Dopalet, for his part, simply wants to get his hands on the two mad bitches and give them a rough time. Something like what they put him through. A little session about which he could say: they won’t forget that in a hurry. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. When all is said and done, it’s his assault, he has every right to do as he pleases. He’ll get his own back in his own way. After all, it’s a pretty personal thing, revenge.
At first, he thought he would easily be able to track them down. He has heard great things about henchmen from the East and a couple of photos of the girls’ faces, ideally disfigured or maimed, would have been enough for him to feel that they were quits. But he hasn’t been able to find the girls. He hired the finest private detectives. They drew a blank. For a fee that seems exorbitant given the information obtained, Dopalet has been able to leaf through a file of their scholastic achievements, their former addresses, friends, acquaintances, their previous online postings and extensive documentation on their respective families. But he’s not interested in family trees, for fuck’s sake. Amélie begged to differ: she argued that if they hit the families, the girls would be devastated. Dopalet is pragmatic. He wants to hit hard. But he wants to hit the right target. He wants the girls. And even if he has sufficient spiritual enlightenment to one day forgive them, he needs to be sure that they won’t go around telling anyone what they think they know about him. Not that he’s afraid of a police investigation. The incident is outside the statute of limitations. He is afraid of rumours. In getting them, he’ll get what he’s spent months searching for: Bleach’s confession. Once he’s tracked down the girls, everything will be done and dusted.
*
The taxi drops him off outside his building. A few weeks ago, he moved into a place in the thirteenth arrondissement. It’s the first time he has lived in a new build. A magnificent apartment, quite small, but well laid out, with a view of the Seine and the Grande Bibliothèque. He has to drive all the way across Paris to get to his office in the eighth arrondissement. He wanted to settle in a neighbourhood that holds no memories for him. He needs to rebuild, to look to the future. No memories of how things were, before. Amélie has kept the large apartment on boulevard Saint-Michel. He never had the time to grow attached to the place – they were still unpacking boxes when they separated. She couldn’t take it anymore. He understood why she felt the need to distance herself from him. These days, an all-engulfing rage destroys everything he touches. One day, Amélie said, “I need to take a break.” The words are familiar, usually he is the one who says them. There is no such thing as a “break”. Once things are broken, there is no way back.
THROUGH THE WINDOW OF THE CAR, VERNON WATCHES AS they flash past, the prefab buildings with their garish logos, the car parks, the billboards planted between high-voltage pylons. A mournful procession, the architecture of desolation, an assemblage of thankless materials, a landscape with nothing to please the eye. Everywhere they have settled, they have driven through similar zones. On the outskirts of Saint-Brieuc or Perpignan, the same superstores, Go Sport, Boulanger, Auchan, Decathlon, Jardiland, Darty, the same companies selling organic food, the same vast outlet stores selling shoes at factory prices and D.I.Y. materials. They come to a roundabout in the middle of which an improbable sculpture sits enthroned like an insult to common sense: giant mushrooms holding hands and dancing a farandole.
Vernon feels a sudden wave of tenderness for this bleak topography just as Jésus declares, “When something’s this ugly, it has to be saying something.” Mariana quips: “Yeah: fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” and everyone laughs. Véro is sitting in the front seat. On her lap, an enormous plastic bag – brand-new, apple-green, pimped out with multicoloured flowers – starkly contrasts with her general appearance. When she showed up at the car, she announced that she suffered from motion sickness and couldn’t sit in the back. But Vernon could see that she had almost fallen over backwards when she saw the ripped body of Jésus, their driver. What she wants is to sit next to him and lech over him, with feverish sidelong glances. During their train journey, Vernon notices that she has a tendency to stare into space, her mouth hanging open, which makes her seem more disturbing than moronic, especially since she moves her lips without making a sound, as though talking to herself.
In that tone of a capable woman she adopts when she talks about serious matters, she declares: “France is the worst offender in Europe when it comes to destroying peri-urban areas, it’s cancer, that’s what it is. It used to be beautiful, this country. But developers didn’t give a damn whether shopping centres worked or not, as far as they’re concerned it’s just numbers on a balance sheet . . . It’s ridiculous. We’re being governed by idiots.” It is something that comes over her from time to time, she starts talking like a passionate local authority official. Immediately afterwards, she slips back into silence, mouth open as though to catch flies, engrossed in her thoughts.
Vernon is trying to understand how the developers can make these crumbling aircraft hangers look good on a balance sheet . . . How do you make something so ugly look good? He promptly dismisses the question. He thinks about Charles. Now there was someone who could launch into virulent tirades on the subject of technocrats destroying everything that worked in the country in order to make a quick buck. The old man’s rages were spectacular. He would launch into logorrhoeic diatribes punctuated by obsolete insults. There are people who ruin the mood when they get angry, drowning out every other voice and leaving those around them in stunned silence. Charles’ outbursts were completely the opposite. They loosened tongues, they made people want to launch into the fray.
