The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  His Maman from here, not Maman-da.

  The horrible scream made him jump. It was the ogre. Instantly, Malone pressed his hood against both ears, and a moment later put two fingers in Gouti’s ears, so he wouldn’t have to hear it either.

  * * *

  With a sudden movement, Alexis Zerda knocked over the plywood cupboard. It exploded over the damp carpet, the walls, doors and drawers. He used his feet to turn over the debris; the wood, glass and crockery, the broken ornaments, the yellowed sheets of paper. Nothing.

  Nothing but a useless mess.

  Still angry, he tore the bookcase from the wall and pushed it over. The few books, records, vases, and tins were all crushed by the weight of the overturned piece of furniture.

  Still nothing, except for the pile of shit they’d left behind when they’d abandoned their lair.

  No trace of the loot.

  Zerda frantically searched through the remaining furniture, under the beds, tore out the plasterboard from the thin walls that separated the five rooms—bedrooms, kitchen, living room—driven by nothing but pure fury, because he’d realized the truth ever since he’d lifted up the trapdoor under the fridge: someone had beaten him to it!

  The loot had been hidden in the crawlspace under the house—accessible only by moving the refrigerator—in three suitcases, each the exact maximum size for hand luggage that could be taken on a low-cost airline. Two million euros’ worth!

  The bed in the first bedroom smashed violently against the wall. The blade of the dagger that he held in his hand carved a large incision in the mattress, unleashing a flurry of foam.

  Only four of them had known about the hiding place. Timo, the Lukowiks, and him. Even the kid didn’t know. Nor did Dimitri or Amanda, obviously. He had hidden the loot as planned after the robbery, so could wait for everything to settle down and have time to get in touch with his fences—some Chinese guys, living on the other side of the world, without any possible connection to the police’s informers over here.

  So who had betrayed him?

  Zerda disemboweled a second mattress, which was already mouldy from the damp, then let it fall to the floor like a slaughtered corpse, barely even bothering to search through its guts.

  There was no reason why the piece of shit who’d retrieved the hoard from under the trapdoor would have hidden it somewhere else inside this house. And he remembered perfectly well where he had left the three suitcases when he’d come here the night after the robbery.

  Who?

  Who could have come here after that?

  Not Timo. Not in the state he was in. Zerda had left him half-dead in his apartment in the Neiges quarter. And definitely not the Lukowiks, as Cyril and Ilona were already in the morgue in Le Havre by then, being examined by the forensics experts.

  That left only one possibility. Someone had talked.

  Timo? To his girlfriend? To the kid?

  Zerda froze for a second and glanced over at Amanda, who was sitting on a chair in the living room, looking pensive, as if staring at an invisible television.

  He’d take care of her later.

  He took three steps towards the front door, paused to take a few deep breaths, and then went out and sat down next to the kid.

  You never know.

  * * *

  Amanda stared at the wall. At a crack in the wall, to be precise, which reminded her of the mortal fissure in a child’s brain. The house would end up collapsing too—it always started like that, with a tiny fissure, that then became a gaping hole, creating an emptiness, a chasm, without you even realizing it, a void into which everything would fall, everything you cared about.

  She stood up quietly. Zerda no longer seemed to be paying any attention to her, but she knew him: he was as alert as a wild animal, like a tiger, even when he appeared relaxed. Ready to pounce, at any moment, on anyone.

  That crack intrigued her.

  She approached it and pressed her nose to the wall. Close up, it looked more like a thread that led from the ceiling to the floor, ran along the skirting board, then rose up again to a little Formica table with a single drawer. As if a colony of ants had found a hoard of sugar and was meticulously transporting its plunder.

  Amanda touched her finger to the wall. Stranger yet, the crack in the wall was not natural. It had been traced, in black felt-tip, in tiny dots, a striking imitation of a discreet line of insects.

  As if someone had wanted her to notice it and only her. As if it had been drawn by someone who knew the secret of her son, who knew that the only living beings who’d accompanied him to heaven were insects, marching in procession beneath his skull.

  She turned back to look at Zerda. He was talking to Malone, outside the front door.

  What could he be telling the child?

  It didn’t matter. At least she had a few seconds to herself. Clearly, whoever had traced this line had wanted her to open that drawer.

  She opened it, taking care to place her body in front of it so Zerda wouldn’t see. Old road maps, badly folded. She pushed them out of the way, searched beneath them.

  She didn’t understand.

  Her trembling fingers grasped hold of two rectangular cards.

  She was holding two airplane tickets . . .

  Two seat numbers, 23 A and B.

  Two names: Amanda and Malone Moulin.

  A place of departure—Le Havre-Octeville—and a destination. Caracas, via Galway, Ireland.

  Flight leaving Le Havre at 16:42. In less than two hours.

  What did it mean?

  Were these tickets what Zerda had been searching for? Was this how he, too, had hoped to get away? But that was impossible: the entire French police force would be searching for him. There was no way he would get through a security check at an airport.

