Leper Tango (2 page)

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

“Are you Père Montagnard?”

“Yes.”

“A woman named Sheba comes by occasionally to confess. Have you heard from her lately?” “
Pardon?
”

“Look, I know this is an unusual request, but this is an emergency. I have to get in touch with her.”

His head jolted forward slightly.

“I must ask you to leave. Immediately.”

“Listen, friend. I know a thing or two about privilege. I'm a solicitor. I don't blame you for being a little uneasy. Tell you what. Just nod your head if she still lives in the quarter.”

He wasn't saying anything much, so I tried another tack. More a long the lines of betting on an inside straight.

“She told me about you. The altar boys. Your seminary adventures. Everything.”

“If you do not depart immediately, I shall contact the police!”

I exited the confessional, ambled past the crypt then out the same door I had entered. Same Indian beggar parked at the door. Same shabby pin-stripe suit. Same makeshift crutch. Same right eye bugged out in fierce entreaty.

“Sir, I can see you are a gentleman. I too was once a gentleman. Truly.”

That word.
Gentleman.
I stopped and examined him.

He was middle
-
aged. Thick, wavy black hair, but for a white streak running incongruously down the centre of his cranium. As if he'd fallen into a pit unexpectedly. Boo!

“Once a gentleman, always a gentleman,” I uttered towards the remains of the sub-continent.

“No, sir, no, not at all, not at all, if you only knew how false this is. I was to be married; she was so lovely, you should see the girls of Bombay, they are remarkable. I was coming here for a weekend. A weekend, can you understand?! And then I threw everything away. Everything! And it led me here. To this! No, I can tell you sir, you are only a gentleman if the world says you are a gentleman. Can you understand this, sir? Can you understand?”

I flipped him a few francs, returned to
rue Montorgueil
, and stopped in to purchase a local daily at a kiosque, entered a café. On the
faits divers
page, an article concerning a woman who poured acid over her husband 's face while he slept. Nothing unusual in that. Not anymore. Or even the fact that he had been tied to the four bedposts. Page 17 material. Hell of a way to celebrate a honeymoon. Particularly in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the Place Vendôme. Not enough to conclude, but plenty enough to keep me reading. The accused's court records had disappeared into the ether. The
Tribunal de Grande Instance
suspected an inside job, but had no choice but to dismiss the case. What the French call a
non-lieu.
It had never taken place.

A couple of days after my return, I had answered a newspaper ad for a flat in the second
arrondissement
,
rue de Mulhouse
, a one block street in the Sentier textiles district which starts on
rue Cléry
at the
Société Parisienne de Boutons
, and ends seventy-eight metres up the road at a gutted out merguez palace on the
rue des jeuneurs
. The street of fasters. The location suited me well enough.
Rue Cléry
was a direct pipeline leading to Saint-Denis from the rear. During the day, the quarter resembled a Tamul rebel outpost, but the terrorists were armed with off
-
the
-
rack fall fashions.

The first two floors of Number 2 housed illegal textile operations. The police were never far. Just as many were on the take in the Sentier as in Saint-Denis, but the racket here was illegal immigrant workers. I had to climb six flights of hardwood stairs to reach my flat, located just over the residence of Bazin, my landlord. Bazin was a pharmacist, and a homosexual of the old school. The kind who shined his oxfords twice a day, and showed up at the door in initialed terrytowel bathrobes at three in the afternoon. Next door was Lafontaine, the resident onanist, and across the way an old rack of a lady, who used the Turkish toilet as a multi-function unit to wash her clothes, urinate, brush her teeth. She also wore her bathrobe t went y hours out of the day. But hers wasn't the same brand as Bazin's, or, if it was, it was forty-five years older and had devolved into a ratty, limecoloured shred of terrytowel. A mad, compulsive cheerfulness possessed her.

I had never seen her descend to the ground floor. Every night at seven sharp, a Vietnamese delivery man in his early sixties arrived on the sixth floor landing, carrying a plastic container with steamed rice and spring rolls. The only other person I saw regularly was De Vecchi, a heavy-set balding Italian who sluffed up and down from the third floor landing twice a day, dragging an arthritic german shepherd he refused to have put down. De Vecchi claimed he had boxed Jake La Motta before La Motta won the championship belt.

