“I was there too, didn’t say he was fishing.”
“Well, tell you something, he don’t buy much meat, that lad.”
“Anyway, he don’t say much either, the American, so you wonder what he’s doing here.”
“Yeah, it’s like he was just coming back. But he never come here in the first place.”
The church clock started striking eleven. The three old men took themselves off in different directions. André hobbled towards the post office, while the other two headed for the grocery and baker’s respectively.
The square was empty. In the distance the sound of the faulty exhaust faded away.
*
He cut the engine, after running along the flat out of the village, and freewheeled downhill. He put a cassette into the old car radio and alongside the squeaks of the bodywork and the colours of springtime, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar made his loudspeakers crackle. “Voodoo Child”. The van gently gathered speed.
He braked as he reached the turn-off, then took the forest track. The suspension, completely shot to pieces, let the wheels do what they liked, and the van seemed to float along on the stones. From here in, to get to the end without the engine, he didn’t even have to brake. The vehicle bounced along so loudly that he couldn’t hear the music.
A turn of the wheel to the left, and up the little track. A slalom between the dried-out ruts left from the winter.
The van slowed and came to a stop at the end of the trail, just under the big oak tree. He celebrated his small victory by listening to the end of the track, hands still on the wheel, before he switched the cassette-player off. Getting out of the car, he went down the steps made of logs. A quick glance at his universe. With the ambiguous satisfaction on his face of a man who owns nothing.
The winter had been long, but now spring was there, brushing away his doubts about the wisdom of his return. He rekindled the fire, then, with a few tools and the parcel newly arrived from Australia, he walked further into the forest. He had been waiting two whole months for this spare part. It took him only a few minutes to replace the propeller of the little turbine installed at the end of the hydraulic system which he had set up: fifty metres of P.V.C. tubing, running along the hill to transform the stream into enough energy for two electric bulbs, a very small fridge, a radio, and a Dremel power tool.
He walked back, started to prepare the perch he had shot the night before up at the dam, and put it on the embers. In the wood, above the sounds of insects and birds excited by the spring, he could hear the little Australian wind pump recharging the four twelve-volt batteries with its new propeller.
The fish tasted good, and he smiled, thinking of the three old men.
*
The 4x4 shook as it travelled over potholes and rocks. The cool morning air came in through the windows, and the woman at the wheel took off her cap, which wouldn’t stay in position. The equipment, radio, shotguns, torches, chevaux-de-frise, and radar, rattled together preventing any communication between the three gendarmes.
The vehicle, overladen already, gave up completely in the deep grooves of the uphill section. Grudgingly, the three of them embarked on the final stretch on foot. The officer with a grey moustache brought up the rear behind his colleague, Michèle, a fine-featured blonde with a Teutonic backside. Her gun bounced on her wide hips, which was a cheering sight. The third, leading the way, was a spotty, stiff-legged youth, who took his career rather seriously.
They reached the camp out of breath. The beat-up Renault van, the hippy’s tepee, the suspicious vegetable patch.
The youngest walked round the car, sniffing like a dog, and kicked one of the smooth tyres. The blonde, hands on hips, was looking closely at the tent, from which floated the last wisps of smoke from the night before. On a line, stretched between two trees, some clothes and undergarments were hung to dry. The officer had thrust his thumbs into his belt, as a way of registering his overall disapproval of the encampment.
“So where is he?”
The valley ran down from the tepee towards a stream shaded by trees. The other way was the north-facing slope, dark and steep. The woman went down a few steps made of logs. The uprights of the tent, made of chestnut stakes, were wide open. A little excited, she leaned inside. A camp bed, with blankets rolled up, a fireplace, a small fridge, some cooking pots, a wooden chest and two rows of books stacked directly on the ground. The blonde pulled her head back out from this deserted intimate scene.
“Not here.”
The youngster, having finished his inspection of the van, pushed his cap up on his forehead.
“What’s that noise?”
His superior listened. In the forest, up above them, came the distant echo of an axe. Chtock.
The three gendarmes took a path leading towards the little wood.
They were sweating under their uniforms, and they masked their annoyance with serious official expressions. The path forked several ways and the chopping sounds ricocheted between the trees. The thicket was dense, making it hard to see anything ahead. The officer muttered, and the blonde spotted a splash of colour on the right. They pushed their way through the undergrowth. The youngest noticed a wad of straw attached to a tree, above what looked like an archery target.
“There!”
A threatening whistle made them duck. A flash, and chtok. The blonde hid behind a tree, and the youngest, clutching his gun, put one knee to the ground. The senior officer had stayed standing. He wiped the sweat from his moustache.
“Hey you! Can’t you see we’re over here? What do you think you’re doing?”
The arrow had hurtled past about two metres in front of them.
At the end of a natural clearing, about forty metres away, they could now see the tall American, who was holding up one hand in apology. He was smiling, but not moving from the spot. The gendarmes advanced down the clearing, readjusting their caps and belts. The American just went on standing there, at the end of the archery lane, with his Anglo-Saxon smile and his stupid bow. The officer thrust out his chest.
