Someone Else by Tonino Benacquista
“A real prick, who does the things pricks do and has the habits pricks have. With the proof to back it up, Angèle will stop seeing this prick.”
Not long after that, Paul met the female equivalent of this: a woman of forty who had been married fifteen years, asking him to follow her husband’s mistress.
“I want to know if she has any other lovers.”
“Why?”
“Because he can’t stand sluts.”
The clients had many more reasons to be wary than the investigator. They were so on edge they were prepared to listen to the first person likely to get to the truth . . . and for someone who is suffering, there is only one truth.
*
Watching Julien Grillet was somehow both fascinating and terrifying. Unlike Paul – who was a “tail” by trade, a grass-roots man – Grillet had been an “investigator” for twenty years and forced himself to respect office hours with the regularity of a metronome, never getting up out of his chair. First thing in the morning, his fax would be spewing out lists of names generated by a variety of payment organizations, property companies or even landlords suffering at the hands of bad debtors, all calling on him to find new addresses for these dishonest individuals. He dealt with an average of fifteen cases a day, and solved three quarters of them. Starting with the last known address, he would ring the administrative organizations that might be able to give him information. He knew the various organizations and what they did, not just the access codes, formalities and key words, but also the customs and psychology of every kind of minor official, and how to bend the rules. He played on the permeability between different departments, and gained access to information that official powers would have trouble getting hold of because of the weighty procedures. Paul liked hearing him passing himself off as someone from the tax office asking a favour of a colleague or, better still, a policeman. His natural affection for forgers and liars meant he felt considerable admiration when he listened to Julien fooling the whole country. Once he had got hold of the address, Grillet checked it on Minitel,* found the telephone number of a close neighbour and passed himself off, amongst other things, as a representative from some office who needed to know what to do with an overpayment for Monsieur X. Ten times out of ten, the neighbour in question was delighted to confirm that Monsieur X did indeed live there. When there was a risk of someone else with the same name living in the building, Grillet would get hold of Monsieur X himself to avoid any mistakes – to be sure he did the job thoroughly.
A tail like Paul often needed an investigator for an address or a name, or for research into someone’s solvency or inheritance. In the early days of their collaboration, Paul had asked Julien whether he missed the grass-roots work. Julien had known, ever since his childhood, that the less he was seen the better it was for him. If I was tailing someone, I’d be the only person they’d see in the street. On the other hand, he could get anything he wanted on the telephone: it was a gift. As a teenager, he had been the one who managed to persuade the girls to come to parties; once there, not one of them would come to talk to him. What Julien liked more than anything else was passing himself off as a Telecom employee, a lance sergeant, a paymaster, a cousin from the provinces or Father Christmas himself, what mattered was that people believed him. For the space of a phone call, he felt as if he almost was all those characters.
Paul Vermeiren and Julien Grillet had been a team for nearly a year, and the Agence Bonne Nouvelle was running smoothly. Neither of them wanted to know more about the other.
*
At the end of the day Paul found time to go to the sports hall to battle against impending flabbiness and an expanding waistline. After which it took no more than twenty minutes to get back to his little corner of the countryside that once more had been spared the sound and fury. He settled himself under the pergola to sip a little glass of port in the dwindling light and sit in silence thinking about the day that was just finishing and the one that lay ahead. He never lost sight of the fact that the bottom half of the hourglass was filling day by day: from now on every grain of sand had its own significance.
As he got ready in front of the mirror, he had a quick look at his scars, which were growing steadily whiter. His features had become fixed forever and had replaced the mask that Joust had drawn.
That evening he felt like wearing a tie; he wanted to please the woman who would be waiting for him in a café in Montparnasse at about 10 o’clock. Eva liked good manners and thoughtfulness, especially in the early days of a relationship. If theirs was to die that night, it would not be a tragedy or a source of regret for either of them. Eva knew how to cut up raw fish herself to make sushi, and almost always wore black lace. She thought Paul was a caricature of a private eye, and that he was taking her for a ride on the rare occasions when he told her about his day. He took her to dinner in a quiet place, where they had fun imagining the children they would never have. She asked whether he would like to go back to her apartment, where they could make the most of the terrace and make love under the sky. Before getting there, Paul made a detour in the car to identify a building in the Twelfth Arrondissement where he would start his tailing job at 10 o’clock the following morning. When Eva asked him why he had made the detour, he told her that she had made him lose his sense of direction.
* A public-access information system similar to the Internet, which has been available in France for many years.
Nicolas Gredzinski
“Of all your beloved geniuses, who are your favourites?”
“Stupid question, my friend. It proves you haven’t understood anything about genius!”
