fifth birthday, she met Laurent at the rue Ramponeau, in front of the
Soeurs de Nazareth, where she collected a weekly parcel of food.
Laurent, another native of the Menilmontant area, was a decade older
than she was, and looked older still. Hunched and bald, he wore a
leather jacket whose sleeves were too long for him. He was walking a
small dog, a terrier, and she asked the dog’s name, and they began to
talk. He told her that he fed his dog, Poupee, before he fed himself,
gave the dog first choice of everything. She told him about her panic
attacks, and the fact that a magistrate for social services, I’Assedic,
had once placed her under supervision. The magistrate also made sure
that the state would provide her with five hundred francs a week. His
interest in her perked up when he learned of the support she received. A
month later, they were married. He moved into her flat near Charonne;
to an impartial eye, it may have appeared small, spare, and dingy but it
was still more appealing than his own place, from which he was about to
be evicted. Soon after they were married, Laurent pressed her to return
to her sewing: they needed the money, the food parcels from the Soeurs
scarcely lasted them half the week, the checks from I’Assedic were
woefully inadequate. She told people she was a dressmaker, didn’t she?
Why, then, didn’t she make dresses? She demurred, quietly at first,
holding out her pudgy, blunt fingers, and explaining she no longer had
the manual dexterity. He remonstrated, less quietly. She countered
with no little vehemence, pointing out that he had a knack for getting
fired from even the lowliest jobs, and that she would never have married
him if she’d known what a drunkard he was. Seven months later, in the
heat of one of these increasingly frequent arguments, Laurent keeled
over. His last words to her were “T’es gras se comtne une truie” You
fat sow. Therese let a few minutes pass and her temper subside before
she phoned for an ambulance. Later, she’d learn that her husband had
been felled by a massive hemorrhagic stroke an aneurysm deep in the
brain. A harried physician told her something about how blood vessels
were like inner tubes, and how a weakness in a vessel wall could
suddenly give way. She wished Laurent’s last words to her had been more
civil.
To her few friends, she referred to her husband as a saint, but no one
was fooled. Having been married was, at any rate, an education. For
much of her life, she believed that a husband would have made her life
complete. Laurent had showed her the untrustworthy nature of all men.
As she watched various figures on the street corner near her hulking,
poured-concrete apartment building, she fantasized about their private
deviances. Which of these men was a junkie? Which a thief? Which beat
his girlfriend?
A knock at the door, loud and authoritative, jarred her from her
reveries. “Je suis de I’Assedic, laissez-moi entrer, s’ll vous plait!”
A man from the welfare department, asking to be let in.
“Why did you not buzz?” barked Madame Broussard.
“But I did buzz. Repeatedly. The buzzer is broken. As is the gate. Do
you claim you didn’t know?”
“But why are you here? Nothing about my status has changed,” she
protested. “My support…”
“Is under review,” the man said, officiously. “I think we can
straighten this all out if we just go over a few matters. Otherwise,
the payments come to an end. I do not wish that to happen.”
Therese trudged heavily over to the door and peered through the
peephole. The man had the familiar haughtiness she associated with all
fonctionnaires of the French state–clerks who imagined themselves to be
civil servants, men given a thimbleful of power, and made despotic by
it. Something about his voice, his accent seemed less familiar. Perhaps
he came from a Belgian family. Therese did not like les Beiges.
She squinted. The man from social services was attired in the thin
worsted wool jacket and cheap tie that seemed to come with the job; his
hair was a thatch of salt and pepper and he seemed an unremarkable
specimen except for his smooth, unlined face; the skin would be babyish,
if it didn’t look almost tight.
Therese unlocked the two deadbolts and released the chain before
pressing the final latch and opening the door.
As Ben followed Anna out of the cafe, he kept his eye on 1554 rue des
Vignoles, trying to fathom its mysteries. The building was a picture of
ordinary dilapidation–too distressed to excite anyone’s admiration,
while not so distressed as to arrest anyone’s attention. But looking at
it carefully–an exercise, Ben imagined, that no one had engaged in for
many years–one could see the bones of a once elegant apartment
building. It was evident from the oriel windows, crested with carved
limestone, now randomly chipped and fractured. It was evident from the
corners of the building, the quoins, where dressed stones had been laid
so that their faces were alternately large and small; and the mansard
roof, edged with a low, crumbling parapet. It was evident even from the
narrow ledges that had once provided a balcony, before the iron rail was
removed, no doubt after it had rusted to pieces and posed a hazard to
public safety. A century ago, a measure of care had gone into the
building’s construction, which decades of indifference could not
entirely efface.
Anna’s instructions to him had been clear. They would join a group of
passersby as they crossed the street, falling into rhythm with their
stride. They would be indistinguishable from people whose destination
was the nearby shop that sold cheap liquor and cigarettes, or the
shawartna place next to it, where a large, fatty oval loaf of meat
rotated, close enough to the sidewalk that you could reach out and touch
it; certainly swarms of flies did. Anyone watching from the window
would see no departure from the ordinary patterns of pedestrian traffic;
only when they passed in front of the main door would the two stop and
enter.
“Ring the bell?” Ben asked as they reached the building’s main
entrance.
“If we rang the bell, we wouldn’t be unannounced, would we? I thought
that was the plan.” Glancing around quickly, Anna inserted a narrow
tongue of steel into the lock and played with it for a few moments.
Nothing.
Ben felt a sense of rising panic. So far, they had been careful to
blend in, to synchronize their pace with those of other pedestrians. But
now they found themselves frozen in place; any casual observer would
notice that something was wrong, that they did not belong here.
“Anna,” he murmured with quiet urgency.
She was bent over her work, and he could see that her forehead was damp
with nervous perspiration. “Take out your wallet and start counting
your bills,” she whispered. “Take out a phone and check for messages.
Do something. Calmly. Slowly. Languorously.”
The faint sound of metal rattling against metal continued as she spoke.
Then finally, there was the sound of a bolt retracting. Anna turned the
lever knob and opened the door. “Sometimes these locks require a little
tender loving care. Anyway, it’s not exactly high security.”
“Hidden in plain view, I think is the idea.”
“Hidden, anyway. I thought you said nobody had ever seen him.”
“That’s true.”
“Did you stop and reflect that if he wasn’t crazy when he started out,
he might have become so? Total social isolation will do that to a
person.” Anna led him to the disheveled elevator. She pressed the call
button, and they briefly listened to a rattling chain before they
decided that taking the stairwell was the safer option. They made their
way up seven flights, taking care to make as little noise as possible.
The hallway of the top floor, an affair of grimy white tiles, stretched
before them.
Startlingly, the doorway of the sole apartment on the floor was already
swinging open.
“Monsieur Chabot,” Anna called out.
There was no response.
“Monsieur Chardin!” she called, exchanging a look with Ben.
There was a movement from within, shrouded in the gloom.
“Georges Chardin!” Anna called again. “We come with information that
may be of value to you.”
A few moments of silence followed–and then a deafening blast.
What had happened?
A glance at the hallway directly facing the open door made things clear:
it was cratered with a deadly spray of lead pellets.
Whoever was in there was firing a shotgun at them.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” Therese Broussard said,
color rising to her cheeks. “Nothing has changed about my circumstances
since my husband died. Nothing, I tell you.”
The man appeared with a large black suitcase, and strode past her to the
window, ignoring her for the moment. A very strange man.