Bed of Nails Page 18

  The old woman’s white eyebrows shot up above the spectacles.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “I knew he was leaving, but not so soon.”

  “He went the day before yesterday. Some people came to fetch his things today, removers. Two hours, and that was it, all done. He said he was going back to America. Promotion or something, but he didn’t look happy to be going. I think he’ll miss Paris. What a nice man, I’m going to miss—”

  “Thank you so much, Madame. Goodnight.”

  John read the letter as he walked back.

  Mr Nichols,

  As you will have gathered, my situation has become impossible in Paris. I have to go back to the States. My career’s on the line, but I’m going to try to do what seems important from now on.

  Alan asked me to send a letter to your address in the Lot, in case anything happened to him. I didn’t realise then what it was he wanted to talk about. I should tell you that I posted it after we’d met at the embassy. A letter for you, from Alan. I don’t even know if you’re still in Paris, so perhaps you’re already back home and have got the letter by now. Never mind, it’s almost funny, even in these circumstances, to be getting out of town and leaving a mystery message. I hope you read this note that I’m giving my concierge to keep for you as a last resort, since I can’t reach you.

  Alan talked a lot about you, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to know you better. I couldn’t talk to anyone, except to Secretary Frazer, and that was not an enjoyable interview, about my love for your friend. It was a tragedy, but now I think, after all, that he must have wanted it that way. The letter to you makes me think he was preparing his death. You knew him better than I did, so maybe you will understand better.

  Forgive my little trick over your name, just a precaution.

  Goodbye

  FH

  Alan certainly had a gift for casting. The lucidity of the torturer. John smiled wryly as he thought about the young diplomat. He hadn’t really understood what he was getting into. A cheap thrill, slumming it with a hippy masochist. A little rebellion against Uncle Sam’s establishment. He’d had a dodgy love affair while under the influence, but he’d played his part in it too. Hirsh would surely get over it.

  His mobile rang. He jumped. Cold sweat. The screen lit up in the dark kitchen. Unknown caller.

  Not Lambert, then. Roman? If the worst came to the worst, he could play for time. He breathed in and pressed reply.

  “Lieutenant Guérin?”

  “Yes.”

  “John Nichols.”

  “Who?”

  “John, we met at the airport, Alan Mustgrave’s friend.”

  “I can’t talk now.”

  “I’ve got to see you.”

  “I haven’t got time.”

  “We’ve got to meet.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  “I don’t have a mob …”

  Guérin had switched off, furious and high on adrenalin. Minutes lost, huge fatigue and nerves on edge. His hour would soon be up. The house had been turned upside down. And now Nichols and his masochistic pal were blundering into the Kowalski sewer. He put the torch down, and rested both hands on the work surface. He breathed in with his stomach, giving himself a minute to collect his thoughts. Sweat was forming on the bald cranium and trickling down into his eyes. The acrid smell mingled with the odour of stale fat. He shone the torch on the hood over the hob, and pressed the on switch.

  The extractor fan didn’t work. He jumped back and dropped the knife. The blade bounced on the tiled floor and shrill tones suddenly burst on his ears. The mobile again. Still not Lambert. He waited for it to stop ringing and picked up the knife, his heart pounding furiously. He pulled the grid out of the hood. Sticking to the grease-drenched filter was a plastic bag, and inside it a big brown envelope. He slipped his hand inside, teeth clenched on the metal torch.

  His mobile registered yet another message and the wretched beep made him jump again. Yes. This was it. Colour photographs. Corpses laid out in the morgue for autopsy. Kowalski. Abruptly, Guérin vomited, a burning stream that sent the torch skittering across the kitchen floor. He ran from the room, skidding on the pool of sick on the floor, jumped out of the sitting-room window, and got into the car with Lambert. He collapsed on the seat, deathly pale, clutching the envelope in his trembling hands.

  Lambert, alarmed, put his foot down.

  “Where to, boss?”

  “Your place.”

  Guérin listened to the message on his mobile in a daze. It was the American again.

