‘By knife throwing?’
‘By his whole performance. He threw the knives at a girl strapped to a spinning wheel and the knives framed her body. My stomach was churning, almost knotted, throughout the performance. When we left, I asked my dad whether we could go again the following night. We couldn’t. So I started saving money, secretly, some of it pinched from my dad’s pockets while he slept. But by the time I had enough for a ticket, the circus had left.’
Abbas looked out through the window, into the darkness, as though the memory of the departed circus still pained him.
‘But then you started working at a circus?’
‘Yes, four years later, when I was seventeen. By then I’d seen a number of performances in various circus tents around Marseille. All of them had knife throwers and none of them came close to Jean Villon.’
‘The Master.’
‘That’s what he was known as among circus people. He was quite famous, but I had no idea. One day I saw that Cirque Gruss was coming to town again, with Jean Villon. And that’s when I decided. I’d been practising knife throwing for a couple of years, at home in the backyard and out on the fields. I knew the basics. So I got in touch with Jean Villon and told him that I wanted to be a knife thrower and asked him whether he would consider training me.’
‘That was quite cocky.’
‘Perhaps, I wasn’t so polished in those days. Maybe that’s why he listened. Then he asked me to throw a few knives against a plank of wood. It was quite dark outside and hard to judge the distance, but I managed to hit the plank with two of the three knives. At the right angle. “Come back tomorrow at seven,” he said. I’d thought he meant in the evening and was there bang on time – he’d meant seven in the morning. But I was given another chance, and the next day I was there at six. He’d already started. He practised with the knives for four hours every morning and two in the afternoon whenever they weren’t travelling. I was there for two hours and he showed me all the mistakes I was making. There were plenty. When we’d finished, he asked whether I wanted to go with the circus to Nice. I certainly did.’
‘He hired you?’
‘I became his apprentice. Board and lodging, that was enough. I shared a little blue circus caravan with a dwarf, Raymond Pujol, the grandson of the great Joseph Pujol. Have you heard of him? Le Pétomane, the “fartomaniac”.’
‘No. Fartomaniac?’
‘He was once a very famous artist. He could fart La Marseillaise and blow out a candle three metres away. He married a dwarf and their daughter gave birth to Raymond.’
‘With whom you shared a caravan.’
‘Yes.’
Abbas held a knife up to the lamp and inspected the blades. Stilton watched him. He’d never heard Abbas give such a long and detailed account about himself, and he realised that this had nothing to do with knife throwing or Abbas’s life in the circus. This was the prelude to the unusual trip they had embarked upon. He still had no idea what it was about, but he knew he would find out.
All he needed to do was listen.
‘I accompanied Jean Villon for almost two years,’ Abbas said. ‘Mostly around southern France, Nîmes, Avignon, Perpignan. Each day we practised for several hours and I improved with every hour that passed. Eventually I was able to pin up a five of hearts on a post ten metres away and hit each heart without the knives touching. Then came the really hard part, when you have perfected the technique and it’s all just in the mind, to be so focused on the throw that nothing can distract you in the ring – a child screeching, someone coughing or gasping, a balloon suddenly bursting, you know. Being able to shut out everything around you.’
‘You learned that too?’
‘Gradually. The acid test came in Narbonne. It was our first night there and suddenly the Master became ill, with a fever. I was summoned to his caravan. He was lying under a couple of large tattered blankets. “You’re throwing tonight,” he said. And that’s all he said. It was a sell-out and there was no way of cancelling. When I left his caravan his wife was standing next to one of the wheels. He was married to a much younger woman, a very beautiful Moroccan woman called Samira. She was blind.’
‘Blind?’
‘Yes. She was the Master’s target girl, the one who was attached to the spinning wheel when he threw the knives.’
‘And she was blind?’
‘Yes.’
‘Strange.’
‘Perhaps. She heard me stepping out of the caravan and waved at me. I walked towards her. “You’ll be throwing at me tonight,” she said. “Yes, are you worried?” I asked. “No, Jean says that you’re as good as he is.” “I’m not,” I said. “Tonight you are,” she replied.’
Abbas turned over and stuffed the last of the knives into his bag. Stilton saw his eyes straining, it was hard for him to talk about this. Why? So far it had just been about knife throwing, hadn’t it?
‘We were very attracted to each other.’
He said it while he still had his head turned towards his bag, as though he was revealing a secret.
‘You and the woman who was going to be your target girl?’
‘We’d been dancing around each other, emotionally, for more than a year. It was easier for me, I could see her. She could only imagine. What, I don’t really know, but once she said it was my smell, another time my voice. We’d never touched each other. She was Jean Villon’s wife. But we both knew. I dreamed about her at night, stole a glimpse as she washed behind the caravan in the morning. She was a fantastic woman. Fantastically beautiful, in my eyes. I was utterly consumed by her.’
‘And now you were about to throw a load of knives at her on a spinning wheel?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did that work? I mean that total concentration you talked about, being able to shut everything else out. Considering your feelings for her?’
