Abel died yesterday. Claude Mesplet called the hospital this morning. When I found out, I felt the tears well up in my eyes, then I slapped myself in the face to stop them falling—or to give them a good reason to fall—and my vision blurred and I felt so sad that I collapsed on the bed and lay there, motionless, unthinking, for maybe an hour. A real sadness. A child’s sadness, inconsolable, immune to reason. I’d forgotten how it felt to be sad like that. I have been through states of despair, melancholy, the blues, whatever you want to call it, but I recall always trying to think, to fight the feeling, at least to putwords to what I was experiencing, usually by writing in my notebooks. But this feeling of absolute solitude and suffering, this slow fall into a bottomless abyss, this inability to explain anything even to myself . . . I didn’t know what it was.
I slept a bit. I sleep a lot here. I sleep and I write in this accounts book that Claude gave me. A twist of fate? A final settling-up? I have been writing in school exercise books since 1946, since I found the strength to do it, as a way of keeping a few beacons lit in my dark night, to help guide my memory. Since more or less the same date, I have kept records of my earnings and expenses, just to balance the books. It was my job, before. I always hated it. Hated my bosses: their obsession with profit, their natural propensity for fraud, their instinct for cheating. I think any boss, big or small, is a cheat who has managed not to get caught.
And now, the hour of reckoning has come and I write indifferently in the two columns as if profits and losses were cancelling each other out. Result: zero. Bankruptcy? No. Just nothing. A whole life, for nothing. I think that’s how it will end. I don’t know when, or where. But it will be soon, and not far away. Here, in this hovel above a roomful of brokendown cars. Or in Bordeaux, if I manage to escape Darlac. I cannot see beyond the next few days. Maybe the next few hours. I write. At least I will leave that behind me, if anyone ever wants to read what I’ve written.
My son, maybe. I left my other notebooks at Abel and Violette’s house, and I feel more destitute, more naked than if I had fled without the clothes on my back. I’ll get them to him via Mesplet, if he doesn’t come to see me. I hope the cops haven’t found them. But of course they have. Even now, they are probing the secrets of a killer, as the newspapers will put it. Of course they are. No way out. So, these lines . . . For you, Daniel. Reaching you across time and distance, if you decide not to come.
For the last three days there have been two cops sitting in a car down there, about fifty meters away, towards the train station. Claude spotted them almost straight away. They came that first evening. They must have found out I came here when I brought the bike to be fixed. They know my son works here. They realize it’s probably the only place I could show up. Although I imagine there are cops sitting in cars outside Maurice and Roselyne’s house too. Darlac knows all this, so he’s cast his nets. I hope Daniel is well hidden, that they won’t take him. I could get out of here, through the back door, and those idiot cops would never know. Mesplet would probably lend me a few francs. But where would I go? Paris? No, don’t go back. Never go back. So I wait here and I write and I try to sleep. Imprisoned in myself.
“Don’t go out in front. Take this key. It opens the door to number 8, Passage Bardos. You know where that is—I showed it to you once. Avoid rue Furtado: there are two cops waiting there, just for you. You’ll need a flashlight. I haven’t been in that house for two years now, so be careful where you put your feet, it’s a huge mess in there. At the back there’s a wooden staircase. Don’t worry, it’s not about to collapse. At the top there’s a door. Go through that and you’ll find your father.”
Daniel takes the key and shoves it in his pocket.
“Thanks.”
“I can come with you to keep an eye on the street, if you want.”
“No. Maybe I won’t have the balls to go through with it at the last moment. I’d better be alone for this.”
Mesplet puts his hand on Daniel’s shoulder.
“As you like. He’s changed, you know.”
“No, I don’t know. I don’t even know what he was like before.”
He picks up his workman’s bicycle, an old rust bucket with a bell that doesn’t work. He had cleaned and oiled it that afternoon, dismantled it, checked the inner tubes and the tires.
Roselyne brings him something to drink.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Later, in the mild night, Irène goes out with him to the sidewalk.
“Let me come with you. I won’t say anything.”
He doesn’t reply. He mounts the bike.
“Daniel?”
She walks over to him and kisses him full on the mouth. She hugs him so tight he almost falls off, because he’s let go of the handlebars.
