Part II Liberation lost

Like a tragedy[7] by Laurent Martin

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;

A stage where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Place de la Nation

1

Still the same smell same view same disgust. Nothing’s changed.

My bedroom window looks out on the night. The night where the lights of the city all around are shining. The night where hidden men are patiently waiting for the next day. When I was a kid, I used to think dead lights left the earth and went up to the sky in the form of stars. Dinner’s over. They’ve left. My sister Sophie and her husband. In actual fact they’re getting married tomorrow. That’s why I’m here.

A few groggy steps around my room. Nothing’s changed. The worn-out furniture. The wallpaper. The dreary smell. Took a whole day to get here. The fatigue and boredom of being here, I’m going to collapse.

When I got here, the table was already set. They had already come. His name is Patrick and my sister’s in love. That’s all I know. Mom made soup for us. Soup’s a family tradition. It’s lasted thirty years. “Eat while it’s hot.” Mom doesn’t look any older. Or hardly any. Still something sad in her eyes, and pink cheeks and jet-black hair. Not like me, verging on brown and now white. Man, do I look older. Dinner. Pretend to be interested in Patrick. With a bitch of a headache. Patrick is tall and kind of good-looking. My sister’s pretty too. The years seem to have made her look even better. Say anything at all to fill up the time and now Sophie’s urging me to tell them some of my adventures. My adventures, when I was in the submarine corps. “That’s such a different life!” “So tell us about it.” So I tell about it. The dives, the trips, the ports of call. The dangerous situations that make you shudder when you have no idea how a submarine works. I worked in the engine room. A very important job and Patrick thought I was interesting. Everybody was happy I was back, happy with my stories, and I played the prodigal son come home, as if nothing had happened, whereas I would have liked to have been very far away from here. Patrick asked me why I’d left Paris. “To see how it is somewhere else.” He could feel I was lying. There are stories I’d rather not tell. Discreetly, Sophie thanked me for coming. “Without you, something would have been missing from my wedding.”

We all separated. Till tomorrow. I was alone again in my lousy room where I spent so many shitty years looking at the stars leaving the earth, wondering if someday I’d have the courage to leave. I had to have a good reason to run away from this city and find myself in a submarine, sealed in half the time. No wonder I already have white hair and tired eyes.

2

The first morning. Up early, first one. A Navy habit. Six o’clock, every day, never lose crappy habits. Mom’s still sleeping. I feed the cat. He must be fifteen or sixteen. I’m the one who found this cat. Lost and wet right outside the building. The only good deed I’ve ever done. I believe. I make myself a cup of coffee. Mom’s coffee’s still just as bad. From the kitchen window you can also see the city the railroad tracks the high-rises that stand out and try to wake up. It’s still almost night. I grab an old issue of the paper lying on the table. Pages are missing. I skim through some news items as I drink my coffee.

In the silence of the early hours I look for the iron. It hasn’t moved. In the hall closet. Nothing has moved. I wonder if I really left, if it’s not the morning after a rocky night of drinking that made me think I’d disappeared for ten years. My only suit has to be ironed. Keep up appearances. Patrick’s parents have money. They rented a big room in a restaurant in the Bois de Vincennes that has a little garden. We don’t have the money for that. So we keep up appearances. A family tradition. Like the soup. But I don’t hold it against her: Mom did what she could when my father died. A perfectly pressed suit. A wedding in September when the days are getting shorter, what an idea. I put it in my room on the bed and I close the door so the cat won’t come in and sleep on it.


Mom’s up now. She’s surprised. She forgot I was here. Yet it’s the first time I’ve been here in ten years.

“Did you sleep well?” “Yes! You left the room just like it used to be.” “What did you expect me to do with it?” “I don’t know.” She grabs a cup and helps herself and takes a sip. “Your coffee is very strong.” “That’s the only way I like it.” She adds a little water. “I ironed my suit for the wedding.” “I could have done it for you.” “I’m used to it. We did everything ourselves in the subs.” “So it’s not like it used to be.” She smiles sadly and adds: “Are you okay?” What can I answer? I lie: “Sure! Work, life... everything’s okay.” She finishes her cup. I tell her I’m going out for a walk. “Do you need something?” “No! I feel like taking a walk.” “You’ll see, there’ve been some changes.” “I’ll bet.”

I walk downstairs. Fifth floor. Fifty-seven steps. I still remember the jerky tempo of the descent. Back in the day, the light used to go on the fritz a lot and you had to keep count of the steps in your head so as not to fall. Outside. A kind of square where two buildings face each other. Ours and Olivier’s. Olivier was a friend of my father’s. Anyway he doesn’t live there anymore. The air is cool. A strange feeling that this new old world is much smaller than the one I left. A few shouts in the distance, and the background noise that never goes away. A mix of all the activities of the city. Never have I heard silence around here. I go up rue de Fécamp, cross boulevard Daumesnil, and I take rue de Picpus to reach the little park where I used to hang out a lot. The place where I smoked my first cigarettes with Marco and the other guys. The mix of new and old apartment buildings gives a rhythm to what I see. Nothing has really changed, but everything is different. Ten years is an eternity. After the little park I walk up to Place de la Nation. I leave the neighborhood. Our neighborhood our universe where we thought we dominated the city and the world. What a laugh. We were just fragile little insects running around in a space that was too vast and noisy for us.

And the back streets around there, like little islands, where life was organized around a café. That’s where we would meet, in those cafés. We rarely went any further away. Rarely to the other neighborhoods — for us that was elsewhere, too far away. I gulp down a cup of coffee in one of those cafés. I don’t know if the sign has changed. It’s a little blurry in my memory. A few old guys are talking over a beer. They were already there in the same spot ten years ago, a hundred years ago.

Store after store, like everywhere else. The same signs, the same colors. Standardization settling in and taking over. Just shadows. Buildings, cars, men, women, these people. Just shadows I ignore.

I walk back toward Daumesnil, until I find another sad café to sit down in. A young woman barely twenty comes to take my order. Just a coffee. This return to the past is awful. It forces me to think about myself, and all I’ve done so far is hide, in order to forget myself. I’m the same. Nothing has changed. The main thing is the only thing you hold onto. Thick heavy vapors coming from the souls of things. Light, superficial, intoxicating things... I’ve forgotten all that. I come up to the surface again, suffering from a painful illness. Stinging nostalgia.


Mom was getting worried. “You could have said where you were going.” “What for? I’m here.” “The wedding.” “D’you think I’ve come six hundred miles to miss my sister’s wedding?” She made me a dish of meat in sauce. I hardly ate any. “It’s not good?” “I’m not really hungry.” “But it’s sauté of veal, you used to like that.”

Yes! I used to like that. She thinks I’m pale for someone who lives on the Riviera. “You know, at my job we’re not outside a lot.” And she makes some comments about my white hair and my father who didn’t have any at my age.


We get ready for the wedding. Mom doesn’t want to be late. She has even ordered a taxi. “We’re not going to your sister’s wedding by bus!” “She could’ve left us her car.” “She still needed it.” Mom bought herself a dress for the occasion. She asks what I think of it. I say it’s fine without looking.

3

About a hundred guests. Eight to a table. I’m entitled to the table of honor. I occupy the seat of the father of the bride. The worst table at a wedding. I listen politely to what Patrick’s parents say. Real assholes who own a business. “Our children are so charming!” Sure! He’s their only son, so they wanted to do things right. And you can tell. A band. Food, and more food. Drink, and more drink. At this moment I hate my sister but I send her loving smiles. Between two yeses and two meaningless comments, I look the guests over. All of them from Patrick’s class. A business school. You can’t change yourself. I don’t know any of them. And a few of my sister’s friends I met years ago; their faces are totally dark in my memory. Time. The feeling that I’m falling headfirst into what I wanted to leave for good. I gulp down wine, good wine, to get drunk. Patrick plays the nice brother-in-law. I gulp down wine. I hardly listen at all. I gulp.

And suddenly I see her.

Sitting at a table, vaguely smiling at the people around her. She wasn’t there at the start of the celebration. She just came in. The same somber face, the same sad smile, and her short hair shorter. I ask my sister: “Is that Valerie over there, in blue?” “Yes.” “You still in touch with her?” “A little. Why?” “Just curious.” A strange emotion in my sister’s face. Fear, almost. I don’t know why. My heart stirs, jumps, the way it jumped ten years ago. I watch Valerie for the rest of the meal. I’m pretty sure she has seen me too.


Before dessert, we’re entitled to a pause for the champagne. I take a bottle and two glasses. I get up. Valerie is there, alone, absent. I walk up to her. A feeling of staggering, plunging into a bottomless pit, one of the dark places alcohol generously throws you into before it asks you to pay the toll. Charon works on earth now. Three breaths. I’m at her table.


[He walks over to her with a bottle in his hand. She’s sitting at a table.]

HIM: Hello.

[She jumps.]

HER: Hello... I haven't had the courage to go up to the table of honor yet... You came back?

HIM: For the occasion. That's all.

HER: I didn't think I'd see you again. Sophie hardly ever talks about you.

HIM: I've been kind of quiet these past few years. I have some champagne. Want some?

HER: Yes, please.

[He serves her. They drink to cover their embarrassment.]

HER: What are you doing now?

HIM: Not much. A few years in submarines. Now I'm working at a garage in Toulon. How about you?

HER: I stayed here. Not much either. It's a nice wedding.

HIM: I don't know what “a nice wedding” means.

HER: Your sister and mother seem happy.

HIM: That's true. Are you alone? No escort?

HER: No! No one.

[Silence.]

[They cross glasses.]

HIM: Cheers.

HER: Cheers.

[The potion acts.]


We spend the rest of the night together. Talking a little about our memories. She talks to me about submarines. What’s with all these people with their submarines? Valerie. Years ago, we went out together. She was a friend of my sister’s. She was beautiful. She still is. A rather sophisticated charm that contrasted with my raw, almost animal state. We finish the bottle of champagne, we take another one. The world fades out around us. We’re alone, surrounded by the deafening crowd that sings, howls. A nice wedding.

I agree to dance with my sister. She’s worried. I’m merry. I wish her moments of happiness. “Just moments?” “Could be worse, right?”


In the restaurant garden. With Valerie. Outside, drunk, staggering, facing infinity and fresh air. She takes my hand.

4

I remembered her body perfectly. And yet we only stayed together for a few weeks. It was just before I left this city. But her body is deeply engraved inside me. With acid, almost.

I watch her slow breathing. Then she wakes up. It is 6 a.m. We’ve only slept a few minutes. The emotional silence of our first morning. Bodies still palpitating. Hands graze each other, push each other away, are pulled toward each other. Doubts. Questions. Who will dare to speak first?

[They are lying pressed against each other. Silence.]

HER: I have to go.

HIM: Already?

HER: Yes. It's late. It's early. I'll call you today or tomorrow. I really have to leave.

[She gets up, gets dressed, and scurries offstage. He remains alone.]


She goes away. I don’t move. I hear the door slam. Close your eyes. Forget. Dream. But nothing happens. Except for this need, here.


She didn’t call, not that day, not the days after.

Hanging around the house, and outside. Looking for her name in the phone book. Nobody with the name of Valerie Mercier. See and see again the place she lived before. Near boulevard Michel Bizot. A guy tells me he doesn’t know her. She doesn’t live here anymore. My sister is on her honeymoon on an island in the Caribbean, I’m not going to bug her about this.


Slow to come to life again after the death that accompanies Valerie’s painful silences.

5

Marco. He learns I’m back. “You could’ve told me.” “I was going to.” Marco. The guy, the friend, the near brother I used to see all the time before I left. Not the kind of guy you really want to be seen with, though. If I hadn’t left, I might have really turned out badly with him.

We’ll meet at Place Daumesnil. A square where we used to hang out when we were younger. A square like in my memory. Sad and gray.

Cars are driving around a fountain where stone lions are spitting out water. He’s late. I walk around a little. Emptied out, tired from the nights spent turning over in my bed, waiting, feverishly, for the phone, for Valerie’s voice, her breath. That fucking need. He arrives in a pretty little English car. Marco hasn’t really changed. A tall blond guy with a smile in his eyes. We kiss each other on both cheeks. “Glad to see you.” “Me too.” We look for a café to have a drink.

“So! How are you, what’s up?” “I managed to integrate into society, like they say. I run a security agency. I supply tough guys for big parties, concerts, things like that.” “You didn’t have any problem getting started?” “No, I knew some people who helped me.” “That’s good.” “How about you?” “I tinker around. I spent a long time in the submarine corps, in Toulon.” “Your mother told me, at the time.” “Now, with my savings, I bought a little apartment and I found a job in a garage.” “A calm life.” “Kind of. Kind of too calm.” “Why don’t you come back here? I’ll fix you up with something.”


“You know that’s not possible.” “Anything’s possible. Especially now.” We talk about years past. Lost years. “I’m going out tonight. Want to come along?” “Sure.” A fine clear night. It’s for us, to celebrate our reunion. That’s it.

Everything, or almost everything, has changed around Bastille. We start at a spot with a tropical atmosphere and a touch of class. Then a new bar with an Indian theme. We end up in a big three-story club. Marco knows everybody. He introduces me as his childhood friend who’s come home. I’m treated with respect. From time to time I see him talking discreetly with people. Marco must be a little more than just the head of a security agency. I don’t ask him about it because it’s none of my business. We got real drunk. Especially me. I want to forget I exist. To forget Valerie exists. But it’s not easy to forget things like that.

We find ourselves at the place of a friend of his. He’s having a party in a big, completely renovated loft near rue Crozatier. I sprawl out for an hour on a leather couch with a bottle of rum in my hand. I’m flying, until I go vomit somewhere. I can sense the friend’s been kicking up a fuss. Marco tells him to calm down and we walk out.


Car at the shore of the lake in the Bois de Vincennes, outside the city. Day’s dawning. Drunkenness going slowly away, giving way to beatitude. The sound of water. The sound of steps. The sound of urban silence. Marco in front of me. Suddenly he stops. “Look!” A field mouse, at the edge of the water. Marco grabs an old piece of wood lying there. He walks forward, stops, then starts to hit the poor beast. The surprised mouse bursts into pieces. Marco keeps going. “What are you doing?” No answer. He keeps hitting. Again and again. Then I understand we don’t belong to the same world anymore. Our minds have grown apart. Finally he stops. He’s breathing heavily. “Want to go home to bed?” “Yes!”

On the way back, the question. The question I didn’t dare ask. “You didn’t get into trouble?” “About what?” “Ten years ago.” “No! Nothing. I forgot all about that business.” “I didn’t forget it.” “You were wrong. And you shouldn’t’ve left. Nothing happened.” “We had no idea. And leaving was good for me. I don’t know what would have become of me if I had stayed here.”

6

Marco calls me up. “What’re you doing tonight?” “Nothing, nothing much.” “I’m taking you along. I’ll come by and pick you up around 10.” “That late?” “Yeah.” He hangs up.

I spend the end of the day with Mom. She needs help wallpapering her bedroom. She was hesitant. I advised her to do it. “Your father liked this wallpaper.” “My father died over fifteen years ago.” “Yes, that’s true.”


Around 10 p.m. I hear a car honking. I lean out. Marco is sticking his head out of a dark BMW. He waves to me. I go downstairs. “You make enough to afford this thing?” “No. It’s a loan. Get in!” I get inside the machine. He puts a CD on at top volume and the bass makes everything vibrate. I yell: “Where’re we going?” “You’ll see.”