The secret service had a few leads, but in truth they knew very little about him. A Franco-American, aged thirty-three, who had been in his hippy camp for about six months. The land belonged to his mother – another dropout – and had been bought in the 1970s. At the time, it had been the site of some kind of lefty New Age commune. One of the men had died of an overdose, it had brought bad karma, and they had all left. Now here was this child of 1968, an intellectual and no doubt a smoker of illicit substances. He had had an education, quite a good one it seemed, but no details were known: registered unemployed and entitled to benefit. The nearer they got, the taller he looked. Not a specky swot at all, that was for sure. One metre 85, strong jaws used to churning chewing gum, and a fine set of teeth. It really got up the officer’s moustache that this guy was half-French. Hell’s bells, that smile was fake.
“Now then, you, for a start, you should be more careful with that bow and arrow!”
“Excuse me, I didn’t see you.”
The woman officer wriggled her bum, blushing deep red from neck to forehead and not just from the climb.
“John Nichols?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, are you hunting with this weapon?”
“Sorry, what did you say?”
The moustache muttered: “What did he say?”
“I think he asked what you said, chef.”
“So how do you say ‘hunt’ in English?”
The blonde tried not to smile, imitating the stern expression of her male colleagues.
“Hunte, I think, to hunte.”
“So, you hunte with your bow? Kill animals?”
“Oh? Hunting? No, I just practise shooting, for my concentration.”
“Whattheheckhesaying now?”
“He said no, chef.”
All four voices fell silent in the middle of the woods. The officer started again, no one else being keen to step in. He spoke loudly, as if the foreigner was deaf.
“We have to take you to the gendarmerie. You. Come. With. Us.”
“What?”
“Oh shit. Police! With us. Come along! To Saint-Céré.”
“I don’t understand.”
The fur trapper lookalike was still smiling.
“You didn’t have a telephone, we couldn’t reach you. No phone!”
“No, I don’t have a phone. You need to make a phone call?”
“You come, police, with us! To Saint-Céré!”
“What? Now?”
The three gendarmes looked at each other. Did he mean no?
“Obligatory!”
The blonde cleared her throat:
“You must to come with us please, Mister Nichols.”
The other two stood open-mouthed: why, Michèle was practically bilingual!
The American slipped the strap of his quiver on to his shoulder. After all, he didn’t see many people, and certainly very few women.
“O.K. Can I take my car?”
“Michèle, what’s he saying?”
“Should he take his car?”
“Tell him we’ll take him there.”
They moved off again towards the yellow-and-black target with its red bull’s-eye. From a distance, it looked like some tropical bird that had strayed into the forest of the Lot, or from further away still, like a furious eye at the end of an imaginary tunnel.
As he went down the path, the American wondered if it had been that old guy at the dam the day before who had tipped off the authorities. No fishing permit. That must be it.
From his seat in the back he tried to catch the eye of the blonde who was driving. She swerved a bit too much on a sharp turn and the chief had to grab a door handle.
The gendarmes exchanged no words, either with their passenger or between themselves, until they got to Saint-Céré.
At the gendarmerie, which was dozing in the sun, surrounded by railings, they left him cooling his heels in a waiting room. He went over to a poster: faces of kids and teenagers who had gone missing. From behind a counter, another gendarme was watching him, visibly put off by his long hair. The station commander came in person to fetch him, and introduced himself courteously.
“Commandant Juliard. Could you follow me, please? Do you speak French?”
Nichols’ face changed shape as he said carefully in French: “I understand a little.”
Behind his desk, facing the American, Juliard tried to find a comfortable position on his chair. He emptied his lungs, rearranged a few papers on his impeccably ordered desk, and breathed in noisily.
“We got a call from Paris this morning. From the American embassy. A call concerning you. That’s why we came to fetch you, because you don’t have a phone. You understand? I’m not speaking too quickly?”
The American uncrossed his legs. They were treating him with kid gloves. It couldn’t be anything to do with the perch up at the dam.
“I understand. So what does the embassy want?”
Juliard raised an eyebrow in surprise. Nichols had spoken French with hardly a trace of an accent.
“I don’t know. But don’t be alarmed. They just want a word with you.”
Looking awkward, Juliard dialled a number while squinting at a piece of paper.
“Commandant Juliard, Saint-Céré gendarmerie. I need to speak to Monsieur Hirsh, please. That’s right.”
There was a pause, during which the commandant looked hard at the American.
“Hunting good up there?”
Juliard smiled, a diversionary smile. Nichols smiled back.
The officer now concentrated on the call.
“Monsieur Hirsh? I’ve got Monsieur Nichols here. I’ll pass you over to him.”
The American took the telephone, suddenly numbed by the impression that every gesture, every word, since the police team had arrived at his tepee, had been rehearsed in advance.
“Monsieur Nichols?”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me for disturbing you, but I had to get hold of you urgently. Frank Hirsh here, assistant secretary at the U.S. embassy in Paris. I’m sorry, perhaps you’d prefer to speak English?”
Hirsh had been speaking the kind of French you learn at an international school, in the refined accent of an American who loves French literature,
“No, it’s O.K., you can speak French. What’s all this about?”
