The President's Hat Read Free Page A

smoke it while they walked. Dumas had paid with a 500-franc note.
    â€˜Shall we?’ the President had asked.
    Dumas had got to his feet. The cloakroom attendant had appeared and helped him on with his coat. She had done the same for Michel, who had complained he could still feel his lumbago, but the President had put on his own coat, and then his red scarf. As he did this he had turned towards the brunette and their eyes had met. She had smiled, very slightly, and the President had doubtless responded in kind, but Daniel had not been able to see that. All three had then headed for the door. In therestaurant, everyone had leant towards their fellow diners and conversations were quieter for a few seconds.
    Voilà
. It was over.
    Nothing remained but the empty plates, the cutlery, the glasses and the barely crumpled white napkins. Now it was just a table like any other, thought Daniel. In a few minutes, the dishes would be cleared away, the tablecloth refreshed, and a new diner would settle himself onto the banquette for the second sitting, never suspecting that the President of the Republic had occupied the very same seat less than an hour earlier.
    Daniel had kept back one last, slightly milky oyster, which had been waiting its turn on the melting ice for the last twenty minutes at least. He tipped a teaspoon of red-wine vinegar over it and tasted it. The iodine spread across his tongue, mixed with the bitter, peppery vinegar: ‘As I was saying to Helmut Kohl last week …’ He was certain now – he would remember those words for the rest of his life.
    Daniel swallowed his last mouthful of Pouilly and put his glass back down on the table. The dinner had been unreal – and he could so easily have missed it. He could have decided to go home and make his own supper, he could have chosen a different brasserie, there might not have been a free table, the customer who’d booked the table might not have cancelled … The important events in our lives are always the result of a sequence of tiny details. The thought made him feel slightly dizzy – or was it the fact that he’d drunk a whole bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé?
    He closed his eyes for a few seconds, breathed deeply,shifted his shoulder and massaged his neck. As he raised his left hand to do this, Daniel touched the brass rail at the top of the banquette. His fingers encountered the cold metal, and then something else as well. Something soft and yielding, something that had just squirmed, like the oyster. Daniel turned to look: the hat was still there. Instinctively, he glanced over to the door of the brasserie. The President had left several minutes ago. There was no one in the doorway.
    François Mitterrand had forgotten his hat. The phrase took shape in his mind. This is François Mitterrand’s hat. Here, right next to you. Proof that this evening was real; absolute proof that it had really happened. Daniel turned to look again at the hat which had been carefully placed between the brass rail and the mirror. Behind the black hat, the whole restaurant was reflected.
    Instead of calling over the head waiter to say self-importantly, ‘I think the customer at the table next to me has left his hat behind,’ and receiving obsequious thanks, Daniel acted on impulse. He felt as if he had a double and that another Daniel Mercier now stood in the middle of the dining room, witness to the simple, irreversible action that would be taken in the next few seconds. Daniel watched as he raised his own hand to the brass bar, lifted the black hat carefully by the brim and slipped it onto his lap, where it remained hidden from view under the table.
    The whole operation took no more than three and a half seconds, but it seemed to him to have been performed in desperately slow motion, so that when the sounds of the dining room reached his ears once more, he felt as if he wasemerging from a long period underwater. The blood beat in his temples