The cries of the cormorants and gulls woke me up, as if thousands of seabirds had met up on social media to welcome the arrival of the Paramé in Saint-Marcouf. The day seemed barely to have broken. A timid sun aimed its red eye at the middle of the porthole, lined with tears of foam.
The wooden walls began to vibrate. Shouting, men this time. I understood that they were mooring the Paramé. The door of my cabin flew open a moment later. I recognised Carmen Avril by her imposing bulk. She was wearing a large purple waxed jacket.
“It’s time,” she exclaimed.
She studied my naked body with revulsion, her eye lingering on the stump of my left knee. She was staring at a monster. A sick and perverted creature. I had rarely observed such a mixture of fascination and hatred in the face of my handicap.
The murder of her beloved daughter. Who she thought . . .
I ostentatiously stretched out on the mattress, opening my thighs to reveal my penis.
I was innocent! The cops were on my side, not hers.
“Put that away,” Carmen growled, throwing a balled-up garment on my bed.
With the same movement, she pointed at me with the iron rod that she was holding behind her back. A kind of poker, but longer and thicker, two centimetres in diameter and a metre long.
Instinctively I retreated into the back of the alcove. I was innocent but handcuffed, naked, defenceless in the face of a madwoman who had been chewing over her vengeance for ten years. Carmen Avril brought the iron bar towards me and held it balanced in front of my face.
Time stopped. For ever.
At last she dropped it on the floor. The iron bar vibrated with an endless echo of cymbals.
“You can use that as a crutch.”
Without another word, she set a small key down on the bedside table, probably the one for my handcuffs, and left the cabin.
As soon as I set foot on the deck of the Paramé, wearing the neoprene wetsuit Carmen had tossed on my bed, Frédéric Saint-Michel passed me in silence and went down to the hold. I didn’t have time to insult them, to shout at them about how humiliating it was for me to have had to climb the stairs on one leg and keep my balance on the boat, helped only by a metal bar. Frédéric Saint-Michel had already come back up, holding the handcuffs, and gestured to me to hold out my wrists.
Saint-Michel . . . That bastard Xanax! He’d taken a beating over the last ten years, this guy Chichin that all the girls loved . . .
I thought again about Piroz’s advice.
It’s all planned.
Everything’s in place.
Play their game.
I let go of the iron bar and held out my arms. Then I hopped over to a storage bench at the foot of the ship’s rail to sit down.
Two fettered hands, one leg. Did they seriously think I planned on swimming back to the mainland?
The Paramé was moored on the Île du Large, one of the two islands in the archipelago of Saint-Marcouf. This island, 150 metres by 80, was essentially a fortress built in the middle of the sea. It immediately made me think of Fort Boyard, the show that fuelled my fears and fantasies as a kid, with its dwarves, tigers, spiders and the breasts of the starlets in their low-cut swimwear.
The central part of the fort of Saint-Marcouf, a kind of coliseum with a lookout post, was protected by battlements that ran all the way around the citadel, then by thick brick walls almost entirely covered with seaweed or moss. At high tide, the sea must have submerged much of the enclosure. Only the sea wall to which the Paramé was moored seemed more recent.
Carmen came and stood right in front of me.
“Don’t expect to be rescued, Salaoui. Mooring on the Île du Large has been forbidden for years for security reasons. Only the association that maintains the fort has permission to moor its boats there, but the volunteers don’t work in the winter . . . any more than sailing boats venture out on to the Channel.”
I didn’t reply. On a table set up on the deck there were cups, a thermos of coffee and pastries. Frédéric Saint-Michel turned towards me, holding a coffee and a croissant.
“A cup of coffee?” he asked me in a glum voice that suggested neither sympathy nor antipathy.
He couldn’t have had much difficulty portraying his character; his face bore the same depressive mask as Christian Le Medef’s.
“No, thanks,” I replied, loud enough for Mona to understand me. How long would it take before I could call her Alina? “I’m still suffering from the effects of the last one I drank.”
Mona didn’t respond.
She was standing near the prow, turned three-quarters towards the other island, the Île de Terre. Her loose red hair was lashing her face, which was crimson with cold, and perhaps even by some tears that had dried around her swollen lids. Beside her, to starboard, Denise Joubain had put a hand on the rail and with the other she was holding her Shih Tzu. Arnold was tearing into a pain au chocolat as if attacking a living prey.
Gilbert Avril was above me, behind the glass of the captain’s cabin, checking some sort of nautical measuring equipment.
The least convinced of the troupe, I thought. Even for a seven-kilometre voyage, even in calm weather, he was probably going to find all kinds of excuses not to leave the tiller and let the others get on with the dirty work.
Carmen passed in front of me, poured herself a cup of coffee, not least to warm up her fingers, then she walked past Océane and gave her a beaming smile.
The complicity of those who have emerged victorious after making enormous efforts.
The reward. The apotheosis.
