Translated by Nicole Ball
Faith has been broken
Tears must be cried
Let’s do some living
After we die
—Keith Richards/Mick Jagger
There are better places than a restaurant in the 9th arrondissement to be spending Christmas Eve, that’s for sure. Even though I’ve been a regular there and a pal of the owner—the successive owners—for the last twenty years, for as long as I’ve lived in the neighborhood.
Actually, Chez Léon is not exactly near my home, but going there gives me a reason to walk a bit. Well, it’s not that far, really … I live on rue de la Grange Batelière—a well-read client, there are some, told me that George Sand had lived there as a child, I think—and Chez Léon is at the corner of rue Richer and rue de Trévise, almost across from the Folies Bergère, where busloads of American and Japanese tourists in search of “Gay Paree” pour out every summer. It makes for a 200-yard walk and allows me to get cigarillos at the café-tabac on the corner of Richer-Montmartre. That café is run by a couple, both tattooed and particularly unpleasant, but fun to watch. And watching people is what I do for a living.
Because I’m a private detective. A “private eye,” as they say in American novels. But there’s nothing glamorous about my life: I don’t have a fedora and I don’t wear a trench coat (well, yes, I do wear one, because it often rains in Paris.) Nobody thinks of Humphrey Bogart when they see me; I don’t go see his films anymore since the Action Lafayette movie house closed (to be replaced by a cut-rate supermarket) because they’re not shown anywhere else in the neighborhood, and I don’t watch them on TV either because I find them irritating. I find them irritating now, I mean. But thirty years ago, I used to like the dark romanticism of those movies and sometimes I tell myself that without The Big Sleep, I wouldn’t have picked this line of work. Back from the Algerian war, I probably would have been a pastry cook like my dad, and I would have been disgusted with napoleons by now. Good thing I finally saw The Big Sleep. Although …
It really is a rotten job, especially after thirty years, and it does wear you out. Now, whatever’s left of my hair is white, I have trouble walking (arthritis, from too much time keeping watch in the rain, hidden behind the column across from the Ritz, waiting for an unfaithful wife), and I look more like Maurice Chevalier in Love in the Afternoon than Bogart; Maurice Chevalier plays another movie private eye but this one is closer to reality. To mine at least. Now there’s a movie I would gladly see again. But the first time I saw it—a terrible copy with Italian subtitles showing at a small film festival at the Action Lafayette—it somewhat depressed me. (Originally, it was because of the two movie theatres—the Action Lafayette on rue Buffault and Studio 43 on rue du Faubourg Montmartre, now replaced by a hair salon—that I chose this neighborhood in 1985, a time when you could still find a rare film by combing all of Paris.) It’s a comedy but it’s only funny to non–private detectives—or private detectives who don’t raise their daughters alone—which still gives it a pretty large audience.
Now that my daughter no longer lives with me and she’s with her mother in Nantes, I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, with a touch of nostalgia even. For without Lola—my daughter’s name is Lola, not Ariane like Chevalier’s in the movie—I’m bored. She’s been gone six months, studying Public Relations at a school paid for by her mother (and her rich step-father) in Nantes, a city her name predestined her to, probably. A dirty trick from my ex-wife to lure her there, obviously. She was supposed to come back for Christmas but the rich stepfather invited her to Chamonix and she’ll only get here on the second week of her break, after New Year’s.
All this to say that, as far as Christmas Eve goes, I had no choice. If I was to spend it by myself, I might as well go to Chez Léon instead of staying all alone with my TV, my canned foie gras, and my lukewarm champagne. I was told they wouldn’t have any mother-in-laws going yackety-yak or revelers celebrating there.
So, on that Christmas Eve, the first one without Lola, it was raining. And what’s worse than Christmas alone in a restaurant to escape from an old two-room apartment in a dark building in Paris’ 9th arrondissement, except Christmas alone in a restaurant to escape from an old two-room apartment in a dark building of Paris’ 9th arrondissement in the rain.
It had been raining for the last two days. I had spent them hanging around the Royal Monceau to catch a super-rich but unfaithful emir whose wife had hired my services, and I had been gazing at the gloomy twinkle of the garlands in the trees of avenue Hoche, under the indifferent eyes of the passersby; sheltered under their umbrellas, they were looking down to avoid the puddles on the sidewalk, busy with their last-minute Christmas shopping. The Arc de Triomphe, way at the end, never seemed so dismal, and my arthritis had flared up.
