As he came to, he realised scissors were cutting away the back of his shirt and was aware of the silent agitation that reigned around him. He was lying on his stomach and when he tried lift his head to see what was happening, a woman’s voice told him not to move.
“How are you feeling? My name is Doctor Ferrière, I’m a paramedic.”
He tried to answer, spat out soil and gravel. He felt a damp patch between his legs, at the top of his thighs. It was not blood.
“I think I’m O.K.,” he managed to say. “I just want to go home. What did he do to me? Oh fuck, I’ve pissed myself.”
He moved his legs, tried to lean up on his elbows.
“Please, don’t try to move.”
He was vaguely conscious of comings and goings in the convulsive light of the torches and the blue strobing from the police cars. A cacophony of voices, shouts and arguments was suddenly superimposed over the doctor’s voice. He felt fingers pressing on his back around the wound the man had made. People were talking over his head and he could not understand what they were saying.
“It’s superficial,” the woman said. “It’s nothing more than a scratch.”
“Pierre? You O.K.? Jesus, you gave us a scare. Are you taking him to hospital?”
Daras was crouching next to him. She took his hand and was forcing herself to smile.
“Where’s the guy?” he asked. “Did you get him?”
“He took off. We’re looking for him everywhere, but I’m not exactly hopeful. Pradeau managed only to wound him.”
She stood up quickly and Vilar felt himself being lifted and put on a stretcher.
He said that he could walk, thank you, but one of the men carrying the stretcher advised him not to move until they got him into the ambulance. Daras mumbled something into her police radio, an order maybe, Vilar could not make it out. He felt as if he were floating in a soporific haze.
“This guy …” he managed to say. “He can’t have slipped through our fingers just like that. You said he took a bullet?”
“Yeah. But Pradeau was only shooting to wound, and the guy managed to run off. We were this fucking close to catching him.”
The paramedic was blonde and rather young. She sat next to him and looked at him with a gentleness that softened the curt tone of her deep voice.
He realised he was trembling. He tried to take a deep, calm breath, to focus entirely on that breath. He could still feel the tip of the knife in his back.
“He tried to hit the spinal cord.”
“Don’t worry, he didn’t get that far. He slashed you a little, the wound is about two, maximum three centimetres, nothing serious.”
She was smiling. She seemed competent. She explained that she was going to give him an injection to calm him. He did not bother to answer, simply closed his eyes. He let her do her job, he felt the injection, felt himself being swabbed with a cold liquid, felt the sutures pinch his skin. He felt alert to the slightest sensation in his body and was surprised to discover he felt no pain.
The doctor asked him again if he was determined to go home and had him sign some sort of discharge form, apologising that this was something she was obliged to do.
He found himself in the back seat of his own car without knowing how he got there, looking out at his fellow officers talking on the pavement while the security guards climbed back into their vans and their patrol vehicles. He felt sleepy, stupefied, and remembered that the blonde woman from the S.A.M.U. had given him a sedative injection to stop his tremors. The alcohol he had drunk earlier was turning off his brain, like the lights in a village hall after a party, when eventually all that is visible is the glow of the green exit signs.
He woke up the next morning in his own bed with no idea who had put him there or how. As he rolled over, he barely felt a twinge from the wound. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he waited for the first shooting pains signalling a migraine, but nothing came, so he stood up and found himself steady on his feet with a craving for coffee and buttered baguette that made his mouth water. He felt none of the panic he had experienced the night before. He felt a trilling of residual adrenalin, nothing more.
He was tucking into bread and jam, waiting for the coffee to brew, when the doorbell rang. He started, the hand clutching a spoon froze in mid-air. From outside he heard Pradeau call out. When Vilar opened the door, Pradeau waved a bag of croissants under his nose.
“Jesus, you’re looking good. Did that blonde from the S.A.M.U. stay behind and administer intensive care, or what?”
He flopped down in a chair and demanded coffee.
“You on the other hand don’t look so hot,” Vilar said. “You’re the one in need of critical attention.”
“Too much booze, too many fags, too much brooding. I didn’t nod off until gone seven this morning. Still, plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.”
He sipped his coffee, lit up a cigarette. Vilar took one from his pack and went to open a window. They smoked in silence. Pradeau stared out of the window, lost in thought.
“We didn’t even find the fucking bullet. I hit him in the neck, I’m pretty sure, but it was only a flesh wound. It can’t have been a through-and-through or he’d be dead. Now I’ve got to fill out some fucking report explaining the incident. I’m going to have Internal Affairs crawling up my arse.”
“There’s a guy dead, isn’t there?” Vilar said. “The only one taking any serious risks was me. They’re not going to hassle us over this, are they? You get to save a colleague’s life, the guy gets to do a runner, everyone’s happy, no?”
Pradeau said nothing, staring at the ashtray into which he was stubbing out his cigarette. He stifled a yawn and poured himself more coffee.
“What is it?” Vilar said, “You really don’t look good.”
Pradeau sighed and gave him a beaten, helpless look.
“My father called at about five this morning, completely hysterical. I’d only just nodded off and the phone scared the shit out of me. My mother collapsed in the toilet and he couldn’t manage to get her up. Wanted me to come around. Shit. I told him to call a neighbour and he started sobbing down the line that it was too early to go waking people … Can you believe it? It’s not O.K. to wake the people next door, but it’s fine for me to drive a hundred kilometres on fuck-all sleep just to help my mother stand up? Fuck’s sake, what am I supposed to do? He refuses to put her in a nursing home, he doesn’t want to be separated from her, but there are days when he wishes she would just die quickly so he could have a bit of peace because he can’t take it anymore. And if that wasn’t bad enough, these last six months she doesn’t know him from Adam. The other day when she saw him in the kitchen she was terrified he was a burglar. She recognises his voice sometimes, so when he talks to her she calms down. It’s like she’s just found something familiar she thought she’d lost forever. I tell you, it fucking does my head in, all this shit.”
In the silence that followed, a bird trilled, a fire engine siren honked in the distance.
“Why don’t you take a week off, go sort things out with your father?”
Pradeau shrugged and shook his head. He smiled sadly.
“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Just leave it.”
Vilar stood up. There was nothing he could do for Pradeau. He wanted him to leave. There was nothing anyone could do for anyone. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then please, don’t say anything. Each to his own. You’ve got your shit, I’ve got mine, that doesn’t make it our shit. I never know what to say to you either.”
Vilar was desperate to find some way out of this blind alley they were in.
“Last night, the guy … did you see him? What did he look like?”
At first Pradeau stared at him dumbfounded, as though he didn’t understand what he was saying. Then he nodded slowly.
“Tall, light brown hair, bright eyes, a prominent chin. I got a good look, I talked to him while he was crouching over you with the knife.”
Nothing like the guy he had seen at Madame Huvenne’s place, nothing like the witness he spoken to in the lobby of the tower block. A shudder ran down Vilar’s spine. He felt as though the wound had suddenly developed a nasty itch.
“The guy I saw before had dark hair. There are two of them, I’m sure of it. Two at Morvan’s place to make him disappear without a trace. There’s the one I had on the line who talked to me about Pablo, and the one who killed Nadia. I don’t know how, but they found each other and they’re in this together.”
“That just brings us back to Marianne’s woolly theories. I don’t buy it. There’s one guy, he’s clever, but he’ll end up getting himself caught. End of story. At Morvan’s house we found fibres, two hairs, nothing concrete. You and Marianne, you’re too determined to make this two people. And if there were two of them, then why would they put themselves to so much trouble? Take so many risks? I think you’re both kidding yourselves. It’s all bullshit.”
