Paris Noir [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  Montez was a sultry Technicolor queen of the 1940s who starred in a series of flicks about the harem girls and thieves of a Baghdad that rose up ludicrously on Hollywood’s back lots. What he loved about Montez was her long silences even when she was asked to play Scheherazade. She could barely mouth a single line of dialogue - she belonged in fantasy baseball rather than Baghdad of the back lots. Perhaps he could remake Montez into a manager of some fantasy team. He had discovered her years ago in a late-night festival of B-movies, her face all aflame, her lipstick as red as lacquered blood, and Montez had remained with him, like a ghost at the very edge of sleep.

  And then he saw her - not in the cemetery, but in a salon on the rue Daguerre, after Cal had decided to have his hair cut. The hairdresser herself couldn’t intrigue him; it was the shampoo girl, Marie, who wore lipstick and nail polish right out of the Arabian Nights. She looked at Cal with her own Arabian eyes, and he muttered ‘Maria Montez’.

  He had a kindergarten command of French, but it didn’t seem to matter with Marie. She sat him down in her private throne where she shampooed customers’ hair, put a huge plastic napkin over his shirt, clutched him around the ears, and drew his head back into the hollow of a sink.

  She rinsed his hair, poured shampoo on his crown, and rubbed the shampoo into his scalp with the palms of her hands. Then there was a curious surprise - the shampoo girl began to massage his scalp with her ten fingers, like ten little animals with their own moist mouths. Cal had never considered until that moment how alive his scalp was in all its bumpy terrain.

  He never wanted to leave Marie’s throne. He couldn’t have told you how long she had massaged his scalp, and when she rinsed his hair, Cal suddenly felt his own strange isolation - he was more connected to a shampoo girl and her ten fingers than he had ever been to his wife, his mistresses, his daughters, and Josh.

  * * * *

  3.

  He didn’t have to get his hair cut each time; he could simply have a shampooing with the fille, as everybody called her - the salon’s own little girl who would never graduate, never grow up into a full-fledged hairdresser. The other girls in the salon poked fun at Cal, this perverse little American who looked like a hobo; his cuffs were frayed, his trousers wrinkled, his shoes beginning to unravel. He was Marie’s one and only ‘fiancé’, offering her his own head of hair like some wild flower that had to be rinsed and stroked.

  They did have a conversation of sorts, but they could just as well have been the inmates of a madhouse with its own elemental language of long silences. She called him ‘Monsieur’, and he discovered with a series of groping questions that she lived in one of Paris’ poorest banlieues with her parents and three older brothers. She herself had hardly gone to school, but would rather wash men’s hair than scrub kitchen floors or bathe the bodies of old people in some sanatorium.

  It was hard for Cal to manoeuvre while he sat on Marie’s throne, but she did agree to meet with him one afternoon during her lunch hour. They bought sandwiches at a bistro on the rue Daguerre and smuggled them into the cemetery.

  He couldn’t explain his affection for Marie. They had little to talk about. The rigid rules and laws of fantasy baseball would have baffled her, and she’d never heard of Baudelaire. And while he blabbered in her ear, sang to her about the mysteries of Maria Montez, she scratched the side of his face - gently, gently - with a polished fingernail; it was the most erotic gesture he had ever experienced. They kissed for twenty minutes right on the Allée Transversale, in front of tourists with their little guidebooks to all the notable graves, and Cal could hear his own heart pound like some maddening earthquake.

  She laughed and wiped the lipstick off his mouth, and led him back by hand to her salon. She had never once pronounced his name. He fumbled against her - could he ride home with her on the Métro?

  ‘Non, chéri.’

  She called him darling but wouldn’t pronounce his name. She did promise to meet him for another stroll in the cemetery. But when he returned to Marie’s salon the very next afternoon, three sombre men were waiting for him. They looked like taller, harder replicas of Marie, each with a pencil-thin moustache. He searched inside the window - Marie wasn’t near her throne.

  The three men kicked him like a dog and left Cal lying on the rue Daguerre. The concierge had to bring him back to his apartment. She washed his face with a little rag. She’d lived in London for a year, and could admonish him in his own language.

