He paused and hunted in his pocket for a cigarette. It was always a sign of emotion, because he almost never smoked except when he was upset.
“They called me ‘the Arab.’”
“Who did?”
“The other kids, and probably the teachers, too. Coming from them, it wasn’t a compliment. A lot of our teachers had fought in Algeria, and the pupils’ parents, too. Most of the boarders were military kids.”
“Did you have any family in France?”
“No. My paternal grandparents stayed in Serbia, and my father was an only child. They could do what they wanted and no one would stick up for me. And kids can sense that.”
“They beat you up?”
Marc made a dismissive gesture, as if to banish an insect or an unpleasant memory.
“It only lasted a year. By then I had figured it out. There was only one way to cope: be the strongest.”
“Even when you’re the littlest?”
“Strength isn’t just physical. For a start you have to know how to suffer, and how not to be afraid. I trained for several months without telling anyone. They went on hitting me, and I would provoke them so they’d hit me even harder. After a while I managed to control the pain.”
“How?”
“I put myself outside my own body. I saw myself suffering, but I didn’t suffer. It’s hard to explain. When you manage to do this, it’s almost like pleasure. I don’t know if you can understand what I mean. You close yourself off completely. Everything happens on the surface, but deep down you feel tough, and intact.”
Maud was astonished to see how conscious Marc was of his own transformation. The metamorphosis he underwent when confronted by danger, and which she had witnessed: this was something she had assumed he possessed by nature, and she had thought it was involuntary. In fact, it was the result of a decision, a consequence of his will. If, over time, it had become natural to him, in the beginning he’d had to train it, like a muscle.
“Then you have to learn how to hit back. Just defending yourself is pointless. You’re better off letting them do what they want with you if you can’t hit back so hard it hurts.”
They were driving through the woods now, and Marc’s face was in shadow. He was smiling, never taking his eyes off the road.
“On the weekends, the others went home. I stayed at school. I found books in the library about combat sports. I learned which blows would hurt, which ones would do damage, and even which ones would kill. I got permission to use the gym on my own on Sunday afternoons. There were punching bags, dumbbells, everything I needed. During the week I went on getting pounded, and didn’t react. I didn’t want to strike back until I was really ready.”
Maud had rarely heard Marc talk for this long. She thought he had probably never shared these memories with anyone. By suddenly releasing them, he was carried away by their strength.
“And then one day, it was May 20th, I can’t remember the year but I remember the date, this big guy in my class came up to me at recess. It always started the same way. He asked me to do some humiliating thing, to tie his shoelaces or something like that. I never agreed, so they would all jump me. But that day I pretended to obey. I went closer to him. He was blond, with pimples on his cheeks, I still remember. He had some aristocratic name, with ‘de’ in it. The others respected him because he was strong and sturdy. Above all, his father was a colonel in the tank brigade, and he worked in Paris at staff headquarters. He let me go right up to him. I kept my eyes down as usual. But at the last minute, instead of doing what he asked, I sprang on him. I didn’t waste any time shoving him around; right from the start I landed two well-aimed blows, one in the liver and the other, with the side of my hand, on his throat.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Almost. He passed out. He was suffocating, because I’d ruptured his larynx. They took him to the infirmary and then the hospital and the doctors saved him just in time. He was out for five weeks.”
“And they didn’t expel you?”
“They wanted to. Everyone testified against me. The headmaster wanted to expel me. But when they told my mother in Lebanon, she got I don’t know whom to intervene and they kept me on.”
“And the others didn’t try to take revenge?”
“Far from it. From that day on, they left me alone. Even when the big guy I had hit came back, he watched his step. They were all afraid.”
He tossed his cigarette butt out the window.
“I went on training, but I never used my strength. I didn’t want to become a bully myself. Gradually, the kids got into the habit of coming to me whenever they had a problem, like when they had to get some rivals to agree, or when some little kid was getting picked on by the bigger ones. They knew I was capable of killing and of getting myself killed. No one wanted to cross me.”
“Is that why you didn’t have any friends?”
“There were some guys I liked and who came to me for help. But friends, real friends, no, I never had any. Ever. That was the price I paid, I guess. Like I said, physical strength is not all of it. What you need to protect yourself is mystery. You have to be impenetrable, unpredictable. Friendship is just the opposite: you open yourself up, you let someone in on your thoughts. At school, it was too dangerous. Later, by the time I was in the army, it had become a habit. I haven’t changed.”
“You’re not friends with Alex?”
“Alex is a buddy. I like him a lot and I respect him. He’s a good kid. But he doesn’t know me. Know how I know? Right this minute he’s behind us with the other two, and he’ll be dragging my name through the mud.”
“And women?”
“What about women?”
She got the impression that he had stiffened.
“Do you trust them?”
He let a long moment go by while he was thinking.
“No.”
She burst out laughing, and after a short hesitation, he laughed, too. It was a nervous laugh, that let off some of the tension. At this point in their conversation, she sensed she ought to stop and leave him alone. He was ill at ease, on the defensive. But she wanted to know more, and after all, she did have the right to.
