Bed of Nails Page 14

  “How did he know I was here?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You weren’t at Saint-Michel this evening.”

  “No, he said to wait, not to go there. He sent us a text, told us you were here, that’s all. That’s how he contacts us. We don’t get to meet him. Two days, Fouad’s been sending us these messages. A bit of cash, that’s all we were in it for. For fuck’s sake, man! I’m in pain! I need a doctor.”

  “I’m going to call the police.”

  Kamal turned to his pal, his panic meter at red. Two useless sidekicks. All they were supposed to do was scare him off. First with fists. But the second time, they’d come with guns. Higher stakes.

  Bunker moved towards the door and signalled to John to follow.

  “Son, you really want to call the police?”

  “No, it was just to frighten them.”

  “Well, glad to hear it. But these two? They’re already scared to death. They won’t say no more, they know fuck all about anything. Your dealer there, he’s not stupid, he’s covering himself, sending these two clowns. It’s clear enough. They’re just working for a dealer who wants his money, no more to it. What you want to do is, you just go away, don’t get mixed up in this, or someone else is going to get themselves killed.”

  “All this just for the money? That can’t be it.”

  “Hell, son, when you get an idea in your head, it’s hard to shift it.”

  “What?”

  “You’re so damn stubborn. What the fuck else do you want to do?”

  “Talk to the dealer, talk to Hirsh, ask that girl some more questions.”

  “Talk to the dealer? Are you off your head? Set foot in the Quatre Mille, you won’t get out alive. These two, they got nothing to do with your pal’s death. Come on, son, he done himself in. He’d had enough … you’re just stirring up trouble for nothing.”

  “Alan mentioned this photo in his last letter to me. Why? And who followed me here, if it wasn’t them?”

  “Search me, but that’s not going to bring him back.”

  “No, I know.”

  “I wonder what you do know. You’re holding out on me, aren’t you, not telling me everything?”

  “I’ve just got this hunch, Bunk. I can’t tell you yet.”

  Bunker ran his hand through his white hair.

  “Son, way I see it, eggheads like you, they shit their pants when someone pulls a gun on them, right. So why do I get this idea that you’re not a fucking shrink after all?”

  John smiled

  “Cos I am a fucking shrink.”

  The old lag rubbed his scar, which reacted painfully to trouble, like rheumatism to rain.

  “That’s what you say. I’ve met blokes like you, think they know it all. Well, you’re not running fast enough, cowboy, let me tell you.” He thought for a moment, still rubbing at the white line running across his wrinkled face.

  “These two losers, right, we chuck ’em back on the street, and they’ll just have to take their chances, there’s a hospital not so far away.”

  “That’s all?”

  “We get the dealer’s address off ’em first, if that’s what you want. One more thing, I’m helping you, son, O.K., but if I land back in jail because of you and your pal, the fakir guy, there’s another promise I’ll keep. You’ve had it. No exceptions.”

  Bunker looked genuinely sorry to have made this point.

  “Bunk, what accent do these kids have, where are they from?”

  “They’re from some estate in the suburbs, son, it’s not a country.”

  Back inside the cabin, the blood was still silently seeping into the basin. Bunker played with his cosh, swinging it to signify a more relaxed atmosphere. He had taken charge now.

  “You, the cripple, where does this Fouad hang out?”

  Kamal tried to summon up some saliva in his mouth, his lips were dry, he was sweating and shivering.

  “He’s got lots of addresses, pal. We never know where he is. That’s the truth.”

  “Respect! Like for my big friend here. I’m not your pal. So how do you get in touch with him, then?”

  “Just by phone. But Fouad, you don’t call him, if he doesn’t call you.”

  “You give us the number, and we’ll do you a little favour, right. No police.”

  Hesitation.

  Hoodie, with his dislocated shuddering jaw, and eyes wide open, was trying to find a convincing expression.

  “Oh! Oh Oh-ee!”

  Kamal seemed to understand.

