The Madonna of Notre Dame (18 page)

“You’re right there, and Gillou’s going to straighten it out. Go easy, Gillou, he’s got some kind of bone disease or something.”

The man called Gillou grabbed Father Kern by the collar of his jacket. Without exercising any actual brutality, somewhat like a cattle breeder immobilizing a young calf, he jammed the short man against the wall and relieved him of his wallet. He threw it on the bed without looking at it.

“Pay yourself, sweetheart. I know him, your dwarf. He had a drink outside the café this afternoon. You don’t forget a face like this. And later, I also had a cop drop by. I could smell him a mile away. He sat inside, watching what was happening on the street. There’s something fishy about all this.”

“I don’t think there’s a connection, Gillou.”

“I’m telling you, there’s something fishy here.”

Nadia wedged the cigarette between her lips and opened the wallet. She suddenly froze. “What’s this?”

The metal cross Kern usually wore on his lapel had replaced the cigarette in the young woman’s fingers. “The old guys who come to see me usually shove their wedding rings in their wallets. What’s this cross? You a priest or something?”

Father Kern didn’t answer. The pain prevented him from thinking and his hands were shaking like two leaves. He clung to the distant, comforting image of the Bayard alarm clock in pieces on the little table in his bedroom, as though remembering the old mechanism had the ability to put him back in control of the situation as well as of his pain. Nadia closed the wallet. “It’s Luna’s priest, Gillou. The one she told us about. Fuck, it’s pathetic. And on top of everything else, the asshole hasn’t got any dough.”

Gillou seized Kern by the collar again, but this time without taking the slightest precaution. “So you’re Luna’s priest? Can you
tell us what happened in that shitty cathedral of yours? What was Luna doing there? Do you know?”

He’d now grabbed him by the throat and was calmly constricting his windpipe. Kern was nailed against the wall. He clutched at the waiter’s fists but these seemed so disproportionately large, they were almost inhuman. His lungs were starting to run out of air when Nadia suddenly got up from the bed. “Let go, Gillou. This guy’s made of china—he’s going to drop dead on us. Anyway, it’s not him that killed Luna.”

“How do you know that?”

“He’s a priest. An old fucker, a pervert, anything you like, but he’s no killer. Just look at him. Luna would have smashed his head in a heartbeat if he’d tried to hurt her.”

“And I don’t believe it was that wacko they showed on TV. The one who went through the window.”

“Let go of him, Gillou, let go.”

“I don’t believe it, I tell you.”

Nadia screamed. “Fuck! Let go! He didn’t do it.”

“How are you so sure?”

“Because all this guy did with me was blubber.”

“What?”

“He took me in his arms then started blubbering all over my breasts.”

The waiter loosened his grip and Kern collapsed on the floor.

“Blubbered, you say? He blubbered over your boobs? Fuck, who is this perv?”

“Just chuck him out.”

“What about your money? You want me to take him for a stroll to the ATM?”

“Chuck him out, I said. Here, give him back his stuff, give him back his shitty cross. Please, just do it, Gillou. I can’t stand this anymore, I’m tired. Luna’s dead. We buried her. I’m fed up
with being a whore so I can have money. I want to go to bed. Sleep and not wake up again.”

She was sobbing but tears refused to flow.

The waiter grabbed Kern by the belt. Not understanding how it had happened, the priest ended up sitting on the sidewalk of Rue Blanche. Finally, some fresh air—more or less. Gillou was standing over him, hands in his pockets and a cigarillo in his mouth.

Some passersby stopped and offered to call the fire brigade. The waiter indicated his café, a few yards away. “Don’t worry, he’s a customer. We know him well. He’s been heavy on the drink again. It’s like this every night. Keeps knocking it back in the bar then falls on his face on the sidewalk. I let him get some air before closing time. He’ll feel better in a couple of minutes, then he can go home. I hope you didn’t drive here at least, Lucien. You shouldn’t drive with all you’ve got in your blood stream. Lucien, do you hear me?” He took a hand out of his pocket. “Here’s your wallet. You left it on the counter again.”

He put it into his jacket pocket. Reassured by this gesture, the onlookers walked away and Gillou lifted the priest by his collar.

“Now you get out of here, priest. Go dip your quill someplace else. And if ever you come back to bother Nadia, I’ll nail you to a cross like you know who. You got me?” Then he took out Father Kern’s metal cross, and threw it into the gutter.

It took him several minutes to find it. He was no longer in control of his hands or his balance. His vision was blurred. Why hadn’t he stayed at home? Why had he decided to play at being an investigator? Cars brushed past him dangerously and honked
their horns. On the sidewalk opposite, a group of three young people were going up toward Place Blanche. One of them had a bottle of Coca-Cola wedged under his arm and his two fists stuffed in the pockets of his tracksuit. They called Kern a drunkard and made fun of him as he searched the gutter for his cross. At the corner of the street, impassive, Gillou was bringing the tables inside one by one.

The priest finally managed to find his cross. He held it tight in his hand as he walked toward the square, supporting himself against the walls in order not to collapse. He knew that if he fell again, he wouldn’t be able to get up. His joints were on fire and his legs weren’t quite obeying the orders of his brain. He looked every bit like a thoroughly hammered drunk, except that the only drunkenness eating away at him on this interminable Via Dolorosa to Place Blanche was pain.

He crossed the boulevard like a blind man, his arms outstretched toward the cars, to the screeching of tires, the screaming of horns and drivers, putting one foot in front of the other in a precarious balancing act, propelled by the movement itself rather than by his own will. The world was now made up only of blurred, multicolored lights, and anarchic voices and noises that echoed painfully in his head. He was unable to make any order out of them. The night had turned into a long tunnel he could not see the end of.

