Gerrit
“Later the same day, a slick looking, pug-faced character named Gerrit came to pay his respects, arm in arm with a tall, black-haired Vlaamse beauty named Magda. Gerrit drove a used gold Mercedes Benz and managed a hotel in nearby Bruges. During that evening and many to come, Gerrit would take me out to the local haunts and ply me full of wine while I tried to figure out how to fuck Magda. Gerrit was a Flanders version of Mister Manners, and pretentious but exquisitely coiffured son of a bitch that he purported to be, he decided to pass on a few of his hard-earned trade secrets to me while keeping my glass full at all times. That gave me an angle on Magda, whom I had fallen in love with, and so we started spending our Saturday evenings together. During one of our outings, we got to talking about books.
“You ever read Henry Miller?” queried Gerrit.
“Never heard of him,” I said, which was true.
The fact was, I’d read Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, but I had no overview about reading at all, because I didn’t discuss the books that fell into my hands with anybody. The next day I found a copy of Nexus waiting for me on a coffee table in Blanche’s living room with a note signed by Gerrit, saying, “Try this.” I opened the book by Henry Miller, skipping the introduction by Erica Jong. Oddly enough, the first page opened with a dog barking.
“WOOF! Woof woof! Woof! Woof!”
The sound of that dog barking inside my head was to change the entire course of my life. ”
Steve
Each afternoon began with tours of garages, checking out the old Citroën Traction models, Panhards and Peugeots prior to seeking out the beaches and bars of the Côte d’Azur. As evening fell and the cocktail of Quaaludes and beer kicked in, our fates became random. After one pleasant evening in Aix-en-Provence, things degenerated when a Marseillais entered the bar with his curly haired, miniskirted woman friend, and Steve made an obscene gesture, clucking his tongue and groaning obscenely, “Boom boom, baby, boom boom.” The man stood up, along with half a dozen other Latins seething with offended honour. Steve put on a lazy grin, but his eyes were dead. “Boom boom, motherfucker,” he said, slicing through the air. The Marseillais decided to leave off and left the bar muttering and shaking his head. Steve caught the eye of the bartender, a burly, bald man with a big belly who was staring at the proceedings.
“Uhh, gimmee some BA MA BA, motherfucker,” said Steve, sounding half asleep. Steve was cradling an empty glass in his hand, leering. The bartender was wiping out a similar looking beer glass from behind the brass counter. He gave no indication that he’d heard the remark one way or another. Steve shook his head at the glass in the palm of his hand, stood up and threw it over the bartender’s head.
“I said more tiger piss, motherfucker!”
Chuchi The Argentinean
“Chuchi the Argentinean had turned up in Paris during the early seventies when her brother disappeared under the Argentinean government’s first Dirty War, waged by the military and police allies against dissidents, when somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand people went missing. During her first years she became Salmon’s mistress. Salmon was a Rouen businessman who struggled for years with the idea of leaving his wife prior to patching things up on the home front and leaving Chuchi to her fate.
A five-year relationship followed with Dany, a Parisian social worker who liked Amazonian flute music and had participated in the May ’68 riots and talked a lot about going to Buenos Aires some day to track down Chuchi’s missing brother. When that died down, Chuchi met Steven the Nam veteran, and Chuchi fell for him hard. Steve, during our hair-raising business trips, fed Chuchi’s illusions with cocaine and Quaaludes while he stopped at every town to phone and mail postcards to swear undying allegiance and passion to four ex-wives and girlfriends before swaggering back to the car. So by the time Steve finished with her, Chuchi’s teeth had darkened, her hope was shattered, and she retreated to a life inside her second-floor flat on rue St. Honoré in the first, smoking Gauloises and drinking espresso coffee and more or less keeping her thoughts to herself.”
