Ring Roads (11 page)

‘Have you known Murraille and Marcheret long?’

‘Since last year.’

‘And you get along well with them?’

You pretended not to understand. You gave a little cough. I tried again.

‘In my opinion, you shouldn’t trust these people.’

You remained pokerfaced, your eyes screwed up. Perhaps you thought I was an agent provocateur. I shifted closer to you.

‘Forgive my interfering in something that doesn’t concern me, but I get the impression that they intend to harm you.’

‘So do I,’ you replied.

I think you suddenly felt you could trust me. Did you recognize me? You refilled our glasses.

‘Perhaps we should drink a toast,’ I said.

‘Good idea!’

‘Your health, Monsieur le Baron!’

‘And yours, Monsieur . . . Alexandre! These are difficult times we’re living in, Monsieur Alexandre.’

You repeated this sentence two or three times, as a kind of preamble, and then explained your situation to
me.
I could hardly hear you, as though you were talking to me on the telephone. A tinny voice, muffled by time and distance. From time to time, I caught a few words: ‘Leaving . . .’ ‘Crossing borders . . .’ ‘Gold and hard currency . . .’ And from them managed to piece together your story. Murraille, knowing your talents as a broker, had put you in charge of the self-styled ‘Societé Française d’achats’, whose mission was to stockpile a vast range of goods for resale later at a high price. He took three-quarters of the profits. To begin with, all went well, you were happy sitting in your large office on the Rue Lord-Byron, but recently, Murraille realised he no longer needed your services and considered you an embarrassment. Nothing could be easier, these days, than to get rid of someone like you. Stateless, with no social status, no fixed address, you had every disadvantage. It was enough to alert the ever-zealous
inspecteurs
of the
Brigades spéciales
. . . You had no one to turn to . . . except a night-club doorman by the name of ‘Titiko’. He was willing to introduce you to one of his ‘contacts’ who could get you across the Belgian border. The meeting was to take place three days from now. The only assets you would take with you were 1,500 dollars in cash, a pink diamond and some thin sheets of gold cut to resemble visiting cards that would be easy to disguise.

I
feel as though I’m writing a ‘trashy adventure story’, but I’m not making this up. No, this is not a fiction . . . There must surely be evidence, someone who knew you back then and who could corroborate these things. It doesn’t matter. I am with you and I will stay here until the end of the book. You kept glancing nervously towards the door.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘They won’t come.’

You relaxed a little. I tell you again that I’ll stay with you until the end of this book, the last one dealing with my other life. Don’t think I’m writing it out of pleasure; I had no choice.

‘It’s funny, Monsieur Alexandre, finding ourselves together in this room.’

The clock struck twelve times. A hulking object on the mantelpiece, with a bronze deer supporting the clock face.

‘The owner must have liked clocks. There’s one, on the first floor that chimes like Big Ben.’

And you burst out laughing. I was used to these outbursts of hilarity. Back when we were living on the Square Villaret-de-Joyeuse and everything was going badly, I would hear you at night, laughing in the next room. Or you would come home with a bundle of dusty share certificates under your arm. You would drop them
and
say in a lifeless voice: ‘I’ll never be quoted on the Stock Exchange.’ You would stand, staring at your loot, scattered over the floor. And suddenly it would overwhelm you. A laugh that grew louder and louder until your shoulders shook. You couldn’t stop.

‘And you, Monsieur Alexandre, what do you do in life?’

What should I say? My life? As storm-tossed as yours, ‘papa’. Eighteen months in Sarthe, as a school monitor, as I mentioned. School monitor again, in Rennes, Limoges and Clermont-Ferrand. I choose religious institutions. They afford more shelter. This domestic existence brings me inner peace. One of my colleagues, obsessed with Scouting, has just started up a troop for young people in the Forest of Seillon. He was looking for scout leaders and took me on. Here I am in my navyblue plus fours and brown gaiters. We get up at six. Our days are divided between physical education and manual work. Communal sing-songs in the evening, round the campfire. A quaint idyll: Montcalm, Bayard, Lamoricière, ‘Adieu, belle Françoise’, planes, chisels and the scouting spirit. I stayed three years. A safe bolt-hole, just the place to be forgotten. Sadly, my baser instincts regained the upper hand. I fled this haven and found myself at the Gare de l’Est, without even taking the time to remove my beret and badges.

