Nazis in the Metro (9 page)

—That’s him!

Gabriel leaned over the photo, which was framed with a thick black border and occupied most of the front page below the headline. You could sense the official nature of the posed shot, and how the figure facing the lens, a man of about sixty, was trying to present an image of himself as energetic, responsible. Gabriel read the blocky type that appeared above the portrait:

TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE OF THE
INDUSTRIALIST EUGÈNE AUDIAT

He skimmed the opening of Ledoeunf’s article, in which all
of the titular responsibilities of the President Director General Founder of the Society for Audiat’s Metal Fabricators were enumerated. The important phrase was drowned in an accretion of commonplaces, a festival of fluff:

Ledoeunf closed the binder over the collection of newspapers.

—In my opinion, he killed his daughter when he found out what she’d done … We’ll never know the circumstances … Anything is possible … We can’t even know whether he was aware of Valérie’s own motive …

Gabriel was visibly shaken.

—When André Sloga came to see you, in the spring, did you tell him what you just told me?

—Barely a tenth of it … He didn’t need me to: he’d been alert to the slightest shred of gossip for weeks. He knew almost everything already.

—All the more reason for someone wanting to shut him up …

—In these parts, people settle scores the old-fashioned way. Why hire Parisian thugs when there was no lack of opportunities here in the swamps? It just wouldn’t be done.

Gabriel walked over to the door. He turned back around when the printer started up the offset and the grippers began to claw at the void.

—You’re going to put this in the next edition?

Ledoeunf lowered his eyes behind his bulletproof glasses. He pressed the palm of his hand to his head.

—The paper is here, in its ideal, perfectly calibrated state … I don’t think it’s time yet to put it out … I’m going to add two or three new bits of information, put an end to this whole Swamp Fever myth, and in a month, or at the most two, people will be ready to know the whole truth.

Gabriel could see from the look in the journalist’s eyes that it would never happen, that the ideal paper would stay right where it was, nice and warm. Too much time had passed since Ledoeunf had abandoned his youth, his
Vendée Fury …
The natives of Bonvix and its environs would learn more from buying Sloga’s book, if he managed to finish it, than they would by subscribing to the
Voice of the Marshes
for ten years. Gabriel retrieved his car from the parking lot, near the arched bridge. The Vendée had turned grey, signaling the arrival of a storm. The first drops, fat and heavy, studded the windshield as Gabriel entered Bonvix. He settled up at the River Rat Inn and left, after first acquiring a cassette tape of Vendéen blues, the only local product he could find in the general store on the riverbank. He arrived in Paris under a downpour, accompanied by the accordion-backed strains of Jeaulin le Patoisant:

A riot of yellow-and-black signs, signaled by rows of blinking lights, had decommissioned two or three lanes of the autoroute, fifteen kilometers from the Porte de Saint-Cloud. Enormous highway maintenance vehicles clogged the parts of the road that had been freed of traffic. An army of workers in hardhats and boots poured out from the canvas-covered trucks, taking over the landscape. He struggled to follow the tortuous signage through the detour.

Cheryl was stuffing her daily half-meter-square of Parisian hair into a trashcan bearing the city’s coat of arms when the Peugeot pulled up in front of the Kurdish restaurant that had just opened across from the salon. She kissed him without uttering the slightest reproach for his escapade. As soon as they’d entered the apartment, she started in on the carcass of a roasted chicken, picking it over for hidden remnants of flesh, and lined up an impressive number of jarred herbs and spices on the kitchen counter.

—What are you making us?

—Poet’s rice …

He understood that this would be his only punishment.

—Poet’s rice? What do you put in that, feet?

—That’s the best you can do? It’s supposed to be very good. A customer gave me the recipe. You’ve seen her … Zaraounia, the sister of the Mauritian filmmaker. I do her hair every other week …

—Hair-shmair! That still doesn’t tell me what I’m going to find on my plate …

Cheryl shrugged and browned two cups of basmati rice in some olive oil. When the grains had turned translucent, she doused them in six parts water and added a spiced
bouillon cube. She added three shakes each from the jars of rosemary, fines herbes, ground garlic, basil, parsley, and herbes de Provence into the casserole dish. She stirred them in with a wooden spoon, then added a good dose of mild curry, which gave the mixture some color. On the other burner, she was slowly browning the onions along with the scraps of chicken meat, which she tossed in with the rice once nearly all the water had evaporated. Gabriel sampled his first forkful of poet’s rice. Cheryl watched him, vaguely apprehensive.

—So, how is it?

He was surprised to hear himself respond:

—Excellent … When you see how it’s made, you fear the worst … It could use some salt, but that’s all …

They went to bed early, and Cheryl, whose turn it was, established the rules of the game for the night.

—No hands!

The next morning, Gabriel lounged around in bed until almost eleven, poring over bits of André Sloga’s manuscript, looking for a hidden meaning. Thanks to Ledoeunf’s prodigious descriptions, he was able to put a real name to each character portrayed by the novelist, but he discovered nothing that would help advance his investigation into the swampy murder.

