Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine

by Quentin Mouron

  The receptionist is coming across the room toward him. “Sir, I’ve been asked to give you this.” An envelope, which Franck slips into his pocket.

  “Thank you. Is that all?”

  “Your bags have been taken up to your room.”

  Franck nods. Calmly, he finishes his burgundy, asks for the drink to be added to his bill, and sets off toward the foyer.

  Sheriff McCarthy rubs his hands to warm himself up. He and his men are questioning the inhabitants of the neighborhood. No one has seen anything. No one ever sees anything. The picture of old Jim, his neighbor of thirty years, comes back to him again and again. Why? For pity’s sake, why? The sheriff is wondering about the wallet found in old Jim’s jacket, his hunting rifle and ammunition, the truck with the keys in the ignition. Why hadn’t the killer taken anything? It can’t have been that he was in a hurry or that he panicked, as he stayed around long enough to mutilate the corpse. No, if he didn’t steal anything it was because he didn’t need to, because it didn’t interest him. Well then, wonders McCarthy, what does interest you, you sonofabitch?

  Franck enters suite 478. He turns on the light. His two bags have been placed at the foot of the bed. He sits on it, takes the letter from his pocket and begins to read, then sets light to it and throws it into the fireplace. He opens the first bag, from which he takes clothes that he puts away in a closet: a black jacket, a lilac one, pants, shirts, a pair of ankle boots, four neckties, a bow tie, two pairs of gloves, and a dressing gown. Then he draws the blinds, lifts the other smaller bag onto the bed, and checks its contents: ten packs of Davidoff cigarettes, several booklets of matches, his toiletries, his pink gold Jacot watch, his pen, a jotter, a travel chess set, a little leather-bound notepad, a copy of Joséphin Péladan’s novel, The Supreme Vice, Paul Bourget’s Essays in Contemporary Psychology, a biography of Shestov, a laptop, a switchblade, a butterfly knife, a silver coffee spoon, an envelope containing a half-ounce of cocaine, and a Steyr TMP machine pistol fitted with a silencer.

  The snow has stopped falling. Watertown is covered with a light white powder beneath which minor dramas continue to play out. Outside, Sheriff McCarthy goes from door to door, from theater to theater. Nowhere is there any appearance of fury or savagery. These people commit only rational murders, justified by drunkenness or necessity and tempered by tears and regrets. They are simple folk, disturbed by life. In room 478 of the Grand Hotel, Franck smokes a cigarette as he reads the Péladan novel. He sees a world weighed down by habit, by a drab determinism comprised of dust and iron filings. Of blinkered people, good only for wielding hammers and battering their neighbors with them. I wish for some kind of convulsion, some discord in the turgid melody of mankind, he thinks. Slowly, he turns the pages. He inhales the cigarette smoke. Perhaps that will never happen.

  SECOND DAY

  6

  Later, in a better-informed age, the word “destiny” will probably take on a statistical meaning.

  ROBERT MUSIL

  THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES

  Alexander Marshall was born in 1967 in a suburb of Orlando. His mother, a follower of the hippie movement, became pregnant during a psychedelic rock concert in a Fort Lauderdale barn. A few years later she stabbed her son, and then cut her wrists. According to the doctors, it was a miracle that Alexander survived. Maybe he himself would not have described as a “miracle” an outcome that sent him from foster home to foster home, on each occasion becoming the object of a pious, morbid pity that made the evangelical affections of his new protectors more hateful to him than the attempted infanticide of which he had been the victim. When he was fifteen, Alexander was taken in by the McCain family. This sterling couple, both teachers steeped in pedagogical theory and charitable intentions, thought their example would be enough to steer the turbulent adolescent back to what they called “a decent way of life.” The McCains were probably the last to show him any love, or, more properly speaking, feelings. They got their reward when, two years later, Alexander left home after beating them up and stealing their car, TV, bottles of liquor, and some cash. They never reported the theft. Marshall then set off for New York, where he lived for ten years, surviving on the proceeds of petty thefts and small-scale dealing, mostly using the money to pay for the crack cocaine to which he had been addicted since he was eighteen. In 1996 he met Tracy at a concert in a Brooklyn warehouse. He fell for her right away. They had sex in the toilet, and then at her place. Two weeks later she told him he was the biggest loser she had ever known. In a fit of rage, he beat her up. A neighbor intervened, and Alexander planted his Opinel knife in the man’s belly. He was arrested that evening. Throughout his trial he kept repeating that he didn’t know what had come over him. He also kept saying how much he loved Tracy. The judge prescribed treatment in a detox clinic and then sentenced him to ten years for attempted homicide. Granted early release, he was freed in 2005. For two years he went straight, selling hot dogs on 13th Avenue. He then set out for Boston, where he learned to forge vehicle registrations. The economic crisis affected criminal activities as well as legal ones, and it became increasingly difficult to get hold of luxury automobiles. Alexander found it hard to get along, especially since he was back on drugs. In 2008 he had to take refuge in Canada for a few weeks to escape the vengeance of a Chechen gang. When the latter was broken up, Alexander resumed his activities in the area, choosing this time to operate in the suburbs, in the Bellams neighborhood.