We leave the neighborhood, and Paris, for the suburbs. He lowers the sound. We get to Rungis, in the industrial zone. There isn’t much traffic at this time of night. We drive between big sheds, warehouses. Black-and-white, like in old films. We turn. Marco hangs a right. We roll up to an open shed. We enter. Inside, an English truck and two small vans. Guys bustling around. I’m getting worried. “What’s happening?” “Nothing. A business operation.”

“What the fuck is this?”

“Come on!” We get out of the car. We walk over to the guys. Marco gives out a few hi’s. There are four guys; they look at me strangely. “No problem, he’s a friend.” The guys are taking big boxes out of the English truck and putting them in the vans. “What’s in them?” “Stuff like cigarettes and hifis.” “You’re bullshitting me. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want anything to do with crap like this?” “Don’t worry, it won’t take long.” “Are you the manager here?” “No, I’m watching it for a boss.” “Who?” “Remember the Café du Commerce?” “On rue de Wattignies?” “Yes. The boss had a son, Frederic Dumont.” “Could be.” “He’s the one I’m working for. I supply the manpower.” “You’re not sick of this shit?” “What else do you expect me to do? Work on trains like your father, or in a factory like mine, and croak like an asshole just for a pitiful salary?” “You don’t have to do that.” “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

A cell phone rings. One of the guys answers. All of a sudden he gives an order. Everybody starts moving. Marco grabs me by the arm. “Come on! Gotta leave.” We run back to the BMW. “You want to drive?” “Why?” “Because you’re the best.” He flips me the keys. I start the car. “Got to get outta here. There’s a Customs patrol going around.” I accelerate. He’s my copilot. “Right. Left. Now hit it!” I keep the lights off. We can make out something in the distance. “Park in the shadows.” I turn off the engine. Silence. A halo of light slowly approaches. A car goes by. Customs. I watch it in the rearview mirror. As soon as it turns I start up again and I speed toward the exit. Marco keeps looking back. “You worried?” “Not about us. About the merchandise. My cut.” “You never should’ve dragged me into this job.” “Sorry. I thought you’d enjoy it. How was I supposed to know?” “Stop breaking my balls.”

7

A strange sun over the city. Something warm and restful. I walk for a long time before I get to Lycée Paul-Valéry. That’s where I told Marco to meet me. The high school we went to. Especially me, because Marco didn’t go to school very often. But I tried my best. Especially in French and History. So how did I end up a mechanic?

Marco’s already there. Sitting on the hood of his BMW. We look for a nearby café. We sit outside. We order, then exchange banalities.

That’s when she appears. For the second time. Valerie is striding ahead, as if she’s late. I call her. I get up. I run after her. She finally turns around.


[She walks rapidly across the stage. He calls her. She turns around.]

HER: What are you doing here?

HIM: Nothing. I'm having a cup of coffee. You have a little time?

HER: No, sorry. Someone's expecting me.

HIM: You never called me.

HER: I know, I was really busy.

HIM: I waited. I didn't know how to reach you.

HER: Forgive me.

HIM: I have nothing to forgive you for. I'm only passing through.

HER: I promise you. As soon as I can...


Then I hear a voice. “Mommy!”

[A voice calling offstage.]


Valerie turns around. A little girl is running toward her. Maybe eight years old. Valerie glances at me. I see a painful form of despair in her face. Behind the little girl, a guy, a tall guy. He looks familiar.

HER: I've got to go.

HIM: I understand.

HER: I'll call you.

HIM: Don't bother. I understand completely.

HER: I don't think so.

[She turns around and exits.]


She leaves. Wobbly legs, exploding heart, I think I’m going to collapse on the ground. Two breaths. I go back to the bar. Marco questions me. “You know Valerie Dumont?” “What?” “The girl you followed.” “She’s a friend of my sister’s. We saw each other at the wedding. I didn’t know her name was Dumont.” “That’s her husband’s name. I told you about him already, at the warehouse. I do some jobs for him. If you want, I’ll introduce you.”

“Don’t bother. Really, don’t bother.”

8

Flattened, hurt, smashed. Aching belly. Back from the station. My train ticket. Tomorrow I’m going back to Toulon. The phone rings. A few words of conversation. Steps. Mom through the door. “Phone for you.” “Marco?” “No, it’s a woman.”

I rush over to the phone. It’s her.


[Each at opposite sides of the stage. They talk to each other on the phone.]

HER: Antoine?

HIM: Yes!

HER: I'm sorry.

HIM: You didn't tell me you were married.

HER: I know.

HIM: Or that you had a daughter.

HER: I know. Forgive me. When we met... it was so sudden... I didn't know what to do.

HIM: And now?

HER: I still don't know. But we can see each other, if you want to.

HIM: That's not a good idea.

HER: What are you talking about?

HIM: You're married, you're a mother, all that.

HER: That's not a problem.

HIM: I'm going to go away.

HER: It's your decision.

HIM: Right. When?

HER: Now.

HIM: It's nighttime.

HER: I'll wait for you at my place. Nobody's home.

[They hang up and exit from different sides of the stage.]


I call out to Mom. “I’m going out for a little while to see a friend.” “So late?” “It’s the only way she can do it.” “Okay, son.” “I’m taking Sophie’s car.”

9

Through the darkened city. Just one thought leads me on. Her. Speed to her. Speed. A nice apartment on boulevard Diderot. I ring. She opens the door.


[Doorbell. She hesitates, walks forward, straightens her hair with one hand, and opens the door.]

HER: Come in.

HIM: Thanks... Nice place... Money's no problem, is it?

HER: It's not me.

HIM: It's your husband.

HER: Yes. Do you want something to drink?

HIM: Something strong.

HER: Cognac?

HIM: Perfect.

[She fixes him a glass.]


I close my eyes. What am I doing here? I should have left today. Shouldn’t have come. She’s pouring me a drink.


[She brings him a glass.]

HER: Here you are.

[He swallows.]

[Silence.]


I drink almost the whole glass. Then silence. Like two strangers in an elevator.

[She takes him by the hand and they exit.]


So she’s taking me by the hand. She leads me slowly upstairs, into a bedroom. Not the master bedroom. A guest room. She only leaves a little lamp on. She strokes my face. Her hand is trembling. And we make love. Entwined in each other, breathless, exhausted, neither of them dare to say anything yet.


[In a big bed, they are lying pressed up against each other, out of breath. We can guess they’re naked under the sheets. Silence.]

HER: Why did you leave?

HIM: Why? Because I couldn't stand this city anymore.

HER: You don't like Paris? The neighborhood?

HIM: It's complicated. I love this city and I hate it at the same time. It's the city of my childhood. That's a terrible thing! Years... painful years...

Silence.

She puts her hand on my cheek.


HER: You know, I was in love with you.

HIM: I was in love with you too.

HER: We've missed each other.

HIM: You said it!

HER: And you left.

HIM: Yes... And now what?

HER: Stop it.

HIM: Stop what?

HER: For a long time, I dreamed of your body.

HIM: You're not answering me. Now what?

HER: I can't answer. You wouldn't like the only possible answer. I wouldn't like it either.

HIM: I know that answer.

HER: I'm not so sure.

HIM: How about your family?

HER: What about my family?

HIM: I don't know.

[She puts her hand over his mouth.]

HER: Shhh! Don't talk about the future. It doesn't exist.

[They embrace.]

10

I decide to stay in Paris longer. My mother is delighted. I meet Valerie the next day. We go for a walk. Moments wrenched away from the rest of the world. Moments for just the two of us, with that permanent threat, that ending getting nearer.


[They cross the stage holding hands.

HER: I can't come tomorrow. But later...

HIM: Later?

HER: In one or two days. I don't know yet. It's complicated.

HIM: I'm not asking you for anything.

HER: I know. It's not easy for me.

HIM: Not for me, either.

[They exit.]


Evening. Marco comes by to pick me up. “Where’re we going?” “A nightclub near Bastille.” “I really don’t like all that.” “I gotta tell you something.” “What?” “You’ll see.”


It’s not really a nightclub. Just a big bar with music playing in the back room. We order cocktails. “What did you want to tell me?” “Just wait a little. Actually, I want to introduce you to someone.” “I don’t like your mysteries. Last time, I was really mad at you.” “Last time, everything went okay.” We drink and we order again. Then a group comes in. Three of them. Marco waves and they walk toward our table. I recognize one of the guys from the warehouse and I recognize Dumont. What the hell is he doing here? The three guys stop. Marco introduces everybody. Dumont stares at me. “Haven’t we met somewhere?” “Could be. I’m from the neighborhood but I’ve been away for a while.”

Marco praises my skill as a driver. Dumont becomes interested in me. “And what are you doing now, my man?” I don’t like it when somebody calls me “my man” just like that. “I work in a garage.” “I might need you.” “I don’t see how.” “A good driver.” “I don’t do that anymore.” “Marco, you should persuade him.” “I’ll take care of it.” “No way.” Dumont gives me a piercing glance. He doesn’t like to be contradicted. “I have a feeling we’ll meet again.” “I don’t think so. I’m leaving in a couple of days.” He doesn’t answer. He goes away with his two bodyguards. Marco doesn’t say anything.

“Why did you bring me over here? Why’d you introduce me to that guy?”

“So you can stay here. He can find work for you.”

“I’m not looking for work. You really don’t get it. I don’t want to stay in Paris. I can’t stay here. I’m going to leave as soon as I can.”

11

Eyes diving into the night. Valerie comes over to me. I can feel her breath and then her arms around me.


[She comes over to him and puts her arms around his shoulders.]

HER: What are you thinking about?

HIM: What I missed in life.

HER: Did you miss me?

HIM: Maybe. Hard to say. I didn't know if you still existed for me, but when I saw you again at the wedding it all came back to me. You had never really left me. You were hidden some where, ready to spring up again.

HER: You still haven't told me the real reason you left.

HIM: I never told anyone because the reason is too ugly.

HER: Tell me.

HIM: Truth burns.

HER: It's as bad as that?

HIM: I think so... Ten years ago, I used to hang out with Marco a lot.

HER: I know.

HIM: We did a lot of shit together. Real hoods, almost. On my end, I was still kind of hanging on to what I thought was a normal life. But him, I felt he was going over the edge. And then there was this problem with a guy. Marco asked me to go to a meeting with him. He had some business to settle. One night, a little after 12. Actually, the guy owed Marco a bunch of money. He was supposed to give some of it back to him. It was near the wine warehouses around Bercy. Before they knocked them down. In a deserted spot... The guy was there, waiting for us, sitting on his moped. We'd come in a car. I was driving, as usual... Marco got out and began talking with the guy. Then they started yelling at each other. The guy shoved Marco to the ground and jumped on his bike and started it... Marco got up. He came back to the car and told me to follow the guy. That's what I did. He had no chance of getting away from us. And suddenly the guy braked, turned around, got off the bike, and pulled a gun out of his jacket. Even in the night, with the moonlight and all, we could see he was aiming at us. We ducked. I hit the gas pedal... He didn't have time to fire and I crashed into him... I felt the shock. We backed up. The guy’s body was lying on the ground. Dead... I decided to get out right then and there. Marco wanted to stay. We promised never to squeal on the other guy if one of us got busted.

[Silence.]

HER: For a long time I thought I was the one you were running away from.

HIM: No, I was running away from that business. I had blood on my hands, I didn't want to pay for it. But, in fact, I did pay. Ten years — a kind of exile.

HER: It was an accident. It wasn't your fault at all.

HIM: There's no such thing as an accident.

[Silence.]

HER: Do you want something to drink?

HIM: No.

[Silence.]

HER: I'm scared.

HIM: Why?

HER: You shouldn't have come back. We shouldn't have seen each other again. We're going to make people unhappy.

HIM: People? Who?

HER: Us, maybe. And then there are our families...

HIM: As far as our families go, all we have to do is leave.

HER: What about us?

[Silence.]

HER: I'm cold.

HIM: Let's go back.

[They exit.]

12

Three in the morning. The phone. I get out of bed. Mom too. She’s worried. I pick up the phone. She must think it’s Sophie. Marco’s voice. I reassure Mom. “That you, Antoine?” “D’you know what time it is?” “You gotta help me.” “Where are you?” “In the country. Seine-et-Marne. A village called Ferrière.” “What’re you doing there?” “I crashed the BMW.” “Anyone hurt?” “No.” “What do you want me to do?” “Come get me.” “Now?” “Yes! I’m at the main square, in front of the church, in the middle of the village. I already walked two miles. I’ve had it.” “I’m on my way.”

I get dressed fast. I grab the keys and papers for Sophie’s car. Two minutes later I’m heading east on the highway. Moving forward through the night. Marco, what an asshole. I drive for half an hour. Then I get on a road toward Marne-la-Vallée. Little roads and villages go by. Don’t get lost. Never been around here before. Finally, a sign says Ferrière. Turn left. What the hell am I doing here again? Go back to Toulon. As fast as possible. Go back to Toulon. Finally I’m there. The village is asleep. I slow down, drive up to the phone booth. Nobody. Where the hell is he? I turn off the engine. I’m about to get out. Marco gets into the car. “Thanks! I owe you one!” “You don’t owe me a thing.” I start the car again. “What about your car?” “We’ll see about that later.” “Someday something’s gonna happen to you.” “Someday. But not today. You’re here. You saved my skin.”


I drop Marco off in front of his house. He left rue de Fé-camp for a more upscale apartment on rue Montgallet. He thanks me again. “That’s your last word, about Dumont? You don’t want to work for him?” “No! Absolutely not.” “Maybe you’re right.” And he adds: “How does it feel, sleeping with his wife?” “What?” “You know what I said.” “What are you talking about? You on the vice squad?” “One day, people are going to find out about it.” “So what?” “Dumont’s not softhearted. He’s going to fuck you up, and his wife too.” “He’ll never know.” “That’s what you think. I know, and I didn’t have to try. G’night!” He slams the door. I really have to leave this city. ASAP. Before things turn nasty.

13

Noon. Valerie’s waiting for me. She wants to talk. Not at her place. In some out-of-the-way café. I take my sister’s car. The fatigue from the night before still weighing on me. I go in. I look around for Valerie.


[He walks in. She’s sitting at a table. He comes over.]

HIM: What's up?

HER: I had to see you. Last night I spoke to my husband.

HIM: What?

HER: I told him I was having an affair with someone.

HIM: You didn't!

HER: What else could I do? He thought I was acting strange. He would have tried to find out and he would have succeeded. He came back pretty late. I waited until it was 1 in the morning. He looked as if something was bothering him. I drank two glasses of cognac to get up the courage. And I told him everything. I didn't tell him who you were. He insisted, he threatened me, he yelled. Luckily, our little girl woke up. He calmed down.

HIM: And then?

HER: I told him I was going away with you.

HIM: With me?

HER: Remember when I was telling you about the only possible answer for our future? The answer wasn't what you thought. I'm not staying. I'm leaving. I'm leaving because it's the only thing to do, even though I know it's not something good for me, or for you. I want to spend the next days, the next weeks far away from here, with you.

[He walks over and puts his arms around her.]


I take her in my arms. I’m almost crushing her. I know she’s right, we’re lost, but it’s too late for us to give each other up.


HIM: What about your daughter?

HER: My mother knows about it. She's going to take her for a while.

HIM: How're we going to do this?

HER: I packed some things. Just two bags.

HIM: We run away like thieves?

HER: We're stealing love, and we'll be punished for it.

HIM: Come on!

[He grabs her by the hand and they exit.]


