Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  Vincent Carré spotted the stranger again the following morning. By that time, Yport was in turmoil: Morgane Avril’s corpse had just been discovered and the police were patrolling the village. The guy was standing in the Place Jean-Paul Laurens, outside the bakery, with his jacket draped over his shoulder. Vincent passed in front of him, almost running; after falling into bed, exhausted, at 2 A.M., he’d woken this morning to the news that a girl had been found dead on the beach! Raped! Like every other male in the vicinity, he’d been told to report to the police so they could collect a DNA sample . . . When he passed in front of the stranger, Vincent Carré had no idea who had been killed, or how.

  The guy had waved a hand in greeting. If he hadn’t, Vincent would have passed him by without noticing. When they spoke, there was no mention of the dead girl. Vincent Carré couldn’t say why. He had the impression that the stranger wasn’t aware that there’d been a murder. Either that or he didn’t give a shit.

  “So, did you enjoy the concert?” Vincent had asked.

  The other man had burst out laughing. “Come on . . .”

  “And the local girls?”

  “Pretty. Very pretty.”

  “So I saw—you didn’t go for the ugliest one.”

  “No, only the hottest would do . . .”

  Vincent Carré had put him down as a poser. He’d also noticed that the stranger was no longer wearing his red scarf.

  “Did you lose your scarf?”

  “I gave it to the girl,” the stranger said. “As a souvenir.”

  “Will you be seeing her again?”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  He had given a laugh that the psychologists would ask Vincent to describe again and again, asking him to elaborate on the finer nuances.

  Did it seem spontaneous? Forced? Cynical? Sadistic?

  Vincent had no idea. The one thing that stuck in his mind was the stranger’s answer to his final question.

  “Are you taking the bus?” Vincent had asked.

  “No, I’m off to see my folks. They have a second home on the Normandy coast.”

  The crux of the Morgane Avril case.

  Naturally the police did all they could to verify the credibility of Vincent Carré’s testimony. He seemed reliable, though the police were concerned about the gap in his schedule. Vincent had gone to bed at about two in the morning, leaving his friends to carry on partying without him. That wasn’t like him . . .

  When Captain Grima questioned him about it, Vincent said that he’d been tired, that he’d had a hard week. When pressed, he became indignant. How dare the police treat him like a suspect when his testimony had provided them with a breakthrough in the case. He had a point; Grima had no reason to suspect Vincent Carré any more than any other customer at the Sea View. Besides, his DNA didn’t match the rapist’s.

  So they were looking for a boy of about twenty whose parents owned a second home on the Normandy coast. Captain Grima discovered at this point that there were over thirty-five thousand second homes in the region. Finding the right one proved impossible, despite teams of officers going door-to-door for weeks, composite in hand, in ever-increasing circles, starting with the closest, Étretat, then Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, then Honfleur, then Deauville, Cabourg, Dieppe . . .

  All in vain.

  The stranger in the red scarf had vanished without trace.

  Captain Grima delivered his report to Judge Nadeau-Loquet on August 20th, 2004. By that time the investigation had been stalled for almost five weeks. No new evidence, but Grima remained convinced that Morgane Avril had agreed to follow the stranger who’d been seen with her on the dance floor. He had retrieved his jacket and his Burberry scarf from the cloakroom without anyone noticing, and then he had waited in the parking lot for Morgane. They had probably gone for a swim together in some secluded spot. Then things turned nasty.

  Morgane has gone as far as she’s willing to, but the stranger refuses to take no for an answer. He rapes her, panics, strangles her, carries her corpse to the top of the cliff and throws her off, perhaps to make it look like a suicide.

  Then he disappears . . .

  Despite his failure to apprehend the suspect, Captain Grima concluded his report to Judge Nadeau-Loquet on an optimistic note. Morgane Avril’s murderer had been partially identified. Eventually, he would lower his guard and someone would spot him, either on the Normandy coast or elsewhere. But there was one thing Captain Grima was certain of:

  Morgane Avril’s killer would never strike again.

  This was a young man from a well-to-do family, cultured, well-educated, who had made the biggest mistake of his life that night in Yport. He would live with that monstrous secret buried deep inside him. Until his death.

  If they didn’t catch him before then . . .

  The police report unleashed the fury of the Avril clan.

  Carmen Avril and her family, through their lawyer, took issue with Captain Grima’s theory. As far as they were concerned, the murderer was a pervert, a predator whose actions were premeditated. They pointed to Vincent Carré’s account of the stranger with the red scarf on the morning after the murder, waiting calmly for his parents to come and get him, untroubled by the police manhunt for Morgane’s killer.

  Police, lawyers, and judges spent hours discussing the brief exchange reported by Vincent Carré:

  “Did you lose your scarf?”

  “I gave it to the girl. As a souvenir.”

  “Will you be seeing her again?”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  Did these sound like the words of a young man who had slipped up and committed a murder that he would regret for the rest of his days? Or the gloating of a cynical and cold-blooded criminal? Or were they the words of an innocent man—albeit one who had failed to present himself to the police so that he could be eliminated?

