Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre

  “Got it!”

  Victor heard the boy pick up the urn and set it on the floor. He tried to move, but his body refused to respond. He thought he might suffocate beneath the weight of this thug. His eyes glazed over. He felt his strength ebb away, he no longer had the will to move or even to think. He thought about his mother, about what she must have felt and thought as she was dying. Had there been someone looming over her, was her killer’s face the last thing she had ever seen? He decided to close s eyes, and when the weight was lifted from his chest and he could finally breathe he let out a groan, almost a sob, coughing, spluttering oblivious to the tip of the blade that was still pricking his neck.

  He could see nothing, too busy gulping air, his eyes filled with tears. He felt them move, get up and sit down next to him, lift him up and stand him against the wall, twisting an arm behind his back. When he finally managed to open his eyes, he saw Nicolas taking out his cock, waving it around and sniggering.

  “Next time I’ll make you suck it, fuckface! This is what I use it for the rest of the time.”

  He started to piss into the urn.

  “Jesus, you’re really doing it? You’re really doing it?” one of the boys said.

  Victor howled and threw himself forward, only to be stopped dead by the blade of the knife, which left a nick just above his Adam’s apple, the tip burying itself in his jaw, and at the same time he felt his arm being wrenched behind his back so hard he thought his shoulder might come out of its socket. He lashed out, kicking wildly two or three times and hitting empty air, impotently. Then panting with pain he slumped onto his side, his face pressed into the bedspread, moaning as he heard the sound of the piss as it hit the ashes, inundating the only thing he had left in the world, and then he wept, no longer aware of what was happening, not even reacting when someone kicked him in the ribs.

  He did not hear them leave.

  He went on sobbing as the silence returned, a hard, bitter lump of poison in his throat, the taste of it, like metal, in his mouth. He rolled heavily off the bed and lay, curled up, his face in his hands, lost in a fathomless abyss of grief.

  And when he heard a commotion in the room, people asking what had happened, what they had done to him, when he felt someone gently take him by the shoulders and lay him down on the bed, mop his forehead with a damp cloth – Victor, Victor, we’re here, it’s O.K. – he let out a howl that made them recoil, a howl that sank its sharpened teeth into their privileged hearts, a howl that could have shaken the distant flickering star he had waited so long to see.

  They got him to his feet and he stood, eyes closed, swaying like a punch-drunk boxer, then he passed out, dropping to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, burning and feverish, and they could not support the dead weight of his body.

  The following afternoon, while he was lying half asleep in his bed, Bernard came to tell him they had found him a foster family, good, kind people, they were used to looking after kids, they understood them. They lived near Pauillac, in the Médoc. The sea was close by. It would be nice.

  The Médoc. All Victor knew about the area was sitting in traffic jams on Sunday night coming back from Montalivet or Soulac, his skin taut from the salt water, his shoulders scorched from the sun, looking forward to a shower, to a little coolness.

  “Nicolas has gone. We couldn’t allow him to stay here after what he did.”

  Victor silently vowed that he would find the boy and kill him. He had dreamed about it that night. A brutal dream from which he had woken with a start, afraid of himself. He watched the light shimmering in the cracks between the shutters. He could just make out the shifting leaves of the poplars. Everything outside seemed blinding.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. We’ll take you there. Next week we’ll go back to your house and get your things. The police have said we can.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  His eyelids fluttered. He felt as though he had stepped off a cliff, the way Wile E. Coyote steps into mid-air but does not immediately fall.

  He curled up again, turning his back on Bernard, waiting for him to leave, driven out by his silence. He thought about what Bernard had said, about this family who were going to take him in, these people he had never met and did not want to meet. These people who could change nothing, who would count for nothing. From now on, he knew, he was on his own, and the image that kept coming back to him was of a deserted world, peopled by whispering shadows that glided around him, whose words he could hardly ever make out in a fog of confused murmurings.