  He met Laura Henderson – old Jim’s daughter – at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Watertown. Initially they combined forces to push drugs, and then moved in together. It wasn’t long before Alexander had his eye on Laura’s daughter, Julia. He began walking in on her when she was in the shower, and caressing her buttocks when she passed by him. Once, unable to get an erection, he inserted a finger in her backside. She complained to her mother, who pretended to be scandalized. But her association with Alexander was just beginning and must have been too profitable for protecting a young girl from abuse – even her own daughter – to be a major imperative. Julia then confided in Jimmy, who headed over to his daughter’s place and declared that this time something had to be done. He added that he considered Julia his last hope of making something worthwhile of his life. When Alexander came home Laura explained to him that her father had threatened to report him to the police. Right then he was too stoned to think, but she made him promise to sort things out with Jimmy and apologize to the girl. By this time Alexander was already the subject of an investigation for theft and receiving stolen vehicles.

  It was because Alexander was suspected of the murder of Jimmy Henderson that Sheriff McCarthy’s men, under Deputy Gomez, came to pick him up at dawn from his place on Faulker Street. He didn’t resist. He knew that the cops had surrounded the house, that they were heavily armed, and that his small weapon, a .22 semiautomatic rifle, wouldn’t be of much use. His goose was cooked. Gomez handcuffed him and dragged him outside, half naked, to a squad car. They didn’t jeer at him, as often happens. Nor did they beat him. “This all looks real serious,” Marshall said to himself as the car started off. Laura wasn’t there. She had left town the evening before without saying where she was going.

  In a padded interview room in the Watertown Police Department, Alexander is sitting across from McCarthy. Gomez is beside the sheriff.

  “Let’s go over it again: old Henderson was about to turn you in, his daughter vamoosed without leaving an address, you have a record as long as a trailer truck, and you have no credible alibi… Do you still deny killing Jimmy Henderson?”

  Alexander is pale, dripping sweat, his eyes bulging. He has slept for only an hour and is suffering from withdrawal, which doesn’t make it any easier to find himself sitting across from a cop accusing him of murder.

  “No… I’ve never killed anybody, I—”

  “You never killed anybody, but you did plant your knife in a guy’s gut back in 1996.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “It was close, if I’m to b
elieve the report made by my colleagues in New York.”

  “I didn’t mean to, I lost control—”

  “Just like when you found out that Jimmy Henderson was going to turn you in for sexual abuse of an underage girl, which, given your record, should fetch you, let’s say three, four years?”

  “No! No…”

  “And was it also because you lost control that you sliced him up like that?”

  Gomez places a photo of the dead man in front of Alexander. He turns away, retches, and throws up on the floor, spattering the deputy’s boots.

  “No, I swear, I swear… Please… Yesterday evening I—”

  “I know. You said so already. You went for a walk. But you don’t remember where—”

  “I was—”

  “Stoned. So you don’t remember if you went to call in at the church, if you ate a bacon cheeseburger, bought a pair of jeans, or cut old Henderson’s throat and then took it out on his dead body.”

  On a nod from his superior, Gomez makes Alexander stand up and leads him back to his cell.

