BY
JEAN-BERNARD
POUY
Le Marais
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
The whole neighborhood called him Zatopek.
Every morning he’d trot five times around the Place des Vosges at a slow pace, keeping under the archways even though it’s a lot more exciting, humanly speaking, to be running beneath the linden trees of the park when it’s nice out.
Something every other stupid jogger in the area actually does.
But he was nothing like any of those fitness fanatics who sweat in their name-brand, pastel-colored, see-through jogging suits, their iPods in their ears, rings of perspiration under their armpits, and the stupid look of someone forced to read Derrida.
He didn’t really look like your basic 4th arrondissement bourgeois bohemian who works himself up into a sweat before he gets on the sweaty backs of the employees in his start-up company. His shaggy head, his strange and frightening grimaces, his intimidating glances, his tramplike clothes, they all stood out in this temple of outdated good taste. He spoke to no one. Not even to himself. He never bumped into anyone, even when passing right by the tables of Ma Bourgogne from where a group of apprehensive Italian-American tourists watched him go charging by, breathing hard and staggering on his skinny legs like a frenzied duck, as if he intended to send their tea and pastries crashing down.
His ritual was unchanging: On his third loop he would stop in front of me and I’d hand him a glass of water, which he’d gulp down like a camel. In my old-fashioned black-and-white waiter’s livery, I felt like a magpie or, on weekends, like a stork giving a drink to a muddy and exhausted fox.
When he’d completed his five rounds of the Vosges Stadium he would disappear, literally melting into the ancient stones of the rue de Birague, passing beneath the archway of the Pavillon du Roi, and no one would see him again for the rest of the day. But at 9 on the dot the next morning, summer and winter, Zatopek would reappear from the rue de Béarn, on the other side, emerging from the Pavillon de la Reine as if he were charging down onto the cinder track in Prague.
Several of us, true professional barkeepers, had figured out that he’d been working out like that for three years. Five times, or about two kilometers, around the square each day over three years adds up to a total—another round, boss!—of 2,190 kilometers in all. Hats off. Here’s to you.
Zatopek.
And then one clear Tuesday in late September he didn’t show up. Nor the following day. The neighborhood was in turmoil. Worse than if a thimble signed Buren had been found in place of the huge, hideous Louis XIII statue planted smack in the middle of the park. We waited. Maybe Zatopek was sick. Or maybe he had corns on his feet. Or his tibias had perforated his knees—who knows what might have happened with that stupid obsession with jogging.
Going from bar to bar, from store to store, we began a speedy little investigation, questioning neighbors like the cops do when they’re out to piss everybody off. No one around had heard anything about an accident. No old folks run over by a bus, not by the number 29 or the 96. No firemen or EMS personnel had been called anywhere. Nothing special had occurred.
It was as if Zatopek had suddenly left for the Olympic Games to defend the honor of the 4th arrondissement before the whole world. Our patient concern lasted a good week. No news at all about our anonymous champion. I waited every day with my glass of water in hand.
A strange panic came over all those who truly loved the Place des Vosges. It was something of a catastrophe. The appeal of the place had suddenly lost one of its vital components. An appeal we had created, protected, and sheltered inside us. In spite of the droves of tourists, guides, and the dismal parade of rich people from the 16th arrondissement who come bursting onto the square every weekend, from rue des Francs-Bourgeois—where else—with gullible faces and teeth sharp enough to cut through the asphalt in search of a duplex to buy. In spite of the avalanche of new galleries under the arcades, filled with ghastly art geared to the lobotomized, showing nothing but pathetic naïve art, lascivious nudes in soft bronze, and hyperrealist paintings of Bordeaux bottles. In spite of all the children tearing at each other in the park’s sandboxes; in spite of the homeless who camp out right beside Miyake’s.
We missed Zatopek.
As if in a small village in the Creuse, the mailman was no longer coming by.
My job as waiter at Ma Bourgogne provides me with free afternoons. After the lunchtime rush, my replacement arrives. Then I leave to join my colleagues in the neighborhood bars. The International League of Barkeepers. Very pleasant to be served. For once. But hey, we don’t bug the waiter all the time. And we leave a tip.
We had gradually formed a group held together by super-glue. For professional reasons, of course; as a group it was easier for us to stay up to date on vacant positions, replacements, and little extras to earn on the side. But we were also attached to our little community for reasons of survival: There were about ten of us who were sick of hearing about soccer games and having to silently put up with the vaguely racist conversations of customers barely awake in the morning or half-sloshed in the evening.