I drive her to the station. Gare de Lyon. I tell her I need an hour, max. The time to go back to the house, get my things, explain everything to my mother, and return to her. She tells me she’ll wait for me at the Train Bleu. I take the car and drive back to the house. I know I’m seeing the neighborhood for the last time.

14

Inside the building. Up the stairs four by four. The door. The living room. I explain things to Mom. “They just called me. I’ve got to go back to the garage. An emergency. The boss is in the hospital.” “You’re leaving me?” “Not for long, this time.” “You’ll be back soon?” “I promise.” Does she believe me? I walk quickly into my bedroom. I cram my stuff into my bag. A last look around this bedroom. Goodbye. I kiss Mom. “I’m going down there with Sophie’s car. I’ll leave it in the parking lot of the station and I’ll mail the keys.” She sniffs. Goodbye.

I run down the stairs. Into the hallway. Marco’s there. “What the hell are you doing?” “I was waiting for you.” “Why? You got more problems?” “I think you’re doing something really dumb with Dumont.” “Me?” “Yeah. He’s not happy.” “He sent you over here.” “You have to give back what you took from him.” “I didn’t take anything.” “His wife.” “What’re you talking about? He doesn’t own her.” “She’s still his wife.” “Marco! Stop this shit. We’re not in the Middle Ages anymore. She can do whatever she wants.” “That’s not what he thinks.” “I don’t give a shit what he thinks. I came to get my stuff and I’m on my way.” “I’m telling you, you’re doing something really dumb.” “Marco! And I thought you were my friend.” “I am your friend. That’s why I’m here. You can’t leave with her. He’ll stop you. Believe me.” “How?” Marco lowers his eyes. A voice behind me.

“Your friend is right.”

I recognize the man who just spoke. It’s Dumont. I turn around. He goes on: “Marco explained the situation to you.” “There’s nothing to explain.” “My wife.” “She can do what she wants.” “She has always done whatever she wants. Except leave me.” “I think that has changed.” I turn back around toward Marco, who’s blocking my way. “Move, I’ve got to go.” He doesn’t budge. “Marco, let me through!” He closes his eyes and seems to be murmuring an apology. Then I feel a kind of shock. Something violent on my skull. And then nothingness.


I wake up. It’s dark. I’m cold. A smell is irritating my nostrils. A sticky smell. My head’s exploding. My eyes hurt. Hand on my skull. My hair is glued down by blood. Where am I? I try to get up. I retch. I vomit. I spit. I cough. I stagger forward a couple of steps. I collapse. The pain makes me scream. I’ll make it. I get up again. The walls are freezing. Concrete stairs. The cellar. Crawling. I vomit again. Bile and blood. At last the hallway. At last I’m outside. Air. Goddamn air’s going straight to my head. For the first time in my life I like the Paris air. The keys to Sophie’s car in my pocket. Valerie must still be at the station.


[He is alone onstage. He falls and gets up again.]

HIM: [shouting] Wait for me, I'm coming!


Night is falling. The car. The keys. Start. Can’t see a thing. Blood and tears blur my vision. Rub my face with the sleeve of my sweater. Everything is blurry. Drive.

Hard to sit up straight. Drive. Light. Red? Green? Doesn’t matter. Retching again. Nothing else to vomit but bitter bile. And that blood flowing from my skull. The wound has opened again. I really feel bad. Arriving in the middle of nowhere. Can’t recognize anything. Ah yes! The avenue of the station. Can’t hold the wheel anymore. Trembling.


HIM: [shouting] Wait for me, I'm here!


The car’s on the sidewalk. I try to get out. Take a step. Fall on my knees.


HIM: [shouting] I'm here...


A breath. A strange sensation. Cold taking hold of me. A tear flows, then nothing. That’s how I die. On a dirty sidewalk, while Valerie is waiting for me.


[He collapses on the ground. We hear a cry offstage.]

[Curtain.]

Christmas[8] by Christophe Mercier

Faith has been broken

Tears must be cried

Let’s do some living

After we die

— Keith Richards/Mick Jagger

Pigalle


There are better places than a restaurant in the 9th arrondissement to be spending Christmas Eve, that’s for sure. Even though I’ve been a regular there and a pal of the owner — the successive owners — for the last twenty years, for as long as I’ve lived in the neighborhood.

Actually, Chez Léon is not exactly near my home, but going there gives me a reason to walk a bit. Well, it’s not that far, really... I live on rue de la Grange Batelière — a well-read client, there are some, told me that George Sand had lived there as a child, I think — and Chez Léon is at the corner of rue Richer and rue de Trévise, almost across from the Folies Bergère, where busloads of American and Japanese tourists in search of “Gay Paree” pour out every summer. It makes for a 200-yard walk and allows me to get cigarillos at the café-tabac on the corner of Richer-Montmartre. That café is run by a couple, both tattooed and particularly unpleasant, but fun to watch. And watching people is what I do for a living.

Because I’m a private detective. A “private eye,” as they say in American novels. But there’s nothing glamorous about my life: I don’t have a fedora and I don’t wear a trench coat (well, yes, I do wear one, because it often rains in Paris.) Nobody thinks of Humphrey Bogart when they see me; I don’t go see his films anymore since the Action Lafayette movie house closed (to be replaced by a cut-rate supermarket) because they’re not shown anywhere else in the neighborhood, and I don’t watch them on TV either because I find them irritating. I find them irritating now, I mean. But thirty years ago, I used to like the dark romanticism of those movies and sometimes I tell myself that without The Big Sleep, I wouldn’t have picked this line of work. Back from the Algerian war, I probably would have been a pastry cook like my dad, and I would have been disgusted with napoleons by now. Good thing I finally saw The Big Sleep. Although...

It really is a rotten job, especially after thirty years, and it does wear you out. Now, whatever’s left of my hair is white, I have trouble walking (arthritis, from too much time keeping watch in the rain, hidden behind the column across from the Ritz, waiting for an unfaithful wife), and I look more like Maurice Chevalier in Love in the Afternoon than Bogart; Maurice Chevalier plays another movie private eye but this one is closer to reality. To mine at least. Now there’s a movie I would gladly see again. But the first time I saw it — a terrible copy with Italian subtitles showing at a small film festival at the Action Lafayette — it somewhat depressed me. (Originally, it was because of the two movie theatres — the Action Lafayette on rue Buffault and Studio 43 on rue du Faubourg Montmartre, now replaced by a hair salon — that I chose this neighborhood in 1985, a time when you could still find a rare film by combing all of Paris.) It’s a comedy but it’s only funny to non — private detectives — or private detectives who don’t raise their daughters alone — which still gives it a pretty large audience.

Now that my daughter no longer lives with me and she’s with her mother in Nantes, I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, with a touch of nostalgia even. For without Lola — my daughter’s name is Lola, not Ariane like Chevalier’s in the movie — I’m bored. She’s been gone six months, studying Public Relations at a school paid for by her mother (and her rich step-father) in Nantes, a city her name predestined her to, probably. A dirty trick from my ex-wife to lure her there, obviously. She was supposed to come back for Christmas but the rich stepfather invited her to Chamonix and she’ll only get here on the second week of her break, after New Year’s.

All this to say that, as far as Christmas Eve goes, I had no choice. If I was to spend it by myself, I might as well go to Chez Léon instead of staying all alone with my TV, my canned foie gras, and my lukewarm champagne. I was told they wouldn’t have any mother-in-laws going yackety-yak or revelers celebrating there.

So, on that Christmas Eve, the first one without Lola, it was raining. And what’s worse than Christmas alone in a restaurant to escape from an old two-room apartment in a dark building in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, except Christmas alone in a restaurant to escape from an old two-room apartment in a dark building of Paris’ 9th arrondissement in the rain.

It had been raining for the last two days. I had spent them hanging around the Royal Monceau to catch a super-rich but unfaithful emir whose wife had hired my services, and I had been gazing at the gloomy twinkle of the garlands in the trees of avenue Hoche, under the indifferent eyes of the passersby; sheltered under their umbrellas, they were looking down to avoid the puddles on the sidewalk, busy with their last-minute Christmas shopping. The Arc de Triomphe, way at the end, never seemed so dismal, and my arthritis had flared up.

On that day of December 24, I had returned home late in the morning, after a stake-out of several hours, and I had made myself a hot Irish toddy (boiling whiskey and cloves). After that, I had buried myself under the eiderdown quilt passed down to me by my great-grandmother.

I had slept a good chunk of the day and after I woke up, I listened to some Bach Christmas cantatas to get into the spirit of the day, comfortably settled in my Voltaire armchair, bundled up in three blankets with a Jack Daniel’s. Keith Richards listens to classical music too, I suppose. He did break a leg when he fell from the stepladder in his library... We must be about the same age. I fantasized for a while about old Keith listening to Bach, then I put on some Stones for good measure. I started with “Time Waits for No One” because of Mick Taylor’s solo (he’s the greatest guitarist they ever had) and because the bourbon, the rain, Christmas by myself, arthritis, and my elusive Arab sheikh and all had put me in a morose mood. After a third Jack Daniel’s, a very hot bath, and the complete recording of Exile on Main Street, I felt a little tipsy, no longer in the Christmas spirit, but reinvigorated and even combative. A combative melancholy, so to speak, an energetic melancholy like in “Let It Loose.”

I slipped into gray pleated pants, white shirt, bow tie, and the narrow-waisted, shiny dark red jacket with thin black threads that makes me look like a pimp, according to Lola; then, armed with my huge red umbrella and a dry raincoat, I was on my way to Chez Léon.

It was 9 p.m., the festive Parisians were celebrating at home, and rue de la Grange Batelière was empty.

I felt like having a drink somewhere, to take part in the upbeat mood of a crowded bar on a holiday evening, or to take in the gloomy atmosphere of an empty bar on a holiday evening. I’ve always liked to hang out over a beer, at night, in train station bars, preferably in the suburbs right outside Paris.

But the wine bars across Drouot were closed, and the dark, dismal glass walls of the auction hall loomed against the sky blurred by the vague drizzle that had followed the afternoon rain. I had rarely seen the neighborhood so dead. More than dead even, deserted, as if the inhabitants had fled to escape a Martian attack, as if they all had been stricken by the plague.

I kept on walking along rue Drouot up to the Grands Boulevards. After a day spent softening in the warmth of my bed and a half-bottle of bourbon, it felt good to walk a bit and my arthritis was no longer bothering me. On boulevard des Italiens, a group of lost, jolly Americans swooped down on me — I was the only living soul in view — and asked me where the Grand Café was. It always gives me pleasure to speak English, as I don’t get to use it often in my profession, so I gladly gave them the information. Grateful or completely drunk already, they made as if to drag me along; I had a really hard time declining the invitation without offending them. I finally convinced them that I was expected somewhere else. A white lie which was hard to tell. Not because I mind lying, but it made me realize how poor my English is, even though I like to use it.

In this state of mortification, I turned left toward the Faubourg Montmartre and Chez Léon. I thought I could take a shortcut through the alleys. They have the feel of Paris in the old days, they give you the illusion of breathing in the smell of its old lampposts. They remind me of Céline and his Passage Choiseul and I was looking forward to seeing the storefront windows illuminated on a Christmas night. Never turn down your nose at simple pleasures. I love the store that sells replicas of old toys on the left of Passage Jouffroy: It brings back my soppy side and the good little boy I used to be. There’s also the cane store on the other side, near the Musée Grévin (one of Lola’s greatest pleasures). I’d love to get a cane someday but they’re too expensive. Or more simply, I’m embarrassed to open the door and wake up the old gentleman with tortoise shell glasses who always seems to be dozing off behind his counter.

As I could have guessed, the Passage Jouffroy was closed, its gates down. Gloom was creeping in and on an impulse, I nearly went back home to finish myself off with Jack D. while listening to the Stones and Johan Sebastian Bach. The thought of the next morning’s hangover stopped me. I know too well how getting smashed on bourbon makes me feel. I had my share of that in another life, before Lola was born. But now, no thanks. Morning hangovers stay with me for the rest of the day and it’s enough to sober me up. So I kept on walking toward Chez Léon.

The novelty store was also closed, of course. I used to buy surprise bombs for Christmas and New Year’s Eve there, and fake mustaches that Lola found hilarious. On those evenings, I would be reminded that I was a single father, and once she was in bed, I would get plastered on whiskey and cry in my glass. The Chirac and Spider-Man masks flashed morose smiles at me.

The café of the tattooed couple, on the other hand, was still open. Because of the festive occasion, she was displaying, instead of her usual biker T-shirt, a low-cut one that enhanced her fake pearls and her Jane Mansfield breasts, as unappetizing as a soft block of butter. Not that it made her any more pleasant. She was grumbling at a short Asian man who insisted on paying for a cigarette lighter with a two hundred — euro bill; I thought I heard her call him a “Chink,” as in Tintin in Tibet, and that made me laugh. Coward as I am, I answered her mumbles with a fake, knowing smile. I’m one of her old regulars but I’m always afraid she might put me down.

Her husband, thin mustache, all dressed up too — black leather pants and orange tie — refused to serve a beer to a lonely old lady adrift in the neighborhood. He was bullying the waiter. “Come on, Marcel, move it! You know we’re invited to Mimine’s sister’s for Christmas dinner. That asshole told us they’ll start the oysters without us if we’re not there by 10.” He calls all the waiters Marcel — I’ve seen many pass through here, all sickly looking and underpaid — like in the old aristocratic families where all the maids were rebaptized as Marie. I hate those old aristocratic families.

Rue Richer, devoid of street lights, was dark — its pizza places were closed, its kosher butchers (Chez Berbèche, served better) had their shutters drawn, its travel agencies (also kosher) offered dream vacations sprawling all over faded posters at bargain prices to the rather scarce customers.

I heard the screams of the crazy woman across from number 46 (I learned from an erudite client of mine — another one — that Alexandre Dumas had briefly lived at that address). She’s famous in the neighborhood; some people complain and want to have her committed. She apparently lives in a hovel at the top of the stairs of the building where the Goldenberg grocery store used to be. (It closed down a few months ago and its front is now blinded with cinder blocks.) You can see her stroll about, dirty as a pig, always wearing the same thick woolly petticoats that she doesn’t pull down to take a piss (she doesn’t squat either, does everything standing up, like an animal), the same heavy, filthy sweater, with her old wino face. The supers of the nearby apartment buildings give her a little money to do chores for them, scrub staircases or take out the garbage in the middle of the night. Sometimes one of them, Maria, an old friend of mine who takes care of the 46 building, pulls her inside her home and forces her to shower. I know the woman through her. She must have been very beautiful once. When she leaves Maria’s place, when her gray hair has just been washed and isn’t greasy or all tangled, you notice how beautiful it still is and what a sweet, rugged face she has. Her name is Elena, she came from Italy (Ferrara) before the war to flee Mussolini, and later, her whole family, with the exception of one son, died in Auschwitz. Maria knows all this because she was already here twenty years ago and because Elena, who lived in a studio apartment belonging to Goldenberg, was still talking at that time. Then her son died, she became a bag lady, and she stopped communicating. Well, she didn’t exactly stop: She still expresses herself: She lets out terrifying howls at night, from the window at the top of the stairs in her building; that’s where she took her rags after she stopped paying her rent.