“For afterwards,” she says.
He rides calmly along the empty docks. Occasionally a car overtakes him, and each time he wonders where they are going, these people, at night. He has always wondered about things like that—where all these figures were coming from or going to, these figures he glimpsed or passed on the street, whom he watched or captured in his little metal frame, and he would imagine little stories for them, strange fates. Sometimes he thinks he should write books about all these people, giving them a past and a future.
He can’t help staring at the moored ships. Always that curiosity when he sees an illuminated porthole, a silhouette on the bridge. Alain. Perhaps Daniel should have done what he did. But further off. Sumatra. Zanzibar. Djibouti. San Francisco. Anchorage. He barely even knows where these places are, has no idea what they’re like. He’s read a few books. Not enough. But those names resound in his mind like magical spells, powerful incantations heard whispered at the other end of the world, attracting madmen and dreamers. People always think I’ll leave one day, later, there’s plenty of time. And often they never do.
And then there is a woman’s kiss, the softness of her hair against your cheek. And it feels good, close to her.
He lets his thoughts drift as far as possible from the man he is about to meet. Sometimes, when the reason for this nocturnal trip crosses his mind, a big shiver runs down his spine and his heart starts to pound in his chest.
He makes a large detour to arrive at the garage from behind, and leaves his bicycle about fifty meters from the street. It is dark and warm in this little alley and he hears something scurry through the gutter. Sweat starts to run down his face, down his back, and his short-sleeved shirt sticks to his skin. He switches on his flashlight because he can hardly even see his own feet. The moonless sky is no help at all. The streetlights on the neighboring roads are choked by the night, illuminating nothing beyond themselves.
The key turns in the lock with a click. A hallway. Strips of paint peeled from the walls litter the floor. Daniel’s feet crunch through cement dust, or maybe it’s sand. The smell of mould, of old paper, saltpetre. Dead rats. His throat tightens in a little spasm of disgust, then he remembers three corpses swarming with wasps that he found during a patrol and the present seems less sickening. In the beam of torchlight he sees piles of chairs, a table on top of another, a sideboard with the doors wide open. A wooden crate filled with tools. He steps carefully through this jumble of objects and hears a stampede of mice under the floorboards.
Suddenly the stairs rise up before him, caught in the glare of the torch. He stops dead in front of the first step and looks up towards the landing where the staircase forks. Impossible to see any further in this darkness. He wishes a door would open, that some light would appear, but there is no illumination, no movement.
Of course, the steps creak under his feet. He senses that in the room upstairs a man he doesn’t know is listening, and that he can hear the ferocious pounding of Daniel’s heart too.
*
“My name is Jean Delbos and I am your father.”
Hearing his son’s footstep on the creaky staircase—it can only be him, because there is nothing sneaky about that slowness, it is merely shy and hesitant—he wonders what his first words will be. Or will he say “Hello, son” to reforge the connection, because Daniel knows who he is?
He can hardly breathe when he hears a knock at the door. He takes two steps forward, then stops. I’m not going to open it. Just leave all that well alone. What’s the point? Olga. She would already be in her son’s arms. Their son. And suddenly he is overwhelmed by tears and a moan escapes his mouth. How he wishes she could be there to live this moment. My little boy, come here so I can see you.
She is dead, her corpse gone in smoke up the chimneys of the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no heaven, no place where souls can feel anything, caresses or vibrations in the air, no way of feeling joy or suffering. Everything is over, irreversibly so, and memory is merely an invocation without response to a fictional and incomplete hereafter. But he summons her image; the beauty of her smile, the warmth of her skin, the depth and sweetness of her gaze when she looked at him are here, with them both. Jean, my sweet darling, she used to say, in the early days of their marriage. Her voice. She would sing all the time.
He opens the door, his vision blurred by tears that he wipes away with the back of his hand, and all he can see is the blinding halo of torchlight and the figure standing before him, unmoving, indistinct as a ghost. He takes a step back, says, “Come in.”
Daniel switches off the torch and stares at this tearful man. He closes the door behind him and walks forward and at that moment he wishes his heart would cease beating because it hurts, it’s strangling him, choking him, and he feels as if he won’t be able to say a single word.
