Alex (2 page)

Alex sets down the wig. For no reason her hands are trembling. She’s being ridiculous. The guy fancies her; he’s following her, thinks he’s in with a chance – he’s hardly going to attack her in the street. Alex shakes her head as though trying to make up her mind and when she looks out at the street again, the man has disappeared. She leans first one way then the other, but there’s no-one; he has gone. The relief she feels seems somehow disproportionate. “I’m just being silly,” she thinks again, as her breathing begins to return to normal. In the doorway of the shop, she can’t help but stop and check the street again. It almost feels as though it’s his absence now that worries her.

Alex checks her watch, looks up at the sky. The weather is mild and there’s at least an hour of daylight still. She doesn’t feel like heading home. She needs to stop off and buy food. She tries to remember what she’s got in the fridge. She’s always been a bit lax about grocery shopping. She tends to focus all her energy on her work, her comfort (Alex is a little obsessive-compulsive),
and – though she’s reluctant to admit it – on clothes and shoes. Plus handbags. And wigs. She wishes her love life had worked out differently; it’s something of a touchy subject. Her love life is a disaster area. She hoped, she waited, and eventually she gave up. These days, she thinks about it as little as possible. But she is careful not to allow regret to turn into ready-meals and nights in front of the television, careful not to put on weight, not to let herself go. Though she’s single, she rarely feels alone. She has lots of projects that are important to her and they keep her busy. Her love life might be a train wreck, but that’s life. And it’s easier now that she’s resigned herself to being alone. In spite of her loneliness, Alex tries to live a normal life, to enjoy her little pleasures. It consoles her to think that she can indulge herself, that like everyone else she has the
right
to indulge herself. Tonight, for example, she’s decided to treat herself to dinner at Mont-Tonnerre on the rue de Vaugirard.

*

She arrives a little early. It’s her second time. The first was a week ago and the staff obviously remember the attractive redhead who was dining alone. Tonight they greet her like a regular, the waiters jostling to serve her, flirting awkwardly with the pretty customer. She smiles at them, effortlessly charms them. She asks for the same table, her back to the terrace, facing into the room; she orders the same half-bottle of Alsatian ice wine. She sighs. Alex loves food, so much so that she has to be careful. Her weight keeps fluctuating, but she has learned to control it. Sometimes she will put on ten or fifteen kilos, become virtually unrecognisable, but two months later she’s back to her original weight. It’s something she won’t be able to get away with a few years from now.

She takes out her book and asks for an extra fork to prop it
open with while she’s eating. Sitting facing her is the guy with light brown hair she saw here last week. He’s having dinner with friends. For the moment there are only two of them, but it’s clear from their talk that they are expecting others to turn up soon. He spotted her the moment she stepped into the restaurant. She pretends not to notice him staring at her intently. He will stare at her all night, even when the rest of his friends show up and they launch into their endless banter about work, about girls, about women, taking turns telling stories that make them sound good. All the while, he will be glancing at her. He’s not bad looking – forty, forty-five maybe – and he was clearly handsome as a young man; he drinks a little too much, which explains his tragic face. A face that stirs something in Alex.

She drinks her coffee and – her one concession – as she leaves, she gives him a look; she does it expertly. A fleeting glance, the sort of look Alex does perfectly. Seeing the longing in his eyes, for a split-second she feels a twinge of pain in the pit of her stomach, an intimation of sadness. At moments like this Alex never articulates what she is feeling, certainly not to herself. Her life is a series of frozen images, a spool of film that has snapped in the projector – it is impossible for her to rewind, to refashion her story, to find new words. The next time she has dinner here, she might stay a little later, and he might be waiting for her outside when she leaves – who knows? Alex knows. Alex knows all too well how these things go. It’s always the same story. Her fleeting encounters with men never become love stories; this is a part of the film she’s seen many times, a part she remembers. That’s just the way it is.

It is completely dark now and the night is warm. A bus has just pulled up. She quickens her step, the driver sees her in the
rear-view mirror and waits, she runs for the bus but just as she’s about to get on, changes her mind, decides to walk a little way. She signals to the driver who gives a regretful shrug, as if to say
Oh well, such is life
. He opens the bus door anyway.

“There won’t be another bus after me. I’m the last one tonight …”

Alex smiles, thanks him with a wave. It doesn’t matter. She’ll walk the rest of the way. She’ll take the rue Falguière and then the rue Labrouste.

