The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  For a long time, she gazed absently at the cup. The cup from which Malone Moulin had drunk that morning.

  What if Vasily Dragonman was right?

  And the simplest solution was to open an official investigation and carry out a DNA test?

  33

  Little hand on the 8, big hand on the 10

  Malone was crying. Maman-da was sitting on the bed next to him, but he couldn’t tell her why he was sad.

  He couldn’t tell her that Gouti had gone to sleep, maybe forever.

  That his heart didn’t beat anymore, that his mouth didn’t speak anymore. That he was now just like any other cuddly toy.

  He had to stop crying, though. He had to stop sniffling, pick up the handkerchief, and dry his tears. He had to because if he didn’t, Maman-da would never leave. She’d stay there, hugging him, telling him that she loved him, that he was her darling, her sweetheart, her big boy. She’d stay there until he calmed down.

  And he didn’t want her to do that.

  He wanted to be alone with Gouti.

  Tonight, since his toy couldn’t speak to him, it would be his turn to tell a story. His story. Through his wet eyes, he saw the little rocket sitting on the caramel planet. The biggest of them all.

  It was the day of Jupiter. The day of strength. The day of courage.

  Maman-da didn’t leave. She stayed there, a warm presence next to him. He could feel her breathe, almost as if she had fallen asleep. But no: from time to time, she would caress him or say “shhhh” almost without moving her lips. Sometimes she kissed his neck and told him that it was late, that he should fly off to the land of dreams.

  Malone understood. He realized that, tonight, Maman-da would stay in his bedroom until he fell asleep.

  So he, too, started talking without moving his lips. He started talking in his head. Maybe Gouti could hear him, when he spoke in his head.

  He knew the story of Jupiter by heart.

  It was the most important one: Maman had told him that many times. This was the one that—when the right moment came—he absolutely had to remember.

  When the moment came to fly away. Not to the land of dreams, as Maman-da wanted.

  When the moment came to fly away to the forest of ogres.

  And when that moment came, Malone would have to be braver than he’d ever been in his life. There was only one way to escape the monsters, not to be taken into their lair. Afterwards, it would be too late: you can’t jump out of a plane. To escape them, there was only one way, Maman had told him, one place where they would never be able to find him.

  And Maman had made him promise to think about it every night in his head. To repeat the words, to recite them to Gouti, but never to repeat them to anyone else.

  EVERY NIGHT.

  To think about that hiding place, again and again, always.

  The most secret hiding place of all. And yet the simplest in the world.

  34

  Today, at the petrol station, I got up the nerve to tell my family that I didn’t even have enough money to fill up the car. Given that we were about to go off on our holidays, it didn’t go down well.

  Want to kill

  With my 20 euros, I was able to pump 11.78 litres all over the ground. Then I dropped my cigarette.

  Convicted: 176

  Acquitted: 324

  www.want-to-kill.com

  The lighthouse on the Cap de la Hève illuminated the cliff precisely every twelve seconds.

  Vasily had counted each second in his head. He had a powerful torch, strong enough to light up the viewing area and to roam over the chalky grassed area at the top of the cliff, but not strong enough to illuminate the foreshore below or the ink-black sea.

  Twelve seconds.

  Vasily aimed his flashlight at the Guzzi he’d parked between two white benches, on the edge of the empty parking lot. An icy wind took his breath away. Not violent enough to knock over the motorbike, which stood on its kickstand, but too strong to allow him to check his map one more time. Instead he just visualized the circles of color in his head, the lines and arrows, all the slow and patient work he’d done cross-checking clues.

  He’d bought a new map earlier that afternoon, copied out the results of his previous theories, then spent a good part of the day listening to Gouti’s stories, over and over again, through headphones, holding felt-tip pens, often pausing the stories and rewinding them, going back over the differences, the evidence, in order to isolate the place that best matched the majority of Malone’s memories. The smallest common denominator, Vasily thought, moving through the dark junipers.

  This place. Here.

  In this jungle of brambles that clawed at the sleeves of his leather jacket an almost brand-new Bering. Probably ruined already.

  What the hell was he doing here?

  The image of the death threat flashed in his mind—the tomb on the cliff—as frequently and regularly as the blinding glare of the lighthouse.

  He walked slowly and carefully. His flashlight only had a reach of about three meters and the grass was slippery. He had no desire to have to grab hold of the thorny branches to stop himself falling.

  He tried to push away the reasonable voices whispering to him that he should turn back, get on his bike and speed back towards the lights of the city. It helped to think about Malone.

  Malone, feeling lost on the step outside his classroom, terrified, shivering, incapable of walking through the slightest drizzle, of being touched by the last few drops of a rain shower.

  Vasily had promised himself he would take a look, check it out. If his intuition proved correct, if all the elements were in place, he would not come back, not even in broad daylight. He would simply call Marianne Augresse, and the accumulated weight of the evidence would oblige her to come, to get involved.

  The flashlight’s beam flickered over the bushes. Through the tangle of branches, he found it hard to tell where the plateau ended and the abyss began. For an instant, he imagined that if he fell here, stupidly, in this inaccessible part of the coastline, no one would find him for days. Not until his corpse had been carried away by the ocean currents and washed up somewhere along the estuary, on a beach, against one of the quays of the port, embalmed in salt and oil and mummified in plastic bags.

  This time, it was the image of Angie that helped him to push back these morbid thoughts. The desire to send her a text. To reassure her. To reassure himself. As soon as he got home, she was supposed to join him at the apartment in the Résidence de France. He wouldn’t be gone long, he’d told her. Just five kilometers each way on his bike.

  The whooshing sound made by the departing message broke the silence. Vasily checked the time.

  10:20 P.M.

  The seagulls were asleep. The sea seemed to whisper.

  Twelve seconds.

  The great beam of light crossed the undergrowth, dazzled Vasily, then continued on its way north, briefly lighting up the beach at low tide.

  Four towers. In a line.

  Malone’s castle!

  Vasily’s heart sped up. He’d been right.

  The light continued circling. It was coming back to him already. The psychologist narrowed his eyes, concentrated, staring at the sea, which sparkled gold as in a brief, intermittent sunset.

  The pirate ship.

  Black.

  Cut in two.

  Vasily tried to control his excitement.

  The next flash would light up the strange houses and then, behind them, the bare wall.

  Shadows? Ogres?

  Was it possible to live there?

  Could Malone really have lived there?

  Wasn’t he following a trail of clues that had been deliberately left for him, using a child’s brain, like some soft version of the Rosetta stone?

  He stayed there for a while, attempting
to measure exact distances, to calculate the number of kilometers separating this spot from the airport, from Mont-Gaillard, from Manéglise. He realized that locating this place would not make much difference without the support of the police. Without a letter rogatory to search, one by one, these huts from beyond the grave. Maybe the ghost of Malone’s mother would still be there, and with it the secret of his birth?

  He waited a good fifteen minutes before heading back to his motorbike. In the end, he found a clearer path that enabled him to avoid the brambles. His flashlight illuminated a circle of ashes littered with three cans of beer and a dozen cigarette butts. A few other traces of life, clandestine and ephemeral.

  He was close to the parking lot, which was half-concealed behind the last line of junipers, when he heard a message arrive on his phone.

  Angie.

  Seven words, full of mistakes.

  Be carful. Im wating 4 u. Kiss

  Vasily felt an inner warmth enveloping him, like a sweet energy driving a silent engine, a wonder of technology that accelerated his heart, his footsteps, his desire to reach Boulevard Clemenceau as quickly as possible, to be wrapped in Angie’s arms once more.

  Falling in love with a hairdresser . . . And yet that was what was happening to him.

  His eyes lingered for a moment on the photograph of Angie displayed on the screen of his mobile phone.

  He smiled as he kept walking.

  Sea fennel and sea kale crunched under his boots.

  His smile froze.

  His thumb pressed against the phone to make Angie vanish into darkness.

  The Guzzi was lying on the ground.

  Like a dead animal left there on the tarmac: that was the first image that popped into Vasily’s mind. He rushed over. The wind gusted against his back, making his jacket swell, but it wasn’t strong enough to have knocked over a three-hundred-kilogram motorbike.

  Dim light from a street lamp, a hundred meters away, vaguely illuminated the scene. Vasily bent over the Guzzi, assessing the damage. Theories flooded through his brain.

  Was it an accident? A threat? Some guy who had deliberately run his car into the bike? No, Vasily would have heard the noise. And there would be traces of the impact. A man, then? Who’d come alone, silently? But why?

  Vasily looked again at the bike’s chrome bodywork. There was no smell of petrol. No dents. The bike did not seem any more scratched by the tarmac than his jacket had been by the brambles.

  He breathed slowly, giving his heart time to go back to its normal rhythm. He probably just hadn’t set the kickstand properly, hadn’t paid attention to the slope of the ground. Because of his fear, because he was rushing. Idiot! He wasn’t made for this kind of adventure. He should pass the baton on to the police as soon as he could, he thought. Then join Angie.

  Love her.

  Give her a child.

  That was the last image that came to his mind. The child had no face.

  And then there was darkness.

  The smell. The pain.

  Vasily had no idea how long he’d been unconscious.

  A few minutes? More than an hour?

  The pain was searing, from his cervical vertebrae all the way down to his lower back, but it was nothing compared to the terrible weight that was crushing his legs. Three hundred kilograms. Grinding his knees and tibias in a vice of chrome and metal. Vasily had tried, in vain. It was impossible to move the Guzzi.

  Caught in a trap. His helmet had rolled onto the parking lot, a few meters away.

  Vasily put his hands flat against the handlebars and pushed again. All he had to do was move the bike a few centimeters and he’d be able to slide out. And the pain would be less intense, at least, while he waited for someone to rescue him.

  He took a deep breath.

  The smell of petrol was inhaled deep into his lungs. Like an invisible acid cloud burning everything in its path. Throat. Windpipe. Thoracic cage.

