Around 1870 or so, La Belle Époque wafted into town, and for a while it really was “La Vie en Rose.” If, that is, you happened to have the odd franc lying around, and were not one of the uncounted thousands of peasants wallowing in the slime making it all happen for the perfumed dandies hanging out at the Ritz. The pneumatic tire was invented by Édouard Michelin, the Lumière brothers showed the first movies, and Louis Pasteur developed antibiotics and a rabies vaccine, which came in pretty handy if you lived in the same town as Paul Gauguin.
Labor was cheap, so the nouveau riche didn’t have to worry about wiping their own asses; the champagnes and absinthes were going down by the gallon in the cabarets; Auguste Escoffier was filling people’s faces with haute cuisine; literature, music, and the arts flourished; and things were really swinging down by the Seine and cooking on the Champs-Élysées.
In 1889, Paris hosted a World’s Fair. They called it an Exposition Universelle, which was fair enough. It was their fair, so they could call it whatever they wanted. But not every Parisian was entirely thrilled when Monsieur Gustave Eiffel proposed the erection of a humongous metallic schlong smack-dab in the center of their civic pride. Nobody does committees quite like the French, and a bunch of artistes and intellectuals and self-appointed guardians of the French aesthetic, including Guy de Maupassant, formed a committee of three hundred to object to the structure, arguing that it was “ugly, useless, and inappropriate.” Monsieur Eiffel formed a committee of one to tell them to fuck right off, and he built it anyway.
The original deal was that the tower was supposed to be scrapped after twenty years, but it was raking in so much dosh from sightseers that it was allowed to stand. So far, 250 million people have forked out wads of francs and euros to climb it, not to mention the astronomical number of postcards and replicas that have been knocked out. In fact, the Japanese got so fed up with the amount of yen that was being splashed out on shoddy souvenirs of La tour Eiffel that they built one of their own in Tokyo. And it’s bigger than the one in Paris, so there! The point here, though, is that in its day it was an engineering marvel, the tallest building in the world until surpassed by the Chrysler Building, and has since become the instantly recognizable and enduring symbol of Paris, and has been a giant success in every respect. So who’s ugly, useless, and inappropriate now, boys?
1889 was a big year as far as Parisian identity went, because that was also the year that the Moulin Rouge opened, and voilà, the gals stared waving their knickers in everyone’s faces and giving the front row a good eyeful of perfumed Parisian gusset. Actually, the can-can, which means “scandal,” had been around for a while, but it really started to get wild, especially with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec gimping around painting every crotch in sight. Of course, he was a good height for it.
In 1914 a bit of global unpleasantness put a stop to all that frivolity and people prospering and enjoying themselves nonsense, but when that particular turkey shoot was done and dusted, Paris flourished once again, and the crème de la crème of the literary world arrived to spend all day getting completely shitfaced in the boulevard cafes and talking a load of pretentious shite with the other legless literati, before staggering off to their garrets to write some of the greatest novels in existence so that Gertrude Stein could tell everybody it was all her idea in the first place, before going home herself to scribble down more unintelligible, childish gibberish and call it art.
In 1940, when the jolly, jackbooted Germans panzered into town again, it put the mockers on the pen party for a while, but before they could fuck up everything that the French had built, they got booted right in their kaisers and hightailed it back to the Fatherland, with Ernest Hemingway hot on their heels, making sure that the Teutonic bastards hadn’t scarfed all the champers out of the Ritz on their way out.
In 1968 the students and unions got a bit uppity and started heaving a few cobblestones in the direction of Charles de Gaulle, which was really no way to be treating the man who was in large part responsible for their still having any cobblestones to throw in the first place; but at least Mick Jagger wrote “Street Fighting Man,” so all’s well that ends well.
So as you can see, it hasn’t always been a bed of roses in “The City of Light” but, throughout a long and turbulent history, the one thing that has remained constant is that it is still a really good place for catching frogs.
