The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers

I

Until the late part of the last century, the area known as Les Hivers was notorious for its poverty, its narrow, filthy streets and the extraordinary number of crimes of passion recorded there. This district lay directly behind the famous Cirque d’Hiver, the winter circus, home to performing troupes who generally toured through the spring and summer months.

Residents complained of the roaring of lions and tigers or the trumpeting of elephants at night, but the authorities were slow to act, given the nature of this part of the 11th arrondissement, whose inhabitants were not exactly influential.

The great canal, which brought produce to most of Paris, branched off from the Canal Saint Martin just below the Circus itself, to begin its journey underground. For many bargees, what they termed Le Bassin Les Hivers was the end of their voyage and here they would rest before returning to their home ports with whatever goods they had purchased or traded. Surrounding the great basin leaned a number of wooden quays and jetties, together with warehouses and high-ceilinged halls where business had always been done in gaslight or the semi-darkness created by huge arches and locks dividing the upper and the lower canal systems. The banks rose thirty meters or more, made of ancient stone, much of it re-used from Roman times, backing onto tall, windowless depositories built of tottering brick and timber. The sun could gain no access here and, at night, the quays and markets were lit by gas or naphtha and only occasionally by electricity. Beside the cobbled canal paths flourished the cafes, brothels and cheap rooming houses, as well as the famous Bargees’ Mission and Church of Our Lady of the Waterways, operated since the 9th century by the pious and incorruptible White Friars. Like Alsatia, that area of London also administered by the Carmelites, it formed a secure sanctuary for all but habitual murderers.

The bargees not continuing under the city to the coast, and even to Britain, concluded their voyages here, having brought their cargoes from Nantes, Lyon or Marseille. Others came from the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Prussia, while those barge-folk regarded as the cream of their race had sailed waterways connecting the French capital with Moscow, Istanbul or the Italian Republics. The English bargees, with their heavy, red-sailed, ocean-going boats, came to sell their own goods, mostly Sheffield steel and pottery, and buy French wine and cheese for which there was always a healthy market in their chilly nation, chronically starved of food and drink fit for human consumption. It was common for altercations and fights to break out between the various nationalities and more than one would end with a mortal knife wound.

And so, for centuries, few respectable Parisians ever ventured into Les Hivers and those who did so rarely returned in their original condition.

Even the Police patrolled the serpentine streets by wagon or, armed with carbines, in threes and fours. They dared not venture far into the system of underground waterways known collectively as the Styx. Taxi drivers, unless offered a substantial commission, would not go into Les Hivers at all, but would drop passengers off in the Boulevard du Temple, close to the permanent hippodrome, always covered in vivid posters, in summer or winter. The drivers claimed that their automobile’s batteries could not be recharged in that primitive place.

Only as the barge trade slowly gave way to more rapid commercial traffic, such as the electric railways and mighty aerial freighters, which began to cross the whole of Europe and even as far as America, Africa and the Orient, did the area become settled by the sons and daughters of the middle classes, by writers and artists, by well-to-do North Africans, Vietnamese, homosexuals and others who found the rest of Paris either too expensive or too unwelcoming. And, as these things will go, the friends of the pioneering bohemians came quickly to realise that the district was no longer as dangerous as its reputation suggested. They could sell their apartments in more expensive districts and buy something much cheaper in Les Hivers. Warehouses were converted into homes and shops and the quays and jetties began to house quaint restaurants and coffee houses.

Some of the least stable buildings were torn down to admit a certain amount of sunlight.

By the 1990s, the transformation was complete and few of the original inhabitants could afford to live there any longer. The district became positively fashionable until it is the place we know today, full of bookshops, little cinemas, art-suppliers, expensive bistros, cafes and exclusive hotels.

The animals are now housed where they will not disturb the residents and customers.

By the time Michel Houllebecq moved there in 1996, the transformation was complete. He declared the area “a meeting place of deep realities and metaphysical resonances.” Though a few barge people still brought their goods to Les Hivers, these were unloaded onto trucks or supplied a marche biologique to rival that of Boulevard Raspail and only the very desperate still plied the dark, subterranean waterways for which no adequate maps had ever existed. The barge folk continued to be as clannish as always. Their secrets were passed down from one family member to another.

When he had been a lowly detective sergeant, Commissaire Lapointe had lived on the Avenue Parmentier and had come to know the alleys and twitterns of the neighbourhood well. He had developed relationships with many of the settled bargees and their kin and had done more than one favour to a waterman accused unjustly of a crime. They had respected Lapointe, even if they had not loved him.

A heavy-set man in a dark Raglan overcoat and an English cap, Lapointe was at once saturnine and avuncular. Lighting a Cuban cheroot, he descended from the footplate of his heavy police car, its motors humming at rest. Turning up his collar against the morning chill, he looked with some melancholy at the boutiques and restaurants now crowding the old wharfs.

“Paris changes too rapidly,” he announced to his long-suffering young assistant, the aquiline LeBec, who had only recently joined the special department. “She has all the grace and stateliness of an aristocratic whore, yet these stones, as our friend de Certau has pointed out, are full of dark stories, an unsavoury past.”

Lapointe had become fascinated by psychogeography, the brainchild of Guy DeBord, who had developed the philosophy of ‘flaneurism’ or the art of derive. DeBord and his followers had it that all great cities were the sum of their past and that the past was never far away, no matter what clever cosmetics were used to hide it. They had nothing but contempt for the electric trams, trains and cars which bore the busy Parisians about the city.

