CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Marcia, 5

THE FIRST ROOM in Madame Marcia’s store, the room her son David is in charge of, is full of small items of furniture: marble-topped coffee-tables, nesting tables, puffy poufs, trestle chairs, Early American stools from the old staging post at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, prayer stools, X-shaped canvas folding chairs with whorled feet, etc. Against the walls, hung with plain brown hessian, stand several bookcases of different depths and heights with shelves covered in green baize with red leather trim studded with large-headed brass nails, and on them a whole assortment of objects stands in meticulous order: a candy box with a crystal base and delicately chased gold feet and lid, antique rings displayed on narrow tubes of white card, a moneychanger’s weighing scales, some headless coins found by Engineer Andrussov whilst clearing the line of the Trans-Caspian railway, an illuminated book open at a miniature depicting a Virgin and Child, a print portraying the suicide at Bourg-Baudoin of Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière (the revolutionary politician, in mauve breeches and striped jacket, is kneeling to scrawl the brief note in which he explains his gesture. Through a half-open door can be seen a man in a Marseilles waistcoat and a Phrygian bonnet, armed with a long pike, looking at him full of hatred); two of Bembo’s Tarot cards, one showing the devil, the other the House of God; a miniature fortress with four aluminium towers and seven spring-loaded drawbridges, equipped with little toy soldiers; other, bigger model soldiers, representing Poilus from the Great War: one officer looking through binoculars, another sitting on a powder keg and studying a map on his lap; a runner saluting as he hands a sealed dispatch to a general in a cape; a soldier fitting his bayonet; another, in fatigues, leading a horse by the reins; a third soldier unrolling a coil-dispenser supposedly containing Bickford fuse tape; an octagonal mirror in a tortoiseshell frame; several lamps, including two lamp brackets held out by human arms, similar to those which come alive, on some nights, in the film Beauty and the Beast; scale models of shoes, carved in wood, concealing pill boxes or snuff boxes; a young woman’s head in painted wax, with red hairs stuck onto her head, one by one, for use by hairdressers in advertising displays; Junior Gutenberg, a child’s printing set dating from the nineteen twenties, including not only a full case of rubber characters, a composing line, tweezers, and inking rollers, but also images in relief on lino blocks, allowing texts to be decorated with various colophons: flower garlands, bunches of grapes and vine leaves, a gondola, a large pyramid, a small Christmas tree, shrimps, a unicorn, a gaucho, etc.

On the little desk David Marcia sits at in the daytime can be found a numismatic book-collector’s classic, the Collection of the Coins of China, Japan, etc. by Baron de Chaudoir, and an invitation card to the world premiere of Suite sérielle 94 by Octave Coppel.

The shop’s original occupant was a glass-engraver who worked mostly for store outfitters and whose delicate flourishes could still be admired in the early nineteen fifties on the frosted-glass mirrors of Riri’s Café, until Monsieur Riri, yielding to fashion, had them replaced with Formica and glued hessian panels. His successors who came and went were a seedsman, an old watchmaker found dead one day on the premises amongst his clocks which had all stopped, a locksmith, a lithographer, a deckchair maker, a fishing-tackle shop, and finally, around the end of the 1930s, a saddler by the name of Albert Massy.

The son of a Saint-Quentin fish farmer, Massy hadn’t always been a saddler. At sixteen, whilst doing his apprenticeship at Levallois, he joined a racing club and immediately proved to be an exceptionally good cyclist: a good climber, a strong sprinter, a fantastic pacemaker, quick to pick up, instinctively knowing when and whom to attack, Massy had the makings of one of those giants of road-racing whose exploits spangle the golden age of cycling: at the age of twenty, scarcely having turned professional, he displayed his mettle to spectacular effect: in the penultimate stage (Ancona–Bologna) of the Giro d’Italia 1924, his first major trial, between Forlì and Faenza, he broke away at such a rate of acceleration that only Alfredo Binda and Enrici could tuck in to his slipstream: this ensured Enrici his overall victory and got Massy a very honourable fifth place.

