by Seth Lynch
'Seeing you now, I'm not sure I'll be able to keep my hands off you.'
'Then don't,' she says.
We don't even buy the whisky.
*
Megan blows large smoke rings at the ceiling. I lie on my side admiring her profile. That nose is still a tad too large, but she's all the more beautiful for it.
'I'm so glad we bumped into each other,' I say.
'I've got a confession to make, Reggie. I thought I saw you the other day near the Café Copenhagen. I was a bit far gone so didn't react. Since then I've been drinking where I can see the Métro Station, waiting for you to pass by. Last night I followed you down and jumped on the carriage behind you. At the next stop I got out and got onto your carriage.'
For some reason we both find this hilariously funny and fall into a fit of laughter.
'I always had the most ridiculous pash for you, Reggie.'
'Really? I never thought about us that way before.' I hate the word 'pash'.
'I know - that's why it's taken us nearly thirty years to get into bed together.'
'I thought you might have married by now,' I say.
'Don't start on marriage. It's one of the reasons I left England. An unmarried woman on the wrong side of thirty is a family ailment. How about you, mister? Is it not a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife?'
'I seriously hate Jane Austen and I have never been in want of a wife. Willing women have always served me well.'
'Willing women like me?'
'They like me too. Actually, I've been through some bad times and went right off the rails for a while. I'm beginning to get on track again.'
'Tell me about it. The whole world got screwed up and now we go around as if it were all some aberration. You know, Reg,' she rolls on her side to fix me with her eyes, 'I'd like to keep on seeing you. We don't have to be lovers; we can be friends, like we used to be. I've lost a lot of people I love and I don't want to lose you again.'
We hold each other for a few moments. Long enough to fight back the tears. I light two cigarettes for us to share. For a while we lie in silence.
'I wish I could have been with you, could have held you. I wish I'd been your lover when we first met,' I say.
'I was five, you were six - our parents would not have approved.'
'When we were older, in our teens.'
'I told you, Reggie, I wanted to. I didn't seem to interest you in that way.'
'You're right; I was more interested in sport. It was only sometimes, in the night, I needed someone to hold me. I needed someone – it didn't have to be a lover, we could have lain side by side and read a book together.'
'Are we to be lovers now, or shall I fetch you a book?'
We make love again and talk until night comes. She falls asleep and I lie beside her, watching her sleeping.
A couple of days pass before we decide to resume our lives. Megan returns to her apartment and I go for a short walk. I have been on the case for a week and three of those days were spent in bed with Megan. Today I will visit my client and quiz her about Marty. Then I will go to the Lacman Brothers. Then this evening will be mine and I can enjoy it with a clear conscience.
*
I don't want to take the Métro to Marie's but it's too far to walk there and back and still have time for anything else. I'll walk for a mile or so and then go underground. This will give me a chance to think over what it is that I want to ask Marie before I slip into Métro stasis. I'm on the other side of the river when it occurs to me that I have not been thinking about the case at all. I had started out thinking about it before an image of Megan in a purple dress overtook those thoughts. I find myself picturing her removing her stockings.
I'm powerless to stop thoughts of her entering my mind at any given moment. They come and go as they please, like the wind through a pauper's coat. I'm going to have to learn to catch them as they arrive and store them up for the evening. There is no point walking any further, I'll take the Métro from here.
My client, Marie Thérèse, lives out in the 19th arrondissement on the rue Cavendish. This is working class Paris, rundown without being a slum. I've been there previously en route to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. That park is one of the few in Paris where you can sit on the grass without an irate keeper appearing from the bushes to shake a stick at you. There you can relax, smoke a cigarette, lie down and watch the clouds pass overhead. The summer is the best time to visit. Isn't everywhere best in the summer?
I've ridden the Métro to the Gare de l'Est where I change for Laumière. While changing trains I realise that I have gone eight stops without thinking about rain. Rather than the bleak Pennine moorland, I've been thinking of Megan. I wasn't only thinking about her naked body either. I was remembering things we used to get up to as kids. She was the first girl I ever heard say 'shit'. Her language has always been quite colourful; in fact she could make be blush merely by swearing.
As new passengers get on the train I notice they are not wearing the casual suits of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The men are in dark blue overalls and have large flat caps on. Some of them are wearing wooden clogs. The women have white aprons over tatty dresses. They've all gone in for large kiss curls in the centre of their foreheads. They sit in silence and eye me with suspicion. These workers are radicalised and I represent the bourgeois oppressors. I get off at Laumière with the feeling of having been held silently to account for my wealth. Come the revolution, they'll be pushing me up against the wall. What would I have to say in my defence? Even my having lived as a pauper, rejecting all the privileges of my position, could be seen as an extreme act of bourgeois decadence.
I meander around for a few minutes trying to get my bearings. There is something unsettling about this place – at every crossroads I expect to encounter a highwayman hanging from a gibbet. I spot the rue Cavendish up ahead, a narrow road lined with five-storey apartment blocks. I start to feel insignificant and out of sorts. The road runs North-South; the sun fails to make it to either side of the street. There are no wide boulevards for the working class. Still, it will be easier to barricade these narrow streets when the revolution does come.