On that day of December 24, I had returned home late in the morning, after a stake-out of several hours, and I had made myself a hot Irish toddy (boiling whiskey and cloves). After that, I had buried myself under the eiderdown quilt passed down to me by my great-grandmother.
I had slept a good chunk of the day and after I woke up, I listened to some Bach Christmas cantatas to get into the spirit of the day, comfortably settled in my Voltaire armchair, bundled up in three blankets with a Jack Daniel’s. Keith Richards listens to classical music too, I suppose. He did break a leg when he fell from the stepladder in his library … We must be about the same age. I fantasized for a while about old Keith listening to Bach, then I put on some Stones for good measure. I started with “Time Waits for No One” because of Mick Taylor’s solo (he’s the greatest guitarist they ever had) and because the bourbon, the rain, Christmas by myself, arthritis, and my elusive Arab sheikh and all had put me in a morose mood. After a third Jack Daniel’s, a very hot bath, and the complete recording of Exile on Main Street, I felt a little tipsy, no longer in the Christmas spirit, but reinvigorated and even combative. A combative melancholy, so to speak, an energetic melancholy like in “Let It Loose.”
I slipped into gray pleated pants, white shirt, bow tie, and the narrow-waisted, shiny dark red jacket with thin black threads that makes me look like a pimp, according to Lola; then, armed with my huge red umbrella and a dry raincoat, I was on my way to Chez Léon.
It was 9 p.m., the festive Parisians were celebrating at home, and rue de la Grange Batelière was empty.
I felt like having a drink somewhere, to take part in the upbeat mood of a crowded bar on a holiday evening, or to take in the gloomy atmosphere of an empty bar on a holiday evening. I’ve always liked to hang out over a beer, at night, in train station bars, preferably in the suburbs right outside Paris.
But the wine bars across Drouot were closed, and the dark, dismal glass walls of the auction hall loomed against the sky blurred by the vague drizzle that had followed the afternoon rain. I had rarely seen the neighborhood so dead. More than dead even, deserted, as if the inhabitants had fled to escape a Martian attack, as if they all had been stricken by the plague.
I kept on walking along rue Drouot up to the Grands Boulevards. After a day spent softening in the warmth of my bed and a half-bottle of bourbon, it felt good to walk a bit and my arthritis was no longer bothering me. On boulevard des Italiens, a group of lost, jolly Americans swooped down on me—I was the only living soul in view—and asked me where the Grand Café was. It always gives me pleasure to speak English, as I don’t get to use it often in my profession, so I gladly gave them the information. Grateful or completely drunk already, they made as if to drag me along; I had a really hard time declining the invitation without offending them. I finally convinced them that I was expected somewhere else. A white lie which was hard to tell. Not because I mind lying, but it made me realize how poor my English is, even though I like to use it.
In this state of mortification, I turned left toward the Faubourg Montmartre and Chez Léon. I thought I could take a shortcut through the alleys. They have the feel of Paris in the old days, they give you the illusion of breathing in the smell of its old lampposts. They remind me of Céline and his Passage Choiseul and I was looking forward to seeing the storefront windows illuminated on a Christmas night. Never turn down your nose at simple pleasures. I love the store that sells replicas of old toys on the left of Passage Jouffroy: It brings back my soppy side and the good little boy I used to be. There’s also the cane store on the other side, near the Musée Grévin (one of Lola’s greatest pleasures). I’d love to get a cane someday but they’re too expensive. Or more simply, I’m embarrassed to open the door and wake up the old gentleman with tortoise shell glasses who always seems to be dozing off behind his counter.
As I could have guessed, the Passage Jouffroy was closed, its gates down. Gloom was creeping in and on an impulse, I nearly went back home to finish myself off with Jack D. while listening to the Stones and Johan Sebastian Bach. The thought of the next morning’s hangover stopped me. I know too well how getting smashed on bourbon makes me feel. I had my share of that in another life, before Lola was born. But now, no thanks. Morning hangovers stay with me for the rest of the day and it’s enough to sober me up. So I kept on walking toward Chez Léon.
