Authors: Patrick Modiano
Je
suis seul
ce soir
avec ma peine . . .
Avenue Kléber, my heart began to beat a little faster. The front of the Baltimore Hotel. Cimarosa Square. Codébo and Robert le Pâle were standing guard in front of No. 3
bis
. Codébo gave me a smile, flashing his gold teeth. I walked up one flight and opened the living-room door. The Khedive, in a dusty-pink brocade dressing gown, motioned to me. Monsieur Philibert was checking file cards: ‘How’s the CKS doing, Swing Troubadour?’ The Khedive gave me a sharp rap on the shoulder and handed me a cognac: ‘Very scarce. Three hundred thousand francs a bottle. Don’t worry. There is no rationing at Cimarosa Square. And the CKS? What’s new there?’ No, I still hadn’t obtained the addresses of the ‘Knights of the Shadows’. By the end of the week, for sure. ‘Supposing we organise the raid on the Rue Boisrobert for some afternoon when members of the CKS are there? What do you say to that, Troubadour?’ I discouraged this plan. Better to arrest them individually. ‘We’ve no time to lose, Troubadour.’ I calmed their impatience, promising yet again to come up with more detailed information.
Sooner
or later they would press me so hard that I would have to keep my promises to get them off my back. The ‘round-up’ would take place. I would finally earn the title of informant –
donneuse
– the one that made my heart skip, my head spin every time I heard it. donneuse. Still, I tried to postpone the inevitable, assuring my two bosses that the boys in the CKS were innocuous. Dreamers. Full of fanciful ideals, nothing more. Why not let the benighted idiots be? They were afflicted from a common illness, youth, one from which they would quickly recover. In a few months they’d be much more tractable. Even the Lieutenant would give up the battle. And besides, what battle was there, besides a heated exchange of words like Justice, Progress, Truth, Democracy, Freedom, Revolution, Honour, and Patriotism? The whole thing struck me as completely harmless. As I saw it, the only dangerous man was
LAM-BALLE,
whom I had not yet identified. Invisible. Elusive. The true brains behind the CKS. He would strike, and strike viciously. The mere mention of his name at the Rue Boisrobert provoked whispers of awe and admiration,
LAM-BALLE!
Who was he? When I asked the Lieutenant, he was evasive. ‘
LAMBALLE
will not spare the thugs and traitors who currently have the upper hand.
LAMBALLE
strikes hard and fast. We will
obey
LAMBALLE
without question,
LAMBALLE
is never wrong,
LAMBALLE
is a great guy,
LAMBALLE
is our only hope . . .’ I could not get any more definite information. With a little patience we would flush out this mysterious character. I kept telling the Khedive and Philibert that capturing Lamballe ought to be our prime target,
LAM-BALLE!
The others did not matter. They were deluded, they were all talk. I asked that they be spared. ‘We ’ll see. First get us details on this Lamballe. Understood?’ The Khedive’s lips curled into a menacing leer. Philibert, pensively stroked his moustache and murmured: ‘
LAM-BALLE, LAM-BALLE.’
‘I’ll deal with this
LAMBALLE
once and for all,’ the Khedive concluded, ‘and neither London, Vichy, or the Americans will save him. Cognac? Craven A? Help yourself,
mon petit
.’ ‘We’ve just made a deal for the Sebastiano del Piombo,’ announced Philibert. ‘Here’s your 10 per cent commission.’ He handed me a pale-green envelope. ‘Get me some Asian bronzes for tomorrow. We’ve got a client.’ I rather enjoyed this sideline work of looting works of art and bringing them to Cimarosa Square. In the morning, I would inveigle my way into the homes of wealthy people who had fled Paris in the wake of the ‘events’. All I needed to do was pick a lock or flash my warrant card to get a key from the concierge. I searched
these
deserted abandoned houses carefully. The owners, in their flight, often left numerous small items behind: pastels, vases, tapestries, books, manuscripts. That wasn’t enough. I searched storerooms, vaults, those places where valuable collections might be hidden in times of uncertainty. An attic in the suburbs rewarded me with Gobelin tapestries and Persian carpets, a musty garage at Porte Champferret was filled with old masters. In a cellar in Auteuil, I found a suitcase full of jewels from antiquity and the Renaissance. I went about this looting cheerfully and even with a sense of pleasure that I would – later – regret in court. We were living through extraordinary times. Theft and trafficking were commonplace these days, and the Khedive, having keenly assessed my talents, used me to track down works of art rather than precious objects of base metal. I was grateful. I experienced great aesthetic pleasures. As when I stood in front of a Goya depicting the Assassination of the Princesse de Lamballe. The owner had tried to save it, stowing it in the vaults at the Franco-Serbian Bank at 3 Rue Helder. All I had to do was show my warrant card and they turned the masterpiece over. We sold on the looted property. These were curious times. They made me into a ‘rather unsavoury’ character. Informant, looter, assassin, perhaps. But no