I presented the problem to them and I must have talked like Victor Hugo in exile, for they got on board very quickly. We decided to reach out to everyone we knew to try and find out a little more about Zatopek. Where did he come from? Where did he live? Where did he go? All the questions that had never really occurred to us over the last three years. Our mascot was so reliable. Every day, at more or less the same time. Like the mail. Like a radio broadcast.
If we, seasonal sidewalk waiters, had spotted Zatopek, other people must have seen him too. Janitors, street sweepers, storekeepers, we were going to approach everyone. Strangely enough, we really missed this weirdo who came shaking his little legs on our turf every day. Some uneasiness about using the past tense when speaking of him. It just goes to show how concerned we were about what might have happened to him.
There was a sense of drama in our activity, not sure why, it was pure intuition. But something didn’t feel right. The whole neighborhood was being hacked away, the old residents dropping off one after another, replaced by young heirs with slicked-back hair; the former notion stores and wrought- iron workshops were turning into clothing stalls which then turned into restaurants where you paid twenty euros for a radish salad.
To take stock of the situation we picked 3 o’clock on Saturday at Jean-Bart on the corner of Saint-Antoine and rue Caron, a cool, bustling café-tabac filled with unintelligible young people and Keno addicts.
In less than a week the job was done.
Three janitors later, we knew where Zatopek lived. Number 12 rue Saint-Gilles. A cavernous, paved courtyard full of ancient workshops, old and crumbling apartments, makeshift shelters, the poor man’s idea of a loft.
I used to walk around there sometimes during my break in the hope of finding an attic room to rent. I was sick of having to cross all Paris every morning.
With Jean-Louis, who slogs away at the café-tabac on the corner of Saint-Claude and Turenne, I went to check out the place, our hearts in our mouths, afraid of finding out that the old jogger had died. Surprise. Impossible to enter beneath the old-fashioned arched entry: A huge wooden fence barred the doorway. Demolition permit. To be followed by the construction of a group of apartments, some of which would be “affordable housing.” Project manager, the IMPACTIMMO Society with the City of Paris as its client, at least for the public housing part. Behind the boards, a construction site, gigantic.
So that’s what it was. Real estate. Plain, dirty real estate. That moral scourge. With its cynicism set in cement. As for Zatopek, they had found him another pad. Somewhere. Far away no doubt. Maybe in a nursing home. Maybe in a shelter, who knows?
Bastards! The heartless sonsofbitches!
An old guy. He’d spotted us scrutinizing the official notices with disappointment. Cap, cane, the type who spends all day hanging around trying to find someone to talk to.
“I used to live here, they threw me out, I won’t tell you how, those bastards, nobody budged, I was one of the first, they didn’t care …”
“Can we buy you a drink?”
“I won’t say no, boys.”
The old fellow was as endlessly talkative as his gullet was bottomless. We learned a ton about the Place des Vioques—the Old Squares Square—as he called the Place des Vosges. He knew everybody. And more importantly, Zatopek. Whose real name was Monsieur Girard, as it said on his mailbox. But he had never made friends with the old madman, a retired railroad worker—that had to be why he was galloping all day long, probably took himself for a locomotive. The only one who managed to talk with him was old Marthe, the one who took the garbage out and sometimes cooked for two. She had vanished as well. No mystery there. Pushed toward the exit little by little, everyone had left. Those bastards from IMPACTIMMO had succeeded in evicting all the residents of number 12 in less than a year. How were they doing it? By negotiating, supposedly. With a little dough—very little given the neighborhood—but the poor who lived there didn’t know any better. Or else, with the oldest and the nearly bedridden, a placement in a home for the elderly, impossible to get under normal circumstances. For this guy it was different, he’d jumped at the money even knowing it was a rip-off, but he had a weak heart. He had given it all to his daughter, who let him have her maid’s room on rue de Turenne. With his puny retirement pension, he could hang on until the grave.
The strange thing was that we suddenly had the feeling we knew it all and yet had learned nothing. The only lead we had was old Marthe. The garbage woman. She might know a little more about Zatopek. But she had left without saying where she was going. She might well have returned to the provinces. Stashed away in some slum, a country dump twenty kilometers from the nearest grocery store. Our marathon man, too, for that matter. Running through the fields wouldn’t be too terrible a sentence.
We let our old timer keep stewing about those rotten real estate sharks a while longer, then left him in front of his fifth Picon beer.
We were stuck.
To get any further, to try and find more traces of the former tenants of number 12, we would have needed an armada of muckrakers. It was hard to feel reassured by the possibility that Zatopek had been safely put away somewhere. In view of the state he was in, that somewhere could be a stinking shelter, a place like a prison where they’d slowly anesthetize you, where they’d just let you croak. Because it costs society too much to take care of its relics. Even the daily Parisien says it, and that’s saying something.
