Paris Noir Read online

  “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.

  PART III

  SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

  RUE DES DEGRÉS

  BY DIDIER DAENINCKX

  Porte Saint-Denis

  Translated by David Ball

  Not very far from what used to be the cour des Miracles, rue de Cléry and rue Beauregard almost merge. They are separated only by a narrow series of old buildings, with sweatshops and showrooms in them. The clacking of sewing machines mingles with the noise of traffic, the shouts of men pushing hand trucks and carrying clothing, and the curses of drivers blocked on the street by the interminable deliveries. The eyes of women with plunging necklines glitter in the shadow of the doorways. Men look at them longingly, hesitating over their beers. Just before they meet the Grands Boulevards at the Porte Saint-Denis, the twin streets are linked together thanks to the smallest street in Paris, six yards long at the most, in fact a set of stairs with fourteen steps that gives the street its name: rue des Degrés. A lamppost, steps framed by two walls, and a metal handrail in the middle shined to brilliance by the clothing of countless passersby rubbing against it.

  That was where the cleaning lady of Chez Victoria found the corpse of Flavien Carvel while taking out the garbage cans at daybreak, below a red stencil of a punk girl’s face with the caption, What if I lowered my eyes?He was lying on his belly across the flight of stairs, and his bloody head was resting on the pile of flattened cartons left there by the neighborhood storekeepers. Brown stains cut across the right-hand wall, under the flaking billboard for Artex Industries. When the policemen turned the body over, they saw that the blood had flowed from his belly, stab wounds no doubt, drenching the head of hair lying below it on the steps. As they were roping off the area, one of the men, Lieutenant Mattéo, followed other signs along the walls of rue Beauregard up to the café Le Mauvoisin. The owner was raising its iron curtain. Over the sign for the café, a candle was burning at the feet of a Madonna sheltered in a niche of the wall.

  “You closed late, last night?”

  “Shut down by midnight … Somebody complain?”

  “No, the only one who could have has no way to do it anymore! Everything calm? Nothing special happen?”

  He raised a hand to his mustache and stroked it a couple of times, spreading his thumb and index finger.

  “No, almost nobody here because of the soccer game, since I never put in a TV … I run a café, not an entertainment center. Two customers at the little table, under the photo of the Voisin girl, the poisoner—she lived here, they say … I was waiting for them to finish their beers before I packed it up.”

  The police officer stepped forward to take a look inside. It smelled of dampness and cold tobacco.

  “Was one of them blond, kind of long hair, wearing black jeans, white sneakers, and a reporter jacket … About twenty-five … ?”

  “Yeah … the one facing me. He had a couple of beers—Leffes—but he couldn’t hold his drink … unless he started before he got to my place. They walked out onto the sidewalk, toward where you are, they walked maybe fifteen yards away while I was locking up. I remember they stopped to keep talking. The young one you’re talking about leaned against the wall while the other guy crossed the street toward rue de la Lune, a little lower down. He clearly didn’t feel like dragging the other guy along. Not very nice, leaving a pal in such a bad state … The guy in jeans staggered away toward the Porte Saint-Denis, and I went home to bed.”

  Lieutenant Mattéo looked the owner of Le Mauvoisin up and down.

  “Sorry, but I don’t think you’re opening this morning … You’re going to have to come along with me. Your last customer of the night wasn’t drunk: He’d just been stabbed in the belly a couple of times. We picked him up off the stairs of rue des Degrés. The bloodstains begin at the exact spot you just pointed out to me.”

  His interrogation revealed that the two men had come into the café one after the other, Carvel first, around 11:00, then his presumed murderer ten minutes later. They had talked quietly, in low voices; it was impossible to grasp the topic of their conversation. It was the victim who had paid for the drinks, with a fifty-euro bill. The second man was about thirty. The café owner didn’t know him, any more than he knew the man he had been talking to. Elegantly dressed, shorter than average, brown hair, a round face, he talked with a slight Spanish accent.

  “He had a little birthmark near his temple that he kept trying to hide by pulling a lock of hair forward. Kind of a nervous tic …”

  They learned almost everything about Flavien Carvel from the passport and other ID they found in the pockets of his reporter jacket. He was born April 21, 1982 in Antony, listed his profession as “decorator,” and lived on the impasse du Gaz in La Plaine-Saint-Denis. The visas and stamps decorating his passport showed that over the last eight months, Carvel had traveled to the United States, Australia, Japan, Vanuatu, and Lebanon for visits never longer than a week. Robbery was not the motive of the crime since the murderer had not taken his collection of credit cards or the eight hundred euros in cash that filled his pockets.

  Mattéo discovered a piece of newspaper slipped between the plastic rectangles of the American Express Platinum and Visa Infinity cards; someone had penned on it:

  Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in thesecond arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wifeof a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumorsof the American star’s separation from Katie Holmesare making headlines in the celebrity magazines.

