brilliant as before: it was a Parisian sun renowned for setting as late as ten o’clock. Finding Julian could wait another day. She scouted a taxi and went back to her hotel to sleep off the deadly exhaustion of a foreign time zone.
11
A PALACE , Iris had written. To Bea’s American eyes that Sunday morning, it was venerably European — Romanesque windows, the lower ones swelled by rounded wrought-iron barriers, dark thick oblong stones rising like a vast wall, heavy wooden double doors carved into bunches of bursting grapes and a fat-stomached glowering Bacchus, all of it giving out some nearly olfactory opulence. Or else it was a latter-day mimicry, war-stained Paris refurbished, an architect’s willful deception or obsequious homage, stale modern Europe pretending to be ancient Europe. One of the doors stood open: a lamplit dimness, a marble desk and a concierge behind it — so this ducal manse was, after all, only another middle-class apartment building, though not of a kind you would ever see in New York.
Julian lived here.
She said his name to the concierge, who, it turned out, spoke English with a cockney sound, and was eager to explain why: it was lonely to sit all day in the half-dark without a living soul to talk to, only the comings and goings of the people upstairs, and nothing in her ears but the lift’s funny whistle. And of course she was English, anyone could hear it straightaway, she couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, she had married her second husband, a Frenchman from La Rochelle on the coast, they had met when she crossed over to Normandy to visit her first husband’s grave, a British soldier, you know, and here she was, stuck now in Paris, because her second husband was dead from the disease you can only whisper about . . . Please say again?
“Nachtigall,” Bea said. “Julian Nachtigall.”
“I’ve got nobody like that on my roster, and believe me” — she tapped her forehead — “I’ve got them all up here.”
“A young man. In his twenties. An American.”
“There’s an American doctor on the top floor, he speaks French pretty well. But almost never here, you don’t mean Dr. Montalbano?”
“No, no, Nachtigall.”
“All these foreign names, you’d think we were with the Jews.” The concierge pleated the sides of her mouth into a smirk. “I know the one you want. He’s a Jew, the one you want, but I don’t like to spread it around. A squatter boy, with another squatter, and now there’s a third one, don’t ask me why. It’s a wonder he keeps them up there, he’s an odd bird, Dr. Montalbano, who knows what they’re up to —”
Garrulousness without plausibility. But what
was
plausible? Was it plausible that Julian had ascended from that other place to this place, the pauper to the palace? The woman was ready to jabber on, widening brownish lips in a know-it-all smile, while Bea escaped across the carpeted foyer toward the glint of a tiny elevator cage. It staggered shrilly upward, one, two, three, four, five, and at the sixth landing halted before a single door.
An ordinary button-bell.
It was cool here, and quiet. She stood and listened. Noiselessness behind the door, a ferocity of expectation — herself caught in a fixity, a movie-still excised from a scene of crisis, the frozen moment of her finger lifted, approaching the button, the button that was about to violate the silence behind the door (Iris’s lifted finger seconds before it fell blindly on a violated key) . . . A muffled ring; then nothing; then still more nothing; and finally the sound of a staccato bark — but a bark with a human timbre. The heavy scrape of shoes, scrabbling with a kind of hobble, as if the laces were untied, and from a diminishing distance a growling American voice: “Fine, not again, just when I’m dropping off you people have to go and forget to take the goddamn key —”
A young man, flabby at the neck, a thin horizontal blond mustache,streaming eyes, a
11
A PALACE , Iris had written. To Bea’s American eyes that Sunday morning, it was venerably European — Romanesque windows, the lower ones swelled by rounded wrought-iron barriers, dark thick oblong stones rising like a vast wall, heavy wooden double doors carved into bunches of bursting grapes and a fat-stomached glowering Bacchus, all of it giving out some nearly olfactory opulence. Or else it was a latter-day mimicry, war-stained Paris refurbished, an architect’s willful deception or obsequious homage, stale modern Europe pretending to be ancient Europe. One of the doors stood open: a lamplit dimness, a marble desk and a concierge behind it — so this ducal manse was, after all, only another middle-class apartment building, though not of a kind you would ever see in New York.
Julian lived here.
She said his name to the concierge, who, it turned out, spoke English with a cockney sound, and was eager to explain why: it was lonely to sit all day in the half-dark without a living soul to talk to, only the comings and goings of the people upstairs, and nothing in her ears but the lift’s funny whistle. And of course she was English, anyone could hear it straightaway, she couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, she had married her second husband, a Frenchman from La Rochelle on the coast, they had met when she crossed over to Normandy to visit her first husband’s grave, a British soldier, you know, and here she was, stuck now in Paris, because her second husband was dead from the disease you can only whisper about . . . Please say again?
“Nachtigall,” Bea said. “Julian Nachtigall.”
“I’ve got nobody like that on my roster, and believe me” — she tapped her forehead — “I’ve got them all up here.”
“A young man. In his twenties. An American.”
“There’s an American doctor on the top floor, he speaks French pretty well. But almost never here, you don’t mean Dr. Montalbano?”
“No, no, Nachtigall.”
“All these foreign names, you’d think we were with the Jews.” The concierge pleated the sides of her mouth into a smirk. “I know the one you want. He’s a Jew, the one you want, but I don’t like to spread it around. A squatter boy, with another squatter, and now there’s a third one, don’t ask me why. It’s a wonder he keeps them up there, he’s an odd bird, Dr. Montalbano, who knows what they’re up to —”
Garrulousness without plausibility. But what
was
plausible? Was it plausible that Julian had ascended from that other place to this place, the pauper to the palace? The woman was ready to jabber on, widening brownish lips in a know-it-all smile, while Bea escaped across the carpeted foyer toward the glint of a tiny elevator cage. It staggered shrilly upward, one, two, three, four, five, and at the sixth landing halted before a single door.
An ordinary button-bell.
It was cool here, and quiet. She stood and listened. Noiselessness behind the door, a ferocity of expectation — herself caught in a fixity, a movie-still excised from a scene of crisis, the frozen moment of her finger lifted, approaching the button, the button that was about to violate the silence behind the door (Iris’s lifted finger seconds before it fell blindly on a violated key) . . . A muffled ring; then nothing; then still more nothing; and finally the sound of a staccato bark — but a bark with a human timbre. The heavy scrape of shoes, scrabbling with a kind of hobble, as if the laces were untied, and from a diminishing distance a growling American voice: “Fine, not again, just when I’m dropping off you people have to go and forget to take the goddamn key —”
A young man, flabby at the neck, a thin horizontal blond mustache,streaming eyes, a
Similar Books