“Call it bullshit if you will, but it’s unlikely that the same guy would be going around abducting a kid and terrorising whores.”
“Unless he’s a pimp … Someone trafficking women and kids. What do we know?”
Vilar leaned back against the sink and nodded.
“Obviously, we don’t know anything. I personally don’t think it holds up, but it’s not so far-fetched. If you’re right, though, I’ll kill the guy myself when we track him down. I don’t give a shit about anything else. I want to see him grovelling at my feet, I want to look him in the eye while he lies there bleeding. Shit, how could you have missed him? You were what? Three, four metres away?”
“I was trying to wound him. We need him alive. And anyway, it all happened so fast, you know what it’s like … I saw him sticking a knife in your back and I did the best I could. I hit his shoulder, or maybe his neck, like I said. The bullet must just have grazed him.”
Pradeau fell silent and looked thoughtful. Between his fingers, he held an unlit cigarette.
“You O.K.?” Vilar said.
“You want to talk about something else?”
Pradeau shuddered, as though someone had jabbed him.
“And what exactly do you … No, it’s fine. Carry on,” he said wearily.
Vilar decided to ignore Pradeau’s apathy.
“So who is this guy?”
“Which one?” Pradeau said, smiling crookedly.
“I don’t know. The man from last night. Or the one I saw at the old biddy’s place in Bacalan. Maybe they’re the same guy.”
“That’s something we won’t know till we’ve got him in front of us and we can beat seven bells out of him – and no bullets, because that won’t answer any of your questions.”
“Last night I screwed up,” Vilar said, who seemed to be thinking aloud, staring vaguely at the impressionist landscape on the calendar hanging on the wall.
“I should have twigged, when he said that the kid used to say hi to everyone in the building … He gave himself away, and I missed it. Instead of ducking the question, he raised the stakes. He’s not afraid of anything. And what with everyone blubbing and screeching behind me and the kid bleeding out on the floor, I lost control. Shit, he was right there in front of me, I could smell the cigarette smoke on him. What is he looking for, the bastard?”
Pradeau’s face contorted.
“Intense emotions. Maybe he wants to feel alive. Maybe it’s a game to him?”
“If it is, it’s Russian roulette, with all the chambers loaded.”
“Could be there’s something in that,” Pradeau said, getting to his feet.
He pocketed the cigarettes and his lighter.
“I have to go. We have to question the dead kid’s friends – what was his name again? Ah, yes, Sofiane – they’re probably the same two little thugs you saw him with in the lobby that time. The neighbours gave us their names and addresses. You never know, maybe these two clowns were there when it happened and ran back home to Maman without saying a word. They act like big men when they’re in a group, but when they’re on their own or they’re faced with a really vicious fucker, they shit themselves. We’ll shake them up a bit, the cowards, teach them a bit of respect. At least we won’t have made the trip for nothing.”
He said goodbye, promising to call later, and left, closing the door quietly behind him.
It was almost 10.00 a.m. Vilar drank some more lukewarm coffee, cursed the fact he had no cigarettes. Then he turned on the T.V. and watched an American thriller on a cable channel, “The Deep End”, the story of woman who kills the man who has been abusing her son and then goes after everyone else involved. The movie was set beside a lake in a majestic, tranquil landscape, lovingly filmed in luminous, saturated colours. Vilar pictured himself in that house. He wondered if he would have the courage to do what the mother in the film did. Of course, he thought. As he did every time the question was asked, every time it occurred to him when he woke from a nightmare or from a deep depression. He would kill anyone and everyone who … He had no words to finish the sentence forming in his mind. Impossible to imagine doing anything else. Impossible to imagine himself resisting the urge to destroy that sort of predator. And yet he understood the law, and he agreed with it. Self-defence … he abhorred all those brainless vigilantes – in films and in real life – including the ones he himself had banged up. He had always despised what they had become, a ragbag of savage, snivelling impulses motivated only by grief or hatred, inadvertent psychopaths who were almost happy to have found, in stalking a killer, their raison d’être.
And suddenly, as always, reason, or perhaps some mad hope, came and placed a hesitant finger between the bullet and the firing pin. What if he ended up killing the one man who knew where Pablo was now? His very last hope? He had spent whole nights wrestling with this question, feverish with exhaustion, nerves wound like barbed wire around his body.
He turned off the T.V., irritated by the very things that had drawn him to the film. The plot seemed hackneyed now, the scenery grandiose. He got up and stood for a few moments in the middle of the room, arms hanging by his sides, unsure, his mind a blank. He ran a finger over the picture frame from which Pablo smiled out, his head resting on Ana’s shoulder.
“I’m here, I’m right here with you.”
Early in the afternoon, he managed to speak to Daras, who informed him that Sandra de Melo was nowhere to be found. Her sister had indeed spoken to her on the telephone the night before, but she noticed nothing out of the ordinary. The boy had not turned up at school.
“She can’t have disappeared into thin air, not with a kid,” Daras said. “She has to resurface.”
Resurface. Archimedes’ principle as life force.
“Obviously. Though that would require the people who are hiding her to let us know. If they’re as scared as she is, they won’t say a word. We’ve seen it before. They’ll think they can protect her better than we can.”
“Well, we haven’t done such a great job up until now. We just have to hope this guy isn’t planning to destroy everything in his wake. You saw what he did to the Sofiane kid last night. And still we’ve got nothing on him. We’ve been chasing a shadow for the past two months.”
“And the shadow is chasing me. But I’d like to see exactly whose shadow it is.”
“The two-man theory?”
“Laurent doesn’t go for it.”
Daras sighed.
“Laurent doesn’t go for much these days. Things are bad with him just now.”
“I think his mother’s on the way out.”
“Yeah. He mentioned something about it once,” Daras said. “He doesn’t confide in me. I’m just some stupid bloody woman.”
They said nothing for a few seconds.
“So what are you up to?” Daras said eventually. “You getting some rest?”
Vilar hesitated.
“I’m staying put. Though I feel fine. I’ll be in tomorrow. I’ll call you later.”
They hung up at the same time. Sandra would turn up, sure. Vilar thought about the little clown. She would not be able to stop herself. It was almost 4.00 p.m. He went into the kitchen to drink what was left of the coffee. The sky was leaden – he had not noticed while he was in the living room, where the shutters were closed, but now through the kitchen window he could see the wind whipping at the trees.
He pulled on a jacket with lots of pockets, slipping a blister pack of tablets into one of them in case the pain came back. He was about to leave when he took out his mobile and called Ana. His heart pounded a little as he listened to it ring. The click made him start.
He could leave a message after the beep.
Vilar reminded himself that it was August. Holidays. Other climes. She had said something about Tuscany.
Traffic was light on the boulevard and he could easily keep an eye on what was going on behind. Several times he changed his speed to see whether anyone was tailing him, but there was nothing. He parked fifty metres from the block where Sandra de Melo lived and walked, taking a roundabout route. He rang the bell for the caretaker, flashed his warrant card and demanded that he hand over the keys. Dressed in shorts and vest with a pair of canvas slippers on his feet, the man said nothing, did not even respond to Vilar’s greeting, simply gave him a suspicious, hostile look. As he went back into his apartment to collect the keys, a wolfhound – or maybe it was a Malinois – came and sat in the doorway, ears pricked, nose to the ground, staring up at Vilar with eyes that burned in the half-light with an unsettling golden glow. He could hear a T.V. somewhere. An American crime drama. The sirens of a police car.
