“Hey, Andre.” Levasseur nodded at the floater. “Anything special?”
“Nah.” Sergeant Levain shrugged. “Just another poor and anonymous soul who couldn’t take it anymore.”
A small group of onlookers on the street above stood in contrast to the pedestrians with umbrellas and faces to the wind, refusing to even acknowledge their presence as they scurried past to their workplace. A line of buildings, windows impenetrable due to glare and grime, ignored the disruption and reflected and amplified shouts, bicycle bells and car horns. A few bleary-eyed faces could be seen in a brightly-lit café on the far side of the street as they read the morning papers and sipped scalding coffees.
It was another morning in Paris and life had its logic and a certain pace of its own in spite of all distractions.
He shivered involuntarily. The slanting grey rain hissed down, making puddles jump and splatter with its violence. The Seine, serene in its relentless push to the sea, made its own contribution to the wetness of the sounds all around them as it lapped at the shoreline and gurgled past a few small rocks at the edge. His shoes squelched as he shifted from side to side on the narrow shore.
This sort of weather always made his back ache. The dead man bobbed face down in one of the recurrent eddies along this stretch of the river. They stood looking on as one of the attendants reached with a borrowed boathook and dragged it in a little closer. The junior looked reluctant to grab it, but waded out into the shallows when it hung up on a snag. They were all soaked anyway, even the boys in blue with their glistening slickers, always dripping down the necks in his recollection. Even so, he wished he had one now.
Grabbing the corpse by the collar, the attendant dragged the thing up as high as it could go. Heavy and limp, probably weighing fifty or a hundred kilos more due to the passage of time and resultant soakage, he was going to need help.
This one didn’t look likely to come apart at the seams, and that was always a blessing. Andre pulled the sodden fedora up a little from his forehead, where it chafed from sheer weight and a long night.
“So where’s Gilles?” Hubert Levasseur and Maintenon went back a long time.
They were both in uniform together. It was hard to visualize either one of them as a young man of twenty. Levasseur was tolerable, unlike some others, and treated Andre with familiarity. It was a kind of professional friendship. You would never know, with Levasseur, whether he liked you or not. He gave no one any cause for complaint, whether they were a colleague or a customer. His partner, whom Andre didn’t know, stood gazing silently at the far side of the river, appearing oblivious to his surroundings.
“The dentist.” Levasseur gave a nod of sympathy.
“Yes, it would take a lot to keep him away.”
“Hah!” Andre grinned. “What are the odds this bugger is going to have a wallet?’
“Slim to none.” Levasseur was probably right. “What are you doing here?”
“Swapped shifts with Couteau. His sister’s getting married.” Levasseur nodded.
“Just your luck.”
“I’ll be home in a couple of hours.” Andre was philosophic, and he might need a favour someday.
“Something’s got him real good!” The fellow, Jaques, wrestled with the weight.
It was probably a dead tree trunk, whole and entire, with one stout branch sticking out just so.
Whether it was suicide, accident or murder, these folks never seemed to make it easy for the police. Genial cursing came from the senior ambulance attendant as he waded into the chill green water. His arms held high, he sighed deeply when his crotch submerged. With a hold under the armpits, one on each side, they dragged the decedent in and unceremoniously flopped him down beside the stretcher. They looked down at themselves, and Andre saw the younger one’s knees knocking from the cold. Excess water flowed out from their shoes. Their lips moved, but they had some sense of propriety, mostly for the sake of the audience. They kept it quiet as they got a proper grip on ankles and shoulders. An officer moved in to assist Hubert at the heavy end.
“Ready?” The younger fellow nodded, giving a flick of the head and a brief grin. “Heave, ho.”
“Up we go.” They put it down again at the base of the concrete seawall.
Andre Levain nodded grimly at the macabre cheerfulness of the meat-wagon boys. When they got home from work, no one ever asked how their day had been. They probably had an answer, though. It’s just that no one ever asked.
“He’ll be along shortly.”
Levasseur waited for them to carry it up the embankment, an affair replete with more carefully-studied cursing, not so good-naturedly now, for the mud and the filth on their obligatory hard leather shoes was as slippery as hot oil on marbles. An officer up above had a rope tied to the guard rails, and even that didn’t help much, but Andre was used to such things.
After he and Levasseur made it up, they tied the rope onto the top of the stretcher for additional pull from above.
With pushing and shoving from a pair of uniformed officers below, braced by whatever footholds and cracks in the concrete that they could find, the heavily-strapped corpse was soon at street level.
“Let’s have a quick look, then.” Levasseur studied the face and then shrugged. “Have you ever noticed they always lay them face-up?”
Andre rewarded Levasseur with an appreciative grunt.
“Oh, look, it’s my uncle Raoul.” Levasseur’s tone was priceless, and one of the gendarmes, face haggard in the early light, laughed out loud.
The onlookers muttered softly in the background, as Andre smiled for the first time since coming on shift at eleven thirty last night.
Hubert, having borne the brunt of unpleasantness this morning, squatted by the body and began checking the pockets for personal articles.
“He’s got a watch.” Hubert checked more pockets, pulling out coins and some small bills from the gentleman’s right front trousers pocket.
He pulled a small silvered flask from inside of the jacket breast pocket.
“That’s a nice coat.”
One of the attendants looked sideways at the senior police officers.
“Good shoes.”
“Thank you, Jaques.” Levasseur pulled one off and took a serious look at it.
“Well, it’s not a robbery, anyway.” Levain pulled out his notebook. “No wallet yet?”
“No. Gin.” Jaques’ nose was legendary, although he could be a pest at times.
Levasseur put the booze aside with the watch and the money. The man had no rings, but the cufflinks looked nice, perhaps even expensive.
“Huh.” Andre was unmoved.
“Yes, thank you, Jacques. Francois.” Levasseur’s eyebrows rose at the thought of the heap of missing persons reports, a heap replenished every single morning, in every town of any size or significance across the entire country. “Oh, boy.”
The boys put him in the back of their little van, bickering back and forth about who was wetter and more miserable. The voices of the crowd, and the people themselves, faded away. There was nothing more to see.
The hiss of the rain and the pushing of the wind through the sycamore branches, barely showing the first hint of green buds breaking open, lifted his hair and warmed his neck as a thin shaft of April sunshine cut across the city from the east.
***
'Quai Montebello before the storm.' The resources available to writers today are wonderful. The photos are presented for scholarly and critical purposes.
As the reader can see from the top photo, I have links to other pictures which show an actual earthen riverbank, with rocks, maybe some snags, and a mucky edge, which might have been found approximately in the correct time period, and the actual location isn't mentioned in this short scene.
When writing a first draft, the important thing is to build a logical plot structure. Descriptive detail can be lavished in later, what I want is to complete the plot, invent all the characters, lay out a nice balance between action, dialogue, characterization, action and repose.
It is really only later that I worry about what the city actually looked like on that rainy morning, or what a certain Levasseur might have looked like. yet even now, some aspects of his character come through, including a sense of humour. I'm not trying to consciously leave things out at this stage. The big goal is to advance the story. Holes in logic, even miss-naming a character, can be fixed later. (I have been known to call comeone Bert in one chapter and then forget the name, and call him Fred. This can be confusing to fix.)
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