Bed of Nails Read online

  Lambert, arms folded, looked down at the victim. He was black, as you could see from his neck and hands, and the dreadlocks still around the face that had been blown away. He had been a small man, sitting on a chair with the gun wedged upright between his legs. Guérin’s lanky junior, in a foul mood now, shook his head from right to left.

  “Who the fuck do they think they’re kidding?”

  Although not particularly gifted in the analysis of a crime scene, Lambert had enough experience by now to feel disgruntled. He knew that Berlion and the others would be along presently, and that he and Guérin had been got out of bed for nothing. Sickened, he let Guérin walk round the body taking notes. Finally, thrusting his hands deep in the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms, he started looking at the C.D.s on a stand. Nothing but reggae. Lambert wasn’t into reggae.

  Guérin went on noting inconsistencies. This was a murder, possibly an execution. How else could you explain how this Rasta had managed to shoot himself in the mouth, then raise the shotgun to a horizontal position and, with his arms, which were too short, pull both triggers, and finally stand the gun upright again between his legs? You might argue at a stretch that he could have used his toes to pull the triggers, if he had been really agile. But the man was wearing trainers. Apart from his having been dead some time, they were asked to believe that he had previously ransacked the flat like a madman, no doubt looking for a book on accidental suicide for beginners.

  Guérin took his mobile from deep in a pocket and called H.Q. He gave the address and asked for a homicide team. Closing the mobile, he took a deep breath and went on walking round the chaos-filled apartment. Lambert watched him rubbing the top of his head nervously, a sign that the boss was starting seriously to think.

  “The neighbours say they heard a noise, some banging, not for long, then nothing, then music. Judging by the mess here, there must have been more than one of them, two at least I’d say, at a reasonable guess. No sign the man had been tied up. Someone must have been holding a gun on him. But I’d say three at most. And given the kind of victim and the area, it’s ten to one this is a drugs case – check if he had a record. They were either looking for cash or a stash. But serious dealers don’t keep the stuff at home, and they didn’t do this for the three joints in the ashtray. So it must have been money. Which they didn’t find. The music was to cover the fisticuffs. We’ll have to get the pathologist to confirm, but they probably beat him up to try and find out where the money was. And they shot him because he wouldn’t say. They lost their rag. It wasn’t an execution. Just some small-time amateurs who didn’t know that you get trigger-happy when you’re nervous. And then they had to hurry to disguise it somehow, and made a mess of it. The music would have covered the sound of the beating, but not the shots. The neighbours are saying they didn’t see or hear anything like gunfire. If you ask me, they were too scared to come out.”

  Guérin was smiling now, working out the score at the speed he could scribble it down in his notebook. Lambert had woken up and was drinking some milk.

  “It’s a quiet neighbourhood, not crime-free, but quiet. The Nigerians have got the Goutte d’Or sewn up. A well-established stamping-ground with clear rules. The shotgun was already in the flat. It’s not a city weapon. He wasn’t expecting trouble, it was just to be able to say he was armed. Too trusting, the familiarity syndrome, Lambert. He opened the door to them, because he knew them.”

  Lambert, warmed up by the effort of concentrating, unzipped his tracksuit top and looked to be on the point of arguing. Without looking at him, Guérin continued.

  “See the door, Lambert, quite a solid one. Not forced, opened from the inside. Or perhaps he even arrived with them. They smoke a few joints, listen to some music. Guys he knew, Lambert, the kind of guys who go round in threes. Homicide may have to go through the anti-gang unit to find them. But it wasn’t really a hold-up, just a spontaneous bit of temptation. Some youngsters thinking of starting their own racket, on the look out for funds. Or maybe they wanted to buy a car. They wouldn’t be from immediately round here, but not from too far away. The Nigerians could probably take a guess. We’ll find them in a council dustbin in a week or two, if we don’t arrest them first. With ballistics and fingerprints – they left them everywhere, they didn’t mean to end up killing him – it should be easy. Especially if the anti-gang brigade already have them on file – best to check with Young Offenders too – and if the Drugs Squad is already operating here. Not complicated. But we’d need to move fast. They’re probably half-dead with fright right now, waiting for something to happen. But the gang leaders aren’t soft on kids like that, even if, when the going gets tough, the young ones think the old ones are past it. Dealing’s a business like any other. It’s getting gentrified, Lambert.”

