“What kind of incident?” asked Jack.

“He didn’t remember exactly.”

“But he remembered Théo’s name!”

“That’s what he said.”

“That’s absolutely ridiculous! It’s been twenty years since Théo was here. How could that reporter remember a name twenty years after the fact? It doesn’t make sense!”

“You don’t understand,” said the girl. “I know, the newspaper article’s old, twenty years old. But he didn’t read it twenty years ago! I mean, really! He said he read the article last spring, in March or something like that. The article turned up when he was doing his research on the Francophones in St. Louis, and he remembered Théo’s name because it was a French name, as I already mentioned. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Of course,” said the man impatiently.

“So what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, it’s just me. It’s my brother . . . It’s in my head.” With a gesture of impotence, he added, “It’s America. You start to read the history of America and there’s violence everywhere. It’s as if America was built on violence.”

The girl offered him her cup of coffee. He drank the last mouthful, then set the cup in the sink. As he raised the curtain he saw a bluish gleam on the horizon, on the other side of the Mississippi. He lay down on the bed, his hands behind his neck. He couldn’t get back to sleep. The girl’s breathing became regular and deep. An hour later he got up without a sound and went to a McDonald’s for breakfast.

XIV

The Captain of
the Natchez

They didn’t leave for Kansas City right away.

They spent another two days in St. Louis in case Théo should answer the ad they’d placed in the newspapers. And meanwhile, La Grande Sauterelle was doing all she could to bring Jack out of his torpor. She took him for an excursion on the Mississippi in a paddle-wheel steamer.

Their boat was called the Natchez. With its two tall smokestacks and its sidewheel, it looked exactly like the steamboats that used to transport passengers and bales of cotton between St. Louis and New Orleans in the 1820s. But this one was a sham, a reproduction built for tourists: that was the first thing they learned after they had boarded the boat along with the other passengers and seated themselves on a wooden bench close to the ship’s rail, with hot dogs and coffee. They learned all sorts of things from the loudspeakers that broadcast the captain’s voice, and they knew it wasn’t a recording, because the captain frequently interrupted his historical reflections to give orders to the sailors or explain the reasons for a manoeuvre.

There was a slight breeze on the Mississippi, and it wasn’t too hot, not even in the sun. Jack had to acknowledge that the excursion was enjoyable and instructive.

The captain described how St. Louis had looked during the last century, with its unpaved streets, its storehouses for furs, its shops and boutiques and the candlelit inns where trappers arriving from the West mingled with shopkeepers, soldiers and immigrants from the East or Europe; he described the lively atmosphere around the pier in the early 1840s, while families set on going west to seek their fortunes waited to board a steamer with their wagons, ox teams, barrels, trunks, provisions and their broods of youngsters. They would travel up the Mississippi a few miles, then take the Missouri to the little town of Independence, where the wagon trains formed that, in April, would set out along the Oregon Trail.