Paris Noir Page 18

  Mattéo took the card. It was from Luximmo, a business on rue Marie-Stuart. He memorized the name of the person printed under the company name: Tristanne Dupré. Then he turned the paper rectangle over, mechanically. The other side was covered with Carvel’s tense writing:

  December 26 could have been the happiest day in Rafiq’slife if the tsunami hadn’t struck, because he was supposedto get married that day. The time of the wedding was set fornoon, but the waves came in the morning. Rafiq was in thevillage of Patangipettai, near the other villages that werehit. Immediately, all the men in the community swung intoaction with Jamaat, their local organization. They tookaway the food for the wedding and gave it to the disastervictims. Up to the day we met them, one week after thetsunami, the organization provided breakfast and lunch tothe victims, cooking lemon rice or veg. biryani.

  The lieutenant drank a mint tea sweetened with acacia honey before saying goodbye to old Assaf.

  All you had to do was walk a hundred yards and you left the sex and garment district behind; you were entering the area reserved for the winners in the new economic order. All the pretty little faces in the world of finance, advertising, top civil service jobs, TV and movies would be walking around on these harmless decorative cobblestones. They crowded into sidewalk cafés, their cell phones glued to their ears, connected to vitamin cocktails by means of fluorescent straws. Mattéo liked the place, despite everything: the façades, the smell of eternal Paris. But he had lived here too long to forget how fake it all was. Going beyond rue Saint-Denis into Mon-torgueil was like crossing a border. He felt almost as if he were at a show, or a tourist: Sometimes he was sorry he hadn’t slung a camera across his chest.

  He quickened his pace. Street people were sorting through the garbage cans lined in front of Suguisa, La Fermette, and Furusato, the Japanese restaurant. They were looking for edible garbage in the form of organic food. He cut onto rue Marie-Stuart, which used to be a fierce competitor of rue Brisemiche in the old days, when they were more prosaically called Passage Tire-Vit and Tire-Boudin. * The realtor was on the ground floor of an old house with exposed oak beams and stone. Tristanne Dupré looked like one of the girls who waited on customers in the Singe Pèlerin. The bodywork was identical, but the license plate was quite different. Everything she was wearing, from her stockings to the cut of her hair, from her pumps to her perfume, came straight out of the pages of Vogue.Badgley Mischka skirt, Alexander McQueen shoes, Carolina Herrara glasses … With one look, you save the price of buying a copy. Mattéo slid the card along the desk.

  “According to what I’ve been told, you’re the one who acted as a go-between for Flavien Carvel …”

  She stared at him with eyes wide open behind her lightly smoked glasses before looking over the inspector from head to foot, scornfully. “I don’t understand.”

  “Mattéo, Criminal Investigation. Carvel’s in the morgue, and I’m trying to nail the guy who bought him a one-way *“Prick-Pull” and “Sausage-Pull.”

  ticket there. The sooner the better. You teamed up to buy the peep show on rue Greneta, right?”

  The theory had come out of his mouth without even thinking about it. From the panic-stricken fluttering of her eyelashes, he realized he’d hit a bull’s-eye. Now he had to proceed with caution.

  “Flavien is dead? No, he can’t be!”

  She threw herself back in her chair, her chest under the silk shaken by spasmodic breathing. Her distress was not affected. He wondered if she was one of those interchangeable girls who waited for the prodigal son in the car when he made a visit to his mother on the impasse du Gaz. Mattéo pushed away a pile of interior design magazines and sat down on the couch.

  “Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were that close … He was found this morning near the Porte Saint-Denis, stabbed … I’d like to learn how you met him …”

  She stuck a Camel into a cigarette holder with a python emblem and lit it with a matching lighter.

  “In the simplest possible way. He opened that door and sat down in the exact same spot you’re in now … He wanted to buy an apartment in the no-car area, preferably Tiquetonne … After ten visits or so, he decided on a big four-room in a historical landmark building on rue Léopold Bellan …”

  “It’s not cheap, in that sector. You gave him a good deal?”

