Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction (10 page)

The speaker raises a conciliatory hand. He’s accusing no one in particular. He’s merely making an observation.

An observation that someone, anyone, should have made ages ago: the accumulation of social problems and architectural aberrations, the increased poverty resulting from the continued rise in unemployment and the growing precariousness of remaining jobs, of deliberately badly controlled illegal immigration and thus of more-or-less latent racism, which will eventually lead to the ghettoisation that automatically acts as a breeding ground for religious fanaticism, and… Need he go on? This has been the state of affairs for a good half century, deteriorating almost daily, depending on which party’s in power, so we shouldn’t pretend we just discovered the scale of the disaster upon opening our eyes this morning.

Undisguised anxiety is painted on most of the faces around the long table. Some of the speaker’s words were unpleasant to hear, but more than that, they’ve prompted enormous doubts as to the reality on the ground. Several hands go up, requesting permission to speak.

The first question asked, relating to the allegedly ‘badly controlled’ illegal immigration, in fact sums up almost all the rest.

The speaker could have bet on it.

He restricts himself to reminding everyone that if there were available jobs elsewhere, no one would willingly leave their country and their family to come and sweat blood and tears in France. And if these jobs were properly remunerated, unemployed nationals would snap them up, but since the pay offered is worse than laughable, they’re reserved for a docile workforce that’s easily replaceable and thus exploitable because it’s outside the law. Illegal workers fulfil these criteria perfectly.

Californians don’t risk their lives swimming across the Rio Grande to go and work their fingers to the bone as illegal slaves in Mexico.

The speaker makes this point with a broad mocking smile.

His humour doesn’t raise a laugh in the boardroom. The smile fades into a carnivorous scowl; the speaker chews his words like a predator that’s captured its prey after three months of enforced starvation.

Once they’ve established that the massive presence of foreigners on their soil is artificial, but definitely never presented as such, it’s easy to understand why racism rages on and why emphasis on minority issues is fast becoming prevalent. By humiliating the other without giving him a say in the matter, a painful feeling of powerlessness develops within him, and powerlessness leads to violence if over-enthusiastic souls fan the flames of revolt. The religious fanatic is a fine example of this bellows effect. One only needs to observe the growing number of veiled women and girls within a Muslim community adrift in Christian lands to measure the quasi-exponential expansion of a religion whose stranglehold tightens a little more each year around bewildered populations attempting to shelter behind the barriers of tradition.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs delegate points out in passing that the veiling of women and girls in fact has very little to do with religion, fanatical or not, and a great deal to do with oppression by men who consider it’s always less tiring to eat couscous than to make it.

The men around the table and the speaker feebly concur, looking away.

‘Pissed off, Momo? Your girlfriend ditch you?’

‘Her? Her father and brothers are giving me dirty looks, yeah, they’re morons, but no it’s not that.’

‘What then?’

‘Haven’t you seen the neighbourhood, sir? It’s enough to piss you off, isn’t it? It’s not a neighbourhood any more. There are so many cops on the street, day and night, it’s a fucking pigsty! It wasn’t exactly fun and games before, but now a guy can’t work!’

‘Is the deal breaking down again, Momo? My condolences! Well, you shouldn’t have gone overboard with the Molotov cocktails… It looked good on TV, but the President wasn’t exactly thrilled, you know.’

‘The President can go fuck himself! Is he going to put food on my table? Can he strip a truck with his eyes closed, the fat bastard? Cut good Colombian with the right dose of flour? Respray stolen cars? My arse.’

‘That I don’t know, but apparently he has other, hidden, talents. Tell me, little Momo, did I hear you right? There are still cars to steal? That’s news! You didn’t burn them all last month?’

‘Don’t take the piss, sir, I swear, life’s no joke right now. If I’m broke, I can’t pay the rent and my family will be evicted, the mayor said so, the bastard!’

The speaker draws himself up, an incantatory finger pointing to the ceiling. More serious, according to him, is the vanishing social mix in the capital.

