Leper Tango (4 page)

It turned out that all three of us had had contracts put out on us at various times, although mine was the only one still outstanding. We were discussing basically, when is the person serious and when are they not, that type of thing. There was no doubt that, sooner or later, if you wrote your own rule book, some people wouldn't like it, and among those people, one or two might utter a few threats, and then there was the case of the person who had nothing better to do, and more or less set about making killing you a high priority item. So, of course, you had to deal with these people.

And, the conclusion was, you're never a hundred per cent sure, but there's an equation, more or less, the less experience with firearms, the more the person had to be desperate. So somebody who killed people for a living, if there wasn't money involved they wouldn't do you in, unless there was a really good reason.

“In Algeria, we were not perfect. We broke rules. But, we knew what the rules were. We had codes of our own. Look, see this tattoo?
1er régiment de chasseurs paras
. And, the other night, a couple of kids,
sauvageons
, tried to rob me at gunpoint. I put them both in the hospital.”

He shook his head. “No respect.”

That word,
respect
, obviously meant something to these people. It was a word with consequences.

Tranh's skin flushed red. He gained in exuberance as he drank. One of those alcoholics who have the gift of uttering truths during states of intoxication, then erasing it from their memories.

“Gentlemen, I am going to articulate the content of our agreement. Maurice, you only know me as a client. This
Egmond
comes from America, so his truths are not ours. But, I put to you the following tripartite proposition. Point One. Virtually all men cannot see what is right in front of their eyes. Point Two. What is right there to be seen is not very pleasant. Point Three. If you can see it, you are best to keep your silence anyways.”

We nodded agreement. It was the drink, but it also sounded true, and perhaps the loss of the world is that perfect strangers cannot meet anymore and say what is in front of their eyes. That the world is an absurd, hypocritical lie, and that the thing they call love is the biggest lie of all.

The soup arrived in wide, brown
soupe à l 'oignon
ceramic bowls, emitting a thick stench of parsley, sage, thyme, garlic, tomatoes. Tranh sucked its vapours into his nostrils.

“This soup, gentlemen, was created in honour of the Franco-English victory over the Turkish-Egyptian fleet in 1827, during the Greek war of Independence. There are evenings like this which must be seized upon, evenings like this when I feel that our tales must be told, that we must get to the bottom of things! And, just the three of us, burrowed into the sewers of Paris, with nothing to do but tell our tales. I am telling you, Egmond, this is fate.”

Tranh poured out the wine.

“At the age of six, I was caught in a rocket attack launched by the Americans in Vietnam. The attack killed my mother. I lost my memory for a week, and the blast deafened me for four years. For that period, I was in a state similar to autism, but my condition had not affected one ability, that of playing chess. It also gave me an intensity which unsettled all of my opponents.

My mere glance was enough to defeat many. At the 1966 Leiden invitational, at the age of 16, I came up against the rising star of the Asian chess world, Ivan Sakharov.

A Russian, of course. It was a game held in the AULA in Amsterdam, a 15
th
century auditorium constructed during the golden era.

“Sakharov was my only true rival. Being my father's son, I set out not only to beat Sakharov, but to destroy him. He was pumped up with pride, came from a bourgeois family of St-Petersburg. He was intelligent, but he lacked imagination. His openings were considered to be novel, but invariably, he fell back into a classical midgame, played out from the Queen's side, almost without fail. After allowing him to win the first game in order to test my theory, I responded to an opening: an East Indian gambit as I recall, and then announced that I would write down his next eight moves. Impossible, he responded. Nevertheless, I shall do it, I said. What will you wager on it. Anything you like. Then it shall be your life against mine...

“This boy pronounced me insane after my proposition, but his vanity and greed were elements I knew I could count on. I laid it out for him. If I am wrong, I shall end my life, and no one will stand between you and ultimate glory.
And, if I lose
, he responded, showing his fear. And, if you lose, I stated, deliberately off hand, you shall know me the superior player, and your life will no longer have any meaning.”

It was a good story, and it might even have been true. Also, I felt free to tell my little tale and, for the first time I could remember, I started thinking back on where I came from, and how I had ended up in a Paris bar with murder on my mind, a price on my head, and still some things to be played out. It was a form of luck, in a way. It would end badly, but, within it all, there was luck, to be here with two other men who understood the way things really are.

