Tarantula

by Thierry Jonquet

  As your initial anxiety turned to panic under the relentless scrutiny of those lights, you began zigzagging through the forest. You could see, in your rearview mirror, that the driver of the car was alone. He seemed to have no wish to close on you.

  The storm finally arrived. Drizzle quickly gave way to driving rain. After every curve the car would reappear. Streaming with water, you were soon shivering. Your bike’s gas gauge had started to flash ominously. You had fuel enough for a very few more kilometers. By this time you had changed course so many times that you were lost in the forest. You no longer had the slightest idea which way to go to get to the nearest village.

  The road surface was slippery, and you slowed down. The car leaped toward you, overtaking you and almost forcing you to skid out onto the shoulder.

  But you braked, and the bike spun around. As you started up again to leave the way you had come, you heard your pursuer’s brakes squeal as he too turned and began trailing you once again. It was darkest night, and sheets of rain made it impossible to see the road ahead.

  In desperation you tried to mount the embankment at the edge of the road, hoping you might escape through the trees, but you skidded in the mud, and the 125 fell on its side, and the engine cut out. You managed to right the machine, though it was not easy.

  Back in the saddle, you kicked the starter pedal, but the fuel tank was empty. The beam of a powerful flashlight was roving across the underbrush. To your dismay, it fastened on you as you raced for the cover of a fallen tree. You fingered the blade in the shank of your boot—a Wehrmacht knife that you always carried…

  Sure enough, the car had pulled up sharply on the road. You felt your stomach knot at the sight of a massive silhouette getting a gun into firing position. The barrel was pointing in your direction. The report melded with the thunder claps. The flashlight had been laid down on the car roof. It went out. You ran then and were soon out of breath. You ripped your hands as you tore your way through the brushwood. From time to time the flashlight would come on again behind you, illuminating your flight. You could no longer hear anything; your heart throbbed crazily; mud clung to your boots and slowed you down. The knife was clasped tightly in your fist.

  How long did the chase go on? Gasping for breath, you leaped over fallen trees in the blackness. A trunk lying flat on the ground tripped you, and you went sprawling on the soaking earth.

  Laid out in the mud, you heard that cry, which was more like a growl. He stamped on your wrist, crushing your hand under the heel of his boot. You released the knife, and he fell upon you, pushing your shoulders down with his hands. Then one hand moved to your mouth, the other was clamped about your throat, and a knee was driven into your flank. You tried to bite the palm of his hand, but your teeth closed on nothing but a clod of earth.

  He continued to hold you tightly against him. The two of you remained like this, welded together, in the darkness … The rain stopped…

  3

  Alex Barny rested on a camp bed in an attic room. He had nothing to do, except wait. The chatter of the cicadas in the garrigue was an unrelenting racket. Through the window Alex could see the crooked silhouettes of olive trees in the night, forms fixed in bizarre poses. With his shirtsleeve, he mopped his brow, where pearls of acidic sweat had gathered.

  A naked bulb dangling from a wire attracted clouds of mosquitoes; every fifteen minutes or so, Alex would get furious and bombard them with Fly-Tox. On the concrete floor, a large dark circle of squashed mosquitoes continued to grow, shot through with specks of red.

  Alex struggled to his feet and, relying on a cane, hobbled out of his bedroom and down to the kitchen of the farmhouse, which was somewhere in the depths of the countryside between Cagnes and Grasse.

  The fridge was well stocked with a variety of provisions. Alex took out a can of beer, pulled off the tab, and drank it down. Belching loudly, he opened another can and went outside. In the distance, beyond the olive-covered hillsides, the sea shone in the moonlight, sparkling beneath a cloudless sky.

  Alex took a few cautious steps. His thigh subjected him to brief bouts of searing pain. The dressing dug into his flesh. For two days now there had been no pus, but the wound was reluctant to heal. The bullet had traversed the muscular mass, happily missing the femoral artery and the bone.

  He leaned with one hand against the trunk of an olive-tree and urinated, spraying a column of ants engaged in the transport of an immense pile of twigs.

