“Really?”

  “Do you wish to see a copy of the message you sent? And check your schedule?”

  Clarissa had no memory of answering the bank’s letter, nor of adding the event to her schedule.

  All of a sudden, an insane craving grabbed at her: the urge to abuse Mrs. Dalloway, shooting her mouth off about everything that was on her chest, all that she could no longer put up with. She yearned to scream at the top of her voice, to stamp her feet, to spill her guts. Mrs. Dalloway didn’t exist. She wasn’t a human being. How would she react? Whatever could Mrs. Dalloway say in order to calm her down, to reason with her? Perhaps she’d stay quiet, after a while. Perhaps she hadn’t been encoded to face a string of insults. Clarissa should give it a go, just to see. While she hesitated, the doorbell rang. Mrs. Dalloway announced, “Clarissa, it’s Ben. May he enter?”

  “Sure, Mrs. Dalloway.”

  The door opened, revealing the tall, gangly figure wearing white overalls. Ben asked her if an alarm had gone off in her place. She said she’d heard nothing.

  “Okay if I check something out?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She followed him into the bedroom. He went straight to the camera covered by the tape and stood in front of it. Clarissa felt as if she’d been caught red-handed. Should she say her granddaughter had done it? Not a clever idea, considering she had been filmed doing the deed herself. Ben was typing something into his device. He remained silent; so did Clarissa. After a while, he extended a never-ending arm and picked the tape off. He turned toward her.

  “You’re not supposed to stick anything on these.” He sighed. “Otherwise, the alarms go off.”

  She decided to speak up freely. She admitted to him she could no longer bear being monitored, especially in her bedroom. She hadn’t taken all this in when she’d signed the contract, and never guessed it would hassle her this way. Ben listened, nodding his head. He seemed in another world. He finally said, “You’ll get used to it. It’s always like that, in the beginning.”

  “But who is watching? You?”

  “Nope. I just fix stuff that breaks down.”

  “So, who is?”

  “It’s for security. No worries.”

  He asked her if the network was working properly. She said yes. He explained that each flat had its own. Hers was CLARISSA8 and the password was the one they’d chosen together. If ever she needed to change it, she’d have to do it with him.

  As he walked toward the entrance, she held him back with a question.

  “About my virtual assistant, please?”

  “Go ahead,” said Ben, his gaze locked on his screen.

  She would have liked him to look at her, to pay attention. Arms crossed, she decided to wait until he raised his eyes, surprised by her silence.

  “That’s better,” she said with a sarcastic smile. “I’d like to talk to you about Mrs. Dalloway.”

  “I’m listening,” he said edgily.

  “During the setup process, I was told she would react only to my voice.”

  “That’s the case.”

  “This morning, Mrs. Dalloway spoke to my granddaughter directly. Is that usual procedure, in your opinion?”

  “If your granddaughter, or any other person speaks to your assistant, it won’t obey that individual. But the assistant may initiate a conversation with someone who happens to be in your home.”

  “I would rather that not be the case. Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t need to intervene with anyone apart from me.”

  Ben shrugged.

  “That can’t be modified. All virtual assistants follow C.A.S.A. protocol. Dr. Dewinter can explain that better than me. I have to go, Mrs. Katsef. Anything else?”

  Ben went back to his device. She felt like shaking him.

  “No. Thanks.”

  She watched him go with his nonchalant tread. The door closed behind him. She longed to shout “You little asshole!” but the black globes on the ceiling held her back. Could she reasonably hold out in this strange flat where she felt eyes on her at all times? She locked herself up in the small toilet room to calm herself down. Nobody could see her there.

  Later on, to get away from the monitoring, she tried shifting the furniture differently in her office. She shoved the desk behind the sofa, so that she could not be seen when she sat to work. While she jostled the table, she hurt her hip. She caught sight of herself in the entrance mirror: wheezing and red in the face. A fit of giggles took over. Seriously, she looked like a lunatic! A madwoman!