She bays at the moon, like a dog, like an animal, as if she has no language, as if she can no longer articulate and the howling comes from a huge red hole deep inside her mouth. Like the desperate woman she is, to whom nothing matters anymore. Those who want to get rid of her or commit her are the young yuppies who subscribe to special cable channels like Canal+. They’ve invaded the neighborhood in the last few years, like rats in pin-striped suits. I hate young yuppies who subscribe to Canal+. The people who’ve been living here for a long time — old Jews with payess and yarmulkes you see on Saturday mornings hurrying to the synagogue with lowered eyes, in white shirts, black suits, and hats — pity her. She’s one of them, only in more despair than they are perhaps. According to Maria, she may have a grandson who’s “very successful,” no one knows in what capacity; he would like to move her into an apartment of her own, somewhere else, but she doesn’t want to; she wallows in her loneliness and misery.

When she screams, you can hear her in the silence of the night for blocks around. In the summer, if I have my window open, her animal cries split the air above the rooftops like a witch’s broom and come to me.

She doesn’t howl every night, only when she’s scared or when she remembers that day during the German occupation when she came back home to find out that a roundup had taken place and that all her family had been taken away.

Her screams don’t bother me anymore, but on that Christmas Eve, under the thick drizzle that had started up again, in that deserted street whose sidewalks would tomorrow be lined with garbage cans overflowing with oyster shells, they made me shiver. I started to walk faster.

Chez Léon is a big, long room with a bar on the right side. I sometimes go there at the end of the evening to have a drink with the owner, a cocky young guy from Morroco I like; he suggested a couple of years back that we go into business together: The idea was to set up a car deal between North Africa and France. His name is El-Hadji; he’s a fun-loving Muslim with a sexy walk and a soft way of looking at you. Conversations are rather limited with him — sex and money — but it doesn’t matter because you can feel friendship behind the words and occasionally even something like tenderness.

Our friendship nearly suffered a major blow three years ago when he got it into his head that Lola, whom he had known since she was very little, was becoming “a real knockout,” as he put it. I had no desire to see Lola be a member of El-Hadji’s harem even if he’s my friend and a nice guy. But I stuck to the principles of education I’ve always given Lola and I didn’t prevent her from going out with him when he invited her to dinner. A good decision really. After the third time, she said he was the biggest asshole, that he was so fucking thick, and how in the world could a guy like that be my friend. She didn’t set foot in Chez Léon for several months after that and I was able to go back to my routine there, without ever bringing up the business with my pal El-Hadji.

I happened to help him out, professionally, once or twice, and since then, it’s friendship for life between us, he says. I’m not that committed; I only hope he stays here; I don’t want him to drop everything and move to the suburbs — he talks about doing that sometimes. I just want to keep coming here like tonight, like I’ve done for the past ten years since he showed up as a young waiter. I want to keep bathing in the milk of human kindness, as Shakespeare wrote, more or less.

El-Hadji got married six months ago (after I did a little investigation on his bride to be, at his request, to see if she was faithful) and he stopped talking about women for a while. (It’s sort of coming back now.) He’s a complete egocentric: A week after his wedding, he had his sexy head of curly hair clipped because it was more comfortable for wearing his bike helmet; and now that he’d found a serious woman, he didn’t care about being good-looking anymore.

His wife is pregnant now and for the last two or three months he’s been complaining about her big belly and letting his hair grow back. Something’s cooking but I have no business trailing him.

Chez Léon: There’s a pale-blue ceramic fountain standing in the middle of the room, always dry, and on each side of it, along the wall, tables for four are enclosed in little booths that make you feel at home.

On that Christmas Eve, El-Hadji had made himself a kind of bullfighter costume and over his white shirt, he was wearing a black satin vest discreetly embroidered with pink silk, bullfighting style. When I got there, the place was empty. He came over with two glasses of champagne and sat down in front of me. He was in a confiding mood so he explained that he had opened tonight not because he was hoping to make money, but because he didn’t want to go to Christmas dinner at his in-laws’ and could go see his babe later. My guess had been correct. His green eyes were shining.

He only had one dinner reservation, two people, around 9:30. He knew he wouldn’t have any unexpected customers, not on a night like this, on such a deserted street, so he would close early.

El-Hadji knew very well that I had come here, by myself, to escape the gloomy festivities, the ready-made, jolly good time you were supposed to have tonight. He didn’t take my order but brought me, as usual, five or six little plates of assorted spicy vegetables. I knew that my traditional tajine chicken-olives would follow, along with a couscous dish. That’s the advantage of being a regular, you don’t have to talk too much. I would wash down my tajine with a Boulaouane rosé, followed by a little glass of fig brandy, courtesy of the house. On Christmas Eve, it’s reassuring to find a place where you can forget you’re all alone on a holiday.

El-Hadji was back at his post behind the bar. He had a beaming, distracted, fixed smile on his face because he was thinking about how his evening would end, and I was day- dreaming in front of my hors-d’oeuvres when they arrived.

It was like an apparition. She was very tall (six-two, as my professional eye automatically informed me), very long; her sublime, never-ending legs were sheathed in soft leather thigh boots studded with fake pearls at the hem.

When she took off her long fur coat, I nearly choked at the view of her back; an oval was left bare by a thin, very short dress of red wool that also let her thighs show. When she got rid of her hat, her curly, jet-black hair fell down to the middle of her back. She had magnificent green eyes and lucky teeth — a space between them, that is. I love women with a space between their upper front teeth, like the actress Maria Schneider. This girl was a cross between Brigitte Bardot ’69, an erotic year, and Maria Schneider — my fantasy women when I was thirty.

The man was up to her — no pun intended: He must have been six-six, like that character in Lucky Luke comics named Phil Defer. I’m not one of these men who claim he’s incapable of telling if another guy is handsome or not, for fear people might think he’s gay. I can tell when a man is handsome, which has nothing to do with the charm that attracts women — I’m a bad judge of that — but that man surely was handsome. It’s all the more praiseworthy for me to admit he was handsome because he had an Italian kind of beauty, handsome but vain and dumb-looking, which I’ve always hated for no particular reason. He was immense, well-built, curly smile and frizzy hair, the typical playboy you picture in your mind, shades on his nose, muscles flexed on his Vespa as he drives along the beach to pick up all the chicks.

In short, that couple made a major impression. Even El-Hadji, who is pretty tall himself, only came to his customer’s shoulder. When he brought my tajine, his annoyance was evident through his forced smile: “Who does that broad think she is? She handed me her coat like I was her servant.” She probably didn’t even see him.

What do you do, alone in front of a tajine on a Christmas Eve, when such a spectacular-looking couple sits down at the next table? You look at them. And if you are a good private eye, you look at them with your ears pricked up without them being aware of it.

It kept me busy for a while. She was truly extremely beautiful and when I heard her speak, I thought I was hearing Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. I’m not an unconditional fan of Lauren Bacall, I even find her a bit stupid to tell you the truth, but I love her husky voice.

The handsome guy — very chic: gold watch and chain bracelet, pocket handkerchief matching his tie, chic like I myself could never be — was looking lovingly, with ecstatic eyes, at his sweetheart. Behind his façade of young businessman, it was easy to see a kid in love. He was no more than twenty-five, too young to be a businessman really, or else he was a particularly gifted one; he looked like a sweet boy.

The couple was rather nice, actually. Busy watching them as I was, I had forgotten my tajine, which was getting cold, as well as my Christmas blues, and the fact that I had taken refuge at my friend El-Hadji’s so I wouldn’t be alone.

The young man’s name was Nico. Hers was Teresa, Teresa, Teresa, a name he kept repeating to get closer to her, to possess her, to convince himself she was his. She looked at him tenderly, as if he were a puppy-like little brother who happened to be her lover too.

After El-Hadji had served each a mayonnaise lobster, he brought me my fig brandy and sat down. I kidded him a little: “Since when have you been serving lobster? You bought it frozen?”

He shrugged. “I bought those lobsters just for them. Fresh. I know how to cook them perfectly. The guy insisted on having lobster when he made the reservation. I told him this was a Tunisian restaurant; he said yes, he knew that, he used to come here a long time ago, but he absolutely needed to have a lobster dinner here tonight. What could I do? The customer is always right and I wanted to open the restaurant tonight anyway. Besides, it was the only reservation I had... Shit! I forgot to bring them their Chablis.”

Apparently, they hadn’t noticed and El-Hadji, holding the bottle with his eyes lost in space, had to wait a solid minute so as not to interrupt a passionate kiss. The girl was so beautiful that there was nothing indecent about the kiss.

El-Hadji came back to my table to tell me at length about his plastic Christmas tree. He hadn’t set it up because he didn’t want his place to feel too much like Christmas; it felt dumb. He was wondering if he would set it up tomorrow morning to make the place feel like Christmas after all, but the tree was in the attic, all dusty and one branch missing. Just to attract a few customers (because, you see, tonight is actually okay, but if it’s empty like this till January, business will suffer).

I was sort of listening while enjoying my second glass of fig brandy when suddenly I saw Nico turning ghastly pale as he peered toward the entrance.

A man had walked in. He was shabby-looking: short, almost dwarflike. His grayish complexion, under a two-day beard, was as rumpled as his suit, which was too big, floating around him with a faded pink that reminded me of that particular color my first grade teacher vividly depicted as “drunk vomit.”

He could have been fifty as easily as seventy. His greasy, thin gray hair was showing from under his felt hat, which he hadn’t removed. You felt like giving him spare change to go get a sandwich.

Everything happened very fast. Handsome Nico turned pale, I glanced at El-Hadji, expecting him to get rid of the intruder, but the aforementioned El-Hadji was petrified: He turned red and lowered his head, concentrating intensely on the few grains of couscous in the congealed sauce on my plate. Nico got up from his seat, abandoning his sublime Teresa, and walked over to the visitor.

Nico, the handsome, flamboyant Nico who had entered Chez Léon just a little while ago, was no more. He was taking little steps with his head down. Next to him, the visitor seemed to be a real midget, but a midget with authority.

The older man made a sign with his finger; Nico bent down so their heads were at the same level. I think the guy whispered something to him but I couldn’t be sure. What I’m certain about, though, is that he smacked Nico on his left cheek with his right hand, a pat really, like in the game where you hold each other’s chin while singing that little song and whoever laughs first gets slapped on the cheek. Except this was no game.

Nico didn’t return to his table. Suddenly hunched, crushed, aged, he left the restaurant. The old man didn’t move. He watched Nico leave, then walked to my table where El-Hadji had remained, as white and rigid as a wax statue.

“Give the lady whatever she asks for. Here’s the money.”

He put a small wad of two hundred — euro bills on the table and walked away. El-Hadji, his eyes still down, didn’t check, but clearly there was enough cash there to cover all of his evening expenses, and even if he served caviar by the ladle to his customer, he could close the place and reopen after the holidays without losing anything.

“The mafia,” he stammered.

The old man had left.

The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than two minutes and Teresa still hadn’t reacted, as if she hadn’t realized that her beau had abandoned her there.

Funny things happen in Paris, that’s for sure, whispered the little provincial guy from Savoie (my father’s pastry shop was in Albertville) sleeping inside of me. But his big brother, the one who grew up and became a private eye, had to find out more.

I jumped from my seat and left with my dark red jacket with black threads.

The old man seemed to have vanished in the deserted street, but I spotted a spineless, raggedy shape who was throwing up on the garbage cans. It was Nico. He hadn’t walked more than fifty yards in two minutes. He was dragging his feet, on his way to doomsday.

On rue Richer, there was no sign of the crazy woman and everything was silent. You could see garlands on Christmas trees twinkling through windows. The rain had turned into a light snow that evaporated when reaching the ground, just as the old man had. The shabby old guy was like a genie, like a snowflake, I said to myself jokingly. He evaporates, disappears, doesn’t exist anymore.

But Nico’s ghost still existed and was sticking to the asphalt. He looked like he was dragging an invisible ball and chain. And then I saw him negotiate a quarter-turn to his left (with difficulty, as his body wouldn’t obey him anymore), and go into the Goldenberg building, the one with store windows blinded by cinder blocks, the building where the old Italian woman, the desperate, crazy Jewish woman lived.

I followed him. The building, ready to be torn down, was deserted and sinister. The marble lobby smelled of mold and at the bottom of the large stairwell, a yellowish stone goddess covered with black and blue graffiti proudly displayed a nudity no one was interested in anymore. The rise and fall of elegant Hausmannian architecture. But I wasn’t there to write about the history of the 9th arrondissement.

Following him was so easy I was almost ashamed. He paused on each step of the large, pompous stairwell. (In other times, young romantic men must have climbed it already on their way to becoming paunchy bankers with pear-shaped heads à la King Louis-Philippe.) I said to myself, and I thought it was funny, that I shouldn’t have been a private detective or a pastry cook like my dad, but a scholar, a historian.

In the dark, barely lit by the snow falling behind the broken transom windows, Nico kept going up, with me trailing him. We were two characters in a silent, black-and-white film, screened in slow motion. It was bitterly cold. A rat scrambled between my legs; I held onto the banister and felt the paint peeling. Falling would be all I needed. Hello! Merry Christmas!

The stone staircase ended at the fifth floor but Nico took a smaller wooden one spiraling up to the next floor which, in another era, must have been where the maids’ rooms were located. I stopped at the bottom of that ladder of sorts which ascended to the heavens. Everything was dark up there.

So that’s where the crazy woman lived, then, and she was the one Nico had come to visit. A picture, a little blurry still, started to take shape in my mind.

And suddenly I was sure of it. The famous grandson who “was doing real well” was Nico, and that’s why he wanted to have dinner in this neighborhood. Childhood memories, probably, from the time his father was still alive and his grandmother still sane. And I also understood how he was getting his money, his suit, his golden jewels, and why El-Hadji had seemed to liquefy when the old guy had stepped into Chez Léon. I had crossed paths with the 9th arrondissement mafia before. I knew Nico was doomed. He had come to say goodbye to his grandmother.

Careful not to make the wooden steps creak, I continued up. There was a sourish smell, a smell of urine, of a stable where the straw is never changed.

Nico was at the top. He groped his way in the dark to find a big flashlight that pointed at a bunch of rags under the slanted roof. The old woman was sleeping like a tired baby, all red and wrinkled. Her face appeared strangely at peace. Again I could see the former beauty my friend Maria had talked about. She didn’t wake up.

Nico set the flashlight down and bent over inside the halo of light. He took his wallet out of the inner pocket of his jacket and came up with a wad of bills that he deposited next to the pallet. He did the same with his wallet. Then he took off his watch and his gold arm chain, and after undoing his tie, the big chain and pendant he was wearing around his neck followed. He placed everything next to the bills and the wallet. At the end of this strange ritual of stripping, he crudely cut a handful of his curly black hair with a kitchen knife he had found by fumbling around in his grandmother’s stuff, near the cheap wine bottles. He deposited the curls next to his other offerings. When his face came back into the halo of the flash-light, I could see he was crying silently.

He remained there motionless for a good ten minutes, looking at her with great tenderness. Then he kneeled, kissed her hand, and went down the stairs again.

I hardly had time to hide in the darkness of the sixth floor landing; and then I followed him. I knew there was nothing anyone could have done for him but I was moved by a kind of sick curiosity, professional as well as romantic.

When he got to the street, he took off his tie, stuffed it inside the pocket of his jacket, and dumped the jacket in a garbage can. It would soon be covered with oyster shells and lemon peels. Wearing only his shirt with the collar open under the snow that was now falling hard and sticking to the ground, he was walking faster than before, as if eager to put an end to the whole thing.

He turned left and took the Cité de Trévise. I love that park with its fountain and trees, its old, solid, and very bourgeois buildings. The balconies around the square were decorated with white garlands that twinkled under the snow.

