Nazis in the Metro

by Didier Daeninckx

  Vergeat lifted his knees, one after the other, to pull up his socks.

  —Don’t play dumb with me, I might beat you at your own game … You know why I’m not surprised to find you here?

  —Do tell.

  —For the simple reason that you could have been his son! The same stew floats in both your hydrocephalic skulls … Defiance of law and order, unmotivated hatred of uniforms, simplistic challenging of statute … Pains in the ass, that’s what you are. Congenital pains in the ass!

  He punctuated his diatribe with a series of slaps to his coattails. Gabriel made a move toward the door. Vergeat rammed his shoulder against the wall.

  —What are you doing in these parts? I’m still waiting for you to answer.

  —Listen, inspector, I’m just an ordinary citizen, and like any ordinary citizen I’m free to walk where I see fit without having to explain myself to any authority, civilian or military … On the other hand, I’ve got quite a few questions about you …

  Vergeat removed his glasses from their natural resting place and nervously wiped them with his handkerchief, which he smoothed and refolded neatly before putting it away.

  —I’d be interested in hearing them …

  —What could an uncultivated pig like you understand about the life of a writer of Sloga’s stature?

  The inspector pulled himself onto the tips of his toes to dig his claws into Gabriel’s jacket collar. The words hissed through his too-white teeth.

  —You can’t possibly know how much I hate guys like you … Your sense of superiority makes me sick. It’s not the only dream I have, but I swear, one day I will break you …

  All at once he became aware of the ridiculousness of his position. His fingers let go of the collar, and his heels regained contact with the hallway’s tiled floor. He straightened his tie.

  —I don’t know what you’re after, Lecouvreur, but you won’t find anything … We’re tracking a gang of junkies who are squatting in the old warehouses of Austerlitz and pay for their fixes by attacking night owls in parking lots … This isn’t the first …

  —What’s curious is that they would send you on such a job … I wasn’t aware that they’d created a surveillance squad for parking lots back at HQ …

  Vergeat restored the shine to his shoes by rubbing them on the backs of his pant legs.

  —You yammer and yammer, and you don’t know a tenth of what we’ve got. HQ is just the tip of the iceberg … Everything happens at the lower levels. As soon as the name André Sloga was entered into the complaints database on the main computer, someone made the connection and his file was faxed to us … He had us by the balls, this hack, in the 70s … Big time! So they asked me to come take a look, as a formality, even though the stiff’s shown no sign of life for almost a quarter of a century … We don’t like loose ends. It’s that simple …

  The inspector frowned when Gabriel began to pull on the tails of his own jacket, to smooth out invisible creases.

  —That’s reassuring to hear … He must have really given you hell …

  Gabriel fingered the flap of his pants fly, setting off a series of nervous tics on Vergeat’s face and causing him to forget, momentarily, the state of his own apparel.

  —A ton of it … The worst was when he secretly moved in with a Polynesian woman on a Pacific island in the middle of a nuclear test zone, near Moruroa … The military found out the night before H-Day, and they had to postpone the whole program …

  Gabriel zipped and unzipped his fly twice, taking advantage of the inspector’s embarrassment to make his way toward the door.

  —I know this story: Sloga recounts it in detail in Weekend at Nagasaki … You can still find it at the used book stalls.

  He backed away down the hall and pushed the button to exit. Before the door clicked shut, he saw Vergeat open André Sloga’s mailboxes, using a skeleton key on a crowded key ring, and remove the bills.

  5

  TIED FOR FIRST PRIZE AT THE YOUNG THEATER OF THE REAL

  Gabriel ordered a pint at the bar of the Cantagrel. As he sifted through Sloga’s letters, he watched Vergeat leave the building. The inspector had apparently not gone up to the writer’s apartment, and Gabriel struggled against the desire to go himself. He decided to walk as far as the Tolbiac bridge as a means of forcing himself to think.

