The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (17 page)

“She never told me all that,” I said.

Nigel looked extremely pleased with himself. “That’s because you lack the intimate touch, old boy. Kate used to remark on it to me, back in the old days.”

I let that pass. “When did Rachel tell you this stuff?”

“Last night, dear boy, when I went round to her hotel to interview her. She’s a rather sweet little thing.”

“Damn it,” I said, “she should have told me all this at the start. What sort of a mug does she take me for? I think Rachel and I had better have this out at once.”

I reached for the telephone. Nigel said lazily, “If you’re calling her hotel, I’m afraid you won’t find her in.”

“Where is she?”

“I thought she’d be more comfortable in my place. Did you ever see my digs near the Panthéon? Just off St-Michel, a dear little place. She told me she hasn’t had a decent meal since coming to Paris. Really, Hob, you’ve been neglectful.”

I stared at Nigel, outraged for the moment. Then I had to laugh. I had forgotten Nigel’s womanizing tendencies. Maybe it was the plummy British upper-class accent, or the military bearing, or the air of amused worldliness. Whatever, the women always seemed to go for him.

“All right, Nigel,” I said. “You’ve done well. But you haven’t found out what I really need to know. Namely, where is Alex now?”

Jean-Claude smoothed his moustache with a supercilious finger and said, “As for zat, I expect to have an answer for you within twenty-four hours.”

“Tell me about it,” I told him.

“But I just have. You don’t think I’m going to tell you the names of my informants, eh?”

“No, of course not; silly of me. Jean-Claude, is this for real or are you shucking me again?”

“Qu’est-çe que ç’est, ‘
shucking
’
?
”

“It means, in this instance, to tell an untruth in hope that it will come true.”

“I would not do that,” Jean-Claude said. “Trust me, ’Ob. Tomorrow evening I will be able to take you to Alex.”

“Great,” I said.

“I will require, of course, an advance to take care of my informants.”

“I could use a little front money too, Hob,” Nigel said. “I more or less promised I’d buy Rachel the best cassoulet in Paris.”

“Then let her pay for it herself.”

“Now, Hob, don’t be that way. Let me pay. You can add it to her account.”

With an ill grace I paid them both. We parted with mutual expressions of esteem, somewhat muted on my part.

After they were gone, I tried Yvette again. We arranged to meet for lunch tomorrow. She might be able to tell me something. In any event, I was glad that Nigel hadn’t seen her first.

GOURMET PRISON

38

If you think French hotels are bad, you should try their prisons. At least they gave me a cell alone. I had been more than a little anxious when the guard led me down the flagstoned corridor, with prisoners leering and catcalling from their cells on either side. French prisons are really old. They were building and rebuilding these things back when North America was still an Indian reservation. And there’s something about old European prisons. Hundreds of years of terror and misery permeate the soiled cobblestones of my cell. They give off an aura, these places that have been so long dedicated to retaining people against their wills. An old prison site is probably worse than any other contamination, because it’s spiritual, a poisonous effluvium of mood that saps the will of even the bravest prisoner.

And I was not exactly the bravest. I think I’ve already explained that macho is not my thing. Nor am I accustomed to being hoisted out of my bed just before dawn by three grim-faced Paris Special Forces policemen, who looked ready to fight the Battle of Algiers all over again on my body.

They gave me time to make a hasty
toilette
, but not enough time to fasten my shoelaces. Nor to zip up my fly. One of them on either arm, the third opening doors, we marched through the hotel. The prosperous burghers in the lobby, with their simpering Mädchen standing by in their overstuffed dirndls, gave me reproving looks as I was half marched, half carried, out into the early Paris morning. No doubt in the minds of the onlookers, I was guilty of whatever the police were taking me away for; because after all, do the gendarmes pluck innocent people out of their beds? Remembering that livid frieze of accusatory faces, I had the passionate desire to grind them all into the dirt. For a moment I longed for the revolution of a proletariat with teeth such as the world has never yet seen.

They piled me into the ominous high-backed blue Citröen van that is always to be seen at student demonstrations, two of them in back with me, daring me with their eyes to complain, to protest, to make any move or gesture that would justify their “beating a little sense into me.” I sat mute, my head hanging low, taking on the posture of one who, to an expert physiognomist, as all the French consider themselves, would appear to exhibit indisputable postural proof of guilt.

We pulled up at the outer gate to La Santé, the big prison in the center of Paris. The police sentries saluted and pulled back the iron gates with their curved and gilded tops. We came to a stop in an interior courtyard. I was swept into a cramped and sweaty room filled with policemen. A sergeant at a desk had a brief argument with one of my captors, in Corsican, I believe, since the only word I could make out was “Ecco!” said by the sergeant as he threw his hands in the air while my captors steered, pushed and dragged me deeper inside.

And that is why I linger here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the soth and no lawyers ring. Excuse me, that was hysteria. But I really did want to see a lawyer. I wanted a French lawyer who would invoke whatever French jurisprudence uses in place of habeas corpus, to get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out of here. …

Sorry, there goes my hysteria again; it comes over me whenever I relive those days, even here, from the supposedly safe spot in which I am writing these memoirs. My cell was about four feet on a side, solid rock walls, little barred window about twelve feet straight up, a slop bucket (I later learned that plumbing troubles were frequent in this quartier), a small bench that looked as if it had been assembled by chimpanzees back at the beginning of time, and nothing more except a few messages scratched onto the wall. The only one I could make out read, simply, courage! and it was signed, francesco issÁsaga. A Basque name, I believe. But what did that matter?