  Guérin turned to the corpse and seemed to be addressing it directly.

  “You move up in the world, you find a flat in a nice building, you get used to the good life. You even get to think you can make new friends.”

  Guérin had leaned towards the dead man, lecturing him as if he were talking to a child who had done something silly. He stood back up, paused a little then started walking round again.

  “These hotheads must have figured by now, wherever they’re lying low, that they’ve screwed up. The Nigerians won’t let them get away with this. Otherwise they’d lose face. The law of rival empires, Lambert: they rise, they last as long as they can, then one fine day they collapse. The barbarians are always at the gates. The bosses have to show they know what’s going on. They have to make a spectacle of it. Another way to find our three barbarians – but we don’t have the manpower – would be to have half the neighbourhood put under surveillance. The really big men, the ones who supply second-rank retailers like our client here – take a look at the apartment, Lambert, he was a cut above a street dealer – there aren’t all that many of them in the Goutte d’Or. But they have plenty of people working for them, way too many. Now then, young Lambert, if someone really wants to find these guys …”

  Savane and Roman burst into the room, followed by a cloud of aggressive smoke.

  Their suits were crumpled, they smelled of Chinese takeaway, their skin was greasy, their eyes red, and their blood heated by beer and amphetamines. Two raging beasts, their nerves on edge, fresh from a long surveillance stint, champing at the bit in their closed van, and ready to fall with ferocious cries on the first sucker they came across. Lambert hesitated over whether to retreat, or to move towards Guérin. So he stayed where he was, and felt the air displaced by the two men brush his face. Like bloodhounds, they pounced on the boss, who was staring at the ground.

  Guérin remained without moving, and in his head, calmly completed his demonstration. If anyone wants to find these three guys it means going via the Cousins, the Drugs Squad. He added, still for his own ears only: but these two won’t do that. They’ll just barge in, like the macho types they are, and they’ll end up looking through the dustbins.

  “Still here, Guérin. Nothing else to fucking occupy you?”

  Savane was confronting him, without even bothering to look at the corpse. Lambert admired the boss, a little man, just a few kilos, who stared out the attacker without blinking. If Guérin had had enough hair, Savane’s breath would have made it flutter. Guérin, still lost in his own thoughts, was looking at his huge colleague as if he were a baffling puzzle which had to be assembled, a series of chaotic events leading to no fixed certainty. And what happened every time, happened again. To Lambert’s ever-repeated surprise. Savane fell silent.

  As if inside Savane’s entirely muscle-bound head, a red light went on when the little lieutenant looked him in the face. An alarm bell and a short circuit that stopped him going even a millimetre further.

  Roman, an officer of very little brain, put in his two cents’ worth:

  “So, what the fuck are you waiting for?”

  Guérin slipped his notebook back in his raincoat pocket. Savane, a glimpse of sadness in his eyes,
watched the notebook disappear. Guérin walked slowly round him, and out of the door. His assistant trotted behind him, hearing a volley of insults as he went. Before he was quite outside the flat, he heard Roman’s hoarse voice saying, “Savane! Are you going to get your arse in gear or what?”

  *

  Boulevard Voltaire was deserted.

  “Goodnight, what’s left of it.”

  “Goodnight, boss, see you tomorrow.”

  Lambert waited in the car, like a father dropping off his child at school, until Guérin had gone inside the block of flats before driving off.