He took a bath in the circular tub that Cheryl had had made to her specifications and installed in the heart of her exquisite apartment. A former graffiti artist turned interior decorator had reproduced a winter landscape by Breugel the Younger on the wall, replacing all the men with the mistress of the house’s favorite animal: the kangaroo.

Gabriel piled his dirty clothes in the wicker hamper, threw on a pair of jeans and a shirt, and planted himself at the living room table. All the things he’d collected having to do with André Sloga were gathered on the tablecloth, which bore the image of Marilyn Monroe: the manuscript, the receipt from Docutec, the package from the bookseller and the letter from the royalties company, the anonymous note, the book by Joseph Délteil, and the transcription of the author’s words from the Pitié: “Max, the loudspeaker,
on the square.” He racked his brain fruitlessly, trying out new groupings, new juxtapositions. When the clock struck noon at Saint-Ambroise de Popincourt, he decided to give up. Just then, as he was putting everything back into one of the plastic bags he used in lieu of a filing cabinet, the diskette from Docutec fell onto the pink carpet. He picked it up, then waved it in front of his face like a fan before finally sliding it into its paper sleeve.

The Atlantic storms that were predicted in all the reports hadn’t yet come to disperse the pollution from the Parisian streets, and Maria was helping Vlad set up tables on the sidewalk of Avenue Ledru-Rollin for customers with a penchant for exhaust. Inside, all the tables were taken. Gabriel hoisted himself onto a bar stool next to an African man absorbed in the financial pages of
Libération
. Gérard presented him with a Kriek Lambic from Ventoux that the sales rep from Kabyle Distributors had dug up for him.

—Try this! Still not as good as Bécasse, but it’s not far off. In two or three years at the most, if they don’t slack off, these brewers from Carpentras’ll be giving the Belgians a run for their money! You want to eat something? The Special of the Day is pigs’ feet …

—That’s not the Special of the Day, that’s the Special of Every Day!

—You’re the only one complaining. I’m on two best-of lists this year …

—You’re getting gullible! Makes me want to … All right, bring me your feet …

Gabriel gorged himself on rind and gelatin, and as was his custom, left nothing but a necklace of ossicles around
the edge of his plate. Old Léon came over to rub up against him. He sniffed at his dog food, didn’t taste it, and retreated to the back of the restaurant, plowing into anyone who stood in his way. Gabriel took out the diskette and showed it to Gérard, who was working the percolator.

—What kind of computer do you have?

—An old Mac Classic …

—Can I go upstairs and see what happens if I put in this diskette?

The African man lifted his head from his valuations and laughed. Gabriel laughed back.

—Did I say something funny?

—You said “diskette” …

The detective frowned.

—And when someone says “diskette,” that makes you laugh?

—Especially when you say that you’re going to “put it in” … In Sénégal, where I’m from, a diskette isn’t that plastic square. A diskette is what you’d call a slut in Dakar … An attractive girl who’s easy to get …

Gérard, beaming, pointed upstairs.

—Well then, listen to the man: Take your diskette upstairs and put it in; it’ll help you digest!

The apartment above the Sainte-Scolasse was like a miniature version of one of the greenhouses in the Jardin des Plantes. Summer and winter, Maria kept it at a constant 24 degrees Centigrade and 66 percent humidity, with the exception of the kitchen and the bedroom. The walls were hidden behind clumps of
evaniscus, rogrindas
, rose laurels. A Virginia creeper had taken over the arbor on the balcony,
Mexican
bifithéums
luxuriated in the bathtub, hops plants with mauve flowers clung to the curtain rods … The old-style Mac sat imposingly on a shelf, next to the conjugal bed. Gabriel turned it on and the opening notes of “En rouge et noir” by Jeanne Mas welcomed him to the land of Apple. He inserted the diskette and an icon appeared near the upper-right edge of the screen. He clicked on it to open the folder. Four icons appeared:

Gabriel skimmed through the first file, which turned out to be identical to the manuscript given to him by the salesgirl-in-training at Docutec; the second folder contained summaries of conversations between Sloga and the main players in the Audiat affair; and in the third was an inventory of everything that had been written on the subject since the discovery of Valérie-Yolanda’s corpse. He read it all in detail without learning anything he didn’t already
know. Deflated, he clicked on the last icon:
The Mess
. After reading nothing but the title and subtitle, he understood that he’d just been given a substantial lead:

DANGEROUS LIAISONS

Fifty years later, the messengers of hate return.

The ten pages didn’t include a single name. It was a frightening collage of quotations that had been painstakingly dated and footnoted. Gabriel took a look at the opening excerpt.

JEWISH COWARDICE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE

Continental Fury
, No. 26, 8 November 1989

Gabriel quickly skimmed a dozen nauseating passages from
Our Friends the Singers
, volumes one and two, only to get stuck on the first lines of an article about Patrick Bruel in which it was revealed that the man with the “broken voice” was born Maurice Benguigui; this permitted the author to refer to him from then on as the singer with three “i”s: one for Patrick, two for Benguigui. Gabriel remembered how Le Pen had taken advantage of the revelation.

The third bit of filth originated from the June 1979 edition of the
Social War
, and was somberly titled
Who Are the Jews?
: