The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  He had the impression that the Yaris bounced several times as it veered right, almost tipping over, but then it stabilized.

  That bastard Soler must be screaming with pain, thought Papy. After being sliced up by Dr. Larochelle, his wound open, the sudden movements of the car must be torture.

  Not torture enough, though, apparently. One second later, the white Yaris sped off between the containers, along Avenue de l’Amiral-Chillou.

  “Straight ahead!” yelled Papy to JB. “He’ll be right in front of you.”

  The bridge was still rising, more than a meter off the ground now. Marianne’s car was still accelerating. The sirens were deafening, the lights blinding.

  “We’re not going to make it!”

  Cabral suddenly hit the brake.

  The wheels of the police car locked a few meters from the bridge that was raised up into the sky. Captain Augresse did not have time to protest: her face smashed against the windscreen which was covered in wet sand.

  Timo Soler’s Yaris, followed by the two Renaults of JB and Deputy Sergeant Lenormand, disappeared from Pasdeloup’s field of vision. His voice shook as he spoke into the walkie-talkie.

  “Shit, are you OK?”

  “We’re OK.”

  It was Cabral who answered.

  “We’ll be fine. The captain’s a bit bashed up, and I reckon she’ll give me hell once she’s feeling better, but I’ll take that any day over a dive into the lock.”

  The bridge slowly descended. At last, the port came alive. Men ran out from behind containers like Playmobil figures coming out of their boxes. Amazed Russian sailors rushed to the railings of the tanker. JB’s voice made Lieutenant Pasdeloup jump.

  “Papy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “We’ve found the Yaris.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s empty,” JB replied. “Avenue du 16eme-Port. Let’s seal the area. He must be continuing on foot, wounded. He won’t get far.”

  “If you say so.” Papy did not sound convinced.

  He knew that area. Avenue du 16eme-Port went right around the Neiges quarter, a strange little village of about a thousand inhabitants, half industrial zone, half deprived urban area completely encircled by the port roads. An enclave. Isolated.

  Timo Soler had not chosen his meeting place by chance, and even less so the place where he had abandoned his car. He had probably been hiding out in the Neiges quarter for months, and finding him there, if he had friends to help him, could take weeks.

  Plenty of time for him to die first.

  11

  Little hand on the 1, big hand on the 7

  Malone was playing with his little white and blue rocket on the living room carpet. Gouti watched him, leaning against the leg of a chair. Malone would have preferred to go up to his bedroom so he could listen to what his toy had to tell him, but he wasn’t allowed.

  We don’t have time today, said Maman-da.

  There was only time to warm up the pasta, set the table and quickly eat before returning to school.

  Malone made the rocket blast off, in search of a planet where it could land. Poof-Poof seemed a good destination to him: a soft, purple, pear-shaped planet. In the kitchen, he heard Pa-di speaking loudly. He was drinking coffee and kept saying the same thing.

  The teacher and Vasily. Vasily and the teacher.

  He was angry. And even if Pa-di hadn’t looked at him during lunch, Malone knew why.

  It was because of him.

  Because of everything he’d told Vasily.

  He didn’t care. Pa-di could shout at him or not talk to him at all. He could even punish him, if he wanted to. Malone didn’t care! He would never tell him anything and he would keep talking to Vasily. He’d promised Maman.

  Maman-da quickly drank her coffee, did the washing-up, kissed him on the forehead, swept up, and gave him another hug. Now she was tidying away all the things they’d taken to school: the papers, the notebooks, the photograph albums. She opened the big cupboard under the stairs, and then Pa-di called to her. He was already wearing his coat, but he couldn’t find his scarf. Maman-da always said that she had two children to look after!

  She went up to the bedroom to fetch the scarf while Pa-di waited in the kitchen in front of the TV, with his coffee, shouting up at her that he was going to be late.

  Malone gently landed the rocket on Planet Poof-Poof. He walked over to the hallway, to that large black door which was never usually open.

