Bed of Nails Read online

  “Lambert, son, you’re a mystery.”

  Lambert did not reply: he was absorbed in staring at Lieutenant Guérin.

  *

  Tenon hospital, in the rue de la Chine, was the nearest place he could get stitches. A centre for cosmetic surgery, as it happened, and the wound wasn’t quite serious enough for that. The police badges persuaded a specialist on liposuction to take care of Guérin’s cheek. “Nothing fancy,” he had said, “just sew it up so that it stays put.” But the doctor took pains to make a good job of it, under the curious eyes of lanky Lambert. He refused to write an invoice, saying that it was a pleasure to do something useful for a change. But he also gave Guérin a brochure about hair transplants, with an expression suggesting he might start with that.

  Six stitches and a small scar for his old age.

  Lambert slid behind the wheel and cleared his throat.

  “Boss, I’m sorry, I, um, I just can’t manage it.”

  “Manage what?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t manage to shed any tears for Savane.”

  The man who could weep had finally delivered a kick in the balls. Two big tears ran down Guérin’s cheeks.

  *

  In the office, the stain on the ceiling had dried up, the pink was paler and the brown rings round it stood out more clearly. Lambert tore two pages from the calendar. Ripping off these two little pieces of paper made him feel as if time had speeded up, was getting out of control. He had forgotten his role as timekeeper these last days. The calendar had stood still on the day Savane had come to see them.

  Guérin sat behind his desk and slid a trembling hand over his cap.

  “Now then, young Lambert, we need some coffee.”

  His deputy went off, dragging his feet at his usual calm pace. Why did he still say “young Lambert” and call him “son”? He remembered his mother who used to call him “my big boy”, and the feeling that had given him that he had never grown up. By calling him “young Lambert”, he was probably trying to say the opposite. He then turned his mind to Nichols, a more strongly built and intellectually sharper version of Lambert, if that comparison made any sense. The American was an empty shell, ninety kilos worth of questions. His mother probably called him “my big boy” too. So perhaps there was a connection between going to university and having a castrating mother. Guérin let his ideas run on for a bit, before he dared to open the envelope. On his desk, in Savane’s small and contorted handwriting, just one word on the crumpled paper: Richard. He looked at the door – Savane had presumably picked the lock without difficulty – then unfolded the letter.

  There are some photos of Kowalski in Roman’s place. Roman’s so dumb he couldn’t help hanging on to them. Now I’m dead, you can finish your investigation. Sorry I let you down. Don’t worry about the memory I’ll leave behind. If you bring down these shits you’ll be doing what I’d have done if I’d had the guts. At least I won’t have died still one of them. Goodbye, Richard. And thanks.

  “Boss, they only had decaff. That O.K.?”

  12

  The teenager, fourteen or fifteen, and growing fast, arrived on a skateboard, slaloming between the pedestrians. Tight jeans, enormous trainers and a skinny T-shirt declaring No Current, No Sharks. His Beatles fringe flopped over his forehead and he was being a pain in the arse to everyone. He stopped his skateboard with a kick and tapped in the code of the big metal door. John went in behind him.

  The young rebel, plugged into his iPod, looked him up and down, wondering what tribe he belonged to. A techno warrior? Homeless? A left-over hippy? The boy asked him who he wanted, with all the aplomb of a householder. John said he was visiting the woman on the ground floor, and the moptop Cotton-Bud blushed scarlet. Behind his dilated teenage pupils, could be guessed the hours he had spent spying from his bedroom on the studio windows below.

  “Patricia? I don’t know if she’s there. I can go and see if you like.”

  “I can manage.”

  The boy trailed around the yard on some non-existent pretext, hoping to see the girl from the ground floor who took her clothes off all the time.

  Patricia opened the door. The dark glasses could hide her eyes, but not her mouth. The manly kudos of having been punched on the jaw did not suit her as well as it did John.

  “What do you want now? Go away.”

  John tried to see behind the dark glasses and his distorted reflection.

  “What happened?”

  Black, long-sleeved, high-necked sweater, no skin showing. Comfort or camouflage. She’d had a bad time. She was trembling, bourgeoise and haughty to her fingertips, wearing her temporary bruises with the dignity of a ruined aristocrat.

  “Get out.”

  “I want some answers, now.”

