Night Rounds (4 page)

Als ihr bleicher Leib im Wasser
…..

(As her pale corpse in the water)

Their faces rotate, very slowly. They murmur gentle reproaches as they pass. Then, while they're still turning, their faces contract, they ignore you now, and their eyes and their mouths convey a hideous fear. Surely they're thinking of what's in store for them. They've become like those children who cry out for mama in the dark…

Von den Bächen in die grösseren Flüsse
…..

(From the brooks into the greater streams)

You recall all the nice things they did for you. One of them used to read you his girl's letters.

Als ihr bleicher Leib im Wasser…..

(As her pale corpse in the water)

Another wore black leather shoes. Another could name every star in the sky. REMORSE. These faces will go on turning forever and you'll never sleep soundly again. But something the Lieutenant said comes back to you: "The guys in my outfit are tough as they come. They'll die if they have to, but you won't wring a word from them." All the better. Once more their faces turn to stone. The Lieutenant's deep blue eyes. Ten, twenty other faces laden with scorn. If they want to die like heroes, let them die!

Aus der Flüssen in das Meer
…..

(From the rivers to the sea)

He is silent. He has propped his violin against the mantel. The others gradually quiet down. A kind of languor envelops them. They sprawl over the sofa and arm-chairs.
"You're white as a sheet, son," murmurs the Khedive. "Don't worry. The roundup will be handled in a perfectly tidy way."

It's pleasant to be out on a balcony in the open air and, for a moment, to forget that room where the scent of flowers, the chatter, and the music were making your head churn. A summer night, so soft and still that you think you're in love.

"Of course, we have all the earmarks of gangsters. The men I use, the brutal tactics, the fact that we took you on as an informer, you with your pretty little Christ Child dimples; none of this speaks well for us, unfortunately …"

The trees and the kiosk in the square are bathed in a reddish glow. "And this odd segment of humanity that gravitates toward what I call our little 'drugstore': swindlers, demimondaines, cashiered police officers, drug addicts, nightclub owners, in short, this whole string of marquises, counts, barons, and princesses that you won't find in the social register ..."

Down below, edging the curb, a line of cars. Theirs. Dark blots in the night.

"I'm well aware that all this could be rather distasteful to a well-bred young man. But" – his voice takes on a savage edge – "if you're among people as disreputable as these tonight, it means, in spite of your little choir-boy mug …" (Very tenderly.) "It simply means, dear fellow, that we're cut from the same cloth."

The light from the chandeliers is burning their faces, corroding them like acid. Their features grow cavernous, their skin shrivels, their heads will surely shrink to miniature, like those the Jívaro Indians prize. An odor of flowers and withered flesh. Soon, the only trace of this gathering will be the tiny bubbles that burst on the surface of a pond. They're already wallowing in muddy-pink sludge, and it's rising, it's knee-deep. They don't have long to live.

"This party's getting dull," announces Lionel de Zieff. "It's time to go," says Mr. Philibert. "First stop: Place du Châtelet. The Lieutenant!"

"Coming, son?" asks the Khedive. Outside, the blackout, as usual. They split up at random and enter the cars. "Place du Châtelet!" "Place du Châtelet!" The doors slam. They're off like a shot. "No passing, Eddy!" orders the Khedive. "The sight of all these fine fellows cheers me up."

"And to think that we're keeping this pack of riff-raff!" sighs Mr. Philibert. "Bear with it, Pierre. We're in business with them. They're our partners. For better or worse."

Avenue Kléber. Their horns are blaring, their arms hang out the car windows, waving, flapping. They weave and tailgate, their bumpers grazing. They're out to see who'll take the wildest risks, make the loudest noise in the blackout. Champs Élysées. Concorde. Rue de Rivoli. "We're headed for a section I know like a book," says the Khedive. "Les Halles, where I spent my teens unloading vegetable carts."

The others have disappeared. The Khedive smiles and lights a cigarette with his solid gold lighter. Rue de Castiglione. The Obelisk in the Place Vendôme, just barely visible on the left. Place des Pyramides. The car slows down gradually, as if approaching the border. Beyond the Rue du Louvre, the city suddenly seems to cave in
.

