into Monceau
——
The next morning he was stationed at the post office again but this time he wasn’t watching for the man. He was only watching the post box. Joe was a tourist. He was buying stamps. He engaged a teller in a long conversation on first day covers; he chose and replaced postcards; he spoke terrible French, but was determined to make use of it for conversation; when he couldn’t make himself understood, he resorted to speaking loudly and slowly in English; he wrote out long messages to absent friends, scribbling them on postcards, leaning on the counter, saying to everyone how beautiful he thought the city was; in short, he made himself a nuisance of the kind that was happy, it was clear to everyone in sight, to remain at the place all day.
It was lucky for all concerned that the boy came a mere one hour and fifteen minutes after the post office opened.
Joe had almost missed him. The boy had brown hair and dark skin and he was small and he went unremarked through the adults who came to check their mail. He carried a small brown bag on a strap on his shoulder. Joe had hardly paid him attention, the small, shy figure passing through the cavernous hall of waiting boxes, going to one end of a row of boxes –
There.
For just a moment, there was post in the boy’s hands. Envelopes. A small package. A couple of single-sheet flyers. And then they were gone into the small brown bag and the boy turned to leave. No one could have seen him.
And, to the relief of the employees of the Avenue Hausmann branch of La Poste, the annoying tourist with the bad French and Parisian manners had suddenly lost interest in the display of pre-independence Algerian stamps he had been giving so much noisy attention to in the past quarter of an hour, and with only a brief merci had finally and rather unexpectedly left the premises.
Joe was relieved, too. Focusing attention on himself came hard to him, almost as a physical exertion, an actual sense of discomfort, as if to draw these people’s attention was to bodily grab them, and do so while moving through a viscous, gelatinous liquid that was resisting and restricting his movements. It was a strange feeling, and it left him, as he in turn finally left, light-headed and a little disoriented. As he walked down the wide avenue it seemed unreal to him, the cars moving along seeming like translucent crawling beetles, and the trees were hands, raised into the sky with fists that opened and closed, and as he looked at them he could see their veins, a map of blood vessels traversing the stump of a hand. He tried to shake the feeling away. He needed sugar, he thought. He felt like a man who had given blood: he needed coffee, a slice of cake, and he would be fine. Instead he lit a cigarette and coughed, and kept his eyes on the boy and his distance from him, and worried about who else might be following.
For it occurred to him that he was not alone. There had been someone – perhaps several someones – watching him in Vientiane, and in Paris too he got echoes of them, nothing concrete, nothing established, but little echoes coming back a little off, a tone of voice, the way an answer had been phrased – too smoothly, too quickly, as if the person being questioned had had occasion to formulate the answer before. There could have been someone else on the same trail, they could even be using Joe – it was a possibility he didn’t like to contemplate, but there it was, and so he worried, and smoked, and followed the boy at a distance, and at the same time watched for a tail, but he could see no one following, and it occurred to him how ridiculous he was being, and yet –
They had shot at him. And perhaps it was merely a warning shot, but they were watching him, he had to go on the assumption that they were, whoever they were, whatever they wanted – and it occurred to him that, sooner or later, he would have to find out. The boy meanwhile was walking along with no care in the world, an anonymous, small brown boy, turning away from Avenue Hausmann, going north, Joe following, the road becoming narrower and quieter, and when he looked in the reflection of shop windows he could still see nothing and no one behind. It was a hot day. The cigarette had scorched his fingers and he had dropped it and now he was sweating, and still the boy was going ahead with the mail meant for someone else, until at last he had crossed a road and disappeared into a green grassy space, and Joe paused: it was the back of the Parc Monceau.
He hesitated before going in, and he didn’t know why. He had never been there before, and yet it felt as if he had. The knowledge of a memory, rather than the memory itself, nagged at him. He knew the park, without quite knowing how or why he knew it.
He walked down the tree-lined Avenue Ruysdaël, and into Monceau.