Nicolas’s temperature had gone down, in fact he wasn’t sick anymore, but everything continued according to his wish, as though he was going to be feverish until the end of ski school, as though once this niche had been selected, it was more convenient to have him stay in it. The teacher and the instructors didn’t even try to justify his quarantine by taking his temperature or giving him medicine. They seemed simply to have forgotten that he might have taken skiing lessons like the others, eaten at the table with them, slept in a dormitory. Anyone entering the small office that had been his room for two days now found him lying on the couch, nestled in his blanket, engrossed in a book (or daydreaming, more often than not), and whoever was using the phone or looking for some papers would smile and say a few pleasant words to him, as though he were a household pet or a much younger child. The door was left ajar. Sometimes a classmate would stick his head in, asking if he was all right, if he needed anything. These visits were brief, not unfriendly, but pointless. Hodkann did not come to see him.
The afternoon of the day the policemen had shown up at the café, Lucas poked his head around the door to say hi to Nicolas, who called him into the office and asked him for a favor: Nicolas wanted Hodkann to come up, he needed to talk to him. Lucas promised to tell him and left. From downstairs came the muffled thud of falling bodies: Patrick was giving the class an introductory lesson in karate.
Nicolas waited until that evening, in vain. Was it that Hodkann didn’t want to come or that Lucas hadn’t given him the message? Suppertime arrived, then bedtime. There was the usual din, which lasted awhile, then all was quiet. The teacher and the instructors had gotten into the habit of chatting while they sipped herbal tea and smoked a cigarette before going to bed; their voices floated up now from the main room, but the words were unintelligible. It was then that Hodkann came into the office.
He hadn’t made a sound, and Nicolas was startled: before he’d had time to plan anything, Hodkann was standing in front of him in pajamas, with a grim look in his eye. His expression indicated that he wasn’t used to being summoned like this by a mere pup and that he hoped he hadn’t gone to all this bother for nothing. Hodkann waited without a word. It was up to Nicolas to speak first, but preferring to keep silent as well, he drew from under his pillow the flier about the missing boy, which he unfolded to show to Hodkann. The small bedside lamp shed a soft orange light around the room; there was an almost imperceptible hum, too, that must have been coming from the light bulb. They could still hear the placid murmur of grown-up voices downstairs, occasionally enlivened by Patrick’s hearty laughter. Hodkann nonchalantly examined the flier Nicolas had handed him. They were engaged in a kind of duel that would be lost by whoever spoke first, and Nicolas realized that he should be the one.
‘There were some policemen in the café this morning,’ he said. ‘They’ve been looking for him for two days.’
‘I know,’ replied Hodkann coldly. ‘We saw the flier in the village.’
Nicolas was floored. He’d thought he was letting Hodkann in on a secret, and everyone knew it already. They must be talking about nothing else in the kids’ rooms. He would have liked Hodkann to give him back the flier – it was his only advantage, the only valuable card he had to play, and he’d stupidly begun by giving it away. Now Hodkann was going to ask why he’d sent for him, what he had to say, and Nicolas had already told him everything. Hodkann’s anger, his crushing contempt, would fall on Nicolas. Holding the flier, Hodkann stared at Nicolas with the same chilly wariness as before. He seemed capable of going on like that for hours, never tiring of the distress he caused his victim, and Nicolas realized that he’d never be able to stand the tension.
Then, in his unpredictable way, Hodkann changed his tactics. His expression softened, and he sat down familiarly on the edge of the bed, next to Nicolas, saying, ‘You’ve got a lead?’ The wall of hostility had crumbled in an instant: Nicolas wasn’t afraid anymore; on the contrary, he felt united with Hodkann in that trusting, whispering complicity he’d often dreamed about, the kind that bound together the members of the Secret Seven. At night, by the gleam of a flashlight, while everyone else was asleep, they were trying to solve a terrible mystery …
‘The police think he just ran away from home for a few days,’ he began. ‘At least, they hope so …’
Hodkann smiled with affectionate irony, as if he knew his Nicolas well and could tell exactly where he was heading. ‘And you,’ he said pointedly, ‘you don’t buy that.’ He glanced down at the flier still lying unfolded on his lap. ‘You don’t think he looks like that kind of kid.’
This idea hadn’t occurred to Nicolas; he found it a flimsy one, but having nothing else to fall back on, he nodded in agreement. Hodkann had accepted his invitation to join in the search for René, to follow the trail of the mystery. Nicolas already envisioned the two of them discovering secret passages, exploring damp tunnels strewn with bones, and since they didn’t have a single lead, there was no point in being picky. Then a thought struck Nicolas out of the blue, dazzling him. His father had told him never to breathe a word about it, never to betray the trust the clinic directors had placed in him, but Nicolas couldn’t have cared less: Hodkann and René were worth it.
‘There is one small possibility,’ he said hesitantly, ‘but …’
‘Let’s have it,’ demanded Hodkann, and Nicolas blurted out the story of the traffickers in human organs who kidnapped children to mutilate them. In his opinion, that’s what had happened to René.
‘And what makes you think so?’ asked Hodkann. There wasn’t a trace of skepticism in his voice, only the liveliest interest.
‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ explained Nicolas, ‘but the night I went outside, I wasn’t sleepwalking. I couldn’t fall asleep at all, and then from the hall window, I saw a light out in the driveway. A man was walking around with a flashlight. That seemed weird to me, and I went down. I hid so he wouldn’t see me and I followed him to a van parked on the road. It was a white van, exactly like the ones where they have their secret operating rooms. The man got in and drove off. The headlights weren’t on – he didn’t even start the engine, just let the van begin rolling down the hill on its own, so there wouldn’t be any noise. That seemed fishy to me, you know? I remembered that story about the organ traffickers and I figured they must be prowling around the chalet in case someone came out all by himself …’
‘If that’s true, you had a close shave,’ muttered Hodkann. He was hooked, Nicolas could tell. This new role was enjoyable: it had all come to Nicolas in a flash, he was improvising, but a whole story was already taking shape before him and everything that had happened during the last few days could be explained, beginning with his own illness. He recalled a book in which the detective also pretended to be sick, even delirious, in order to allay the suspicions of the criminals and keep a close eye on them. That’s just what he’d been doing, too, for several days now. In the book, the detective’s assistant – very resourceful but not quite as smart – continued the investigation on his own as best he could, thinking the detective was out of the game. In the end, admitting he’d been faking, the detective abandoned the masquerade, and it turned out that by staying in bed he’d come closer to solving the mystery than his assistant had by shadowing and interrogating everyone. Caught up in his story, Nicolas actually thought it plausible that he and Hodkann might play out similar roles, and even more astonishingly, Hodkann seemed to go along with this as well. They both imagined the organ traffickers spying on the chalet (that huge store of fresh bodies, of livers, kidneys, eyes), waiting for a chance that never came and making up for it with a child from the neighboring village, little René, who’d had the misfortune to be discovered alone nearby. It all fit. Horribly, it all fit.
‘But why shouldn’t we tell anyone about this?’ asked Hodkann, suddenly worried. ‘If it’s true, it’s very serious. We’d have to tell the police.’
Nicolas looked him up and down. That night, it was Hodkann who was asking timid practical questions and he, Nicolas, who was silencing him with cryptic replies.
‘They won’t believe us,’ he said, lowering his voice still further to add, ‘and if they did, it would be worse. Because the organ traffickers have accomplices in the police force.’
‘How do you know that?’ asked Hodkann.
‘From my father,’ answered Nicolas firmly. ‘Because of his job, he knows lots of doctors.’ And as he spoke, forgetting that everything was based on a lie he had told, he had another idea: perhaps his father’s absence was somehow involved. What if he’d spotted the traffickers? What if he’d really and truly tried to follow them? What if they’d taken him prisoner – or killed him? Although it was fairly shaky, he confided this hypothesis to Hodkann anyway and, to strengthen it, invented more details: absolutely nothing must be said about this, either, but his father was investigating on his own, without the knowledge of the police. Using his job as a cover and taking advantage of his connections in the hospital business, he was on the trail of the traffickers. That was why he’d come to this area, under the pretext of driving Nicolas to the chalet: his informants had tipped him off about the presence of the van where the secret operations were performed. The hunt was desperately dangerous. The quarry was a powerful, unscrupulous organization, and he was going up against them alone.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Hodkann. ‘Your father’s a detective?’
‘No, no, but …’
Nicolas broke off, and this time he was the one to wear a look of grim determination, studying Hodkann as if gauging his ability to handle the whole story. Hodkann waited. Nicolas realized that Hodkann didn’t doubt any of what Nicolas had already told him, and he pressed on, somewhat unnerved by his own words.
‘He has a score to settle with them. Last year they kidnapped my little brother. He disappeared in an amusement park and was later found behind a fence. They’d taken out a kidney. Now do you understand?’
Hodkann understood. His expression was solemn.
‘No one knows this,’ continued Nicolas. ‘You promise me you won’t talk about it?’
Hodkann promised. Nicolas enjoyed the effect his tale was having on Hodkann. He’d envied the prestige the other boy had derived from his dead father – a man who’d died a violent death – and now he, too, had a daredevil father, an avenger running a thousand risks, embroiled in an intrigue from which he had little chance of escaping alive. At the same time, Nicolas wondered anxiously what would come of that night’s crazy extravagance, the torrent of fantasies he couldn’t take back now. If Hodkann talked, it would be a complete catastrophe.
‘I was wrong to tell you that,’ he whispered. ‘Because now you’re in danger too. They’ll be targeting you.’
Hodkann smiled, with that mixture of jauntiness and irony that made him irresistible, and said, ‘We’re in the same boat.’ At that moment, they slipped back into their former roles: Hodkann was once again the big kid to whom the little one had wisely entrusted his perilous secrets, the protector who would look out for him, taking things in hand. They heard chairs scraping over the flagstones of the main room, then the teacher and the instructors coming upstairs. Hodkann placed a finger to his lips and dove under the bed. An instant later, the teacher looked in at the half-open door.
‘Time to sleep, Nicolas, it’s late.’
Drowsily, Nicolas said okay and reached over to turn off the lamp.
‘Everything’s all right?’ asked the teacher.
‘Just fine,’ he replied.
‘Good night, then.’ Back out in the hall, she turned off the light there as well. Her footsteps faded away; he heard a door creak, a faucet running.
‘Perfect,’ whispered Hodkann, plopping down on the bed again near Nicolas. ‘Now we need to make our plan of action.’