Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (5 page)

‘You haven’t got a licence.’

‘I have but I don’t want any hassle. Who are those guys? And who are you?’

‘None of your business.’

She slams on the brakes. We’re at the corner of boulevard Saint Martin. Everything’s blurry under the rain which mists up the glass.

She walks round the cab and opens my door. She’s already soaked.

‘Get out, you moron.’

‘But why?’

‘I like to know who I’m dealing with.’

‘OK, I’ll tell you, but get a move on, I don’t want to die in a taxi.’

At last she starts up again. This woman’s stressing me out. With all the hassle I’ve got, I didn’t need this too.

‘Right, explain.’

So I describe my glamorous life in the square. Of course I don’t give names. I say I went into a diabetic coma on the terrace in rue Myrha. Rashid my neighbour’s got diabetes.

‘You don’t look like a diabetic. You were smoking dope and off your head, I reckon.’

‘I was not. I can control my drugs.’

‘Oh yeah, you’re in control. And now you’ve got all the dealers in Barbès on your arse, wanting to avenge their friend.’

I don’t answer but she’s right. We reach A &E, there are lights flashing, ambulances drive to and fro in front of the taxi. The knife digs into my shoulder when I move. Taxi woman turns to me and pushes back the blonde hair hanging over her eyes.

‘What’s his name, this dealer you didn’t warn?’

‘Why?’

‘Just curious.’

‘Roger.’

‘Roger who?’

‘Solal. You know him?’

She turns back to her steering wheel, leans back on her seat and says in a thin voice:

‘He’s my son. I knew it.’

Shit, what luck. I don’t know what to say. The shame of it.

Roger’s mother.

‘Get out, now.’

‘Uh, I’m…’

‘Get out!’

I quickly get out of the car, bent over like an old man, and walk slowly towards A &E, so as not to dislodge the knife.

Looking to pick up, I’m back on boulevard Sebastopol. And I realise: I never took the kid’s money. Roger’s face appears on my windscreen. A man. now. But it’s the child I still see. The child who cried at the physio’s, wheezing with broncheolitis. The child who held his breath, pretending to drown, leaving me gasping on the edge of swimming pools in the Essonne. Roger, going under a lorry with his bike, hiding his lacerated, stitched face from me. Roger at the Marley concert shouting ‘No woman no cry,’ mouthing the words in English, eyes shining with joy.

And now, Roger in a cell in La Goutte d’Or, destined for Fleury-Mérogis. I go back up towards Barbès Métro station: Mekloufi’s is still open. I park the car twenty metres away and go in.

Mimine is settling into an impro, picking up the melody from place de Brouckère. He’s learning new tunes, that’s good. I sit myself at the bar and ask for a Kronenbourg. Thinking of my boy. A few minutes later, I go down to the phone booth in the basement and call Patrick, my ex’s, number.

‘It’s me, I’m calling from Barbès.’

‘Lydie. D’you know what time it is? What’s going on?’

‘It’s not good. I picked up a young black kid and we were held up. He was knifed and Roger’s been busted with a load of coke on rue Myrha.’

‘Good God, Lydie, I live in Nice, remember?’

‘I know.’

‘He’s my kid, but he chose you. He chose Paris. Listen, I’m not saying it’s your fault.’

‘It’s always the parents’ fault.’

‘I quit the drugs squad in Nice. They offered me organised crime, it’s more hands on. You want me to put a call in for Roger?’

‘I haven’t seen him in six months. But yeah, I think we’ve got to do all we can. He’s at La Goutte d’Or, d’you know anyone there?’

‘The captain, Delpierre; I’ll call him, he owes me one.’

‘Thanks. I’ll finish my beer and go and find my darling boy. It’s good to hear your voice.’

‘And yours. Keep me in touch.
Ciao
Lydie.’

Now I’m walking towards the dark, narrow Goutte d’Or. Yes, I’m walking towards Roger – a man, it’s true. The kind of guy I’d have hated at twenty. I think of Patrick, cosy and warm on the coast, of the years I’ve spent in city streets, of the bad smells in the early morning, the bad food, the bad fucks. Of the guys I ditched, of life’s irony which made me save Roger’s lookout’s arse. The dozy police station is 200 metres away when suddenly I see two black guys in Tacchini tracksuits coming towards me. And I recognise them.