  “Lieutenant, it’s John again. I’m in a phone booth. I’ll wait half an hour. Please call back, it’s urgent.”

  “Nichols?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve got to see you, now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Lambert, go to rue de la Pompe metro station, we’re picking up the American.”

  “Boss, what’s all this about. What were you getting from Roman’s place?”

  “Evidence, my son, that the worst is always yet to come.”

  “And this hippy, this American, what’s he got to do with it?”

  On the avenue de Paris, they met Roman coming the other way, sirens screaming. Lambert shrank back on his seat.

  *

  John got into the back of the car. No-one spoke. Lambert let him close his door and then drove on. John noticed the stitches on Guérin’s cheek but asked no questions. Their faces were starting to match.

  “So, Monsieur Nichols, you went on searching. And what did you find?”

  “Alan’s got nothing to do with your case.”

  “Still just as sure of yourself, are you?”

  “There are people after me now, the same ones who were after Alan, but they’ve got nothing to do with your investigation.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Alan was blackmailing Frazer, the secretary in the embassy. Frazer headed up this unit in Kuwait in ’91. A specialist in interrogations. His real name’s Lundquist, and he was with the C.I.A. Alan was one of his men, a protégé. I think Frazer used Boukrissi, the dealer, to kill Alan.”

  Lambert sighed deeply. The American was even nuttier than his boss.

  In Lambert’s bedsit, there was no room for the three of them to squeeze in alongside the immense T.V. screen. Twenty square metres, including the shower, the kitchen units and the hot-water tank. They remained standing, as the young man brought out a folding chair from a cupboard.

  Twelfth floor, a fantastic view through the only window onto the City of Clouds estate in Nanterre. Tower blocks with round sides like they built in the seventies, decorated with trompe-l’oeil skies and clouds, in faded tones of red and blue. Magical under a grey, half-full moon. At the foot of the tower blocks, gangs of youths were fooling about and smoking under the street lights. The lamps were wreathed in mist, like vaporous islands on which the teenagers were huddled.

  In the distance was the great illuminated window frame of the Arch of La Défense, these days more and more hemmed in by the new towers, cranes and buildings in Puteaux, shooting up like mushrooms.

  John turned away from the window.

  “Want a drink? I’ve got some beer,” Lambert suggested.

  Guérin shook his head, the American accepted a Kronenbourg, its damp label smelling of Camembert.

  Guérin took out his notebook, and Lambert, following the boss’s lead a few seconds late, took out his diary.

  “O.K., Monsieur Nichols, we’re listening.”

  “What?”

  “Tell us about Monsieur Mustgrave.”

  John drank half the beer, with his back to the window.

  “In ’90, when he recruited Alan, Lundquist was a little over thirty. He was in Army Intelligence and the C.I.A. had taken him on. He belongs to that generation of Americans that regrets having no more commie bastards to fight. The Cold War was just over, the Gulf War was just starting. That was a s
troke of luck for guys like him, patriots.”

  An hour to tell them everything, as he paced about the tiny room. The story of the haemophiliac fakir raised no laughs. John let it all spill out. The Jim Beam bottle, Alan, his Ph.D. thesis, Bunker, Boukrissi’s two henchmen, Königsbauer, and the money, Hirsh and the message he had found earlier. An hour to unroll the whole story, from Venice Beach to Paris. Finally he fell silent, grappling with a sickening feeling that his story was a pack of lies, invented to impress his listeners.

  As a conclusion, he announced what was coming next.

  “Bunker’s taken the train down to the Lot this evening to fetch my thesis.”

  Guérin had taken a few notes. Lambert, who had filled the pages of his diary up to August, asked the first question.

  “Want another beer?”

  Guérin crossed his legs and looked directly at the American.

  “Why did you come to France, Monsieur Nichols?”

  John went to the window and looked down at the lamp posts twelve storeys below.

