The cops cuff Roger and bundle him into a car marked ‘Police’.
The fear of it.
Lookouts aren’t allowed to doze off. The walkie-talkie crackles in my right hand. I stash it in the fuse box in the hallway. Then leg it to the bottom of the street. I run down the street behind Saint-Bernard, think about doing a tour of Barbès, choosing the darkest, seediest streets. It’s not hard.
The cannabis slows me down.
I think of my sister, on the Tarterets estate.
Of my brother, Mamadou, working like a bastard at the post office, feeding the whole family.
I hear a Capelton reggae number, it’s doing my head in.
I think of the pile of money we made from the deal and deposited at the BNP.
And most of all, I clock the two guys running after me. A dark patch and I cut into rue Polonceau and jump over the fence around the square. Ten or so babes surround a rabble of boys playing football and swapping panini in the half-light. I crouch behind a bench and close my eyes. I don’t want to die.
* * * *
LYDIE
The guy playing guitar at Mekloufi’s is known as Mimine and he knows three songs: ‘Black Eyes’, ‘Minor Swing’ and ‘Clouds’. When he’s finished those three, he turns to his accompanist, another guitarist, and they improvise. I still don’t get why they’ve got gypsies playing a Moroccan bar but who cares: the beer costs two euros, the music isn’t bad if you like Django Reinhardt and the boss cooks couscous for the regulars. Perfect.
The promotional clock tells us it’s 9 p.m. Through the cafèwindows, I check out the immigrants rushing back to their tiny freezing rooms, women in African robes and baggy-jeaned rappers jangling their two-carat bling.
I’m working till midnight tonight because Alex, the second driver, only picks the car up at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. I throw ten euros on the table and stick my nose outside, just as a fine drizzle begins to fall. A young Senegalese woman decked out like a Christmas tree rushes towards me, waving her tresses.
‘Are you the taxi?’
I nod.
‘I’ll take it. I’m going to rue Polonceau.’
‘You’re kidding. Rue Polonceau’s three hundred metres away on foot, that works out a lot per hundred metres.’
‘I know, but I’m going to a birthday party and I don’t want to get my hair wet. Shall we go.’
I get into the cab, turn on the meter and tune into TSF which is playing ‘Paris Blues’, an old Terry Callier number that brings tears to my eyes. In five twists of the steering wheel I’m back up La Goutte J’Or, turning into rue Polonceau. The girl gets out at number 14. A bit further on, a whole group of mothers and kids leaving the square with old newspapers shielding their heads. I put the meter back to zero when a son of Jah - a teenager - throws himself on to the back seat, bent double.
‘Come on, grandma, get going!’
I half turn round and give him a professional slap. Little shit.
‘Hey, what was that for? Get a move on, I’m in a hurry.’
‘I’m not your servant, kiddo.’
‘OK, OK.’
Then I spot three black guys, dressed hip-hop style, making their way towards us. And swivel to look at the kid, who’s turning green.
Trembling, he holds out a twenty-euro note.
‘Go, lady, please.’
I move into first, but as I pass the black guys, they throw themselves on my bonnet, stopping me. Shit, it’s not the day for it.
I open the glove box and pull out the Beretta, putting on the safety catch. Then, pretty tense, I push the door open, waving my gun.
‘Touch the taxi and you get shot.’
‘Hey grandma, stay cool, we just want to pick up our friend in the back.’
‘He’s not your friend. Get back all three of you.’
* * * *
SUGAR
I know those guys: three of the Barbès drugs boss’s henchmen. Look like rappers but they’ve got chickpeas for brains. I hear them whining to the taxi woman: they’re scared of her gun. I yank open the door and shout to the old girl:
‘Lady, it’s best to just go.’
She turns towards me and at the same time I get a knife in the shoulder. Shit, it burns. I quickly get back in, shouting, while the taxi woman shoots a few bullets into the air to frighten off the scum.
She gets behind the wheel.
‘It’s bleeding.’
‘Shut it, trouble.’
She throws the taxi into reverse, backs down La Goutte d’Or and we reach boulevard Barbès in the rain. And I think I’m dying.
‘A hospital . . .’
‘I know. Let me think.’
It’s not my day. My district’s a no-go area and my only chance is to get back to Tarterets to lie low and wait for them to forget me.
She’s turned on the radio and I recognise something by Dr Dre.
I see her eyes in the mirror.
‘Shit, it hurts.’
‘Don’t pull on the blade, it’s stopping the blood flow. I know Hôtel-Dieu well, we’ll go straight there. When we get there, you say nothing about my gun. You got knifed by some crazies in the street and I picked you up afterwards. Understood?’
‘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.
* * * *
LYDIE
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’O
r, 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
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* * * *
NEW SHOES
JOHN WILLIAMS
S
ometimes 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.
Paris Noir [Anthology] Page 4