  ‘Monsieur has been a bad boy,’ she said. ‘Monsieur is not supposed to kiss la shampouineuse.’

  Cal loved the sound of it - shampouineuse.

  He was crazy about the shampouineuse of the rue Daguerre. But how would he ever find her again? She disappeared from the salon, and none of the hairdressers would offer him a clue. And then Mélodie Montesquieu stopped visiting him on Tuesdays, stopped visiting him at all; she was his courier to the world outside his little tomb.

  Lightning & Lightning had decided to shut him down. He’d have to flee, but where could he go? He called American Express - his account had been frozen. He called his bank collect - his new balance was one dollar and twenty-six cents. And all the codes to his retirement accounts had been changed. He was locked out of his own past, like some mechanical monster without a persona.

  He rode in a cab to the American Express offices on the rue Scribe with the possibility that his passport might get him a line of credit or some cash. But men with razored moustaches lurked about, reminding him of Marie’s brothers, and he couldn’t get near any of the managers.

  Mélodie awaited him when he returned to his tomb on the rue Boulard. She sat smoking a cigarette that filled his bedroom with a foul odour and nearly burnt his nostrils. But she didn’t bask on his bed like some Delilah without her clothes.

  ‘This is your apartment, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘Mine and Josh’s. I’m married, and this is where we meet.’

  ‘Your name isn’t Mélodie, and you’re not an actress.’

  ‘I’m a housewife who does tricks on the side. My name is none of your business.’ Her green eyes grew bolder as his grew opaque, and she apologised for her bluntness. ‘I’m sorry, Cal. Mélodie is the name I use with all my tricks.’

  ‘He means to kill me,’ Cal said.

  ‘It’s not that simple. Let’s just say he’s decided to abandon you. And you’ll have to fish around on your own.’

  ‘Fish with what? I had five million I can’t touch. I—’

  ‘He thinks you should run to Morocco.’

  ‘Why Morocco?’ he sang in his own sad voice.

  ‘Because it’s easy to get lost.’

  Lightning & Lightning would kill him as soon as he landed, hire someone to tear Cal limb from limb.

  ‘I’m staying right here,’ he told her.

  ‘Darling, your little shampouineuse can’t save you. She can hardly save herself. Her brothers beat her black and blue.’

  ‘And who tipped them off?’

  ‘I did,’ she said with her own kind of truculence. ‘You weren’t supposed to leave the building - darling, wasn’t I enough?’

  ‘You’re Josh’s girl.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, her big toe riding up his trouser leg. ‘Wouldn’t you like a freebie, Cal?’

  ‘No.’

  * * * *

  4.

  He was running out of euros. Perhaps they were hoping to starve him to death. They toyed with Cal, left souvenirs on his dining-room table while he slept. An old Photoplay magazine with Maria Montez on the cover - it must have cost a fortune, a collector’s item from the forties, with a note attached. Keep away from cemeteries, Cal. You won’t survive your next trip.

  But he did rush into the Montparnasse cemetery, hoping he might find Marie, even in some spectral form, floating above the tilted tomb of Maupassant. Instead, he found Mélodie Montesquieu in the company of two suspicious men - assassins he assumed, handpicked for the job. They could borrow a shovel from some gravedigger and b
ury Cal next to Maria Montez.

  He nosed past Mélodie and the two men, saw the mayhem in their eyes, and left the Montpamasse cemetery. He had a gelato at an ice-cream parlour on the rue Daguerre, bought an orange that he peeled with his fingers. But a shiver travelled up his spine when he saw Mélodie and the two men enter his own building on the rue Boulard. They would wait for Cal behind the door, massacre him with Mélodie’s kitchen knives.

  Cal had lost his lair, and he’d have to loop across Paris like some grey wolf. He went to the Dingo, sat on its cramped seats, but he couldn’t conjure up the ghost of Scott Fitzgerald with his first or second glass of Sancerre. He checked into a fleabag hotel on the rue d’Odessa - the young people flocking in the little square outside his window hypnotised Cal with their swaying bodies, and he watched them for hours.

