Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [55]
To take stock of the situation we picked 3 o’clock on Saturday at Jean-Bart on the corner of Saint-Antoine and rue Caron, a cool, bustling café-tabac filled with unintelligible young people and Keno addicts.
In less than a week the job was done.
Three janitors later, we knew where Zatopek lived. Number 12 rue Saint-Gilles. A cavernous, paved courtyard full of ancient workshops, old and crumbling apartments, makeshift shelters, the poor man’s idea of a loft.
I used to walk around there sometimes during my break in the hope of finding an attic room to rent. I was sick of having to cross all Paris every morning.
With Jean-Louis, who slogs away at the café-tabac on the corner of Saint-Claude and Turenne, I went to check out the place, our hearts in our mouths, afraid of finding out that the old jogger had died. Surprise. Impossible to enter beneath the old-fashioned arched entry: A huge wooden fence barred the doorway. Demolition permit. To be followed by the construction of a group of apartments, some of which would be “affordable housing.” Project manager, the IMPACTIMMO Society with the City of Paris as its client, at least for the public housing part. Behind the boards, a construction site, gigantic.
So that’s what it was. Real estate. Plain, dirty real estate. That moral scourge. With its cynicism set in cement. As for Zatopek, they had found him another pad. Somewhere. Far away no doubt. Maybe in a nursing home. Maybe in a shelter, who knows?
Bastards! The heartless sonsofbitches!
An old guy. He’d spotted us scrutinizing the official notices with disappointment. Cap, cane, the type who spends all day hanging around trying to find someone to talk to.
“I used to live here, they threw me out, I won’t tell you how, those bastards, nobody budged, I was one of the first, they didn’t care …”
“Can we buy you a drink?”
“I won’t say no, boys.”
The old fellow was as endlessly talkative as his gullet was bottomless. We learned a ton about the Place des Vioques—the Old Squares Square—as he called the Place des Vosges. He knew everybody. And more importantly, Zatopek. Whose real name was Monsieur Girard, as it said on his mailbox. But he had never made friends with the old madman, a retired railroad worker—that had to be why he was galloping all day long, probably took himself for a locomotive. The only one who managed to talk with him was old Marthe, the one who took the garbage out and sometimes cooked for two. She had vanished as well. No mystery there. Pushed toward the exit little by little, everyone had left. Those bastards from IMPACTIMMO had succeeded in evicting all the residents of number 12 in less than a year. How were they doing it? By negotiating, supposedly. With a little dough—very little given the neighborhood—but the poor who lived there didn’t know any better. Or else, with the oldest and the nearly bedridden, a placement in a home for the elderly, impossible to get under normal circumstances. For this guy it was different, he’d jumped at the money even knowing it was a rip-off, but he had a weak heart. He had given it all to his daughter, who let him have her maid’s room on rue de Turenne. With his puny retirement pension, he could hang on until the grave.
The strange thing was that we suddenly had the feeling we knew it all and yet had learned nothing. The only lead we had was old Marthe. The garbage woman. She might know a little more about Zatopek. But she had left without saying where she was going. She might well have returned to the provinces. Stashed away in some slum, a country dump twenty kilometers from the nearest grocery store. Our marathon man, too, for that matter. Running through the fields wouldn’t be too terrible a sentence.
We let our old timer keep stewing about those rotten real estate sharks a while longer, then left him in front of his fifth Picon beer.
We were stuck.
To get any further, to try and find more traces of the former tenants of number 12, we would have needed an armada of muckrakers. It was hard to feel reassured by the possibility