The novelty store was also closed, of course. I used to buy surprise bombs for Christmas and New Year’s Eve there, and fake mustaches that Lola found hilarious. On those evenings, I would be reminded that I was a single father, and once she was in bed, I would get plastered on whiskey and cry in my glass. The Chirac and Spider-Man masks flashed morose smiles at me.
The café of the tattooed couple, on the other hand, was still open. Because of the festive occasion, she was displaying, instead of her usual biker T-shirt, a low-cut one that enhanced her fake pearls and her Jane Mansfield breasts, as unappetizing as a soft block of butter. Not that it made her any more pleasant. She was grumbling at a short Asian man who insisted on paying for a cigarette lighter with a two hundred–euro bill; I thought I heard her call him a “Chink,” as in Tintin in Tibet, and that made me laugh. Coward as I am, I answered her mumbles with a fake, knowing smile. I’m one of her old regulars but I’m always afraid she might put me down.
Her husband, thin mustache, all dressed up too—black leather pants and orange tie—refused to serve a beer to a lonely old lady adrift in the neighborhood. He was bullying the waiter. “Come on, Marcel, move it! You know we’re invited to Mimine’s sister’s for Christmas dinner. That asshole told us they’ll start the oysters without us if we’re not there by 10.” He calls all the waiters Marcel—I’ve seen many pass through here, all sickly looking and underpaid—like in the old aristocratic families where all the maids were rebaptized as Marie. I hate those old aristocratic families.
Rue Richer, devoid of street lights, was dark—its pizza places were closed, its kosher butchers (Chez Berbèche, served better) had their shutters drawn, its travel agencies (also kosher) offered dream vacations sprawling all over faded posters at bargain prices to the rather scarce customers.
I heard the screams of the crazy woman across from number 46 (I learned from an erudite client of mine—another one—that Alexandre Dumas had briefly lived at that address). She’s famous in the neighborhood; some people complain and want to have her committed. She apparently lives in a hovel at the top of the stairs of the building where the Goldenberg grocery store used to be. (It closed down a few months ago and its front is now blinded with cinder blocks.) You can see her stroll about, dirty as a pig, always wearing the same thick woolly petticoats that she doesn’t pull down to take a piss (she doesn’t squat either, does everything standing up, like an animal), the same heavy, filthy sweater, with her old wino face. The supers of the nearby apartment buildings give her a little money to do chores for them, scrub staircases or take out the garbage in the middle of the night. Sometimes one of them, Maria, an old friend of mine who takes care of the 46 building, pulls her inside her home and forces her to shower. I know the woman through her. She must have been very beautiful once. When she leaves Maria’s place, when her gray hair has just been washed and isn’t greasy or all tangled, you notice how beautiful it still is and what a sweet, rugged face she has. Her name is Elena, she came from Italy (Ferrara) before the war to flee Mussolini, and later, her whole family, with the exception of one son, died in Auschwitz. Maria knows all this because she was already here twenty years ago and because Elena, who lived in a studio apartment belonging to Goldenberg, was still talking at that time. Then her son died, she became a bag lady, and she stopped communicating. Well, she didn’t exactly stop: She still expresses herself: She lets out terrifying howls at night, from the window at the top of the stairs in her building; that’s where she took her rags after she stopped paying her rent.
She bays at the moon, like a dog, like an animal, as if she has no language, as if she can no longer articulate and the howling comes from a huge red hole deep inside her mouth. Like the desperate woman she is, to whom nothing matters anymore. Those who want to get rid of her or commit her are the young yuppies who subscribe to special cable channels like Canal+. They’ve invaded the neighborhood in the last few years, like rats in pin-striped suits. I hate young yuppies who subscribe to Canal+. The people who’ve been living here for a long time—old Jews with payess and yarmulkes you see on Saturday mornings hurrying to the synagogue with lowered eyes, in white shirts, black suits, and hats—pity her. She’s one of them, only in more despair than they are perhaps. According to Maria, she may have a grandson who’s “very successful,” no one knows in what capacity; he would like to move her into an apartment of her own, somewhere else, but she doesn’t want to; she wallows in her loneliness and misery.
When she screams, you can hear her in the silence of the night for blocks around. In the summer, if I have my window open, her animal cries split the air above the rooftops like a witch’s broom and come to me.