  He had once been passionate about steel architecture, and he would certainly have become an engineer if the hardware store owned by his uncle Émile and aunt Marie-Claude, who raised him after the death of his parents, hadn’t been located at the end of the Passage des Deux Soeurs, a hundred meters from a place called Block 18, where the skinheads met. Twice a day on his way to the university, he would pass the windows plastered with gothic posters for a hard-rock band, Commando 88, without paying them much attention—until the day when a prominent lawyer’s son who’d become an active Autonomist, not out of rebellion against his family but out of conviction, explained the skinhead code of numbers to him: the “18” stood for “Adolf Hitler,” the “1” for “A,” the first letter in the alphabet, and the “8” for “H.” The “88” was even more obvious: one “H” for “Heil” and the other for “Hitler.” On top of that, if you scratched off two curves from each “8” you would get the acronym “S.S.” The hardware store stocked all the resources necessary to launch a siege. The following week, two Molotov cocktails, perfectly dosed, shattered the front window of Block 18, and, as a bonus, set two Harley Davidsons on fire. A month later, after the upstanding people of the neighborhood had readily identified him and gone to the police, after his educational deferral from mandatory service had been rescinded, he found himself traipsing through the heart of a German forest buried in snow. Six months of military punishment that he made the best of by perfecting his knowledge of weaponry.

  He leaned on the bridge’s armature, near a cast-iron plaque that credited its design to the nineteenth-century engineer Daydé, and took the four letters from his pocket. The postmark on the first one indicated that it had been sent from Fontenay-sous-Bois five weeks earlier. He tore open the envelope and removed a sheet of paper covered in minuscule handwriting.

  Fontenay, 24 July, 1995

  Élisabeth Puchet

  12, Rue Maxime Gorki

  94 Fontenay-sous-Bois

  Dear M. Sloga,

  I pick up the pen anew, not knowing if my previous letters have reached you. I discovered this address (is it your address?) only after struggling for some time. None of your publishers seems to have preserved a relationship with you, and they claim to be incapable of making contact. By a happy accident, my brother works at the airport in Roissy for one of your cousins, and that has given me the means to write to you.

  I direct a theater company that has already produced a number of original works drawn from major contemporary literary texts (Blood and Misery by Pierre Bondieff, and The Impossible Reply by Phillipe Duras, which tied for First Prize at the Young Theater of the Real, for example) and my dearest hope is to be able to stage an adaptation of the work that is, to my mind, your most successful: Solace for the Hopeless …

  Gabriel refolded the insufferable missive without taking the time to read to the end. The second letter came from an organization that distributed royalties to authors. André Sloga was to show up at the teller’s window, on Rue Ballu, between nine o’clock and noon to retrieve the advance he had requested for a series of readings of some of his texts on a radio station in the overseas territories. The third envelope contained a monthly bill for photocopies, documents, and office supplies sent by Docutec, Inc. The surprise was hidden in a shabby manila envelope, un-stamped, the kind used only by the social-welfare services in the districts near the city limits. The message, drawn in capital letters on a sheet torn from an advertising pamphlet vaunting the merits of Corona beer, was impressive in its brusqueness:

  FINAL WARNING

  Gabriel turned the paper over several times before replacing it in its envelope.

  The sole p
arcel did bear the address of its sender:

  LOST & FOUND INK

  Bibliographic research

  33 Rue de la Santé, 75013 Paris

  The book within was accompanied by a form letter thanking the client for the confidence he had placed in Lost & Found Ink. The book’s cover was completely blank except for the name of an obscure publisher in Narbonne: Path and Terroir. It was a well-preserved volume from the early 1950s, with engravings embellishing the first page of each chapter. He read the title on the flyleaf: The Five Senses by Joseph Délteil. An interminable convoy of passing delivery trucks made the Tolbiac bridge shudder, and brought a burst of air that fluttered the pages he’d been leafing through. A paragraph caught his eye:

  “Each hour, a shiny-faced pickaninny would come to ask after the women who were sick with chlamydia. Lines of Negresses, their tits in gourds …”

  A hand came down suddenly on his shoulder as he was closing the book, stunned by the word Negresses. Inspector Vergeat brought his face close and yelled over the roar of the ancient trains.