“I’m Daniel.”
He tries to catch his breath. He feels the sweat run down his back. The man wipes away his tears again and manages to smile.
“And I’m Jean. Your father. Even after all this time.”
Daniel does not recognize this deeply wrinkled face. But the voice, yes. It hasn’t changed. And that is how he recreates the image of the man who lifted him up in his arms and took him on the merry-go-round. He was a very tanned man, with good teeth. Always smiling. He sees him again now. He rubs his eyes, feeling suddenly weightless, the walls of the room spinning slowly around him.
“Are you alright? Do you want some water to drink?”
Daniel nods without looking at this frail, unsteady man, afraid to meet his gaze.
Jean walks over to a cupboard and takes out two glasses that he fills with water from the tap. He takes a few deep breaths while he does this, shakes his head, splashes water on his face. He comes back to Daniel and hands him a glass. He can see his son’s face in this man’s. Thinner and longer, of course. The eyes bigger, dark like his mother’s. He wants to hold him. He can’t bear to remain standing like this, a meter away from him.
Daniel drinks, staring into the bottom of the glass. He wishes he could leave. He doesn’t know what to say and it disturbs him to stay here, before this man who has the same voice as his father, before this echo of the past. But he also wants the man to speak again so that everything can really come back, if that’s possible.
“I don’t recognize you. I can’t. Only your voice. It’s still like it was before, when you . . . When you took me to the fair and bought me doughnuts.”
Jean smiles and the tears fall again from his eyes. He doesn’t wipe them away this time.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s completely stupid . . . I just can’t stop. It’s like a river, overflowing . . . I don’t know, I’m just so . . . How can I say this . . . Happy, I suppose, but that’s a stupid word, it doesn’t mean anything . . . And I’m so ashamed too.”
Daniel walks over and puts his hand on the man’s shoulder, and Jean puts his on Daniel’s arm, and then they hug, both of them relaxing. It is a sweet embrace, nothing manly about it: no pats on the back or hearty squeezes, just their bodies close together and each with their chin in the other’s neck, but not daring to kiss because first they probably need to get a handle on the other’s reality, their substantiality, to feel their breathing, hear them gulp as they swallow their emotions, balled up in a rough knot in their throats.
“Let’s sit down,” says Jean.
He takes a chair and invites Daniel to sit on the bed. Jean sits very straight-backed, and he wipes his cheeks again and rubs the last tears from his eyes. He is preparing to speak, to explain his embarrassment and his regrets and his sorrow, but Daniel speaks first.
“Everyone thought you . . . that you were dead, all this time.”
“I thought I was dead too. Maybe I am, in a way.”
“I don’t understand. You’re here, in front of me. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Me neither. And yet sometimes I feel sure they exist.”
“And my mother? Is she a ghost?”
Daniel doesn’t know where he found the strength to say that. How he scraped up enough air in his lungs to breathe those words.
“What happened to her?”
Jean stares at him, but what he sees is still Olga in the line of prisoners, held up by some woman, turning around to try and find him in the crowd, and not seeing him even though he was waving to her and calling out to her in spite of the S.S. guards screaming at him—at all the other men in the crowd who were gesticulating and yelling and crying and sometimes throwing themselves forward—to shut up, in spite of the S.S. beating them with the butts of their rifles or setting their dogs on them, the men falling to the frozen ground and curling up in a ball, no longer moving, their faces covered with blood.
After a while, he realizes that he is telling his son what he has scarcely told a soul before.
“If we’d been able to see each other one last time, if we’d been able to look in each other’s eyes, you understand . . . If I’d been able to tell her that I loved her, that she was the only one I ever loved . . . I don’t know, I think that would have made things better for her. I even prayed to God, can you believe it? I even tried to talk to that thing, but apparently if you don’t believe in him, he doesn’t respond. Some old man told me that. And when you believe in God, you realize he’s not there anymore. That he won’t be there ever again. That’s what this old Jew told me. He laughed as he said that, like he was telling a really good joke. God exists, he said, but he’s never there, the bastard.
