Nazis in the Metro (4 page)

Gabriel fingered the flap of his pants fly, setting off a series of nervous tics on Vergeat’s face and causing him to forget, momentarily, the state of his own apparel.

—A ton of it … The worst was when he secretly moved
in with a Polynesian woman on a Pacific island in the middle of a nuclear test zone, near Moruroa … The military found out the night before H-Day, and they had to postpone the whole program …

Gabriel zipped and unzipped his fly twice, taking advantage of the inspector’s embarrassment to make his way toward the door.

—I know this story: Sloga recounts it in detail in
Weekend at Nagasaki
 … You can still find it at the used book stalls.

He backed away down the hall and pushed the button to exit. Before the door clicked shut, he saw Vergeat open André Sloga’s mailboxes, using a skeleton key on a crowded key ring, and remove the bills.

Gabriel ordered a pint at the bar of the Cantagrel. As he sifted through Sloga’s letters, he watched Vergeat leave the building. The inspector had apparently not gone up to the writer’s apartment, and Gabriel struggled against the desire to go himself. He decided to walk as far as the Tolbiac bridge as a means of forcing himself to think.

He had once been passionate about steel architecture, and he would certainly have become an engineer if the hardware store owned by his uncle Émile and aunt Marie-Claude, who raised him after the death of his parents, hadn’t been located at the end of the Passage des Deux Soeurs, a hundred meters from a place called Block 18, where the skinheads met. Twice a day on his way to the university, he would pass the windows plastered with gothic posters for a hard-rock band, Commando 88, without paying them much attention—until the day when a prominent lawyer’s son who’d become an active Autonomist, not out of rebellion against his family but out of conviction, explained the skinhead code of numbers to him: the “18” stood for “Adolf Hitler,” the “1” for “A,” the first letter in the alphabet, and the “8” for “H.” The “88” was even more obvious: one “H” for “Heil” and the other for “Hitler.” On top of that, if you
scratched off two curves from each “8” you would get the acronym “S.S.” The hardware store stocked all the resources necessary to launch a siege. The following week, two Molotov cocktails, perfectly dosed, shattered the front window of Block 18, and, as a bonus, set two Harley Davidsons on fire. A month later, after the upstanding people of the neighborhood had readily identified him and gone to the police, after his educational deferral from mandatory service had been rescinded, he found himself traipsing through the heart of a German forest buried in snow. Six months of military punishment that he made the best of by perfecting his knowledge of weaponry.

He leaned on the bridge’s armature, near a cast-iron plaque that credited its design to the nineteenth-century engineer Daydé, and took the four letters from his pocket. The postmark on the first one indicated that it had been sent from Fontenay-sous-Bois five weeks earlier. He tore open the envelope and removed a sheet of paper covered in minuscule handwriting.

Gabriel refolded the insufferable missive without taking the time to read to the end. The second letter came from an organization that distributed royalties to authors. André Sloga was to show up at the teller’s window, on Rue Ballu, between nine o’clock and noon to retrieve the advance he had requested for a series of readings of some of his texts on a radio station in the overseas territories. The third envelope contained a monthly bill for photocopies, documents, and office supplies sent by Docutec, Inc. The surprise was hidden in a shabby manila envelope, un-stamped, the kind used only by the social-welfare services in the districts near the city limits. The message, drawn in capital letters on a sheet torn from an advertising pamphlet vaunting the merits of Corona beer, was impressive in its brusqueness:

FINAL WARNING

Gabriel turned the paper over several times before replacing it in its envelope.

The sole parcel did bear the address of its sender:

The book within was accompanied by a form letter thanking the client for the confidence he had placed in Lost & Found Ink. The book’s cover was completely blank except for the name of an obscure publisher in Narbonne: Path and Terroir. It was a well-preserved volume from the early 1950s, with engravings embellishing the first page of each chapter. He read the title on the flyleaf:
The Five Senses
by Joseph Délteil. An interminable convoy of passing delivery trucks made the Tolbiac bridge shudder, and brought a burst of air that fluttered the pages he’d been leafing through. A paragraph caught his eye:

“Each hour, a shiny-faced pickaninny would come to ask after the women who were sick with chlamydia. Lines of Negresses, their tits in gourds …”

A hand came down suddenly on his shoulder as he was closing the book, stunned by the word
Negresses
. Inspector Vergeat brought his face close and yelled over the roar of the ancient trains.

—Interesting place to read!

Gabriel pointed at the four glass silos in the middle of
the no-man’s-land of the development zone that Austerlitz had become.

—You’d think so. But they’ve fallen behind in the construction of my library …

He walked away without another word. The windshield of the Peugeot was adorned with a second ticket; they seemed to proliferate in the 13th. He placed it on top of the burgeoning pile that awaited the inaugural amnesty of Chirac’s second term, and headed for the Rue Popincourt.

As soon as he set foot on the tile floor of the salon, the Yorkshire Terrier that belonged to the apprentice hairdresser ran toward him and flopped on its back, its four legs quivering, and the fifth displaying its little lipstick. Gabriel tried to flip the dog back onto its paws with the tip of his cowboy boot, but the beast’s fur slid off the leather. The customers laughed beneath their hair-dryers, and it was clear from their expressions that they were all imagining what the proprietress’s husband must have been doing to the apprentice to put a pet as innocent as this in such a state. Gabriel opened the door to the apartment and succeeded in banging it into the frantic dog’s muzzle. Cheryl was taking advantage of the relative lack of customers at the end of the morning to take a break from the chatter of the “Wigs,” a categorical term that applied to all but two or three of the salon’s regulars. She was lounging on the window seat amidst her collection of stuffed animals, watching a compilation of Marilyn Monroe’s musical performances for the thousandth time. He bent down to kiss her neck. She propped herself up on her elbows, making her breasts jut out.

