Patrick Modiano - The Night Watch

Le temps passe très vite,

et les années vous quittent.

Un jour, on est un grand garçon. .

I would had preferred to do something more worthwhile than work for this so-called detective agency. Medicine appealed to me, but the sight of wounds and blood make me sick. Moral unpleasantness, on the other hand, doesn’t faze me. Being innately suspicious, I’m liable to focus on the worst in people and things so as not to be disappointed. I was in my element at the Avenue Niel, where there was talk of nothing but blackmail, confidence tricks, robbery, fraud, and corruption of all sorts, and where we dealt with clients of the sleaziest morality. (In this, my employers were every bit their equals.) There was only one positive: I was earning — as I’ve mentioned — a huge salary. This was important to me. It was in the pawnshop on the Rue Pierre Charron (my mother would often go there, but they always refused to take her paste jewellery) that I decided once and for all that poverty was a pain in the arse. You might think I have no principles. I started out a pure and innocent soul. But innocence gets lost along the way. Place de l’Étoile. 9 p.m. The lights along the Champs-Élysées are twinkling as they always do. They haven’t kept their promise. This avenue, which seems majestic from afar, is one of the vilest sections of Paris. Claridge, Fouquet, Hungaria, Lido, Embassy, Butterfly. . at every stop I met new faces: Costachesco, the Baron de Lussatz, Odicharvi, Hayakawa, Lionel de Zieff, Pols de Helder. . Flashy foreigners, abortionists, swindlers, hack journalists, shyster lawyers and crooked accountants who orbited the Khedive and Monsieur Philibert. Added to their number was a whole battalion of women of easy virtue, erotic dancers, morphine addicts. . Frau Sultana, Simone Bouquereau, Baroness Lydia Stahl, Violette Morris, Magda d’Andurian. . My bosses introduced me to this underworld. Champs-Élysées — the Elysian Fields — the name given to the final resting place of the righteous and heroic dead. So I cannot help but wonder how the avenue where I stand came by the name. There are ghosts here, but only those of Monsieur Philibert, the Khedive, and their acolytes. Stepping out of Claridge, arm in arm, come Joanovici and the Count de Cagliostro. They are wearing white suits and platinum signet rings. The shy young man crossing the Rue Lord-Byron is Eugene Weidmann. Standing frozen in front of Pam-Pam is Thérèse de Païva, the most beautiful whore of the Second Empire. From the corner of the Rue Marbeuf, Dr Petiot smiles at me. On the terrace of Le Colisée: a group of black marketeers are cracking open the champagne. Among them are Count Baruzzi, the Chapochnikoff brothers, Rachid von Rosenheim, Jean-Farouk de Méthode, Otto da Silva, and a host of others. . If I can make it to the Rond-Point, I might be able to lose these ghosts. Hurry. The gardens of the Champs-Élysées, silent, green. I often used to stop off here. After spending the afternoon in bars along the avenue (at ‘business’ appointments with the aforementioned), I would stroll over the park for a breath of fresh air. I’d sit on a bench. Breathless. Pockets stuffed of cash. Twenty thousand, sometimes a hundred thousand francs. Our agency was, if not sanctioned, at least tolerated by the Préfecture de police: we supplied any information they requested. On the other hand, we were running a protection racket involving those I mentioned above, who could truly believe they were paying for our silence, our protection, since Monsieur Philibert still had close ties with senior colleagues on the force, Inspecteurs Rothe, David, Jalby, Jurgens, Santoni, Permilleux, Sadowsky, Francois, and Detmar. As for me, one of my jobs was to collect the protection money. Twenty thousand. Sometimes a hundred thousand francs. It had been a rough day. Endless arguments. I pictured their sallow, oily, faces again: the usual suspects from a police line-up. Some, as usual, had tried to hold out and — though shy and softhearted by nature — I found myself compelled to raise my voice, to tell them I would go straight to the Quai des Orfèvres if they didn’t pay up. I told them about the files my bosses had with their names and their curricula vitae . Not exactly glowing reports, those files. They would dig out their wallets, and call me a ‘traitor’. The word stung.