“But we talked all the time in the train carriage. For more than two days, the two of us huddled close, all of us crammed in together. I held her, leaning back against the wall so she could sleep a bit, just a few minutes. She was shivering with fever. I told her everything I hadn’t taken the time to tell her in years. And we talked about you, and that was terrible, and sometimes we preferred not to say anything cos we would have gone mad.”
Silence. The yellow light filtered through the filthy lampshade casts more shadow than brightness. They both slouch forward as they breathe, eyes lowered.
“Sometimes I can’t remember her face,” Daniel says. “I have to look at Roselyne’s photos. But now, with your voice, loads of images are coming back to me. I’m glad you came back.”
“Are you sure? Wasn’t it simpler the way it was before? When I was really dead?”
“I prefer people to be alive.”
Jean nods, pensive. My son is right. He is on the other side, in sunlight.
“Did you really kill those people?”
“Which people?”
“The ones in the newspaper.”
“I killed some bastards. Friends of a cop I knew before the war. A cop I still hung around with during the Occupation, despite what was happening. When I let you and your mother down. His name is Albert Darlac. He promised to protect us, and then one day he just handed us over. I found a few of his friends, his relatives, and I killed them. That’s why I came back, to start with. I thought it would be easy. But then there was that kid, at the bar. I don’t know what she was doing there. She died in the fire. I didn’t know what to do then. As for the others, Darlac must have been eliminating a few inconvenient witnesses and framed me for it.”
“Is that true?”
Daniel immediately regrets asking this. Jean sits up, opens his hands in front of him.
“You’re the only one who can believe me. I don’t care about the others.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
They fall silent again. Afraid of hurting each other with words.
Daniel looks at Jean. My father. He does not really understand what that means. This man makes him sad. He wishes he could love him. He’s heard stuff before about blood ties being indissoluble, instinctive, almost animal, and now he can see that it’s not true. There’s that voice, of course, those echoes, those images coming back to life. Useless memories.
“Why didn’t you come back to get me when the war ended?”
For years he’s been asking himself the same question every day, and each time it is like a very fine needle puncturing his skin, creating an electric pain, deep and fleeting.
They jump to their feet when the door is suddenly flung open and bangs against the wall. Jean knocks his chair over backwards as he stands up and at first Daniel does not understand who this man is, entering the room with a pistol, a Colt like the ones the officers in Algeria carried. He is tall, wide, solidly built. He is wearing gloves, a pale sports jacket.
“Ah, shit! I bet I’m interrupting a family reunion, aren’t I?”
Darlac points his gun at Daniel.
“You, lie on the floor. Face down, hands on your head. And do it quick, cos I’m in a bit of a rush.”
He curses himself for not having thought to bring handcuffs. He wasn’t expecting this little shit to be here too. Oh well, that’s even better. Two for the price of one. The minister’s special envoy will come in his pants with excitement. Inside his pocket, he handles Mazeau’s .30.
Daniel obeys. He tries to remember the name of the cop his father was talking about. Darnac? Darlac. He wonders what his chances are of getting up and charging into this bastard before he has time to open fire. Slim to none.
“And you, grab that chair and sit your ass on it. Here. I want you both in my line of fire. And don’t try anything.”
Moving slowly, Jean picks up the chair, sets it upright, sits down on it.
“And now what are you going to do? Are you going to kill us? Make it look like I committed suicide and murdered my own son?”
“I don’t know yet, but that’s not a bad idea. Just shut your mouth and let me savor the moment. You are my best ever arrest, you know that? And no-one cares if you’re alive or dead. I’ll have caught the murderer of nine people. If this was America, I’d be on the covers of magazines for this, pistol in hand, smiling for the camera. Can you believe the irony? Why exactly did you come back? To kill those losers and scare me? What did you think was going to happen? What were you even avenging yourself for? That old business with the camps? I bought you a one-year reprieve. That’s not too bad, is it? You thought you were on the right side cos you hung around with me and a few Kraut whores while your Jewish wife went on with her life as if everything was normal? How could you expect not to get wet when it was pissing down with rain, you dick? Jesus, how old were you? And now you come back to avenge yourself, like in a film? Look at you! You’re fucked. I can kill you whenever I want, if I want, cos you screwed it up, as usual, by thinking that you’re cleverer than everyone else.”