“Have you known a lot of women?”
“What a question!”
“A typical girl’s question—is that what you think?”
By adopting that tone, she was making things easier for him. He could drop the heavy confessional mode he’d been in, relax and joke a little.
“Girls are like buddies. I let them come near but I don’t let them in.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“You’ve never been in love?”
“Not to the point where I’d let my guard down like—”
“Like with me.”
They laughed again and at the end she leaned over to kiss him. He slammed on the brakes.
“Stop! You’ll run us off the road!”
“I don’t care. I want you.”
The truck came to a halt in the middle of the narrow road. The engine was still idling, and they could hear the wind gusting down from the mountaintops, whistling, louder than the purr of the engine. They threw their clothes on the floor of the cab and kissed with a violence they had not known at night. The light on their bodies enhanced their desire and made them feel as if they were exploring each other for the first time. As he took her, Maud pushed Marc back by his shoulders so she could look at him and luxuriate in the twin sensations of distance and intimate proximity. As if she were trying to convince herself that he was really the same man she could see here in broad daylight, this man who was penetrating her. She looked right at him, and he looked back and did not blink. What she knew about him now gave her the sweet opportunity to believe that those black eyes trained on her would allow her to see into this impenetrable man’s most deeply guarded secrets. He on
ly closed his eyes when the moment came to let the pleasure in.
He collapsed against her and she stroked his thick hair, spreading her fingers to trace invisible, ephemeral furrows. Then as he leaned to one side, she began to study the tattoos that covered his shoulder. The India ink had spread into his skin and the lines were blurry. Seen this close up, there was nothing frightening about the drawings. The disgust Maud had initially felt on seeing them had vanished. The vaguely colored shapes were puzzles to start with, like the half-erased pictures beneath the enamel of an ancient ceramic. She touched them with her finger, then squinted to make the shapes appear, and like patterns in a carpet, once she had located them, that was all she could see. On his prominent shoulder muscle was some sort of mythological griffin, spreading two crenellated wings that looked like a bat’s. Beneath it, running down his arm, was a double-edged sword with snakes winding around it, and in a cartouche coiling along either edge, there was an inscription she could not read.
“Are you looking at my tattoos?”
“Did you choose them?”
“Those two I got in Africa. I served in Chad for two years. There was a Chinese man who was pretty good at it.”
“But why those two in particular?”
He sat up. They were both naked, sitting side by side. With her white, empty skin, she felt vulnerable, plain. But he looked as if he were clothed, perhaps because of his muscles, but above all because of the inky adornments covering his arms and chest, forming a kind of shell.
“This dragon, here,” he said, looking at his shoulder, “is evil.”
He seemed a bit embarrassed, and laughed.
“All the crap in the world, the violence suffered by innocent people, vice, treachery, abuse of power, all of that.”
“The Devil, in a way. Are you a believer?”
“I never wanted to believe in any one god. But I had plenty to choose from. My mother was Muslim, my father was Protestant, and at school they took us to Catholic Mass. For me to believe in a god, he would have to be universal. All the ones they offered me were these limited gods who didn’t extend their influence beyond their own followers. The only thing they all had in common was evil. That is the only universal belief. And that one I did not refuse.”
“And the double-edged sword?”
“Is salvation. Against evil, there is only strength.”
“Basically, you would like to be some sort of knight.”
She was immediately sorry she’d said it, because it had been slightly ironic, and he might take it badly.
“Don’t worry, I’m not one of those lunatics who thinks they’re du Guesclin. But when I left secondary school and had to choose a profession, I couldn’t see myself being anything other than a soldier. It’s not that I liked the profession per se. But I figured I could bear arms not to serve a machine, a state, or a bunch of politicians, but simply to combat evil.”
Maud listened gravely to what Marc was saying. She was impressed by his sincerity. But she could not help but smile at some of his declarations. Why did women have this gift that allowed them to see the little boy inside the adult man? Because that was precisely what she felt at that moment. The intimidating tattoos, the big muscles, Marc’s fierce demeanor were no more than the derisory armor that a lonely, vulnerable child had put on to protect himself. His vision of the world stemmed from his childhood purpose of surviving humiliation and bullying with no other recourse than his own courage and the strength he had not yet acquired. The years had gone by and had eventually hardened him, armed him. But he still had the heart of a child.
They got dressed, digging cheerfully through the pile of clothes scattered on the floor. Then they set off again.
The sky was overcast now but it wasn’t raining yet. There were fewer and fewer trees, and soon they were in a region of barren high mountain pastures. The wind twisted little shrubs the goats had ravaged. Enormous limestone boulders rose up out of the carpet of grasses and clustered in fortresslike circles. The road was starting to look like a country lane: two parallel chalk-white grooves on either side of a strip of dirty grass.