One month later, in his first and last Tour de France, Massy almost repeated his performance to even better effect, and in the very tough Alpine stage from Grenoble to Briançon he only just missed taking the yellow jersey from Bottecchia, who had worn it from day one. With Leduc and Magne, also doing their first Tour de France, he made a breakaway at the Aveynat bridge and had distanced the bunch by the time they reached the exit from Rochetaillé. Their lead grew progressively over the next fifty kilometres: thirty seconds at Bourg d’Oisans, one minute at Dauphin, two at Villar-d’Arène, before the long climb to the summit of the Col du Lautaret. Electrified by the crowds, who were delighted to see Frenchmen at last threatening the unbeatable Bottecchia, the three young racers breasted the Col with a lead of three minutes: all they now had to do was to let themselves go in a triumphant descent down to Briançon; in whatever order the others crossed the line, Massy, as long as he kept his three-minute lead over Bottecchia, would obligatorily become race leader: but twenty kilometres before the finishing post, just before Monêtier-les-Bains, he skidded on a turn and fell, doing no serious damage to himself but with a disastrous effect on his machine: the front forks snapped clean off. In those days the regulations forbade riders to change bicycles within stages, and the young roadster had to quit the race.

The end of his season was dismal. His team manager, who had almost unbounded faith in his star youngster’s promise, managed to persuade him, as he went on saying he would give up racing forever, that his bad luck in the Tour had left him with a real road-phobia, and succeeded in making him take up track-racing instead.

Massy thought first of all of doing six-day events and to this end got in touch with the veteran Austrian pursuit rider Peter Mond, whose usual teammate, Hans Gottlieb, had just retired. But Mond had already signed with Arnold Augenlicht, so Massy decided – on the advice of Toto Grassin – to go in for motor-paced racing: of all the forms of cycle sport, it was at that time the most popular, and champions like Brunier, Georges Wambst, Sérès, Paillard, and the American Walthour were literally worshipped by the Sunday crowds which filled the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the Buffalo Bowl, the covered track at Berny, and the stadium at Parc des Princes.

Massy’s youth and enthusiasm worked miracles, and on the fifteenth of October 1925, less than a year after his debut in the event, the novice stayer beat the world one-hour record at Montlhéry by pedalling 118.75 kilometres behind his pacer Barrère’s big motorcycle, fitted for the occasion with a primitive windshield. The Belgian Léon Vanderstuyft, motor-paced by Deliège on the same circuit a fortnight earlier, using a rather bigger cowl, had only reached 115.098 kilometres.

In other circumstances this record might have been the start of a prodigious career in motor-paced championship riding; but it turned out to be no more than a sad apotheosis without a morrow. Massy was in fact at that time, and had so been for only six weeks, a private in the First Transport Regiment at Vincennes, and though he had obtained special leave for his championship challenge, he had not managed to get the leave postponed when one of the three judges required by International Cycling Federation rules cancelled two days before the date fixed.

His performance was thus not made official. Massy fought the decision as hard as he could, which wasn’t easy from the back of his barracks despite the spontaneous support given not just by his hut comrades, for whom he was obviously an idol, but also by his superiors up to and including the colonel commanding the garrison, who even got a speech made in parliament by the War Minister, who was none other than Paul Painlevé.

The International Homologation Committee remained unmovable; all Massy could get was authorisation to make a second attempt in regulation conditions. He went back into training with determination and confidence, and in December, at his next attempt, impeccably motor-paced by Barrère, he beat his own record by covering 119.851 kilometres in the hour. But that didn’t prevent him shaking his head in sadness as he dismounted: some two weeks previously, Jean Brunier, pedalling behind Lautier’s motorcycle, had done 120.958 kilometres, and Massy knew he hadn’t beaten him.

