Paris Noir

DEUS EX MACHINA by SPARKLE HAYTER

Going through a rough time in a happy and beautiful place like Paris puts one’s misery in sharp relief. The more luminous and prosperous Paris looks, the more Shay feels excluded from it. Her self-pity steadily darkens that winter despite her earnest efforts to make her dismal state of affairs romantic, invoking the spirits of great writers forged by poverty and depression. After all, while Hemingway was poor, he found a moveable feast. Orwell, down and out in Paris, scratching with bugs from old grey mattresses in flop hotels, sick from the stench of sulphur burned to try to keep the insects down, found in it all the brilliance to become a great writer. Then there was the composer Virgil Thomson, an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Miss Toklas, who once said, glibly, that he preferred to be poor in Paris rather than in America because ‘I’d rather starve in a place with good food’.

Shay tries to be buoyed by that philosophy but now she wonders if it isn’t better to starve in a place with bad food, where the warm gusts of air and laughter escaping through restaurant doors on cold winter nights are scented with less delicious flavours and don’t remind her how long it has been since she’s been able to afford even a medium-rare bavette in Béarnaise sauce with frites and a glass of beer, under ten euros in most joints in her neighbourhood. And besides, those who found inspiration and the seeds of prosperity in hard times were usually iconoclastic geniuses. She isn’t sure any more she has even the spark to genius, that she can justify coming here. It had all been done, hadn’t it? Every inch of this city, every quirk of the culture, had been covered long before she arrived, right down to the joys of the classic French pissoir which Henry Miller spoke about with such eloquence and affection. Most of them were gone now, the ornately decorated circular tin urinals, little green kiosks, open at the top and bottom so you could see the legs and heads of those using them, exchange a friendly wave or have a neighbourly chat. It would be hard to update that – the new version was an oblong booth made of corrugated fibreglass in dull beige or brown. It cost 40 cents to use it, and you had a limited amount of time in the closed, modular bathroom before it flushed itself with water and cleaning chemicals. She’d heard about someone who lingered too long in one and drowned.

During this time, she develops a terror that this is how she’ll die, not in a public toilet per se, but in some ironic, comic or embarrassing way, which will stick in people’s minds so everything she has done before will be blotted out by it. Instead of ‘award-winning graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and performance artist Shay Rutherford dies’ or even, ‘artist of some renown in certain circles dies during performance’, she’ll be remembered as the woman killed by the cork of the bottle of champagne she was opening to celebrate some long-awaited good news, or run over by a truck full of monkeys bound for the zoo, the driver later revealed to be a long-lost cousin, or by a car full of clowns in civilian clothes on their way to a wedding, or simply remembered as the woman killed while walking down the street by the last Titanic survivor who falls out of a window while watering her peacock tulips and, miraculously, survives yet again thanks to Shay’s broken body cushioning her fall.

Aware of her awesome ability to make her fears come true, she gets the idea that she should control her own death by killing herself. At this point, she is without hope, and this plan gives her a certain discipline and purpose. A project. She used to be much better at making her dreams come true – for example, her dream of living one day in Paris brought her to Paris. Now the fears rule, hard as she tries to keep them at bay. All the mistakes, the triumphs, have taught her nothing useful. She has experience now, and is hidebound by it, unable to move in any direction, lacking the same energy and daring she once had to challenge the maze, too prone to analysis – ‘what worked, what didn’t work, how did I do it before’, at the cost of all spontaneity. If experience was wisdom, it was greatly overrated.

The suicide note is the first thing that grabs her in ages, and she writes the initial draft in a frenzy, feeling unshackled from her fears, temporarily. But unfortunately, the fears kick in again as she edits and she can’t stop rewriting the note. Is she being too honest or too obtuse, too easy on herself or too hard? On others? Will people understand why she’d rather die than admit failure and go home? Will they lament the waste of a young talent, or her wasting their time and that of other people by trying to be an artist all these years? After all, what did she have to show for all these years in school and in Paris except a couple of lit mag publications and one article on French words that look like English words but mean completely different things that was printed on page seventeen of a free newspaper for Anglos? She imagines her death notices will read like her rejection slips: ‘over-dramatic’, ‘not much there to interest us’, ‘belaboured ending’.