I
scour Paris looking for a steady job. A futile search. The fog never lifts, the pavement slips away beneath me. More and more often I suffer dizzy spells. In my nightmares, I am crawling endlessly, trying to find my backbone. The garret I live in, on the Boulevard Magenta, was the studio of the artist Domergue before he was famous. I try to see this as a good omen.

Of what I did, at this time, I have only the vaguest memory. I think I was ‘assistant’ to a certain Doctor S. who recruited his patients from among drug addicts and gave them prescriptions for vast sums of money.

I had tout for him. I seem to remember that I also worked as ‘secretary’ to an English poetess, a passionate admirer of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Such details seem irrelevant.

I remember only perambulations across Paris, and that centre of gravity, that magnet to which I was invariably drawn: the
préfecture de police
. Try as I might to stay away, within a few short hours my steps would lead me back. One night when I was more depressed than usual, I almost asked the sentries guarding the main door on the Boulevard du Palais, if I could go in. I could not understand the fascination the police exerted over me. At first I thought it was like the urge to jump you feel when you leaning over the parapet of a bridge, but there
was
something else. To disoriented boys like me, policemen represented something solid and dignified. I dreamed of being an officer. I confided this to Sieffer, an inspector in the vice squad I was lucky enough to meet. He heard me out, a smile playing on his lips, but with paternal solicitude, and offered to let me work for him. For several months, I shadowed people on a voluntary basis. I had to tail a wide variety of people and note how they spent their time. In the course of these missions, I uncovered many poignant secrets . . . Such-and-such a lawyer from La Plaine Monceau, you encounter on the Place Pigalle wearing a blonde wig and satin dress. I witnessed insignificant people suddenly transformed into nightmarish figures or tragic heroes. By the end I thought I was going insane. I identified with all these strangers. It was
myself
that I was hunting down so relentlessly. I was the old man in the mackintosh or the woman in the beige suit. I talked about this to Sieffer.

‘No point carrying on. You’re an amateur, son,’

He walked me to the door of his office.

‘Don’t worry. We’ll see each other again.’

He added in a gloomy voice:

‘Sooner or later, unfortunately, everyone ends up in the cells . . .’

I had a genuine affection for this man and felt I could
trust
him. When I told him how I felt, he enveloped me with a sad, caring look. What became of him? Perhaps he could help us, now? This interlude working for the police did little to boost my morale. I no longer dared leave my room on the Boulevard Magenta. Menace loomed everywhere. I thought of you. I had the feeling that somewhere you were in danger. Every night between three and four in the morning, I would hear you calling to me for help. Little by little, an idea formed in my mind, I would set off in search of you.

I did not have very happy memories of you, but, after ten years, that sort of thing doesn’t seem so important and I’d forgiven you for the ‘unfortunate incident in the George V métro’. Let’s deal with that subject once more, for the last time. There are two possibilities: 1) I wrongly suspected you. In which case, please forgive me and put the mistake down to my own madness. 2) If you did try to push me under the train, I freely admit there were extenuating circumstances. No, there’s nothing unusual about your case. A father wanting to kill his son or to be rid of him seems to me to be symptomatic of the huge upheaval in our moral values today. Not long ago, the converse phenomenon could be observed: sons killed their father to prove their strength. But now, who is there for us to lash out at? Orphans that we are, we are doomed
to
track ghosts in our search for fatherhood. We never find it. It always slips away. It’s exhausting, old man. Shall I tell you the feats of imagination I’ve accomplished? Tonight, you sit facing me, your eyes starting from your head. You look like a black market trafficker, and the title ‘Baron’ is unlikely to throw the hunters off the scent. You chose it, I imagine, in the hope that it would set you up, make you respectable. Such play-acting doesn’t work on me. I’ve known you too long. Remember our Sunday walks, Baron? From the centre of Paris, we drifted on a mysterious current all the way to the ring roads. Here the city unloads its refuse and silt. Soult, Massena, Davout, Kellermann. Why did they give the names of conquering heroes to these murky places? But this was ours, this was our homeland.

