Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction by Dominique Sylvain, Michael Moorcock, Jerome Charyn, Jason Starr, Cara Black, John Williams, Barry Gifford, John Harvey, Scott Phillips, Stella Duffy, Maxim Jakubowski, Jean-Hugues Oppel, Dominique Manotti, Sparkle Hayter, Jake Lamar, Jim Nisbet, Romain Slocombe Read Free Book Online Page A

to signify that your heartbeats are converging, coming closer and closer still.
    Towards evening we crossed over the river at Pont Neuf and went to Renée the gypsy’s hotel. We asked if she had room for us. She smiled, sat there huge in her robes in the front room. ‘Yes darlings,’ she said, ‘I have three rooms. Five beds. You will be OK, I think.’
    We thought so too. We didn’t assign the beds just yet. It was not only Beth and I who were caught up in anticipation of what developments the night might bring.
    On a roll now, we decided to go out and sing some more. The only place to busk after dark was the rue St André des Arts, a tourist-packed, café-lined walkway though the busiest part of the Left Bank, from St Michel to the rue Bonaparte. Halfway along, the road suddenly widened outside a school. It was the perfect place to set up and play: the night was fine and warm and the tourists were out in force, their generosity levels raised by drink. Beth sang her featured number, ‘24 Hours From Tulsa’, with all the sweetness and charming flatness of a young Françoise Hardy. My cap was filling up not just with the usual francs and centimes, but actual folding money.
    Emboldened by our success, I actually started asking for requests, when a window opened in an apartment four stories up and across the road from us. A man leaned out, yelled something, disappeared, then reappeared with a bucket of water, which he threw down at us, splashing a couple of tourists but doing little harm.
    ‘When he does that he always calls the police afterwards,’ said a passing local.
    ‘Oh, right,’ I said, ‘so how long do the police take to arrive?’
    ‘Ten minutes,’ said the local.
    ‘OK,’ I said to the crowd, ‘the police are coming in ten minutes, that means we have five minutes to play a request, what would you like?’
    An American smartarse called out for some Captain Beefheart. We looked at each other, Don gave me a thumbs up and whipped up a mighty percussive burst from which we launched into something that bore a very faint resemblance to ‘Big-Eyed Beans from Venus’. I’m sure to those watching it was just a cacophony, but, as I say, we were young and we were cute and they must have felt something of our own intoxication, because they laughed and cheered and put more money into the cap, then we saluted and promised to be back same time, same place tomorrow, and hotfooted it down the street just as the police came barrelling along in the opposite direction.
    We were heading for the buskers’ café. It probably had some other name, maybe it was the Café St André des Arts or something entirely forgettable like that, but everyone knew it as the buskers’ café. It was full of 1970s hangovers, French guys with long hair and battered acoustics exchanging tips on how to play Neil Young songs. Up to now we’d held each other in amiable mutual contempt: they thought we were idiot punk rockers who couldn’t play an instrument, we thought they were ridiculous old hippies in Gauloise-reeking velvet jackets.
    This time though, as we approached, I could see a whole bunch of these guys, five or six of them, mostly with guitars out, sitting at the big table in the window. They were banging their way through ‘Hey Jude’, which was not unusual, except for the fact that they were all joining in and two of them were playing the spoons on the table, and in the instrumental break one of them pulled out a kazoo. We stood there open-mouthed. The hippie bastards were stealing our act.
    It would have been too embarrassing to go in there now. So, as usual, everyone looked to me to come up with an alternative. Ifor the anarchist had taken me to a bar around here, I was sure. Could I remember where it was? Of course I could. I led the way unerringly, and soon we were sitting around the front table of a real locals bar, counting our takings and drinking the cheapest
vin rouge
yet, while watching a Chinese kid, maybe ten years