Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [26]
To get to his grandfather’s funeral, they’d taken an old mainline train with sleeping compartments. Berthet, distraught by the first death in his life, had spent his time walking annoyingly back and forth past his sobbing mother to go jerk off in the train car’s toilet, mentally replaying to the rhythm of the tracks the images of the railway caryatids, their hard breasts, their arms against the gray sky.
When they buried his grandfather in the rain, which played its role perfectly in that cemetery on the outskirts of Abbeville, Berthet wept hot tears because he liked his grandfather, but also because his martyred prick was bleeding a little and he was afraid it would show on his black corduroys.
At the time, the Gare du Nord didn’t look like an airport you’d take to fly to the fourth dimension, a platform for freaks bound to the parallel worlds of dope, an accelerated state of homelessness, and social death. Their medieval-looking faces, their ulcers, their missing teeth, their foul smell of mass graves, their barely articulated speech, all of this was like living blame for thirty years of failure on the part of the welfare state.
At the time, the trains at the Gare du Nord were not designed for high speed, for the exclusive use of global elites.
Blue, gray, Bordeaux trains, phallic enough to make a Laca-nian laugh out loud. And from these trains, men and women pour every hour now, looking busy with their laptops, their cell phones, their bodies full of benzodiazepines, antidepressants, alcohol, come, shit, and the latest figures marking the return on their investments in start-ups in Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Their bodies full of all these things, but not nicotine. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere: Cigarettes stink and smoking can kill you.
At the time, to intervene between those two mutant species, the Gare du Nord did not have mixed patrols of soldiers and uniformed cops, which always makes you think a coup is not far off. Besides, at The Unit, they know that a coup is never far off, that perhaps one is happening at this very moment, though no one knows it. A postmodern coup.
At the time, there were no battalions of special riot police either, transformed into ninja warriors meant to make the new market gap materialize once and for all—a digital divide to the end of time, unbridgeable, an end of the war of all against all. Neck-protecting helmets, opaque visors, Kevlar vests, padding at the joints, walkie-talkies constantly crackling.
And Berthet thinks that he has never liked the 10th ar-rondissement, and the Gare du Nord even less, the Gare du Nord as:
antechamber of the coup
prelude to civil war
back room of electronic fascism
warehouse of the death trade
laboratory of the apocalypse
Once again, Morland is telepathic: “When I arrived from Brussels a little while ago, I said to myself, walking along the platform, that everyone is now living in a permanent state of emergency and everyone thinks this is normal. No one can even remember what this place was like only twenty years ago. Better they don’t, or they would seriously start to panic.”
Morland interrupts himself. Morland burps from the charcuterie, but discreetly because Morland is a high-level intelligence bureaucrat, a classy one, not a bum.
“Fucking hell, Berthet, they’re really after your hide at The Unit …”
The blond waitress brings the bottle of Dilettante.
Berthet is still hard, Berthet tastes. The Vouvray is perfect, heartbreakingly perfect, even when you know that The Unit is ditching you and drinking wines like this one cannot go on much longer.
“You know why?” Berthet asks.
“Hélène. Hélène Bastogne,” says Counselor Morland.
They bring the fricassées of langoustines with cèpes. Berthet and Counselor Morland sniff.
It’s like a forest in autumn by the sea.
And then the