Death on Credit
Page 68
p.445, Rungis: A reference to the Fresnes-les-Rungis prison.
p.476, Jean Bart hat: A hat with a wide turned-up brim, formerly worn by children. In his best-known portraits, Jean Bart (1651–1702), the famous privateer, is not wearing anything of the kind.
They went back down to the concierge… They raised hell… Things were getting rough. So then Antoine and the boss’s wife began going out all the time, they did their drinking on the outside, they ran up terrible bills in every joint in the neighbourhood… I didn’t breathe a word about all this at home… They’d have blamed it all on me… They’d have thought I was at the bottom of all the mess!
The main thing was the jewel case!… That solid-gold Sakya-Muni… I didn’t let him run around, he didn’t get out much! I kept him very carefully way down in the bottom of my pocket… and fastened with three safety pins. I had stopped showing it to people, I didn’t trust anybody any more… I was waiting for the boss to come back.
In the shop Robert and I took it easy… Antoine hardly did a lick of work. After their parties he and the old bitch would come in and kid around with us. We turned the whole place into a shambles. Meanwhile in the afternoon they’d saw wood for hours… We were one happy family… as thick as thieves and twice as sticky!…
But one night the axe fell! We hadn’t bolted the door… It was dinner time… There was a lot of bustle on all the landings… So one of our enraged liquor suppliers, the meanest of the lot, comes dashing up the stairs, four at a time!… We didn’t hear him until it was much too late! He opens the door, he comes in… He finds the two of them in bed! Antoine and Her Fatness!… He begins to yap like a dozen seals!… His eyes were all bloodshot… He wanted to murder Antoine on the spot! He was brandishing his big hammer… I thought he was going to emboss him one…
It was true, we owed him plenty… for at least twenty-five bottles… white… rosé… cognac and even vinegar… It degenerated into a pitched battle… It took eight of us to handle that gorilla… We called in all our friends… Antoine was bleeding like a stuck pig. He had two enormous shiners… a blue one and a yellow one…
From downstairs in the court he went on threatening us. He was delirious. He called us every name in the book: “Crooks!… Scum!… Cocksuckers!…”
“You just wait, you layabouts! You’ll hear from me!… Sooner than you think, you bastards!… You’ll see when the police get here!”
Things were getting sticky!…
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