Nazis in the Metro (2 page)

A commercial moving truck pulled up in front of the wooden table-leg manufacturer’s place on Rue Godefroy-Cavaignac. A team of burly, taciturn men began loading machine parts, strapping them in place somewhere in the dark belly of the semi. Gabriel approached Monsieur Alaric
the elder, proprietor of the table-leg operation, a portly Breton with olive skin who was watching the movers’ comings and goings through a double door. He extended his hand. The pressure of his fingers was more than just weak: it was disillusioned.

—No rest for the weary, eh! What are you doing, modernizing? Getting rid of the old rigs?

The carpenter shrugged.

—Modernize? What for? With table legs, it’s not like you’re cutting them with lasers and scouring the Internet every morning to find out if some cabinetmaker in Fatchakulla has invented a revolutionary new technique in the middle of the night!

—So what are they doing then?

Alaric unzipped the front pocket of his overalls and dug out a Gauloise Light from a dented packet.

—Isn’t it obvious? I’m out of here.

He offered Gabriel a cigarette.

—Thanks, but I haven’t quit quitting … You’re really leaving? Closing up shop? Is business that bad?

Smoke streamed from his nostrils in two jets that merged into one.

—You kidding? I’ve got a list of orders as long as a day without bread … No, the new owner’s kicking me out. There’s no romance in table legs anymore. He wants to gut the place and turn it into a gallery-café …

—Another café! Well, we don’t have to worry about dying of hunger in this neighborhood anymore … And where will you go? Back to Brittany?

Alaric nearly choked.

—Brittany, me? Never! I don’t even go there for vacation! I need streets, bars, cars, subways! The older generations might’ve had a hard time adapting, but I’m completely at home …

Gabriel leaned his long frame against the wall.

—Of course, it’s been a long time … The Alaric name has been on this shack forever …

—You can say that again! Now we’re out on the street … It was my great-grandfather who came here first, from Finistère-Nord, at the end of the last century … The recruiters arrived and sent whole villages into exile, giving advances to parents and wives … Reimbursable from the first year’s pay. It was a little like Citroën and Bouygues with the Moroccans and the Turks … But with us it was for the first Delaunay-Belleville cars. The plant was in Saint-Denis, not far from Briche. Steel frames, spoked wheels, wood interiors, all-leather upholstery … They needed the best craftsmen in the country, and they went looking for them in Brittany and Auvergne … I never had the chance to know my great-grandfather, but my grandfather lived basically the same shitty life as he did … At first he didn’t speak a word of French, and on Saturday nights, after their shifts, Parisian workers would unwind by chasing down “foreigners” … Because they spoke Méteque, because they were unmarried, because they didn’t eat the food everyone else ate. He was systematically beat up … And you know what the bastards called those raids?

—No.

With an expert flick, Alaric propelled his cigarette butt into the clear waters of the gutter.

—Brétonnades
! Can you imagine? Forty years before the
ratonnades
^*
against the Arabs … It’s only proof that nothing ever changes: we just get used to it …

—And where will you go?

—When they ruin the provinces for you and then kick you out of the city, what’s left?

Gabriel Lecouvreur’s eyebrows rearranged themselves into a circumflex.

—I don’t know …

—It’s obvious: the outskirts … They’re sticking me with three thousand square meters in Montreuil, along the highway. It’s called Mosinor … Twelve stories surrounded by a truck route. Three-quarters of the building is occupied by sweatshops, and the courtyard is used as a parking lot for those green dumpsters from the Department of Household Waste! It’s a dream come true!

—You do make it sound appealing … You should reinvent yourself as a real-estate agent. Is there anywhere to get a drink, at least?

—Oh sure, these are civilized people, after all: they just opened a Burger King on the ground floor … I’m going to have to get used to soft drinks …

Gabriel Lecouvreur walked back up toward Ledru-Rollin, his
Parisian
open against the crowd, his nose deep in the news of the rotating orb beneath his feet. The other pedestrians made way for this beanpole of a man absorbed in the world’s progress. Some lifted their heads in his direction, and the oldest among them saw in him a strong resemblance to a young Philippe Clay.

Perched on a wobbly stool, on tiptoes, Maria was writing the list of appetizers and desserts of the day on the front window of the Pied de Porc à la Sainte-Scolasse. Lecouvreur stopped next to her. Thanks to the stool, their heads were at the same height. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and pointed at the menu.

—Vinaigrette is written with a V, not a W …

She spun around reflexively to check her writing, realizing as she turned that he was teasing her. She responded in an exaggerated Teruel accent:

—I don’t understand … it weally is leeks wit’ win-aigwette …

The proprietor, who was busy fiddling with the coffee machine, didn’t see him enter. Gabriel greeted the fifteen or so regulars gathered around the counter and sat down behind the row of potted Wandering Jews whose leaves, which Maria doped up with aspirin and a concoction of ground eggshells, were as green as the hills of Normandy. Léon, the epileptic German Shepherd, headed toward him in slow motion, his hindquarters skidding. He plowed his muzzle twice into the plastic lattice-backed chairs before collapsing with a sigh at Gabriel’s feet. Gérard, who had just
finished serving a dozen coffees and almost as many glasses of Calvados, walked across the room. He set down Gabriel’s daily bowl of Arabica and a croissant.

—No more sweets for Léon, he’s becoming blind as a bat! It’s bad enough that he can’t bark anymore …

Ordinarily, Gabriel would have bestowed a thousand virtues on the dog’s gluttony; he would have patiently explained that, in
The Symposium
, Plato had the Philosopher assert the palate’s superiority over sight, arguing that our eyes detect only the surface of things whereas our taste buds are able to decipher the secret depths of all the flavors of the earth. In other words, he would have put on his usual show. The customers waited attentively for the joust to begin, but it did not; Gabriel remained immobile, waylaid by the News in Brief. Gérard tried again to spark an exchange with a noisy sniff.

