Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [71]
“Yeah … the one facing me. He had a couple of beers—Leffes—but he couldn’t hold his drink … unless he started before he got to my place. They walked out onto the sidewalk, toward where you are, they walked maybe fifteen yards away while I was locking up. I remember they stopped to keep talking. The young one you’re talking about leaned against the wall while the other guy crossed the street toward rue de la Lune, a little lower down. He clearly didn’t feel like dragging the other guy along. Not very nice, leaving a pal in such a bad state … The guy in jeans staggered away toward the Porte Saint-Denis, and I went home to bed.”
Lieutenant Mattéo looked the owner of Le Mauvoisin up and down.
“Sorry, but I don’t think you’re opening this morning … You’re going to have to come along with me. Your last customer of the night wasn’t drunk: He’d just been stabbed in the belly a couple of times. We picked him up off the stairs of rue des Degrés. The bloodstains begin at the exact spot you just pointed out to me.”
His interrogation revealed that the two men had come into the café one after the other, Carvel first, around 11:00, then his presumed murderer ten minutes later. They had talked quietly, in low voices; it was impossible to grasp the topic of their conversation. It was the victim who had paid for the drinks, with a fifty-euro bill. The second man was about thirty. The café owner didn’t know him, any more than he knew the man he had been talking to. Elegantly dressed, shorter than average, brown hair, a round face, he talked with a slight Spanish accent.
“He had a little birthmark near his temple that he kept trying to hide by pulling a lock of hair forward. Kind of a nervous tic …”
They learned almost everything about Flavien Carvel from the passport and other ID they found in the pockets of his reporter jacket. He was born April 21, 1982 in Antony, listed his profession as “decorator,” and lived on the impasse du Gaz in La Plaine-Saint-Denis. The visas and stamps decorating his passport showed that over the last eight months, Carvel had traveled to the United States, Australia, Japan, Vanuatu, and Lebanon for visits never longer than a week. Robbery was not the motive of the crime since the murderer had not taken his collection of credit cards or the eight hundred euros in cash that filled his pockets.
Mattéo discovered a piece of newspaper slipped between the plastic rectangles of the American Express Platinum and Visa Infinity cards; someone had penned on it:
Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in thesecond arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wifeof a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumorsof the American star’s separation from Katie Holmesare making headlines in the celebrity magazines.
He had gone to La Plaine-Saint-Denis early in the afternoon after grabbing a slice of Tuscan pizza at the Casa della Pasta on rue Montorgueil. He hadn’t set foot in the northern suburbs for years. In his memory it was all gray, gas meters, oil-refinery walls, Coke plants, chimney stacks, ash-colored façades stained by constant rain, the open trench of the Au-toroute du Nord and its constant flow of smoking carcasses … When they built the huge new soccer stadium—the Stade de France—it had completely transformed the geography of the area. The last remnants of the old industrial revolution had been razed to the ground. The buildings with the corporate main offices in them stood as if on parade along the huge flowered concrete slab that now covered the sewer of flowing cars. The rectilinear greenery and the erratic movements of clouds were reflected in the shining aluminum, the smoked glass, and the polished steel. The recipe had worked wonders in Paris: Thanks to the construction of the Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, the Forum des Halles, the Bastille Opera, the Arche de la Défense, and the Very Big Library, the city had been emptied of its lower strata. Now the recipe was being