  She shrugged.

  “Seven thousand euros a square meter. He had about a hundred and twenty square meters … You can do the math … Flavien had a third of the money and he was sure he’d have no problem getting the rest from what the peep show brought in. He was supposed to move in next month.”

  “Where was he living in the meantime?”

  “Upstairs, fourth floor, a studio apartment that belongs to the agency … I have a copy of the keys.”

  Mattéo learned that the real estate agency owned the building with the rooms for voyeurs, that Tristanne had tipped off her rich client, and that his bank was on the Place de la Bourse, near the editorial offices of the Nouvel Observateur.

  The lieutenant then brandished the notes Flavien had taken.

  “Do you know why he wrote down these bits of human interest stories on paper scraps?”

  “No. He used to copy them onto his computer in the evening, to post them on a website, that’s all he told me … I held onto a few of them. I also remember he backed up all his work on his flash drive.”

  The young woman opened her bag—a Vuitton—and fumbled around in it.

  “Here, this is something he wrote.”

  The police officer took the paper:

  The police have been heating up since the start of the riots,they’re provoking us more and more. The brother of oneof the electrocuted children was hanging out with us asusual, in front of his building, when the police got there.

  They started to look us up and down and finally they saidto him: “You, go home to your mother.” He walked threesteps toward the cops to talk to them and one of themsaid: “Stop or you’ll regret it.” We ran away to the eleventhfloor, they started firing gas cartridges into the lobby. Theysmoked out the family in mourning.

  He had just finished reading it when she gave him another one:

  Cotonou Airport, December 25. I had a very bad premonitionand I really felt ill at ease. Every time something badis going to happen to me, I can feel it. And this time mysixth sense was telling me we weren’t going to take off. Iwas really expecting something to happen. I even told oneof my coworkers what I felt. A few seconds later, the planewas in the water. The people who were still alive werescreaming. I wasn’t afraid because I’d sensed somethingterrible was going to happen. Everything happened veryfast. I’d say there were two minutes between takeoff andthe accident. When I got out of the plane, I wasn’t far fromthe shore. So I swam back to the land and survived.

  The lieutenant put them away in his wallet with the others, then walked to the stairs. He didn’t need to use the keys the real estate agent had given him. The door had been forced open and every nook and cranny of the studio had been searched. He looked at the disaster—the drawers thrown over, the bed upside down, the slashed mattress. He picked up the furniture, looking for the computer or the flash drive Tristanne had mentioned. Apparently the visitor had taken everything away. Mattéo found one more enigmatic message in a trash can in the bathroom:

  December 26. Rababa and his son Hamed were sleepingwhen the earthquake hit the little town of Bam, in Iran.

  Before they had time to run outside, their house had collapsedaround them. They remained trapped for four daysuntil a neighbor came to the rescue, digging into the wreckagewith his bare hands.

  He walked back to rue de la Lune, near the old postern of la Poissonnerie, the fish-market gate: They used to bring the day’s catch into Paris through it at dawn. A tiny, almost provincial enclave, with its small public garden, its church, and its little bands of children. Just a step away from the noisy Grands Boulevards, the excitement of rue Saint-Denis, and the sector reserved for bohemian yuppies. From the k
itchen he could make out the ceramic advertisement for Castrique, promising Total dust removal when you vacuum. He had kept the apartment after his divorce, when Annabelle left with the kids, s almost half his income on rent for a place where he used only two rooms out of four. Everything was ready for their return. Moving out would have meant admitting defeat.

  He heated up a tajine, lemon chicken with carrots, cooked by the Moroccan woman who took care of the building as well as his laundry and cleaning. Later he watched a gangster film on TV the way you look at the passing landscape from the window of a train, unable to follow the plot, his mind fixated on the murder of Flavien Carvel.