  He approached the cupboard and went inside. The only light came from outside, and the space grew even darker with his body blocking most of the light. He moved to the side, near the photo albums on the shelves. There was no point opening them: he’d seen them before—Maman-da showed them to him sometimes—but he didn’t recognize himself when he was little. He remembered lots of things, thanks to Gouti, but not that. Not his face, not what he looked like when he was a baby.

  Malone looked at the other boxes and objects crammed under the steps of the staircase. He spotted a large board. It was strange because it had big letters written on it. Malone didn’t know all his alphabet, but he knew how to read his own name:

  M A L O N E

  In school, he had to be able to find the right label so he could hang up his coat.

  M A L O N E

  His name was written on that board hidden under the stairs, in large lettering, on white paper under glass, but it had not been written in felt-tip pen. Nor in paint. Nor with a pen.

  Malone had to lean even closer to be sure.

  He climbed over a few boxes and picked up the board with both hands so that he could bring it towards the light.

  The letters of his name were spelt out using animals!

  Tiny little creatures.

  Ants.

  Dozens of ants lined up, stuck to the paper, then crushed against the glass. Whoever had done this had taken great care. There was hardly a single ant out of place. It was pretty, and very neat, even if Malone was a bit sad for all those ants that had been killed in order to spell out his name. Unless the letters had been formed using ants that were already dead?

  Who could have done this?

  Not Pa-di, that was for sure. He hated coloring in, cutting up things, building things with Lego. Maman-da then, but why? To surprise him?

  It would be a strange kind of surprise. He didn’t really like ants. Especially not dead ones. He would rather have seen his name written in colorful felt-tip or finger-painted, like they did at school.

  The front door banged shut, without Pa-di saying goodbye to them.

  “Time to go, sweetie!” Maman-da shouted from upstairs in his bedroom. “Can you get your coat?”

  Malone came out of the cupboard under the stairs. He’d seen something else, too: other strange creatures, also dead.

  And these creatures were bigger than ants.

  12

  The ugly bandage was stuck to both of Marianne Augresse’s cheeks, squashing down her nose. She looked like a boxer, she thought, or a cougar who’d just had plastic surgery. She hated the thirty male eyes that were turned on her, particularly—for different reasons—those of JB and Cabral. But there was no way she could get out of this debriefing session. With Timo Soler on the run, she had to put as many men as she possibly could on the case, including those who’d been here less than a year, and it was essential that they all possessed the same amount of information about the Deauville armed robbery.

  She moved to the center of the room, resigned. When Marianne had first seen herself in the rear-view mirror of the police car on the bridge by the lock, blood pouring from her nose, it had made her cry. Weirdly, it was the first thing that had struck her, even before Timo Soler’s escape: how long would it take for her face to get back to normal? A week? A month? Maybe several months, if her nose was broken. All that lost time in her pe
rsonal countdown, because how could she find a man capable of giving her a kid if she had a nose like this?

  Ugh, this is becoming an obsession!

  The captain slid her USB key into the computer while folders were being circulated among the police officers. Anyway, she reminded herself, her nose wasn’t broken. Larochelle had been quite reassuring when he examined it at the port, surrounded by dockers and sailors who had nothing better to do than watch her as if she were a stowaway who’d just emerged from a container. There wasn’t even any need for stitches, the doctor had added. All she had was a big bruise that would disappear in a few days. At least Larochelle had been useful in that regard.

  The surgeon had parked his Saab 9-3 next to the lock less than three minutes after Soler had escaped, and Marianne, as soon as she was bandaged up, had given him both barrels, even threatening to investigate him for obstruction of justice.

  What if he’d held back deliberately? What if he had wanted Timo Soler to escape?

  It was Papy—not exactly Larochelle’s biggest fan—who had taken her aside and calmed her down. “You’re not thinking straight, Marianne,” he’d whispered to her. “The doctor gave us the exact time and place of the meeting, and Timo Soler turned up as arranged. All we had to do was catch him. We’re the ones who screwed up!”

