“I was there. We all were, or almost. You wanted to speak to me?”
“How is the Crabos?”
“Why are you asking me about him?”
“To find out what’s happening.”
“Apparently he buggered off to Spain. Good riddance. He won’t be around to piss us off anymore.”
“He wasn’t really up to much though, was he? A few girls, his bar on rue de Bègles . . . And seriously ill, from what I’ve heard. Cancer again.”
“He’ll die in the sun. It’s better than in the shade. He was smuggling in a bit of heroin and opium, but anyway . . .”
The chief smiles.
“I don’t give a shit about drugs. We need to have a proper talk, Commissaire Darlac. Alright? We know each other and we’re not going to hide anything from each other. Understood?”
Darlac sighs. Nods. Shifts around in his chair to make sure it’s solid, because he knows it’s in for a good shaking. Turbulence. An air pocket. Just wind, when it comes down to it. This idea forces him to suppress a smile. Still, it’s not going to be fun.
“What were you doing on rue du Pont de la Mousque on Monday night?”
“My job. I was looking for the Crabos, in fact.”
“Did you find him?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t you tell me that when I asked you about him, just now?”
“What was the point? He’s gone to Spain, as I told you. The matter’s been dealt with. The guy’s half dead anyway—who cares what happens to him?”
“So why go looking for him? And also, four days ago he was still in Bordeaux, wasn’t he? It’s not like he went off to eat paella two years ago, is it?”
“You know perfectly well why I wanted to see him. For the same reasons as you. Because he might have been able to give me information about Penot’s death. And because we found one of his men at the submarine base the day before yesterday. Three bullets. Sloppy work. There’s been a lot of that recently.”
Laborde sighs. He picks up his pencil and starts rapping it against the edge of the table again. He thinks, is about to say something, shakes his head, then looks Darlac in the eyes and starts to speak:
“We’d agreed that we didn’t give a shit about Penot. That piece of shit. One of Poinsot’s5 henchmen. No-one knows why he wasn’t executed after the Liberation like his boss.”
“We’re sure he was involved in that robbery in Bayonne last year. He was working for Destang, and consequently against Crabos, who went round telling everyone that he was going to kill him. So we had to give a shit, as you put it.”
“Crabos’ brother was a communist. He was tortured by Poinsot and Penot, then sent to the camps. He died out there. Everyone knows that. We’re not going to go out of our way to catch someone who nailed a former torturer, are we? Unless . . .”
Darlac waits for the next words, rigid in his chair. The chief stares at him, hard, elbows on his desk. He waits too, and his blue eyes darken to steely grey. In the background, there is the sound of a typewriter, the keys rattling in short bursts, and a telephone ringing unanswered. These familiar noises vibrate the air between the two cops, slowly boring into each of them like a form of Chinese torture.
Laborde is silent, his eyes trained on Darlac, a half-smile on his lips. Then, pressing his hands flat on the desk, he says in a hollow voice:
“Anyway, I don’t want to see your fat ass near rue Saint-Rémi anymore. Particularly if you’re harassing people who are useful to us.”
“Ah, right, the hotel boss . . . I thought she was a bit high and mighty, that bitch.”
Silence. The chief opens a drawer and pretends to rummage around inside it. Darlac shifts in his chair.
“Is that all?”
“Why? You want to request a transfer to Oran? You’ve got it.”
Darlac takes this in silence. He stands up. Behind him, he hears the chief’s hollow, almost muffled voice:
“Watch yourself . . . And your men. The war is over. The Liberation—you’ve heard of that, I suppose? So change your methods, or don’t get caught.”
They try to outstare each other. Neither backs down. Finally, Laborde shrugs and silently laughs.
“Get out of here. And keep being careful.”
The commissaire divisionnaire immediately starts reading a file, with a little wave of the hand to dismiss Darlac.
