Nazis in the Metro

by Didier Daeninckx

  —I’m with you, Gabriel. In any case, it’s how I like my literature, “slightly rumpled from the journey” …

  —Me too. After that, the whole thing, at least what I’ve been able to read of it, is laid out as a succession of flashbacks. They are fairly short scenes, all structured in practically the same manner: Sloga establishes a character and his surroundings, then has Yolanda burst into his life and push him to his limits. She teases him mercilessly and refuses to put out, unless it will serve her better than would prolonging his sexual frustration …

  —A genuine bitch!

  —That would be too simple. This isn’t Robbe-Grillet. Gérard cast a surreptitious look at his Moldavian cook.

  —Don’t dismiss detective novels, Gabriel, I liked The Erasers …

  Gabriel responded only with a disdainful shrug.

  —As you’ve surely figured out, Yolanda works as an independent nurse in Bonvix. She knows every rear end in the region and can identify them by touch … There are a few among them that she makes full use of: those of the pharmacist, the two doctors, the veterinarian, and a surgeon from Fontenay-le-Comte who comes to spend weekends at his family home. Everyone knows about her amorous tendencies, and throughout the county she has a solid reputation for nymphomania …

  —That seems rather unfair. What strikes me is her remarkable faithfulness to the medical corps …

  Gabriel ignored the wise crack, amusing as it was, and persevered:

  —Fernand, who had you so worked up a moment ago, tried his luck because of the rumors, but Yolanda just patted him sweetly on the tip of his prick before packing up her gear. Basically, she only slept with them if it was useful. In a dozen chapters, we watch her inject the deadly virus into the immune systems of Fernand, the five doctors, and others of their ilk …

  Gérard’s eyes opened wide.

  —Oh, I see! The virus … I hadn’t realized that she’s giving them AIDS! I see why she’d get herself bumped off! Which one of them figured it out first?

  —That’s the whole problem! It could be one of the six, or a plot between them all, like in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians … Or like in Délteil’s Five Senses, with Élie-Élie … The Plague … AIDS …

  —You’ve lost me now.

  The Octopus pursued his train of thought without concern for his friend.

  —Unless it came from outside. Only André Sloga has the answer, or rather, had the answer … His brain has been soaking in sauerkraut since his brétonnade, and now he only says a few words: Max, loudspeaker, bank, and square! Even Columbo would eat his hat.

  —There isn’t anyone named Max in the manuscript?

  Gabriel turned the bottle of Clermont upside down. A single auburn drop did him the favor of rolling from its neck.

  —You’ve really been reading too much junk, haven’t you? Some hack trots out a bunch of pop psychology and stock characters, and the marketplace claps its hands and asks for more … You don’t think it was the first thing I checked? … I even went deeper into the hypothesis … No Maxime, Masque, Lebanc, Laban, Loew, Speaker … Nothing, not the least mention of any of them!

  The cafe owner racked his brains for a way to save face.

  —My job is to design dishes and cocktails; to marry flavors, colors; to harmonize for the eyes, the nose, the palate … Not to analyze, dissect, perform autopsies … That’s your job! I’m partial to things invented by nature, not by man … And in your story there are two things that give me pause: First, I honestly wonder why this young girl enjoys killing the medical personnel of the Poitiers swamps in such a ghastly manner. There must be a reason. And second, I cannot understand what would cause the daughter of a good family, whose father’s got half the region under his thumb, to adopt the prosaic profession of independent nursing! It’s the lowliest rank in medicine. Those kids are usually set up as dentists at least: from what I hear, that’s a specialty that requires no more rigorous training than wholesale butchery does.

  Gabriel put the manuscript back in its folder and placed the floppy disk on top.

  —Congratulations, I arrived at the same conclusions. For the first question, I’m leaning heavily toward the theory of vengeance. I have a hunch that young Yolanda is picking off Bonvix’s health professionals according to a meticulously developed plan. Fernand has his ass pricked for a nervous problem; the pharmacist is subject to spasms, one of the doctors to asthma, the other to allergies; the vet has a bad case of psoriasis, and the surgeon is addicted to morphine … The why of the thing completely escapes me. But if it turns out she chose the profession of nursing from the start just so she could execute her plan, I’ll leave you to imagine the weight she’d be carrying on her shoulders! The men who killed her were hell-bent on keeping their secret from being revealed … The fact that Sloga is now a vegetable at the Pitié-Salpêtrière can only mean that he ferreted it out.

  —If I know you, you’ll be going to take a look around the marshes.

  Gabriel stood up, the manuscript under his arm.

  —I’m going to stop by Weston’s, buy myself a good pair of waders, and I’m off!

  * André Breton was from the Orne region of France.

  9

  RIVER RATS

  Gabriel exited the Aquitaine highway just as the nine o’clock news began to air on France-Inter. He stopped at the public telephones across from a tollbooth. The apprentice with the Yorkie picked up, holding a blow dryer in her other hand. She told him, her sharp voice piercing through the din, that Cheryl had left an hour early to do the grocery shopping. The little beast yapped at her feet, as if signaled by a sixth sense that the object of his desire was on the line.

