Bed of Nails

by Varenne, Antonin

  Guérin brandished his hard disk and looked triumphantly at his assistant. A cup-and-ball toy with a spinning top perched on it, advertising a make of guns. The blood, by now soaking the last few strands of black hair that formed a wispy crown round his head, was reaching the corner of his mouth and trickling onto his neck.

  “Right, young Lambert, let’s get to work!”

  Lambert took out the keys, unlocked the door and they went past the row of stinking dustbins. Their entrance was through the garbage area outside the office kitchens. The heavy-handed humour of Police H.Q. He put his arm on Guérin’s to steer him up the steps. The little man was losing his surge of energy and starting to collapse, out of breath.

  They reached the office safely without meeting anyone. Lambert breathed again as he closed the door. The ghostly glare from the strip-lighting drew a little cry of hope from the small room, which never saw daylight: after the first flash, it settled to its usual pale twilight.

  Guérin pulled the woolly hat off and sat down at the desk. Still chasing his ghosts, he was shaking all over and his large, wounded head bobbed dangerously.

  “Call Forensics, and tell them to send a team to the Natural History Museum. Fingerprints and anything else on the handrail of the third floor. I’ve had it cordoned off.”

  Lambert, filled with pity, watched as his boss tried, with clumsy gestures, to connect the hard disk to his computer. The light made him blink hard. Soon he would be seeing the dangerous moment once more.

  “Boss, shouldn’t you clean up a bit first?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  With his chin, Lambert gestured to his bald cranium. Guérin peered at him enquiringly, then felt it with his hand and contemplated his fingers, now smeared with blood. Slowly he looked up at his tall fair deputy. Deep in Guérin’s eyes, two little men in yellow raincoats stood terrified and frantic, calling for his help to get them out of there.

  A muscle twitched on Guérin’s cheek and his gaze faltered. Lambert had the impression of hearing a windscreen splinter.

  “It was … er, Churchill, he pecked me this morning … the old parrot …”

  “Yeah, O.K., boss, but still better clean it up.”

  Guérin wiped his bloodstained hand on his raincoat.

  “I’m going to watch these videos … get me a paper towel, it’s nothing, it’s not serious, just a scratch.”

  Half his head was scored with bleeding grooves.

  Guérin is completely nuts. As Lambert grabbed a paper roll from the coffee machine room, the sentence hammered over and over in his head. Guérin is completely nuts. When he opened the office door again, the room was empty. He went into the archive section, called out, then looked for the boss between the shelves. Gone. Back in the office he saw that the hard disk was still sitting there, but the cap had disappeared. He put out the light and went downstairs. Lambert searched his conscience, where he found an overwhelming desire to have a beer. Could a dog get his master certified?

  6

  John walked along the Seine, protected by the night, which gradually hid his tall silhouette against the background.

  So Alan has sex with an embassy official. Then he dies during a stage act, hanging from butcher’s hooks. The embassy official turns up in the morgue, because he has to see to the repatriation of the body of his lover. The embassy keeps a close eye on this deviant staff member whose nerves are rather too fragile. That’s all. But there seem to be too many things going on here. The persistent impression that everything had been rehearsed in advance, ever since the moment the gendarmes had turned up at the tepee, was giving him a migraine. Alan was free to sleep with whoever he liked, yeah, but to pick a man from the embassy was unlikely, stupid and dangerous. Perhaps he had actually fallen in love? A sort of delicious swansong, like falling for a priest. Doing something stupid and dangerous was more likely, coming from Alan. But if he had learned one thing, it was not to die on stage. Piercing his skin made him happy. John had had to admit that in the end. But wait, he’d started doing drugs again. He must have gone on stage when he was stoned. End of story. O.D. on stage, hanging in the air. The fakir’s apotheosis. Perhaps after all it was better than a backstreet, or a stinking latrine. The audience would certainly have a hangover from it. Would it have changed anything, if John had been there? He had picked Alan up twenty times, but he couldn’t be there round the clock. Pointless to speculate. End of, again. Should he wait for the ceremonial send-off of the coffin? That sort of farewell wasn’t his thing. He should just get back home, away from this whole scene. John felt as if he were holding his breath all the time in Paris, and that he could really only start to grieve once he was back in his camp in the sticks.

