Article 353

by Tanguy Viel

  ALSO BY TANGUY VIEL

  The Absolute Perfection of Crime

  Beyond Suspicion

  Originally published in French as Article 353 du code pénal in 2017 by Les Éditions de Minuit, 7, rue Bernard-Palissy, 75006 Paris.

  Copyright © 2017 by Les Éditions de Minuit

  Translation copyright © 2019 by William Rodarmor

  This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Viel, Tanguy, author. | Rodarmor, William, translator.

  Title: Article 353 : a novel / Tanguy Viel; translated from the French by William Rodarmor.

  Other titles: Article 353 du code pénal. English

  Description: New York, NY : Other Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018028886 (print) | LCCN 2018035269 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519349 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519332 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Legal.

  Classification: LCC PQ2682.I316 (ebook) | LCC PQ2682.I316 A8813

  2019 (print) | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028886

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519349

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v5.4

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tanguy Viel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  About the Authors

  Nobody wants to fall overboard fully clothed into the ocean anywhere in the world, even close to shore—it’s such a surprise for the body to find itself in this new element. One moment, the man is on a bench in a boat, chatting at the stern rail while rigging his lines, and the next he’s in another world, with gallons of salt water, numbing cold, and the weight of wet clothes making it hard to swim.

  Our boat was still slowly put-putting along, with little waves gently slapping against the hull. There were rocky islets in the distance that would soon be awash, while terns and seagulls circled overhead to see what we had caught, as if we were a trawler. In this case, a lobster and two crabs. Which is what was in the pot when we hauled it up, the two of us hoisting it over the rail—because there were still two of us at that point. People seeing us might have thought we were two old friends, as we raised the lobster pot together and checked the crabs struggling and beating against the wire mesh while we lowered the heavy pot into the cockpit. He was the one who pulled the lobster out and tossed it into the bucket quickly enough to avoid its claws, which started snapping at the plastic sides. Pleased as Punch at catching a lobster, he said: Kermeur, this is my first lobster, I’m giving it to you.

  Today, I couldn’t say if it was that thing he said or something else, but I know that not long afterward I was watching him flailing in the water, ignoring the splashes he was raising. Maybe he thought it was a bad joke. Maybe he thought he could make it to some rock or other that might be dry at low tide. Even the laughing terns perched on the sharp ridges of the few distant rocks jutting above the horizon seemed to think that what had just happened was normal, I mean a guy falling into cold water and trying to swim fully dressed, gasping and yelling to me for help: Kermeur, goddammit, come help me! Kermeur, what the hell are you up to? And he added “asshole” and “fucker” and “son of a bitch,” thinking this would spur me to action. No dice; that was out of the question. I could already sense that even the seagulls, looking as white and cold as nurses because they never blink, even the seagulls approved. I’ve since thought that to really understand what happened at that moment, you’d have to ask a seagull.

  I stepped into the wheelhouse and pushed the throttle lever, alone now at the helm of a thirty-foot Merry Fisher as if I were piloting my own boat, sitting in the leather chair behind the salt-spotted window, the crabs lying resigned at my feet. From the outside, I’m sure people would have taken me for an old fisherman accustomed to going out on his boat every day, silent by nature and spare in his movements, while the noisy wake behind me drowned out his screams. Then I pushed the lever a little harder, and with four hundred horses propelling us, the boat and I covered the five miles to the harbor in barely a quarter of an hour. You sure can’t swim five miles, especially in water as cold as it is off our coast in June.

  I moored the boat at the same place from where we’d taken it an hour earlier, Dock A, Slip 93. There wasn’t anyone, or hardly anyone, in the harbor that morning, and I behaved as if nothing were out of the ordinary. I tied up the boat as if it were mine, climbed the iron gangway to the quay, and got into my car in the parking lot. Surely, I thought, someone would have watched the whole scene from a window or behind a curtain. In the car, I remember telling myself that at that moment the whole thing was being written with black ink in someone’s observing eye.

  I wasn’t surprised when the police rang at my door a few hours later. I couldn’t say if it was the gendarmerie or the national police, but there were four of them, two guys in uniform at the door and two others, a little more discreet, in the van parked at the end of the path. I must have a pretty guilty conscience to not be surprised to see the law swoop down on me like a vulture, already sinking its talons into my shoulders. And thinking back now, even if I’d seen them coming from afar, even if I’d spotted them on the highway with binoculars and figured they were coming for me, I wouldn’t have done anything different. Even if they’d been following me since dawn, I would have done the same thing, heaved Antoine Lazenec overboard the same way and brought the boat back in the same way, following the channel to the yacht harbor while respecting the green and red buoys like railroad signals, with that seagull still perched on the boat’s stern rail, maybe waiting for me to pay it to leave. As if the gull, with its round, unblinking eye, insisted on being part of the story, like an unshakable witness prepared to testify in any courthouse in the world. And I felt like telling the gull that I would go to the courthouse of my own accord, that I wasn’t planning to evade the law.