Only by walking, by ‘drifting’, could one appreciate and absorb the history which one inhaled with every breath, mixing living flesh with the dust of one’s ancestors. Commissaire Lapointe, of course, had a tendency to support these ideas, as did many of the older members of the Surete du Temps Perdu and their colleagues abroad. This was especially true in London, where Lapointe’s famous opposite number, ‘Sir Seaton Begg’, chief metatemporal investigator for the Home Office, headed the legendary Whitehall Time Centre, whose very existence was denied by Parliament, just as the Republic refused to admit any knowledge of the Quai d’Orsay’s STP.

LeBec accepted these musings as he always did, keeping his own counsel. He had too much respect to dismiss his chief’s words, but was also too much of a modern to make such opinions his own.

Reluctantly, Lapointe began to move along the freshly-paved quay until he had reached the entrance to a narrow canyon between two of the former warehouses. Rue Mendoza was no different from scores of similar alleys, save that a pale blue STP van stood outside one of its entrances, the red light on its roof turning with slow, almost voluptuous arcs while uniformed officers questioned the inhabitants of the great warren which had once housed grain and now was the residence of publicity directors, television producers and miscellaneous media people, all of whom were demanding to know why they could not go about their business.

Behind him on the canal, Lapointe could see a faint mist rising from the water and he heard a dozen radios and Vs, all tuned to the morning news programmes. So far, at least, the press had not yet got hold of this story. He stubbed out his cigar against a masonry-clad wall and put it back in his case, following the uniformed man into the house. He told Le Bec to remain outside for a minute and question the angry residents as to their whereabouts and so on before following him upstairs. There were no elevators in this particular building and Lapointe was forced to climb several storeys until at last he came to a landing where a pale-faced young man, still in his pyjamas covered by a blue check dressing gown, stood with his back to the green and cream wall smoking a long, thin Nat Sherman cigarette, one of the white Virginia variety. He transferred the cigarette from right to left and shook hands with Lapointe as he introduced himself.

“Bonjour, M’sieu. I am Sebastien Gris.”

“Commissaire Lapointe of the Surete. What’s all this about a fancy dress party and a dead girl?”

Gris opened his mouth, but there was no air in his lungs. His thin features trembled and his pale blue eyes filled with helpless fury. He could not speak. He drew a deep breath. “Monsieur, I telephoned the moment I found her. I have touched nothing, I promise.”

Lapointe grunted. He looked down at a pretty blonde girl, her fair skin faintly pockmarked, who lay sprawled in the man’s hallway, a meter or so from the entrance to his tiny kitchen filling with steam from a forgotten kettle. Lapointe stepped over the body and went to turn off the gas. Slowly, the steam dissipated. He took a large paisley handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his head and neck. He sighed. “No name? No identity? No papers of any kind?”

The uniformed man confirmed this. “Just what you see, Monsieur le Commissaire.”

Lapointe leaned and touched her face. He took something on his finger and inspected it carefully. “Arsenic powder,” he said. “And almost certainly cochineal for rouge.” He was growing depressed. “I’ve only seen this once before.” He recognised the work on her dress. It was authentic.

Though unusually beautiful for the period and with an unblemished skin, she was as certainly an inhabitant of the early 19th century as he was of the 21st and, as sure as he was alive, she was dead, murdered by a neat cut across her throat. “A true beauty and no doubt famous in her age. Murdered and disposed of by an expert.”

“You have my absolute assurances, Monsieur, that her body was here when I got up this morning. Someone has done this, surely, to implicate me. It cannot be a joke.”

Lapointe nodded gravely. “I fear, Monsieur Gris, that your presence in this building had little or nothing to do with the appearance of a corpse outside your kitchen.” The young man became instantly relieved and began to babble a sequence of theories, forcing Lapointe to raise his hand as he dropped to one knee to inspect something clutched in the corpse’s right fist. He frowned and checked the fingernails of the left fingers in which some coarse brown fibres had caught. The young man continued to talk and Lapointe became thoughtful and impatient at the same time, rising to his feet. “If you please, Monsieur. It is our job to determine how she came to die here and, if possible, identify her murderer. You, I regret, will have to remain nearby while I question the others. Have you the means to telephone your place of work?”

The young man nodded and crossed over to a wall bearing a fashionably modelled telephone. He gave the operator a number. As he was speaking, LeBec came in to join his chief. He shuddered when he saw the corpse. He knew at once why their department had been called in.

“1820 or perhaps ‘25,” he murmured. “What’s that in her hand? A rosary?

An expensive gold crucifix, too? Poor child. Was she killed here or there?”

“By the look of the blood it was there,” responded his chief. “But whoever brought her body here is still amongst us, I am almost certain. He turned the crucifix over to look at the back. All he read there were the initials j.c. “Perhaps also her murderer.” With an inclination of his massive head, he indicated where the bloodstains told a story of the girl being dragged and searched. “Did they assume her to be a witch of some sort? A familiar story. Her clothes suggest wealth. Yet she wears too much make-up for a girl of her age from a good family. Was she an adept or the daughter of an adept, maybe? What if she made her murderers a gateway into wherever they thought they were going and they killed her, either to be certain she told no others or as some sort of bizarre sacrifice? Yet why would she be clutching such an expensive rosary. And what about those fibres? Were they disguised? You know how they think, LeBec, as well as I do.” He watched as his assistant took an instrument from an inside pocket and ran it over the girl’s head and neck. Straightening himself, Le Bec studied his readings, nodding occasionally as his instincts were confirmed.

The commissioner was giving close attention to the series of bloody marks leading away from the corpse to the front door of the apartment.

Again he noted those initials on the back of the crucifix. “My God!” he murmured. “But why…?”