Night

by Bernard Minier

  He would like to cry out: More! More! I’ve been in tears!

  But only his brain cries out.

  Another night. His father is there again, in the room. Sitting on the chair. Reading a book, out loud. As he did when Servaz was a child. He recognises the passage:

  SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr Livesey and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

  What do you think, son? This is quite a change from what you usually read, isn’t it?

  His father must be referring to his numerous volumes of science fiction. Or perhaps his current reading material. And suddenly he remembers another book he read – a terrifying one; he must have been twelve or thirteen years old:

  To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages, ‘Dammit, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!’

  Why has this memory suddenly surfaced? No doubt because tonight more than other nights he shivers on feeling its presence in the dark nooks and crannies: what he felt in that dismal house by the railway, on the chemin du Paradis; what has been clinging to his footsteps ever since, and has followed him all the way here, like a curse in a film that spreads from one victim to another.

  Dammit, it must be saying, he isn’t quite ready …

  6

  Awakening

  He opened his eyes.

  Blinked.

  This time, it wasn’t an imaginary movement. His eyelids really did move. The nurse on duty had her back to him. He could see how her shoulders and hips made her uniform taut while she examined the treatment forms.

  ‘I’m going to give you a blood test,’ she said, without turning around or expecting any answer from him.

  ‘Mmmh.’

  This time, she turned around. Looked closely at him. He blinked. She frowned. He blinked again.

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ she said. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Mmmhhh.’

  ‘Oh, goodness.’

  She rushed out and a few seconds later came back with a young intern. An unfamiliar face. Glasses with a steel frame. A bit of stubble on his chin. He moved closer, leaned down. Servaz could smell coffee and tobacco on the intern’s breath.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  He nodded his head and felt a pain in his spine.

  ‘Mmmh.’

  ‘I’m Dr Cavalli,’ said the intern, taking his left hand. ‘If you understand what I’m saying, squeeze my hand.’

  Servaz squeezed. Limply. But he could see the doctor smile. The doctor and the nurse exchanged a look.

  ‘Go and inform Dr Cauchois,’ the young intern said to the nurse. ‘Tell him to come right away.’

  Then he turned back to Servaz and held a pen up in front of his eyes, moving it slowly from left to right and right to left.

  ‘Can you follow this pen with your eyes, please? Don’t move. Just your eyes.’

  Servaz did as he was asked.

  ‘Great. We’re going to remove this tube and get you some water. Above all, don’t move. I’ll be back. If you understood what I said, squeeze my hand twice.’

  Servaz squeezed.

  He woke again. Opened his eyes and saw Margot’s face right in front of him. His daughter’s eyes were moist but he could tell that this time, these were tears of joy.

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ she said. ‘Are you awake? Can you hear me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He took his daughter’s hand. It was warm and dry in his own, which was cold and damp.

  ‘Oh, Dad, I’m so happy!’

  ‘Me too, I …’ He cleared his throat; it felt as if he had sandpaper for vocal chords. ‘I … am … glad you are here …’

  He managed to say these words almost in one go. He pointed towards the glass of water on the night table. Margot picked it up and held it to his dry lips. He looked at his daughter.

  ‘Ha … have you been here long?’

  ‘In this room or in Toulouse? A few days, Dad.’

  ‘And your work, in Quebec?’ he asked.

  Margot had landed several jobs there, over the last few years, and had eventually settled down in a Canadian publishing house. She worked in foreign acquisitions. Servaz had been out there twice to see her and, each time, the flight had been an ordeal.

  ‘I’ve taken unpaid leave. Don’t worry, everything has been arranged. Dad,’ she added, ‘it’s great that you’re … awake.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s great.’

  Why had he said such a thing? She looked at him, surprised. And blushed.

  ‘Me too. Do you remember what I told you the time you ended up in hospital after the avalanche?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t ever do anything like that again.’

  It came back to him. Winter 2008–9. The chase through the mountains on a snowmobile, and the avalanche. Margot at his bedside when he woke up. He smiled at her, as if in apology.

  ‘Fuck, boss. You gave us a real fright!’

  He was having his breakfast, which consisted of dreadful coffee, toast and strawberry jam – with a side order of medication – and reading the newspaper, when Samira swept in, followed by Vincent. He looked up from his article, where he had read that Toulouse was taking in 19,000 new inhabitants every year, and at that rate in ten years it would be larger than Lyon; that the city was home to 95,789 students and 12,000 researchers; that it offered flights to 43 European cities, and to Paris more than 30 times a day, but – the sting in the tail – the article then stated that between 2005 and 2011, for strictly budgetary reasons, the number of police officers in Toulouse, and indeed the national police as a whole, had declined year on year, and that this dramatic decrease had not been fully offset since. Further budget cuts meant that in 2014 they had even scrapped technical training for certain officers in the criminal division. However, the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 had radically changed the situation. The forces of law and order had suddenly become a priority again, and night-time searches were now authorised (Servaz had always wondered why the hell it wasn’t possible to arrest a dangerous individual before six o’clock in the morning – it was as if, during a war, there was a truce every night which only one of the two sides respected), and this made procedures much simpler. The debate over the restriction of civil liberties and the wisdom of extending these measures had come quickly to the forefront again, however – which was healthy in a democracy, he supposed.

