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Byrd nodded. ‘Can’t stand it. Sorry and all that, but can’t stand it.’
The woman with green eye-shadow waved across a sea of shoulders, then cupped her mouth and yelled to me. ‘They have broken one of the gold chairs,’ she said. ‘Does it matter?’
I couldn’t stand her being so worried. ‘Don’t worry,’ I called. She nodded and smiled in relief.
‘What’s going on?’ said Jean-Paul. ‘Do you own this gallery?’
‘Give me time,’ I said, ‘and maybe I’ll give you a one-man show.’
Jean-Paul smiled to show that he knew it was a joke, but Byrd looked up suddenly. ‘Look here, Jean-Paul,’ he said severely, ‘a one-man show would be fatal for you right now. You are in no way prepared. You need time, my boy, time. Walk before you run.’ Byrd turned to me. ‘Walk before you run, that’s right, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Any mother will tell you that most kids can run before they can walk; it’s walking that’s difficult.’
Jean-Paul winked at me and said, ‘I must decline, but thank you anyway.’
Byrd said, ‘He’s not ready. You gallery chappies will just have to wait. Don’t rush these young artists. It’s not fair. Not fair to them.’
I was just going to straighten things out when a short thickset Frenchman with a Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole came up and began to talk to Byrd.
‘Let me introduce you,’ said Byrd. He wouldn’t tolerate informality. ‘This is Chief Inspector Loiseau. Policeman. I went through a lot of the war with his brother.’
We shook hands, and then Loiseau shook hands with Jean-Paul, although neither of them showed a great deal of enthusiasm for the ritual.
The French, more particularly the men, have developed a characteristic mouth that enables them to deal with their language. The English use their pointed and dexterous tongues, and their mouths become pinched and close. The French use their lips and a Frenchman’s mouth becomes loose and his lips jut forward. The cheeks sink a little to help this and a French face takes on a lean look, back-sloping like an old-fashioned coal-scuttle. Loiseau had just such a face.
‘What’s a policeman doing at an art show?’ asked Byrd.
‘We policemen are not uncultured oafs,’ said Loiseau with a smile. ‘In our off-duty hours we have even been known to drink alcohol.’
‘You are never off duty,’ said Byrd. ‘What is it? Expecting someone to make off with the champagne buckets?’ Loiseau smiled slyly. A waiter nearly passed us with a tray of champagne.
‘One might ask what you are doing here?’ said Loiseau to Byrd. ‘I wouldn’t think this was your sort of art.’ He tapped one of the large panels. It was a highly finished nude, contorted in pose, the skin shiny as though made from polished plastic. In the background there were strange pieces of surrealism, most of them with obvious Freudian connotations.
‘The snake and the egg are well drawn,’ said Byrd. ‘The girl’s a damn poor show though.’
‘The foot is out of drawing,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It’s not well observed.’
‘A girl that could do that would have to be a cripple,’ said Byrd.
Still more people crowded into the room and we were being pushed closer and closer to the wall.
Loiseau smiled. ‘But a poule that could get into that position would earn a fortune on the rue Godot de Mauroy,’ said the Chief Inspector.
Loiseau spoke just like any police officer. You can easily recognize them by their speech, to which a lifetime of giving evidence imparts a special clarity. The facts are arranged before the conclusions just like a written report, and certain important words – bus route numbers and road names – are given emphasis so that even young constables can remember them.
Byrd turned back to Jean-Paul: he was anxious to discuss the painting. ‘You’ve got to hand it to him though, the trompe l’œil technique is superb, the tiny brushwork. Look at the way the Coca-Cola bottle is done.’
‘He’s copied that from a photo,’ said Jean-Paul. Byrd bent down for a close look.
‘Damn me! The rotten little swine!’ said Byrd. ‘It is a bloody photo. It’s stuck on. Look at that!’ He picked at the corner of the bottle and then appealed to the people around him. ‘Look at that, it’s been cut from a coloured advert.’ He applied himself to other parts of the painting. ‘The typewriter too, and the girl …’
‘Stop picking at that nipple,’ said the woman with green eye-shadow. ‘If you touch the paintings once more you’ll be asked to leave.’ She turned to me. ‘How can you stand there and let them do it? If the artist saw them he’d go mad.’
‘Gone mad already,’ said Byrd curtly. ‘Thinking chaps are going to pay money for bits cut out of picture books.’