And there she still stands, in all her glory and fading beauty, a grand old lady who hides the heart of a harlot behind the dowager’s sad and enigmatic smile that she wears as she mourns the gentility and elegance of her glory days, and remembers her lovers and suitors, those who wooed her with a poem and a lover’s whisper, and those who fucked her senseless, and as she remembers the stately march of her days through the ages, before there were thousands of mad bastards daily careering round the Arc, tooting their little French horns. Perhaps she even harbors a slight nostalgia for the turmoil and upheaval that every once-upon-a-time shook her foundations and rattled the glass in her windows, when the martial music flared and she thrilled to the sound of the guns.
Well, old girl, be careful what you wish for, as they say.
Chapter 16
People in jail make promises to themselves. Principally, they make promises to themselves about what they are going to do when they get out of stir. Like go straight, go to the park and feed the ducks, go to a fancy restaurant, get into a bath full of Heinz tomato ketchup with three hookers and a ukulele, find out where all the jurors live and eviscerate their cats and burn their houses down, that kind of thing.
Alphonso Nightingale promised himself that he would find Fanny Lemming—or Fatima Habibi, as she was calling herself then—and, after recovering his diamonds of course, have a land mine surgically implanted into her womb before having her buried underneath the penalty spot at the stadium of the Paris Saint-Germain football club.
But first, he had a little business to take care of. Apparently some ungrateful swine had attempted to take advantage of his incarceration and take over his organization. During the course of the customary repercussions and beggings for mercy and pleadings for forgiveness, etcetera etcetera, one poor unfortunate promised that he could make Alphonso, if not richer than God, at least up there with Gabriel and the boys, or girls, or whatever it was they were supposed to be. Naturally old Alphonso was a little skeptical, as people have a tendency to say anything when their dick has been sown into the mouth of a dead mackerel and they are suspended over a compound full of starving pelicans. But angels get their golden harps from somewhere, and what did it cost to listen, so Alphonso gave the nod, which seriously pissed off the pelicans.
It seemed this guy had a niece called Serendipity Pascal, who told him an interesting story around the family dinner table one night. Serendipity was a bit of a math whiz, and scored herself a scholarship grant to MIT where she met this dweeb kiddie with an IQ so high that conventional measurements were irrelevant; essentially no one was smart enough to calibrate just how smart this kid was. But the kid had a real head for figures, and one of the figures he had a head for was Serendipity’s, along with about seventy-five percent of the male population of Massachusetts aged between ten and ninety. The kid’s name was Hyatt.
Hyatt was somewhat naïve in the dick-and-pussy department and failed to realize that Serendipity’s interests were not quite so ethereal as his, and that she was in fact being regularly boned on a rotational basis by the members of the grunge band Joe Butcher and the Beef Curtains. Hyatt started dogging Serendipity around campus, writing special equations just for her, and recalculating Archimedes’s principle to prove that Archimedes cheated by pissing in the bath, and generally getting on her tits—if in, sadly for Hyatt, only a figurative sense.
One day, out of sympathy, Serendipity agreed to go to Hyatt’s room so he could show her his secret. She figured she was reasonably safe because if things got out of hand he would undoubtedly prematurely ejaculate before he got within stabbing distance. She was surprised to le
arn that not only was the secret a real secret, but it was mesmerizing. Hyatt explained that it was only a primitive prototype which he would soon have perfected, but what she saw with her own eyes was incontrovertibly a flickering copy of Casablanca starring Eddie Murphy as Rick and Moms Mabley as Ilsa. Serendipity was so impressed she decided to let Hyatt have a swift one out of gratitude but, as predicted, it cost her eight bucks to get her dress cleaned.
Hyatt insisted on keeping in touch, and she’d gotten regular progress reports that indicated he would soon be so rich that only a brainless cunt would refuse to marry him for sentimental reasons.