“Let’s put it another way: which one do you feel particular affection for, a little inexplicable weakness?”
“Are you applying for the position?”
“Answer the question.”
“I like Rimbaud because he had weak knees, and I think that goes well with genius. I’ve also got a soft spot for Freud because he committed suicide by cigar with a furious dedication which his doctors found disconcerting. Michelangelo is also one of my favourites because he was mad enough to make fakes.”
“Fakes . . .?”
“Once, because he needed the money, he made a fake ancient sculpture which he buried in his garden and which, once it was discovered, was worth ten times as much as a Michelangelo! If anyone put an estimate on it nowadays, it would definitely be the most expensive fake in the world.”
“What do you like best, of all his work?”
“I’ve only ever seen reproductions.”
“What would you like to see for real?”
“The Sistine Chapel, the Pietà and probably his Moses.”
“All three of those are in Rome, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
A trip to Rome: now he had found something to give her. After all, surely she was the instigator of the Trickpack, not to mention the individual alarm watch? Loraine was on the right scale to inspire a Renaissance artist or a picaresque novelist; Nicolas did not feel worthy of his muse.
She preferred the charm of a railway carriage to an aeroplane; going by train struck him as a more everyday option, and the possibility of experiencing new sensations was attractive. So they conformed to the fantasy of the sleeper train as they sipped their white wine, served by a conductor who momentarily found himself back in the days when the tips were so generous that they made his salary look ridiculous.
Nicolas’s salary seemed even more so, compared to what the Trickpack was bringing in. Other brands of fizzy drink had got caught up in the game but also, and he had to see it to believe it, a brand of wine and a champagne. You could hide your beer or your sparkling water in a golden sleeve embossed with the coat of arms of Paul Garance et Fils champagne. It had been the most widely sold Trickpack over the last few months, snobbery in the extreme for 40 francs. The whole range was producing very good results; the patent had been bought for Italy, Germany and all the Scandinavian countries. Hugues, Nicolas’s accountant
Nicolas felt guilty for having so much money. Pleasing the people around him was a way of healing his guilt. He started with his team, the art department and its administrative counterpart. Nicolas discovered by chance the common denominator of all these individuals: football. They had all revealed themselves as fans when he had told them that the Parena Group was taking on a small club which was about to be promoted to the first division. A whole identity had to be created – shirts, logos, transport – and the graphic designers had buckled down to the job. It was when he saw their enthusiasm that he had the idea of giving each of them two seats for a final at the massive Stade de France. He gave Muriel the biggest bottle of a perfume she said she couldn’t ever buy for herself. The whole floor was entitled to his generosity too, as well as the aperitif club and many others. He had to lie about the origins of the gifts, claiming he had a friend who was on good terms with the French Football Federation, another at Guerlain, and a whole host of others pretty much all over the place, when he had, in fact, paid out of his own pocket. In his largesse, he had taken special care of Jacot by taking him to sample the cuisine of the greatest restaurants in Paris in an attempt to put a bit of weight back on him. One evening, at the Grand Véfour, he asked him: “Do you really have to be in Paris to rest?”
“No, I could just as easily be in the country but I’ve always found it depressing.”
“Why not by the sea?”
“At this time of year?”
“With a few wahines.”
Jacot looked up inquisitively.
“Kauai. Do you know where that is?”
“No.”
“In the Hawaiian islands.”
Jacot had come back still just as thin, but tanned, relaxed, feeling as if he had stolen this dream month from the enemy – a victory. If money could buy a little comfort and combat worry, then there was no better investment. And, who knows, with all this playing Father Christmas, Nicolas might find that money could buy him some confidence, discretion, enthusiasm and – most paradoxically – some sincerity.
Loraine had concerns about exploiting his generosity, a trait peculiar to those born without a fortune, who work their entire lives. During their escapades Nicolas realized that Loraine got up in the morning, day after day, to earn a living. He tried to picture what sort of work she might do, but could come up with no interesting answers. He almost asked her the question directly, but the protective shadow of his inner demons held him back just in time. In the notes that he left on the bedside table the Other was very firm: Don’t push your luck with this girl!
In a double compartment on the Palatino train Loraine lay on the bottom bunk watching the darkness flitting past at her feet. At daybreak Nicolas opened his eyes and found her in the same position with a book in her hand and a cup of coffee on a tray.
“. . . Where are we?”
“We’ve just passed Pisa.”
“Could I have some coffee too?”
“I’ll ask for some more from Monsieur Mésange.”
“Who?”
“The conductor.”
“Are you friends already?”
“Neither of us was asleep. He told me about his life on the trains – it was fascinating. When we left Turin, I came back into our compartment. I checked that you were OK, and I started reading.”
