Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre

  All three burst out laughing.

  “Guy’s a comedian.”

  “Don’t got their number,” the guy in the white hoodie said.

  “Well then, our hands are tied,” Vilar said.

  He took a few steps towards the stairs. It felt hard to breathe, as though he were trekking high up in the mountains. He tried to catch his breath, only to feel a painful, familiar weight pressing on his chest.

  “Hey, mister comedian, you wouldn’t be busting our balls there, would you?”

  Vilar turned to the guy in the shell suit, who was standing in the middle of the hall, his legs apart, gesturing defiantly. The dope smoker had also jumped to his feet and was standing on the bottom step. The third youth was still leaning against the window, his head back, watching carefully between half-closed lids.

  Vilar looked from one to the other, sizing them up rapidly, mustering every ounce of willpower not to lay into them. He would have enjoyed it too much; he would have done his utmost to really hurt them. His muscles crackled with undirected electricity; his heart was thumping in his throat. He could feel his arms tensing at the thought of the pounding he would give them. He heaved a sigh.

  “You’d have to have some balls for me to bust them,” he said at last.

  He strode towards the lift. The smoker had lit a cigarette and was looking him up and down, his face screwed up, fag drooping from the corner of his mouth.

  Vilar turned instead to the stairs. The boy there put out an arm to block his path, looming so close that Vilar could smell the dope on his clothes.

  “Give me a break. I’m tired.”

  He said it in a low voice, a lump in his throat, struggling to swallow the anger he could feel welling in him. The boy stepped aside and Vilar slowly started up the stairs, finally exhaling the stifling air trapped in his chest. When he reached the next floor, he stopped and looked along the grey corridor, blood pounding in his ears, distorting the silence.

  The door was opened straight away. Sandra de Melo was a small, pretty woman with bronzed skin and large, dark, expressive eyes. When he showed her his warrant card she nodded and smiled, explaining that Monsieur Dumas, her boss, had called to say he was coming. She led him down a corridor laid with wood-effect vinyl. The brown striped wallpaper that made him think of a mattress. A vacuum cleaner spilled its brushes and nozzles in the doorway to the living room, and the woman pushed them aside with her foot and told Vilar to sit where he liked as she tidied the magazines on a coffee table. He sat down on a leatherette sofa that creaked under his weight. Sandra took a seat opposite and lit a cigarette. She took a deep drag, her eyes half closed. She seemed nervous or tired, and was doing her best to hide it with lively gestures and the youthful smile that softened her features.

  “I was doing some cleaning, just for a change … You timed it perfectly, I was just going to take a break. Do you fancy coffee? I’ve just made some.”

  Vilar nodded, and she got up eagerly. As he listened to her bustling about in the kitchen, he looked around at the mismatched furniture and the widescreen television on mute, showing some American sitcom. As she came back with a tray with two cups, a cafetière and a porcelain sugar bowl, he thought he could hear a steady pounding on the wall. A soft hammering, rhythmic, muffled. Someone was hitting the wall. A neighbour, probably. Vilar had grown up in this kind of building, the constant noise from the neighbours, shouting, doors banging, televisions blaring late at night.

  They drank their coffee without saying much. Vilar said it was good, and added that he knew people who could not make a decent cup of coffee, something he considered a serious failing. Sandra smiled, fluttering her eyelashes. The pounding on the wall, which had stopped for a moment, started up again.

  “Sorry,” Sandra said, “I’ll be back.”

  Her face had suddenly tensed, she looked older, and Vilar heard her sigh wearily as she got to her feet.