  But the grey wolf had to return to the one street that mattered to him - the rue Daguerre. He promised himself that he wouldn’t look into the window of Marie’s salon, but he did look. And the shampouineuse was at her station, the little throne that her customers sat in while she washed their hair.

  Marie had welts under her eyes, bruises printed on her face. The bell attached to the door clacked as Cal entered the salon. The hairdressers were not happy to see him. Still, Cal sat down on Marie’s throne. She clipped the plastic bib to his collar, but would not offer Cal the simplest sign of recognition. The shampouineuse was like a machine with bruised eyes.

  ‘Monsieur,’ she said, gripping him by the cars and pulling his head back into the basin. The first drop of shampoo excited him. His scalp burned with a liquid fire. Then her hands caressed the soft pit of skin that covered his crown. He blinked, his head rising above the basin for a moment - Mélodie and her two assassins stood outside the window. But Cal no longer cared. His head sank back into the basin. He would rupture time with his own implacable logic. All he had to do was convince the shampouineuse never to take her fingers out of his hair.

  <>

  * * * *

  GUY GEORGES’ FINAL CRIME

  ROMAIN SLOCOMBE

  A

  t work, in the design department, in the corridors and the canteen too, it was all the women were talking about. The RTL announcer had been first to broadcast the news, at 7 a.m. on that Thursday 26th March 1998. And the other radio stations soon swung into action.

  After long months of investigations, the police have finally named France’s most wanted man, the serial killer of east Paris. His name is Guy Georges. Thousands of copies of his photograph have been circulated to the police; every officer has been issued with one. A manhunt has been launched, his arrest is now only a matter of hours . . .

  Julie Coray, sitting at a table at the back of the Reader’s Digest magazine canteen in Bagneux, a southern suburb of Paris, raises her glass of mineral water and smiles at her colleagues: ‘At last I’ll be able to go home in peace tonight. It’s been horrific, especially on the nights we’re going to press: my road’s really badly lit and when you come out of the Métro around midnight or one in the morning, I can’t tell you how awful it is . . .’

  ‘Where d’you live, Julie?’ asked Farida, the new editorial assistant.

  ‘Between Denfert and Gaîté. Rue Cels, next to Montparnasse cemetery ... In the fourteenth.’

  Sylvie Mariani, the picture editor, shrugged her shoulders: ‘You weren’t in much danger, anyway: that’s outside the killer’s stamping ground. The guy only operated around Bastille . . .’

  Slightly miffed, Julie cut herself a piece of ham and mushroom pie, muttering: ‘Yeah, but still . . .’

  Farida, in her guttural Maghrebi accent, came to her rescue: ‘Well, I’d like to see you do it, Sylvie . . . You’re married and you go home early to feed your kids. But for four months women have been scared stiff, I swear, at night it’s terrifying. You let yourself into your building looking over your shoulder in case some guy with a knife’s about to jump you and force you to go up with him . . . Bastille or anywhere else, it’s the same, I don’t see the difference. Once you’ve been raped and murdered, you’ve been raped and murdered. It’s too late to put up your hand and say “Hey, mister, that’s cheating, this isn’t your patch!’”

  Farida had a point and her colleagues all giggled, Sylvie included. They could laugh, now that the nightmare was over, A nightmare for Paris’s female population that had been going on since the end of November, with the discovery - by her own father - of Estelle Magd’s body, raped, her throat slit, in her home. After years of bewildering judicial negligence and bureaucratic incompetence, the police had finally made the link between different cases that had strange similarities. Examining magistrates working on rape and murder cases that bore the hallmark of the same sexual criminal had agreed to share the evidence in their possession. Now DNA test results were being compared in public and private laboratories all over France. Mainstream newspapers and magazines had got hold of the story, at the risk of unleashing a panic: a bloodthirsty wolf, a psychopathic killer - he was North African, Egyptian to be precise, they said (on account of a footprint discovered in a pool of blood, the second toe longer than the big toe) - was terrorising Paris, slitting the throats of lone, pretty young women in car parks or in their homes. A steady stream of suspects were questioned but to no avail, photos on file of thousands of offenders were shown to the only survivor who’d been able to get a good look at the killer, but in vain. Photofits of the olive-skinned man followed, none of them reliable. Gossip and fanciful accusations threatened to jam the switchboard of the Paris murder squad headquarters, women trembled with fear, and gallant men saw their colleagues of the supposedly weaker sex all the way home at night . . .

  And twenty-four-year-old Julie Coray, a striking brunette from Rennes who’d recently arrived in Paris, landing this rather well-paid job as graphic designer for the French edition of Reader’s Digest Select Editions, would shudder every evening as she inserted her key in the lock of her small studio flat, on the top floor of a dilapidated building on rue Cels.

  From the neighbouring desk, Robert Flageul - usually in charge of rewriting dramatic first-hand accounts and other ‘human interest stories’ that the review pre-digested each month with the aim of bringing tears to pensioners’ eyes - cut in, addressing the picture editor: ‘Plus you had it all wrong, Sylvie. ‘The beast of Bastille’, ‘the east Paris killer’, it’s all just tabloid cliché, I shouldn’t have to tell you that. The first crime attributed to this Guy Georges was Pascale Escarfail, the humanities student, murdered on the 24th of January ‘91 in her flat in the fourteenth arrondissement, on rue Delambre, just round the corner from Julie, which is a long way from Bastille, and more south than east. And other times he rampaged through the thirteenth, the tenth, the nineteenth . . . His turf seems pretty vast to me. Not to mention the assaults he must have committed before they’d made the link with him . . .’

  Back in design, Julie Coray saw that her boss, the magazine’s art director, wasn’t yet back from his lunch with an illustrator at the Japanese restaurant next to the motorway, below the RER station. Knowing Gilles - a cigar-smoker and something of a foodie, too - he wouldn’t return before 3 p.m., so she had time to make a call before carrying on with the layout. Julie rang the mobile number of Claire, her best friend, a Breton like her. Claire Le Flohic was in her sixth year of medicine and was doing her internship at Cochin Hospital.

  She answered after the fourth ring. ‘Oh, it’s you? Your name didn’t come up . . . You’re lucky I answered, I was about to reject the call, I’m on duty till tonight.’

  ‘I’m calling from the land line, at the magazine. Did you hear the news?’

  The young intern answered in a voice quivering with excitement: ‘You bet! In fact, I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone but I’d known for two days they were going to get him. My cousin’s working at the Nantes lab that found the killer’s DNA. They’d been on the case for weeks, they compared it manually with 3,500 specimens before they found it. Suddenly there it was
, just like that, bingo! They couldn’t believe their eyes! Amazing . . . !’

  Twenty-four years old like Julie, Claire was a true-crime fan and passionate about forensic medicine, which she intended to specialise in. She was already pestering the professor to let her attend autopsies in criminal cases - in theory, off limits to trainees - during which Claire impressed him with her knowledge of heparic temperature, rigor mortis and dermabrasions, as well as marks from blows and wounds. The case of the ‘east Paris killer’ literally fascinated her, and Claire was convinced that she herself resembled one of the psychopath’s victims, found raped and murdered in an underground car park on boulevard Reuilly in January 1994: Catherine Rocher, a pretty, twenty-seven-year-old marketing assistant. ‘A tall girl with long brown hair, well mine’s more chestnut and very long, but we both have a straight nose, a long smiling face and we’re full of life! The killer goes for that kind of girl. If I were a psychological profiler, I’d infer that he’d been very unhappy when he was young, his parents probably knocked him about, he had a difficult childhood, is unemployed, has already done time for rape or assault, he lives in a squat, maybe prostitutes himself and is ashamed of it. He’s angry with the whole world and especially when he sees a beautiful girl go by, looking happy, he can’t help it, he’s compelled to follow her home, tie her up and rape her . . . And afterwards, he slashes her, aiming for the neck. There was blood all over the fl—’