A lot more serious because it has implications for the near future, so near it’s already around the corner.

Does anyone here know the price per square metre in Paris? the speaker hammers it out to the beat of a requiem. Of the lowest possible rent, if you can find someone willing to let you even a crummy studio on the top floor with no lift? Who, among the Parisian middle classes, can still afford to live in the centre of Paris these days? The last remnants of accessible working-class districts are disappearing one by one under so-called joint urban rehabilitation programmes, which don’t even bother to hide their true nature – lucrative property speculation – any more.

The Finance Minister’s chief of staff looks at the speaker askance. He can’t quite place this young upstart who makes remarks that a hardened left-winger wouldn’t disagree with, and, making no bones about it, decides to ask him where he lives. Unfazed, the speaker replies that he lives in the outer suburbs but for security reasons he’s not authorised to discuss that here. He won’t, however, insult anyone by asking for private addresses at such a fine gathering of senior ministerial officials, who ought to be aware of how many of their subordinates really can easily afford to live less than twenty minutes away from their workplace.

Never lost for words when the opportunity presents itself, the only woman in the room points out that it’s become commonplace at international level: what mid-income household can still afford to live in the centre of London, for instance? The big cities are emptying themselves of their poor, one after the other. The exodus speeds up when a hurricane has the bright idea of ravaging the metropolitan coastline. Having said that, the rich don’t all cling to their town houses but prefer a life of luxury in the country or the privacy of good company in five-star apartment complexes with a pool and private militia, sifting visitors at the entrance.

The speaker doesn’t disagree, but his concern is Paris, Paris whose well-off inhabitants are not only deaf to the complaints of suburbanites but also blind to the urgency of their situation since they don’t realise the ghetto’s been reversed. The speaker’s tone suddenly turns bitter, the words fall one by one like bombs.

It’s time to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. Urgent full-scale measures must be taken, unless we want to see the isolated city plundered, invaded by new, ravenous beggars who will cross the orbital road – on horseback if necessary, if they haven’t eaten their horses first. Their kids with wolf-like fangs are no longer content with fine words when it’s become impossible even to make a dishonest living. The speaker knows them. The speaker’s seen them. The speaker no longer sees those who were once his best informants on the ground.

Yesterday, they stole. Today, they have guns.

Barbaric hordes are surrounding the capital. It will only take a spark for the city to be besieged, while awaiting the final assault which will have the last privileged few taking refuge on the Ile Saint Louis or the Ile de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, blowing up the bridges behind them. In the glow of the fires that will devour the nights, the city of fire and blood will plunge into the chaos of a future with no tomorrow. So yes, again yes, Paris smells danger and sends out an alarm signal. Paris is calling. Paris is calling with all the strength it has left. Paris is calling for other cities to help before it’s too late.

‘You were meant to call me, Momo. Did you forget?’

‘No, sir, but I couldn’t. I was busy, I couldn’t find the time, you’ll have to forgive me…’

‘Oh, so you found a job? An honest job, I mean?’

‘Don’t swear, sir!’

‘Ha, that’s a good one, well done! I knew you were a good grass and now I see you can be witty too. So tell me, am I going to have to do without your services, Momo?’

‘Well, sir, it won’t be like before, sir, yeah, I’m sorry but…’

‘But you’ve found someone who pays better than me, that’s all. I get it, I’m not stupid, I only hope you’re not barking up the wrong tree. They’re saying second-hand Kalashnikovs bring in more than dope these days, Momo?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Seems so, yeah. But then some people would say anything to get attention.’

‘Momo, you disappoint me, you know that?’

‘I’m not a grass any more, sir!’

Alone and last to leave the boardroom, the woman with the scarf slowly closes the open file in front of her as if sealing a tomb. The speaker’s lyrical flights have scared her. His last words are still ringing in her ears, like a haunting refrain: Paris is calling for help…

But who will hear?

