He rode in a cab to the American Express offices on the rue Scribe with the possibility that his passport might get him a line of credit or some cash. But men with razored moustaches lurked about, reminding him of Marie’s brothers, and he couldn’t get near any of the managers.
Mélodie awaited him when he returned to his tomb on the rue Boulard. She sat smoking a cigarette that filled his bedroom with a foul odour and nearly burnt his nostrils. But she didn’t bask on his bed like some Delilah without her clothes.
‘This is your apartment, isn’t it?’ he asked.
‘Mine and Josh’s. I’m married, and this is where we meet.’
‘Your name isn’t Mélodie, and you’re not an actress.’
‘I’m a housewife who does tricks on the side. My name is none of your business.’ Her green eyes grew bolder as his grew opaque, and she apologised for her bluntness. ‘I’m sorry, Cal. Mélodie is the name I use with all my tricks.’
‘He means to kill me,’ Cal said.
‘It’s not that simple. Let’s just say he’s decided to abandon you. And you’ll have to fish around on your own.’
‘Fish with what? I had five million I can’t touch. I-’
‘He thinks you should run to Morocco.’
‘Why Morocco?’ he sang in his own sad voice.
‘Because it’s easy to get lost.’
Lightning & Lightning would kill him as soon as he landed, hire someone to tear Cal limb from limb.
‘I’m staying right here,’ he told her.
‘Darling, your little shampouineuse can’t save you. She can hardly save herself. Her brothers beat her black and blue.’
‘And who tipped them off?’
‘I did,’ she said with her own kind of truculence. ‘You weren’t supposed to leave the building – darling, wasn’t I enough?’
‘You’re Josh’s girl.’
‘Ah,’ she said, her big toe riding up his trouser leg. ‘Wouldn’t you like a freebie, Cal?’
‘No.’
4.
He was running out of euros. Perhaps they were hoping to starve him to death. They toyed with Cal, left souvenirs on his dining-room table while he slept. An old Photoplay magazine with Maria Montez on the cover – it must have cost a fortune, a collector’s item from the forties, with a note attached. Keep away from cemeteries, Cal. You won’t survive your next trip.
But he did rush into the Montparnasse cemetery, hoping he might find Marie, even in some spectral form, floating above the tilted tomb of Maupassant. Instead, he found Mélodie Montesquieu in the company of two suspicious men – assassins he assumed, handpicked for the job. They could borrow a shovel from some gravedigger and bury Cal next to Maria Montez.
He nosed past Mélodie and the two men, saw the mayhem in their eyes, and left the Montpamasse cemetery. He had a gelato at an ice-cream parlour on the rue Daguerre, bought an orange that he peeled with his fingers. But a shiver travelled up his spine when he saw Mélodie and the two men enter his own building on the rue Boulard. They would wait for Cal behind the door, massacre him with Mélodie’s kitchen knives.
Cal had lost his lair, and he’d have to loop across Paris like some grey wolf. He went to the Dingo, sat on its cramped seats, but he couldn’t conjure up the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald with his first or second glass of Sancerre. He checked into a fleabag hotel on the rue d’Odessa – the young people flocking in the little square outside his window hypnotised Cal with their swaying bodies, and he watched them for hours.
But the grey wolf had to return to the one street that mattered to him – the rue Daguerre. He promised himself that he wouldn’t look into the window of Marie’s salon, but he did look. And the shampouineuse was at her station, the little throne that her customers sat in while she washed their hair.
Marie had welts under her eyes, bruises printed on her face. The bell attached to the door clacked as Cal entered the salon. The hairdressers were not happy to see him. Still, Cal sat down on Marie’s throne. She clipped the plastic bib to his collar, but would not offer Cal the simplest sign of recognition. The shampouineuse was like a machine with bruised eyes.
‘Monsieur,’ she said, gripping him by the cars and pulling his head back into the basin. The first drop of shampoo excited him. His scalp burned with a liquid fire. Then her hands caressed the soft pit of skin that covered his crown. He blinked, his head rising above the basin for a moment – Mélodie and her two assassins stood outside the window. But Cal no longer cared. His head sank back into the basin. He would rupture time with his own implacable logic. All he had to do was convince the shampouineuse never to take her fingers out of his hair.
GUY GEORGES’ FINAL CRIME by ROMAIN SLOCOMBE
At work, in the design department, in the corridors and the canteen too, it was all the women were talking about. The RTL announcer had been first to broadcast the news, at 7 a.m. on that Thursday 26th March 1998. And the other radio stations soon swung into action.
After long months of investigations, the police have finally named France’s most wanted man, the serial killer of east Paris. His name is Guy Georges. Thousands of copies of his photograph have been circulated to the police; every officer has been issued with one. A manhunt has been launched, his arrest is now only a matter of hours…
Julie Coray, sitting at a table at the back of the Reader’s Digest magazine canteen in Bagneux, a southern suburb of Paris, raises her glass of mineral water and smiles at her colleagues: ‘At last I’ll be able to go home in peace tonight. It’s been horrific, especially on the nights we’re going to press: my road’s really badly lit and when you come out of the Métro around midnight or one in the morning, I can’t tell you how awful it is…’
‘Where d’you live, Julie?’ asked Farida, the new editorial assistant.
‘Between Denfert and Gaîté. Rue Cels, next to Montparnasse cemetery… In the fourteenth.’
Sylvie Mariani, the picture editor, shrugged her shoulders: ‘You weren’t in much danger, anyway: that’s outside the killer’s stamping ground. The guy only operated around Bastille…’
Slightly miffed, Julie cut herself a piece of ham and mushroom pie, muttering: ‘Yeah, but still…’
Farida, in her guttural Maghrebi accent, came to her rescue: ‘Well, I’d like to see you do it, Sylvie… You’re married and you go home early to feed your kids. But for four months women have been scared stiff, I swear, at night it’s terrifying. You let yourself into your building looking over your shoulder in case some guy with a knife’s about to jump you and force you to go up with him… Bastille or anywhere else, it’s the same, I don’t see the difference. Once you’ve been raped and murdered, you’ve been raped and murdered. It’s too late to put up your hand and say “Hey, mister, that’s cheating, this isn’t your patch!’”
Farida had a point and her colleagues all giggled, Sylvie included. They could laugh, now that the nightmare was over, A nightmare for Paris’s female population that had been going on since the end of November, with the discovery – by her own father – of Estelle Magd’s body, raped, her throat slit, in her home. After years of bewildering judicial negligence and bureaucratic incompetence, the police had finally made the link between different cases that had strange similarities. Examining magistrates working on rape and murder cases that bore the hallmark of the same sexual criminal had agreed to share the evidence in their possession. Now DNA test results were being compared in public and private laboratories all over France. Mainstream newspapers and magazines had got hold of the story, at the risk of unleashing a panic: a bloodthirsty wolf, a psychopathic killer – he was North African, Egyptian to be precise, they said (on account of a footprint discovered in a pool of blood, the second toe longer than the big toe) – was terrorising Paris, slitting the throats of lone, pretty young women in car parks or in their homes. A steady stream of suspects were questioned but to no avail, photos on file of thousands of offenders were shown to the only survivor who’d been able to get a good look at the killer, but in vain. Photofits of the olive-skinned man followed, none of them reliable. Gossip and fanciful accusations threatened to jam the switchboard of the Paris murder squad headquarters, women trembled with fear, and gallant men saw their colleagues of the supposedly weaker sex all the way home at night…