  She looked over his shoulder at the empty courtyard and let him in.

  Today her style was low heels, tailored trousers, black too, and the sweater was skin-tight. These carefully chosen coverings were worrying in a woman who had few inhibitions.

  “I went to the airport this morning. You didn’t come to say goodbye to your friend.”

  “I was otherwise engaged, Mr Nichols.”

  She took off the glasses. The left eye was black and closed. She had dressed to match.

  “A problem with a customer. He didn’t like the photos?”

  “Alan told me you had no idea how to talk to women.”

  Her blonde curls seemed ablaze, atop the sexy black column.

  “I live in the woods.”

  “Really? One would hardly have guessed.”

  “Black suits you. Are you in mourning for your business?”

  The remaining eye was enough to put him in his place.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “…”

  John blinked. An explosion went off in his head. There was no longer any lying, calculation or game-playing in Paty’s voice. A cold shower. John P. Nichols was knocked out by one look. Bad call, wrong track. With one sentence, a fuse in the machine had blown and hit him between the eyes. Patricia Königsbauer blackmailing someone, playing the whore for money she didn’t need? No, it was ridiculous. Alan. Him again. John walked round the studio, looking into the blank canvases for a confidence which he had already lost. With the first reply, like the first arrow. For months now, every time he drew his bow, he’d had the same impression: doubt. Fear of aiming at the wrong target: he’d had the same intuition, in the car with Guérin. It was Alan who had landed Paty in the shit. That’s what must have happened. Alan with his big grin. “Want me to stand in front of the target?” She had been beaten up on account of the fakir. As he had. Paty was a friend. Another friend. John had been jealous. “You used him.” Since the beginning. He had denied, thought, mulled over, invented a portrait of her to feed his own bitterness.

  He tried to rescue what he could of appearances, so as not to have to backtrack too fast. But this time he knew, he would be the one who ended up stripped naked.

  “Was it Boukrissi who did this to you?”

  Go on, John, get in deeper.

  “You really don’t get it, do you?”

  “Well, who then?”

  “The important thing is why. I wasn’t at the airport, because I was being beaten up, on your account.”

  Get the coaches back on track, do the math, Nichols, stick the pieces together.

  “Big blond guy, neck like a bull, American?”

  “They told me not to talk to you. Get out, get out of town, take the money and disappear. That’s all you can do now.”

  “But who are you talking about? Who’s ‘they’? The chauffeur? Hirsh?”

  “Hirsh? Don’t be ridiculous, Hirsh was just a plaything for Alan. I can’t tell you any more. Just go.”

  “Tell me about the blackmail. Were you in it with Alan? Who else was there, that time I came here?”

  “Stop inventing stupid stories, I was never in anything with Alan.”

  “Tell me what happened. I can p
rotect you.”

  Her laughter exploding from the black column, resounded round the studio.

  “Protect me! Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “There was a policeman at the airport this morning. I can call him if you like.”

  “So you say.”

  He put Guérin’s card down on the counter in the kitchen.

  “Do you want to talk to him?”

  “You disappoint me.”

  She folded her arms, but looked at the card. She was trembling with fear. Her skin-tight clothes, John thought, were to hold in the fear.

  “Who was here when I came before?”

  “Hirsh.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He’d come to warn me.”

  “About what?”

  “That the others would probably come. He thought it was because of his affair with Alan.”

  “Tell me, for fuck’s sake …”

  “They want the money and the documents.”

  “…”

  John sat down on a stool and she had the decency not to humiliate him further. She said nothing, but went behind the bar to fetch a glass and poured herself a Scotch which made him want one too. As she had two days before, she turned and looked critically at John’s portrait: You’re too big. You take up all the room on the canvas. “Alan did this because of you. It’s all your fault. Does this policeman really exist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is he interested in Alan?”

  “Just tell me everything.”

  She swirled the alcohol round the glass.

  “Then you’ll get out of my life?”

  Choose now. The truth and then go? A lie and stay here? He knew fuck all about what was going on.

  Go down with the ship. Get it over with.

  John clenched his teeth. “You didn’t sleep with Alan, did you?”

  She sipped the whisky, not sorry to end up confessing: “It was a lie, pure vanity.”

  “Why did you do my portrait when Hirsh was there?”