‘So, grandma, gonna show us your gun? We didn’t have time to see the make.’

I step out of the way to avoid them. We’re alone. As I walk faster, the bigger one’s hand stops me.

His body’s glued to mine and the bastard hisses in my ear:

‘You, you’re just pretending, but I’m for real.’

And he sinks a knife in my back. Christ, my legs give way, my head hits the edge of the pavement. I hear their steps retreating. I try to shout but there’s some kind of bubble between my lips. I think of all the things I haven’t done, the froth on a beer, triumphant jazz, the cops I’ll never see again. That’s the good news. My body shrinks. I say ‘Roger’.

And then.

And then I say nothing.

Translation © Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz

Sometimes when it’s late and you’ve been listening to Lucinda Williams and you have a bottle of Gigondas empty beside you and the noise from the drinkers in the rue Mouffetard down below won’t let you sleep, a line from an old song gets lodged in your brain,
And I can never, never, never go home again
, and you can’t help but remember, remember how you got here.

In the spring of 1981 there were only three places in Paris to busk. The first and easily the best, probably the best place in all of Europe, was outside the Beaubourg. Can I start to explain how fabulous the Beaubourg was back then? This building with its primary-coloured plumbing on the outside, with its giant Perspex escalator clambering across the front. I can hardly credit it myself – twenty-five years of living in this city has allowed familiarity to do its job of breeding contempt – but really back then it seemed to represent a whole world of possibilities, a future in which anything could happen. We’d lost sight of that you see, in those the first years of Thatcher, living in a city, Cardiff, that was closing down around us.

But back to the point. There were three places to busk in Paris that spring, and the big open space in front of the Beaubourg, always full of tourists and locals marvelling at this new wonder, was by far the best of them. The others were the Métro and the rue St André des Arts, but each of those had its problems, as we discovered.

Who were we? We were seven, no eight, refugees from the punk-rock experience, boys and girls hoping to shift our lives from black and white into technicolor. We’d pooled our dole money and student grants and wages from the anarchist print shop and crammed into the back of my old Transit van and headed to Paris to busk. Our act, such as it was, consisted of playing hits of the day – David Bowie, Adam and the Ants, Robert Wyatt, whatever – in ragged vocal-harmony style backed only by percussion and kazoos. At the time, and mostly because we were young, and in some cases even cute, it went over OK. I won’t bother you with all our names, since you’ll only forget them and anyway there was only one that really mattered. If any of the others play a part along the way I’ll name them then.

The one that mattered, matters even, was called Beth and the week before we left she had her hair restyled in a Louise Brooks bob. Actually I thought she looked more like Anna Karina in
Vivre Sa Vie
impersonating Louise Brooks than Brooks herself, if you see what I mean. Either way it’s obvious I was smitten. As for the rest of how she looked, well, I’m sorry, but I don’t feel inclined to go past her hair. Let memory fall lightly on what follows.

We’d been there, I suppose, for a week, long enough at least to have found some kind of routine. A lot depended on the weather. If it was fine we did well, two hour-long sessions in front of the Beaubourg and we were made for the day; we could eat and drink and some of us could even stay at the gypsy’s hotel. If it rained things were harder. No one wants to stand and watch buskers in the rain, not even in front of the finest new building in the western world, so the only option was to go down into the Métro.

There were good things about that, the sound you get singing in the tunnels is beautiful, it’s a cathedral for drifters, for losers, for
loubards
, for my people, and we sounded like angels down there. The bad side was the cops. Those French cops back then were bastards. Thank our lucky stars we were all white, or almost all, and Yaz was a girl so she was OK, but anytime they’d run out of black kids to persecute they were on our case, moving us on, checking our IDs, threatening us with all kinds of shit. One time, the first time, Don talked back to them. We didn’t make that mistake twice. They threw him up against the wall and practically ripped his arm off his shoulder as they searched him for drugs. They had no luck there, of course, as even on a good day our budget didn’t stretch any further than plastic bottles of
vin rouge.

Rainy days we stayed in the
forêt
, out in St Germainen-Laye, right on the western fringe of the city. It was my idea. I’d been there the year before, when I’d stayed with an anarchist called Ifor. This time, though, Ifor’s house had been shuttered and locked. The neighbours said he’d gone to Mexico. But it was right by the
forêt
, so we’d parked the van and some of us slept inside and the rest took tents and camped. And in the morning we’d jump the barrier into the RER, just like the local kids, and go to work.

As I say the weather made all the difference and this day, the point where we’ll start, was fine. More than fine, it was unequivocally the best day of my life so far. Scratch that, let’s make it ever. It’s not as if I’m going to be revisiting that happy innocence again.

Anyway, right from the start everything was running right, I knew it from the moment I clambered out of the van, where I’d slept stretched out across the front seats. I’d seen Beth emerge from the tent she was sharing withYaz, just that same instant. We’d walked down to the stream together, washed our faces and cleaned our teeth, not saying a word, just suddenly at ease with each other, at ease with what we both knew was coming. There had been no rush. That was the strangeness of it, just a week of slowly falling, of singing and dancing in the street.

Later that morning we arrived at the Beaubourg. Our favourite pitch, the one right dead centre, was occupied by some circus guys, so we moved off to one side and started to set up. We shrugged off our coats and showed off our Oxfam finery, pulled out our kazoos and drum-sticks.

There was already quite a crowd gathered around our rival buskers, so I walked over to have a look. They were a bunch of travelling circus types: there was a bed of nails laid out on the ground waiting for action, and next to it there was a guy stripped to the waist, jet black ponytail and tattoos, breathing fire.

These guys were good. I would have happily stayed and watched them, but strangely, as we set up and started clanging our way into ‘Sound and Vision’ – ‘blue, blue electric blue’ – the crowd started drifting towards us. By the time we launched into ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ we were out-drawing the fire eater and his posse by four to one. I introduced the band in bad French and took the cap round, making sure to make eye contact with each and every one. This, by the way, is the true secret of busking success, not being a virtuoso flautist or hard enough to lie on a bed of broken glass, but having someone go round and collect the money with a smile and a wink and a smattering of bad French.

When we took a breather at the end of our first set, the fire eater came over to warn us off. ‘You are not permitted,’ he said, and we looked at each other.

‘Is our place,’ he added. I was not about to argue with a man who breathes fire, and his friend who lay on a bed of broken glass, and I was about to apologise and say we’d come back later, when Don stepped forward and faced up to the fire eater and the fakir.

‘No,’ he said, all but jabbing his finger in the fire eater’s face, ‘it’s not your place. You go back over there, do your thing. We’re staying here.’

Christ. I looked round and saw Beth’s eyes on me. Was I going to back Don up in his foolhardiness? I certainly didn’t want to. In the end I did nothing, didn’t advance to stand shoulder to shoulder with Don or back off, just stood there in no man’s land watching the fire eater stare at Don. I wondered what came next – the punch, the butt, the suddenly present knife? What was Don’s problem? Why couldn’t he let it go, didn’t he realise we were little more than kids? But then the fire eater just shook his head, spat on the ground and backed off, barking something in a language I didn’t even begin to recognise.

We clamoured around Don then, all of us angry and relieved at his bravery. And it struck me that Don was actually a big guy and his Mohican, with its three giant spikes, was distinctly unusual, and evidently menacing, for people who hadn’t spent the last few years in the punk-rock micro-climate.

Our next set was a riot, our good humour infectious enough to bring the sun out, and by early afternoon we had enough money not just for food and drink but for lodging too.

We ate lunch by the Seine, as you do when you’re young and you’ve never been to Paris before, back in a time when baguettes and pâté and red wine were still exotic fare, unavailable at home.

What did we do next? It’s all something of a haze, but I’m sure we went back to the Beaubourg and took the escalators up to the top, took pictures of each other against the skyline. And a bubble started to form around Beth and me. Things were said you can’t remember, but serve to signify that your heartbeats are converging, coming closer and closer still.