The marquee attraction the following evening at
Le Tambour
— “Rhanya and Gaston sing Piaf and Montand” — was announced on a chalkboard on the sidewalk outside the café. Upon entry, we spotted a robust Arab woman, stumbling around in a paisley smock on a makeshift stage near the rear of the bistro. She cursed loudly at a microphone, eventually tossed it to the floor and stamped on it once or twice. A liver-lipped, beet-eyed man — who wore his hair in a tightly tressed Chinaman ponytail, and was stuffed inside an undersized Sergeant Pepper admiral uniform — joined her onstage and on cue, they kicked into an off-key version of
Les Feuilles Mortes
.

The act was macabre and burlesque, proving the Parisians hadn't lost their taste for low-level
music-hall
. Rhanya, the star of the evening, had a head like a rhomboid stump, adorned with a shrub of follicles that looked to have been culled from a subterranean garden. Her face thickly painted with an oily film, smeared unevenly over her pulpy features. A makeshift bandage, wrapped around her head from skull to chin, completed her hybrid lizard lounge/emergency ward look. She was heavily intoxicated, but once she got into her number, she sang an honest, industrial version of the Piaf song
La Vie en Rose
.

An old woman sat at a table nearby the stage, clapping listlessly. Three men stood together at the bar, drinking Pastis. If they lived in America, they would be assistant golf pros or real estate salesmen, or franchise operators. But, this was Paris, so they were just drunk. Two men seated alone at neighbouring tables, their backs to the wall, seemingly unaware of each other. One of the two bore a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley. Thick, pitch-black sideburns bordering a face buried in melancholy. Wearing a black leather vest, no shirt. His forearms covered in tattoos. Elvis II was seated in front of three empty bottles of St Emilion and was busy working his way through the fourth. Behind the King, an oversized map of the Paris Metro, and a message woodburned into the wall:

No British, No
Amerloques

As Rhanya stepped off the stage, she noticed Tranh, who waved her to join us at the bar.

“Je vais crever, Tranh
. This time I am sure I am done for.” One of the three pastis drinkers caught wind of this.
“Allez, Rhanya, vous étiez merveilleuse!”

The second of the three pastis drinkers, a broadshouldered working stiff, lumbered up and put his arm around her.

“Apollinaire!”

Rhanya burst into tears.“Je ne dors plus
! Before, at least, I could sleep. And now,
terminé
. If only I could sleep!”

“Come home with me, Rhanya. I will make love to you. Like a Cossack!”

“Thank you for joining me this evening, Robinson. I

am very pleased.”

Rhanya sidled up to Tranh.

“If you buy me a Kir, I will suck your Asian cock,

Tranh.”

Tranh observed her momentarily, amused.

“Mr Robinson, there is nothing new in the human genome project. We have developed our own laboratory of mutant strains, right here in
le Tambour
.”

He turned his attention back to Rhanya.

“Have you not heard, Rhanya? The mayor has launched a vast campaign to flush Paris of anything and anyone offending the hygiene and anti-loitering laws.

There is a chance you will be flushed out of the city if you are not careful.”

“I cannot be stamped out. My stench is Parisian stench, and the mayor is a Corsican
enculé
!”

As Rhanya said this, a trap door opened, and a lift came up, an oversized dumbwaiter, common to Parisian restaurants, used to bring up merchandise.

“Get on the lift, Robinson. Maurice has a special room downstairs. I want to hear more of your tale.”

We rode the lift downstairs, into a cellar vault, stacked to the ceiling with wine, beer, Campari, and foodstocks.

At the far end of the room, two olive
-
green doors, barricaded shut. Tranh pushed hard against the doors, forcing them open.

We entered a large room, with half a dozen rickety tables set up for board games. Pairs of men were intently focussed on games of speed chess or Chinese Go. An oval doorway led out of that room into a narrow, damp corridor.

“We are walking over the remains of the old
cimetière des innocents
. Molière is buried beneath us. And, at the exact same spot, La Fontaine. Here we are.”

We entered a room at the end of the corridor. Burgundy
-
red curtains covered the walls and ceiling. Four sets of electric bulbs hung loosely in clusters. There was only one rectangular pine table in the room, dead centre with a bench on either side. Tranh sat down, invited me to join him, clapped his hands. A gruff looking man appeared with a straggly beard, trailing the remains of food and mustard, wearing an open
-
necked Greek blouse.

