The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  Malone breathed softly against her chest, his body as limp as his toy’s. Asleep, maybe. Amanda turned onto Rue Chopin. Their house was at the end of the cul-de-sac, seventy meters away. She cut straight through the empty parking lot, without changing direction or slowing down, without turning her face to the window of Dévote Dumontel’s house opposite. The high-pitched yapping of another dog, somewhere behind her, sounding like an alarm.

  Vasily Dragonman. Burned to death. Good news, obviously.

  Alive, he was a danger to them.

  But now he was dead, wasn’t the threat even worse?

  39

  Officer Bourdaine, standing like a maritime pine, his body twisted as though he’d been struggling against the wind in this position for the past century, didn’t dare shout. Despite the urgency.

  “Captain! Phone call for you!”

  Marianne Augresse still had her back to him. Only her neck moved, slowly. Facing the Cap de la Héve, the captain observed every detail of the panorama that opened around her with the precision of a lighthouse beam.

  Vasily Dragonman had not come here by chance.

  She was going to ask the forensics team to go over the area with a fine-tooth comb. They’d complain, but who cared? Obviously, the psychologist had been looking for something.

  She tried to unfold Vasily’s map in her memory, but was incapable of recalling the places he’d mentioned, the lines he’d drawn, the circles and the colors. On the other hand, she remembered every one of his final words:

  “I’ve made some progress on the list of possible locations. It should only take me a few hours to visit the spots that could correspond to the place where Malone used to live, before.”

  They had had to start the investigation over again, from scratch. Using Vasily’s notes, Malone’s testimony, Gouti’s stories. Marianne had also sent JB to the school in Manéglise to talk with the headmistress. He’d scowled a bit—he’d been up all night in the freezing cold—but the captain hadn’t given him any choice in the matter. It was a detour of barely ten kilometers.

  “Captain?”

  Finally Marianne turned around.

  Bourdaine stammered. “A . . . a phone call for you. It’s urgent.”

  It was Papy. He was yelling into the phone.

  “Marianne? For Christ’s sake, what are you doing? Larochelle’s called!”

  “Larochelle, the surgeon?”

  “Yes! Timo Soler has just contacted him. He said he’s losing consciousness, that his wound’s reopened, that he can’t move. He’s arranged to meet him.”

  “Fuck. Where?”

  “Get this. At home! Well, in his hiding place, I mean. Rue de la Belle-Etoile, in the middle of the Neiges quarter.”

  Marianne closed her eyes for a moment, offering her face to the sea as if its spray might cover her face with a thousand salty drops. But there was nothing. Nothing but a cold, dry wind, blowing away the ashes of a man she might one day have loved.

  “Let’s do it, Papy. Let’s go. Round up five vehicles and ten officers.”

  40

  Little hand on the 11, big hand on the 10

  On Malone’s bed, they were all dead. A dozen ants, a black beetle with red dots, three ladybugs and another insect—bigger, this one, but he didn’t know its name. He’d picked them up in the hallway, while Maman-da was hanging up his coat, and had hidden them in his pocket. Maman-da hadn’t swept up properly yesterday. Now, the creatures were lying on his Buzz Lightyear duvet, neatly lined up, like monsters from outer space floating between the stars.

  Dead.

  Like Gouti.

  His toy was leaning against the pillow, eyes open. He looked as if he was just resting.

  But he would never speak again. Vasily had lied to him. Maman-da had lied to him. Everyone had lied to him. Adults couldn’t be trusted. Except Maman.

  He turned to look at the calendar. He counted the planets.

  One, two, three, four, five . . .

  The moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus . . .

  Today.

  The day of love.

  Tonight, once again, since Gouti couldn’t speak, it was Malone who would tell the story. Very quietly, hidden under the duvet. He didn’t mind. He knew the story by heart. He knew them all by heart.

  Malone realized he had stopped crying. He hadn’t even noticed. Anyway, there was no point crying when the grown-ups weren’t there to see you.

  Maman-da was downstairs in the kitchen. He was alone in his room. He turned to Gouti and an idea came to him: after all, today, he could tell the story whenever he wanted! He could choose. There was no longer any need to wait for night-time.

  On the calendar, the rocket was on the green planet, but that wasn’t his favorite. He preferred the ones where there was more fighting, where you had to be brave, to battle ogres, monsters, protect Maman.

  His eyes flicked down to the bed, to the tiny ants, the ladybugs that looked like hardened sweets, the beetle with two legs missing.

  An army of the stars only fit for the rubbish bin.

  He moved closer to Gouti, put his mouth next to the toy’s little pink ear, and began to whisper. He wanted to tell him his favorite story, the one that scared him most of all. The one about the chief of the ogres, the ogre with the shiny earring and the tattoo of a skull-and-crossbones on his neck. It was easy to recognize the chief of the ogres, but it was much harder to escape from him.

  “Listen, Gouti. In the forest, there was an ogre who . . . ”

  He stopped. His mouth wanted to keep talking, but this time it was his nose that prevented him. He was disturbed by a smell that made him think of something other than the story, and ogres, and Maman.