The days went by and the Place des Vosges was looking hard in the direction of Versailles. And to think that I’d known that square as a little kid, a real rough place then. With the opening of the Picasso Museum everything had changed. Consequently, the Spanish paint-splasher had pushed the whole area toward the classical era, chic, conservative, with a platinum checkbook. Even if the joint where I work, my Bour-gogne, had always been classy. It used to be a gem in a rugged setting. Now it was a gem among other gems. With Jack Lang practically living above it.
It was Joseph, who worked nights at the Elephant du Nil by the Saint-Paul metro station, who reopened the hunt. There was this old woman, a funny one who hung out at his bar every morning; she came from the rue de Fourcy senior housing. She’d attack her first glass of white wine and lemonade at 10 in the morning and get steadily soaked until noon. She’s soaking up her coffin, the owner would say. A real chatterbox. A nasty one too, angry with the entire world.
We went there the following Saturday as a delegation, a group of union representatives. And we sure weren’t disappointed. It was good old Marthe, the garbage lady of number 12, the one who knew Monsieur Girard—Marcel to his friends, Zatopek to us. A poor devil. Retired from the railroads, gone half-crazy after he’d pulled parts of a woman who’d been run over by a freight train car. Crazy, for sure, but only halfway, completely with it at other times. Together with her, Zatopek had been the only one to truly fight the real estate jackals. He owned his small two-room apartment in the back of the courtyard and screamed that he’d only go feet first, they wouldn’t mess with him. The old guy was borderline straightjacket. And in excellent health; he even went running, can you believe it?
“Where does Monsieur Girard live now?”
“What do you want with Marcel?”
“Nothing. We don’t see him on Place des Vosges anymore so we’re worried. He was a friend, an acquaintance.”
“Oh really? Did he talk to you?”
“Not really. He’d smile. We liked him.”
She observed us, her glass of white wine in hand. With her blue smock, her red cheeks, and her eyes an opaque white because of cataracts. Cute as hell, like an old enamel coffeepot. Which could burn your hands if you didn’t watch out.
“Why are you worried?”
“We don’t know. That’s why we’d like to know where he is. So we can stop worrying.”
She scrutinized us for a long time. Time enough to empty her glass and order another.
“One morning he wasn’t there anymore. He’d left during the night.”
“He moved?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, he left everything. Two days later, two guys from Emmaus came to load up his stuff. Nothing much. Rickety furniture, some old things, borderline homeless stuff. He must have taken everything worth something with him. Clothes probably.”
“Did he have family elsewhere, like, I don’t know, in the provinces?”
“I don’t think so. Besides, he was a Parisian, a real Parisian, a Parisian down to his toes.”
And so on. She kept talking for quite a while, she couldn’t let go of us. She felt important at last, and that pleased her. Late in life, almost at death’s door, she’d found an audience. But for us it was just padding. We let her talk, we had the basics. Zatopek had suddenly disappeared.
A bit too suddenly.
That Saturday, as we prepared to leave rue Saint-Antoine—already overrun with leisured people stopping every twenty meters to study the restaurant menus and real estate ads—we decided to change our approach. We sat down around some blazing hot pizzas and very quickly, without anyone taking the lead, decided to kick into high gear. No one dared to openly express the negative thoughts that had just entered our heads. The rotten smell of a shady operation. The stench of a dirty trick.
Somberly, we divided the work. It looked like a meeting of anarchists plotting the stormy end of the Republic. Each of us knew we had to get rid of that bad taste in our mouth.
Maurice from the Dôme had a cousin who worked at City Hall. He’d asked her. No trace. Marcel Girard had never asked for any assistance at the municipal offices and always paid his residence tax. He had recently provided a change of address: in Montargis, rue des Hirondelles. He was therefore no longer of concern to the Paris administration. We checked Montargis; rue des Hirondelles didn’t exist.
Same story, more or less, at the Railroads Pension Fund. It was Samir, from the Fontenoy at the corner of Saint-Gilles and Beaumarchais, who had the job of investigating this. Marcel Girard had not cashed his last two money orders. The post office had declared them Unknown at this address. The French national railway company had no new address listed. They were waiting. Had to. Without a death certificate, the law required them to wait one year before closing the account. As soon as anything new came up, they’d let Samir know. Thanks, that’s very nice of you.