  He began drinking once more, sucking on the can of beer, swilling the foam around his mouth, spitting it out. He sat down on a bench on the porch, puffing and blowing, belching once more. He fished a pack of Gauloises from his shorts pocket. The beer had splashed onto his T-shirt, already filthy with grease and dust. Through the cotton material, he pinched his stomach, taking a fold of flesh between thumb and forefinger. He was getting fat. Over the last three weeks of forced idleness, of nothing but sleeping and eating, he had been getting fat.

  Alex ground his foot into a two-week-old newspaper on the floor. The heel of his hiking boots covered a face staring out from the front page: his own. Alongside the image was a column of large print in which a name stood out, in even larger characters. It was his name: Alex Barny.

  There was another photograph, too, smaller: a guy with his arm around a woman with a baby in her arms. Alex cleared his throat and hawked onto the paper. His saliva, which had picked up a few traces of tobacco on its way, landed on the baby’s face. He spat again, this time hitting his intended target, the face of a cop smiling at his little family. A cop who was now dead…

  He emptied the rest of the beer over the paper, causing the ink to run, blurring the pictures and bloating the newsprint. For a few moments, he was lost in contemplation of the progressive staining of the pages by the trails of liquid. Then he stamped on the whole mess, reducing the paper to shreds.

  A wave of anxiety flooded through him. His eyes misted over, but no tears came; the sobs that formed in his throat failed to materialize, leaving him distraught. He tidied up his dressing, rearranging the folds and tightening the whole thing by shifting the safety pin.

  With his hands flat on his knees, he stayed where he was, staring into the night. During the first days after his arrival at the farmhouse, he had found it devilishly hard to adjust to the solitude. He had a slight fever because of his infected wound, and there was a buzzing in his ears that blended unpleasantly with the chirping of the cicadas. He scrutinized the garrigue, and often thought he detected movement in the scrub; night sounds filled him with alarm. His revolver was always in his hand or, when he lay down, on his stomach. He feared that he might go mad.

  The bag full of banknotes lay at the foot of his bed. He would dangle his arm over the iron bedpost and plunge his hand among the wads of bills, turning them over, fondling, enjoying the feel of them.

  He had moments of euphoria when he would suddenly burst out laughing and tell himself that after all nothing could happen to him. They would never find him. He was safe here. There were no other houses, no neighbors, for over a kilometer around. Even then, it was only some Dutch or German tourists who had bought up a ruined farmhouse for a vacation home. Some hippies with herds of goats. A potter. Nothing to fear! In the daytime, he occasionally observed the road and the vicinity through binoculars. The foreigners would take long walks, picking flowers. Their children were extraordinarily blond—two little girls and a boy slightly older. The mother would sunbathe naked on the flat roof of their house. Alex would spy on her, squeezing his crotch and grousing to himself…

  He went back inside and made himself an omelet, which he ate straight from the pan, mopping up the sloppy part with bread. Then he played darts, but the to-ing and froing needed to retrieve the darts after each turn soon wore him out. There was also a pinball machine, which had worked when he arrived but had now been on the blink for a week.

  He turned the television on. He couldn’t make up his mind between a Western on France 3 and a variety show on Channel
1. The Western was about a bandit who became a judge after having terrorized an entire town. The guy was crazy—he went around with a bear—and his head was always strangely out of kilter. The fact was that this banditcum-judge was the survivor of a botched hanging … Alex muted the sound.

  He had seen a judge once, a real one, complete with a red robe and a weird white fur collar. At the Hall of Justice in Paris. Vincent had dragged him there to witness the superior court in action. He was a little bit nuts, Vincent. He was also Alex’s only real friend.

