by Michel Bussi
We climbed in through the window.
Arnold, I thought. Arnold will spot us!
Strangely, there was no sign of the Shih Tzu. I tried to memorise the arrangement of the rooms of the old railway station. Denise’s bedroom was diagonally opposite.
My flashlight lit up the walls.
I felt a huge sense of relief. Reassuring, almost burning warmth. The photographs of trains were still on the walls! The Orient Express crossed Venice Lagoon, the Shinkansen slipped into its Japanese city. My flashlight went on inspecting the room, sliding over the exposed beams, the dresser, the dried flowers in the vase, the wicker chairs.
Every detail was as I remembered! A few neurones in my brain were still making connections. For the first time in ages I could trust my memory. I hadn’t dreamed that demented discussion with Denise.
I hesitated between calling Denise Joubain’s name, as I had done for Christian Le Medef, or surprising her in her bed to give her a heart attack, shaking her, putting her under the shower, torturing her until she remembered our meeting on the beach at Yport on Wednesday, with Piroz and the corpse of Magali Verron.
We approached the bedroom. As I pushed the door, the sneaker screwed on to the prosthesis of my left foot touched a soft object on the floor.
A surreal squeak ripped through the silence. A plastic squeaky toy. A giraffe.
Almost immediately the light came on in Denise Joubain’s bedroom. My retinas exploded. I gripped the revolver in my pocket. Don’t let the old woman scream. Don’t give her time to raise the alarm this time. Don’t . . .
The walls of the old woman’s bedroom were covered with Hello Kitty wallpaper.
Fairies dangled above my head from a wire on the ceiling. Elves climbed along the curtain. Giant soft toys were piled up. Dogs, rabbits, and elephants. More fairies whirled above the turquoise bed. Inside it, two dazzled eyes stared at me. A child of about six.
A cry made me turn my head. It came from a second, smaller bed on my right, this one with pink stripes.
The head of a little girl of about three appeared. Terrified. The child screamed without interruption, without even breathing, without worrying about the fact that her cheeks, her forehead were turning bright red.
“Christ, Jamal.”
Mona seemed incapable of uttering another word. As if until now she had been understanding about the crazy trail I was pursuing, but this time I had crossed the line.
I turned on my heel, trying to find some way to reassure the little girl.
Waste of time.
The boy was now shouting even louder than his sister, his thin body curled up in his pirate pyjamas.
“What the hell are you doing here?” a voice thundered behind us.
We turned to see a woman in a nightdress, pale, mute with horror. The speaker was a bare-chested man in his forties, with grey hair, was brandishing a kitchen knife in his right hand.
Mona’s damp palm settled on my shoulder as I turned the King Cobra on the two parents.
A reflex action, without thinking.
The children’s cries grew louder than ever. The mother, like a she-wolf, seemed to be poised to throw herself on these two strangers who were separating her from her children.
Mona’s voice was pleading:
“Jamal, no.”
I gripped the butt of the revolver.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“What?”
The father, though taken aback, held my eye. He didn’t show the slightest sign of fear.
I said it again: “What are you doing here?”
He didn’t seem to understand the meaning of my question, but he answered anyway.
“We’ve rented the cottage for the week . . .”
Mona sighed and tugged my sleeve.
“It’s O.K., Jamal. Let’s go . . .”
I didn’t move. The King Cobra was only a replica, but the man with the knife didn’t know that.
“And yesterday?” I asked. “Were you here early yesterday afternoon?”
“No,” said the father. “We spent the whole day at the D-Day beaches, but . . .”
His voice gained in confidence the more questions I asked. Perhaps he thought he was dealing with some crazy police officers . . .
Mona pulled my arm again.
“Come on. You’re scaring me.”
I followed her, slowly, keeping the gun pointed at the parents. The mother dashed towards her little girl, who fell silent as if by magic. The father didn’t take his eyes off us, and still held the knife pointed in our direction.
Mona’s hand grabbed mine, urging me to beat a hasty retreat. The knick-knacks from the old railway station danced a sarabande in my head. The trains on the walls, the wicker chairs, the fairies on the ceiling.
Bloody hell, I couldn’t have invented all those details! I had a perfectly clear memory of those photographs, that furniture, the position of every object in that room.
As soon as we had passed through the door of the old railway station, Mona forced me to run. I remembered that, a few hours earlier, Arnold had run after me into the parking lot, as if he had always lived here and was defending his territory with all his doggy fury. Two children’s bicycles, one with training wheels and one without, leaned against the wall. An Audi with a Paris registration was parked a few metres further away.
Mona drove this time, without a word. I kept up a monologue, as if trying to convince myself, firing out frantic arguments until I ran out of ideas.
“So the former station is a holiday cottage, fine. The family has hired it for the week, O.K. But they left it empty all day yesterday. There would have been time to tidy the kids’ toys away in the bedroom, so Denise could move in and play out that part for me. Tell me the story of her railwayman husband. Claim not to remember Magali Verron’s suicide.”
