There was a message from the office when I got up: the president would like to see me at ten. I had already said no to Renaud. In nine years I had never refused the president anything except in his office, and I did not intend to start with this.
I walked down to Old Montreal. Saint-Denis all the way down, across Sherbrooke, past the university to Sainte-Catherine, across the long flat width of René-Lévesque, and after that the buildings went from brick to stone and the traffic went quiet, because past a certain point only the people who work there still come. The fog had burned off by nine. It was an ordinary September morning, cold enough for a coat and bright enough that I did not need one.
The last time I had walked this street was the morning after the review. Once a year, in September, the ones they rank highest sleep a night in the building so that the office can watch how we work. I had slept there, and walked home up Saint-Denis at seven, and found her gone. I did not call the police. A woman who leaves is not missing; they would have taken her name and a description and put them in a drawer, and finding things is what I do. I came back down Saint-Denis at ten and told them instead. I had walked it every day since in my head and not once on foot. It was the same street.
The building on Saint-Sulpice had no sign. It had never had one. The brass plate beside the door was worn down to a rectangle of dull metal that had once had letters on it, and nobody had replaced it in longer than I had been coming here, because the people who needed to find the door already knew where it was.
Inside, the hallway smelled of stone, radiator heat, and under both of those the paper smell that never leaves a building where paper is kept. The three portraits were where they had always been, going up the first flight of stairs in order. Brassard hangs at the bottom, in a dark suit, looking at something past the painter’s shoulder rather than at whoever is looking at him. Desrosiers is halfway up, younger than I have ever managed to picture him, with his hands folded on a desk that no longer exists anywhere but in the painting. Cartier is at the top, under the landing window, the only one photographed rather than painted, black and white, not smiling, looking directly into the camera as if she had asked for it to be pointed at her rather than the other way around.
Under each portrait there was a small brass plaque. Under Brassard’s: A child who believes the door is locked will not try the handle. The whole of teaching is convincing them the door is a door. Under Desrosiers’s: You already own what you need. Under Cartier’s: Watch the cat. She sleeps most of her life, and she always lands on her feet. It is the first sentence of the Playbook, and the only one every trainee can say without looking. I had read all three often enough, in nine years, that I no longer read them most mornings. I only registered that they were there, the shape of the words familiar enough to skip without losing anything.
A door on the second floor stood open, and a trainer’s voice came through it, mid-sentence.
“...realizing, navigating, remembering, reading. In that order and never any other, and if you tell me you remembered before you realized, I will tell you that you are describing something else.” A pause, not unkind. “Adrien has been doing this for nine years and is still the fastest first discipline anyone in this building has ever clocked, and he will tell you himself that he does not know why, so do not ask him to explain it to either of us.”
I did not stop walking. I have heard my own name used this way before, in rooms I was not meant to be listening from, and it does the same thing to me every time, which is that I walk a little faster past the door.
The reading room was on the ground floor, past the stairs, behind a door with a small window of frosted glass. I did not go in. The room is for members carrying an assignment, and I was not carrying one, so the door was, as far as I knew, locked to me, but I stood in front of it for a moment anyway, because I knew what was on the other side: the parish registers, and the gazetteer with every name a place has ever had, and somewhere in the cabinets, if it existed anywhere on paper at all, a town on the water that I had never been able to name.
I went up.
The president’s office is on the third floor, above the training rooms, at the end of a corridor with more doors than the building seemed to have room for. He was already standing when the assistant let me in, which he did to make you feel considered rather than kept waiting, and it worked on me every time even though I knew exactly what it was.
“Adrien.” He did not shake my hand. He gestured at the chair across from him, and I sat, and he sat down after me, behind a desk with nothing on it but a single closed folder. “Renaud told you about Thursday.”
“He did.”
“And you said no.”
“I did.”
He nodded, as if this were the answer he had planned around, which it probably was. “The Institute does not need you to want the job,” he said. “It needs the client in Toronto to have an answer by Friday morning, and you are the person who gets it to them clean. I am not going to pretend otherwise.”
I noted, as I always did, that he said the Institute, and that in nine years the word had never once come out of my own mouth.
“I am not taking jobs,” I said, “until I find her.”
“I know.” He opened the folder without looking down at it, a habit that used to unsettle me and now only told me that he wanted his hands to have something to do. “Which is why I am not asking you to take this one for its own sake. The reading room is for members carrying an assignment, and you are not carrying one. I can open it to you today. Every record we hold, for as long as you need it: whatever it is you have been trying to get at without us.”
