Paris Noir (19 page)

Assaf, the master of the house, was born on the second floor of the shop. Rounded up by the French police like all the Jews of the neighborhood, he had survived the hell of Auschwitz before making a detour of almost ten years in the camps of his liberators. The lieutenant and the hat maker came together when Mattéo had chased out a gang hitting him up for protection money. Mattéo had then formed the habit of coming to play chess with the old man. He practically never brought up his past, except to reminisce about the games he’d played against a champion of the USSR suspected of Trotskyite sympathies. (Assaf had lost every one of them.) As tournaments were forbidden in the gulag, an inmate had someone tattoo a chessboard on his back. He would get down on all fours, naked from the waist up, until one player was checkmated.

Mattéo gave his old friend a hug. “A customer’s going to come in for a visit. Don’t waste your saliva, I can tell you he won’t buy a thing …”

“You can go into the kitchen. I’ll take him in to you as soon as he shows up.”

When the bartender of the Singe Pèlerin arrived, the lieutenant saw that he had put on a raincoat over his working clothes. The bartender asked for some water to take a handful of pills, then refused the chair the lieutenant pointed him to.

“I can’t stay, it’s the noon rush. All the big boys are there. What do you want from me? Is it about the guy who got shot on rue des Degrés?”

“If you ask the questions and then answer them, it’ll go a lot faster … His name was Flavien Carvel and he wasn’t shot, he was stabbed … What can you tell me about him?”

The bartender raised his head with his mouth open, as if he was trying to get some fresh air. “All I know is, he was loaded. He began hanging around the neighborhood about six months ago. He bought some shares in The Sphinx as a way of getting in with the mob. Recently there was a rumor of his buying heavily into the peep show on the corner of rue Greneta … a first-class business. They were talking about his coming in with 200,000 euros.”

“I took care of them two years ago; a real rough place. You sure you’re not giving me the wrong club?”

Mattéo got up to fill a pot of water and put it on the gas stove.

“No, everything’s back on track again. It’s one of the joints that brings in the most. All the bread in cash, tax-free. From what I know, there were lots of extras too …”

“What kind?”

“They opened up little trapdoors so the customer could stick his hands through ’em and feel up the dancers’ tits and stick dildos or vibrators up their asses or pussies. Stuff they bought exclusively at the shop, for the highest price imaginable. It went both ways—if the customer asked for it, the dancers screwed them with the same utensils.”

“You have any idea where he lived?”

The bartender stuck his hand into the pocket of his raincoat and took out a business card he then handed to the police officer. “I did him a favor by telling him what I heard … He told me I could reach him through this real estate agency if it was urgent.”

Mattéo took the card. It was from Luximmo, a business on rue Marie-Stuart. He memorized the name of the person printed under the company name:
Tristanne Dupré
. Then he turned the paper rectangle over, mechanically. The other side was covered with Carvel’s tense writing:

December 26 could have been the happiest day in Rafiq’slife if the tsunami hadn’t struck, because he was supposedto get married that day. The time of the wedding was set fornoon, but the waves came in the morning. Rafiq was in thevillage of Patangipettai, near the other villages that werehit. Immediately, all the men in the community swung intoaction with Jamaat, their local organization. They tookaway the food for the wedding and gave it to the disastervictims. Up to the day we met them, one week after thetsunami, the organization provided breakfast and lunch tothe victims, cooking lemon rice or veg. biryani.

The lieutenant drank a mint tea sweetened with acacia honey before saying goodbye to old Assaf.

All you had to do was walk a hundred yards and you left the sex and garment district behind; you were entering the area reserved for the winners in the new economic order. All the pretty little faces in the world of finance, advertising, top civil service jobs, TV and movies would be walking around on these harmless decorative cobblestones. They crowded into sidewalk cafés, their cell phones glued to their ears, connected to vitamin cocktails by means of fluorescent straws. Mattéo liked the place, despite everything: the façades, the smell of eternal Paris. But he had lived here too long to forget how fake it all was. Going beyond rue Saint-Denis into Mon-torgueil was like crossing a border. He felt almost as if he were at a show, or a tourist: Sometimes he was sorry he hadn’t slung a camera across his chest.