She doesn’t howl every night, only when she’s scared or when she remembers that day during the German occupation when she came back home to find out that a roundup had taken place and that all her family had been taken away.
Her screams don’t bother me anymore, but on that Christmas Eve, under the thick drizzle that had started up again, in that deserted street whose sidewalks would tomorrow be lined with garbage cans overflowing with oyster shells, they made me shiver. I started to walk faster.
Chez Léon is a big, long room with a bar on the right side. I sometimes go there at the end of the evening to have a drink with the owner, a cocky young guy from Morroco I like; he suggested a couple of years back that we go into business together: The idea was to set up a car deal between North Africa and France. His name is El-Hadji; he’s a fun-loving Muslim with a sexy walk and a soft way of looking at you. Conversations are rather limited with him—sex and money—but it doesn’t matter because you can feel friendship behind the words and occasionally even something like tenderness.
Our friendship nearly suffered a major blow three years ago when he got it into his head that Lola, whom he had known since she was very little, was becoming “a real knockout,” as he put it. I had no desire to see Lola be a member of El-Hadji’s harem even if he’s my friend and a nice guy. But I stuck to the principles of education I’ve always given Lola and I didn’t prevent her from going out with him when he invited her to dinner. A good decision really. After the third time, she said he was the biggest asshole, that he was so fucking thick, and how in the world could a guy like that be my friend. She didn’t set foot in Chez Léon for several months after that and I was able to go back to my routine there, without ever bringing up the business with my pal El-Hadji.
I happened to help him out, professionally, once or twice, and since then, it’s friendship for life between us, he says. I’m not that committed; I only hope he stays here; I don’t want him to drop everything and move to the suburbs—he talks about doing that sometimes. I just want to keep coming here like tonight, like I’ve done for the past ten years since he showed up as a young waiter. I want to keep bathing in the milk of human kindness, as Shakespeare wrote, more or less.
El-Hadji got married six months ago (after I did a little investigation on his bride to be, at his request, to see if she was faithful) and he stopped talking about women for a while. (It’s sort of coming back now.) He’s a complete egocentric: A week after his wedding, he had his sexy head of curly hair clipped because it was more comfortable for wearing his bike helmet; and now that he’d found a serious woman, he didn’t care about being good-looking anymore.
His wife is pregnant now and for the last two or three months he’s been complaining about her big belly and letting his hair grow back. Something’s cooking but I have no business trailing him.
Chez Léon: There’s a pale-blue ceramic fountain standing in the middle of the room, always dry, and on each side of it, along the wall, tables for four are enclosed in little booths that make you feel at home.
On that Christmas Eve, El-Hadji had made himself a kind of bullfighter costume and over his white shirt, he was wearing a black satin vest discreetly embroidered with pink silk, bullfighting style. When I got there, the place was empty. He came over with two glasses of champagne and sat down in front of me. He was in a confiding mood so he explained that he had opened tonight not because he was hoping to make money, but because he didn’t want to go to Christmas dinner at his in-laws’ and could go see his babe later. My guess had been correct. His green eyes were shining.
He only had one dinner reservation, two people, around 9:30. He knew he wouldn’t have any unexpected customers, not on a night like this, on such a deserted street, so he would close early.
El-Hadji knew very well that I had come here, by myself, to escape the gloomy festivities, the ready-made, jolly good time you were supposed to have tonight. He didn’t take my order but brought me, as usual, five or six little plates of assorted spicy vegetables. I knew that my traditional tajine chicken-olives would follow, along with a couscous dish. That’s the advantage of being a regular, you don’t have to talk too much. I would wash down my tajine with a Boulaouane rosé, followed by a little glass of fig brandy, courtesy of the house. On Christmas Eve, it’s reassuring to find a place where you can forget you’re all alone on a holiday.
El-Hadji was back at his post behind the bar. He had a beaming, distracted, fixed smile on his face because he was thinking about how his evening would end, and I was day- dreaming in front of my hors-d’oeuvres when they arrived.
It was like an apparition. She was very tall (six-two, as my professional eye automatically informed me), very long; her sublime, never-ending legs were sheathed in soft leather thigh boots studded with fake pearls at the hem.