  At present, Alex was in deep shit. Vincent, he thought, would have known what to do in this kind of situation: how to get out of this hole without getting caught by the cops, how to unload the bills, whose serial numbers were undoubtedly known, how to get to a foreign country, how to get oneself forgotten. Vincent spoke English, Spanish…

  In the first place, Vincent would never have let himself be fooled so easily. He would have foreseen the cop—and the hidden camera in the ceiling that recorded all Alex’s exploits. Some exploits! Beginning with his wild intrusion into the branch bank, yelling and pointing his revolver at the teller…

  Vincent would have thought to check out the regular Monday customers—especially the cop, who was always off duty on Mondays and always withdrew cash at ten in the morning before going to do his shopping at the Carrefour supermarket nearby. Vincent would have worn a ski mask; he would have shot up the surveillance camera … Alex had worn a ski mask, as a matter of fact, but the cop had torn it off. Vincent would not have hesitated to shoot that guy who wanted to play the hero. If you were going to die…

  But it was he, Alex—petrified, waiting for that fraction of a second too long instead of deciding to open fire instantly—who had allowed himself to be taken by surprise. It was he, Alex, who had taken the bullet in the thigh; he, Alex, who had dragged himself out of the bank streaming blood and clutching a bag stuffed with bills. No, there was no denying that Vincent would have done a far better job.

  Vincent, though, was no longer around. No one knew where he was hiding. Perhaps he was dead? In any case, his absence had been a real catastrophe for Alex.

  Still, Alex had learned. He had made new friends after Vincent vanished. One of them had even supplied him with false papers and this hideout in the middle of the scrubland of Provence. The almost four years since Vincent’s disappearance had transformed Alex, and his father’s farm with its tractor and its cows was very far off now. For a time, he had worked as a bouncer at a nightclub in Meaux, where his massive paws served to make short work, on many a Saturday night, of wine-besotted and unruly patrons. Alex soon had fine clothes, a large ring, his own car. Quite the big shot!

  The more he beat people up for his employers, however, the more he came to feel that mugging a few on his own account would be no bad thing. So Alex mugged and mugged and mugged. He did so late at night, in the higher-class districts of Paris, as customers tumbled out of the clubs and restaurants. He garnered a rich harvest of wallets, more or less well filled, and plenty of the credit cards that came in so handy for maintaining his ever more lavish wardrobe.

  But Alex grew tired of thumping people so hard and so often in exchange for what was after all a pathetic payoff. It would take just one bank job—a large-scale mugging, in effect—and he could be through with mugging for life…

  He lay limply in an armchair, staring at a blank television screen. A mouse ran squeaking along the baseboard just inches from his hand. With a swift motion he straightened his arm, palm open, and his fingers closed over the small furry body. He could feel the tiny heart throbbing in fear. He remembered the fields, the wheels of the tractor startling the rats and birds concealed in the hedgerows.

  He brought the animal close to his face and began to squeeze it gently. His nails dug into its silken coat. The squeaks became sharper. Then his gaze lighted upon the front page of the newspaper, on the boldface print, on his own image held prisoner by the columns of reporters’ baloney.

  He got to his feet, returned to the front steps of the house, and then with all his strength hurled the mouse away into the dark of the night.

  There was that taste of mildewed earth in your mouth, all that mud underneath you, tepid and soft against your back (your shirt was ripped), that odor of moss and rotting wood. And then there was the vise of his hands around your neck and over your face, those iron fingers holding you fast, that knee braced against the small of your back and pressing down with the full weight of his body behind it, as though he wanted to force you down into the ground and make you disappear.

  He was panting, trying to get his wind back. And you were not moving now—just waiting. The knife was nearby, in the grass somewhere to your right. He would surely be obliged, any moment now, to relax his grip. When he did, you could heave up, throw him off, get him off balance, grab the knife, and kill him, kill him—rip the bastard’s belly open!

  Who was he? A madman? A sadist on the prowl in the forest? For long seconds the two of you lay painfully entwined in the mire, husbanding your breath. Did he mean to kill you? To rape you and then kill you?

  The forest was utterly silent, inert, devoid of life. He said nothing, breathing more easily now. You awaited some gesture—a hand, perhaps, moving to your groin. Something of that sort. Little by little you got control of your terror; you felt prepared to fight—to jab your fingers into his eyes, to find a place at his throat to bite. But nothing transpired. There you were, beneath his weight, waiting.