  The Bellams had once been a quiet neighborhood. But in 1956 a grandiose real estate project, jointly promoted by the speculators of Fargo Inc. and the municipal authorities, resulted in the destruction of some colonial-style houses so that they could be replaced by concrete blocks and affordable housing for the new, low-paid Boston workforce at a moment when the region was undergoing an unprecedented economic boom. The Bellams (Faulker Street, Crescent Street, Downard Street, and Bartolomeo Avenue) became one of those much-deplored bad neighborhoods where alcoholism, violence, and suicide grew like mushrooms on damp moss – mushrooms whose growth accelerated at the end of the 1960s when the drug trade (and at the same time the repression of drug use) underwent a significant expansion. Between 1980 and 1995, tourist guides advised their readers to steer clear of the neighborhood, and even the cops preferred to conduct large-scale sweeps rather than see their patrolmen fall like flies under a hail of bullets from the guns of small-time, junked-up hoodlums and the local mafia. In 1986, Jon Harvey, the Republican mayor of Boston, solemnly promised to “cut the criminal networks to shreds” and “clean up the Bellams from the trash that has been accumulating there for thirty years.” In 1988 Harvey was arrested for associating with organized crime and misappropriating public funds. It wasn’t until 1994, a year marked by record levels of crime, that the authorities truly confronted the situation. Though it is no longer as unsavory as it was during the 1980s, the neighborhood remains, together with the suburb of Dorchester, the city’s most significant hotbed of crime, and still has a bad reputation. Furthermore, the 2007 economic crisis witnessed a resurgence of behaviors that had been considered past history – vicious, barbarous killings for the sake of a beer or a pack of cigarettes, adolescent girls prostituted by their own parents, and so on. The Bellams boasts just a single church, which is tiny and in ruins, so some Bostonians see that as the mark of Satan, saying it is a lack of religion that has led its inhabitants to the edge of the abyss. The politicians in office, as well as those who, like Sheriff McCarthy, had been attempting for several years to restore a semblance of order to these neighborhoods, offer other explanations… They know all about the contempt heaped on the workers who were brought in during the 1950s only to turn up on the unemployment rolls twenty or thirty years later. They know how few obstacles were put in the way of the criminal gangs and drug cartels when they moved in and put roots down there; they know how easy it was for people to neglect the Bellams file when, in the mid-1980s, it became one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Greater Boston area. It was there that Laura Henderson and Alexander Marshall found a fertile terrain in which their activities could prosper. There are hundreds of other Laura Hendersons, hundreds of other Alexander Marshalls, all living on the proceeds of petty theft, swindles, and dealing. Sometimes gangs settle accounts, and some guy is found lying riddled with bullets between two garbage cans, or a cop turns up in a pool of his own blood. Occasionally too, a father runs amok and murders his wife, his children, or a neighbor. All the same, thinks McCarthy, they don’t mutilate the body of an old guy sitting in his truck right there in the street and then leave the scene without touching his gun or his wallet. It’s hard to imagine they’d even leave as much as his dentures—

  “Sheriff…”

  McCarthy looks up at Gomez.

  “What is it?”

  “Marshall’s lawyer is here.”

  “Okay, then.”

  In spite of everything, and in spite of the statistics, the Bellams neighborhood sees itself as a typical district in the suburbs. Its streets, which are busy mostly at rush hour, only become intimidating after dark. Its inhabitants set off at seven in the morning to take Route 1, or to catch a bus from one of the five stops that serve the neighborhood. They work until four. In the evening they dream of a different life, or come face to face with the life they lead. In all their dreams it differs from the reality – but isn’t it that way for just about everyone? The worker sees himself as a foreman, the foreman as a boss, and the boss as a shareholder. They all dream of a wife more beautiful than the one they have. They all dream of having children less stupid and more grateful than the ones they have. Dissatisfaction with life has nothing to do with social class. Still, in the Bellams more often than elsewhere, dissatisfaction flirts with crime or self-destructive behavior. That makes it more obvious. It becomes entitled to its own statistics, as well as to a succession of politicians and clergy who preach about the ravages wrought by poverty and drugs. McCarthy thinks of the dramas he has seen played out under his eyes between Crescent and Downard Streets. He thinks of the family quarrels, the emaciated faces of the junkies, the vicious murders, and the settlings of scores. None of that is peculiar to the Bellams. It all happens in other places too. But it seems to McCarthy that in other places crime looks like an avoidable accident, while in the Bellams dramatic events have an inevitable, definitive appearance. When a murder victim is found in a well-to-do home in the center of Watertown, people are shocked, scandalized. But when a murder victim turns up in the Bellams, people just shrug. So Jimmy Henderson’s murder will be on the front pages of the newspapers this morning, reflects McCarthy, but when they find out we’ve arrested a suspect in the Bellams no one is going to bother asking questions, and the buzz will die down; the only things left will be brief news reports for the crime buffs – who’ll admit that after all there wasn’t a lot that could be done. That is what frightens Sheriff McCarthy most: the idea that nothing can be done, that the die is cast.

