The feeling of rolling through nothingness.
Since passing Chambéry, at around midnight, Lucie had trusted only the readings from her GPS. From what the indicator said, she had about thirty miles to go.
Alone, exhausted by the constantly winding road, she felt lost in a void. She had only one fear: that her car might break down. All around her was an apocalyptic landscape that no stars could brighten. While the mountains were probably beautiful in daytime, at night they looked like angry titans—frozen monsters with bodies of ice, which tore the horizon to shreds and absorbed the slightest ray of light. Lucie imagined Eva Louts in the same situation, driven by a force that had pushed her to travel all those miles, toward the far edge of darkness.
Finally, she arrived in Montaimont. Eyes burning, jaw aching, neck in tatters. On her dashboard was Eva’s photo, and next to it an empty water bottle and a sandwich wrapper, along with Franck Sharko’s phone number. Lucie could still see his scarecrowlike frame in the gloom of the café. I want to find the scum who did this to her. I’ll make him pay his debt, he’d said in a cold voice, with no trace of feeling. She had also seen all that money in his wallet. Large bills, at least two thousand euros, she’d estimated. She knew he’d received a huge life insurance settlement following the deaths of his wife and daughter. He could have taken an easy retirement somewhere in the sun, but instead he kept on scraping the worn-out streets, his wallet stuffed with unused cash. Why would he inflict that daily torture on himself?
Back to the narrow road. Fewer than five hundred lost souls here, scattered across the foothills. The streetlamps struggled to diffuse a coppery glow.
The GPS told her she’d reached the street with the bank machine. Under her headlights, the village center revealed a few sorry-looking shop windows. Louts must have driven up by the same route, arrived late, and withdrawn some cash, no doubt for a night’s lodgings. Lucie began exploring the nearest streets. After about ten minutes of driving around, a lit sign caught her attention.
The Ten Marmots hotel was set back slightly from the road, at the other end of the village. An unpretentious structure, white façade, little wooden balconies, carriage entrance. A dozen rooms at most. Lucie stopped at a gravel-covered parking area and, once out of the car, stretched lustily. The fresh, sharp air made her quickly put on her jacket. Finally, she pulled her meager bag from the trunk: a pair of jeans, two T-shirts, underwear . . .
It was almost two in the morning when she walked up to the receptionist, a sixty-year-old in a sweat suit, with a mountain-man beard, graying hair, and black eyes. He was watching a nature show on Rai Uno, though “watching” might be pushing it.
“Evening. Have you got a room?”
He gauged the woman with a dull eye, then turned toward a board still containing more than three quarters of its keys.
“Sì, signora. Number eight. Your name?”
An Italian, with an accent you could cut with a fork and r’s you could roll uphill. Lucie improvised:
“Amélie Courtois.”
He wrote the name in the register.
“For how many nights?”
“One or two. It depends.”
“Tourist?”
Lucie slid the photo of Eva Louts across the desk.
“This woman might have come here about ten days ago. Saturday, August 28, to be precise. Do you recognize her?”
He looked at the picture, then at Lucie, with an anxious face. She saw a dull light in his eyes: a workaday type who didn’t want any trouble.
“Are you with the police?”
“No, Eva is my half sister. She went abroad without leaving me her address and I need to find her. I know she probably stayed in a hotel. Is this the only one around here?”
“Yes.”
Dubious, he put on a pair of glasses and looked more carefully at the picture. Then he opened the register, turned a page, and pressed his finger onto a line written in spidery scrawl.
“That’s it. Eva Louts, right.”
Lucie’s fists clenched: that was one obstacle passed. The man kept silent, as if digging into his memory. Another glance at the photo. Then he pointed to a phone number written on the register, just underneath the young woman’s name.
“Is that Eva’s phone?” asked Lucie.
He took a cell phone from his pocket, scratching his head.
“Pazienza, pazienza. I think this number . . . is in my contacts list. Curioso . . .”
For a brief moment, Lucie forgot all about her fatigue and her troubles, or that she had set off on the trail of a girl she’d never met.
“Here we are. It’s him. It’s his cell number.”
He showed her the screen of his phone, with a name and number: Marc Castel. Lucie felt her throat tighten.
“Who’s that?”
“He’s a kind of guide for the upper mountains. I often recommend him for tourists who want to do some climbing or hike up top. I must have jotted down his number here so she could copy it—something like that, I don’t really remember.”
Lucie knit her brow.
“What did Eva need a guide for? Where was she going?”
“I have no idea. All I can tell you is that she stayed here two nights, then left early Monday morning. The best thing would be to ask Marc. He lives in Val Thorens. I’ll tell you how to get there.”
“Terrific.”
“Be sure to get to his place early. I’d say seven at the latest. After that, Marc heads up to the summit and you won’t see him again until after dark.”
He scratched out an approximate map with an address and handed it to Lucie, who thanked him and gave him back the room key.
