Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [44]
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