So I made up my mind.
“Tomorrow I’ll go to Vernon. To take a look at the scum-bag’s face.”
“I’m going too,” Samir said.
“Count me in,” Maurice added. “I like action. In memory of Zatopek. We’ll see what happens.”
We left very early. In Maurice’s car. That guy is a gadget freak, his entire salary goes into anything new. He even had a GPS on his dashboard. He drove well and he drove fast, nearly risking points on his driver’s licence. We ate up the 130 kilometers like you gobble down a ham sandwich and reached Vernon by 9.
Thanks to the GPS we easily located rue de l’Insurrection. In a residential development built in the ’80s. Imitation modern houses with lawns decorated with ceramic dwarfs, sculpted hedges, and at least one araucaria tree every fifty meters. It reeked of money, but not too much. It had the smell of retired civil servants’ money. With cars primly parked in front of the outmoded mansions of their owners. The cushy life. Far from Darfur. Nothing to do with all those wretched, helpless, old folks who vegetate in the big cities, sometimes eating out of the same cans as their mangy dogs.
In a silence that spoke volumes, we waited for a solid hour, sitting in the car without knowing why, vaguely hoping to see the cop. Nothing. Other people were coming out of their houses with swarms of kids, rushing to their cars. A picnic. A walk in the woods. Perhaps mass. Sunday lunch at a restaurant and then a movie. Well-deserved peace.
And then he came out. Small and fat.
Without thinking, we disembarked from the car, approached him like the brothers Earp at a pathetic OK Corral. Three against one. We just wanted to talk to him. I started three meters away from him.
“Monsieur Henri Portant?”
He stopped. Same reflexes as before. Inspecting us. Weighing what could be happening here. Who we might be. He was thinking, that was obvious. Perhaps we were ex-cons he had caught before who were coming to take revenge. Or highway robbers about to rip him off.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Are you Henri Portant?”
“What is this about?”
We hesitated. We didn’t know where to begin.
The former cop moved his hand toward the inside of his jacket. Samir reacted very fast, jumped him, smashing him with the head butt of the century.
Portant fell backward screaming. I pounced on him to pull him up and drag him off. Into his house. All of this taking place right in the middle of the street, a major mistake.
He was bleeding, his crushed nose was leaking like a fountain. His startled blue eyes were barely visible behind that red river.
I grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and pulled him up to his feet with difficulty. He was moaning and blowing bubbles.
“Bunch of assholes,” he muttered.
I smacked him. He groaned. He was in pain.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe it!” Maurice cried out behind me.
I turned around.
Some twenty meters off, Zatopek was moving toward us, grunting, trotting along down the sidewalk.
La Vie en Rose[10]
by Dominique Mainard
Belleville
1
On rue de Belleville, Japanese tourists who had come to see the steps on which Edith Piaf entered the world lingered under the April drizzle, protected by odd little hats of pink, translucent plastic with the logo of a travel agency on them. All the way to boulevard de Belleville, two hundred yards further down, the bright red signs in Chinese characters gleamed through the mist. Legendre turned left into the labyrinth of little cobblestone streets leading to the park, swung the wheel hard to avoid the kids playing soccer in the puddles. Arnaud was trying to drink out of the thermos of coffee his friend made when his radio had started crackling half an hour ago. They had gone to bed very late and he had a hard time waking up, but his heart jumped when he saw police cars stopped a few dozen yards up the street with their lights flashing.
Legendre parked the car at the end of the street and winked at Arnaud.
“I have to be careful,” he said. “They’ve seen me hanging around the neighborhood too much, one of them threatened to give me a ticket for obstruction of justice. You coming?”
When Arnaud hesitated, Legendre held out the car keys with a theatrical gesture.
“Okay, you’d rather stay warm,” he said. “That’s your problem. You’ll find CDs in the glove compartment. But I’m telling you, man, if you want inspiration for your book, this is the place to find it.”
Arnaud shrugged with a forced smile. He was almost sorry he’d told Legendre about it a few days ago, out of boredom, out of loneliness; but the truth is, even if he hadn’t seen the guy since college, there was no one else he could talk to about it. At the beginning of the winter, Arnaud had gone on unemployment insurance to start writing the novel he’d been thinking about for a long time; 181 days, he’d counted them, and he hadn’t even succeeded in finishing four chapters. All winter he’d paced through his apartment watching the leaves fall from the chestnut tree under his windows and onto the sidewalk, soon to become invisible. He’d felt himself sinking into the inertia and calm of his little town in the suburbs — what a cliché, he thought, a former Literature major, the ambitions, the powerlessness.
After a meal washed down with a lot of wine — he’d accepted the cigarette Legendre had offered him, and since he didn’t smoke very often he was dizzy and laughed as easily as if it had been a joint — he had dropped a few words, negligently, about this novel he’d given himself till spring to finish, adding that it was coming along, it was coming along nicely. Legendre had tried to get it out of him and finally he admitted it was a noir novel, but he didn’t want to say very much more. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t. He had only said his hero would be a private detective, his victim a woman, she’d live in Paris and work in the world of the night, a stripper or a prostitute. And who’ll be the murderer? Legendre had asked, and Arnaud had raised his eyebrows with an air of mystery. If I tell you, there won’t be any suspense, he’d answered; but the truth was, he didn’t know himself. He didn’t have a feel for crime, he hated to admit, and the five months he’d spent going through short news items in the newspapers hadn’t changed a thing. When he tried to understand what could drive a man to close his hands around a woman’s neck, he couldn’t imagine it and he told himself this was a terrible start for a novelist. Would his murderer be a pimp, a customer, a serial killer? It was absurd to already have the victim and the setting and be unable to find the murderer, as if a writer could be worse than a bad cop.
He knew Legendre worked for the newspapers and that’s what had led him to get back in touch with the guy: the confused hope that since his old friend had written stories about ordinary daily dramas, he had pierced this secret and could reveal it to him.
When he spoke to Legendre about his novel, his friend had slapped him on the shoulder, pointed to the radio on a shelf, and said: “Dig that: It’s a police transmitter. When something happens in the neighborhood, sometimes I manage to get there before they do and I sell my photos for five or six hundred euros. Come sleep over next weekend and if something happens, I’ll take you along. With a little luck you’ll get to see him, your ideal killer. Don’t kid yourself, though, there’s not much going down right now.”
But the transmitter had started crackling early in the morning, and hearing the code the police use, Legendre jumped to his feet and shook Arnaud, who was sleeping on the floor of the two-room apartment situated over an Asian produce store with its fetid stench of durian. Come on, he’d said, this is the real thing, and twenty minutes later they were turning onto rue Jouye-Rouve.