Leper Tango (29 page)

Tranh's attic mouse titter was activating, and continued like a low decibel scuttle for a good minute.

“Truly, truly, I have underestimated you. It was a ploy to rid yourself of this woman. Don't answer, I do not need the answer. May I ask you a favour?”

“Sure. You can ask.”

“May I call you Franck?”

“Sure.”

“Franck, I no longer know what to think. Only that there are no clear lines in life. Things are out of our hands, ultimately. And, I don't really care. Now, let's have some lunch!”

V

September 11. I'd been skulking up
rue St-Denis
towards
Porte St-Denis
and back to my starting point for two years. Djana, Verena and the African girls were out on afternoon shift. I spotted Galicia, standing in a doorway. She was wearing scarlet pumps, a dull pink t-shirt, and a set of canary pedal pushers so tight, her legs resembled a sulphurous yolk oozing out into the grate of a sewer right outside the door. Ready for a day at the beach. A Monoprix throw-away nail file propped negligently upwards between her thumb and index of her left hand, as she examined her lips in a compact mirror held in her right. She spotted me just as I crossed
Pas de Caire
in front of the leprosarium housing the Thai massage parlor.

“
Franck, tu viens
?”

I shook my head and burrowed forward. The sky was darkening. A grey rain dripping down for three days running.

“
Franck, tu viens
?” Water sluicing through the gutters, a gastric acid of the previous day's waste.

“
Tu viens, Franck?
”

The street cleaners were on strike again. The shit, garbage and sputum caked to the asphalt. The work of a scatological schizophrenic with artistic pretensions.

“
Franck, tu viens? Allez, viens, je t'emmène, Franck
...”

The African girls joined in Galicia's taunts. They formed a loose semi-circle. A Salvation Army choral group, offering cunt instead of eternal redemption. Galicia balancing a powder pack in her left hand. She couldn't have held a robin's eggshell with more delicacy, her lips puckered in mock pity.

“
Franck, tu viens pas
?”

At
boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle
, I turned left, and found myself in front of a bookstore of historical erotica. The thing about sex is you are just in it. All activity is reduced to the emission of fluids — the secretion of saliva, sweat and grunts. I lit a cigarette, and surveyed a string of photos, showing a Prussian nobleman of the nineteenth century flagellating three servile blondes on leashes.

The St-Denis whores had woven a web of their own making, stretching end to end along the seedy thoroughfare of human refuse. The pimps, flics, barmen and johns were nothing more than
figurants
, bit-players, and anyone who inhabited the realm knew it. We were the drones buzzing around in concentric circles, and the circles spiralled around chakra-like nexa, located in each and every cunt along that forsaken road.

Our own movements were without focus or direction, except as a function of the cunt. Their immobility was apparent only. It was the presiding of queens overlooking their domains. And St-Denis was the heart of it. Sex was for sale everywhere in the city of Paris. In respectable quarters and less respectable, but St-Denis was the temple of sleaze, and the crypt of the temple was down on the street. On the street, not even the cops or the pimps could compete with the girls. Any display of masculine power was sporadic, ineffective and purely ornamental. In theory, a pimp could beat the shit out of his girls, but if he did, word would get out and his stock-in-trade would decline overnight. An eager young pup of the
Brigade Judiciaire
could theoretically intervene, at the risk of discovering he had arrested the Deputy Mayor, or a Cardinal, or the bastard son of the Justice Minister. Or that he was screwing with his colleagues' side pay and commissions. The girls on the other hand knew that
as long as they put out
, they were basically untouchable.

I continued up
rue du Faubourg Poissonnière
towards the
Gare du Nord
.

I walked into the
Gare du Nord
. It too had been bombed, and somehow survived. Nazis had the run of the place for awhile. I walked back to
Brasserie la Guignotte
, and sat down. At Platform 9, the Customs police had teamed up with the CRS, and held three blacks handcuffed to the ground. I took a seat and ordered a Meteor beer. Across the way, a digital neon screen flashed a message:

Discount fare:
on bouge?

Fantasia voyages

A tour guide leading a group of dowdy Brits in town for a shrinks convention. They walked into a QUICK fastfood and timidly took their seats.

Franck, tu viens
?