‘It’s quite legitimate,’ said Jean-Paul. ‘It’s an objet trouvé …’
‘Rot,’ said Byrd. ‘An objet trouvé is a piece of driftwood or a fine stone – it’s something in which an artist has found and seen otherwise unnoticed beauty. How can an advert be found? How can you find an advert – the damned things are pushed under your noses every way you look, more’s the pity.’
‘But the artist must have freedom to …’
‘Artist?’ snorted Byrd. ‘Damned fraud. Damned rotten little swine.’
A man in evening dress with three ballpoint pens in his breast pocket turned round. ‘I haven’t noticed you decline any champagne,’ he said to Byrd. He used the intimate tu. Although it was a common form of address among the young arty set, his use of it to Byrd was offensive.
‘What I had,’ interrupted Jean-Paul – he paused before delivering the insult – ‘was Sauternes with Alka Seltzer.’
The man in the dinner suit leaned across to grab at him, but Chief Inspector Loiseau interposed himself and got a slight blow on the arm.
‘A thousand apologies, Chief Inspector,’ said the man in the dinner suit.
‘Nothing,’ said Loiseau. ‘I should have looked where I was going.’
Jean-Paul was pushing Byrd towards the door, but they were moving very slowly. The man in the dinner suit leaned across to the woman with the green eye-shadow and said loudly, ‘They mean no harm, they are drunk, but make sure they leave immediately.’ He looked back towards Loiseau to see if his profound understanding of human nature was registering. ‘He’s with them,’ the woman said, nodding at me. ‘I thought he was from the insurance company when he first came.’ I heard Byrd say, ‘I will not take it back; he’s a rotten little swine.’
‘Perhaps,’ said dinner-jacket tactfully, ‘you would be kind enough to make sure that your friends come to no harm in the street.’
I said, ‘If they get out of here in one piece they can take their own chances in the street.’
‘Since you can’t take a hint,’ said dinner-jacket, ‘let me make it clear …’
‘He’s with me,’ said Loiseau.
The man shied. ‘Chief Inspector,’ said dinner-jacket, ‘I am desolated.’
‘We are leaving anyway,’ said Loiseau, nodding to me. Dinner-jacket smiled and turned back to the woman with green eye-shadow.
‘You go where you like,’ I said. ‘I’m staying right here.’
Dinner-jacket swivelled back like a glove puppet.
Loiseau put a hand on my arm. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about getting your carte de séjour from the Prefecture.’
‘I’m having no trouble getting my carte de séjour,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said Loiseau and moved through the crowd towards the door. I followed.
Near the entrance there was a table containing a book of newspaper clippings and catalogues. The woman with green eye-shadow called to us. She offered Loiseau her hand and then reached out to me. She held the wrist limp as women do when they half expect a man to kiss the back of their hand. ‘Please sign the visitors’ book,’ she said.
Loiseau bent over the book and wrote in neat neurotic writing ‘Claude Loiseau’; under comments he wrote ‘stimulating’. The woman swivelled the book to me. I wrote my name and under comments I wrote what I always write when I don’t know what to say – ‘uncompromising’.
The woman nodded. ‘And your address,’ she said.
I was about to point out that no one else had written their address in the book, but when a shapely young woman asks for my address I’m not the man to be secretive. I wrote it: ‘c/o Petit Légionnaire, rue St Ferdinand, 17ième.’
The woman smiled to Loiseau in a familiar way. She said, ‘I know the Chief Inspector’s address: Criminal Investigation Department, Sûreté Nationale, rue des Saussaies.’
Loiseau’s office had that cramped, melancholy atmosphere that policemen relish. There were two small silver pots for the shooting team that Loiseau had led to victory in 1959 and several group photos – one showed Loiseau in army uniform standing in front of a tank. Loiseau brought a large M 1950 automatic from his waist and put it into a drawer. ‘I’m going to get something smaller,’ he said. ‘This is ruining my suits.’ He locked the drawer carefully and then went through the other drawers of his desk, riffling through the contents and slamming them closed until he laid a dossier on his blotter.
‘This is your dossier,’ said Loiseau. He held up a print of the photo that appears on my carte de séjour. ‘“Occupation,”’ he read, ‘“travel agency director”.’ He looked up at me and I nodded. ‘That’s a good job?’
‘It suits me,’ I said.
‘It would suit me’, said Loiseau. ‘Eight hundred new francs each week and you spend most of your time amusing yourself.’
‘There’s a revived interest in leisure,’ I said.