"We're entering the 'belly of Paris,'" comments the Khedive. Though the car windows are shut, a stench, unbearable at first and then by degrees more tolerable, makes you want to retch. They must have converted Les Hai les into a slaughterhouse.

"The belly of Paris," repeats the Khedive.

The car glides along slippery pavements. The hood is getting all spattered. Mud? Blood? Whatever it is, it's something warm.

We cross Boulevard Sébastopol and come onto a vast open tract. All the surrounding houses have been razed; the only vestiges are wall beams with shreds of wallpaper. From the little left standing, you can picture the location of the stairs, the fireplaces, the closets. And the size of the rooms. Where the bed stood. Here's where a boiler used to be. There, a sink. Some people preferred flowered wallpaper, others a version of toile de Jouy. I even thought I saw a colored print still hanging on the wall.

Place du Châtelet. Zelly's, the bar where the Lieutenant and Saint-Georges are supposed to meet me at midnight. What kind of expression shall I put on when they come walking up to me? The others are already seated at tables as the Khedive, Philibert, and I enter. They swarm around us, each trying to be the first to shake our hands. They clutch at us, squeeze and shake us. Some of them smother us with kisses, others caress our necks, still others tug playfully at our lapels. I recognize Jean-Farouk de Méthode, Violette Morris, and Frau Sultana. "How are you?" Costachesco asks me. We push our way through the crowd that has gathered. Baroness Lydia pulls me over to a table occupied by Rachid von Rosenheim, Pols de Helder, Count Baruzzi, and Lionel de Zieff. "Have a cognac?" offers Pols de Helder. "You can't get any more of it in Paris, it sells for a hundred thousand francs a half-pint. Drink up!" He crams the neck of the bottle into my mouth. Then von Rosenheim shoves a cigarette between my lips and flourishes a platinum lighter set with emeralds. The light grows dim, their gestures and voices fade into soft, shadowy stillness, whereupon surging up before me with vivid clarity comes the face of the Princess de Lamballe, a devoted friend of Marie Antoinette's whom a company of "garde nationale" has come to fetch from La Force prison: "Rise, Madam, you must go to the Abbaye." Their pikes and leering faces are right in front of me. Why didn't she shout "
LONG LIVE THE NATION
!" just as they wanted her to? It would have
kept her head from decorating a pike beneath the Queen's window. If one of them pricks my forehead with his pike-head (Zieff? Hayakawa? Rosenheim? Philibert? the Khedive?), that single drop of blood is all it will take to bring the sharks rushing in. Don't move a muscle. Shout it as many times as they want:
"
LONG LIVE THE NATION
!
"
Strip off your clothes if necessary. Whatever they want! One more minute, Headsman. No matter what the price. Rosenheim shoves another cigarette into my mouth. The condemned man's last? Apparently the execution is not set for tonight. Costachesco, Zieff, Helder, and Baruzzi are exceedingly friendly. They're worried about my health. Have I enough cash? Of course I do. The act of delivering over the Lieutenant and his whole ring will net me about a hundred thousand francs, and with that I'll buy a few foulards at Charvet and a vicuña coat for the winter. Unless they settle my hash in the meantime. It seems that cowards invariably die a degrading death. The doctor used to tell me that every person about to die becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes his life, his character, and his hopes. For some, it's a popular waltz; for others, a march. Still another wails a gypsy air trailing off in a sob or a cry of panic. When it's
YOUR
turn, precious boy, it will be the clang of a trash can clattering into the blackness of no man's land. And just a while back, when we were crossing that open space on the far side of the Boulevard Sébastopol, I thought: "Here's where your story will
end." I remember the gentle slope of the road that brought me to the spot, one of the most desolate in Paris. Everything begins in the Bois de Boulogne. Remember? You were rolling your hoop on the lawn in the Pré Catelan. The years pass, you skirt the Avenue Henri-Martin and wind up in the Trocadéro. Then Place de l'Étoile. An avenue stretches out, lined with glittering street lights. Like a vision of the future, you think: full of promise – as the saying goes. You're breathless with exhilaration on the threshold of this vast thoroughfare, but it's only the Champs-Élysées with its cosmopolitan bars, its call girls and the Claridge, a caravansary haunted by the specter of Stavisky. Dreariness of the Lido. Dismal ports of call, Fouquet and the Colisée. Everything was phony from the start. Place de la Concorde, you're sporting lizard shoes, a polka-dot tie, and the smug assurance of a little gigolo. After turning off into the MadeleineOpéra district, just as tawdry as the Champs-Élysées, you continue your journey and what the doctor calls your