—I get the sense your morning wasn’t dull …

—Not really … What makes you say that?

She stretched a hand out toward his crotch.

—The magic shop’s still open!

Gabriel quickly zipped up his fly.

—You don’t need to worry. I was playing a joke on Vergeat …

Cheryl pressed a button on the remote control to rewind the tape.

—Really! I guess your relationship has taken a turn for the better … Now you pass the time by taking off your pants? That’s original …

He sat next to her to recount the series of events that had occupied his morning, from the first parking ticket at Place Léon Blum to its twin sister on Rue Jeanne d’Arc.

When he finished, she was naked.

After that, the world existed only for others.

Gabriel woke up alone in the middle of a family of kangaroos. The hair dryers were emitting an insistent whirr that drowned out the din of activity. He brushed aside the stuffed animals so he could gather up his clothes. He had returned from his adventure with the four letters addressed to André Sloga and the book by Joseph Délteil, which he turned back to now. Well before Camus, the plague had descended upon the world described in
The Five Senses
. Everyone was trying desperately to get to the north pole, where the virus apparently lost its potency. Élie-Élie, Scientist of the State, became the sacrificial lamb. As he labored to save the world, each of the five senses the Creator, in his largesse, had offered to Man were torn away from him, one by one, like five exploding flowers: Hearing, Smell, Taste, Sight, Touch.

Gabriel, a savvy reader of detective novels, detected the stink in
Élie-Élie as soon as he appeared beneath the delicate
pen of Joseph Délteil.

“He was born in Vienna (Austria) to a Yid, but with an American mother.”

He stopped for a moment on the compensatory “but,”
which multiplied the sentence’s loathsomeness, before reading on:

Nausea overcame him well before the end of this portrait, but he forced himself to read every disgusting word.

Gabriel let the volume slide from his hands and remained motionless for a while, his gaze tilted toward the ceiling as he concocted a number of scenarios, each as unsatisfying as the last, to explain the presence of such a piece of work in the mailbox of a man like André Sloga. It made no sense. He went downstairs, poking his cowboy boot into the Yorkie’s hindquarters before the door to the salon was even fully open. The miniature canine squealed all the way
to his mistress’s station and took refuge under a sink. As he passed, Gabriel quickly kissed Cheryl, who was busy giving a perm to the actress who played Jackie Sardou in the Sound and Light show. Up the street, the car was receiving the distinction of yet another parking infraction.

The offices of Lost & Found Ink consisted of a garret with an ancient fanlight, on the eighth floor of a building with no elevator. Gabriel hadn’t been back to the neighborhood around the Santé municipal prison since the glory days when students had assembled there to demonstrate against a minimum wage law proposed by the last right-wing minister of a president who claimed to be on the left. The disparate protesters had joined together and were rushing the high walls, pursued by National Guardsmen eager for some action, when the detainees grabbed the bars of their cells and yelled out to the demonstrators that the cars parked on Rue de la Santé belonged to the wardens. Throughout the year, this little corner of Parisian paradise was given a pass by the meter maids, and those men and women who’d been sentenced to life, whose only mental stimulation came from the activity in the neighborhood, had forgotten what a parking ticket looked like. The protesters made a quick job of overturning the Peugeot GTIs, the Renault TSs, the Citroën ZXs, and Mercedes TDs that were being paid off in monthly installments with the bitter sweat of the condemned. Gabriel had restricted himself to helping the kids set fires, out of a fear of being mistaken, at his age, for an infiltrating cop.

Now he bowed his head and took a half step into the offices of Lost & Found Ink, pushing lightly on the door, which had been left ajar to let in an illusory current of air. The floor creaked, attracting the attention of a man of about sixty who was stuffing books into generic envelopes similar to the one addressed to André Sloga. His face glistened with perspiration, and beads of sweat, heavy like the first drops in a storm, splashed onto book covers, bills, and packages. He looked up, pausing to wipe his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

—What do you want?

Gabriel ignored the question.

—Are you the person who searches for hard-to-find books?

—If one wants to earn a living in this racket, one quickly discovers that it’s better to find the books for which people are searching …

Gabriel indicated, with a slight movement of his features, that this demonstration of wit had not gone unnoticed. As he approached, he read several titles from the spines of books piled up next to the postage meter.
The Beetles of Andalusia
by Jaime Izquierdo,
The Wind in the Trenches
by Francois Dubanchet,
Wine and Spirituality
by Robert Illier … He didn’t know exactly how to engage with this strange and damp man, who was continuing to make up packages. Not being suspicious by nature, Gabriel decided to start by playing it straight.

—Do you know André Sloga?

The man paused for a moment and then stuffed an
envelope with
Letters to a friend who is dead and gone
by Clotilde Tempruns, the cover of which was decorated with a scarlet band advertising that this tome had been awarded the Valentine-Abraham-Verlain Prize, given by the Academie Française to a “poetess visited by unhappiness.”