Bed of Nails Read online

  Once he had drunk his coffee, Guérin switched on his mobile. A few bleeps indicated messages he had failed to pick up.

  The little lieutenant rubbed the top of his bald head, letting his fingers run over the pink scars where he had picked off the scabs. Stripes of new skin, soft and tender to the touch. Another line of reconstituted flesh, with its stitches still in place ran across his cheek in a long black stripe.

  “Now then, young Lambert, this is when you have to make up your mind.”

  Lambert had rubbed his face and pinched his big nose, standing in front of a bookcase and the shooting trophy. The objects in the room were still only vaguely outlined, drowned by grey light in a mass without contrasts. The decision was fraught, but in the end inevitable.

  “Boss, I already said, I’m not going to walk away from you.”

  “What about your career?”

  Lambert zipped up his jacket.

  “… Well, I wouldn’t carry on without you anyway.”

  Guérin seemed to want to say something, but Lambert had stopped listening, and was looking at the photographs. The young policeman’s features had sharpened. Lambert had grown up overnight.

  “Guérin, what the fuck is going on? Roman called me in the night, he says you’ve wrecked his house! Even his kids’ bedroom! What the devil’s the matter with you? Isn’t there enough of a mess already?”

  Barnier had evidently not slept either, his voice was sharp.

  “I’ve got to see you, commissaire. I’ll explain.”

  “I should bloody well think so! In my office in an hour, and it had better be good.”

  “I’d prefer to meet you somewhere else.”

  “You’re finished, Guérin, don’t try and impose conditions on me.”

  “I could call someone else.”

  “You’re crazy … Where do you want to meet?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s say …”

  10.00 a.m.: Montparnasse Cemetery, a whole neighbourhood in itself between the boulevard Raspail, the rue Froidevaux and the Gaïté quarter. Above its walls loomed the huge Montparnasse Tower and other tall office blocks, vertical projects looking down on this immense horizontal expanse in the middle of the city, safe from real-estate developers. On the Paris map, it looked like a green space, but in reality it was uniformly grey. An underground city, a reverse reflection of the 1970s Maine–Montparnasse development. Most of the names on the graves were unknowns, a few celebrities from between the wars; it was less of a showbiz graveyard than the one at Père-Lachaise. Among the non-famous, one could easily slip in a few obscure policemen. Thousands of tombs, but no indications of the cause of death. Old age, accident, illness, passion, crime. How many suicides? Better not to know, perhaps: the number might interfere with the beauty of the place.

  Guérin walked to the middle of the central alleyway, turned left and counted the rows. Eleven. It had the grid-plan simplicity of an American town, he said to himself, as he came to a stop in front of the grave. All you need is the intersection of two numbers.

  A name and two dates, some plastic flowers decorating a rarely visited tomb.

  Guérin pulled out his mobile.

  “Commissaire, a slight change of plan. I’m not at the bottom of the tower, I’m in the cemetery. I dare say you remember the way … That’s right.”

  Barnier arrived in front of the grave ten minutes later. Guérin wasn’t there. The divisionnaire turned on his heel, scouring the horizon bristling with tombstones. A few elderly visitors were bending down to pick up faded bunches of flowers, carrying shopping bags, their wrinkled faces reflected in the polished granite. Barnier was holding his hat in his hand and leaned down to look at the grave. His bulky silhouette, well wrapped up in a three-quarter-length grey overcoat, suddenly convulsed.

  Christophe Kowalski 1966–2006

  On the flat slab were the usual trite messages: “To our valued colleague”; “To our friend”; “Everlasting regrets”; not much real affection, but plenty of respect, and four plastic flowers, rather discoloured, in a little tin vase. But behind the flowers, was an enlarged photograph of Kowalski, naked under strip-lighting, in the act of taking a woman’s corpse from behind.

  Barnier stood up abruptly, bending his spine as if under an invisible whip. He looked round the horizontal expanse of the cemetery again, and saw young Lambert, hands in pockets, a few rows away from him. Lambert was leaning up against a Gothic vault, and watching him. Barnier wheeled round as he heard steps on the gravel.