—You don’t think he stinks?

This attempt met with no greater success. He was preparing to resume his position behind the bar when Gabriel raised his head with a devastated look in his eyes.

—Have you read this?

Gérard leaned over the minuscule box of text to which the Octopus was pointing, at the foot of the page:

ATTACKED IN THE BASEMENT

The proprietor shrugged.

—That’s what put you in such a state? There’s no respect anymore, especially for old people. Those stories are a dime a dozen around here! …

Gabriel placed his finger on the victim’s name.

—Sloga … André Sloga, the name means nothing to you?

—Why, should it?

—Actually, yes … You haven’t read
The Innocents, Hell’s Harvest
, even
Weekend in Nagasaki
?

Maria, whose breasts were exactly level with the counter, had begun to take orders. Gérard admitted his ignorance.

—I’ve never heard of him … Who is he, a writer?

—Yes, and not just any writer … He was a working-class kid from the south of Paris … His father worked like a slave in an alloy plant in Vitry and on Sundays played accordion at the dance clubs on the banks of the Marne. Anarcho-pacifist, bit of a basher, borderline alcoholic … He writes about it in his first book …

—Now that you mention it, I’m beginning to place him … Weren’t they also athletes?

—Not exactly, but almost. In ’37, around the time of Guernica, the father and son got involved in the International Brigades. They were assigned to the defense of the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, a competition that was to have taken place at the same time as the Nazi Games in
Berlin, at the opening of which, we all too often forget, our beloved sportsmen, with images of Baron de Coubertin
^*
in their minds, coughed up a raised-arm salute to the Führer! Sloga recounts all of this in detail in
The Innocents
, which Gallimard published in June of 1940, causing a full-scale debacle … Almost the entire edition was pulped after the superior race cleansed the reading committee—

Maria interrupted him.

—I’ve only been acquainted with your Sloga for five minutes, but I have a feeling he hasn’t had a lot of luck in his life …

Gabriel tore a crusty point from his croissant and dunked it into his steaming coffee.

—Well, the book ends with the death of his father, who was executed by supporters of Franco … It’s there in everything he writes, every word, story, every tangent, and at the heart of it all: pulsating, bleeding life … Basically, everything that’s missing from almost all the others.

Gérard leapt over to the coffee machine to loosen the handle of a portafilter Maria was wrestling with.

—It’s strange that you’ve never spoken of him before … We’ve fought over Calet, Hardellet, André Laude, de Bove, but this guy: nothing. He’s fallen through the cracks … How do you explain that?

Gabriel leaned over his bowl, his hands gripping its porcelain sides, and, lips protruding like a giraffe’s, inhaled in one go more than half of the liquid inside.

—The hard times never left him. After the War, Gallimard published a half-dozen titles by Sloga, until one day they turned one down … He’d written too pointedly about the free use of the guillotine in Algerian prisons, and the Gestapo-style torture the French army was endorsing in the Aurès mountains … This was in 1955. He left Gallimard and slammed the door on his way out … Twenty years later his fury would have made him famous; his fatal flaw was that he was ahead of his time … After that, he floated from publisher to publisher … The last thing of his I read was
Countercurrent
from Plasma in the middle of the 1980s. To my knowledge, he hasn’t published anything for more than ten years … Total oblivion. The guy who cranked out that article today didn’t even know who he was writing about …

—Give him a call so he can print a correct …

—I have better things to do in life than to call out journalists!

Gabriel Lecouvreur got to his car at the precise moment when the traffic warden for Place Léon Blum was tearing the ticket from its stub. She ignored the hand he held out to her, and, without a glance at her victim, tucked the slip of paper under the left wiper blade as procedure required. During the vacation month of August, the streets were beset by repairs that necessitated endless detours, allowing statisticians to observe that summer car travel by Parisians was trending toward the annual norm. He crossed the Seine on the Austerlitz bridge and parked in the shade of the tracks of the elevated metro. One of two white-shirted men in the sentry booth cast him an indifferent glance as he crossed the median.

Six months earlier, when Gabriel had been investigating abusive psychiatric internments, the president of a human-rights organization—who had himself suffered the rigors of a prolonged sojourn between padded walls—dragged him to every hospital in Paris and its vicinity to show him the secret equipment used by state-employed psychiatrists. This self-proclaimed President of the Falsely Diagnosed harbored a pronounced taste for the clandestine. When they’d visited the Pitié-Salpêtrière, he’d asked to meet Gabriel in an infamous parking lot at Port Austerlitz. Gabriel had to
knock four times—long, long, short, short—on the side of the electrician’s van that served as the man’s cover, and await verification before the door slid open. He folded himself in two to enter the vehicle. The president traded his mechanic’s overalls for jeans and a sweater. He asked the Octopus to wait, then crouched before a mirror hanging from a strap to fit a jet-black wig on his bald head. After the approximate application of a mustache to match the hair, using his right index finger and a tin of Black Lion shoe polish, the character transformation was complete. From his booth, the sentry of the Salpêtrière had been watching them approach from far away. The mocking smile on his lips blossomed into outright mirth when, as the men passed through the gate, one of the gusts of wind typical to the area caused the president’s rug to rotate a quarter-turn. His attempt to reposition his synthetic mane led only to disaster: the sleeve of his pullover, which was too big for him, brushed against his nose and jaw, marring the face of the Defender of Lunatics with black streaks. Gabriel was about to turn back, but his guide, not realizing that his wig was on backwards and his mustache had procreated, shot him an encouraging wink to signify that he had the situation under control.