by Michel Bussi
She watched the tide rise higher.
The sea would carry her body far away, to the muddy estuary, where she’d join the other refuse fallen from container ships. Her hand was wet, and Malone’s slipped around inside it like a fish fresh out of the water.
Her body, her life, this Calvary . . . she didn’t care about any of it, as long as her son survived.
* * *
Zerda stopped outside the house and grinned at them. Amanda could see the butt of his Zastava again, now that he’d opened his jacket. He seemed to be able to read the internal battle she was having with herself, as if he had somehow bugged her brain. She was panicking, hesitating, still hoping at least for a truce, a reprieve. Let him spare the boy. Let him fuck her before he killed her. Let him be content with the loot.
Perfect.
He had no doubts. There was no reason to change his plan. After all, why not continue with his Hansel-and-Gretel idea, leaving bodies behind like breadcrumbs. In the eyes of this kid, he was already an ogre anyway.
He’d wasted too much time over the last few months. Looking after Timo so he wouldn’t go to the police. Leaving his treasure in place. Waiting for the kid to forget. For the cops’ attention to waver.
He climbed the three steps up to the wood and corrugated iron house, which was in the same dilapidated state as the other ten huts on this crappy beach, then he took the key from his pocket, although it would have been just as easy to open the worm-eaten door with a simple kick. He had to struggle against the euphoria that was rising inside him. He mustn’t let it drown him, or intoxicate him.
But it was difficult.
He knew that he would, in a few minutes, emerge from this house where he had spent all those weeks before the robbery, with Timo, Ilona, Cyril and the kid, that he would emerge from this pirates’ den, as they’d called it, and he would be rich.
And alone.
56
Saint-Lazare station. Line 14. Friday evening. I’m one of the hamsters rushing up the escalators.
Want to kill
I left a bomb down there. They don’t understand—they think it was Al-Qaeda. But it was just me.
Convicted: 335
Acquitted: 1,560
www.want-to-kill.com
She’d always hated parking lots. It was almost a phobia.
Especially the gigantic parking lots that you find in shopping centers, those steel plains that were prohibitive to pedestrians, whose exits seem to slip away as soon as you get close to them, but which you had to walk across.
Once, when she was young, she got lost in one.
At the Mondeville 2 shopping center, in the suburbs of Caen. She’d come into the center’s parking lot through the north door, feeling sure of herself, sulking because her parents had refused to buy her the latest Pokemon. She, Papa, and Maman had entered the center through an identical door. The south door. Her parents had spent an hour searching for her in the S2 parking lot, the purple one, while she was crying in N3, the green one. Panicking. Abandoned.
The security guards had found her there.
Want to kill.
Parking lots. A phobia.
Even as an adult, she lost her car in these places, almost every time.
Today, it was where she lost her love.
Timo’s dark blood continued to leak out of him, slowly. Beneath him, the stain was spreading over the ivory-colored seats of the Twingo, like a sugar cube dunked in a cup of coffee. Timo’s face and arms and neck, on the other hand, were growing even paler.
She stroked his thigh, lovingly, reassuringly. Timo was sitting in the passenger seat, which was reclined back as far as it would go, strapped in place by the seat belt. The people wandering around the parking lot couldn’t see anything; at most, those who turned their heads as they walked past the car and tried to look through the windows, like nosy neighbors, might think they were a couple who were in no hurry to move, deep in discussion.
Timo’s quivering lips, seen from the other side of the glass, might have made people think he was speaking.
And he was trying to, although all she could understand were a few sounds, one syllable in three, one in ten. Timo’s mouth sighed as it closed again.
“ . . . care . . . ”
She smiled at him and her hand moved up to his torso. She had always found Timo handsome. Girls used to stare at him, before, when he could still walk around without the danger of being recognized.
“ . . . care . . . ”
What was Timo trying to say? What was he talking about?
How much he cared about her?
How scared he was?
Something else, before he died . . . ?
“You have to live, Timo. You hear me? You have to live . . . ”
She forced herself to speak slowly too, pronouncing each syllable, as if encouraging Timo to do the same.
But there was no reply, only a quiver of his lips.
“You have to live, my love. For our son! I need to leave you for a few moments, you know that, but you must stay strong. After that, I’ll call the hospital, and I’ll give them everything: the aisle number, the color of the zone, our car’s registration number, and they’ll come and find you. They’ll save you. They’ll keep you in the hospital for a few weeks, and you’ll spend a few years in prison, but then you’ll get out, you’ll still be young, my love, and your son will still be a boy. We’ll see each other again. You understand, don’t you, my love? You have to live. For us. For the three of us.”
As she spoke to him, she kept an eye on the luminous figures on the dashboard.
14:13.
Timo pronounced another word, unfathomable, except for the first letter. L. The rest was lost in a gurgle of saliva and blood.
A word beginning with L.
Love?
Later?
Lost?