Jean concentrates on the gun—on the single dark eye staring at him—in order not to look in Darlac’s eyes. Between the firing pin and the cartridge primer, there remain ten to fifteen millimeters of space, in which is trapped everything he has been through, all his sufferings and hopes. He made every mistake possible. He even brought Daniel into this, and now his son is lying in the line of fire of this vile, crazy prick. Darlac is going to shoot, no matter what. He’s going to kill him. He didn’t think it would happen like this. So quickly. At the hands of this bastard. He’d have preferred to do it himself. Jump under the wheels of a train. He’s thought about it often during the three days he’s spent here, hearing the horns of the locomotives blaring from the station. He would probably have fucked that up too. Sliding at the last moment onto the ballast, or throwing himself off the wrong bridge, or onto the roof of a carriage. It’s farcical, the way he can fuck everything up.
Daniel listens to the cop’s sarcastic voice, discharging its venom. He thinks about getting up, creating a diversion, but Darlac is holding two guns and covering every possible angle. He would still have a hand free to shoot, even if he was thrown to the ground. And that type of man is never easily intimidated; that type of man always recovers, with some unsuspected back-up plan ready at a moment’s notice, a secret weapon stashed up his sleeve. Daniel wonders if perhaps he isn’t simply scared. Maybe because he looked into the cop’s eyes and it was like staring into dead water, a toxic swamp waiting for you to move closer so it can suck you in. In Algeria, if he’d looked into the enemy’s eyes, he would probably have thrown down his weapon instead of fighting, as he ended up doing.
A scraping noise of wood on wood, and then the sound of the overturned chair hitting the floor. Sudden yelling. Daniel gets to his feet and sees the two men rolling on the floorboards, Darlac’s hands, a gun still in each, beating the air. A gunshot sends him to ground again and deafens him, leaving a painful buzzing in his ears. Next to the wall at the other end of the room, the two tangled bodies continue fighting. He gets up again amid the stink of gunpowder and charges, but suddenly Darlac frees himself and hits Jean in the face with the butt of a gun, then pulls backwards and aims at both of them. With the Colt, he fires twice in Jean’s chest. Jean does not cry out. His body falls back against the skirting board. Then Daniel sees the cop raise his other huge fist, with the pistol pointing like a child’s toy, and he feels a hammer blow to his shoulder that sends him flying. He falls to the floor, and when he tries to break his fall he feels as if he no longer has an arm and he rolls onto his side.
Darlac places the .30 in Jean’s right hand, slides his index finger onto the trigger and squeezes. The bullet lodges in the wall above Daniel and a cloud of white dust puffs into the air. The cop stands for a moment in the middle of the room, staring at the two prone bodies, then goes over to Daniel as shouts echo in the street below, along with car doors banging. So he goes down the stairs leading to the garage, pushes open the creaking door, half-blocked by shelves covered in spare parts, and sees two figures waving torches and yelling, “Police! Don’t move!” He tells them his name and rank, calls them cocksuckers and approaches them.
“Things turned ugly up there. I got here too late. He’d shot his son. I had to defend myself.”
The two men grope around for a light switch, find one and silently stare at the cars gleaming under the 100-watt bulbs.
The street is packed with cops jumping out of vans and Peugeot 403s parked any which way across the sidewalk in the amber flashes of the rotating lights on their roofs. Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde bursts into view, flanked by two detectives whom he immediately sends off to find out what’s happening.
“So have you got what you wanted?” he asks Darlac. “Everyone dead?”
“I had to kill him. He threatened me with his gun. Anyway, it was two bullets or the guillotine. I prefer the first solution: it’s neater, and it’s cheaper for the taxpayer.”
“That’s not the only thing that costs the taxpayer.”
Other cars arrive. The prefect. A bigwig from the mayor’s office. Darlac has met them before at office meetings.
“So?” they ask, slapping Laborde on the back. “You got him?”
“He’s dead, along with his son. Commissaire Darlac led the operation single-handed.”
Laborde stresses the word “single-handed” and the prefect raises an eyebrow. All the same, he walks over to Darlac looking grave and solemn and shakes his hand.
