Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

‘Phone you, why?’

‘Just to tell me he loved me…’

That set off the waterworks again. Clara wept, sobbed. Reyer let her cry, then asked, between hiccups, where the husband was. ‘I don’t know.’

‘The water bottle on the bike. Where’s the bike?’

‘Probably at the station,’ replied Zaraoui. ‘Garnier’s friends parked it in the corridor with theirs. You don’t leave expensive machines like that out on the street.’

Reyer called the station. They kept him hanging on. A duty officer said he’d find out about the bike. And informed him it had gone. Reyer asked to speak to his chief. The chief passed the matter on to his team. The chief’s secretary eventually remembered a tall, thin, fair-haired man. He’d calmly walked out with the bike, it hadn’t occurred to her that he might be stealing it. The description matched that of Alexandre Lorieux. Reyer took another swig of rum and reflected on the situation. The number of cyclists in Paris was at its peak during the Tour de France. Might as well try to find a minuscule needle in a colossal haystack. He watched the muck-rakers through the window. They’d let the dishevelled guy go and were hassling another guy. A tall, fair-haired man, the beanpole type, standing beside a bicycle. Looking distraught. Reyer raced down the stairs, bottle of rum in hand. He wielded it like a sabre to threaten the journalists, then sent it flying over the ancient cobblestones. The cameraman filmed him. The sound engineer swung his mammoth-hair device in his direction. Reyer gave the journalist a pithecanthropine clout, grabbed Clara’s husband’s arm and marched him up the stairs, pronto. The physio wouldn’t let go of the bike. Getting up the stairs was a struggle.

Lorieux admitted he’d poisoned Gamier with a shrub brought back from India which was flourishing in his bathroom. It was a magic tree that killed and left no trace. Thousands of Indian wives had found that out to their cost when their husbands had tired of them.

That evening, Reyer hammered on a familiar door in the Canal Saint-Martin district. She opened the door, calm, smiling, wearing a simple tight-fitting T-shirt and a ridiculous little pair of trousers which were too short. He explained that he’d solved a case in a matter of hours but his chief had suspended him all the same for assaulting a bunch of journalists. He needed an emergency consultation. He knew it was 9.46 p.m., but anxiety was quick to spread over ravaged terrain.

‘I’m an ataraxic cop,’ said Reyer sitting down facing Marthe.

That’s a good opener, he thought. With words like that, I might just interest her, surprise her. A surprised woman is always a good thing. After all, that poor sod Gamier managed to surprise little Clara with muscle names. Gastrocnemius is over the top, biceps femoris, I’m losing it, you’re my Achilles heel, my trapezius balance, my brachioradialis muscles want to enfold you, my pectorals marry you…

‘Sorry?’ said Marthe in her melodious voice.

Be still my words, whoa, whoa, slow down my horses running before the cart, it’s to her I must offer you, to her alone, and to her body that could help me so much…

‘An ataraxic cop. From ataraxy, tranquillity of the soul. But not just any tranquillity, Marthe. Absolute tranquillity.’

Translation © Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman

S. has changed her hairstyle. It happened during the rentrée. Before, her chestnut brown mane had hung loosely, girlishly, about shoulder-length. Now she wears it quite short, swept away from her forehead, with a little upward flip at the bottom. It has an early 1960s look about it, this hairdo – and it accentuates her long, porcelain throat. She is no more and no less beautiful to me than before. In fact, S. is not really beautiful at all. But there is a great beauty about her, as Georges Guétary once said of Leslie Caron.

Anyway, I am devoted to her whatever she does with her hair. Because we are meant to be together. I know this. I’m serious: I know it. Like you know you’re you when you look in the mirror. I look at S. and know what our destiny is. And she looks right through me.

Maman mocks me, tells me I have no chance. I hadn’t told her my concept of destiny with S. All I said was that I thought S. could be interested in me. Someday.

‘That’s your medication talking,’ Maman sneered. ‘Do you really think she’d be interested in a mental case?’

This is what Maman always says when she wants to hurt me. But I know I am not a mental case. I was a troubled young man, yes. But I’m OK now. I am completely lucid. And Maman knows I’m not crazy. She wouldn’t call me a mental case if she thought I really was still sick. She says it now just to humiliate me, to rub my nose in the stinking shit of my past.

Besides, Maman doesn’t want me to have any women in my life. She wants me all to herself. She always has. Maybe that was my problem, eh? I’d like to have this all out with her, hold the mirror up to Maman. But I never do. I will, though. Someday. When I can afford my own apartment.

Maman and I live together in the same dreary flat in a characterless street in the fifteenth arrondissement. This is the apartment in which I grew up, the only home I have ever known; the apartment in which my father died, four years ago, back when I was a mental case, living in a hospital among other mental cases. Every once in a while, Maman tries to make me feel responsible, as if my psychiatric condition caused Papa’s heart attack. But she dare not harass me too much about that. Because we both know the truth. Maman always said this place was too small for three people. She lived alone with Papa during my first two years in the hospital. She lived completely alone, after my father’s death, for two years. She has now lived alone with me for two years and she definitely prefers me to utter solitude, as well as to Papa. She always preferred me to Papa. Would always rather touch me than touch Papa.

But we don’t talk about that.

I need to get my own place, some place where S. and I could be alone. Maman is wrong. I plan to tell S. everything about my past. And I am certain she will understand. She wouldn’t coddle me, wouldn’t excuse the errors of my youth. She would be firm yet compassionate. Who knows? It might even make me more interesting to her. Hey, I’m not just a twenty-four-year-old computer geek. I’m a twenty-four-year-old computer geek who spent four years in a mental hospital! I’m sure S. would begin to see my time in there the way I do. Some young people spend four years at university. Some spend four years in the military. I spent those formative years of eighteen to twenty-two in a nuthouse. This was my sentimental education.

The guys at work needle me for what they call my ‘crush’ on S. Not that I talk to them about it. Not really. But I have occasionally spoken about her to my colleagues, four computer geeks who – except for the fact that none of them ever spent four years in a mental hospital – are pretty much just like me. They don’t know I was hospitalised. They just think I spent four years jerking off, watching TV, reading sci-fi novels, surfing the Internet and playing video games while collecting unemployment hand-outs and sponging off my parents. That’s what a couple of them did for four years after high school. For me to think I might have a chance with S. (yes, it must be obvious, even without my explicitly stating it) I’m conveying to my colleagues that I consider myself somehow superior to them. So they must relentlessly take the piss out of me, try to cut me down to their size. Of course, I do consider myself superior to them. I don’t tell them that. Just as I don’t tell them that it is my destiny to be with S. Not a ‘crush’. Destiny.