  —Interesting place to read!

  Gabriel pointed at the four glass silos in the middle of the no-man’s-land of the development zone that Austerlitz had become.

  —You’d think so. But they’ve fallen behind in the construction of my library …

  He walked away without another word. The windshield of the Peugeot was adorned with a second ticket; they seemed to proliferate in the 13th. He placed it on top of the burgeoning pile that awaited the inaugural amnesty of Chirac’s second term, and headed for the Rue Popincourt.

  As soon as he set foot on the tile floor of the salon, the Yorkshire Terrier that belonged to the apprentice hairdresser ran toward him and flopped on its back, its four legs quivering, and the fifth displaying its little lipstick. Gabriel tried to flip the dog back onto its paws with the tip of his cowboy boot, but the beast’s fur slid off the leather. The customers laughed beneath their hair-dryers, and it was clear from their expressions that they were all imagining what the proprietress’s husband must have been doing to the apprentice to put a pet as innocent as this in such a state. Gabriel opened the door to the apartment and succeeded in banging it into the frantic dog’s muzzle. Cheryl was taking advantage of the relative lack of customers at the end of the morning to take a break from the chatter of the “Wigs,” a categorical term that applied to all but two or three of the salon’s regulars. She was lounging on the window seat amidst her collection of stuffed animals, watching a compilation of Marilyn Monroe’s musical performances for the thousandth time. He bent down to kiss her neck. She propped herself up on her elbows, making her breasts jut out.

  —I get the sense your morning wasn’t dull …

  —Not really … What makes you say that?

  She stretched a hand out toward his crotch.

  —The magic shop’s still open!

  Gabriel quickly zipped up his fly.

  —You don’t need to worry. I was playing a joke on Vergeat …

  Cheryl pressed a button on the remote control to rewind the tape.

  —Really! I guess your relationship has taken a turn for the better … Now you pass the time by taking off your pants? That’s original …

  He sat next to her to recount the series of events that had occupied his morning, from the first parking ticket at Place Léon Blum to its twin sister on Rue Jeanne d’Arc.

  When he finished, she was naked.

  After that, the world existed only for others.

  6

  LOST & FOUND INK

  Gabriel woke up alone in the middle of a family of kangaroos. The hair dryers were emitting an insistent whirr that drowned out the din of activity. He brushed aside the stuffed animals so he could gather up his clothes. He had returned from his adventure with the four letters addressed to André Sloga and the book by Joseph Délteil, which he turned back to now. Well before Camus, the plague had descended upon the world described in The Five Senses. Everyone was trying desperately to get to the north pole, where the virus apparently lost its potency. Élie-Élie, Scientist of the State, became the sacrificial lamb. As he labored to save the world, each of the five senses the Creator, in his largesse, had offered to Man were torn away from him, one by one, like five exploding flowers: Hearing, Smell, Taste, Sight, Touch.

  Gabriel, a savvy reader of detective novels, detected the stink in Élie-Élie as soon as he appeared beneath the delicate pen of Joseph Délteil.

  “He was born in Vienna (Austria) to a Yid, but with an American mother.”

  He stopped for a moment on the compensatory “but,” which multiplied the sentence’s loathsomeness, before reading on:

  The two kinds of blood, Jewish and Yankee, were as harmonious in his veins as they were in society. To their mingling, he owed his facial features and his business sense. Viennese waltzes, Esau’s lentils, and Chicago-style pork all contributed, with their complementary forms of nourishment, to his weak and fleshy soul. He was delicate like an archduke and fat like a Wall Street banker.

  Nausea overcame him well before the end of this portrait, but he forced himself to read every disgusting word.

  A kind of millennial force, coated with music and fat, emanated from his greasy corpulence, from his face with its gold-rimmed glasses. This flower—a monstrous eunuch, a hybrid beauty—united, in his person, old Slavonic flesh with brand-new bones: Moses and Rockefeller.

