Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (18 page)

I asked Nadja what she intended to do about this problem.

‘Nothing.’ she said. ‘So I have one normal eye and one very interesting eye. The left shall be the practical side, the ordinary eye, useful and necessary. The right shall be the dream side, the indefinable, the exquisite and ungraspable. The right eye is my entrance to a drifting, unstable world ruled by colour and magic. Nothing is absolute there, it is a true wilderness. Covered by this thin red veil realities are made bearable by their vagueness.’

I suggested to Nadja that the presence of blood in her eye, if indeed that was what it was, might be a sign of a more serious condition, a remark that caused her to explode with laughter.

Who was Madame Sacco? Unlike Madame Blavatsky no religion was founded in her name, and also unlike the Russian she was not a charlatan. Her real name was Paulette Tanguy. born in Belleville. She set up shop as Mme Sacco on the rue des Usiness several months after the death of her third husband, an Italian, whose name I’ve forgotten, though I do not believe it was Sacco. In any case, he was seldom mentioned, and neither was she very forthcoming regarding his two predecessors. As to how Mme Sacco acquired her gift of clairvoyance, I never knew. She was never mistaken about me and I trusted her completely.

Mme Sacco knew of Nadja’s existence prior to my ever mentioning her. When Mme Sacco told me about my pre-occupation with a woman named ‘Hélène’, I was necessarily astonished. Only a day before Nadja had said to me, seemingly apropos of nothing, ‘I am Hélène.’ These women were already connected! My reputation in certain circles for naivety was apparently not altogether undeserved.

They did not, however, get along well. Nadja distrusted clairvoyants – ‘seers’ she called them, rudely. ‘Even if they know what they’re talking about,’ Nadja said, ‘even if their predictions are accurate, what right have they to inform?’

Mme Sacco sensed immediately Nadja’s hostility, and her performance in Nadja’s presence was subdued. ‘There is a great deal I could tell you about this woman,’ Mme Sacco said after Nadja had departed, ‘but she is opposed to it and therefore I cannot pursue her. I do know,’ and here Mme Sacco smiled, ‘that she is dishonest, she feigns madness and is a danger to you.’

‘Do you mean,’ I asked, ‘that Nadja is sane? That she intends to harm me?’

‘Oh no,’ Mme Sacco said, smiling even more handsomely than before, ‘she is genuinely deranged. Her pretending is the way she fools herself. As to harm, consider what you already do to yourself. This Nadja is a brief disruption in your life.’

Walking away from Mme Sacco’s I heard laughter coming from above me. I looked up and saw a boy sitting on a windowsill, playing with a live monkey. It’s me, I thought. I am the monkey.

Nadja, why is it so difficult to remember exactly what you looked like? Your precise words escape me also. My recreations are passable but not accurate. You made me examine my actions, forced me to consider possibilities other than the obvious. I am desperate now for the absolute taste of you.

I am in my studio at one minute past four o’clock in the afternoon, listening to the traffic pass in the street below my open windows. The sky is solidly grey with perhaps a stripe of white. I am embarrassed by my eagerness for night, the darkness, which I never used to be.

One evening in Père-Lachaise, as we strolled among the graves, you began to sing – some children’s song, I believe – and I was horrified. I dared not mention the fact to you, knowing you would ridicule my timidity; but I could not suppress the unholy feeling I derived from your merrily singing in the cemetery. Virtually everything you did disturbed, upset, surprised me. And yet I suffer.

Wherever Nadja is must be a better place than this, especially for her. I prefer to imagine Nadja in paradise, satisfied at last with the circumstances of her existence. She could never be happy in conventional life, better than she is allowed the latitude of feeling beyond desire. That her behaviour was considered bizarre, her appearance unsightly, and she found herself rejected on her own terms, could not have given Nadja much hope for even an acceptable afterlife.

I recall the time Nadja decided she would be an artist, a painter. She borrowed money from me for materials and did not leave her room at the Hotel Sphinx for several days. At the end of her siege Nadja emerged with one painting, which she showed to me at the Dôme. It was a self-portrait,
Nadja Among the Carnivores
, she called it. In the painting Nadja was depicted nude, walking in a street surrounded by ghoulish figures: huge goblins with beaks, monstrous dark shapes, devils with pitchforks, deformed crones, a conglomeration of hideous Bosch-like characters. The style was, as one might imagine, crude, the technique primitive. One could not, however, deny its power, the unsettling effect of the painting.