We saw Marthe again. After thirty liters of white wine, she agreed to take us to the person in charge of her residence who, very kindly, began an inquiry among similar institutions. Nothing. There was no one in Paris or the surrounding area by the name of Marcel Girard living in a nursing home, senior housing, or the like. No one with an extended stay in a hospital either.
All this took us about two weeks. Two weeks during which we kept going forward despite the tiny spark of hope getting hit with more bad news, bad but not definitive. Perhaps he was now homeless, living in one of those camper tents that keep popping up on the banks of the Seine and the Saint-Martin canal.
Two weeks for our hearts to sink deeper and deeper, avoiding the thought of the old runner having passed away.
But a village is always a village, even inside a big city, even buried inside the City of Lights, that unavoidable city which people from all over the world come to admire, their eyes sparkling and smiles frozen on their faces by the blinking Eiffel Tower. In a village everyone knows everything about everything and the shutters are never closed. Bernard, the waiter at the Mousquetaires on the corner of rue Beautreillis, serves beer to all the fans of The Doors who come ogling the banal façade of the building where Jim Morrison kicked the bucket. He’s been hitting on the lady mail carrier who told him that the headquarters of the DAL—a leftist group that focuses on housing issues and has been battling the real estate sharks for years—is right near rue des Francs Bourgeois.
I got the job. They appointed me to sniff around in that direction. The lefties might know something about the number 12 rue Saint-Gilles scheme.
The activist was practically a grandma. Not the leader but a key person. Very interested in our story, even over the phone. I set up a meeting with her at Ma Bourgogne. As she settled down in the back of the room, slipping in behind the white tablecloths, she grew wide-eyed; no doubt the first time she’d ever dared enter this place reserved for the platinum card holders.
Full of fun, bubbly. A Pasionaria. Who was probably getting revenge for something, maybe her previous life. The DAL knew—those were her words—the monstrous, disgusting scandal of number 12 inside out. They had opposed it, tried everything, even a surprise occupation, quickly repelled by the cops, but nothing had done any good, the press had barely mentioned the scandal, a clear reflection of the new, cynical harshness of the ruling class. The white-collar gangsters of real estate capitalism were acting somewhat legally, but it was a legality that was infinitely variable, for they were protected by the government. This explained why the former residents, even though they knew they were being ripped off, had all, or almost all, accepted the skimpy bit of money. So they could leave as quickly as possible.
And one of the main reasons, according to this pugnacious old lady, was that the negotiating team was led by a retired police chief named Henri Portant, a sly and devious fellow, using a mix of kindness, threats, understanding, and harshness as he must have used throughout his career. For a fellow who’d spent thirty years getting the toughest of the tough to talk, dealing with scared old people with no support was a godsend.
She herself had met him once, only once, the day when the DAL had been alerted that he would turn up with his assessors to try and persuade the tenants in the back courtyard of number 12. She remembered him as a guy who breathed calm strength, very calm, incredibly calm, like someone with no scruples whatsoever, absolutely no reservations, doing a job that undoubtedly paid him twice as much as what he was offering his victims.
The rebellious grandma asked us to let her know if we were able to dig up anything. The story of number 12 was sticking in their throats. The DAL had legal resources. Any proof of embezzlement could be taken very far, no reason to give up. It’s not because the enemy wins every battle that the war is lost.
Our meeting at the Jean-Bart on the following Saturday was morose. We laid it all out. Bernard was the first to speak.
“It’s very simple. Zatopek doesn’t want to leave. He has no family. They see him as a crazy man and no one else at number 12 gives a shit.”
“Except Marthe.”
“But what can that old hag do? No, Zatopek doesn’t count. And that old wreck is certainly not the one who’s going to throw a monkey wrench into the system or even slow it down.”
“Time is money.”
“And who’s on the other side? Tough guys, handsomely paid to throw everyone out.”
“With a former cop in command.”
“We should find out more about this guy.”
“We already have. The quiet, kind Inspector Maigret fond-of-his-veal-stew type is gone.”
“Right. Cowboys now, that’s what they are …”
“So? Come on! What’re you thinking?”
“The old guy, he must have left in a truck, buried under rubble. Or he fell inside the foundation and they poured concrete on him. Who would know?”
Bernard had said it. He’d said what everyone was thinking. Once it had been said it seemed true. It was no longer a foolish thought. It became a plausible reality. Awfully plausible. An anonymous grave.
And now what? What were we supposed to do with this bitch of a quasi-certainty?
“We need to check it out.”
“Check what out?”
“Portant. The cop. We need to—”
“Torture him? So he’ll spill the beans? How do you expect to do that?”
“No. Meet with him. To find out more.”
