Sunday, August 28th, New Orleans. The storm’s getting nearer, stronger and stronger. The telephone never stops ringing. “You staying or leaving?” “Where’re you living now?” “You have the cats with you?” “What should we do?” The governor is asking us to “pray for the hurricane to go down to Level 2”... Finally I give in. I’m going to move into a stronger building. An old cannery downtown made of brick and cement, five stories high. There are seven of us in the apartment, with four cats.
It was the same slanted, energetic handwriting as the message about Tom Cruise and the wife of the presidential candidate. He held out the paper under Flavien’s mother’s eyes.
“He’s the one who wrote this?”
“Yes, that’s his handwriting. He never stopped taking notes, scribbling... stuff he’d hear on the radio, on the phone, or things he found in the papers. It was like an obsession. I wore myself out telling him to stop, but he couldn’t help himself.”
“You know where he was living these last few months?”
She shook her head.
“All I know is, he bought a place in Paris... He never gave me his phone number. Just his e-mail address. What am I supposed to do with that? I don’t even have a computer!”
The lieutenant’s cell phone began vibrating in his pants pocket. He waited to get outside the house on the impasse du Gaz to call back. He quickly jerked the phone away as Burdin’s shrill voice drilled through his ear.
“I wanted to tell you we’ve got a lead for the corpse on rue des Degrés. He isn’t in any of our files, a real ghost. I went through my usual stoolies with his photo on my chest. He’s been hanging out for some time in the back room of the Singe Pèlerin, where the sex-shop customers of rue Saint-Denis leer at the two-legged meat... Seems he was interested in one of those places, but I don’t know which one.”
Mattéo knew the chatterbox of the Singe Pèlerin — a bartender — because he’d recruited him five years ago, when he caught the guy with his nose buried in white powder. The café used to be a ripening room for bananas; it was hidden in a little nook near the start of the Place du Caire, built over one of the entrances to the mythical cour des Miracles. For dozens of years he’d never even wondered about this name. Its probable meaning had been given to him the week before by an exhibitionist alcoholic they had to yank from rue Saint-Sauveur. It had taken him about an hour to give this explanation in the drunk tank of the police station, but it could be summed up in a few words. Every evening, when the beggars around the city returned to their dens with change jingling in their pockets, it was as if Christ had turned His face to them: The blind regained their sight, amputees stood up on their legs, the scrofulous lost their scrofula, the deaf became sensitive to noise, the mute began to sing, Siamese twins stood face to face; all they had to do was enter the perimeter of this refuge for miracles to happen!
The lieutenant pushed down on the handle and opened the glass-paned door where the old phone number was still displayed from the time when the numbers began with letters. Thirty girls or so were sitting on the imitation leather chairs, waiting to take their exams in the back room. Most of them were kids from Eastern Europe or Africa, along with an Asian girl and one from India. He walked straight to the bar. Leaning on his elbows in front of his debtor, he ordered almost without opening his mouth.
“Give me a strong coffee, real strong, then get out of here and make a little stop at the usual place...”
The bartender was about to protest, but Mattéo had already turned around to admire the slender legs of an Estonian girl who was passing the time by stretching out a pink piece of chewing gum in front of her silicone-enhanced lips. He made a face as he swallowed his coffee without putting sugar in it, crossed the room, walked about thirty yards up the sidewalk toward rue Saint-Denis, and entered the shop of the last strawhat maker in Paris.
Assaf, the master of the house, was born on the second floor of the shop. Rounded up by the French police like all the Jews of the neighborhood, he had survived the hell of Auschwitz before making a detour of almost ten years in the camps of his liberators. The lieutenant and the hat maker came together when Mattéo had chased out a gang hitting him up for protection money. Mattéo had then formed the habit of coming to play chess with the old man. He practically never brought up his past, except to reminisce about the games he’d played against a champion of the USSR suspected of Trotskyite sympathies. (Assaf had lost every one of them.) As tournaments were forbidden in the gulag, an inmate had someone tattoo a chessboard on his back. He would get down on all fours, naked from the waist up, until one player was checkmated.
Mattéo gave his old friend a hug. “A customer’s going to come in for a visit. Don’t waste your saliva, I can tell you he won’t buy a thing...”
“You can go into the kitchen. I’ll take him in to you as soon as he shows up.”
When the bartender of the Singe Pèlerin arrived, the lieutenant saw that he had put on a raincoat over his working clothes. The bartender asked for some water to take a handful of pills, then refused the chair the lieutenant pointed him to.
“I can’t stay, it’s the noon rush. All the big boys are there. What do you want from me? Is it about the guy who got shot on rue des Degrés?”
“If you ask the questions and then answer them, it’ll go a lot faster... His name was Flavien Carvel and he wasn’t shot, he was stabbed... What can you tell me about him?”
The bartender raised his head with his mouth open, as if he was trying to get some fresh air. “All I know is, he was loaded. He began hanging around the neighborhood about six months ago. He bought some shares in The Sphinx as a way of getting in with the mob. Recently there was a rumor of his buying heavily into the peep show on the corner of rue Greneta... a first-class business. They were talking about his coming in with 200,000 euros.”
“I took care of them two years ago; a real rough place. You sure you’re not giving me the wrong club?”
Mattéo got up to fill a pot of water and put it on the gas stove.
“No, everything’s back on track again. It’s one of the joints that brings in the most. All the bread in cash, tax-free. From what I know, there were lots of extras too...”
“What kind?”
“They opened up little trapdoors so the customer could stick his hands through ’em and feel up the dancers’ tits and stick dildos or vibrators up their asses or pussies. Stuff they bought exclusively at the shop, for the highest price imaginable. It went both ways — if the customer asked for it, the dancers screwed them with the same utensils.”
“You have any idea where he lived?”
The bartender stuck his hand into the pocket of his raincoat and took out a business card he then handed to the police officer. “I did him a favor by telling him what I heard... He told me I could reach him through this real estate agency if it was urgent.”
Mattéo took the card. It was from Luximmo, a business on rue Marie-Stuart. He memorized the name of the person printed under the company name: Tristanne Dupré. Then he turned the paper rectangle over, mechanically. The other side was covered with Carvel’s tense writing:
December 26 could have been the happiest day in Rafiq’s life if the tsunami hadn’t struck, because he was supposed to get married that day. The time of the wedding was set for noon, but the waves came in the morning. Rafiq was in the village of Patangipettai, near the other villages that were hit. Immediately, all the men in the community swung into action with Jamaat, their local organization. They took away the food for the wedding and gave it to the disaster victims. Up to the day we met them, one week after the tsunami, the organization provided breakfast and lunch to the victims, cooking lemon rice or veg. biryani.