waiter for the bill. They were not a foot from their table when a man Verlaque’s age quickly sat down with a sigh, relieved to get a spot. He glanced at Verlaque, and Verlaque pointed to his cigar and shrugged, as if to ask permission to smoke. “Pas de problème,” the man replied, smiling. Verlaque said merci and then looked at the man again. “Charles-Henri?” he asked.
“Antoine!”
“I should have guessed I’d see you here,” Verlaque said. They shook hands and laughed. He hadn’t seen Charles-Henri Lagarde in years. A dinner party in Paris,