I find Marie's apartment near the junction with the rue Armand Carrel. This is a sparse area with a couple of parked automobiles to break up the monotony of grey concrete. These machines are like the yellow crosses of the plague, spreading across the city as each area becomes infected with auto-madness. If you want to travel a short distance, cycle or walk; if you need to go further, get the train. Why would you want one of these frightful contraptions? Filatre owns one: an otherwise level-headed man and he still found a reason to go out and buy one. He took me for a spin once, never again. He transformed into a raving lunatic the moment his arse hit the leather seat. This man, who would go out of his way to help anybody he met, spent the entire time in the automobile honking at pregnant women who couldn't cross the road fast enough.
I ring the buzzer. Was it working class rebelliousness that gave Marie that air of defiance when she came to visit me? She answers the door wearing the same dress she had worn for our last meeting. I doubt it's a coincidence. She is a little more relaxed today, although she does not invite me inside. Instead we leave the building and walk to the rue Armand Carrel and a café called Les Gondoles.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Les Gondoles is one of those practical cafés located in exactly the place where a café is required. To compensate for this excellent location, it is a drab and soulless place. The paint work is plain and in need of a going over; it hasn't reached crisis point, so will remain in its deteriorating state for at least another year. The chairs are a wooden miss-matched collection. No doubt they were purchased from a bric-a-brac store before the war - which war I wouldn't like to guess. The floor has a stickiness which tells of careless customers and a lacklustre cleaner.
The two other customers are engaged in the noble art of ignoring one another. One is sat, w
ith his back to the bar, facing a bawdy circus poster hanging on the wall. The poster looks to have replaced a large mirror, the frame for which still remains. The other customer is standing at the bar with his back to the poster. Both men look to be around fifty years old. It would not surprise me to learn that they are brothers. The waiter is reading the racing form. The silence is reverential.
Outside the café there are three abandoned tables. Are they meant for customers or had a delivery man reached this point before losing heart? Whichever the case, we sit at one of them. Our feet nestle amongst cigarette butts on the pavement. I light a cigarette and watch a page from one of last week's newspapers as it rolls along the road. My chair has taken umbrage to my presence - in the space of five minutes it has made two unsuccessful attempts to unseat me.
'I have received some information about monsieur Marty,' I say, 'the address of a former employer. He used to work as a stockbroker on the boulevard Rivoli.'
'I told you he was a stockbroker,' she says. Marie looks at me for a moment and then at the grocery store across the road. Perhaps she is searching for a rag and bone man's horse. Perhaps she finds me too attractive and is trying not to give in to her desire. If that is the case she has resisted for too long; I'm spoken for now. I wonder if that is true. Megan never mentioned anything about me not sleeping with other women.
'Yes, you did,' I say, 'but you didn't give the name of any brokerage or dates when he may have worked at them.'
'I am not in the least interested in the man's work history. I only want to know where he is right now.'
'Of course you do. This is like mislaying your cigarette case: you retrace your footsteps until you happen upon it.'
'A slug like Gustave Marty will leave a trail of slime for you to follow, I'm sure.' She takes a sip of her orange juice, ice jostling against the glass. 'Let me know when you have located him please.'
'I certainly shall. By the way, a rather consumptive looking youth followed me the other day. Goes by the name of Stefan.'
'Stefan is infatuated with me. It's really rather dreary, although he does have his uses. I let him carry my shopping or do odd jobs around the apartment.'
'I gave him a damn good thrashing. Following a detective is like crossing the road without looking. You are liable to get hit.'
'That's because you are brute.'
She says this as a matter of fact, and, as a matter of fact, she may be right.
'Has he recovered?'
'You hurt his pride as much as his body. He resents it but will do nothing about it. He used his bruises to try to persuade me drop the case. You told him about Marty, didn't you?'
'I asked him about Marty – that's what I do, it's called investigating.'
'If Stefan knew anything about Marty, don't you think he would have told me?'
'I don't know Stefan from Tom the Baker's son. For all I know, and for all you know for that matter, Marty might have sent him to spy on you.'
'Monsieur Salazar, you are barking up the wrong tree. Stefan, for all his many faults, is not particularly devious. Besides, Marty has no reason to spy on me.'
'Perhaps if you could give me a little more information as to why you want to track him down, or the relationship you had with him, I wouldn't waste my time barking up these wrong trees.'
'You have the pertinent facts, monsieur Salazar – I want to find monsieur Marty. He has no reason to believe that I am alive and if he did he would not give that fact more than a passing thought.'
She folds her arms and leans back in her seat. There is something very appealing about her, also something repulsive. It isn't exactly physical; there is nothing repulsive about her appearance. It's her mannerisms; she draws you in only to spit you out again. I can understand how Stefan has fallen under her spell. The poor sap better get over it soon or he'll be finished.
'Can you tell me anything about Marty's family? What did his father do - was he a stockbroker too?'
