Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [21]
That, he couldn’t explain to Rachid. How to explain that the rich no longer needed to import the poor to keep their factories going since they’d now set up the same factories in their own countries—work at home, you might say.
“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
“Uhh …”
“Malcolm X.”
They stopped for a moment in front of the Place de la Sorbonne. Where once again, no doubt to make fun of him, Big Brother gave Rachid a lecture.
“On rue du Fouarre, every house was a school. But how could they house all those people who were piling up on the straw during the day and wandering around looking for a place to stay at night? So they created colleges! They were a dormitory, a shelter, and a cafeteria all in one. Robert de Sorbon, Saint Louis’s chaplain … May he rot in hell, King Louis. Robert de Sorbon received a house near the Baths from the King. The man took in sixteen poor students who were studying for their doctorates in Theology. That’s how the Sorbonne was born, on the very same spot as this late nineteenth-century complex, which is quite ugly, with a seventeenth-century chapel in the middle of it that is quite lovely. Cardinal Richelieu is the one who gave the Sorbonne that magnificent chapel, in which he is buried. A masterpiece of classical architecture.”
Big Brother was playing tour guide, pointing to the façade of one of the most famous universities in the world. As for Ra-chid, he was watching the female students who were coming out of their last classes of the day.
Night had fallen and only the cafés around the Sorbonne lit up the square where these long-haired enigmas were walking by. They intrigued Rachid.
Blondes, brunettes, redheads, tall ones, small ones, some wrapped up in warm clothes, some undressed in spite of the cold or because of the cold, with pink cheeks—they flashed by, their legs like rockets, flashed by like mercury to catch their bus, or to get swallowed up by the Metro, to disappear forever from the face of the earth for at least one night; for the next day, with the first gleam of light, these early-blooming bouquets would swing into motion again, stems in the morning wind.
Rachid was beginning to have a poetic soul. Was he getting all emotional from the contact with Paris, the City of Lights? Were Big Brother’s lectures beginning to bear fruit?
As for Big Brother, he didn’t give a shit about women, cared for them about as much as his first VD, which he got at fifteen from the wife of the super of his building, avid for youth and exoticism. Since then he’d had no time to waste on all that. He didn’t even have the means to do it anymore.
They stationed themselves in front of the first building on rue Gay-Lussac at the corner of boulevard Saint-Michel. Big Brother played the keyboard of the access code box, the big door opened, and they moved into the lobby. A friend in the post office who owed him one had given him the code. Life is hard for those men of letters and a little white powder livens up the deadest days. And then, everybody knows a mailman’s salary doesn’t cover the needs of a runny nose and a brain above it in withdrawal.
The superintendent wouldn’t be in, his cokehead friend had assured him. And it was true.
Big Brother looked up a few names on the mailboxes. He pushed a button on the intercom and waited. Nothing. They shouldn’t hang around too long, he knew. He tried another name. Silence. Then a crackle. He heard a sleepy, slow Yes, no doubt the voice