  Installed at her desk, she felt safe for the first time, a marvelous sensation that made her spirits soar. “They” couldn’t see her here, hidden by the back of the sofa. Hands flat out on the table, she breathed in and out calmly, like Elise had taught her all those years ago. This was where she was going to write. This was where she was going to create. This past month had been taxing. Writing would pull her through, the way it always had.

  She hadn’t looked at her hands for a long time. Stunned, she noticed she was still wearing her wedding ring, the thin golden circle François had slipped on her finger at the town hall in the fifth arrondissement. His name and the date of their marriage were engraved inside it. Despite the passage of time, her hands had remained long and slim, and she slid the ring off easily.

  She thought about everything that wedding band had witnessed, seasons, voyages, encounters, lectures, readers, hours of work; simple everyday actions, and the gestures of love: François’s body, the number of times her hands had landed on his skin, how it had become familiar to her, like his beauty spots, his carefully groomed beard, his robust neck. The wedding band that had observed every detail of the secret apartment on rue Dancourt.

  She found an envelope, glided the ring inside, and placed it in the back of a drawer. A thin white circle remained on her finger, vestige of the jewel she’d worn for so many years, but a sense of liberty blossomed up within her, powering her with an energy she hadn’t felt for weeks, to such an extent that she grabbed her notebook, the one she hadn’t opened since she got here, a pen, and began to write.

  * * *

  Mia White was waiting for her very nicely, facing number 108, rue du Bac, absorbed not by her mobile, but by a book, an actual book made of paper. She looked like she did in her photos: a lovely young girl with long chestnut hair, wearing jeans, a jacket, and sneakers. Before she went up to her, Clarissa observed her; Mia White seemed captivated by what she was reading, holding her book to her face as if it were a treasure she could not possibly relinquish. The pavement was somewhat narrow in front of Romain Gary’s last home, and the young girl had to regularly step back in order to let pedestrians by, but even when she did that, she never took her eyes off the page. What was she reading with such interest? Clarissa drew nearer. It was a vintage edition of Promise at Dawn, a paperback that had been read over and over again, lent, lost, found, with warped pages and a torn and tattered cover, everything Clarissa loved: a well-thumbed book.

  “Oh! It’s you!”

  So Mia White had spotted her. What a smile!

  “You’re bang on time,” said Clarissa in French.

  “I’m the punctual type,” said Mia White, speaking in French, as well.

  They turned around to face the large pale building behind them.

  “So it was here,” said Mia White.

  “Yes, here. But no need to get emotional looking up at those second-floor windows. Romain Gary’s place gave on to an inner courtyard.”

  They crossed the street to get a better view.

  “I’d like to know…” Mia White paused in mid-sentence, shyly.

  “What?”

  “That scene, in Topography of Intimacy, about Gary’s apartment. Did it really happen that way? The way you wrote it?”

  “More or less.”

  “I loved your book, but I especially loved that bit.”

  Clarissa searched the young girl’s face. Mia White seemed perfectly sincere. Her magnificent eyes, riveted to Clarissa’s own, brimmed over with discernible esteem. It had been a while since anyone had looked at Clarissa that way. It felt good.

  “Would you mind telling me again how it happened? It would be such an honor.”

  Mia White spoke in English this time. Not that it made any difference to Clarissa. She knew all too well how true bilinguals were incapable of sticking to one language; they switched from one to the other with astounding changeability, making interlocutors who didn’t have the possibility to express themselves seamlessly in two languages feel giddy. Mia White had no accent in either French or English, like herself.

  Clarissa pursued in English, pointing to the building. She told Mia she had first come to 108, rue du Bac several years after Gary died. She had just moved to Paris, after spending her childhood, her adolescence, and her university years in England. She worked as a property surveyor for a notary office and a real estate agency. She lived on rue d’Alésia, with the young man who would soon become her first husband. She had no idea the writer Romain Gary had committed suicide here on December 2, 1980. Her colleagues and she were to assess an apartment on the third floor. While they worked, the writer became the topic of their conversation.