Translation © Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz

In all the many cases investigated by Sir Seaton Begg of the Home Office Metatemporal Investigative Agency, one of the most curious concerned his co-operation with his opposite number, Commissaire Lapointe of the Sureté du Temps Perdu, involving not only the albino gentleman connected to a royal house whom we call ‘Monsieur Zenith’, but also members of an infamous terrorist gang, a long-dead enemy of Begg’s German cousins and the well-known adventuress, Mrs Una Persson. As Begg’s friend, the pathologist Dr ‘Taffy’ Sinclair, remarked, ‘For a while it seemed that Chaos, in all its unchained wildness, had been let loose through every region of our vast and complex multiverse, so that even now we cannot be certain whether it was contained or whether we are merely experiencing a moment of relative harmony in a howling cacophony…’

‘I cannot tell you, my old friend, how delighted I am that you should come over at such short notice.’

Lapointe, his assistant Bardot, Taffy and Begg were wandering through the pale gold autumn light of the Luxembourg Gardens. The chestnut trees were shedding dark reds and yellows and the flower beds were full of beauty on the verge of succumbing to winter. Lapointe had thought it expedient for them to talk in the open air where there was less chance of being overheard.

‘The train? Was it comfortable?’

In his light tweed sports jacket, white shirt and well-pressed flannels, Lapointe had a bulky, stiff-necked, slightly professorial air, with a great wave of grey hair untidily arranged over his pale forehead. His deep green eyes, angular features and heavy body gave him the air of a large amiable dinosaur. Begg knew his opposite number had one of the sharpest minds on the Continent. Single-handedly Lapointe had captured the ex-police inspector turned crook: George Marsden Plummer (alias ‘Maigret’ in France) who had once been Lapointe’s chief. Lapointe had also been the one to bring ‘Fantomas’ to book at last. Together he and Begg had tracked down ‘Jock Collyn’, otherwise known as The Master Mummer, and been instrumental in his lingering to this day on Devil’s Island. Inspector Bardot, on the other hand, had no spectacular record, but was much admired at the Quai des Orfèvres for his methodology and his coolness under pressure. Small, dark, he seemed permanently and privately amused. He wore a buttoned three-piece grey suit and what was evidently an English school tie.

The two Home Office men had come from London via the recently opened Subchannel Excavation, whose roads and railway lines now connected the two nations, a material addition to the decades-old Entente Cordiale, an alliance which had been cemented by the signing of a European-wide Mutual Co-operation Pact, which, with the Universal Civil Rights Act, united all the Great Powers, including the Confederated Forty-Seven States of America, in one mighty alliance, sharing common laws and goals.

‘Perfectly, thank you,’ said Begg, speaking excellent French. Lapointe had put the STP’s private express at his disposal. The journey had taken less than an hour and a half from London to Paris. ‘I must say, Lapointe, that you French chaps have your priorities well in hand – rapid and comfortable transport and excellent food among them. We had a superb lunch en route.’

The French detective acknowledged this compliment with a small self-deprecating shrug.

Taffy, taller than the others, murmured his own discreet appreciation.

‘I gather, Dr Sinclair, that you are recently back from the Republic of Texas?’ Lapointe courteously acknowledged the pathologist, whose expertise was internationally famous.

‘Indeed.’ Sinclair removed his wide panama and wiped his glistening head with a large Voysey-patterned Liberty’s handkerchief, which seemed an uncharacteristic part of his otherwise muted wardrobe. Save for his taste in haberdashery, nobody would have guessed that during his time at Oxford he had been a leading light in the post-Pre-Raphaelite revival and that women had swooned over his massive head of hair and melancholy features almost as much as over his poetry. Like his friend and colleague, he wore a cream-coloured linen suit, but whereas Begg’s tie was a rather flamboyant bow, Sinclair’s neck was adorned by his old school colours. Indeed, his tie was identical to Bardot’s. The two had been contemporaries at Blackfriars School and later had attended the Sorbonne before Bardot, eldest son of a somewhat infamous Aquilonian house, entered the service of the Quai d’Orsay and Sinclair, after a spell in the army, decided to follow his father into medicine and the civil service.