Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

‘Do I know you?’ I ask, stupidly, since I am sure that I do not.

‘No,’ one of the stubbleheads says as they both sit down at my table. ‘But we know you.’

From this moment on, everything has a strange, dreamy feel about it. One of the stubblehead twins talks, the other never says a word. He just glares menacingly at me. The talking stubblehead tells me that they have read the email I sent to S. last week. They know that I was in a mental hospital. If I send another message to S., if I try to contact her in any way, they will make sure that I will be put back in the hospital. Or worse. I could very well be put in prison – for a very long time.

‘Think about how that would hurt your mother,’ he adds.

I think about it. I couldn’t care less. But I say nothing.

I assume these guys are part of the most private, inner security team that S. has. I cannot help but feel flattered by their attention.

The guy who has done all the talking asks if I understand what he has just said to me. I say yes. The stubblehead twins rise, tell me one more time to stay away from S.

Just as they are turning to leave, I blurt out the question: ‘Has she read my email?’

They both smirk at me. The talkative stubblehead nods, then says: ‘Do you really think she’d be interested in a guy who looks like a garden dwarf?’

Then they walk away, chuckling.

I take this, the entire encounter, as a challenge.

Over the next nine or ten hours, everything happens in a kind of dreamy haze. I wonder why the stubbleheaded goons only decided to confront me today, nearly a full week after I sent my email to S. It must be because she is making an appearance in a grande halle des expositions in my very arrondissement this Saturday night.

That is the immediate, specific reason for the goons showing up to try to intimidate me.

The larger reason is that they want to stop me from really making myself known to S., to confronting her face to face. Hell, for all I know, S. might have read my email and found me a fascinating young man, someone she would actually like to meet. Probably it was her husband – sorry, the man in her life, the father of her four children, who has never bothered to marry her – who sent the goons to try to intimidate me. He’s scared. Terrified that I will steal his woman from him. That she will see me, our eyes will meet, and she will experience a total coup de foudre - love at first sight.

This all seems so clear to me Saturday afternoon. I must make myself known to S. I must confront her. Face to face. Tonight. At the convention centre. I know the back exit, where all the featured guests, all the celebrities, leave the grand hall. I will be waiting there tonight. I will make myself known to S.

There is only one huge problem. The men who would thwart me now know my face. ‘A garden dwarf’ they called me!

That Saturday afternoon, I stand before the bathroom mirror, scrutinising the image before me. Yes, it’s true I have let my hair grow long, my beard is a bit bushy and unkempt. And, I see it for the first time, my nose is rather bulbous. A shocking moment of self-recognition. I do resemble a garden dwarf.

If I am to confront S. face to face I must make my face unrecognisable to the stubbleheaded security men. Standing before the bathroom mirror, I take in hand my dead father’s electric razor. I shave away my whiskers. I then apply the buzzing razor to my shock of head hair. By the time I’m finished, I look not unlike the stubble-head twins themselves.

This way, I should blend easily into the crowd outside the grand hall. Even the security men will not recognise me, for I will look so much like-one of them, so little like a garden dwarf. But S. will see me for who I am. The moment our eyes meet, she will realise that I am her salvation.

‘Aren’t you staying for dinner?’ Maman asks absentmindedly, not even looking at me, as I walk through the living room, wearing my winter coat on this cold November night. Then, just as I am about to pass her, she glances up, sees me with a clean-shaven face, a head of ultra-short stubbly hair. ‘Jean-Hugues!’ Maman shrieks.

I do not pause to explain or to comfort her. I just keep walking, right out the front door.

S. was smiling at me. I am sure of it. S. looked directly into my eyes. And she was smiling. Right at me. Her destiny.

I am, for these last few moments before my eternal notoriety, just another face in the crowd. I stand with all the other ordinary citizens behind the police barricades that have been set up outside the back exit of the grand hall. Suddenly, the building’s metal doors swing open. A squad of scowling security agents streams out, clearing a path, scanning the crowd with menace in their eyes. I see the stubblehead twins. And I see that they do not see me, do not recognise my face in the crowd.

Then I see S., hurrying out of the building. The very sight of her, in the flesh, takes my breath away.

It occurs to me, at that moment, that some public figures are akin to human sacrifices. Think of JFK, Martin Luther King, John Lennon. Considering that last name, it occurs to me how odd it is that the human sacrifices moved from being politicians and religious leaders to popular celebrities.

But, no matter: Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Mark David Chapman: the names of the men who carried out the sacrifices will be forever linked with those of the luminaries they slaughtered. Is it not the same glory?

A mere second after I first see S., I spot the man across from me, on the opposite side of the police barricade. He is an older man, maybe fifty. He wears steel-rimmed glasses and a black baseball cap. I see the deranged look in his eyes. And I think: do I look like that?

I can understand, on some profound but, for me, unknowable level, how one might love S. and, at the same time, want to destroy her. But that is not me. I cannot allow this madman in the cap and glasses to possess the glory of the assassin.

Three seconds have passed since S. emerged from the metal doors at the back exit of the grand hall. She strides confidently into the cold night air. She is absolutely radiant, her smile a beacon, her eyes glowing, her new hairdo bouncing as she walks down the column of admirers. The chant erupts: ‘Say-GO! Say-GO! Say-GO! Say-GO!’

She is approaching me, quite quickly now. I catch a glimpse of the stubblehead twins, one on each side of the aisle formed by the police barricades. One of them, the talkative stubblehead, looks directly at me. I quickly look away and spot, across the lane carved out by metal barriers, the man in the black baseball cap and steel-rimmed glasses. He is reaching into his jacket pocket. I see the gun emerge in his hand.

‘Ségolène!’ I scream.

Her name explodes from my mouth, involuntarily-That is when she turns and looks straight into my eyes. She is no more than six feet away. And she is smiling at me. She knows me. I am sure of it.

All is instinct now. I see the man in the cap and glasses extending his arm, pointing the gun at the presidential candidate’s head.

Surely, you have heard those stories about people being gripped by a superhuman strength, an instinct beyond the realm of actual physical capacity, triggered by an immediate crisis. The mother who lifts a car off a child trapped beneath its weight, that is the classic example.

I don’t know if what I instinctively do fits in the same category. But I leap over the police barricade and lunge in front of Ségolène. The gun fires. Just as Ségolène’s smiling face passes out of my vision, I am nearly blinded by the flash of the pistol. I feel the burning sensation in the centre of my forehead. It is indescribable, the pain of hot metal blasting through bone and into the brain.