Maud offered to relieve Marc at the wheel. He stopped and they got out for a moment to stretch their legs. From the high vantage point on the mountainside, they overlooked the entire plain, and could see for miles. Marc took the binoculars from the glove compartment and peered into the distance. The little snake of road they had driven up was clearly visible. He adjusted the focus and suddenly let out a swear word.
“What did you see?”
He hesitated, lowered the binoculars and squinted, then looked again.
“They’re after us.”
6
Vauthier had the instincts of a hunter. From time to time he made them stop the truck while he got out to crouch down on the ground and study the tire tracks; depending on how clear they were, he could estimate how much time had passed since Marc’s truck had gone by. They stopped off at farms along the road and asked the peasants, using sign language, whether they’d seen anything. As was to be expected in such a desolate region, any vehicle that went past was observed from behind the lace curtains in the kitchen. Vauthier confirmed his suspicions:
“They’re not even a day ahead of us. We’ve got a good chance.”
“Maybe, but their truck is faster than ours, especially going uphill.”
Lionel was skeptical. He might have gone along with Vauthier’s opinion, and agreed to take the track, but he was beginning to regret it.
“They don’t know we’re after them,” said Vauthier. “I’m sure they think they’ve been safe ever since they turned off onto this road. They’ll screw up. Mark my words, if we drive day and night, we’ll catch up.”
As he drove, Lionel had time to think over Vauthier’s rationale, and his faith in what they were doing was dwindling. Surely they could have dealt with the matter by getting in touch with the UN, without triggering any major diplomatic incident. There was plenty of evidence against Marc proving that he had acted on his own. Above all, Lionel was beginning to have doubts about Vauthier himself. Some of the things he said did not add up. If he really was an intelligence agent, would the official organisms he worked for let him take this sort of initiative on his own? And above all, what did he intend to do if they did manage to catch up with the other truck?
He glanced behind and saw that Alex, who was on his rest shift, was asleep on the bunk. So, discreetly, amenably, because he was still afraid of him, he began to question Vauthier.
“How did you become a cop?”
“Me? But I’m not a cop. That would go against all my convictions.”
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
Vauthier turned to Lionel, his expression grave.
“I would like a bit more respect from you. I’ll say it again, I’m not a cop.”
“You told us yourself that you worked as an informer!”
“So? That’s something else altogether.”
Vauthier slumped on his seat, then leaned back, with his cowboy boots up on the dashboard.
“You want to know how I got into this work? Well, I’ll tell you. But first let me tell you a story. When I was a kid, I used to see my old man come home from the factory, in Decazeville, where his bosses treated him like a dog. He was a militant in the Communist Party, my old man, and on Sundays I went with him to put up posters. And when I looked at those guys from the Party, I could see that they really didn’t give a damn about him. What they wanted was for the workers to stay nice and quiet and let them, the Party big shots, fill all the good positions. And even as a little boy I told myself that no one would ever make me a slave. Ever! No bosses, no phony politicians, no cops. No one.”
He sniffed noisily and wiped his nose on his sleeve. For a split second Lionel wondered whether he hadn’t shed a tear. But Vauthier was already continuing his story, his voice a touch too loud.
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br /> “When I was eighteen, there was the war in Vietnam. I was a conscientious objector. I hung out with guys who demonstrated against the Americans. The ‘American imperialists,’ as we called them. I was a rebel, excitable, always getting into fights and so on.”
“And did you believe all that stuff?”
Vauthier went on as if he hadn’t heard the question.
“But then I did something stupid and the cops got me.”
“Stupid, how?”
“A break-in, to finance ‘the cause.’ I was living in Saint-Ouen in a squat with a particularly radical bunch of Trotskyists, real politicized. They were older than me and I wanted to show them how smart I was. With a pal we held up this bar with a betting shop, at opening time. What we didn’t know was that they’d already been done three times the year before and the cops had their eye on the place. A patrol was waiting for us on the way out. My pal managed to run away but I was taken into custody.”
“Did you go to jail?”
“No, that’s the thing. I ended up with this strange guy, a sort of fat Commissaire Maigret, with the pipe and everything. His name was Meillac, and he was doing the rounds of the local police precincts to meet informers. We had a chat, and I liked him. He was a real clever guy, completely free, too, in his way. He’s dead now, but we knew each other for years. He had studied philosophy, and he was a policeman by calling, so he could see, and understand.”
“So he recruited you?”
Lionel was completely fascinated. He would have dreamt of a life like that, but he knew very well that he didn’t have the guts.
“In a way. But he told me above all not to change anything. I went back to my squat and I made up some story to explain that the cops had let me go by mistake. And I went on being a militant. I was living two lives, in a way. When I organized demonstrations or even more violent stuff, I really threw myself into it. But then on the side, I was feeding information to Meillac, and I liked talking to him.”
“Did he pay you?”
“Yeah, not bad. And that meant I could fulfill another dream I had. I was able to take up motorcycle racing. I entered competitions and I won a few. Until my accident, and then I had to stop.”
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