“He’s not generally dangerous,” the caretaker said without much conviction, nudging the dog with his foot. “Depends on the person.”
He held the keys out to Victor who thanked him and turned on his heel. He had already gone down a couple of steps when he heard the caretaker’s voice:
“You planning to be long?”
He turned. The man had spoken through the half-closed door.
“I don’t know. Why? Do you really need to know?”
Vilar went back up to the landing. He thought he saw the caretaker ease the door close. The dog poked its nose between its master’s legs.
“I thought you didn’t want to talk to me,” Vilar said. “Or that you didn’t like the look of me – you didn’t even fucking say hello … And me, I don’t like to impose.”
“It’s not that,” the caretaker said. “It’s just, you get so you don’t trust anyone. And it was weird, that kid getting himself killed. I chucked them out of here, you know, him and his mates, twenty times I threw them out, the little wankers. Sometimes they’d get wound up, call me a dickhead, threaten to cut my wife’s throat, or my mother’s, threaten to fuck them, it depended … That sort of drivel. Twelve years I’ve lived here. I watched them grow up, every one of them. They don’t scare me, they’re not so tough, but when they’re together they think they’re big men, I don’t know, they get arrogant, try to start laying down the law and I’ll tell you there’s been times when I wished I could get a shotgun and sort them out.”
“That bad? Did they threaten people?”
“Not really … But they were always hanging around, smoking weed and making smart remarks, and over time people feel intimidated, they’re afraid to walk past, and the more people are scared of them the more they think they’re gangsters. That’s what they used to say, the little bastards: ‘We be gangstas’ …”
The man paused, because this long speech had left him breathless.
“Obviously I feel sorry for him, and for his parents – they’re good people, they worked hard for their kids. The sisters are both at college. One of them is going to be a nurse. The kid didn’t deserve what happened to him. A good kick up the arse, yeah, a clip round the ear, but not that …”
“And not someone coming after him with a shotgun like you were suggesting.”
“No, of course not. That was just the anger talking … Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.”
The man had opened the door a little wider. The dog had disappeared.
“In any case, he didn’t die because he was hanging around doing fuck all,” Vilar said.
“He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He ran into a man we were already looking for … I don’t suppose you saw anything unusual? I realise you’ve been asked that already, but you never know, if something came back to you …”
The man shook his head.
“No, nothing. But don’t think I spend all day hanging out on the stairs watching people come and go. I’m responsible for taking out the bins, doing minor repairs, looking after the grounds. It’s a full-time job! But the little woman on the third floor, the one with the handicapped son, I knew her. She was really sweet, very shy, and she was a pretty little thing too.”
He glanced furtively behind him as though some jealous shrew might suddenly appear and claw his eyes out.
“You don’t know if she had any visitors, people who came to see her?”
“As I said, I’ve got too much work to be meddling in the tenants’ private lives. Unless I’m asked or unless someone complains, I keep my nose out, I say good morning, I say goodnight and that’s all. I know what goes on in my world, I’ve got a keen eye, but I’m not the type to go playing detective … I mean … sorry …”
“That’s O.K., we wouldn’t expect you to. I’m going to take a look round her flat. Don’t worry if I’m a while. I’ll bring the keys back to you.”
He walked up the stairs, watched by the caretaker, who could not seem to bring himself to close the door. Once in her apartment, he headed straight for the kitchen: as he expected, the clown was no longer lying under the table between the legs of the chairs. He went into the boy’s room but could see nothing different there. A quick tour of the other rooms gave him no more information: Sandra had been inconspicuous, stealthy in invading her own privacy. She had to be nearby. Probably upstairs with a neighbour. He felt like calling for backup, instigating another door-to-door, finding her so he could talk to her, so he could get her to talk, get her to tell him whatever it was the other guy had been trying to find out so as to be one step ahead of him; but the thought of his colleagues showing up, all that manpower combing every floor, sparking panic across the whole estate, was not bearable. He would have to play things out alone this time. No-one knew he was here apart from the caretaker who, from what Vilar could tell, was not involved. Which probably meant that for the first time in this investigation he was acting without the killer’s knowledge.
He flicked off the light and sat in an armchair in the living room. Here, in spite of the loud pulsing of his heart and crackle of the nervous electricity he could feel coursing through his limbs, alternately searing and freezing, he was overcome by a torpor that kept him floating on the surface of sleep, in the shallows where dreams come skimming and where, of course, Pablo appeared and spoke to him. Pablo’s voice was clear and bright, and when Vilar found the words to answer him, his own voice was tremulous with sobs.
He was ripped from this desolate happiness by the soft creak of a door being opened above or below him, and he held his breath for a long moment in the half-light, not knowing the time, refusing to check his watch, then he drifted off again, vainly trying to reconstruct the heart-rending illusion of the dream.
He was woken with a start by something moving. At first he thought he was at home in his bedroom, but he quickly came to himself. He did not know how long he had slept. It looked dark outside: no light filtered through the shutters. He could not possibly have slept for five hours. The darkness was such that he could not read his watch.
He had heard nothing, yet he was convinced there was someone in the apartment, perhaps even in the room. He sat, motionless, breathing through his mouth.
Behind him. Sitting in this armchair, there was nothing he could do.
When the light was flicked on it felt as though he had been electrocuted: his heart stopped, his brain was little more than a feverish pulp. Sandra de Melo screamed, her finger still on the light switch. She was deathly pale and stared at him terrified and gasping for breath.
He stood up, tried to calm his nerves, fumbled for words. Here he was standing before the woman he had come to find and yet, dazed with sleep, he did not know what to do.
She took a step towards him.
“What the hell are you doing in my flat? I thought you were him!”
Her shrill, hoarse voice cracked. Her tousled hair framed a face that looked drawn, the eyes ringed with dark circles.
“Jesus!” he said.
“Don’t scream at me like that. I’ve been looking for you, and looking for him. Where did you get to? What’s with your little game of hide-and-seek?”
“Oh? You think I’m the one playing hide-and-seek? So what are you playing at? I’m betting you have no right to be here.”
“Calm down …”
“I will not calm down! That guy the other night, he was coming here to kill me, wasn’t he? He slit that boy’s throat just like that, just because the kid got in his way! Bloody hell, that’s a good enough reason not to sleep soundly in your bed, don’t you think? And what about my son? Did you even stop to think about him?”
He let her finish. He felt the knife wound throbbing in his back. He could hear the two of them breathing, hear as they struggled to swallow. Sandra sighed.
“I came to pick up some things for José. Is that O.K.? They’re in his room.”
She did not give him time to answer. She walked down the corridor and he followed her. She rummaged through a wardrobe, took out some T-shirts and some underwear, which she stuffed into a plastic bag.
“What do you want to know?”
“Where have you been hiding?”
“I’m thirsty. There’s cold water in the fridge. You want some?”
She took out two cans of sparkling water and offered one to Vilar.
They opened them without a word and drank in long gulps. Sandra sat down, wedged between the table and the wall behind her, and Vilar lowered his stiff body into a chair.
“Now that’s what I call thirsty,” Sandra said, “but to answer your earlier questions, I’ve been staying upstairs with a neighbour, Madame Fadlaoui. José’s asleep right now. He knows her, he’s calm when he’s around her.”