  —Can you tell her I had to leave town, and that I won’t be back until tomorrow or the next day?

  He heard a small cry from the receiver and thought for a minute that she’d burned herself by putting the hairdryer to her ear instead of the telephone, but it was only a protestation from the Wig whose fate she held in her hands.

  He followed the Sèvre Niortaise river for about ten kilometers, crossing sleepy villages dotted with houses, low-lying as if crushed by the weight of the past and tradition. Stocky peasants traveling on foot turned to look at the Peugeot as it passed, scanning the numbers and letters on the license plate for an explanation of the evening intrusion.

  Bonvix distributed its dullness equally on both sides of the river. The church, the town hall, and the Agricultural Credit Union occupied the heart of the large village, and at its base, the main street was interrupted by a narrow stone bridge that meant a long wait for cars coming from downriver. Copper plaques engraved with the names of attorneys, notaries public, and doctors gleamed in the electric glow of faux gas lamps, while the neon alternative of the pharmacy’s sign cast a cold light on the charmless facades. Gabriel drew nearer to the edge of the village. The houses became more spaced out, shorter, and sadder, until they resembled Fernand’s hovel as Sloga had described it in his manuscript. The water level was low; the wooden fishing boats sat half-exposed on the sludgy riverbed. An odor of stale dirt, spongy grasses, and fish rose from the trench, wafting into the car through the open window. He thought he made out the shadow of a giant rat on the road, just as the sign for the River Rat Inn came into view.

  The parking lot, carved out of a field bordered by gorse bushes, abutted a cluster of small outcroppings used by anglers. He entered the inn. The main room seemed to have been hollowed out from the earth, and he had to stoop while descending the three massive steps to avoid smacking his head on the oak joists. The fifteen or twenty people, mostly men, who were seated at a bar constructed from logs fell silent and watched him for a long moment while, bowing slightly, he crossed the room to the small reception desk. It was distinguished only by the required list of room rates and a pegboard hung with keys.

  The proprietor herself was a swamp thing: the honeycombed nose of an amphibian, thick skin and mustache, globular eyes, heavy breath, stubby limbs … She brusquely described a r
oom that looked out over the coppice, and he accepted it sight unseen before sitting down, without enthusiasm, to a grey slab of freshwater fish pâté. He ordered a local beer, a pale Angle, which was served plain, without the detestable slice of poorly-rinsed lemon or moldy olive Parisian waiters habitually tossed in. The sad appearance of the pâté turned out to be misleading; the blandness of the tench, roach, and pike was fortuitously countered by a delicate balance of aromatic herbs, and he valiantly attacked the chanterelle omelet that followed. When he went upstairs to his room an hour later, the customers were still leaning their elbows on the logs. He bid them goodnight, but none of them responded.

  His first visit, the next morning, was to the pharmacist. He looked nothing like the portrait Gabriel had sketched of him in his imagination: rachitic and sickly, observing the world from behind glasses perched on the tip of his nose, dragging his infected carcass back and forth across a counter lined with bottles and potions. This apothecary had the physique of a butcher: a portly torso, hands like frying pans, prominent cheekbones, and a straightforward gaze, which met that of the detective. The Octopus stammered out a request for aspirin. The pharmacist slid the box out from a paper bag emblazoned with a red cross and handed over his change. Gabriel took two steps toward the exit, then turned around.

  —Excuse me, but have you been here a long time?

  The man’s lips curled into a smile tinged with irony.

  —Why do you ask? Got your eyes on the place …

  —No, I’m as incompetent at real estate as I am at pharmacopoeia … It’s just that I was a journalist once, and I followed the story of Valérie Audiat, that young woman who was found next to a small lock in the swamp …

  The reference to the crime made the man suspicious. His eyes hardened.

  —It’s been talked about much too much, blathered about all over … People here would rather forget it … The press did a lot of damage.

  Gabriel shoved the medication into his pocket.

  —Those are some of the reasons I changed professions … I was a journalist, but … Now I edit and revise manuscripts … Peace and quiet are what I need. I remembered the area, and I said to myself that at the end of the season, it would be the ideal …

  —For quiet, you can’t do better: with the amount of sleeping pills and antidepressants I sell, there’s no chance of a crisis within a radius of twenty kilometers! I imagine that with what ends up going into the waste water, even the fish are getting treated for their blues.

  Gabriel wrinkled his brow to show that he was thinking.

  —I actually think that I came into your pharmacy for an interview at the time, but I can’t put a face on the person who was here in your place …

  —You won’t have a chance to see it again, except in a photo … I took over for him four years ago. He was very sick, and he died a few months later …

  Gabriel leaned in toward the pharmacist.

  —What did he die of, if I’m not being too indiscreet?

  —Here, when we speak of it, we call it swamp fever.

