Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [85]
“My God …”
“Monsieur Robert!”
“I remember everything … They didn’t need to touch me. The bathtub … I fainted before they threw me in … When I came to, I talked … I told them everything I knew … And I would have told even more if I could have.”
“…”
“Twenty-six. I was twenty-six years old. Have youalready smelled the scent of death at the bottom of a filthy cellar?”
“No … I … No one—”
“They let me go … I was supposed to give them more information … A few days later the Americans landed …”
“The war’s over, Monsieur Robert.”
“Not yet … Leave me alone. I’m tired.”
“Can you give me your revolver?”
“Pistol … Think of the exercises, young man, memory is a strange machine.”
“Monsieur Robert … what are you doing?”
“Now I know who I have to kill. He’s a twenty-six-year-old boy … No, not you; you can relax now. The one I’m talking about never leaves me. He hasn’t left in more than sixty years. Time has no grip on him.”
“Please …”
“Do you see him? He’s in front of you. Every morning I’ve seen him in my mirror. He’s haunted me every night, leaving me sleepless. He eventually dozed off, but you’ve awakened him with your books and your good intentions.”
“I didn’t know … I swear …”
“I have to finish him off now …”
“Please … Your death won’t change anything … It was such a long time ago.”
“‘Je me souviens / Des jours anciens… I can recall / The daysof yore …’ Do you know Verlaine? It was yesterday. It’s today. Get out.”
“I won’t let you do something stupid.”
“Go to hell …”
“Monsieur Robert!”
“I’ll be waiting for you down there.”
Precious
BY DOA
Bastille
Translated by Carol Cowman
The office where I was sitting was on the top floor of the building, right under the roof. “Rear window,” a police officer with a weary, ironic tone of voice had said when we arrived. He was part of a group of three who had come with me from the crime scene to the hospital for the required medical visit. A nurse had cleaned the dried blood off my face and turned me over to an intern. After taking an X-ray of my spinal column and sewing some painful stitches on me, he pronounced my state compatible with police custody. I had a long gash on my left eyebrow, with a hematoma under the eye, another to the right of my mouth, and one on the back of my head, at the base of the skull. “Nothing too bad,” the doctor had said.
That was half an hour ago and the day was rising behind the window of the examination room. After going through these procedures and taking some blood samples, they’d brought me to police headquarters at the Quaides Orfèvres. Now I was watching the sky turn blue through a fan-light with iron crossbars.
“They installed them because of Durn.” The cynic the two others called Sydneyand treated like their boss must have followed the meanderings of my puzzled, not yet altogether sober gaze.
I turned toward him. “Who?”
“Durn, the crazy gunman in 2002.”
“I wasn’t living in France then.”
“Oh … A demented man we arrested …”
He went on with the conversation but I had lost interest.
“… who killed himself by jumping through a window like this one, but in another office, across the hall …”
My eyes drifted around the gray bureaucratic surroundings. Two little rooms leading into one another that opened onto a neon-lit corridor. A different world from mine, shabby and hostile.
“He’d just made a full confession …”
The walls, whose neutral paint had seen better days, were covered with administrative documents, maps, and war trophies. A few elegant watercolors too, but only behind Sydney. Probably painted by him.
“The bars were put there right after.”
There was a light-starved green plant in a corner, a rack of walkie-talkies charging, several metal cabinets topped by boxes of whiskey, exclusively single malt—the denizens of the place were clearly connoisseurs—and six cluttered desks, each with its aging PC that had replaced the typewriter of yesteryear.
“How long have you been living abroad?”
Not forgetting the three cops. The one facing me, Sydney,a little guy with a double-breasted suit too large for him and a pipe;