Nico stared at them for a few minutes, shivering; he was standing in front of the old store that sells theater wigs at one corner of the square (it seemed right out of a Balzac novel), he was smoking a cigarette he’d had trouble lighting because of the snowflakes. He looked like he was filled with a vague longing for a life that could never have been his. Then he started walking again, along rue Bleue, then the dismal and deserted rue Lafayette, that cold thoroughfare that cuts the 9th arrondissement in two, between the first slopes of Montmartre and the flat, Hausmannian part where I live.

I followed him up to rue des Martyrs and I was almost happy for him that his last walk — for I was sure this was his last — was taking him to a more lively, joyful part of the neighborhood that I’ve always liked. On a night like this, you could feel the magic of Christmas. The windows of the antique stores on the little square Saint-Georges were still lit, and because I was walking very slowly, I spotted a magnificent barrel organ that reminded me of the one in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. Which made me wonder if people who live in the bourgeois 16th arrondissement are so happy or at peace with themselves after all.

The cafés on rue des Martyrs were still brightly lit, and down the street, on the right, the beautiful produce store — managed by a Moroccan guy who couldn’t care less about Christmas — was open. After reaching boulevard Rochechouart, Nico turned left toward Pigalle. The sex shops splattered the night with their bright lights, but the whores, freezing under their much-too-short synthetic fur coats, didn’t even try to seduce that strange passerby wearing only his shirt in the snow, disheveled, lonesome, and disgraced, already a shadow.

On Place Blanche, Nico got into a big black limousine that seemed to be waiting for him there. It went around the traffic circle and down toward the Opéra. The snow on the ground was so thick by now that the limousine had a hard time moving forward and I could easily follow it. My feet were freezing inside my cowboy boots and I said to myself that at least Nico was out of the cold. Rue Blanche, La Trinité Church, less forbidding than usual under the snow, and the huge Christmas tree twinkling in the little park. The doors of the church were wide open, a well of light, like the mouth of hell. A loudspeaker played “Silent Night” over and over for the few faithful who were cautiously walking to midnight mass. But I don’t like hymns or mangers anymore. I’ve lived too long.

The limousine was moving forward, solemnly, silently, like a black whale lit by the bluish whiteness of the snow. Behind the Opéra, without slowing down — granted, it wasn’t going very fast — one of its doors opened up and a body fell out. Finally, the car accelerated in the mud and disappeared in the direction of boulevard Haussmann.

The intersection was completely empty; the Santa Claus of the Galeries Lafayette, tucked away inside the warmth of its department store window, was moving his arms mechanically for nobody, with his ugly, hairless papier-mâché reindeer standing in the cotton snow.

I walked up to Nico. He had stopped breathing and his confession, scribbled in a shaky handwriting — I have betrayed — was pinned to his chest with a knife. He looked like a frightened little boy. I closed his eyes and left.

The Godfather, one of my favorite movies, only came to my mind when I was in front of the Opéra. I thought of all the killings and the death of Al Pacino’s daughter at the end, on the steps of the Palermo opera. The scene amused me and I think I even smiled. How theatrical these Italians are! But really, it would have had more panache if they had disposed of the body in front of the Opéra, at the foot of the majestic staircase rather than behind it. The way they had done it here, it looked kind of lame. The 9th arrondissement mafiosi were small-time gangsters.

Cars were scarce on Place de l’Opéra but you could already see a few dressed-up silhouettes: early revelers in suits and long dresses returning home after the twelve strikes of midnight; frail silhouettes against the snow carefully making their way — they could have been right out of a Dauchot painting.

I came to know Dauchot well, at the end of his life. I had paid him a visit twenty years earlier in his studio towering above Pigalle and we had become friends. I would drop by his place sometimes in the morning and have a drink there, when I was depressed after a night stake-out. He was the only friend of mine who could give me a dry pastis, like Robert Mitchum, apparently, when he was on a shoot in Corsica, at 8 a.m. He would show me the painting he was working on, though at the end, the poor guy wasn’t painting much. We didn’t talk a whole lot but we were fond of each other. I love friendship. I sure miss that poor old drunk.

Rue du Faubourg Montmartre was almost magical, surreal, in the quiet of the snow. But my heart wasn’t into dreaming.

Fifty yards beyond the intersection, flying over the snow, the screams of the crazy woman pierced the silence. I had never heard her howl so loudly, to the point of exhaustion. You could feel she was breathless. A few seconds of silence and it would start up again, a long, strident sob, inhuman, so human, unbearable. The nearer I came, the more I felt for her. I was sorry that she hadn’t died in her sleep, that she had seen the things her grandson left. Nico, out there, under the dead gaze of Santa Claus, had probably turned into a vague snow heap by now.

A police van came skidding along the buried street. It stopped in front of the crazy woman’s building. People in the neighborhood must have called to complain, finally. Nobody’s very patient on Christmas Eve...

On my way up to my place, I heard Tino Roastbeef’s stupid “Petit Papa Noël” song trumpeting out from under a door. I wasn’t in the mood. I nearly rang the doorbell of my downstairs neighbor, an eviction officer with ugly daughters, and acted tough, like a private dick, threatening to smash his face if he didn’t turn the sound down. But then, why bother? I was too tired, even to talk.

When I got home, I sank into my Voltaire chair and bour-bonized. I finished off everything I had left. And I listened to “Wild Horses” over and over again, not the Stones’ version but my buddy Elliott Murphy’s Last of the Rock Stars, last of the bluesmen, the ultimate loner, like Dylan, like Neil Young. He lives not far from here, on rue Beauregard, on the other side of this arrondissement. Sometimes when I feel blue, I go visit him; he takes his guitar and plays some Willie Dixon for me. Beautiful, my friends, just beautiful.

But tonight, it was Christmas and it was too late. And Elliott, after all, is a married man and a father.

So I kept on playing “Wild Horses,” all alone.

On Christmas morning, I had a terrible hangover.

The revenge of the waiters[9] by Jean-Bernard Pouy

Le Marais


The whole neighborhood called him Zatopek.

Every morning he’d trot five times around the Place des Vosges at a slow pace, keeping under the archways even though it’s a lot more exciting, humanly speaking, to be running beneath the linden trees of the park when it’s nice out.

Something every other stupid jogger in the area actually does.

But he was nothing like any of those fitness fanatics who sweat in their name-brand, pastel-colored, see-through jogging suits, their iPods in their ears, rings of perspiration under their armpits, and the stupid look of someone forced to read Derrida.

He didn’t really look like your basic 4th arrondissement bourgeois bohemian who works himself up into a sweat before he gets on the sweaty backs of the employees in his start-up company. His shaggy head, his strange and frightening grimaces, his intimidating glances, his tramplike clothes, they all stood out in this temple of outdated good taste. He spoke to no one. Not even to himself. He never bumped into anyone, even when passing right by the tables of Ma Bourgogne from where a group of apprehensive Italian-American tourists watched him go charging by, breathing hard and staggering on his skinny legs like a frenzied duck, as if he intended to send their tea and pastries crashing down.

His ritual was unchanging: On his third loop he would stop in front of me and I’d hand him a glass of water, which he’d gulp down like a camel. In my old-fashioned black-and-white waiter’s livery, I felt like a magpie or, on weekends, like a stork giving a drink to a muddy and exhausted fox.

When he’d completed his five rounds of the Vosges Stadium he would disappear, literally melting into the ancient stones of the rue de Birague, passing beneath the archway of the Pavillon du Roi, and no one would see him again for the rest of the day. But at 9 on the dot the next morning, summer and winter, Zatopek would reappear from the rue de Béarn, on the other side, emerging from the Pavillon de la Reine as if he were charging down onto the cinder track in Prague.

Several of us, true professional barkeepers, had figured out that he’d been working out like that for three years. Five times, or about two kilometers, around the square each day over three years adds up to a total — another round, boss! — of 2,190 kilometers in all. Hats off. Here’s to you.

Zatopek.

And then one clear Tuesday in late September he didn’t show up. Nor the following day. The neighborhood was in turmoil. Worse than if a thimble signed Buren had been found in place of the huge, hideous Louis XIII statue planted smack in the middle of the park. We waited. Maybe Zatopek was sick. Or maybe he had corns on his feet. Or his tibias had perforated his knees — who knows what might have happened with that stupid obsession with jogging.

Going from bar to bar, from store to store, we began a speedy little investigation, questioning neighbors like the cops do when they’re out to piss everybody off. No one around had heard anything about an accident. No old folks run over by a bus, not by the number 29 or the 96. No firemen or EMS personnel had been called anywhere. Nothing special had occurred.

It was as if Zatopek had suddenly left for the Olympic Games to defend the honor of the 4th arrondissement before the whole world. Our patient concern lasted a good week. No news at all about our anonymous champion. I waited every day with my glass of water in hand.

A strange panic came over all those who truly loved the Place des Vosges. It was something of a catastrophe. The appeal of the place had suddenly lost one of its vital components. An appeal we had created, protected, and sheltered inside us. In spite of the droves of tourists, guides, and the dismal parade of rich people from the 16th arrondissement who come bursting onto the square every weekend, from rue des Francs-Bourgeois — where else — with gullible faces and teeth sharp enough to cut through the asphalt in search of a duplex to buy. In spite of the avalanche of new galleries under the arcades, filled with ghastly art geared to the lobotomized, showing nothing but pathetic naïve art, lascivious nudes in soft bronze, and hyperrealist paintings of Bordeaux bottles. In spite of all the children tearing at each other in the park’s sandboxes; in spite of the homeless who camp out right beside Miyake’s.

We missed Zatopek.

As if in a small village in the Creuse, the mailman was no longer coming by.


My job as waiter at Ma Bourgogne provides me with free afternoons. After the lunchtime rush, my replacement arrives. Then I leave to join my colleagues in the neighborhood bars. The International League of Barkeepers. Very pleasant to be served. For once. But hey, we don’t bug the waiter all the time. And we leave a tip.

We had gradually formed a group held together by super-glue. For professional reasons, of course; as a group it was easier for us to stay up to date on vacant positions, replacements, and little extras to earn on the side. But we were also attached to our little community for reasons of survival: There were about ten of us who were sick of hearing about soccer games and having to silently put up with the vaguely racist conversations of customers barely awake in the morning or half-sloshed in the evening.

I presented the problem to them and I must have talked like Victor Hugo in exile, for they got on board very quickly. We decided to reach out to everyone we knew to try and find out a little more about Zatopek. Where did he come from? Where did he live? Where did he go? All the questions that had never really occurred to us over the last three years. Our mascot was so reliable. Every day, at more or less the same time. Like the mail. Like a radio broadcast.

If we, seasonal sidewalk waiters, had spotted Zatopek, other people must have seen him too. Janitors, street sweepers, storekeepers, we were going to approach everyone. Strangely enough, we really missed this weirdo who came shaking his little legs on our turf every day. Some uneasiness about using the past tense when speaking of him. It just goes to show how concerned we were about what might have happened to him.

There was a sense of drama in our activity, not sure why, it was pure intuition. But something didn’t feel right. The whole neighborhood was being hacked away, the old residents dropping off one after another, replaced by young heirs with slicked-back hair; the former notion stores and wrought- iron workshops were turning into clothing stalls which then turned into restaurants where you paid twenty euros for a radish salad.

To take stock of the situation we picked 3 o’clock on Saturday at Jean-Bart on the corner of Saint-Antoine and rue Caron, a cool, bustling café-tabac filled with unintelligible young people and Keno addicts.

In less than a week the job was done.

Three janitors later, we knew where Zatopek lived. Number 12 rue Saint-Gilles. A cavernous, paved courtyard full of ancient workshops, old and crumbling apartments, makeshift shelters, the poor man’s idea of a loft.

I used to walk around there sometimes during my break in the hope of finding an attic room to rent. I was sick of having to cross all Paris every morning.

With Jean-Louis, who slogs away at the café-tabac on the corner of Saint-Claude and Turenne, I went to check out the place, our hearts in our mouths, afraid of finding out that the old jogger had died. Surprise. Impossible to enter beneath the old-fashioned arched entry: A huge wooden fence barred the doorway. Demolition permit. To be followed by the construction of a group of apartments, some of which would be “affordable housing.” Project manager, the IMPACTIMMO Society with the City of Paris as its client, at least for the public housing part. Behind the boards, a construction site, gigantic.

So that’s what it was. Real estate. Plain, dirty real estate. That moral scourge. With its cynicism set in cement. As for Zatopek, they had found him another pad. Somewhere. Far away no doubt. Maybe in a nursing home. Maybe in a shelter, who knows?

Bastards! The heartless sonsofbitches!

An old guy. He’d spotted us scrutinizing the official notices with disappointment. Cap, cane, the type who spends all day hanging around trying to find someone to talk to.

“I used to live here, they threw me out, I won’t tell you how, those bastards, nobody budged, I was one of the first, they didn’t care...”

“Can we buy you a drink?”

“I won’t say no, boys.”

The old fellow was as endlessly talkative as his gullet was bottomless. We learned a ton about the Place des Vioques — the Old Squares Square — as he called the Place des Vosges. He knew everybody. And more importantly, Zatopek. Whose real name was Monsieur Girard, as it said on his mailbox. But he had never made friends with the old madman, a retired railroad worker — that had to be why he was galloping all day long, probably took himself for a locomotive. The only one who managed to talk with him was old Marthe, the one who took the garbage out and sometimes cooked for two. She had vanished as well. No mystery there. Pushed toward the exit little by little, everyone had left. Those bastards from IMPACTIMMO had succeeded in evicting all the residents of number 12 in less than a year. How were they doing it? By negotiating, supposedly. With a little dough — very little given the neighborhood — but the poor who lived there didn’t know any better. Or else, with the oldest and the nearly bedridden, a placement in a home for the elderly, impossible to get under normal circumstances. For this guy it was different, he’d jumped at the money even knowing it was a rip-off, but he had a weak heart. He had given it all to his daughter, who let him have her maid’s room on rue de Turenne. With his puny retirement pension, he could hang on until the grave.

The strange thing was that we suddenly had the feeling we knew it all and yet had learned nothing. The only lead we had was old Marthe. The garbage woman. She might know a little more about Zatopek. But she had left without saying where she was going. She might well have returned to the provinces. Stashed away in some slum, a country dump twenty kilometers from the nearest grocery store. Our marathon man, too, for that matter. Running through the fields wouldn’t be too terrible a sentence.

We let our old timer keep stewing about those rotten real estate sharks a while longer, then left him in front of his fifth Picon beer.

We were stuck.

To get any further, to try and find more traces of the former tenants of number 12, we would have needed an armada of muckrakers. It was hard to feel reassured by the possibility that Zatopek had been safely put away somewhere. In view of the state he was in, that somewhere could be a stinking shelter, a place like a prison where they’d slowly anesthetize you, where they’d just let you croak. Because it costs society too much to take care of its relics. Even the daily Parisien says it, and that’s saying something.

The days went by and the Place des Vosges was looking hard in the direction of Versailles. And to think that I’d known that square as a little kid, a real rough place then. With the opening of the Picasso Museum everything had changed. Consequently, the Spanish paint-splasher had pushed the whole area toward the classical era, chic, conservative, with a platinum checkbook. Even if the joint where I work, my Bourgogne, had always been classy. It used to be a gem in a rugged setting. Now it was a gem among other gems. With Jack Lang practically living above it.

It was Joseph, who worked nights at the Elephant du Nil by the Saint-Paul metro station, who reopened the hunt. There was this old woman, a funny one who hung out at his bar every morning; she came from the rue de Fourcy senior housing. She’d attack her first glass of white wine and lemonade at 10 in the morning and get steadily soaked until noon. She’s soaking up her coffin, the owner would say. A real chatterbox. A nasty one too, angry with the entire world.

