New York City

New York City is the novel’s point of convergence for two mysteries: Roger Bolduc’s disappearance in the September 11 attacks and the fate of a rare family cameo carried into the disaster. The city first appears as the destination of Roger’s secretive journey, then as the site of Loïc’s uncanny foreknowledge, and finally as a landscape of ruins where the jewel is found, stolen, and eventually reported recovered. Its role is both concrete and structural: events separated by months and years meet there, but their apparent resolution generates new uncertainty.

Destination and Disappearance

In September 2001, Roger travels toward New York City on an overnight bus with a briefcase chained to his wrist beneath his raincoat. It contains a unique and priceless jewel, and the journey is the culmination of a plan he has been developing for months. The narration presents him as anxious and acutely aware of the risks to his family, marriage, and career. His bus ride makes the city a destination of deliberate action, not an incidental stop: Roger is carrying something on which, as he believes, the rest of his life may depend.

The journey becomes more enigmatic when Georges D’Anjou tells Loïc that Roger was heading to Toronto but changed course in Montreal and took the overnight bus to New York City. The family does not know why he altered his route or whether he was inside the World Trade Center complex on the morning of September 11. A search of Roger’s computer adds a possible purpose without resolving the question: he had arranged to meet a person named Patrice Desbois in New York City that day. The number listed for Desbois had a French country code, but a call reached only an automated message saying that the number was no longer in service. No meeting place was recorded. The city thus holds the missing coordinates of Roger’s final plans, while the available clues stop short of explaining them.

The Attacks and Loïc’s Dream

New York City enters Loïc’s consciousness through television images of the World Trade Center complex in flames. As footage of the planes striking the towers is replayed, he recognizes the reported time of the first impact, 8:46, as the moment of his recent nightmare. The correspondence unsettles him: he had not dreamed simply of a skyscraper burning, but of what seemed to be an individual’s particular, subjective thoughts. He wonders whether his subconscious had briefly received the vibration of another consciousness, perhaps at the instant of death, even as he tries to dismiss the possibility.

That private uncertainty becomes entangled with the public uncertainty surrounding Roger. Georges later explains that the family has learned Roger was in New York City on the day of the attacks, but cannot establish whether he was at the World Trade Center complex. The novel places Loïc’s dream beside the incomplete investigation rather than using it to settle what happened. New York is therefore at once a real city under attack and the focus of a possible psychic connection whose meaning remains unresolved.

Ground Zero and the Cameo

On April 11, 2002, New York City’s Ground Zero provides the setting for the cameo’s most vivid appearance. Jim Browning, a firefighter finishing another exhausting week of work in the ruins, notices a reddish glint in an area that has not yet been searched. He crosses twisted, soot-covered steel to investigate. Partly submerged among debris and human remains, the object proves to be an intact cameo, still attached to strands of clothing. Its fine workmanship and remarkable preservation stand out against the devastation around it.

Browning knows that workers are required to turn over objects found at the site, but he puts the cameo in his pocket, intending to show the stone to his wife over the weekend. He does not reach home. After leaving a bar near Harlem with his friend Ron, he encounters a violent dispute between dealers and tries to intervene. He is stabbed and robbed; during the hurried search of his pockets, one of the dealers takes the cameo and flees. The discovery that seemed to restore a lost heirloom instead begins another disappearance. Ground Zero gives the jewel back to the story, but New York’s violence immediately carries it out of the family’s reach again.

Recovery and Narrative Significance

In June 2002, Isabelle D’Anjou receives a letter from New York City’s chief medical examiner. Bone fragments recovered from the World Trade Center ruins have been identified through DNA analysis as Roger’s remains. The letter confirms his death but says nothing about the cameo. Isabelle and her family had already come to regard Roger as irretrievably lost, and the official identification closes one uncertainty without recovering the object whose fate remains bound to his journey.

About nine months after the attacks, Isabelle is still depressed and isolated, taking long solitary walks on the Plains of Abraham and spending much of the day in her room. She has overcome her drug addiction but remains burdened by grief and guilt over her involvement in the affair. Her father, Georges, has stopped pressing her for a confession, though he wonders whether making her disclose what she has done might relieve that burden. New York’s consequences thus reach beyond the city through the family’s private aftermath: the confirmed loss of Roger does not end the questions about the jewel or Isabelle’s complicity.

Later, Isabelle tells Loïc that the cameo has been found in New York City and delivered to her in Quebec. She says it is intact, having survived the explosions, fire, and collapse. Loïc cannot reconcile this report with the earlier account of the jewel’s theft from Browning, and considers whether there might be a genuine cameo and a counterfeit, or whether American police recovered the jewel that had passed through Cuba. The apparent return therefore deepens, rather than resolves, the object’s uncertain history. In June 2003, Charles de Castelmont believes the cameo received from New York is a fake, while the D’Anjou family had revered it as an ancestral treasure. New York City is not simply where Roger vanishes: it is the recurring hinge between family inheritance, physical evidence, and competing claims about what is genuine.