Murder in Clichy

Friday Evening

GASSOT WOKE UP SCREAMING, his arms tangled in something and his undershirt drenched with sweat. Pounding throbbed in his ear. Red-pink bursts of tracer bullets arced, flashing above him. Instinctively, he ducked and clutched his leg. His phantom leg. And remembered. This was no red mud foxhole. No dying men of his regiment moaned; there was no thud of distant artillery pounding the thatched huts of a village. The neon lights of a Clichy bar tattooed his wall and the pounding came from the trains hurtling north in the night. His chest heaved.

“Quiet down!” a voice yelled from somewhere next door.

He punched the wall, clutched his cane and hobbled to the table. The nightmare again! Haunting him, after all these years.

Perspiration beaded his forehead and he reached for what was left in the Pastis bottle. Swallowed it. The smell of grease rose from the café below, nauseating him. Who ate in the middle of the night?

His body shook and the phantom pain in his leg ached. The damned leg that wasn’t even there.

And those faces. He couldn’t get his comrades’ faces from his mind. The Expeditionary Force was a decimated, exhausted army even before Dien Bien Phu, despite the psychological warfare strategized by the Fifth Bureau in Paris.

Landless peasants listened to Ho Chi-Minh’s ideology and the Vietminh, not to French colonials and fresh-faced graduates from St. Cyr, the elite military academy. Nor to General de Castries who’d relabeled the peaks ridging the heart-shaped valley of Dien Bien Phu, with his mistresses’ names: Dominique, Eliane, Claudine, Françoise, Huguette, and Béatrice.

The regiment’s annihilation proved it. Even Gassot’s work with Tran had been sabotaged. Old World thinking had been outwitted by Asian natives, in a battle to survive.

A knock at his door. The flics? Had Picq implicated him?

He grabbed his cane and eyed the open back door where his prosthesis stood, ready for a getaway.

“Who’s there?”

“Phone call in the café, old man,” someone said. “Hurry or your girlfriend will hang up.”

Girlfriend? He wiped his brow. Must be a new code of Nemours’s.

“I’m coming.”

He slipped on the stocking, then the bandage, eased his stump into the artificial leg, and attached it. By the time he had navigated the backstairs and reached the café’s zinc counter, the pockmark-faced youth shrugged his shoulders. “She hung up.”

Gassot wanted to hit him.

“But she’s calling back,” he grinned. “Must like you. Eager, eh?” And he made an obscene gesture.

“Give me a pastis and shut up,” Gassot said.

“You’re not very nice. The flics were asking about you, but I—”

Gassot slammed five francs on the counter and shot out the door.