  “Morning, commissaire.”

  Barnier put his hand to his chest to press his madly beating heart. Lambert made a move towards his armpit, thinking he was reaching for a gun. But the boss’s boss was simply panic-stricken.

  “What’s all this about, Guérin? Where did you get this … this photograph?”

  “Does the place suit you, sir? A bit dramatic, I grant you. Do you know what the connection is between this grave and yourself?”

  “This is no time for riddles, Guérin. Did you find this at Roman’s house?”

  “Between necrophilia and the Homicide squad?”

  Barnier’s voice quavered, high up above the tombs. “Stop this nonsense now!”

  “Between a pervert and the people watching him?”

  “Guérin, you’re in no fit state. You’re out of control. Maybe you were right about Kowalski, but it doesn’t change anything. You’re barking up the wrong tree. Kowalski committed suicide, and nothing can alter that.”

  “Between suicide and murder?”

  “What is it you want? Do you want someone to apologise to you? Don’t expect anyone to give you a medal. Nobody wants all this shit to come to the surface again.”

  “Between a photographer and a parrot?”

  Barnier put one foot on the gravestone, leaned over and picked up the photograph, tearing it to pieces without looking at it.

  “Roman will be sacked, if that’s what you want. But there’s no question of taking this any further to the Disciplinary Division or anywhere else. Is that what you’re after?”

  “Between a divisionnaire’s head and an ordinary policeman’s skin?”

  Barnier threw the fragments of the photograph at his feet.

  “What do you think you’re going to do? Think you can come out of this smelling of roses? Reckon you can destroy our entire squad, with the blessing of the Ministry of the Interior?”

  “Commissaire, somebody has to have taken these photos. Somebody must have been protecting Kowalski and his pals. Even if they were well out of order, someone had to be in charge, someone had to cover for them when they had gone too far, so that they’d go on doing the job expected of them. Don’t you agree? You haven’t found the answer yet, but it’ll come to you. Let’s say we’re an oddly civilised organisation, that can’t yet manage without certain necessities. It needs people like you. Excuse me. Like us. It’s a heavy weight to carry. For some people more than others.”

  Guérin was staring beyond his commanding officer, his head on one side, calculating future trajectories between the tombs.

  “Being out of control, as you nicely put it, is inevitable. It isn’t a paradox that anarchy, or at any rate anarchy of the mind, is found among people whose job is to keep order. Kowalski must have been just one link in a chain of command. To think someone like him can exist and do all that in a vacuum would be ridiculous. You had to be there, to protect them, to turn a blind eye to a few little peccadilloes. Do you think your rank protects you from the rest of the world? Giving orders, commissaire, means you’re the last person who can disobey them. It isn’t the great man’s burden, it’s just a pathetic illusion of power. You need obedience like you need a mirror, with devoted servants to maintain the illusion. It’s asking a lot of a man to place him at the crossroads of duty and disgust. Perhaps there were tastes and distastes that you shared with Kowalski? Am I wrong? But after all, Kowalski didn’t kill anyone, did he? No, of course not. Other people did that for him. Once things had got that
far, all that was needed to guarantee the stability of the whole structure was a fuse that could be allowed to blow if the unexpected happened. In other words, a scapegoat. Remember what you said, commissaire? “Guérin, Suicides is you now.” You made me your excuse, locked inside a room that was full of them. But with one difference: I’m still alive. It’s easier to get the dead to talk than to make the living shut up. You were right. Suicides is me. But murders, in this cemetery, that’s you.”

  Guérin smiled, Barnier took a step backwards, hitting an invisible barrier.

  “I’ve got about fifteen of these photos. I needn’t describe them to you. You know what they’re like. Whether Berlion, or Roman, or you, took them doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter either, which one of you turned on the gas taps at Kowalski’s house. All I want is for you, and the others like you, to draw the right conclusions from all this. Make your choice freely, on your own. No more chain of command. You just have to account to yourself, nobody else. Other people will take your place, but it’s a good thing sometimes for the cogs in the machine to think about what they’ve been used for. If the idea of killing yourself crosses your mind – and it will, believe me – think carefully before you act. Do it for the right reasons, commissaire. The shit, as you so aptly put it, doesn’t need to come to the surface. It’s smeared all over everything already. Take a breath of air, taste the lonely joys of anarchy: all you have to do is search your own conscience.”

