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Zieff. ‘Care for a little cognac?’ offers Pols de Helder. ‘It’s impossible to get the stu ff these days in Paris, it sells for a hundred thousand francs a half-bottle. Drink up!’ He pushes the neck of the bottle between my teeth. Then von Rosenheim shoves a cigarette between my lips and takes out a platinum lighter set with emeralds. The light dims, their gestures and their voices fade into the soft half-light, then suddenly, with vivid clarity, I see the face of the Princesse de Lamballe, brought by a unit of the ‘Garde Nationale’ from La Force Prison: ‘Rise, Madam, it is time to go to the Abbey.’ I can see their pikes, their leering faces. Why didn’t she simply shout ‘ VIVE LA NATION!’ as she was asked to do? If someone should prick my forehead with a pike-staff (Zieff? Hayakawa? Rosenheim? Philibert? the Khedive?), one drop of blood is all it would take to bring the sharks circling. Don’t move a muscle. ‘ VIVE LA NATION!’ I would shout it as often as they want. Strip naked if I have to. Anything they ask! Just one more minute, Monsieur Executioner. No matter the price. Rosenheim shoves another cigarette into my mouth. The condemned man’s last? Apparently the execution is not set for tonight. Costachesco, Zieff, Helder, and Baruzzi are being extremely solicitous. They’re worried about my health. Do I have enough money? Of course I do. The act of giving up the Lieutenant and all the members of his network will earn me about a hundred thousand francs, which I will use to buy a few scarves at Charvet and a Vicuña coat for winter. Unless of course they kill me first. Cowards, apparently, always die a shameful death. The doctor used to tell me that when he is about to die, a man becomes a music box playing the melody that best describes his life, his character, his aspirations. For some, it’s a popular waltz; for others, a military march. Still another mews a gypsy air that trails off in a sob or a cry of panic. When your turn comes,
mon petit
, it will be the clang of a can clattering in the darkness across a patch of waste ground. A while ago, as we crossed the patch of waste ground on the far side of the Boulevard de Sébastopol, I was thinking: ‘This is where your story will end.’ I remembered the slippery slope that brought me to the spot, one of the most desolate in Paris. It all began in the Bois de Boulogne. Remember? You were bowling your hoop on the lawn in the Pré Catelan. Years pass, you move along the Avenue Henri-Martin and find yourself on the Place du Trocadéro. Next comes the Place de l’Étoile. Before you is an avenue lined with glittering street lights. Like a vision of the future, you think: full of promise – as the saying goes. You’re breathless with exhilaration on the threshold of this vast thoroughfare, but it’s only the Champs-Élysées with its cosmopolitan bars, its call girls and Claridge, a caravanserai haunted by the spectre of Stavisky. The bleak sadness of the Lido. The tawdry stopovers at Le Fouquet and Le Colisée. From the beginning, everything was rigged. Place de la Concorde, you’re wearing alligator shoes, a polka-dot tie, and a gigolo’s smirk. After a brief detour through the Madeleine-Opera district, just as sleazy as the Champs-Élysées, you continue your tour and what the doctor calls your MOR-AL DIS-IN-TE-GRA-TION under the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. Le Continental, Le Meurice, the Saint-James et d’Albany, where I work as a hotel thief. Occasionally wealthy female guests invite me to their rooms. Before dawn, I have rifled their handbags and lifted a few pieces of jewellery. Farther along. Rumpelmayer, with its stench of withered flesh. The mincing queers you beat up at night in the Tuileries gardens just to steal their braces and their wallets. But suddenly the vision becomes clearer: I’m here in the warm, in the belly of Paris. Where exactly is the border? You need only cross the Rue du Louvre or the Place du Palais Royal