MOR-AL DIS-IN-TE-GRA-TION
beneath the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. The Continental, the Meurice, the SaintJames et d'Albany, where I work as a hotel thief. The wealthy guests occasionally have me up to their rooms. Before it's light, I rifle their handbags and lift a few pieces of jewelry. Farther along. Rumpelmayer's, with its odors of withered flesh. The fags you assault at night in the Carrousel gardens just to filch suspenders and wallets. But the vision suddenly looms clearer: I'm right in the
belly of Paris. Where exactly are its borders? All you have to do is cross the Rue du Louvre or the Place du Palais Royal. You head toward Les Hailes down narrow, fetid streets. The belly of Paris is a jungle striped with motley neon signs. All around you, overturned vegetable crates and ghostly figures wheeling giant haunches of carcass. A cluster of wan and weirdly painted faces surge up, then vanish. From here on, anything is possible. They'll rope you into the dirtiest jobs before letting you have the final payoff. And if, by some desperate, cunning subterfuge, one more last-ditch act of cowardice, you wriggle clear of this horde of foul-mouthed fishwives and butchers lurking in the shadows, you'll go on to die just up the street, on the far side of the Boulevard Sébastopol, right there in that vacant lot. That wasteland. The doctor said so. You've reached your journey's end, and there's no turning back. Too late. The trains aren't running. Our Sunday walks along the Petite Ceinture, the railway line that's idle now … It took us in full circle around Paris. Porte de Clignancourt. Boulevard Pereire. Porte Dauphine. Farther on, Javel…..The stations along the loop had been converted into depots or bars. Some of them had been left intact, and I could almost picture a train coming by any minute, yet for the last fifty years the hands of the clock have never moved. I've always had a special feeling about the Gare d'Orsay, to the point that I wait there for the pale blue Pullmans that speed you to the Promised Land. And since they
never appear, I walk across the Pont Solferino whistling a waltz tune. Then I take from my wallet a photograph of Dr. Marcel Petiot in the defense box and, behind him, that whole pile of suitcases crammed with hopes and thwarted plans, while the judge, pointing to them, asks me: "What have you made of your youth?" and my attorney (my mother, as it happened, for no one else would undertake my defense) tries to convince him and the jury that I was "nonetheless a promising youngster," "an ambitious lad," slated for a "brilliant career," so everyone said. "The proof, Your Honor, is that the luggage, over there behind him, is impeccable. Russia leather, Your Honor." "Why should I give a damn about those suitcases, Madame, since they never went anywhere?" And every last one of them condemned me to death. Tonight, you must go to bed early. Tomorrow the whorehouse will be packed solid. Don't forget your make-up and lipstick. Rehearse it once more in the mirror: you must wink your eye with velvety smoothness. You'll run across a lot of perverts who'll want you to do unspeakable things. Those depraved creatures frighten me. If I don't satisfy them, they'll wipe me out. Why didn't she shout:
"
LONG LIVE THE NATION
"
? When it's my turn, I'll repeat it as often as they want. I'm the most accommodating whore. "Come on now, drink up," Zieff pleads with me. "Some music?" suggests Violette Morris. The Khedive comes over to me, smiling: "The Lieutenant will be here in ten minutes. Say hello to him as if nothing
were up." "Something romantic," Frau Sultana requests. "
RO-MAN-TIC
" shouts Baroness Lydia. "Then try to take him outside the bar." "
Negra noche
, please," asks Frau Sultana. "So we can arrest him more easily. Then we'll pick up the others at their homes." "
Five Feet Two
," simpers Frau Sultana. "That's my favorite song." "Looks like a good haul. Thanks for the information, son." "Well, it's not mine," declares Violette Morris. "I want to hear
Swing Troubadour
!" One of the Chapochnikoff brothers winds the victrola. The record is scratched. The singer sounds as if his voice is about to crack. Violette Morris beats time, murmuring the words: