Before the Republican Guard could get to him, Gabriel was able to grab the microphone. As they dragged him away, he yelled into it:
—The person who really deserves this elegy is still alive … Nobody here knows his name … André Sloga … He’s fighting to recover the memory that too many of us have lost, thanks to trash like Jean Brienne … Bon appétit, Monsieurs!
The police threw him in a cell for forty-eight hours for forged credentials, after charging him without due process. Cheryl was not there when he got home to Rue Popincourt. She was out on a call, setting an elderly home-bound client’s curls. She had left the mail on the table with the Marilyn Monroe tablecloth. He glanced quickly at the envelopes, opening the one with a return-address stamp from the Voice of the Marshes. In chicken-scratch handwriting, Fred Ledoeunf, the journalist from Fontenay-le-Comte, informed him that he had just submitted his resignation and that, to boot, he was quitting the profession altogether. Gabriel had to squint to decipher the deformed letters:
The reason for this decision is that the Bonvix police have just arrested Valérie Audiat’s slayer, who is guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. He has confessed to everything, providing details that no one but the murderer could know. It turns out to have been the sadistic crime of a true predator. I have grossly misrepresented the facts, and I am here to accept the consequences. It is not only myself I have misled: by virtue of my position in the community, I have shared my delusion with many thousands of readers. Since my arrival at the Voice of the Marshes, I have allowed myself to wallow in the mud of corruption; I have forsworn critical thinking; I’ve abandoned myself to the opinions of every other “well-meaning” citizen. It should be stated for the record that Valérie Audiat entered the profession of nursing out of a desire to be of service to others. The doctors, pharmacists, and veterinarians of the region caught their deadly disease through independent means, and the aging Audiat died of grief, a man broken from years of slander. I have included in this letter the affidavit of the killer. If you could share it with André Sloga, so that he may make the necessary modifications to his manuscript, you would be doing me a great service …
The Octopus folded the letter, slipped it into his pocket, and left the hair salon for the Pitié.
* Members of the Académie Française are known as Immortals because they are elected for life, although expulsion for grave misconduct is permitted. Several members were expelled after World War II for their association with the collaborationist Vichy regime.
22
MAX, ON THE SQUARE
Éloi, the village sage, insists to this day that when a storm hits la Bastide, the rain spares Serviès. It had been dousing other, dryer villages, far from the Val de Dagne. The last tourists had left the region a good two months ago, and the grape harvest had taken place the week before, filling the barrels with what old-timers were already touting as one of the best vintages since the War.
Sitting beneath an arbor in front of a pastis, Max knew that nobody would be coming back to this remote part of Corbières before next summer. He had come to close up his family’s inn, Chez Verdier, for the winter, except for one or two rooms that would be kept up for the occasional passing boar hunter or traveling salesman. The grizzly sounds of an old Plastic Bertrand record began to play over the loudspeakers, with Jeannine’s voice rising above the static:
—Attention, please! Monsieur Jean-Claude Gibert, the butcher from Lagrasse, has arrived on the square … Today you have a choice of beef, fresh sausage, and venison stewed in Corbière … Attention, please! The butcher from Lagrasse has arrived on the square …
Max opened the Indépendent de Pérpignan that his wife had brought back from the bakery along with a loaf of bread. He skimmed the local news, pausing to read the weather report, and then noticed a photograph in the Arts & Culture section. He recognized the old man who had stayed with them for three weeks in August, the one who was so interested in their local hero, Joseph Délteil, for whom one of the village’s wines had been named. He called to his wife, who came and leaned over his shoulder.
—I don’t have my glasses … What’s it saying about him?
—I never would have thought it, he was such a simple man, but Monsieur Sloga is a writer … His latest book just came out from Éditions Baleine … It’s called Moon over the Marshes …
—What kind of book is it?
—According to this, it’s a tragic love story …
The Plastic Bertrand record started up again.
—Attention, please! The fishmonger from Sigean has arrived on the square … Today’s sale item is sardines … Attention, please! The fishmonger from Sigean has arrived on the square …
Max turned to his wife.
—I’ve got a hankering for sardines for lunch … How about you?
—Yes, me too, but don’t get too many, like last time. They don’t freeze well at all …
She walked away, and the first drops fell on the arbor, as if for the sole purpose of giving Éloi the lie.
AN INTERVIEW WITH DIDIER DAENINCKX
What inspired you to write Nazis in the Metro?
I wrote this book in 1995, just after the Yugoslav Wars that killed more than 250,000 people in Europe. A very strange phenomenon was taking place then: French intellectuals from the extreme left were defending ultranationalist killers. People like the French-Russian writer Edouard Limonov enlisted in the Serbian army, and then came to the fashionable bars of Saint-Germain in Paris boasting of their triumphs. It was that climate, that shift in the elite classes, that I wanted to describe.
Nazis in the Metro tells the story of a writer called André Sloga. Was he modeled on anyone?
Yes, I modeled him on a writer friend of mine by the name of Jean Meckert (1910–1995), who published numerous crime novels under the pseudonym Jean Amila. He was violently attacked in the 1970s and lost his memory as a result. He later carried out investigations into his own life, in order to recover the memories he had lost.
What drives your detective, Gabriel Lecouvreur?
He has a major flaw for the times we live in: he is devoid of indifference, he’s affected by the suffering of others. If he were a philosopher, he would define himself as an “Unhappy Consciousness.” Which doesn’t stop him from wanting to put everything to rights!
Why do you so often take real historical and political events as the basis of your novels?
I think history invited itself into my cradle: I had one pacifist grandfather who was a deserter in the First World War; one communist grandfather who was the mayor of a town near Paris in 1935 and who resigned in protest of the Hitler-Stalin pact; a mother who used to travel secretly into Franco’s Spain to work with those plotting to overthrow the dictator; a bedroom that served as a hiding place for Vietcong emissaries during the secret negotiations that took place in Paris in the middle of the Vietnam war … I had no choice but to investigate all of that, this family history of fighting injustice, of solidarity with people from far away.
You’re known as one of France’s most outspoken writers. Have you ever experienced an attack like that on Sloga in Nazis in the Metro?
A few years ago, an extreme-right group, Unité Radicale, tried to kill President Jacques Chirac on the Champs-Élysées in Paris during a military parade. The police found a file on me in this group’s records—my address, telephone number, a write-up of my movements … Later, someone emptied many liters of gas on my front door and set it alight. Fortunately, my neighbors alerted me, and my wife and I were able to escape. Periods of crisis don’t tend to calm such passions …
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Nazis in the Metro Page 12