Leper Tango (3 page)

Bourque, my seventy year old mentor, handing down his last piece of nostalgia from the annals of his own depravity, still salivating at the prospect of an ultimate, mind, body or soul-wracking experience.

But, I was too far away, another anonymous john in a whore of a city. Whore writ large in every nook and cranny. You could see the whore in the most erudite comments of the oldest member of the
Académie Française
. You could hear it in every discourse pronounced by the politicians, judges, clerg y and the journalists. It looked to me like everybody was on the take, one way or another, which eased the pressure considerably.

Not that I was in better shape just because I had a clear read on things. I was a john, which by definition meant I would empt y my wallet when my prick was standing on end. I could see the confidence trick,
deconstruct it
as my contemporaries would put it, but I far preferred to believe the whore when she claimed it was all about beauty, when I knew damn well it was and always had been about cash up front.

They were lined up in their usual postures in
le paradis
club on
rue des Martyrs
. Six tiny broads perched on stools. All wearing miniskirts, all between johns, all of them indistinguishable. Fungible goods. Girls from the 18
th
arrondissement
or from the provinces. Girls who just didn't have the hand-eye coordination or the drive to become Monoprix cashiers. Cleopatra bartender. An awning of indigo bangs hanging over her forehead. Scarlet lipstick burnishing a ghoulish complexion.

Despite being twice the size of anyone in the place, I managed to fit in after a while. That was easy enough.

Order a beer. Light a cigarette. Say nothing. Tip the girls. Become listless. Do nothing. After a week, I fit right in with the ersatz Rodin sculptures and the velvet table tops.

I had taken to carrying a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings during my wandering. A detail of the left wing of the Garden of Earthly Delights peered out from page 73. The painting depicts a bird-headed monster devouring damned souls, then defecating them into a chamber pot, after which they fall into a foul pit. The seven deadly sins hover obsequiously around the monster. The slothful man visited in his bed by demons. The glutton forced to vomit into the pit. Vanity viewing her reflection in the backside of the devil.

After an hour or so, I waved one of them towards a curtained door way. She led me through, up a set of stairs, then along a hallway to one of the rear bedrooms.

She opened the door with an old skeleton key. Two counter-clockwise revolutions, then inside. What's your pleasure, sir? W hat's your name? Zazie. That's not a name. What's your real name? Alena. What's your pleasure, sir? My pleasure is another room. That's impossible.

Next time, I want a room looking out over the street.

You have to ask Yannick. Who is Yannick? The guy at the door. He's not a client? A client? Ha!
Pauvre con
. Then, more impatiently, as if expecting Yannick to kick the door down, what do you want?
Une pipe
? Get to the point,
m'sieur
. I don't have all night.

“There was a Sheba who worked here once.” She laughed.

“
Oh, ça alors
. Look, I have to go back to work.” “When's the last time you spoke to her?”

“Listen, you want something special, something you've never tried, two thousand francs.
Sinon, faites pas chier le monde, OK?”

II

I was back in the city for my own reasons, but those reasons would take care of themselves in good time. Meanwhile, the cafés were there, and you could remain inside for as long or as little as you liked, no questions asked. The café denizens acted like they were members of Masonic orders, or provided unnamed but extremely essential ser vices, or were in on the latest conspiracy to end civilizations. At the same time, there was a certain humility to their arrogance. Which is to say, none of them spent their time telling you they were going to reinvent the wheel or change the world. It's pretty hard to take it personally if someone brags about seven generations of his family cleaning sewers or pouring béchamel into
Croque Monsieur
sandwiches.

I followed a default nocturnal trajectory which took me through the sleazier ends of the St-Denis and Montmartre quarters. Down the stairs of N° 2
rue de Mul
house
, out the thick
porte cochère
horsegate door, onto the
rue des jeuneurs
, which I followed up to
boulevard Mont-martre.
Ten million people in the city, and never more than t wo or three desolate f igures on the street of fasters.

