The Night Watch by Patrick Modiano Read Free Book Online Page B

. .
    At Fouquet, they linger at their tables. Most of them have lost all semblance of humanity. One can almost see their entrails beneath their gaudy rags. In the waiting hall at Saint-Lazare, corpses drift in serried groups; I see a few escaping through the windows of commuter trains. On the Rue d’Amsterdam, the patrons streaming out of Le Monseigneur have a sickly green pallor but seem better preserved than the ones before. I continue my night rounds. Élysée-Montmartre. Magic City. Luna Park. Rialto-Dancing. Ten thousand, a hundred thousand drowned souls moving slowly, languidly, like the cast of a film projected in slow motion. Silence. Now and then they brush up against the bathyscaphe, their faces – glassy-eyed, open-mouthed – pressed against the porthole.
    . . .
Swing Troubadour . . .
    I can never go back up to the surface. The air is growing thin, the lights in the bar begin to flicker, and I find myself back at Austerlitz station in summer. Everyone is leaving for the Southern Zone. They jostle each other to get to the ticket windows and board trains bound for Hendaye. They will cross the Spanish border. They will never be seen again. There are still one or two strolling along the station platforms but they too will fade any second now. Hold them back? I head west through Paris. Châtelet. Palais-Royal. Place de la Concorde. The sky is too blue, the leaves are much too delicate. The gardens along the Champs-Élysées look like a thermal spa.
    Avenue Kléber. I turn left. Place Cimarosa.
A peaceful square of the kind you only find in the 16th arrondissement
. The bandstand is deserted now, the statue of Toussaint L’Ouverture is eaten away by greyish lichen. The house at 3
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once belonged to Monsieur and Madame de Bel-Respiro. On 13 May, 1897, they held a masked ball on the theme of the Arabian Nights; Monsieur de Bel-Respiro’s son greeted guests dressed as a rajah. The young man died the next day in a fire at the Bazar de la Charité. Madame de Bel-Respiro loved music, especially Isidore Lara’s ‘Le Rondel de l’adieu’. Monsieur de Bel-Respiro liked to paint in his spare time. I feel the need to mention such details because everyone has forgotten them.
    August in Paris brings forth a flood of memories. The sunshine, the deserted avenues, the rustle of chestnut trees . . . I sit on a bench and look up at the façade of brick and stone. The shutters now have long since been boarded up. Coco Lacour’s and Esmeralda’s rooms were on the third floor. I had the attic room at the left. In the living room, a full-length self-portrait of Monsieur de Bel-Respiro in his Spahi officer’s uniform. I would spend long moments staring at his face, at the medals that bedecked his chest.
Légion d’honneur
. The Order of the Holy Sepulchre, the Order of Saint George from Russia, the Order of Prince Danilo from Montenegro, the Order of the Tower and Sword from Portugal. I had exploited this man’s absence to commandeer his house. The nightmare would end, I told myself, Monsieur de Bel-Respiro would come back and turn us out, I told myself, while they were torturing that poor devil downstairs and he was staining the Savonnerie carpet with his blood. Strange things went on at 3
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while I lived there. Some nights I would be wakened by screams of pain, footsteps scurrying to and fro on the main floor. The Khedive’s voice. Or Philibert’s. I would look out of the window. Two or three shadowy forms were being bundled into the cars parked outside the house. Doors slammed. The roar of the engines would grow fainter and fainter. Silence. Impossible to get back to sleep. I was thinking about Monsieur de Bel-Respiro’s son, about his tragic death. It was not something he had been raised to consider. Even the Princess de Lamballe would have been astonished if she had learned of her own execution a few years beforehand. And me? Who would have guessed that I would be a henchman to a gang of torturers? But all I had to do