“And he has his clown …”
“You thought about that? You noticed I forgot it when I left?”
“Who is this guy you’re so terrified of?”
“His name’s Éric. He’s the one who killed Nadia.”
“How do you know that? What’s his surname, this Éric? Do you know where we can find him? You were happy to feed me Thierry Lataste’s name without worrying whether that might make him a suspect. Were you trying to confuse me? Why should I believe you now?”
“Because I’m telling the truth. And I didn’t lie to you about Thierry. I just told you about him, and left you to make up the rest. I didn’t tell you about Éric because I was scared of him, that’s all.”
“Éric what? Is that even his name?”
“Yes. At least I think so … Just Éric. Nadia used to talk about him and that’s what she called him and it never occurred to me to ask her his surname or his address. He’s not exactly the kind of guy you would want to drop in on. But he killed Nadia, I know that much. I’ve no proof, but I know it’s true. He’s sick in the head. A vicious thug who can’t control himself. She was terrified of him. He wouldn’t let her go. Told her he was in love with her. He wanted them to go off and live in the Antilles together … I don’t know, he was planning to open a restaurant, or manage one, or something – I don’t remember. It was some idea he had. But Nadia, she wouldn’t even talk about it. And then recently, he got it into his head that the kid was his.”
“What are you saying? Had they known each other a long time?”
“Since ’93. When he got out of prison.”
Vilar did the calculations. It could tally. And now he knew the guy had a record – the fact that he had been banged up meant he was no longer merely a shadowy presence. They almost had him.
“Which prison?”
Sandra de Melo sighed, pulled a face. “Oh, for God’s sake, how would I know? I don’t even remember whether Nadia told me! Besides, when it comes to ex-cons – especially that one – the less I see of them the better …”
“Why, do you know a lot of ex-cons?”
“I don’t have to answer that, do I?”
“We’ll see. But think hard, because if we know which prison he did time in, then we can find out who he is.”
She drank some water, and crushed the empty can.
“No, I don’t know. I’m sorry …”
“How did you meet him, this Éric?”
Something moved above them. A chair being dragged across the floor. Sandra sat up, rigid, staring at the ceiling, then relaxed and leaned back again, one elbow on the table.
“It’s nothing. It’s just I’m always scared that … What were you saying?”
“I was asking you how you met Éric.”
“Through Nadia. They already knew each other and Nadia had told me what she was doing to earn a little cash. So one day when I was finding things tough – I didn’t have a penny to my name, my son was having fits every day and down at the centre they didn’t know how to deal with him, they’d started talking about putting him into a psychiatric unit to try and control the fits … Anyway, Nadia mentioned some party where they needed some girls who were not too ugly and not too shy, told me it was well paid, about a thousand euros, all that money just for allowing yourself to be touched up by a few big shots, I mean customers, politicians, that kind of thing, and she said if I wanted I could come along … I started screaming at her, saying what did she take me for, I wasn’t some whore, and she didn’t push it, in fact she apologised and explained that as far as she was concerned it wasn’t a big deal.”
“What wasn’t a big deal?”
As she’d been talking, Sandra had folded her arms across her chest and was now hugging her sides. Vilar thought she was trembling.
“I don’t know how to explain. But suddenly I felt bad about what I’d said. Because whores are just people … We talked about it a lot. As far as she was concerned her body didn’t matter. She told me she was paralysed from the waist down … That’s how she put it. She couldn’t feel a thing. Like it was no longer a part of her. And she hated men. She said having some guy put his hands on her made her feel dirty, so you can imagine how she felt about sleeping with them. She said she’d kill one of them someday, bleed him like a stuck pig. I could never have imagined such hatred. She told me that ever since her father … When she talked like that, it was like I didn’t know her at all.”
“In that case, how could she stomach the visits from … from Éric? And her fling with Thierry Lataste?”
“I don’t know … Habit … Or money, maybe.”
“How did it work? I mean, she didn’t do it at her place, with her son in the next room, surely?”
Sandra looked away.
“I don’t know. We never talked about that.”
Vilar sprang to his feet, making the woman flinch in fear and surprise. He paced the room, trying to think of some way he could get her to talk.
“Look, do me a favour and stop fucking me about, alright? ‘I don’t know’, ‘I can’t remember …’ It’s one step forward and two steps back. I’m not here for the good of my health, you got that? A guy you know comes around here one night planning to kill you, but you, you don’t know what it’s about, you play the innocent … I don’t mind you taking me for a fool, I mean in my job I get it all the time, but just know that right now you’re guilty of perverting the course of justice, you’re protecting a criminal on the run, and that’s more than enough for me to make your life very difficult.”
Sandra tried to say something. She stood up. He waved for her to sit down.
“Let me finish. I reckon you know a lot more than you’re saying, about Nadia, about her activities, and I think you probably did what she did sometimes, when you needed cash, and you often need cash, don’t you? It’s as you said, whores are just people. So now you’re going to tell me everything, very calmly, because if you don’t I’m going to arrest you and have your son taken into care by social services. Think about that. It’s another thing you have in common with Nadia, trying to protect your sons from the shit you’ve had to deal with, am I right?”
“I see, so that’s your attitude?”
“Maybe. But let’s talk about yours, because I’m losing time and patience.”
She got up quickly and stalked across the room. As she passed him, Vilar could smell her perfume, though he did not recognise the dominant fragrance. Nor did he react to her swearing at him behind his back.
Then she went back and curled up in the chair again, her eyes fixed on the tray on which the glasses stood.
“We hit it off the first time we met at S.A.N.I., we worked in the same team that first month, we joined at about the same time. There was this foreman, Castets, who was desperate to fuck us, so we stuck together. He’d do his round every night in a company van and he’d ask us out for a drink, or for something to eat at Les Capucins, as if we really wanted to party at eleven or twelve o’clock at night when we had kids at home. Every night, the same thing. We’d say no, he never pushed it and he never held it against us, never tried to blackmail us, nothing. It was weird … Let’s just say it was friendly persuasion, or maybe that dickhead was waiting until one us felt desperate enough to fuck him, I don’t know. And then he stopped. So anyway, Nadia and I, we’d laugh about it, and she’d say that we could make serious money out of a nerd like that, then she started talking about what she did so she could make ends meet, so she could save up to buy her apartment. One day, she told me she’d found a little studio flat on the cours Balguerie – it’s number 145, if you want to check – and she’d go there once or twice a week with clients who contacted her on a mobile phone she kept only for that. It was cheaper than the hotels on the bypass where she used to go. Sometimes, she’d stay overnight, especially Saturdays, and she was making good money. She also had a network of guys who’d call her up if they needed to close a deal with some foreign client. She’d pretend to be a secretary at some meeting, or over dinner and she’d be all over these guys, spend a couple of nights with them while they were here and mostly it worked out pretty well …”
“Did that happen a lot?”
“Three or four times a year … maybe more, I don’t know. It was well paid.”
“Why did she go work at S.A.N.I.?”
“To have a payslip, so as not to attract attention at school, with the civil service. She did it for her kid … She wanted him to have a normal life – a normal mother, as she put it. She didn’t want a social worker coming around poking her nose in.”
“What about Éric? Was he collecting the takings?”
Sandra smiled bitterly and shrugged.
“No. Nadia worked alone. She wasn’t some whore walking the streets, competing with girls from Africa and Romania with some bastard of a pimp running the show. Besides, Éric never gave her any grief about what she did, he told her he loved her, that he’d never hurt her or her kid. Let’s just say that from time to time he borrowed money that he never paid back.”