  Her black eye opened a little, and the hazel iris shone in the middle of the bruise. A smile. The killer blow, John. Soon.

  “It was a game Alan liked to play. Hirsh came sometimes too. It wasn’t blackmail, just a game. Alan liked a good show … the way the … He said it made him laugh to see these men’s faces when I made them impotent. You probably think that’s perverse, sadistic, whatever. Alan said you were straight-laced, naïve, you were just into boring stuff.”

  “Alan said that? Why did you do it with me, then?”

  “Alan talked a lot about you. One more of his games. I suppose he liked to get inside other people’s emotions by proxy.”

  She smiled again, and finished the sentence she had started two days before.

  “Alan was in love with you; he’d always been in love with you.”

  “I know.”

  Each of them on one side of the bar, faces in the mirror, distorted.

  “When he laughed, the truth was sad but beautiful.” She turned her back. “I liked Alan’s games.”

  Before he could say anything else, she made him leave.

  *

  Bunker was finishing his rounds. He had slept badly, with his joints and his scar aching. All day, he had prowled the park railings like a wild beast, Mesrine skulking at his heels. He had coshed a man, no doubt risking his life, and uncorked the volcano of anger that he had spent long years trying to bottle up. He could hardly say he regretted it, but he was afraid now that he might not be able to turn back the clock. The American had shaken his false sense of calm, blown a hole in his hard-won little island of security.

  He had tasted once more the freedom that had sent him to prison. The gates were closing on him, and Bunker was gasping for breath. That kid was going to push him deeper in without realising it. And the old convict would be asking for more.

  He dragged his boots along the alleys of the gardens aiming for his cabin, with the impression of going back into the cooler. How long had it been since he had approached a woman, gone into a café or been able to walk through the streets? All he knew was these fucking lawns, the park fountains, the pigeons, the minimarket in the rue Bara. How long since he had really seen his city? Had a life? 1994 had meant the cabin with its little fence. He had never counted the years. Time had stopped with the 1983 calendar, and never started again. It was time to stop lying to himself. Getting on for fifteen years in a park … A double sentence.

  Fear of opening the cage door. Prison had been following him around, he was beginning to admit it. It was right here, inside him.

  The American was slumped across the step of the cabin.

  Mesrine sat down at a safe distance, not attempting to come nearer. Bunker waved his hand and fetched the little table and chairs, a bottle of wine and two glasses without a word. The shrink needed to talk.

  It was a fine day, almost warm in the shade of this umbrella pine, surviving miles from the sea. Mesrine stretched out in the sun a few yards away.

  “So you said goodbye to your mate?”

  John smiled. He was aware of having a mask over his face that was unlike him. A routine mask, expressionless and distant. With Bunker’s ugly mug pretending to be happy with his lot, they’d have been a gas at a fancy-dress ball.

  “Why do you always understand too late something you already knew? Know the answer to that, Bunk?”

  “You wouldn’t last long in prison, tell you that, son. Too much going on inside that head.”

  Visitors to the park strolled by, no doubt thinking they were witnessing a typical, picturesque, Parisian scene. An old reprobate, no doubt, with his glass of red and his tobacco, alongside a Yankee hippy smoking a cigarette, and a mutt that was clearly an enemy of the system. Bunker put his cap on the table and rumpled his hair. He filled the glasses. John took a long pull on his Gitane.

  “I tried to say goodbye, but he came back again.”

  “No further on then?”

  “Yeah, I am, but it doesn’t make things any better.”

  “Spit it out, Mr Shrink, I can’t wait.”

  “Apparently all this has happened because of me, I can’t think any different. She was right.”

  “You saw the girl again?”

  “Here’s looking at you.”

  The wine was working its benevolent magic.

  “Alan met Hirsh at the cabaret. Hirsh liked all kinds of perversions, probably because he’d led such a sheltered life. Alan played games with him. It gave him a kick, this junkie who was into S and M, this Gulf War veteran, screwing Hirsh in his office at the embassy. If that wasn’t so stupid, it would almost be funny. But that was just the last stage.”

  “Drink up. I got nothing to do but listen.”

  Like every time he talked about Alan, John’s American accent was stronger.

