Read Online Night Rounds by Patrick Modiano - Free Book Online

was so discreet and wary, so anxious to avoid being seen. But you have to start out somewhere in life. You can't buy it off. In the end it sends round to you its recruiting sergeants: the Khedive and Mr. Philibert, as it happened. On some other evening I could have fallen among more honorable companions who might have encouraged me to enter the textile field or become a writer. Having no particular bent for any profession, I waited for my elders to decide what I would do. Up to them to figure out what they'd like me to be. I left it in their lap.
    Boy scout? Florist? Tennis pro? No:
    Employee of a phony detective agency.
    Blackmailer, finger man, extortionist.
    Still, it was rather surprising. I didn't have the equipment for this kind of work: an ugly temperament, lack of scruples, a relish for sordid company. I dug into it conscientiously, the way others go for a boilermaker's license. Funny thing about guys like me: they can just as easily end up in the Pantheon as in Thiais cemetery, dumping-ground for spies. They become heroes. Or rats. Nobody will ever know that they got dragged into some foul mess to save their own skins. What they really cared about: their stamp collection, and a bit of peace and quiet, on the Place des Acacias, so they could breathe.
    Meanwhile, I was turning out a miserable piece of goods. My apathy and indifference made me doubly vulnerable to the Khedive's and Mr. Philibert's influence. I remembered the words of a doctor, a neighbor on my floor at the Place des Acacias. "After you reach twenty," he told me, "you start to rot. Fewer and fewer nerve cells, my boy." I jotted this remark down on an engagement calendar, for we should always heed the experience of our elders. He was right, I now realized. My illegal activities and unsavory associations would rob me of the bloom of youth. My future? A race, with the finish line in no man's land. Being dragged to a scaffold without a chance to catch my breath. Someone whispered in my ear: All you'll have had from life is this whirlwind you let yourself be caught up in gypsy music, wilder and wilder, to muffle my screams. This evening the air is decidedly balmy. As in the past, always at the same time, the donkeys are leaving the main path and heading home to the stables. All day long they've had to walk the children to and fro. They disappear around the corner of the Avenue Gabriel. No one will ever hear about their suffering. Such reticence was impressive. As they went by, my peace of mind returned, my indifference. I tried to gather my thoughts together. They were few and far between, and all extremely commonplace. I'm not the thinking sort. Too emotional for that. Lazy. A couple of quick efforts always brought me to the same conclusion: I'll die sooner or later. Fewer and fewer nerve cells. A lengthy process of putrefaction. The doctor had warned me. I should add that my work inclined me toward perverse pleasures: police informer and blackmailer at the age of twenty, that narrows one's sights a bit. A funny odor permeated 177 Avenue Niel from the antiquated furniture and the wallpaper. The light was never steady. Behind the desk with the wooden files where I kept the records on our "customers." I indexed them by names of poisonous plants: Inky Coprinus, Belladonna, Satanic Boletus, Henbane, Livid Entoloma … The slightest contact with them made me start to decalcify. My clothes reeked of Avenue Niel's stifling odor. I let myself be contaminated. This disease? An accelerated aging process, a physical and moral decay just as the doctor had said. Yet I have no relish for morbid situations.
    Un petit village
    Un vieux clocher
    was the pinnacle of my fondest hopes. Unfortunately, I was in a city, a kind of sprawling Luna Park where the Khedive and Mr. Philibert were driving me from shooting galleries to roller coasters, from Punch and Judy to "Sirocco" caterpillars. Finally I lay down on a bench. I wasn't meant for this sort of thing. I never asked a soul