Nazis in the Metro

Also by Didier Daeninckx

A Very Profitable War
Murder in Memoriam

Sloga had read the
Indépendant de Perpignan
while downing an uninspiring coffee on the terrace of the Trois Grâces café, just before hitting the road. Murdered children, ethnic cleansing, a prince’s divorce, the usual filth. The only touch of humanity was in the almanac, next to the weather report: an item recalling the assassination of Jean Jaurès, eighty-one years earlier to the day, the 31st of July, 1914. He had not known that this disappearance was compensated for, a few hours later, by the birth of the comedian Louis de Funès. A conscience, pawned for its weight in funny faces: the century was off on the right track.

The Autoroute des Deux Mers snaked and dipped. Undulations in the land concealed the Catharist past the villages were now selling off, stone by stone: their erstwhile resistance embellished labels on bottles of Corbières; their sacrificed villages attracted euro-wielding tourists; their marginalized faith inspired spectacles of Sound and Light. He didn’t blame them; the entire country, a republic of autophagics, was living on its own remains. In the last few days, the waves of suntanned Spaniards and Italians had slowly begun to drift northward, and he was surprised not to be making any progress toward Roquemaure. When he
recognized the sound of ambulances chirping in the distance, he understood that the traffic jam was actually a spontaneous funeral procession. The people who now lay dead in crumpled metal heaps where the Languedoc Route met the Autoroute du Soleil couldn’t have dreamed of drawing such a crowd to their services. Sloga slowly advanced alongside the red-and-white clown hats that surrounded the accident scene and first-aid zone, trying not to look at the disemboweled suitcases, the metallic shimmer of emergency blankets, the bottles turned upside down over IV tubes.

For some ten kilometers, his foot was lighter on the gas, and then, gradually, it began to recover its sense of weight. He enjoyed long, solitary trips. Driving calmed him down, and, as he no longer dreamed, it gave his mind the opportunity to wander in total freedom. He would talk to himself, sing, arrange sounds according to nothing but the obscure meaning of their rhythm. The place names marked with arrows on the brown signs that lined the road were so many memory traps. Every now and then, a memory gave rise to a burst of nostalgia, and he let the ghosts rush in until their features were reflected clearly in the windshield, floating above the shifting landscape. Then he would concentrate on the three-pointed star stuck to the tip of the hood and breathe deeply, to disengage with anything beyond the tangible world. Protesting grape growers had taken over the tollbooths at Ury. They would let you through for the price of a smile.

He tossed the yellow tract onto the passenger seat and read it at an angle as he descended into Paris. He entered the capital via a tentacle of the ring road and drove along
its cultivated banks. There was almost nothing left of the neighborhood where he’d roamed as a child. Not even the name. The glory of Bercy’s wine-trading past was no longer the first thing that came to most people’s minds. At best, they might think of the Palais Omnisports, but more likely it would be the omnipresent Minister of Finance. Dust from construction sites dulled the sparkle on the tiles of the old pneumatic factory, a bulldozer’s claws attacked the cement rotunda near the refrigeration warehouses, and a perforated metal barrier blocked off Rue Watt. What was left of a world that had been built by labor was being erased so that the book stacks for the grand library could be erected in its place: four massive, glassed-in legs of a gigantic table turned on its head. Wherever you looked, placards announced ambitious building projects along the Seine, and he wondered once again if the Opéra Bastille, the Abattoir des Sciences et Techniques, and the Arche de la Défense were built in response to real needs, or if their construction was not, rather, a pretext for reclaiming whole segments of working-class Paris.

He crossed over the Austerlitz tracks on the Tolbiac bridge, which a municipal architect had repainted red, white, and green like a pizzeria, and activated the remote-controlled door to the parking garage as soon as the building on the corner of Rue Jeanne d’Arc came into view. The nose of the Mercedes tilted toward the basement, where the fluorescent lights flickered on and off until their autopsy glow settled on the cars squeezed tightly between rough pillars. He parked between two Clios near the elevator door on Level 2, and gathered up the objects that had scattered
around the car’s interior over the course of his trip. It wasn’t until he was making his way around to the trunk to retrieve his luggage that he became aware of a presence. Nothing concrete, not the movement of a shadow, nor the sound of breathing, nor the squeaking of soles, only the weight of someone’s eyes, someone’s attention.

He froze, his hand on the car, and turned around to take a long look at the garage. He blinked. The tens of thousands of painted white dashes on the roadway between Narbonne and Paris had left their imprint on his retinas. He shook his head to dispel their traces as much as his own uneasiness. He had to use both hands to pick up the suitcase, which was weighed down by books. The lights went out just as he stopped in front of the elevator. The call button was not illuminated as usual. He felt around for it, then pressed it several times, tugging the door toward himself out of instinct. It opened. A man was huddled on the floor of the elevator car, his silhouette reflected in its mirrored back wall. Sloga backed up and into another man, who had snuck up silently behind him under the cover of darkness. He blurted out a ridiculous “Pardon me” before the first punches fell.

Gabriel Lecouvreur, also known as the Octopus, extracted himself from the compact Peugeot like a crab from a shoe-box. The periwinkle-clad meter maids hadn’t yet started scouring for miscreants on this side of the Place Léon Blum, and he figured he had time to go have his coffee before the windshield of Cheryl’s car was graced with a city-issued ticket. The news seller, inside the illuminated, ad-covered walls of his tiny kiosk, was tying up yesterday’s unsold papers. He had arrayed the day’s wares in misshapen, unstable waves on the counter. Gabriel managed to withdraw a
Parisien
and a
Libération
more or less intact, without endangering the precarious equilibrium. Not long ago, just the sight of someone flipping through the first of these lying rags would have constituted an act of war. But now, surprisingly, he found himself more interested and engaged by its provincial reportage than by the sententious editorials in his other standby for daily news. And yet, he was sure he hadn’t changed …