Paris Noir Read online

  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 Kommandanturthis 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 youalready 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.”

  Precious

  BY DOA

  Bastille

  Translated by Carol Cowman

  The 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 Sydneyand 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 Ralphfrom 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?” Sydneymotioned 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.

  Sydneyflipped 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?” Sydneywaited, 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 weknow 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, Ralphsnickered.

  “Really.”

  Sydneygave 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 yo
u 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.” Ralphinvited himself into the discussion. “Model too, I suppose?”

  I nodded without turning around or rising to the taunt.

  “Where does she live?” Sydneytook 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.” Ralphagain, 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.”

  Sydneylocated 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 … ?”