  He had gone to La Plaine-Saint-Denis early in the afternoon after grabbing a slice of Tuscan pizza at the Casa della Pasta on rue Montorgueil. He hadn’t set foot in the northern suburbs for years. In his memory it was all gray, gas meters, oil-refinery walls, Coke plants, chimney stacks, ash-colored façades stained by constant rain, the open trench of the Au-toroute du Nord and its constant flow of smoking carcasses … When they built the huge new soccer stadium—the Stade de France—it had completely transformed the geography of the area. The last remnants of the old industrial revolution had been razed to the ground. The buildings with the corporate main offices in them stood as if on parade along the huge flowered concrete slab that now covered the sewer of flowing cars. The rectilinear greenery and the erratic movements of clouds were reflected in the shining aluminum, the smoked glass, and the polished steel. The recipe had worked wonders in Paris: Thanks to the construction of the Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, the Forum des Halles, the Bastille Opera, the Arche de la Défense, and the Very Big Library, the city had been emptied of its lower strata. Now the recipe was being applied to the nearby districts outside the city. Nothing like a grand architectural gesture in the middle of the urban jungle to regain possession of a city.

  Lieutenant Mattéo
had always lived in the second arrondissement. He couldn’t imagine the slightest exile from it, not even in a neighborhood next door. Montorgueil, Tique-tonne, Réaumur, Aboukir, Sentier, all these streets were like lifelines in the hollow of his palm. But for ten years now he’d really had to hang on, ever since the massive arrival of the bohemian yuppies: They spent way more every month at the sidewalk tables of the Rocher de Cancale, the Compas d’Or, and the Loup Blanc than he paid in rent. He walked along the canal, passed the camps of Romanian gypsies mixed with all the homeless displaced from the banks of the Seine, then took rue Cristino Garcia, moving into what remained of the old Spanish neighborhood. The impasse du Gaz was no more than four or five attached redbrick houses, like a mining town. It felt a little like England. Cranes were wheeling in the sky just behind this relic of the past. A mailbox had the name Carvelon it followed by the first name, Mélanie. He reflected that it was the same as his assistant’s. He pulled the chain that hung next to the door with thick iron mesh over it.

  A woman of about fifty came to open it, dragging her feet and grumbling. Yellow hair, tired waves of an old permanent, pallid face, bluish bags under her eyes, the corners of her lips sagging … and the same for the rest of her body: Flavien’s mother was the very image of defeat, of abandonment. Contrary to what the lieutenant had feared, she absorbed the news of her son’s death without collapsing. All she did was clench her jaw and suppress a tremor in her right hand before wiping away the tears welling in her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

  “How’d it happen?”

  As he entered, Mattéo glanced at the dining room where a low table in front of the TV, lit like a night-light, was buckling under empty bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

  “We don’t know much yet. His murderer might be Spanish. There are plenty of them in the neighborhood: Your son must have known some of them …”

  “Sure, dozens. Back in the day, he used to go next door to the Youth Center, to play cards, dance, eat tapas …”

  “Back in the day, that means when?”

  She had pushed open a sliding panel, revealing a messy bedroom with walls studded with posters. A smiling Bill Gates with pinched lips was like a stain in the middle of the rows of sparkling teeth of the stars of showbiz, movies, and sports.

  “For the last two years he’d just drop by in a rush. We must’ve eaten together once or twice, with his current girlfriend … Last week he brought me flowers for my birthday …”

  “You remember their names?”

  She removed a pack of Lucky Strikes from the pocket of her cardigan, lit the end of a cigarette with a Zippo that stunk of gas.

  “The names of the girls? No. He changed them even more often than he changed cars … I don’t know the brands either.”

  Mattéo hadn’t asked her permission to enter the room. He began to look through the collections of video games, photo albums, films, magazines. A few lines scrawled on a piece of notebook paper suddenly caught his eye:

  Sunday, August 28th, New Orleans. The storm’s gettingnearer, stronger and stronger. The telephone never stopsringing. “You staying or leaving?” “Where’re you livingnow?” “You have the cats with you?” “What should wedo?” The governor is asking us to “pray for the hurricaneto go down to Level 2” … Finally I give in. I’m going tomove into a stronger building. An old cannery downtownmade of brick and cement, five stories high. There are sevenof us in the apartment, with four cats.

  It was the same slanted, energetic handwriting as the message about Tom Cruise and the wife of the presidential candidate. He held out the paper under Flavien’s mother’s eyes.

  “He’s the one who wrote this?”

  “Yes, that’s his handwriting. He never stopped taking notes, scribbling … stuff he’d hear on the radio, on the phone, or things he found in the papers. It was like an obsession. I wore myself out telling him to stop, but he couldn’t help himself.”

  “You know where he was living these last few months?”

  She shook her head.

  “All I know is, he bought a place in Paris … He never gave me his phone number. Just his e-mail address. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t even have a computer!”