He quickened his pace. Street people were sorting through the garbage cans lined in front of Suguisa, La Fermette, and Furusato, the Japanese restaurant. They were looking for edible garbage in the form of organic food. He cut onto rue Marie-Stuart, which used to be a fierce competitor of rue Brisemiche in the old days, when they were more prosaically called Passage Tire-Vit and Tire-Boudin. * The realtor was on the ground floor of an old house with exposed oak beams and stone. Tristanne Dupré looked like one of the girls who waited on customers in the Singe Pèlerin. The bodywork was identical, but the license plate was quite different. Everything she was wearing, from her stockings to the cut of her hair, from her pumps to her perfume, came straight out of the pages of
Vogue.
Badgley Mischka skirt, Alexander McQueen shoes, Carolina Herrara glasses … With one look, you save the price of buying a copy. Mattéo slid the card along the desk.

“According to what I’ve been told, you’re the one who acted as a go-between for Flavien Carvel …”

She stared at him with eyes wide open behind her lightly smoked glasses before looking over the inspector from head to foot, scornfully. “I don’t understand.”

“Mattéo, Criminal Investigation. Carvel’s in the morgue, and I’m trying to nail the guy who bought him a one-way *“Prick-Pull” and “Sausage-Pull.”

ticket there. The sooner the better. You teamed up to buy the peep show on rue Greneta, right?”

The theory had come out of his mouth without even thinking about it. From the panic-stricken fluttering of her eyelashes, he realized he’d hit a bull’s-eye. Now he had to proceed with caution.

“Flavien is dead? No, he can’t be!”

She threw herself back in her chair, her chest under the silk shaken by spasmodic breathing. Her distress was not affected. He wondered if she was one of those interchangeable girls who waited for the prodigal son in the car when he made a visit to his mother on the impasse du Gaz. Mattéo pushed away a pile of interior design magazines and sat down on the couch.

“Forgive me, I didn’t realize you were that close … He was found this morning near the Porte Saint-Denis, stabbed … I’d like to learn how you met him …”

She stuck a Camel into a cigarette holder with a python emblem and lit it with a matching lighter.

“In the simplest possible way. He opened that door and sat down in the exact same spot you’re in now … He wanted to buy an apartment in the no-car area, preferably Tiquetonne … After ten visits or so, he decided on a big four-room in a historical landmark building on rue Léopold Bellan …”

“It’s not cheap, in that sector. You gave him a good deal?”

She shrugged.

“Seven thousand euros a square meter. He had about a hundred and twenty square meters … You can do the math … Flavien had a third of the money and he was sure he’d have no problem getting the rest from what the peep show brought in. He was supposed to move in next month.”

“Where was he living in the meantime?”

“Upstairs, fourth floor, a studio apartment that belongs to the agency … I have a copy of the keys.”

Mattéo learned that the real estate agency owned the building with the rooms for voyeurs, that Tristanne had tipped off her rich client, and that his bank was on the Place de la Bourse, near the editorial offices of the
Nouvel Observateur
.

The lieutenant then brandished the notes Flavien had taken.

“Do you know why he wrote down these bits of human interest stories on paper scraps?”

“No. He used to copy them onto his computer in the evening, to post them on a website, that’s all he told me … I held onto a few of them. I also remember he backed up all his work on his flash drive.”

The young woman opened her bag—a Vuitton—and fumbled around in it.

“Here, this is something he wrote.”

The police officer took the paper:

The police have been heating up since the start of the riots,they’re provoking us more and more. The brother of oneof the electrocuted children was hanging out with us asusual, in front of his building, when the police got there.

They started to look us up and down and finally they saidto him: “You, go home to your mother.” He walked threesteps toward the cops to talk to them and one of themsaid: “Stop or you’ll regret it.” We ran away to the eleventhfloor, they started firing gas cartridges into the lobby. Theysmoked out the family in mourning.

