So that’s what it was. Real estate. Plain, dirty real estate. That moral scourge. With its cynicism set in cement. As for Zatopek, they had found him another pad. Somewhere. Far away no doubt. Maybe in a nursing home. Maybe in a shelter, who knows?
Bastards! The heartless sonsofbitches!
An old guy. He’d spotted us scrutinizing the official notices with disappointment. Cap, cane, the type who spends all day hanging around trying to find someone to talk to.
“I used to live here, they threw me out, I won’t tell you how, those bastards, nobody budged, I was one of the first, they didn’t care...”
“Can we buy you a drink?”
“I won’t say no, boys.”
The old fellow was as endlessly talkative as his gullet was bottomless. We learned a ton about the Place des Vioques — the Old Squares Square — as he called the Place des Vosges. He knew everybody. And more importantly, Zatopek. Whose real name was Monsieur Girard, as it said on his mailbox. But he had never made friends with the old madman, a retired railroad worker — that had to be why he was galloping all day long, probably took himself for a locomotive. The only one who managed to talk with him was old Marthe, the one who took the garbage out and sometimes cooked for two. She had vanished as well. No mystery there. Pushed toward the exit little by little, everyone had left. Those bastards from IMPACTIMMO had succeeded in evicting all the residents of number 12 in less than a year. How were they doing it? By negotiating, supposedly. With a little dough — very little given the neighborhood — but the poor who lived there didn’t know any better. Or else, with the oldest and the nearly bedridden, a placement in a home for the elderly, impossible to get under normal circumstances. For this guy it was different, he’d jumped at the money even knowing it was a rip-off, but he had a weak heart. He had given it all to his daughter, who let him have her maid’s room on rue de Turenne. With his puny retirement pension, he could hang on until the grave.
The strange thing was that we suddenly had the feeling we knew it all and yet had learned nothing. The only lead we had was old Marthe. The garbage woman. She might know a little more about Zatopek. But she had left without saying where she was going. She might well have returned to the provinces. Stashed away in some slum, a country dump twenty kilometers from the nearest grocery store. Our marathon man, too, for that matter. Running through the fields wouldn’t be too terrible a sentence.
We let our old timer keep stewing about those rotten real estate sharks a while longer, then left him in front of his fifth Picon beer.
We were stuck.
To get any further, to try and find more traces of the former tenants of number 12, we would have needed an armada of muckrakers. It was hard to feel reassured by the possibility that Zatopek had been safely put away somewhere. In view of the state he was in, that somewhere could be a stinking shelter, a place like a prison where they’d slowly anesthetize you, where they’d just let you croak. Because it costs society too much to take care of its relics. Even the daily Parisien says it, and that’s saying something.
The days went by and the Place des Vosges was looking hard in the direction of Versailles. And to think that I’d known that square as a little kid, a real rough place then. With the opening of the Picasso Museum everything had changed. Consequently, the Spanish paint-splasher had pushed the whole area toward the classical era, chic, conservative, with a platinum checkbook. Even if the joint where I work, my Bourgogne, had always been classy. It used to be a gem in a rugged setting. Now it was a gem among other gems. With Jack Lang practically living above it.
It was Joseph, who worked nights at the Elephant du Nil by the Saint-Paul metro station, who reopened the hunt. There was this old woman, a funny one who hung out at his bar every morning; she came from the rue de Fourcy senior housing. She’d attack her first glass of white wine and lemonade at 10 in the morning and get steadily soaked until noon. She’s soaking up her coffin, the owner would say. A real chatterbox. A nasty one too, angry with the entire world.
We went there the following Saturday as a delegation, a group of union representatives. And we sure weren’t disappointed. It was good old Marthe, the garbage lady of number 12, the one who knew Monsieur Girard — Marcel to his friends, Zatopek to us. A poor devil. Retired from the railroads, gone half-crazy after he’d pulled parts of a woman who’d been run over by a freight train car. Crazy, for sure, but only halfway, completely with it at other times. Together with her, Zatopek had been the only one to truly fight the real estate jackals. He owned his small two-room apartment in the back of the courtyard and screamed that he’d only go feet first, they wouldn’t mess with him. The old guy was borderline straightjacket. And in excellent health; he even went running, can you believe it?
“Where does Monsieur Girard live now?”
“What do you want with Marcel?”
“Nothing. We don’t see him on Place des Vosges anymore so we’re worried. He was a friend, an acquaintance.”
“Oh really? Did he talk to you?”
“Not really. He’d smile. We liked him.”
She observed us, her glass of white wine in hand. With her blue smock, her red cheeks, and her eyes an opaque white because of cataracts. Cute as hell, like an old enamel coffeepot. Which could burn your hands if you didn’t watch out.
“Why are you worried?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’d like to know where he is. So we can stop worrying.”
She scrutinized us for a long time. Time enough to empty her glass and order another.
“One morning he wasn’t there anymore. He’d left during the night.”
“He moved?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, he left everything. Two days later, two guys from Emmaus came to load up his stuff. Nothing much. Rickety furniture, some old things, borderline homeless stuff. He must have taken everything worth something with him. Clothes probably.”
“Did he have family elsewhere, like, I don’t know, in the provinces?”
“I don’t think so. Besides, he was a Parisian, a real Parisian, a Parisian down to his toes.”
And so on. She kept talking for quite a while, she couldn’t let go of us. She felt important at last, and that pleased her. Late in life, almost at death’s door, she’d found an audience. But for us it was just padding. We let her talk, we had the basics. Zatopek had suddenly disappeared.
A bit too suddenly.
That Saturday, as we prepared to leave rue Saint-Antoine — already overrun with leisured people stopping every twenty meters to study the restaurant menus and real estate ads — we decided to change our approach. We sat down around some blazing hot pizzas and very quickly, without anyone taking the lead, decided to kick into high gear. No one dared to openly express the negative thoughts that had just entered our heads. The rotten smell of a shady operation. The stench of a dirty trick.
Somberly, we divided the work. It looked like a meeting of anarchists plotting the stormy end of the Republic. Each of us knew we had to get rid of that bad taste in our mouth.
Maurice from the Dôme had a cousin who worked at City Hall. He’d asked her. No trace. Marcel Girard had never asked for any assistance at the municipal offices and always paid his residence tax. He had recently provided a change of address: in Montargis, rue des Hirondelles. He was therefore no longer of concern to the Paris administration. We checked Montargis; rue des Hirondelles didn’t exist.
Same story, more or less, at the Railroads Pension Fund. It was Samir, from the Fontenoy at the corner of Saint-Gilles and Beaumarchais, who had the job of investigating this. Marcel Girard had not cashed his last two money orders. The post office had declared them Unknown at this address. The French national railway company had no new address listed. They were waiting. Had to. Without a death certificate, the law required them to wait one year before closing the account. As soon as anything new came up, they’d let Samir know. Thanks, that’s very nice of you.