‘It worked perfectly. As though whatever was between us was helping. When they dimmed the lights in the packed circus tent and it was only me and her in the ring, it really was only us in there. No one else. Just me and her. And the knives. When the wheel started spinning and I weighed the first knife in my hand and flung it at her, it was like a strange declaration of love. For every knife that landed a couple of centimetres from her body I became more and more aroused, without losing focus. When the final knife was in place and the whole tent started roaring, I collapsed into the sawdust. Pujol ran in and lifted me up and out of the tent. The last thing I saw was her face as she was lifted off the wheel. She looked very sad.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll get to that presently.’
Stilton nodded. He was trying to tally Abbas’s flow the whole time, so as not to interrupt him in the wrong place, not say something that would make him shut off. In some way, the whole tale was connected to what he knew was coming – what Abbas was getting closer to telling him… in his increasingly thinner voice.
‘It was almost two o’clock at night, that same night that she’d been my target girl, and I couldn’t sleep. I was lying naked in the bed, staring at the strange bells hanging here and there on the ceiling, wondering where Pujol was. Suddenly the door opened and he helped Samira up into the caravan. Then he disappeared. I got up out of bed. The light from one of the tent lamps was shining in through the window, enough for me to see her. She’d wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. When she dropped it on the floor she was naked. I touched her shoulder – it was the first time I touched her. She reached out her hand and touched my waist. I took her hands and guided her down into the bed. Then we made love.’
Abbas fell silent and Stilton didn’t dare to say anything. He tried to picture the scene in front of him – the beautiful blind woman and the young knife thrower in a cramped circus caravan somewhere in southern France, aroused following months of dancing around each other, unleashed by knife throwing in a packed circus tent, making love as silently as possible, while the woman’s fever-ridden husband lay in a nearby caravan.
He want
ed to know more.
‘So what happened then?’ he dared to ask.
‘The last thing I asked her was why she’d looked so sad out in the tent. “Because you and I will never be,” she whispered and kissed me. When I woke up she was gone. I fell asleep again and was woken by the Master. He was better and came into the caravan with a thermos of coffee and a bottle of calvados. We drank coffee and some booze. Then he calmly and rather cheerlessly explained that I had to leave the circus that same day. I understood. So an hour or so later I said goodbye to Pujol and a few others I’d got to know and left. As I was walking out through the gate, I turned around and looked back at Samira’s caravan, at the oval window. There was no one there – I never saw her again.’
Abbas fell silent. He’d reached an emotional barrier, a very private barrier. The barrier to Samira, to the meeting with her and the scars that it had left him with, scars that were still there, on the other side of the barrier. After a while, he looked up at Stilton again.
‘You’ve never been able to forget her,’ Stilton said.
‘No, never. Of course I’ve been with other women, in other ways, but no one has reached that same spot.’
‘She’s still in there?’
‘Yes.’
Abbas pulled a jug towards him and poured a splash of water into a tumbler. He raised the glass to his lips while gazing out through the window. He drank slowly. Stilton watched him. Abbas put the empty glass down and stared into it, for a long time, as though he was looking for what he wanted to say.
‘A few years ago, I read in a French newspaper that Jean Villon had died. I got hold of Samira’s address and wrote her a few letters. She never replied.’
‘So you don’t know what happened to her?’
‘No, not until now.’
Abbas bent down towards his bag and pulled out a newspaper and another knife. He put the newspaper on the table and unfolded it, while holding the knife in his hand. Stilton looked at the newspaper and saw that it was French.
‘What’s this?’
‘Libé, a French newspaper, Libération, I subscribe to it. This is what I found a couple of days ago.’
Abbas pointed at a long article on the front page. There was a large photograph of French police officers by a cordoned-off site in a nature reserve.
‘What’s it about?’ Stilton said. ‘I don’t speak French.’
Abbas steeled himself. His hand holding the knife had slid down around the blade, and he began translating the article. It was about the finding of a butchered female corpse. The body had been found by tourists in Callelongue, in a national park south of Marseille. A wild boar had dug up a dismembered body part, and a tourist had tripped over the gnawed bony remains. Next to the picture of the mangled body was a photograph of the victim, a very beautiful woman. Abbas pointed to it.
‘Is that Samira?’
‘Yes.’
He suddenly realised what this trip was about. Why Abbas had told him what he’d told him. He suddenly understood what was waiting. He looked at the small photograph again.
‘She was beautiful.’
‘Lunar beauty.’
Stilton looked up at Abbas.
‘That’s what her name means. Samira.’
Stilton nodded and saw a little blood trickling from the hand that was gripping the blade.
‘Abbas.’
He nodded at the knife. Abbas loosened his grip and wrapped a napkin around his hand. With his other hand he folded up the newspaper and put it back in his bag. As he sat up, Stilton saw that he had tears in his eyes. They looked at each other. They felt the train pounding along the rails and saw lights in the distance as they sped through the darkness. Stilton pulled his blue bag towards him. Luna had slipped in a bottle of whiskey for him. Wise woman. He pulled out the bottle and put it on the table. He knew that Abbas only rarely drank alcohol, but in light of what he’d just told him, Stilton felt that this was one of those rare moments. He poured two glasses and raised his.
