ONE

Henri Castang, an officer of police in the criminal brigade of a large city in the provinces, loitered through a Paris street, his hands in his pockets. He was a smallish, closely-knit man and did not slouch: he strolled. He was on his way towards work, a bit before time.

     Going down a steepish hill, he had Paris at his feet. He had been a boy here, a student here, and since then ten years away from here had given him objectivity. An image came into his mind.

     It is like a stained-glass window, he thought. An old one, medieval even; much broken and patched, and suffering like most old things from a lot of restoring in bad taste. Filthy too, etched and scored by the acids of pollution, and crusted by plain dirt, and perhaps the more brilliant for that.

     He had nothing else to think about and his image pleased him. He did not want to think of what lay ahead. The long grey boulevards of Paris are lead, the lead in the window, but between these monotonous streets are irregular splinters of brilliant glass, high in colour. Seen on a sunny morning at the beginning of autumn – it was mid-September – the grimy streets had the patina of an old coin on which the ugliest, lumpiest profile has become dignified, ennobled.

     Nobody could become sentimental about the Porte Saint Denis, least of all Castang. An uninteresting piece of meaningless masonry, dividing a slummy street from a slummy faubourg, at the crossing of a vulgar noisy boulevard. Still, it was an ancient highroad, full of history. Full too of horse-butchers, whores, and rotting greengrocery, and he liked it.

     He went on down the hill. He was in the Rue d’Aboukir. No lead here; it is one of the most luminous splinters in the huge brilliant rose window.

     It is a steep, narrow street where the traffic is always jammed. A double row of tawdry shop-fronts full of cheap textiles. Tourists do not come here, where the wholesale rag trade is crammed in greasy proximity. Darting in and out of every doorway are meagre painted shopgirls, young men too well dressed. In the windows are the sewing-machine girls, nervous and anaemic. On the pavements the elderly businessmen with diamonds and suits beautifully cut talk in mime, and the tough middle-aged businesswomen in complicated bras are giving their bra-less young ladies fierce brief lessons in sales strategy – or the sack.

     In the street is Fagin, theatrical against the backdrop of gaudy fairground booths, like the coachmen in Petrushka, shaking a long-nailed finger at the dirty boy pushing the handcart. And the mighty army too of the old women of Paris with their bandaged poor legs and old tennis shoes slit to ease bunions, doing everything imaginable that is eccentric and dignified, humble and proud.

     Castang was looking at it all, but with only one eye. The other was professionally examining the Levantine boltholes of the Rue d’Alexandrie and the Place de Caire. Somewhere along here a man was in hiding, a man whom Castang had come to Paris to arrest. A dangerous man, who carried a gun. Castang was on his way to meet someone who had found out the hiding-place. The disposition of traffic might come to have importance.

     He pattered on, sweating slightly in warm humid air, his jacket buttoned because of his gun in a belt holster. Shoulder holsters sound fancier, but are mortally slow.

     The Rue d’Aboukir ends abruptly. Contrasting-coloured glass: the Place des Victoires, a quiet, shabby little square with a discoloured periwigged Louis on a horse. Here policemen hold discreet rendezvous with pigeons; a colleague was waiting for him, a bony man with dust-coloured hair, eating small bits of bread with a sad head held on one side, the pigeons sneering at him. The two men shook hands limply. The Paris cop left his car where it was: in the Rue d’Aboukir a car is no use to anybody. Behind them two more plain-clothes cops strolled up the hill, all marble unconcern. When their superiors turned into a courtyard stuffed with rags they posted themselves and waited quietly. Nobody appeared to be expecting them, but the place was oddly free of people.

     The two officers had not met before this morning, but understood each other: a simple sign language guided them. They crossed the court, entered a passage, found themselves with a choice of doors. The first was an office, empty but for dust and paper, the second a dank lavatory. The third, when gently tried, seemed locked. There was a brief mimed debate. There are various ways of dealing with locked doors but the shortest was the best. They examined the door frame, nodded, stepped back, lifted each a leg, and hit the wooden traverse together hard. The door broke, but gave unwillingly: it was barricaded with bales of rags. It delayed them, and the delay meant a fusillade. They couldn’t help that, but were glad that baled rags will stop bullets.

     Three pistols together made a tremendous noise. The Paris cop, flat on his chest, fired five times without stopping, with no particular idea of hitting anything but hoping to intimidate, to make the man duck, flinch, and give Castang behind a bale time to get over it. He was elastically built and had been a fairish performer on parallel bars: he went over feet first and found himself very close to a man with a gun, close enough to punch him in the stomach with his pistol barrel instead of shooting him. While they were both on the floor the dusty man, now dustier than ever, jumped the bale and hit the gunman under the nose with the heel of his hand. They all got up sneezing, the gunman further handicapped by tears, a smear of blood and handcuffs. Ten shots had been fired and only the rags had been hit. Castang picked up two pistols and gave the man a paper handkerchief.

     A kind of nest had been made, furnished and fortified by bales. There were some empty coffee cups and beer bottles, some gnawed sausage and several newspapers. For some days it had been home.

     Behind his barricades this man had built illusions of peace. He had been left quiet and had come to believe in safety. He could daydream of green fields and softly flowing water. He could gather strength, concentrate force, hope, plan. To be sure there was very little difference from a cell in the Santé prison. But Castang, sharpened by having just risked his life, saw beyond the rags.

     One could dream about peace anywhere. What difference was there that counted between this dusty storeroom and a country cottage, or, come to that, a suburban living-room with a piano? Or a flat with a picture window, looking down onto Paris-by-night, high in a tower? It was the peace which counted. Home can be the framework of one’s mattress.

     In the yard, the two cops were saying ‘Move’ to a few morbid onlookers attracted by gunfire. In the building, nobody had budged, which was as planned. They took the handcuffed man by the elbows, neither gently nor roughly, and hurried him down to the car in the square. People looked with mild interest. A change from waiting for the lights to go green at the top, but it was just another bundle of rags, more or less. There were circles under Castang’s arms, from fear as much as humidity. He hitched his shirt off a sticky back, but the others were in the same state.