“Where is the Comédie-Fran?aise?”
“On a side street in Pigalle. It doesn’t have a sign because the movies are so dirty.”
“Okay, okay, but what was the title?”
“In pornographic movies the title is unimportant,” Raschid Belghazi said with the authority of a professor.
“We have to check it out. What was the plot?”
“The plot? This chick goes to a tropical resort and everybody fucks her, even the women, even on the airplane.”
“You mean in the airplane, unless they’re all wing walkers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Never mind. Tell us a detail you remember.”
Raschid laughed. “I know!” he said. “This you can’t forget. She goes into a hut on the tropical island and has sex with a guy, but through the window you can see the top of the Arc de Triomphe, covered in snow. I don’t think anyone noticed but me, because when I yelled out they all told me to shut up.”
“Duvalier,” Arnaud said, “you realize, you’re going to have to see that movie.”
“We’ll both go. Maybe we can arrange a screening at the Comédie-Fran?aise.”
Raschid then told the rest of his story.
“Describe the guy,” Arnaud commanded.
“He was very tall, heavy, bald, a mustache. He yelled at us in German.”
“Do you know German?”
“No, but I can recognize it.”
“You said he made racist insults. In German?”
Raschid nodded.
“How do you know?”
“Arabische Schweinen? That sounds racist to me.”
“Is it grammatical?” Duvalier asked, turning to Weissenburger.
“How should I know?”
“Weissenburger?”
“You don’t speak Arabic.”
Duvalier pressed on. “Your description of him is completely different from what the two witnesses say they saw. Why? Don’t you want us to find him? Was it a drug deal? Was he someone you attacked on the bridge?”
“So why did he run?” Raschid asked indignantly. “I didn’t run. He killed my two friends. I swear, we didn’t attack him. We didn’t. I can take a lie detector test. He just came out of nowhere.”
“Did he look like Gérard Depardieu?” Arnaud asked.
“Are you kidding?” Raschid asked. “This guy was an athlete. Gérard Depardieu is as fat as a hippopotamus.”
Duvalier turned to Arnaud and they both stepped aside to where Raschid couldn’t hear them. “I like the kid,” he said. “He’s kind of an idiot, but so was I at that age, in a different way I admit.”
“I like him, too,” Arnaud said. “It makes me want to find out who did this even more. Why kill some jerky kids who think the Comédie-Fran?aise is a pornographic movie house?”
“None of them has a record. We’ll have to make some inquiries, but I don’t think this kid is attached to a gang or anything. He’s too dumb. Okay, the gangs use dumb ones, but they’re always afraid, and he isn’t, unless he’s dumber than anyone I’ve ever encountered. Granted, he’s a tabula rasa, but I don’t think he’s mixed up enough in drugs or the underworld to have had anything impressed upon him yet. I mean, maybe when the cars were burning he threw a brick or two, but I’m not even sure he’d know how.”
“Informants?” Arnaud suggested.
“Do you have any? Because I don’t. We can ask the local cops, but so what. These guys are the victims. Let’s not forget that.”
They asked Raschid a few more questions about the details of the encounter, and the interview came to an end as a giant Airbus, forced by traffic and the wind to make its turn southeast of Paris before setting a near-polar course, roared overhead so loudly that it sent the forest of television antennas on the roof into aluminum hysteria.
A Million Swimming Pools
LIKE REMNANTS OF Pacific spray sparkling in the sun, a million swimming pools were sprinkled across the hills, ravines, and flats of Los Angeles, glinting sapphire and aquamarine from Mexican-tended foils of green. Veins of blinding molten silver in newly burgeoning watercourses testified to a recent October rain. And the unstoppable, inescapable traffic, never ceasing, coursed through arteries everywhere. As the plane made slow and methodical turns that with baby G forces pressed Jules against his seat, he strained to stay close to the window.
Wheeling now over the Pacific, now over villa-covered hills, Jules was able to sense that the lightness and ease of Los Angeles arose as if the whole city wanted to float up and be carried away on the wind. But though held down by a netting of freeways, roads, streets, fence lines, canals, high tension wires, telephone and other communications lines, and tens of thousands of radio and microwave rays that, were they light, would have encased the city in a gleaming, golden skein, Los Angeles, perhaps more than any place in the world, pulled buoyantly against the threads that tethered it. It was balmy, sunny, happy, and unreal.
THE CAR JULES HAD rented was not available, so he was promised it at his hotel the next day. In the taxi ride from LAX to the Four Seasons on Doheny, he was shell-shocked by the Persian horde of traffic, the massive construction, the ceaseless and insane maneuvers of cars, the cranes, helicopters, road workers, pedestrians, police, the desperate commercial density, and the radio.
“I know who that is,” he said to the taxi driver as a giant plane roared overhead after having almost given the Getty a haircut.
“Who who is?” the taxi driver returned.
“Erre, e, esse, pé, e, cé, té.”
“What?”
“‘Respect.’ Aretha Franklin. She’s excellently popular in France.”
“That’s the oldies station. I can change it.”
“No, I like it.”
“Aretha who?”‘
“Franklin.”
“I think that’s from a long time ago.”
“How old are you?” Jules asked.
“Twenty.”
“Oh.”
“Are you a pilot?” the taxi driver wanted to know.
“A pilot? Why do you ask?”
“I picked you up at the airport. Air Ethiopia. Did you ever jump out of a parachute?”
Jules thought, so this is America. Then he answered. “I jumped out of an airplane. I was a paratrooper. How did you know?”
“Because I’d like to be one. I’d like to jump out of a helicopter into the ocean. With a surfboard. That would be cool.”
“You could do that, maybe minus the surfboard,” Jules told him, “if you set your mind to it.” They were passing a Bank of America at the edge of Beverly Hills. Although Jules was the same careful, honest man he had always been, he was also now a different man, on the run from the police, freer, crazier. So he said, “How about helping me rob a bank?” It was a joke, of course.
The taxi driver was silent for a block. Then he said, “When?”
“We’d have to plan it. The hard part for me would be getting the money back to France. But you don’t have that problem.” That also was a joke.
“Just one?”
“Just one what?” Jules asked.
“Just one bank?”
“Oh no, but we stop at six … banks, not o’clock.”