There’s just one last question.
Is there still a way for me to keep my hard-earned cash: yes or fucking no?
I think hard, turning all the options over in my head. Only one solution presents itself.
Sarqueville.
Let’s pay Paul Cousin a visit.
41
The doors open and close. There’s a positive feel to the dreary thud, yet I’m scared. I’ve come out alive and in one piece, with the exception of a few fingers. I don’t want to make one more mistake.
And when I step through the prison door, I’m still not sure whether I’m going to attempt one last play.
As ever, I’m going to let circumstances decide for me.
The street is divided into a perfect triangle.
There’s me with my back to the prison gate, empty handed and wearing my last remaining suit.
To my left, on the other side of the road, there’s Charles. Good old Charles. Confronted with the dual challenge of staying both upright and stationary, he is leaning against a wall. As soon as I get out, he lifts his left hand as a sign of victory. He must have come by bus which, if true, is nothing short of miraculous.
There to my right, on the far pavement, is David Fontana, who gets out of an enormous 4×4 to intercept me. Full of exuberance, Fontana, with that same dynamic stride.
And no one else.
Just the three of us.
I look left and right to find Nicole. The girls are meant to be joining us later for dinner, but Nicole . . . where is she?
On seeing Fontana heading my way so purposefully, my gut instinct is to look for help. I take a backward step.
Charles has kicked into gear, too. Fontana turns and points a finger at him. Clearly intimidated, Charles stops dead in the middle of the street.
Fontana’s in front of me, a few feet away. He is radiating a negative aura. I know that if he pretends to smile, it gets even worse: he exudes ferociousness.
He pretends to smile.
“My client has kept his side of the deal. Now it’s your turn.”
He rummages in his pocket.
“Here are your keys. The keys to your apartment.”
My internal alarm is triggered.
“Where’s my wife?”
“As you’ve never been to the place before,” he adds, ignoring my question, “I’ve made a note of the address. And here’s the number for the keypad.”
He holds out a piece of paper, which I grab. His steely eyes don’t blink.
“You have one hour, Delambre. One hour to make the transfer into my client’s account.”
He nods toward the piece of paper.
“The bank details are at the top.”
“But . . .”
“I can assure you that your wife is eager to have you home.”
I try to support myself, but behind me is just empty space.
“Where is she?”
“She’s safe, don’t panic. At least she’ll be safe for the next hour. After that, I’m no longer answerable for anything.”
He gives me no time to respond. His cell phone is already in his hand. The blood drains from my face. Fontana listens, then holds it out to me.
“Nicole?”
I pronounce her name as if I’d just come home and couldn’t figure out where she was.
“Alain . . .”
She pronounces my name as if she were on the brink of drowning but trying to remain calm.
Her voice pierces me and runs right down my spine.
Fontana snatches the phone out of my hand.
“One hour,” he says.
“It’s not possible.”
He already looked set to leave, so I blurted this out with as much conviction as I could manage. Fontana glares at me. I take a deep breath. Crucial to speak slowly, to make my sentences flow.
Another golden rule of management: trust in your skillset.
“The money’s stored in various accounts, all of them offshore. What with the different time zones and stock exchange trading hours . . .”
I egg myself on: Believe in yourself! You’re an international finance expert; he’s just an asshole! You know what you’re talking about! He’s got no fucking idea! Keep hammering it home!
“. . . the time needed to verify sales, redeem shares, process payments, approve passwords . . . It’s just not possible. I’ll need at least two hours. More like three, in fact.”
Fontana didn’t see this one coming. He thinks about it, looking for a shred of doubt in my eyes, a bead of sweat on my forehead, or an unusual dilation of the pupil. Then he looks at his watch.
“You’ve got until 6:30 p.m.”
“What guarantee do I have . . . ?”
Fontana wheels around furiously.
“None.”
He doesn’t pick up on my distress. I, on the other hand, have just noticed a crucial development: for Fontana, this is no longer simply about sealing a deal; I have become an object of personal hatred. Despite all his experience, I’ve caught him off-guard several times. For him, this is now a matter of honor.
