He’d taken part in the birth from the beginning to the end. He’d breathed with Claire, he’d pushed with her, they’d cried out together at the moment the baby emerged. Taking in his hands that little ball of a person curled up on itself, he’d felt strong. Invincible, for the first time in his life. Then he’d understood what no one had been able to explain to him. That if the bitter struggles of life shaped character, only the suffocating warmth of a maternity ward could make you a man. A new Gilles Sebag had been born that day.
Séverine had joined them scarcely two years later. A boy, a girl. The king’s choice, as they say. Perfect happiness.
“Good evening!”
A sweet, melodic voice. Gilles extricated himself from his thoughts. He turned around.
“Good evening.”
Claire came toward him. She wore a flowered dress, light on her tanned skin. Her walk was aerial. Earlier, she’d studied dance for ten years and her body remembered it. She bent over him and kissed him on the lips.
“You’re beautiful.”
She gave him an astonished look.
“That’s kind,” she said softly.
“No, it’s not kind, it’s sincere.”
She bent down again and gave him a long, sensual kiss. Their lips lingered. Claire’s cheeks were red. She must have been hot in the car, Sebag said to himself.
“You were late getting home.”
The words had just slipped out of him, and they sounded like a reproach. Fortunately, Claire didn’t notice. She limited herself to blowing out a long sigh.
“We had two difficult cases to deal with: students in tenth grade whose parents are refusing to let them repeat a year.”
Claire was a French teacher. She taught in a high school in Rivesaltes. She was still passionate about her profession. He wished he could say as much about himself.
“What are we eating?” she asked.
“I don’t know. There’s a leftover tomato salad.”
“Again . . . ”
“We can fry up some bacon bits with little onions. That’ll be something new.”
She gave him another kiss on the lips. Tender.
“Can I let you take care of everything? I’d like to have a swim.”
“No problem.”
She let her dress fall to the floor and slowly unhooked her bra. Well! He didn’t know that one. Then she took of her g-string panties and plunged naked into the water.
He contemplated her for a moment. He found her beautiful. Even more beautiful than before. He finished his glass, pulled his feet out of the water, dried them off, and went into the kitchen to make dinner.
When Léo came home, they were finishing the meal on the terrace. He was proud as a peacock and took off his helmet only when he sat down at the table.
“Great,” he said.
“You think a tomato salad is great?” asked Séverine, who was sulking over her dish.
“No, basketball.”
Sebag questioned him in turn.
“Basketball or the scooter?”
Léo laughed.
“Both, Captain.”
“Lieutenant,” Séverine corrected him. “Today, an inspector in the French police is called a lieutenant.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I always forget.”
“I do, too,” Sebag assured him. “And I’m not the only one.”
“Lieutenant!” Léo laughed. “That’s too cool. Like in the States. Papa, are you Starsky or Hutch?”
“Neither. Inspector Gadget, rather.”
Gilles and the children giggled. Claire, who seemed not to have followed the conversation, smiled to be in tune with the others.
After the meal, while they were alone in the kitchen, cleaning up, Gilles asked his wife:
“I have a feeling that you’ve been preoccupied for some time. Is it work?”
“Yes, a little,” she replied without conviction. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the end of the year.”
“Or a mid-life crisis?”
She pretended she was going to slap him.
“Oh, it’s okay, I’m not yet forty.”
“Getting pretty close.”
“Next year.”
“That’s what I said: a few months.”
He kissed her on the neck.
“You’ve never been so beautiful.”
She ran her hand through his hair. Gently made him lift up his head.
“Do you love me?”
“Not yet, but I have a feeling that might happen some day.”
“How soon?”
“Let’s wait another couple of decades.”
They kissed for a long time over the open door of the dishwasher. A little later, at bedtime, he undressed her. She seemed embarrassed. He closed the window and they made love. It was hot.
Claire’s body shone in the moonlight. It was of an almost unreal alabaster color. Gilles caressed her skin. His fingers slipped over her neck, then her back, down to her buttocks.
“J’aime le clair de lune. Et la lune de Claire.”
He’d already told her that countless times, but you had to know how to repeat yourself. She turned her face toward him. Smiled at him with a little too much gravity. Her cheeks were red. Like a little while ago.
CHAPTER 5
She’d eaten. Pasta, cooked too long and not salted enough, but she’d eaten. And drunk, too.
Before she sat down in front of a plate and a glass, the young woman hadn’t realized that she was hungry and thirsty. The fear that was tying her stomach in knots was too intense.
Her jailer had come in on tiptoe. He’d made no sound. She had simply noticed his calm breathing. Before untying her hands, he’d checked to make sure that the mask over her eyes was secure. She’d gotten the message, and assured him she wouldn’t take off the mask. She had talked to him at length, moreover. At first in Dutch, and then, realizing her mistake, in French. The words had come to her all by themselves, even in that language that she still didn’t speak very well. They gushed forth like a tide that has been too long held back. They let out her fear. To speak is to live, it is to remain a human being. And it is also to create a bond. She’d asked her kidnapper questions. About his intentions. His motivations. And his choice.
