Salim Bachi - Paris Noir

“I didn’t know... I swear...”

“I have to finish him off now...”

“Please... Your death won’t change anything... It was such a long time ago.”

“‘ Je me souviens / Des jours anciens ... I can recall / The days of yore... ’ Do you know Verlaine? It was yesterday. It’s today. Get out.”

“I won’t let you do something stupid.”

“Go to hell...”

“Monsieur Robert!”

“I’ll be waiting for you down there.”

Bastille

The office where I was sitting was on the top floor of the building, right under the roof. “Rear window,” a police officer with a weary, ironic tone of voice had said when we arrived. He was part of a group of three who had come with me from the crime scene to the hospital for the required medical visit. A nurse had cleaned the dried blood off my face and turned me over to an intern. After taking an X-ray of my spinal column and sewing some painful stitches on me, he pronounced my state compatible with police custody. I had a long gash on my left eyebrow, with a hematoma under the eye, another to the right of my mouth, and one on the back of my head, at the base of the skull. “Nothing too bad,” the doctor had said.

That was half an hour ago and the day was rising behind the window of the examination room. After going through these procedures and taking some blood samples, they’d brought me to police headquarters at the Quaides Orfèvres. Now I was watching the sky turn blue through a fan-light with iron crossbars.

“They installed them because of Durn.” The cynic the two others called Sydney and treated like their boss must have followed the meanderings of my puzzled, not yet altogether sober gaze.

I turned toward him. “Who?”

“Durn, the crazy gunman in 2002.”

“I wasn’t living in France then.”

“Oh... A demented man we arrested...”

He went on with the conversation but I had lost interest.

“... who killed himself by jumping through a window like this one, but in another office, across the hall...”

My eyes drifted around the gray bureaucratic surroundings. Two little rooms leading into one another that opened onto a neon-lit corridor. A different world from mine, shabby and hostile.

“He’d just made a full confession...”

The walls, whose neutral paint had seen better days, were covered with administrative documents, maps, and war trophies. A few elegant watercolors too, but only behind Sydney. Probably painted by him.

“The bars were put there right after.”

There was a light-starved green plant in a corner, a rack of walkie-talkies charging, several metal cabinets topped by boxes of whiskey, exclusively single malt — the denizens of the place were clearly connoisseurs — and six cluttered desks, each with its aging PC that had replaced the typewriter of yesteryear.

“How long have you been living abroad?”

Not forgetting the three cops. The one facing me, Sydney, a little guy with a double-breasted suit too large for him and a pipe; the one on my right, at the keyboard, whose first name was apparently Yves, tall and thin, slightly bent, wearing jeans; and the last one behind me, still silent. I hadn’t heard his name, but since he was wearing a purple shirt with the logo of a polo player, I mentally dubbed him Ralph from the start.

“Seven years.” And finally, me. I was there too. At least physically, because otherwise I felt unconcerned. I was experiencing all this remotely, with the feeling of not being fully there in the stale back rooms of the famous 36, Quaides Orfèvres, headquarters of the Paris Robbery and Homicide Division, trying to unscramble what had happened that night.

“In London?” Sydney motioned with his chin to Yves , signaling him to be prepared, while I answered him with a silent nod. “Monsieur Henrion... Valère, right?”

Another nod. Valère Henrion . A strangely familiar name. Mine. In the mouth of a stranger, a police officer to boot. Reality check. I looked at my shackled hands. The gravity of my situation suddenly struck me, and I nearly choked. This was not a friendly interview. These guys were treating me like a suspect. I swallowed. “Don’t I have the right to a counsel?” Pitiful.

Sydney flipped through my passport. “You sure do a lot of traveling.”

It wasn’t a question, and his voice had lost all of its weary warmth. He pointed his nose at me. “The lawyer comes later, first we talk between us. This loft, Place de la Bastille, the place where we found you, who owns...?” He didn’t finish his sentence.

“It belongs to a friend, Marc Dustang. He let me borrow it for a few days.

“Very nice of him. Doubt if he’ll do it again soon.” Smile.

For a moment I flashed on Marc’s room and its light walls splattered with red.

“And where is this Marc Dustang?”

“In New York for two weeks.”

“For?”

“Business, I guess.”

“And you, you’ve come to Paris for what?”

I sighed, feeling tension mounting inside of me, annoyed at the idea of what was about to follow. I wanted only one thing: to shut myself up in the dark and get my ideas straight. “To work. I just came back from Fashion Week in Milan and I cover the one in Paris right after. September through October is a pretty busy season for me. All the fashion capitals are buzzing, I work a lot.”

“You’re what...? Oh yes, sound... designer ?” Sydney waited, looking at my nervous right leg, which was jumping uncontrollably.

Again I conceded. “That’s right. I create the sound tapes for the runway shows. Sometimes I do set mixes for designers’ private parties.”

“And the money’s good?”

“Not bad, yes.”

“That’s how you met Mademoiselle Ilona...” he consulted his notes, “Vladimirova? She was also part of that crowd, right? And not just that one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come on, Monsieur Henrion, you want me to believe that you didn’t know how your girlfriend made her living? Even we know it. I see here” — he pointed to his PC monitor with his index finger — “that she’s already met some of our colleagues a few times.”

“She was not my girlfriend, and no, I didn’t know it.” I was having difficulty talking about her in the past tense. “We didn’t know each other...”

At my back, Ralph snickered.

“Really.”

Sydney gave me a condescending smile. “The two of you were kind of intimate for people who didn’t really know each other. Unless you paid to screw her, which would mean that you knew perfectly well who you were dealing with. What am I supposed to think?”

I looked for words to answer him but only managed to spit out the banal truth. “Listen, I met this young woman last night for the first time in my life. I’d heard about her, but I’d never seen her before.”

“Ah, and who told you about her?”

“Her best friend, one of my exes.”

“Her name?”

“Yelena Vodianova.”

“You’ve got a thing for Russian babes, Valère.” Ralph invited himself into the discussion. “Model too, I suppose?”

I nodded without turning around or rising to the taunt.

“Where does she live?” Sydney took things in hand again.

“Yelena? In Milan. She’s married with a kid. She still works the catwalk and sometimes we meet in the fashion show season. I told her that I had to spend a few days in Paris, so she asked me to make contact with Ilona.”

“Why?”