  The next morning, after stopping by the offices of the Criminal Investigation Department, Mattéo went to the bank that managed Carvel’s accounts, the Financière des Victoires.

  No one seemed to be aware they had lost an important client the day before on rue des Degrés. The dead man’s financial adviser very grudgingly agreed to enter the password to access information in his computer about Carvel’s financial transactions.

  “Monsieur Carvel’s net holdings amount to nearly 400,000 euros. We have also approved transactions for double that amount. Real estate projects. I can give you a statement to the last centime.”

  “Thank you very much, but what would really help would be to know where Flavien Carvel got his money from … If I understand correctly, he made his fortune rather suddenly. One might wonder … Everything was legal, in your opinion?” The banker tensed up at the mere suggestion of money-laundering. “I don’t see why you would have any doubt …”

  “No reason … Experience, maybe … I’m just asking you to reassure me. Where did those 400,000 euros come from?” “From all over … Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, South Africa. Close to a hundred countries in all … Last month, he received nearly 10,000 transfers via the Internet at an average of three euros per transaction. He sold connection time, access to information …”

  Mattéo took out his wallet and unfolded the scrap of paper found on the corpse.

  “This kind of information?”

  The banker pinched it between his fingertips to read the message:

  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.

  “Our role is limited to making sure that all transactions are legal and managing the flow of money in the best interest of both the bank and its clients. We would never intervene in our clients’ activities in any way. All I can tell you is that Monsieur Carvel got his income from selling information on the web. Nothing more. I am putting these lists at the disposal of the examining magistrate.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  When he got outside, a gathering had formed on rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. A rainbow-colored banner attached to the iron fence around the stock exchange proclaimed the construction of the Marker of Evil. Mattéo mingled with the onlookers to watch the inauguration of some kind of monument in the form of a coffin with the names of all of today’s dictators and warmongers printed on it. He walked away when he heard the police sirens.

  His steps carried him toward the garment district. As he walked up rue Beauregard, he saw the mustached owner of the Mauvoisin polishing his coffee machine in the shadowy light of his café, then he retraced the last path of Flavien Carvel up to the fourteen steps of rue des Degrés. The sanitation workers had erased all traces of the murder. All that remained was a memory of the bloodied body rubbing against the wall under the peeling billboard for Artex. The lieutenant pressed himself up against the wall, into the exact spot where the victim had been found. He raised his eyes and then noticed a few drops of blood a foot or so above his head. He stood on tiptoe and saw that there were some more drops a bit higher, at the edge of the plaque where it said, ARTEX distributes CHAL-DÉEcreations, manufacturer. He slipped a fingertip under the inside right corner, which was slightly raised, and wiggled it around. A small object, freed from behind the metal, fell to his feet. He bent down to pick up the small flash drive that Flavien had managed to hide before he died.

  Ten minutes later, Mattéo was loading the contents of the drive onto his office computer. Two icons indicating videos popped up in the middle of a dozen other files. The first was titled 09-11-01, the other one Tom-Cécilia. He double-clicked on the second one. The scientologist actor and the flighty wife were walking near the Opéra de Paris and laughing as they stepped into Café de la Paix arm in arm. Insignificant pictures that only a tendentious commentary managed to turn into a secret idyll. The content of the second sequence, also a minute long, was totally different. It was clearly filmed from a surveillance camera with a zoom lens at the top of a building with a roof terrace; Mattéo could make out a corner of the façade when the camera swept around. He began to recognize the massive architecture of the Pentagon, with gardens, parking lots, and entrances sprinkled with sentry boxes at checkpoints. After about fifteen seconds of the webcam’s slow scanning, a white object came into its field of vision, from the right, and smashed into one of the sections of the large concrete wall, sinking into it with a huge burst of flame. A digital clock gave the date and time of the crash: 09-11-01, 9:43 a.m. The slow motion that followed allowed Mattéo to recognize the fuselage of a Boeing 757 with the colors of American Airlines. It was as obvious—and as horrifying—as the newsreels showing the two planes moments before slamming into the Twin Towers. Mattéo could not recall seeing a film as precise as this about the attack on the Pentagon. Everything the Bush administration had made public to refute the conspiracy theories failed to stand up to scrutiny, whereas here, before his eyes, the reality of the explosion of AA Flight 77 was indisputable.

