The Black Notebook Read Free Page B

Finally, Aghamouri maintained fairly close ties with the hotel manager, the aforementioned Lakhdar, who every other day came to the office behind the reception desk. He was often accompanied by a man named Davin. Those two seemed to have known Paul Chastagnier, Marciano, and Duwelz for a long time. All this I recorded in my black notebook one afternoon while waiting for Dannie, as one might do crossword puzzles or doodle, to pass the time.
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    Later on, they questioned me about them. I had received a summons from a certain Langlais. I arrived at ten and spent a long time waiting in an office at police headquarters on the Quai de Gesvres. Through the window, I gazed at the flower market and the black façade of the Hôtel-Dieu. A sunlit autumn morning on the quays. Langlais entered the office: brown hair, average height. Despite his large blue eyes, his manner was cold. Without so much as a hello, he began asking questions in a gruff voice. I think that because I kept my calm, his tone eventually softened and he realized that I wasn’t really mixed up in all this. It occurred to me that there, in his office, I might have been sitting in the exact spot where Gérard de Nerval had hanged himself. If we looked around the cellar of this building, we would find a section of the former Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. I wasn’t able to answer Langlais’s questions very precisely. He cited the names of Paul Chastagnier, Gérard Marciano, Duwelz, and Aghamouri, and wanted me to talk about my relations with them. That was when I realized how small a part they had played in my life. Walk-ons. I thought about Nerval and Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, on which they had erected the building we were in now. Did Langlais know? I almost asked him. Several times during the interrogation, he brought up the name of one Mireille Sampierry, who allegedly “frequented” the Unic Hôtel, but I didn’t know her. “Are you quite sure you never met?” The name meant nothing to me. He must have seen I wasn’t lying and let it drop. I jotted down “Mireille Sampierry” in my notebook that evening, and at the bottom of the same page, I wrote, “14 Quai de Gesvres. Langlais. Nerval. Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne.” I was surprised he never mentioned Dannie. It was as if she had left no trace in their files. As the expression went, she had slipped through the cracks and vanished into thin air. So much the better for her. The night when I’d discovered her with Aghamouri at the bar of the Café Luxembourg, after a while I couldn’t make out her face in the glaring neon. She was no more than a spot of light, without relief, as in an overexposed photograph. A blank. I thought maybe she had eluded this Langlais’s investigations by the same phenomenon. But I was mistaken. During a second interrogation the following week, I discovered that he knew plenty about her.
    One night when she still lived at the Cité Universitaire, I had accompanied her to the Luxembourg metro stop. She didn’t want to go home alone to the American Pavilion, and she had asked me to take the metro with her. Just as we were heading down to the platform, the last train departed. We could have walked, but the prospect of following endless Rue de la Santé at that hour and skirting the high walls of the prison, then of Sainte-Anne Hospital, made my blood go cold. She pulled me toward the start of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and we found ourselves at the semicircular bar, in the same spot she and Aghamouri had occupied a few nights before. She sat on a stool, while I remained standing. We were pressed together because of the crowd at the bar. The light was so harsh it made me squint, and we couldn’t hear ourselves talk in the hubbub around us. Then, one by one, everyone left. There remained only a single customer at the back, sprawled over the bar, and we couldn’t tell whether he was dead drunk or merely asleep.