Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [50]
Nico didn’t return to his table. Suddenly hunched, crushed, aged, he left the restaurant. The old man didn’t move. He watched Nico leave, then walked to my table where El-Hadji had remained, as white and rigid as a wax statue.
“Give the lady whatever she asks for. Here’s the money.”
He put a small wad of two hundred–euro bills on the table and walked away. El-Hadji, his eyes still down, didn’t check, but clearly there was enough cash there to cover all of his evening expenses, and even if he served caviar by the ladle to his customer, he could close the place and reopen after the holidays without losing anything.
“The mafia,” he stammered.
The old man had left.
The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than two minutes and Teresa still hadn’t reacted, as if she hadn’t realized that her beau had abandoned her there.
Funny things happen in Paris, that’s for sure, whispered the little provincial guy from Savoie (my father’s pastry shop was in Albertville) sleeping inside of me. But his big brother, the one who grew up and became a private eye, had to find out more.
I jumped from my seat and left with my dark red jacket with black threads.
The old man seemed to have vanished in the deserted street, but I spotted a spineless, raggedy shape who was throwing up on the garbage cans. It was Nico. He hadn’t walked more than fifty yards in two minutes. He was dragging his feet, on his way to doomsday.
On rue Richer, there was no sign of the crazy woman and everything was silent. You could see garlands on Christmas trees twinkling through windows. The rain had turned into a light snow that evaporated when reaching the ground, just as the old man had. The shabby old guy was like a genie, like a snowflake, I said to myself jokingly. He evaporates, disappears, doesn’t exist anymore.
But Nico’s ghost still existed and was sticking to the asphalt. He looked like he was dragging an invisible ball and chain. And then I saw him negotiate a quarter-turn to his left (with difficulty, as his body wouldn’t obey him anymore), and go into the Goldenberg building, the one with store windows blinded by cinder blocks, the building where the old Italian woman, the desperate, crazy Jewish woman lived.
I followed him. The building, ready to be torn down, was deserted and sinister. The marble lobby smelled of mold and at the bottom of the large stairwell, a yellowish stone goddess covered with black and blue graffiti proudly displayed a nudity no one was interested in anymore. The rise and fall of elegant Hausmannian architecture. But I wasn’t there to write about the history of the 9th arrondissement.
Following him was so easy I was almost ashamed. He paused on each step of the large, pompous stairwell. (In other times, young romantic men must have climbed it already on their way to becoming paunchy bankers with pear-shaped heads à la King Louis-Philippe.) I said to myself, and I thought it was funny, that I shouldn’t have been a private detective or a pastry cook like my dad, but a scholar, a historian.
In the dark, barely lit by the snow falling behind the broken transom windows, Nico kept going up, with me trailing him. We were two characters in a silent, black-and-white film, screened in slow motion. It was bitterly cold. A rat scrambled between my legs; I held onto the banister and felt the paint peeling. Falling would be all I needed. Hello! Merry Christmas!
The stone staircase ended at the fifth floor but Nico took a smaller wooden one spiraling up to the next floor which, in another era, must have been where the maids’ rooms were located. I stopped at the bottom of that ladder of sorts which ascended to the heavens. Everything was dark up there.
So that’s where the crazy woman lived, then, and she was the one Nico had come to visit. A picture, a little blurry still, started to take shape in my mind.