Paris Noir (21 page)
Here I am at Brochant. To the left, along the beltway where the no-man’s-land used to be, is the cemetery. To the right, Porte de Saint-Ouen, the field, and the flea market. I come here often. Should I say I used to come here? A second-hand clothes dealer. All sorts of old clothes, worn shoes, and for those in the know, coal, jerricans picked up at railway warehouses. You can find everything at Riton’s in Clignancourt. Including, for those who know how to ask for them, parachute silk and weapons—Lugers?
I got nabbed near his shop.
“Papers,
bitte!”
As they pushed me in the car, I had time to glimpse the ticket office of the stadium, the guy inside, his cap and his embarrassment at having seen this. No more soccer match, I thought. At that moment, nothing could have been more important.
They took boulevard Berthier. Outside, life was going on. At the red light, a woman on a bicycle looked at me with infinite tenderness. Green. The driver turned off toward Malesherbes to reach avenue de Wagram. Classy part of town. Rich-looking façades, broad sidewalks. People walk there, relaxed, important, between two business meetings handled with broad, elegant gestures. There are charming, rousing encounters from 5 to 7, and pleasant memories. The car stopped in front of Hotel Mercedes, number 128.
Geheimfeldpolizei
.
I remember everything.
The room with chipped porcelain tiles. The bloodstains on the floor. The metal chair, the naked lightbulb dangling from its wire. The hideous bathtub, its obscene pipes.
They talked about Riton, the weapons, and the forged papers.
“Who gives the orders?”
A guy turned on the faucets in the bathtub. He was completely ordinary. I heard the water gushing from the faucet.
“We’re going to refresh your memory!”
I don’t remember anything.
When I came to, they were smoking and chatting like three buddies sharing a good story. A really great dinner. A good place to go. The girl they had the night before in a very comfortable house. Two steps from Parc Monceau. The girls of the house were very clean. Hygiene—that’s the main thing … So many guys got the clap in sleazy whorehouses. They were no longer concerned with the bathtub, nor with the metal chair, nor with the basement with the foul smell of death. They were no longer concerned with me. They went into the next room. They headed out into the scent of chestnuts, on the beautiful, straight, pleasantly shaded avenues. With the perfume of women still lingering in the early-morning hours after they’ve left such a comfortable whorehouse, so typically Parisian.
They were three good friends chatting.
You had to convince yourself of the unbelievable, go through the corridor, reach the laundry room with its door open to the street. The piles of sheets and soiled towels, like lifeless bodies. Outside, the air had never been sharper. And yet so soft and sweet in the summer evening.
You had to go down the avenue, strolling like a regular customer, despite your heart jumping in your chest. At the end, Place des Ternes, florists, white tablecloths at the café Lorraine. And the steps to the metro hurtled down four at a time, because you’re about to make it now.
I remember everything.
Look, the newspaper stand over there, at the corner of rue Balagny, I remember it too. The paper seller in his box looks like a puppet in its little theater. His nose of gnarled wood like a vine.
Ah … today it’s someone else selling the papers.
“
Paris Soir
, please …”
“Is that a paper?”
“What a question!”
“A new one?”
“After twenty years its novelty has worn off.”
“Twenty years … it’s been around since 1987?”
“What are you talking about? Since 1923, of course! Okay, I’ve rounded off one year. Let’s not quibble. It’s been around for twenty-one years, are you happy now?”
“You’re not confusing it with
Paris-Turf?”
“What would I want with horse racing?”
“If you don’t know, it’s not for me to say …”
“You’re not very helpful.”
“I don’t have to be. Don’t get on your high horse, now.”
“Do you sell newspapers or don’t you?”
“For thirty years, monsieur, and I’ve never heard of
ParisSoir
. Wouldn’t it be
France Soir
? Or
Le Parisien?
”
“Of course, the name may have changed with the Liberation. It wasn’t very respectable anymore.”
“The liberation … ?”
“Of Paris. For someone who sells information, you seem ill informed. Goodbye, monsieur.”
One thing’s for sure, he’s not the one I have to kill. He doesn’t open his papers, he couldn’t have lent me books. Paper sellers should never change. Nor avenues. Avenue de Clichy has its usual look. Dusty from all the humanity beating the pavement, the same worn-out hope in their pockets. And the bargain display windows, the cheap items, the fake-jewelry stores, the greasy spoons … Nothing’s missing. Yet I have trouble recognizing it.
“Ni tout à fait la même ni tout à fait une autre.” (“Neithercompletely the same nor completely other.”)
