being a detective
———
Finding the fat man had not been easy. In the morning he woke early, and took his coffee standing up beside an outdoors kiosk, with Sacré Coeur towering overhead. He took the Métro to Boulevard Haussmann and was stationed outside the post office at number 102 when it opened.
Joe was the first customer.
He located the post box easily enough. The post office was an old, run-down establishment on the ground floor of 102. There were apartments above. Inside, the sound of traffic was strangely diminished, and the lighting, too, was dim, and the floor was stained concrete, and the spots on the floor and walls could have been old blood stains from the German war or they could have been spilled coffee – either way they weren’t telling. The woman guarding the boxes did not ask him for identification but he still made a show of jingling keys in his pocket and going confidently, as if merely to collect his morning post. There were rows upon rows of small wooden doors set in the walls, thousands of boxes: already the first customers of the day were coming in, each wrapped in their own private universe, each going to their own small address, and for a moment the feeling came to Joe of the weight of expectations there, the pressing body of letters waiting just behind the little locked doors, beyond the thin makeshift wooden walls and the metal grilles that separated the inside and outside of this outpost. He thought of wild mail, living freely behind those doors; of lost mail, like buried treasure, waiting to be unearthed in dark booby-trapped tombs; and of the mail that wasn’t there but was hoped for, the unreal mail that would never be written or delivered, but still hoped for every day, still expected against all hope: We made a mistake, your daughter is alive. Please accept our apology, your son has been found well and is on his way back home. And then he shook his head, because he was being fanciful, and he had located the box, and now all he had to do was wait for the man to come and collect his post, because one thing a publisher had to do every day, if nothing else that day, was check his mail. He was tempted to break the lock and look inside, but decided against it. There would be time later, but for now he needed only to watch, and wait: which was ninety-five percent of being a detective.
By noon he had seen no sign of a man fitting the description of Papadopoulos. At one o’clock he bought half a baguette with ham and cheese and a thin mayonnaise, and washed it down with two small black coffees. At half past one he had to go in search of a bathroom, which he at last found in a local brasserie, where they grudgingly let him use it. At two o’clock he thought he saw someone fitting the description and followed him for forty-five minutes through twists and turns and stops that seemed very promising, until the man at last went into a butcher’s shop on Rue de Londres with pig heads staring mournfully through the glass: the man turned the sign on the door from Closed to Open, put on a white apron, and went behind the counter.
Joe decided to call it a day. As he walked back, the great grey structure of the Gare St. Lazare rose above him, and he watched the dark railway lines spread out from the station like a spider bite, their paths crisscrossing and hatching, and the great metal beasts of burden trudged along them, fleeing across the earth. His footsteps led him to the back of the station. It seemed a wild wasteland that took him by surprise. Beyond the gate, at the back of the station, pools of standing water littered the ground, and amidst them, like a still landscape, were strewn abandoned objects, broken and unwanted, like sacrificial offerings to St. Lazare. Joe paused as his shoes squelched in the water, and watched a man leap from a floating wooden ladder, his reflection caught in the smooth surface of the water. He saw bicycle tires, and disused pipes, a wet newspaper, an army helmet, clothes pegs, a broken torch, an upturned beer crate, a pair of spectacles with the glass missing, a toy monkey with its eyes missing, something that looked like the inside of an electronic device of some sort, all wires and copper, lines in complicated patterns, a milk bottle, an empty packet of cigarettes, a floating ticket stub, for a train or a cinema, a broken pencil, white toilet paper strewn this way and that like bandages that had been torn away from a rising corpse. All that and, as his eyes wandered over the sea of debris, that geography of abandoned human lives, further away and to the left, disappearing behind a corner: polished black shoes.
‘Hey!’ Joe shouted. ‘Wait!’ And he ran, following the shoes, but as he turned the corner there was nobody there. Joe swore. Then he said, ‘Enough,’ and turned, and went to the St. Lazare Métro station. The clouds were amassing overhead, and as he descended the steps into the underworld of the train network, a fine rain began steadily to fall.