‘I hadn’t noticed any decline among the people who work for me.’ He pushed his Gauloises towards me. We lit up and looked at each other. Loiseau was about fifty years old. Short muscular body with big shoulders. His face was pitted with tiny scars and part of his left ear was missing. His hair was pure white and very short. He had plenty of energy but not so much that he was prepared to waste any. He hung his jacket on his chair back and rolled up his shirtsleeves very neatly. He didn’t look like a policeman now, more like a paratroop colonel planning a coup.
‘You are making inquiries about Monsieur Datt’s clinic on the Avenue Foch.’
‘Everyone keeps telling me that.’
‘Who for?’
I said, ‘I don’t know about that place, and I don’t want to know about it.’
‘I’m treating you like an adult,’ said Loiseau. ‘If you prefer to be treated like a spotty-faced j.v. then we can do that too.’
‘What’s the question again?’
‘I’d like to know who you are working for. However, it would take a couple of hours in the hen cage to get that out of you. So for the time being I’ll tell you this: I am interested in that house and I don’t want you to even come downwind of it. Stay well away. Tell whoever you are working for that the house in Avenue Foch is going to remain a little secret of Chief Inspector Loiseau.’ He paused, wondering how much more to tell me. ‘There are powerful interests involved. Violent groups are engaged in a struggle for criminal power.’
‘Why do you tell me that?’
‘I thought that you should know.’ He gave a Gallic shrug.
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you understand? These men are dangerous.’
‘Then why aren’t you dragging them into your office instead of me?’
‘Oh, they are too clever for us. Also they have well-placed friends who protect them. It’s only when the friends fail that they resort to … coercion, blackmail, killing even. But always skilfully.’
‘They say it’s better to know the judge than to know the law.’
‘Who says that?’
‘I heard it somewhere.’
‘You’re an eavesdropper,’ said Loiseau.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘And a damned good one.’
‘It sounds as though you like it,’ said Loiseau grimly.
‘It’s my favourite indoor sport. Dynamic and yet sedentary; a game of skill with an element of chance. No season, no special equipment …’
‘Don’t be so clever,’ he said sadly. ‘This is a political matter. Do you know what that means?’
‘No. I don’t know what that means.’
‘It means that you might well spend one morning next week being lifted out of some quiet backwater of the St Martin canal and travelling down to the Medico-Legal Institute
where the boys in butchers’ aprons and rubber boots live. They’ll take an inventory of what they find in your pockets, send your clothes to the Poor Law Administration Office, put a numbered armband on you, freeze you to eight degrees centigrade and put you in a rack with two other foolish lads. The superintendent will phone me and I’ll have to go along and identify you. I’ll hate doing that because at this time of year there are clouds of flies as large as bats and a smell that reaches to Austerlitz Station.’ He paused. ‘And we won’t even investigate the affair. Be sure you understand.’
I said, ‘I understand all right. I’ve become an expert at recognizing threats no matter how veiled they are. But before you give a couple of cops tape measures and labels and maps of the St Martin canal, make sure you choose men that your department doesn’t find indispensable.’
‘Alas, you have misunderstood,’ said Loiseau’s mouth, but his eyes didn’t say that. He stared. ‘We’ll leave it like that, but …’
‘Just leave it like that,’ I interrupted. ‘You tell your cops to carry the capes with the lead-shot hems and I’ll wear my water-wings.’
Loiseau allowed his face to become as friendly as it could become.
‘I don’t know where you fit into Monsieur Datt’s clinic, but until I do know I’ll be watching you very closely. If it’s a political affair, then let the political departments request information. There’s no point in us being at each other’s throat. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘In the next few few days you might be in contact with people who claim to be acting for me. Don’t believe them. Anything you want to know, come back to me directly. I’m 22.22.
If you can’t reach me here then this office will know where I am. Tell the operator that “Un sourire est différent d’un rire”.’
‘Agreed,’ I said. The French still use those silly code words that are impossible to use if you are being overheard.
‘One last thing,’ said Loiseau. ‘I can see that no advice, however well meant, can register with you, so let me add that, should you tackle these men and come off best …’ he looked up to be sure that I was listening, ‘… then I will personally guarantee that you’ll manger les haricots for five years.’
‘Charged with …?’
‘Giving Chief Inspector Loiseau trouble beyond his normal duties.’
‘You might be going further than your authority permits,’ I said, trying to give the impression that I too might have important friends.
Loiseau smiled. ‘Of course I am. I have gained my present powerful position by always taking ten per cent more authority than I am given.’ He lifted the phone and jangled the receiver rest so that its bell tinkled in the outer office. It must have been a prearranged signal because his assistant came quickly. Loiseau nodded to indicate the meeting was over.
‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘It was good to see you again.’
‘Again?’