Verlaine again. Did he go to Cité des Fleurs
?
The poets all go there, I suppose. As for me, rarely. Why don’t they ever want me to go out alone? Getting lost in the streets is dizzying. They don’t like me to get lost. It’s stupid. They end up finding you. They always do. The worst thing is getting lost inside. They call that wandering. But they often say all sorts of nonsense. That we are in 2007, for instance. Who told me that crap? The one I have to kill? He’ll get what he deserves. All I have to do is take the right street. Through Cité des Fleurs, since time has stopped there. A long and peaceful path, wisteria on the walls, small gardens and bourgeois houses. Nothing disrupts its peace. Neither the flow of cars on the avenue nor life swarming at the intersections. Nor the overflowing sidewalks. Right near there people walk, eat, slave away, and die too. But no echo of that ever penetrates here. Can one die in Cité des Fleurs?
A cat stretches out in the sun. Was it stretching out when the soldiers came? The pavement echoed with the noise of their boots. The gray-green trucks were barring the path. The door of the house broken open, the screams. Inside, they’re caught in a trap. There were only three of them. Two and her. Did they try to escape? Did they resist or did they tell each other goodbye? Now the soldiers turn their guns on them. Everything is sacked, books trampled on, furniture overturned. Paintings thrown to the ground. And the shouts, like barking. Why do soldiers always bark? They immediately found the printing press hidden in the cellar. They were well-informed. To show them they were nothing anymore, the soldiers hit them.
The three of them, one after the other. What happened when they led them away? They shot her in the courtyard. A burst of gunfire. Clacking. She fell into the fuchsias. She was twenty-five years old.
No one ever saw the other two again.
Who remembers?
My God …
“Mademoiselle!”
“…”
“Mademoiselle … please …”
“Are you ill, monsieur?”
“I would like to go home.”
“Are you lost? Do you live far from here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Monsieur Robert, do you still want to kill me?” “Don’t wear me out with your questions. Tell me, instead, whether you’ve lent me any books …”
“Ah! You remember …”
“Where are they?”
“On the cupboard. Have you read them?”
“
The Old Man from Batignolles
… I suppose you had me in mind …”
“Where do you get that from? It’s because of the location. The story takes place near your home. Do you know that Émile Gaboriau’s novel may have started the detective thriller genre?”
“Nothing to be proud of. And that one,
The Man Who GotAway.
Albert Londres …”
“A fabulous journalist.”
“A lot of good that did him! He got away from the 17th arrondissement? It’s not hard, all you need to do is cross the avenue … Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“You’re hinting at something again …”
“Who knows?”
“My getaway from the
Kommandantur
this time …”
“You got away from the
Kommandantur?
You never told me about that …”
“You didn’t need me to find out about that.”
“I swear I didn’t know anything.”
“Really? Then why this book?”
“The escapee here is a prisoner that Londres met during one of his reporting stints at the penal colony in Guyana. Eugène Dieudonné.”
“Don’t know him!”
“A typesetter accused of belonging to the Bonnot gang. Those anarchists they nicknamed the Tragic Bandits back during the Gay Nineties. An innocent man, condemned to a life of forced labor. His workshop was right next door, rue Nollet.”
“And this book …
The Suspect
… you’re going to claim he has no connection with me …”
“None. Why would he? I brought it to you because Georges Simenon lived here when he came to Paris. At the Hotel Bertha. It’s still there, you surely know it …”
“What bull! Why did you lend me these books?”
“But … To refresh your memory: so you could remember the places here, the neighborhood, its history …”
“To refresh my memory.”
“Monsieur Robert, can you put down that revolver?”
“Pistol, for God’s sake!
Pistol!
Luger Parabellum P-08. You’re a speech therapist; instead of making me do your stupid exercises, do them yourself. You need them.”
“Monsieur Robert, please, your pistol …”
“Speech therapist … Are you the speech therapist?”
“Of course … I come every week … Lower that weapon.”
“The man I have to kill … it’s not you … You haven’t talked, have you?”
“Talked?”
“You’re too young. How old are you?”
“Twenty-six.”
“I was that age when they arrested me. The identity cards at Riton’s … It would have only taken an hour. I got out of their clutches two days later … A miracle. It seemed suspect to our network. But should I have croaked down there because some torturers got distracted for a moment? Because a laundress left a door open that should have been closed? Because fate did me a favor? I was cleared, right?”
“Calm down …”
“My God …”
“Monsieur Robert!”