“I don’t know if it was done by the rules, but at least it’s done. This city will be peaceful again. The police is honored to have officers such as you in its ranks. Go ahead . . . go home to your wife. You’ve earned a few hours of rest. Don’t you think, commissaire divisionnaire?”
Laborde nods. Darlac takes his leave of these good people, then walks over to his car amid congratulations, compliments and salutes. He shakes hands, gets his back slapped. “Jesus, say what you like, but . . . what a cop!” he hears someone say behind him. It has been a long time since he felt so at peace. In the warmth of the night, he breathes in with a feeling of perfect fulfillment. He daydreams about the cognac he will pour himself when he gets home. About the sweet sleepy feeling that will soon overcome him.
He drives with the windows down, smoking a cigarette. He feels the best he’s felt in so long that he finds himself humming a popular song, one of those inane tunes that madame sings to herself in her kitchen as she cooks.
*
He is woken by the pain. Daniel is floating at first, then feels the weight of his body again. He is lying in an awkward position, his right cheek against the floorboards, his arm trapped under his ribcage, one knee bent. Just as he decides to move, a hand grabs his wounded shoulder, making him groan with pain. He turns over and lies on his back. The room is swarming with people. He tries to see where his father fell, but there is a forest of legs planted in front of the slumped body, which he can hardly make out at all. Above him, a bald, square-faced man stares dumbstruck.
“This one’s alive!”
Pandemonium. Voices shouting. Four or five faces turn towards him, incredulous.
“He’s been shot in the shoulder,” says the cop crouched down next to him. “Call an ambulance. Tell Commissaire Divisionnaire Laborde.”
He feels like he’s nailed to the floor by his own weight, a bit like on those giant spin-dryers you see in funfairs where you’re stuck to the wall by the speed at which the thing is revolving. He looks up at the dark ceiling, examining the random shapes of the yellowish halos cast by the lamp and tries to think about something. But the pain drives everything from his mind, leaving him feeling stupid, like so many pounds of lifeless meat. Through the open window he can see flashing lights, hear engines rumbling.
He comes to again when they put him on a stretcher. He asks the policemen who lift him up to wait and he turns sideways, leaning on his good arm, and stares at his father’s body. There is no-one around it now, and he is able to see the face at rest, the marks of time seemingly faded, the mouth half-open as if he were about to say something in his sleep, and he remembers the man whose hand he held when they walked in the street, the man who smiled as he talked to him.
Later still, in the hospital lobby, his shoulder immobilized by bandages, he shivers with fever, feeling thirsty and desperately lonely. He wishes Maurice and Roselyne were there, to reassure him. He wishes Irène could give him something to drink and hold his hand. The feel of her cool fingers in his palm. Her lips near his.
A few words. He closes his eyes, lulled by these sweet thoughts.
Then the cop who’s sitting by the foot of the bed looks up at him over his newspaper and asks if he’s alright.
*
Commissaire Albert Darlac feels another wave of happiness as he closes the door of the house behind him. The air is cool. Through the open French window, a breeze blows in from the garden, bringing the scent of the jasmine that grows on the pergola. Madame is sitting in an armchair and reading by lamplight as a moth flutters around the bulb. What a charming sight. She is wearing a pair of Capri pants that show off her ankles and cling tightly to her legs, and a pale blue blouse with an open neckline. He contemplates the roundness of her breasts, feels the urge to see her naked. He wants her. It is sudden and brutal. Back in the good times—when were the good times? His memory is shot—he would have moved closed to her and slid his hand under the fabric, his fingers caressing her nipple as he buried his other hand between her parted thighs. She would lie back, moaning softly, and hold his hand firmly inside her secret warmth . . .
He pulls himself together, takes off his jacket, tosses his waistcoat onto the sofa as he walks over to the bar. Cognac. He pours a generous measure into a heavy glass that he holds in the palm of his hand. He sniffs it, takes a sip, then sits down. Sigh of pleasure. Silence and darkness.
“Elise not here?”
