Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (17 page)

‘Which is?’ Zenith seemed genuinely puzzled.

‘Taffy and I have both wondered about it,’ put in Begg, leaning forward to address his cousin. ‘Our question would be – where did that soul come from? Whose did you use? You can surely see why we would be wondering…’

‘Aha!’ Monsieur Zenith turned, laughing, to Mrs Persson. She clearly knew the answer. She leaned down and petted her two Orientals, who lay, perfectly behaved, at her feet. ‘I think I will leave that to you, Mrs Persson.’

The exquisitely beautiful adventuress straightened up and reached for her glass of absinthe. ‘It was the last soul the sword drank. It has been many years, if I am not mistaken, since you have unsheathed that particular weapon, Monsieur Zenith?’

‘Oh, many. I suppose, my friends, I will have to let you into a secret I have kept for rather a long time. While I have in the course of the past two thousand years sired children and indeed founded a dynasty which is familiar to anyone who knows the history of the province of Waldenstein and her capital Mirenburg, I am not truly of this world or indeed this universe. It is fair to say that I have, in the way some of you will know to be possible, been dreaming, as it were, myself. I have another body, as solid as this one, which as I speak lies on a ‘dream couch’ in a city more ancient than the world itself.’ He paused almost in sympathy as he observed their expressions.

‘The civilisation to which I belong is neither truly human nor truly of this universe. Its rulers are men and women who are capable of manipulating the forces of nature and, if you like, super-nature to serve their own ends. They are sometimes, in this world, called sorcerers. How they learn their sorcery is by making use of their dream couches, sleeping sometimes for thousands of years while they live other lives. In those other lives they learn all kinds of arcane wisdom. Upon waking, they forget most of the lives they have ‘dreamed’ save for the skills of sorcery, which they employ to rule the world of which their land is the imperial centre. I am one of those aristocrats. The island where I dwell is known, as far as I can pronounce it in your language, as Melnibone. We are not natives of that world, either, but were driven to inhabit it during a terrible upheaval in our history which ultimately turned us from peaceful beings into the cruel rulers of a planet.

’The demonic archangel upon whom of Klosterheim called to aid him is our own patron Lord of Chaos. His name is Arioch. Both your Bible and the poet Milton mention him. On occasions, he inhabits that black blade you saw me use. On other occasions, the sword contains the souls of those its wielder has killed. Some part of those souls are transferred to whoever uses the blade. Other parts go to placate Arioch. When Satan attempted, hundreds of years ago, on this plane – or one very much like it – to be reconciled with God, neither Klosterheim nor Arioch accepted this and have, across many planes of the multiverse, sought not only the destruction of God himself, but also of Satan – or whatever manifestations of those forces exist here.’

’You have still not explained whose soul Klosterheim’s body drank,’ pointed out Sinclair.

‘Why, the last soul it took,’ said Monsieur Zenith in some surprise. ‘I thought that is what you understood.’

‘And whose was that-?’

Monsieur Zenith had risen swiftly and elegantly and was kissing Mrs Persson’s hand, moving towards the shelf where he had placed his silk hat and gloves. ‘You must forgive me. I have some unfinished business at a nearby art gallery.’

Almost instinctively, Commissaire Lapointe rose as if to apprehend him but then sat down again suddenly.

Sir Seaton Begg, with dawning comprehension, laid his hand on his old friend’s arm, but Taffy Sinclair was insistent. ‘Whose, Monsieur Zenith? Whose?’

Monsieur Zenith slipped gracefully from the table and seemed to disappear, merging with the sunlit spray of the fountain.

‘Whose?’ Sinclair turned baffled to look at Mrs Persson, who had taken her two cats into her lap and was stroking them gently. ‘Do you know?’

She inclined her head and looked questioningly, intimately at Sir Seaton Begg, whose nod was scarcely perceptible.

‘It was his own, of course,’ she said.