worse
than the next man. I followed the crowd, nothing more. I’m not particularly entranced by evil. One day I met an old gentleman covered with rings and laces. In a quavering voice, he told me that he cut pictures of criminals out of
Détective
, finding they had a ‘savage’, a ‘malevolent’ beauty. He admired their ‘unshakeable, lofty’ solitude. He talked to me about one of them, Eugene Weidmann, whom he called ‘the angel of the shadows’. This old fellow was a man of letters. I told him that on the day of his execution, Weidmann had worn crepe-soled shoes. His mother had bought them for him in Frankfurt. That if you truly cared for people, it was crucial to discover minor details of this kind. The rest was unimportant. Poor Weidmann! Even as I’m speak, Hitler is sleeping and sucking his thumb, I give him a pitying glance. He yaps, like a dreaming dog. He curls up, steadily growing smaller until he fits in the palm of my hand. ‘What are you thinking about, Swing Troubadour?’ ‘About our Führer, Monsieur Philibert.’ ‘We’re going to sell the Frans Hals shortly. You’ll get a 15 per cent commission for your trouble. And if you help us capture Lamballe, I’ll give you a five hundred thousand franc bonus. Enough to set you up for life. A little cognac?’ My head is spinning. It must be the scent of the flowers.
The
living room was almost buried beneath dahlias and orchids. A huge rosebush between the windows partly hid the self-portrait of Monsieur de Bel-Respiro. 10 p.m. One after another they filed into the room. The Khedive greeted them in a plum-coloured tuxedo flecked with green. Monsieur Philibert gave a curt nod and returned to his files. Now and then he would walk up to one of them, exchange a few words, make some notes. The Khedive was passing around drinks, cigarettes, and
petits fours
. Monsieur and Madame de Bel-Respiro would have been amazed to find such a gathering in their living room: here were the ‘Marquis’ Lionel de Zieff, convicted of larceny, fraud, receiving stolen property and illegally wearing military decorations; Costachesco, a Romanian banker, stock market speculation and fraudulent bankruptcies; ‘Baron’ Gaétan de Lussatz, professional ballroom dancer holding dual French and Monegasque nationalities; Pols de Helder, gentleman-thief; Rachid von Rosenheim, voted Mr Germany 1938, professional swindler; Jean-Farouk de Méthode, owner of Cirque d’Automne and L’Heure Mauve, pimp,
persona non grata
throughout the British Commonwealth; Ferdinand Poupet, alias ‘Paulo Hayakawa’, insurance broker, previously convicted of forgery and use of
forgeries;
Otto da Silva, ‘
El Rico Plantador
’, cut-rate spy; ‘Count’ Baruzzi, art expert and heroin addict; Darquier, aka ‘de Pellepoix’, shyster lawyer; Ivanoff ‘the Oracle’, a Bulgarian charlatan, ‘official tattooist to the Coptic Church’; Odicharvi, police informant in White Russian circles; Mickey de Voisins, ‘
la soubrette
’, homosexual prostitute; Costantini, former air force commandant; Jean Le Houleux, journalist, former treasurer of the Club du Pavois, blackmailer; the Chapochnikoff brothers, whose precise number, their crimes and their professions, I never discovered. A number of women: Lucie Onstein, alias ‘Frau Sultana’, exotic dancer at
Rigolett’s
; Magda d’Andurian, manager of a ‘refined, discreet hotel’ in Palmyra, Syria; Violette Morris, weightlifting champion, invariably wore men’s suits; Emprosine Marousi, Byzantine princess, drug addict and lesbian; Simone Bouquereau and Irène de Tranze, former residents of the One-Two-Two Club; ‘Baroness’ Lydia Stahl, who loved champagne and fresh flowers. All of these people regularly frequented No. 3
bis
. They appeared out of the blackout, out of an era of despair and misery, through a phenomenon not unlike spontaneous generation. Most of them held key roles with the ‘Inter-commercial Company Paris-Berlin-Monte
Carlo’.
