Suspended Sentences (16 page)

A statement by a waiter who worked in a restaurant-nightclub in Le Perreux figures on the front page of an evening paper in that month of April 1933. The headline is as follows:

POLICE SEARCHING FOR TWO COUPLES
WHO SPENT EVENING IN APARTMENT
OF YOUNG CHEMIST AND HIS WIFE

At police headquarters in the Val-de-Grâce precinct, though the investigation has been called off because it was ruled a double suicide, they tell us that the young couple had gone not only to Montparnasse but also to the banks of the Marne, to Le Perreux; and that they went not just with two women but with two women and two men… . Attempts to locate these four individuals have so far been in vain.

We went to Le Perreux in hopes of gleaning a few important details on the moments preceding the tragedy.

In a “restaurant-nightclub” on the Quai de l’Artois, they clearly remember the presence of the two young persons.

“They arrived at around ten,” states the waiter who served them. “They were alone. She was very pretty, blonde, very slim … They were sitting over there, under the balcony. Is that where they met the people they invited home? I didn’t notice. We get a lot of traffic on Saturday nights at that time of year. They didn’t seem to be having an especially good time. In any case, I remember they settled their check at eleven-thirty.”

It is hard to take this testimony at face value, as it presupposes that the T.’s had gone to Le Perreux alone, and of their own accord. But everything we know about their life in the quiet neighborhood around Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques suggests that they were not the type to frequent dance halls on the banks of the Marne on Saturday nights. No, it was certainly the two unknown women, met in Montparnasse, who took them to Le Perreux that night, as Gisèle T. had herself indicated. And one has to wonder why the waiter made such a statement. Did he confuse them with other customers? More likely, he was trying to steer the investigators away from the people in whose company he had seen the T.’s, two women and two men, no doubt regulars of the establishment. The two women from Montparnasse knew the two men. But where—asked the newspaper article—was the house with the red elevator that Gisèle T. had spoken of?

Leaving the Café de la Marine, the T.’s and the two unknown women might have taken a taxi. But no cab driver, the day after the tragedy, told investigators that he’d driven four fares to Le Perreux-sur-Marne. Nor had a single one come forward to say that he’d brought back several couples from Le Perreux to number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques at around two in the morning.

In those days, one went from Paris to Nogent-sur-Marne and Le Perreux via the train station at Bastille or the Gare de l’Est. The trains leaving from Bastille followed the so-called Vincennes line, up to Verneuil-L’Etang. I knew that line even in the early sixties, before the RER replaced it and the Bastille train station was demolished to make way for the new Opera.

The tracks ran along the viaduct on Avenue Daumesnil, whose arches were populated with cafés, warehouses, and businesses. Why do I so often walk along this viaduct in my dreams? This is what one discovered under its arches, in the shade of the plane trees along the avenue:

L’Armanite Laboratory

Garage des Voûtes

Peyremorte

Corrado Casadei

Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Dispensary

Dell’Aversano

La Régence, furniture maker

Les Marbres Français

Café Bosc

Alligator, Ghesquière and Co.

Sava Autos

Daumesnil Wireworks

Café Labatie

La Radieuse heating

Testas, nonferrous metals

Café-Tabac Valadier

One summer evening, at Café Bosc, just before my departure for Vienna, the tables were set out on the sidewalk. I couldn’t take my eyes off the lights of the Gare de Lyon, nearby …

The train stopped at Reuilly, then at Bel-Air. It exited Paris via the Porte Montempoivre. It passed by the Braille school and made a stop at Saint-Mandé station, near the lake. Then it was Vincennes, and the station at Nogent-sur-Marne, at the edge of the forest.

From Nogent station, they would have had to walk all the way up Grande Rue to the town of Le Perreux. Unless the two men came to pick them up in a car.

It seems more likely that when leaving the Café de la Marine with the two women, they headed down into the Raspail metro stop, a few yards away from the café.

The metro runs directly to the Gare de l’Est. There, they took the train on the Mulhouse line. When it left Paris, crossing the Canal Saint-Denis, one could see, from above, the slaughterhouses of La Villette. The train stopped in Pantin. Then it ran along the Canal de l’Ourcq. Noisy-le-Sec, Rosny-sous-Bois. They arrived at Le Perreux station. They stepped onto the platform and the train continued on its way, over the viaduct that crosses the Marne River. The two women took them to a restaurant-nightclub right nearby, on the Quai de l’Artois. They were now a group of six, including the two unknown men.

I remember the Quai de l’Artois, which began at the foot of the viaduct. Just opposite was the Ile des Loups. During the years 1964 and 1965, I went to that island: a certain Claude Bernard, to whom I’d sold a music box and several old books, had invited my girlfriend, Jacqueline, and me there several times. He lived in a kind of chalet, with bow windows and verandas. One afternoon, he photographed us on one of the verandas, to try out his new camera, and a few moments later he handed us the color image: it was the first time I’d ever seen a Polaroid.

This Claude Bernard was about forty years old and made his living as a dealer in secondhand goods: he owned warehouses, a stall at the Saint-Ouen flea market, and even a used bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, which is where I’d first met him. After dinner, he drove Jacqueline and me back to Paris in a gray Jaguar. A few years later, I lost touch with him for good. His stall at the flea market and his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy had vanished into thin air. The phone number to his house on the Ile des Loups was “no longer in service.”

I’m thinking of him because of the Ile des Loups. In one of the articles about what the newspapers labeled “the tragic orgy,” they hinted that the police might have identified one of the unknown men that the T.’s and the two women had met in the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois: a resident of Le Perreux. As far as I’m concerned, he could only have lived on the Ile des Loups. And given the waiter’s dubious testimony, I wonder whether the T.’s and the two other couples even went to the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de
l’Artois that evening. It seems more likely that one of the men took them to the Ile des Loups, for that was where the house with the red elevator stood.