  Guérin, stooping now, stepped over the shredded photograph. He went past his deputy, nodding to him. Lambert watched the divisionnaire leaning over Kowalski’s tomb for a few minutes. The chief was mumbling something, alone amongst the alleys. The young policeman looked up at the sky, searching for an unlikely break in the clouds, detached his shoulder from the vault, stretched, and walked off after his boss. He turned round as they left the cemetery. Barnier had fallen to his knees in front of the grave. Lambert felt no particular emotion.

  16

  Bunker found everything he was after among the American’s things. Matches, newspaper, kindling, logs, an Italian coffee pot and some coffee. It took him some time to get a fire going all the same, on all fours in the grass, blowing on the flames until he felt light-headed. He had exchanged his spiv’s costume for a more rustic pair of trousers, a T-shirt and one of John’s check shirts with its sleeves rolled up. He had fixed up the electricity again, following the directions he had been given. John obviously organised his camp according to the same logic as the old man. It was a little world of manic simplicity, slightly paranoid even, built on the freedom of having nothing but the bare essentials.

  Mesrine was running round the camp in ever widening circles, exploring his new territory and marking it by lifting his leg every few metres. Holding his mug of coffee, Bunker whistled to the dog when he disappeared for longer than a minute.

  He looked into the dregs of the coffee, then stared ahead of him, every time letting his eyes wander a little further afield. Bunker was sending his intimidated gaze into the far distance, as his lungs filled with fresh air, making him feel dizzy. No more park railings, no more swept paths, no more tourists. Silence, a little breeze coming up from the valley, fluttering the leaves. The coffee tasted awful, the American had no sugar in the tepee. Bunker still made it last as long as possible. The fatigue from his almost sleepless night made his legs feel heavy, but he didn’t care. Mesrine made a rapid reappearance, then dashed off again chasing some wild creature such as he had never seen before. Bunker leaned over the bound pages.

  The Saint Sebastian Syndrome

  The victim and the punished

  By John P. Nichols

  U.C.L.A. 2006

  Under the title, someone had written a few sentences in English which he couldn’t read. The rest of it was in English too. He flipped through the pages with his big fingers, impressed by the quantity of words, astonished that someone could write all this, just to say in the end that man was a bag of shit and not to be trusted. Behavioural psychology, he couldn’t care less, but he knew that in this pile of paper there were the names of some men who meant business. They had to be taken seriously, and one had better be afraid of them. He put the thesis down and refreshed his eyes by looking down at the stream running below. The leaf-mould and sediments made the water look a golden brown. Bunker’s nostrils dilated as he tried, like Mesrine, to rediscover the smell of bathing in the wild. The sun was strong, but felt good. Bunker thought of himself taking all his clothes off and plunging his backside into the cold water. The old man hesitated, out of both embarrassment and fear of the cold.

  He checked the time on his watch, swallowed the last of the coffee and whistled to the dog. Mesrine trotted beside him as he went along the narrow path with his carrier bag. The sun warmed the broom flowering at the edge of the track; foxgloves waved in the breeze and Bunker remembered his grandmother telling him when he was a kid that these elegant flowers were poisonous. He stepped cautiously to the side so as not to touch them, holding his breath, despite the uphill slope. A big grasshopper shot past his head with a whirr and he gave a start. He stopped walking, to listen for mocking laughter. But he was all alone, and smiled. Fifteen years in jail, no knife had ever frightened him and here he was, terrorised by an insect.

  He had been walking back up the road for about a kilometre when a tractor pulling an empty trailer stopped alongside him. An elderly hippy, with a beard, long hair and a headband, was driving it. Presumably a back-to-the-land survivor from the sixties: his smile as happy as an evening spent smoking weed.