  Gomez has returned to the sheriff’s office.

  “The lawyer doesn’t want to see me right now… He’s just pointing out that he doesn’t understand why his client is in the cells when he hasn’t been charged with anything, and all the usual crap.”

  “I see… Just tell them that he had a loaded gun on his nightstand, which has been illegal since 1996.”

  Gomez is about to leave the office when he turns around.

  “Sheriff…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think Marshall was really the killer?”

  McCarthy reflects for a moment.

  “One thing I’m sure of is that he’s the ideal culprit.”

  7

  Joséphin Péladan was born in Lyon in 1858. His first job was in a bank. He felt that this experience was, if not exactly torture, at least trying enough to create in him a feeling of disgust with the drabness of office life. His coworkers were, according to him, dour-looking and impossible to suspect of the slightest passion, except perhaps for a marked interest in the stock market, while their wives were tempted by “fashion” – the tastes shared toward the end of the century by almost everyone with more income than a laundry worker. On an impulse – one of those urges that would later make people say of him that he was an “eccentric” or a “visionary” – he set off for Italy. There, among the Renaissance masters, he forged his tastes, and especially his distastes. On his return to France h
e combated materialism and devoted himself to mysticism. Along these lines, all sound and fury, he founded the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, and later the Order of the Catholic Rose-Cross, the Temple, and the Grail. He had people address him as “Sâr Merodak” and was considered a brilliant author – though somewhat “flowery,” and half-demented. In addition to an impressive amount of art criticism, he wrote several essays, tried his hand at the theater, and, above all, threw himself into a venture as remarkable as it is forgotten: writing the seventeen volumes of Latin Decadence. His life, like his work, is characterized throughout by its anti-conformism, for in the late nineteenth century – like nowadays, in the early twenty-first century – sameness, born as much from materialism as from democracy, was the enemy that had to be overcome.

  “There is a sin of the flesh unknown to novelists, one that might be thought lost if it were possible for mankind to lose a vice. None accuse themselves of it in the confessional, and its name – demoniality – is not to be found in many dictionaries. It is the literary, patrician, decadent sin par excellence […]: it consists in copulating with demons – men with succubi and women with incubi.”

  Franck lays the first volume of Latin Decadence on the nightstand alongside his pen and notebook. Suite 478 of the Grand Conference Hotel is filled with sunlight; the morning is glorious. Franck is wearing his purple dressing gown. He gets up. From the window he has a view across the hotel’s parking lot to the Denny’s restaurant, which offers all-you-can-eat pancakes from 4:00 a.m. until midnight, the disused water tower which serves as a billboard for Lanzmann Escrow & Co., the three buildings of the Super 8 Motel that faces the street, and the skyline provided by the near and distant blocks – a conglomeration of brick homes, small apartment buildings, supermarkets, service stations, and warehouses – streets and avenues where hundreds of thousands of individuals live, love, suffer, and die. He extracts a cigarette from his packet of Davidoffs, licks it up and down, and rolls it in the little pile of coke on the desk. The cigarette crackles and the room fills with a smell resembling turpentine and ammonia. Franck lies down on the bed and resumes his reading. “The Middle Ages were poetic: in their fond naivety they were so eager to preserve the dignity of the human species that, unwilling to believe that evil could be the work of man, they made it the work of the devil and, rebelling against the idea that humans might be evil in the same way as they are good, they declared that the wicked were possessed and saw demons where there were only vices. By restoring to human devilry what had been ascribed to the Devil, demoniality is a creation of the flesh that consists in exciting the imagination by fixing one’s desire on a dead, absent, or inexistent being.”