Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [57]
Somberly, we divided the work. It looked like a meeting of anarchists plotting the stormy end of the Republic. Each of us knew we had to get rid of that bad taste in our mouth.
Maurice from the Dôme had a cousin who worked at City Hall. He’d asked her. No trace. Marcel Girard had never asked for any assistance at the municipal offices and always paid his residence tax. He had recently provided a change of address: in Montargis, rue des Hirondelles. He was therefore no longer of concern to the Paris administration. We checked Montargis; rue des Hirondelles didn’t exist.
Same story, more or less, at the Railroads Pension Fund. It was Samir, from the Fontenoy at the corner of Saint-Gilles and Beaumarchais, who had the job of investigating this. Marcel Girard had not cashed his last two money orders. The post office had declared them Unknown at this address. The French national railway company had no new address listed. They were waiting. Had to. Without a death certificate, the law required them to wait one year before closing the account. As soon as anything new came up, they’d let Samir know. Thanks, that’s very nice of you.
We saw Marthe again. After thirty liters of white wine, she agreed to take us to the person in charge of her residence who, very kindly, began an inquiry among similar institutions. Nothing. There was no one in Paris or the surrounding area by the name of Marcel Girard living in a nursing home, senior housing, or the like. No one with an extended stay in a hospital either.
All this took us about two weeks. Two weeks during which we kept going forward despite the tiny spark of hope getting hit with more bad news, bad but not definitive. Perhaps he was now homeless, living in one of those camper tents that keep popping up on the banks of the Seine and the Saint-Martin canal.
Two weeks for our hearts to sink deeper and deeper, avoiding the thought of the old runner having passed away.
But a village is always a village, even inside a big city, even buried inside the City of Lights, that unavoidable city which people from all over the world come to admire, their eyes sparkling and smiles frozen on their faces by the blinking Eiffel Tower. In a village everyone knows everything about everything and the shutters are never closed. Bernard, the waiter at the Mousquetaires on the corner of rue Beautreillis, serves beer to all the fans of The Doors who come ogling the banal façade of the building where Jim Morrison kicked the bucket. He’s been hitting on the lady mail carrier who told him that the headquarters of the DAL—a leftist group that focuses on housing issues and has been battling the real estate sharks for years—is right near rue des Francs Bourgeois.
I got the job. They appointed me to sniff around in that direction. The lefties might know something about the number 12 rue Saint-Gilles scheme.
The activist was practically a grandma. Not the leader but a key person. Very interested in our story, even over the phone. I set up a meeting with her at Ma Bourgogne. As she settled down in the back of the room, slipping in behind the white tablecloths, she grew wide-eyed; no doubt the first time she’d ever dared enter this place reserved for the platinum card holders.
Full of fun, bubbly. A Pasionaria. Who was probably getting revenge for something, maybe her previous life. The DAL knew—those were her words—the monstrous, disgusting scandal of number 12 inside out. They had opposed it, tried everything, even a surprise occupation, quickly repelled by the cops, but nothing had done any good, the press had barely mentioned the scandal, a clear reflection of the new, cynical harshness of the ruling class. The white-collar gangsters of real estate capitalism were acting somewhat legally, but it was a legality that was infinitely variable, for they were protected by the government. This explained why the former residents, even though they knew they were being ripped off, had all, or almost all, accepted the skimpy bit of money. So they could