Most of the faces were young: gelled hair, tattooed arms, piercings. Goth pin-up girls in long black coats, with boots covered in buckles and smiles etched in black make-up to match their nails. Some of the guys wore make-up too, looking like a mixture of owls and crows. Night birds, their pupils dilated by pills and powder. Vampires who flocked to see fakirs in this place with its antique stone walls, white-faced disciples of morbid poetry. Disguises, masquerades, eternal teenagers under long shapeless coats, their flesh either hidden or covered with cosmetics; originality and conformism, a perpetually chewed contradiction. Men watching men, women watching women. They merged together, a mass of bodies.
The audience sitting at the tables was older, less noisy, all wearing black too, but more soberly dressed. John Lennon glasses, post-Goth-punk intellectuals, waiting in silence. Women with tightly pursed lips, grinding their teeth instead of laughing. Habitués of extreme conceptual art. They liked watching S and M shows with timid little pats on the bottom, to pass the time intelligently and relieve the boredom of sex. They had come to watch a man suffer without complaining, although they themselves probably moaned all day long, boring their shrinks, their partners and their friends to death with their egotistical agonies. They had come to watch a real-life actor, a living man, piercing his skin. A plucked parrot, a Saint Sebastian in search of his amour propre. Self-love was what the audience came looking for. Giving yourself a scare by watching a man suffer was one way of getting through to your inner self.
John laughed inwardly and his laugh turned to a grimace. Sebastian, they said, survived the arrows because the archers loved him too much. They dared not aim at his heart. Fakirs and martyrs have to consider the public’s love for them as their most serious hope. The path to holiness on one condition: persuade them that you are dying in ecstasy under the blows. It’s a show.
But that evening in the Caveau, it wasn’t love that had drawn them along. They were there because of death. The death they had either missed, or wanted to see again. How many of these people had been present when Alan died?
John unbuttoned his shirt and wiped the sweat from his chest. How many of these were making a return visit?
Saint Sebastian had survived the arrows and then died when he was beaten to death by a less scrupulous public.
The guy on stage was going to need a stiff drink.
An Asian waitress in a bra and skirt, tattooed to the eyebrows, and with the muscles of a karate specialist or a ballet dancer, was gliding between the customers, holding a champagne bucket above her head. She put it on a table just in front of the stage. John watched the well-dressed couple from the door sit down there, joining another wealthy pair of Parisian bourgeois. The women were sexy in a classy way with maximum slit skirts and décolleté, clothes that if they had been red instead of black would have made them look like whores. They had highly varnished nails and whitened teeth. They exchanged greetings without looking each other in the face. The two men, in casual shirts and dark jackets, shook hands in an exaggeratedly virile way. What a jolly start to the evening. Later, after the S and M act, they would have a little coke in a nightclub full of people like themselves, till the sweat poured into their eyes as they discuss bankers’ bonuses; then some partner-swapping; the exchange of like for like in a penthouse with mirrors, brought together by their possession of capital that would soon, after all, be exhausted.
The most expensive tables, up by the altar, were occupied by addicts of the chic frisson, the ones Ariel had talked about. Aficionados of “this incredible act, you’ve just got to see it”, which would make their anaesthetised libidos explode, liberating the well-calibrated fantasies of a sterile class obsessed with its own preservation. An animal crowd all round them, so they could slum it a bit. And a front row seat for the smell of blood,
Leaning on a wall to right of the stage, bending his head because of the low ceiling, Lambert was wearing a yellow tracksuit, the only splash of colour in the whole room, but one hardly noticed him. His long form melted into the wall, as he leaned on an old poster for white magic. The tall, fair-haired policeman raised his gaze slowly towards John and their eyes met. Lambert was no longer wearing the happy smile of a kid watching planes taking off. It must be his new face that allowed him to merge into the mass of the Caveau. Lambert slowly turned his head towards a table on the other side of the room. John followed the direction of his gaze.