When she took off her long fur coat, I nearly choked at the view of her back; an oval was left bare by a thin, very short dress of red wool that also let her thighs show. When she got rid of her hat, her curly, jet-black hair fell down to the middle of her back. She had magnificent green eyes and lucky teeth—a space between them, that is. I love women with a space between their upper front teeth, like the actress Maria Schneider. This girl was a cross between Brigitte Bardot ’69, an erotic year, and Maria Schneider—my fantasy women when I was thirty.
The man was up to her—no pun intended: He must have been six-six, like that character in Lucky Luke comics named Phil Defer. I’m not one of these men who claim he’s incapable of telling if another guy is handsome or not, for fear people might think he’s gay. I can tell when a man is handsome, which has nothing to do with the charm that attracts women—I’m a bad judge of that—but that man surely was handsome. It’s all the more praiseworthy for me to admit he was handsome because he had an Italian kind of beauty, handsome but vain and dumb-looking, which I’ve always hated for no particular reason. He was immense, well-built, curly smile and frizzy hair, the typical playboy you picture in your mind, shades on his nose, muscles flexed on his Vespa as he drives along the beach to pick up all the chicks.
In short, that couple made a major impression. Even El-Hadji, who is pretty tall himself, only came to his customer’s shoulder. When he brought my tajine, his annoyance was evident through his forced smile: “Who does that broad think she is? She handed me her coat like I was her servant.” She probably didn’t even see him.
What do you do, alone in front of a tajine on a Christmas Eve, when such a spectacular-looking couple sits down at the next table? You look at them. And if you are a good private eye, you look at them with your ears pricked up without them being aware of it.
It kept me busy for a while. She was truly extremely beautiful and when I heard her speak, I thought I was hearing Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep. I’m not an unconditional fan of Lauren Bacall, I even find her a bit stupid to tell you the truth, but I love her husky voice.
The handsome guy—very chic: gold watch and chain bracelet, pocket handkerchief matching his tie, chic like I myself could never be—was looking lovingly, with ecstatic eyes, at his sweetheart. Behind his façade of young businessman, it was easy to see a kid in love. He was no more than twenty-five, too young to be a businessman really, or else he was a particularly gifted one; he looked like a sweet boy.
The couple was rather nice, actually. Busy watching them as I was, I had forgotten my tajine, which was getting cold, as well as my Christmas blues, and the fact that I had taken refuge at my friend El-Hadji’s so I wouldn’t be alone.
The young man’s name was Nico. Hers was Teresa, Teresa, Teresa, a name he kept repeating to get closer to her, to possess her, to convince himself she was his. She looked at him tenderly, as if he were a puppy-like little brother who happened to be her lover too.
After El-Hadji had served each a mayonnaise lobster, he brought me my fig brandy and sat down. I kidded him a little: “Since when have you been serving lobster? You bought it frozen?”
He shrugged. “I bought those lobsters just for them. Fresh. I know how to cook them perfectly. The guy insisted on having lobster when he made the reservation. I told him this was a Tunisian restaurant; he said yes, he knew that, he used to come here a long time ago, but he absolutely needed to have a lobster dinner here tonight. What could I do? The customer is always right and I wanted to open the restaurant tonight anyway. Besides, it was the only reservation I had … Shit! I forgot to bring them their Chablis.”
Apparently, they hadn’t noticed and El-Hadji, holding the bottle with his eyes lost in space, had to wait a solid minute so as not to interrupt a passionate kiss. The girl was so beautiful that there was nothing indecent about the kiss.
El-Hadji came back to my table to tell me at length about his plastic Christmas tree. He hadn’t set it up because he didn’t want his place to feel too much like Christmas; it felt dumb. He was wondering if he would set it up tomorrow morning to make the place feel like Christmas after all, but the tree was in the attic, all dusty and one branch missing. Just to attract a few customers (because, you see, tonight is actually okay, but if it’s empty like this till January, business will suffer).
I was sort of listening while enjoying my second glass of fig brandy when suddenly I saw Nico turning ghastly pale as he peered toward the entrance.
A man had walked in. He was shabby-looking: short, almost dwarflike. His grayish complexion, under a two-day beard, was as rumpled as his suit, which was too big, floating around him with a faded pink that reminded me of that particular color my first grade teacher vividly depicted as “drunk vomit.”