Today I’m trying to reconstruct the layout, but at the time when I went to visit Claude Bernard, I would never have imagined such a thing. Claude Bernard had not lived long in that large chalet decorated with verandas and bow windows. A wooden kiosk rose in the back of the garden.

Who had the previous owner been? A certain Jacques Henley? Henley’s photo figures in old film directories, with the caption “Speaks English and German without an accent.” A very British face: blond mustache, very pale eyes. His address is given as: Jacques Henley, “Les Raquettes,” Ile des Loups, Nogent-sur-Marne (Seine), Tremblay 12-00. But in the phone book, at the same telephone number, he is listed under the name E. J. Dothée. Among the other former inhabitants of the island that I was able to inventory:

Dothée alias Henley and the two above-mentioned persons lived in the part of the island that belongs to Nogent-sur-Marne; these others lived in the eastern part, in Le Perreux:

The Société d’Encouragement du Sport Nautique (Tremblay 00-80) was in the part belonging to Nogent-sur-Marne. I believe Claude
Bernard’s house, for its part, was located in the eastern sector, part of Le Perreux. In short, the Ile des Loups called to mind that island in the Caribbean split between two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic—the difference being that it hadn’t won its independence, since it was under the sovereignty of Nogent and Le Perreux. The viaduct crossed through it, and this was what marked the boundary of the two zones.

Clumps of trees lining the banks concealed Claude Bernard’s house. He came to get us at the Quai de l’Artois in a small boat. The neglected garden was surrounded by a white fence. On the ground floor, a huge space that opened onto the veranda acted as the living room: a sofa, two leather armchairs, a coffee table, and a large brick fireplace. Claude Bernard was always alone in that house and gave the impression of camping out in it. When he invited us to dinner, he did the cooking himself. He had told me he was tired of living in Paris and that he couldn’t sleep without country air, and water nearby.

I suppose there’s no trace of countryside left in Le Perreux and on the Ile des Loups. They’ve no doubt razed Claude Bernard’s house. The trees and pontoon boats have disappeared from along the banks.

At the time of our first meeting, in his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, the day when I offered him the twenty-volume set of Balzac’s complete works—the Veuve Houssiaux edition—and he had bought it from me for three thousand francs, we talked literature. He’d confided that his favorite writer was Buffon.

The works of Buffon bound in green morocco leather on the brick mantelpiece of his living room were the only books I noticed at his house. Naturally, that house on the Ile des Loups seemed strange to me, and I found Claude Bernard’s occupation as a dealer in “secondhand goods” intriguing. But most often we talked about film or literature, and that’s what he liked about me.

I remember the heavy wood paneling on the living room walls, the ironwork, but especially the elevator lined with red velvet—it no longer worked—that Claude Bernard, one day, laughingly told us
had been installed by the former owner for the sole purpose of going up to his bedroom on the next floor.

That elevator was the only remaining clue to the night in April 1933 when the T.’s had ended up in Le Perreux with the two other couples. Afterward, they had returned to their sober quarters on Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, but it no longer mattered. It was too late. Their fate had been sealed in Le Perreux and in the house on the Ile des Loups.

At the time, I didn’t really care about the whys and wherefores of “the tragic orgy,” or about the role of the red velvet elevator that Claude Bernard had shown us at the back of the living room. To us, the Ile des Loups and its environs were just one more suburb. On the route we took from the station to the Quai de l’Artois, where Claude Bernard was waiting for us in his boat, I was thinking that we’d soon be going away, thanks to the money from the Balzacs and the old music box I’d sold him. Before long, Jacqueline and I would be far away from the Marne and Le Perreux—in Vienna, where I’d turn twenty.

I’d like to linger on the Left Bank a while longer, being a child of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I attended the public school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi and studied catechism with Father Pachaud on Rue de l’Abbaye and Place Furstenberg. Since then, however, I’ve avoided my former village, which I no longer recognize. This evening, the Carrefour de l’Odéon seems as desolate to me as the Breton port of Montparnasse in the drizzle.

One of my last memories of Saint-Germain-des-Prés goes back to Monday, January 18, 1960. I was fourteen and a half and I had run away from school. I had walked all the way to La Croix de Berny, skirting the hangars of the Villacoublay airfield. Then I’d taken a bus to the Porte d’Orléans, and then the metro. I had gotten off at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I ended up in a café, Chez Malafosse, at the end of Rue Bonaparte where it meets the quay. At least, Chez Malafosse is what my father used to call it. After lunch, we’d be in his office with his friends and he’d say to me:

“Go get us some Partagas at Malafosse.”

That afternoon, at Chez Malafosse, a group of people my mother knew, who were always hanging about in that neighborhood, were standing at the bar. Among them was a pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said:

“What the fuck are you doing here, old top?”

I confessed that I was playing hooky. There was an embarrassed
silence. I was on the verge of bursting into tears. Suddenly, she said, with her Danish accent:

“What the fuck does that matter, old top?”

Then she slammed the palm of her hand down on the counter:

“A whiskey for Old Top here …”

I recall the billiards players upstairs at the Café de Cluny. I happened to be there, one Saturday afternoon in January, the day of Churchill’s funeral. It was in 1966 that they renovated all the cafés on Place Saint-Michel and the boulevard; in recent years, some became McDonald’s, like the Mahieu, where the off-track bettors used to gather, and where one could hear the crackling of the machine as it spewed out the racing results.