Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon (37 page)

I listened to Tante Ju as she told me why Pap had died before his time. He watered his garden himself and he carried the cans for hours and hours over a distance of more than two hundred yards. “Just imagine that, my dear, at his ages He could have bought a rubber hose, but Lord above, he was as stubborn as a mule. And one day, as he was carrying these watering cans, his heart failed.”

I could just see my father lugging those heavy cans all the way to his beds of lettuces, tomatoes and stringbeans. And I could see him obstinately persisting in not getting the hose his wife, Tante Ju, kept begging him to buy. And I could see him, that country schoolmaster, stopping to draw breath and to mop his forehead, advise a neighbor or give a botany lesson to one of his grandsons.

Before going to see his grave in the cemetery, I asked Tante Ju to go with me on his favorite walks. And we went at the same pace he used to go, following the same stony paths lined with rushes, poppies and daisies until a milestone or some bees or the flight of a bird would remind Tante Ju of some little happening long ago that had touched them. Then, quite delighted, she would recall for me how my father had told her about his grandson’s being stung by a wasp. “There, Henri, do you see? He was standing just there.”

I listened, with my throat constricted, thirsty for more, still more of the smallest details about my father’s life. “You know, J u,” my father had said to her, “when my boy was very small, five or six at the most, he was stung by a wasp when we were out for a walk--not once, like my grandson, but twice. Well, he never cried at all; and on top of that, we had the greatest difficulty keeping him from going off to look for the wasps’ nest to destroy it. Oh, Riri was so brave!”

I did not travel on into the Ardèche; I went no farther than Saint-Peray. For my return to my village I wanted Rita with me.

I got out of the train at the Gare de Lyon, and put my bags in a locker at the station so as not to have to fill out a registration form at the hotel. And then, once more, there was the asphalt of Paris under my feet.

But this asphalt was not my asphalt until I was in my own district, Montmartre. I went there by night, of course. The only sun the Papillon of the Thirties knew was that of the electric lights.

And here it was, Montmartre: the Place Pigalle and the Pierrot Café and the moonlight and the Passage Elysee des Beaux-Arts and the heilbenders whooping it up and the jokers and the whores and the pimps that anyone in the know could recognize right off just by the way they walked, and the joints crammed tight with people at the bar. But all this was just my first impression.

Thirty-seven years had gone by, and nobody took any notice of me. Who was going to look at an old man of sixty? The girls might even ask me upstairs, and the young men might be so disrespectful as to elbow me out of my place at the bar.

Just one more stranger, a possible client, a provincial manufacturer--that’s what this well-dressed, tie-wearing gent must be; a middle-class guy, another who had lost his way at this late hour and in this dubious bar. You could see right away he wasn’t used to these parts; you could feel he was uneasy.

Sure I was uneasy, and that was understandable. These were not the same people or the same faces; at the first whiff you could tell that everything was mixed up now. Pigs, lesbians, flits, knowit-aIls, squares, blacks, and Arabs; there were only a few characters from Marseille or Corsica, speaking with a southern accent, to remind me of the old times. It was a completely different world from the one I had known.

There wasn’t even what there had always been in my timetables with groups of poets, painters or actors, with their long hair that reeked of Bohemia and an avant-garde intellectuality. Now every silly little jerk had long hair.

I wandered from bar to bar like a sleepwalker, and I climbed stairs to see if the pool tables of my youth were still on the second floor, and I civilly refused a guide’s offer to show me Montparnasse. But I did ask him, “Do you think that since 1930 Montmartre has lost the soul it had in those days?”

I felt like slapping him down for an answer that insulted my own personal Montmartre: “Oh, but Monsieur, Montmartre is immortal. I’ve lived here forty years, seeing I came when I was ten, and believe me, Place Pigalle, Place Blanche, Place Clichy and all the streets running off them are just the same and always will be the same forever.”

I fled from the dreary bastard and walked along under the trees on the raised part in the middle of the avenue. From here, yes-- as long as you didn’t see the people clearly, as long as you saw only their shapes--from here, yes, Montmartre was still the same. I went slowly toward the very spot where I was alleged to have shot Roland Lepetit on the night of March 25--26, 1930.

The bench, probably the same bench repainted every year (a public bench might perfectly well last thirty-seven years with wood that thick), the bench was there, and the lamppost, and the bar over the way, and the half-closed shutters on the house opposite, they were still there. They were the first, the only, the true witnesses of the tragedy; they knew very well the man who fired that night was not me. Why didn’t they say so?

People went by, unconcerned, never noticing this sixty-year-old man leaning against a tree, the same tree that had been there when the shot was fired.

Twenty-four I was in 1930, when I used to run down the Rue Lepic, that street I can still walk up pretty briskly. The ghost has come back in spite of you all; he’s pushed back the gravestone under which you buried him alive. Stop, stop, you half-blind creatures passing by! Stop and have a look at an innocent man who was condemned for a murder on this very ground, before these same trees and these same stones--stop and ask these dumb witnesses, ask them to speak out today. And if you lean close, you will hear them whispering faintly, “No, this man was not here at half past three on the night of twenty-fifth to twenty-sixth March thirty-seven years ago.”

“Where was he, then?” the doubters will ask. Simple: I was in the Iris Bar, maybe a hundred yards from here. In the Iris Bar, when a taxi driver burst in, crying, “There was a shot outside just now.”

“It wasn’t true,” said the pigs. “It wasn’t true,” said the boss and the waiter of the Iris, prompted by the pigs.

Once again I saw the inquiry; I saw the trial: I could not avoid being brought face to face with the past. You want to live through it again, man? Nearly forty years have passed, and you still want to go through that nightmare again? You’re not afraid this going back will make you long for a revenge you gave up ages ago?