Abbas didn’t move.
Stilton had a swig.
‘You know Jean-Baptiste Fabre, don’t you?’ Abbas said.
‘Yes, I’m assuming that’s why I’m here.’
‘Yes.’
Jean-Baptiste Fabre was a detective in Marseille. Stilton had had close contact with him during a few joint murder investigations. It was a long time since they’d been in touch. Those years on the streets lay in between.
But Abbas knew about the contact.
‘You want information about the French murder investigation?’ Stilton asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe they’ve already arrested the perpetrator?’
‘They haven’t, it would have said. I’ve checked every single online newspaper.’
‘So what are you planning to do?’
‘What would you do?’
‘In your position?’
‘Yes.’
‘The same as you.’
And Abbas knew that. Stilton would have done the same as him. Done everything he could to catch whoever murdered and butchered Samira.
Simple as that.
‘I’m going to get some sleep now.’
Abbas curled up on the bed, turned his face against the wall and turned off his bedside lamp.
His whiskey remained untouched.
Chapter 7
Stilton was standing on the hotel’s breakfast terrace, observing an elderly woman dressed in black carrying a metal detector. She was slowly walking back and forth along the narrow beach. Her husband was doing the same a short way out to sea, with water up to his waist. Stilton assumed that they were a couple. They could have been siblings of course, aged unmarried siblings on the hunt for a lost coin or a piece of jewellery. He sipped his bitter espresso and let his gaze wander out over the bay, before it settled on a rocky island.
The island of If.
The famous setting of The Count of Monte Cristo to some, a common crossword answer to others.
Stilton watched boats making their way over to the island and sat down on a plastic chair. He had a pain in his groin. The sun was just about rising behind him and Marseille, the rays of sunshine spreading out over the mountains on the other side of the bay, glistening against the large golden statue of the Madonna on the hill. He looked at the long narrow stone pier that seemed to disappear straight out into the Mediterranean. He’d been to the coast down here a couple of times before, on police business. He didn’t know about this hotel. Abbas had booked it online – Hotel Richelieu – a flaking stone building built on rocks that jutted out into the sea. The terrace was resting on a few concrete pillars that went right down into the deep. Stilton peered over the edge and saw the dark-blue waves lashing all the way up against the stone balustrade in front of him. He turned back to look at the spartan reception, a blue wooden desk and a Windsor chair. Not much of a welcome. The hotel was cramped and pokey, with a kind of flaking charm, and the porter always stood slightly too close when you talked to him.
Stilton looked at his watch.
Abbas was having a shower, a procedure that could seldom be hurried. From hot to lukewarm to freezing cold. Always the same process – from lassitude to samurai. Sometimes it took half an hour, but he was faster today. Abbas stepped out onto the terrace with a thin jacket in his hand and a piece of fruit. Stilton had no idea what kind of fruit it was. It looked bitter, like the coffee.
‘That was where I started.’
Abbas took the fruit out of his mouth and pointed down at the narrow beach next to the hotel. The woman in black and her husband had gone.
‘The Catalan Beach – during the summer it’s full of locals and tourists. I started selling fake watches, then bags.’
‘Did you sell anything?’
‘Every so often, not much. Have you called Jean-Baptiste?’
‘Yes, we’re meeting at ten.’
‘Where?’
‘Some bar by the police station.’
‘Do you know where it is
?’
‘Not the bar.’
‘Come on.’
Abbas had booked what the hotel’s website had described as a ‘suite’ with two separate bedrooms. One of them had a wide bed that stretched from wall to wall, almost. You could just about squeeze in next to it. The other was a window alcove where the owner had managed to fit in a bed at one end. These facilities were complemented with a narrow corridor, a tiled bathroom and a shared wardrobe.
Suite?
‘I’ll take the alcove,’ said Stilton.
He’d been sleeping in all sorts of places for several years and presumed that Abbas was a little more fussy. He was, normally anyway, but at the moment he could have slept on broken glass if he’d had to.
But he took the wide bed.
‘There.’
Abbas had put up a large detailed map of Marseille on the wall next to the bed. He pointed at a crossing right in the middle of the city.
‘How do I get there?’
‘Walk. It’ll take half an hour. And it won’t be any quicker to take the bus.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘Meet a friend.’
‘When will we meet up?’
‘I’ll call you. If we don’t speak, we’ll meet at the restaurant next door, at eight.’
‘OK.’
‘Have you charged your phone?’
‘Yes.’
Stilton noted that Abbas took charge in a very natural manner.
Good.
It was his revenge.
Not Stilton’s.
Stilton had asked the porter for a simple tourist map, as a backup. He knew roughly where he was going, but nevertheless, it was quite a distance to the police station. He stepped out onto Boulevard Kennedy and turned left, towards the old port. Just ten minutes later he realised his first mistake – his clothing. He’d left Stockholm in November where the temperature was around zero, and landed in Marseille where it was almost twenty degrees hotter. His thick leather jacket came off straight away. A few blocks later, his newly purchased Timberland boots felt like two walking sauna heaters.
Third Voice Page 10