The Night Cab

Paris · September 2008 · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

On the Friday before the world ended I was twenty-two, slightly drunk on a very good wine and entirely at peace with the universe, which is the best possible condition in which to meet a prophet.

It was the twelfth of September 2008. I had just started in business, and I owned a good jacket and a Nokia Communicator, the one that opened like a small book with a real keyboard inside, which in those days was the most elegant thing a man could take out of his pocket at a dinner table. That evening I had taken it out as little as possible. The dinner was in the rue du Bac, in a flat with too many books and a host who poured a Pauillac two years older than I was as if it were water. I listened a great deal. At twenty-two, listening is the best education available, and the wine made it a pleasure.

At half past one I came down into the street and a taxi appeared as if I had ordered it. It was a black Mercedes with its light on and, on the front passenger seat, sitting upright on a folded blanket, a small grey dog wearing an expression of professional boredom. The driver was about sixty-five, with a white moustache, a tweed cap and hands that moved when he talked, which was immediately. His name was Gérard. The dog was called Coupon. “Like on the old bonds,” Gérard said. “You clipped them and they paid. He doesn't pay. But he's regular.” Radio Classique was playing Ravel very quietly.

He saw the Communicator open on my knee and nodded, as if it confirmed a suspicion. “Banker.” Not exactly, I said, just starting. “Everybody is just starting,” he said. “Some finish very fast.” Then, because the boulevard Saint-Germain was empty and he had decided he liked me, he told me who he was. For twenty-two years he had worked the corbeille, the great round rail in the Palais Brongniart where men in jackets shouted prices at each other. He had been a crieur. He had a voice that could throw a thousand shares across a room like a ball. Then, at the end of the eighties, the screens came, the shouting stopped and the Bourse went as quiet as a church. “They did not need voices any more,” he said. “So I took mine for a drive.”

He had driven nights ever since, and he liked them. After midnight the men in the back forgot there was anybody in the front. But tonight, he said, was not like other Fridays. Since seven o'clock nearly every fare had been the same: a man from La Défense or the avenue Montaigne, in a good suit, on the telephone, in English. Gérard's English was the English of the corbeille, mostly numbers, but he did not need the words. “In the Palais you learned to hear fear before the price,” he said. “Tonight, monsieur, my back seat has been full of it. Quiet fear. The worst kind. Loud men are fine. It is when they whisper.”

We crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde, the water black and the obelisk lit like a candle. At twenty past eight, Gérard said, he had driven an Englishman from the avenue George V who told his wife, twice, the second time more slowly, that it was done: a big British bank would buy the American one over the weekend, everything signed by Sunday night, and on Monday everyone would call it the deal of the decade. At ten to one he had driven an American to a hotel on the rue de Rivoli who told somebody he called Dad that nobody was buying anything, that Washington would not put in a cent, and that on Monday the bank would go down and take half the street with it. “Two men,” Gérard said. “Two Mondays. Both certain. And I am a man with only one Monday.”

That, it turned out, was his problem. Gérard and his wife Odile had been married thirty-eight years, and for thirty-one of them there had been a jar on the kitchen shelf, an old mustard jar from Dijon. Whenever Gérard was certain of something, an election, the price of petrol, whether their son would marry the girl from Lyon, he wrote his prediction on a slip of paper and put it in the jar with a twenty-franc note, later a twenty-euro note, and if he was wrong, Odile kept the money. Out of his certainties she had bought a sewing machine, a week in Venice and most of a dishwasher. “She calls it the Bourse,” he said. “It is the only one left in Paris where a voice still counts.”

Tonight he had gone home at midnight for a coffee, meaning to put in a slip about Monday, and found that he could not choose. So he made me an offer, over his shoulder, at the lights on the rue Royale, with great formality. He would give me both versions, word for word, for nothing. All I had to do in return was tell him which one was true. “You have the little computer,” he said. “You have been to a dinner where they pour wine like that.” He could smell it, he said, and approved. “Somebody at that table knows.”

I should explain that the people at that table had spent three hours not knowing, very elegantly. Nobody had said the name of the bank. Everybody had thought it. I had listened, as I usually did, and what I had heard was six intelligent men choosing different wines in order to avoid choosing a Monday. So I told Gérard the truth, which was that I did not know, and that I did not believe anyone at the table knew either. At the lights by the Madeleine he looked at me in the mirror for a long moment, the way a man looks at a horse he has been told is fast. Then he laughed, delighted, and slapped the wheel, and Coupon opened one eye.

“Good,” he said. “You are the first honest one tonight.” We turned up the boulevard Malesherbes. He took a small notebook from under the dog's blanket and a pencil from behind his ear, and at the next red light wrote two slips, one on each knee, in capitals, with the care of a man signing a contract. He took two twenty-euro notes from the sun visor and folded each one round a slip. I asked him what he was doing. “What we did in the Palais when we heard a thing and did not know if it was true,” he said. “We never believed it. We never ignored it either.” Then he held both up between two fingers, like theatre tickets, and told me exactly what he was going to do with them in Odile's jar, and what he thought she would say.

What did Gérard carry across Paris all evening, in two opposite versions?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.