Soon, she begins fictionalising here and there to make it a better read, and before long, the note isn’t about her any more, but about a man named Harry Waller, who sits down one day and loads a gun with bullets, placing it carefully by the side of a typewriter where he proceeds to write his farewell – the story of a life gone wrong, the love and opportunities lost, the heartbreak that he feels physically, a genuine pain in his heart whenever he thinks of his sad, bad and mad moments, as if these regrets reside in his heart like shards of glass. As he approaches the end of his ten-page suicide note, he suffers a sudden coronary, and instinctively picks up the phone and calls 911. Alas, by the time paramedics arrive, he is dead.

Afterwards, she reads it and decides it is good, not just good but redemptively good. Faith is restored. She spends precious euros at an internet café emailing it to magazines who take electronic submissions and on postage sending it to those that do not. Then she waits, living on street crêpes and water and the certainty that she has turned a corner and the future is wide open. Not only is it a great short story, she thinks, but it would make a great independent film, the note framing Harry Waller’s wild woolly life as an international oil rig salesman, which was much funnier and more interesting than her life.

But it turns out the editors don’t agree it is great, or even agree with each other about why it is not. ‘Too long’, says one. ‘Too short and undeveloped’, says another. ‘Very funny but not right for us’. ’Failed to see the humour’, and so on.

That day she receives the last rejection slip for ’A Short Story about Hope’. She hasn’t eaten in two and a half days and is more than two months behind on the rent, phone and EDF. The man who runs the Manhattan School for Business English in Paris, where she was working black, refuses to pay her the 1,500 euros he owes her. He knows that she can’t do anything about it without revealing her sans papiers status and getting kicked out of France. She wasn’t angry when he fired her – she hated the job and the students, who seemed to think she could do all the work in getting them to understand English, pumping them full of useful English words and phrases while they did nothing, sitting by slack-jawed and dull-eyed like force-fed geese. But she is angry that he won’t pay her what she is owed.

Having been through the gamut of ‘black’ jobs, off the books, which are few, badly paid and usually menial, there remains prostitution and begging – never! – and thievery, which she considers. Back in college, she used to pick pockets as a party trick. There’d be some meaty and easy pickings in some of the tourist areas, like place du Tertre where the crowds jostle with sidewalk artists, who advertise their skills with portraits of celebrities that are at the same time more flattering and less interesting than the originals. But she could only do it if she knew her victim was a greedy despoiler of planet Earth and its people, and that would require an unrealistic amount of research. Otherwise, she was liable to pick someone who looked the part, some big-spending German with a big belly, and worry later he was just an innocent tourist, maybe here for a last vacation before he begins the cancer surgery to remove the watermelon-sized tumour in his stomach. So thievery is out. There are no options other than starve in Paris or find her way back to her home town in Wisconsin to work in the cheese-flavoured foods factory or the Walmart, like her sister Tiff who has sacrificed everything to stay home to look after her mother, who is suffering from some mysterious undiagnosed ailment that keeps her in bed most of the day watching game shows and screaming at CNN.

No, the bottom line is she’d rather die in Paris, she thinks.

But now she feels incapable of writing even a suicide note.

When Anna calls from Oslo, Shay is wondering where her next meal will come from. Literally, she is thinking this when the phone rings, and she hears Anna’s invitation – she has a one-night stopover in Paris, and would Shay join her and some Norwegian friends for dinner that night, her treat?

There seems to be a bit of magic left in her world.

But no money left. The biggest problem now is that the restaurant they are meeting at, Hotel du Nord by Canal St Marttin in the tenth, is way the hell across the city from her apartment near Convention. It is too far to walk in bad shoes, in bad weather – it is a record a breaking winter – too far to walk even in good shoes in good weather, and all she has in her pocket is a used Métro ticket with a smeared date stamp. It has already saved her a couple of tickets for ‘stealing trains’ – not paying the fare, in other words. If the cops stopped her at one of their random underground check stops, she just showed the old ticket and babbled in English and they waved her through.

You couldn’t jump the turnstiles any more, not since they’d all been replaced with electronic turnstiles and six-foot gates. But you could still sneak through if you went right behind someone with a ticket, so close you were touching. It helped if the station was crowded. The trick was picking out someone who wouldn’t mind and wouldn’t rat you out, or someone so preoccupied they wouldn’t notice – people on cellphones, with small children, too many bags, or muttering to themselves. She slips through by helping an African woman struggling with her two tired, dead-weight children. There is no check stop, so she is able to get off without any problem at Jacques Bonsergent and walk the four blocks to Hotel du Nord.

