Scene of the crime, p.1
Scene of the Crime, page 1
Scene of the Crime
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS
BY PATRICK MODIANO
From Yale University Press
After the Circus
Family Record
Invisible Ink
Little Jewel
Paris Nocturne
Pedigree: A Memoir
Scene of the Crime
Sleep of Memory
Such Fine Boys
Sundays in August
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin)
Also Available
The Black Notebook
Catherine Certitude
Dora Bruder
Honeymoon
In the Café of Lost Youth
Lacombe Lucien
Missing Person
The Occupation Trilogy (The Night Watch, Ring Roads, and La Place de l’Etoile)
Out of the Dark
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood
28 Paradises (with Dominique Zehrfuss)
Villa Triste
Young Once
PATRICK MODIANO
Scene of the Crime
A NOVEL
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.
English translation copyright © 2023 by Mark Polizzotti.
Originally published as Chevreuse. © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2021.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Set in Source Serif type by Karen Stickler.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937804
ISBN 978-0-300-26593-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For Dominique
How many names have I etched in memory like “dog” or “elephant” or “cow”
So long ago now, I recognize them only from afar, even the zebra—and what was it all for?
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Scene of the Crime
Bosmans recalled that a single word, “Chevreuse,” kept cropping up in the conversation. And that a song played constantly on the radio that autumn, sung by a certain Serge Latour. He’d heard it in the small, empty Vietnamese restaurant, one evening when he was with the woman he called Deathmask.
Gentle lady
So often do I dream of you . . .
That evening, “Deathmask” had closed her eyes, visibly moved by the song’s lyrics and the singer’s voice. The restaurant, its radio on the counter playing nonstop, was located in one of the narrow streets between Maubert-Mutualité and the Seine.
Other lyrics, other faces, and even verses he’d read at the time jostled together in his head—verses so numerous he couldn’t write them all down:
“The lock of chestnut hair . . . ” “ . . . From Boulevard de la Chapelle, from fair Montmartre and Auteuil . . . ”
Auteuil. That was a name that rang strangely for him. Auteuil. But how could he marshal all those signals and Morse code messages that stretched over a distance of more than fifty years? What was the common thread?
He jotted down thoughts as they flitted through his mind. Generally in the morning or late afternoon. It took only a detail, one that might have seemed insignificant to anyone else. That was it: a detail. The word “thought” wasn’t right. Too solemn. A multitude of details gradually filled entire pages of his blue notebook, apparently having no connection with one another, and so cursory that they would have been incomprehensible to someone trying to read them.
The more these seemingly unrelated details accumulated on the blank pages, the greater his chances of elucidating them later on—he was sure of it. And their apparently futile character must not discourage him.
His teacher had once told him, back in the day, that the different stages of life—childhood, youth, middle age, senescence—corresponded to several successive deaths. It was the same for the scraps of memory he tried to set down as fast as he could: scattered images from a period of his life that he watched flit by before they disappeared forever into oblivion.
Chevreuse. Perhaps that name would draw other names to him, like a magnet. Bosmans repeated it in a whisper: “Chevreuse.” And what if he held the thread that would let him reel in the entire spool? But why Chevreuse? There had been a Duchess de Chevreuse, of course, who figured in Cardinal de Retz’s Memoirs, long one of his favorite bedside readings. One January Sunday in those distant years, stepping off a crowded train returning from Normandy, he had left the white-covered volume printed on Bible paper on his seat in the compartment, and he’d known immediately he would never get over that loss. The next morning, he had gone to the Gare Saint-Lazare and wandered around the waiting room, the shops, finally coming upon the lost-and-found window. The man behind the counter had handed him the volume of Cardinal de Retz’s Memoirs, intact, the red ribbon marker clearly visible where he had interrupted his reading the day before on the train.
He had left the station, shoving the book deep in a pocket of his coat for fear of losing it again. A sunny January morning. The earth continued to turn and the passersby to walk all around him at their tranquil pace—at least in his memory. After Trinité Church, he arrived at the bottom of what he called “the first slopes.” Now he only needed follow his usual path, climbing toward Pigalle and Montmartre.
In a Montmartre street in those years, he had crossed paths one afternoon with Serge Latour, the man who sang “Gentle Lady.” That encounter—barely a few seconds—had been such a minuscule detail in Bosmans’s life that he was amazed it resurfaced in his memory.
Why Serge Latour? He hadn’t spoken to him, and anyway, what would he have said? That a girlfriend of his, “Deathmask,” used to hum “Gentle Lady”? Or ask whether the song’s title had been inspired by a medieval poet and musician named Guillaume de Machaut? Three 45s on Polydor in one year. He didn’t know what had since become of Serge Latour. Soon after that fleeting encounter, he’d heard someone in Montmartre say that Serge Latour “was touring around Morocco, Spain, and Ibiza,” as was common back then. And the remark, in the hubbub of conversations, had remained suspended for all eternity; he could still hear it fifty years later, as clearly as on that evening, uttered by a voice that would forever remain anonymous. Yes, whatever had become of Serge Latour? And that strange girlfriend nicknamed Deathmask? Thinking of those two individuals was enough to make him even more sensitive to the dust—or rather, the odor—of time.