Océane held a cigarette between her fingers, which protruded from a pair of mauve mittens. She had pinned back her hair with some grips of the same colour. Her hairstyle emphasised her features, her dark eyes, giving them the elegance of a Hollywood actress. A beautiful woman on the deck of an ocean liner leaving New York to seduce Paris. Unlike the others, she didn’t try to avoid my gaze. She stared at me, every now and again letting the sea breeze carry the smoke between us.
A light veil of mystery. I was left-handed and one-legged, but I felt invincible.
Océane was probing me. She was interested in me. She was wondering. The opportunity was almost too good in the end. Had it not been for that gross misunderstanding, mixing me up with someone else, such a beautiful woman would never have deigned to glance at me.
It’s all planned, Piroz had said.
Everything’s in place.
Play their game.
The old drunk was the only one who wasn’t standing on the deck. He was busy guzzling calvados, waiting to pull his famous counter-hypothesis out of his sleeve.
The low voice of Frédéric Saint-Michel rang out behind me.
“Shall we get it over with?”
Carmen set down her cup of coffee.
“You’re right, let’s not waste time, the sea has been rising for two hours.”
I didn’t grasp the connection.
“Alina,” she commanded. “Tighten the moorings.”
Mona reacted mechanically, slowly hauling on the orange buoys wedged between the Paramé and the sea wall of the Île du Large. Denise kept Arnold out of the way during the manoeuvre.
“Which one?” Carmen asked, studying the brick wall.
“The third one from the top,” Frédéric Saint-Michel replied, looking in the same direction.
The third what?
I couldn’t see anything on the wall but viscous seaweed, some of it soaked by the waves, the rest relatively dry—for a few more minutes.
“The least rusty one,” Carmen said, pointing at a brass ring embedded in the wall, more than a metre above the current level of the sea, but fifty centimetres below its maximum level, judging by the permanent dampness of the seaweed. I immediately understood why they had asked me to put on a neoprene wetsuit.
They planned to tie me to that ring! And wait for the sea to rise.
A trickle of acrid sweat slipped between my skin and the wetsuit.
What was their intention? Make me confess to crimes that I hadn’t committed? Force confessions from me and then hand me over to the police? Or would they punish my “crime” by leaving me there to die?
I thought again of Piroz’s advice.
It’s all planned. Everything’s in place.
I prayed that the police captain wasn’t mistaken.
That cop who was still sleeping it off.
Océane flicked her cigarette butt into the sea, then gave me another defiant look. Unfathomable . . .
Carmen came towards me.
“You get it this time, don’t you, Salaoui. The sea is rising by about a centimetre a minute . . . Which means you have just over an hour to talk to us about your crimes.”
I gulped down my saliva.
Play their game.
O.K., Piroz, I have no choice, but shift yourself.
“And then?” I asked.
“At the end of the hearing, the jury will decide. A jury of the people—I’m sure you don’t need me to list the members of the jury. It’s in your interest to be convincing.”
Play their game.
“You’re a bunch of sickos,” I spat.
Carmen ignored the insult and turned to Frédéric. “Go and get Piroz! We’re going to need another man to chuck Salaoui in the sea, because Gilbert refuses to get his hands dirty.”
Gilbert Avril said nothing. He probably couldn’t even hear his sister’s words over the cries of the gulls gathered on the roof of the wheelhouse.
Frédéric disappeared into the hold. Mona’s hands were still gripping the mooring ropes that were being whipped by the waves. Blue with cold. The thin sunlight of dawn had already been swallowed up in an eiderdown of clouds. The temperature outside couldn’t have been more than five degrees. The temperature of the water didn’t bear thinking about.
Océane lit a second cigarette. Carmen drained a second cup of coffee.
“What’s that idiot doing?” she muttered, when Saint-Michel failed to return.
Eventually his footsteps echoed on the stairs. His face was distorted with bewilderment.
“Piroz isn’t in his cabin,” he said.
A yawning chasm opened up beneath me. Fate was dashing me against the walls. The cormorants seemed to mock me with their cries.
“Have you looked anywhere else?” Carmen asked. “In the head? In the shower?”
“Christ, Carmen, the boat’s thirty metres long!” shouted Frédéric, venting his irritation. “He’s gone, I tell you!”
Without a word, Carmen, then Océane, then Denise went down and searched every corner of the Paramé.
Without success.
The police captain was no longer on the boat.
Had Piroz drunk too much and fallen overboard? Had he deliberately jumped into the icy water and set off in an inflatable raft to get help? Or had he been silenced because he knew too much, because he hadn’t been careful enough?
While Gilbert Avril, at Carmen’s insistence, counted the Paramé’s lifejackets one by one, I thought of Piroz’s words:
No one else knows. Your innocence must remain a secret for a few more hours.
No one else knows.
Gilbert Avril cursed and put all the lifejackets back in their box.
Not one was missing.
Terrified, I looked at the brass ring fixed to the wall.
The sea had already risen by at least ten centimetres.