Mona didn’t reply. We hadn’t driven three hundred metres before she turned abruptly to the right and stopped the car in a huge deserted parking lot, in front of a long concrete building.
Entrepôt Bénédictine, it said in big red letters. Benedictine Warehouse. The place looked abandoned.
Mona turned off the engine.
“This is the end of the road, Jamal. I’ve gone as far as I can.”
“Listen to me, Mona . . .”
In my mind’s eye I saw the framed photographs of trains. The Magistral Baikal-Amur stuck in the snow, the slopes of the Andes and the dykes crossing the sea. The pictures I’d seen the day before in the old railway station of Les Ifs.
“Jamal, it’s over. Denise Joubain has never lived in that railway station. Any more than Christian Le Medef lived in that house on Place Jean-Paul-Larens. You never spoke to them, they never saw that girl jumping off the cliff. They didn’t, and neither did anyone else. No journalist. No police officer. Because Magali Verron has never existed, Jamal. You made her up. I don’t know why, but you created that girl out of nothing. It probably has something to do with Morgane Avril, because you gave her the same face. And perhaps with the murder of Myrtille Camus. That’s probably why the police are after you, but one thing is certain, Jamal, and it’s actually good news. The police can’t pin the rape and murder of Magali Verron on you: the girl doesn’t exist.”
I picked up the police file, the one I stole from Piroz.
MAGALI VERRON, written in capital letters.
I couldn’t have invent—
With an exasperated wave of her hand, Mona gestured to me to be quiet.
“We’ve had that conversation already. I’ve fulfilled my part of the bargain, Jamal. It’s up to you to fulfil yours. You’ll hand yourself over to the police as soon as the sun rises.”
I refused to give in.
“Damn it, Mona, that’s what they’re waiting for! O.K., for the moment, we’re getting nowhere, but there are s
till other possibilities to explore, don’t you thinkThis business about the prisoner’s dilemma, for example. And the mail I’ve been getting! I’m not crazy enough to leave those envelopes lying in the glove compartment and forget.”
Mona looked at me affectionately in a way that reminded me of the shrinks at the Saint Antoine Institute when they were listening to the fanciful explanations of young people caught lying.
Fuck it! I wasn’t giving up.
“The explanation is in these letters! Something that no one’s noticed, Mona. And I’m the only one who can find it . . .”
She ran her hand tenderly through my hair. A gesture more maternal than passionate.
“Forget it, Jamal. Forget the present. Forget everything that’s happened over the last three days. You’ve fantasised the whole thing.” Her forefinger came down to my forehead. “You’ve fantasised it because the truth is in your head somewhere, buried deep. You need to look for what happened ten years ago rather than what happened this week.”
Without thinking, I grabbed her wrist and clutched it tightly, too tightly, before throwing it on her lap like a dead branch.
My voice was icy.
“You too, then.”
“You too what?”
“You’re playing this little game as well. Driving me mad to make me the scapegoat! Pin the murders of those two girls ten years ago on me. That’s the goal, isn’t it? Make me crack? Make me confess?”
I thought again of the envelopes in the glove compartment of the Fiat 500, of the postman delivering mail to Vaucottes. Whoever was responsible had to have set up those deliveries in advance, anticipating my every move. Only Mona could have organised all this. She was part of this conspiracy.
“That’s it, Mona. From here on I’m going it alone.”
She tried to rest her hand on mine. I brushed it away.
“I don’t trust you any more, Mona. I don’t trust anyone any more.”
I realised that I was a total bastard.
Maybe . . .
Mona had taken incredible risks for me.
Or not.
To give her the benefit of the dubt would have meant taking a risk. A risk I could no longer afford. I was going to get up, leave the Fiat and disappear into the night. Mona opened the door.
“Keep the car, Jamal. You’re going to need it more than I do . . .”
Again her gaze shifted from the Magali Verron file to Morgane Avril’s. I remembered that she’d discovered something before we parked in front of the old railway station, something that had convinced me that I was raving.
Later. After the old woman, she had said.
Too late to ask her.
She stepped outside, then leaned back in. Illuminated by the streetlamp a few metres away. The playful expression had been replaced by the look of a hunted animal that wouldn’t live to see another year. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“There’s one more thing, Jamal. There’s still a piece missing from your puzzle. Something important that you’ve overlooked.”
She was crying even harder now.
An important fact that I’d overlooked?
I was trying to work out what she meant, when Mona spelled it out for me:
“You’ve fallen in love with this girl, Jamal. With Morgane Avril. With that face you’ve described to me so many times. So noble, so pure, so sad. That face you thought you saw again three days ago at the top of the cliff. Before it slipped through your fingers and disappeared over the cliff. You’re fantasising about a corpse, my love! A pretty little dead corpse, buried ten years ago. Sorry, I’m no match for that. I can’t be jealous of a ghost.”
“The girl exists, Mona.”
