The Resistance Man (Bruno Chief of Police 6)

colourful designs, glanced at Pascal’s sketch and said proudly: ‘That’s my Maori warrior.’
    ‘Your what?’ Bruno asked.
    ‘Maori warrior, from New Zealand, I saw it on one of their players in a rugby match on TV. Different designs say different things about how many fights you’ve been in, how many enemy you killed. I adapted it and made my own design.’
    ‘Did you do one for this guy?’ Bruno showed him Paul’s photo.
    ‘Paul, yes, I did that one, and another that only his best friends would see. But I haven’t seen him for a few days. He’s usually in Marcel’s of an evening.’
    ‘Is that a bar?’
    ‘Bar, bistro, little theatre in the back, its real name is Proust but we all call it Marcel’s. It won’t be open now, though. Weekend nights run late so they don’t open Mondays until the evening. Is he in trouble again?’
    ‘No, he’s a witness in a case, but what was he in trouble for?’
    ‘I don’t know, it’s just something you say. But I make sure he pays me cash in advance,’ the man said. ‘You know what I mean?’
    ‘Do you know where he lives?’
    ‘You might find him at Marcel’s, he’s got one of the rooms upstairs. I don’t know if he lives there or just uses it for pickups, but like I said, I haven’t seen him for a bit. And if you find him, don’t tell him it was me that told you.’
    Bruno found the place easily enough, between a dog-grooming parlour and an antiques shop with a single Buddha head in grey stone dominating its window. Proust was painted black, and the windows were filled with movie posters of Jane Russell and Lana Turner, flanking a blown-up photo of a beautiful woman’s eyes. Bruno thought they might have belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. Below the eyes was a photo of Marcel Proust in profile. The door to the bar was closed, but it opened when he tried the handle. Inside, chairs were piled atop tables, the floor was wet and a black woman who was mopping it looked up guardedly at his police uniform.
    ‘Looking for Paul Murcoing,’ he said, showing the photo.
    She shrugged and slopped water on the floor. ‘Boss not here,’ she said, not looking at him.
    He walked across and put the photo in front of her face. ‘Do you know this man?’
    She closed her eyes. ‘You talk to boss.’
    Bruno sighed. She was almost certainly an illegal immigrant. He disliked doing this but he did not want to waste time.
    ‘Your papers, please, Madame.’
    ‘Papers at home.’ Now she had stopped mopping and was standing still, head down.
    ‘You have a choice, Madame, you either show me his room right now or we go to the police station and check your papers.’
    She shrugged again, this time with an air of defeat, pulled a large ring of keys from the pocket of her apron and led the way up two flights of narrow stairs to an unpainted wooden door. She unlocked it and let him step into a room that was clearly unoccupied. There was a plain double bed, with a mattress and a pillow but no bedding, a small table with a water jug and basin, a hard-backed chair and a handsome armoire that had seen better days. It was empty.
    ‘Paul gone,’ she said, a phrase she repeated when he asked when he had gone, how long he had been there and who else had stayed.
    ‘His things, his possessions?’ he asked. ‘Where are they?’ He knew the police lore, that when you wanted to intimidate, you took out a notebook. He fished in his jacket pocket for something to write with, remembering with a sinking feeling that he had left his pen in his car when checking the tattoo-parlour addresses on the map. The notebook was sufficient. Sullenly, she led the way downstairs to the cellar and pointed to two cardboard boxes.
    ‘Boss packed these when Paul gone. He leave Tuesday.’
    That was the day of Fullerton’s murder. He put the notebook away and opened the first box, full of unwashed clothes and a pair of dirty sheets. The second box contained shoes, toiletries, a small TV set, some books and what Bruno assumed were sex toys. They included leather manacles with straps, a battery-driven vibrator and what looked like clothes pegs in brass. Heassumed they were nipple clamps. There was a small brown bottle with a label describing it as leather cleaner, which Bruno suspected was amyl nitrate, a drug that was sniffed and supposedly enhanced sexual pleasure. At the bottom was some mail. The biggest envelope had an English stamp and postmark and inside was a printout of two crude photos that