This injustice of fate which robbed him of ever seeing his name in the lists of champions, despite his having been, in actual fact, world champion in the professional one-hour motor-paced event from 15 October to 14 November 1925, so demoralised Massy that he resolved to give up cycling completely. But then he made a bad mistake: barely discharged from military service, instead of looking for a job far from the roaring crowds of the velodromes, he became a pacemaker, that is to say a motorcyclist, pacing a very young stayer, Lino Margay, a stubborn and inexhaustible chap from Picardy who had chosen motor-pacing out of admiration for Massy’s exploits and had come at his own initiative to ride under his auspices.

The pacemaker’s lot is not a happy one. He stands arched over his big motorbike with legs straight and elbows tucked in to the body to make the best windshield possible, he pulls along his stayer and directs him as he races in such a way that he minimises his energy output and at the same time puts himself in a favourable position for attacking one opponent or another. It is a terribly tiring posture; almost all the body’s weight is carried on the tip of the left foot; the pose has to be held for an hour or ninety minutes without moving an arm or a leg, the pacemaker can barely see his stayer and is practically unable, given the noise of his machine, to hear any message from him: all he can do, at the most, is to communicate with him by brief nods of the head, with meanings agreed in advance, that he’s about to accelerate, slow down, go up to the banked edge, dive off the banking, or overtake some opponent. All the rest, the rider’s physical form, his aggressivity, his morale, has to be guessed. The racer and his pacer must thus be as one man, think and act as one man, make the same analysis of the progress of the race at the same time and draw the same consequences at the same instant: any delay, and the rider is lost: a pacer who allows an enemy motorcycle to get into a position that cuts his slipstream cannot then help losing his stayer; the stayer who fails to follow his pacer when the latter accelerates into a bend so as to attack a rival will burst his lungs when he tries to close up on the rollers again; in either case, in a few seconds, the rider loses any chance he might have had of winning.

From the start of their association, it was obvious to all that Massy and Margay would make a model tandem, one of those teams people still cite as examples of a perfect match, in the mould of those other celebrated two-man teams of the twenties and thirties, the great age of motor-paced racing, such as Lénart and Pasquier senior, De Wied and Bisserot, or the Swiss Stampfli and D’Entrebois.

For several years Massy led Margay to victory in all the great velodromes of Europe. And for many years, when he heard the audience in the stalls or on the stands cheer Lino on with a deafening roar and rise to their feet to chant his name as soon as he appeared on the track in his mauve-striped white jersey, when he saw him, the winner, step up to the podium to receive his medals and his bouquets of flowers, he felt only joy and pride.

But, as time passed, these acclamations that were not for him, these honours he should have known and which only an iniquitous fatality had deprived him of, aroused in him a resentment that grew ever sharper. He began to hate those howling crowds which ignored him and stupidly adored the hero of the day who owed his victories only to him, to his experience, to his willpower, to his technique, to his abnegation. And, as though he needed, in order to confirm him in his hatred and his contempt, to see his youngster heap up trophies, he came to demand greater and greater efforts of him, taking greater and greater risks, attacking from the start of the race, and leading from start to finish at an infernal average. Margay followed, doped by the inflexible energy of Massy, for whom no victory, no exploit, no record ever seemed enough. Until the day when, having incited the young champion to take his turn at challenging the one-hour event, at which he had once been the unacknowledged world champion, Massy forced him, on the wicked Vigorelli track at Milan, up to such a powerful pace and into such tight cornering that the inevitable finally happened: sucked along at over one hundred kilometres an hour, Margay missed a corner, got caught in a crosswind, lost his balance, and fell, coming to a halt more than fifty yards on.

He didn’t die, but when he left hospital six months later he was horribly disfigured. The hardwood track had ripped off the whole right side of his face: he had but one eye, but one ear, no nose, no teeth, and no bottom jaw. All the lower part of his face was a horrible pinkish magma which quivered uncontrollably or alternatively froze into an unspeakable rictus.