“Did she ask for it back?”
“He’s not the kind of guy you ask for anything. But she must have done, once or twice, and from what she told me that’s when things got ugly. He’d get angry, they’d fight.”
“Where? At her place? At her studio flat?”
“It depended. Wherever. Every time it happened she’d try to get him to forgive her. Or he’d bring round a few of his mates to punish her, if you know what I mean.”
Vilar knew. He tried to see where all this was leading. He would have to go and talk to the boy, Victor, who might know something about this man who thought he was his father. He took two large swigs of water to wash the bitter taste from his mouth. He desperately wanted a cigarette, and vaguely hoped that maybe the young woman might take out a pack so he could ask for one. He glanced towards the closed shutters, wishing he could look out at the scenery rather than at these blank boards: a lit window in the tower block opposite, the halo of light that hovered above the city at night. Suddenly he felt boxed in. Trapped in a blind alley. Only Sandra de Melo’s gentle face, the shimmer of her dark eyes, stopped him from getting to his feet and leaving right now. It had been a long time since he had taken such pleasure in looking at a woman’s face.
At the same time, he wondered how she could have sold her body to these men, allowed them to touch her, penetrate her, pollute her. In spite of everything he had seen in his years with the police, he still found it difficult to imagine the terrible plight that could lead people to debase themselves like that. At what point does a person think that there is no other solution than this self-abnegation, this leap into the void, this poison that seeps into you, that you try to wash away, to mask with perfume, this self-loathing that kills more swiftly than any illness since with each new humiliation something in the body, something in the soul dies? Nadia was already dead long before she was murdered. Her body no longer mattered to her. All she could do was try to keep a small part of herself, that part of her mind that included her love for her son, her last vestige of dignity, safe from this mental necrosis. As someone might clutch their most precious belongings to them as they are swept away by a landslide.
He wanted to go on talking to her, if only for the simple pleasure it afforded him, and the curious sensation of helplessness he felt when she looked at him.
He came up with one more question, a pointless one in all probability. One way or another he would track down this Éric, it was only a matter of days, he had only to find the man’s police record.
“These special … parties, what was Éric’s role?”
“He was the one who told Nadia about them, he always drove her there. From what she said, he checked out the place where it was being held. Apparently there was some cop who helped him out.”
“A cop? What do you mean, a cop?”
“What do you want me to say? Some officer he knew. Maybe they were friends. I mean sometimes criminals get to know policemen, don’t they?”
“Did you ever see this officer?”
She shrugged and gave him a mocking smile.
“It bugs you, doesn’t it, the idea that there’s some colleague mixed up in this shit?”
He thought back to his conversations with Daras and Pradeau. The possibility of a leak.
“What kind of places were these parties held? Did she tell you?”
“A couple of times it was a villa in Cap-Ferrat, or one down near Pyla, there were politicians there and people off the television. The sort of arseholes who get their pictures in the paper when they spend their holidays or the weekends in the area. Famous people, she said, but she never mentioned any names. A lot of guys off the T.V. are happy to pay for a hooker for the night, as long as she doesn’t look like a hooker … The sort of girls who play walk-on parts and are happy to get fucked for a thousand euros, or two thousand, in the hope that one of these bastards might call and ask her to work on his fucking show. I tell you, there’s no shortage of slappers who dream of being on T.V. Nadia used to try and persuade me to come, telling me I’d see loads of famous people, that it was totally safe. About how there was lots of champagne and coke set out in little bowls. Not that she ever touched the stuff, but she saw those bastards doing coke. And she told me …”
A telephone rang, the ringtone made a mooing sound like a cow and Sandra jumped to her feet and took a small black mobile from her pocket. She was pale now, her hands fumbled to open it and her fingers hesitated over the keys. She looked at bluish glow of the screen. Vilar stood up, and they stood staring at each other, the mobile and the ridiculous mooing sound between them. On the screen he saw a picture of little José.
“Who is it?” Sandra said to Vilar.
“Answer it and you’ll find out. Doesn’t it tell you on the screen?”
“No. This is my new phone. I haven’t had time to set it up properly.”
She tried to bring herself to answer.
“What if it’s him?”
She stared at Vilar, wild-eyed, leaning towards him. He tried to think of something to say.
“If it’s him, give me the phone. Keep calm.”
She answered the call and gave a little cry of surprise.
“Paola? What’s happening?”
Paola. Sandra’s sister. From where he stood, Vilar could hear her voice crackle through the receiver. She was talking quickly and loudly.
“So what was he like, this guy? Yeah, I know him, kind of. Say again? Yeah, obviously.”
“Let me speak to her.”
Vilar introduced himself, explained why he was there with Sandra. The woman told him that a guy had turned up asking for Sandra at about six o’clock, saying he was a friend of hers, and was worried because she wasn’t at home. Charming, polite, with a big bandage on his neck. Since Paola could not tell him anything, he did not press the point and left, wishing her a pleasant evening. Too polite to be genuine.
“I can spot that kind of bullshit artist from fifty metres,” Paola said, “I watched him leave, he got into a big car, a metallic grey estate. I stood behind the curtain and watched him drive slowly past the block. Given that Sandra had phoned me this morning and told me a bit about what had happened – she’s a magnet for this sort of trouble, I don’t know how she does it – anyway, I thought I should call to warn her. So who is this guy?”
“You said he had a bandage on his neck?”
“Yeah, a big thing like surgical collar. So who is he?”
“Someone we’ve been looking for. He’s got a grudge against your sister, but we’re protecting her. Did you call the local police? And what about the car, did you see what make it was?”
“No. I don’t know anything about cars. It was an estate, really big, too … Pretty new, I guess, because it was gleaming. But no, I didn’t call the police. In our family, we sort out our own problems, we don’t get the police involved. When it comes to Sandra, I’m kind of used to situations like this.” She hesitated. “I’m all alone here with the kids. My husband’s a truck driver, he’s not here at the moment. Do you think we’re in any danger from that guy?”
“No, I don’t think you’re in any danger. He’s just trying to track down your sister, but we’ll be waiting for him if he shows up. But give the local force a call, they’ll keep an eye on things. Meanwhile, if you see him hanging around again, give me a call, maybe we can collar him.”
He heard the woman sigh, clearly relieved. She trotted out a few hollow platitudes about the world we live in, then asked if she could have another word with Sandra. Vilar handed the phone back and left the two sisters to say their goodbyes. Eventually Sandra rang off and set the mobile gently on the table in front of her, still open, as though her life depended on the next call, or the next, or the next.
“How did he know my sister’s address? He didn’t even know she existed!”
“You’re sure you never mentioned her?”
“Of course I’m sure. I would never get her mixed up in my shit. She did more than enough for me when I was young, when I moved out of my parents” place and all she got for it was grief. And it’s not like Éric could have looked her up on the internet, her last name is Ménenteau, not de Melo.’
Vilar looked at his watch. I was 8.50 p.m.
“He’s coming here,” he said.
“Who?”
“What do you mean, who? Éric whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is. Who did you think I meant? We have to get out of here. Let’s go up to your neighbour’s place. You get the kid ready, and I’ll get another officer to take you somewhere. We’ll put you in a safe house.”