  He could hear her talking in the next room. She obviously had a child. Too young to go to school. Or sick, maybe. He got up, wandered over to the window and stared out at the grim geometry of the tower blocks, the dreary rows of windows with their tiny balconies, almost all sprouting satellite dishes, all interchangeable even though the buildings had recently been repainted in pastel colours, with garishly coloured tubes and pipes designed to cheer up the entrances. Vilar suddenly thought of the Red Hand Gang, the three dim-witted nineteen-year-olds who had left two dead at a bank in Avignon. They had been caught because they stopped at a petrol station to try to wash the red ink off their hands after the dye pack exploded when they opened the booby-trapped strongboxes. They had burst into tears as they were handcuffed, snivelling about how they had only carried guns to scare people, how they never wanted any of this to happen, never wanted anyone to get killed – nor, obviously, to be arrested, something that had apparently brought their whole world crashing down around them. Did the architects of these hovels, and those who commissioned them, weep when they drove past them now? Or had they washed their well-manicured hands of them?

  Sandra reappeared after a few minutes, holding the hand of a little boy who looked a lot like her, thin, almost scrawny, teetering on spindly legs. His dark eyes darted here and there without looking at anything, he blinked constantly, dazzled perhaps by the brightness of the room. Behind him he dragged a clown puppet.

  “Meet José.”

  Vilar said hello and waved, but the boy stared down at the grinning face of the clown.

  “José,” his mother said. “See that man? He’s a policeman, just like in the movies. An inspector, you know what that means? He arrests robbers and murderers. José, are you listening?”

  The boy glanced up at her, then collapsed on the floor, a ragdoll clutching a puppet, as through his muscles had suddenly given out. He landed gently and lay there on the carpet, staring up at Vilar.

  “Are you going to stay there? You don’t want to come with me? What about him?” Vilar pointed to the clown. “What’s his name?”

  “That’s Toto. He takes him everywhere. It was the first thing he ever really noticed. One day I was holding him in my arms and he started covering Toto in kisses, and I was just relieved that for once he wasn’t screaming and struggling. If he had kissed me, I couldn’t have been happier.”

  She blew José a kiss then sat down again opposite Vilar. She poured more coffee. Her hands trembled.

  “I’m sorry about this. We missed the taxi this morning, so I have to look after him today, they weren’t able to send another. And since I’m on my own … I’m sorry. I’m wasting your time.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s no problem.”

  She turned towards the boy and waved and smiled at him and still he lay on his side, his cheek resting on the clown’s head, staring up at the policeman.

  “Especially as you’ve come to talk about Nadia, the poor thing.”

  “It’s me who’s come at a bad time. I hoped to talk to her family and friends at the funeral, but no-one came, so I’ve been forced to come bothering people at home to ask them questions. Did you know Nadia well?”

  “We got on O.K., but I wouldn’t say I knew her well. We had coffee sometimes, talked about our sons, about our problems … I wanted to come to the burial, sorry, I mean … she was cremated, wasn’t she? But I didn’t have the strength. I’m not good with that sort of thing.”

  “No-one’s good with that sort of thing.”

  The woman sighed. She seemed to be thinking, searching for words.

  “I can’t stop thinking about Victor, the poor kid, he’s all alone now.”

  “Doesn’t he still have a grandfather? Nadia’s father.”

  Sandra shook her head.

  “I don’t think she’d seen him in years. He lives somewhere near Aixen-Provence, I think. That’s if he’s still alive …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, I mean … He might be dead, I don’t know, she burned her bridges long ago. I don’t think she really saw him after she ran
away from home in her teens. Can I ask you something?”

  She did not give Vilar time to reply.

  “How did she die? What did he do to her?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Sandra blushed a bit, but held his gaze.

  “Yes. It’s important to know if she suffered. We might not have been close, but we talked a lot, we talked about our troubles, she’d come round to mine for dinner or we’d go to hers. Victor and José got on well. So yes, I really want to know whether they hurt her, even if I know it doesn’t change anything.”

  Her eyes were glistening. She poured herself another coffee, her movements halting, almost trembling.

  “She was beaten and then strangled.”

  Sandra de Melo nodded, sitting motionless, staring down at the cup in her hand. Vilar allowed her time to collect her thoughts, to imagine what Nadia must have suffered in her dying moments. When she raised her cup and sipped her coffee, he said gently:

  “A minute ago you said something about her running away from home … Can you tell me a bit more about that?”