Jack Fingon
“With half a dozen interviews concluded, I left the office earlier than usual, returned to my flat on Jaffe Road, brought up some Carlsberg and some smokes and gazed out over the water. Everything moving, the Star Ferry, Jumbo restaurant, the Tate’s Cairn and Kowloon peak visible, and just on the other side, Guangdong province and a ruthless regime that still saw Hong Kong as a spit in the ocean. I was staring into a future ripe with Cendrarsian possibilities.
All I had to do was rubbish what remained of my reputation and sacrifice a few neo-Canadians on the altar of my ambition. A no-brains, ground-floor opportunity at a time and in a place where even the teenagers glittered with gold. On the risk side, outside of the law societies, there were other intangibles to deal with. Some bad feng shui, a look in the wrong set of eyes on the street, the number four turning up in transactions, and you might get a knife in the guts or find some heroin planted in your suitcase at Canadian customs. But the day I had brunch with Jimmy Ho, end of the empire Hong Kong looked good—better than good.”
Eva
I spent the first hours of the morning building a makeshift target with a 2 x 4 and a 4 x 8 sheet of coarse plywood so that Eva could do her knife practice with something that wasn’t a tree. Eva used a twin set of Malagasy cutters. The handle of each blade was carved palissander hardwood with something written in Betsileo and served as the scabbard for the other twin blade. When you fit the two together, it looked like a nunchuk stick, which she said the Betsileo used to hit zebus over the head. The blade itself resembled a stiletto blade, thin and lethal, multipurpose. It was a gift of Rakotomela during the time when he was courting her in Maravato. He’d taught her to throw, and she had maintained the unorthodox underhand style which she used during her practice sessions in our large yard overlooking the cliffs.
Every morning and afternoon, she marched out by herself, stood for a time praying on her knees in front of the target. Then she’d stand up, walk three metres, her back to the target, stop, about-face, and with a short cry, launch her knife. Thwack. Then she’d walk up to the spot she’d hit and say something in Betsileo dialect, a high-octave, mellifluous expression of wonder or contemplation, and finish the move by tracing her finger around the spot, remove the knife and march out the same three or four paces. After a time, she would repeat the process at five, seven and finally ten metres, and when her final throw went well, she’d let out a sharp, gleeful cry meant only for herself.
Fébronio
Cendrars knew Fébronio was a devil of the most powerful sort who could subject others to his will to the point that they would accept their fates passively. And Cendrars was not exempt. In La Vie Dangereuse, he describes walking into the confino, the solitary of Rio de Janeiro prison, where the most dangerous offenders of Brazil were confined. Cendrars first came upon Fébronio sitting nude in the large central cage, locked deep in his own thoughts. The convict was short but with herculean musculature, and he was positioned in front of a fire he was feeding—one straw at a time—from his bed and with newspaper pages which he torqued like rags before tossing them into the fire.
As the guard prepared to escort him out of the dungeon where Fébronio was kept, Cendrars shouted out a remark intended to stir him from his torpor: “You wrote a book, didn’t you … the Revelations of the Prince of Fire … Is that it? So tell me where I can find it. Maybe you’ll give it to me …”
After a long minute of silence, Fébronio suddenly leapt at the bars, cursing, coming so close that Cendrars “felt his feverish breath coursing across my face.”
Maria Alvares
Maria Alvares perched up on the upper part of the divan, her thin muscular legs dangling from under her skirt. Credit where it’s due, she was letting me weigh the options. She slid down on the divan and reached for her purse, pulled out a small packet, laid out some white powder in a line on the coffee table, and snorted it up. There was a piece of ceramic fetish art on the table in front of her carved in a phallic shape whose stem strongly suggested that of a circumcised penis.
“We all have needs, Jack. We all have desires. It’s difficult to feed a woman’s needs out here with these miserable Bretons.”
“Even the lower forms of life can do that.”
“You have misplaced loyalties, Jack. Cendrars is nowhere today. He doesn’t exist. Maybe he never did. What’s Cendrars worth? That’s the relevant question.”
“He’s worth more than a few minutes with an Alfama puta.”
