Murder in Clichy

Tuesday Evening

HERVÉ GASSOT DIPPED HIS fingers in the icy holy water font of the nineteenth-century church. He stuck his cap in his wool overcoat pocket, smoothed down his fringe of white hair and sat in the worn pew. He ignored the tsk, tsk of an old woman woman bent in prayer as he lifted his artificial leg onto the kneeler. His prosthesis, stiff on the cold unforgiving stone floor, had rebelled.

Candles sputtered by the saints’ statues, their scent of burning wax as familiar as the low drone of prayer from the confessionals. He bowed his head and prayed for his stupid camarade, Albert, from his old regiment. Albert, who’d earned the croix de guerre at Dien Bien Phu, had gone to the clinique, between the plumber’s and Communist party office, for a routine cardiogram and ended up on a cold slab in the morgue.

The priest made the sign of the cross, ending the evening rosary. Gassot stood and went to shake hands with the younger priest who wore a clerical collar and jogging shoes as he passed out the liturgy calendar.

“Bonsoir, mon père,” he said.

“Don’t forget the sing-along liturgy tomorrow, mon fils,” the priest said.

But Gassot knew neither he, nor the church congregation, all over sixty, would make that a priority. Out in the vestibule, the white marble gleamed in the low light.

On the church steps, Picq, one of the few left from his regiment in Indochina, sidled up next to Gassot, lighting two unfiltered Gitanes. He offered one to Gassot, who accepted, inhaled the woody tobacco, and exhaled into the night air.

“The first one to go, eh?” Gassot said, shaking his head. “And in a careless way, but that sums up Albert.”

“Not careless,” Picq said. He wore a blue raincoat that matched the hard blue of his rheumy eyes. He leaned close to Gassot’s shoulder. “Lucie’s upset, something strange with the doctor’s report. I showed it to my nephew, the médecin.”

Médecin? Picq’s nephew had flunked out of medical school and made false teeth now. And a good living.

“Funny red pinpoints in his eyes,” Picq said. “And bruising on his neck.”

Gassot’s shoulders tensed. “But he went for a cardiogram and his heart gave out!”

“Not according to my nephew,” Picq said. His eyes narrowed. “You know what that means.”

“But he was in a clinic!”

Picq jumped to conclusions. Always had. Still Gassot’s stomach twisted.

Albert had always worried he’d be the first one they caught up with: Their miscalculations had wiped out the village near Dien Bien Phu, but it had been by mistake.

“Lucie said the strangest thing,” Picq continued. “Albert’s pants’ cuff was rolled up when she claimed his body.”

“Eh, so what?” Gassot said.

“Rolled up beyond the tattoo on his ankle.”

Gassot stiffened. The dripping knife. They each had one.

“That could mean anything.”

“Try convincing yourself after reading the report from the Préfecture,” Picq said. “They’re calling it suspicious, starting an investigation. It all began after the jade reappeared.”

The jade?

“We’ve been looking for years. . . . How can you be sure?”

“Use your head, Gassot,” he said. “We had a lead. Albert blabbed and shot it to hell.”

“You call that rumor a lead?”

“Seems the mec took the bait. . . .”

“Wait a minute Picq, what bait?”

“We got to talking, I had every intention of telling you.” Picq shrugged. “But Albert challenged this guy. Told him ‘If the jade’s resurfaced in Paris, prove it.’ To force his hand we offered him a cut if he discovered it. He doublecrossed us and took some bullets in the back.”

Gassot clenched his teeth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It happened right over there.” Picq pointed to the boulangerie.

Harebrained schemes. Imagining themselves rogue warriors but they were just foolish old men like himself.

“Did he have the jade?”

“We don’t know,” Picq said.

Gassot wanted to distance himself from his comrades but he had to know the extent of the damage they’d done.

“Tomorrow, meet me at the market,” Gassot said. “Bring Nemours. We’ll talk.”

“Watch your back.”

Gassot always did.

He rolled up his collar against the chill and limped through the shadows cast by sodium streetlamps’ light filtering through the trees. He tried unsuccessfully to ignore his fears.

Fools! What kind of mess had they dragged him into?

The jade had belonged to them . . . they’d discovered it while surveying land, buried in a metal ammunition box by the old emperor’s tomb. By rights it was theirs: To the victor belongs the spoils.

But at Dien Bien Phu they had been losers and the box had disappeared. Gassot clutched his phantom leg and leaned into a darkened doorway.