Leaving Chevreuse, there’s a bend in the road, then a narrow tree-lined highway. After a few miles, the entrance to a village, and soon you were running alongside train tracks. But very few trains passed over them. One at around 5 a.m., which they called the “rose train,” since it carried that variety of flower from the regional nurseries to Paris; the other train at 9:15 p.m. sharp. The small station looked abandoned. To the right, opposite the station, an alley rising in a slope past an empty lot led to Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. In that street, slightly to the left, was the front of a house.
On the old Geological Survey map, the distances did not match Bosmans’s recollection. Chevreuse in his memories wasn’t as far from Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne as it was on the map. Behind the house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne were three terraced gardens. A rusty iron gate in the wall surrounding the highest one opened onto a clearing, then came the grounds that were said to belong to the Mauvières chateau, a few miles away. Bosmans had often walked far down the forest paths, without ever reaching the chateau.
If the Geological Survey map contradicted his memory of the place, it was no doubt because he had passed through the area in various stages of his life, and the years had ended up shortening the distances. Moreover, it was said that the game warden of the Mauvières chateau had once lived in the house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, which was why that house had always seemed like a border post to him, with Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne marking the boundaries of a domain—or rather, a principality of forests, ponds, woods, and parks—named Chevreuse. He tried to reconstruct a kind of Geological Survey map of his own, but with holes, blanks, villages, and back roads that no longer existed. Little by little, the routes came back to him. One in particular seemed quite precise. A car trip, its point of departure an apartment somewhere near Porte d’Auteuil. People gathered there in late afternoon, often after dark. The ones who seemed to live there permanently were a man of about forty, a small boy who must have been his son, and a young woman who worked as the boy’s nanny. She and the boy occupied the room at the back of the apartment.
Some fifteen years later, Bosmans thought he recognized that man, alone and grown older, through the window of a Wimpy’s on the Champs-Elysées. He had gone inside and sat next to him, as often happened in self-service restaurants. He w anted to ask for explanations, but he suddenly experienced a memory gap: he couldn’t recall the man’s name. Besides, bringing up the apartment in Auteuil and the people Bosmans had once met there might have embarrassed him. And what had become of the boy? And the girl, whose name was Kim? That evening, in Wimpy’s, a detail had caught his attention: the man was wearing a huge wristwatch with multiple dials that Bosmans couldn’t stop staring at. The other noticed and pressed a button at the bottom of the watch, which triggered a soft chime, no doubt an alarm. He smiled, and his smile, that watch, and that chime evoked a childhood memory.
It was Deathmask who had brought him to the apartment in Auteuil one evening. She had acquired the nickname, long before they met, owing to her impassive nature, and because she often remained silent and inscrutable.
In her soft voice, she would sometimes say by way of introduction, “You can call me Deathmask.” Her real name was Camille. And whenever he thought of her, Bosmans hesitated between writing Camille or Deathmask. He preferred Camille.
At first, he couldn’t quite fathom what all those people in the Auteuil apartment had in common. Did they meet via the “network,” a disused telephone number over which disembodied voices made assignations under false names? Camille, aka Deathmask, had told him of this “network” and of the disused telephone number AUTEUIL 15-28, which by a strange coincidence, she said, used to be the apartment’s phone number. And that apartment, despite the fugitive presence of the child and the young girl in the back room, apparently was not really lived in, but rather served as a meeting place and a site for brief encounters.
Among the people gathered in the living room, a room furnished with three large, low-slung sofas, with a double door that opened curiously onto a bathroom—among those people who were no more than shadows in his memory, because of the light in the apartment that was always too dim, Camille aka Deathmask had introduced him to a friend of hers, a certain Martine Hayward, whom she seemed to have known for a long time.
A late afternoon in summer, when daylight would last until ten o’clock. The three of them had left the apartment. A car was parked a little farther up the street, Martine Hayward’s car. Deathmask had sat behind the wheel. The nickname didn’t really suit her, but she retained it out of a perverse sense of humor.
“Would you mind if we swing by the Vallée de Chevreuse?” Martine Hayward had asked her, sitting next to him in the back seat. “Just a pit stop.”
For much of the trip, Camille had kept silent.
“We are now entering the Vallée de Chevreuse,” Camille had said that late afternoon, turning toward him. The landscape had changed, as if they had crossed a frontier. And from then on, whenever he followed that same route from Paris and Porte d’Auteuil, he would experience the same feeling: the sense of gliding into a fresh zone that the foliage on the trees sheltered from the sun. And in winter, because of the snow which was heavier in the Vallée de Chevreuse than anywhere else, it was as if you were driving along mountain roads.