  He folded the newspaper noisily. Samira was pacing round the bed like a lion in a cage; she was wearing a black motorcycle jacket covered in zips and buckles. Vincent was wearing a grey woollen cardigan over a Breton shirt and jeans. As usual, they looked like anything but cops. Vincent took out his phone and held it up towards Servaz.

  ‘No pho-to,’ articulated Servaz.

  ‘Not even as a souvenir?’

  ‘Mmmh.’

  ‘When are you getting out, boss?’ Samira asked.

  ‘Stop calling me boss, it’s ridiculous.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Don’t know. Depends on the tests.’

  ‘And afterwards, are they going to prescribe rest?’

  ‘Same answer.’

  ‘We need you on the team, boss.’

  He sighed. Then his face lit up.

  ‘Samira?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’ll manage very well without me.’

  He opened his newspaper and immersed himself in it again.

  ‘Yeah … maybe … but that doesn’t mean …’ She swung around. ‘I’m going to get a Coke.’


  He heard her six-inch heels move away down the corridor.

  ‘She has a problem with hospitals,’ Vincent explained. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘All right, all right, or really all right?’

  ‘Raring to go.’

  ‘Regarding work, you mean?’

  ‘What else?’

  Espérandieu sighed. With his brooding expression and his hair falling over his forehead, he looked like a student.

  ‘Shit, Martin, only a few days ago you were still in a coma. You haven’t even got out of bed yet, dammit! And you’ve just had your heart operated on.’

  A finger tapped gently on the door, and Servaz turned his head. He instantly felt his stomach lurch.

  Charlène, his assistant’s too-beautiful wife, was standing on the threshold. Charlène, her ginger hair like the flames of an autumn fire mingling with the thick tawny and white fur of her oversized collar; her milky white skin and huge green eyes promising paradise to all.

  When she bent over him, he felt that primitive desire he always experienced in her presence.

  He knew that she knew. She knew everything about the violent desire she inspired in him, in all men. She ran her fingernail over his cheek, almost pressing it into his skin, and smiled.

  ‘I’m glad, Martin.’

  That’s all. I’m glad. Nothing else. And he knew she was being absolutely sincere.

  In the days that followed, all the members of the investigation team, the majority of the crime unit, officers from Narcotics, the Banditry Repression Brigade and the rest of the directorate for criminal affairs, and even crime scene investigators, paraded through his room. Once the plague victim, he was now the miraculous survivor. He’d been shot, and he had made it. Every cop in Toulouse hoped that if the day came, it would be the same for them; their passage through his room was a sort of pilgrimage, a quasi-religious act of devotion. They wanted to see him, touch him and learn from him, this man who had come back from the dead. They wanted to be contaminated by his baraka.

  The head of the Toulouse crime unit himself, Stehlin, took the trouble to visit one day at the end of the afternoon.

  ‘Dammit, Martin, you got a bullet to the heart. And you survived. That’s a miracle, is it not?’

  ‘Over sixty per cent of those who receive a wound to the heart die on the spot,’ answered Servaz calmly. ‘But eighty per cent of those who make it alive to the hospital survive. It’s true that mortality in the case of a gunshot wound is four times higher than in the case of a stabbing … Cardiac wounds from a trauma penetrating the thorax concern, in order of frequency, the right ventricle, the left ventricle and the auricles … Light ammunition is more unstable, and after the first trajectory of penetration has a tendency to swerve; bullets without a full metal jacket have an augmented cavitation tunnel, the bullet enlarging its diameter on impact. Buckshot has a different effect depending on the distance, with cut-and-dried lesions at less than three metres and shrapnel at more than ten.’

  Stehlin stared at him, flabbergasted, then smiled. As always, when he was on an investigation, Martin had thoroughly studied his subject – or else he had grilled the doctors.

  ‘That guy, Jensen, is he dead?’ Servaz asked.

  ‘No,’ replied the Divisional Commissioner, placing his grey jacket on the back of a chair. ‘They sent him for treatment in the severe burns unit. I think he’s having rehabilitation sessions now at a specialised centre.’

  ‘Are you serious? You mean the man went free, then?’

  ‘The guy’s got a lawyer, he’s suing us.’

  ‘What?’

  Stehlin was pacing back and forth in the little room, the way he always did in his big office – except that here he didn’t have enough space, and he bumped into the wall.

  ‘He says you threatened him with a weapon and forced him to climb onto the train, that you knew very well that he risked being electrocuted, and you did everything you could to ensure he would be.’

  ‘He was electrified,’ amended Servaz. ‘He survived.’