The neighbour, Madame Fadlaoui, opened as soon as they knocked, looked at them wide-eyed and ushered them inside quickly, glancing anxiously along the walkway before she closed the door. She was a tall woman with a face like a knife, an aquiline nose. In the immaculately polished living room decorated with brass plates, intricate lamps, leather cushions and sofas, she invited them to sit down and offered them something to drink. In a corner of the room, a little girl was staring goggle-eyed at a flat-screen T.V. and jiggling the buttons on a games controller. Little characters were running and jumping and shooting at each other.
“You’re the police officer, is that right?” Madame Fadlaoui said.
“My name is Sihem. And this is Amel.”
The little girl barely tore her eyes from the game to greet them with an extravagant flick of her eyelashes.
“What’s going on?” Sihem Fadlaoui said.
“We need to leave,” Sandra said. “I’ll explain everything later.”
The woman looked at Vilar questioningly. He turned away and keyed a number into his phone.
“Marianne? Something’s come up … No, nothing, I don’t have time to go into it right now. I need you to put out an alert for a man named Éric, surname unknown, released from prison in ’93, probably from the Gironde area … No, that’s all I’ve got. We’re not talking some minor offence here, it had to be something major. Yeah, that kind of thing … Anyway, Sandra de Melo. I found her, she’s here with me. We need to get her into a safe house, I’ll sort that. O.K.? I’ll call Laurent. I don’t want news of this getting all around the station. This guy knows too much, he’s got someone on the force feeding him information, I have confirmation of it … I’ll tell you later, I’ve no time now. You have any idea where Laurent is at the moment? O.K., well that’s not too far. He should get her quickly. I think our guy might come back. We need bodies here. I’ll hang around to wait for reinforcements. Yeah, that’s good.”
He hung up and keyed another number.
“Laurent?”
He gave a detailed account of the situation, told him that they had identified the suspect, Éric, and had officers looking for him. Pradeau seemed overwhelmed by so much information, his uneasiness was palpable. Vilar felt as if he were dealing with a swimmer, overcome by exhaustion, plunging into the murmuring depths of the ocean. He told Pradeau to get a grip, said he needed him. Pradeau quickly composed himself and promised to get there within half an hour, and he kept his word.
By the time Pradeau rang the doorbell, José was half asleep, slumped against his mother, the clown in his arms. As a precaution, it was Vilar who opened the door. They said goodbye to Sihem Fadlaoui, thanked her for her help and warned her to lock the door and not to open it to anyone, and to call the police if she saw anything suspicious. The building would be under surveillance in case Éric came back. The woman turned the almost gentle steel of her grey face on the policemen and gave them a sceptical smile.
“My husband and my son will be home soon; that way I’ll feel safer,” she said.
Sandra stepped out into the walkway behind Pradeau who was already on his way down the stairs, waving for the woman to follow him. Vilar brought up the rear. Little José was clinging to his mother’s neck, his chin on her shoulder, staring behind her, looking up only when they passed a ceiling light. When Vilar appeared in his field of vision, the child raised his head, his mouth half open in surprise, then reverted to his previous position. Sandra de Melo was panting, José was a heavy child and she frequently had to hitch him up, having trouble finding a comfortable way to hold him.
It was now almost 11.00, nothing was stirring in the building. The buzz of television sets, the sound of muffled voices, music and laughter followed them to the ground floor, but they encountered no-one. Sandra and her son got into the back of Pradeau’s car; he was to drive them to the police station until someone could find them a place for the night. As Vilar was heading back upstairs to hide out in Sandra’s apartment, Pradeau insisted he take his weapon and pressed the pistol into his hands.
“You never know … this guy sounds like he’s completely out of control.”
He did not give Vilar time to answer, quickly putting the car into gear and driving off. Vilar stared at the gun, watched the street light cast copper reflections on the steel, then he tucked it into his belt.
He was hardly back inside Sandra de Melo’s apartment when his mobile rang.
“I see you’re visiting that Portuguese slut … Did she give you a decent blow job? You do know that’s her speciality?”
Vilar ran to the windows, cursing at the fact the shutters were closed. The guy was downstairs. How was it possible?
“How do you know that?”
“That she sucks cock? Guess! I’ve even got it on video. Just like I’ve got one of your son.”
Vilar almost ripped the handle off the door as he flung it open. He dashed along the walkway, took the stairs three at a time, slamming into the wall, because the mobile pressed to his ear threw him off balance.
“Doing a little jogging? You think you can catch me, dickhead? What, you think I’m going to be waiting outside the door? You dumb fucks didn’t even set a trap – or ‘stake the place out’, as you’d say. Jesus, even I feel embarrassed for you.”
Vilar arrived outside and looked around, started back towards his car, trying to catch his breath. He could hear the guy laughing on the other end of the line and he tried to think of something to say to needle him, to get to him somehow.
“She talk to you, did she?” the voice growled. “Tell you who I was? That little whore knows nothing. I suppose she told you my name’s Éric? Well, good luck hunting. Makes no odds … I’m about to kill her anyway. I’ve got your mate’s car about fifty metres ahead of me. Just wait till you see the expression on her face when I’m done. Maybe later I’ll show you some more stuff about your son. Have to keep my priorities straight, can’t do everything at once. You got to understand, I’m taking a risk here with a guy like you. Then again, I get off on it, so I can’t really complain. O.K., shitface, see you round.”
Vilar ran the last few metres and jumped behind the wheel. He called Pradeau, but the call went straight to voicemail. He left a brief message, knowing it was pointless: hide, make a run for it, do whatever you have to because this psychopath is right behind you and more than capable of creating a bloodbath. Then he called the station to tell them an officer was in danger and to ask that patrol cars be despatched to secure the likely route. The duty officer promised to do the necessary. Pradeau had probably taken the most direct route to the police station. At this hour of the night, it should take him about fifteen minutes. Vilar floored the accelerator as hard as he dared, one hand pressing the mobile to his ear, trying again to get through to Pradeau, the other hand gripping the steering wheel. He negotiated every red light at speed and quickly found himself at the intersection of the boulevard Georges V and the rue de Pessac, where heavy traffic forced him to slow to a crawl. Cars honked their horns angrily at the way he was driving. All he needed now was for the local traffic police to arrest him or give chase, try to breathalyse him. He called the station again, narrowly missing a moped that shot out of a side street, and waited to hear if Pradeau had got back safely.
“He’s not here,” the officer on the phone said. “He took the woman directly to a safe house.”
By now, Vilar could see the police station up ahead, rising up in the darkness, immense, white as an iceberg. He parked on the kerb, jerking the handbrake.
“What? What safe house?”
“Ah, that I don’t know. No-one’s told me.”
“Where the fuck is he? I called not five minutes ago to say there’s an armed and very dangerous bastard on his tail, and what the fuck have you done about it? Would it really be so hard to get off your arse and do something to stop him being killed?”
The guy mumbled, called someone over. There seemed to be a commotion. As though an alarm had finally gone off, Vilar thought.
“Commandant Castel,” a voice said suddenly. “The officer has just been located. Place Jacques-Dormoy. We’ve got two units on their way to the scene. Bystanders thought it was a fight between a couple of drunks and called the police.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know yet. We’ve paged Capitaine Daras.”
It took him less than ten minutes to get to the place Jacques-Dormoy, weaving through narrow, potholed streets lined with parked cars where he several times had to swerve to avoid hitting vehicles parked haphazardly on the pavement.
