Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [92]
As he was aiming his gun at me, Victor had told me—in broken French—what he and his henchmen were looking for. He owned a special kind of airline that dealt in illegal freight. I even work with CIA, I transport prisoners terrorist, he’d slipped in, laughing, between two swigs of vodka, in Marc’s living room. At the end of the ’90s he had a businesspartner, Leonid, a Ukrainian Jew who had acquired Israeli nationality. Victor thought that was hilarious. They were selling weapons to the rebels in Angola and Liberia and the rebels were peddling some of them to al Qaeda for diamonds. Down there everything was paid for in local precious stones, conflict diamonds, war diamonds.
Six years earlier, Victor and Leonid had met in London to seal a pact with a rival. They’d ordered some girls—Ilona and Yelena—to celebrate. The evening had gone well, but in the early hours of the morning they’d noticed that the payment for their last African shipment, five million dollars in rough stones, had disappeared. They’d blamed the other criminal, of course, and settled the score with him. Neither of the two would have suspected those little whores, as Victor called them, of pulling off the theft. And as for the girls, they waited.
Not long enough, apparently.
A month ago, Ilona had traveled to Antwerp with Polaroids of the uncut set of stones, to find out their market value from some diamond merchants. A rumor had swept through the diaspora before reaching Leonid, who started to watch her. He quickly understood that Yelena had also been in on the job, and his plan was to send some of his men to Italy to get the diamonds back.
Without suspecting anything, Yelena had gotten ahead of everybody by entrusting me with the gift to Ilona. Then her luck turned, and I nearly got myself killed. Bitch. “I’m tired.”
“You’ll be able to rest soon.”
The cops released me the next day. The DA told me to stay in France a few more days for final verifications and then told me that the case would probably be taken to court, and that I would have to come back. I was able to go back to Marc’s place to collect my things, particularly the jacket I’d been wearing that evening, which I’d intentionally left there. Inside was Ilona’s cloakroom ticket.
I’m a really, really patient guy.
NO COMPRENDO THE STRANGER
BY HERVÉ PRUDON
Rue de la Santé
Translated by David Ball
Diary
Paris is a full city. Every morning I empty out my head: It’s like in the country—last day of November—a new blue sky improves—upon acquaintance—with a bare sky—advancing openly emptiness—on a glass tray—sea without spray—sea of ice—and the city disappeared—like in the fields—when time passes—the wind dies down and pain disappears—you take a chair—you sit there—you feel like painting that—nothing oppresses—caresses from beyond …
I’m not going out but I’m not the only one: cocoons, tribes, parties, cells—family cells or others—ghettoes, armored doors, double-paned, triple-locked, padlocked, barricades, everybody standing firm. Nobody moves. To go from my place to the chic neighborhoods, you have to climb on trees, go from branch to branch like the baron in the trees. I’m too acrophobic. Also too claustro to crawl through catacombs. So walk along the asylum, the big prison, the convents and hospitals. Closed spaces. What they call maximum-security areas. Maximum tension. That’s rue de la Santé, from one end to the other. Health Street. The sickest street in Paris.
Iron
It was a fine end of November, abnormally mild. People were swimming in Nice and Biarritz. In some Parisian neighborhoods a vacation mood must have been in the air, the kind of spontaneous fragrance that floods you with pleasure, makes you fall in love, and fills you with bliss in front of a store window or behind a behind. No fragrance like this in other neighborhoods. It wasn’t a good idea to go out today. Outside it was too empty in spots. Real black holes of antimatter. Elsewhere dripping with picturesque. There are days where this city is borderline bipolar. I had zero grams of iron in my blood and