  He waited for stillness to return, for the moment when the heat would gradually stifle all activity. He listened for the slightest sound, a creak of doors, laughter dying away. He heard snatches of conversation outside, a burst of music.

  He picked up the urn, which no-one had dared touch, screwed the lid down tighter, and opened the bedroom door. He made sure the corridor was empty, listened again, then stepped outside.

  He locked himself in a shower cubicle and immediately felt himself bathed in sweat, though it was no hotter there than anywhere else. He sat on the edge of the tub, tilted the urn and poured out some of the contents. The liquid ran almost clear, and he was glad that the ashes had sunk to the bottom. He poured away these dregs with the fastidiousness of a sommelier decanting a vintage wine. The acrid smell turned his stomach, and he nearly dropped the urn to bring his hands up to his mouth. He turned away, took a deep breath and swallowed hard. When there was nothing left, or almost nothing, he poured in some water and waited for a while for the ashes to settle again.

  He was finding it hard to breathe, he gulped air with his mouth wide open, as if he had almost drowned. Keeping his lips pressed together, he began to pour again, but this time the stench had almost disappeared, and he could breathe more easily. He repeated the process three times, until he could no longer smell anything, and then slumped back against the cool, hard, tiled partition, whispering to the damp ashes as he clutched them tightly to him: Don’t worry, we’re together, they can’t hurt you, don’t worry, we don’t care about them.

  8

  Somewhere in the apartment a mobile was ringing. Vilar wondered where the sound was coming from and quickly realised it was the pocket of his jacket, hanging in the hall where he had left it the night before. Given that it was Saturday and almost 9.00 a.m., he assumed that it was Morvan and felt that strange quaking in his heart he always felt whenever the retired gendarme called or he found an email from him on his computer.

  A woman’s voice. He did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  “Commandant Vilar?”

  Vilar confirmed that it was he.

  “Lieutenant Domergue, with the police judiciaire in Marseille. Sorry to call you on your mobile, but it was the only contact number I had. You requested information on Nadia Fournier and her parents, Souad and Michel Fournier? In relation to a homicide?”

  “Yes, and—”

  “I’ll fax the paperwork through on Monday, but since it sounded urgent I took the liberty of calling.”

  The voice was gentle, a little indistinct, but there was something firm and resolute about the tone.

  “Let me give you the bullet points: Nadia Fournier has a record here for prostitution and drugs offences. It started when she was sixteen. She had run away from home – it was almost a year before we tracked her down.”

  “She ran away?”

  “Yes. Does that surprise you?”

  “Do you know why she ran away?”

  “Yes, I’ll explain in a minute. She was found working for a pimp, a Tunisian, a violent little shit who kept his girls drugged up so they were easier to control. He’s dead now … A bullet in the head, looks like he stepped on the toes of some Russian mobsters. Good riddance … Anyway, she was in a terrible state when we picked her up, but even then she was determined not to go home, which brings us to the reasons why she ran away in the first place, and I have to say the whole story’s pretty vile.”

 
; Vilar sighed. Apparently the woman wanted to impress him with her diligence. He rummaged for paper and pen and sat in an armchair, scribbling notes. He stretched his bare feet into a patch of sunlight on the carpet.

  “Her father, Michel Fournier, was a professor of maths at Aix University. And a serious alcoholic. It seems he took an unhealthy interest in his daughter’s virginity. When he was pissed, he’d harass her and beat his wife, Souad, a primary school teacher in Marseille, her maiden name was Kaci. An all-round decent bloke. The upshot was that Souad committed suicide in ’87. A year later Nadia took off. Left one hell for another.”

  “And no charges were ever brought against this guy Fournier?”

  “Of course there were. From what I’ve read, he claimed that Nadia wasn’t his daughter, that he’d brought her up, that’s all. The case was dismissed shortly before the mother’s suicide. Anyway Nadia retracted her statement, she was no longer a minor at the time, and then in 1990 she disappeared. So as you can guess, as far as we’re concerned it’s a cold case. Took me four days to dig this stuff up from under all the dust. But the fact that Fournier was a left-wing councillor and pretty well known – and that people still remember the case – made it not too hard to put together some bits and pieces.”