We went there the following Saturday as a delegation, a group of union representatives. And we sure weren’t disappointed. It was good old Marthe, the garbage lady of number 12, the one who knew Monsieur Girard — Marcel to his friends, Zatopek to us. A poor devil. Retired from the railroads, gone half-crazy after he’d pulled parts of a woman who’d been run over by a freight train car. Crazy, for sure, but only halfway, completely with it at other times. Together with her, Zatopek had been the only one to truly fight the real estate jackals. He owned his small two-room apartment in the back of the courtyard and screamed that he’d only go feet first, they wouldn’t mess with him. The old guy was borderline straightjacket. And in excellent health; he even went running, can you believe it?

“Where does Monsieur Girard live now?”

“What do you want with Marcel?”

“Nothing. We don’t see him on Place des Vosges anymore so we’re worried. He was a friend, an acquaintance.”

“Oh really? Did he talk to you?”

“Not really. He’d smile. We liked him.”

She observed us, her glass of white wine in hand. With her blue smock, her red cheeks, and her eyes an opaque white because of cataracts. Cute as hell, like an old enamel coffeepot. Which could burn your hands if you didn’t watch out.

“Why are you worried?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we’d like to know where he is. So we can stop worrying.”

She scrutinized us for a long time. Time enough to empty her glass and order another.

“One morning he wasn’t there anymore. He’d left during the night.”

“He moved?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, he left everything. Two days later, two guys from Emmaus came to load up his stuff. Nothing much. Rickety furniture, some old things, borderline homeless stuff. He must have taken everything worth something with him. Clothes probably.”

“Did he have family elsewhere, like, I don’t know, in the provinces?”

“I don’t think so. Besides, he was a Parisian, a real Parisian, a Parisian down to his toes.”

And so on. She kept talking for quite a while, she couldn’t let go of us. She felt important at last, and that pleased her. Late in life, almost at death’s door, she’d found an audience. But for us it was just padding. We let her talk, we had the basics. Zatopek had suddenly disappeared.

A bit too suddenly.

That Saturday, as we prepared to leave rue Saint-Antoine — already overrun with leisured people stopping every twenty meters to study the restaurant menus and real estate ads — we decided to change our approach. We sat down around some blazing hot pizzas and very quickly, without anyone taking the lead, decided to kick into high gear. No one dared to openly express the negative thoughts that had just entered our heads. The rotten smell of a shady operation. The stench of a dirty trick.

Somberly, we divided the work. It looked like a meeting of anarchists plotting the stormy end of the Republic. Each of us knew we had to get rid of that bad taste in our mouth.

Maurice from the Dôme had a cousin who worked at City Hall. He’d asked her. No trace. Marcel Girard had never asked for any assistance at the municipal offices and always paid his residence tax. He had recently provided a change of address: in Montargis, rue des Hirondelles. He was therefore no longer of concern to the Paris administration. We checked Montargis; rue des Hirondelles didn’t exist.

Same story, more or less, at the Railroads Pension Fund. It was Samir, from the Fontenoy at the corner of Saint-Gilles and Beaumarchais, who had the job of investigating this. Marcel Girard had not cashed his last two money orders. The post office had declared them Unknown at this address. The French national railway company had no new address listed. They were waiting. Had to. Without a death certificate, the law required them to wait one year before closing the account. As soon as anything new came up, they’d let Samir know. Thanks, that’s very nice of you.

We saw Marthe again. After thirty liters of white wine, she agreed to take us to the person in charge of her residence who, very kindly, began an inquiry among similar institutions. Nothing. There was no one in Paris or the surrounding area by the name of Marcel Girard living in a nursing home, senior housing, or the like. No one with an extended stay in a hospital either.

All this took us about two weeks. Two weeks during which we kept going forward despite the tiny spark of hope getting hit with more bad news, bad but not definitive. Perhaps he was now homeless, living in one of those camper tents that keep popping up on the banks of the Seine and the Saint-Martin canal.

Two weeks for our hearts to sink deeper and deeper, avoiding the thought of the old runner having passed away.

But a village is always a village, even inside a big city, even buried inside the City of Lights, that unavoidable city which people from all over the world come to admire, their eyes sparkling and smiles frozen on their faces by the blinking Eiffel Tower. In a village everyone knows everything about everything and the shutters are never closed. Bernard, the waiter at the Mousquetaires on the corner of rue Beautreillis, serves beer to all the fans of The Doors who come ogling the banal façade of the building where Jim Morrison kicked the bucket. He’s been hitting on the lady mail carrier who told him that the headquarters of the DAL — a leftist group that focuses on housing issues and has been battling the real estate sharks for years — is right near rue des Francs Bourgeois.

I got the job. They appointed me to sniff around in that direction. The lefties might know something about the number 12 rue Saint-Gilles scheme.


The activist was practically a grandma. Not the leader but a key person. Very interested in our story, even over the phone. I set up a meeting with her at Ma Bourgogne. As she settled down in the back of the room, slipping in behind the white tablecloths, she grew wide-eyed; no doubt the first time she’d ever dared enter this place reserved for the platinum card holders.

Full of fun, bubbly. A Pasionaria. Who was probably getting revenge for something, maybe her previous life. The DAL knew — those were her words — the monstrous, disgusting scandal of number 12 inside out. They had opposed it, tried everything, even a surprise occupation, quickly repelled by the cops, but nothing had done any good, the press had barely mentioned the scandal, a clear reflection of the new, cynical harshness of the ruling class. The white-collar gangsters of real estate capitalism were acting somewhat legally, but it was a legality that was infinitely variable, for they were protected by the government. This explained why the former residents, even though they knew they were being ripped off, had all, or almost all, accepted the skimpy bit of money. So they could leave as quickly as possible.

And one of the main reasons, according to this pugnacious old lady, was that the negotiating team was led by a retired police chief named Henri Portant, a sly and devious fellow, using a mix of kindness, threats, understanding, and harshness as he must have used throughout his career. For a fellow who’d spent thirty years getting the toughest of the tough to talk, dealing with scared old people with no support was a godsend.

She herself had met him once, only once, the day when the DAL had been alerted that he would turn up with his assessors to try and persuade the tenants in the back courtyard of number 12. She remembered him as a guy who breathed calm strength, very calm, incredibly calm, like someone with no scruples whatsoever, absolutely no reservations, doing a job that undoubtedly paid him twice as much as what he was offering his victims.

The rebellious grandma asked us to let her know if we were able to dig up anything. The story of number 12 was sticking in their throats. The DAL had legal resources. Any proof of embezzlement could be taken very far, no reason to give up. It’s not because the enemy wins every battle that the war is lost.


Our meeting at the Jean-Bart on the following Saturday was morose. We laid it all out. Bernard was the first to speak.

“It’s very simple. Zatopek doesn’t want to leave. He has no family. They see him as a crazy man and no one else at number 12 gives a shit.”

“Except Marthe.”

“But what can that old hag do? No, Zatopek doesn’t count. And that old wreck is certainly not the one who’s going to throw a monkey wrench into the system or even slow it down.”

“Time is money.”

“And who’s on the other side? Tough guys, handsomely paid to throw everyone out.”

“With a former cop in command.”

“We should find out more about this guy.”

“We already have. The quiet, kind Inspector Maigret fond-of-his-veal-stew type is gone.”

“Right. Cowboys now, that’s what they are...”

“So? Come on! What’re you thinking?”

“The old guy, he must have left in a truck, buried under rubble. Or he fell inside the foundation and they poured concrete on him. Who would know?”

Bernard had said it. He’d said what everyone was thinking. Once it had been said it seemed true. It was no longer a foolish thought. It became a plausible reality. Awfully plausible. An anonymous grave.

And now what? What were we supposed to do with this bitch of a quasi-certainty?

“We need to check it out.”

“Check what out?”

“Portant. The cop. We need to—”

“Torture him? So he’ll spill the beans? How do you expect to do that?”

“No. Meet with him. To find out more.”

“He’s a cop. We’re not cut out for that. Look at us: a bunch of bored waiters, nice guys crying over a poor old madman, not even a customer. The Cartier-Bresson type...”

“Still, we managed to dig up some shit.”

“Okay. But what are we up against, poor forty-year-old slobs with little potbellies that we are? The pigs. City Hall. Plenty of powerful guys whose arms are so long they could slap us from thirty kilometers away.”

We looked at each other. We knew Maurice was right. From start to finish. But we also knew that being right wasn’t good enough. That’s the way it was.

“It won’t cost us anything to find out a little more,” I said slowly.

We wasted no time. It was so obvious. The Internet. The phone book. There were several Portants. But only one Henri. He lived at 22 rue de l’Insurrection in Vernon-sur-Eure. I called him, claiming to be an employee of the CNAV Pension Fund. I talked about a file issued by the police department that was confusing me because the addressee was already retired.

He fell for it. He began to yell. There’s the administration for you! He wasn’t surprised, it’s a mess over there! He was yelling so much that when he asked for the file number so he could give them all hell, I hung up.

So now we knew where he lived.

So what?

So nothing.

Except that two days later Samir got a call from the lady at the Railroad Pension Fund. Marcel Girard had just reappeared. He had asked that his small pension be sent to his new address, 22 rue de l’Insurrection in Vernon-sur-Eure.

Saturday.

We were all there.

With the same findings, worthy of a detective story but one that’s hard to finish.

“On top of wasting him he’s now grabbing his money.”

“He buried Zatopek in the garden of his stupid house, for all we know.”

“Sounds like the Landru case. Or Petiot. That kind of shit isn’t new.”

And then we looked carefully at each other. Testing each other. Silently. For a long time. The time it took for two more glasses of kir. In an hour I’d have to be back at work at the Place des Vosges. To serve all those rich fucks who look at you as if you’re ectoplasm. An ectoplasm who never works fast enough. They call you by snapping their fingers. They bellow from beneath the archway: “Garçon!”

So I made up my mind.

“Tomorrow I’ll go to Vernon. To take a look at the scum-bag’s face.”

“I’m going too,” Samir said.

“Count me in,” Maurice added. “I like action. In memory of Zatopek. We’ll see what happens.”


We left very early. In Maurice’s car. That guy is a gadget freak, his entire salary goes into anything new. He even had a GPS on his dashboard. He drove well and he drove fast, nearly risking points on his driver’s licence. We ate up the 130 kilometers like you gobble down a ham sandwich and reached Vernon by 9.

Thanks to the GPS we easily located rue de l’Insurrection. In a residential development built in the ’80s. Imitation modern houses with lawns decorated with ceramic dwarfs, sculpted hedges, and at least one araucaria tree every fifty meters. It reeked of money, but not too much. It had the smell of retired civil servants’ money. With cars primly parked in front of the outmoded mansions of their owners. The cushy life. Far from Darfur. Nothing to do with all those wretched, helpless, old folks who vegetate in the big cities, sometimes eating out of the same cans as their mangy dogs.

In a silence that spoke volumes, we waited for a solid hour, sitting in the car without knowing why, vaguely hoping to see the cop. Nothing. Other people were coming out of their houses with swarms of kids, rushing to their cars. A picnic. A walk in the woods. Perhaps mass. Sunday lunch at a restaurant and then a movie. Well-deserved peace.

And then he came out. Small and fat.

Without thinking, we disembarked from the car, approached him like the brothers Earp at a pathetic OK Corral. Three against one. We just wanted to talk to him. I started three meters away from him.

“Monsieur Henri Portant?”

He stopped. Same reflexes as before. Inspecting us. Weighing what could be happening here. Who we might be. He was thinking, that was obvious. Perhaps we were ex-cons he had caught before who were coming to take revenge. Or highway robbers about to rip him off.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Are you Henri Portant?”

“What is this about?”

We hesitated. We didn’t know where to begin.

The former cop moved his hand toward the inside of his jacket. Samir reacted very fast, jumped him, smashing him with the head butt of the century.

Portant fell backward screaming. I pounced on him to pull him up and drag him off. Into his house. All of this taking place right in the middle of the street, a major mistake.

He was bleeding, his crushed nose was leaking like a fountain. His startled blue eyes were barely visible behind that red river.

I grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and pulled him up to his feet with difficulty. He was moaning and blowing bubbles.

“Bunch of assholes,” he muttered.

I smacked him. He groaned. He was in pain.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe it!” Maurice cried out behind me.

I turned around.

Some twenty meters off, Zatopek was moving toward us, grunting, trotting along down the sidewalk.

La Vie en Rose[10] by Dominique Mainard

Belleville

1

On rue de Belleville, Japanese tourists who had come to see the steps on which Edith Piaf entered the world lingered under the April drizzle, protected by odd little hats of pink, translucent plastic with the logo of a travel agency on them. All the way to boulevard de Belleville, two hundred yards further down, the bright red signs in Chinese characters gleamed through the mist. Legendre turned left into the labyrinth of little cobblestone streets leading to the park, swung the wheel hard to avoid the kids playing soccer in the puddles. Arnaud was trying to drink out of the thermos of coffee his friend made when his radio had started crackling half an hour ago. They had gone to bed very late and he had a hard time waking up, but his heart jumped when he saw police cars stopped a few dozen yards up the street with their lights flashing.

Legendre parked the car at the end of the street and winked at Arnaud.

“I have to be careful,” he said. “They’ve seen me hanging around the neighborhood too much, one of them threatened to give me a ticket for obstruction of justice. You coming?”

When Arnaud hesitated, Legendre held out the car keys with a theatrical gesture.

“Okay, you’d rather stay warm,” he said. “That’s your problem. You’ll find CDs in the glove compartment. But I’m telling you, man, if you want inspiration for your book, this is the place to find it.”

Arnaud shrugged with a forced smile. He was almost sorry he’d told Legendre about it a few days ago, out of boredom, out of loneliness; but the truth is, even if he hadn’t seen the guy since college, there was no one else he could talk to about it. At the beginning of the winter, Arnaud had gone on unemployment insurance to start writing the novel he’d been thinking about for a long time; 181 days, he’d counted them, and he hadn’t even succeeded in finishing four chapters. All winter he’d paced through his apartment watching the leaves fall from the chestnut tree under his windows and onto the sidewalk, soon to become invisible. He’d felt himself sinking into the inertia and calm of his little town in the suburbs — what a cliché, he thought, a former Literature major, the ambitions, the powerlessness.

After a meal washed down with a lot of wine — he’d accepted the cigarette Legendre had offered him, and since he didn’t smoke very often he was dizzy and laughed as easily as if it had been a joint — he had dropped a few words, negligently, about this novel he’d given himself till spring to finish, adding that it was coming along, it was coming along nicely. Legendre had tried to get it out of him and finally he admitted it was a noir novel, but he didn’t want to say very much more. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t. He had only said his hero would be a private detective, his victim a woman, she’d live in Paris and work in the world of the night, a stripper or a prostitute. And who’ll be the murderer? Legendre had asked, and Arnaud had raised his eyebrows with an air of mystery. If I tell you, there won’t be any suspense, he’d answered; but the truth was, he didn’t know himself. He didn’t have a feel for crime, he hated to admit, and the five months he’d spent going through short news items in the newspapers hadn’t changed a thing. When he tried to understand what could drive a man to close his hands around a woman’s neck, he couldn’t imagine it and he told himself this was a terrible start for a novelist. Would his murderer be a pimp, a customer, a serial killer? It was absurd to already have the victim and the setting and be unable to find the murderer, as if a writer could be worse than a bad cop.