  I felt like telling it that I’m a seagull too, I glide above the water, aware that I don’t have much flesh left, so I fly over the sea and the boats in the harbor, and I’m a seagull now, a seagull in the fog hanging over the port. I can make out the city starting to appear, but it seems written in a language I don’t understand, an alphabet made of renovated buildings and open windows, and it’s only on the ledges that I can see the crumbs that are left. Yeah, I’m a seagull and I’m also waiting for dawn, for people to put their garbage bins out on the street, because people here have learned that you can’t put them out overnight, that you can’t just stuff y
our rubbish in bags and toss them outside. No, you have to keep your bins inside all night next to your bed, to make sure no seagull comes and pecks them open. You have to live with the smell of your bins, the reek of everything prepared, digested, and discarded but that keeps on rotting beside you until dawn. That’s the price of having seagulls around here.

  With the police and the arrest, everything happened quietly. They said the stock phrases you use at times like that. I got my coat from the hallway and followed them without saying anything. I think it started to rain a little then, a windless drizzle that makes no sound when it hits the ground and even wraps the air in a kind of strange softness from penetrating matter and quieting it. Just as I was holding my wrists out to the cops as if it were an old habit, I took one last look around, at the ripped-up earth and the sea beyond. I told myself that I would have time to look at it, the sea, through my cell windows. Then the two cops shoved me into the back of the van and sat me on the plastic bench bolted to the sheet metal. It was uncomfortable in the van as it crossed the bridge, jolting at every pothole in a road worn by the weight of trailers hauling ten-ton boats. Looking through the rear window that the drizzle was fogging, you’d have thought the sky was trying to squeeze through the wire mesh to seek shelter too. It was like a sheer curtain drawn over the town—like our story, I told the judge—it wasn’t fog or wind, just a curtain that can’t be torn hanging between us and things.

  So you came back alone, said the judge.

  Yes. There were two of us, and yeah, I came back alone.

  So you know why you’re here.

  Yes.

  The body was found this morning.

  I know.

  The best thing to do would be to go back and start from the beginning, said the judge—without revealing if this was sort of a threat or if he was giving me a last chance. I was sitting on a wooden chair opposite the oak or cherry desk that seemed to elevate him a little, there in the one hundred and fifty square feet allocated to the two of us in the shabby courthouse office at the end of a dark hallway.

  The sea breeze was still scattering my thoughts, the feeling that the windows were wide open, and that my thoughts—no, they weren’t thoughts, images maybe—were still whirling around more than the wind over a sail. It was as if I were a cormorant aloft on a shifting breeze, scanning the sea for a tiny shadow or glint that would justify my diving to catch something, anything, so long as it was a place to begin, something sparkling under the water like the scales of a fish.

  It would be nice to have these handcuffs off, I said. Me, I can’t talk unless my hands are free.

  The judge heaved a heavy sigh, a sigh that said, “I shouldn’t, but I’m going to do it anyway,” and he gestured to the policeman behind me that it was okay to take the cuffs off. For a juge d’instruction—examining magistrate—he wasn’t condescending or harsh, and he didn’t have the traits I’d expected, like a gray beard or a forty-year-old’s paunch. This judge was thirty at the most and seemed like he wanted to hear me out. He could be my son, I told myself, and in a way, it would have been better if he actually were my son, given Erwan’s situation right now—Erwan, that’s my son’s name, see—given the ten-by-ten-foot cell from which he was probably looking out at the town, since Erwan’s screw-ups are part of this story too.

  I rubbed my wrists a little to ease their soreness, and avoided looking at the gendarme because I didn’t want him to think I was insolent or proud, since I wasn’t proud of anything, no sir. And as the door quietly clicked shut, the judge gestured for me to start talking, his hands spread like a preacher’s. The room smelled of fresh paint, that neutral gray that’s often used on offices to hide their age, and it made for a strange kind of mixture, as if all the town’s injustices had lingered there for centuries and were now trapped under the fresh paint, imprisoned for a long time. I won’t say I was relaxed just then, but for the first time in months I felt like I was where I belonged. In fact, from the steadiness of my voice or my seeming to be at ease in his office, I could see the judge sit back in his leather chair and breathe more easily, as if to say that from then on he would be counting on me the same way he counted on the penal code.