The windows of Hotel du Nord are frosted, it’s so cold outside, but the warm, amber lighting glows through. The cold follows her inside and clings to her like an aura, which makes the maitre d’ shiver when he approaches her. Anna is already there with a male pilot, Peter, and two other, flight attendants for her airline – a gay man, Baard, and another woman, Liv. While waiting for Shay, they’ve already polished off a couple of bottles of wine, so it’s a pretty happy group. Shay gets into the mood, sharing some of her favourite stories about Anna back during Anna’s modelling days in New York, when they had both been twenty-something and beautiful, invited everywhere. There was that night at Elaine’s, a book party for some friend of Anna’s. They’d brushed shoulders with Arthur Miller and Robert Altman, and Jerry Stiller had introduced them to Matt Dillon. Or the night Shay had turned off her phone to write, hearing Anna’s message too late, ‘I’m hanging out with Mick Jagger and Carly Simon at Whiskey. Where are you? Come down.’ There were parties with free food and drinks almost every night, and too many nights dancing after hours at Splash with gay boys. Anna still parties occasionally with glamorous people, but not exclusively – obviously, or Shay, long past glamorous with her two pairs of jeans and three shirts, all fraying, would not be here.

Exuberantly joining the many wine toasts, snapping photos of the happy group, Shay is now the picture of gaiety, enjoying herself for the first time in she doesn’t know how long.

Just before midnight, Shay announces she has to leave if she is going to catch the last Métro home and Anna says, ‘No, stay. You can take a taxi.’ Then she slips a bill to Shay under the table when the others are distracted by cellphones or off in the bathroom. Fifty euros. Too much! Shay whispers.

Anna insists, and Shay puts the bill in her purse. It is a godsend. If traffic flow is good, she can get home for under twenty, and have enough left over to eat for a week. Maybe in that week she would have The Idea, the one she would write that would save her. In any event, she won’t starve.

After dinner, she walks the Norwegians back to their hotel – it is 2 a.m. and they have an early call the next morning so they all kiss and say goodbye to Shay. She looks for a taxi, but the streets are full of people who have missed the last Métro, and the lines at the taxi stations are ridiculously long. So Shay walks further, looking for a street where she might find a free cab without competition. Occupied taxis whiz past her. When she sights a rare free one on the horizon, people pop out of nowhere to grab it from under her. At one point, this means a handful of late-partying Chinese tourists whose bus has broken down near Folies Bergère, all of them in bright red scarves and hats so they’ll be easy to find in a crowd. Even the infrequent Noctabuses that roll by are so jammed she can’t get on.

Clapping her gloved hands to keep them warm, her collar up and scarf around it to keep out the cold, she walks on, wondering if she might freeze to death before she finds transportation, and what her obits might say in that case, a drunk and bankrupt American found frozen stiff in a taxi-hailing posture? Would her life mean anything then, other than as a martyr for the late-night Métro service movement?

Then, on a little street off Sebastopol, a car pulls up beside her, and the driver rolls down a window. Before he can say anything, she says, ‘Are you free?’

He nods, and she jumps in, calculating that her miserable, bone-chilling walk has saved her five euros at least. With this, she can treat herself to a pouch of tobacco, which will aid the creative processes in untold ways. After a few minutes in the cab, she realises that the driver hasn’t turned his meter on, which will save her a few more euros – life is going her way again. Traffic is light and signals are turning green as far as the eye can see.

After a few blocks, though, she feels guilty about cheating a working man, and mentions the meter. He clacks it on. It’s then she notices he is taking a strange route to get to Convention, heading east instead of south and west. She suggests a faster route. He ignores her. She sees his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They are shiny and red, the pupils dilated. He has no driver ID for her to see. The doors are auto-locked.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says. ‘You can let me off here.’

He keeps driving. He looks like a smallish man, like many men here not much bigger than she is. His hair is brown and greying. But she cannot see his face or get a clear image of what he looks like.

Vaguely, she remembers a story about a young woman in England who was picked up by a fake cabbie, raped and killed, her body left in a mattress factory dumpster in Shropshire. She remembers it only vaguely because it was in French, and she read it in a detective magazine while waiting at a doctor’s office, preoccupied as usual by her own problems. Now it has happened to her and this will be her obit: ‘American in Paris slain in grisly rape-murder’, a dripping blood-red headline in a pulpy barbershop magazine.