In a few seconds, the street is deserted. Charles, who’d managed to make it as far as the street lamp, resumes his journey along the pavement unaided.
I rest my hand on his shoulder.
Charles is all I have left.
We hug each other. It’s weird, but he reeks of kirsch. It’s been ten years since I smelled that.
“I get the feeling you’re in deep shit,” Charles says.
“It’s my wife, Nicole . . .”
I have no way of explaining why I hesitate. I should already be sprinting to the nearest computer, getting online, fetching the lucre, filling up the bucket, and dumping it in Exxyal’s coffers. I’m holding the keys to our new apartment. There’s a little label on a green plastic thing, like a real estate agent’s set. I read the address. My god, it’s on avenue de Flandre. There’s nothing but dreary low-rise buildings and anonymous apartment towers out there. I could have guessed as much from the photos. This settles it for me.
“Your wife not there?”
Whenever I’ve thought about this money, I’ve pictured maybe twenty, a hundred, a thousand times the sort of immaculate apartment Nicole and I would be able to afford. The girls, too.
“Don’t worry sure as anything she’ll be there waiting.”
In this place, I imagine Nicole laying out the same worn-out kitchenware. In the sitting room, the carpet will be as frayed as her cardigan. Fuck. After all we’ve been through, we can’t just let it all go. Rouen’s two hours away. It’s doable. They can’t do anything to her. They won’t touch her. But first I have to call her.
“Have you got your cell phone?”
It takes Charles a bit of time to grasp what I’m talking about.
“Your cell phone . . .”
Charles twigs. He goes in search of his phone—this could take all day.
“Here, let me.”
I sink my hand into the pocket he was heading for, grab the phone, and punch in Nicole’s number. I picture her with her cell phone. The girls have teased her about it for years. It’s an ancient thing she’s never wanted to part with. A horrendous orange job, virtually first generation, that weighs a ton and barely fits in her hand. There can’t be another one like it anywhere in the world. She’s always telling us to leave her old gizmo alone—it’s hers and it works just fine. When it dies, how will she be able to pay for a new one?
A woman’s voice. It must be Yasmine, the young Arab woman from the hostage taking.
“You calling your wife?” Charles asks.
“Put my wife on!” I scream.
The girl weighs it up, then says: “Wait there.”
Then it’s Nicole.
“Have they hurt you?”
That’s my first question. Because in my head, they’ve already done awful things. I feel a tingle in each of my knuckles, even the ones that don’t work anymore.
“No,” Nicole says.
I barely recognize her voice. It’s completely hollow. Her fear is palpable.
“I don’t want them to hurt you. You mustn’t be afraid, Nicole. You have nothing to be afraid of.”
“They say they want the money . . . What money, Alain?”
She’s crying.
“Did you take their money?”
Too complicated to answer that.
“I’ll give them everything they want, Nicole, I promise you. Promise me they haven’t touched you!”
Nicole can’t speak through her tears. She utters syllables that I can’t make out. I try to keep her on the line.
“Do you know where you are? Nicole, tell me if you know where you are!”
“No . . .”
Her voice is like a little girl’s.
“Are you in pain, Nicole?”
“No . . .”
I’ve only heard her cry like this once before. It was six years ago, when she lost her father. She collapsed on the kitchen floor in tears, screaming endless words, in a horrendous state. She had the same sobbing, high-pitched voice.
“That’s enough,” says the woman.
The line goes dead. I’m rooted to the pavement. The silence is brutally abrupt.
“That your wife?” Charles asks, slow on the uptake as ever. “You in the shit then?”
He’s a sweet man, Charles. I’ve been paying him no attention, but he’s still there, waiting patiently, bathed in his eau de kirsch. He’s worried for me.
“I need a car, Charles. Now. Right now.”
Charles whistles. Yup, that really is a thinker. I keep going:
“Listen, I don’t have time to explain . . .”
