Sphinx (4 page)

This bad quarrel rendered the studious path odious to me and was the final push in my decision to stray from it. I took up the habit of studying in complete solitude at my house, and I would show up to the university
exams without having attended any of the lectures. Padre*** directed my thesis, which I wrote in part while in residence at Solesmes Abbey for three weeks of perfect tranquility, benefiting from the resources of the Benedictine library.

One night we dined well in one of the Padre's favorite restaurants. Over liqueur, after we had finished discussing the thousand problems we faced at the university, he proposed an outing he thought I might like, to a very exclusive nightclub where he was a member. The idea that a priest, in his cassock no less, could frequent these places that the traditional bourgeoisie condemn as places of debauchery might scandalize naïve souls. But in such places I encountered so many people that one would never expect to find there, and witnessed so many scenes that one would think implausible, that the slight surprise I felt then seems to me, retrospectively, to be the mark of an almost ridiculous simplicity. I didn't take the Padre for a saint, I didn't think it improper that a priest went to these places of pleasure, nor even that he went there habitually, and I was no doubt guilty of still more shameful slumming. But the contrast between our pious conversation in the calm of a private room and the surging of music and movement that we would certainly encounter in this club shocked me prophetically, so to speak.

We had to take a taxi there. It was raining, one of those April showers that unfolded a moving curtain of icy pleats in the troubled night air. We sat in silence. I don't know what the Padre was thinking about but I suspect he was observing me, looking straight ahead of him at the windshield of the car, which acted as a mirror in the blackness of the night. The taxi dropped us off in front of an illuminated entrance sheltered from the rain by a white canopy. The Padre rung at the imposing metallic door that bore a copper plaque with the words “Apocryphe—Private Club.” A mesh spy-hole half-opened, then rapidly closed again. A woman opened
the door only enough for us to enter, and then shut it sharply behind us. I couldn't distinguish anything at first, passing from the flood of light in the entrance to the shadows of the antechamber.

A staircase that subsequently I would descend countless times led past the cloakroom and into the club itself. There the maître d' sat us at a table in the corner, next to a staircase leading to the dance floor. From this table we had an almost complete overview of the club without the music deafening us, as it would have done one or two rows closer to the floor. The Padre introduced me to the manager, who came to greet us. He brought us a bottle along with two glasses and some orange juice, which he liked to add to his whiskey. This first time I didn't have the leisure I would have liked to observe the play of lights, the movements and appearances of the people there. The powerful booming of the loud speakers made it so that I had to lean in as closely as possible to hear and to be heard. And the conversation I had that night with the Padre, if I no longer remember it, swept along like so many others I had under similar circumstances, was absorbing enough that I only rarely raised my head. I retain only a fragmentary impression of this first night at the Apocryphe—my first experience at a place like this—as of a city faithfully reconstructed after a bombardment, pieced together from the testimony of photographs. Lights and music of such intensity that space and time were no longer coherent, lacerated and turned upside down in what seemed to be complete chaos. The countless mirrors that went as high as the ceiling and covered even the walls and pillars multiplied dimensions and bodies, preventing me from defining and pinpointing the effects I was feeling and turning the Apocryphe into a topographical enigma.

I wasn't long in returning there, always in the company of the Padre,
who I shadowed in all of his nocturnal outings. In April and May he almost exclusively frequented the Apocryphe, sometimes as often as four nights per week. He would call me at night around nine o'clock, always asking me if I was free and telling me to meet him there. I don't know what brought about this sudden intimacy; the substance of our relationship boiled down to club conversations, not quite the conversations of confidants. Retrospectively, I think perhaps he was hoping for a more intimate liaison, but falling in love with me would have posed him too many problems. Maybe he secretly desired that I would be the one to initiate a declaration he didn't dare make.

One night in May, we were seated at our usual table discussing the performance of
Don Giovanni
we had just seen at the Opéra when George, the manager of the club, came looking for us. He led us along the dance floor toward the bathroom. There, lying on the floor, his head in a pool of blood, the DJ was dying. Next to the toilet were a little blackened spoon and a syringe still containing a bit of murky liquid. George had had this part of the bathroom closed to the public; we pulled the almost lifeless body toward the sinks, leaving a wake of blood. Michel—that was the DJ's name—must have fallen, cracking his skull open against the edge of the toilet bowl or on the ground. In the harsh light of the room we discerned what the faint, colored luminosity of the club had always masked: a deathly pale complexion, skin like plaster, eyes sunken in their sockets and circled with bluish rings. The pronounced marks of cyanosis were visible on his face. The raised sleeve of his shirt revealed an arm marbled with old injection scars. His heart was beating faintly, stopping then restarting. The Padre asked if anyone had called an ambulance. George frowned at the question: he had looked for a doctor among the clientele and, not having found one, had fallen back on a priest. To inform the police of such an incident would be all they needed to close down the
club. The Padre tried to do a few chest compressions before quickly giving up. He began to recite a summary of the Extreme Unction, continuing even when a final jerk produced a grimace that revealed rotting teeth in Michel's death-kissed mouth. The squalidness of the setting, of this demise concocted between dirty water, white powder, and a suspicious syringe, was making me nauseous. The stench of vile shit was invading my nostrils. I bumped into a bottle of vodka that was lying there for no reason; it spilled over the ground where it shattered, mixing its contents with the blood pooled nearby. It was then that I noticed the flies that had come from who knows where to swarm above the puddle.