I told Nadja that I was impressed by the force of her work, and that I would gladly purchase the painting from her. She refused my offer. ‘It is not for sale,’ she said. ‘Now that you’ve seen it, I can destroy it.’ I begged her not to, but at that moment she began tearing the canvas apart, shredding it into strips. ‘Now,’ Nadja said, smiling, ‘I have been an artist. You are my witness. I never have to prove myself again.’

My feeling about Nadja is ultimately one of sadness, loss, but not without a certain degree of satisfaction in having kept faithful to my perception of her intentions. I do not pretend to have understood Nadja, though I remain to verify her existence.

As we were walking together along the Quai de l’Heure Bleue on a November afternoon, Nadja stopped and pointed to the river. ‘November is the first of the Suicide Months. Look there, in the middle of the Seine, I am drowning and boats pass oblivious to my distress.’

Here in the fading afternoon light, the world spinning senselessly as always, besieged by despair and unreasonable notions, I recall Nadja’s succinct admonition, ‘Prepare.’

Twenty thousand now,’ says the fat, greasy-haired man in a cheap brown suit, his forehead and upper lip covered in perspiration. He repeats: ‘Twenty thousand now,’ as if to convince himself of the amount, and taps his desk drawer. ‘Cash. And twenty thousand when the job’s done, if it all goes well, no discussion. Again, cash.’ Breaks out into a fresh sweat. I’m handing over forty thousand euros to a guy whose name I don’t even know. He mops his forehead with the cuff of his brown suit jacket, which is nice and absorbent, as if he does it all the time. It’s come to this… This or fleeing abroad. This and fleeing abroad?

The guy standing in front of him – athletic body, well-groomed, shaved head, smooth, tanned, tight black T-shirt, black jeans, black leather boots, not far off forty, from the slight slackening of the skin and the stomach – wordlessly extends an open hand across the desk. The fat man hesitates for a moment, opens the drawer and tosses an envelope onto the desk. The other guy picks it up, counts the notes in no hurry, and slips them into his underpants, under his jeans, pulling in his stomach.

‘How long?’

‘A week, max.’

‘Fine.’

He automatically hitches up his jeans and leaves. Does his sums as he goes down the stairs (avoid lifts, potential hazard). Forty thousand, not exactly a fortune. But I’m not getting any younger… Besides, it’s not the riskiest job. That’s why it’s worth it, don’t want to stick my neck out, or share. Not bad. He’s back in the street. Little wink at the copper plate by the entrance to the building. Alfred Poupon Property Agent, Staircase A, 3rd floor, left. Old Poupon was sweating, he reeked of fear. Not used to this type of operation. Is that a good thing for me or dangerous?

Hidden behind a third-floor window, Alfred Poupon watches the man walk off down the street with the wad of notes in his underpants. He turns the corner, calm and assured. That’s it, he’s gone.

End of a suffocatingly muggy August day. Zé leaves Paris at the wheel of his white, five-year-old, all-purpose Clio. He turns off the périphérique onto a very wide main road alongside a chaotic sprawl of showy office blocks. This new business district is the big city’s latest growth spurt. At this hour, and in the middle of August, it’s completely deserted, quite sinister. Zé cruises slowly. He’s approaching the A86 motorway which is becoming the second Paris orbital, spots the slip road, turns onto it, goes even slower. The target’s there, set back from the road below him, a few metres from the security barrier. Zé’s on the alert, eyes sharp, neurons buzzing: take it all in at a glance, clock everything, don’t risk a second drive-by. An isolated five-storey building of dirty, greyish brick, with a long crack running diagonally from window to window. All the openings, which must have been bricked up once, are now gaping. Behind the building, a huge overgrown waste ground dotted with loose stones, apparently empty, sloping down to a canal where there’s little activity.

But the building in the middle of this wilderness is teeming with life. At ground level, on the strip of beaten earth between the façade and the motorway slip road, there’s a whole crowd of black men in jellabas or brightly coloured shirts coming and going amid the dust – squatting, sitting on wooden packing cases, standing around, chatting, playing cards and doing business. An old man in a long, immaculately white robe sitting motionless on a chair against the wall, face upturned, eyes closed, seems to be drinking in the light of the orange sunset which makes his face glow.

Through the cracks in the wall, glimpses of a central wooden staircase, women in flowing boubous busy around makeshift fires surrounded by hordes of children jostling and running. The upper floors look very animated too. Zé thinks he catches a whiff of the familiar smell of groundnuts and spices simmering. That’s the real thrill of the chase, when the hunter feels this close to his prey. Get a grip. Professional. Loads of squatters, all looking alike. No hope of passing unnoticed with your white mug, even with a deep tan. He pulls out onto the motorway and accelerates.

In a midnight-blue tracksuit, Zé jogs along the former towpath beside the canal. A few warehouses, silos and barges line the quay. Not a soul. He draws level with the Africans’ squat. A fence, broken in several places. Still nobody about. He pulls his tracksuit hood over his shaved head and slips through to the waste ground. A series of stony humps and dips overgrown with brambles, like a field of ruins dominated by the grey brick building, obscured at the bottom by brambles. From this side, everything looks dead. The ground- and first-floor windows are still bricked up with concrete breeze blocks and on the upper floors only a few small holes have been made here and there. Clearly the squatters are wary of the waste ground and are trying to keep it out.

Zé moves slowly and noiselessly, camouflaged by the undergrowth, and comes across a whole network of paths and hidey-holes dug into the ground, protected by cardboard, planks, and sometimes carpeting. You can bet that after dark, this sort of wild garden, so close to the dormitory suburbs, will be teeming with people. Ze looks for a hole that appears to be empty and finds one on an area of high ground near the motorway from which he can watch the building. He clears some space for himself with a few flat stones, wedges himself in and waits. The building looks deserted. In the late afternoon, Zé distinctly hears the noise of people flocking back to the squat and going about their usual business. In the openings of the facade he’s watching, he sees lights flickering. Then darkness falls and the waste ground comes alive. Life rises up from the canal, floats above the ground, as if immaterial. Rustling, whispering, half-glimpsed flames. Zé hopes he’s not in the path of the main tide of people and focuses on the facade. Sniff out any clandestine contacts between the squat and the waste ground. That’s his way in. He lights a joint, to blend in, and pulls his hood down over his eyes.

As the night’s very dark, for a few hours he concentrates on the sounds so as to chart the comings and goings, and thinks he’s identified more intense activity under the brambles at the farthest corner of the building. He doesn’t budge. He waits. Around 4 a.m., life begins to flow back towards the canal and dissolves into the night by osmosis.

Zé uncurls himself, dives under the brambles closest to the building and finds a clear path running its entire length. At ground level, the five bricked-up basement windows must open into the cellars. Zé stops in front of the fifth one, bricked up like the others, and prods the breeze blocks. Finding they’re loose, he pulls a knife from his pocket and inserts the blade between the rubble stones. They’re a snug fit, but not cemented in. Zé moves away quickly, and hides in a dip in the ground, keeping still again. Take time to think.
I
’ve found the front door. No doubt
I
’m sharing it with dealers I know nothing about. So I don’t know what I might find behind it. Don’t want to know. Too great a risk of being seen. Come back tomorrow, properly equipped, and give it a go, blind.

Around 5.30, the lights begin to come on again in the squat. Between the dealers leaving and the squatters waking, I have got a good half hour to act undisturbed. That’s plenty. Zé too makes his way back to the canal.

Back to the waste ground, same time, same clothes, to find the same hole and wait there. The routine, in other words. Zé’s brought an old rucksack, crammed full, and a sleeping bag. The hours tick by. Nothing out of the ordinary. Only, around midnight, a kid who’s already well out of it and really wants to hang out with ‘a grown-up’ and ‘possibly more’. Zé frightens him off with a few curses in Serbo-Croat and the kid doesn’t insist.

4.20 a.m. Zé gets up, walks quickly over to the fifth basement window. Crouching in front of it, from his rucksack he pulls a pair of rubber gloves, a balaclava and night-vision goggles, which he puts on. He inserts a flat hook between the breeze blocks and loosens them just like that, throws his rucksack through the window and drops down into the cellar. First surprise, he hits the ground sooner than expected. A huge underfloor space rather than a cellar. Barely room to stand up. Senses a presence in a corner: a horizontal shape beginning to sit up. In two strides, Zé’s on top of him, pinning him to the floor. He knocks him out with a punch to the chin. He finishes him off with a stone picked up from the ground. Quick, find the the trap door leading up to the ground floor.