Zieff, Méthode, and Helder were in charge of the leather department. Thanks to their skilled agents, they could wagon loads of box caulk which was resold through the ICPBMC at twelve times the market price. Costachesco, Hayakawa, and Rosenheim specialized in metals, fats, and mineral oils. Ex-Commandant Costantini operated in a narrower but profitable sector: glassware, perfumes, chamois leathers, biscuits, nuts and bolts. The others were singled out by the Khedive for the more sensitive jobs. Lussatz was entrusted with the funds that arrived at Cimarosa Square in great quantity each morning. Da Silva and Odicharvi tracked down gold and foreign currency. Mickey de Voisins, Baruzzi, and ‘Baroness’ Lydia Stahl catalogued the contents of private houses where there might be works of art for me to confiscate. Hayakawa and Jean Le Houleux took care of the office accounts. Darquier served as legal counsel. As for the Chapochnikoff brothers, they had no definite function but simply fluttered around. Simone Bouquereau and Irène de Tranze were the Khedive’s official ‘secretaries’. Princess Marousi facilitated useful connections in social and banking circles. Frau Sultana and Violette Morris made a great deal of money as informers. Magda d’Andurian, an aggressive, hard-headed
woman,
scoured the North of France and would come up with quantities of tarpaulin and woollens. And finally, let us not forget the members of staff who confined themselves solely to police work: Tony Breton, fop, NCO in the French Foreign Legion, and veteran extortionist; Jo Reocreux, a brothel owner; Vital-Leca, known as ‘the Golden Throat’, hired assassin; Armand le Fou: ‘I’ll kill them all, every last one of them’; Codébo and Robert le Pâle, both scheduled for deportation, worked as porters and bodyguards; Danos ‘the Mammoth’, also known as ‘Big Bill’; Gouari, ‘the American’, freelance armed robber. The Khedive ruled over this cheerful little community which legal chroniclers would later refer to as ‘the Cimarosa Square Gang’. In the meantime, business was going well. Zieff was toying with plans to take over various film studios – the Victorine, the Eldorado, and the Folies-Wagram; Helder was organizing a ‘general holdings company’ to run every hotel on the Riviera; Costachesco was buying up real estate; Rosenheim had announced that ‘the whole of France will soon be ours for the asking, to sell to the highest bidder.’ I watched and listened to these lunatics. Under the glow of the chandeliers, their faces were dripping sweat. Their voices became more staccato. Rebates,
brokerage
fees, commissions, supplies on hand, wagonloads, profit margins. Chapochnikoff brothers, in ever-growing numbers, tirelessly refilled the champagne glasses. Frau Sultana cranked the Victrola. Johnny Hess:
Mettez-vous
dans l’ambiance
oubliez
vos soucis . . .
She unbuttoned her blouse, broke into a jazz step. The others followed suit. Codébo, Danos, and Robert le Pâle entered the living room. They elbowed a path through the dancers, reached Monsieur Philibert, and whispered a few words in his ear. I was staring out of the window. A car with its headlights off was parked in front of No. 3
bis
. Vital-Léca was holding a flashlight, Reocreux opened the car door. A man, in handcuff s. Gouari brutally pushed him toward the steps up to the house. I thought of the Lieutenant, the boys in Vaugirard. One night I would see them all in chains like this man. Breton would give them the shock treatment. What then . . . Will I be able to live with the guilt? Pernety and his black leather shoes. Picpus and
his
fiancée’s letters. The periwinkle-blue eyes of Saint-Georges. Their dreams, all their wonderful fantasies would come to an end on the blood-spattered walls of the cellar at No. 3
bis
. And it will be all my fault. That said, don’t think I casually use the terms ‘shock treatment’, ‘blackout’, ‘informant’, ‘hired killer’. I am reporting what I’ve seen, what I’ve lived. With no embellishments. I have invented nothing. All the people I have mentioned really existed. I have gone so far as to use their real names. As for my own tastes, they tend towards hollyhocks, a garden in the moonlight and the tango of happier days. The heart of a star-struck girl . . . I’ve been unlucky. You could hear their groans rising from the basement, stifled at last by the music. Johnny Hess:
Puisque je suis là
le rythme
est là
Sur son aile il vous
emportera . . .
Frau Sultana was goading them on with high-pitched squeals. Ivanoff was waving his ‘lighter-than-iron rod’. They jostled, gasped for breath, their dancing grew
spasmodic,
upended a vase of dahlias and went back to their wild gesticulating.
La musique
c’est
le philtre magique . . .
The double-doors were flung open. Codébo and Danos propped the man up. He was still in handcuff s. His face was dripping blood. He stumbled and collapsed in the middle of the living room. Everyone froze, waiting. Only the Chapochnikoff brothers moved about, as if nothing was happening, picking up the shards of the broken vase, straightening the flowers. One of them crept towards Baroness Lydia proffering an orchid.