There were police everywhere. A dozen patrol cars. Every squad out tonight had clearly shown up the moment they heard that one of their own was in trouble. The metallic chatter of the radios mingled with that of the officers, while around the little square people peered out of their windows or gathered in groups along the pavements, waiting in this muted cacophony for some dramatic or tragic announcement. As he got out of his car, Vilar spotted a dog handler wearing blue fatigues getting his Alsatian to piss against a tree. Surveying the scene, illuminated by the convulsive blue flashes of the squad cars, Vilar felt his blood run cold because he knew all too well what was at the centre of this chaos of flickering lights: a place where nothing moved, where the noise and the voices suddenly fade, as though muffled by a wall of glass.
He flashed his warrant card to silence a driver yelling at him to move his vehicle. From behind, he immediately recognised Pradeau’s car which had piled into a black Mercedes, hitting the driver’s door and smashing the window. The doors on the other side were open onto the road and as he drew closer, he saw someone in a white coat leaning into the back seat and, just then, he heard the scream, a long wail broken by groans and splutters coming from inside the car. He walked more quickly, dodging between the cars, weaving between the officers standing talking, breaking though the semi-circle surrounding the screaming child and the five or six men working the scene. One of them, a lieutenant called Gallin working with Mégrier’s team, a stocky blond man as short as he was fat, was just about to push Vilar aside when he recognised him.
“Where’s Pradeau? Is he O.K.?”
“We don’t know. There’s only the kid. Your partner’s not here.”
“What do you mean there’s only the kid? Where did he go?”
“We have a witness who says he saw two men fighting and that they then got into the other guy’s car.”
“They just got in? Pradeau wasn’t injured? Where is he, this witness? And what about the woman?”
“She left with them. The witness didn’t see much. He heard the car slam into the Mercedes, and he heard the screams, but when things got ugly he legged it.”
Vilar felt his mouth go dry.
“Are we looking for them?”
“No,” a voice behind him said. “Why on earth would we be doing that?”
It was Mégrier. He was snapping shut a mobile.
“I mean, obviously we just came out to get a bit of air, go for a spin. We’ll give the kid a little injection so he keeps his trap shut and then we’ll all go home to bed. I mean, you hardly expect us to disturb the whole town at this time of night, do you? We were just waiting for you to tell us what to do. We knew you’d be worried.”
The officers giggled silently at their commander’s comeback.
“Do you take us for complete idiots or what? And where’s the beautiful Marianne Daras? Doing the horizontal mambo? I’m sure she’ll get here the moment she gets her knickers back on.”
Vilar could think of nothing to say; he shook his head. He walked around Mégrier and stepped closer to the Peugeot where José was still wailing. Officers were taking fingerprints and collecting evidence around the vehicle and inside the car itself. A S.A.M.U. paramedic kneeling on the back seat climbed out shaking his head, he sighed, ignoring Vilar’s questioning look, then moved aside to let him pass. Now Vilar could see the boy, huddled on the back seat of the car, clinging to an unbuckled seatbelt that was bizarrely wound around him, thrashing about like a terrified animal whenever anyone tried to come near or speak to him. Vilar leaned one knee on the back seat, slowly reached out his hand and called the boy by name. He looked around for Toto the clown, saw it on the passenger seat, picked it up and handed it to the little boy who hugged and kissed the doll, no longer wailing. Vilar watched as the boy looked up at him with big eyes, looked right through this stranger leaning over him, staring into the distance at some place no-one else could reach. He curled up again and began to howl sadly, banging the clown against his forehead. Vilar withdrew his hand and got out of the car. He was shivering, in spite of his sweatsoaked shirt, in the sweltering heat of the night.
“I don’t think there’s anything else we can do,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to give him a shot. He’ll end up hurting himself. Do you know the kid?”
“His mother is a witness in a case I’ve been working on. The boy’s autistic, as far as I know. He looks like he’s in shock. He must have been terrified …”
“We’ll have to take him to a psych unit. The children’s hospital won’t take him.”
“A psych unit?”
“You got a better solution?” The man’s tone was curt, impatient. José was wailing now and sobbing.
“No, I’ve no solution.”
He looked back at the boy, his eyes were wide with fear, crouching in the back seat of the car.
Pablo. Different shadows, a different fear. Vilar felt himself choking, everything around him was suddenly floating. He leaned on the bonnet of the car and shook his head.
“You O.K.?” the doctor said.
“Yeah, yeah … Just look after him. Don’t leave him crying in the dark like that. Give him something so he can sleep, so he can get some rest.”
He felt sweat trickle down his back. His eyes were blurred from the dizziness – from the tears – and he stood for a moment, head bowed, hands resting on the warm bonnet. All he could hear now was the boy’s wail, shrill, deafening, right beside him in the darkness. A woman in a white coat came over and set a first-aid kit on the roof of the car. Slowly, she opened the door against which José was leaning and began whispering to him gently. The doctor Vilar had spoken to was also leaning into the car and they discussed what to do while the boy whimpered softly.
Vilar walked away, watching as one by one the officers left the scene. An ambulance moved slowly off. Mégrier was giving orders to his men, juggling two mobiles simultaneously. In his pocket, Vilar’s own mobile rang. It was Daras.
“Mégrier told me about Laurent. Shit. What the fuck did you do?”
“We were trying to get Sandra de Melo somewhere safe. The guy must have followed her. He called me. He was tailing Pradeau’s car, threatening all sorts. What would you have done?”
He heard Daras sigh.
“How do you expect us to find them in the middle of the night when we’ve got nothing to go on?” she said. “We could put an officer on every street corner but we’d just be pissing in the wind. Besides, by now they’ll be long gone.”
“So what are you planning to do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. We can’t do more than Mégrier. He’s already got bodies on the ground. He has promised to call me the minute he hears anything. He’s been in touch with the big shots, the commissaires and the directors and they’ve told him to do his best, to get out all the officers he can. Jesus wept! I think I’m just going to take a pill and get some sleep so I can start again early tomorrow. Not that there’s anything we can do. We’re already trying to track down details for this Éric guy, we can’t do any more. With a bit of luck, we’ll have some information tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, yeah.” Vilar echoed her words mechanically, incapable of forming a coherent thought.
“What about you?”
“I’ll hang around for a bit. Tire myself out, because the way things are I won’t get a wink of sleep, and that wouldn’t help.”
He broke off as he saw the frail form of the boy being lifted gently out of the car like some sacred effigy. Surrounded by doctors and police officers, his body seemed as though it might disappear. A huge firefighter was cradling him in his arms. To such a giant he barely weighed anything, he barely existed. Vilar wondered whether this boy would ever truly be aware of his own existence.
“If you’d seen the kid screaming in the back of the car … The guys from the S.A.M.U. are just taking him away, sedated like an elephant. They didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing left of him but this howl. He saw everything, his mother was taken away from him, while he was there, bawling in the dark. You remember, I told you about him? And the girl, his mother, she’s a decent person.”