  The inner courtyard, with its little squares of grass surrounded by ten-storey buildings, was silent. No light in the windows to show any sign of life. It was the hour when the city took time off, just a brief half-hour when nothing moves. Four in the morning. Guérin savoured the calm, the suspended moment when even death took a break. Suicides at this time of night were exceptional. Suicides at four in the morning were mostly people without any previous history who were suddenly faced with some frightening revelation they hadn’t anticipated, and that allowed no delay.

  The only faint light came from his room on the first floor. Behind the curtain, Guérin could sense the hunched shadow of old Churchill, dozing with his head towards the courtyard. Waiting for him.

  He walked past his balcony without looking up.

  Guérin clenched his head between his shoulders, anticipating the end of the silence. He had hardly stepped inside his flat, before Churchill’s raucous voice accused him:

  “You’re late! You’re late!”

  The old strident, aggressive cry made him breathe in sharply. He emptied his pockets onto the hall stand, took off his raincoat and hung it up. Once the ghostly robe was on the wall, all that was left of Guérin was a tiny silhouette with a pot belly, in a woollen sweater and corduroy trousers. On his slight shoulders sat his disproportionate head, smooth-topped with the last vestiges of a thin fringe of dark hair, like seaweed on a pebble. The stone seemed no more than precariously balanced on his neck, ready to fall to the ground. To someone seeing him stripped of his soft shell, Guérin looked like a living cup-and-ball toy.

  His large head drooped as Churchill started up again:

  “You’re late! Hundred francs for a blowjob! Hundred francs for a blowjob!”

  Guérin swivelled round and turned on the bird with a fierce pointing finger:

  “Oh, shut up!”

  The ancient and bedraggled parrot, claws firmly clutching his perch, squinted at the finger and swung over backwards.

  “Assassin! Assassin!”

  Guérin looked at the upside-down bird, passed his hand over his bald head, and went into the kitchen. He filled a glass with water and drank it in small sips. In a murmur, he went on talking to the furniture.

  “It was a mistake. A dealer. Made to look like suicide.”

  In the sitting-room, Churchill was still imitating his mother’s voice: “Ha, ha! Assassin!”

  Troubled, and drinking a second glass of water, he muttered

  “Dead right, Churchill, spot on.”

  He switched on the television and sank into an armchair. Churchill hopped off his perch. His claws clattered on the wooden floor and he jumped up onto the armrest. Hanging off the sleeve of the sweater, and using his beak, the bird hauled himself up to Guérin’s shoulder, where there was just room for him to cling on. The parrot rubbed his old beak against his master’s bald head and cried out again in his mother’s voice:

  “You’re late! Sweetie-pie! Sweetie-pie!”

  Without conviction, Guérin told him again to be quiet. He channel-hopped, using the remote. When some Formula One cars appeared racing round a circuit, Churchill started up again, this time in a man’s voice Guérin did not recognise:

  “Morons! Morons!”

  And ended with a screech of feminine laughter.

  Guérin decided to stay with the racing cars and tried to think what the link could be between a Nigerian drug-dealer in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood and a Formula One racetrack.

  The ancient bird, this time imitating his master’s voice, stared at the screen and squawked: “Why-eee-eye? Why-eee-eye?”

  From the courtyard came another voice.

  “Can’t you shut that bloody bird up?”

  Almost 5.00 a.m. Paris was waking up.

  The link was the illusion shared by junkies and the public watching a race. They all think life is a little circuit going round and round, but that if you keep on consuming vast and ever-increasing quantities of fuel, you can get right away from it. Guérin thought of Savane, of the drivers, of the galaxy of little dents in the wall of the flat, of the dealers and their clients, and concluded that this night had been organised around the idea of the wall, and of the speed at which one thought one was going to hit it.

  On the screen, a car left the track, after colliding with another and somersaulted several times in a cloud of dust. Churchill, digging his claws into Guérin’s shoulder, gave a burst of cynical laughter, again imitating the voice of the unknown man.