  But the headache wouldn’t go away, there was something his brain couldn’t let go of.

  He lit a Gitane and started coughing at once. He hadn’t smoked for months. The migraine got worse, the half-smoked cigarette ended up in the gutter. He stopped at a telephone booth, hesitating to take this feeling of unfinished business seriously, then called enquiries.

  Was it the same girl on duty as that morning? He made up some improbable story on the spur of the moment. His loneliness was not about to be relieved yet. All he got was an address.

  He crossed the river at the Pont de Sully and walked along the left bank, past the locked booksellers’ kiosks. He went up the rue de la Harpe, declining the offers of waiters from the many restaurants. There were only a few tourists around, so they were competing for them. The photographs of Greek dishes, despite their horrible technicolour, made him feel hungry. At the St Michel fountain, the archangel, stabbing in the back a Satan who was forever in his death throes, conveyed a warning message to the handful of tourists wandering in front of it. John consulted his map. The Caveau club was very near, almost on his way. So he had time, before he left town, to do one last thing. To settle his mind.

  He turned into the rue de l’Hirondelle, a quiet street. Only the French would name a narrow and dark street, where the sky was barely visible, after a bird, and a swallow moreover. The sign for the Caveau de la Bolée piled on the air of mystery: it was hardly lit at all, and painted in old-fashioned colours. The face of a diabolical magus, a sort of Uncle Sam with green skin, slanted over an upturned top hat from which a cone of light emerged. The association would not have escaped Alan who was well acquainted with good ol’ Uncle Sam. The club’s name was written in creepy Gothic-Celtic script.

  John knocked at the door, which had no handle, just a huge bronze knocker. A thin, dark man, unshaven and long-haired, with a greasy apron round his waist, half-opened the ancient door.

  “No show tonight,” he said in French, then repeated it in English with a French accent you could cut with a knife, and whistling through a gap in his teeth.

  “No show tonigh-eet!”

  The left bank equivalent of a gorgon, with a filter-tipped Gauloise between two yellowed fingers.

  “I don’t want to see a show, I’m a friend of Alan’s.”

  “Ah.” He looked at John, raised a black unkempt eyebrow and opened the door wider. “O.K., you can come in.”

  There were only three customers inside. Two long-haired men were playing draughts, with beers at their sides, and a third, with bloodshot eyes and wearing a tail suit, was shuffling a deck of cards. The furniture was varnished rustic wood, and it looked rather unconvincing as an underground scene. Not enough metal around. But there was a stage of sorts at the back, hidden by long black drapes. His eyes swept over them. Without realising it, John held a hand to his heart. The room was arched, and the stone walls were blackened with time and the tar of millions of cigarettes. The walls were hung with old posters advertising magic shows.

  “I’ll get the boss.”

  The cook disappeared behind a curtain. To the left of it, a little opening, perhaps the remains of an old bread oven, acted as a tiny counter. A head poked out. The boss was a woman, but she met the requirements.

  “Want something?”


  “I’m a friend of Alan’s. Voodoo Child?”

  “Yeah, didn’t think you were selling brushes. You do a number with the bow and arrow? But you can’t shoot at yourself, can you?”

  “No, I don’t do any number, my name’s John. I just wanted to come here to see what happened.”

  She hesitated, then came out from behind the stone counter. Her head came up to a point between his navel and his chest.

  “It wasn’t good for business, Alan dying like that, I don’t really want to talk about it.” She looked gloomily round the near-deserted room.

  Short hair, about forty, round cheeks and smooth skin. Leather trousers, reminding him of the blonde gendarme at the camp. She had almost as many piercings and tattoos as Alan, but there was more flesh on her arms. Under the fabric of her tank-top, two studs prolonged the nipples of her ample breasts. Bait and hooks to fish for women.