  Then he laughed. A little laugh, joyful, ingenuous, juvenile. The laugh of a boy who has just been given a Christmas present. As the laugh ended, you heard his voice, composed, neutral.

  “Don’t be afraid, kid. Don’t move. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  His left hand was removed from your throat, and the flashlight came on. The knife was there, sure enough, protruding from the grass just a few inches away. But, stamping down even harder on your wrist, he grabbed the weapon himself and flung it far away. Your last chance…

  He set the flashlight down and, taking you by the hair, twisted your face into the beam of yellow light. You were blinded by it. He spoke once more:

  “Yes, it’s you, all right.”

  His knee ground ever harder into your back. You cried out, but he clamped a vaporous rag over your mouth. You fought not to succumb, but by the time his grip loosened a little, you were already dead to the world. A great bubbling torrent of blackness rolled over you.

  It was a long time before you came back to your senses. Your memory was a fog. You had had a nightmare, a ghastly dream. Were you in your bed?

  No, everything was dark, dark as deep sleep. But now you were well and truly awake. You screamed. A long, long scream. You tried to move, to get up.

  But your wrists, your ankles were shackled. You could barely move at all. In the obscurity you felt the ground on which you lay. It was hard and covered with some kind of oilcloth. Behind you was a wall padded with moss. Your chains were anchored to it, and solidly. You pulled on them, bracing a foot against the wall, but clearly even a far greater traction than you could muster would have been equally ineffective.

  Only then did you become aware of your nakedness. You were naked, completely naked, chained to a wall. Frenetically, you inspected your body for signs of wounds that might somehow be causing no pang. But your delicate skin was as intact as it was pain-free.

  It was not cold in that dark room. Naked as you were, you felt no chill. You called, shouted, roared. Then you wept, beating your fists against the wall, rattling your chains, and screaming with impotent rage.

  It seemed that you had been yelling for hours. You were sitting up on the floor, on the oilcloth. You wondered whether you had been drugged, whether all this was hallucination, delusion…Or perhaps you were dead—killed that night on your motorcycle? You could not recall an accident for the moment, but maybe memory would return? Was this what death was like: being chained up in the dark, knowing nothing?…

  But no, you d
ecided, you were alive. You started yelling again. The sadist had taken you captive in the forest, but for some reason he had done you no harm, none.

  I have gone mad—that was another thought that came to you. Your voice was weak, broken, cracked; your throat was dry, and you could no longer shout.

  Then you began to feel thirsty.

  You slept. When you awoke, the thirst was still there, crouched in the shadows, lying in wait. It had kept vigil, patiently, as you slept. Now it gripped your throat, tenacious, perverse. It was a scratchy, thick dust that coated your mouth, a sand that grated between your teeth; not a simple desire to drink, but something quite different, something you had never experienced, something whose name itself, crisp and clear, resembled a whiplash: THIRST.

  You strove to think of something else. You recited poems in your mind. Now and again you raised yourself and called for help, banging on the wall. You screamed: I’m thirsty; you moaned: I’m thirsty; at last you could only think: I’m thirsty! Groaning, you implored, you begged, that you be given something to drink. You regretted having urinated earlier, at the very beginning. You had pulled on your chains as hard as you could, trying to piss away from the patch of oilcloth that was all you had by way of a bed and keep it clean. I’ll die of thirst, you thought, I should have drunk my piss…

  You slept some more. Was it for hours—or just minutes? It was impossible to know, so long as you lay there naked in the dark, without any point of reference.

  A good deal of time had elapsed, however. Suddenly it dawned on you: it was all a mistake! You had been taken for someone else; it was not you that they wanted to torture like this. You mustered all your strength, then screamed:

  “Monsieur, I beg of you! Come here! You have made a mistake! I am Vincent Moreau! You made a mistake! Vincent Moreau! Vincent Moreau!”