  He opened the other files to find several dozen messages similar to the ones he’d already found in his investigation of Flavien Carvel: testimony from all the disasters that had struck the planet in the course of recent history—tsunamis, earthquakes, environmental disasters, suicide bombings, tornados, volcanic eruptions … Every message corresponded to visual imagery and was labeled with its source—last name, first name, and a telephone number or an e-mail address—followed by a sum in euros. A group of tourists in the Philippines running wildly from an incandescent cloud was 300 euros; the confession of a Hezbollah martyr child wearing an explosive belt was valued at 200 euros; while the pictures of an old man swept away by a gigantic wave in Thailand was worth 1,000. Just one paragraph had no price tag on it:

  the one relating exactly how the Pentagon’s outer rings had been destroyed. Yet the alleged source of this document was listed: Fidel Hernandez. The lieutenant figured this might be the elegant guy with the Spanish accent who had been with Flavien Carvel in the Mauvoisin café shortly before his death. It took his assistant less than two hours to locate the address Hernandez had given for his cell phone bill: a hotel near the stock exchange.

  “It doesn’t seem fake. I was able to check calls from his cell over the last three days; a number of them were traced to that neighborhood.”

  “Thanks, Mélanie.”

  Mattéo walked around the Opéra building and headed toward the old library, the Bibliothêque Nationale. The Royal Richelieu, wedged between two banks, displayed its gilded, intertwined initials under the windows of all six stories of this Haussmannian building. The police officer set his forearms on the reception desk.

  “Good morning. I would like to talk to Monsieur Fidel Hernandez. I don’t have his room number …”

  The receptionist looked at her reservation screen.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have anybody with that name.”

  “I was told he was still here yesterday.”

  She typed on her keyboard, consulted several pages of listings. “No, no Hernandez over the past few weeks … None.”

  Mattéo slid his police card over the varnished wood. “I can’t explain, b
ut it’s very important … This Hernandez may have registered here under another name. Very elegant, fairly short, round face, a slight Spanish accent …”

  “That doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Mattéo pointed his forefinger at his temple. “He has a birthmark right there, which he tries to hide by pulling his hair over it …”

  Her face lit up with a smile.

  “That’s not Monsieur Hernandez, it’s Monsieur Herrera! You have the wrong name. He’s been a guest here for a week. Room 227, third floor. Do you want me to call him?”

  He stopped the hand about to pick up the phone.

  “Absolutely not. Hand me the duplicate keys for his room, I’m going to give him a little surprise.”

  When the lieutenant reached the floor, he drew his revolver before opening the lock. Hernandez was stretched out naked on his bed watching TV; he jumped when he heard the click. To Mattéo’s surprise, instead of trying to grab a weapon, he clapped his two hands over his penis.

  When the manager opened the safe under the name Herrera in the hotel strong room, Mattéo recovered Carvel’s computer and palm pilot stolen from his temporary apartment above the offices of Tristanne Dupré. Fidel Hernandez wasn’t really named Herrera either, but Miguel Cordez. Originally from Mexico, he had been in France for about ten years, living lavishly through a series of swindles, each one more clever than the last. The development of sites like Flickr, Dailymotion, Starbucks, and YouTube, with pay-per-view amateur videos on them, had attracted his attention. Too big for him. He had then set his sights on a little upstart, NewsCoop, created a few months back by Flavien Carvel.

  “I knew a lot of guys who worked in planes. As soon as there was a disaster somewhere, I’d run off to Roissy or New York to get the photos or video tapes from the first people coming back from the place. I was able to buy exclusive coverage of the tsunami and Katrina for next to nothing …”