Murder in Clichy by Cara Black Read Free Book Online

half-buried in the red earth he avoided stepping on, but sniper fire, had shredded his calf and ankle. The piercing, tearing pain brought him to his good knee. His hands had come back covered with his own blood and gristle. Sniper bullets spit all around and he crawled, pulling himself toward the mangroves.
    Adrenalin propelled him and then the chalky earth gave way and he was in a hole, a bombed out Vietminh tunnel on the warm, wet body of a moaning man. A Vietnamese holding his blood-soaked arm. “Help me and I help you,” the man said. “I know a way out. To the temple. No fighting there.”
    What chance did he have? None by himself in the enemy trenches.
    “Call me Jin,” the man said, “My father worked in France. The Vietminh don’t trust me.”
    Gassot had taken off his ammo belt, wrapped it tourniquet-style around Jin’s arm, and staunched the blood. He unscrewed the canteen of Courvoisier that General de Castries had issued to the corps for courage, drank, and shared with Jin. Then he bit a morphine tablet in two, put half in Jin’s mouth and swallowed the other half. He gritted his teeth and bound the loose muscle shreds of his own leg with his shirt. “Show me,” he’d said. “We have to move while we can.” While the morphine lasted.
    Somehow he’d crawled and half-dragged Jin through the tunnel all afternoon—cries, cannon fire and earth-pounding explosions above them. The cognac had loosened Jin’s tongue and he’d sung folksongs. In the evening, when the smoke settled by the river, the French troops had surrendered and he’d never seen Jin again.
    Gassot had survived prison camp. Bamboo cages, and rice gruel if they were lucky. A concrete hole and all the rice paddy rats they could catch when they weren’t. Gangrene had set in and a Parisian-trained Vietminh doctor had amputated his leg above the knee.
    Gassot shook off the memories. What was he doing, reliving the past again, huddled in a doorway on a cold, wet street?
    He headed home to where Avenue de Clichy intersected a maze of narrow streets. He lived in a hotel on the Clichy side, by the derelict marshalling yards of the old steam train line. Once the fief of Mérovingian king Dagobert and much later, home to Verlaine who taught at the nearby lycée; Manet and Renoir’s ateliers; Georges Simenon’s first Paris address; Captain Dreyfus’s apartments, Proust’s suite, Colette’s despised aunt’s bourgeois apartment; the area in which Zola found inspiration for Nana, the courtesan of his novel. And Ho Chi-Minh. Now, they wouldn’t know it.
    He entered his third-floor room. There was no elevator, but the stairs kept him in shape. Going down was the hard part. He opened the door to the back steps. Always keep an escape route, he remembered their commander saying.
    Indochina had lain in rubble and the République ignored its soldiers. Gassot even had to fight for his pension. But the old Colonials, rich and fat with the spoils of Indochina, had thrived. Still thrived.
    Gassot hung up his jacket, unstrapped his prosthesis, set it by the door next to his shoes, and lay on his cot-sized bed. He set his alarm clock and switched off the light. Only the occasional red blink of neon from the kebab shop sign below illuminated his wall giving the military calendar a blood-red glow.
    Gassot put his hands behind his head on the pillow. The past invaded and permeated his thoughts. After the camp released him, he’d recovered, tended by Bao. He remembered the incessant gyaow-gyaow of the cicadas in the hot, still night and the black satin sheen of her hair brushing her slim waist. The aroma of the herbal cloths she laid on his fever-wracked head mingling with the tamarind scent wafting through the blown-out windows. They’d camped in an abandoned yellow stucco, green-shuttered colonial villa, its rococo interior pockmarked by bullet holes. Until the Underground—a ragtag alliance of Ho’s deserters— found her. Took her on a forced labor