He knew Legendre worked for the newspapers and that’s what had led him to get back in touch with the guy: the confused hope that since his old friend had written stories about ordinary daily dramas, he had pierced this secret and could reveal it to him.

When he spoke to Legendre about his novel, his friend had slapped him on the shoulder, pointed to the radio on a shelf, and said: “Dig that: It’s a police transmitter. When something happens in the neighborhood, sometimes I manage to get there before they do and I sell my photos for five or six hundred euros. Come sleep over next weekend and if something happens, I’ll take you along. With a little luck you’ll get to see him, your ideal killer. Don’t kid yourself, though, there’s not much going down right now.”

But the transmitter had started crackling early in the morning, and hearing the code the police use, Legendre jumped to his feet and shook Arnaud, who was sleeping on the floor of the two-room apartment situated over an Asian produce store with its fetid stench of durian. Come on, he’d said, this is the real thing, and twenty minutes later they were turning onto rue Jouye-Rouve.

Several of the entrances to the Parc de Belleville hadn’t been closed off, so they got in without difficulty. They were not alone; onlookers were crowding the paths, teenagers especially, standing on tiptoe to peer over the metal fences and the yellow police tape stretched from one tree to another. Despite the gray sky you could see all of Paris, just slightly veiled in mist, even the Eiffel Tower to the west. The catalpa trees were in bloom, tulips were standing straight up in carefully spaded triangles of soil, and the park’s little waterfall was murmuring; but in the middle of the roped-off space there was a slight swelling under a gray tarp. The fine drizzle had almost stopped; only the smell of moss and undergrowth remained hanging in the wet air. The spectators crowded behind the yellow tape in a warm, motionless mass, and Arnaud almost felt good: It was the first time he had ever been so near a crime scene and he was discovering the silence interspersed with whispers, the strange complicity of the crowd, that morbid fascination, the almost superstitious fear — but also the hope that a corner of the gray tarp would be lifted to reveal a hand or a leg.

Legendre had gone off. Arnaud heard him murmuring a few yards away, moving from one bystander to another. After two or three minutes his friend came back, grabbed him by the arm, and led him away from the crowd.

“I got some information,” he said in a low voice. “It’s a kid, a mixed-race girl seventeen or eighteen years old, Layla M. She grew up here but she’d been living with a guy for a year. She danced in a nightclub in Pigalle and they say she also slept with the customers. She was strangled to death. See, you’ve got your story now! All you have to do is find out who did it and you’ve got your book.” He glanced at the gray tarpaulin and went on: “Got something to write with? Go question the neighbors, the people who live in the old building over there — the one with the Hotel Boutha sign on it — they might’ve seen something. I’m gonna stay here and try to grill these guys — discreetly. Hurry up, you got to be the first to question them. If you go in after the cops they won’t want to say a thing.”

Reluctantly, Arnaud walked away from the crowd. He was cold in his light jacket and he would have liked to stay in the circle, the cocoon of onlookers. “But I can’t,” he protested, “I’ve never done that. What the hell gives me the right to question them?”

And Legendre threw open his arms, exasperated. “I thought you wanted to get involved. If you’d rather sit in front of your computer tearing your hair out, that’s your problem.” Arnaud felt ashamed to have hidden his secret so poorly. “But what am I going to tell them?” he insisted, and Legendre answered with a wink before he turned away:

“Tell ’em you’re a private detective. They should like that and it’ll give you something to think about.”

Arnaud waited until Legendre went away; then he groped around in the vest pocket of his jacket, took out the notebook and pen he always carried on him, and walked to the gates of the park. Hotel Boutha was a bit higher up, and Legendre had a point: It was the only building whose windows let you see out onto this part of the park. On the façade, a notice was nailed under the old hotel sign — Condemned Building — but the apartments were obviously inhabited. In the lobby, over-flowing garbage cans almost prevented him from going in, and the mailboxes had been broken into so often that their doors were dangling from the hinges; the names on the boxes were all faded out, illegible. Arnaud wrote down these details in his notebook and even copied the red graffiti on a wall. He felt a vague sense of shame, taking advantage of the situation to get his hands on these fragments of reality, like a petty thief. Then he made his way between the garbage cans and walked up the stairs.

He rang the doorbells on the second and third floors but nobody answered; a baby was crying behind one door, but no one opened it. A little girl in pajamas opened the door next to it. Her hair was made up in dozens of braids; she looked at him in silence, but before he had a chance to say a word, her mother appeared, with hair braided the same way, and as quietly as her daughter, pulled the child back and closed the door. He started up the stairs again. The stairway smelled of urine and vegetable soup but he didn’t have the heart to write it down any more than he’d had the heart to note the serious silence of the child and her mother. For a moment he thought of going back down and telling Legendre the building was empty, but then he heard a door open on the fourth floor and when he got up to the landing, he saw an old man watching him intently from the threshold of his apartment.

The man must have been waiting for him — or the police, more likely — because a plate of cookies was sitting on the kitchen table next to the entrance, as well as cups with coffee stains in them.

“Good morning, sir,” Arnaud said, holding out his hand, “I’m a private investigator looking into the crime that just occurred down there.” And the old man shook his hand with surprising gentleness.

He was wearing a big plaid jacket even though it was quite hot in the apartment, and a woolen cap he immediately took off with an embarrassed look: “I don’t even know when I’m wearing it anymore. Come in, come in.”

Arnaud remained in the doorway with his notebook in his hand, tapping the cover with his pen. “I don’t have much time, sir,” he said. “I have to question the whole building.”

But then the old man smiled knowingly, as if he was well aware that no one had opened their door for him on the lower floors, and simply repeated: “Please, come on in.”

Arnaud hesitated. Later, he wouldn’t be able to recall how he’d guessed the old man knew something; maybe because just as he was about to refuse again, the old man’s smile had hardened and he’d looked Arnaud straight in the eye. So he nodded and said, “Just five minutes,” and with two steps he was right there, in the kitchen. An old dog was sleeping under the radiator, stretched out on a plaid blanket the same colors as the old man’s jacket, and he didn’t even open his eyes when Arnaud pulled a chair over for himself.

As the old man puttered around in the kitchen, checking that the coffee was hot, putting the sugar bowl and a glass of milk on the table, he said: “She’s a kid, right?”

“Yes,” replied Arnaud, looking out the window at the trees in the park. Between their branches, blobs of color — the onlookers — were pressing against the yellow tape. “Layla M., seventeen or eighteen years old, they told me. She died from strangulation.” He was trying for the neutral voice of the private detective he claimed to be. “That means she was strangled, see.”

The old man had his back turned. His hands were in the sink; he was mechanically running spoons and knives under the faucet. He didn’t say a word.

“Seems she grew up near here,” Arnaud continued. “She hadn’t been living in the neighborhood for a few months, but I thought some people would be bound to remember her. You yourself — did you know her, by any chance?”

The old man still had his hands in the sink. He seemed to be washing the silverware under the faucet for an interminable length of time, and Arnaud, thinking the sound of the water might have prevented him from hearing, repeated more loudly: “You know her, by any chance?”

The old man kept his head down, but stretched out his hand and shut off the water. Finally, still without turning around, he said: “Yes, sir, I knew her. I knew her very well. I loved her like a daughter.”

Arnaud remained silent for a moment. He cursed Legendre for having put him in this situation; he had no more idea how to console a man than he knew how to grill him or judge his guilt, and he remained silent until the old man finally turned around and leaned against the sink, drying his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he spoke again, clumsily: “She probably didn’t suffer, you know, she must have passed out when she couldn’t breathe anymore. And the police are there, they’re going to find the bastard who did it. Don’t worry, they’re animals but they always get caught in the end.”

The old man raised his head and stared at Arnaud without answering. He picked up the coffeepot, brought it to the table, and filled the two cups. He sat down in front of Arnaud, right next to the dog; he scratched the animal behind the ear for a long time. Then, as if he’d just made a decision, he sat up, put his two hands down on the table, and said: “I’m going to tell you a story.”

2

You see, sir, in two or three months this building’s going to be torn down. I think about it every time I see it. Every time I turn the corner I’m glad to see its old walls still standing, and then the potted geraniums of the old lady on the third floor, they’re old as the building. She takes cuttings from them and puts them in glasses of water, they’re all over her kitchen. During the summer, with the flowers and the wash drying outside the neighbors’ windows, you’d think it’s a street in Italy. That’s what I tell myself, you see, even though I’ve never been to Italy. Every time I see the building from the street I’m happy, and relieved. As if the demolition crew might come in with their bulldozers and jackhammers before the date they’ve set, and there’ll be nothing left of my house but a pile of rubble. They’re going to build what they call a “residence,” you know, one of those high-class buildings they sell to young people for a fortune because you can see the trees in the park, as if you couldn’t go live in the country when you feel like seeing trees. Twenty years ago it was a hotel — you can still see the sign painted on the front — then they knocked down some inside walls and turned the rooms into apartments to rent to people who didn’t mind sharing a bathroom with four other apartments and a toilet out on the landing. Yes, people like me and Layla’s mother.

But I’m always afraid they’ll knock down the building without any warning, and every time I go out I take a bag with my most important things in it: my papers, the money I’ve saved up, my watch — I don’t like to wear it on my wrist — my social security card, some letters from my mother, and... these photos. That’s Layla. Take a look. She got these snapshots done in the Photomaton at the supermarket; she gave them to me on her fifteenth birthday. You can see how beautiful she is. Nobody ever knew who her father was; her mother got married and had three other kids but Layla was the oldest, from the years when her mom was going out and having a good time. The kid was conceived who knows where and she was born who knows where, in the street, she was in a hurry to see the world, the neighbors didn’t have the time to call an ambulance.

For a long time she was ashamed of it, being born in the street. The other kids in the neighborhood knew — kids always know everything — and you can bet they made fun of her. Then one day I took her by the hand — her mother asked me to watch her a lot when she was a little girl and the kid was used to coming over my place — and I took her to rue de Belleville to show her the marble plaque on number 72, where Piaf was born, you know, five minutes away from here. And then I took her to the library to show her what a great lady Piaf was, I showed her books and I made her listen to recordings too, she looked like a little mouse with those earphones — she was... oh, not more than five or six. I never had a record player and neither did her mother.

That story of Piaf who was born in the street like her... it was a good thing for her — and a bad thing too. Because she decided right away she’d be a singer, and she did have a nice little voice. She started singing all the time. Since they couldn’t handle her anymore at her place, with the three other kids squealing, she’d come to mine. She used to give me sheets of paper with the words of the songs and I had to check if she was making any mistakes, and me, I hardly know how to read, sir. When it was nice out we’d go down to the park, right next door, I’d spread out a sheet or a blanket under a tree and I’d give her what I’d made to eat, sandwiches usually, cheese or chicken sandwiches, and sometimes she’d run off to get Cokes at the nearby Franprix. Those days, when I listened to her sing, with the smell of the flowers all around, stretched out on the blanket with a piece of grass between my teeth — sometimes she sang so softly I’d fall asleep — yes, sir, no doubt about it, those were the best days of my life.

They should have given her singing lessons, of course, and taught her to play an instrument too, but they didn’t have any money for that either. For a while she thought she’d pay for them herself and she sang in the street, especially in summer at the sidewalk cafés around Ménilmontant, and there too, I’d go with her to make sure nothing happened to her; I used to take along a folding chair and I’d roll myself cigarettes until I decided it was time to go home. Yes, you see, I never had a kid, so naturally it was like she was mine, almost, what with her mother always busy with the three little ones. But she was never able to collect enough money to pay for lessons or a musical instrument.

When she grew up things got difficult. At fourteen she started changing her name all the time, saying she was looking for a stage name. She used to go to the library a lot, first with me and then alone, that’s where she learned all those names of singers and opera heroines, Cornelia, Aïda, Dorabella. Plus, you had to watch out: You couldn’t make a mistake, confuse her most recent name with the old one, or she’d get mad; it was like mentioning somebody she’d had a fight with. One day, just kidding around, I told her she was like an onion adding skins instead of taking them off, but after that she wouldn’t talk to me for a week. Maybe what the girl really missed was bearing the name of a man who was a real father to her.

She hung onto the idea of becoming a singer. Her parents wouldn’t hear of it, of course, they wanted her to get a real job, with a good salary. But she stuck to her guns. Then it began to go to her head, and it’s my fault too, because I always encouraged her. Those years, when she was fourteen or fifteen — they were the worst. Layla wasn’t going to school anymore — we learned this by pure chance because she’d steal the notes from school and imitate her mother’s signature. Her stepfather gave her a beating and she went back, but not for long, she never stopped cutting classes, she’d leave in the morning with her school bag but she’d hang out in the street all day.

Things were so bad at home that she got used to sleeping here from time to time, then more and more; her parents felt secure knowing where she was. I wanted to give her my room but she said no, she made her bed on the living room sofa, over there, she’d sleep with Milou at her feet. She said she didn’t want to bother me but mainly I think she wanted to be able to go in and out without my hearing her; I’ve gotten hard of hearing in my old age and it wasn’t so easy to watch her, she wasn’t a little girl anymore. And then, I didn’t have the guts to bawl her out, I was afraid she’d leave, that’s the way it is when you’re not really the parent, you don’t dare to be too strict. And then she started disappearing for days on end. We didn’t know where she went. I had a feeling she was traveling with a bad crowd — when she came back her breath smelled of cigarettes and even liquor, but you see, sir, she still loved to sing. So I used to tell myself that would save her, I always thought that in the end it would save her from the worst, that’s how naïve I was!

A year ago, she started telling me about people she’d met who worked in television. She told me there were shows that helped young people like her become singers or actors and she was going to try her luck, and for the first time she asked me for a little money to buy herself a dress and shoes. For the audition, she said — she’s the one who taught me the word: audition. She told me it was going to be in a suburb of Paris and she’d sleep over at a girlfriend’s place, a girl who dreamed of going on stage too. She told me all that sitting right where you are, with Milou’s head on her lap, pulling his ears the way she liked to do when she was a little girl. At the time we already knew the building was going to be torn down and she told me that when she was famous she’d buy a big house with a garden and there’d be a room for me and a basket for the dog. Yes, that’s what she said. Then she asked if she could sleep on the couch and of course I said yes. When I went to bed, she kissed me. She told me she’d keep in touch, because she’d probably have to stay a few months there in the TV studios, after the audition. She was laughing. I hadn’t heard her laugh like that for a long time. The next morning when I woke up, she was gone.

Right away I knew she’d left for a long time. She’d been to her place very early and took some money from her mother’s purse. Everybody was still sleeping. They thought one of the kids had left the door open and someone had snuck in. I didn’t say a thing, but I was sure it was her, even if she never stole before. I was hurt, less because of what she did than because it meant she wouldn’t be coming back for a long time. And also because I told myself that if I’d only given her more she wouldn’t have had to steal.

I began to spend my evenings at Samir’s, the grocer on the corner of rue Piat. He had a TV set in the back room and when he had customers he let me watch whatever channel I wanted. I watched all the shows Layla told me about, those shows for young people. I never thought there were so many kids who wanted to be famous, and that made me afraid for her. It’s true she had a nice voice and she was very good-looking, but there were lots of other kids with nice voices too, just as good-looking. I just hoped it wouldn’t ruin her life, hoped she wouldn’t be afraid to come back. I got five postcards from her over the next year, look, you can see them over there on the wall. She wrote the same thing on every one of them, or just about: I’m fine, Grandpa. Love you.