'No, he was actually quite a nice man. He owned a couple of furniture shops in Namur. He was even mayor there once, before the war.'
'That should make him easy to trace.'
'You don't need to trace him - he's in Namur Cemetery.'
'What about Marty's mother?'
'That bitch, I'm pleased to say, lies besides her husband.'
'You two weren't friends?'
She replies with a brief, malformed, smile.
'When was the last time you saw Marty?'
'Around 1922. He'd already left Namur for the university in Brussels. I saw him because he was visiting his parents for Christmas. He was walking down the other side of the street with some girl he'd picked up. I haven't actually seen him since.'
'And you have been looking all this time?'
'No. I started looking about a year ago – not in a serious way.' She drains her drink with one long swallow. 'Then I saw your card and decided I would track him down properly. Will there be anything else, monsieur Salazar?'
She lights a cigarette and walks away without waiting for my reply. I watch her cross the road and enter her apartment building. She's out of place in this district; she would be out of place in any district.
Without much else to go on I really ought to get over to the Lacman Brothers place. I should also write to Marty's university and see if they have an address for him. A trip to Namur would be pretty pointless and I have a duty to keep my costs down - Marie doesn't look as if she has any spare cash.
To achieve your goals, without over-wearying yourself, you should aim to achieve one thing each day. To me that makes perfect sense. I shall call on the Lacman Brothers in the morning. At the moment I have a bottle of wine in my apartment and Megan is due to visit in a few hours. I'll buy a couple more bottles on the way home.
*
Before starting on the wine I should write that letter to the university; it will be all the better for having been written sober. I get out a pen and some writing paper then fuss around to find an envelope. During the short course of its composition the sunny day has become a rainy evening. Does this symbolise my chances of a successful reply? I imagine it does. Marty doesn't strike me as someone who'd be foolish enough to leave a forwarding address before doing a disappearing act. Having wasted twenty minutes and the price of a stamp, I can at least drink the wine happy in the knowledge that I have achieved two things today.
Megan arrives in a green dress with a little hat and a bottle of red. After finishing off the wine we head out into the night in the direction of Montparnasse. Perhaps it's the evening breeze, or Megan's perfume, or the wine we drank together, but I'm in the mood for cocktails.
*
Morning beats a relentless tattoo on my brain. With this throbbing head and a strong desire to sleep for a year in darkness, I get up. I loathe hangovers, I enjoy drinking, such is my burden. In spite of the pain I remain intent on visiting the offices of the Lacman Brothers this very morning; it's a way to convince myself that I can drink heavily and still work the next day. I think that notion caused me to stagger home to bed rather than spending the night at Megan's place.
'I shall go by God!' I declare to a spider on the ceiling. I sit up, a little too quickly. My head spins wildly; I try to hold back the vomit. This is worse than I thought. Why, oh why, did I start on those cocktails and why wasn't that enough? I might have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for that half-bottle of whisky.
I sit in the kitchen with coffee and orange juice. A Gitane glows delightfully between my fingers. I've taken the only course available to a man in my position; I paid a visit to the nearest café, where upon I consumed two whiskies in quick succession. After the initial protests from my gullet, which tried to close, they went down fine. I don't normally go in for hair of the dog. I can't help feeling that you are storing up all those hangovers for an almighty day of reckoning, one I doubt my head will survive.
Place Vendôme, home to the Lacman Brothers, is also home to Napole
on's column and the Ritz Hotel. Fashion houses and private banks huddle together, whores with their pimps, preying on the rich and vain. Rapaciousness poisons the air. Is there a city in the world which has luxury like this without countless slums as a counterpoint? For each rich sir or madam who totters forth from a Mercedes Benz, patting a Bichon Frise, there are fifty men out of work, fifty families without an income, and a hundred children going hungry. In this square there is no poverty, only ice-cold consumption and the blindness which allows people to pass one day to the next without tying a rope around their necks.
I walk past the Lacman Brothers a few times without noticing it. Their entrance is understated, as opposed to the marble luxuriance of Kuo and Partners. Here an anonymous stairway leads up to an unadorned dark-green wooden door. It has the feel of a gentleman's club, tucked away in Piccadilly or just off St. James's Square. Climbing the steps I have the feeling of being neither invited nor spurned, as if I'm walking towards eternal limbo.
A doorman stands sentry at the top of the stairs. He opens the door as I approach and then opens an interior door. The receptionist is young and attractive. She wears expensive looking clothes. My shoes resound on the stone floor causing her to turn and greet me with a brilliant white smile. I can't help but be suspicious; what is she there to distract me from? My money, no doubt.
'Good morning, sir.'
She smiles again. I smile back, a yellow smile tarnished by nicotine, red wine and coffee. My smile isn't something I usually think about.
'Good morning, mademoiselle. I'm trying to track down an old friend of mine.'
'How can I help you?'
'I think he works here.'
'What is his name?'
'Gustave Marty.'
She smiles once more and then lifts up a big ledger from which she reads one of the pages.
'There is no Gustave Marty working here, I'm afraid. Could he be with The Jackman Brothers? They are four doors down from us.'