“Raki, Dmitri. Rib-eye steaks. Os à moelle. A la Bordelaise. Some cool Touraine wine.”

Tranh turned towards me.

“You recall our conversation the night we met. About this Sheba, this boa, this killer woman who is looking for you. Or, is it you looking for her?”

“Vaguely.”

“You asked me for some assistance. Something about ridding yourself of her presence.”

“Just talk.”

“You told me you loved this woman too much to let her live. I can help you, but you must tell me the rest of your tale. There are certain things which escape me. Any woman deserves a man's attention for an evening or two.

But, why for so long? I want to hear more about this obsession. I have an idea about this woman. I presume you don't have any scheduled appointments, Robinson.

Bear with me, Robinson, I have my own reasons for listening to stories such as these.”

III

A few stints doing factory work and waiting tables as a young man taught me quickly enough that you had to find an angle if you wanted to escape a life of drudgery. This meant learning to stand on your own t wo feet, and selling yourself to the world. My ticket to a palatable life was a law degree, once I realized the lucrative possibilities of being
vested with a public trust.
After a few years representing the scum and dregs of the city of Montreal, I tilled more fertile soil.

At one time or another, I have sold junk bonds, raised funds for First Nations tribes, run immigration scams out of Wanchai during the post-Tiananmen fiasco, acted as front man for venture capital schemes and served as an intermediary between the First World and the Third for rebuilding projects in Beirut and Algiers until the Hezbollah and the Armed Islamic Group brought beheading back into fashion. At one point, I hung out my shingle as a
facilitator
, and spent my time organizing golf dates and bordello visits in the Wanchai for Taiwanese defence ministry types and French arms salesmen with a taste for retro-commissions. With a law degree, you could pretty well do whatever you wanted during the eighties and early nineties. People were selling everything from plutonium to countries. The whole planet was open for business.

I never did business to make a fortune. Getting by was plenty for me, and I was happy enough on the margins. You didn't have to be a genius to figure out that everything would collapse sooner or later. The markets were like a global casino. The conditions were created by a war, and a war or some act of terrorism would bring it to a halt.

Oddly enough, it was during a brief return stint to the practice of law that I hit the jackpot. A colleague, or rather crony, Hervé Bourque, had asked me to take on some of his case load during one of his own sordid sex tours of Bangkok before the politically correct cut out that as a viable option. One of his cases involved a girl named Kimberley Sutherland. She had been honeymooning in the South-West with a man named Spike. Spike suggested they rent an ATV. What's an ATV? asked Kimberley. They're made by Honda, Spike responded, omitting to mention that ATVs run on three wheels, which makes them notoriously easy to f lip. When Spike hit the first dune in the Mojave Desert, Kimberley screamed. As he hit the second, Kimberley's butt bounced off the seat. On the third, the ATV flipped, bringing the honeymoon and life, as she had previously known it, to a full stop.

Spike couldn't have known it at the time, but his lunatic driving would also turn my life around a hundred and eighty degrees. Sentimentality aside, a quadraplegic is of no use to anyone, except for a personal injury law yer. When the victim is on a car manufactured by Honda, and insured by a notoriously solvent insurance company with pockets deeper than the Grand Canyon, everything moves quick ly from the courtroom to the corridors. The day after my motion for a jury trial was granted, I settled for 2 million, which left me half a million as a contingency.

If you are planning a long life, half a million really isn't that much. It might buy you a house, where you can set up shop until it's your turn up on the chopping block. On the other hand, if plan A is to overtip a few waiters and spoil a whore or t wo, it's plenty. I picked up and relocated to Paris with nothing more on my mind than cunt and
blanquette de veau
...

It was around 2:30 in the morning. Thirty-six hours after my arrival in the city, when I stumbled out of a taxi on boulevard St-Germain and weaved into the
Café de Flore
. She was sitting alone, writing notes at the second table to the right as I entered, her eyes cast sky ward in reflection, and a mechanical pencil jammed in her mouth right at the point where my cock would be moored three hours later. Another budding genius. Paris is full of them. Always has been. Some of the budding geniuses are well into their mid-sixties, still waiting for the big break, still raving about their genius. But genius is still very marketable currency as a posture in the city of light, and being able to posture is crucial for survival.

