“You must be hungry …”
She had a husky voice and, I thought, a slight accent.
“Will you help me bring dinner in?” she asked him curtly.
“Of course.”
The two of them got up.
“It’s a cold supper,” she said. “Will that be all right?”
“That’s perfect,” said Jacqueline.
He had taken the woman by the shoulder and steered her out of the living room. He stuck his head through the doorway.
“You like champagne?”
He had lost his dental accent.
“Very much,” said Jacqueline.
“Be right back.”
We sat alone in the living room for a few minutes, and I’m racking my brains to remember as many details as I can. The French windows looking out on the boulevard were half-open because of the heat. It was at 19 Boulevard Raspail. In 1965. A grand piano at the very back of the room. The sofa and the two armchairs were made of the same black leather. The coffee table of chrome-plated metal. A name like Devez or Duvelz. The scar on the cheek. The unbuttoned blouse. A very bright light, as if from a projector, or rather a flashlight. It lights only a portion of the scene, an isolated instant, leaving the rest in shadow. We will never know what happened next or who those two people really were.
We slipped out of the living room and, without shutting the door behind us, crept down the stairs. Earlier, we had taken the elevator, but it wasn’t red like the one mentioned by Gisèle T.
A statement by a waiter who worked in a restaurant-nightclub in Le Perreux figures on the front page of an evening paper in that month of April 1933. The headline is as follows:
POLICE SEARCHING FOR TWO COUPLES
WHO SPENT EVENING IN APARTMENT
OF YOUNG CHEMIST AND HIS WIFE
At police headquarters in the Val-de-Grâce precinct, though the investigation has been called off because it was ruled a double suicide, they tell us that the young couple had gone not only to Montparnasse but also to the banks of the Marne, to Le Perreux; and that they went not just with two women but with two women and two men…. Attempts to locate these four individuals have so far been in vain.
We went to Le Perreux in hopes of gleaning a few important details on the moments preceding the tragedy.
In a “restaurant-nightclub” on the Quai de l’Artois, they clearly remember the presence of the two young persons.
“They arrived at around ten,” states the waiter who served them. “They were alone. She was very pretty, blonde, very slim … They were sitting over there, under the balcony. Is that where they met the people they invited home? I didn’t notice. We get a lot of traffic on Saturday nights at that time of year. They didn’t seem to be having an especially good time. In any case, I remember they settled their check at eleven-thirty.”
It is hard to take this testimony at face value, as it presupposes that the T.’s had gone to Le Perreux alone, and of their own accord. But everything we know about their life in the quiet neighborhood around Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques suggests that they were not the type to frequent dance halls on the banks of the Marne on Saturday nights. No, it was certainly the two unknown women, met in Montparnasse, who took them to Le Perreux that night, as Gisèle T. had herself indicated. And one has to wonder why the waiter made such a statement. Did he confuse them with other customers? More likely, he was trying to steer the investigators away from the people in whose company he had seen the T.’s, two women and two men, no doubt regulars of the establishment. The two women from Montparnasse knew the two men. But where — asked the newspaper article — was the house with the red elevator that Gisèle T. had spoken of?
Leaving the Café de la Marine, the T.’s and the two unknown women might have taken a taxi. But no cab driver, the day after the tragedy, told investigators that he’d driven four fares to Le Perreux-sur-Marne. Nor had a single one come forward to say that he’d brought back several couples from Le Perreux to number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques at around two in the morning.
In those days, one went from Paris to Nogent-sur-Marne and Le Perreux via the train station at Bastille or the Gare de l’Est. The trains leaving from Bastille followed the so-called Vincennes line, up to Verneuil-L’Etang. I knew that line even in the early sixties, before the RER replaced it and the Bastille train station was demolished to make way for the new Opera.
The tracks ran along the viaduct on Avenue Daumesnil, whose arches were populated with cafés, warehouses, and businesses. Why do I so often walk along this viaduct in my dreams? This is what one discovered under its arches, in the shade of the plane trees along the avenue:
L’Armanite Laboratory
Garage des Voûtes
Peyremorte
Corrado Casadei
Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Dispensary
Dell’Aversano
La Régence, furniture maker
Les Marbres Français
Café Bosc
Alligator, Ghesquière and Co.
Sava Autos
Daumesnil Wireworks
Café Labatie
La Radieuse heating
Testas, nonferrous metals
Café-Tabac Valadier
One summer evening, at Café Bosc, just before my departure for Vienna, the tables were set out on the sidewalk. I couldn’t take my eyes off the lights of the Gare de Lyon, nearby …
The train stopped at Reuilly, then at Bel-Air. It exited Paris via the Porte Montempoivre. It passed by the Braille school and made a stop at Saint-Mandé station, near the lake. Then it was Vincennes, and the station at Nogent-sur-Marne, at the edge of the forest.
From Nogent station, they would have had to walk all the way up Grande Rue to the town of Le Perreux. Unless the two men came to pick them up in a car.
It seems more likely that when leaving the Café de la Marine with the two women, they headed down into the Raspail metro stop, a few yards away from the café.
The metro runs directly to the Gare de l’Est. There, they took the train on the Mulhouse line. When it left Paris, crossing the Canal Saint-Denis, one could see, from above, the slaughterhouses of La Villette. The train stopped in Pantin. Then it ran along the Canal de l’Ourcq. Noisy-le-Sec, Rosny-sous-Bois. They arrived at Le Perreux station. They stepped onto the platform and the train continued on its way, over the viaduct that crosses the Marne River. The two women took them to a restaurant-nightclub right nearby, on the Quai de l’Artois. They were now a group of six, including the two unknown men.
I remember the Quai de l’Artois, which began at the foot of the viaduct. Just opposite was the Ile des Loups. During the years 1964 and 1965, I went to that island: a certain Claude Bernard, to whom I’d sold a music box and several old books, had invited my girlfriend, Jacqueline, and me there several times. He lived in a kind of chalet, with bow windows and verandas. One afternoon, he photographed us on one of the verandas, to try out his new camera, and a few moments later he handed us the color image: it was the first time I’d ever seen a Polaroid.
This Claude Bernard was about forty years old and made his living as a dealer in secondhand goods: he owned warehouses, a stall at the Saint-Ouen flea market, and even a used bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, which is where I’d first met him. After dinner, he drove Jacqueline and me back to Paris in a gray Jaguar. A few years later, I lost touch with him for good. His stall at the flea market and his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy had vanished into thin air. The phone number to his house on the Ile des Loups was “no longer in service.”
I’m thinking of him because of the Ile des Loups. In one of the articles about what the newspapers labeled “the tragic orgy,” they hinted that the police might have identified one of the unknown men that the T.’s and the two women had met in the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois: a resident of Le Perreux. As far as I’m concerned, he could only have lived on the Ile des Loups. And given the waiter’s dubious testimony, I wonder whether the T.’s and the two other couples even went to the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois that evening. It seems more likely that one of the men took them to the Ile des Loups, for that was where the house with the red elevator stood.