On Leave by Daniel Anselme

Author:Daniel Anselme
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Faber & Faber

CHAPTER EIGHT

At first glance the Café des Vrais Sportifs, in the alley that runs behind the Arena, looks more like the sort of place with a curved bar where you knock back a glass without sitting down. There was only one table in a corner of the room, and when Lachaume got there, it was already taken by customers eating dinner. It was an odd place to pick for a rendezvous.

It was eight o’clock. Lasteyrie and Valette would be there soon. He ordered a sandwich. That would have to do for dinner, because the basketball heats they were going to watch were due to start at eight-thirty.

“Would you like to sit down?” the barman asked him, waving his knife to the rear, over his shoulder.

Lachaume didn’t understand.

“In the back!” the barman explained.

What he hadn’t realized was that the door marked Toilette–Téléphone to the left of the counter actually opened onto two rooms, one behind the other. The first, smaller one had bench seats and tables, and the larger one, with a low ceiling, was where they’d put the billiard tables that made sense of the café’s name.

He took a seat in the smaller room, which was empty save for a young blond woman at one of the tables. In the back room two men were playing a game at a table lit by low-hanging reflector lights; the rest of the room was in darkness.

The girl hadn’t ordered a drink, as if she really was waiting for a lover. Part of the pleasure of such meetings is to order together. Hazy memories brought that back to Lachaume. Then it struck him that the girl must be waiting for Lasteyrie. She was neatly dressed and looked sad, with her lipstick, her overdone mascara, and a plush overcoat that was neither opulent nor indigent—the kind of coat worn in Paris that sets a conundrum for sociologists.

How peculiar to set up a get-together in this obscure hole, when there were so many other cafés opposite the entrance to the Arena …

Valette is the first to turn up, looking gloomy, dragging his feet. He’s wearing his uniform, with his cap in his hand. He nods by way of hello and flops onto the bench seat.

“Are you in disguise?” Lachaume whispers.

Valette doesn’t argue with that, and his eyes wander. “This is a real dive,” he says at long last, nodding toward the backroom. “And I bet that girl’s waiting for Lasteyrie,” he adds sotto voce.

“Dead right,” Lachaume says.

Talking in whispers because of the girl and the silence all around made the place—the dive, as Valette called it—seem all the more mysterious. Small bars serving particular localities in Paris, especially at off-peak times in the early evening, when the owners turn down the lighting to save electricity, take on an eerie, conspiratorial air, reminiscent (for those with vivid imaginations) of the secret and illegal life of the city that Balzac once described, but for which Paris may have lost its appetite and capacity. Lachaume had spent his day walking around Paris as if he’d wanted to get lost or to disappear in it.

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