“Could you give me number six instead? According to the register, that was Eva’s room.”
Room 6 was pleasant enough but awfully small. A bathtub that could crack your spine, narrow single bed, miniature television. The one window looked out on something dark and infinite, probably a mountainside. Beneath the wan luster of a nightlight, Lucie sat on the mattress and removed her shoes with an ahhh of relief. She massaged her feet slowly, pensive.
Delicately, she pulled a small, transparent medal from the pocket of her jeans and slid it under her comforter. It was a plastic oval, with a small loop for hanging on a chain, that contained the last photo she’d ever taken of the twins together. The living one on the left, the dead one on the right. She’d had medals of this type made by the dozens, and had put them everywhere. In her car, her house, her clothes. Her children were always with her, no matter where she went.
Lucie spent ten minutes composing a text to her daughter. Juliette would find it tomorrow morning at breakfast, when she put the phone inside her schoolbag.
Once she had washed, undressed, and set her cell phone on “alarm,” she sat on the bed, handling her Mann pistol. She ran a finger over the grip, brushed the trigger with a sigh. Through this object, she recalled the smells of the squad room, of black coffee, ink on freshly printed reports, the cigarettes some of her colleagues smoked.
After setting the pistol on the nightstand, she lay back on the mattress, hands behind her head, eyes to the ceiling. Lucie could hear the mountain breathing. A lugubrious lung with granite alveoli, which seemed to be pumping all the air out of her. She turned onto her side, shut off the light, and curled up like a child. Sleep enfolded her in its thick, warm blanket.
• • •
Lucie was dazzled by the beauty of the countryside closely surrounding her. At the foot of Marc Castel’s chalet, set into the heights of Val Thorens, she enjoyed a panoramic view of Vanoise National Park. Snowy peaks as far as the eye could see. Powerful, hieratic crests assaulting a crystal sky. Closer in, so near it almost seemed you could touch them, were smaller mountains of red, green, and yellow that were already playing with the tints of morning light. In this early dawn, nature offered up its freshest and most gorgeous spectacle: wrapped tightly in her thin jacket and black woolen gloves at an altitude of more than sixty-five hundred feet, Lucie was shivering.
Beautiful as it was, the landscape had nothing on the man who opened the door. Eyes of a troubling green, short brown hair, a compact, angelic face that made him look like Indiana Jones. He was a head taller than Lucie and, beneath his tight-fitting undershirt, showed a climber’s fine physique. Apparently the woman from the North was catching him fresh from bed.
“Forgive me for intruding, but . . . the owner of the Ten Marmots suggested I come find you here before you headed up the mountain.”
He looked her over from top to bottom, as if she had disembarked from another planet.
“Do you know what time it is? It’s not even seven! Who the hell are you?”
Lucie again pulled out the ID photo, holding it out in front of her, and adopted an authoritative tone. Given how rude the guy was being, enough with the politeness.
“Amélie Courtois, Paris police. I need to know what this woman was doing here.”
He accepted the photo mechanically, without taking his eyes off Lucie.
“Come inside a minute. I’m freezing my balls off.”
Lucie entered the wooden lodging and shut the door behind her. She loved the ambiance of these large mountain chalets: the honeyed tones, the softness of the wood floors, the brute force of the exposed beams. In the living room, a large bay window offered a picture postcard view. It must have been so nice to wake up here every morning, head in the clouds, far away from the blackness of the big cities, the pollution and honking horns.
The man stared at her questioningly.
“The police? So what do you want with Marc?”
“Wait—you’re not Marc?”
“No, just a friend.”
Lucie clenched her teeth. Couldn’t the idiot have said so sooner?
“I just want to ask him some questions about one of his customers. Where is he?”
The man nodded toward the summit, through the bay window.
“Up there. Didn’t you see the helicopters as you were coming up?”
“Sure. They seem to be making round trips from the top, carrying large rolls of something.”
“They’ve been at it since six thirty. Marc was in one of them. For the last few days he’s been helping cover the most vulnerable parts of the Gebroulaz glacier with tarps, in preparation for next summer. The choppers regularly bring men and materials up there.”
“They wrap up glaciers these days?”
“Just a small part. With climate warming these past years, all the glaciers on the planet are starting to sweat, especially in the Alps. In the last century, some of them have lost eighty percent of their volume. This year, they’re trying to see if they can slow down Gebroulaz’s melt rate, the way they did last year at Andermatt. Sixty-five thousand square feet to wrap in two layers of film barely an eighth of an inch thick, to protect them from UV rays, the heat, and the rain.”
“So, this girl?”
“I’m not the one you should ask—I’ve only been here a few days.”
“And when will Marc be back?”
“Not before evening. He spends all day up on the glacier. Sorry.”
Lucie pocketed the photo and thought a moment. There were only two solutions she could see: wait patiently for his return or . . .
“Take me to the helicopters.”