  “You know what happened to Fournier?”

  “No. We’ve got nothing on him, so, well … You asked for information, I’ve given you everything I’ve got. We’re snowed under just now, so anything we can let slide, we do.”

  For a few minutes they bitched about the job, about how they were worked to the bone, then wished each other all the best and hung up. Vilar sat for a few moments, pen in hand, feeling the cool morning breeze from the window on the back of his neck, unable to think about anything.

  He was postponing the moment when he would have to get up, get his things, get into the car and drive to Morvan’s, convinced it would lead nowhere, that Morvan would show him photographs from C.D.s, magazines, internet sites, a catalogue of heinous acts in which the former gendarme thought he recognised Pablo. It had happened before: a year ago, he had shown Vilar a photograph released by Interpol of a young boy picked up by the police in Milan, an amnesiac, clearly a victim of abuse, who was all but mute but managed to stammer a few words in French, and it was true that Vilar had felt his heart stop when he saw the tanned face, the big dark eyes, the heavy lips half open in silent surprise. But he had quickly come back to earth when he summoned an image of Ana and realised this boy’s face had looked nothing like hers. Pablo had always had his mother’s eyes. This was why when he stared into Ana’s eyes, he could still lose himself, despite the silence between them like a glass wall, despite the distance that separated them.

  Vilar put the memory of last year out of his mind. He ran a hand over his face. In the back of his throat he felt a desperate urge to smoke. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths, shrugging off the torrent of unanswered questions. He leapt to his feet, his heart beginning to race: maybe this time Morvan really had a solid lead. He felt a familiar lump in his throat, and the three or four deep breaths he took were not enough to ease his grief, his pain.

  “Pablo …”

  He felt no calmer as he drove toward Morvan’s place, but he was happy to be on the move, to be heading towards something he refused to think of as hope – he knew it was a counterfeit, like an artificial flower one feels the need to reach out and touch to dispel the illusion.

  He drove, letting the mild morning breeze rush into the car, going over in his mind the various pieces of evidence he had about Nadia Fournier’s death. He would pay another visit to Sandra de Melo, he decided, because she hadn’t told him the truth, and because right now there was some guy roaming the streets of Bordeaux who might make her pay dearly for her tact.

  He thought about calling Daras to let her know, but gave up on the idea because by now he was driving into Angoulême, and as he did so he felt himself entering the glass bubble into which he sometimes drifted, a place beyond ordinary space and time.

  He found a parking space thirty metres from Morvan’s house on a narrow street in the upper part of town. The sun beating down on the yellow stone facades dazzled him, making him squint, screwing up his face so much it hurt. He pressed the doorbell twice, impatient to be in the semi-darkness of the house, behind its closed shutters. He waited for a minute and rang again, assuming that Morvan was in the small back garden where he tended his rose bushes with painstaking care.

  He listened but could not hear the slightest movement inside. He felt sweat trickling down his back, his forehead hurt from squinting into the sun. He glanced towards the street, stepping back to check the parked cars, and spotted the red Peugeot 306 the former gendarme had driven ever since Vilar first met him.

  He did not bother to ring again, but pushed the door, which had not been properly closed and now swung open onto a dark hall, filled with the boxes of books and files that Morvan was forever promising he would sort out some day. Vilar closed the door behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the house, still cool from the night, he walked down the hall towards the area Morvan had his office, in one corner of the living room.

  He called out at the doorway, expecting no reply, and noticed that the lamp on the desk was on and the two large computers in sleep mode, displaying the same mountain scene. There was a faint smell of coffee. Vilar saw a red bowl and, next to it, a few crumbs of bread. The desk, which usually groaned under the weight of notebooks, maps, memo pads, diaries, pens and C.D. cases, was bare. All the tools of the former gendarme’s trade had vanished. It had been a thorough cleanup. Vilar was about to click the mouse to wake the computer, but his finger hovered over it. There might be fingerprints everywhere.