  On August 23rd, Le Havre Libre quoted Captain Grima’s dismissive response to the suggestion that Morgane’s murder had been premeditated. He found it unbelievable that the killer could have been devised a plan that would allow him to approach and then attack Morgane Avril without being seen. And why the dip in the sea? Why the Burberry scarf?

  Then, on August 26th, 2004, his theory was blown to pieces.

  Along with his credibility.

  All that effort he’d put in, the sleepless nights away from home, missing three months of his baby daughter’s life in the process—wasted.

  Overnight, the case of the red Burberry scarf turned into a drama of such magnitude it surpassed anything Captain Grima could have imagined.

  The sound of the bell dragged me from my reading.

  It rang out continuously, as if summoning a ship’s crew to assemble on deck.

  André’s voice boomed in the corridor:

  “Jamal! Dinner time!”

  I looked at the clock on my bedside table: 7:17 P.M.

  Shit!

  11

  WILL YOU BE SEEING HER AGAIN?

  I made my way down the steps into the dining room, which was big enough to accommodate over thirty people, with most of the tables commanding a view of the sea. In February, however, the Sirène felt more like a family boarding house than a hotel restaurant. Tonight, only a handful of the tables were occupied. There were two pensioners, stopping for one night on their way to Mont St. Michel. An English couple who had arrived on the ferry to Dieppe with their red-faced baby. A man in a tie, sitting alone, like a lost sales rep.

  And a surprise guest, who greeted me with the words:

  “You’re late, Jamal.”

  Mona!

  She was dining alone at her table, sitting over her plate of whelks armed with a small stainless steel skewer. The pensioners ate in silence a few tables away. In the other corner of the room, the English couple were struggling to make their baby eat vegetables.

  Mona
indicated at the chair in front of her. “Would you rather eat on your own, or will you join me?”

  How could I refuse?

  As soon as I sat down, André appeared with my plate and my cutlery. He vanished with a complicit smile; I couldn’t tell whether it was meant for her or for me.

  “You sneaky little thing! Did you arrive at the Sirène this morning?” That explained her mysterious comment at the police station, about seeing me later. Her eyes sparkled with delight at having duped me.

  “That’s right. Yesterday, I was prospecting on Veules-les-Roses, but now I have to move on to the pebble beaches between the oil terminal at Antifer and the nuclear plant at Paluel. When you came back from your jog this morning I was standing right behind you, at the counter, but you didn’t notice me.”

  Hardly surprising, given that was the moment André handed me the first envelope.

  “And did you manage to persuade the police to approve your permit?”

  “Yes! But I had to sleep with half the station. What about you, no new suicides?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  André arrived with my whelks and mayonnaise at that moment. He must have heard the “no new suicides” remark, but showed no sign of it.

  “Let’s have a bottle of wine,” Mona suggested. “I’ll get this!”

  I protested for form’s sake, but Mona insisted.

  “I’ll put it on expenses. My company’s not short of a euro or two. P@nshee Computer Technologies must have made almost five billion in profits last year. There’s no reason why Key Biscayne retirees should be the only ones to profit from that, is there?”

  She ordered a 2009 white Burgundy, a Vougeot Chardonnay premier cru.

  Seventy-five euros! My entire budget for the week.

  A long silence set in between us. I had no desire to talk about that morning’s suicide, about the Burberry scarf, even less about the Morgane Avril case. Mona seemed to offer a pleasant interlude amid this torrent of unanswered questions and impossible coincidences.

  My gaze darted about the room, from the romantic paintings of storms over the cliff, to the sailors’ knots displayed in wood and copper frames, the “Welcome aboard” life belt, the giant compass hanging from the beam. I lingered on these maritime knick-knacks, knowing that the alternative would be to risk drowning in Mona’s cleavage.

  She had undone another button on her blouse since I saw her that afternoon.

  To seduce me, or to persuade the police to stamp her permit?

  Mona was the first to break the silence.

  “Do you know how the CEO of P@nshee made his fortune?”

  “No idea . . .”

  “It’s an incredible story. You’ll love this, Jamal. Panshee Kumar Shinde is his name, he arrived in San Francisco in the mid-seventies as a poor Indian immigrant without a rupee to his name. By night he cleaned toilets in downtown offices, and by day he took classes in management at one of those colleges that rips off foreign students by charging them thousands of dollars, leaving them in debt for three generations. Halfway through the course, Panshee was assigned a business creation project. He had to draw up a marketing plan, an amortisation program—the whole shebang. Exhausted by the work he did at night, he hadn’t managed to write a single line. The night before he was due to hand in his work, he was cleaning the toilets of the Transamerica Pyramid, forty-seventh floor, with no idea what business he could create, even a virtual one. More prosaically, he was raging against the idiots who clogged the toilets with tissues or sheets of A4 when there was no toilet paper . . .”

  Mona took a sip of Chardonnay before going on:

  “And then he had the idea—”

  “In the toilets?”