The pure desolation of the street, its name, the grime of the couscous palace at the end of the road, provided me with the backdrop I required to review a set of apparently random facts which had accumulated in my mind. The facts were simple, when placed one in front of the other. They added up to my life. But, taken together, they lost all meaning, became more indecipherable than Boolean algebra.

My thoughts by now had carried me well into the backwash of the 9
th
arrondissement,
and into a twentyfour hour café in the
Faubourg Montmartre
called
Le Bled
, owned by a Marseillais second
-
tier mafia racketeer known as
Coco Lunettes
. Ghassim, a hundred and thirty kilo gorilla from Chad, surveyed proceedings from the entrance. A group of Africans were jamming franc pieces into illegal slot machines near the bar.

I parked myself at the counter beside a grey-haired paunchy man wearing a tweed cap.

He held a large goblet of Leffe beer in his right hand, and was staring fiercely at his companion, a middle-aged Asian gentleman. His listener looked to be Vietnamese. Thick
-
lensed glasses. Dressed Camus existential. Camus existential had always been a big look for the Asian crowd. A halfway ground bet ween inscrutability and pessimism as a fashion statement.

“Meteor, Khaled,” I ordered. “Good evening, Mr Robinson.”

The old man at the counter beside me struck me right away as one of those sour lefties from the sixties who figured they were Picasso or Che Guevara for whatever reason, and rained their bitterness on the world. “Diderot was right,
mon cher ami
. ‘
L'art est au fond des testicules
'
.
”

He turned and snarled in my direction: “What do you have to say about that,
monsieur l 'américain
?”

“You've pretty well covered the topic.” The Asian man waved him silent.

“Allez, du calme
. Roger, this gentleman is not responsible for whatever ails you.”

He extended his hand in my direction.

“Allow me to introduce myself. Victor Tranh. Chairman of the unoff icial ninth arrondissement club of reprobates and degenerates.
Merde de la merde
.
Santé
.

And your name?”

“Franck Robinson. Reprobate.”

He raised his glass as a toast.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Sure. Victor Tranh. Chairman of the reprobates.”

"No, Franck Robinson. I am the son of Vo Nguyen

Giap, the man responsible for the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.”

“And only a
Phu
people remember who your father is?”

Victor Tranh laughed. Like mice in an attic. Unexpected and irritating.

“Hee, hee. That is very funny, Robinson. So, you have a sense of humour. Excellent, for I am convinced that your life is a disaster.”

He scrutinised me for a moment.

“You've done time, haven't you?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Let me offer you a beer.”

“Sure.”

Roger the leftie had drifted towards the exit door of Le Bled, where he was banging angrily at the flippers of a vintage pinball machine called
Bon Voyage
. For a minute or two, Victor Tranh directed his clinical gaze at Roger the leftie while tossing back his Leffe, then turned towards me.

“You ever feel loneliness, Robinson?”

“Sure, we're all alone in the end. That's lonely enough.”

“Loneliness is a funny thing. It has nothing to do with being physically alone. It's realizing that, no matter what you do, nobody even comes from the same planet.

It can get lonely at times. Sometimes, the loneliness gets so intense, you become attached to it. In a perverse way.

Then, when it lessens, it becomes hard again. Beer?”

“Beer.”

“What brings you to Paris?”

“Just passing through.”

“What's her name?”

He wiped the beer off his mouth with the sleeve of his trenchcoat.

“No one just passes through the Faubourg Montmartre. This place is for people who fall off the planet.

Maybe you should share your story.
With a friend
.”

It was the way people talked nowadays.
Share your

story.
No story to share. I had taken up with a whore
named Sheba, then did the rest of what followed. Sheba.

A lifer. Someone who really believed in it as both art and craft. You never read about people who answer a calling anymore. One hundred and forty-three titles on billiards listed in
Books in Print
. The perfect carem. The champion players. The crowds. The best tournaments.

Nothing on whores. Who gives the best head. The oldest whore in the world. The managers and agents. No customer surveys. No instruction manuals. In a spoon-fed universe, whoring was the last refuge of the autodidact.