  John put his rucksack on the tiled floor.

  “Doesn’t look like the places he usually worked. He must have thought this one a funny kind of dive, didn’t he?”

  The woman fingered a diamond in her nostril.

  “Oh, he used to call it Long John Silver’s Tavern. Before us, they used to put on magic shows, rabbits out of hats, all that stuff. And before that again, it was a Breton cider bar, that’s what the name means. And before that, no idea. But I don’t think anyone’s had the cash to redecorate since the Bretons left. We only started six months ago, and I haven’t got enough money yet to do it up. But we put on good shows, we’re often packed out. There was always a full house for Alan.”

  The cook brought a plate of steak and chips out from behind the curtain and put it in front of the anaemic conjuror.

  “I wouldn’t mind a steak like that.”

  “We only serve them bloody.”

  She no longer smiled at her well-worn joke.

  “Only kidding. How do you want it?”

  “Bloody will do.”

  “Chef. One rare steak.”

  “Coming up, boss.”

  She rolled her eyes to indicate that the décor wasn’t the only thing that needed changing. Nodding towards the kitchen, she went on:

  “He worked here with the Bretons or before, he doesn’t remember. He comes with the furniture. But don’t worry, he cooks steaks okay.” She held out her hand. “So you’re his pal who lives in the woods? Alan used to say you were a genius. What happened to you?”

  *

  “Alan had decided to stop, or at any rate he wasn’t going to work for me any longer. I think he was talking of going back to the States.”

  John stopped chewing.

  “Going back?”

  “That’s what he said. Anyway, that night was supposed to be his last show here. He decided to make it his farewell number. Shit, when I think of it, it gives me the creeps. Chef! Bring me a cognac.”

  “Coming up, boss.”

  “Goodbye Mother Fakir – that’s what he called his last show, Goodbye…”

  Ariel, the boss, sat opposite him as he ate. Short nails and plump hands, she was chain-smoking in her own club and didn’t care who knew it.

  “Nobody realised in time what was happening. When the audience reacted, some people in the front row got up on stage and tried to bring him down, but it was too late. He was rolled up inside his cape and at first you couldn’t see any blood. But I have to say, because I was watching too, I think he had already lost a lot of blood before the hooks.”

  “Nobody saw anything?”

  “Alan fooled us.”

  “He what?”

  “He fooled us. He did his show so you couldn’t see. He wiped his body down and he wore this cape. I found three of them afterwards backstage, all soaked through.”

  Ariel drank half her glass of cognac; on her arm, a sexy mermaid folded in two, then straightened.

  “But really, he did it so cunningly that nobody saw a thing. There wasn’t a sound in the room, everyone was hypnotised. He had even stopped the music. It gives me goosebumps just to think of it. He got a girl to come up on stage, gave her a saw and held out his arm. He was smiling so convincingly that she started to saw without taking her eyes off his face. She stopped just before she fainted. I’ve never seen the audience in such a state. At the end, when he hoisted himself up on ropes for the hook trick, he must already have lost half his blood, but nobody could see.”

  Ariel looked at John uneasily.

  “Or perhaps nobody wanted to see.”

  She drained her glass, turning towards the stage, embarrassed by this last idea. Perhaps in the end, people who were fans of this kind of act, the ones who were going to pay for her to redecorate her club, were really waiting for something like this to happen. She had sold them Alan’s death, and people hadn’t complained. John, who was a specialist in how low humans could sink, followed her thoughts. But he had no wish to twist the knife, nor, to be honest, to console her. He pushed away his plate without finishing the meat.

  “Was he already high when he went on stage?”

  After a final hesitation, Ariel probably decided to trust him and lowered her voice.

  “As a kite. But no different from usual.”

  The club owner had more to tell. John waited for her to go on. After pulling nervously on half her piercings, including the one in her tongue, she stretched her neck like a boxer.