  Gabriel let the volume slide from his hands and remained motionless for a while, his gaze tilted toward the ceiling as he concocted a number of scenarios, each as unsatisfying as the last, to explain the presence of such a piece of work in the mailbox of a man like André Sloga. It made no sense. He went downstairs, poking his cowboy boot into the Yorkie’s hindquarters before the door to the salon was even fully open. The miniature canine squealed all the way to his mistress’s station and took refuge under a sink. As he passed, Gabriel quickly kissed Cheryl, who was busy giving a perm to the actress who played Jackie Sardou in the Sound and Light show. Up the street, the car was receiving the distinction of yet another parking infraction.

  The offices of Lost & Found Ink consisted of a garret with an ancient fanlight, on the eighth floor of a building with no elevator. Gabriel hadn’t been back to the neighborhood around the Santé municipal prison since the glory days when students had assembled there to demonstrate against a minimum wage law proposed by the last right-wing minister of a president who claimed to be on the left. The disparate protesters had joined together and were rushing the high walls, pursued by National Guardsmen eager for some action, when the detainees grabbed the bars of their cells and yelled out to the demonstrators that the cars parked on Rue de la Santé belonged to the wardens. Throughout the year, this little corner of Parisian paradise was given a pass by the meter maids, and those men and women who’d been sentenced to life, whose only mental stimulation came from the activity in the neighborhood, had forgotten what a parking ticket looked like. The protesters made a quick job of overturning the Peugeot GTIs, the Renault TSs, the Citroën ZXs, and Mercedes TDs that were being paid off in monthly installments with the bitter sweat of the condemned. Gabriel had restricted himself to helping the kids set fires, out of a fear of being mistaken, at his age, for an infiltrating cop.

  Now he bowed his head and took a half step into the offices of Lost & Found Ink, pushing lightly on the door, which had been left ajar to let in an illusory current of air. The floor creaked, attracting the attention of a man of about sixty who was stuffing books into generic envelopes similar to the one addressed to André Sloga. His face glistened with perspiration, and beads of sweat, heavy like the first drops in a storm, splashed onto book covers, bills, and packages. He looked up, pausing to wipe his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

  —What do you want?

  Gabriel ignored the question.

  —Are you the person who searches for hard-to-find books?

  —If one wants to earn a living in this racket, one quickly discovers that
it’s better to find the books for which people are searching …

  Gabriel indicated, with a slight movement of his features, that this demonstration of wit had not gone unnoticed. As he approached, he read several titles from the spines of books piled up next to the postage meter. The Beetles of Andalusia by Jaime Izquierdo, The Wind in the Trenches by Francois Dubanchet, Wine and Spirituality by Robert Illier … He didn’t know exactly how to engage with this strange and damp man, who was continuing to make up packages. Not being suspicious by nature, Gabriel decided to start by playing it straight.

  —Do you know André Sloga?

  The man paused for a moment and then stuffed an envelope with Letters to a friend who is dead and gone by Clotilde Tempruns, the cover of which was decorated with a scarlet band advertising that this tome had been awarded the Valentine-Abraham-Verlain Prize, given by the Academie Française to a “poetess visited by unhappiness.”

  —Certainly … People ask for him from time to time. In fact, I believe all of his books are out of print, and none of them went into paperback editions … Though there are some that deserve to … What title are you looking for?

  Gabriel positioned himself below the fanlight, which allowed him to stand up a bit straighter.

  —None of them … I have all of his books at home … I’m helping him a little with his research … I type his manuscripts …

  —He’s still writing?

  —He was writing …

  The man stopped mid-gesture and lifted his head, surprised.

  —What do you mean, “He was writing”? I didn’t know he’d died.

  —He hasn’t, yet … You haven’t heard about what happened? It was in this morning’s Parisien …

  —If you think I have time to waste reading newspapers …

  Gabriel withdrew a sheet of notebook paper covered with notes he’d taken while reading The Five Senses from his pocket. He unfolded it as if it were a precious document.