Chapter 12 Plainsong #2
A moment later, his eyes fell – and froze – on a woman walking briskly down the boulevard toward the station.
Even in her worn black raincoat, cinched at the waist, even with her hair and face heavily made up, he found her stunning, almost perfect.
As she drew closer, Mitch pretended to be deeply absorbed in his fingernails.
The swishing of the raincoat grew audible and stopped right in front of his table.
Mitch looked up and was struck again by the woman’s smile, as if it were destined just for him.
His first, immediate thought was that no woman this beautiful ever came without a trail of heartbreak in her wake.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” she asked, puzzled.
She must have recognized him as the stranger who had stared at her through the train window a few days earlier.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” Mitch said, rising to his feet. “It was just… the book you were reading—”
“Of course! 84 – that was you!”
Mitch frowned. “I doubt it. I wasn’t even born yet.”
“Neither was I,” she said and laughed. “I meant the book.”
“…Orwell?”
“No – a Japanese author.”
“1Q84!”
“That’s the one! You recommended it to me. It was ages ago – you’d have no reason to remember it, but I certainly do. You were the last person I spoke to before I went away.”
Anna could have told him that when you’ve left everything behind, small moments like that tended to stay with you – but she didn’t.
She wasn’t na?ve enough to admit to a man she’d met only once that the book he’d recommended had stayed with her, literally, for the past five years.
That on some nights, when her loneliness took her to some very dark places, she’d found light in its pages.
That Aomame and young Fuka-Eri had become her companions in exile.
“I hope you liked it,” Mitch said.
“I think of it very fondly. Do you still have that lovely little bookshop by the station?”
“Now more than ever.”
“In that case, I’ll stop by again. You can recommend something new.”
She gave him a small wave and left as suddenly as she’d appeared.
Still standing on the café terrace, watching her walk away until she vanished into the crowd, Mitch was as close to believing in miracles as he’d ever been.
He could have invited her to sit down. He could have asked her about the trip she’d mentioned.
He could have asked her how on earth she’d even recognized him.
He could, at the very least, have asked her name.
But he hadn’t done any of those things, and he was furious with himself. He could only hope that she would keep her word, and really would stop by the bookshop one day soon.
* * *
Anna paused in front of a shop window on the street corner and brushed the plaster dust out of her hair and off her cheeks and shoulders, horrified that she’d let herself be seen looking like that.
Forget that man right now and stick to the plan, she told herself sternly.
Or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
But at the station, she did exactly the opposite.
She called the contractor she had planned to hire for her renovation and haggled over the quote with her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder.
At the same time, in a feat of impressive dexterity, she managed to retrieve a small notebook from her coat pocket and jot down a meeting for the next day.
The location? A café just down the street from a certain lovely little bookshop.
Then she ran to catch her train, hopping into the last carriage just in time.
* * *
The following day, Mitch returned to the courthouse just before noon.
Yesterday he’d learned from studying the bulletin boards outside the courtrooms that all hearings broke for lunch precisely at twelve.
At ten to twelve, he took a seat on a bench and waited for Salinas to leave the building.
Then he followed him. He wanted to know where the prosecutor usually had lunch, and whether he preferred to eat alone, like Verner, or continue the buddy-buddy routine with his colleagues.
Before he made any kind of move, he needed intel.
Everything mattered now: the man’s routine, likes and dislikes, the places he went, the people he saw.
At 12 p.m. sharp, Salinas crossed the plaza and pushed through the doors of the corner brasserie Aux Trois Cousins.
Mitch followed him in after a few minutes, scanning the room with practiced ease.
He nodded to the hostess and pointed to a table close enough to overhear Salinas, but not close enough to raise suspicion.
The prosecutor sat in a booth, glancing at his watch every so often, until a large man arrived.
The hostess pulled his chair out for him, and Mitch caught the words “Your Honour” as he sat.
It seemed to Mitch that a prosecutor and a judge probably shouldn’t be seen together outside the courtroom, let alone have lunch together.
If he was indeed right about that, clearly these two didn’t particularly care.
He didn’t learn much of interest from their conversation, except that Salinas, in declining the day’s special, revealed that he was allergic to shellfish.
The prosecutor did most of the talking, hardly even pausing to eat.
The judge, who’d long since finished his meal, sat listening to him with the look of someone who was making a tremendous effort to be patient.
Power might have changed hands in the government recently, but it clearly remained squarely within the prosecutor’s grasp.
The meal lasted less than an hour. As the two men ordered coffees, Mitch paid his bill and slipped out. As he was walking away from the restaurant in one direction, Anna was approaching it from the other.