  Clarissa knew nothing about Gary. One of her associates was familiar with his life story. Clarissa was captivated by the flamboyance of his existence: Born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, the only child of an impassioned and whimsical mother, he became, in turn, an aviator, war hero, writer, diplomat, and filmmaker. He moved into number 108 in 1963, with his wife, the American actress Jean Seberg. He had lived there for nearly two decades. As Clarissa listened, her inquisitiveness had grown. In those days, the late eighties, with no Internet and no Google, she reminded Mia White, smiling, books were still purchased in bookstores. That evening, she had gone to buy Promise at Dawn. The title had enticed her. Looking at the back cover, she discovered a man with thoughtful features, startlingly clear eyes, a well-drawn mouth. At that point, books didn’t have such a large part in her life. She wasn’t yet the reader she would later become; she read seldom, and slowly.

  It had taken her a while to immerse herself in Romain Gary’s realm. She bought other books, The Roots of Heaven, White Dog, and The Life Before Us, which he had published under another name: Émile Ajar. Little by little, Romain Gary’s prose had acted upon her like a sort of drug. She had been taken aback by his seductive fusion of delicacy and potency. His writing, both poetic and brutal, appealed to her. She had been expecting the ascetic and irreproachable works of a grand intellectual; instead, she stepped into the teeming world of a creative virtuoso who had never ceased to reinvent himself. Who was Romain Gary? All his life, he excelled in the art of covering his tracks. A young author, Dominique Bona, had just published the first biography concerning him. Clarissa had devoured it.

  Clarissa crossed the street again, with Mia White following her, over to the iron fence enclosing number 108. She placed her palm on the handle. She said in French, “I needed to come back here regularly, especially since I’d read his books. I was following in his footsteps, setting my hand where he’d set his over and over again, like an intimate pilgrimage.”

  “I understand,” said the young woman solemnly.

  “You don’t find it morbid?”

  “No. Not at all. It’s like paying tribute to him.”

  There was curiosity mingled with admiration in Mia White’s scrutiny. Clarissa took up with her story. One morning, as she was passing by, some time after the measuring of the third-floor flat, she noticed the gate of number 108 was held open by a wedge. She had made the most of it, slipping inside. She hurried to the main stairway, on the right. As she went up the steps, she discovered movers emptying Romain Gary’s old apartment on the second floor. The door was half-closed. She had hesitated, fleetingly, on the landing. Since 1980 and Gary’s death, she realized, several occupants had probably lived here one after the other. She was not going to walk into a home that still bore his imprint, as his furniture, paintings, and books were no longer here. But it was the layout of the flat that drew her in, how this man, whom she found mesmerizing, had moved within these very walls, how he had occupied the premises. She put one foot into the entrance. She remembered the third-floor flat measured with her colleagues was L-shaped, 372 square meters, with eight rooms giving on to a tree-lined private lane.

  Romain Gary’s sixty-six-year-old body had been carried from here, over this threshold, and down the stairs behind her. She moved forward, cautiously at first, then with a firmer gait. If someone asked her what the hell she was doing, she’d say she had made a mistake and ended up on the wrong floor. But no one came. She had remained alone in a string of vast rooms leading one into the next. She noticed the parquet floors had here and there been replaced by charcoal slate tiles, that fireplaces had been removed. A large bedroom overlooked the courtyard and its chestnut trees. She had a gut feeling it had happened here. The bed must have been placed against the wall on the left, between two electrical sockets. A bed made of copper. She’d read that in the biography. He’d lain down for the last time where she was standing now. He had placed his last handwritten letter at the foot of the bed. A note that began with “D-Day. No connection with Jean Seberg.” A year before, in 1979, the actress, with whom he no longer lived, had been found dead in her car near avenue Victor-Hugo in Paris, the police ruling her demise a probable suicide. After that, Romain Gary had given up writing for good.