  “He knew what he was doing. That’s what I think. He wanted to kill himself in front of everyone. He hung himself up there with the pulleys, he pulled up the ropes and he made a knot. They couldn’t get him down. When I asked, the police told me it was a haemorrhage. But that would be too crazy, a fakir who was a haemophiliac.”

  John smiled. Alan had made a joke like that one day. The steak and chips stirred in his stomach, He swallowed and clenched his teeth, as an acid liquid filled his mouth.

  “Heroin might do it, if he was already weak.”

  “It wasn’t that bad. He knew, he wasn’t stupid. And then, he didn’t stop. Bye Bye Mother Fakir. He wanted to go. I won’t believe any different, and that’s not just to cover my back. Alan killed himself. If you want my opinion, I think he had taken something else beforehand to make the blood flow.”

  John put down his knife and fork. The idea that Alan had committed suicide was a tempting idea for everyone. And to some extent for him too. Shit, he needed some sympathy and Ariel wasn’t any more to blame than anyone else. She had obviously liked Alan, you could tell; no reason to treat her as the enemy.

  “I think so too. And I’ll tell you something, it fits.”

  A short silence followed, punctuated only by the bleary-eyed magician, who waved as he left the club.

  “Had you known him a long time?”

  “Twelve years. We met in Los Angeles. We were both young. But he was already piercing himself with skewers and needles. It was three years after Iraq.”

  “Iraq?” Ariel let the question hang in the air a moment. The idea was hard to assimilate. “You mean Alan had been in the war?”

  “Alan had been in a war. The first Gulf War.”

  She dropped back on her chair.

  “Fuck, I can’t really see him in camouflage kit, yes sir, no sir, all that shit.”

  John gave a bitter smile.

  “He went off there when he was nineteen. He wasn’t so thin then, and he didn’t have the tattoos.”

  Ariel tugged too hard at her eyebrow, a little metal ball rolled onto the table and a brittle steel stem remained in her fingers. She pulled a face and started to put the pieces back together. Apart from the large tattooed arms and the eyebrows, she had the coquettish gestures of a woman adjusting her earring. It made John see her for the first time as a woman. His look made her smile, an amused warning. John laughed and Ariel shrugged.

  “I didn’t think he was that old. Some days he looked twenty-five, others nearly forty. Days when things were going badly, he was … unbearable, you know.” She pulled an embarrassed face.

  “Alan could be
a perfect bastard half the time. I won’t argue with you about that.”

  “Alan as a saviour of democracy. Well, he never said so.”

  “It didn’t do him much good. Alan had already died a lot of deaths. The first time was out there in the desert. The last time was here.”

  Ariel turned towards the curtain masking the kitchen, chin in the air and arms outstretched.

  “Chef! Two cognacs!”

  She was making a big effort not to seem feminine, despite a bosom ample enough to feed a tribe.

  “Coming up, boss.”

  Either the cook got the message or thought he was still talking to the previous, male boss.

  John picked up his bag and started feeling in his pocket.

  “No worries, the food’s on me.”

  “Thanks. Just one more thing. In the audience that night, was there a guy who looked well-heeled, thirtyish, blond, smart suit and edgy. A guy who already knew Alan. I guess you wouldn’t have many people looking like him here.”

  “More than you might think. That night, there were about fifteen people from the smart set in, men and women. Alan had this reputation you know. They were the first to head for the door when the panic started.”

  “O.K.”

  “But not your blond guy. He was in the front row and he was the first up on the stage to try and get Alan down. He vanished when the police got here.”

  John smiled. So Alan had found himself a lover to be witness to his final farewell. Someone who was his opposite. Now he had succeeded in placing Hirsh: a representative of the U.S. government weeping tears of love.

  “There was a girl too, a friend of his, an artist, called Paty?”

  “Now you’re asking too much. There were lots of people in – the place was packed out.”

  “O.K.”

  John gave her a hug and she let him.

  “You’re like your pal, you act like a couple of gay Boy Scouts.”

  “Thank you. I needed to know all this.”

  As he closed the door, she called out:

  “Johnny! Take a shower next time you get close up and personal with a girl!”