He turns south. They cross the river to the Left Bank, over a bridge whose name she doesn’t know.

There is a button to unlock the back passenger side on the door beside her, but she will have to wait for a red light, then move fast in order to escape. Tonight, of all nights, they are hitting all the green lights in a seamless journey to hell.

‘You are American,’ he says, in English, with barely an accent.

She says nothing. He wants to make small talk?

‘You are frightened.’

She says, ‘Please let me out. I just want to go home.’

‘You love to scare people. How does it feel?’

‘I don’t like scaring anyone. If you’re talking about Bush, didn’t vote for him, I despise him. Can you let me out here?’

‘You think it started with Bush? They’re all gangsters. And I know gangsters. What’s your price?’

He believes I’m a hooker, she thinks, and says, ‘I’m a writer.’

‘Are you? What’s your price?’

Now she’s sure he’s crazy, and she tries to reach into her handbag for her cellphone. She has no credit on her phone, but maybe she can bluff the guy. She thinks of what she’ll say, ‘Yeah, I found him. You still tracking me? So you know where we are?’

Before she can, he stops and because of her search for her phone she’s distracted from her original goal to unlock her doors and escape. She’s a moment too late. He relocks her doors with his lock, which overrides hers, and then he sticks a gun in her face.

‘Give me your purse,’ he says.

She’s stunned to see a gun in her face, in Paris. She’s never seen a gun before here, except in the movies or on the news. Only the cops and the gangsters have guns here. In her peripheral vision, she sees that they are near the Mitterrand library on the south-east side of the river, a deserted area at night, with lots of lit-up skyscrapers and no people. Even if she could scream, nobody would hear her. She gives him her purse and asks, meekly, ‘What are you going to do with me?’

He doesn’t answer. She sees his eyes in the rear-view mirror and thinks he is smiling.

‘You can let me out. I can’t identify you. I’ve barely seen your face.’

He doesn’t respond to that. ‘I have committed the perfect crime,’ he says.

‘It’s hardly perfect. The owner of this cab is sure to notice it’s gone-’

‘He won’t miss the car for a while. I staked out this cab for a long time. That was a perfect crime too, but not the one I’m talking about. It’s a night for perfect crimes, and I am on a roll. Earlier tonight, I robbed a robber and killed a killer.’

He’s an admitted killer and she is going to die…

‘Don’t you want to know?’ he asks.

‘Know what?’

‘How I committed the perfect crime?’

‘Sure.’

‘What constitutes the perfect crime? Motive, means, opportunity?’

‘An iron-clad alibi,’ she says.

‘I have all that. You see, the people who would look for me are dead in what appears to be an accident, a gas leak that has filled the house with fumes and exploded, killing everyone. The house was well sealed for the winter. The gas could not escape. There were pilot lights on the stove and the furnace, and a light bulb that had started to short-circuit in the basement. Everyone drank a great deal tonight and went to bed around eleven. I saw the explosion from a hill overlooking the house, and then I drove away. It’s been on the radio.’

‘Murder made to look like an accident, OK. But what’s your iron-clad alibi?’

‘I wasn’t there when the victims were killed. I’m not here now. I’m in Monaco. There’s a paper trail there, a hotel reservation, meals ordered in, a priest with secrets who will say he and I enjoyed a long conversation. Of course, I was never meant to be in Monaco. That was just my cover. I was meant to be on my way to Central Africa, delivering a bribe to a general there. I have delivered the money elsewhere.’

For forty-five years, since he was a kid, he had worked for a man he refers to as the ‘Big Man’. The Big Man was a ‘facilitator’, someone who would do the dirty jobs legitimate companies and countries would not. If a bribe was needed to keep an oil company drilling in a third world country after a coup, the man would make it happen. If an inconvenient person threatened to make trouble, the Big Man made sure the person disappeared. Of course, the Big Man never touched the money or the bodies himself. The cabbie did that, travelling on false passports and under false identities, never who or where he was supposed to be.

He tells her the Big Man got his start at the hands of his father, who did similar work in North Africa when it was still French and colonial, making contacts that spanned the continent. The cabbie, in turn, had followed his own father into employment with the Big Man before they all returned to France. He had been stripped of his identity at an early age and groomed to be invisible, effective, and completely beholden to his masters.