“I had him down for a count of eight. Lost on a split decision, but it was a fix from the start. Then, some of LaMotta's handlers visited me one night. Smashed every joint in my hands with a crowbar. Then a few over the head. Look.”

He peeled back a few remaining strands of hair from his skull, baring a scar laterally traversing his cranium. As if a makeshift railway track had been hastily embedded into his skull.

“None of that matters. They're all dead. LaMotta. Sugar Ray Robinson. Tunney. Marciano. Cerdan. You seen the current crop? Bunch a goddam ballerinas. Never heard of a boxer getting his hair done in the old days. Ballerinas, I'm tellin' ya. Bunch a goddam ballerinas.”

My descent into the catacombs of St-Denis started by way of
Place du Chatelet
, pushing through the Friday night shoppers until the wide square narrowed into a tubular stretch between
Pas du Grand Cerf
and
Aboukir
, where the commerce of whoring began in earnest, and continued through to its North end at the
Porte St-Denis
. No sign of the arid spheres of Paris society. The wellbred gallantries of better quarters yielding to a buttery river of sperm, blood, skin and vomit gushing upstream towards Montmartre, where St-Denis himself was decapitated, prior to walking across the city carrying his detached head in his hands.

I caught sight of her as I rounded onto Boulevard Sebastopol. She looked all right. Knew how to strike a pose. Casual, swinging a purse, smoking a cigarette. Something mundane and day-to-day in it. A veteran Parisian whore. I'm out doing my job. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a cunt for sale.

I offered her a cigarette. What's your name? Francine, she cooed, culling out of her mental catalogue. What's yours? Oh, Franck, I answered out of my own brochure of duplicity, and bang, the contract was sealed. Francine and Franck. Just a nice couple having a chat on a Parisian
trottoir
. How's your cunt, Francine? Just fine, Franck. I've let fourteen men stick their dick in it this morning, and I've sucked t went y-six cocks. Are you available still? Of course. But, do you have special requests, she said, with a side glance to see whether I had a hard on or not. Judging from the knife scar down her left cheek, she had good reason to be a little careful. “
Tu as l 'air correct
,” she concluded.

We moved up
rue Réaumur
together, Francine half a step ahead. She had ink-black hair which flowed to her shoulders in rivulets. I imagined her dancing tango in an obscure, ill-lit private club, somewhere on the Iberian peninsula, then being expelled for performing fellatio on the instructor as his wife walked through the door.

At St-Denis, she turned North, me following in tow, until we arrived at an entrance located at 143 bis, which led into a narrow outside corridor. We continued five or six more paces, her buttocks swivelling between two musty walls. Then, a showcase window, blocked by venetian blinds. A red neon sign advertised Thai massages, blow-up dolls, aphrodisiacs.

“Here. In here.”

She drew back a curtain in the doorway, and we entered a long room set up as a film theatre, with a dozen fold-up chairs arranged into a haphazard semblance of rows. The screen at the opposite end was an off-white bedsheet nailed to a sheet of plywood. As we sat down, the bicycle chain tackety tack of a thirty year old sixteen mm projector announced the showing. At first, nothing but light, which briefly exposed two long yellow streaks across the middle of the screen before the film began.

“Très
kitsch
,” she said, but the tone of
kitsch
implied it was perched near the apex of her pyramid of values. I caught sight of an old man in the far corner, his pants at his ankles, jacking off. The film was in black-and-white, an ancient silent movie, other than the player piano jangling in the background. A long dead porno idol dressed in white lingerie sat in a chair of a far West saloon, her breasts partially exposed over a half-cup bra. A second woman entered the saloon, dressed in the Charleston style, smiled, then, a propos of nothing in particular, bent over the knees of the f irst woman, who began thwack ing her on the ass with a wooden ping-pong paddle. The projector briefly sputtered, then shifted into another scene. The same feminine duo, now clad as Austrian frauleins, on all fours, being walked on hunting grounds by a thick-necked moustachioed man wearing a green leather jacket, peasant hunting cap, carrying a boar spear.

Meanwhile, Francine had crawled to her knees and was now facing me. She leaned over, stuck her hand inside her purse, pulled out a condom and a small plastic glass.

“What's that for?” “Something special.”

She pushed her index finger and thumb inside her mouth around her upper gums. A clicking sound like a suction pump pulling on the roof of her mouth. A full set of dentures popped out of her mouth and into the glass.