The Padre and the manager, kneeling on either side of the corpse, said nothing. Although the bathroom was secluded from the club, the imperturbable thuds of the bass still reached us in a mumble. We had to decide the fate of this corpse relatively quickly so that no one would suspect anything. Only Elvire, the bathroom attendant, was abreast of the situation. When she noticed that Michel—whom she had suspected was taking drugs—hadn't come out of the bathroom in a long time, she sensed some kind of accident and alerted the manager, who, forcing open the door, had discovered his DJ in the aforementioned state. Memories of similar scenes in novels popped uselessly into our heads. George was still refusing to alert the police and the Padre was reluctantly starting to agree. The law, other than divine law, mattered little to him, and a dead body was a dead body; the tribulations of a corpse had no influence on the destiny of its soul, now liberated. Michel wasn't leaving behind a widow or an orphan, he had no known relations. Such is the heroic life of a junkie: cruising and seclusion. He had started working there only recently, receiving money under the table.

What were we to do? Seal off this part of the bathroom under the pretext of a leak and, in the morning, once the clientele and personnel
had left, transport the corpse to his house and abandon it there? We would only be shifting the location of the incident; the evidence of Michel's vice would do the rest. But carrying out the operation posed some risks. And a police investigation that was even the slightest bit thorough would have found George and the Padre guilty of paying an employee under the table, failing to assist a person in danger, concealing a corpse, false witnessing, and who knows what else. I would be implicated too, most likely.

Only one solution remained: we had to get rid of this corpse that no one was coming to claim, adding Michel to the list of those vanished without a trace. But where would we put the body? The Seine, that perilous solution, was too far away. All three of us, standing around the corpse, were staring at it and trying to think. Suddenly I spotted a groove in the ground that demarcated the edges of a plaque, partially covered by the corpse. I had been staring at it for a long time without really noticing it. Finally, I asked what it was. It was the entrance to the septic tank and the pump that allowed its contents to flow into the sewer. We moved the corpse onto its side and lifted it up. The tank, commensurate with the size of the club, was big enough for us to imagine hiding a body there. But we had to be careful to avoid blocking the opening of the pump once the corpse was inside, which would hinder its functioning and draw unwanted attention. The motor and its opening were situated at one end of the tank. We had to let the corpse float to the other end and then weigh it down so that it wouldn't drift. The operation, simple in theory, was more complicated in execution: it was out of the question that one of us would go wading in this cesspool; so we had to calculate accurately, and in one stroke thrust the corpse into just the right spot.

First we searched his pockets, removing his wallet and the keys to his car and apartment. George would get rid of any form of identification,
move his car from where it was parked behind the Apocryphe, and purge Michel's house of any clue capable of compromising the establishment. We sent Elvire for some floor rags and a broom. We still needed an object that would weigh the body down to the bottom of this pool of sludge and keep it there. George went to the end of the hallway and opened the door to the cellar where he fetched, concealed in a bucket, a cinder block left over from some construction job in the club, and a synthetic fiber cord that was used during parties as a clinch to suspend lanterns and other decorations. Then it was time to strip the corpse of its clothes, because they too risked hampering the functioning of the pump if they were to drift. We took off his shirt, shoes, socks, pants, even his briefs, which were soaked with urine from the
post mortem
loosening of the sphincters. They were all thrown in a heap near the sink, later to be torn into little pieces and collected in a plastic bag. The body, now naked, was stretched on the tiles, revealing the extent of the disaster brought on by drug abuse. He was skinny; high doses of heroine had shriveled his body, as if burning it from the inside. On all of his limbs, the injection scars—violet, yellow, or black depending on how recent they were—tattooed the Harlequin's costume onto his flesh. The blood that had oozed from his head wound was now nearly coagulated, glued in his blond hair, forming a brown scab upon his scalp. I caught the Padre with his eyes fixed on the dead man's penis and he diverted his gaze. George and I fastened the cinder block in place around Michel's waist with a dozen twists of the fine string. The dead man's eyes, which we had forgotten to close, were regarding me with no regard for me. Their empty fixity wasn't what troubled me, but the weight, in my arms, of this dead body. We each grabbed one end of the corpse. We slid it forward through the opening into the tank, holding onto it until the last second. Then, giving it a strong horizontal push, we let it go. The density of the tank's contents made it bob for a few moments,
sliding before finally sinking. It was swallowed up from the center, under the weight of the cinder block that compressed its abdomen; the legs and arms disappeared last, absorbed as if regretfully by the malodorous mix of excrement and filth. I didn't have the wits about me to recite a
de profundis.
I stood up after letting the slab fall back into place and washed my hands. George and the Padre were attempting to clean the floor of all traces of the incident. I made the spoon and the syringe disappear down the toilet; they went to rejoin their worshipper. In a bag, the Padre collected the dead man's old rags, now reduced to shreds. George threw them deep into a trashcan, where they would soon be buried under the mass of putrescence produced by a night of partying.

In two weeks' time there would be no memory of the person who had manned the turntables at the Apocryphe; someone else would have taken his place, running the same ship with the same consenting slaves. We left the bathroom after asking Elvire to exercise the greatest discretion as to what she had seen. Whether the manager won her silence through money or threats, I don't know, but she kept quiet. We verified that Michel owed nothing at the coat check and we circulated the rumor that, feeling ill, he had asked the manager for permission to leave and had slipped out the fire exit, where he had parked his car. He didn't have any friends at the Apocryphe; the effect of heroin on his behavior had left him alienated, and consequently no one inquired about what had become of him. For the duration of the incident, a pre-recorded tape had covered for the missing DJ. However, things couldn't continue like this for the rest of the night.