They both hung up. Vilar turned away from the line of police officers and headed back to his car. He drove towards the train station, his mind blank, unable to think, then he went along the cours de la Marne, found a place to park in a narrow street next to the Marché des Capucins. All the windows in the alley were dark, the heat was stifling. From the vast mouldering dumpsters by the market came a stench of rotten meat and fish that made his stomach heave. He walked back towards the cours de la Marne, where the greasy smell wafting from a steakhouse forced him to double up between two cars, but he could only manage to vomit up a little bile. He headed towards the place de la Victoire, his eyes blurred with tears, an acrid taste in his mouth, weaving between the crowd that was gathered around the stalls offering various kinds of food. The place smelled of fried onions, pizza, grilled meat and hot fat, and as he walked he caught snatches of conversation – this seemed to be a nocturnal race of people who communicated only in monosyllables and in the rumblings of their bellies. Their faces were dazed, tanned or flushed with sickly colour by the garish neon lights. He stepped aside for five guys who came swaggering along, taking up the whole pavement, wearing baseball caps or bandanas in a pathetic attempt to look like American “gangstas”. He passed an African woman dressed in a red and gold bubu, pushing a buggy with a baby who stared out, wide-eyed at the garish lights and the milling crowds. Two little girls, their hair braided in cornrows, walked alongside, sometimes pressing themselves against her hips.
Through the square, which was marked out like a landing strip with recessed lights, weaved a host of shadows, chattering into mobile telephones, publicly declaiming their most private thoughts, some with the faint blue glow of a Bluetooth headset winking at their ears, others with their heads down, listening to music on their phones. From here and there came cries or laughter in this darkness spangled with lights and teeming with sleepwalkers. Vilar stopped in the middle of the square, its cobblestones transmitted all the heat of the day to the legs of the passers-by and, for a brief second, he had the precise impression of being surrounded by the dead. By a crowd of people who did not realise they had died. Oblivious and sombre, quickly swallowed by the darkness and dispersed into the void. He allowed himself to sink into this vertiginous feeling, his breath coming in gasps, an urge to cry caught in the back of his throat.
Then a boy walked past. Ten years old, maybe, pushing a bicycle that was too big for him.
Pablo. Vilar shuddered at the idea that his son could be right here, alone in the darkness, drifting in limbo, unable to see or hear him, while Vilar could do nothing to bring him back to the light. He felt himself choking, wanted to cry out. He spun around, shook his head in an attempt to ward off this nightmare.
He headed for the bars with their dazzling terraces, not daring to look around him, crossed the street, weaving between the cars, and walked into the first bar he came to which was huge, heaving, deafeningly loud. He tugged the sleeve of a barman who initially tried to extricate himself, arrogant and aggressive, but seeing the man half slumped over the bar, he served Vilar the beer he had ordered. Vilar had to force himself to breathe, otherwise all his internal workings would have stopped dead. In that moment it seemed to him that to stay alive he had to make a conscious effort to breathe, to constantly check his heart was still beating, just as someone in the hold of a sinking ship – he had seen this in films – has to keep working the hand pump that both drains the breath from him even as it prevents him from suffocating.
Breathless, Vilar gulped half of his beer so quickly he had a coughing fit that had him doubled over. When he finally managed to catch his breath, the thick wall of cotton that had been smothering him had melted away. Pradeau’s pistol, tucked into his belt, was digging into his back. He thought about the evening, about Sandra de Melo somewhere out there in the darkness at the mercy of that psychopath, separated from her son; about the little boy separated from himself, torn away, torn apart, a boy who right now was bludgeoned by sedatives, thrashing in terrifying sleep. He wondered how Éric – since this seemed to be his name – would manage to cope with two hostages, one of them a police officer who would grab the first opportunity to take him down.
He thought again about Pablo, about limbo, about the nightmare vision that had overwhelmed him in the square, and he knew that if one day he began to believe in these images, began to talk to them, a conversation with shadows, he would go mad.
He looked around, because there was nothing else for him to do.
Apart from a couple of old lags sucking in their stomachs to hide beer bellies while they chatted up drunk students, he had to be the oldest person in this milling crowd. He listened, but heard only a general hubbub in which he could not make out a single word, and once again he had the insistent sensation of being in a foreign country with an unfamiliar language, a feeling that faded as he gradually came back to the surface of things, of himself. He could now make out isolated words, voices, the throaty, sensual laugh of a girl standing behind him.
All this was life. And nothing else. It was this or nothing, perhaps. These loud, pretentious young people crowded in here to exorcise a working day, a week of grovelling, self-denial, resentment and humiliation; to forget everything they have been forced to meekly accept; to drown the insidious sorrows that govern their lives. Young people who are already resigned, already wrinkled beneath their smooth, glossy skin, their limber backs already bowed. Reduced to silence, or to the scarcely articulate gabbling of drunken crowds. Vilar looked at the laughing faces, the shocks of hair, the bodies of the girls naked under bodysuits; curvaceous breasts and muscular abs visible through cropped T-shirts. He saw three or four faces of extraordinary beauty; suddenly he desperately needed a woman, right now; he felt his cock harden in a way it had not done in a long time and he thought about how he would like to grab one of them, fuck her roughly, right here, pounding into her, howling more with rage than with pleasure.
He drained his glass, dropped a five-euro note on the bar and walked away. As he made his way to the door, he brushed against one of these beautiful girls, felt the curves of her body, the heft of her breasts pressed against him. He gently pushed her away, wrestling with the urge to shove his hand between her legs and drag her away with him.
He wandered around for a while, shocked by the violence of his feelings, of his desires, he drifted towards the dark corners of the square past lurking groups of thugs, walked a little way along the cours Pasteur then turned back and walked back down the cours de la Marne oblivious to everyone, paying little attention to the fight that broke out on the opposite pavement, only dimly aware of shouts, jerking movements, a body collapsing into the road. He needed to get back to his car, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling of being clumsy, drunk, pathetic, his stomach lurching queasily. He slipped behind the steering wheel with a groan of exhaustion and relief and drove off, all the windows rolled up, happy in this silence, this solitude. He crossed the city in his air-conditioned bubble, the radio playing a Mozart concerto he happened upon while flicking through the stations. He allowed himself to be filled with the grace of this music. By the sudden joy that formed like the cool condensation on a glass when you are thirsty.
As he got home and was fumbling in his pockets for his keys, the telephone in his apartment rang. He slammed open the door, crashing through the dark flat, winded and wheezing.
He recognised the voice. He listened.
“It will be all over soon,” the man said, “You’ll see.”
“What do you mean, ‘over’?”
“For everyone. You, me. The time we’ve spent together. This is the moment when everything comes together.”
“What about Sandra? What about my partner?”
“It will be over for them too. Don’t worry, I’m taking care of it right now. You tried to fuck me over, but you’re not in control of anything, you shower of shits. I’ve been in control, ever since the beginning. Oh, and I’ve got some stuff about your son. You’ll like that.”
Vilar had to sit down. He slumped into an armchair, feeling suddenly dizzy. The darkness whirled around him.
“Hey, you listening to me?”
Vilar sought some reserve of air within himself.
“Yeah, I’m listening. One of these days, I’m going to kill you.”
“Whatever. But maybe you should wait till you find out about your son, because if I’m dead, you’ll never know.”
Vilar closed his eyes. The man had stopped speaking. There was nothing now but the hum of electrical static, a meaningless buzzing.
Then, without another word, the call was cut off.
Vilar threw his head back. Tears trickled into his throat.
Late that night, the telephone rang again and immediately a dream came to him in which Ana was saying that they would be home soon and telling him she was about to pass the phone to Pablo, and Vilar, half asleep, leaning over the nightstand, receiver pressed to his ear, smiling at the thought of hearing his son’s high-pitched voice, could not understand why Daras was talking to him in a muffled, distant, barely audible voice as though she were calling from the bottom of an abyss; he had to ask her to repeat what she had said.
“They’ve found Sandra de Melo at the Cité du Grand-Parc. It’s not pretty. You have to get here.”