  He was right. It wasn’t Larochelle’s fault; it was purely down to their own incompetence. The surgeon was still smiling, apparently more amused than frightened by the swarm of cops around him.

  “OK, Papy,” Marianne had muttered through gritted teeth. “We’ll deal with this later.” Her deputy had a point, anyway; they needed to take it easy on the surgeon, because they might need him again. Timo’s ugly open wound was his handiwork, after all.

  But still Marianne had brooded all the way back to the police station:

  Today, because of an asshole doctor, I let a criminal escape, and now I’m disfigured.

  Want to kill

  I grabbed the gun from my belt and I . . .

  She didn’t have the imagination to invent an amusing or surprising punchline, not like the other users of want-to-kill.com, who were constantly outdoing each other with new and interesting ways to get rid of the people who’d annoyed them. The website’s instructions were simple: write about someone who’d pissed you off so badly you wanted to kill them, and then describe how you might do it, if possible in a way that was joyful, moving, or pathetic, then wait for the jury of online readers to give their verdict. Just another way for frustrated wishful thinkers to get their feelings off their chest without actually killing anyone. And in a way, the captain thought, that stupid website had changed her life.

  She forced herself to stop thinking about it all and start the presentation. With relief, she felt the men’s eyes move from her face to the map of Deauville. Marianne had asked Lucas Marouette—an intern who was spending a few bored weeks at the station before starting active service—to create a 3D animation on Google Street View. This was easy, apparently, if you knew how to download the basic apps. These virtual reconstructions were now the examining magistrates’ favorite tool.

  “It’s the morning of Tuesday, January 6, 2015,” began Marianne. “Twelve minutes past eleven. The weather is cold and windy. The streets of Deauville are practically deserted. Two motorbikes stop at the city’s central roundabout, between Rue Eugène-Colas and Rue Lucien-Barrière, very close to the casino. At the same moment, a couple walks along the sidewalk, arms around each other. An elegantly dressed couple. He is wearing a gray felt hat, she has on a silk headscarf. It is impossible to see their faces on any of the city’s surveillance cameras.”

  On the animation, two stylized figures in blue and red—no clothes or faces—walk along the shopping street in Deauville, each luxury store’s sign clearly visible; a perfect reproduction of the captain’s description.

  “While the two motorbikes park, the couple separates. He goes into the Hermès boutique and she goes into Louis Vuitton. After that, everything happens very quickly. At the same moment as the two motorcyclists, armed with Maverick 88s, enter the two main jewellery shops on Rue Eugène-Colas—Godechot-Pauliet and Blot—the man in the hat takes out a Beretta 92 and aims it at the two saleswomen in Hermès while the woman does the same thing in Louis Vuitton. It takes them only two minutes to fill four bags, one for each robber. They know exactly what they’re after, opting mostly for easily transportable objects. Watches, jewels, scarves, belts, wallets, bags, glasses . . . plus a few more rarefied pieces. Their gestures are precise and perfectly timed. All four of them emerge into Rue Eugène-Colas at exactly the same moment. The two bikers hand their bags to the woman. An alarm goes off at that point. The police station is only seven hundred meters away, at the end of the same street. A cop going outside to smoke a cigarette would have been able to see the two motorbikes.”

  On Street View, the half-timbered Norman houses flash past on fast forward, as if filmed by a hand-held camera, before the image stops on the four robbers. Marianne goes on:

  “I’ll spare you the press articles about the robbers, their audacity, their recklessness even. Let’s stick to the facts. The whole thing was expertly staged. The two bikes quickly drove back up Rue Eugène-Colas, almost to the police station, but turning about two hundred meters before it, on to Place de Morny. The objective was clear: to create a diversion. Force the police to chase them while their two accomplices made off with the loot. In theory, their bikes—two Munch Mammut 2000s—would be powerful enough to outpace the police cars.”

  “Not just in theory,” sniggered one of the cops.

