Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [1]
We’re having a smoke outside the well-lit café, Momo and me. It’s been eight months now that smokers walk around the sidewalks in circles like penitents. My first time in New York, I got a kick out of watching the ballet of smoked-out people moving in and out of bars. Never in France,I said to myself. But we French end up doing everything exactly as the Americans do, a few years later at best. So the time is right to include Paris in the Akashic Books Noir Series. Momo thinks, and rightly so, that I’m short of brilliant ideas, so there he goes drawing a historical picture of Paris, the city of crime. He tells me about the working classes, exceptionally dangerous, who peopled the belly of Paris in the nineteenth century, until the bourgeoisie kicked them out with big avenues and urban renewal under the reign of the late, unlamented Baron Haussmann.
Two beers later, Momo is on the Butte Montmartre with the gangsters of the ’30s and ’50s, the early days of junk deals, streetwise Parisian kids, and loud, foul-mouthed prostitutes whose slang could frighten even the bigwigs. The problem with Momo is that he loves beer and the more he’s in love, the less clear his ideas are. He’s now on to the filmmaker Melville, the actor Alain Delon (he’s one of our specialties like unpasteurized Camembert), and sepia photographs.
But all of a sudden it dawns on me that practically nothing of this improvised lecture has registered, and I get all tense. No wonder you learn things in classrooms, not sitting on hard stools in cafés where the atmosphere is too bright (as in the famous “Atmosphère, atmosphère, estce que j’ai unegueule d’atmosphère, moi?”—Arletty’s indignant response to Louis Jouvet in the film Hôtel du Nord).
Back in front of my insomniac computer, this is what I tell myself: The key thing to say is that Paris is a city that lives, and thus dies, every day. No point hiding behind history or war memories. What is a threat to Paris, to its noir dimension even, is potential “museumification,” the possibility of the city turning into a big theme park. In Paris, after all, everything is still there. All you have to do is look around with eyes wide open. In the shadows of his big car, the chauffeur in Marc Villard’s story dreams about saving the love of his life, a prostitute stranded on the asphalt like a bird caught in an oil spill. Further up north, around the train station, Jérôme Leroy follows in the footsteps of a guy on the run with the feds at his heels, and the men in black aren’t simply agents of the FBI. Concurrently, Salim Bachi lets us examine two young men of Arab descent who have a hard time fitting into a closed society; unfortunately, whether in Paris, New York, or Karachi, it’s hard to resist the temptation of violence, always present, insidious, and sneaky.
And what about that Chinese guy, delightfully depicted by Chantal Pelletier? He thought he’d have a taste of the famous French cuisine … until he realizes that the choice dish will be himself.
Far from cliché postcard photos, we witness the revenge of the waiters along with Jean-Bernard Pouy: They go to a lot of trouble to locate an unknown jogger who has mysteriously stopped taking his daily run through the Place des Vosges and disappeared.
Everything takes place in cafés, not just Momo’s beer-soaked history lessons. That’s where the doomed lovers in this volume meet to secretly celebrate Christmas.Didier Daeninckx’s reporter, an expert in tracking rumors on