I was recently told a story that was so stupid, se so melancholy, and so moving: a man comes in into a hotel one day and asks to rent a room. He is shown up to number 35. As he comes down a few minutes later and leaves the key at the desk, he says: ‘Excuse me, I have no memory at all. If you please, each time I come in, I’ll tell you my name: Monsieur Delouit. And each time you’ll tell me the number of my room.’ ‘Very well, Monsieur.’ Soon afterwards, he returns, and as he passes the desk says: ‘Monsieur Delouit.’ ‘Number 35 Monsieur.’ ‘Thank you.’ A minute later, a man extra ordinarily upset, his clothes covered with mud, bleeding, his face almost not a face at all, appears at the desk. ‘Monsieur Delouit.’ ‘What do you mean, Monsieur Delouit? Don’t try to put one over on us! Monsieur Delouit has just gone upstairs!’ ‘I’m sorry, it’s me… I’ve just fallen out of the window. What’s the number of my room please?’

André Breton,
Nadja

Nadja was taken to a madhouse in 1928. Some place in the French countryside where ordinary people, those fortunate enough to have escaped scrutiny, who have avoided so far in their lives being similarly judged and sentenced and dismissed from the greater society, will not be reminded of their own failings by the screams of the outcast.

It is reasonable to suppose that by that time there could not be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanatorium and the outside – but Nadja was here, she left something of herself. Certainly she’s dead by now, buried in a field behind an insane asylum, cats screwing on her grave.

The day she threatened to jump from the window of her room in the Hotel Sphinx on the boulevard Magenta I should have known she was not a fake. Who can tell the genuine mad from the fake? Nadja could. She was always pointing them out to me. In a café she’d whisper, ‘Look at her. Biting her nails. Pretending to be waiting for someone. She’s a fake. Her lovers disappear.’ ‘But how can you tell,’ I’d ask. ‘Look at my eyes,’ Nadja would say. ‘Can you see the way they are lit from behind? I’m dangerous. To be avoided.’

Who was Nadja? What was the significance of Nadja in my life? Why does she return, a constant, though I’ve neither seen nor heard of or from her in fifty years?

I saw a woman in a marketplace in a Mexican city, Merida, perhaps, in the Yucatan, twenty years ago or so. She resembled Nadja, or what she might have looked like, according to my idea of Nadja had she still been alive, let alone an inhabitant of a jungle town in Mexico. I followed her as she moved from stand to stand, inspecting the fruits, dresses, beads, kitchen knives, crucifixes. Was this a woman or a phantom? Her grey hair was worn long and thick and fell across her face so that her features were indistinct, shadowed. Nadja had been blonde, with the short, curled haircut of the day, a brief nose, sharp black hawk’s eyes, a long mouth with slender lips, purple, that grinned in one corner only. This hag in the marketplace was fat, toothless, I would say, judging by the line of her jaw, dark-skinned. Nadja had been white as the full moon of February over Venice, almost emaciated, seldom are, with a full mouth of teeth, crooked but strong. She was capable of cracking open with ease in one swift bite a stalk of Haitian sugarcane.

How could I imagine this hideous, crumbling jungle creature to be Nadja? Some feeling made me follow until, crossing a busy street, I lost sight of her. I panicked and looked around wildly. She was gone and I was forced to suppress a great scream of pain. Unused to this severe sort of anxiety, I battled to control my emotions, there in the midst of a crowd of Indians.

It was what Nadja had meant when she stuck her tongue into my ear as we rode in a cab along the boulevard Raspail. As quickly as she’d done it she withdrew to the opposite corner of the seat and said, staring blankly ahead, ‘To me nothing is more terrifying than the curse of self-fulfilment.’

What did Nadja do before we met? I asked her many times and mostly she would avoid answering by laughing and kissing me, adjusting my tie, or brushing my lapels. She did tell me she was born in Belgium, near Ghent, and that her father raised flowers. She went to the local school, a convent, and moved to Paris when she was seventeen. She met a man, unidentified, got married, gave birth to a daughter, who promptly died of pneumonia. Those were facts, according to Nadja. The man was gone soon after the daughter.

Other than that there was little Nadja would admit. None of it was important, she said. ‘Not to you!’ She instructed me to invent her story, it was all the same, unrelated to today. ‘Who is the hero of a film that has at its centre a peacock flying through and landing in the snow?’ Nadja asks, licking my chin as if she were here.