  “True,” admitted Marianne. “Which confirms that the robbers’ actions were perfectly planned. They must have spent a hell of a long time preparing this: scouting the location, timing all their actions. But then the robbers got unlucky.”

  Google Street span around again. An empty racecourse surrounded by opulent villas filled the screen.

  “A police patrol was heading across town at that particular moment. It went past the racecourse on Boulevard Mauger and was in position to be able to intercept the two bikers. You know the rest, I assume.”

  On the screen, the line of 3D houses vanished and was replaced by photographs. Extreme close-ups. Blood on the sidewalk. A helmet in the gutter.

  “One of the bikers shoots first. Our men respond. The second biker, the one who hadn’t fired, is hit. His bike ends up on top of him, his helmet hits the ground and the visor smashes. He is still partly protected from our men’s gunfire by objects on the street, a lamp post and a dumpster. While the first biker continues to fire back, positioned behind the cars parked on the roadside, the second one takes off his helmet and drops it on the ground. Two surveillance cameras—the ones outside the racecourse and the Côte Fleurie hotel—catch his face on film.

  The blurred face of Timo Soler appeared on the wall. A good-looking young man. Gentle eyes, with a hint of defiance.

  “More shots. No one else is wounded. The gunfire lasts only eighteen seconds in total. Timo Soler gets back on his bike, the two bikers do a U-turn and turn off onto the road that leads to the stadium. They follow the train tracks for a short while, then leave the road to join the path that runs alongside the Touques river and disappear into the woods, probably heading towards Pont-l’Eveque. There’s no way of following them. Despite the roadblocks, we don’t see them again.” The captain pauses here and lowers her eyes slightly. “With the exception of Timo Soler, who we saw again for the first time this afternoon.”

  Marianne clicked on the mouse. Deauville city center again, with the two red and blue figures.

  “However, the diversion was only partly successful. This was the one glitch in the robbers’ plan. As soon as the man in the hat comes out of the Hermès boutique, Florence Lagarde, the manageress, not only sets off the alarm, but is reckless enough to walk along the sidewalk of Rue Eugène-Colas with her mobile to her ear. Less t
han five seconds later, she is talking to Lieutenant Gallois at the Deauville police station and has the presence of mind to tell him that there are two groups of robbers: the motorcyclists heading towards the station, but also the two others, who are going the opposite way, on foot. Here too, everything happened very quickly, in less than two minutes.

  “Still armed with a revolver, the man in the hat enters Rue Lucien-Barrière, turning around frequently, while the woman in the scarf, carrying the four bags, runs towards the beach. Their strategy seems clear: the woman is supposed to stash their haul while the man covers their tracks, making sure there are no acts of heroism from any of the local shopkeepers. By the time he reaches the convention center, the woman is already on Rue de la Mer and has turned left, near the boardwalk. She passes the casino surveillance camera at 11:17 A.M. One minute later, the same camera films her again, running in the opposite direction without the bags.”

  The captain paused again, as if to emphasize the importance of this detail.

  “At the same moment, the man in the hat who is protecting the woman’s retreat is trapped by two policemen at the end of Rue Lucien-Barrière, in the pedestrian zone. We know every detail of the gun battle that ensued. The woman yells at the man to join her. He sprints. He is hit by a bullet in the leg, but he fires back, wounding Deputy Sergeant Delattre in the kneecap. He’ll survive, but he’ll have a limp for the rest of his life. They reach Rue de la Mer, but there they are caught in the crossfire from two patrols coming the other way. The man and the woman keep going along the street, slaloming between cars. Another one of our men, Savignat, is hit—in the shoulder this time, but it’s not serious. The man and the woman try to cross the street, to get to the spa opposite, on the beach side of the road, shooting randomly. A few tourists are walking along by the seaside, mostly grandparents with little grandchildren. The cops aren’t taking any risks. The two fugitives are shot dead as soon as they are out in the open, at the end of the street. The end.”