  Sandra hesitated. She turned towards her son, who was crawling slowly towards the table, clutching his puppet.

  “Yeah. She told me she left home when she was sixteen, that that’s when her life went all to hell. Before that, things had been going really well, she was good at school. A bit like me, I did O.K. at school, I actually liked it. I even managed to get my baccalauréat. Anyway, long story short … She’d been really close to her mother – I think she was a teacher.”

  “Her mother committed suicide, didn’t she? Was that after Nadia left home? Because you said she ran away, but it sounds like she was really leaving for good. You said yourself, ‘she left home’. ”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t ask her. If I so much as mentioned her mother she’d end up crying. But her father, I don’t know, it was like she hated him.”

  Here was something interesting. The father was the only surviving member of the nuclear family. His daughter runs away, his wife commits suicide, and there he is, alone. What sort of state must he have been in? How does someone survive something like that? In his notebook, Vilar scrawled half a dozen circles around the word “father”. Nadia would have been a minor at the time. There would have been a missing person’s report. There might still be something on file.

  “You’ve no idea what her problem with her father was?”

  Sandra only pursed her lips to say she did not know. She glanced at her son, who was under the table now, curled up on his side with his back to them.

  “He’ll go to sleep and later I’ll have a hell of a job getting him out from under there. He’s getting so big and heavy. And if I wake him sometimes he’ll throw a tantrum and I don’t know how to calm him.”

  Vilar looked at the child curled under the table, like a little animal. When Pablo was learning to walk, he had loved to hide under tables and stretch his hand out to touch people’s feet as they passed and, if they bent down, Pablo would laugh and scuttle away between the legs of a chair as though this were a dark forest. If someone made as if to catch him, he would scream “Wolf! Wolf!”, pretending to be scared but then suddenly he was no longer pretending and he would snuggle in your arms, hot, panting. Vilar noticed that the young woman was waiting, holding the coffee pot.

  “He’s calm for the moment. Would you like more coffee?”

  Vilar almost asked who was calm, struggled to come back to the present. He held out his cup, mumbling an apology. Painfully he swallowed a scalding mouthful, though the smell of the coffee did him good.

  “I’m terrified of what will happen when he grows up,” Sandra said. He—’

  “Never say that.”

  He had spoken sharply. The woman froze, the cup pressed to her lips. She bowed her head.

  “I … I didn’t mean … Well, I’m sure you know that kids like this grow up, but they’ll never really be adults.”

  Vilar got to his feet and walked to the window, staring out without seeing. The light hurt his eyes. He had to take a breath before he could speak again. He turned back to the woman.

  “I’m sorry. I have … I had a son, and I …”

  He sat down again, shook his head.

  “I won’t keep you much longer. Just a couple more questions and I’ll leave you to take care of him. Let’s see …”

  He consulted his notes. Bit by bit, he managed to marshal his thoughts.

  “You said that Nadia’s life went to hell when she ran away. Did something happen?”

  Sandra hesitated. She seemed unsure for a second, then sighed.

  “I suppose I should tell you, in case it might help to … It was something Nadia didn’t really talk about, or she’d make, like, some vague reference to it, but, bottom line: she was raped by these guys and after they forced her to become a prostitute.”

  She rattled it off in a single breath, desperate to unburden herself.

  “This was in Marseille?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose.”

  “Did she give it up?”

  Sandra stiffened, as though the question were inappropriate.

  “Of course she did … She was raising a kid, she had a job …”

  “She was only part-time from what S.A.N.I. told me. A few night shifts.”

  “Yeah, I know, and that doesn’t mean she worked every night …” the woman snapped back.

  She frowned and bit her lower lip.

  Vilar leaned towards her.

  “Tell me a bit more about that.”

  “I’ve let her down. I can’t keep my mouth shut. I’m hopeless. Nadia’s dead and here I am trash-talking her.”

