Читать книгу The President's Hat - Antoine Laurain - Страница 11

Two hours and seven minutes had gone by. François Mitterrand had just disappeared into the night, flanked by Dumas and the large man, after the maître d’ had ceremoniously held the door for them. All three had finished their meal with a crème brûlée. The large man had removed a cigar from a leather case, telling them he would light it outside and smoke it while they walked. Dumas had paid with a 500-franc note.

‘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 the restaurant, 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 was emerging from a long period underwater. The blood beat in his temples and his heart thumped in his chest. What if someone came back to claim the hat now, he thought, in a brief moment of panic. A bodyguard? The President himself? What would he do? What could he possibly say? How could he explain the sudden transfer of the hat to his lap?

He had just committed an act of theft. The last time he had stolen something was in early adolescence, in a shopping centre in Courbevoie, egged on by a friend after school. They had stolen a record: ‘Aline’, a hit single by the pop star Christophe. Since that afternoon back in 1965, he had never done such a thing again.

What he had just done was far worse than sneaking a record into his schoolbag in a supermarket. Daniel sat motionless, his eyes darting around the room at the other diners. No, no one had seen him, he was sure of that. Nothing to fear on that score. But now he had to leave before anything untoward happened, before the President asked someone to call the restaurant, looking for his hat; before the waiters came scurrying to the table under the furious gaze of the maître d’.

Daniel asked for the bill, saying he would pay by card. The waiter returned with the credit card machine. Daniel hardly noticed the amount. Nothing mattered any more. He signed the slip and took his receipt. He rummaged in his pockets for a tip and put it in the chrome dish. The waiter bowed slightly in a gesture of thanks and walked away.

Now, said Daniel to himself. His mouth was dry so he poured himself a glass of water and gulped it down, then delicately extracted the presidential hat from under the tablecloth and put it on his head. Yes, it fitted perfectly. He put on his coat and headed for the door, feeling as if his legs were about to give way. The maître d’ would stop him: ‘Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur! S’il vous plaît! The hat, Monsieur …?’

But nothing of the kind happened. Daniel had left a fifteen-franc tip, and the waiters all nodded respectfully as he passed; even the mâitre d’ attempted a smile which lifted the tips of his narrow moustache. The door was held open for him, and he stepped out into the cold, turning up the collar of his coat and heading for his car. Mitterrand’s hat is on my head, he told himself.

Once in the driver’s seat, with the hat still on his head, Daniel angled the rear-view mirror and gazed at his reflection in silence for several minutes. He felt as if his brain was bathed in a refreshing dose of sparkling aspirin. Bubbles of oxygen were fizzing through zones that had slumbered for too long. He turned the key in the ignition and drove off slowly into the night.

Daniel drove through the streets for a long while, circling his neighbourhood several times before leaving the car on level five of his building’s underground car park. He could have driven like that for hours, his mind a complete blank. He felt buoyed up with a confidence that was as comforting as a warm bath.

In the deserted living room, he sat down on the sofa and looked at his reflection in the blank television screen. He saw a man sitting with a hat on his head, nodding slowly. He stayed like that for a good hour, contemplating his own image, his entire being suffused with an almost mystical feeling of serene calm. It was two in the morning before he listened to his wife’s message on the answering machine. Everything was fine in Normandy, Véronique and Jérôme would be back next day, arriving at Gare Saint-Lazare at 9.45 p.m. Daniel undressed. The last item he removed was the hat. He gazed in wonder at two letters embossed in gold on the band of leather running round the inside:

F.M.