Nothing has changed. Ten years later, here you are the same as ever: glancing at the living room door like a terrified rat. And here I am gripping the arm of the sofa for fear of slipping off the dustsheet. Try though we might, we will never know peace, the sweet stillness of things. We will walk on quicksand to the end. You’re sweating with fear. Get a grip, old boy. I’m here beside you, holding your hand in the darkness. Whatever happens, I will share your fate. In the meantime, let’s take a tour of this place. Through the door on the left,
we
come to a small room. The sort of leather armchairs I love. A mahogany desk. Have you ransacked the drawers yet? We’ll comb though the owners’ private life and gradually begin to feel as though we are part of the family: are there more drawers, more chests, more pockets upstairs that we can rifle through? We have a few hours to spare. This room is cosier than the living room. Smell of tweed and Dutch tobacco. On the shelves, neat rows of books: the complete works of Anatole France and crime novels published by Masque, recognizable by their yellow spines. Sit behind the desk. Sit up straight. There’s no reason we can’t dream about the course our lives might have taken in such a setting. Whole days spent reading or talking. A German shepherd on guard to deter visitors. In the evenings, my fiancée and I would play a few games of
manille
.

The telephone rings. You jump up, your face haggard. I must admit that this jingling, in the middle of the night, is not encouraging. They’re making sure you’re here so they can arrest you at dawn. The ringing will stop before you have time to answer. Sieffer often used such ruses. We take the stairs four at a time, tripping, falling over each other, pulling, scrabbling to our feet. There is a whole warren of rooms and you don’t know where the light-switches are. I stumble against a piece of furniture,
you
feel around for the telephone. It’s Marcheret. He and Murraille wondered why we had disappeared.

His voice echoes strangely in the darkness. They have just found Annie, at the Grand Ermitage moscovite, in the Rue Caumartin. She was drunk, but promised to be at the town-hall tomorrow, on the dot of three.

When it came to exchanging rings, she took hers and threw it in Marcheret’s face. The mayor pretended not to notice. Guy tried to save the situation by roaring with laughter.

A rushed, impromptu wedding. Perhaps, a few brief references might be found in the newspapers of the day. I remember that Annie Murraille wore a fur coat and that her outfit, in mid-August, added to the uneasiness.

On the way back, they didn’t say a word. She walked arm in arm with her witness, Lucien Remy, a ‘variety artiste’ (according to what I gathered from the marriage certificate); and you, Marcheret’s witness, appeared there described as: ‘Baron Chalva Henri Deyckecaire, industrialist.’

Murraille weaved between Marcheret and his niece cracking jokes to lighten the mood. Without success. He eventually grew tired and didn’t say another word. You and I brought up the rear of this strange cortège.

Lunch
had been arranged at the Clos-Foucré. Towards five, some close friends, who had come down from Paris, gathered with their champagne glasses. Grève had set out the buffet in the garden.

We both hung back. And I observed. Many years have passed, but their faces, their gestures, their voices are seared on to my memory. There was Georges Lestandi, whose malicious ‘gossip’ and denunciations graced the front page of Murraille’s magazine every week. Fat, stentorian voice, a faint Bordeaux accent. Robert Delvale, director of the théâtre de l’Avenue, silver haired, a well preserved sixty, priding himself on being a ‘citizen’ of Montmartre, whose mythology he cultivated. Francois Gerbère, another of Murraille’s columnists, who specialized in frenzied editorials and calls for murder. Gerbère belonged to that school of hypersensitive boys who lisp and are happy to play the passionate militant or the brutal fascist. He had been bitten by the political bug shortly after graduating from the École Normale Supérieure. He had remained true to the – deeply provincial – spirit of his alma mater on the rue d’Ulm, indeed it was amazing that this thirty-eight-year-old student could be so savage.

Lucien Remy, the witness from the registry office. Physically, a charming thug, white teeth, hair gleaming
with
Bakerfix. He could sometimes be heard singing on Radio-Paris. He lived on the fringes of the underworld and the music-hall. And finally, Monique Joyce. Twenty-six, blonde, a deceptively innocent look. She had played a few roles on stage, but never made her mark. Murraille had a soft spot for her and her photograph often appeared on the cover of
C’est la vie
. There were articles about her. One such informed us she was ‘The most elegant Parisienne on the Côte d’Azur’. Sylviane Quimphe, Maud Gallas and Wildmer were, of course, among the guests.