  “Yes—the most idiotic idea of the universe. Rather than putting a standard twenty-metre roll of toilet paper in offices, the same as the ones you’d use at home, why not install a much longer roll? Two hundred, three hundred metres, locked up in a metal dispenser. He started with that, for lack of anything better, and spent the rest of the night drafting his project. The next day, he was about to get off the subway train to go to his class when at the last moment he changed his mind. He stayed on the train, got off five stops later, at West Portal, and went into the Wells Fargo office to sell his project and apply for the patent.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Before the year was out he was a multi-billionaire. One of the hundred richest people in the world. Do you know a single public building that doesn’t have one of those toilet-paper dispensers? Can you imagine how many metres of toilet paper are rolled out every day from those things?”

  Mona finished her glass and continued:

  “It was the most lucrative patent of the century! Panshee went on to invest in computer technology, then he bought an island in Micronesia. They say he never wears clothes and wipes his bum with palm fronds.”

  “Is that true?”

  She burst out laughing. “What do you think?”

  I hesitated for a moment.

  “You made it all up?”

  “Perhaps. I love telling stories.”

  I wanted to applaud, to hold her in my arms, run outside with her to the sea wall, and laugh all night beneath the moon. I had never met a girl I had so much in common with. That offbeat sense of humour, as if she’s not quite living in the real world, caught somewhere between the cars rumbling in the street below and the stars up above. For the second time that day I thought about Djamila. Mona reminded me of my grandmother, the Sheherezade of Drancy. Every Saturday evening all the kids used to gather to listen to her stories, Géricault Tower, staircase C—until they shoved Djamila in a care home at Blanc-Mesnil and the nurses reduced her fabulous stories to incoherent rantings, proof of advanced Alzheimer’s. I was eight years old. I have never forgotten any of her stories.

  André took advantage of my preoccupation to remove my plate and set down a bowl of mussels. A brief hesitation on his part told me that he wanted to talk, probably about the suicide that he had just heard us discussing. The news had spread: a girl found dead after leaping off the cliff. Perhaps the fact that someone had tried to strangle her had got out as well . . .

  I imagined the panic in the fishermen’s houses.

  Ten years later, had the Burberry-scarf rapist returned?

  “What about you?” Mona suddenly asked me.

  “Me?”

  “Yes! Your turn to tell me an amazing story.”

  I shook my head, all out of inspiration, as if sorting through the mussels had exhausted all my powers of invention. Mona stamped her foot.

  “Don’t disappoint me, Jamal! I wouldn’t have invited you to my table if I hadn’t been sure that you were going to surprise me. Come on, something crazy!”

  I took a moment to wipe my fingers on my napkin. Three tables away, the pensioners were too engrossed in their smartphones to pay any attention to each other.

  “O.K., Mona. You’ve asked for it. A crazy thing? Here you go: I’ve found a revolutionary way of getting off with girls. A surefire method of luring the most beautiful ones into bed.”

  I had Mona’s attention. She sat up straight, opened her eyes wide and parted her lips.

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked.

  “I’m waiting for you to show me some proof.”

  I took out my wallet and removed a small business card. I placed it on the table, concealing it with my palm so that Mona couldn’t read it.

  “There’s my secret weapon.”

  “Ah,” Mona said, exaggerating her disappointment.

  I pushed the card towards her without revealing it.

  “For ten years I’ve never gone out without my cards. I always have a few in my pocket. As I go about my day, commuting to work, walking the city streets, every now and then I happen upon a girl I like. Without stopping, without giving her the chance
to get a proper look at me, I slip one of these cards into her hand.”

  I opened my hand and read the card.

  Dear Miss,

  I have calculated that every day I see several thousand women in the streets of Paris. Every day I give a card to one of those women, sometimes two, rarely three, never more.

  One woman out of several thousand.

  You. Today.

  You are different. In this crowd, something sets you apart from all the others.

  If there is a man who loves you and you are happy with him, I hope you will still be touched by my gesture.

  If you aren’t loved, that’s an injustice. Because you deserve to be. More than anyone else.

  In my eyes.

  Thank you for this magic moment.

  jamalsalaoui@yahoo.fr

  I gave the card to Mona and she snatched it up as if it were a treasure map.

  “Whoa! And this works?”

  I emptied my glass, savouring it. One euro per centilitre.

  “It’s infallible! At worst, the woman feels flattered. At best, she falls for it. I play on the element of surprise, on their ego, on the contrast between Parisian indifference and my little touch of romanticism. You see, Mona, it’s the ideal compromise between virtual flirting on hook-up sites and the clumsy passes that girls constantly have to put up with in the street.”

  Mona reached for the bottle and topped up our glasses. She whistled between her teeth.

  “One girl in thousands. How do you choose?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain it. If there’s one thing I’ve never understood it’s love at first sight. Frankly, Mona, almost all women are charming, almost all of them have a little something that would make you fall in love with them, to love them for a lifetime without regret. But when it comes to love at first sight, that isn’t enough . . . At least one woman in three is really pretty if she wants to be. And at least one woman in ten—in twenty, perhaps, is perfect. Each in her own unique way, but perfect. But love at first sight comes from a look that blows me away. Women who can leave me thunderstruck like that—I come across one of those per metro carriage, ten outside every café in a Paris square in the sun, a hundred on a summer beach . . .”