This time Juliard gritted his teeth. Nichols was looking him in the eye, and there was no longer the slightest trace of an American accent, nor of a smile on his face.
“I’m sorry to have to call you in circumstances like these. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
Juliard was looking at his hands and had a formal expression on his face. Juliard already knew, he was just avoiding having to deal with it himself.
“I believe you know Monsieur Mustgrave, Alan Mustgrave.”
Hirsh had pronounced the name with some awkwardness.
“Yeah, he’s a friend of mine.”
“Monsieur Nichols, I’m very sorry to have to tell you that Monsieur Mustgrave is dead. We’ve been trying to reach you for two days. Monsieur Nichols … Are you still there?”
“Ye … Oui.”
“We have a problem here. Monsieur Mustgrave’s parents can’t come to France … Monsieur Nichols?”
“What?”
“We need you to come to Paris.” Hirsh cleared his throat. “To identify Alan Mustgrave’s body. Monsieur Nichols?”
John had let go of the telephone and was walking out of the office.
This time the woman wasn’t driving the police car. The two male gendarmes, the spotty youth and his moustached boss, dropped him off at the top of the track. John cut across the woods to his tepee, passing the target into which his arrows were still stuck.
He stuffed some clothes into a rucksack, loaded a few blankets and his bow and arrows into the van, without asking himself why he was taking a weapon to Paris. He threw away any leftover food, and lifted the lid of the wooden chest where he kept important documents, looking for the car’s papers, his passports and his French driving licence. He stopped when he found his Ph.D. thesis and a note from Alan, scribbled in biro, alongside a bundle of letters in a rubber band. John pulled out the last-dated, received two weeks earlier, without knowing why he did so. Last words of a corpse.
A couple of minutes later, without a backward glance at his camp, he drove off, slaloming in reverse through the ruts on the path.
Once he reached the main road, he wound back the cassette and pressed play.
Voodoo Child …
Alan’s stage name.
Al standing in front of a little tape recorder, Al smiling as he answered his questions.
“I started when I was twenty-one, when I came back.”
Al, drunk, years later, in a bar in La Brea.
“Paris? Hey John, why Paris?”
Al, last autumn, in a bar in Paris.
“Will you come and see me sometimes, Wild Man of the Woods?”
3
Lambert shed fewer tears when it was a man. There were more of them, and they were less affecting.
His eyes still full of sleep, he looked at his watch and stretched his back. Through the window, which someone had very wisely opened, the sounds of the night came in, a constant, nervous background of traffic, accelerating and braking. Lambert asked himself what the hell they were doing there.
It was difficult, without shocking people, to explain that they had their own preferences where suicides were concerned. Lambert would have been in a better mood if it had been a woman. They fell less often, but harder. They must have had to put up with more grief before deciding to die. That was another reason why Lambert felt he was more useful when asked to witness a woman’s corpse: as if by his presence he was paying homage to their efforts.
Men seemed to give up more easily, once their source of pride – work or marriage – had been lost, after some incident that had made them lose face in other people’s
eyes, whom they usually blamed. They tended to commit suicide in the name of their self-image. Women often killed themselves for the sake of an image too, but theirs were of a different kind, and more moving: constructed images as well, but more important than male pride. Namely illusions. When a woman committed suicide, a greater portion of the hope of a better world went with her. Women died in everyone’s name.
Guérin’s mother had not committed suicide: she hadn’t needed to. She had lived with men’s treachery so long that the cancer had caught up with her just as surely. For him, men’s suicides contained a certain element of justice, or at any rate of fairness, but women’s were the cancer of disillusion that was eating away at society. In his case, he felt not sadness, like Lambert, but anxiety. Guérin never wept for anyone in particular. He shed tears, when he did so, in the name of everyone. In this he recognised the generous influence of his mother, who had brought him up on her own.
If by chance the suicide resulted in the man’s head being obliterated, Lambert was left completely cold. Especially if it was some thug with no family to comfort. Anybody else (they were not the only people in Paris who handled suicides) could have taken care of it. But when the central switchboard received a call in the middle of the night for a truly terrible suicide, it had become the traditional routine for two years now, to wake up Guérin and his faithful dog. Lambert had jumped into his car and gone to pick up his boss at boulevard Voltaire before driving to the 18th arrondissement. Outside the block of flats, the flashing lights of police cars of every colour were blazing, and the city police were there, along with neighbours in dressing gowns.
They should have given a medal to the patrolman who had found the body: he had excelled himself.
The shotgun pellets had redecorated the wall and peppered the plaster with little dents behind the body. Even if one imagined that the guy had been able to fire both barrels at one go, it was impossible for so many shots to have gone though his head. The detail might have escaped the notice of a novice, it was true. And the scene was certainly impressive, if all you ever did was stick parking tickets on cars. But if you looked more closely, and if you could stand the sight and the smell, you could easily see where the bullets had gone. There was a hole in the back of the skull the size of a grapefruit. On the wall, in the middle of the galaxy of shotgun pellets, was a larger impact made by the high-calibre bullet that had preceded the shotgun. A black hole in a bloody galaxy. And that wasn’t all.
Bed of Nails Page 3