After the accident, Massy finally gave up cycle sport for good and went back to the trade of saddler, which he had learnt and practised when he had still been only an amateur. He bought the premises in Rue Simon-Crubellier – his predecessor, the fishing-rod merchant, whose fortune had been made by the Popular Front government, was moving into a shop four times bigger in Rue Jouffroy – and shared the ground-floor flat with his young sister Josette. Every day at six he would go to see Lino Margay at Lariboisière Hospital, and when Margay was discharged he took him in. His feelings of guilt were inextinguishable, and when the former champion asked him a few months later for the hand of Josette in marriage, he worked at it so hard that he managed to persuade his sister to wed this larval monster.

The young couple moved to a little house by the lake at Enghien. Margay rented out deckchairs, rowing boats, and pedalos to holiday-makers and to people taking the waters. With his lower face permanently swaddled in a big white wool scarf, he more or less managed to hide his intolerable ugliness. Josette kept house, did the shopping and the cleaning, or did sewing for a lingerie shop which she had asked Margay never to set foot in.

This state of affairs lasted eighteen months. One evening in April nineteen thirty-one, Josette came home to her brother and begged him to free her of this slug-faced man who had become for her a nightmare of every minute.

Margay did not try to find Josette, to see her or to get her back. Some days later, a letter reached the saddler: Margay understood only too well what Josette had endured ever since she had sacrificed herself to him, and he implored her forgiveness; unable to ask her to return, but just as unable to get used to living without her, he preferred to go away, to leave the country, in the hope of finding the deliverance of death upon some foreign shore.

War came. Massy was conscripted into the Compulsory Labour Service and left for Germany to work in a shoe factory; Josette set up a tailoring business in the saddler’s shop. In that time of penury, when almanacs recommended strengthening shoes with soles cut out of thicknesses of newsprint or old discarded felt and unpicking old pullovers so as to knit new ones, it was obligatory to have old clothes remade, so Josette was not short of work. She could be seen sitting by the window rescuing shoulderpads and linings, reversing an overcoat, cutting a loose jacket out of an old brocade offcut, or, kneeling at Madame de Beaumont’s feet, chalking the hemline of her culotte-skirt contrived from a pair of tweed trousers that had belonged to her late husband.

Marguerite and Mademoiselle Crespi sometimes came to keep her company. The three women sat in silence around a little wood stove for which the only fuel was sawdust-and-paper pellets, drawing their needled threads for hours on end under the dim light of their blackout lamp.

Massy returned at the end of 1944. Brother and sister resumed their life together. They never uttered the name of the former stayer. But one evening, the saddler found his sister in tears, and in the end she confessed that she had not stopped thinking of Margay for a single day since she had left him: it was neither pity nor remorse that was torturing her, but love, a love a thousand times more powerful than the repulsion the face of her loved one inspired.

Next morning there was a ring at the bell, and a wonderfully handsome man stood in the doorway: it was Margay, returned from monstrosity.

Lino Margay had not only become handsome, he had grown rich. When he had resolved to leave the country, he had left it to fate to decide his final destination; he had opened an atlas and had stuck a pin in a map of the world without looking: fate, after falling a few times into the ocean waves, had in the end indicated South America, and Margay joined a Greek freighter, the Stephanitos, bound for Buenos Aires, as a cargo hand; during the long crossing he had befriended an old sailor of Italian extraction, Mario Ferri, known as Ferri the Eyetie.

Before the First World War, Ferri the Eyetie ran a small nightclub in Paris called Le Chéops, at 94 Rue des Acacias, which fronted for a clandestine gambling den known to habitués under the name of The Octagon because of the shape of the chips they used there. But Ferri’s real business was of a different order: he was one of the ringleaders of the group of political agitators who went by the name of Panarchists, and the police, although they knew with certainty that Le Chéops concealed a gaming den known by the name of The Octagon, did not know that this same Octagon was only a cover for one of the Panarchists’ headquarters. After the night of 21 January 1911 when the movement was beheaded and two hundred of its most active militants were gaoled, including its three historical leaders, Purkinje, Martinotti, and Barbenoire, Ferri the Eyetie was one of the few officials to escape the police chief’s dragnet, but being denounced, then spotted, then hunted, all he could do, after going to ground in Beauce for a few months, was to lead a wandering life that took him without respite from one end of the planet to the other and obliged him, in order to survive, to ply the most various trades, from dog-clipper to election agent, from mountain guide to miller.