  From the beginning, Monsieur Kermeur, he said again. Take it from the beginning.

  He looked as if he had all the time he needed. If it took two weeks, he would take them, if only to detect some hidden twist or turn in the story. So I said: It’s about a run-of-the-mill swindle, Your Honor, that’s all.

  When I said that, I suddenly grasped the whole business for the first time, like I was taking a picture of it from the moon and seeing a planet wrapped in its big sheets of blue.

  Just a run-of-the-mill swindle, I repeated, lowering my gaze to the wood of the desk with his hand resting on it, half hidden by dozens of files piled on the leather desk pad, many of them already labeled “Lazenec Case.”

  If we lived in a village up in the mountains or in some Wild West town a hundred years ago, I’m sure we would have seen him coming, I told the judge, maybe when he walked into town or rode down Main Street, spotted him from the stagecoach stop or the saloon, and it wouldn’t have taken us long to size him up. And a hundred years ago, you would probably be a sheriff, with a revolver or something in your pocket instead of a law book you knew by heart, at a time when right and might weren’t completely separate, if you can say that they’ve been completely separated since then, and if that’s such a good thing, considering that power and violence have learned how to disguise themselves.

  Anyway, the fact is we didn’t see him coming. It was more as if he popped up like a mushroom under a tree and had grown pretty tall before we noticed anything. I’m not saying things were all that quiet around here before him, but in a region that probably hadn’t appeared on TV in twenty years, most of the time life just goes on without any hiccups, with the usual daily stuff chewed over in the newspapers and bars, of course, but nothing likely to become the talk of the town. And then you felt like a rumor grabbed hold of everyone, and the rumor grew, and it had some basis, and worse, it spread and got into people, to the point where no one had more of a right to repeat it than anyone else. Like a kind of background noise that started gently rising, full of molecules that eventually rained down on each of us, without any one person feeling more guilty or involved or better placed to talk about it, but also without anyone keeping from adding their two cents or their anecdote and eventually their judgment, provided each sentence spoken could seal the guy’s tomb, which we all would have liked to have closed over him a long time since.

  No, not all of us. Otherwise, he would have never prospered the way he did, I told the judge, without our ever knowing who was really supporting him. And I’m in no better position to tell the whole story than anyone else, except that maybe more of the debris landed on my doorstep than at other houses, like shards of broken glass that some local wind picked up and blew to my place, the way newborns are left on certain people’s stoops.

  Seeing how long ago the courts should have gotten interested in his case, though, I’m only a new bud on branches that have been growing for a long time, I told the judge, a bud just opening on a November dawn as foggy as the streets of London, considering that when it comes to fog, England doesn’t have anything on us. Maybe that’s also why when a guy like him shows up with his straight talk and his straightforward looks, standing so straight on the damp ground, there was something about him that was like a hand reaching out to pull us from the waves by dint of energy and ideas about change, by big plans.

  Because when it came to plans, he had them. That’s the kind of guy he was, I told the judge, a guy with plans.

  That’s not a word we heard very often these last years, I’ll tell you, considering who was around here, considering the five thousand somewhat tired people living on the peninsula. I can’t say it happened more here than other places, but heaven’s been hard on us for a long time, on the harbor t
here, the trails along the coast, the village streets, and even in the town council meetings, you felt the weariness.

  So maybe all it took was a guy coming along with enough energy and a checkbook fatter than average for everyone to decide he was the one sent by some god or other to pull us out of our quagmire. At least that’s what seems to have happened. The day he showed up on the peninsula with that simple idea of buying the château and the land around it, it was a little as if when he wrote the check that day, we all signed it with him.

  I’ve never quite known why it was called the château because it really wasn’t a castle, more a big freestone house with old slate tiles that were always sliding off the roof whenever the wind picked up, but it was big enough for everyone around to use that word, “château,” since in a burg like ours, each thing has to have its own nickname to belong to all of us, so the house, which had been vacant for a long time, had also been called the château for a long time, perched up there overlooking the harbor, facing the city at the other end of the bridge.

  We weren’t the city, I told the judge. We were the peninsula opposite.

  And we said château, first because being on the point there, it seemed to be standing up to the city. And I think we also called it a château because it belonged to the commune, the municipality. In fact, it was because it belonged to the commune that they needed someone to maintain the grounds, someone to mow the five acres of lawn once a month as if it were a real castle, so they needed a groundskeeper. And in a way, I was that groundskeeper, at least from when the mayor at the time offered me the job—Something to tide you over, he’d said—because of the troubles that were raining down on me in those years, so maybe out of friendship, and maybe compassion, too, he suggested that I look after the château and live in the little empty house at the entrance to the estate.