She hadn’t reacted yet, but her eyes were glistening. I reached over and picked up the phallic pipe, caressed it for a moment, and set it down in front of her.
“Here, suck on this for a while; it’ll help bring your blood levels down.”
During the 1940s, Blaise Cendrars, a one-armed, vagabond French poet who helped found modern French poetry, expressed the desire to have his remains scattered over the Sargasso Sea in a quatrain:
I will be a man fulfilled if, when my time comes,
I can disappear anonymously and without regret,
At the originating point of our world, the Sargasso Sea,
Where life first burst from the depths of the ocean floor towards the sun.
His wish would remain unrealized; in 1961, Cendrars died penniless and was buried in the vault of a friend in a Paris cemetery.
Some sixty years later, writer, ex-solicitor, and “deal facilitator” Jack Fingon stumbles upon Cendrars’ quatrain and sees in it a potentially lucrative venture. He decides to grant the poet’s wishes, proposing to transport Cendrars’ ashes to the Sargasso Sea with journalists and a film crew in tow. But when resistance to his proposal stokes his curiosity, Fingon makes a shocking discovery: Cendrars was disinterred and cremated thirty-three years after his death. Now it is up to Fingon to determine why Cendrars has been left by his protectors to vagabond in the hereafter.
In this historical thriller, Fingon’s investigation leads him back to World War I battlefields of Champagne and to the tragedy behind the myth of one of France’s greatest poets.
Whether cutting deals with Hong Kong smugglers or waiting for someone to die in the Malagasy outback or going to ground to avoid an Antibes mobster, Jack Fingon has always been governed by the laws of what he calls “gravitational pull”. Fingon devises a project to escape the doldrums of his brief fling at the writer’s life – deliver the ashes of Cendrars, France’s vagabond poet, to the Sargasso Sea. But as he gets closer to the tomb of Cendrars, he finds himself on an untravelled road where the ghosts of a World War I battlefield, the scattered seed of the vagabond poet and the vengeance of a coterie of Cendrarsians bring him back to Big Sur, California and a cliffside climax that shows him how dangerous the writer’s life can be. A few clips from the story…
1 
2 
“I’m bad, man, I’m fucking bad!” said the Serb to all assembled, performing another kung-fu kick for anyone who hadn’t yet noticed him. Anybody looking for trouble in Wanchai was suicidal. Maybe he’d lost his brother. Maybe he’d flunked his driving test. He was now moving my way to rejoin his friend. The old madam running the joint was shaking her head and waving two or three girls off-stage and into the dressing room. The buoyancy of the show had vanished, and we were moving into slow time.
3 
I felt myself panicking as this voice out of nowhere continued: “A snow crystal, as the name implies, is a single crystal of ice.”
It was cold, dead cold, and I had to get back to the cabin, but the voice kept speaking to me in its didactic neutrality: “A snowflake is a generic term; it can mean an individual snow crystal or a few snow crystals stuck together or large agglomerations of snow crystals that form puff-balls that float down from the clouds.”
4 
After a few hours, I woke up and packed a walking rucksack. My walk took me up boulevard Montparnasse, past Le Select and the rest of the twenties cafés—Le Dome, La Rotonde—and kept moving on right through the Porte de Versailles, and upwards towards the Meudon forest, Céline country, with a pounding head but not much else on my mind.
5 
6 
7 
“Look at this shithead. He thinks he’s the man.”
Steve stepped off the island and moved past the gas jockey, disappearing behind the gas station.
“What’s he doing now?” asked Florent, uneasy, after a few minutes.
“Taking a leak. I’ll check.”
Steve was standing outside the door leading to the toilet area out back, grinning at a fifty gallon drum of petrol he had just tipped onto the ground. A thick tarry pool covered the floor and now was spreading over the asphalt outside. Steve studied the results of his work. He held a Zippo lighter in front of him at eye level and was swivelling it horizontally in a wide arc, like a periscope surveying the ocean surface.