“I remember everything … They didn’t need to touch me. The bathtub … I fainted before they threw me in … When I came to, I talked … I told them everything I knew … And I would have told even more if I could have.”
“…”
“Twenty-six. I was twenty-six years old. Have
you
already smelled the scent of death at the bottom of a filthy cellar?”
“No … I … No one—”
“They let me go … I was supposed to give them more information … A few days later the Americans landed …”
“The war’s over, Monsieur Robert.”
“Not yet … Leave me alone. I’m tired.”
“Can you give me your revolver?”
“Pistol … Think of the exercises, young man, memory is a strange machine.”
“Monsieur Robert … what are you doing?”
“Now I know who I have to kill. He’s a twenty-six-year-old boy … No, not you; you can relax now. The one I’m talking about never leaves me. He hasn’t left in more than sixty years. Time has no grip on him.”
“Please …”
“Do you see him? He’s in front of you. Every morning I’ve seen him in my mirror. He’s haunted me every night, leaving me sleepless. He eventually dozed off, but you’ve awakened him with your books and your good intentions.”
“I didn’t know … I swear …”
“I have to finish him off now …”
“Please … Your death won’t change anything … It was such a long time ago.”
“‘
Je me souviens / Des jours anciens
…
I can recall / The daysof yore …
’ Do you know Verlaine? It was yesterday. It’s today. Get out.”
“I won’t let you do something stupid.”
“Go to hell …”
“Monsieur Robert!”
“I’ll be waiting for you down there.”
Translated by Carol Cowman
T
he office where I was sitting was on the top floor of the building, right under the roof. “Rear window
,
” a police officer with a weary, ironic tone of voice had said when we arrived. He was part of a group of three who had come with me from the crime scene to the hospital for the required medical visit. A nurse had cleaned the dried blood off my face and turned me over to an intern. After taking an X-ray of my spinal column and sewing some painful stitches on me, he pronounced my state
compatible with police custody.
I had a long gash on my left eyebrow, with a hematoma under the eye, another to the right of my mouth, and one on the back of my head, at the base of the skull. “Nothing too bad,” the doctor had said.
That was half an hour ago and the day was rising behind the window of the examination room. After going through these procedures and taking some blood samples, they’d brought me to police headquarters at the Quaides Orfèvres. Now I was watching the sky turn blue through a fan-light with iron crossbars.
“They installed them because of Durn.” The cynic the two others called
Sydney
and treated like their boss must have followed the meanderings of my puzzled, not yet altogether sober gaze.
I turned toward him. “Who?”
“Durn, the crazy gunman in 2002.”
“I wasn’t living in France then.”
“Oh … A demented man we arrested …”
He went on with the conversation but I had lost interest.
“… who killed himself by jumping through a window like this one, but in another office, across the hall …”
My eyes drifted around the gray bureaucratic surroundings. Two little rooms leading into one another that opened onto a neon-lit corridor. A different world from mine, shabby and hostile.
“He’d just made a full confession …”
The walls, whose neutral paint had seen better days, were covered with administrative documents, maps, and war trophies. A few elegant watercolors too, but only behind
Sydney.
Probably painted by him.
“The bars were put there right after.”
There was a light-starved green plant in a corner, a rack of walkie-talkies charging, several metal cabinets topped by boxes of whiskey, exclusively single malt
—
the denizens of the place were clearly connoisseurs—and six cluttered desks, each with its aging PC that had replaced the typewriter of yesteryear
.
“How long have you been living abroad?”
Not forgetting the three cops. The one facing me,
Sydney,
a little guy with a double-breasted suit too large for him and a pipe; the one on my right, at the keyboard, whose first name was apparently
Yves,
tall and thin, slightly bent, wearing jeans; and the last one behind me, still silent. I hadn’t heard his name, but since he was wearing a purple shirt with the logo of a polo player, I mentally dubbed him
Ralph
from the start.
“Seven years.” And finally, me. I was there too. At least physically, because otherwise I felt unconcerned. I was experiencing all this remotely, with the feeling of not being fully there in the stale back rooms of the famous 36, Quaides Orfèvres, headquarters of the Paris Robbery and Homicide Division, trying to unscramble what had happened that night.
“In London?”
Sydney
motioned with his chin to
Yves
, signaling him to be prepared, while I answered him with a silent nod. “Monsieur Henrion … Valère, right?”
Another nod.
Valère Henrion
. A strangely familiar name. Mine. In the mouth of a stranger, a police officer to boot.
Realitycheck.