She smiled at me without answering, then walked in front of the Fiat. She studied the straight, empty road for a long time and then took an object from her jacket.
A flash of gold sparkled in the night.
“You can have this back,” Mona said.
She set the sheriff’s star down on the hood of the car.
I couldn’t speak.
“Good luck,” she whispered through the open door.
The sheriff’s star. The five peaks I had to climb . . .
The five directions of my star, like everything else, had been swept away by the torment of the last few days. Curiously, they ran through my head as Mona walked away, swallowed by the darkness of the parking lot. Become, Do, Have, Be, Pay.
Lost in my thoughts, it took me a while to notice that Mona had turned around. Then, as she approached the Fiat again, I thought she was going to come back to me, kiss me, hold me in her arms, collapse in tears, and ask my forgiveness.
She merely lifted the windshield wiper.
What was she playing at, damn it?
Slowly, with one finger, she wrote in the dust of the windshield. Twelve letters.
M A G A L I V E R R O N
Then her finger started erasing a letter, just one, then writing the same letter a few centimetres below.
M first.
Then O.
Then R.
Then G.
Then all the rest.
When each of the twelve letters had been erased and written on another line a few centimetres lower but in a different order, a new name appeared in the dust of the windshield.
M O R G A N E A V R I L
Mona leaned towards the door of the Fiat 500 again.
“One and the same woman, Jamal. A dead woman and her ghost . . .”
At the end of the road two headlights flashed and then, almost immediately, the glare from a revolving light pierced the night with a blue whirl.
33
A DEAD WOMAN AND HER GHOST?
The police van suddenly changed course to climb the embankment and come to rest a few metres from the Fiat 500.
Full beam. Two suns shining straight ahead, while an electric-blue sky spun around.
For a moment I wondered how the police had been able to find us so easily. Just for a moment.
What an idiot!
Obviously, as soon as we left, the couple from the old railway station cottage had called the police. A guy with a gun had broken into their house, they’d found him standing in their children’s room.
An Arab. Crippled. Excited.
And obviously the cavalry had charged.
Two shadows emerged from the van. I recognised Piroz’s heavy silhouette, and the long, bent-backed outline of his deputy.
The captain’s voice called into the night.
“Salaoui, game’s up. Get out of the car with your hands in the air.”
Piroz and his deputy were each holding a gun. They came forward by a metre. The headlights behind them made them look vast. Mona recoiled until she was pressed against the hood of the Fiat, as if frightened by the disproportionate size of their weapons.
Piroz shouted again.
“Don’t move, Mademoiselle Salina.”
I was frozen in the car, unable to take the slightest decision. I felt the weight of the King Cobra in my pocket. A pathetic weapon that only fired rubber bullets.
“Out of the car now, Salaoui!”
I opened the door. Calmly.
I felt what one must feel before dying: intense resignation, but at the same time the ultimate excitement . . . Knowing at last what lies hidden behind it all. The explanation of the great mystery.
Who was I?
An amnesiac madman or a trapped scapegoat?
“Step forward, Salaoui!”
My eyes swept the parking lot of the Benedictine warehouse. Less than ten metres away, the tarmac was engulfed in darkness.
“Don’t try anything,” Piroz barked again, “I don’t want to shoot you.”
I only had to sprint to lose myself in the darkness, a simple thrust of the hips should do it. Would
the police really fire?
“Do as they say,” Mona pleaded.
As I got to my feet I pressed my left hand against the car, in the shadow of the bodywork. I felt Mona’s warmth less than a metre away, her crazed breathing. I took my decision in a second.
The worst one possible.
Try my luck. Push it as far as it would go.
The reflex of a street urchin, like any kid from the estates at the sight of a uniform. Run!
Slowly, I raised my right hand while my left hand, hidden against the door, rummaged in the pocket of my WindWall.
Then it all happened very quickly.
I suddenly raised my left arm, my hand gripping the King Cobra, aiming for the stars, so that Piroz was surprised by two contradictory pieces of information.
Simultaneously.
I was armed. I was giving myself up.
I figured I could take advantage of that moment’s hesitation to jump into the night, run due east, first cover the thirty metres of parking lot, then the kilometres of flat fields. My hundreds of hours of training would save my skin.
The report went off without warning.
Piroz had fired at me. Point-blank.
No pain.
Simultaneously, Piroz and his deputy lowered their guns, silent with dread.
As if in slow motion, Mona slumped on top of me.
The King Cobra danced frantically in my fist, while Mona’s body hiccupped against my shoulder. Blood spilled from her chest, drenching her swamp-green jumper. A second scarlet thread trickled from her lips.
My heart was pounding till I thought it would break.
Anger. Fear. Hatred.
Mona was suffocating. Invisible words escaped from her throat, mute mysteries murmured in angels’ ears. Her eyes gently darkened, as if discovering a landscape that no one had ever looked upon, then they went out.
For ever.
Mona’s body slipped against mine until it fell, face down on the tarmac, almost without a sound, with the elegance of a ballerina dying on stage.