She put her lips to his. They were dry. Hard. Cracked. Above them swung the little pine tree hanging from the rear-view mirror, the odor of vanilla mingling with the smell of stale tobacco without managing to overpower it.
Before she could staunch the memory, that pine tree made her think, inevitably, of the drawing she’d hidden behind the photograph of her baby.
Noel Joyeux.
N’oublie Jamais.
The only thing that still connected him to her.
Everything was in place. Everything had been planned. Now she just had to trust to luck.
She made sure that Timo would not tip over, that his position was comfortable—or bearable, at least—lying on the passenger seat; then she pulled the sun screens down to be certain that no one in the parking lot would be able to spot him.
Timo could hold out. Timo was going to hold out. He’d held out all those months since the robbery, all those days, since that bastard of a surgeon had tricked them. He could hold out a few hours longer, just a few hours.
Want-to-live.
She got out of the car and smiled one last time at Timo. Her lover’s eyes were already closed. His mouth was still trembling, but no sound came from it.
She staggered slightly and had to put one hand on the car to steady herself. Behind her sunglasses, the tears were falling, deforming the face of her wristwatch as if it were the clock in a painting by Dali.
14:23.
At the end of the parking lot, the electric sliding doors opened as people came and went. She was right on time.
57
Papy stood staring at the chasm below. Stunned.
Five hundred and sixty meters!
Around the hole, everything seemed to have been abandoned. Obviously, he was lost. His GPS had not taken into account the recent renovations in Potigny, the latest destruction of the industrial wasteland and the new streets that crossed through the vanished factories, ruined cottages and old brick buildings the way you pass throug
h a ghost without feeling anything other than an inexplicable shudder. The lieutenant had found himself outside the village and had stopped his car before making a U-turn in a rubble-strewn parking lot.
He was looking for Rue des Gryzon´s, a little mining street that would also be demolished one day, when all the miners were dead, and be replaced with apple trees and meadows. Wiping out this anomaly forever.
In the north of France, there are mines, pyramid-shaped slag heaps and red cottages with flower-lined streets; in Normandy, there are farms, half-timbered houses and wells in courtyards. Real landscapes end up resembling those produced by the collective imagination. In the north, people wanted to see Zola; in Normandy, Flaubert or Maupassant. A kind of cosmetic surgery that was performed by men to the places where they slept, rather than to the women they slept with. Another way of fighting against the march of time and erasing the ugliest parts of the past.
Papy liked to put the world to rights, alone, in his head, with no one to contradict him; not even the honeyed voice of the GPS that told him to go down streets that no longer existed and ordered him to “make a U-turn immediately.”
In defence of his GPS, Lieutenant Pasdeloup had not really been paying attention to the directions. Although driving slowly, he had also been checking the messages that Marianne had sent him: drawings by that kid, Malone, and the same old clues.
A boat.
A forest, a rocket.
A castle with four towers.
The captain’s messages, accompanying the drawings, were increasingly urgent in tone.
Come on, Papy, you’ve lived in the area for more than fifty years—you must have some idea!
True, but . . .
The policeman was no longer really concentrating on those drawings either. Each man had his own job. There were fifteen cops in Le Havre, staring at those sketches. An investigation is a team job, and he liked to sniff out leads the other cops hadn’t followed. He liked to work solo, a bit like a private detective. A few months from retirement, he thought he was owed a certain degree of freedom. He called Lucas Marouette, the intern who was holding the fort at the station, and fired questions at him. He wanted to have as many cards as possible in his hand when he found that damn Rue de Gryzon´s, when he walked around the street where Timo, Ilona, Cyril, and Alexis were born, had grown up, at exactly the point in time when the mines were closing. They were like kids who’d survived the bombardment of their village and had to invent games to play in the ruins, their laughter drowning out the lamentations of the old. Like the children of Oradour, the babies of Hiroshima: the unfounded hope of children running around a grave, without understanding, without any respect for what was sacred.
A grave that was five hundred and sixty meters deep. A grave he stood next to now, in which a hundred years of local history had been carelessly thrown away.
The lieutenant had got out of his car and read the little sign before leaning over the chasm. The Aisy shaft was the last industrial remnant of the village’s mining past. Five meters wide, but almost bottomless. Ore had been extracted from it right up to the late 1980s, and a sort of concrete blockhouse had been built around the hole, surmounted by a tower, thirty meters high, square in shape, and covered with narrow windows, their panes all now broken.
Papy stood there for a moment. What the hell was that intern doing? He’d asked Lucas some precise questions that would only need a quick search on the internet, even if they might have seemed a little odd. Was the old lieutenant going soft in the head, the younger man must have wondered? First of all, Papy had wanted to know about the life cycle of an agouti, a strange South American rodent! Absolutely everything. Yes, it might seem a stupid request, young Marouette, but it wouldn’t kill you to give me the answer. And, even easier, tell me the meanings of a few Polish words (any translation tool would do the job) . . . Gryzon´s, and other names linked to the Polish colony in Potigny that he’d been able to spot.