  He moved through the house, flinging open doors. Not a trace of Morvan, nothing of the usual chaos, nothing that gave him the slightest clue as to what had become of him. Everything was filed away, with the obsessive neatness of an ex-soldier. The bed was immaculately made and the wardrobe, where everything was neatly piled and lined up as if for inspection, smelled of lavender. He had not really been expecting to find anything, but he would press on, in the teeth of the evidence, if it meant him getting even a few millimetres closer to Pablo.

  Vilar was relieved not to have discovered Morvan’s dead body and tried to feel hopeful that they might still find him alive, though every step he took in the empty house persuaded him otherwise. He had to believe the link was not yet broken, to maintain the dream that one day he might reach out his hand and clasp his son’s. And perhaps also because he had more respect for the man than he realised. In the kitchen nothing was out of place. The half-full cafetière was cold, in the sink there was one plate and a glass. The bathroom smelled of lavender and soap. Two towels were spread out, dry and a little rough.

  He went back and sat down at the computers, his head whirling with theories and questions. Morvan had spent a dozen years investigating paedophile networks and missing children, he had insisted that they meet in person, and Morvan was not the sort of man who insisted without reason, he was not impulsive, quite the contrary, he was quick to dash false hopes, quick to remember that he had to stick to the facts, follow the evidence, take no shortcuts …

  Morvan was not here, and he had not nipped out to buy cigarettes – which he got by the carton for free from a friend who worked in Customs. Vilar could not imagine why this man might have disappeared, still less who might stand to gain, unless he really had found an important lead. Besides, no-one knew whether he worked alone or in a team, or whether he shared information with officers who were still on the force – something that would make his abduction, his death, pointless and deeply dangerous to anyone involved.

  Unable to restrain himself, Vilar found a tissue and gently pressed ENTER on both keyboards. The hard drives whirred, and he heard the fans purring.

  He felt his heart stop and lurch into his throat.

  On an open document, written in huge letters, was the message:

 
I’VE GOT THE BOY COME AND GET HIM!

  He jumped to his feet, backed away from the desk, then turned to look at the screen, reading and rereading these two lines as though some encoded meaning might suddenly be revealed. He stood in the middle of the room, gasping for breath, his mouth open, whispering his son’s name over and over: “Pablo”, until his mouth was dry and he had to go to the kitchen and take a long drink from the tap. He had never felt so thirsty. He filled his mouth with water, spat it out, gulping more until he could not breathe.

  When finally he stood up again, he felt faint and had to lean on the kitchen table.

  “Pablo,” he whispered again as he trudged back to the computers. He felt as though his son were the prisoner of this message and for an instant was gripped by the sort of fantasy that children have when they imagine actors trapped inside the TV and want to prise off the screen to let them out. He reached a hand towards the desk and exhaled violently, realising that he had been holding his breath for some time.

  He explored the hard drives. Nothing. Everything had been erased, including the encrypted files Vilar knew about. He stared at the Welcome screen, at the flock of sheep on a mountain slope. He slumped back in the chair and closed his eyes. To get Morvan’s passwords, someone had tortured him, forced him to talk. Vilar glanced around him, looking for some sign of a struggle, some clue as to what might have happened. No. That was stupid. There would be nothing, of course.

  Someone had meticulously planned all this. Someone who was no doubt plotting his next move. Suddenly, it occurred to Vilar that the room might be bugged, that they might be watching him, and he peered into the shadowy corners of the room, studied everything on the desk looking for any sort of recording device, and once again felt like a fool and realised that this was an obvious mistake. He listened, watched, trying to detect the slightest movement in the air, searching for some trace of the man who had been here, who had probably sat in the chair where he was sitting, hoping that a whiff of cigarette smoke, a smell of aftershave or sweat, might cause whoever had abducted Morvan and his secrets to materialise.