Apparently, they hadn’t noticed and El-Hadji, holding the bottle with his eyes lost in space, had to wait a solid minute so as not to interrupt a passionate kiss. The girl was so beautiful that there was nothing indecent about the kiss.
El-Hadji came back to my table to tell me at length about his plastic Christmas tree. He hadn’t set it up because he didn’t want his place to feel too much like Christmas; it felt dumb. He was wondering if he would set it up tomorrow morning to make the place feel like Christmas after all, but the tree was in the attic, all dusty and one branch missing. Just to attract a few customers (because, you see, tonight is actually okay, but if it’s empty like this till January, business will suffer).
I was sort of listening while enjoying my second glass of fig brandy when suddenly I saw Nico turning ghastly pale as he peered toward the entrance.
A man had walked in. He was shabby-looking: short, almost dwarflike. His grayish complexion, under a two-day beard, was as rumpled as his suit, which was too big, floating around him with a faded pink that reminded me of that particular color my first grade teacher vividly depicted as “drunk vomit.”
He could have been fifty as easily as seventy. His greasy, thin gray hair was showing from under his felt hat, which he hadn’t removed. You felt like giving him spare change to go get a sandwich.
Everything happened very fast. Handsome Nico turned pale, I glanced at El-Hadji, expecting him to get rid of the intruder, but the aforementioned El-Hadji was petrified: He turned red and lowered his head, concentrating intensely on the few grains of couscous in the congealed sauce on my plate. Nico got up from his seat, abandoning his sublime Teresa, and walked over to the visitor.
Nico, the handsome, flamboyant Nico who had entered Chez Léon just a little while ago, was no more. He was taking little steps with his head down. Next to him, the visitor seemed to be a real midget, but a midget with authority.
The older man made a sign with his finger; Nico bent down so their heads were at the same level. I think the guy whispered something to him but I couldn’t be sure. What I’m certain about, though, is that he smacked Nico on his left cheek with his right hand, a pat really, like in the game where you hold each other’s chin while singing that little song and whoever laughs first gets slapped on the cheek. Except this was no game.
Nico didn’t return to his table. Suddenly hunched, crushed, aged, he left the restaurant. The old man didn’t move. He watched Nico leave, then walked to my table where El-Hadji had remained, as white and rigid as a wax statue.
“Give the lady whatever she asks for. Here’s the money.”
He put a small wad of two hundred — euro bills on the table and walked away. El-Hadji, his eyes still down, didn’t check, but clearly there was enough cash there to cover all of his evening expenses, and even if he served caviar by the ladle to his customer, he could close the place and reopen after the holidays without losing anything.
“The mafia,” he stammered.
The old man had left.
The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than two minutes and Teresa still hadn’t reacted, as if she hadn’t realized that her beau had abandoned her there.
Funny things happen in Paris, that’s for sure, whispered the little provincial guy from Savoie (my father’s pastry shop was in Albertville) sleeping inside of me. But his big brother, the one who grew up and became a private eye, had to find out more.
I jumped from my seat and left with my dark red jacket with black threads.
The old man seemed to have vanished in the deserted street, but I spotted a spineless, raggedy shape who was throwing up on the garbage cans. It was Nico. He hadn’t walked more than fifty yards in two minutes. He was dragging his feet, on his way to doomsday.
On rue Richer, there was no sign of the crazy woman and everything was silent. You could see garlands on Christmas trees twinkling through windows. The rain had turned into a light snow that evaporated when reaching the ground, just as the old man had. The shabby old guy was like a genie, like a snowflake, I said to myself jokingly. He evaporates, disappears, doesn’t exist anymore.
But Nico’s ghost still existed and was sticking to the asphalt. He looked like he was dragging an invisible ball and chain. And then I saw him negotiate a quarter-turn to his left (with difficulty, as his body wouldn’t obey him anymore), and go into the Goldenberg building, the one with store windows blinded by cinder blocks, the building where the old Italian woman, the desperate, crazy Jewish woman lived.
I followed him. The building, ready to be torn down, was deserted and sinister. The marble lobby smelled of mold and at the bottom of the large stairwell, a yellowish stone goddess covered with black and blue graffiti proudly displayed a nudity no one was interested in anymore. The rise and fall of elegant Hausmannian architecture. But I wasn’t there to write about the history of the 9th arrondissement.
Following him was so easy I was almost ashamed. He paused on each step of the large, pompous stairwell. (In other times, young romantic men must have climbed it already on their way to becoming paunchy bankers with pear-shaped heads à la King Louis-Philippe.) I said to myself, and I thought it was funny, that I shouldn’t have been a private detective or a pastry cook like my dad, but a scholar, a historian.
In the dark, barely lit by the snow falling behind the broken transom windows, Nico kept going up, with me trailing him. We were two characters in a silent, black-and-white film, screened in slow motion. It was bitterly cold. A rat scrambled between my legs; I held onto the banister and felt the paint peeling. Falling would be all I needed. Hello! Merry Christmas!
The stone staircase ended at the fifth floor but Nico took a smaller wooden one spiraling up to the next floor which, in another era, must have been where the maids’ rooms were located. I stopped at the bottom of that ladder of sorts which ascended to the heavens. Everything was dark up there.
So that’s where the crazy woman lived, then, and she was the one Nico had come to visit. A picture, a little blurry still, started to take shape in my mind.
And suddenly I was sure of it. The famous grandson who “was doing real well” was Nico, and that’s why he wanted to have dinner in this neighborhood. Childhood memories, probably, from the time his father was still alive and his grandmother still sane. And I also understood how he was getting his money, his suit, his golden jewels, and why El-Hadji had seemed to liquefy when the old guy had stepped into Chez Léon. I had crossed paths with the 9th arrondissement mafia before. I knew Nico was doomed. He had come to say goodbye to his grandmother.
Careful not to make the wooden steps creak, I continued up. There was a sourish smell, a smell of urine, of a stable where the straw is never changed.
Nico was at the top. He groped his way in the dark to find a big flashlight that pointed at a bunch of rags under the slanted roof. The old woman was sleeping like a tired baby, all red and wrinkled. Her face appeared strangely at peace. Again I could see the former beauty my friend Maria had talked about. She didn’t wake up.
Nico set the flashlight down and bent over inside the halo of light. He took his wallet out of the inner pocket of his jacket and came up with a wad of bills that he deposited next to the pallet. He did the same with his wallet. Then he took off his watch and his gold arm chain, and after undoing his tie, the big chain and pendant he was wearing around his neck followed. He placed everything next to the bills and the wallet. At the end of this strange ritual of stripping, he crudely cut a handful of his curly black hair with a kitchen knife he had found by fumbling around in his grandmother’s stuff, near the cheap wine bottles. He deposited the curls next to his other offerings. When his face came back into the halo of the flash-light, I could see he was crying silently.