One evening I really thought I saw her on a show. I’m almost sure of it. By that time I’d lost hope, I kept going to Samir’s mainly because I wasn’t used to staying home alone anymore, especially without much chance of Layla dropping by. The girl I saw only stayed on stage for a few minutes, they didn’t even give her time to finish her song. She said her name was Olympia but that doesn’t mean a thing, you know. She had heavy makeup on, with silver on her eyelids and red lips, done up in a way she never would have dared here, a shiny dress, very short. I remember thinking, So much money for such a short dress. But her voice sounded like Layla’s and she sang a Piaf song, which is funny because the others chose much more modern music, the kind you hear blasting on young people’s car radios when they’re stopped at a light with their windows rolled down, or when they don’t shut their bedroom windows. I couldn’t get a good look at her face, it went so fast, I yelled for Samir, hoping he could help me figure out if it really was her, but by the time he got there — he was helping another customer — it was already over.

The weeks after that I kept watching the show, but the girl — Layla — she never came back. I kept hoping for months, I told myself maybe it was just the first round and we were going to see her again at some point. But I never did.

A few months later there were the rumors. Somebody claimed they saw her in a bar, a nightclub really, then somebody else, and then somebody else again. They swore it really was Layla, said she was dancing every Saturday over there, near Pigalle, then they said the words peep show. I didn’t know what that meant either, before. Around that time, her family moved out; they didn’t even leave an address — I don’t know if it was the shame of the neighborhood hearing that their daughter was dancing naked in front of men. Her mother just left a box in front of my door with the girl’s things. They’re still there, in my bedroom.

There isn’t much left to my story. One day I went there. I don’t know why, I think I was sure it wasn’t Layla, just as I had been sure that I’d seen her on TV at the gates of fame with Piaf’s song on her lips, but I needed to see her in person. The rumor had become more and more persistent and I basically knew where to look for her. I waited a few weeks, the time to get up my courage, and then I took the bus to Pigalle one evening around midnight. I didn’t have to look far. There were photos of her at the entrance to one of the clubs. I looked at them for a long time, so long the guy watching the door got impatient and said, “Hey, Gramps, you coming in or you growing roots there?” In some pictures she was wearing dresses with slits at her thighs and between her breasts and in others she was almost naked. I had washed her when she was a baby and when she was a little girl; it didn’t bother me to see her naked. But there wasn’t one single photo where she was smiling. The lipstick was like a gash across her face, she’d lost her nice round cheeks, and her black eyes looked very big. When the guy at the entrance spoke to me I was caught unprepared, I couldn’t stop looking at her face after not having seen her for months, and when he said, “Well, Gramps?” I asked, “How much is it?” and I fumbled around in my wallet to pay the admission.

Inside the peep show, as they call it, it was dark and it smelled of sweat, the music was too loud, you’d think you were in one of the worst bars in our neighborhood. I stayed standing near the door of the room they pointed me to, men kept coming in, pushing each other, I was hot, and then I realized I still had my cap on and I took it off. The first girl was a blonde in a shiny pink slip, she couldn’t dance but the men were whistling and yelling, some of them tried to touch her but there was a strongman watching the edges of the stage. After that I didn’t have to wait long, because the next one was Layla.

I won’t tell you about how she was dancing under the eyes of those men, my poor ruined little girl. I didn’t stay very long, just enough to see her pace back and forth on the stage two or three times on her high heels, with a swaying walk I’d never seen from her, and then just when I was putting my cap on to leave — maybe it was my motion that attracted her attention — she saw me. She didn’t stop dancing but she dropped her arms, she’d been holding them over her head till then, and she twisted her ankle. I saw her mouth tighten in pain but nothing more because I’d already turned around, and I left without looking back.

I didn’t tell anyone about what I saw. Nobody asked me anything but I think a lot of people understood, because I never went back to watch TV at Samir’s. I just went out to walk the dog and shop for food. The rest of the time I stayed here sitting in the kitchen, and I tried not to think. I didn’t even wonder anymore where I’d go when the building was torn down.

I didn’t think she’d come. I didn’t guess it in her look when she spotted me at the peep show, all I saw was boredom and that new toughness, and the jab of pain when she twisted her foot, but I didn’t see joy or sorrow at the idea of what she’d lost, and I told myself she’d put all that behind her. Still, when there was a knock on the door one evening, very late, I knew right away it was her. I’d fallen asleep on the couch; since she left that’s where I usually slept, as if giving myself the illusion she was in the room next door. I went to splash some water on my face before I opened the door.

She was pale, and I realized right away she’d knocked on the door across the hall first, the door of the apartment where her family used to live. It hadn’t been rented again because of the plan to demolish the building, but two guys set up house there, with candles for light and a coal stove for heat. They drank all day and begged in front of the Monoprix supermarket on rue des Pyrénées, a little further up. She must have woken them up because the younger one, a guy with a beard, was standing in the half-open doorway looking at us. When she came in, I didn’t hear him close the door and I’m sure he stayed there waiting for her to come out again.

Oh yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking he waited for her, followed her to the park, and then what happened, happened. But you’re wrong.

She didn’t cross the threshold until I told her to come in, and it was strange, that mix of humility and provocation in her face, like she was defying me to criticize her for anything. I found her taller, maybe it was her high heels, maybe her thinness, she was wearing a jacket I recognized and she floated in it like a little bird. She sat down on the couch and looked at me with a funny smile on her face. I could see immediately she’d taken something, something stronger than a couple of drinks, and that was new too: She looked at me and then seemed to look through me, she had to make an effort for her eyes to focus on my face again. She rubbed her nose with her forefinger and then she said: “So, they left.”

Her voice was like her face, just as tough, like, grated — I know I should say grating, but it was something else, it was like they’d both been dragged over a hard surface and they’d lost all their softness. “Two months ago, yes,” I said. “But your mother left your things, they’re in my room, I can go get them if you like.”

She shrugged indifferently, as if none of it had any importance. She stayed slumped on the couch with that half-smile on her lips and that floating look, twisting a strand of hair around her finger.

“Layla,” I said, “come back. You can stay in the bedroom, you’ll be fine there, I almost always sleep in the living room now. I can help you bring over your things, if you like. We can even go there right now.”

She laughed, a joyless laugh, and I thought of the night before she left, that happy laugh I’d kept inside my ear like a good luck charm while she wasn’t here. “And to do what, huh?” she answered.

I lowered my eyes, I never felt so old, so powerless, so silly too, but I made myself go on. “You can start singing again,” I said. “Samir’s looking for someone to take care of the cash register on weekends, it’d do me good to get out of here a little, and it could help pay for lessons. Maybe that’s all you need to make it work.”

She laughed again, rolling her head against the back of the couch, and then she said: “No, Grandfather, it’s over, my voice is gone, can’t you hear? It’s not there anymore. It’s gone, that’s all there is to it.”

It hurt when she called me Grandfather because there was no tenderness in her voice like when she called me Grandpa, it was more of an impatient tone of voice, kind of scornful, like the kids playing soccer in the little square in front of the park when they think I’m not getting out of the way fast enough. It hurt, and then it made me mad. It was also seeing her like that on the couch, sprawled out like a doll, occasionally scratching her knee or her nose, looking like she was bored, not giving a damn about anything. I went and sat down next to her. “You can’t lose your voice just like that,” I said, even if it’s what I thought when I opened the door — that grated, worn-out voice, almost unrecognizable. “It’s because you haven’t worked on it for a long time. I’ll make you herb tea, lemon and honey, and then those powders Samir sells for colds, you’ll see, it’ll come back.”

But she just closed her eyes and shook her head with an angry expression, and when I held out my hand to push back a strand of hair that was falling over her cheek, she shoved it away impatiently. “No,” she said. “My voice is gone. Don’t you get it? It’s all over. Oh, leave me alone.”

She thought she was strong but she wasn’t as strong as all that; she couldn’t manage to brush away my hand and I left it there, near her cheek, even when she tried to push it away more impatiently, saying, “Stop it.”

I slid my hand down and placed it on her throat. “Your voice isn’t gone,” I said. “I’m sure I’d feel it if you sang something — there, now, I can feel it vibrating under my fingers. Your neck’s all cold, that’s why too, but it’s going to warm up.”

“Come on, leave me alone,” she repeated. “Leave me alone, I can’t breathe.” She could have screamed if she wanted to, there were neighbors, the two guys on the other side of the landing, and yet she whispered, and it was like a secret being born between us.

“Sing,” I told her. “Sing something. Sing that song by Piaf you used to like so much. ‘La Vie en Rose.’ Sing.”

Her throat vibrated under my hand when she murmured something, still softer, but I didn’t hear it. We stayed like that for a long time. She hadn’t opened her eyes again. She wasn’t trying to push me away anymore, she had her hands on her knees, quietly waiting for something, and that smile that didn’t look like hers was gone from her face. She didn’t move. I thought she was asleep.

3

Arnaud hadn’t said a word while the old man was talking. He had opened his notebook and began mechanically taking notes after glancing over at the old man to make sure he didn’t mind. But his notes were such a mess that later he would be unable to read them or understand what they meant, aside from the last words he’d written in the middle of one page: La Vie en Rose.

Now the old man was silent. Arnaud watched him. Big, fat tears were flowing from the old man’s eyes, like a child’s tears. He never would have thought such a deeply furrowed face could have so much emotion or so much water in it. At last the old man sighed, picked up his cup of coffee, and put it to his lips, then put it back down without drinking a drop.

“When her neck began to grow cold under my palms I understood,” he said. “I took away my hands and her head slipped onto my shoulder. I didn’t know what to do, so I laid her down gently on the couch and I got up. It’s funny what goes through your head at moments like that, sir, because I wasn’t really thinking and yet I went straight to the bedroom closet where I knew that long ago I’d put away the blanket we used to take for picnics in the park. I took it, I went back to the living room and wrapped Layla in it. All that time I was wondering what I was going to do, but I must have known already. I picked her up in my arms without any hesitation — it wasn’t easy, since skinny as she was, she still weighed a lot, or maybe death just does that to you — and I walked to the door. The guy across the hall must’ve gotten tired or else he understood and didn’t want any trouble, because his door was shut.

“I walked down the three flights with Layla in my arms, I went out into the street where it was still very dark, you couldn’t hear a car, not even a moped, and I walked to the park gate that doesn’t close very well. Everybody in the neighborhood knows there’s a gate that doesn’t close and all you have to do is jiggle it the right way to open it, any ten-year-old can show you how. I pushed the gate wide with my shoulder and I took the park path to the spot where we used to have picnics back then. It must have been close to dawn because a blackbird was singing in the trees, we must’ve stayed on the couch much longer than I thought, I may have fallen asleep with my hands on her throat. The smell of the flowers was very strong that night, I was surprised spring was in the air. I think I’d hardly been out of the house since the night I saw Layla in Pigalle.

“I stopped at a tree we used to sit under. I kneeled down and I put her down on the ground. I picked her up a little to tuck the blanket under her, I laid her out with her legs together and her arms straight down beside her body, I buttoned up her jacket to hide the bluish necklace around her throat, and then I got up. I looked at her for a moment. Oh, we were so happy under this tree, me and her. As I was walking back home, it started to rain and suddenly I couldn’t stand to think of her staying out there in the rain. I went up to get a pink nylon windbreaker she’d left behind when she went away; her mother had put it in the box she’d left on my doormat. I took it out of its plastic bag, went back down, and put it on Layla; first I slipped it over her head, then I pulled her arms through the sleeves, and finally I drew the hood over her face. I could hear the sound of the raindrops falling on the plastic. Did she have her pink windbreaker on when they found her? She didn’t get too wet?”

He was looking at Arnaud imploringly, and Arnaud lowered his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said in a low voice, “I couldn’t cross the police barrier. But she was under another plastic thing, a kind of gray tarp. No, I don’t think she was wet.”

The old man shook his head with a pensive expression. He picked up the cap on the table next to his cup and wiped his face with it, then kept it in his hand.

“After that, I came back up here and waited for someone to arrive,” he began again in a weary tone. “I waited for someone to come so I could tell my story. I will follow you to the police station. But the dog... I’d just like you to leave the dog at the grocery store on rue Piat.”

Arnaud capped his pen and shut his notebook. The coffee must have been boiling for hours, it was much too strong; he felt as if it had ripped the skin off his mouth and his heart was beating very fast. He was thinking of all those newspapers he’d skimmed through since the fall, all those sordid crimes, stabbings, shootings, skulls cracked against walls, that search for evil he’d thrown himself into to find an ideal killer, and he remembered the incredibly gentle handshake of the old man. He was looking at them at that very moment, those two hands clenched on his cap, which he was stroking softly, the way you pet an animal. Then Arnaud glanced up again and forced himself to smile.

“I’m not the police, sir,” he said. “I’m not going to put you in jail. Your story...” he went on hastily. “Don’t say anything. Don’t tell anyone anything. Layla did not come to see you. You were sleeping, you didn’t hear her knock, you didn’t open your door.”

But the old man was staring at him as if he didn’t understand. “Don’t say anything,” he repeated. “Why?” He had mechanically put his cap back on, he looked ready to go, to follow the police who’d come knock on his door in a few minutes or a few hours.

“I live outside Paris,” Arnaud suddenly heard himself saying. “I can take you in for a while if you like. We can go there now. No one will know you were here last night. No one will suspect you.”

But under the woolen cap, his face still reddened by tears, the old man was looking at him with incomprehension, almost with mistrust.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,” he said at last. “What you’re telling me there, that’s not my story. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.” He continued to examine Arnaud’s face as if he was seeing him for the first time, as if he didn’t know how this stranger got into his kitchen, sitting in front of him with the coffeepot between them. He pushed back his chair and got up heavily. “Go away, sir,” he said. “Go away, please.”

Arnaud hesitated, then did as he was told. He stood up, slipped his notebook and pen into his pocket. The old man remained standing behind the table while Arnaud walked over to the door and went out. In the stairway he found the same stench of urine and soup; the door to the apartment across the hall was slightly open, but he was not tempted to take a look inside. He walked quickly down the three flights. Just as he was leaving through the doors of the building, he saw the police coming — three men who seemed to know where they were going — and he turned his face away so their eyes would not meet.

He headed back to the park. Most of the police cars had disappeared; so had most of the onlookers. When he passed through the gates, he saw that the yellow tape was still there but they’d taken the body away. He stopped on the path. He looked for a long time at the lawn, soaked by the downpour. In the grass under a tree, there was an oval in a softer green on the spot where the body had protected it from the rain. Suddenly he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He turned around and saw his friend.

“Hey, you sure took your time,” Legendre said. “I hope you came up with something, at least. Me, I drew a blank, nobody wanted to tell me a thing and then the cops threw me out. So tell me. What happened?”

But Arnaud was looking at the soft oval of grass again. He felt tears welling up in his eyes, tears that seemed to him as big and childish as the old man’s. He didn’t know where he got that absolute ignorance of the human psyche. All he knew, with absolute certainty, was that he would never write his book; but that wasn’t what was causing this inconsolable sorrow. Legendre had lit a cigarette and was staring at him in amazement.

“For Chrissake, what’s with you, man? What did you see in that building?”

Arnaud shook his head without answering. The last onlookers were moving away, and couples, strollers, and children were coming in through the gates of the park. In a few weeks, a few months, no one would remember Layla M. except for the old man in his cell and me, he told himself. He thought of the pink nylon windbreaker the old man had taken down to cover the corpse with, and as his tears turned into sobs, he remembered the pink plastic hats the Japanese tourists were wearing a few hours earlier in front of the plaque for Edith Piaf. They had seemed so bright and cheery in the grayness of the morning.

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