Somewhere east of them lay Belleville, Stanislas thought. Enclave of the outcast, the striver, the pious, Léon Pincus’s world. Had he begged or confronted Boucher for some reason the day of his murder? And why had those men, he wondered, held him captive, and who were they? No answers came to him; the previous Friday night’s protestors’ death chant had kept him awake, and he too had slept poorly and felt tired.
Shortly a neon sign, hazing pink a Tunisian restaurateur’s window, came into view. Two Jews in wide-brimmed hats and frock coats hurried into a kosher deli. A black woman, hair swathed in bandanna, paused under a fruit stand’s canopy. The exotic signaled they had arrived in Belleville. The driver slowed at another intersection. Stanislas saw they had turned onto Boulevard de la Vil