Why her?
But she’d received no response. He’d taken her hands and put them on the plate. Then he left.
She’d devoured the pasta, shoveling whole forkfuls into her greedy mouth. It was so good to eat. When the body is busy, the mind rests.
After the meal, she’d meekly lain on her stomach to make it easier for him to tie her up again.
He’d returned immediately.
He must be watching her from behind the door. But he’d knocked before coming in. That had astonished her. He’d come up to her, taken her by the arm, and guided her into a corner of the cellar. The cool dampness of the place meant that it had to be a cellar.
The man had made her touch something she had easily identified. A pail. He’d pushed firmly on her lower abdomen, and initially she’d mistaken his intentions; then she understood. Since he didn’t move, she’d ended up lowering her panties in front of him, lifted her skirt, and sat down.
It took hours before she could let go. He hadn’t said a word in protest. Just breathed. Always calmly.
Then he’d taken her back and tied her up again. First her hands. Behind her back. Then her feet. He’d stopped there. Hadn’t tied her hands to her feet.
Her situation was less uncomfortable now. She saw that as a reward for her docility. The rules of the game were simple. That was a positive sign. It had to be a positive sign. She needed one. To keep from cracking. From screaming. Because at first, once her physical needs had been satisfied, she’d felt surprisingly calm. But now that she was alone again in the dark, fear was taki
ng up all the space. It was coming back. Stronger than before.
CHAPTER 6
Sebag had been going over the cab driver’s file for a good half hour when Molina appeared in the office. Jacques was holding a paper cup containing a hot, black liquid that Sebag refused to call coffee.
“So?” Gilles asked abruptly.
“None of his billiards buddies was there yesterday, but I got their names and phone numbers. We’ll be able to contact them this morning.”
Molina took a sip of his coffee before expressing his astonishment
“Weren’t you supposed to be continuing the rounds of the hotels first thing this morning?”
“I started at eight o’clock sharp. I did a dozen of them and then gave up.”
“Ah!”
The task had quickly annoyed him. Going from one hotel to another and showing Lopez’s photo was already not exactly fun, but it was part of the job. What he’d found more difficult to put up with was the way he was received by the hotel staff. At the Hôtel de la République he’d almost blown up at the person on the reception desk, who’d told him, without even glancing at the photo, that he didn’t recognize the taxi driver.
“If you want my opinion, we’re wasting our time. The people who work mornings aren’t going to have seen Lopez. If he’d been to one of these hotels, it would have been in the afternoon or evening, not the morning: he was with his little wife.”
“There are also the hotel registers,” Molina retorted.
When he’d tried to look at them, the other grump at the République had asked if he had a warrant. Sebag felt like making the asshole eat his register page by page. The older he got, the less patience he had in such situations.
Molina wasn’t happy. He didn’t like his colleague giving up so quickly.
“You know,” Sebag continued, “I think we’ve already expanded the circle around the train station enough. Either he went to get laid somewhere right nearby or he could have gone almost anywhere else. After all, we’re not going to visit all the hotels in the department. Do you have any idea how much work that would be?
That was a sure-fire argument. Molina made a quick calculation. The Roussillon plain formed a rough rectangle about twenty-five miles long by twelve miles wide and included not only the city of Perpignan but also the Mediterranean coast, with all its hotels. That made it certain . . . a job impossible to finish before evening. Especially for two such highly motivated inspectors. He leaned back his head and swallowed the last drop of his coffee, crushed the cup in his hand, and threw it in the wastebasket. Then he heaved a long sigh. Defeated if not convinced.
“So what do you think we should do?”
Sebag wasn’t very happy about having won the argument.
“The usual. We poke around and see what turns up.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
“We’ll do the most efficacious thing.”
“And what’s that?”
“No idea.”
Sebag went back to reading Lopez’s file. The cab driver’s two criminal convictions. The first concerned a car theft in August 1994. The young José had gone out with some pals, apparently all sons of Spanish immigrants living in the Saint-Jacques neighborhood of old Perpignan. They’d met some German girls during the day and were supposed to meet them that night in Canet. Since they thought it would look stupid to show up on motorbikes, they’ simply stolen a car. It probably wasn’t their first car theft, but this time they got caught. For speeding. Lopez was in the back seat and he had no police record, but he got two months in jail anyway, suspended: he’d argued with a policeman.
Molina interrupted Sebag’s reading.
“Okay, I’m going to call Lopez’s two billiards buddies. That’s all that’s left to do. I’ll take one, you take the other. Unless you’d rather do it the other way around.”
Since his partner didn’t react, he added:
“Well, if you don’t care, I’ll take one and you take one . . . ”
“Fine with me.”