  Sandra buried her face in her hands.

  “You haven’t let anyone down. All we’re trying to do is catch the guy who killed her, the man who beat her and strangled her. Anything that will help us do that can’t hurt the memory of your friend. Besides, we already know that what she made at S.A.N.I. wasn’t enough to cover her expenses. She had to pay the rent, the car, the bills, so she had to be getting the money from somewhere. And we know she didn’t have another job, so if you rule out a lottery win, it’s not hard to work out where she got the cash. According to her neighbours she left for work almost every night at around the same time. Where did she go when she wasn’t cleaning offices for S.A.N.I.? Right now, anything seems possible, so if you don’t tell us, we’re likely to suspect Nadia of anything and everything. Now that would be letting her down.”

  Sandra stared intently at Vilar, winding a lock of hair around a finger.

  “She had a boyfriend.”

  Vilar shuddered.

  “What boyfriend?”

  “I don’t know. She mentioned this guy called Thierry, that’s all I know. She saw him a lot, but, him being married … Well, he threw his money around, at least that’s what she told me. He said he wanted to help her, to get her out of here. He had money, he was the boss apparently, the C.E.O. or whatever … She ran into him one night. He was there when she showed up to clean his office. Scared the hell out of her when she saw him because she wasn’t expecting anyone to be there at that time of night, so anyway he apologised, offered her a drink, and one thing led to another … I told her I thought she was pushing it but she said she needed to make ends meet, that the ends justified the means. That was Nadia’s motto. She used to say that she wanted her son to get on in life.”

  She took out another cigarette and lit it. Her hands were trembling again, and she could not bring herself to look at Vilar.

  “You ever see him, this man?”

  “Once, from a distance. He was driving a Mercedes. He was waiting for her outside the office. He had dark hair, I think, and he wore sunglasses.”

  Vilar shook his head.

  “Well that’s a big help. What kind of Mercedes?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know much about cars. A sports car, you know, a two-door saloon. Black, I think. Yeah, black.”

  Vilar was thinking, he
had something now, a lead, maybe even a suspect: a spurned, upstanding citizen gets angry, lashes out and kills, he smashes his little toy and with it any vague impulse to be a Good Samaritan; or maybe the girl was blackmailing our upstanding citizen in which case he’s hardly likely to risk his perfect family and his social status for some fantasy, for some sleazy little affair that’s supposed to end with him saving her? A perfect crime? People think they can pull it off. They think that if they leave no prints, they can disappear for good, the way a child who covers his eyes thinks no-one can see him.

  By tomorrow, this Thierry would be spilling his guts, snivelling about how his life was ruined, about his poor children, and his wife who would curse the son of a bitch for generations to come. After he confessed he would have all the time in the world to re-edit his movie, to put the finishing touches to a script in which the bad guy never gets caught, not because he is not guilty, but because he is clever.

  Vilar played out this scenario in his mind, then decided it was drivel. Sandra de Melo had turned her attention back to her son, who was awake now. He was gently wriggling his legs, and Vilar could tell he was playing with the clown, whispering to it. The officer got to his feet, thanked Sandra for what she had told him, and thanked her again for her coffee.

  She walked him to the door and, as he passed the boy, the policeman crouched down to say goodbye and was surprised to see José roll over and stare at him with his big, vacant eyes.

  Down in the lobby, he was relieved to find that the three sentries had given up their duty. The smell of dope still hung in the air, like an invisible marker of their territory. As he walked back to his car he spotted them at the far end of the tower block, glaring at him defiantly. One of them gave him the finger and shouted something Vilar couldn’t make out. Vilar simply shrugged.

  As he drove away from the estate, he called Ana. She picked up almost immediately. She had just got in from work and was exhausted, it had been a tough day and there was a month to go before her holidays. Vilar could hear the tension and tiredness in her voice.

  “Can I call round? I won’t stay long.”