He raised a hand to his mustache and stroked it a couple of times, spreading his thumb and index finger.
“No, almost nobody here because of the soccer game, since I never put in a TV... I run a café, not an entertainment center. Two customers at the little table, under the photo of the Voisin girl, the poisoner — she lived here, they say... I was waiting for them to finish their beers before I packed it up.”
The police officer stepped forward to take a look inside. It smelled of dampness and cold tobacco.
“Was one of them blond, kind of long hair, wearing black jeans, white sneakers, and a reporter jacket... About twenty-five...?”
“Yeah... the one facing me. He had a couple of beers — Leffes — but he couldn’t hold his drink... unless he started before he got to my place. They walked out onto the sidewalk, toward where you are, they walked maybe fifteen yards away while I was locking up. I remember they stopped to keep talking. The young one you’re talking about leaned against the wall while the other guy crossed the street toward rue de la Lune, a little lower down. He clearly didn’t feel like dragging the other guy along. Not very nice, leaving a pal in such a bad state... The guy in jeans staggered away toward the Porte Saint-Denis, and I went home to bed.”
Lieutenant Mattéo looked the owner of Le Mauvoisin up and down.
“Sorry, but I don’t think you’re opening this morning... You’re going to have to come along with me. Your last customer of the night wasn’t drunk: He’d just been stabbed in the belly a couple of times. We picked him up off the stairs of rue des Degrés. The bloodstains begin at the exact spot you just pointed out to me.”
His interrogation revealed that the two men had come into the café one after the other, Carvel first, around 11:00, then his presumed murderer ten minutes later. They had talked quietly, in low voices; it was impossible to grasp the topic of their conversation. It was the victim who had paid for the drinks, with a fifty-euro bill. The second man was about thirty. The café owner didn’t know him, any more than he knew the man he had been talking to. Elegantly dressed, shorter than average, brown hair, a round face, he talked with a slight Spanish accent.
“He had a little birthmark near his temple that he kept trying to hide by pulling a lock of hair forward. Kind of a nervous tic...”
They learned almost everything about Flavien Carvel from the passport and other ID they found in the pockets of his reporter jacket. He was born April 21, 1982 in Antony, listed his profession as “decorator,” and lived on the impasse du Gaz in La Plaine-Saint-Denis. The visas and stamps decorating his passport showed that over the last eight months, Carvel had traveled to the United States, Australia, Japan, Vanuatu, and Lebanon for visits never longer than a week. Robbery was not the motive of the crime since the murderer had not taken his collection of credit cards or the eight hundred euros in cash that filled his pockets.
Mattéo discovered a piece of newspaper slipped between the plastic rectangles of the American Express Platinum and Visa Infinity cards; someone had penned on it:
Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in the second arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wife of a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumors of the American star’s separation from Katie Holmes are making headlines in the celebrity magazines.
He had gone to La Plaine-Saint-Denis early in the afternoon after grabbing a slice of Tuscan pizza at the Casa della Pasta on rue Montorgueil. He hadn’t set foot in the northern suburbs for years. In his memory it was all gray, gas meters, oil-refinery walls, Coke plants, chimney stacks, ash-colored façades stained by constant rain, the open trench of the Autoroute du Nord and its constant flow of smoking carcasses... When they built the huge new soccer stadium — the Stade de France — it had completely transformed the geography of the area. The last remnants of the old industrial revolution had been razed to the ground. The buildings with the corporate main offices in them stood as if on parade along the huge flowered concrete slab that now covered the sewer of flowing cars. The rectilinear greenery and the erratic movements of clouds were reflected in the shining aluminum, the smoked glass, and the polished steel. The recipe had worked wonders in Paris: Thanks to the construction of the Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, the Forum des Halles, the Bastille Opera, the Arche de la Défense, and the Very Big Library, the city had been emptied of its lower strata. Now the recipe was being applied to the nearby districts outside the city. Nothing like a grand architectural gesture in the middle of the urban jungle to regain possession of a city.
Lieutenant Mattéo had always lived in the second arrondissement. He couldn’t imagine the slightest exile from it, not even in a neighborhood next door. Montorgueil, Tique-tonne, Réaumur, Aboukir, Sentier, all these streets were like lifelines in the hollow of his palm. But for ten years now he’d really had to hang on, ever since the massive arrival of the bohemian yuppies: They spent way more every month at the sidewalk tables of the Rocher de Cancale, the Compas d’Or, and the Loup Blanc than he paid in rent. He walked along the canal, passed the camps of Romanian gypsies mixed with all the homeless displaced from the banks of the Seine, then took rue Cristino Garcia, moving into what remained of the old Spanish neighborhood. The impasse du Gaz was no more than four or five attached redbrick houses, like a mining town. It felt a little like England. Cranes were wheeling in the sky just behind this relic of the past. A mailbox had the name Carvel on it followed by the first name, Mélanie. He reflected that it was the same as his assistant’s. He pulled the chain that hung next to the door with thick iron mesh over it.
A woman of about fifty came to open it, dragging her feet and grumbling. Yellow hair, tired waves of an old permanent, pallid face, bluish bags under her eyes, the corners of her lips sagging... and the same for the rest of her body: Flavien’s mother was the very image of defeat, of abandonment. Contrary to what the lieutenant had feared, she absorbed the news of her son’s death without collapsing. All she did was clench her jaw and suppress a tremor in her right hand before wiping away the tears welling in her eyes with the back of her sleeve.
“How’d it happen?”
As he entered, Mattéo glanced at the dining room where a low table in front of the TV, lit like a night-light, was buckling under empty bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.
“We don’t know much yet. His murderer might be Spanish. There are plenty of them in the neighborhood: Your son must have known some of them...”
“Sure, dozens. Back in the day, he used to go next door to the Youth Center, to play cards, dance, eat tapas...”
“Back in the day, that means when?”
She had pushed open a sliding panel, revealing a messy bedroom with walls studded with posters. A smiling Bill Gates with pinched lips was like a stain in the middle of the rows of sparkling teeth of the stars of showbiz, movies, and sports.
“For the last two years he’d just drop by in a rush. We must’ve eaten together once or twice, with his current girlfriend... Last week he brought me flowers for my birthday...”
“You remember their names?”
She removed a pack of Lucky Strikes from the pocket of her cardigan, lit the end of a cigarette with a Zippo that stunk of gas.
“The names of the girls? No. He changed them even more often than he changed cars... I don’t know the brands either.”
Mattéo hadn’t asked her permission to enter the room. He began to look through the collections of video games, photo albums, films, magazines. A few lines scrawled on a piece of notebook paper suddenly caught his eye: