2007
Bernard Petit knew perfectly well that he did not have many friends and his family mostly despised him. Nor did he fool himself into believing he was popular with any of the people he’d done business with over the years, in a variety of importing deals that were not quite illegal, most of the time. But Bernard did not find out until one particularly cold and starless evening in November just how deep the animosity went.
After polishing off a passable dinner of lamb shank and lentils the housekeeper had prepared and left for him to warm up, Bernard wiped his mouth and wandered away from the dinner table to stand at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room. He gazed out to the backyard, his eyes moving distractedly over the familiar territory.
That deal he was working on was not going well. That damned Stephane Burnette didn’t know a good opportunity when it jumped up and smacked him right in his insipid face. Bernard clenched his fists, remembering last week’s meeting with Burnette, during which the other man made such agreeable murmurs while Bernard spoke that it surely seemed Burnette was ready to sign on the dotted line. But no, the little weasel demurred at the last minute, and Bernard was left without the investment he had not only hoped for, but thought was practically, as hunters might say, firmly in the bag.
Bernard’s stomach felt vaguely upset, and he rubbed a hand over his belly as he stared outside. Bergerac was in the midst of an unusual cold snap. By a spotlight he had installed for security reasons, he could see the bare pollarded tulip tree at the end of the yard, and the outline of an old yew his neighbor continually asked that he cut down.
He most certainly had not cut it down and had no intention of doing so, though he himself had no particular love for the tree. Bernard was not in the habit of acquiescing just because a person got it in his head to ask him a favor. He waited, always, to see what he might get out of it, with general goodwill not exactly a prized asset.
With a sour expression, he drifted from the window into his study. Alaina, his former wife, had used it as a sewing room and it still had an extravagantly feminine wallpaper: pink bouquets of roses and peonies, twirling ribbons, and what looked to be fairies perched among all the frou-frou. He made a mental note, for the hundredth time, to hire a decorator to fix things up more appropriately for a single man living alone. It wasn’t that Bernard was a procrastinator, far from it—but the expense always stopped him in the end.
He sat heavily in his chair, at his desk, facing a window that looked onto the street. It was after ten o’clock, and cold enough that no one was out walking just for the fun of it. He saw a man in a dark overcoat hurry along across the street; no one Bernard recognized.
Things aren’t good, he muttered to himself, putting his elbows on his desk instead of opening the file he had intended to have a look at. I need to make some sort of change. But what kind of change—I have no idea.
Bernard Petit was experiencing, for once in his life, a shred of desire for a better life than the one he’d been leading. You could not really say that he was facing his demons, or taking comprehensive stock of himself. But he did, in his final breath, have at least one moment of realizing that his life was rather empty, along with a flicker of desire for something better.
In the next instant, all was darkness, and Bernard slumped forward on his desk, the back of his head bashed in by someone he had not heard enter his house, so wrapped up had he been in these baby steps of reckoning, this faint yearning for a more meaningful life.