She opened the door and waved along the corridor; the conductor arrived two minutes later with a breakfast tray, which he handed to Nicolas, then he exchanged a few niceties with Loraine before leaving the compartment.
“I’d like to have your gift for making friends,” he said.
“Isn’t there a hint of irony in that?”
“Not at all. I have to really know someone to feel comfortable with them.”
“I just go by the first impression.”
“I never do! I can radically change my mind about someone between the first and the second time I meet them.”
“The first impression is more reliable than the second,” she said, “for one very precise reason: it’s the product of much longer experience.”
One of the thousand reasons he wanted to wake up with Loraine every day: hearing her embark on a theoretical conversation at 7 o’clock in the morning. He adored her convoluted lines of reasoning, especially when she was lying on her front.
“Every time you meet someone for the first time, you judge them according to criteria that have matured over forty years of experience. Consciously and subconsciously your mind analyses all the signs transmitted by a stranger. You can call it intuition; intuition is a complex mechanism. On the other hand, if you see them again a week later, your experience and the way you think will only be a week old. Do you see what I mean?”
“No.”
“I do like you.”
“So do I.”
The moment he set foot on the platform at Roma Termini, Nicolas wanted a drink; it was only twenty-five past ten. In the taxi, to stave off his impatience, he launched into a perilous eulogy on the architectural mixture of chalky stone and ochre stone, which, according to him, eased you from an imperial city to a tiny country town. Their bedroom window looked out over the Campo dei Fiori, and the one in the bathroom over a patio where a fountain tinkled. The fresh, orange autumn sunshine beckoned them outside, but they could not resist the temptation of closing the curtains and lying down on a large, motionless double bed. Huddled against each other, they relaxed their bodies wearied by the trundling of the train; a completely new energy gave them an urge for discovery. He opened the mini-bar, looked at his watch (too quickly to see what the time was), picked up a shot of whisky, impatiently unscrewed the metal lid and emptied the contents into a glass.
“Are you tempted?”
“I’ll wait till lunchtime,” she said, going into the bathroom.
Leaning out of the window with the glass in his hand, he looked at the Campo dei Fiori without seeing it, as if he were anywhere but there.
An hour later, they went into Saint Peter’s Church, where Moses had been waiting for Loraine for five centuries, sitting there with his stern expression, turning to face her. She had the peculiar impression that she was late. Nicolas felt superfluous.
*
Their little tête-à-tête lasted an hour. When Nicolas’s patience was running thin, he suggested that Loraine come and recover from her emotions in a trattoria.
“But first I’d like to stop by at a little wine cellar on the Via Cavour, it’s very near here.”
“You told me you didn’t know Rome . . .”
“That’s true, but I do know a bit about wine.”
It was a casa vinicola shoehorned between a mini-market and a shop selling ceramics. Nicolas stood with his arms crossed, watching her scanning the shelves in silence, reading labels and picking up the odd bottle for the pleasure of touching it. The assistant managed to answer her questions and Loraine, once again, had found herself an ally in less time than it took to clink two glasses together.
“Is there a difference between semisecco and amabile?”
“No, they both mean slightly sweet, it’s more the wines . . . frizzanti?”
“Sparkling wines.”
The man invited them to taste a 1995 Chianti, which Loraine found robusto (although she did not know whether the word existed), and she asked: “Vitigno Sangiovese?”
“Il Brunello di Montalcino, tutto Sangiovese.”
Nicolas understood only one thing: his glass was already empty. He had not had time to savour the bouquet, the tannins or all the subtleties hel
The “best” was Marcheschi’s real speciality. He waxed lyrical about “bests” in very diverse fields: he knew the best video repair man in Paris, the best Tonkinese soup in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, he listened only to Frank Zappa’s best album, and he himself made the best tarte au citron in the world.
“I’ll have the melanzane alla parmiggiana,” Nicolas said casually.
“What’s that?”
“Slices of aubergine layered like a lasagne, with melted parmesan.”
“I’ll have a hundred of them.”
In one corner of the room Nicolas spotted a violin lying on top of its case, and an upright piano which looked well cared for. A Debussy tune came back to him.
“With your little performance in the shop back there, I’ll let you choose the wine.”
“Aubergine and parmesan, that must be quite strong on the palate,” she said, picking up the menu. “How about a good solid Barolo?”
Nicolas relaxed when he saw the bottle, and drank two glasses straight away, quickly, as if he were thirsty. Now he knew how to smile and how to speak.
“I knew you liked wine, but it’s a big step from that to knowing I’m sleeping with an oenologist.”