I sat with that for a moment. It was exactly what I needed, and what I had told myself, since she left, that I would not ask for.
“For the job,” I said.
“For the job. Three days to read, one night, one report. You have done it countless times.”
“And after Friday, the room stays open.”
“For as long as you are carrying assignments.” He closed the folder again, having found nothing in it that he needed. “I would rather you were tired from real work than tired from nothing at all.”
I did not answer that. He was right, and I was not going to tell him so. I looked at the folder instead of at him, and I heard myself say the day before I had decided to say it.
“Thursday,” I said.
“Thursday.”
Renaud was in the kitchen on the ground floor when I came down, standing at the counter with two cups already made, one of them clearly poured before he knew whether I would want it, which was the kind of thing Renaud did without seeming to notice that he was doing it.
“You said yes,” he said.
“I said yes to the room.”
“That’s the same thing to them.” He passed the cup across the counter. The coffee was strong enough that I smelled it before I noticed how tired he looked, which told me something about the last two days that he had not said on the phone. He had taken something on, an extra night, or two, and he did not mention it, and I did not ask, because that was the arrangement we had arrived at over nine years without ever discussing it.
A colleague I had worked jobs with for years came in behind me for the pot, and poured her coffee, and leaned against the counter with the air of someone planning to stay for the whole conversation.
“We were talking about you yesterday,” she said, speaking to Renaud so that she could say it to me. “About the day you came in and told us. None of us had any idea you were even seeing anyone. One week you were single, and the next you had a wife, and she’d gone.”
Renaud did not say anything. He was looking into his cup.
“It happened quickly,” I said, which was true, and which was also the sentence I always gave to people who asked, because it ended the question without answering it.
“I’ll bet.” She smiled wistfully into her cup and took it back down the hall.
I finished mine standing there with Renaud, and neither of us said anything else about it.
I left a little after eleven, with the room open to me again and Thursday marked, and it was not until I had crossed back over René-Lévesque that I understood what I had agreed to. I was going to work for them again so that I could look for her in their building.
The fog was gone entirely by the time I reached Saint-Denis, and the street looked ordinary at noon: buses, a delivery truck double-parked outside the pharmacy, people with somewhere to be.
The superintendent of my building was in the lobby, on a stepladder, doing something to the fixture over the mailboxes that had needed doing since summer. He does not work quickly, and he likes to talk while he works.
“You’re back early,” he said, without turning around.
“I had a meeting.”
“Any news of your wife?”
I had asked him, on the morning she left, whether he had seen her go out. He had not, and he had been kind about it.
“She’s away,” I said. It was, of all the things I had said about her since she left, the closest to true.
He climbed down to move the ladder, and while he did he asked, over his shoulder, whether we had any wedding photos up yet, because his daughter had just gotten married and he had already run out of wall for the frames; did I want the number of the frame shop on Mont-Royal, they gave a good rate to anyone in the building.
“We do not have any,” I said. “From the wedding.”
He looked at me then, surprised, deciding whether to ask about it.
“No photographer?”
“No photographer. No guests. We wanted it to be the two of us and nobody else, and a priest to say the words, and he did not ask why we wanted it that way, which was the only thing either of us asked of him.”
I told him about the beach, because once I had started I did not know how to stop in the middle of it, and because it is the easiest story I own, having told it enough times that it comes out of me now the way a held breath comes out, all at once. It was white sand, and flat water, and no wind at all. Mia was in a plain dress too long for the sand, holding it up with one hand, laughing at me because I had not thought to take my shoes off before the water reached them, and there was an old priest with his book open and his shoes as wet as mine. I told it the whole way through, standing in the lobby with the ladder between us, and I did not leave anything out.
He listened the way people listen to a story they can tell is true, his weight on one foot and the ladder forgotten in his hand, and when I finished he said it sounded like the right way to do it, and that he wished he had thought of something like it himself, twenty years ago, instead of the reception his wife’s family had insisted on.
I agreed that it was the right way to do it. Nobody has ever told me otherwise.
I went upstairs and put the kettle on. There had been no dream worth keeping the night before, only the ordinary static of a night’s sleep with nothing shaped enough to write down, so the notebook stayed on the floor where I had left it. The sheet with her name on it was still on the desk, with nothing under the name. I told myself that this was not the same as deciding not to do it.
Thursday was three days away. I would spend them reading about a company in Zurich I had never heard of before yesterday, and on the third night I would prime for a client I would never meet, and all that time the reading room on Saint-Sulpice would be open to me, with every register on the coast in it, and I had not yet opened one.
La Veille
The Playbook of Cats, Chapter 2