“He’s a cop. We’re not cut out for that. Look at us: a bunch of bored waiters, nice guys crying over a poor old madman, not even a customer. The Cartier-Bresson type …”
“Still, we managed to dig up some shit.”
“Okay. But what are we up against, poor forty-year-old slobs with little potbellies that we are? The pigs. City Hall. Plenty of powerful guys whose arms are so long they could slap us from thirty kilometers away.”
We looked at each other. We knew Maurice was right. From start to finish. But we also knew that being right wasn’t good enough. That’s the way it was.
“It won’t cost us anything to find out a little more,” I said slowly.
We wasted no time. It was so obvious. The Internet. The phone book. There were several Portants. But only one Henri. He lived at 22 rue de l’Insurrection in Vernon-sur-Eure. I called him, claiming to be an employee of the CNAV Pension Fund. I talked about a file issued by the police department that was confusing me because the addressee was already retired.
He fell for it. He began to yell. There’s the administration for you! He wasn’t surprised, it’s a mess over there! He was yelling so much that when he asked for the file number so he could give them all hell, I hung up.
So now we knew where he lived.
So what?
So nothing.
Except that two days later Samir got a call from the lady at the Railroad Pension Fund. Marcel Girard had just reappeared. He had asked that his small pension be sent to his new address, 22 rue de l’Insurrection in Vernon-sur-Eure.
Saturday.
We were all there.
With the same findings, worthy of a detective story but one that’s hard to finish.
“On top of wasting him he’s now grabbing his money.”
“He buried Zatopek in the garden of his stupid house, for all we know.”
“Sounds like the Landru case. Or Petiot. That kind of shit isn’t new.”
And then we looked carefully at each other. Testing each other. Silently. For a long time. The time it took for two more glasses of kir. In an hour I’d have to be back at work at the Place des Vosges. To serve all those rich fucks who look at you as if you’re ectoplasm. An ectoplasm who never works fast enough. They call you by snapping their fingers. They bellow from beneath the archway: “Garçon!”
So I made up my mind.
“Tomorrow I’ll go to Vernon. To take a look at the scum-bag’s face.”
“I’m going too,” Samir said.
“Count me in,” Maurice added. “I like action. In memory of Zatopek. We’ll see what happens.”
We left very early. In Maurice’s car. That guy is a gadget freak, his entire salary goes into anything new. He even had a GPS on his dashboard. He drove well and he drove fast, nearly risking points on his driver’s licence. We ate up the 130 kilometers like you gobble down a ham sandwich and reached Vernon by 9.
Thanks to the GPS we easily located rue de l’Insurrection. In a residential development built in the ’80s. Imitation modern houses with lawns decorated with ceramic dwarfs, sculpted hedges, and at least one araucaria tree every fifty meters. It reeked of money, but not too much. It had the smell of retired civil servants’ money. With cars primly parked in front of the outmoded mansions of their owners. The cushy life. Far from Darfur. Nothing to do with all those wretched, helpless, old folks who vegetate in the big cities, sometimes eating out of the same cans as their mangy dogs.
In a silence that spoke volumes, we waited for a solid hour, sitting in the car without knowing why, vaguely hoping to see the cop. Nothing. Other people were coming out of their houses with swarms of kids, rushing to their cars. A picnic. A walk in the woods. Perhaps mass. Sunday lunch at a restaurant and then a movie. Well-deserved peace.
And then he came out. Small and fat.
Without thinking, we disembarked from the car, approached him like the brothers Earp at a pathetic OK Corral. Three against one. We just wanted to talk to him. I started three meters away from him.
“Monsieur Henri Portant?”
He stopped. Same reflexes as before. Inspecting us. Weighing what could be happening here. Who we might be. He was thinking, that was obvious. Perhaps we were ex-cons he had caught before who were coming to take revenge. Or highway robbers about to rip him off.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Are you Henri Portant?”
“What is this about?”
We hesitated. We didn’t know where to begin.
The former cop moved his hand toward the inside of his jacket. Samir reacted very fast, jumped him, smashing him with the head butt of the century.
Portant fell backward screaming. I pounced on him to pull him up and drag him off. Into his house. All of this taking place right in the middle of the street, a major mistake.
He was bleeding, his crushed nose was leaking like a fountain. His startled blue eyes were barely visible behind that red river.
I grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and pulled him up to his feet with difficulty. He was moaning and blowing bubbles.
“Bunch of assholes,” he muttered.
I smacked him. He groaned. He was in pain.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe it!” Maurice cried out behind me.
I turned around.
Some twenty meters off, Zatopek was moving toward us, grunting, trotting along down the sidewalk.