He had just finished reading it when she gave him another one:

Cotonou Airport, December 25. I had a very bad premonitionand I really felt ill at ease. Every time something badis going to happen to me, I can feel it. And this time mysixth sense was telling me we weren’t going to take off. Iwas really expecting something to happen. I even told oneof my coworkers what I felt. A few seconds later, the planewas in the water. The people who were still alive werescreaming. I wasn’t afraid because I’d sensed somethingterrible was going to happen. Everything happened veryfast. I’d say there were two minutes between takeoff andthe accident. When I got out of the plane, I wasn’t far fromthe shore. So I swam back to the land and survived.

The lieutenant put them away in his wallet with the others, then walked to the stairs. He didn’t need to use the keys the real estate agent had given him. The door had been forced open and every nook and cranny of the studio had been searched. He looked at the disaster—the drawers thrown over, the bed upside down, the slashed mattress. He picked up the furniture, looking for the computer or the flash drive Tristanne had mentioned. Apparently the visitor had taken everything away. Mattéo found one more enigmatic message in a trash can in the bathroom:

December 26. Rababa and his son Hamed were sleepingwhen the earthquake hit the little town of Bam, in Iran.

Before they had time to run outside, their house had collapsedaround them. They remained trapped for four daysuntil a neighbor came to the rescue, digging into the wreckagewith his bare hands.

He walked back to rue de la Lune, near the old postern of la Poissonnerie, the fish-market gate: They used to bring the day’s catch into Paris through it at dawn. A tiny, almost provincial enclave, with its small public garden, its church, and its little bands of children. Just a step away from the noisy Grands Boulevards, the excitement of rue Saint-Denis, and the sector reserved for bohemian yuppies. From the kitchen he could make out the ceramic advertisement for Castrique, promising
Total dust removal when you vacuum
. He had kept the apartment after his divorce, when Annabelle left with the kids, s almost half his income on rent for a place where he used only two rooms out of four. Everything was ready for their return. Moving out would have meant admitting defeat.

He heated up a tajine, lemon chicken with carrots, cooked by the Moroccan woman who took care of the building as well as his laundry and cleaning. Later he watched a gangster film on TV the way you look at the passing landscape from the window of a train, unable to follow the plot, his mind fixated on the murder of Flavien Carvel.

The next morning, after stopping by the offices of the Criminal Investigation Department, Mattéo went to the bank that managed Carvel’s accounts, the Financière des Victoires.

No one seemed to be aware they had lost an important client the day before on rue des Degrés. The dead man’s financial adviser very grudgingly agreed to enter the password to access information in his computer about Carvel’s financial transactions.

“Monsieur Carvel’s net holdings amount to nearly 400,000 euros. We have also approved transactions for double that amount. Real estate projects. I can give you a statement to the last centime.”

“Thank you very much, but what would really help would be to know where Flavien Carvel got his money from … If I understand correctly, he made his fortune rather suddenly. One might wonder … Everything was legal, in your opinion?” The banker tensed up at the mere suggestion of money-laundering. “I don’t see why you would have any doubt …”

“No reason … Experience, maybe … I’m just asking you to reassure me. Where did those 400,000 euros come from?” “From all over … Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, South Africa. Close to a hundred countries in all … Last month, he received nearly 10,000 transfers via the Internet at an average of three euros per transaction. He sold connection time, access to information …”

Mattéo took out his wallet and unfolded the scrap of paper found on the corpse.

“This kind of information?”

The banker pinched it between his fingertips to read the message:

Tom Cruise was seen last Monday on rue de la Paix in thesecond arrondissement of Paris in the company of the wifeof a candidate in the French presidential election, while rumorsof the American star’s separation from Katie Holmesare making headlines in the celebrity magazines.

“Our role is limited to making sure that all transactions are legal and managing the flow of money in the best interest of both the bank and its clients. We would never intervene in our clients’ activities in any way. All I can tell you is that Monsieur Carvel got his income from selling information on the web. Nothing more. I am putting these lists at the disposal of the examining magistrate.”