Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [59]
Saturday.
We were all there.
With the same findings, worthy of a detective story but one that’s hard to finish.
“On top of wasting him he’s now grabbing his money.”
“He buried Zatopek in the garden of his stupid house, for all we know.”
“Sounds like the Landru case. Or Petiot. That kind of shit isn’t new.”
And then we looked carefully at each other. Testing each other. Silently. For a long time. The time it took for two more glasses of kir. In an hour I’d have to be back at work at the Place des Vosges. To serve all those rich fucks who look at you as if you’re ectoplasm. An ectoplasm who never works fast enough. They call you by snapping their fingers. They bellow from beneath the archway: “Garçon!”
So I made up my mind.
“Tomorrow I’ll go to Vernon. To take a look at the scum-bag’s face.”
“I’m going too,” Samir said.
“Count me in,” Maurice added. “I like action. In memory of Zatopek. We’ll see what happens.”
We left very early. In Maurice’s car. That guy is a gadget freak, his entire salary goes into anything new. He even had a GPS on his dashboard. He drove well and he drove fast, nearly risking points on his driver’s licence. We ate up the 130 kilometers like you gobble down a ham sandwich and reached Vernon by 9.
Thanks to the GPS we easily located rue de l’Insurrection. In a residential development built in the ’80s. Imitation modern houses with lawns decorated with ceramic dwarfs, sculpted hedges, and at least one araucaria tree every fifty meters. It reeked of money, but not too much. It had the smell of retired civil servants’ money. With cars primly parked in front of the outmoded mansions of their owners. The cushy life. Far from Darfur. Nothing to do with all those wretched, helpless, old folks who vegetate in the big cities, sometimes eating out of the same cans as their mangy dogs.
In a silence that spoke volumes, we waited for a solid hour, sitting in the car without knowing why, vaguely hoping to see the cop. Nothing. Other people were coming out of their houses with swarms of kids, rushing to their cars. A picnic. A walk in the woods. Perhaps mass. Sunday lunch at a restaurant and then a movie. Well-deserved peace.
And then he came out. Small and fat.
Without thinking, we disembarked from the car, approached him like the brothers Earp at a pathetic OK Corral. Three against one. We just wanted to talk to him. I started three meters away from him.
“Monsieur Henri Portant?”
He stopped. Same reflexes as before. Inspecting us. Weighing what could be happening here. Who we might be. He was thinking, that was obvious. Perhaps we were ex-cons he had caught before who were coming to take revenge. Or highway robbers about to rip him off.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Are you Henri Portant?”
“What is this about?”
We hesitated. We didn’t know where to begin.
The former cop moved his hand toward the inside of his jacket. Samir reacted very fast, jumped him, smashing him with the head butt of the century.
Portant fell backward screaming. I pounced on him to pull him up and drag him off. Into his house. All of this taking place right in the middle of the street, a major mistake.
He was bleeding, his crushed nose was leaking like a fountain. His startled blue eyes were barely visible behind that red river.
I grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and pulled him up to his feet with difficulty. He was moaning and blowing bubbles.
“Bunch of assholes,” he muttered.
I smacked him. He groaned. He was in pain.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe it!” Maurice cried out behind me.
I turned around.
Some twenty meters off, Zatopek was moving toward us, grunting, trotting along down the sidewalk.
LA VIE EN ROSE
BY DOMINIQUE MAINARD
Belleville
Translated by David Ball
1.
On rue de Belleville, Japanese tourists who had come to see the steps on which Edith Piaf entered the world lingered under the April drizzle, protected by odd little hats of pink, translucent plastic with the logo of a travel agency on them. All the way to boulevard de Belleville, two