The girl looked at him coldly. She studied the papers and started to ask the same questions as the customs officer. Then she inquired, “What do you write?”

“Novels,” said Jack.

“What kind of novels?”

It was the standard question, and he’d never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. How many kinds of novels were there? What category did his belong to? To answer these questions he would have had to be able to state the main subject of his novels . . . And that he could not do, for the simple reason that, for him, writing was not a means of expression or communication but rather a form of exploration. Each of his novels had been written in the following manner: he had placed two characters together in a certain setting and then he had watched them live, intervening as little as possible.

“Love? Adventure?” the girl persisted.

Jack decided in favour of the first, because it included the second.

“Love,” he said, looking the girl in the eyes. He was expecting to see something special there, a flash, a sign of complicity or intelligence — a glimmer of some sort. But the girl’s eyes were as grey and cold as steel, and her face was like marble.

She asked some questions about Théo. How long had he been in St. Louis? What was his address? What kind of work did he do? Had he become an American citizen? Finally, weary of vague replies, she asked him to stay in the immigration office while she went to inspect the Volkswagen. Through the window, Jack saw that La Grande Sauterelle was walking away from the minibus with the cat in her hood. The grey-eyed girl came back ten minutes later and told him he could go.

“Everything’s in order,” she said.

“May I ask you a question?” Jack inquired.

“Sure.”

He constructed the sentence in his head, then asked, “Was I under suspicion because I’m a writer?”

“No. Because you don’t seem to know anything,” said the girl.

“Maybe that’s why I’m a writer,” Jack said jokingly.

“I think you’d better go,” she said, and the man had the distinct impression that he shouldn’t push the matter.

They stopped at a visitors’ bureau on their way into the city, but it was closed.

“What time is it?” asked La Grande Sauterelle.

“Five to five,” he said. “What shall we do?”

“It depends whether you want to look for traces of Théo or not.”

“I don’t really feel like it. This city is grey and dirty. I’m anxious to get to St. Louis. How about you? What would you like to do?”

“If we could find a post office I’d like to mail the book I borrowed in Toronto,” she said.

“All right,” he said.

“And one other little thing . . . I read somewhere in the literature about Detroit that there’s a museum with a Diego Rivera mural, so I’d like to go and have a look at it . . . really, just a quick look. Would you mind terribly? Anyway, the museum closes at five-thirty.”