He stops me with a direct, almost precise gesture, not the kind I would usually associate with him.
“Don’t mess around with me!” I say.
A short silence, then:
“Right,” he says.
He pulls a few crinkled notes out of his pocket, unfolds them, and starts counting.
“Cabs are over there,” he says, jerking his head somewhere behind him.
I don’t need to bother counting—I know how much the custody office lot gave me. I say:
“I’ve got twenty euros.”
“And . . . .” says Charles, counting shakily.
It takes him a crazy amount of time.
“. . . I have twenty, too!” he yells suddenly. “Snap!”
It takes a moment for him to come back to earth after this giddying revelation.
“It’s not quite enough for a full tank, but it’ll have to do.”
42
The taxi hardly waited around. I’m buzzing, adrenaline coursing through my veins as fast as a galloping horse. It takes me less than ten minutes to jack up Charles’s Renault 25, kick away the blocks, and get it back on its tires. Charles is swaying back and forth, always a few steps behind. Everything’s going hellishly fast for him. So fast, in fact, that while he’s still filling up at the Center Leclerc on the corner at 3:45 p.m., we’re actually zooming past Porte Maillot. Five minutes later and we’re joining the autoroute, where the traffic is fine. The car’s steering is pulling hard to the side, and the fact that half my fingers are in a mush doesn’t help the matter. I compare my watch with the clock on the dashboard.
“Aha, look no further,” Charles says, waving his gargantuan watch, “this puppy doesn’t lose a minute in three months!”
A quick bit of arithmetic tells me I have just over two hours left. I call directory assistance and request the Exxyal refinery in Sarqueville. “I’m putting you through,” the voice says. I ask for Paul Cousin. I get pinged from one secretary to another. I ask for Paul Cousin again.
Not there.
I slam on the brakes.
Charles, his bottle of kirsch clenched between his thighs, looks around as quickly as he can, peering through the back window to check whether we’re about to be crunched by a truck.
“How can he not be there?”
“He’s not here yet,” says the girl.
“But he’ll be in today?”
The girl checks her calendar.
“He’ll be in, but it’s a bit of a difficult day . . .”
I hang up. For me, he’ll be in. Meetings, appointments, whatever—he’ll be there. I chase away the thought of Nicole, the sound of her voice. I don’t know where she is, but nothing will happen to her before 6:30 p.m. By which time I’ll have solved the problem.
Fuck you, Fontana.
I clench my jaw. If I could, I’d clench the steering wheel, too, destroying my joints that are already in pieces.
Charles watches the traffic race past. He puts his bottle of kirsch back in its spot under the seat. The enormous chrome bars that serve as bumpers come a third of the way up his windshield and stick out into the other lane a bit. I have no idea what the police will say if they stop us. I don’t even have my license on me.
In theory, Charles’s home is a six-cylinder, 2.5-liter turbo V6. In theory. In reality, it maxes out at 70 miles an hour and shudders like a Boeing 747 preparing for takeoff, with noise levels to match. We can barely hear each other. I stick firmly to the fast lane.
“You can give her some more, you know!” Charles says. “She’s not shy!”
I don’t want to upset him by telling him that my foot’s down as far as it’ll go. He’d be so disappointed. We surrender to the sound of the engine. The car stinks of kirsch.
About an hour in, I tap the dial with my finger. The gauge is going down so fast I can scarcely believe my eyes.
“Yup,” says Charles, “she’s a thirsty girl!”
You’re telling me. She’s sucking it down at twenty-five miles per gallon, no problem. It should get us there, but only just. I do everything I can to keep Nicole from my thoughts. The farther I get from Paris, the closer I feel to her, to saving her.
Fucking hell, I will do this.
I hold the wheel tight because the steering’s wildly, dangerously off-kilter.
“Sore is it?” Charles asks, pointing at my bandages.
“No, that’s not . . .”