He collapsed on an empty bench on the median strip. How many times had he already walked by there in the past few hours? He’d lost count. He kept seeing himself standing at the edge of a grave, surrounded by young people in white, but he no longer knew who was in the coffin, or if the memory belonged to that day or to the day before or to his youth. He felt trapped, locked up in that everlasting round trip between the den in Rue Blanche and the Montmartre cemetery. He looked at his fists, which he
kept obstinately clenched. The neon signs of the sex shops gave them a violet tint. Or was it the red marks of his illness that were turning a dark purple? How would he get out of here? How would he get home? He rummaged in the pocket of his jacket. His wallet was there. This both comforted and surprised him. He couldn’t remember how it had been put back there after he was searched by the waiter with sideburns. He opened it only to realize that there wasn’t a single bill left. How would he get a cab? How would he get back to Poissy? How would he even walk as far as the Métro entrance he saw nearby? He remained there, sitting on the bench, distraught, his tiny cross clenched in one hand, his wallet in the other, staring at the tower of the Moulin Rouge opposite him, and at the mesmerizing movement of its luminous sails. Once again, he thought of the Bayard alarm clock. This time, he was no longer able to put the pieces together in the huge disarray of his memory.

The three young people he’d seen earlier, and who had been watching him from a neighboring bench while passing around a joint and a bottle of Coke, finally approached. One of them slumped down next to him. Later, he wouldn’t remember their faces, only the smell of the one sitting next to him, a smell of whiskey and leather coming off his biker jacket, a black jacket worn despite the heat, with white letters at heart level. He would remember that smell of whiskey, which was markedly different from the smell of vodka in which he would float later, a little farther along his way through the narrow streets of Paris and his purgatory.

“Hey, daddy, you had too much to drink? Aren’t you scared, all alone with your dough in your hand? Aren’t you scared of thieves, daddy?”

Which of the three had spoken? At first impression, it wasn’t the one next to him, who kept silent while absentmindedly swigging
his bottle of whiskey and Coke. The other two, standing before him, suddenly looked disproportionately tall.

“What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

“What’s he saying?”

“He says he’s hurting all over.”

“Where does it hurt, daddy? Momo, give him a puff.”

“You crazy or what?”

“Fuck, he says he’s in pain. Give him a puff. Go on, daddy, have a smoke, it’ll do you good.”

They placed the paper cone between his lips. At first, he refused, but the second time, he inhaled and the smell immediately brought back to his mind the cells of Poissy detention center. He inhaled again, and again, and again. He was beginning to forget his body, to take off, to float in the warm air like a smoke ring. The cannabis opened up the doors of his memory, taking him back to his brother, at the very beginning, during the first years of his downward slide, before the hard drugs, before all the problems with the police, before jail.

They took the joint from his mouth. “Go easy on this, daddy, it’s good stuff.”

“Feeling better, daddy?”

“Do you have all you need?”

“Do you want some to take home, daddy? Doctor Momo’s orders. I can give you a prescription if you like.”

The others laughed. Kern did, too, not really knowing why.

“How much have you got on you?”

“Show us your dough. How much have you got there, daddy?”

“How much has he got?”

“Fuck, not a cent. What’s this old son of a bitch?”

He didn’t see the leather-clad elbow coming. He felt the impact with his face only later, once he was on the ground and
the volley of kicks had started, and he curled up as best he could under the bench in order to bear them. It was the black jacket hitting him. The other two stood by and watched, hands in the pockets of their tracksuits. He felt warm liquid pour out of his nose, flood over his cheek, into his ear, over his neck and hair. For a few moments, his lips had been moving in vain, and nothing and nobody seemed to be granting his prayer. And he wasn’t addressing God, but his brother. Finally, he heard shouting and the blows ceased.

He felt someone pull him out from under the bench. Instinctively, he shielded his head with his arms but a pair of strong hands grabbed them and pulled them away. He gave up fighting, laid himself open, his arms crossed over on the sidewalk asphalt. What could he, a four-foot-ten runt, possibly do? So he gave in to his fate, to his martyred body, to the blows, and even the prospect of death. His muscles relaxed. For a moment, he thought he was being called back to God, yet the seconds lapsed, each one lasting an eternity. When his nose finally allowed a thread of air through, and he was able to breathe, he saw that something had changed, or rather he smelled it. The odor of whiskey had been superseded by that of vodka. When he opened his eyes and looked up at the sky, he saw a big, bearlike head, large and hairy, something prehistoric, watching him, with fur that changed color to the rhythm of flickering neon signs and headlights sweeping over the median strip. He suddenly felt he was being lifted up in the air and placed on a feather comforter. He clung to it, like a child does to a huge cuddly toy, although only God knew just how much the teddy bear stank. His body was weightless, and he felt light as air. Blood was streaming out of his nose. He raised his eyes to the sky. Above him, the sails of the Moulin Rouge were still performing their lazy circular movement, a movement that nothing seemed in a position to stop that night.

He drifted. The streets of Paris, bathed in this nocturnal bustle so typical of sweltering nights, paraded before his half-closed eyes. People watched him go by with astonishment, some pointing their fingers at him, others laughing. But he knew he was now safe, shielded beneath a shell of filth and stench. Nobody would approach him again tonight. He could finally rest. He closed his eyes completely and let himself be cradled. Dried blood had formed a crust on his cheek and neck. He could hear a crackling sound at every sway of his head, at every nod, to the rhythm of the steps that were carrying him from one arrondissement to another. Steps that weren’t his own.