Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [48]
Chez Léon: There’s a pale-blue ceramic fountain standing in the middle of the room, always dry, and on each side of it, along the wall, tables for four are enclosed in little booths that make you feel at home.
On that Christmas Eve, El-Hadji had made himself a kind of bullfighter costume and over his white shirt, he was wearing a black satin vest discreetly embroidered with pink silk, bullfighting style. When I got there, the place was empty. He came over with two glasses of champagne and sat down in front of me. He was in a confiding mood so he explained that he had opened tonight not because he was hoping to make money, but because he didn’t want to go to Christmas dinner at his in-laws’ and could go see his babe later. My guess had been correct. His green eyes were shining.
He only had one dinner reservation, two people, around 9:30. He knew he wouldn’t have any unexpected customers, not on a night like this, on such a deserted street, so he would close early.
El-Hadji knew very well that I had come here, by myself, to escape the gloomy festivities, the ready-made, jolly good time you were supposed to have tonight. He didn’t take my order but brought me, as usual, five or six little plates of assorted spicy vegetables. I knew that my traditional tajine chicken-olives would follow, along with a couscous dish. That’s the advantage of being a regular, you don’t have to talk too much. I would wash down my tajine with a Boulaouane rosé, followed by a little glass of fig brandy, courtesy of the house. On Christmas Eve, it’s reassuring to find a place where you can forget you’re all alone on a holiday.
El-Hadji was back at his post behind the bar. He had a beaming, distracted, fixed smile on his face because he was thinking about how his evening would end, and I was day- dreaming in front of my hors-d’oeuvres when they arrived.
It was like an apparition. She was very tall (six-two, as my professional eye automatically informed me), very long; her sublime, never-ending legs were sheathed in soft leather thigh boots studded with fake pearls at the hem.
When she took off her long fur coat, I nearly choked at the view of her back; an oval was left bare by a thin, very short dress of red wool that also let her thighs show. When she got rid of her hat, her curly, jet-black hair fell down to the middle of her back. She had magnificent green eyes and lucky teeth—a space between them, that is. I love women with a space between their upper front teeth, like the actress Maria Schneider. This girl was a cross between Brigitte Bardot ’69, an erotic year, and Maria Schneider—my fantasy women when I was thirty.
The man was up to her—no pun intended: He must have been six-six, like that character in Lucky Luke comics named Phil Defer. I’m not one of these men who claim he’s incapable of telling if another guy is handsome or not, for fear people might think he’s gay. I can tell when a man is handsome, which has nothing to do with the charm that attracts women—I’m a bad judge of that—but that man surely was handsome. It’s all the more praiseworthy for me to admit he was handsome because he had an Italian kind of beauty, handsome but vain and dumb-looking, which I’ve always hated for no particular reason. He was immense, well-built, curly smile and frizzy hair, the typical playboy you picture in your mind, shades on his nose, muscles flexed on his Vespa as he drives along the beach to pick up all the chicks.
In short, that couple made a major impression. Even El-Hadji, who is pretty tall himself, only came to his customer’s shoulder. When he brought my tajine, his annoyance was evident through his forced smile: “Who does that broad think she is? She handed me her coat like I was her servant.” She probably didn’t even see him.
What do you do, alone in front of a tajine on a Christmas Eve, when such a spectacular-looking couple sits down at the next table? You look at them. And if you are a good private eye, you look at them with your ears pricked up without them