There were five people in the Flore. I recognized three of them, although they didn't me. One was a TV fashion commentator. He stood in the stair well, his tongue wrapped around the arm of an ochre
-
tinted set of sunglasses, eyes rolling imploringly, while he tried to placate a clearly dissatisfied dyke comedian with a sour grimace on her face that said Paris didn't measure up to her own virtual realities. A high profile philosopher known for his anti-American jingoism was intently scribbling his next piece of vitriol. That left her and me. The only illustrious unknowns in the place.

We were made for each other. I had been sliding into a posture of indifference for years. Nothing was real to me, except the strong smell of grains in the whisky I drank, or the nicotine stains on my fingers. Those were my faithful companions. They would lead me to premature death, but in the meantime, they allowed me to navigate through my personal mental wasteland of scrub and savanna. I, at least, knew my gaoler, whereas the great mass of humanity had not yet even realized they were in prison. It allowed me clarity, if not liberty.

Any thing I did had no meaning, other than as a means of marking time. From one cigarette to the next, or one drink to the next. Or one cunt to the next. The only remaining issue was to see how things played out. Occasionally, I would latch on to the illusion that I could accomplish something useful. Those inter vals were short-lived, and led nowhere. A decent poker game would pull me back to reality. Or a month or two with any given woman.

At least that was my state of mind until I spotted Sheba. The second I caught sight of her, I knew I had fallen onto terra incognita. I sat down at the table beside her. Asked her who she was. What brought her there. Her nationality. All of it in a deliberately slow, plodding accent as if I had just wandered in from Cracow or Prague. I had no idea what effect I had on people, didn't really care at that point. It was a weak, clumsy ploy, but tactics were a secondary issue when people didn't really exist. I offered her a drink. Watched her consider giving me the brush-off, then decide she would put up with whatever I had to offer. After some small talk, I could see she was in for a few more, provided I paid. We moved up the street to a rum bar.

When the rum bar shut down, she offered to take me for a spin in her car. We took a fast, rain-slicked drive up the
rue de Seine
, onto
Vaugirard,
and alongside the Luxembourg gardens. For those of you who have never tried it, it's a hell of a lot of fun to whiz along Parisian rain-driven streets at high-speed with a French broad stripped of the usual moral scruples, and not a clue where you're headed. Type of thing that can make you forget you've been up for thirty-six hours. We raced the wrong way up
Soufflot
, higher than kites, thanks to some ecstacy she had stashed in her purse, then did a few 360s around the Pantheon. Not a soul to be seen. The pillars of the austere law faculty staring down at us. The Pantheon, and a slew of famous men's graves — Voltaire, Montaigne and Pascal, the foolish experimenter and conjecturer — Foucault's pendulum,
Ste-Geneviève du Mont
. We were higher than the philosophers, macrocosmic. Nobody could touch us. We had been sprayed with human repellent.

It's prett y difficult to describe your state of mind when you find yourself in these regions. From the outside, it definitely looks like insanity. It's not, though. It's just not caring anymore. Outside of ever ything else, Sheba had provided me with the perfect excuse to write off humanity once and for all. That's how I felt when we jumped out of the car and entered a bar on
Mouffetard
. “Bartender, for those in attendance who are interested, one round of cranberry vodka martinis or Black

Bush coolers or other poison of their choice.”

I must have said something like that as we took our seats. If Western Union had walked through the door just behind us, in that hole in the wall on
Mouffetard
to announce that America had been destroyed by nuclear holocaust, I would have turned my back and ordered another round of cranberry vodka martinis for the house. To celebrate the event. Or more precisely,
to get on with it
. Or just to keep the chaser rinsing my vocal chords between the lines of coke we snorted. Or to underline my
core belief
that all life had now magically been compressed inside the bodies floating within my spongiform cerebral universe. But more than anything because Sheba had become magnetic North, and the sound of that siren voice cooing in my direction just sent me right off whatever was left of my head. But, it was voluntary. Consensual synallagmatic every step of the way.

And not a single redeeming feature to her. Unless you call a cunt like a pocket warmer a redeeming feature. Or a superhuman ability to perform fellatio better than a piccolo player in the
Orchestre Nationale de France
a redeeming feature. Or an assassin's smile, and an attitude to match a redeeming feature. Lucifer's daughter was perched in my lap and I felt the date was long overdue.

“Sheba, you know what I am thinking?”

