Page 84 of The Girl You Left Behind
“And... Ranic?”
“Foreign rules. Everyone knows it doesn’t count if you’re in another country.”
Mo is through the door and standing at the bar. A young, impossibly handsome man in a starched apron greets her. Liv stands to the side as Mo chats away to him in French.
Liv breathes in the scents of food cooking, beeswax, and perfumed roses in vases, and gazes at the walls. Her painting lived here. Almost a hundred years agoThe Girl You Left Behindlived here, along with its subject. Some strange part of her half expects the painting to appear on a wall before her.
She turns to Mo. “Ask him if the Bessettes still own this place.”
“Bessette?Non.”
“No. It belongs to a Latvian, apparently. He has a chain of hotels.”
She’s disappointed. She pictures this bar full of Germans, the red-haired girl busying herself behind the bar, her eyes flashing resentment.
“Does he know about the bar’s history?” She pulls the photocopied picture from her bag, unrolls it. Mo repeats this, in rapid French. The barman leans over, shrugs. “He’s only worked here since August. He says he knows nothing about it.” The manager, is, of course, on holiday.
The barman speaks again, and Mo adds: “He says she’s a pretty girl.” She raises her eyes to heaven.
“And he says you’re the second person to ask these questions.”
“What?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Ask him what the man looked like?”
He barely needed to say. Late thirties or so, about six foot tall, sprinkling of early gray in his short hair. “Comme un gendarme.He leave his card,” the waiter says, and hands it to Liv.
Paul McCafferty
DIRECTOR, TARP
It is as if she has combusted internally.Again?You even gotherebefore me? She feels as if he is taunting her. “Can I keep this?” she says.
“Mais bien sûr.” The waiter shrugs. “Shall I find you a table,mesdames?”
Liv flushes.We can’t afford it.
But Mo nods, studying the menu. “Yeah. It’s Christmas. Let’s have one amazing meal.”
“But—”
“My treat. I spend my life serving food to other people. If I’m going to have one blowout, I’m going to have it here, in a Michelin-starred restaurant, surrounded by good-looking Jean-Pierres. I’ve earned it. And, come on, I owe you one.”
They eat in the restaurant. Mo is garrulous, flirts with the waitstaff, exclaims uncharacteristically over each course, and ceremonially burns Paul’s business card in the tall white candle.
Liv struggles to stay engaged. The food is delicious, yes. The waiters are attentive, knowledgeable. It is food nirvana, as Mo keeps saying. But as she sits in the crowded restaurant, something strange happens: She cannot see it as just a dining room. She sees Sophie Lefèvre at the bar, hears the echoing thump of German boots on the old elm floorboards. She sees the log fire in the grate, hears the marching troops, the distant boom of guns. She sees the pavement outside, a woman dragged into an army truck, a weeping sister, her head bent over this very bar, prostrate with grief.
“It’s just a painting,” Mo says a little impatiently, when Liv turns down the chocolate fondant and confesses.
“I know,” Liv says.
When they finally get back to their hotel, she takes the file of documents into the plastic bathroom, and as Mo sleeps, she reads and reads by the harsh striplight, trying to work out what she has missed.
•••
On Sunday morning, when Liv has chewed away all but one of her nails, the matron calls. She gives them an address in the northeast of the city, and they drive there in the little hire car, wrestling with the unfamiliar streets, the clogged Périphérique. Mo, who had drunk almost two bottles of wine the evening before, is subdued and tetchy. Liv is silent too, exhausted from lack of sleep, her brain racing with questions.
