Paris Nocturne

A young man crossing Paris's Place des Pyramides late at night is sideswiped by a car whose driver, a woman in a fur coat, stumbles out injured when the car slams into one of the square's surrounding arcades. Both are taken to the hospital in a police van, where the young man notes others arriving in handcuffs before he's put under ether. Waking up muddled in a different hospital, he finds the woman gone and meets a large, surly man he remembers from the scene of the accident, who gives him a wad of cash and a typed report absolving the woman of wrongdoing. Is the man being overly solicitous of the woman or covering up a crime? Who is she, anyway, and what happened to her? This being Modiano, there are no simple solutions ("I think there's something you're hiding from me" is one of the last lines of the book). But this being Modiano, we get a chilling portrait of everyday obsession as our hero looks for the woman and a sober and satisfying reminder of life's slipperiness in the split-screen interpretation of events.