Paris Noir

1.

He lived in a honeycomb, a prison with wallpaper and a panoramic view. He could have climbed right into the graves of Maupassant and Maria Montez from his balcony window. But Calvin Morse wasn’t supposed to climb. He wasn’t supposed to walk or fly or leave his honeycomb. He was an accountant on the lam from federal prosecutors and a little gang of mob bankers and lawyers.

Until last week he worked for a factory that made faucets – faucets of silvered chrome – that went into every building put up by Joshua Lightning’s own construction company. Lightning & Lightning was a kind of corporate octopus, but Calvin had been the full-time accountant for its largest affiliate, Lightning Faucets & Chrome. How could he have guessed that the ingenious way he cooked Joshua’s books would be copied by Lightning & Lightning’s other accountants, and that federal prosecutors would consider him the brains behind the whole octopus?

If he hadn’t gone to Columbia with Josh, roomed with him for three years, he would have been disposed of, dumped into a truck, and become part of lower Manhattan’s landfill. But Josh had pleaded Cal’s case with the mob bankers, had convinced them that he could hide Cal, keep him out of harm’s way. Josh would have preferred that he disappear into Bolivia or Brazil, where gringo prosecutors would never find him, but Paris had always been Cal’s dreamland, ever since he read Baudelaire and Maupassant at Columbia.

He’d gone to work for Josh’s dad right out of college, had to attend accounting school at night, and slave for Lightning Faucets & Chrome – he’d been married and divorced, had one daughter at Amherst and a second daughter at Yale, and all his vacations up until now had been packaged retreats that Lightning & Lightning put together and paid for: the Bahamas, Cape Cod, the Hemingway country of Key West.

Cal had five million in a retirement account, held at Lightning & Lightning’s own private bank, but he was having a crisis long before federal prosecutors swooped down on Lightning’s books, which were almost like fairy tales with elaborate fictional plots. He couldn’t bear his accumulations of money. His daughters went to Joshua for their tuition, not to Cal. He’d always been absent, even while he was at Faucets & Chrome. He was a walking, talking filament of fire, a hot wire that could create or swallow up a whole column of numbers and categories – he was like a musical instrument that had learned to play itself. In fact, his only pleasure had come from his manoeuvrings with a sea of lines on a ledger book. He’d never been in love, and his connection to his daughters was so ambiguous and remote that it too was at the point of disappearing.

But there was a touch of eccentricity to Cal – his passion for Paris, a city he had only seen once in a mad weekend whirl when he accompanied Joshua to a convention of faucet makers at some palais in the middle of nowhere – he’d barely had time for a pilgrimage to Baudelaire’s grave, a hike in Montparnasse, a visit to the Dingo, where Hemingway had first met Scott Fitzgerald. Yet that weekend had sculpted Cal, defined him in some essential way – and his dream, or delirium, was to escape Lightning Faucets and live in that city of desire he knew so little about.

And now he hid in a luxurious apartment with a bird’s-eye view of Maupassant. He hadn’t realised that his flat on the rue Boulard would be just another tomb. Joshua had commanded him never to venture into the street – not even after midnight. All his meals were prepared by the concierge, a Portuguese woman who also dusted the apartment and did his laundry. He had 180 channels he could watch on a plasma screen that covered an entire wall. A call girl visited him on Tuesdays, a ravishing métisse with green eyes and mocha skin. Her name was Mélodie. She was a figurante at some theatre company in the provinces, could recite Molièere and Shakespeare, and talk to Cal about books until he was blue in the face. The sexual splendour she offered was beyond the realm of what he might have imagined, and yet something gnawed at him. Mélodie could deliver all the mechanics of love, even camaraderie and companionship, but it felt like the dress rehearsal for a play that Cal would never be in.

He had a suspicion that Mélodie might be spying on him, and he wondered if she was Joshua’s own mulatto mistress. She knew things about Cal she ought not to have known, that he was a fanatic about fantasy baseball, had used his command of statistics to invent his own baseball league, where Babe Ruth could bat against Sandy Koufax, and Joe DiMaggio could duel with Willie Mays in centrefield – Cal’s artistic trick was to merge time and space in his fantasy league, as if the whole history of baseball could collapse into one titanic season. He’d ‘cooked’ baseball with the same imaginative leap in which he’d cooked Lightning’s books.

And so he would lie with Mélodie on his coverlet, the cemetery outside his window like some burning woods, and even as she devoured him with her green eyes, he couldn’t wait until she left. But when he tried to stop seeing her, Josh suddenly appeared with a split of champagne.

‘I don’t believe in Mélodie Montesquieu,’ Cal sang while he sipped. ‘She belongs in fantasy baseball. She could play shortstop without her clothes. She’d win every game.’

‘Don’t knock the kid,’ Joshua said. ‘She visits you as a personal favour to me. Our people worry, worry that you’ll crack. That you’ll wander into some hole that belongs to the feds. Uncle Sam could haul your ass right back to the States.’

‘And Mélodie writes reports and convinces your money-men that I’m more valuable to you alive than dead.’

