Free The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau by Graeme Macrae Burnet Page B

room.
    Gorski took a seat on the banquette and indicated to the proprietor with a little mime that he would take a
pression
. The bar occupied the wall opposite the door. On the right of this was the
tabac
area from which cigarettes, smoking paraphernalia and lottery tickets were sold. These two areas of the bar were separated by the wooden flap through which the proprietor accessed the bar. There were three beer taps, offering
biere d’Alsace
, a German
weißbier
and a dark ale. On the left of the bar was a stainless steel water bath, used to heat the hotdogs which were the only food served in Le Pot. The boiler was never turned off and it was from this that the bar got its characteristic aroma. The proprietor kept the lighting low, so that it was usually hard to tell whether it was day or night. In the late afternoon, however, if the sun was shining, two shafts of light penetrated the high windows and panned across the bar like the beams of a slow searchlight.
    There were three other customers in the bar. A man in a shabby suit sat on the banquette beneath the high windows reading a newspaper, a glass of white wine on the table in front of him. He looked vaguely familiar. This was a common occurrence for Gorski. His work brought him into fleeting contact with a great number of people and in a small town like Saint-Louis it was inevitable that he ran into them again. His predecessor, Ribéry, had been blessed with total recall of the names and faces of people he met, but Gorski possessed no such a talent. Still, it bothered him that he could not remember who the man was.
    Two men in workmen’s overalls stood at the bar. One of them looked at Gorski as he settled himself at his table. He probably recognised him. The previous day he had held a press conference at which he had given out the description of the young man seen on the scooter with Adèle. Gorski had been at pains to stress that the young man was sought only as a witness, but the papers had naturally chosen to cast the development in the most lurid light. Gorski’s picture had appeared next to the story in
L’Alsace
and in several other papers. He nodded a greeting in the direction of the man at the bar, who immediately looked away.
    The proprietor brought his beer. He was a short, swarthy man with the build of an ex-boxer. He had small beady eyes and a slack, unattractive mouth. Gorski had overheard regulars address him as Yves, but he never greeted him by name. Similarly, although he must have recognised him, the proprietor did not show any sign of knowing Gorski. That was his way. Some bars fostered an atmosphere of conviviality. Le Pot was not one of them. If you made a remark to the proprietor, he would pass the time of day, but otherwise customers were left to themselves.
    As Yves set his beer in front of him, Gorski asked him for a hotdog. Before he made his way back to the bar, he made a tour of the tables, wiping each of them down in the same unhurried manner. Gorski sipped his beer. It was pleasingly cold and crisp. His hotdog arrived on a paper plate. The meat was pink and flabby and disintegrated unpleasantly as soon as he put it in his mouth. He thought of Manfred Baumann tucking into his
pot-au-feu
or whatever it was he had been eating.
    His talk with Baumann had gone pretty much as he had anticipated. If he was lying, he was hardly likely to admit to the fact unless confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Gorski was used to being lied to. People lied as matter of course and even when their lies were shown to be implausible, they were stubborn. Gorski understood the mechanism well. If, for example, his wife was to later ask him how he had spent his afternoon, he would, of course, omit any mention of his visit to this bar. Whatinterested him was not so much the fact that someone lied, but how they behaved when they did so. Often people would reach for their cigarettes or became suddenly distracted by some irrelevant