Madame shakes her head. He wasn’t looking at her though, so he waits for her response, is about to repeat his question then decides not to bother: why should he care about his whore of a daughter, good only for turning him on with her cuddles or her distant attitude, depending on her mood. Soon all that will be over. He is going to put his life in order. During the last few months, he has done a good job of tidying up his mess: he got rid of a lot, it’s true. But you can’t go on living amid an accumulation of old stuff; you can’t keep walking forever through the same old shit without it starting to stick to the soles of your shoes and to stink, making people turn as you pass.
Soon he will be a free man. He will file for divorce, because that slut went on seeing her Kraut for years without his knowledge—that’s what he will say, and they’ll believe him, and they’ll look at that unworthy beauty caught up with the devil like some demonic creature, and she’ll be like those women who are branded with red-hot pokers, their heads shaved while the good people jeer and spit at them. He is sure of his ground. He will request a transfer to Paris. Or no, maybe Marseille, because he likes the sensations and the strong smells. They owe him that, at least, after he rid Bordeaux of the worst killer the city has known since the war officially ended. So they can fuck off, his wife and daughter. Madame can start training as a shorthand typist again and she’ll get a job as a secretary in some office to make ends meet. She’ll be fine: he can see her now, dispensing her favors to her boss. With a body like hers, she’ll probably end up getting promoted and marrying some ambitious bureaucrat or being kept by an adulterous executive.
So here he is now, planning out his life. He who has always lived so determinedly in the present, forbidding himself to look backwards, mistrusting tomorrow, here he is now going soft over his prospects, thinking about his future. He puts that down to the alcohol that is starting to lure him into a sleepy bliss, punctuated with pornographic scenes: madame in every possible position, using and abusing her charms in the most diverse places, to the point where he wonders if—touching his rock-hard erection through the fabric of his trousers—he couldn’t have her now: turn her over as he usually does so he won’t have to see her face and smash into her without a word. Why not enjoy this little comfort, this right granted to him by marriage?
He hears her moving about in the kitchen and wonders what she could be doing in there. He is surprised that he didn’t see her get up. He looks around as if he’s just waking up from a dream and is reassured by the firm grip of his hand on the glass of cognac. He takes another sip.
She comes back into the living room. He sees her tall figure walking towards him, backlit by the light from the kitchen, and he is seized by the desire to touch her, to bend her over—here on the sofa, for instance—and take her. The thought makes him shiver.
He is surprised to see her standing firmly in front of him, arms dangling. He stares at the triangle at the top of her thighs emphasized by those skintight trousers, and thinks only of what is hiding behind that thin fabric.
He is surprised to hear the sound of her voice. “Why did you kill Willy? Why couldn’t you leave him for me? I never asked you for anything.”
He looks up and sees that she’s crying. This surprises him too, because she spoke in a firm, strong voice.
He is surprised when she falls on him. He holds out his arms—he is afraid of spilling his drink. He is about to yell at her, shit, what are you . . . then he feels a sharp pain in his chest and realizes that his shirt is wet with blood, that it is soaking the top of his trousers, so he drops his glass in order to push his wife away but his arms have no strength and they fall back on her as if he was trying to hug her.
She lies on top of him, thrusting the knife in with all herstrength. Her face is only centimeters from his. She looks as though she’s about to kiss him or tear off his face with her teeth. She whispers, her jaw tensed, the words barely articulated.
“Look at me, you bastard. Look at me as you’ve never seen me before.”
Albert Darlac does as she tells him and he has trouble recognizing his wife, Annette, in the frozen mask that leans over him. And that impassive perfection scares him, really scares him, because it seems to him that she is not human and that he cannot control her, he who has always so shrewdly manipulated the mediocrities who surrounded him to his own advantage. He tries to speak, but the only sound that emerges from his open mouth is a groan of pain.
It is at this moment that she stands up and he sees that she is covered in blood: her hair tied back, impeccable as always, but her forearms red and glistening, her impassive face flooded with tears, mascara trickling down her cheeks. He tries to pull out the knife that is plunged in him up to its hilt, but he can’t find it because suddenly it is dark, and his vision is scattered with dazzling lights, and his arms no longer obey him.
She sits on the chair across from him, leaning slightly forward, and stares at the wooden knife handle as it rises up and down in time with his breathing. In a whisper, she counts. One, two, three . . . For the eighth time, the knife handle rises then falls slowly and does not move again. And the woman wipes away her tears.