He could have been fifty as easily as seventy. His greasy, thin gray hair was showing from under his felt hat, which he hadn’t removed. You felt like giving him spare change to go get a sandwich.
Everything happened very fast. Handsome Nico turned pale, I glanced at El-Hadji, expecting him to get rid of the intruder, but the aforementioned El-Hadji was petrified: He turned red and lowered his head, concentrating intensely on the few grains of couscous in the congealed sauce on my plate. Nico got up from his seat, abandoning his sublime Teresa, and walked over to the visitor.
Nico, the handsome, flamboyant Nico who had entered Chez Léon just a little while ago, was no more. He was taking little steps with his head down. Next to him, the visitor seemed to be a real midget, but a midget with authority.
The older man made a sign with his finger; Nico bent down so their heads were at the same level. I think the guy whispered something to him but I couldn’t be sure. What I’m certain about, though, is that he smacked Nico on his left cheek with his right hand, a pat really, like in the game where you hold each other’s chin while singing that little song and whoever laughs first gets slapped on the cheek. Except this was no game.
Nico didn’t return to his table. Suddenly hunched, crushed, aged, he left the restaurant. The old man didn’t move. He watched Nico leave, then walked to my table where El-Hadji had remained, as white and rigid as a wax statue.
“Give the lady whatever she asks for. Here’s the money.”
He put a small wad of two hundred–euro bills on the table and walked away. El-Hadji, his eyes still down, didn’t check, but clearly there was enough cash there to cover all of his evening expenses, and even if he served caviar by the ladle to his customer, he could close the place and reopen after the holidays without losing anything.
“The mafia,” he stammered.
The old man had left.
The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than two minutes and Teresa still hadn’t reacted, as if she hadn’t realized that her beau had abandoned her there.
Funny things happen in Paris, that’s for sure, whispered the little provincial guy from Savoie (my father’s pastry shop was in Albertville) sleeping inside of me. But his big brother, the one who grew up and became a private eye, had to find out more.
I jumped from my seat and left with my dark red jacket with black threads.
The old man seemed to have vanished in the deserted street, but I spotted a spineless, raggedy shape who was throwing up on the garbage cans. It was Nico. He hadn’t walked more than fifty yards in two minutes. He was dragging his feet, on his way to doomsday.
On rue Richer, there was no sign of the crazy woman and everything was silent. You could see garlands on Christmas trees twinkling through windows. The rain had turned into a light snow that evaporated when reaching the ground, just as the old man had. The shabby old guy was like a genie, like a snowflake, I said to myself jokingly. He evaporates, disappears, doesn’t exist anymore.
But Nico’s ghost still existed and was sticking to the asphalt. He looked like he was dragging an invisible ball and chain. And then I saw him negotiate a quarter-turn to his left (with difficulty, as his body wouldn’t obey him anymore), and go into the Goldenberg building, the one with store windows blinded by cinder blocks, the building where the old Italian woman, the desperate, crazy Jewish woman lived.
I followed him. The building, ready to be torn down, was deserted and sinister. The marble lobby smelled of mold and at the bottom of the large stairwell, a yellowish stone goddess covered with black and blue graffiti proudly displayed a nudity no one was interested in anymore. The rise and fall of elegant Hausmannian architecture. But I wasn’t there to write about the history of the 9th arrondissement.
Following him was so easy I was almost ashamed. He paused on each step of the large, pompous stairwell. (In other times, young romantic men must have climbed it already on their way to becoming paunchy bankers with pear-shaped heads à la King Louis-Philippe.) I said to myself, and I thought it was funny, that I shouldn’t have been a private detective or a pastry cook like my dad, but a scholar, a historian.
In the dark, barely lit by the snow falling behind the broken transom windows, Nico kept going up, with me trailing him. We were two characters in a silent, black-and-white film, screened in slow motion. It was bitterly cold. A rat scrambled between my legs; I held onto the banister and felt the paint peeling. Falling would be all I needed. Hello! Merry Christmas!
The stone staircase ended at the fifth floor but Nico took a smaller wooden one spiraling up to the next floor which, in another era, must have been where the maids’ rooms were located. I stopped at the bottom of that ladder of sorts which ascended to the heavens. Everything was dark up there.