Alphonso reasoned that it wouldn’t do any harm to have Serendipity pulled in and slapped around a little, just to find out if she was on the level, and the uncle was put on ice. The upshot is that Alphonso made a deal with Hyatt, whereby his syndicate would match any existing offer that Hyatt had, plus he’d throw in Serendipity as a sweetener. But, of course, he wanted a little demonstration. So Hyatt duly recorded a live, real-time demo session of someone using the R3 at Khuy’s dacha and sent it to Alphonso. And…no prizes for guessing who was operating the R3.
***
In that magical and mysterious hour, just before the dark, when the first kiss of night teases the horizon and the world is filled with hope and renewed possibilities, a young man awoke on the roof of his apartment building seventy miles outside of Paris on the road to Val-d’Oise, with a hangover of biblical proportions and little recollection of the events that had delivered him there. Fortunately, there was a half-full can of lager on the concrete next to him, rendered to a suitable drinking temperature by the chill of the incipient night. As the young man fastened the tin to his grateful lips and looked skyward, he beheld an astonishing sight.
Slowly sinking out of the night sky was a red-and-green-striped hot air balloon, with a basket suspended from it. As it gently descended past eye level, he saw a voluptuous and naked woman, with long red hair, gazing contemplatively at the ground. The young man rubbed his eyes and looked again, but there was no doubt that the vision was real. The young man was prepared to swear upon all he held sacred, for the rest of his days, to anyone who would listen, that as the woman sank below the lip of the roof, she winked at him.
***
The Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in Europe. It handles almost two hundred million passengers a year. This fact did not impress Woolloomooloo Wally. The fact that impressed him was that the French beer was cat-piss warm and served in thimbles with so much foam on top that you had to wait half an hour before you could get your chops around it.
Another fact about France that Wally was uncomfortable with was that they made you wear shoes. And even though he had scored when he sat down on the grass to rest his aching feet, which were in more or less permanent protest about being confined, and some lady had apparently mistaken him for a street performer, taken his picture, and given him ten euros, he reckoned it was high time to get back to Oz and some proper amber nectar.
It was pleasant enough sitting in the café and watching all the Parisian women wafting past in clouds of perfume, towing embarrassing little half-scalped dogs around, but he knew he would be happy when he was on the plane headed down under. He drank down his tepid suds and stood up to leave.
***
Crispin’s feet were killing him, and his hands were sore from where the handles of his shopping bags were digging into them. This shopping lark was hard work. He looked at the clock in the central hall. He had a half hour to kill before his rendezvous with Asia and Baby Joe. A nice glass of champers would not go amiss, or maybe a lovely, ice-cold Chablis. He headed over to the café and looked for a table outside where he could survey the comings and goings on the boulevard.
Wouldn’t you fucking know it? Not a seat available anywhere. The place was packed to the rafters with tourists and plebs. Why didn’t they have a first class section? He was just about to leave when he saw some old tramp with some kind of sea anemone stuck on top of his head stand up and leave. Crispin bustled over and claimed the chair, giving a triumphant smile to some old biddy that had been heading toward it. A garçon approached.
“Monsieur?”
“Parlez-vous English?”
“Mais oui, but of course, monsieur,” replied the waiter, seeming a little offended to have been asked.
“Good. Then fetch me a bottle of chilled Chablis, would you. And make sure it’s a Bougros or something. Don’t try to palm me off with any of that cheap shite that you sell to the tourists. And wipe this table. You don’t know what disease that golliwog who was just sitting here might be carrying.”
The waiter smiled a smile so thin and tight it looked like he was enduring a wax job, and stalked off.
Crispin looked around and began to feel more comfortable. This was more like it. He might not have felt so comfortable if he could have heard the conversation in the bar. The French will not translate exactly, but it went more or less like this:
“It is intolerable. This rude fat bastard has insulted me, and insulted France. He must be punished. I believe he needs a Marseille Special.”
The barman grinned a beatific smile. “One Marseille Special, coming right up, mon ami.”