*
Vernon looks at Mariana’s profile. Eyes closed, she is singing “Satellite of Love” in a soft voice. A half-smile plays on her lips. When he looks at her, his resistance gives way. It is an almost painful tenderness, haunted by the presentiment that it will not last. That she is just passing through. Every moment must be savoured for what it is – a grace before ruin.
She hadn’t wanted to leave Paris. Hadn’t wanted to leave behind her girlfriends, the bars where she likes to hang. And she worries, about money – she pays her rent by subletting on Airbnb, one of her friends looks after the keys in exchange for a cut of the rental. But Mariana needs to find work. She cannot imagine living the way they do, from what people leave behind between convergences.
Vernon said, stay, if you like, you can come and meet up with us later, but she wants to be with him. She would be worried to think of him on his own. It’s not jealousy. It’s not very likely that Vernon will have a mad, passionate affair with Véro. Not because Véro is ugly, but because she’s a complete pain in the arse. She’s constantly bellyaching. At the train station, she was disappointed to discover they weren’t travelling first class, and, as soon as Mariana went off to look for some free seats, she grumbled, “All the money the old bastard left you, it’s a crying shame that you’re so tight-fisted,” and Vernon took it as a joke as he struggled with her suitcases, because Véro has a bad back and can’t lift heavy objects. Véro is constantly bitching. Next, it was the price of beer in the buffet car. Outrageous. Not that it stopped her buying one, and a croque monsieur that stank out the whole carriage. She hasn’t touched a cent of the inheritance, not yet, but she spends money like it’s burning a hole in her pocket. She says she’s afraid she’ll kick the bucket before she has time to blow it all.
*
Vernon tried to persuade Véro to wait until the next convergence to see what the camp was like. She insisted, and he agreed. Jésus has not said a word since they set off, but Vernon can read the disapproval on his face. Jésus is used to being stared at. He is so staggeringly beautiful that it almost makes people uneasy. Even so, he must be surprised at the way Véro is eyeing him with that slightly scandalised air. Slightly worried, even.
*
Between convergences, there are only four or five people living at the camp, the others come and go, and while it’s not forbidden to
bring in outsiders, it happens so rarely that it has become a sort of unspoken rule. Jésus is Pamela’s boyfriend, he’s one of the regulars. They are often off travelling, since they are the ones who scout for locations for the next camp. Jésus showed up at one of the convergences. Pamela immediately took him under her wing. Before becoming her full-time assistant, he was a surfer. He is accustomed to the nomadic life. He is a good ten years younger than Pamela and hails from Kenya. Vernon checked it out – his beauty has nothing to do with where he was born, it is utterly exceptional. In the same way that he finds it’s somewhat exceptional for someone to be African and a surfer – not that he knows anything about it. When he is not acting as the camp chauffeur, Jésus spends his days on a bike. Everything he does becomes interesting because of the perfect body that goes with it. Pamela doesn’t have a driving licence – she’s a true-blue Parisian. It is Jésus who drives the battered old bottle-green Polo. And even that he does with style. At the camp, it’s not just the girls who gaze hungrily at him – he has an animal beauty of the kind you never get used to. Aside from him, and, more recently, Mariana, the other permanent residents are founding members: the Hyena, Olga, Pamela and Vernon. There are rarely six. Then there are the veterans – Kiko, Sylvie, Emilie, Xavier, Patrice and Antoine – who visit regularly. And the sound engineers, two girls who came from Bordeaux to the very first convergence and have joined the group to work on Alex Bleach’s tapes. Before they showed up, Vernon had come up with a hack that allowed him to mix some of the audio fragments into certain songs. The girls know all about binaural beats and have considerably improved the process. Their work is incredibly precise. Vernon has always loved watching sound engineers at work, the way they obsess over details that are incomprehensible to mere mortals. They show up without warning between concert dates. In hindsight, it’s strange to think that, for months, the group was completely focused on the tape of Bleach’s confession, whereas his real legacy was his work on these strange sound waves, which are neither melodic nor even made up of identifiable sounds, but produce an effect on the listener. Now, they all believe, Lydia Bazooka has transcribed Alex Bleach’s statements. She’s got it into her head to write a book about him, one that no publisher seems to want. She’s been working on it for months. No-one around her can understand why it’s taking so long.
Vernon has found his groove here in this communal life. There are few arguments. At first, sure, it could take two hours of negotiations to decide whether they were going to eat rice with tomato sauce or tuna and corn. Since then, they’ve progressed – they’ve learned to be still. In a community, silence is a priceless commodity. But when Vernon imagines a ten-way discussion on how to use a sum that amounts to almost five hundred thousand euros . . . he’s not sure that everyone will easily come to an agreement.
He withstood the knowing look Véro gave him when he asked her not to mention it to anyone. The sardonic little smile that seemed to say – yeah, yeah, you hippies are all the same, you’re all cold and laid back about money when there’s no food on the table, but when it comes to divvying up a fortune, it’s like getting a bailout from the I.M.F. Vernon has no interest in knowing what she thinks about them in general, and about him in particular.
