The Figures of Beauty Read Online Free Page B

suspicious that in all of Paris it is a living American who finds a dead one.”
    “Canadian,” Oliver said.
    Levy ignored this. Such a distinction was immaterial in view of what he was about to say.
    “But this death is not suspicious. I can see that. It is only sad. Sad because whatever troubles the young man was facing, he might have been able to overcome them. He might have gone on to live a life that now is not a possibility. Who knows? Young people don’t always see things clearly.”
    It was Inspector Levy’s voice that Oliver found confusing. The inspector’s stiff, brisk steps from behind his desk had seemed to indicate that the interview was nearing its end. But his mournful tone wasn’t that of someone telling Oliver he was free.
    This could become complicated. This was the thought that was weaving its way through the dull pulse of Inspector Levy’s headache. His colleagues would be thorough. There were too many uncertainties here for them not to be.
    But his forgetting to ask the young man to make himself available for further questioning would not be seen by anyone as a very consequential slip-up. Because that’s what the inspector had decided to say. He knew that the uncoupling of bureaucratic procedure was often mistaken for its conclusion. Nobody would take much notice. Everybody was tired. It’s not as if they didn’t have enough to worry about.
    “So my advice to you is this: Leave. Leave Paris. At once. You have your passport?”
    Oliver did. He had needed his passport to open his bank account earlier that day.
    “Leave the way young travellers leave,” Levy said. “It’s perfectly natural. You’ve had your visit to the Louvre. You’ve walked through our famous streets. And now it is time for you to move on. As young people do on summer vacations. To London. To Copenhagen. To Rome. To Barcelona. Leave in the early morning. Leave before the traffic is terrible again. Leave before the students start their demonstrations again.”
    The inspector brought his face closer. It felt to Oliver that hewas being given an unusually candid view of the inner workings of a Parisian police station. “Leave before the morning shift,” the inspector whispered.
    Oliver stared.
    “I am not joking,” Inspector Levy said. “Believe me. This is a strange time to be in Paris. We cannot count on things making sense anymore.”
    Oliver realized he was being dismissed.
    “Do not wait even a few hours,” the inspector said. “Things will be much better for you if you take me at my word.”
    And so Oliver did.
    He got back to his hotel. He repacked his knapsack. He left.
    The hitchhiking was terrible. It took forever. But he found his way, eventually, to a town near the border of Tuscany and Liguria called Pietrabella.

CHAPTER FOUR
Cathcart, Ontario, June 2009
    T HERE WAS SOMETHING about the militant swing of the young woman’s arms that led Oliver Hughson to believe she had been hurrying in his direction well before she came into view. She was wearing a print dress. She was striding fiercely up through the garden. Her quick steps seemed as if they were the last of a determined journey. He had no idea who she was.
    It was a hot day. He was barefoot, vacuuming the pool. It was well into the afternoon. Oliver was wearing the kind of loosely fitting, muddy-brown madras swim-trunks that men in their sixties tend, for some reason, to wear. He had already replenished his drink.
    Her hair had a halo in sunshine. It was the henna she used. It wasn’t orange, exactly, but the name of no other colour that Oliver could think of came closer to describing it.
    She marched resolutely toward the pool. She strode up the stone steps from the garden without hesitation. He guessed herage to be thirty—an underestimation, he would later learn, of exactly ten years.
    Oliver placed his plastic tumbler down on a patio table. The ice cubes had already melted to noiseless wafers.
    She stopped abruptly at the top of the stairs. She