  “Going to the village?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re coming from John’s camp? Isn’t he there?”

  “Nope.”

  “Jump in the back, I’ll drop you off.”

  Bunker blinked. This guy’s casual manner disarmed him. He put his foot on the wheel of the trailer to hoist himself up and sat down, his legs dangling from the back. Mesrine started yapping. Bunker thumped the floor of the trailer, the dog crouched and sprang up. This cool dude seemed only too happy to have passengers in his rattletrap. He nodded to Bunker, giving him a thumbs-up, and the tractor started with a snort of its exhaust, suggesting a speedy take-off, then trundled along at all of twenty kilometres an hour. Bunker was bouncing around on his backside. Wisps of hay flew round his head, lodging in his hair.

  The dude introduced himself, as he let him off by the sign for Lentillac.

  “I’m Bertrand. Me and my wife, we’re in the farm, just a bit down from John’s place. Feel free to drop in if you want. We’re just starting haymaking, but you call round after six, we can always have a drink.”

  The hippy looked about sixty. He leaned out of his smoking heap of rust, stretching out his hand, and Bunker shook it.

  “Édouard’s the name. Ta for the invite and the lift.”

  The Bar des Sports was open and deserted.

  The barman had had a go at the red, as could be seen from his eyes. Bunk put his bag on the counter and ordered a glass of the same. Drank it straight off, looked at his watch and asked for another. At 2.00 p.m., the telephone rang. The owner picked up, listened in silence then brought it over to him.

  “For you.”

  Bunker nodded thanks and turned to face the tables, putting the receiver to his ear.

  *

  John had slept until late morning in the Luxembourg Gardens. A disturbed sleep, but his bad dreams hadn’t wakened him. His face had almost returned to normal. The black eye hardly showed now. His ribs and stomach were still sore, but he could live with that. After coffee prepared on the hotplate, he lit a cigarette. A feeling that something was missing persisted in spite of the nicotine. It was the time of day he usually practised with his bow. But the park was full of visitors so he abandoned the idea, with a slight feeling of relief. He had taken up archery at the same time as starting his thesis. Maybe it was time to give it up now, even if he was replacing it with cigarettes.

  At midday he left the park and walked through
the streets: to the Pantheon, the place de la Contrescarpe, the rue Mouffetard, just another American tourist. When he reached the Gobelins, he bought some more cigarettes. He went on down the avenue de Choisy and crossed the gardens at the end. Trees and lawns were hardly sufficient compensation for being here. At Tolbiac, he went into a telephone kiosk. He got two numbers from directory enquiries. He left no message on Patricia Königsbauer’s answer-phone, but called the Bar des Sports in Lentillac.

  Bunker’s voice sounded far away, but it was reassuring.

  “It’s me here. You O.K.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you find everything?”

  “Yep, the lot.”

  “Got something to write with?”

  John heard Bunker asking for a pen and paper from the barman.

  “I’m listening.”

  “You need to post the thesis to this address: Richard Guérin, 74 boulevard Voltaire, Paris 11.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Cop who handles suicides.”

  “And you really trust him?”

  “Yeah, I do. And something else, Bunk. In the post office, there should be a letter for me from Alan. You’ll have to sweet-talk Mme Labrousse the postmistress to get it. I’ll call you back in half an hour, and you’ll have to read it out to me.”

  “That all?”

  “Yeah. How do you like the tepee?”

  “It’s like my hut. Only better.”

  “Half an hour then.”

  John went to sit on a bench in the park.

  Bunker paid for his drinks and set off across the square.

  “Sit, boy! Wait here.”

  Mesrine sat down outside the post office.

  An old guy with a stick was hanging onto the counter, his nose to the glass and his mouth against the plastic screen. Bunker prepared to wait, but the old man moved aside at once. He wasn’t there to collect his pension, just to chew the fat with the postmistress, the aforementioned Mme Labrousse. Cast-iron perm, flowery blouse and pebble glasses. The old man developed a sudden interest in an ad for life insurance with his ears flapping two metres behind him.