I continued right out of the district, and up
Réaumur
until it turned into the
rue du 4 septembre
, and back to the American Express office. There were two letters waiting for me. I exited the
rue Scribe
offices, and stopped in at the
Café de la Paix
. I ordered a coffee, and opened the first, from the Law Society:

Dear Mr Robinson,

R E: Reichman vs Masbourian et al

Please be informed that your disciplinary hearing has been cancelled due to the disappearance of the complainant. We shall keep you apprised of any further developments in this matter.

Yours truly, Margaret Tillman

The second letter was postmarked Boca Raton, Florida.

Dear Franck,

Laraine here. I'm down recuperating from another bout with Dr Cooper, Franck. Is it worth it? Who knows? But, Franck, I need some company, and while you're drinking Bacardi in my million dollar flat, have I got a deal for you, Franck? Take a break, Franck. You're a prick, but you make me laugh.

Love, Laraine

I stared out the window of the
Café de la Paix
, right at the spot where Oscar Wilde couldn't sponge a centime from the patrons who had idolized him a year previous. That's the problem with literature. No contingency funds. Then, staring into the window, I recalled Sheba looking through the plexiglass of the Montreal airport about thirty lifetimes previous. Pushing the index of her left hand up against the glass, drawing a vertical line on it, then peering through it at the whiteness outside. Then uttering my name, sending a small trace of vapour into the window.

“Franck.”

Where had we fucked each other in the city? Père Lachaise. The catacombs. The crypt of the Madeleine.

If she were only a whore, why can't you get her out of your mind, Franck? The answer is simple. You just don't.

It was like Tranh said. The lines weren't really clear in life. Whether Spike found me or not wouldn't resolve anything one way or the other. As for Sheba, she would stick around for awhile in my brain. Then, the storm would pass. But the overall energy would remain the same.

Then, the thought of that yard-ape Charlotte came to mind. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my wallet.

The old man's phone number in Lusignan. It was a long shot, 9-1 at best, and even if it panned out, it was another crapshoot having a nine-year-old version of Sheba to deal with. But, hell, she still couldn't handle firearms, and, what were the options — Margaret Tillman? I walked up to the counter.

“Give me a
jeton
for the telephone.”

On the other hand, Millie had offered me a freebie for the afternoon. I walked down the stairwell curling downwards, towards the toilets and telephone. As they say in the New World, heads I win, tails you lose.

 

 

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Copyright © 2012, David MacKinnon and Guernica Editions Inc.

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2012932925

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacKinnon, David (David J.) Leper tango / David MacKinnon.

(Essential prose series ; 95) Issued also in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55071-367-1

9781550713688 Epub
9781550713831 Mobi

I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 95. PS8625.K5535L46 2012 C813'.6 C2012-901199-1

 

 

 

David MacKinnon is a lawyer by training, member of both the British Columbia and Quebec law societies. He has five university degrees, including two law degrees and t wo degrees from
Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne
. He studied history, law, languages and philosophy at the universities of British Columbia, Louvain (Belgium), Sorbonne (Paris), Laval (Québec) and Ottawa. He has worked in oilfields, factories and warehouses, morgues and operating rooms, lumberyards, shipyards, construction sites and in the courtroom as a trial lawyer. For the better part of twenty-five years, he lived and worked in France and Quebec. He has written eight novels.

 

About
Leper Tango

Leper Tango
recounts the lunar trajectory of Franck Robinson — a self-confessed member of “the despised and despicable sub-species of skirt-chaser known as the john.” During one of Franck 's regular free-falls into the Parisian night, he meets Sheba, who moves from being Franck 's favourite hooker to being Franck 's obsession.
Leper Tango
is a confession of an unrepentant man whose stated life aim is to screw an entire cit y. The author, presumably the alter ego of Franck, is also a jack-of-alltrades and vagabond spirit.

—
FNAC Book Review

 

Franck Robinson, forty-something, chaser of skirts, usually the low-end sidewalk variety, combs the streets of Paris in search of Sheba, whom he imagines to be the ultimate Parisian whore. Franck drifts from bordello to bar, and ultimately finds himself trapped by his own demons of alcohol and a fatal attraction. With this hilarious novel, the Canadian MacKinnon showcases a talent for the absurd and a mastery of language reminiscent of Henry Miller.

—
Glamour Magazine