  The smell was coming from the kitchen, and it replaced everything else in his head. Now it was all he could think about. How good it smelled. How hungry he was. How he wanted to go downstairs, give Maman-da a hug and steal a piece.

  He stared at Gouti as if seeking forgiveness. The toy still didn’t reply. Gouti was often a bit annoying in that way, but even more so now that he was dead and didn’t have a heart.

  What did it mean, if Gouti didn’t say anything?

  That he was allowed to go down and eat a slice of cake with Maman-da, or that he had to stay in his room and finish telling Maman’s story?

  41

  The mechanic lying under the car had promised me that my Twingo would be repaired by this evening. It wasn’t. He seemed so genuinely sorry, the idiot.

  Want to kill

  I pulled out the jack.

  Convicted: 1,263

  Acquitted: 329

  www.want-to-kill.com

  Officer Cabral was driving like a madman. Marianne had put on her seat belt this time. Cabral had refused to start the engine until she did, staring at her still-slightly-twisted nose, the scabs barely concealed by a layer of foundation. He hadn’t needed to say another word.

  “All right, I’ll put it on. But hurry up!”

  The river of cars opened up for them all along Avenue Foch. Marianne liked that about Le Havre: the American-style grid layout of the city center, its wide perpendicular streets, even if the comparison only really applied during their rare car chases, when they would play Starsky & Hutch between Rue Racine and Rue Richelieu, siren screaming.

  The volume of the GPS was turned up as high as it would go.

  She had to press the phone against her ear to understand the few words said amid this racket. The captain almost didn’t pick up.

  Angie.

  “Marianne? I saw an article on grand-havre.com. The headline was ‘Motorcyclist burned on Cap de la Hève.’”

  Angie was silent for a moment. She sounded out of breath.

  “The article said the victim was a school psychologist. My God, was it Vasily, Marianne?”

  Without slowing do
wn, the car cut across the grassy avenue reserved for trams. A few schoolchildren waiting at the stop stared wide-eyed, the quickest of them aiming mobile phones at the speeding police car.

  Angie must have been fretting about her. This was not the moment for a friendly chat, but Marianne understood her friend’s concern: after all, she’d spent half the night praising the charms of that man . . . while he was being burned to a cinder less than five kilometers away.

  The horror of it! Even if the adrenaline pumping through her veins momentarily anaesthetised her emotions.

  But she needed to concentrate on her mission.

  Catch Timo Soler.

  “Do you have any more news?” Angie asked, after a period of silence. “Are you sure that . . . that it’s him?”

  “Not yet. It’s good of you to worry, Angie, but I can’t speak right now.”

  Cabral slammed on the brakes on Rue Brindeau. There was no way he could cross the tramline this time: an “A” from Mont-Gaillard was passing a “B” coming back from the beach. Ahead of them, at the end of Rue de Paris, a gray container ship, as high as a five-storey building, offered the illusion that one of the quarter’s concrete apartment blocks had decided to leave the city.

  Angie wasn’t giving up.

  Marianne put her palm over her right ear so she could hear her friend’s words.

  “As soon as you have any news, will you call me?”

  Her voice was trembling. For an instant, Marianne had the strange impression that it was Angélique, not her, who had fallen in love with the psychologist.

  Or his ghost.

  Officer Cabral sped down Rue Siegfried, heading towards the port.

  “In five hundred meters,” the female voice of the GPS announced, as loud as a gospel singer, “cross the Pont V, then turn left. Your destination is in front of you.”

  Marianne had to hang up. She had to guide Cabral once they got to the Neiges quarter. The last thing they needed was to make so much noise that Timo Soler knew they were coming.

  They would be there as soon as they crossed the bridge.

  She had to forget Angie. Forget the shrink. Concentrate on this arrest.

  “I’ll call you tonight, dearest. I have to hang up.”

  42

  Little hand on the 12, big hand on the 2

  Amanda had just put the last plate on the table when she heard the front door open.

  Just in time.

  Table set. TV on. Bottle of Faugères on the table. She opened the oven door so that the smell of the Carambar cake would cover up the odor of the beef in the frying pan. Malone loved to smell his favorite cake slowly baking.

  Malone was sensitive, gentle, intelligent, intuitive. Amanda had realized long ago that a keen sense of smell was a sign of sensitivity in a boy. The most important sense, along with touch, whereas most men were content with sight and taste.

  While little Malone was incapable of eating an entire Carambar, he loved the taste of them, liked to suck them until they stuck to his fingers, chew on them a little bit, and best of all empty a whole packet into a saucepan with butter and sugar so they would melt. When he wasn’t sulking, as he was today.

  Before Dimitri came into the kitchen, Amanda turned the beef. It was already a bit too late for that: the meat was slightly overcooked. Dimitri’s culinary advice would constitute the majority of their table talk during their meal, along with a few enlightened remarks about the current state of the world, as seen from his house.

  She was surprised by her husband’s smiling face. He didn’t go so far as to kiss her, but he did put a hand under her apron, which was tied at the waist.