A few miles before Chevreuse proper, Camille aka Deathmask turned onto a path in the woods, the entrance to which was marked by a wooden sign bearing the half-faded inscription: “Moulin-de-Vert-Cœur Inn.” An arrow pointed the way.
She had parked the car in front of a large half-timbered structure. On its flank, a restaurant dining room with picture windows. Martine Hayward got out of the car.
“I’ll just be a minute.”
He and Camille remained seated for a while. And when Martine Hayward still hadn’t returned, they got out of the car as well.
Camille told him that Martine Hayward’s husband owned this Moulin-de-Vert-Cœur Inn, but the establishment had gone bust—too many administrative complications and upkeep costs, debts, not enough guests, and anyway, Martine Hayward’s husband wasn’t much of a hotel keeper or restaurateur. They’d had to close the hotel, then the restaurant. Now it was just a dilapidated building, looking like a Norman villa washed up in the Vallée de Chevreuse. A pane was missing from one of the picture windows.
Bosmans had questioned Camille about this Hayward person, but she answered evasively. He was abroad for the moment, but would be back in France soon. While he was away, Martine Hayward found it hard to live alone in that huge abandoned inn. Camille had offered to move into one of the fifteen empty guest rooms and live with her, at least until her husband returned, but meanwhile Martine Hayward had found a small house to rent in the vicinity.
She reappeared, holding a black leather suitcase, which she put down on the stoop to turn the key in the heavy wooden front door, as if she were the final guest, responsible for shutting down the Moulin-de-Vert-Cœur Inn forever.
Camille took her place behind the wheel. And Martine Hayward in the back seat, next to him.
“Now I’ll show you the way,” she had said.
They had to rejoin the road and follow it east to Toussus-le-Noble. It suddenly occurred to Bosmans that he knew that name, but he couldn’t say why. When they skirted the airfield, it all became clear. The name “Toussus-le-Noble” called to mind an airshow he’d seen, one Sunday in his childhood. Unless that was at Villacoublay, the other aerodrome nearby. He didn’t have the exact map of the region in his head, but for him those two airfields marked the limits of the Vallée de Chevreuse. Besides, after Toussus-le-Noble, the light changed, and you entered another region of which the Vallée de Chevreuse was the backcountry.
“One more quick detour and we’ll head back to Paris,” Martine Hayward said to him, as if in apology.
They arrived in Buc. Bosmans felt a stab in his heart. This name, which he had forgotten, that brief, clear name, seemed to waken him brutally from a long sleep. He wanted to confide to them that he had lived near here, but it was none of their business.
At the entrance to the next village, Bosmans immediately recognized the town hall and the railroad crossing. Deathmask drove over the crossing and took the main street to the church square. She stopped in front of the church where he had been a choirboy one Christmas night. Martine Hayward said it would be better to turn around and follow the railroad tracks. They couldn’t miss coming to the train station and the road facing it, as she’d been instructed.
The public garden ran alongside the tracks. The concrete barriers and thickets separating it from the road hadn’t changed. Bosmans had traveled fifteen years into the past, as if a period of his childhood was about to begin again. And yet the public garden was much smaller than the one in his memory, where they sent him to play during summer vacations, at nightfall. The station also struck him as tiny, and its decrepit façade brought home how much time had passed.
Camille turned the car onto the rising alley. Then he felt his heart pound. To the left, the empty lot still deserved the nickname “the forest primeval,” as in the days when he and his playmates from the Jeanne d’Arc school would venture in until they nearly got lost. The vegetation was even denser.
She parked at the corner of Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. A woman in a black blouse was waiting at the iron gate and fence of number 38. Martine Hayward waved and walked toward her. The woman had a folder under her arm. Camille also got out of the car, while he remained in the back seat. But when he saw the woman take a keyring from her bag and open the iron gate, he decided to join them. This way, he’d get to the bottom of it. He repeated the expression to himself, “the bottom of it,” to fully understand what it meant, and perhaps to buck up his courage.
Martine Hayward introduced him to the woman in the black blouse: “A friend of mine, Jean Bosmans,” and Camille turned to him with a smile: “This is the woman from the real estate agency.” But standing in front of this house after so many years made him feel slightly dizzy.
He followed them to the front porch. The woman in the black blouse unlocked the front door that hadn’t changed in fifteen years. Still with its pale blue color and, at the center, the gilded metal of the mail slot. She stood aside to let Camille and Martine Hayward enter. And him too. He hesitated a few seconds before saying he’d wait for them outside.
He found himself alone, across the street, facing the house. Nearly seven o’clock. The sun was still fairly strong, as at the end of those summer days when he’d played in the wide expanse of tall grass around the ruined chateau, then followed the road to return home. Those late afternoons, the silence around him was so deep that he could hear the regular clack of his sandals on the sidewalk.