  He coughed. That was another reason he had to get out. He was lying in a pool of petrol. Most of the thirty litres from his tank, probably. He’d filled the bike up at the 24-hour petrol station in Mont-Gaillard before he came here.

  He closed his eyes and slowly counted to twenty, taking the time to relax his muscles—biceps, triceps, and deltoids—before tensing them again and pushing the Guzzi with all the strength he had left.

  He would repeat this sequence until he was completely exhausted. Until dawn if necessary.

  He couldn’t just lie there, like a pinned butterfly.

  He inhaled deeply, despite the stench of the petrol, then held his breath.

  Opened his eyes.

  Push . . .

  At first Vasily thought it was a star, or the red lights of a plane against the black sky, or some strange luminescent insect.

  It took him some time to understand, because he couldn’t see anything other than that light.

  His nostrils quivered first. Because of the smoke. And maybe because they scented danger.

  It wasn’t a star, or a bug, or a beacon on a plane, or a rocket.

  Just the glowing red end of a cigarette. In the mouth of an almost invisible man, standing a few meters away from him.

  35

  Today, I am 39. No kids.

  Want to kill ME

  To bite into a poisoned apple, to lie in a glass coffin, and wait.

  Convicted: 7

  Acquitted: 539

  www.want-to-kill.com

  Be carful. Im wating 4 u. Kiss

  Angie reread the message she’d written on her phone, which was resting on her knees, then lay trapped between her thighs. The glass screen, sliding against the nylon tights under her skirt, made her shiver slightly.

  In front of her, Marianne was still talking.

  They were in Uno. Her calzone, which she’d barely touched, looked like a volcano that had stopped erupting and gone cold thousands of years before. The waiter kept coming over to their table. As if he might end up sitting next to them and spoon-feeding the captain.

  It was late. Nearly midnight.

  Angie wanted to leave, to go home, back to her lover’s arms.

  But she couldn’t tell Marianne that.

  She couldn’t talk to Marianne about men tonight. Especially not hers.

  It was almost as risky as talking about herself. She hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol tonight; she’d said too much the last time. She had almost finished the bottle of Rioja on her own.

  Angie listened automatically, the words entering her ears without making much sense, as if Marianne were speaking a foreign language that she barely understood; just a few words, like buoys, strung to the line of the conversation.

  Vasily.

  That made sense. Angie immediately concentrated.

  “You’re going to think I’m an idiot, but I saw Vasily Dragonman again. We chatted outside the station, with all my men running past, and him on his bike. He lectures like a pro, but he looks like an angel . . . as if Dennis Hopper had read every book by Françoise Dolto!”2

  Angie had no choice but to pour herself a glass of wine. Just one. She rolled her eyes: half-surprised, half-scandalized. She was used to simulating amazement at her customers’ most banal revelations. Hairdressers are the world’s best actors.

  A life spent in front of a mirror.

  “That shrink of yours? You’re dreaming, Marianne. He’s ten years younger than you. Anyway, a shrink and a cop falling in love as they investigate a case together . . . it’s a bit like some crappy TV thriller, don’t you think?”

  Marianne stuck out her tongue. Her eyes lingered on the waiter’s bum as he cleared a nearby table. Angie grimaced at her, drawing it out a bit too long.

  She wondered how Marianne would react if she found out that her best friend was the lover of the man she was fantasizing about . .
. Would she laugh? Make a toast to handsome, young lovers? Or would it be a blow to her morale—yet another one—which the captain would simply accept in silence? Either that or she’d slap Angie in the face.

  Angie had got herself into so much trouble by suggesting that Vasily call the captain. She needed to change the subject.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your colleague instead?”

  “JB? What do you want to know?”

  “Everything!”

  She forced herself to laugh, throwing her head back. The waiter returned, his gaze sliding down Angie’s neck and clinging to the bright pendant she wore around it, as if attempting to stop himself falling further into the shadows of her blouse.

  Marianne stared up at the heavens.

  “Well, darling, Lieutenant Lechevalier is still just as married as he ever was, still just as devoted to his kids, and still as sexy as ever in his tight jeans.”

  “All good, then. You just have to wait until it’s your time. Love is simply a question of patience, Marianne. You have to be there at the right moment, that’s all.” She took a sip of her red wine before continuing: “That’s what my father always told me. He was bald at seventeen, was only one meter sixty tall, and his chest was so hairy he had to wear his shirts buttoned all the way up to his neck. And yet he hit the jackpot: the most beautiful girl in his class, an Andalusian all the other boys were in love with. He always said that he just stayed close, faithful, stubborn, attentive, like a fan who’s so desperate to be in the front row that he’s willing to sleep in front of the stadium for two days before his idol’s show. For a whole year, while the others came and went, my father held a candle for her—or an umbrella, or a box of tissues, whatever was needed. But he was there. Twelve months of hell so he could be happy for the rest of his life. He said it was the same for my baccalaureate, a lot of hard work but with long-term benefits.”