‘That’s the equation – in a nutshell.’

2.

Josh had left him some mad money – a thousand euros, in case there was a sudden call from Lightning’s lawyers to vacate the rue Boulard and hide somewhere else. He sat on the euros like a squirrel, slept with Mélodie, promised himself he would see a tiny piece of Paris before he died.

He had to deflect the concierge, who was Josh’s own gatekeeper. He went down the back stairs, entered a garden with its own glass gazebo, climbed a wall that led him onto the rue Daguerre, a market street that emboldened Cal, made him feel that he’d discovered a little paradise of cafés and stalls and shoppers clutching little baskets composed entirely of string.

How much of a sin could it be to stroll among the shoppers, sit at a café like some hidden king of fantasy baseball? But he couldn’t take the chance. Suppose the concierge saw him on one of her own shopping sprees? So he climbed back over the wall to his tomb above the cemetery. And after a few days he went on a second outing, to the cemetery itself, where he found Maupassant and Maria Monte: among graves that were scattered like broken teeth.

Montez was a sultry Technicolor queen of the 1940s who starred in a series of flicks about the harem girls and thieves of a Baghdad that rose up ludicrously on Hollywood’s back lots. What he loved about Montez was her long silences even when she was asked to play Scheherazade. She could barely mouth a single line of dialogue – she belonged in fantasy baseball rather than Baghdad of the back lots. Perhaps he could remake Montez into a manager of some fantasy team. He had discovered her years ago in a late-night festival of B-movies, her face all aflame, her lipstick as red as lacquered blood, and Montez had remained with him, like a ghost at the very edge of sleep.

And then he saw her – not in the cemetery, but in a salon on the rue Daguerre, after Cal had decided to have his hair cut. The hairdresser herself couldn’t intrigue him; it was the shampoo girl, Marie, who wore lipstick and nail polish right out of the Arabian Nights. She looked at Cal with her own Arabian eyes, and he muttered ‘Maria Montez’.

He had a kindergarten command of French, but it didn’t seem to matter with Marie. She sat him down in her private throne where she shampooed customers’ hair, put a huge plastic napkin over his shirt, clutched him around the ears, and drew his head back into the hollow of a sink.

She rinsed his hair, poured shampoo on his crown, and rubbed the shampoo into his scalp with the palms of her hands. Then there was a curious surprise – the shampoo girl began to massage his scalp with her ten fingers, like ten little animals with their own moist mouths. Cal had never considered until that moment how alive his scalp was in all its bumpy terrain.

He never wanted to leave Marie’s throne. He couldn’t have told you how long she had massaged his scalp, and when she rinsed his hair, Cal suddenly felt his own strange isolation – he was more connected to a shampoo girl and her ten fingers than he had ever been to his wife, his mistresses, his daughters, and Josh.

3.

He didn’t have to get his hair cut each time; he could simply have a shampooing with the fille, as everybody called her – the salon’s own little girl who would never graduate, never grow up into a full-fledged hairdresser. The other girls in the salon poked fun at Cal, this perverse little American who looked like a hobo; his cuffs were frayed, his trousers wrinkled, his shoes beginning to unravel. He was Marie’s one and only ‘fiancé’, offering her his own head of hair like some wild flower that had to be rinsed and stroked.

They did have a conversation of sorts, but they could just as well have been the inmates of a madhouse with its own elemental language of long silences. She called him ‘Monsieur’, and he discovered with a series of groping questions that she lived in one of Paris’ poorest banlieues with her parents and three older brothers. She herself had hardly gone to school, but would rather wash men’s hair than scrub kitchen floors or bathe the bodies of old people in some sanatorium.

It was hard for Cal to manoeuvre while he sat on Marie’s throne, but she did agree to meet with him one afternoon during her lunch hour. They bought sandwiches at a bistro on the rue Daguerre and smuggled them into the cemetery.

He couldn’t explain his affection for Marie. They had little to talk about. The rigid rules and laws of fantasy baseball would have baffled her, and she’d never heard of Baudelaire. And while he blabbered in her ear, sang to her about the mysteries of Maria Montez, she scratched the side of his face – gently, gently – with a polished fingernail; it was the most erotic gesture he had ever experienced. They kissed for twenty minutes right on the Allée Transversale, in front of tourists with their little guidebooks to all the notable graves, and Cal could hear his own heart pound like some maddening earthquake.

She laughed and wiped the lipstick off his mouth, and led him back by hand to her salon. She had never once pronounced his name. He fumbled against her – could he ride home with her on the Métro?

‘Non, chéri.’

She called him darling but wouldn’t pronounce his name. She did promise to meet him for another stroll in the cemetery. But when he returned to Marie’s salon the very next afternoon, three sombre men were waiting for him. They looked like taller, harder replicas of Marie, each with a pencil-thin moustache. He searched inside the window – Marie wasn’t near her throne.

The three men kicked him like a dog and left Cal lying on the rue Daguerre. The concierge had to bring him back to his apartment. She washed his face with a little rag. She’d lived in London for a year, and could admonish him in his own language.