Guérin was sitting down. Ariel, in a tank-top, her arms glistening with sweat, was serving him a glass of beer. She was watching him intently, part mother hen, part she-wolf. Guérin was looking round, perhaps for a table with three people. A blonde woman and two men. He looked like a choirboy who had wandered into a brothel.
The patronne slipped between the tables and crossed the room in her leather pants, rubbing up against people as she passed. She was either trying to get the clientèle aroused, or looking for a little warmth in the icy furnace. She arrived in front of John and stood on tiptoe, straining to make herself heard.
“I kept you two seats like you asked. That little table there, just behind your pal. Where did you dig him up from?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Ariel was indeed on edge. She glanced round the room, as disgusted as when it was empty. “What’s all this about? Alan still?”
John nodded. Ariel dropped back onto her heels again and tugged up her bra straps. She grinned, to give herself confidence.
“Go and sit down, I’ll bring you a drink. It starts in a couple of minutes.”
John made his way across the room, apologising to people, trying to shrink his shoulders so as not to jostle into them. But the bumps were hard, the bodies he met unyielding. He sat down at the table. On a card alongside the candle, Ariel had written Reserved for Saint John Pierce. John picked the card up to look closer. He turned his back on Guérin who did not see him smile.
“What time did you tell him?” asked the lieutenant without turning round.
“About now.”
John looked towards the door. The cook was pointing at him, indicating the way to Lundquist.
Forty-five, short dark hair, a smooth jowly face. Hand-made suit, tie, average height. Lundquist strolled across the room as if he owned it, or had organised the whole evening. He could have been a critic at the private view of an artist whose career he was about to destroy. In his hand he held a cane, but did not lean on it. An accessory that suited neither his age nor his physique, and which he was holding just under the pommel like a sceptre.
John was surprised to see him alone. That made no sense. Someone must surely have arrived ahead of him, someone in the room, who already had him under surveillance. Hard to tell in this crowd. The music slowly faded away and silence fell. All heads turned towards the stage, except Lundquist’s. He was looking towards John. The lights dimmed, the stage was lit up and Lundquist sat down at the table.
His back was rigid, and he used the cane to sit down. He had had a fall from an army vehicle in Afghanistan and fractured several vertebrae, or so Alan said. This was the man Patricia had described. The stiffness of his body added to his cold manner. His eyes were like drills, piercing anyone who looked at him, turning them into an adversary.
A harsh electronic composition, somewhere between twelve-tone music and New Age, started to play. The single candle on the table lit Lundquist’s brutal and unmarked face from below. People held back from applauding, as an anxious excitement rippled through the audience. On the stage, a young man with shaved head and ponytail bowed soberly, holding three needles twenty centimetres long in each hand. John remembered the plucked wings of Guérin’s parrot, ending in the stalks of the vanished feathers. The fakir smiled, and planted the first needle in his forearm.
Lundquist read the card on the table, then looked round the room, with a smile, He spoke in English.
“Funny place this.”
John chose to speak French.
“You think so?”
“So it was
here that Mr Mustgrave and Mr Hirsh …”
“Stop being a twat.”
Lundquist’s smile vanished, replaced by a much more natural expression of animosity.
“Mind your language, Nichols.”
“No point wasting time. I don’t want to sit here with you longer than I have to.”
Ariel put a beer in front of John and asked the man from the embassy if he wanted a drink.
He didn’t reply. He was watching the stage. The fakir was now pushing a needle into his tongue. Ariel moved away silently, after an anxious glance at John. Lundquist glanced at her retreating buttocks, twiddling his cane in his fingers.
“So, what is it you want, Nichols?”
“Alan’s dead. The blackmail’s over. I’ll give you back the money. And in return, you don’t take any further action. I don’t want the F.B.I. harassing my mother. And you can tell Boukrissi to lay off, and leave me alone.”
The fakir now put a needle through his cheeks, which crossed with the one already in his tongue.
“Boukrissi?”
“You know perfectly well who I mean.”
“Are you taping this conversation by any chance?”
“No. It’s just between ourselves.”