  “The C.I.A., N.S.A., and F.B.I., the secret services, they’ve always got cutting-edge technology, but that’s not the only thing they’re into. They’re into psychology and social science as well. They call it ‘intelligence’. Bullshit. Torture isn’t the best way to get information. Eighty per cent of stuff you get that way isn’t reliable: pressure, lies, memory failure, phoney confessions, anything to stop the pain. The things that really work are spying and truth-telling drugs. Torture’s a form of psychological warfare. When people talk about gratuitous torture, they think it isn’t to get information, that it’s pure sadism. But really it’s the opposite, it’s the true torture. The idea is to demolish the enemy, then let a few go back home. To tell the tale. They demolish them, Bunk, so they won’t give you any trouble in future, you’re going to build a perfect world of tomorrow, using guys who don’t share your vision of democracy. And you let them loose like a virus, a virus of fear and silence. Torture means attacking an individual to terrorise a group. You create these lonely men, the walking dead, and they strike fear into people. And if you want to manufacture torturers, same thing. You take regular guys and transform them. You empty them out and then fil
l them with whatever suits you. You get a trained soldier, someone in the secret police, or a scientist who sees enemies everywhere. And around these guys, with films and newspapers, you build a world that tells them they’re absolutely right, paranoid and ignorant. And to make it all work properly and efficiently, you need some specialists, intellectuals, people like me. Creating torturers isn’t something you can simply improvise. Then, after that, you find some guys like Alan. That’s not the hardest bit.

  “He had no idea the Gulf War was about to happen, he only joined the army to get out of Kansas. He was recruited when he was still in the mud on Parris Island, the boot camp for the marines. Alan was good and ready for all this, a whole new custom-built family. Unbelievable what a man will do to get out of Kansas. His instructor, the one who found him, he was in the C.I.A. and he was heading up a new programme. So Alan spent four months in a training centre in the navy base in San Diego. At first he didn’t get what was going on with this special job. They never tell you directly, it’s all very gradually eased into place. You’re an intelligence specialist. And he was a good pupil. To create a torturer, first of all you show him what the other side did – in Korea, Japan, Vietnam. And on the other side, of course they’re doing the same thing, showing their soldiers what was done in Korea, Japan, Vietnam. You want to terrorise your enemies, and the result is just the opposite: you get to be so goddam disgusting that you’re the direct cause of the resistance. If they torture your father and mother, what do you do? Give them a hand burning the bodies? Don’t laugh, Bunk, there are professionals in the military who still don’t get it.

  “Alan was in one of the first planes that took off for Iraq in ’91, with the Intelligence staff. This was a new war, a new generation, new technology. Nothing original about it. Just perfecting the old ways. You give your victims a cocktail of drugs, you mess up their biological clocks, light, sleep, you put them in cages too small to lie down, too low to stand up, or boxes where you can only stand up, for days. You alternate the things you do, the kind of humiliation, depending on the people you torture; you adapt it for religion, or culture or sex; you make threats, give them false information: your brother said this, your pal’s confessed, your father’s dead, that kind of thing. And the guys in charge, they watch their men as closely as the prisoners: they’re sensitive machines, you’ve got to look after them. You can’t let it get out of hand, let the sadists go off and do whatever they want. The progress that’s been made in torture these days, it’s in the quality of the people doing it. Alan was very fragile before. Over there, he was one of the tough guys, a real asshole. He took it out on people’s bodies. He told me that when he was doing that, he could feel in his head that his father was proud of him. Or so his instructor was telling him. This guy, his commanding officer, he knew Alan’s whole life story. Successful torture is when you’ve destroyed the victim’s ideology. And a well-trained torturer gets his own ideology inside the other guy’s head. That’s what ideology is, Bunk. A distorting mirror, where the enemy has the same twisted face as you. Alan’s boss was just a machine for processing ideas that weren’t his own. But who has their own ideas anyway? If you’re a good subject, you can do everything they tell you to, and even get the feeling you’re free. Alan liberated himself in Iraq, you could say. But all the same, there was something inside him that put up resistance. A paradox. He thought the army had freed him from his past, and that he could start living a new life afterwards … his own life. So he got out. When he got back from the desert, he left the army. Well, what he did, he broke his contract, he deserted. But when he found himself out of the army, he couldn’t recognise the world he’d had described to him, and that felt strange. Strange to feel like the men he’d sent away with their balls ripped off.