In the corridor, Albert Darlac realizes that he is soaked in sweat, his breathing ragged. He runs downstairs to his office. There, he opens the window again and takes two or three deep breaths, arms outstretched and fists balled. Then, from a drawer, he takes a leather shoulder harness weighed down by a large black pistol, which he removes from its holster. The steel ridges are smooth with use. A Colt 1911, a gift from an officer in ’45. He takes off his jacket, puts on the harness and slips the gun under his left arm.
Then he stares at himself in the frame of the open window. His reflection in the glass is dark, thick, faceless.
When he leaves the car park, the night is already there, gray, soaked with water, scattered with vague glimmers. The rain seems to extinguish this drab city, while elsewhere it lights up the streets with splashes of color and makes the wide avenues gleam. Murky figures roam the sidelwalks. He shivers in the front seat of his 403, hands tensed on the wheel. Wondering if he has a fever, he lights a cigarette, but its harsh taste instantly makes him feel sick and he tosses it through the open window. He drives like that, with the windows rolled down, through the confusion of narrow streets packed with cars and trucks and bicycles veering close to his wheels. Ghosts, hunchbacked and screeching. They scream insults at him and he barks back abuse and threats.
He parks near a little bar cum wine cellar on place Nansouty, then he walks, bent under the wind, and the cold seeps in through his coat. Inside the little bistro, narrow, low-ceilinged, full of barrels and shelves packed with bottles, it smells of wine and cork. At the back, next to a glass door marked “PRIVATE,” a couple sits at a table, two glasses of red between them. The man and the woman are sitting up straight in their chairs, almost stiffly, smoking and looking at each other, not saying a word. It is impossible to guess their ages. Emile Couchot, the landlord, pours wine from a barrel into bottles that he puts into a crate. He nods at Darlac then goes back to what he’s doing, one hand on the tap. The cheap wine foams inside the bottle. The man rams in the cork, banging it down with the palm of his hand.
“Here you go,” he says to the couple when the sixth and final bottle has been filled. “You’ll have a ball with this. I’ll put it on the tab.”
He walks up to Darlac, wiping his hands on a tea towel.
“You ’ere for the kid?”
Darlac nods.
Couchot goes behind the counter. Two men enter and say good evening to no-one in particular. They sit down and order a Monbazillac. One of them puts a toolbox down next to him and it makes a metallic noise.
“Trains still going the right way, boys?” the landlord asks them.
“Yeah, you’d think they were on rails,” one of the men replies.
They all laugh. Emile pours the golden wine into two glasses, fills a bowl with peanuts from a machine, and takes all of this over to the railway workers.
“Missus not here?”
“She’s making soup.”
“Didn’t spit in it, did she?”
“Nah, that’s only for the special clients.”
They laugh again. The man and the woman at the back of the room turn their way and smile as they watch them with an expression halfway between envy and weariness. Same puffy skin, same red watery eyes. A pair of corpses. Their frayed, skimpy clothes are the same color as the wall they’re leaning against: gray, brown. But you can’t camouflage poverty.
Darlac turns his back on all this and looks behind the bar at the lines of bottles and the barrels with
their appellations contrôlées marked in chalk. He wishes all these losers would just leave. The couple of derelicts. The pair of union workers. The pistol weighs heavy under his armpit and he thinks that he could kill them all now and they’d have no idea what was happening to them and what he saw in their eyes would be the ultimate expression of their deep stupidity, that ignorant contentment with little that holds up their pathetic existences.
Couchot comes back behind the counter and asks him what he’s drinking.
“Nothing. I have to see the girl.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that actually. But you should drink something first. I got a Saint-Emilion, look . . .”
He takes a bottle from under the counter and uncorks it. The wine flows into a glass with a gargling noise.
Darlac sniffs it, takes a mouthful and swishes it around his mouth, then slowly swallows it. Emile watches for his reaction, leaning close, the bottle still in his hand.
“Not bad. What did you want to tell me about the girl? Is there a problem?”