  “Did you hear? It’s all everyone’s talking about in the village. That fucking shrink went up in smoke!”

  Amanda detached herself from his embrace and signaled for him to speak more quietly.

  He poured himself a glass of wine while glancing over at the frying pan, as if the smell of Carambar was coming from there. Next to the frying pan, a saucepan of mixed vegetables was simmering. He didn’t make any comment. You get used to quality, he’d told her one night after scolding her for a fallen soufflé.

  His special way of paying her a compliment.

  Dimitri lowered his voice and pulled out a chair.

  “Our troubles are over. He won’t be bothering us anymore.”

  Amanda shrugged and turned off the gas under the frying pan.

  “The cops will investigate. He spent a lot of time with Malone.”

  “Half a day per week. He must have been dealing with at least twenty other kids in the area. All of them nutcases.”

  Amanda didn’t rise to the bait. Putting on an oven glove, she took the cake out of the oven. She imagined the smell escaping, invisible, climbing the stairs and sliding under the door of Malone’s bedroom. Like a delicate invitation that he alone would understand. Nothing else mattered.

  As long as he never forgot that smell.

  As long as he never forgot the taste of nice things. Only mothers could give that to little boys: sensitivity. If they followed in the footsteps of their fathers, idolized them, obsessed over football and cars and DIY, they were screwed: they’d end up being just as stupid. Generation after generation of idiots. Only mothers could try to put an end to this curse.

  “You’re right,” admitted Amanda. “Anyway, we have no reason to feel guilty.”

  Silence. Amanda dusted the cake with a layer of chocolate sprinkles. A pointless yet essential detail. The difference between men who would guard palaces in the future, and the refined men who would live inside them.

  “Do we know what happened?” she asked. “An accident at Cap de la Hève, that’s what I heard. He crashed his bike. Is that right?”

  Dimitri emptied his glass and smiled again.

  “Yeah. That’s what they’ll say. He slid on a patch of black ice and, unlucky for him, his tank was full. He ended up underneath the bike, squashed. And then the whole thing caught fire. Maybe that dumb Romanian felt like having a smoke while he was waiting for the ambulance to arrive.”

  He laughed.

  Amanda thought for a moment. Yesterday, Dimitri had been with her all evening, even if it had been late when he came up to their bedroom. It was gone 11 P.M. when she heard the end of Private Confessions, and then he had turned off the TV. How could he have been at Cap de la Hève at the same time?

  In her head, she visualized the distance from their estate to the coast. The viewpoint was only about ten kilometers away, less than half an hour there and back, and Dimitri had been alone downstairs for more than an hour, lying on the couch, watching television.

  In Amanda’s head, a lawyer continued to plead her husband’s case. It was impossible that he could have gone out: she’d have heard him start the car outside their house; she’d have heard him come back in . . . unless he’d been very quiet, if he’d deliberately turned up the volume on the television, for example, if he’d parked the car further away . . . The defence lawyer, having run out of arguments, clung to one last certainty.

  Dimitri was not a killer.

  “What do you mean exactly?” Amanda asked, her voice shaking. “You mean it’s not an acc—’

  There was a knock at the door.

  The police, already?

  The school, again?

  Dimitri got up to answer it, not appearing particularly worried. Amanda watched him disappear through the doorway, then felt a slight draft of cold air as the front door opened.

  Dimitri did not sound surprised.

  “Oh, it’s you? Good timing. Come in!”

  Her husband burst out laughing. While she hadn’t been attracted to him when they first met, that laugh of his had comforted her. He wasn’t that funny, but he saw humor all around him, in everyone, in every situation. His sense of humor was fairly obvious, and generally his life and his frien
ds did not disappoint him.

  Amanda went into the hallway and saw two men. She immediately noticed, also, that at the top of the stairs, Malone’s bedroom door was ajar.

  The Carambar effect.

  In that moment, Amanda loved everything. That smell, her kitchen, her little man who, after a tantrum, would come and hug her skirt. A friend who had dropped by unexpectedly to talk to her husband, and her leaving them alone so she could add another plate to the table before serving the aperitif.

  Happiness, just as she had always imagined it. As if everything could simply stop in that moment.

  * * *

  Malone stood at the top of the stairs.

  He was hungry. He would have preferred to start with dessert. He heard voices in the hallway. He liked it when Pa-di invited friends round; they would stay in the living room while he, having nabbed some of the snacks from the bowls, would go to the kitchen to eat dinner in front of the TV, which was tuned to the cartoon channel. When Pa-di ate with them, he forced Maman-da to watch the news, and Malone couldn’t understand any of it.

  He approached the banister, holding Gouti in his arms. He didn’t even need to tell him “Shh’.

  In the hallway, Maman-da had seen him and smiled up at him.

  Suddenly, Malone bit his lip. Pa-di had taken the man’s coat and scarf as he came in.

  And it was then that Malone recognized him.

  Not him, not his face. Something else.

  The shiny earring. The skull-and-crossbones tattooed on his neck.