Paris Noir Page 14

  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

  BY DOMINIQUE MAINARD

  Belleville

  Translated by David Ball

  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 he
sitated, 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.