Sit down there, on this same green bench, the one that saw the killing just opposite the Rue Germain-Pilon, right here on the Boulevard de Clichy, by the Clichy Bar-Tabac, where the tragedy began after the inquiry.

It’s the night of March 25--26: half past three in the morning. A man comes into the Clichy and asks for Madame Nini.

“That’s me,” a tart says.

“Your man’s just been shot in the guts. Come on; he’s in a taxi.”

Nini runs after the unknown guy, together with a girl friend. They get into the taxi, where Roland Lepetit is sitting on the back seat. Nini asks the unknown guy who told her to come, too. He says, “I can’t,” and disappears.

“Quick, the Lariboisière hospital!”

It was only during the drive that the taxi driver, a Russian, learned that his passenger was wounded: he had not noticed anything before. The moment his fare was unloaded at the hospital he hurried off to tell the police what he knew: he had been hailed by two men arm in arm outside 17, boulevard de Clichy: only one of them got in--Roland Lepetit. The other told him to drive to the Clichy Bar and followed on foot. This man went into the bar and came out with two women; then he vanished. The two women told him to drive to the Lariboisière hospital: “It was during the trip that I learned the man was wounded.”

The police carefully wrote all this down; they also wrote down Nini’s declaration that her boyfriend had played cards all that night in that same bar where she plied her trade, had played cards with an unknown man; he’d played dice and had a drink at the bar with some men, still
all of them unknown
; and Roland had left after the others,
alone
. There was nothing in Nini’s statement to indicate that anyone had come to fetch him. He’d gone out by himself, after the others, the unknowns, had left.

A commissaire and a cop, Commissaire Gérardin and Inspector Grimaldi, questioned the dying Roland Lepetit in the presence of his mother. The nurses had told them his condition was hopeless. I quote their report; it’s been published in a book written to pull me to pieces, with a preface and therefore a guarantee by a
commissaire divisionnaire
, Paul Romain. Here it is. The two pigs are questioning Legrand:

“Here beside you you have the police commissaire and your mother, the holiest relationship in the world. Tell the truth. Who shot you?”

He replied, “It was Papillon Roger.”

We asked him to swear that he had really told the truth. “Yes, Monsieur, I have told you the truth.”

We withdrew, leaving the mother beside her son.

So what happened on the night of March 25, 1930, was clear and straightforward: the man who fired was Papillon
Roger
.

This Roland Lepetit was a pork butcher and a pimp, who put his girl friend Nini out to work for him: he lived with her at 4, rue Elysee des Beaux-Arts. He was not really a member of the underworld, but, like all those who hung around Montmartre and all the genuine crooks, he knew several Papillons. And because he was afraid they might arrest another Papillon instead of the one who had killed him, he was exact about the Christian name. For although he was fond of living outside the law, like all squares he also wanted the police to punish his enemy. A Papillon, sure, but Papillon
Roger
.

Everything came flooding back to me in this accursed place. I must have run through this file in my head a thousand times; I’d learned it by heart in my cell, like a Bible, because my lawyers had given it to me and I’d had time to engrave it on my mind before the trial.

So there was Lepetit’s statement before he died; and the declaration of Nini, his girl. Neither of them named me as the killer.

Now four men come upon the stage. On the night of this job they went to the Lariboisière hospital to ask:

(1)
   
if the wounded man was in fact Roland Lepetit;

(2)
    
what condition he was in.

The pigs were told at once, and they began a search. Since these men did not belong to the underworld and were not concealing themselves, they had come on foot and they left on foot. They were picked up as they were walking down the Avenue Rochechouart and kept in custody at the station in the XVIII arrondissement.

They were:

Georges Goldstein, 24; Roger Dorm, 24; Roger Jourmar, 21; Emile Cape, 18.

All the statements they made to the commissaire of the XVIII arrondissement station on the very day of the killing were cut and dried. Goldstein stated that in a gathering of people he had been told that a man called Lepetit had been wounded--shot
three times
with a revolver. Thinking it might be his friend Roland Lepetit, who was often in that district, he walked to the hospital to find out. On the way he met Dorin and then the two others and asked them to go with him. The others knew nothing about the business, and they did not know the victim.

The commissaire asked Goldstein, “Do you know Papillon?”

“Yes, a little. I’ve met him now and then. He knew Lepetit;
that’s all I can tell you
.”

So what of it? What does this Papillon mean? There were five or six of them in Montmartre!

Dorm’s statement: Goldstein asked him to go along to the Lariboisière to inquire after a friend
whose name he did not mention
. Dorm went into the hospital with him; and Goldstein asked if the Lepetit who had been brought in was seriously wounded.

“Do you know Lepetit? Do you remember Papillon Roger?” the commissaire asked.

“I don’t know Lepetit, either by name or by sight. I do know a man called Papillon, having seen him in the street. He is very well known and they say he is a terror. I know nothing more.”

The third man to be questioned, Jourmar, said that when Goldstein came out of the hospital, having gone in alone with Dorm, he said, “It’s certainly my buddy.”

So before he went in, he was not sure about it, right?

The commissaire: “Do you know Papillon Roger and a man called Lepetit?”

“I know a man called Papillon who hangs around Pigalle. The last time I saw him was about three months ago.”

The same with the fourth thief. He didn’t know Legrand. A Papillon, yes, but only by sight.

In her first statement the mother also confirmed that her son had said Papillon
Roger
.

So far, everything was plain, clear-cut and exact. All the chief witnesses gave their evidence in complete freedom before a local commissaire without being prompted, threatened, or guided.

In short, Roland was in the Clichy Bar before the tragedy, and all the people present were unknown. They may have been playing cards or dice, which meant they were acquaintances of Roland’s, but still they were unknown. What was odd, and indeed disturbing, was that they remained unknown until the very end.