A single naked lightbulb, caged in wire, hung by a long frayed cord from the high ceiling. I looked at it but it gave me no ideas. What was really annoying was that I had nothing to read. Funny how that’s one of the first things a man thinks of when he finds himself in jail. My theory is that the taste for reading is so developed in some of us that it amounts to a veritable appetite on a par with eating, sleeping, fornicating, and sitting around feeling sorry for oneself. Most of us never suffer real linguistic deprivation, because, even if we are not actively reading, we are aware of the plethora of reading matter on all sides of us—newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, menus, calling cards, notices on telephone poles, and the like. Thus we are bathed daily in a sea of words, and we take care to be well provisioned when we undertake air, rail, or bus trips, or when we have to spend a lot of time on queues in public agencies trying to get our visas stamped. Prison is a form of travel, too, a foretaste perhaps, of that Great Waiting Room in the Sky which some say is the long-term destination of most of us. Yes, these are gloomy thoughts, but
que voulez-vous?
I’m in prison; I don’t have to be cheerful.

There was nothing for me to do but sit quietly and put my thoughts in order. I believe it was Pascal who pointed out that most of the mischief in the world is due to man’s inability to sit quietly in a room for any length of time. Now was my chance to try to solve the world’s problems, at least in microcosm.

I adjusted my shoes and clothing, took off my jacket, folded it, put it down on the bench, sat down on it. No sooner had I done that than the heavy old-fashioned lock on the outside of my door turned with a grating sound, and the door flew open. I stood up rather hastily, because a horrid thought had gone through my mind. There is a famous scene in French literature and movies which portrays the criminal in his cell, waiting to hear whether he will be executed or pardoned. He waits, his eyes fastened on the door. Suddenly it flies open. Policemen rush in, seize him, and, despite his screams and struggles, drag him off to the guillotine. Pardon denied!

Yes, they still use the guillotine over here. Not that I was in immediate danger of that. There is generally a rather long and complicated trial before it is brought into play. But I had forgotten that, or, rather, I had considered it but had thought that maybe
they
had forgotten about it.

And so I was prepared to act like my predecessors, all the convicted, guilty and innocent alike, who have been seized and carried through these portals to meet their ends in one of the more stylish executions still extant in the world today. But of course, what happened was nothing of the sort.

My visitor was a guard, dressed like all the others, but with one exception: instead of a round policeman’s hat, he wore a tall, spotlessly white, rakishly curved to one side chef’s hat.

“Good day, m’sieu,” he said. “I am Henri, a representative of Le Repas Obigatoire of the Santé kitchens. I can take your dinner order now, m’sieu.”

I was dumbfounded, but managed to retain sufficient sang froid to enquire, “What would you recommend?”

“Our fare is simple, but has won awards in
L’Incarcerátion
, the International Magazine of Prisons.
Potage parisien
, to start, accompanied by
le bloc de paté fois gras trufflée
, then
gigot de mouton de Sologne à l’eau
, accompanied by a medley of fresh asparagus and cut red peppers decorated with a sheen of finest olive oil. If m’sieu would prefer a fowl course, today we are featuring
pêche de caneton
in a delicate sauce of Montmorency cherries.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. “The duck, I mean. If that’s all right. Although, I’m not saying anything against the gigot. And I know you mentioned it first. So if you’d prefer—”

I was being cautious, not captious. I had no idea what this chef-guard’s behavior signified. France is a strange country, after all, especially when you are forced to deal with the French.

“The choice is entirely up to you,” Henri said. “Might I recommend a little-known Grâves ’82 which we managed to secure only last week?”

“By all means,” I told him. “But tell me something—if I might ask a question?”

“But of course, m’sieu,” Henri said.

“What is this all about?”

“M’sieu?” Henri said, evidently puzzled.

“Where I come from,” I told him, “prisoners don’t get to choose to order gourmet food from a guard in a chef’s hat with a wine list in his pocket. I always knew that France was ultracivilized, but this is too much!”

“We do like to think of ourselves as civilized, m’sieu,” Henri said, “but I can assure you this is not an everyday occurrence in the Paris prison system. It is just that this year we are celebrating the Year of the Prisoner. No, no, I didn’t mean that last; just my little joke, m’sieu; the fact is, I am not at liberty to say whence comes this most excellent repast, this prison fare fit for an emperor. All will be revealed in due course, never fear.”

Smiling, bowing, Henri departed from my cell, not forgetting to lock the door behind him. I sat back on my bench and permitted myself just the faintest degree of relaxation. It is hard to explain why I felt that sense of relief, but I will try to explain, since it is directly relevant to the strange events that lay immediately ahead of me.

It is my belief or let us say theory, that the actions of men are ruled to a very great extent by the Spirit of Place. What do I mean by Spirit of Place? I refer to the individuating specificity that certain geographic regions possess; in other words, the congeries of associations and interconnections that binds a place to its past, shapes its future, determines the behavior of its citizens, and even sets the tone of the adventures experienced by those who visit it.

Put even more simply: in Venice, Venetian things happen; in Hoboken, Hobokenese things happen; and you can bet that in the stony mountainscapes of the Chiricahua, Apache things happen.

So it is with Paris, a city which draws you quickly into its Zeitgeist. Paris has not a single aspect, of course. Multiform and multiplex, it presents a variety of faces, of possibilities, of moods. It all depends on which Paris you’re traveling in. Or, more exactly, which Paris is traveling through you. Is it the Paris of Jean Valjean, of Victor Hugo, the Paris of Haussmann, the Paris of Danton, the Paris of the Comédie Française? The possibilities are many, but each of the choices is a French one, and all together represent the collective
moira
of the Gallic entity, the still-developing collection of tendencies that is France.

What I thought I had detected, as Henri the chef-cop bowed himself out, was the strong possibility that the ground rules for my situation were about to change. We were leaving the gritty world of detection and entering a new realm of farce, French farce, of which there’s nothing sillier. Or so I hoped.