“No, no, it’s just that . . . Well, basically, she tried to run off yesterday, and it was a pain in the ass stopping her, and then afterwards she went a bit mad and I had to calm her down with a couple of slaps, the bitch. We put her in a room upstairs, but she has to go outside to use the bathroom, and, you know, we have to be careful. So it’s not easy, is what I’m saying. Not easy at all.”
Darlac says nothing. He inhales the bouquet of his wine, observes it in the gleam of a lamp.
“You see what I’m getting at?” Couchot asks. “I mean, it’s a big responsibility!”
Darlac sighs. Shakes his head.
“That’s why I thought of you. Cos you don’t shirk your responsibilities. There are loads of other places I could have stashed her. But I came here cos I know I can count on you. It’s disappointing to me to hear you talking like this. But never mind . . .”
Darlac pats him on the shoulder, trying to force a smile. The way you pat a stupid mutt after you’ve belted it for running away. A way of showing it who’s boss, who metes out punishment and reward.
“Where’s Odette?”
“Making supper. She’s got the key.”
Darlac pushes open the glass door. The dead-eyed woman looks up at him with her swollen face and he has the impression that he’s seen her before, a long time ago, when she was younger, fresher, but decides he doesn’t give a shit because this is what she’s become: not much. He crosses a storeroom crammed with crates and barrels and racks, the air thick with that same odor of damp and cheap wine. Without knocking, he enters a shockingly bright kitchen where a tall woman with almost red hair turns, startled, towards him, a knife in one hand and an onion in the other. A billycan of soup is warming up in front of her.
“You scared me!”
“Where is she?”
“In the back room. The key’s on the hook, there, near the door.”
She turns away. He grabs the key and remains standing there, in the doorway that leads to the staircase, to watch her. Narrow black skirt, tight over her hips. Mauve sweater. A gray apron tied behind her neck and her back. He looks down at her slender legs, sheathed in stockings, the black line of the seam running up the middle. She always loved lingerie. And for a long time he loved taking it off her. But that’s an old story. Everything has grown old.
“We never see you anymore,” the woman says without turning round.
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffs because of the onion.
“You can see me now, can’t you? Don’t tell me you miss me.”
“I wouldn’t tell you that. But let’s just say you used to come round more often, before.”
“Before what?”
“How’s Annette? Still doesn’t dare ask for a divorce?” She is talking over the soup. He watches her hands moving left and right to pick up what she needs to season it.
“I’m the one who should ask for a divorce. She still doesn’t know how to make coffee. And every year she loses a bit more of her charm.”
“Ever the gentleman. And your daughter?”
He hesitates for a moment. Odette turns around. Her mascara is running, she looks muddled. With a snigger, she says: “I wonder what she’s been up to . . .”
“Shut your mouth. Don’t even mention her.”
He starts up the stairs as the woman’s laughter rises behind him. When he opens the bedroom door, the girl is lying on the bed, poorly lit by a bedside lamp with a wonky shade, her coat acting as a blanket. She puts a romance novel down on the bedside table and watches him approach. He grabs a chair, sits close to her and removes his overcoat.
“You recognize me?”
The girl says yes with a bat of her eyelashes.
“Arlette, isn’t it? Arlette what?”
“Darriet.”
He writes it in his notebook. The kid is sitting up now, leaning on an elbow. She has big black eyes and long thick lashes.
“How long have you been a whore?”
“Six months. I left home on July 14th. Not hard to remember. A friend of mine introduced me to this guy and—”
“What guy? Who was it?”
“I only know his first name. Robert. He took me to meet men, he said I could make a living that way. It was fine with me, anyway. Anything was better than going back to my father. I’d rather anyone fuck me than him.”
“What’s he like, this Robert?”
“Blond. Glasses. Tall. Two fingers missing on his left hand. He’s got a Parisian accent.”
He writes this down in his notebook. Who is this man? Someone new? Where did he come from?
“So how does he treat you, this Parisian guy?”