  “No police.” He pulled a mobile from his pocket, and Bunker snatched it.

  “Not on. What’s the code?”

  He gave them the code.

  “Take us to hospital?”

  “You get yourselves there, one of you can walk and the other can talk. What name on the phone?”

  “François.”

  “Fantastic. And your names?”

  “Kamal Aouch and he’s Nourdine. Nourdine Aouch: he’s my kid brother.”

  Bunker smiled, without joy.

  “Unemployment, brother, is the mother of vice.”

  John stationed himself at the south gate. 4.00 a.m. He waited a moment, then gave them a sign. Shoved from behind by the keeper and his dog, the two injured brothers dragged themselves to the exit. Bunker had put on his cap to look official. He unlocked the gate and let John have the last word.

  “We hear another peep out of you, we call the cops. You find some excuse at the hospital, don’t talk, don’t mention us at all. What do you (Oh fucking French! I’m too tired to speak it. Shit!), what do you do to contact Boukrissi?”

  “A text saying O.K., and the money in the letter box if we had it. GONE, if we didn’t find you. P.B. if there was a problem, and …”

  Kamal stopped. He was meeting some resistance at the level of his conscience.

  “What else?”

  “OVER, if there was a different problem.”

  Over. A little text message, in case by any chance one of these two motherfuckers had put a bullet in his brain. The idea amused him. Bunker took hold of the Aouch brothers, Kamal the legless and Nourdine the speechless, and pushed them into the street. They collapsed in a heap, then got back up and, stifling their moans, made their way up the road, a three-legged pair.

  Risky to let these two go free. But they didn’t have a whole lot of choice, and the last thing they would do was go to the police. If they reported to Boukrissi, he didn’t mind if they said “over”.

  “Son, I’m going to bury the guns. After that, not a peep out of you either. I’m going to sleep. And I get the bed.”

  John emptied the basin of blood at the foot of a tree and went back in. He pushed the table against the wall and spread his blanket on it. He lay down slowly, lowering his ribs one by one onto the wooden boards.

  Bunker came in without a word, his hands stained with earth. He hung his cap on a nail, took off his shoes and lay down fully dressed. Mesrine stretched out with a snort, burying his muzzle in one of his master’s shoes.

  “Listen, son, it took me fifteen years to find this place. There’s nothing in the world to beat a one-room cell. And if I heard right, you’ve got one like this down in the Lot. Well, you better get back there. The guns are under the tree where I found you. And the day you use them, you won’t never come back here.”

  The bed squeaked. Bunker was snoring within minutes. He had left the light on, a prison habit which didn’t stop him sleeping. But for John it was his first night in prison and he slept not a wink.

  11

  A telephone call at eight in the morning. Guérin answered it and made a note. A hanging in the 12th arrondissement. An eighty-year-old widower, one of the most common statistics in suicide. He had sent Lambert. His deputy, still smarting from the dressing-down of the day before, had slunk off, his tail between his legs.

  The videos had been no help. Possibly doctored, more probably just nothing. Guérin had called the witnesses named in his six files. He had
managed to contact the concierge, the doctor and the theatre-goer. They could all remember the suicides, but they had forgotten the details. A blonde woman and two men, one with a beard: vanished into the arbitrary meandering of memory. The street vendor couldn’t be traced. Next, he called the refuge for the homeless to question Paco again. Guérin had kept his word, finding him a place at the centre, so that he could be examined and offered treatment, at least for a few days. But Paco had decamped overnight. Guérin spoke to the doctor who had seen him. He diagnosed double pneumonia, plus secondary infections, the kind of thing people pick up living rough: skin disease, parasites, early stages of cirrhosis. According to the doctor, Paco was not long for this world. A few months at most: as well as everything else, there were tumours everywhere, as big as fists, from the stomach to the lungs. The city had punched holes throughout the organism of the little Tunisian of uncertain age. He had slunk off to die alone in a hole somewhere, like sick animals do, without making a fuss or attracting an audience.