I looked at my shackled hands. The gravity of my situation suddenly struck me, and I nearly choked. This was not a friendly interview. These guys were treating me like a suspect. I swallowed. “Don’t I have the right to a counsel?” Pitiful.
Sydney
flipped through my passport. “You sure do a lot of traveling.”
It wasn’t a question, and his voice had lost all of its weary warmth. He pointed his nose at me. “The lawyer comes later, first we talk between us. This loft, Place de la Bastille, the place where we found you, who owns …?” He didn’t finish his sentence.
“It belongs to a friend, Marc Dustang. He let me borrow it for a few days.
“Very nice of him. Doubt if he’ll do it again soon.” Smile.
For a moment I flashed on Marc’s room and its light walls splattered with red.
“And where is this Marc Dustang?”
“In New York for two weeks.”
“For?”
“Business, I guess.”
“And you, you’ve come to Paris for what?”
I sighed, feeling tension mounting inside of me, annoyed at the idea of what was about to follow. I wanted only one thing: to shut myself up in the dark and get my ideas straight. “To work. I just came back from Fashion Week in Milan and I cover the one in Paris right after. September through October is a pretty busy season for me. All the fashion capitals are buzzing, I work a lot.”
“You’re what …? Oh yes,
sound … designer
?”
Sydney
waited, looking at my nervous right leg, which was jumping uncontrollably.
Again I conceded. “That’s right. I create the sound tapes for the runway shows. Sometimes I do set mixes for designers’ private parties.”
“And the money’s good?”
“Not bad, yes.”
“That’s how you met Mademoiselle Ilona …” he consulted his notes, “Vladimirova? She was also part of that crowd, right? And not just that one.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Come on, Monsieur Henrion, you want me to believe that you didn’t know how your girlfriend made her living? Even
we
know it. I see here”—he pointed to his PC monitor with his index finger—“that she’s already met some of our colleagues a few times.”
“She was not my girlfriend, and no, I didn’t know it.” I was having difficulty talking about her in the past tense. “We didn’t know each other …”
At my back,
Ralph
snickered.
“Really.”
Sydney
gave me a condescending smile. “The two of you were kind of intimate for people who didn’t really know each other. Unless you paid to screw her, which would mean that you knew perfectly well who you were dealing with. What am I supposed to think?”
I looked for words to answer him but only managed to spit out the banal truth. “Listen, I met this young woman last night for the first time in my life. I’d heard about her, but I’d never seen her before.”
“Ah, and who told you about her?”
“Her best friend, one of my exes.”
“Her name?”
“Yelena Vodianova.”
“You’ve got a thing for Russian babes, Valère.”
Ralph
invited himself into the discussion. “Model too, I suppose?”
I nodded without turning around or rising to the taunt.
“Where does she live?”
Sydney
took things in hand again.
“
Yelena? In Milan. She’s married with a kid. She still works the catwalk and sometimes we meet in the fashion show season. I told her that I had to spend a few days in Paris, so she asked me to make contact with Ilona.”
“Why?”
“To give her a gift. Missed her birthday, I guess, or something like that.”
“What sort of gift?”
“I don’t know. It was wrapped and I don’t like poking into other people’s business. I can only tell you that it wasn’t very large. Or very heavy.” With both hands I indicated the shape of the box, about twenty centimeters long, ten across, and ten thick.
“And you didn’t ask your Yelena what kind of gift it was?”
“No.”
“You’re not very curious.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Or very careful.”
Ralph
again, aggressive. “She could have had you smuggling dope on the sly. Sure you don’t know anything about the contents of this package? It’s not too late to—”
“Yes. I’m sure. And I have no reason to mistrust my ex-girlfriends.” This answer, a stupid and gratuitous challenge, sounded hollow even to me. If I ever got out of this hornet’s nest, there wasn’t a chance I’d trust anyone ever again.
“You have this girl’s number?”
“In my cell phone, under
Yelena
.”
Sydney
located the phone among my personal effects on his desk. He tossed it to
Ralph,
who went into the next room.
“So you made contact with Ilona, and then … ?”
“We met in the 11th arrondissement.” I saw myself entering that bar near the Cirque d’Hiver, where Ilona had said she’d meet me at 11 o’clock, the Pop’in. It was full of noise and smoke, a young crowd, very hip, in the midst of a pop rock revival. As background music The Von Blondies were singing “Pawn Shoppe Heart,” a piece I’d used to close a show two years earlier. And there she was at the counter, perched on her Jimmy Choo high-heeled sandals, the latest black leggings, a denim miniskirt, a white blouse open over a sequined tank top, under the de rigueur military jacket. She was talking with the bartender without really paying attention to him, her elbow resting on a pink motor scooter helmet, with her pale blue gaze outlined in black towering over the room. Not difficult to recognize; Yelena had shown me a photo of her.
