AL05 - Murder in Clichy

done.

“Tomorrow, meet me at the market,” Gassot said. “Bring Nemours. We’ll talk.”

“Watch your back.”

Gassot always did.

He rolled up his collar against the chill and limped through the shadows cast by sodium streetlamps’ light filtering through the trees. He tried unsuccessfully to ignore his fears.

Fools! What kind of mess had they dragged him into?

The jade had belonged to them . . . they’d discovered it while surveying land, buried in a metal ammunition box by the old emperor’s tomb. By rights it was theirs: To the victor belongs the spoils.

But at Dien Bien Phu they had been losers and the box had disappeared. Gassot clutched his phantom leg and leaned into a darkened doorway.

He closed his eyes but he saw the monsoon-swollen Nam Ron river, engorged with dark green silt and bloated bodies. Heard the crackle of gunfire, the drone of C-119s so low they whipped leaves off the mango trees, and the whimpering of someone in the bushes. And that’s when it happened. Not the landmine half-buried in the red earth he avoided stepping on, but sniper fire, had shredded his calf and ankle. The piercing, tearing pain brought him to his good knee. His hands had come back covered with his own blood and gristle. Sniper bullets spit all around and he crawled, pulling himself toward the mangroves.

Adrenalin propelled him and then the chalky earth gave way and he was in a hole, a bombed out Vietminh tunnel on the warm, wet body of a moaning man. A Vietnamese holding his blood-soaked arm. “Help me and I help you,” the man said. “I know a way out. To the temple. No fighting there.”

What chance did he have? None by himself in the enemy trenches.

“Call me Jin,” the man said, “My father worked in France. The Vietminh don’t trust me.”

Gassot had taken off his ammo belt, wrapped it tourniquet-style around Jin’s arm, and staunched the blood. He unscrewed the canteen of Courvoisier that General de Castries had issued to the corps for courage, drank, and shared with Jin. Then he bit a morphine tablet in two, put half in Jin’s mouth and swallowed the other half. He gritted his teeth and bound the loose muscle shreds of his own leg with his shirt. “Show me,” he’d said. “We have to move while we can.” While the morphine lasted.

Somehow he’d crawled and half-dragged Jin through the tunnel all afternoon—cries, cannon fire and earth- pounding explosions above them. The cognac had loosened Jin’s tongue and he’d sung folksongs. In the evening, when the smoke settled by the river, the French troops had surrendered and he’d never seen Jin again.

Gassot had survived prison camp. Bamboo cages, and rice gruel if they were lucky. A concrete hole and all the rice paddy rats they could catch when they weren’t. Gangrene had set in and a Parisian-trained Vietminh doctor had amputated his leg above the knee.

Gassot shook off the memories. What was he doing, reliving the past again, huddled in a doorway on a cold, wet street?

He headed home to where Avenue de Clichy intersected a maze of narrow streets. He lived in a hotel on the Clichy side, by the derelict marshalling yards of the old steam train line. Once the fief of Merovingian king Dagobert and much later, home to Verlaine who taught at the nearby lycee; Manet and Renoir’s ateliers; Georges Simenon’s first Paris address; Captain Dreyfus’s apartments, Proust’s suite, Colette’s despised aunt’s bourgeois apartment; the area in which Zola found inspiration for Nana, the courtesan of his novel. And Ho Chi-Minh. Now, they wouldn’t know it.

He entered his third-floor room. There was no elevator, but the stairs kept him in shape. Going down was the hard part. He opened the door to the back steps. Always keep an escape route, he remembered their commander saying.

Indochina had lain in rubble and the Republique ignored its soldiers. Gassot even had to fight for his pension. But the old Colonials, rich and fat with the spoils of Indochina, had thrived. Still thrived.

Gassot hung up his jacket, unstrapped his prosthesis, set it by the door next to his shoes, and lay on his cot- sized bed. He set his alarm clock and switched off the light. Only the occasional red blink of neon from the kebab shop sign below illuminated his wall giving the military calendar a blood-red glow.

Gassot put his hands behind his head on the pillow. The past invaded and permeated his thoughts. After the camp released him, he’d recovered, tended by Bao. He remembered the incessant gyaow- gyaow of the cicadas in the hot, still night and the black satin sheen of her hair brushing her slim waist. The aroma of the herbal cloths she laid on his fever-wracked head mingling with the tamarind scent wafting through the blown-out windows. They’d camped in an abandoned yellow stucco, green-shuttered colonial villa, its rococo interior pockmarked by bullet holes. Until the Underground—a ragtag alliance of Ho’s deserters— found her. Took her on a forced labor march.

Repatriated to France, he’d done physical therapy in the army hospital in Toulon, been given a fake leg. Gotten an engineering job at the Citroen factory. Luckier than most, he always told himself. The old Indochina existed in his memories, revisited only via crackling newsreels.

Then he saw the paper napkin slipped under his door, the way the waiter let him know he’d had a phone call. Picq and Nemours never used the phone. His heart pounded.

Scribbled on the napkin were the words “You a dirty old man, Gassot? A mec called to tell you that he’s going to roll your pants up.”

Wednesday Morning

RENE PASSED THE LINE of people buying newspapers and Metro passes at his corner tabac. A man stood reading a newspaper and smoking in the chill gray mid-morning.

“Bonjour,” Rene said as he opened the door of the shoe repair shop a few doors down from his apartment.

The new apprentice, whom Rene didn’t know, affixed taps to a pair of heels. Loud grinding noises filled the narrow shop crammed with shelves of arch supports and insoles, shoes to be worked on, shoes to be called for.

The young man switched off the grinding wheel. He wore a blue work coat with FRANCK embroidered on the pocket, that was marked with glue smears, over patched jeans. He looked down at Rene, took in his short stature.

The usual stare.

“Picking up for someone?” Franck asked, rubbing his hands on his pockets. His gaze hadn’t left Rene’s long trunk and short legs.

Rene pointed to the polished handmade Italian shoes on the shelf.

“Actually, that pair’s mine. What’s the damage?”

Franck lifted the shoes from the counter. “Nice! Eh, they fit you?”

“Should fit even better with the orthotics your boss put in.”

Rene’s hip dysplasia made arch adjustments necessary every other month. His hip ached more and more in the damp weather.

“I didn’t know . . . well, I mean . . .”

“That I wear regular shoes?” he said, taking a fifty franc note from his wallet and reaching up to set it on the counter. He buttoned his coat. “Even a cashmere coat.”

A cheap shot. He wanted to take it back as soon as he’d said it.

A sullen look crossed Franck’s face. “Guess you have to, so you feel big.”

Rene saw the worn jacket on the peg and Franck’s HLM— Habitation a Loyer Moderee—application for subsidized housing peeking from the pocket. He took the shoes.

“Merci,” he said and pocketed his change.

He left the shop, glad he hadn’t said the owner was an old friend who would have fired Franck on the spot for his comment. Everyone needed a job these days. He, too, after looking at Leduc’s finances.

Though he’d encouraged her at the outset, Aimee had jumped into the nun’s affair without thinking. As usual. Impulsive, intuitive! It didn’t pay the bills.

He paused on the cracked pavement to check his phone messages. The battery was dead. No time to charge