Lopez’s second conviction went back more than six years. Some kind of fight outside a discotheque. He’d been flirting with a girl, and her boyfriend hadn’t liked it. They’d shouted at each other in the discotheque, and then taken it outside. Lopez had won the fight. Naturally! He had a buddy who held the jealous guy while he beat the shit out of him. The victim got two weeks off work, and Lopez got six months in jail.
“That’s perfect, Mr. Barrère, thanks for fitting us in so quickly. I’ll send you one of my colleagues; he’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Jacques Molina hung up the phone; he looked happy.
“Well?” Sebag asked.
“It worked, pal. I got us two interviews this morning. I’m going to see Fabrice Gasch; he runs a security company in Cabestany, and I’ve got an appointment with him at ten-thirty. You’re going to see Gérard Barrère. He’s waiting for you. He also has a company located near the station. I didn’t understand very well what he does, exactly, something in public relations. Lopez knew people . . . ”
“Among professionals, that’s understandable. Shall I meet you here afterward?”
“No, not here, it’s too depressing. The less I’m here the better I feel. And by the time we’ve finished it’ll be time for a drink. Meet you at the Carlit?”
“Great!”
“In fact, I hardly know Lopez.”
Gérard Barrère gave him an armor-plated professional smile. He was a little hair ball, hardly over five feet tall. His flowered shirt, unbuttoned over his chest, revealed a dense, damp savanna. He was sweating heavily despite the air-conditioning, which was set for a temperature close to that of Stockholm on Christmas Eve.
“We met in a billiards hall and played a game. Which I won, moreover. Since then, we’ve played regularly. He comes every Friday.”
His mouth opened wider, showing the little, pointed teeth of a carnivore.
“Generally speaking, I win,” he added.
“When did you first play?”
“About six months ago. More or less.”
Gérard Barrère had rejected his office in favor of sitting on chairs that were fashionable but nonetheless soft and comfortable. A low round table separated him from the inspector. The room was well-lighted, the walls light-colored, and the furniture made of glass. Everything gave an impression of transparency and conviviality. Gérard Barrère’s gestures were ample and gentle but his apparent affability was contradicted by two bright, piercing little eyes hidden behind round glasses.
“Do you play for money?” Sebag asked.
It was a direct question, as Sebag was well aware. That was his way of refusing the crony relationship that his interlocutor was offering him. Barrère pursed his lips but continued to smile.
“Oh, Inspector, how could you think that?”
His right hand rotated the silver band on his Rolex. He was lying and didn’t even try to hide it. One might even say that it amused him.
“When did you last play with him?”
“Last Friday, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
Sebag felt a tingling in his fingers. He was beginning to get annoyed.
“Some weeks I play billiards two or three evenings in a row. But if Lopez was there, I suppose it was a Friday.”
“That doesn’t help me much.”
“I’m very sorry about that.”
Sebag looked carefully, but he detected no sorrow in Barrère’s eyes.
“Was he alone?”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought my question was clear enough: was José Lopez alone or was someone with him the last time you saw him?”
Barrère took his time before answering. As if he were weighing the pros and cons. His eyes left Sebag’s and looked somewhere behind him.
“Ye
s, of course, he was alone. As usual.”
Barrère was still lying, but this time trying not to show it. He turned his eyes away from the inspector again. Sebag took advantage of this to have a close look at the man. He had little, close-set eyes under thick but delicate eyebrows. His mustache looked like a freshly trimmed broom. A thick neck under a dimpled chin. The body was husky without being fat. Sebag’s eyes moved down Barrère’s white, hairy arms and stopped at his small hands. Manicured. Being ugly doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to take care of yourself.
Since Barrère was still looking behind him, Sebag decided to turn around. On the other side of the glass wall that protected the office from indiscreet ears, a pale secretary sat facing them, diligently filing her nails. When she saw the inspector looking at her, she quickly pressed her legs together.
“What exactly do you do, Mr. Barrère? I’m not sure I completely understand.”
The mustache lengthened as Barrère smiled.
“I’m an event organizer,” he answered, handing him a business card.
Sebag examined it closely. On it was the name—Perpign’And Co—along with the firm’s address, phone number, and website.
“That doesn’t get me very far,” he said.
Barrère furrowed his brow and raised the left corner of his upper lip, hollowing his cheek. This meant something like: “You’re really stupid, but it’s okay, I’m willing to explain it to you.”
“I organize events for businesses. Seminars, parties, weekend retreats. Sometimes trips.”
Sebag looked doubtful.
“And you do all right?”
“I can’t complain,” he answered, smiling complacently and making a broad sweep with his arm to invite Sebag to admire the luxury of his place.
Objects worth their weight in cash and ostentation were arranged here and there on the glass furniture. A few old books, probably rare, a statuette in genuine ivory, numbered Tintin figurines, a coaster containing ancient Roman coins. On the desk was a miniature replica of Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man.
“It’s a copy, but it’s a real one,” Barrère explained.
Summertime All the Cats Are Bored Page 4