Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [51]
And suddenly I was sure of it. The famous grandson who “was doing real well” was Nico, and that’s why he wanted to have dinner in this neighborhood. Childhood memories, probably, from the time his father was still alive and his grandmother still sane. And I also understood how he was getting his money, his suit, his golden jewels, and why El-Hadji had seemed to liquefy when the old guy had stepped into Chez Léon. I had crossed paths with the 9th arrondissement mafia before. I knew Nico was doomed. He had come to say goodbye to his grandmother.
Careful not to make the wooden steps creak, I continued up. There was a sourish smell, a smell of urine, of a stable where the straw is never changed.
Nico was at the top. He groped his way in the dark to find a big flashlight that pointed at a bunch of rags under the slanted roof. The old woman was sleeping like a tired baby, all red and wrinkled. Her face appeared strangely at peace. Again I could see the former beauty my friend Maria had talked about. She didn’t wake up.
Nico set the flashlight down and bent over inside the halo of light. He took his wallet out of the inner pocket of his jacket and came up with a wad of bills that he deposited next to the pallet. He did the same with his wallet. Then he took off his watch and his gold arm chain, and after undoing his tie, the big chain and pendant he was wearing around his neck followed. He placed everything next to the bills and the wallet. At the end of this strange ritual of stripping, he crudely cut a handful of his curly black hair with a kitchen knife he had found by fumbling around in his grandmother’s stuff, near the cheap wine bottles. He deposited the curls next to his other offerings. When his face came back into the halo of the flash-light, I could see he was crying silently.
He remained there motionless for a good ten minutes, looking at her with great tenderness. Then he kneeled, kissed her hand, and went down the stairs again.
I hardly had time to hide in the darkness of the sixth floor landing; and then I followed him. I knew there was nothing anyone could have done for him but I was moved by a kind of sick curiosity, professional as well as romantic.
When he got to the street, he took off his tie, stuffed it inside the pocket of his jacket, and dumped the jacket in a garbage can. It would soon be covered with oyster shells and lemon peels. Wearing only his shirt with the collar open under the snow that was now falling hard and sticking to the ground, he was walking faster than before, as if eager to put an end to the whole thing.
He turned left and took the Cité de Trévise. I love that park with its fountain and trees, its old, solid, and very bourgeois buildings. The balconies around the square were decorated with white garlands that twinkled under the snow.
Nico stared at them for a few minutes, shivering; he was standing in front of the old store that sells theater wigs at one corner of the square (it seemed right out of a Balzac novel), he was smoking a cigarette he’d had trouble lighting because of the snowflakes. He looked like he was filled with a vague longing for a life that could never have been his. Then he started walking again, along rue Bleue, then the dismal and deserted rue Lafayette, that cold thoroughfare that cuts the 9th arrondissement in two, between the first slopes of Montmartre and the flat, Hausmannian part where I live.
I followed him up to rue des Martyrs and I was almost happy for him that his last walk—for I was sure this was his last—was taking him to a more lively, joyful part of the neighborhood that I’ve always liked. On a night like this, you could feel the magic of Christmas. The windows of the antique stores on the little square Saint-Georges were still lit, and because I was walking very slowly, I spotted a magnificent barrel organ that reminded me of the one in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. Which made me wonder if people who live in the bourgeois 16th arrondissement are so happy or at peace with themselves after all.
The cafés on rue des Martyrs were still