So that’s where the crazy woman lived, then, and she was the one Nico had come to visit. A picture, a little blurry still, started to take shape in my mind.
And suddenly I was sure of it. The famous grandson who “was doing real well” was Nico, and that’s why he wanted to have dinner in this neighborhood. Childhood memories, probably, from the time his father was still alive and his grandmother still sane. And I also understood how he was getting his money, his suit, his golden jewels, and why El-Hadji had seemed to liquefy when the old guy had stepped into Chez Léon. I had crossed paths with the 9th arrondissement mafia before. I knew Nico was doomed. He had come to say goodbye to his grandmother.
Careful not to make the wooden steps creak, I continued up. There was a sourish smell, a smell of urine, of a stable where the straw is never changed.
Nico was at the top. He groped his way in the dark to find a big flashlight that pointed at a bunch of rags under the slanted roof. The old woman was sleeping like a tired baby, all red and wrinkled. Her face appeared strangely at peace. Again I could see the former beauty my friend Maria had talked about. She didn’t wake up.
Nico set the flashlight down and bent over inside the halo of light. He took his wallet out of the inner pocket of his jacket and came up with a wad of bills that he deposited next to the pallet. He did the same with his wallet. Then he took off his watch and his gold arm chain, and after undoing his tie, the big chain and pendant he was wearing around his neck followed. He placed everything next to the bills and the wallet. At the end of this strange ritual of stripping, he crudely cut a handful of his curly black hair with a kitchen knife he had found by fumbling around in his grandmother’s stuff, near the cheap wine bottles. He deposited the curls next to his other offerings. When his face came back into the halo of the flash-light, I could see he was crying silently.
He remained there motionless for a good ten minutes, looking at her with great tenderness. Then he kneeled, kissed her hand, and went down the stairs again.
I hardly had time to hide in the darkness of the sixth floor landing; and then I followed him. I knew there was nothing anyone could have done for him but I was moved by a kind of sick curiosity, professional as well as romantic.
When he got to the street, he took off his tie, stuffed it inside the pocket of his jacket, and dumped the jacket in a garbage can. It would soon be covered with oyster shells and lemon peels. Wearing only his shirt with the collar open under the snow that was now falling hard and sticking to the ground, he was walking faster than before, as if eager to put an end to the whole thing.
He turned left and took the Cité de Trévise. I love that park with its fountain and trees, its old, solid, and very bourgeois buildings. The balconies around the square were decorated with white garlands that twinkled under the snow.
Nico stared at them for a few minutes, shivering; he was standing in front of the old store that sells theater wigs at one corner of the square (it seemed right out of a Balzac novel), he was smoking a cigarette he’d had trouble lighting because of the snowflakes. He looked like he was filled with a vague longing for a life that could never have been his. Then he started walking again, along rue Bleue, then the dismal and deserted rue Lafayette, that cold thoroughfare that cuts the 9th arrondissement in two, between the first slopes of Montmartre and the flat, Hausmannian part where I live.
I followed him up to rue des Martyrs and I was almost happy for him that his last walk—for I was sure this was his last—was taking him to a more lively, joyful part of the neighborhood that I’ve always liked. On a night like this, you could feel the magic of Christmas. The windows of the antique stores on the little square Saint-Georges were still lit, and because I was walking very slowly, I spotted a magnificent barrel organ that reminded me of the one in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. Which made me wonder if people who live in the bourgeois 16th arrondissement are so happy or at peace with themselves after all.
The cafés on rue des Martyrs were still brightly lit, and down the street, on the right, the beautiful produce store—managed by a Moroccan guy who couldn’t care less about Christmas—was open. After reaching boulevard Rochechouart, Nico turned left toward Pigalle. The sex shops splattered the night with their bright lights, but the whores, freezing under their much-too-short synthetic fur coats, didn’t even try to seduce that strange passerby wearing only his shirt in the snow, disheveled, lonesome, and disgraced, already a shadow.
