Now Nicolas was thinking (and at least it was helping keep him awake) about Hodkann’s declared intention of seeing with his own eyes the samples stored in the car trunk. How would he go about it? Perhaps he’d find a way to stay in the chalet while the others went down to the village for their skiing lesson. Hidden behind a tree, he’d keep his eyes peeled for the car. Nicolas’s father would get out, open the trunk to remove the bag, and carry it to the chalet. As soon as his back was turned, Hodkann would rush up, raise the lid of the trunk, then open the black plastic cases containing the artificial limbs and surgical instruments. That was undoubtedly his plan, but he wasn’t aware that Nicolas’s father always locked the trunk after taking something out of it, even if he knew he was going to be reopening it a few minutes later. Hodkann was so bold, though, that you could imagine him following Nicolas’s father into the chalet and picking his pockets, stealing his key ring while he was speaking to the teacher. Nicolas saw Hodkann bent over the open trunk, forcing the latches of the sample cases, testing the blade of a lancet on the ball of his thumb, bending the joints of a plastic leg, so enthralled that he’d forgotten all danger. Nicolas’s father was already leaving the chalet, walking toward the car. Another moment, and he would catch Hodkann. His hand would fall heavily on Hodkann’s shoulder, and then – what would happen? Nicolas hadn’t any idea. Actually, his father had never threatened dire punishment for touching his samples. Nicolas was certain, however, that even for Hodkann it would be a very tricky situation. The expression ‘to have a rough time of it’ kept running through his head. Yes, if he got caught rummaging through the car trunk, Hodkann would have a rough time of it.
Hodkann’s interest in his father bothered Nicolas. He even wondered if the other boy hadn’t taken him under his wing to get close to his father, to win his confidence. He remembered that Hodkann didn’t have his own father anymore. And when he was alive, this father, what did he do? Nicolas hadn’t thought to ask, and anyway, he would never have dared. He couldn’t help thinking that Hodkann’s father had died violently, in suspicious, tragic circumstances, and that his life had led inexorably to such an end. He imagined him as an outlaw, dangerous, like his son, and maybe Hodkann had become so dangerous only because he had to deal with that, with the risks he ran for being the son of this father. Nicolas would have liked to ask Hodkann about him now. At night, with just the two of them, it would be possible.
It was a voluptuous thought, this nocturnal conversation with Hodkann, and Nicolas spent some time imagining how it would go. They would both leave the room, without awakening anyone. They would talk quietly in the hall or the bathroom. He pictured their whispering, the nearness of Hodkann’s big, warm body, and he relished the idea that the tyrannical power wielded by Hodkann concealed a sorrow, a vulnerability that the other boy would confess to him. He would hear him confide, as though to his only friend, the only person he could trust, that he was unhappy, that his father had died gruesomely, dismembered or tossed into a well, that his mother lived in fear of seeing her husband’s accomplices reappear some day, determined to avenge themselves on her and her son. Hodkann, so imperious, so mocking, would admit to Nicolas that he was afraid, that he, too, was a lost little boy. Tears coursing down his cheeks, he would lay that proud head on Nicolas’s lap, and Nicolas would stroke his hair, speaking gentle words of consolation, consolation for this vast and hitherto unspoken grief that had suddenly burst out before him, for him alone, because only he, Nicolas, was worthy of this revelation. Between sobs, Hodkann would say that the enemies who had killed his father and whom his mother so dreaded might come to the chalet to take him away. To take him hostage or simply kill him, abandoning his corpse in a snowy patch of undergrowth. And Nicolas would realize that it was up to him to protect Hodkann, to find a hiding place where he would be safe when these bad men, who wore shiny dark coats, surrounded the chalet and silently entered, one at each door so that no one could escape. They would draw their knives and strike coldly, methodically, determined to leave no witnesses. The half-naked bodies of children surprised in their sleep would pile up at the foot of the bunk beds. The floor would be streaming with blood. But Nicolas and Hodkann would be hiding in a hollow in the wall, behind a bed. It would be a dark, narrow space, a real rat hole. They would huddle together, their eyes wide with terror and glistening in the shadows. Together they would hear, over the sound of their own breathing, the appalling din of the carnage: shrieks of horror, death agonies, the dull thud of falling bodies, windows shattering into glass shards that would embed themselves in already mutilated flesh, the curt laughter of the killers. The severed head of Lucas, the red-headed boy with glasses, would roll under the bed toward their hiding place, coming to a stop at their feet to stare at them in disbelief. Later, all would be silent. Hours would pass. The murderers would have left empty-handed, exhilarated by the massacre yet seething with vexation at having missed their prey. In the chalet, there would be only corpses, huge heaps of dead children. But the two of them would not leave. They’d spend the whole night crouched in their nook, entrenched in the heart of the slaughterhouse, each one feeling on his cheeks a warm trickling that might be blood from a wound or the other boy’s tears. They would stay there, trembling. The night would have no end. Perhaps they would never come out.