  10

  TO DOC OR NOT TO DOC

  Gabriel walked along the dock from which the flat-bottomed fishing boats, loaded up with the year’s last tourists, flooded the canals of the hinterland. For the length of a summer, perpetually unemployed men of a certain age were able to escape their government-subsidized lives by plunging long boathooks into the slimy depths. They braced themselves on the wooden handles, their bodies cantilevered over the water, and then propelled the skiffs forward with a single thrust of the pelvis, marking their paths with the tips of their poles on the river’s surface. Children scoured the banks for coypus; the women smiled, happy; and the men, their eyes glued to point-and-shoots and camcorders, immortalized their cropped version of reality in video and film. Back on the square, a young woman with a headful of curls and the profile of a sheep was attempting to unlock the door to the veterinarian’s office. Gabriel watched for a moment before approaching her.

  —Would you like some help?

  She turned around, and he noticed that she was slightly less ugly from the front than from the side. She handed him the crowded key ring.

  —Yes, that would be nice … I don’t understand it at all, it only works half the time …

  He looked at the nearly identical keys one by one, bending down to examine the mechanism itself. He tried a different key from the one the woman had been struggling with, and the cylinder turned effortlessly. She took a perfume-soaked handkerchief from her bag and pressed it to her nose and mouth, then entered the waiting room, the walls of which were adorned with cheap posters of cats, dogs, birds, and tortoises. A layer of dust obscured the covers of the old magazines that blanketed the floor. A rank, composite odor, like what trails in the wake of less than meticulous taxidermists, seemed to have been deposited in several distinct layers throughout the room. Every movement revealed more of its nauseating variety. Though he had wisely remained at the doorstep, Gabriel recoiled, suffocating.

  —My God! It’s like being at a morgue during a strike!

  The young woman with the graceless profile had crossed the room to open the two windows, holding her breath. She rejoined Gabriel on the sidewalk to air out her clothing and hair. She was breathing laboriously through her handkerchief. He wrinkled his nose.

  —So, where does that stink come from?

  She smiled to show that she understood what he was referring to.

  —The vet I’m supposed to be replacing has been dead for a month …

  —In my humble opinion, it’s high time to remove the body, or else it will be weeks before the stench subsides …

  Her smile broadened.

  —Don’t worry, he was at the hospital when it happened … The problem is that he didn’t have an assistant, and everything was left as it was … The odor comes from the freezer … It was full to the brim with dead animals that need to be removed by special services, and the electrical company had the brilliant idea to cut off the juice! I had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy to move to Bonvix, but this, this is something …

  —Where are you from?

  —Rueil-Malmaison. I’d had enough of doggie-dogs and kitty-cats …

  —I understand completely. My wife also takes care of hairy beasts, and it gets to her more than it should …

  —That’s funny! You’re married to a vet?

  —No, a hairdresser.

  She leaned on his arm and collapsed in laughter. He pointed toward the minuscule terrace of the only bar in Bonvix, the Gantua, which was across from the disused train station.

  —Can I offer you a coffee, while the air clears?

  She glanced at her watch.

  —The main thing is I can’t miss the corpse collectors. They’d better not be late …

  —We’ll see them arrive. We won’t be able to miss them from there.

  They settled in at one of the two tables exposed to the timid midmorning sun and, instead of coffee, ordered two pale Angle beers, which arrived tainted with oozing slices of lemon that the barman, with an air of self-satisfaction, had slotted on the mugs’ rims. Gabriel lifted his glass, after relieving it of the unwelcome intrusion.

  —To your new job!

  They let the foam dissolve on their lips. Gabriel knew enough to shut up, but he didn’t have to for long; the young woman quickly picked up the conversation.

  —Are you on vacation in the area?

  —No. For that I would need the sea, palm trees, coral reefs, and for everyone to be speaking Creole, at least … I’m just getting some country air. I work for a publisher, revising manuscripts, improving novelists’ prose, strengthening sentences, toning paragraphs, sculpting chapters … You could call me a “professor of literary fitness” …

  —I think that’s something I would love …

  Gabriel played it cool.

  —It’s frustrating more than anything else … You can’t imagine what it’s like to watch a guy whose sinking book you saved swagger a
ll over the stage of a literary television show, and blush with pleasure while the host of the day flatters the quality of his style! I’ve had future winners of the Goncourt in my hands … If I read you the original, you would think I was making it up …

  —I had no idea that’s how it worked …

  —Oh! It’s the same in every profession. For example in your field, medicine … A whole team works for years on a virus, and when the vaccine is discovered everyone says it’s Professor Blank’s vaccine, not the vaccine created by Professor Blank and his team. There’s only one name on the nomination form for the Nobel Prize: Dr. Blank, period, done! Anyway. How did he die, your predecessor?

  She looked at him, amused.

  —Why do you ask me that?

  —For my own protection … Yesterday, I had a sore throat, and I went to see the pharmacist. He’s new too … The one before him keeled over from swamp fever, from what I’ve heard. If that’s the same thing that got your veterinarian, I’d want to take some precautions …

  She lifted her arm to order a second round of Angles and lowered her voice as soon as the waiter had turned his back.

  —You’re right, they both died from the same illness, but it has nothing to do with the swamp …