Charles nods in agreement. He thinks he knows what I mean. It suddenly strikes me that since his first greeting outside the prison gate, I have taken his cell phone, his twenty euros, and his car, subjecting him to this hazardous journey without saying or explaining anything to him. Charles hasn’t asked me a single question. I turn to him. As he watches the landscape flash past, his face enthralls me.
Charles is a beautiful man. There’s no other word.
He has a beautiful soul.
“Let me explain . . .”
Charles doesn’t look away from the landscape, but just lifts his hand as though to say tell me what you want, when you want, if you want. Don’t fret.
A beautiful, big soul.
So I start explaining.
In doing so, I replay everything. Nicole. The last few years and months. I relive the pathetic hope of landing a job at my age and I see Nicole’s face again as she leans against the door of my office, holding the letter and saying: “My love, this is unbelievable!” The tests, the interview with Lacoste, all my idiotic preparation.
“Ah well, holy shit!” Charles says admiringly. He is deep in thought, his eyes fixed on the passing autoroute.
I talk about my stubbornness and Nicole’s anger. Mathilde’s money and my fist in her husband’s face. The hostage taking. It all comes out.
“Ah well, holy shit!”
By the time he’s digested all the information, we’ve made another eighteen miles.
“This Fontana,” he says, “is he that squat guy with metally eyes?”
Charles had been struck by him at the trial, too.
“Always on the lookout, that guy! And he had some backup as well. Tough bastard that one. What did you say his name was again?”
“Fontana.”
Charles mulls over the name for a long while. He murmurs “Fontana,” chewing on each syllable.
The dial continues its
breakneck descent. You’d think there was a leak in the fuel tank.
“She’s going at less than twenty-five miles per gallon!”
Charles looks skeptical.
“I’d say more like twenty . . .” he says at last.
Perhaps Renault 25 actually means liters . . . At this rate, we won’t have enough. He offers me the bottle but thinks better of it.
“No, that’s true—you’re driving.”
However hard I try to concentrate on other things, I am assailed by the thought of Nicole and her tears over the phone. I’m confident that they haven’t hurt her. They must have grabbed her at the bottom of the building. Adrenaline pumps through my veins faster and faster, surging from head to toe. I picture Nicole sitting tied to a chair. No, that’s crazy—if there are still hours to go, she’ll be free to move. What use would it be to tie her up? No. They’re just keeping an eye on her. What sort of place? Nicole. I think I might be sick. I concentrate on the road ahead. Paul Cousin. Sarqueville. All my thoughts must stay focused on that. If I win this round, I win the whole thing. Nicole will be back, back with me.
I lied to them: transferring their money would have taken half an hour. By now, it could be back in Exxyal’s account.
Nicole could be free.
Instead, I’m getting as far away from her as this old banger will allow.
Have I completely lost my mind?
“Mustn’t cry, my man . . . ,” Charles says.
I hadn’t even noticed. I wipe away my tears with the back of my sleeve. This suit . . . Nicole.
Criquebeuf: almost seventy miles to go. The fuel gauge is sputtering like a candle.
“There’s no way she’s even doing twenty, Charles. Come on, it’s got to be less!”
“Could be . . .”
He leans toward the dial.
“Oh yeah, look at that! Well then, we’ll need to have a think about that . . .”
A sign indicates it’s about four miles to the next service station.
It’s 5:00 p.m.
We’ve only got four euros and some change left.
A few minutes later, the Renault 25 starts juddering. Charles grimaces. I feel ready to cry again and start smacking the steering wheel like a maniac.
“We’ll find something,” Charles assures me.
Will we now. The car bunny-hops more and more severely, so I pull into the slow lane and ease off the accelerator to save the last few seconds. The engine stalls, but I manage to use our momentum to carry us onto the exit for the service station. We can put in four euros of petrol. The car doesn’t so much stop as collapse. It dies. Silence inside. Despondence. I look at the time. I have no idea what to do. Even if I were to change my mind and make the transfer right away, how would I do it? Where would I go?
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