  Clarissa’s expert gaze, honed by her professional training, scanned the room. The radiator was vintage; so was the door leading into the adjacent bathroom. She passed into it. There had been no recent refurbishments here. She’d read that Gary used to dictate his books to his secretary (and lover) while he took his bath, cigar clamped between his teeth. Romain Gary had looked at himself daily in this very mirror. In this private place, he had washed and groomed himself, had tended to his body and its needs. These walls had witnessed his nakedness.

  It felt like he was beside her now, buttoning up one of his custom-made mauve satin shirts, an ornate cabochon ring on his left hand, and he seemed close enough for her to make out the blue intensity of his eyes, his bittersweet smile, and the beard he carefully blackened to wipe out traces of gray. Did she perceive the acrid waft of a Montecristo? Almost. She stood at the heart of his private life, where he had slept, dreamed, and loved; where he had decided to end it all. The perimeter of his death was revealed to her.

  Clarissa went on, while Mia White listened attentively. Tuesday, December 2, 1980, had been a rainy day. After lunching with his editor in the neighborhood, and relishing a last cigar, Romain Gary had walked home along the rue de Babylone. He was by himself. He had closed the shutters and the curtains. He had planned it all. He had not faltered. He had done what he had intended to do. Killing himself, in his room. He had taken the Smith & Wesson from its case, spread a red towel over his pillow, and had lain down, the barrel lodged between his lips. No one had heard the gunshot.

  Clarissa remained quiet for a while.

  “When I read that part in your book, I felt like I was there with you,” whispered Mia White.

  Clarissa continued. She had looked at the ceiling for a long moment, which must have been the last thing Gary’s eyes had glimpsed. She had wondered, since that rainy afternoon, what Gary had left behind. Those who slept there, in that room, within those walls, had they not been marked, in one way or another, by his bloodstained wake? Without meaning to, Clarissa had picked up the writer’s fragility, connecting to his torment, loneliness, and despair; the emotions had engulfed her as soon as she had walked into his old apartment, leaving their stain on her.

  “Did Gary transmit a form of gloom to you?” asked Mia White.

  “He had already done that through his books. There’s this beautifully melancholic quote in The Life Before Us: ‘It’s always in the eyes that people are the saddest.’ I experienced a special connection with him that day on rue du Bac.”

  “Did you already know you were going to write about that moment?”

  “No,” said Clarissa impulsively. “Writing came much later to me, via another angle, via Virginia Woolf and what I felt when I visited her home. But the fascination with this place, for this room, has never left me. Telling you this story all these years later revives it all.”

  The two women were now walking up the rue du Bac toward the Seine. Mia White’s long chestnut hair rippled in the light breeze.

  “Are you working on a new book?” she asked.

  “More or less. I haven’t gotten very far because of my move.”

  “Which area did you move to?”

  Her beguiling smile. Her wide blue eyes.

  The small inner voice murmured: Never get specific with a reader, remember, nothing about where you live. Cloud the issue. It’s okay to lie. Don’t give any indications, addresses, street names.

  “I’m in the new district, at the top of avenue Gustave-Eiffel, near the Tower Memorial.”

  Too late.

  “Oh, I never would have thought you’d choose to live there! I thought you didn’t like modern buildings.”

  “On the contrary, it’s a nice change, being somewhere brand-new. No one’s lived there before me.”

  “You like it, then?”

  Don’t tell her about Mrs. Dalloway, about the cameras, about the spooked cat. Shut up.

  “Very much so.”

  Mia White was shorter than Clarissa. She moved gracefully. Pedestrians often turned around to stare at her, Clarissa noticed. They strolled along the river, toward Île de la Cité. Clarissa asked her if she’d made some new friends. The young girl said she’d met a couple of nice people. She missed her boyfriend. He lived in England. They saw each other every other weekend.

  The conversation became slightly idle. Time was ticking by. Clarissa knew one should never spend too much time with a reader. At times, they became inquisitive, asked too many questions, turned out to be clingy. This wasn’t the case with Mia White. She seemed to be enjoying Clarissa’s company, and nothing more. Clarissa asked her about her own writing. The young girl blushed.