The key lay in an association of ideas, a coded memory; Papy felt sure of it.
Lastly, and more difficult to find—but Marouette needed a bit of a challenge—he wanted as much detail as possible on the lives of Timo Soler, Alexis Zerda, Ilona Adamiack, and Cyril Lukowik, from their childhood to the present day. Not their criminal records—he knew those details already—but everything else, the kind of stuff that normally didn’t interest the police or lawyers.
And so he waited.
A message arrived one minute later. But it was Marianne, not Marouette.
Papy cursed.
The boss was growing impatient.
She’d sent him a drawing by Malone Moulin, which to his eyes looked just like all the others. A scrawl, which only held his interest for a second or so because it was just like the ones his grandchildren did, and which were stuck to the front of his fridge with magnets.
Four vertical black lines and three vaguely horizontal blue lines.
The famous castle by the seaside, according to Malone.
A castle, FFS! Marianne had written. Papy, find me a fucking castle in the estuary with a view of the Channel.
There isn’t one, Marianne!
The child is making it up.
Papy waited a while longer, savouring those moments of reflection by the bottomless grave, then headed back to the car. He was on his way to Rue des Gryzon´s, with or without ammunition.
The message from Lucas Marouette reached him while he was arguing with Anna, the bossy voice of the GPS. Although normally the lieutenant liked bossy women who stood up to him.
There were three attachments.
The first contained about thirty pages on the life of an agouti. Lieutenant Pasdeloup quickly scrolled through it. Later . . .
The second was only one page long, a table with two columns: Polish words in the first, French translations in the second.
Only one line interested him in that particular moment.
Gryzon´s.
The lieutenant felt his heartbeat accelerate. With a movement of his thumb on the touchscreen, he reduced Anna to silence.
So he’d been right all along!
He clicked, a little feverishly, on the last file. Two pages: a few scraps of information about the Solers and Lukowiks. The intern was quite resourceful: he’d unearthed some old CVs from the job center. He’d remembered that all these criminals had been claiming benefits in the months leading up to the robbery. No one had looked into their prior work experience, any training courses or temporary jobs they had done. Even less so for the Lukowiks, whose unemployed status had ended that morning in January 2015, on Rue de la Mer. All anyone remembered was that they’d worked at the port for a while, him as a docker and her as an accountant.
Papy looked up at the sky. Now he had everything he needed. Might he be wrong? Should he speak to Marianne about it? It wouldn’t help her, right now, in finding Timo Soler, Malone Moulin, Amanda Moulin or Alexis Zerda. But at least he now knew how this madness had come about.
Another message. Marianne again. She was obsessed with those bloody drawings . . .
Papy? Did you get my last message?
Sighing, the policeman looked again at Malone Moulin’s latest masterpiece.
Four black lines . . .
The kid had told the shrink about the cylindrical towers, but there were no castles still standing anywhere near Le Havre. And certainly not by the sea. The whole area had been bombarded during the war.
Marianne was getting on his nerves. He wished she’d just let him get on with his side of the investigation! If everyone did their job, followed their own threads, they could talk about it once the ball of wool had been disentangled.
The policeman’s eyes followed the movement of the clouds for a moment, until they stopped on the tower above the Aisy mine shaft.
And then the penny dropped. There was a shifting of gears inside his brain. Suddenly, it seemed
as if the immense concrete block rising up towards the sky began to waver, to tremble, before it collapsed into the gaping hole beneath it.
Hand shaking, he grabbed his mobile phone. After all, he loved to satisfy the desires of bossy women. He scrolled down his list of contacts and pressed Boss.
“I’ve found it, Marianne. I’ve found your goddamn castle by the sea!”
58
Little hand on the 2, big hand on the 7
Malone was sitting on the steps of the house on stilts, facing the sea. Gouti was perched on his knees in case the tide suddenly came in or an especially big wave crashed close by. Gouti didn’t have a hood. He didn’t have anything on his head to protect him from the drops. The ogre had told him not to go inside the house, to stay outside and wait.
He didn’t mind. Even if it was cold, he preferred to stay out here. In his memories, the boat was prettier: it had large white sails and a black flag at the top. This one was ugly, half-sunk in the water. It almost looked like a rock.
Like the castle. It didn’t look very solid either, and the towers didn’t protect you much and you probably couldn’t see very far from the top of them, if you could even get up there, because there were no windows and no stairs. Just four towers. Not even any walls between the towers for knights to look down from. All it would take was one big wave and it could all disappear, like the boat, like the ogre’s house, like Gouti.
No, not Gouti. Because he was holding him tight, between his knees. Even if he was dead.
Malone wanted the sea to hurry up and go out. He remembered that too. Sometimes, the sea went out a long way, further out than the round stones, leaving sand behind it. Malone had built castles with Maman, in front of the house, big sand castles that stood for a long time before the sea returned.
It had been right here, he was sure of it, even if everything was now hidden under the water. Maybe when the sea went away again, his Maman would come back to play with him.