  Guérin couldn’t get hold of the fingerprint files from his office. He had called the lab. Ménard was a rotten apple, but better not to talk to anyone else. And the technician was off sick for three days.

  Everything was falling apart, the elements were becoming atomised. The yellow raincoat had got bigger, or else Guérin had shrunk. Churchill was sulking, as he slipped into depression. The apartment had become a mausoleum to the memory of his mother, watched over by a neurotic parrot. There were no more temper tantrums or cackles, only silence. Guérin had lost the thread. He simply saw a parallel between his own condition and that of the world: they were both chaotic, no need to imagine any conspiracy, just a complex mass alternating between hazardous free will and anarchic disintegration. In that steaming cauldron, anything might make sense. Believing gave a shape to your illusions. But faith had to be shared. Out there somewhere, it might be that three insane people were methodically killing others. Nobody was going to help him find them. All he had was one newspaper cutting and a bloodstain on the ceiling. And the Kowalski affair was bound to resurface: the Kowalski nightmare, rather. Absence of proof and lingering doubt. Doubt about Kowalski.

  Guérin slipped the cutting into his pocket. In the corridor, he turned his back on the service stairs and walked resolutely towards the inner reaches of No. 36, wedging his cap down over his eyes.

  Today he needed to see them face to face, the colleagues who had chosen him as a scapegoat for their own sickness – the delusion, stupid or hypocritical, that you could live in a cesspit without picking up its stink.

  Guérin walked through the offices, outstaring his colleagues. The stigmata of their constant lies had punched holes in their skin. The ones who worked in Criminal Investigation wore themselves out as they aged. As young policemen, newly married, they were keen on justice, eager to go, and excited at carrying a gun. Once they reached forty, Guérin could read on their weary faces the divorces and the bitter awareness of the pointlessness of their task. The ones over fifty clung in disgust to the cause of all their failures and disappointments: their work. They had no choice. They handled their guns with anxiety, knowing that the bottle, nightmares and psychotherapy lay ahead. The prefecture of police was marinated in society’s turbid depths, registering, with every day that passed, more damage from mutually inflicted decomposition. Behind the hostile or evasive glances, Guérin found the evidence he was looking for: the shame that drove his colleagues. Shame over Kowalski – because that was the name that had become attached to it – now converted, out of cowardice, into hate for Guérin. He felt no satisfaction, rather a vague sense of pity, as he realised how much he scared them.

  In the stairwell, he met Roman and Berlion. The two lieutenants gave off an aura of hunted beasts ready to bite. They reeked of musk and hostility, scents of the night from which they were emerging. Roman, on a lower step, but with his eyes on the same level, snarled at him.

  “You got a problem, Guérin? Lost your way?”

  Shame, splitting open the hatred and seeping from infected internal wounds. Guérin looked from one to the other. Two fugitives.

  “Kowalski was guilty. It’ll come out one day, there’s no way it won’t, and you know it. You’re in it up to your necks. But there’s no justice in this world, so it’ll only be on your consciences. If I were you, Roman, I’d keep away from Savane for a while.”

  Roman grabbed Guérin by the collar and pulled him down a step. Berlion intervened.

  “Give over, he can’t do anything.”

  Roman’s huge hand was pressing on his throat. Guérin smiled, standing on tiptoe, and managed to croak:

  “What’s the police coming to, when you can’t count on your pals?”

  Roman let him go. Guérin pulled his crumpled raincoat round him and went on down.

  On the way, he tried to find the connection between this world where no revenge was possible, and a fakir who had died of a haemorrhage. Obvious. The connection was a perfect parallel. The world of men, a bed of nails, on which they were balancing clumsily as they tried to run away from one another.

  *

  The sign creaked as it swung in the wind: ridiculous in broad daylight. A fairy-tale wizard, painted in a naïve, realistic style, peering over a top-hat. The Caveau de la Bolée.