  He held one hand to his chest. He felt as if the stitches were pulling on the wound. They had sliced into his breastbone with cutters or a saw, and it would take weeks for the bone to fuse back together completely, weeks during which he could put no pressure on his arms or lift the slightest weight.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. According to his lawyer, there was “criminal intent”, and “an initiation of offence constituted by acts tending directly to the perpetration of the offence”.’

  ‘What offence?’

  ‘Attempted murder.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘According to his lawyer, you tried to kill him by electrocution. It was raining, you must have seen the warnings on the gate, and you ran after him in spite of that and obliged him to climb onto the train, while threatening him with your gun …’ Stehlin waved his hands. ‘I know, you didn’t even have your gun on you. But he claims you did. He’s just trying to intimidate us; we cannot allow ourselves to add oil to the fire at the moment.’

  ‘The man is a murderer.’

  ‘Martin, he was not charged for the rapes and the murder of the jogger …’

  Through the window, Servaz saw the clouds grimacing above the flat hospital roofs.

  ‘He’s a murderer,’ he stated.

  ‘Martin, the culprit was arrested, he confessed. We found overwhelming proof at his house. Jensen is innocent.’

  ‘Not as innocent as all that.’ He leaned over to take the bitter-tasting corticosteroid that had dissolved in the glass. ‘He killed someone else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The woman who was murdered in Montauban: it was him.’

  He saw Stehlin frown. Over the years his boss had learned to respect his opinion.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘What did you do with Jensen’s mother and all those cats?’

  ‘His mother is in hospital, the cats were given to the SPCA.’

  ‘Call them right away. See if they still have a young white cat that’s missing an ear. Then find out what Jensen was doing at the time of the assault. And whether his phone activated a cell tower identifier in the sector during that same period.’

  Servaz described the visit to Jensen’s place, with the cat hiding under the sideboard and Jensen running away when Servaz told him – in all likelihood too quietly for Vincent to have heard – that it wasn’t his cat.

  ‘A young white cat,’ said Stehlin, his tone openly sceptical.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Hell, Martin, are you sure of what you saw? I mean … blimey, a cat! You don’t want me to go arresting a bloke because you saw a cat in his house?’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘Because no judge will buy it, dammit!’

  Stehlin said ‘dammit’ where others would have said ‘for fuck’s sake’.

  ‘Well, we could remand him in custody, couldn’t we?’

  ‘What proof do you have? Apart from a cat?’

  7

  Séfar

  ‘No one refutes testimonies of near-death experiences any more,’ said Dr Xavier. ‘On the other hand, the reality of a life after life is still just as open to debate. Those who, like you, have had a brush with death are, by definition, not dead. Since you are here.’

  The psychiatrist gave him a warm smile, which widened his mouth in his salt and pepper beard, as if to say, ‘And we are all very glad of it.’ Servaz reflected that the events of the winter 2008–9 had changed Xavier – not just psychologically but also physically. When Servaz had met him, Xavier had been head of the Wargnier Institute. He was a precious, pedantic little man who dyed his hair and wore ostentatious red glasses.

  ‘All near-death experiences can be explained by a dysfunction of the brain, a neurological correlate.’

  Correlate. Servaz savoured the word. A touch of pedantry could do no harm when it came to establishing one’s authority: it has always been thus, ever since Molière’
s doctors. In this respect Xavier had not changed. But it was nevertheless a changed man that Servaz saw before him. Wrinkles had appeared on his brow and at the corners of his eyes, which were no longer as bright, but rather like two bits of old metal. Xavier still had his passion for scholarly words, but he used them more circumspectly now, and he and Servaz had forged ties that were fairly close to true friendship. After the fire at the Wargnier Institute, Xavier had opened a surgery in Saint-Martin-de-Comminges, in the Pyrenees, only a few miles from the ruins of the establishment he had once run. Servaz went to see him two or three times a year. The two men went for long walks in the mountains, mindful not to stir up the past. Nevertheless, the past did hover over all their conversations, the way the shadow of the mountain hovered over the town after four o’clock in the afternoon.

  ‘You were in a coma. This “out of body experience” you mention: there are researchers in neuroscience at the University of Lausanne who have succeeded in triggering it in people who are in good health, by stimulating different regions of the brain before an operation. Similarly, the famous tunnel would seem, in fact, to be due to a lack of irrigation to the brain, which causes hyperactivity on the level of the visual cortex. A hyperactivity that is said to produce this intense frontal light and, consequently, a loss of peripheral vision, whence the impression of tunnel vision.’

  ‘And the feeling of plenitude, of unconditional love?’ asked Servaz, sure the shrink was going to pull another explanation out of his hat.

  Where has your rationality gone, dammit? he wondered. Good grief, you’re agnostic, and you’ve never believed in little green men or telepathy.

  ‘A secretion of hormones,’ answered Xavier. ‘An influx of endorphins. In the 1990s, German researchers who were studying the phenomenon of blackouts realised that after they lost consciousness, a number of patients claimed to have felt extraordinarily good, had witnessed scenes from their past and had even seen themselves above their own bodies.’