He has a powerful need to impress her, she realises, to be the Big Man, to be recognised after years of anonymity. In the moment, she can’t figure out how to exploit this to her advantage. Should she flatter him, be sympathetic, or be mildly disdainful? She’s never been good at this.

The driver babbles on. He first hatched the plan because he was getting tired of all the travelling, not to mention the danger. There was a dispute with another lieutenant in the Big Man’s organisation, and the Big Man himself was putting more and more distance between them – not that he minded. He now hated the Big Man. Everything he did, the way he spoke, the way he walked, the way he ate, mouth open, talking, crumbs spraying around him, was annoying. He began to feel like he was losing position, and that this might lead to his own ‘disappearance’. So he went with the flow, caused no trouble, plotting, looking for his chance.

She doesn’t believe a word of it now. He’s crazy, or full of shit, she thinks, until he starts going into detail. There’s a poison he liked to use – ricin, because it’s lethal in small doses, easily obtainable and virtually untraceable. Sometimes he had to shoot men, though, and contrary to what you see in the movies, a silencer doesn’t completely silence a gun. But if you put a condom over the barrel before you shoot, that absorbs the remaining sound-

As he talks, her terror grows. Around her neck, her scarf seems to tighten on its own. It would be too easy to strangle her like this, so when he is looking at the road, she slowly pulls it off, inch by inch, into her pocket, where she feels her digital camera.

He tells her about specific victims and dates and places, and she is able to piece this together with news stories she’s read. Now she believes him.

‘I have killed people whose deaths nobody will want to investigate. It would shine too much light into too many dark corners. I have made it look like an accident. I have stolen money nobody knows exists, except for people who cannot admit to it. I’m not even here. It’s perfect.’

They are outside the city now. She is his next perfect crime.

Or maybe not. When she sees him pull into the Bois de Vincennes and into a dark wooded area, she turns her camera on in her pocket. The battery was low when she left the Hotel du Nord, but she is sure she can get one good flash out of it.

As soon as he parks, she flashes the rear-view mirror, temporarily blinding the man, then throws her scarf over his neck, pulls it tight with every ounce of strength she has. At her wrist, the camera swings on its strap.

The attack catches him by surprise and this gives her a moment to consolidate her strength, tightening the scarf more and twisting it to stop his gurgled attempts to scream. He struggles, jerks his body forward and sideways, trying to turn around. Then he tries to aim the gun over his shoulder at her, while reaching for the scarf with his free hand. She manoeuvres her arm in front of the gun and is able to knock it away from her head. He loses his grip on the gun and drops it. She holds on. Her leather gloves give her a good grip. He goes limp.

But she doesn’t let go. She holds on until she is sure that be is, at the very least, unconscious. She unlocks her door, then manually unlocks his and gets out. She takes the bullets out of the gun, puts them under his seat and the empty gun in his pocket. She grabs her purse and pops the trunk, dragging his body out and along the ground to the back, where she slumps his torso into the trunk before heaving his legs in. Carefully, she removes her scarf from the neck of the man, without checking to see if he is dead or not. She doesn’t care to know. She only checks that she has all her things and no blood on her.

When she is about to close the trunk, her eye catches on the faint glint of shiny leather. It is a valise, wedged under the man’s foot next to a spare can of petrol. She carefully opens the petrol and pours it on the body and the back seat of the car, thinking this might fuck with any DNA evidence, though she doesn’t know how. Does it even matter? There have probably been a hundred people through this cab in the last week and, anyway, nobody knows she is here. She is ‘black’ in France and there is no reason to suspect her of involvement in this, part of a larger crime that cannot be investigated.

The valise is locked, so she takes it with her, closes the trunk, and begins walking. Later, she will jimmy the lock open, find the valise full of cash, and count it – 100,000 euros in small, nonsequential bills.

For now, she heads towards the Château de Vincennes Métro station. It’s almost 5 a.m. She feels great. It has occurred to her that a) she may have committed the perfect crime and b) she now has the whole 50 euros and no cab fare to pay. ‘Picked up the wrong girl,’ she thinks. ‘Fucked with the wrong girl. Your perfect crime, my ass.’

The first Métro comes within the hour and she vanishes into the crowd of bleary-eyed morning commuters, looking, with her valise, just like one of them.