“I don’t understand what kind of deal it is you want, Nichols. What can you offer me? This young man is amazing,” he added, looking at the stage again. The show amused him, as if he were a romantic poet visiting the music hall.
“I know what you were up to in San Diego and Iraq. I’ve got dates, names, details. Alan’s dead, but there are plenty of other witnesses I could call on. He wasn’t the only one under your command. I’ll be able to find the others, I’ve got their names.”
Lundquist looked more and more amused.
“You don’t have anything. Just the ravings of a junkie who’s dead, a mythmaker and a paranoid self-harmer, who was never even in the U.S. army.”
“You can destroy all the files you want and it won’t make any difference. All it needed for the whole world to find out about Abu Ghraib was for some cretins to post up pictures of what they were doing on the internet. I’ve got 400 pages of evidence. Don’t you think that’s enough? At a time like this.”
“I thought you said the blackmail was over! You don’t have the means of your ambitions, Nichols. I’m sorry about your friend’s death, but I had nothing whatever to do with Mr Mustgrave.”
“I don’t have any ambitions. I’m just saying you’ll find it hard to cover up your past. It could be the end of your diplomatic career in France, Frazer.”
Lundquist put his cane flat on the table. The fakir, still bristling with needles, had now put hooks through his nipples and was hanging weights from them. His skin was stretched, and he walked across the stage. His smile had lost its brilliance and a little blood trickled down to his belly. In the front rows, hands clenched the stems of their champagne glasses more tightly. The audience had fallen quite silent. Only the dissonant music was there to cover Lundquist and Nichols’ voices.
“I could call the police in, over Boukrissi. He might have an interesting tale to tell.”
“Watch it, Nichols, you’re playing with fire.”
“You told Boukrissi to cut the dope with something else, didn’t you? What did he put in it, to make Alan haemorrhage? You know your drugs, Frazer, I’m well aware of that. You provided the dealer who would kill Alan.”
“Mustgrave was a wreck, a degenerate, like Hirsh. He got what was coming to him. There was no need for anyone to give him a push. It was your job, not mine, to help losers like him.”
“You really are a piece of shit. A trained poodle who thinks he’s a psychologist. You’re a sadist and a coward, an impotent one what’s more with your stupid conductor’s baton. Your superiors gave you an honorary job here in Paris, because you’re an embarrassment. Your ego makes you a time bomb. They won’t hesitate to get rid of you, like Alan, if you start making waves.”
Lundquist’s hands whitened as he gripped the cane. Behind the diplomat, at the next table, John noticed a man looking at them. The only other person in the audience who was not watching the show. Not the embassy driver, but it could have been his twin brother. The heavy-duty chaperone was in the starting blocks.
Lundquist’s face had stiffened and twisted. His voice went up an octave and the civilised varnish exploded in a second.
“What about you, Nichols? You got your rocks off looking after a queer like Mustgrave? A little piss-artist, who reminded you of the daddy you never knew, the Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress? Another junkie he was, a stupid idiot who did himself in as well, I heard. So who are you working for, Nichols? Your mom? Did she tell you to go in to sort out her problems for her? How long did it take you to screw up the courage to come to France? You even sent Mustgrave on ahead. Am I wrong? Tell me, you shit-faced pacifist, who’s the real coward here? If I’d waited any longer, I wouldn’t have needed Boukrissi to pass Mustgrave any dope. He’d have killed himself without any help from me. In fact, that’s what happened. He knew perfectly well what he was doing. That pervert Hirsh told me, and he was in the front row. Your pal, the homo, he let himself die. And where were you when that was going on? I bet you were relieved when you heard that walking disaster had hit the deck at last. It’s true, isn’t it, Nichols?”
The fakir, now pierced all over and laden with weights, was unrolling a blanket covered with crushed glass. He took a few steps on the shards, barefoot, then let himself fall heavily to his knees. A crunch of broken glass and excited gasps from the audience.
John pressed the cane down with both hands, crushing Lundquist’s fingers. Behind him he heard Guérin stirring.