  Other images now mingled with the race. His eyes half-closed, Lieutenant Guérin was seeing in among the cars, plastered with advertisements for cigarettes, D.I.Y. stores and motor oil, a naked man running with his arms up in a frenetic race. And he knew, now without hesitation, that the man on the ring road was also an element in the Big Theory.

  As he dropped off to sleep, his arms falling to the sides of the chair, Churchill, with his clipped beak, gently rubbed the top of this overfull head.

  4

  The van had started overheating somewhere around Limoges. John stopped at a roadside café, to drink a beer and eat a soapy-tasting ham sandwich, while he waited for the engine to cool down. He started off again as darkness fell, drove some way, then left the main road, looking for a field to park for the night.

  He opened the back of the van and rolled up in a blanket, letting his legs hang down outside. It took a long time to drop off to sleep. During the journey, he had been going back over the story of his acquaintance with Alan Mustgrave.

  Twelve years. Alan’s absence, even though it seemed unreal, was revealing a presence whose weight he had not yet measured.

  Lying in the van, he had reached the end of the story, the last time he had seen him. Two months earlier, in mid-winter, in the tepee. As usual, Alan had turned up without notice.

  The real surprise was that he had made it that far. Al hated the countryside, any countryside, because he had grown up in one of the deadliest patches of it: the endless plains of Kansas. That winter morning, John had been coming out of the wood, holding his toolbox, after failing to fix the turbine. His breath steamed in front of him and the undergrowth crackled with frost. In his other hand, he carried the propeller which had been damaged by ice: his turbine didn’t react well to cold weather, and he was wondering whether the Australian guarantee would cover it now. From the edge of the wood, he could see someone standing in front of the tepee. He had stopped still, then hidden behind a tree to observe the intruder.

  Leather jacket, hands in pockets, the man was stamping his feet to warm himself up, as he looked at the north slope of the valley.

  Even before he saw the tattoos on the shaved skull, and the face streaked with tribal markings and pierced with rings, John had recognised Alan, who looked as out of place in this rural scene as a ukulele on an ice floe. As he approached, he heard his friend shouting insults at the trees, at the muddy paths that messed up your shoes, and at the sons of bitches who lived in the forest. Alan Mustgrave had just kicked a basin where John’s underpants and socks were soaking.

  “Shit!”

  “Hi, Al.”

  The lines and piercings turned towards him with a nervous smile.

  “Hi, big J. What the heck is this shit-house you’re living in?”

  Turning up, just like that, without warning. His French was a bit approximate, but to the point.

  Alan had felt the urge to see him. He ha
d taken the night train, then a taxi from Saint-Céré to Lentillac, asked the way at the Bar des Sports and completed the journey on foot. Three kilometres. A feat that still amazed John. Alan hadn’t had anything special to say, he had just been happy ribbing John about his encampment, joking about his own life in Paris. Alan was essentially laughing at himself, from embarrassment and modesty perhaps, or as a sort of constant confession of powerlessness. Powerlessness to change. It didn’t take long for John to realise that Alan was back on the habit. In mid-sentence, Alan had stopped speaking and looked down. As he watched his hands trembling, he had simply said:

  “I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry.”

  Then he looked up again and smiled.

  “I’ve met this girl, John, you’d really like her. She’s called Paty, what she does is she strips off and runs at walls.”

  The subject of dope was dropped and Alan had dismissed it with his famous smile, the earthly reflection of the last element of his soul, once dazzling, and as yet not entirely eaten up with suffering and heroin. The smile that was the only thing that stopped him from being thrown out of the bars he hung out in, from making too many enemies, and helped him survive his image when he passed in front of a mirror. He had lost a few more pounds in weight, if that were possible.

  Alan adored talking about his female conquests – the result of the fascination he inspired and that disarming smile. A ravaged homosexual, whom strange women fought over before being sent packing with another smile and some devastating remark.

  “Hell’s bells, John. What do you do in this hole when you wanna get your rocks off? Rub up against the trees, or think of me while you jerk off?”

  The cruder Alan’s talk, the nearer you got to what he was thinking about.