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Page 71.
 The growing day’s warmth would dispel the soggy corona of a summer stored in bloody wine—all too briefly a summer’s resigned hope.
The city was alive. Its throbbing traffic, exhaust air, squealing brakes and horns and tires on the streets outside the courtyards, pounded on his head. The passage of elegant young women on high heels mocked his yearning eyeballs.
Then came a summons from his superior, whose office was a former hay barn on a side street.
Puzzled and apprehensive, and holding a little paper cup of machine coffee, Marc stepped into the tiled and damp interior of the foreman’s supply room where Armand Artiglio rested a grim mien and a pudgy thigh upon a worn dark wood desk. “I hate to tell you the bad news, son, but there’s no putting it off. There has been a cutback in funds and naturally since you are the lowest on the union list you are affected directly.” Armand, wearing checkered pants and a dark blue windbreaker, nervously shuffled papers—which needed no shuffling—on his desk .
“Wait a minute,” said Marc, struggling not to drop his cup of acrid and rubbery-smelling coffee.
“I’m sorry,” Armand said afraid to meet his eyes. The hard, distanced look, the stanced attitude, in Artiglio’s eyes threatened the rest of what had to be said. “You’re terminated effective right now.”
“Just like that,” Marc said. Zut. What a tarte de mierde this turned out to be. A shit-pie.
“You can pick up your final check at the union office,” Armand said, shuffling his papers aimlessly. “Even though you ain’t fully one of the union; yet; so now you’ll never be.”
“I understand,” Marc said, leaving his coffee steaming on the hard chipped desk as he rose and started dazed and wonderingly out of the tiled office.
As he left, he saw in the fuzzy environs of Armand Artiglio’s office a darkly coiffeured man of indeterminate age, wearing a frown and a dashing gray suit.
This had to be a cute setup.
The union steward, a balding little man with conspiratorial eyes and ever so boyish cynicism, passed him in the parking lot; probably no accident; a gesture of sympathy, “Sorry…”
Marc paused under a cloudy skyline and surveyed his ruined thoughts.
What to do now? He must be Marc Fontbleu now. No time for the poet and his precious jazz thoughts. Léopold Montblé once again gone into hiding, to make way for harsh daylight and bitter bread. Hard reality, this. How to scratch enough together to pay the rent? Back to bartending, taxi driving, mierde shoveling, what? Or back to mom and dad’s house in Créteil, be a child again, do what you’re told, don’t track in those muddy feet, blah blah blah, back to studying dead poets at the local college factory of vapors…
As he stood on the street, numbly, almost guilty because right about now he should have been sitting on the assignment truck with the rakes and lawnmowers, he saw that silent man leaving the office: tiptoeing on hushed & puppied soles, his suede-patch elbows raised at an indignant angle, shoulders hunched so his school tie dangled, collegiate curly mane scraping his collar, and dark eyes peering poisonously; so Marc glimpsed him. Snapshots are always a glimpse of unintended truthfulness. This man, this creature, was an assassin, a conspirator. More was at work here than just a union list or a lawnmowing budget.
After that fraction of a glance, the man entered a little yellow Renault 5 (Supercinque). Marc stood frozen. Had the guy seen him? He memorized the license plate as the very hip, academic little car tooled away into dense traffic.
What is going on here? What just happened?
Survival before information: Marc had a quick cup of real coffee and sat in a bistro, wrapped around the cup, as he planned a strategy to avoid both starvation and depression. A quick check of the newspaper revealed that twenty men were needed right away and all that sort of thing, but unless you had experience in a trade or profession it was clearly an uphill fight to land even a lower-end job these days. He left the paper in a trash can and went to the employment office. Between there and the unemployment office, he wasted precious time well into the afternoon.
Well, there’s always the taxi company if all else fails.
The city—emptying of its daytime multitude of suburban working people, but never the crowds of wandering tourists—took on a sleepy, bated empty atmosphere in-between time. It was Happy Hour in the bars. It was nearly five in the afternoon when he walked up to his apartment off the Rue Monge. He had no appetite, but forced himself to eat a cheap salad in a small, stuffy bistro.
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