Margay had no precise plans. Ferri, though well over fifty, had ideas enough for two, and placed all his hope in a notorious gangster he knew in Buenos Aires, Rosendo Juarez, alias “The Thumper”. Rosendo the Thumper was one of the men who walked tall in Villa Santa Rita. A guy with a real knack with a shiv, and what’s more he was one of Don Nicolas Paredes’s men, and he was one of Morel’s men, and he sure was a real big guy. Scarcely had they landed than Ferri and Margay called on the Thumper and put themselves at his command. Which they had cause to regret, for the first job he gave them to do – a straightforward drug delivery – got them arrested, very probably on Thumper’s own orders. Ferri the Eyetie was clobbered with a ten-year gaol sentence, and died a few months into it. Lino Margay, who had not been carrying any weapons, got off with three years.

Lino Margay – Lino the Dribbler, or Lino Prickface, as they called him at the time – realised in clink that his obscene ugliness inspired in everyone, cops and gangsters alike, feelings of pity and trust. On seeing him, people wanted to know his story, and when he’d told it, they told him theirs. Lino Margay discovered in this way that he had an astonishing memory: when he left prison, in June 1942, there was nothing he didn’t know about the pedigrees of three-quarters of the South American underworld. Not only did he know their criminal records in detail, but he knew all the particulars of their tastes, their weaknesses, their favourite weapons, their specialities, their prices, their hide-outs, how to get in touch with them, etc. In a word, he was ideally equipped to become the impresario of the lower depths of Latin America.

He settled in Mexico in a former bookshop on the corner of Corrientes and Takahuano. Officially he was a pawnbroker, but, since he was convinced of the effectiveness of the double cover as formerly practised by Ferri the Eyetie, he let it be known that he was actually more of a fence. In fact, the gangsters who came to consult him from all over Latin America, including bigger and bigger bosses, rarely came to entrust valuable goods to him: henceforth he was known under the respectful nickname of “El Fichero” (The Index), for Lino Margay had become the New World’s mobsters’ who’s who: he knew everything about everyone, he knew who was doing what, when, where, and for whom, he knew that this Cuban smuggler was looking for a bodyguard, that that Lima gang needed a good gunslinger, that Barrett had hired a killer called Razza to hit his rival Ramon, or that the safe of the Hotel Sierra Bella at Port-au-Prince contained a diamond rivière valued at five hundred thousand dollars and for which a Texan was ready to put three hundred thousand down in cash.

His discretion was exemplary, his efficiency was guaranteed, and his commission was reasonable: between two and five percent of the final product of the operation.

Lino Margay made his fortune rapidly. By the end of 1944 he had accumulated enough money to go to the United States to try to get surgery: he had heard that a doctor in Pasadena, California, had just developed a proteolytic graft technique which allowed scar tissue to regrow without leaving any marks. The process, unfortunately, had only been tested satisfactorily on small animals and on fragments of human skin that were not innervated. It had never been applied to such a shattered expanse – or one of such long standing – as Margay’s face, and a positive result seemed so remote and unlikely that the surgeon refused to undertake the experiment. But Margay had nothing to lose: the specialist was forced to operate on the former champion with the encouragement of four bruisers toting sub-machine guns.

The operation was a miraculous success. Lino Margay could finally return to France and find the woman he had always loved. A few days later, he took her off to a luxurious property he had had built near Coppet, by Lake Geneva, where there is every reason to suppose that he proceeded, on an even larger scale, with his lucrative activities.

Massy stayed a few more weeks in Paris, then sold his saddlery and retired to Saint-Quentin to finish his days in peace.