  A cutting from the Parisien and someone at police H.Q. with a weird sense of humour had sent him here. Chance, the fantastic double of his rapidly disappearing rationality, had drawn Guérin to the club.

  The sheer stone wall had no opening except the huge door without a handle. He lifted the bronze knocker and let it fall. He knocked again twice and stepped back. A bolt squeaked and a small, plump woman covered in tattoos opened the door.

  “What do you want?”

  She looked as if she had just got out of bed; her lips and eyelids were puffy with sleep. Guérin checked his watch. 11.00 a.m. How could anyone be so late getting up? He introduced himself politely. She replied in a husky voice:

  “We shut down the music at one in the morning, I’m not responsible for anything that happens in the street after that.”

  “I’m here about the man who died.”

  A ray of sunshine lit up the silver stud in her eyebrow. Ariel blinked the light away as if it were an insect.

  “I’ve already had the police round. Just get off my back about this business.”

  “I’m investigating a series of suicides.”

  She started to close the door.

  “So what? This was an accident, I can’t tell you any more.”

  Guérin took his cap off and put his head to one side. His eyes rolled.

  “I don’t believe in accidents. Or suicides. I’m looking into murders.”

  The woman’s pale cheeks were freckled. She slid her thumb into a strap of her tank top, adjusting one of the cups of her bra. Guérin bit his tongue as he saw the curve of her breast.

  Ariel leaned towards him. Guérin had gone red then white. He put his hand up against the stone wall.

  “Are you O.K.?”

  The little policeman stuttered.

  “I … I’m not sure.”

  A cognac and a strong coffee. A lesbian and a detective sitting together, a cigarette consuming itself in an ashtray. Three overhead bulbs and in the half-light the smell of absent bodies, as if a packed house had only just left.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

  “On duty?”

  “No, I don’t drink, full stop.”

  Ariel tipped the cognac into her own coffee.

  “Cyclist’s breakfast.”

  Guérin looked at his watch again.

  “Mademoiselle, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you some questions. Monsieur Mustgrave, that was his name, yes? He died in circumstances … well, I’m not quite sure how to put this, but in circumstances that may be connected to my enquiry.”

  Ariel swallowed her hot and alcoholic drink, and was probably wondering when she had last been a
ddressed as Mademoiselle.

  “Why did you say murder?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Are you prepared to answer my questions?”

  The coffee cup rattled on the saucer.

  “What are you frightened of?”

  Guérin’s head sloped several degrees to the side.

  “Of your answers, Mademoiselle. I’m afraid of coincidence …”

  Ariel’s mouth formed an O, in a tender pout revealing plenty of chrome and steel. She pulled up the straps of her tank top. The studs on her nipples stood out through the fabric. Guérin’s head was almost on his shoulder.

  “Are you afraid I might want to give you a spanking?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Only joking,” she said cheerfully. “It’s my motherly instinct being aroused. What do you want to know?”

  “It wasn’t an accident?”

  Coffee cognac. Her leather trousers squeaked on the chair. She leaned forward.

  “Will you want me to say this in court?”

  “No, this is just for me.”

  Ariel chewed a metal piercing in her pink tongue.

  “Well. I’d call it a pre-prepared accident.”

  “I’m looking for three people who might have been in the audience that night. A blonde woman, middle-aged, and two men, about the same, one of them had a beard or stubble. Does that ring a bell?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  Her breasts were resting on the table. Guérin tried to assemble his ideas out of the twilight.

  “These people were, well, let’s say rather more la-di-da than your usual clientele.”

  “It was full to bursting that night, I didn’t spend all evening looking at their faces. Anyway, heck, don’t you tell me the toffs don’t come here. Take a look at the drinks prices, and tell me if the workers can afford a bottle of champagne here.” She was sitting up straight, gripping the table.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Offend me? What planet are you on? I’m not offended, I’m bloody angry.”