*
The car turns off the main road. Jésus says he has a photographic memory, at the very least he has a G.P.S. in his brain – every time they set up a new camp, he knows how to get back there from any given location with no need for signposts. He drives through villages and fields. Véro says, “Oh, look, cows. It’s been years since I saw a cow. I haven’t been out of Paris since . . . fuck, I’ve no idea how long. I don’t like cows. They remind me of when I was a kid and used to go on holidays to my aunt’s farm. We had a little stick we used to lead them out to the pasture every morning and bring them in again every night. I was scared of them. I’ve always hated cows. They’ve got beautiful eyes, I know . . . but I can’t abide them.” Then she suddenly whips around and, as though the two were logically connected in her mind, she scowls and says to Vernon: “You don’t wander around buck-naked in this commune of yours, do you? Because let me tell you right now, I’m keeping my clothes on!” Vernon snaps back: “You should know that at our place people do whatever they want,” and from the faint smile she gives him he’s willing to bet that she was hoping that young Jésus would strip off as soon as they arrived at the camp. But she says seriously, “No, because when I was young, I went to a commune once. No-one warned me. And when I got there, everyone was nude. I didn’t eat a thing the whole week I was there, I can tell you. Imagine – you’re sat around a table for twelve with tits and balls hanging out everywhere, so when someone passes you the salad, it kind of puts you off your food a bit.” Then she falls silent. The car thrums to the first bars of Johnny Cash’s version of “Personal Jesus”. Mariana, who knows it by heart, leans forwards and croons into the driver’s ear. They get along well, they spend a lot of time together. Vernon considered being jealous – but the boy is too beautiful. He can’t see himself telling his girlfriend, “If the opportunity arises, I forbid you from sleeping with him.” He is not particularly broad-minded, and he’s never had fantasies about swinging, but this guy is fucking hot. Even the lesbian separatists want to sleep with Jésus. He is the only person at the camp who has a more devoted gang of groupies than Vernon. The guys want to sleep with Jésus. He and Pamela make for an unsettling couple, to say the least.
*
There is something of the goddess about her since she has been with him. Unless it is the camp that agrees with her. She quickly got her bearings in this new life they have fashioned for themselves, which consists of finding a site to pitch camp, staying there a few weeks while preparing a convergence, then cleaning up everything and moving on. Vernon plays the diva – he allows himself to be moved from place to place. Pamela is a gifted administrator. She takes on an improbable list of responsibilities and dispatches them with disconcerting ease. When the convergences begin, she is in her element, she is transformed into a stationmaster: she directs the throng of people, telling them where to pitch their tents, recites the list of things that are allowed and those that are frowned on, checks they have no mobile phones, hands out schedules, reassures the timorous, calms the panicked and sets the more resourceful to work. When the time comes to strike camp, it’s the same story: who does what, who leaves with whom, in which car . . .
Vernon gets out of the car and stretches. The dogs scamper around them, barking. Véro freezes, petrified – “You never told me you lived in a kennel. I hate mutts!” – and Mariana laughs as she opens the boot. “You’re a real godsend, you are, you don’t like cows, you don’t like dogs . . .”
Olga and Victor have taken in seven dogs. Each one saved from certain death, according to the rescuers. Olga tends to them and feeds them. But although she has an innate authority over humans, when it comes to training dogs, she is hopeless. So they do whatever they like. Luckily, they’re good-tempered animals. Sometimes, Xavier will say, “Since I’m here for a couple of days, I’ll make the most of the time to train the dogs,” and he can be heard giving orders in a splendid stentorian tone, truly his master’s voice, which, as a sound, is superb, but has not the least effect on the pack. When she first saw them, Mariana said, “Fucking hell, even your dogs are activists, they fight for the right to do as they please against the oppressive human regime,” and this notion delighted Olga, who let them run wilder still. She gives an order and the dogs look at her, astonished, not necessarily restive or rebellious, just surprised at the change of tone in her voice. Set a stopwatch and within thirty seconds she will have given in, dropped to the ground and be rolling around with the dogs, burbling, “Who’s got lovely eyes then, huh? How did you all get to be so cute, so cute?” When she genuinely needs something, she takes out a biscuit – anyone would think that her pockets are routinely restocked with dog biscuits – and simply leads the animal to the desired goal. And everyone has grown accustomed to living with the dog
s, to tossing a ball seven hundred times a day for the arthritic pit bull, seeing the Westie scamper over at the clink of cutlery, rubbing the schnauzer’s tummy, taking the chihuahua onto their lap otherwise he’ll yap tirelessly because he doesn’t like being on the ground or reassuring the elegant white greyhound brought here from Spain by a gang of punkettes who know that Olga loves dogs.
Vernon Subutex Three Page 8