‘Monsieur has been a bad boy,’ she said. ‘Monsieur is not supposed to kiss la shampouineuse.’

Cal loved the sound of it - shampouineuse.

He was crazy about the shampouineuse of the rue Daguerre. But how would he ever find her again? She disappeared from the salon, and none of the hairdressers would offer him a clue. And then Mélodie Montesquieu stopped visiting him on Tuesdays, stopped visiting him at all; she was his courier to the world outside his little tomb.

Lightning & Lightning had decided to shut him down. He’d have to flee, but where could he go? He called American Express – his account had been frozen. He called his bank collect – his new balance was one dollar and twenty-six cents. And all the codes to his retirement accounts had been changed. He was locked out of his own past, like some mechanical monster without a persona.

He rode in a cab to the American Express offices on the rue Scribe with the possibility that his passport might get him a line of credit or some cash. But men with razored moustaches lurked about, reminding him of Marie’s brothers, and he couldn’t get near any of the managers.

Mélodie awaited him when he returned to his tomb on the rue Boulard. She sat smoking a cigarette that filled his bedroom with a foul odour and nearly burnt his nostrils. But she didn’t bask on his bed like some Delilah without her clothes.

‘This is your apartment, isn’t it?’ he asked.

‘Mine and Josh’s. I’m married, and this is where we meet.’

‘Your name isn’t Mélodie, and you’re not an actress.’

‘I’m a housewife who does tricks on the side. My name is none of your business.’ Her green eyes grew bolder as his grew opaque, and she apologised for her bluntness. ‘I’m sorry, Cal. Mélodie is the name I use with all my tricks.’

‘He means to kill me,’ Cal said.

‘It’s not that simple. Let’s just say he’s decided to abandon you. And you’ll have to fish around on your own.’

‘Fish with what? I had five million I can’t touch. I-’

‘He thinks you should run to Morocco.’

‘Why Morocco?’ he sang in his own sad voice.

‘Because it’s easy to get lost.’

Lightning & Lightning would kill him as soon as he landed, hire someone to tear Cal limb from limb.

‘I’m staying right here,’ he told her.

‘Darling, your little shampouineuse can’t save you. She can hardly save herself. Her brothers beat her black and blue.’

‘And who tipped them off?’

‘I did,’ she said with her own kind of truculence. ‘You weren’t supposed to leave the building – darling, wasn’t I enough?’

‘You’re Josh’s girl.’

‘Ah,’ she said, her big toe riding up his trouser leg. ‘Wouldn’t you like a freebie, Cal?’

‘No.’

4.

He was running out of euros. Perhaps they were hoping to starve him to death. They toyed with Cal, left souvenirs on his dining-room table while he slept. An old Photoplay magazine with Maria Montez on the cover – it must have cost a fortune, a collector’s item from the forties, with a note attached. Keep away from cemeteries, Cal. You won’t survive your next trip.

But he did rush into the Montparnasse cemetery, hoping he might find Marie, even in some spectral form, floating above the tilted tomb of Maupassant. Instead, he found Mélodie Montesquieu in the company of two suspicious men – assassins he assumed, handpicked for the job. They could borrow a shovel from some gravedigger and bury Cal next to Maria Montez.

He nosed past Mélodie and the two men, saw the mayhem in their eyes, and left the Montpamasse cemetery. He had a gelato at an ice-cream parlour on the rue Daguerre, bought an orange that he peeled with his fingers. But a shiver travelled up his spine when he saw Mélodie and the two men enter his own building on the rue Boulard. They would wait for Cal behind the door, massacre him with Mélodie’s kitchen knives.

Cal had lost his lair, and he’d have to loop across Paris like some grey wolf. He went to the Dingo, sat on its cramped seats, but he couldn’t conjure up the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald with his first or second glass of Sancerre. He checked into a fleabag hotel on the rue d’Odessa – the young people flocking in the little square outside his window hypnotised Cal with their swaying bodies, and he watched them for hours.

But the grey wolf had to return to the one street that mattered to him – the rue Daguerre. He promised himself that he wouldn’t look into the window of Marie’s salon, but he did look. And the shampouineuse was at her station, the little throne that her customers sat in while she washed their hair.

Marie had welts under her eyes, bruises printed on her face. The bell attached to the door clacked as Cal entered the salon. The hairdressers were not happy to see him. Still, Cal sat down on Marie’s throne. She clipped the plastic bib to his collar, but would not offer Cal the simplest sign of recognition. The shampouineuse was like a machine with bruised eyes.

‘Monsieur,’ she said, gripping him by the cars and pulling his head back into the basin. The first drop of shampoo excited him. His scalp burned with a liquid fire. Then her hands caressed the soft pit of skin that covered his crown. He blinked, his head rising above the basin for a moment – Mélodie and her two assassins stood outside the window. But Cal no longer cared. His head sank back into the basin. He would rupture time with his own implacable logic. All he had to do was convince the shampouineuse never to take her fingers out of his hair.