  “After Alan left in 2006, the C.I.A. got in touch with me. They put this proposal to me: work on a programme helping veterans, former special service personnel. Another deal, practically blackmail: we’ll forget about Mustgrave, if you work for us. The U.S. always takes care of its enemies. I accepted. I didn’t feel I was, what would you call it, selling out? I thought I could do some good, working with guys like Alan. Yeah, it was hypocritical, I know: the army giving therapy to the same guys it had destroyed, so that everything could stay under wraps. Well, I accepted all the same. But I soon realised they were using my work not so much to treat people as to perfect their own training practices. So I resigned. I came over here, to the Lot, I stopped doing any research. I wanted to forget the whole damn thing.”

  John smiled at his reflection floating over the Paris suburbs.

  “Stupid, isn’t it? You never can forget stuff like that. For six years, I’d been saying to Alan, look, you’ve got to talk, get it out of your system. And then I went to earth in the woods myself. He was braver than me. You see, I’d signed all the same confidentiality agreements as him. Maybe that was really all the C.I.A. wanted: that way they’d got me pinned down. If ever this affair gets out, I’ll never be able to go back to the States, because I’ll be a traitor. Alan didn’t know about that. Do you still think your suicides have anything to do with him and his act?”

  Guérin looked disappointed with the question; he sat up straight, as if to explain to this slow-witted pupil.

  “They’re all the same cases, only from different points of view. The same as Kowalski. Death on stage.”

  “Kowalski? Who’s that?”

  The lieutenant opened the envelope and took out the photographs, laying them one by one on Lambert’s coffee table.

  Corpses, in various positions lying on autopsy tables, or on gurneys belonging to the morgue, like the one on which John had seen Alan’s body. A naked man, the same one in all the shots, was having sex with them. Corpses of both men and women, before or after the autopsy.

  “That’s Kowalski. He used to be a good guy. But a fakir too, like your friend, a torturer, and a self-torturer. I thought the evidence had gone up in flames when his house burned down the night I went to pull him in for questioning. Suicide, sleeping pills and gas. These photos have just come to light, after another man killed himself. For two years now, people have been accusing me of driving Kowalski to suicide by running a completely fictional enquiry …”

  His eyes focused in empty space, Guérin was talking to himself. Lambert was sipping one of the Camembert-smelling beers, saying nothing. John blanched as he looked at the photographs, a mixture of French and English running through his head.

  “Maybe someone killed him too, like Alan. Whoever took these photos perhaps?”

  “They were done to order … commissioned. The real killer’s always the audience.”

  “The Saint Sebastian Syndrome,” John whispered in English.

  Guérin snapped out of his reverie.

  “What was that you said?”

  “Pictures of Saint Sebastian. The archer. The one who watches, the spectator. He’s the executioner.”

  14

  Looking through the train window, he could see only his own face reflected in the dark pane streaked with the lights of the suburbs. As the train picked up speed, he had watched flash past first the modern illuminated buildings of the new Paris, then the less well-lit suburbs, finally the deserted streets of dormitory towns, with their rows of unlit villas. Then after Les Ulis, the wide dark plains. Behind the glass, you could sense the countryside by the deep silence which had overcome the passengers. A silence like the desire to sleep. His face had become sharper now, imprinted on the invisible background. This was a journey where all you could do was contemplate yourself, moving across landscapes you had to guess at. If only they didn’t get panic attacks all the time, ex-convicts would make good travellers.

  Night train.

  He had had to take the metro, and before that, so as not to look stupid in front of the kid, to haul his old ne’er-do-well clothes out of their mothballs. A two-piece suit that had already been difficult to squeeze into in 1991, and it was even worse seventeen years later in the hut. But it was good quality, and he had sucked in his stomach, encouraged by the idea that he looked like someone else.

  The suit of a man-about-town. A musketeer from the chic underworld of the 1980s. The suit spoke of past glories, fast living and night clubs. Of course it was well out of date, dark brown, a colour that used to be fashionable, but was unlamented now.