I would find myself alone on the bench. Some places encourage reflection. Public gardens, for instance, the lost kingdoms in Paris, those ailing oases amid the roar and the cruelty of men. The Tuileries. The Jardins de Luxembourg. The Bois de Boulogne. But never did I do so much thinking as in the Jardins des Champs-Élysées. What precisely was my job? Blackmailer? Police informant? I would count the cash, take my 10 per cent and go over to Lachaume to order a thicket of red roses. Pick out two or three rings at Van Cleef & Arpels. Then buy fifty dresses at Piguet, Lelong & Molyneux. All for maman — blackmailer, thug, informant, grass, even hired killer I might be, but I was a model son. It was my sole consolation. It was getting dark. The children were leaving the park after one last ride on the merry-go-round. The street lights along the Champs-Élysées flickered on suddenly. I would have been better off, I thought, staying close to the Place des Acacias. Steer clear of junctions and the boulevards to avoid the noise and the unsavoury encounters. How strange it was to be sitting on the terrace of the Royal-Villiers on the Place Pereire, for someone who was so discreet, so cautious, so eager to pass unnoticed. But in life you have to start out somewhere. There’s no getting away from it. In the end it sends round to you its recruiting officers: in my case, the Khedive and Monsieur Philibert. On a different night, I might have made more admirable acquaintances who could have encouraged me to go into the rag trade or become a writer. Having no particular bent for any profession, I waited for my elders to decide what I would do. Up to them to figure out what they’d like me to be. I left it in their lap.

Boy scout? Florist? Tennis player? No: Employee of a phony detective agency. Blackmailer, informant, extortionist. I found it quite surprising. I did not have the talents required for such work: the cruelty, the lack of scruples, a taste for sleazy company. Even so, I bravely stuck at it, the way another man might study for a boilermaker’s license. The strange thing about guys like me is that they can just as easily end up in the Panthéon as in Thiais cemetery, the potter’s field for spies. They become heroes. Or bastards. No one realises they get dragged into this dirty business against their will. That all they wanted, all they cared about was their stamp collection, and being left in peace on the Place des Acacias, where they could breathe in careful little breaths.

In the meantime, I was getting into bad ways. My passivity and my lack of enthusiasm made me all the more vulnerable to the malign influence of the Khedive and Monsieur Philibert. I remembered the words of a doctor who lived across the landing in our apartment block on the Place des Acacias. ‘After you reach twenty,’ he told me, ‘you start to decay. Fewer and fewer nerve cells, my boy.’ I jotted this remark down in a notebook, because it’s important to heed the experience of our elders. I now realised that he was right. My shady dealings and the unsavoury characters I rubber shoulders with would cost me my innocence. The future? A race, with the finish line on a patch of waste ground. Being dragged to a guillotine with no chance to catch my breath. Someone whispered in my ear: you have gained nothing in this life but the whirlwind you let yourself be caught up in. . gypsy music, played faster and faster to drown out my screams. This evening the air is decidedly balmy. As they always have, the donkeys trudge down the path heading back to the stables having spent the day giving rides to children. They disappear around the corner of the Avenue Gabriel. We will never know how they suffer. Their reticence impressed me. As they trotted past, I once again felt calm, indifferent. I tried to gather my thoughts. They were few and far between, and utterly banal. I have no taste for thinking. Too emotional. Too lazy. After a moment’s effort, I invariably arrived at same conclusion: I was bound to die some day. Fewer and fewer nerve cells. A long slow process of decay. The doctor had warned me. I should add that my profession inclined me toward dwelling on the morose: being an informant and a blackmailer at twenty rather narrows one’s sights. A curious smell of old furniture and musty wallpaper permeated 177 Avenue Niel. The light was constantly flickering. Behind my desk was a set of wooden drawers where I kept the files on our ‘clients’. I catalogued them by names of poisonous plants: Black Ink Cap, Belladonna, Devil’s bolete, Henbane, Livid Agaric. . Their very touch made me decalcify. My clothes were suffused with the stifling stench of the office on Avenue Niel. I had allowed myself to be contaminated. The disease? An accelerated aging process, a physical and moral decay in keeping with the doctor’s prognosis. And yet I am not predisposed towards the morbid.