He was looking at Arnaud imploringly, and Arnaud lowered his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said in a low voice, “I couldn’t cross the police barrier. But she was under another plastic thing, a kind of gray tarp. No, I don’t think she was wet.”
The old man shook his head with a pensive expression. He picked up the cap on the table next to his cup and wiped his face with it, then kept it in his hand.
“After that, I came back up here and waited for someone to arrive,” he began again in a weary tone. “I waited for someone to come so I could tell my story. I will follow you to the police station. But the dog... I’d just like you to leave the dog at the grocery store on rue Piat.”
Arnaud capped his pen and shut his notebook. The coffee must have been boiling for hours, it was much too strong; he felt as if it had ripped the skin off his mouth and his heart was beating very fast. He was thinking of all those newspapers he’d skimmed through since the fall, all those sordid crimes, stabbings, shootings, skulls cracked against walls, that search for evil he’d thrown himself into to find an ideal killer, and he remembered the incredibly gentle handshake of the old man. He was looking at them at that very moment, those two hands clenched on his cap, which he was stroking softly, the way you pet an animal. Then Arnaud glanced up again and forced himself to smile.
“I’m not the police, sir,” he said. “I’m not going to put you in jail. Your story...” he went on hastily. “Don’t say anything. Don’t tell anyone anything. Layla did not come to see you. You were sleeping, you didn’t hear her knock, you didn’t open your door.”
But the old man was staring at him as if he didn’t understand. “Don’t say anything,” he repeated. “Why?” He had mechanically put his cap back on, he looked ready to go, to follow the police who’d come knock on his door in a few minutes or a few hours.
“I live outside Paris,” Arnaud suddenly heard himself saying. “I can take you in for a while if you like. We can go there now. No one will know you were here last night. No one will suspect you.”
But under the woolen cap, his face still reddened by tears, the old man was looking at him with incomprehension, almost with mistrust.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,” he said at last. “What you’re telling me there, that’s not my story. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.” He continued to examine Arnaud’s face as if he was seeing him for the first time, as if he didn’t know how this stranger got into his kitchen, sitting in front of him with the coffeepot between them. He pushed back his chair and got up heavily. “Go away, sir,” he said. “Go away, please.”
Arnaud hesitated, then did as he was told. He stood up, slipped his notebook and pen into his pocket. The old man remained standing behind the table while Arnaud walked over to the door and went out. In the stairway he found the same stench of urine and soup; the door to the apartment across the hall was slightly open, but he was not tempted to take a look inside. He walked quickly down the three flights. Just as he was leaving through the doors of the building, he saw the police coming — three men who seemed to know where they were going — and he turned his face away so their eyes would not meet.
He headed back to the park. Most of the police cars had disappeared; so had most of the onlookers. When he passed through the gates, he saw that the yellow tape was still there but they’d taken the body away. He stopped on the path. He looked for a long time at the lawn, soaked by the downpour. In the grass under a tree, there was an oval in a softer green on the spot where the body had protected it from the rain. Suddenly he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He turned around and saw his friend.
“Hey, you sure took your time,” Legendre said. “I hope you came up with something, at least. Me, I drew a blank, nobody wanted to tell me a thing and then the cops threw me out. So tell me. What happened?”
But Arnaud was looking at the soft oval of grass again. He felt tears welling up in his eyes, tears that seemed to him as big and childish as the old man’s. He didn’t know where he got that absolute ignorance of the human psyche. All he knew, with absolute certainty, was that he would never write his book; but that wasn’t what was causing this inconsolable sorrow. Legendre had lit a cigarette and was staring at him in amazement.
“For Chrissake, what’s with you, man? What did you see in that building?”
Arnaud shook his head without answering. The last onlookers were moving away, and couples, strollers, and children were coming in through the gates of the park. In a few weeks, a few months, no one would remember Layla M. except for the old man in his cell and me, he told himself. He thought of the pink nylon windbreaker the old man had taken down to cover the corpse with, and as his tears turned into sobs, he remembered the pink plastic hats the Japanese tourists were wearing a few hours earlier in front of the plaque for Edith Piaf. They had seemed so bright and cheery in the grayness of the morning.
Part III
Society of the spectacle
Rue des Degrés[11]
by Didier Daeninckx
Porte Saint-Denis
Not very far from what used to be the cour des Miracles, rue de Cléry and rue Beauregard almost merge. They are separated only by a narrow series of old buildings, with sweatshops and showrooms in them. The clacking of sewing machines mingles with the noise of traffic, the shouts of men pushing hand trucks and carrying clothing, and the curses of drivers blocked on the street by the interminable deliveries. The eyes of women with plunging necklines glitter in the shadow of the doorways. Men look at them longingly, hesitating over their beers. Just before they meet the Grands Boulevards at the Porte Saint-Denis, the twin streets are linked together thanks to the smallest street in Paris, six yards long at the most, in fact a set of stairs with fourteen steps that gives the street its name: rue des Degrés. A lamppost, steps framed by two walls, and a metal handrail in the middle shined to brilliance by the clothing of countless passersby rubbing against it.
That was where the cleaning lady of Chez Victoria found the corpse of Flavien Carvel while taking out the garbage cans at daybreak, below a red stencil of a punk girl’s face with the caption, What if I lowered my eyes? He was lying on his belly across the flight of stairs, and his bloody head was resting on the pile of flattened cartons left there by the neighborhood storekeepers. Brown stains cut across the right-hand wall, under the flaking billboard for Artex Industries. When the policemen turned the body over, they saw that the blood had flowed from his belly, stab wounds no doubt, drenching the head of hair lying below it on the steps. As they were roping off the area, one of the men, Lieutenant Mattéo, followed other signs along the walls of rue Beauregard up to the café Le Mauvoisin. The owner was raising its iron curtain. Over the sign for the café, a candle was burning at the feet of a Madonna sheltered in a niche of the wall.
“You closed late, last night?”
“Shut down by midnight... Somebody complain?”
“No, the only one who could have has no way to do it anymore! Everything calm? Nothing special happen?”