She was sizing me up, basically as prey, not because she was immoral, or evil or any of those things. It was just in her nature. She was obeying the voice, or as the new
-
agers would put it, just
following her bliss.

“What are you thinking, Franck?”

“I'm thinking I'm Faust, and you're Beelzebub.”

“No, it's far better than that, Franck. You see, I can be
anything
you want me to be. Anything, Franck.”

The next day, Sheba took me for a spin down the

Quai Jemmapes
, which runs alongside the Canal St-Mar
tin. We were more or less drifting, passing a cigarette back and forth between us. She was looking out the car window driver side towards the water slapping against the side of the locks, monitoring something, smiling at some private joke. The soundtrack from
Lift to the Scaffold
was playing on FIP FM, 105.7. I could see Sheba was happy. There was something else, too. But there was happiness. I was already learning to separate it from whatever the other part was.

The cit y had crawled to its usual Sunday morning halt. It was a grey day, of a kind that only Paris can give you, because even with ten million people in it, the city still knew how to come full stop, shut down and loll like the lazy, self-indulgent whore it was. The Miles Davis track had yielded to the husky reverb of a female voice describing a traffic jam in a tone and cadence that sounded piped direct from a caisson at the bottom of a river.

She turned right, drove onto a curved street, which hugged the edges of the
Buttes Chaumont
and pushed us through Belleville and further South. Once on
boulevard Menilmontant
, she pulled over, then parked just outside the walls of
Père Lachaise
cemetery. The city was grey, overcast.

The street where we parked was a short stretch of alley named
rue du Repos
. We climbed some steps. Walked through the main entrance of the cemetery. A concierge was sitting inside an office at the entrance, blandly leafing through the daily horse-racing form in
le Parisien
. Sheba walked several steps ahead of me towards the lower end of the Eastern divisions of the cemetery, just inside the walls. The cenotaphs and shrines, visible at higher levels of the cemetery like contours of a mountain vineyard, yielded to simple headstones, flat tombs, and a few scattered cairns at the sliver of plots where we now stood. The surrounding lawn was neglected. Many of the stones were partially overgrown with thistles, vines, milkweed, dandelions. I followed her along a narrow path between two rows of marble slabs. She eased past an old man, hunched over, kneeling as he lay a bouquet of
muguets
on a tomb. She wore a thin, gauze-like material as a scarf, over a cream-coloured blouse and a knee
-
length skirt. Dressed for the role. Woman in a Paris cemetery on another dismal Sunday near the end of the millenium. The sun was creeping through the clouds, casting out thick beams of light.

I watched her buttocks swivel back and forth, taunting death with the projects that still lay ahead. I looked back towards the entrance to see if anyone other than the old man was in the vicinity. A young group of anemic Germans had entered by the main road, looking for Jim Morrison's tomb, or looking for a place to drink. Or just looking. I looked back at her. She was examining me. Everything else, corpses included, were backdrop. There was only her, and her cunt, and the wreckage of her mind.

She bent to her knees, wrenched a sprout of milkweed from the soil. She bit off part of the stem. A lactic fluid oozed out into a rivulet onto her lips, then into an estuary over her chin.

“Look at the area around this
mauvais herbe
, Franck. Nothing alive. Just to live, it has to suck and choke the life of everything within reach.”

She held a small bouquet of the weed, as if she were a bridesmaid. She turned around and continued her walk towards a vertical mausoleum in the shape of a balustrade. Both the inside and out were covered with graffiti and ivy. She pulled me inside.

“Look, Franck.”

She reached for a stretch of iv y clawing at the wall and pulled it back, revealing an etched inscription on

two drawers: Victor Levy Estelle Goldstein

Rachel Levy [1950-1970]

“a refuge for men in need”

There were several swastikas on the wall. One of the graffiti said: “
Mort aux juifs.
” Another said: “
Juden verboten.
”

She leaned backwards against the wall and pulled her skirt upwards, showing her rusty cunt hairs draped between the two white straps of her garter belt. Ready for the matinee performance.

“Now, Franck. Now.”

A shaft of sunlight was coming through an open crack in the wall of the mausoleum. She lifted up her left leg and wrapped it around my thigh. I pulled her upwards until both her legs were wrapped around my waist. Over her shoulder, as I felt my cock penetrate past her labia and lodge against the spongiform walls of her vagina, my eyes fell onto the graffiti.
Mort aux juifs
.