  So who, then?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a violent coughing fit. Zerda looked round at her, suspicious. Opening the buttons on her blouse had been a stupid idea: all it had achieved was to expose her chest, and her lungs, to that icy wind, enclosing her heart in a coffin of frost.

  She was going to die in a few minutes, anyway, her nose full of snot. Ridiculous, pitiful, just like her whole life. She should be concentrating on just one thing right now: distracting Zerda, and screaming at Malone to run away, to run as fast as his little legs would carry him away from this hovel, before the tide imprisoned them here for good.

  * * *

  “You’ve lost your treasure?”

  Malone wasn’t afraid of ogres, so he could help him. Especially as this one seemed completely lost, nothing like the big ogre in the story of the Naive knight, with his dagger that could cut even the moon into pieces.

  “Do you have an idea, Malone? Do you know where it’s hidden?”

  He sounded like a baddie, pretending to be a goodie.

  “You’re like Gouti, then . . . ”

  “What do you mean, like Gouti?”

  “Yes, like Gouti. Don’t you know the story? Gouti, his treasure, he hides it before he goes to sleep, so he can be sure to find it when he wakes up.”

  “Go on, Malone. What does he do to find his treasure?”

  “Well, nothing. That’s the point of the story. He never finds it. Each time Gouti buries treasure, he loses it and doesn’t remember where he’s hidden it.”

  A flood of insults smashed together inside Zerda’s head. It was as if someone had put all these ideas in the kid’s head just to fuck with him.

  And yet he made his voice go softer. High-pitched, but children liked that. He knew how to control himself when he had to.

  “But if Gouti never finds his treasure, then . . . who does? Who stole it from him?”

  “No one.”

  Malone looked out at sea, pressing Gouti between his knees, then went on.

  “No one and everyo
ne. That’s the point of the story. Gouti’s treasure is a seed, a seed buried in the ground that grows and makes a big tree so that everyone can enjoy it, and eat from it, and sleep inside it too.”

  Zerda leaned closer to the child. He could feel the barrel of the Zastava rubbing against his thigh.

  * * *

  Her curiosity too strong, Amanda continued to search through the drawer, while making sure she was blocking it from Alexis’s view. She lifted up one last map. Yvetot. Code 1910 O. But she moved it too quickly, and the object hidden beneath it also moved. There was a noise, only a faint one, probably drowned out by the sound of the waves, but even so it made Amanda shudder.

  This time, as if playing the Operation game, she took infinite care as she put the road map down on top of the table, revealing what lay beneath.

  She narrowed her eyes to be certain that she wasn’t dreaming.

  There was no other explanation possible. Someone had put it there deliberately. For her.

  59

  Today, Stéphanie gave birth to our third child. Except there were two in her womb.

  Want to kill

  I asked her which one she wanted to keep.

  Convicted: 1,153

  Acquitted: 129

  www.want-to-kill.com

  Gouti was just three years old, which was already pretty big in his family, because his mother was only eight and his grandfather, who was very old, was fifteen.

  Five cops were busy working around Captain Augresse and Lieutenant Lechevalier.

  Dimitri Moulin’s corpse had been removed, along with the blood-soaked rug, and now the cops could come and go around the crime scene without taking any precautions; there was even a map spread out on the Moulins’ living room table.

  This is urgent, the captain had shouted: we have to prevent two more murders, one of them of a three-year-old boy. And since Papy had called, outlining his conviction, they finally had a proper lead.

  Malone didn’t draw the towers of a castle, but of a factory . . .

  Lieutenant Pasdeloup had had this sudden revelation while observing the tower of a mine that looked strangely like a keep. They weren’t looking for four towers but four chimneys, or four tanks, or four cisterns.

  Facing the sea. Should be child’s play . . .

  The five policemen around the table each had a laptop in front of them and were staring at the screens like a team of geeks playing some online game with more geeks on the other side of the planet.

  Google Earth, Google Street View, Mappy, the local Urban Planning office’s information system . . . they were checking any site that contained georeferenced data, photographs or maps. Two other cops, Benhami and Bourdaine, had been ordered to call the port authorities and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

  Captain Augresse supervised the operation. Papy was the best cop on her team, and his intuition had proved itself once again. What a shame that the stubborn bastard insisted on working alone . . . She would happily have swapped him for JB. Not that she didn’t enjoy the sight of the lieutenant’s tight little ass bent over the table, and not that he wasn’t an effective cop either—he’d proved he was when he’d spotted the child’s booster seat in the Opel Zafira parked outside the Deauville casino. But Papy’s presence would have reassured Marianne, even if she couldn’t say why exactly. It was stupid, but she no longer felt able to fully trust JB.

  Once upon a time there was a big wooden castle that had been built with the trees from the large forest that grew all around. In this big castle, which could be seen from far away because of its four high towers, lived the knights. In those days, the knights each bore the name of the day when they were born . . .

  After the initial euphoria following Lieutenant Pasdeloup’s suggestion—“Look for a factory!”—the enthusiasm in the room had waned.