On Place Blanche, Nico got into a big black limousine that seemed to be waiting for him there. It went around the traffic circle and down toward the Opéra. The snow on the ground was so thick by now that the limousine had a hard time moving forward and I could easily follow it. My feet were freezing inside my cowboy boots and I said to myself that at least Nico was out of the cold. Rue Blanche, La Trinité Church, less forbidding than usual under the snow, and the huge Christmas tree twinkling in the little park. The doors of the church were wide open, a well of light, like the mouth of hell. A loudspeaker played “Silent Night” over and over for the few faithful who were cautiously walking to midnight mass. But I don’t like hymns or mangers anymore. I’ve lived too long.
The limousine was moving forward, solemnly, silently, like a black whale lit by the bluish whiteness of the snow. Behind the Opéra, without slowing down—granted, it wasn’t going very fast—one of its doors opened up and a body fell out. Finally, the car accelerated in the mud and disappeared in the direction of boulevard Haussmann.
The intersection was completely empty; the Santa Claus of the Galeries Lafayette, tucked away inside the warmth of its department store window, was moving his arms mechanically for nobody, with his ugly, hairless papier-mâché reindeer standing in the cotton snow.
I walked up to Nico. He had stopped breathing and his confession, scribbled in a shaky handwriting—I have betrayed—was pinned to his chest with a knife. He looked like a frightened little boy. I closed his eyes and left.
The Godfather, one of my favorite movies, only came to my mind when I was in front of the Opéra. I thought of all the killings and the death of Al Pacino’s daughter at the end, on the steps of the Palermo opera. The scene amused me and I think I even smiled. How theatrical these Italians are! But really, it would have had more panache if they had disposed of the body in front of the Opéra, at the foot of the majestic staircase rather than behind it. The way they had done it here, it looked kind of lame. The 9th arrondissement mafiosi were small-time gangsters.
Cars were scarce on Place de l’Opéra but you could already see a few dressed-up silhouettes: early revelers in suits and long dresses returning home after the twelve strikes of midnight; frail silhouettes against the snow carefully making their way—they could have been right out of a Dauchot painting.
I came to know Dauchot well, at the end of his life. I had paid him a visit twenty years earlier in his studio towering above Pigalle and we had become friends. I would drop by his place sometimes in the morning and have a drink there, when I was depressed after a night stake-out. He was the only friend of mine who could give me a dry pastis, like Robert Mitchum, apparently, when he was on a shoot in Corsica, at 8 a.m. He would show me the painting he was working on, though at the end, the poor guy wasn’t painting much. We didn’t talk a whole lot but we were fond of each other. I love friendship. I sure miss that poor old drunk.
Rue du Faubourg Montmartre was almost magical, surreal, in the quiet of the snow. But my heart wasn’t into dreaming.
Fifty yards beyond the intersection, flying over the snow, the screams of the crazy woman pierced the silence. I had never heard her howl so loudly, to the point of exhaustion. You could feel she was breathless. A few seconds of silence and it would start up again, a long, strident sob, inhuman, so human, unbearable. The nearer I came, the more I felt for her. I was sorry that she hadn’t died in her sleep, that she had seen the things her grandson left. Nico, out there, under the dead gaze of Santa Claus, had probably turned into a vague snow heap by now.
A police van came skidding along the buried street. It stopped in front of the crazy woman’s building. People in the neighborhood must have called to complain, finally. Nobody’s very patient on Christmas Eve …
On my way up to my place, I heard Tino Roastbeef’s stupid “Petit Papa Noël” song trumpeting out from under a door. I wasn’t in the mood. I nearly rang the doorbell of my downstairs neighbor, an eviction officer with ugly daughters, and acted tough, like a private dick, threatening to smash his face if he didn’t turn the sound down. But then, why bother? I was too tired, even to talk.
When I got home, I sank into my Voltaire chair and bour-bonized. I finished off everything I had left. And I listened to “Wild Horses” over and over again, not the Stones’ version but my buddy Elliott Murphy’s Last of the Rock Stars, last of the bluesmen, the ultimate loner, like Dylan, like Neil Young. He lives not far from here, on rue Beauregard, on the other side of this arrondissement. Sometimes when I feel blue, I go visit him; he takes his guitar and plays some Willie Dixon for me. Beautiful, my friends, just beautiful.
But tonight, it was Christmas and it was too late. And Elliott, after all, is a married man and a father.
So I kept on playing “Wild Horses,” all alone.
On Christmas morning, I had a terrible hangover.