I must recall how and why I became involved with Nadja. I was walking along the rue Vaugirard, preparing to turn into the Luxembourg, when I saw a woman standing in front of a butcher’s shop, desperately examining the contents of her purse. I say desperately because there were lines of great consternation on her face, as if she had misplaced and was frantically searching for the ticket that would allow her to claim a side of beef she’d pawned or left to be laundered. The weather was foul, it was early November and it was raining. The air was ugly, full of wood smoke and water, black, brown and grey. The woman, who was Nadja, was a disconcerting sight, her hair matted, stockings torn, coat soaked. I approached her immediately and asked if I might be of service.

’This is an evil afternoon,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘Can you buy me a drink? There are ravens everywhere now. Even in the shops, in the road. The government is full of them, as you no doubt are already aware. What would a government be without its ravens?’ She stared at me with horrible yellow eyes. There was no possibility of refusal. ’Of course,’ I said, and Nadja smiled, a sweet genuine smile, and gently took my arm.

Nadja had a harelip. Have I mentioned that? Or had been born with a harelip. She’d had it fixed, but that was the reason for her lopsided grin that added so inexplicably to Nadja’s desirability.

She disliked being thought of as foolish, though she often sought to contribute to the common good by committing foolish acts, such as disrobing in the Louvre in front of the
Mona Lisa.
For that ’act of valour’, as Nadja referred to it, she spent several days in jail, not having the money to pay the fine for being a public nuisance.

Following the incident at the Louvre, Nadja made a similar gesture of liberation on the avenue d’lena near the German Club. The Germans, she claimed, would not have her arrested; instead, Nadja said, they would pretend to ignore her. Then came the affair at the Trocadéro where Nadja disrobed and poured a bucket of red paint over her head. Neither time was she detained. The
Mona Lisa
episode had made her famous for the moment and her exploits of this order were no longer effective. Trocadéro was Nadja’s final mention in the newspapers. After that hers was a presence of secrets.

Nadja had a habit of laughing at the wrong moment. Someone would be in the midst of telling a story, approaching a crucial point, and Nadja would begin to laugh, softly at first, then gradually increase the level of laughter to a kind of shrill cry, shocking all those present and of course preventing the narrator from finishing his tale. The phenomenon would not occur always, but often enough so that I would be on edge whenever we were in the company of others. Several times I was forced to escort Nadja out of the room until she regained her self-control.

The unpredictable laughter was not her only social aberration. Nadja refused to be photographed. True, photographs of Nadja do exist, but they were taken surreptitiously, without her knowledge; usually when she was drunk.

Contrary to what most of my acquaintances thought at the time, Nadja was the least mysterious person I have ever met. Everything about her was obvious. Her motives were plain, she desired love, sanity, colour – all healthy pursuits. Failure on any one count can hardly be held against Nadja. Disgrace, after all, is merely a manifestation of value. The price of anything is always set in advance. Nadja made me see this. Truth is perhaps more horrible than anyone would dare admit.

She was standing there in the dream, the gun still in her hand pointing down at the body, when the cops broke in. It was Nadja with a Barbara Stanwyck hairdo in a black robe, a silk one with gold brocade on the wide lapels. ‘I shot him in the face,’ she said, ‘and he tumbled like laundry down a chute.’ Those were her exact words. They were fresh in my mind when I woke up. The name of the movie was
Riffraffs
that much I could remember. But it wasn’t real, it was a dream, right? I hadn’t seen Nadja in four years, and I knew who the man on the floor had to be.

One morning Nadja awoke and could not see out of her right eye. She sent a
pneu
asking me to meet her at the Café des Oiseaux that afternoon. ‘It’s awful and wonderful,’ Nadja said as soon as I sat down at her table. ‘There is a cloud in my eye, floating across the centre.’

‘Is it any particular colour?’ I asked.

‘Red,’ said Nadja. ‘Like a veil of blood.’

‘Perhaps it is blood,’ I said. ‘Have you made arrangements to see a doctor?’

‘Doctors can only destroy,’ Nadja said. ‘Have you a cigarette?’

I gave her one, lit it and watched her blow out the smoke.

‘Usually cigarette smoke is blue,’ she said. ‘Mixed with the red it’s actually quite beautiful, like two ghost ships passing through one another on the rolling sea.’