The colossus behind Lundquist was moving too. Then he seemed to hesitate, and sat back down. John hadn’t noticed Lambert slip into the middle of the room. The young officer had put the Beretta to the back of the bodyguard’s neck, while apparently still absentmindedly admiring the show.
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it, Lundquist. The C.I.A. is more interested in guys like me than in sickos like you. You’re ten a penny, and so was Alan. I could ask them to break you, if I agree to work for them.”
Lundquist’s arms started to tremble, and he pulled at the cane, with a grimace. On stage, the fakir had stood up, was unhooking the weights and taking out the needles. John suddenly let go, and Lundquist, caught off balance, fell back against the chair.
“You can’t touch me and don’t think you can!”
“Witnesses. A dealer the French police can question. If that isn’t enough, I’ll sell my thesis to someone else, one of the people whose names are in there, the ones who’ve had brilliant careers since Desert Storm, not phoney diplomats like you. I don’t think they need asking twice. Especially since I won’t ask a lot for it. All I’ll ask for is Frazer’s head, and they’ll give me it on a platter. But if you just drop it all, you can bury the whole thing. That’s all I’m asking, and I already told you, I’ll give the money back. Otherwise, it’s the police and the media. I don’t give a damn about going back to the States, Frazer, it’s your country, not mine now. I’m not one of your protégés; you’ve got nothing on me.”
Alan used to say that Lundquist had tics. When he was furious, when he lost control of one of his men, or when he went into the interrogation room. His eyebrows were knitted, his nostrils dilated and his shoulders twitched with a movement that communicated itself to his stiff spine.
“Police! Who do you think you are! The French police can’t touch me, I’m a diplomat.”
John moved his chair aside.
Guérin turned round slowly towards their table, calmly, with his strange manner of looking beyond the present. Lundquist had no idea what this grotesque apparition could mean, this man with a scarred face and a hydrocephalic head, balanced unsteadily on its neck. Guérin waved his tricolour badge in front of his eyes. In his other hand was a little digital recorder. John lifted the card labelled Saint John Pierce and picked up the wireless mi
crophone underneath it.
“Lieutenant Guérin, Paris Criminal Investigation Department. Your diplomatic passport will indeed protect you, Monsieur Lundquist, but your compatriot here, Mr Nichols, has persuaded me to take the opportunity to ask for a favour I’m owed from people higher up. Just by chance, it happened this morning. The Minister can’t refuse me anything at the moment. I’m quite ready to question you about the death of Mr Mustgrave, as well as about a dealer, a Monsieur Boukrissi.”
Lundquist was jerking with spasms and looked back over his shoulder. John leaned across to him, almost breathing him in.
“Forget it, Frazer, your bodyguard is being watched.”
The fakir had now attached two hooks to the skin over his shoulder blades, attached to ropes running up to pulleys in the vaulted ceiling. The Asian waitress was acting as his assistant. She pulled on the ropes with her dancer’s tattooed arms. The public gasped again, a storm of clapping broke out as the fakir rose into the air. His pain could be seen on his face, deforming a more and more fixed smile. Not exactly holy ecstasy, but he was certainly getting a good round of applause.
Lundquist was frothing at the mouth, but his pale eyes did not express defeat, only rage.
“Without your thesis, you can’t do a thing. We’ve got all your papers, Nichols. If there’s still a copy left, I’ll soon have got it from …”
The fakir spread his arms wide in a cross, throwing out his chest.
The audience rose to its feet clapping hysterically.
John cried out:
“What! What did you say?”
Their table was surrounded by people; Lundquist made a dash for it, hitting his way out with his stick. John leaped up. He saw Lambert’s Beretta, held by the barrel, come down hard. A sound of breaking glass and the bodyguard collapsed between the tables. The fakir was still hanging on, trembling more and more now. The Asian girl weakened and relaxed the cords, which were vibrating, the music stopped and the audience was screaming with joy. Lundquist thrust aside the cook at the door, and John burst out after him, elbows and shoulders thrusting his way through, Lambert at his heels.
Bed of Nails Page 22