  Between two spells in jail, Bunker had lived the high life, at a time when other reprobates had chosen the more austere pleasures of politics. Bunk had been a frequenter of casinos, and his dog Mesrine summed up what he felt about revolution. Especially when revolution was a rallying cry for psychopaths. Nutters like that weren’t so bad to chew the fat with in jail, but they went too far sometimes. Accusing the authorities of injustice when you got your own kicks wielding a submachine gun was a joke that wore off quickly. Some of them had pure hearts and violent ideals, others were just evil bastards to be distrusted. He had lost his own freedom three times, and gritted his teeth. He hadn’t tried to justify his own armed robberies by Marxism–Leninism. Maybe he was on their side, sort of, only doing it his way. This guy once in Fleury prison had told him he was a structuralist. Well, fuck that. Anyway the suit didn’t look reactionary now, just old-fashioned.

  Mesrine, tail between his legs, sniffed the trousers with their smell of camphor. When Bunk thought about it again, the suit had given him a panic attack. He had been wearing it in ’83, and again when he came out, eight years later. It wasn’t reassuring to let it see the light of day again. He had considered wearing his park keeper’s uniform, but in the end decided that would be even worse.

  And before that again, he had had to put up a bit of resistance, making it plain to the kid that he wasn’t going off full of the joys of spring. It had only lasted a few minutes, then he had found some arguments himself. Bunker had been grateful for the chance, but he hadn’t told the kid, feeling a bit ashamed that he hadn’t got to this point before under his own steam.

  “Just for two or three days, O.K.? Anyway, gotta lot of leave coming to me, haven’t I? City Hall owes me … Mesrine can come in the train, can’t he? I’m only doing this to do you a favour, son. Get that straight for starters … No-one’ll notice if I take a few days off. Blimey, nobody noticed when I went away for eight years. So how do I get to your place? … Got a train timetable, have you? Got to change anywhere? … You better do me a drawing, I won’t find your camp just like that, heck, make it a big bigger, kid, I can’t hardly see anything with those squiggles … Saint what? Oh shit, look at this suitcase. Have to get another. Can’t get on a train with a case all tied up with string. And what about Mesrine’s food? Where am I going to find some dog food? … At the grocer’s in the village? … Opposite what? … There�
��s a café? Well, that’s the first bit of good news. How old is she, Mme Bertrand? … Oh, forget it. Got a bit of string? And where are these papers anyway? I’m never going to be able to find your place … You don’t seem even to know where it is on the map … What? Not on the map? Oh, fuck this for a lark, I give up … What! Take that back, kid, or I’ll set Mesrine on your arse … I am not scared! And it is not natural. I just need to get sorted, you can understand that, can’t you, for God’s sake.”

  In the metro on the way to the Gare d’Austerlitz, he cursed the American shrink. He felt too hot. Mesrine flipped every time the doors opened. When he had to change at Denfert-Rochereau, the string on the case had broken, and his bottle of wine had shattered in a corridor. He had scraped together his things, red-faced, and while he was trying to fix the case again, Mesrine had buggered off. Ten minutes to find the dog. Mesrine had got into a train heading for Robinson in the southern suburbs. He had just had time to grab the scruff of his neck before the doors closed. Another ten minutes to find the right connection. He had got to the mainline station dripping with sweat, his throbbing carotid vein thrusting at the top button of his shirt. The woman at the ticket desk wasn’t much of a looker. But she was the first woman he had asked anything from in fifteen years, and she had been helpful. He had been hurtling along like a scalded cat, only to get there an hour early.

  Under the great glass roof of Austerlitz, Bunk had drunk a beer, in a café from which he could see the platforms. The rear ends of the trains with their greasy axles and shock absorbers looked as if they were turning their back on him, as if they couldn’t give a damn. Their destinations, exotic places like Vierzon, Châteauroux or Moulins, sounded classy enough to make him feel small. The second beer tasted like dishwater, the old man was getting morose.

  Twenty minutes. Just twenty minutes to get from the park to the station. In fifteen years, he had escaped for no more than half an hour. His anger had worked on his scar, because he was obliged to blame himself and no-one else.

  Fifteen lost years, when you were sixty-six, it was a lot. Hell, not minutes, years, another fifteen living in the shadows. A quarter of a lifetime, then another – he hadn’t gone on counting.