“
Sthpethial
,” she lisped, wrapping her gums around my cock. Lifting three fingers upwards. I slipped three hundred franc notes between her index and forefinger. Glanced over at the old man, still industriously jacking off in the front rows of the makeshift theatre. A look of ragged intent on his face, as if summoning the troops for one last charge into the German lines on the Marne river. His trenchcoat rising and falling. A tent in a nor‘wester gale, flushing shit and mud across a no man's land.
Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori
.

“
Ca va
?”

“Sure. Go for it.”

Later, she asked me whether I had access to a computer. As a matter of fact I do, Francine. Here, then take this. She pulled a f loppy disk out of her purse and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Goodbye, Franck. Enjoy. Then evaporated. The way they all did. I drifted down
rue Aboukir
, my mind nowhere, until I fell on Clér y and the now familiar nocturnal spectre of the
Société Parisienne des Boutons
. De Vecchi was entering his apartment on the third floor, wearing nothing but a sweat-stained undershirt over grey jogging pants, the exposed portion of his torso protected by enough hair to turn an orangutang green with env y. The door closed behind him.

As I passed by Ducastin-Chanel's door on the sixth floor, I could hear her cajoling her cat.

“
Descend, descend
,” she squawked, “
combien de fois je t'ai déjà dit, minou
? Come and see madame Claude.”

I entered the flat, reached for one of the four bottles of
Côte du Rhône
perched on the tile counter, poured out a glass, drained it. I repeated the process three times. I f lipped open the laptop, pushed in the diskette and opened the file. The screen burst into a pyrotechnic display of a garbage dump. This was succeeded by a panoramic shot of screeching seagulls unleashing shit pellets onto the shell of a giant Galápagos tortoise. Then a flash onto a clip of another spanking scene. Then a shot of Hitler being appeased by an obsequious, arse-bending crew of Iron-cross bearing senile generals. Suddenly, an eclipse. Followed by a whore jacking off a donkey. All shot with a hand-held camera by someone suffering from a nervous disorder.

I lit a cigarette, walked to the window overlooking the
Société Parisienne des Boutons
. Across the way, all the textile operations closed for the evening. On the third floor, one room alight. A forty-ish man, shoulder-length hair, skinny as a rockstar, reptilian features, swatting a girl. Her head was bowed, in complete submission to him. He was toady, pock-marked. Whatever had happened to him had been used as barter material to acquire his air of authority. As much as anyone could own anything, he owned the girl. She had given up her liberty. Whatever. I turned out the light, lay on my cot and lit a cigarette.

A fter a while, thoughts once again channelling through ducts and micro-vessels in a chaotic harmony that suited me.
Déjà vus.
The usual thoughts aborted by short circuiting of the cerebral vectors. Memories of whores. Nothing but whores. The whole planet crawling with cunt for sale, or cunts selling shit, or shitheads looking for cunt, and me only one john in a buyers' market, and unable to meet the supply, unable to satisfy all the cocksuckers in the world who just wanted my jism and my cash, and wanted to suck it out of me as soon as possible.

The rain was falling again, splashes pinging off the aluminum roof, bouncing off so loudly that I recalled a similar time, in the St-Regis Hotel, San Francisco, after being dumped by my first wife, Donna, and was just getting ready to take a mental elevator up seventy-five floors, fuelled by some high-octane blotter acid. Four hours, I was married to a whore named Donna. After a four-hour engagement. Then it was over.

I was awoken by the Portuguese concierge who had come to collect the rent. Yes, she added, as an afterthought, this also came for you. It was postmarked from Bourque, concerning a character reference for my disbarment hearing. He was quite matter of fact about the whole thing, seemed more interested in knowing whether I was still frequenting that lovely
nymphette
he had once seen with me in the old port. Followed by a brief codicil, congratulating me on my return to the city: “I remember my years in Paris were constantly plagued by the imminent prospect of financial difficulty. But, to my mind, the price was trifling. Paris is its own reward, Robinson. Just hang in there and ENJOY EVERY MINUTE. Daily life can appear banal occasionally, but don't let that happen. All those flirtatious glances in the gutters of Pigalle — Jesus, I'd concede disbarment three times over just to leer one last time into the eyes of those shameless tarts ...”