He closed his eyes but he saw the monsoon-swollen Nam Ron river, engorged with dark green silt and bloated bodies. Heard the crackle of gunfire, the drone of C-119s so low they whipped leaves off the mango trees, and the whimpering of someone in the bushes. And that’s when it happened. Not the landmine half-buried in the red earth he avoided stepping on, but sniper fire, had shredded his calf and ankle. The piercing, tearing pain brought him to his good knee. His hands had come back covered with his own blood and gristle. Sniper bullets spit all around and he crawled, pulling himself toward the mangroves.

Adrenalin propelled him and then the chalky earth gave way and he was in a hole, a bombed out Vietminh tunnel on the warm, wet body of a moaning man. A Vietnamese holding his blood-soaked arm. “Help me and I help you,” the man said. “I know a way out. To the temple. No fighting there.”

What chance did he have? None by himself in the enemy trenches.

“Call me Jin,” the man said, “My father worked in France. The Vietminh don’t trust me.”

Gassot had taken off his ammo belt, wrapped it tourniquet-style around Jin’s arm, and staunched the blood. He unscrewed the canteen of Courvoisier that General de Castries had issued to the corps for courage, drank, and shared with Jin. Then he bit a morphine tablet in two, put half in Jin’s mouth and swallowed the other half. He gritted his teeth and bound the loose muscle shreds of his own leg with his shirt. “Show me,” he’d said. “We have to move while we can.” While the morphine lasted.

Somehow he’d crawled and half-dragged Jin through the tunnel all afternoon—cries, cannon fire and earth-pounding explosions above them. The cognac had loosened Jin’s tongue and he’d sung folksongs. In the evening, when the smoke settled by the river, the French troops had surrendered and he’d never seen Jin again.

Gassot had survived prison camp. Bamboo cages, and rice gruel if they were lucky. A concrete hole and all the rice paddy rats they could catch when they weren’t. Gangrene had set in and a Parisian-trained Vietminh doctor had amputated his leg above the knee.

Gassot shook off the memories. What was he doing, reliving the past again, huddled in a doorway on a cold, wet street?

He headed home to where Avenue de Clichy intersected a maze of narrow streets. He lived in a hotel on the Clichy side, by the derelict marshalling yards of the old steam train line. Once the fief of Mérovingian king Dagobert and much later, home to Verlaine who taught at the nearby lycée; Manet and Renoir’s ateliers; Georges Simenon’s first Paris address; Captain Dreyfus’s apartments, Proust’s suite, Colette’s despised aunt’s bourgeois apartment; the area in which Zola found inspiration for Nana, the courtesan of his novel. And Ho Chi-Minh. Now, they wouldn’t know it.

He entered his third-floor room. There was no elevator, but the stairs kept him in shape. Going down was the hard part. He opened the door to the back steps. Always keep an escape route, he remembered their commander saying.

Indochina had lain in rubble and the République ignored its soldiers. Gassot even had to fight for his pension. But the old Colonials, rich and fat with the spoils of Indochina, had thrived. Still thrived.

Gassot hung up his jacket, unstrapped his prosthesis, set it by the door next to his shoes, and lay on his cot-sized bed. He set his alarm clock and switched off the light. Only the occasional red blink of neon from the kebab shop sign below illuminated his wall giving the military calendar a blood-red glow.

Gassot put his hands behind his head on the pillow. The past invaded and permeated his thoughts. After the camp released him, he’d recovered, tended by Bao. He remembered the incessant gyaow-gyaow of the cicadas in the hot, still night and the black satin sheen of her hair brushing her slim waist. The aroma of the herbal cloths she laid on his fever-wracked head mingling with the tamarind scent wafting through the blown-out windows. They’d camped in an abandoned yellow stucco, green-shuttered colonial villa, its rococo interior pockmarked by bullet holes. Until the Underground—a ragtag alliance of Ho’s deserters— found her. Took her on a forced labor march.

Repatriated to France, he’d done physical therapy in the army hospital in Toulon, been given a fake leg. Gotten an engineering job at the Citroën factory. Luckier than most, he always told himself. The old Indochina existed in his memories, revisited only via crackling newsreels.

Then he saw the paper napkin slipped under his door, the way the waiter let him know he’d had a phone call. Picq and Nemours never used the phone. His heart pounded.

Scribbled on the napkin were the words “You a dirty old man, Gassot? A mec called to tell you that he’s going to roll your pants up.”