She’d spotted me too, an older guy not in sync with the rest of the clientele. I walked toward her, she greeted me quickly, in French but rolling her
r’
s
,
no warmth, scarcely polite; she accepted another glass, then abruptly took her gift and buried it in her purse. Without opening it.
“Strange, don’t you think, that she didn’t want to see what it was?”
Yves
looked up from his keyboard for a few seconds.
I shrugged. This had intrigued me at the time. But the girl’s haughty manners had hardly made me want to try and understand or linger in the bar. I was tired after my week in Milan, and the idea of a peaceful evening was rather attractive. Besides, very early on she’d given me hints that she wanted to leave, and she got up from her stool without waiting for me to finish my beer. With a half-hearted goodbye, she took her helmet, headed for the door at the entrance of rue Amelot, then froze abruptly, her hand on the doorknob. After turning around, she came back toward me, all smiles. She was really beautiful when she smiled.
A bit surprised, I’d taken a look outside, seen a few passersby, particularly a hefty guy a little older than me, kind of tough looking in a black three-piece suit. But he had turned his head away when he caught me looking at him, and by the time I asked Ilona about it, he’d disappeared. She herself had chosen to play the guilty party, so I could forgive her for her behavior.
“She came back just like that and apologized?”
“Yes. She was a strange girl.”
“And what about the guy in the suit? Did you ask her if she knew him?”
Nod. “She claimed she didn’t. At that point I had no reason to doubt her.”
Sydney
didn’t seem convinced but went on: “And then what did you do?”
“She suggested dinner. We left the Pop’in and went to Oberkampf.” But, in fact, things didn’t happen that simply. After talking for another half hour inside, Ilona had made me climb up to the second floor and then back down again into the bar’s concert hall. There we zigzagged between full tables so as to leave through an emergency exit that led to an inner courtyard, and then into Beaumarchais.
“And her bike?”
“Her bike?”
“Yes, you said that she had a helmet, was it just for decoration?”
“No, she had a scooter, but she wanted to go on foot.” Because she’d parked it in front of the bar. And that was when I understood the reason behind this and the paranoia Ilona was showing. She kept looking behind her on the way. I had attributed her behavior to her eccentricity. All the Russian girls I’ve met in my work have been a bit eccentric. In fact, she had obviously wanted to avoid rue Amelot—and the people who were waiting there for her. “We walked for about thirty minutes, around Place de la République, up Faubourg du Temple as far as Saint-Maur, then turned right to get to Oberkampf and the restaurant. Café Charbon, know it?”
Sydney
didn’t react but I felt
Yves
nodding on my right and heard him commenting on my lack of judgment, strolling around like that on a Saturday night in such a neighborhood with
that kind of girl.
I heard a noise behind me—
Ralph
was back in the room: “No answer to the number you gave us, Valère.” His voice was first very close, controlled, then I had the impression that he was straightening up to talk to his boss. “I got our colleagues there. One guy speaks English so I asked him to check a couple of IDs. He’s going to call back.”
“Go on, Monsieur Henrion.”
“We ate, talked a little, there was a crowd. It wasn’t very good.”
“Still didn’t open the present?”
“No.”
“So, this Ilona girl wasn’t as bad as all that.”
“I did it for Yelena, because she was her best friend.” And perhaps a little for myself, I thought.
“Very nice of you.”
Ilona had insisted that we sit in the rear, near a big mirror. She sat down so she could have her back to the restaurant window. In order to see what was behind her without the risk of being recognized from the outside. During the meal, she’d called a number on her cell several times but no one answered. At every aborted call, she’d seemed more tense. As for me, I was learning a little more about her because she was lowering her guard. I was only guessing really, catching signs. I’d already heard other stories like this and had no trouble filling in the blanks.
Like Yelena, she had arrived in Paris around the age of fifteen, leaving behind a crappy life with no future in a ruined, corrupt country. Ready to do anything to have her place in the sun. A pretty kid like so many others. Unscrupulous agencies relying on older former models from the same background who had actually become pimps had dragged her from capital to capital. Never forgetting to pump as much bread as they could out of her. Agencies that didn’t hesitate to put her on lousy jobs once she’d started to age, which meant turning a lot less tricks.