  Nothing seemed to match.

  Most of the team were focusing on the port’s industrial zone, but that was a long way from Cap de la Hève. Along the sea front, there were no refineries or power stations or steelworks or chemical factories. Production sites were mostly situated upstream, near Port-Jérome, the biggest refinery in France. The police had also searched on the other side of the Seine, towards Honfleur, but all they could find there was a marina, a few fishing boats, a lighthouse, and no towers of any kind . . . There was nothing to the north either, towards the Antifer oil terminal, nothing resembling Malone Moulin’s descriptions.

  Marianne cursed as she glared at her watch.

  2:40 P.M.

  They were getting bogged down . . . At least JB would have a good excuse for arriving home late that night. He’d be able to kiss his children and wife without worrying about her smelling another woman’s perfume on him. The captain could even write him an excuse note without feeling any qualms.

  They were getting nowhere on the other aspects of the investigation too. The lead on the Opel Zafira’s number plate had ended up in a dead end. The car had been moved after the robbery—either a few hours later or the next morning—without anyone noticing. According to the registration number, it belonged to a pharmacist from Neuilly, who almost never came to Deauville and kept three cars in his garage. He only reported the theft three months later, on April 9. And, at the time, no one made the connection between this stolen car and the list of twenty-seven other vehicles parked along Rue de la Mer on the day of the robbery. What a mess! The Opel had probably been burned somewhere in the estuary since then, or pushed off a quay into the port.

  From this, only two conclusions could be drawn, neither of them particularly new: the first, that the robbers had prepared their crime in meticulous detail, and second, that it was in this car—since it had been stolen—that Ilona and Cyril Lukowik had planned to flee, and also in this car that the loot had disappeared.

  One last hope remained: picking out Malone Moulin on one of the photographs taken by bystanders before, during, or after the shoot-out. Lucas Marouette was on that job. Nothing to report for now, though, and unless he got lucky, it was likely to take him a long time to get through all the photographs. The IT wizard was going to have to zoom in on several hundred pictures, searching out just one face amid a crowd of tourists.

  On his island, everyone called him the Baby Pirate. He didn’t like that much, especially as he hadn’t been a baby for a long time, but as he was the youngest in the family, with his cousins growing up at the same rate as he was, he always remained the baby.

  In the Moulins’ living room, the distorted voice of Gouti continued to tell his stories, from Monday to Sunday, on a loop. He’d been doing it for nearly an hour now. Marianne had insisted that they didn’t stop the MP3 player until they had discovered the coded meaning of all those places, even if the nasal voice playing in the background gave a weird, almost surreal aspect to the scene.

  Cops playing on their consoles while listening to fairy tales.

  You see, Gouti, the real treasure is not what we spend our life searching for; the real treasure was buried close by all the time.

  The captain moved away from the table to answer her mobile, which was vibrating in her pocket.

  Angie.

  Perfect timing!

  Marianne pressed her phone against her ear and walked out onto the terrace of the Moulins’ small back garden.

  “Marianne, are you there?”

  “Angie? What’s up? Is there a problem?”

  “No . . . it’s just that you were supposed to call me back, to tell me what was going on. So, your shrink, was it him, that pile of ashes?”

  The captain rolled her eyes, then looked around the garden, which was enclosed by three privet hedges. A pile of firewood under a lean-to, which the man of the house would never bring in; a lost ball under a plastic chair that his son would never see again; a rusted barbecue that would never be lit . . .

  “Yes, it was him,” said Marianne.
<
br />   There was a long silence. Interminable. It was the captain who broke it.

  “And the list has grown longer since then. I really don’t have time right now.”

  “I . . . I understand . . . ”

  Marianne’s fingers toyed with a piece of paper in her pocket. She took it out and read it.

  Noel Joyeux. N’oublie Jamais.

  The drawing found in Malone’s photograph album.

  “Are you . . . could I see you tonight?” Angélique asked shyly.

  “No, probably not.”

  Marianne felt bad about her curt reply, but she couldn’t be on the line to Angie for more than a minute. All the same, Marianne did decide to ask one last question.

  “Are you OK? Are you at work? You sound strange.”

  “I’m OK. I’m fine. You’re very important to me, Marianne, you know. I need you.”

  She’d said this in a soft voice, almost a whisper, as if speaking to a child, or a lover. The captain felt moved. She felt a great deal of affection for Angie. Inexplicably, given that they’d only really known each other for a few months. Almost certainly because she and the dreamy hairdresser shared the same mixture of absolute despair and uncontrollable passion for a fairy-tale ending; and that only a fierce sense of humor allowed them to bear the huge gap between those feelings.

  Want-to-kill.

  Want-to-live.

  Want-to-blow-up-everything.

  Want-everything, want-nothing.

  But not now, not tonight. They’d have time to put the world to rights while downing a bottle of Rioja when this case was closed. To put their own little world to rights, at least.

  “Thank you, my lovely,” whispered Marianne. “I’ll get back to you soon, I promise. But I have to hang up now.”