The lieutenant drank a mint tea sweetened with acacia honey before saying goodbye to old Assaf.
All you had to do was walk a hundred yards and you left the sex and garment district behind; you were entering the area reserved for the winners in the new economic order. All the pretty little faces in the world of finance, advertising, top civil service jobs, TV and movies would be walking around on these harmless decorative cobblestones. They crowded into sidewalk cafés, their cell phones glued to their ears, connected to vitamin cocktails by means of fluorescent straws. Mattéo liked the place, despite everything: the façades, the smell of eternal Paris. But he had lived here too long to forget how fake it all was. Going beyond rue Saint-Denis into Montorgueil was like crossing a border. He felt almost as if he were at a show, or a tourist: Sometimes he was sorry he hadn’t slung a camera across his chest.
He quickened his pace. Street people were sorting through the garbage cans lined in front of Suguisa, La Fermette, and Furusato, the Japanese restaurant. They were looking for edible garbage in the form of organic food. He cut onto rue Marie-Stuart, which used to be a fierce competitor of rue Brisemiche in the old days, when they were more prosaically called Passage Tire-Vit and Tire-Boudin. * The realtor was on the ground floor of an old house with exposed oak beams and stone. Tristanne Dupré looked like one of the girls who waited on customers in the Singe Pèlerin. The bodywork was identical, but the license plate was quite different. Everything she was wearing, from her stockings to the cut of her hair, from her pumps to her perfume, came straight out of the pages of Vogue. Badgley Mischka skirt, Alexander McQueen shoes, Carolina Herrara glasses... With one look, you save the price of buying a copy. Mattéo slid the card along the desk.
“According to what I’ve been told, you’re the one who acted as a go-between for Flavien Carvel...”
She stared at him with eyes wide open behind her lightly smoked glasses before looking over the inspector from head to foot, scornfully. “I don’t understand.”
“Mattéo, Criminal Investigation. Carvel’s in the morgue, and I’m trying to nail the guy who bought him a one-way *“Prick-Pull” and “Sausage-Pull.”
ticket there. The sooner the better. You teamed up to buy the peep show on rue Greneta, right?”
The theory had come out of his mouth without even thinking about it. From the panic-stricken fluttering of her eyelashes, he realized he’d hit a bull’s-eye. Now he had to proceed with caution.
“Flavien is dead? No, he can’t be!”
She threw herself back in her chair, her chest under the silk shaken by spasmodic breathing. Her distress was not affected. He wondered if she was one of those interchangeable girls who waited for the prodigal son in the car when he made a visit to his mother on the impasse du Gaz. Mattéo pushed away a pile of interior design magazines and sat down on the couch.
“Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were that close... He was found this morning near the Porte Saint-Denis, stabbed... I’d like to learn how you met him...”
She stuck a Camel into a cigarette holder with a python emblem and lit it with a matching lighter.
“In the simplest possible way. He opened that door and sat down in the exact same spot you’re in now... He wanted to buy an apartment in the no-car area, preferably Tiquetonne... After ten visits or so, he decided on a big four-room in a historical landmark building on rue Léopold Bellan...”
“It’s not cheap, in that sector. You gave him a good deal?”
She shrugged.
“Seven thousand euros a square meter. He had about a hundred and twenty square meters... You can do the math... Flavien had a third of the money and he was sure he’d have no problem getting the rest from what the peep show brought in. He was supposed to move in next month.”
“Where was he living in the meantime?”
“Upstairs, fourth floor, a studio apartment that belongs to the agency... I have a copy of the keys.”
Mattéo learned that the real estate agency owned the building with the rooms for voyeurs, that Tristanne had tipped off her rich client, and that his bank was on the Place de la Bourse, near the editorial offices of the Nouvel Observateur.
The lieutenant then brandished the notes Flavien had taken.
“Do you know why he wrote down these bits of human interest stories on paper scraps?”
“No. He used to copy them onto his computer in the evening, to post them on a website, that’s all he told me... I held onto a few of them. I also remember he backed up all his work on his flash drive.”
The young woman opened her bag — a Vuitton — and fumbled around in it.
“Here, this is something he wrote.”
The police officer took the paper:
The police have been heating up since the start of the riots,they’re provoking us more and more. The brother of one of the electrocuted children was hanging out with us as usual, in front of his building, when the police got there.
They started to look us up and down and finally they said to him: “You, go home to your mother.” He walked three steps toward the cops to talk to them and one of them said: “Stop or you’ll regret it.” We ran away to the eleventh floor, they started firing gas cartridges into the lobby. They smoked out the family in mourning.
He had just finished reading it when she gave him another one:
Cotonou Airport, December 25. I had a very bad premonition and I really felt ill at ease. Every time something bad is going to happen to me, I can feel it. And this time my sixth sense was telling me we weren’t going to take off. I was really expecting something to happen. I even told one of my coworkers what I felt. A few seconds later, the plane was in the water. The people who were still alive were screaming. I wasn’t afraid because I’d sensed something terrible was going to happen. Everything happened very fast. I’d say there were two minutes between takeoff and the accident. When I got out of the plane, I wasn’t far from the shore. So I swam back to the land and survived.
The lieutenant put them away in his wallet with the others, then walked to the stairs. He didn’t need to use the keys the real estate agent had given him. The door had been forced open and every nook and cranny of the studio had been searched. He looked at the disaster — the drawers thrown over, the bed upside down, the slashed mattress. He picked up the furniture, looking for the computer or the flash drive Tristanne had mentioned. Apparently the visitor had taken everything away. Mattéo found one more enigmatic message in a trash can in the bathroom:
December 26. Rababa and his son Hamed were sleeping when the earthquake hit the little town of Bam, in Iran.
Before they had time to run outside, their house had collapsed around them. They remained trapped for four days until a neighbor came to the rescue, digging into the wreckage with his bare hands.
He walked back to rue de la Lune, near the old postern of la Poissonnerie, the fish-market gate: They used to bring the day’s catch into Paris through it at dawn. A tiny, almost provincial enclave, with its small public garden, its church, and its little bands of children. Just a step away from the noisy Grands Boulevards, the excitement of rue Saint-Denis, and the sector reserved for bohemian yuppies. From the kitchen he could make out the ceramic advertisement for Castrique, promising Total dust removal when you vacuum. He had kept the apartment after his divorce, when Annabelle left with the kids, s almost half his income on rent for a place where he used only two rooms out of four. Everything was ready for their return. Moving out would have meant admitting defeat.