Of course, all the stalls were full. Crispin began to hop up and down. He looked despairingly along the rows. Sticking out from under the bottom of one trap was a pair of black feet so leathery and wrinkled that it appeared as if a crocodile was inside taking a dump. Crispin didn’t have time to be disgusted at the kind of vagrants that were allowed to use the public facilities. He was about to burst. The trap next to the crocodile’s opened up, and Crispin crabbed sideways over to it. He regarded the seat with suspicion, but knew that if he attempted to wipe it with his handkerchief, he wouldn’t make it. He sat down, grimacing at the still-warm seat, and gratefully deposited his Marseille Special into the pan. The most appalling animal noises were coming from the next stall, and it was all he could do to keep from gagging on the noxious odor that drifted under the door. He had to get out of there. His face dropped when he looked at the roll. Empty. He checked his pockets for paper. Nothing. There was nothing else for it. He tapped on the partition.
“I say. Excuse me. You don’t happen to have any spare toilet paper in there, do you?”
“Fuck off, ya bladdy woofter. ’Ev ’eard about blokes like you.”
Crispin was taken aback. The voice. And the crocodile feet! It couldn’t possibly be, could it? Could it?”
He started to say, “Wally, Wally, is that you?” but the loud noise of flushing water and a clanking drain drowned out his words. By the time he had, reluctantly, used his handkerchief to clean himself up, and waddled out of the trap, the other man was gone.
***
“Fuck this sightseeing shit. I need a drink.” Baby Joe was exhausted, and had reached the limit of his tolerance, and Asia knew it. She smiled at him.
“Okey-dokey. You did well. Thanks. I enjoyed it. Shall we sit here?”
“No. Don’t show me any more fucking tourists. I like the look of that joint over the road there.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you what. You go and get yourself a drink in that den of iniquity, and I’ll sit here and have a nice glass of wine and wait for Crispin.”
“You’re on.”
Joe smiled at her, and she returned his smile, and the thing that was again between them glowed for a moment, warm and tangible, as if you could touch it.
Baby Joe eased gratefully onto the barstool in the dark recesses of the tavern. This was more like his kind of place. Cool and quiet, and real, the motes dancing in the sunlight that came through the window and glowed in the rows of bottles behind the bar and highlighted the nails in the wooden floor. He ordered a double whiskey and a beer chaser, and asked the guy not to pour the beer. He downed the beer, ordered another, and sipped his whiskey until it came. He liked the peace. He thought about Asia and was happy. It was back. They were back. The thing that had been between them, pushing them a
way from each other, the thing that would not articulate itself and that they themselves could not bring into the light by talking about it, was gone.
But he knew Asia was right about what had dispelled the chill gray mist of uncertainly that rose to swirl between them and prevent them from seeing and reaching each other. It was the adventure. The danger. The sense of urgency and peril that had brought them together in the first place. The need for her to feel protected and the need for him to protect her. It was the medium in which their love had taken root and grown, and without which it withered. They were not meant for slow days of tranquility. They needed the dynamo of excitement to generate the power of their love at its full force. So what, when this was over? When they were back in Australia? Would it start to bleed again? Would the distance and doubts return? Probably. But at least they had given themselves a little more time. And he intended to make the best of it. Fuck it. There would be time enough for sadness. So ring the bell, pay the piper, and start the dance, and keep dancing until the last balloon burst and the last candle went out.
Baby Joe realized that he had drunk his second beer without noticing that he was drinking it. He signaled for another and headed toward the toilets at the back of the room.
***
Wally crossed the road to the taxi stand. There was a queue. He glanced at the clock. No worries, plenty of time. Right behind him was a bar. Quick cat’s piss for the road, then, hey? Wally stepped into the cool interior. His eyes had trouble adjusting after the brightness outside. He bellied up to the bar. There were two empty stools. One had a half-full glass of whiskey and two empty beer bottles in front of it. Wally sat on the next one. He ordered a beer. He asked the bartender not to pour it. He regarded it ruefully. It was tiny. It went down without touching the sides.
The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) Page 32