“Why do you think people talk like that these days?”

“Like what?” “You know.
Share your story.
”

“You don't want to share your story?”

Victor Tranh now turned to the remainder of the six drunken clients in the bar.

“
Il s'appelle Franck Robinson
. He has no story to share!!”

I'd spent enough time in Southeast Asia to know the place was as good at producing lunatics as any other part of the planet. Tranh 's laugh now a rodential flood of scavengers racing into a cellar after a block of Roquefort.

“It's a woman. Only a woman can do this. You have been ruined by a Cunt, capital C, and you are ashamed before the world, and think it a tragedy. You know, I met a Welshman once. He said, cheer up, you
bastahd
! I suppose you want to kill yourself now.”

The man named Tranh turned back to the counter, ordered two more Leffe beers, and quaffed both down in front of me. When he turned back, his eyes had reddened. In the alcohol tolerance zone, I was a racial profiler, and I'd rarely met a chinaman who could make it past four or five drinks in an evening.

“ When I am attempting to seduce a woman, Mr Robinson, I always ask her whether she has ever tasted dog meat.”

Tranh had crossed from over
-
the
-
top courteous effeteness to slobbering dog meat marketer within seconds.

My theory was intact.

“If a woman stays with you after you have confessed to eating dog meat, you can do anything with her. I recall an evening at the Opera Garnier.
Giselle
was playing, danced by Nureyev. The performance was exquisite, and I took advantage of the moment to invite my escort to the
Café de la Paix
for Veuve Cliquot. While she sipped contentedly, I leaned over and whispered ‘cocker spaniel ', then sat back and watched. She was a very spoiled woman, obsessed with herself, and a selfdescribed animal activist. Her smile, even
a priori
, was a sentimental, kitsch shield to mask her utter lack of taste.

‘
Pourquoi dites-vous cocker
, Egmond,' she hummed. She insisted on calling me Egmond. ‘Because I eat them.' When did Western women embark on this dog saving crusade, Egmond?”

All that to say we decided, or not so much decided, as ended up drinking a good portion of the night away in each others' company, while we addressed each other as Egmond. And, for a little Viet, it turned out that he could toss back more than a few Meteor beer. He seemed to have a dozen zones of imbibing, plunging first into temporar y inebriation marked by a comment on dog meat, fol lowed by a retreat into clearly articulated thoughts on the state of the world, another drink, and a plunge into the next phase of his drunkenness. He'd developed some kind of sui generis style. Later, at a hole in the wall in the 9
th
, there was a legionnaire, old guy, and he knew Tranh. There was no love lost bet ween them, so he could have been telling the truth. The legionnaire looked like he would know the answers to certain questions. As for the rest of the night, it was pretty vague. At one point, he mentioned something about his wife having MS. Those things are traded off with casual disinterest in certain establishments of the second
arrondissement
of the city of Paris. We agreed to meet a week later in a café called
Le Tambour
, which Tranh referred to as a “temple of absurdity”.

Tranh had grown up in Cambodia and Laos in the seventies, and I had run a few scams Wanchai way after the Tiananmen fiasco, which was more than enough to keep us going, and we both wanted to kill time. Later in the evening, the owner of
Le Tambour
, a moustachioed hulk named Maurice, joined in on the conversation. Just prior to daybreak, he locked up the bistro, and ordered his chef to cook food for the three of us.

There's a point in the night in Paris, where if you're with the right people and mix the right drinks, you start waking up again. Nothing really happened that evening, other than the fact that I decided to tell these rogue gentlemen my story. A David Byrne song, “I Love America,” playing over the speakers. Maurice had opened up another bottle of
Gigondas Seigneurie de Fontanges
, a few years old, and his cook had prepared a Navarin lamb stew, and Maurice was relating a few tales about his time in Algeria in the late fifties, and how sometimes you have to leave a man in a cell for three weeks without sleep, before you even began interrogating him.