  The lieutenant’s cell phone began vibrating in his pants pocket. He waited to get outside the house on the impasse du Gaz to call back. He quickly jerked the phone away as Burdin’s shrill voice drilled through his ear.

  “I wanted to tell you we’ve got a lead for the corpse on rue des Degrés. He isn’t in any of our files, a real ghost. I went through my usual stoolies with his photo on my chest. He’s been hanging out for some time in the back room of the Singe Pèlerin, where the sex-shop customers of rue Saint-Denis leer at the two-legged meat … Seems he was interested in one of those places, but I don’t know which one.”

  Mattéo knew the chatterbox of the Singe Pèlerin—a bartender—because he’d recruited him five years ago, when he caught the guy with his nose buried in white powder. The café used to be a ripening room for bananas; it was hidden in a little nook near the start of the Place du Caire, built over one of the entrances to the mythical cour des Miracles. For dozens of years he’d never even wondered about this name. Its probable meaning had been given to him the week before by an exhibitionist alcoholic they had to yank from rue Saint-Sauveur. It had taken him about an hour to give this explanation in the drunk tank of the police station, but it could be summed up in a few words. Every evening, when the beggars around the city returned to their dens with change jingling in their pockets, it was as if Christ had turned His face to them: The blind regained their sight, amputees stood up on their legs, the scrofulous lost their scrofula, the deaf became sensitive to noise, the mute began to sing, Siamese twins stood face to face; all they had to do was enter the perimeter of this refuge for miracles to happen!

  The lieutenant pushed down on the handle and opened the glass-paned door where the old phone number was still displayed from the time when the numbers began with letters. Thirty girls or so were sitting on the imitation leather chairs, waiting to take their exams in the back room. Most of them were kids from Eastern Europe or Africa, along with an Asian girl and one from India. He walked straight to the bar. Leaning on his elbows in front of his debtor, he ordered almost without opening his mouth.

  “Give me a strong coffee, real strong, then get out of here and make a little stop at the usual place …”

  The bartender was about to protest, but Mattéo had already turned around to admire the slender legs of an Estonian girl who was passing the time by stretching out a pink piece of chewing gum in front of her silicone-enhanced lips. He made a face as he swallowed his coffee without putting sugar in it, crossed the room, walked about thirty yards up the sidewalk toward rue Saint-Denis, and entered the shop of the last strawhat maker in Paris.

  Assaf, the master of the house, was born on the second floor of the shop. Rounded up by the French police like all the Jews of the neighborhood, he had survived the hell of Auschwitz before making a detour of almost ten years in the camps of his liberators. The lieutenant and the hat maker came together when Mattéo had chased out a gang hitting him up for protection money. Mattéo had then formed the habit of coming to play chess with the old man. He practically never brought up his past, except to reminisce about the games he’d played against a champion of the USSR suspected of Trotskyite sympathies. (Assaf had lost every one of them.) As tournaments were forbidden in the gulag, an inmate had someone tattoo a chessboard on his back. He would get down on all fours, naked from the waist up, until one player was checkmated.

  Mattéo gave his old friend a hug. “A customer’s going to come in for a visit. Don’t waste your saliva, I can tell you he won’t buy a thing …”

  “You can go into the kitchen. I’ll take him in to you as soon as he shows up.”

  When the bartender of the Singe Pèlerin arrived, the lieutenant saw that he had put on a raincoat over his working clothes. The bartender asked for so
me water to take a handful of pills, then refused the chair the lieutenant pointed him to.

  “I can’t stay, it’s the noon rush. All the big boys are there. What do you want from me? Is it about the guy who got shot on rue des Degrés?”

  “If you ask the questions and then answer them, it’ll go a lot faster … His name was Flavien Carvel and he wasn’t shot, he was stabbed … What can you tell me about him?”

  The bartender raised his head with his mouth open, as if he was trying to get some fresh air. “All I know is, he was loaded. He began hanging around the neighborhood about six months ago. He bought some shares in The Sphinx as a way of getting in with the mob. Recently there was a rumor of his buying heavily into the peep show on the corner of rue Greneta … a first-class business. They were talking about his coming in with 200,000 euros.”

  “I took care of them two years ago; a real rough place. You sure you’re not giving me the wrong club?”

  Mattéo got up to fill a pot of water and put it on the gas stove.

  “No, everything’s back on track again. It’s one of the joints that brings in the most. All the bread in cash, tax-free. From what I know, there were lots of extras too …”

  “What kind?”

  “They opened up little trapdoors so the customer could stick his hands through ’em and feel up the dancers’ tits and stick dildos or vibrators up their asses or pussies. Stuff they bought exclusively at the shop, for the highest price imaginable. It went both ways—if the customer asked for it, the dancers screwed them with the same utensils.”

  “You have any idea where he lived?”

  The bartender stuck his hand into the pocket of his raincoat and took out a business card he then handed to the police officer. “I did him a favor by telling him what I heard … He told me I could reach him through this real estate agency if it was urgent.”