“He puts me up in a room, behind the cours de l’Yser. Not far from his place.”
“And where would that be?”
She shakes her head. She pulls her coat around her, shoulders hunched, suddenly shivery.
“Answer, or you’ll go to prison. Vagrancy, prostitution. Or we’ll take you back to your bastard of a father. In both cases, you won’t have a choice.”
“He’ll kill me . . .”
“No. He won’t kill anyone, cos we’ll get him first.”
The girl stares into Darlac’s eyes. They are only about a meter apart. Presumably she’s trying to figure out if he is trying to dupe her.
Darlac says nothing. Almost holds his breath. No point forcing it. Don’t shake the tree too hard: if the fruit falls, it’ll go to waste. He smiles. Now he’s coming up with agricultural proverbs! He enjoys moments like this, watching creatures struggle in his hands, creatures he knows he will later crush.
“Rue de Bègles, number twenty-eight. It’s his missus’ place. Blandine, she’s called.”
Blandine. Darlac remembers the images they showed at school of the Christian martyr thrown to the lions. Only nuns would give names like that to orphans whom they rule with an iron fist then kick out the door—sometimes literally onto the street—as soon as they’re eighteen. They must do it on purpose, those twisted sisters. THE Blandine. The Venus of the F.F.I..6 She arrived in Bordeaux following a column of irregulars from the Landes who had taken her under their wing to help make the most of their R&R time. After a month, she had set up a discreet and highly republican and patriotic brothel between the Saint-Pierre church and the docks where young men went with their weapons standing to attention. A Resistance member who insulted her was instantly ejected by pros who knocked a few of his teeth loose with their rifle butts. That was how she got to know the Crabos, a handsome man at the time, and who considered himself an honorable crook because he was swindling for the right side.
“Where do you work?”
She keeps her eyes lowered, fiddling with the material of her coat.
“The men come to us in an attic room, above a bar run by a pal of Blandine�
��s, on the cours de la Marne. It’s clean. No more than two or three a day. Sometimes old men who can’t do it anymore. With gold watches and waistcoats. Who pay more cos I’m young. Blandine told me there are some of ’em who like little girls less than ten years old, but she says they’re perverts and she won’t have anything to do with guys like them. I reckon they’re the same ones, but they make do with me.”
She says all this in a monotonous drawl, not looking at Darlac. When he finally sees her eyes again, they are huge and black and sad.
The commissaire looks away. He knows all about these sobstory whores who try to suck you in with their big, poor-me eyes all wet with tears. He can’t stand them. They scare him, like those stray mutts who you look at or pat on the head and who start following you round and won’t leave you alone even if you kick them.
“And Crabos?”
“Who?”
“The guy you were with the other night. The corpse on legs.”
“Oh, yeah. Bertrand. What about him?”
“Tell me how long you’ve known him. Who you’ve seen him with. If I like your answers, we’ll get you out of here, we’ll protect you. Far away from all this shit.”
“He was different. He respected me. We talked a lot.”
Darlac sniggers like a creaking door.
“You don’t seriously expect me to believe that? You’re saying he took you to dodgy hotels to chat about the weather? You were naked in a bed the other night, weren’t you? Or did I dream that?”
“Oh, is that what you’re interested in? You want me to tell you? Well, guess what, he never fucked me. He can’t anymore, because of his disease. He hasn’t got the strength. So he asks me to take my clothes off and to sleep next to him. Holding him. He takes me in his arms. He touches me a bit—he likes that. And we talk, sometimes. He tells me about his childhood, stuff like that. Me too. We go to the hotel to keep up appearances, as he says. He doesn’t want people saying he’s not a man anymore. He’s very kind. He pays for my meal and he gives me money so Blandine can take me to the cinema.”
The kid stops talking and seems to go into a daydream. Suddenly she looks twelve years old, with her pale, sweet face. She lets out a big sigh as she plays with her fingers.
After the War Page 7