She’s been living near the Porte de Vanves for three months now. She moves around a lot. Before this, she lived near Porte de Clignancourt and before that on the rue du Commerce. Most people hate moving, but for Alex it’s a need. She positively enjoys it. Maybe because, as with the wigs, it feels like she’s changing her life. It’s a recurring theme. One day she’ll change her life.

A little way in front of her, a white van pulls onto the pavement to park. To get past, Alex has to squeeze between the van and the building. She senses a presence, a man; she has no time to turn. A fist slams between her shoulder blades, leaving her breathless. She loses her balance, topples forward, her forehead banging violently against the van with a dull clang; she drops everything she’s carrying, her hands flailing desperately to find something to catch hold of – they find nothing. The man grabs her hair, but the wig comes off in his hand. He curses, a word she can’t quite make out, then viciously yanks her real hair with one hand, and with the other punches her in the stomach hard enough to stun a bull. Alex doesn’t have time to scream; she doubles over and vomits. The man has to be very powerful because he manages to flip her like a piece of paper so that she is facing him. His arm slides round her waist, pulling her against
him while he stuffs a wad of tissue paper into her mouth and down her throat. It’s him: the man she saw in the
métro
, in the street, outside the shop. It’s him. For a fraction of a second they look each other in the eye. She tries to struggle, but he’s got her arms in a tight grip, there’s nothing she can do, he’s too strong, he pushes her down, her knees give way, she falls onto the floor of the van. He lashes out, a vicious kick to the small of the back, sending Alex sprawling into the van, the floor grazing her cheek. He climbs in behind her, forcibly turns her over and punches her in the face. He hits her so hard … This guy really wants to hurt her, he wants to kill her – this is what’s going through Alex’s mind as she feels the punch. Her skull slams against the floor of the van and bounces and she feels a shooting pain in the back of her head – the occiput, that’s what it’s called, Alex thinks, the occiput. But apart from this word, the only thing she can think is, I don’t want to die, not like this, not now. Huddled in a foetal position, mouth full of vomit, she feels her arms wrenched hard behind her back and tightly bound, then her ankles. “I don’t want to die now,” Alex thinks. The door of the van slams shut, the engine roars into life, the van pulls away from the pavement with a screech. “I don’t want to die now.”

Alex is dazed but aware of what is happening to her. She is crying, choking on her tears. Why me? Why me?

I don’t want to die. Not now.

When he called, Divisionnaire Le Guen gave him no choice.

“I don’t give a shit about your scruples, Camille, you’re seriously busting my balls here. I haven’t got anyone else, and I mean anyone, so I’m sending a car for you and you’re fucking going!”

He paused a beat, then, for good measure, he added: “And stop being such a pain in the arse.”

Then he hung up. This is Le Guen’s style. Impulsive. Usually Camille takes no notice of him. Usually he knows how to handle the divisionnaire.

The difference this time is that it’s a kidnapping.

And Camille wants nothing to do with it. He’s made his position clear: there aren’t many cases he won’t handle, but kidnapping is top of the list. Not since Irène died. His wife had collapsed in the street, eight months pregnant, and been rushed to hospital; then she’d been kidnapped. She was never seen alive again. It destroyed Camille. Distraught doesn’t begin to describe it; he was traumatised. He had spent whole days paralysed, hallucinating. When he became delusional, he had had to be sectioned. He was shunted from psychiatric clinics to convalescent homes. It was a miracle he was alive. No-one expected it. In the months on sick leave from the
brigade criminelle
– the murder squad – everyone had wondered whether he would ever
show his face again. And when finally he came back, the strange thing was that he was exactly the same as before Irène’s death, just a little older. Since then, he’s only taken on minor cases: crimes of passion, brawls between colleagues, murder between neighbours. Cases where the deaths are behind you, not in front. No kidnappings. Camille wants his dead well and truly dead, corpses with no comeback.

“Give me a break,” Le Guen has told him more than once – he’s doing the best he can for Camille – “you can’t exactly avoid the living; there’s no future in it. Might as well be an undertaker.”

“But …” Camille said, “that’s exactly what we are!”

They have known each other for twenty years and they like each other. Le Guen is a Camille who gave up on the streets. Camille is a Le Guen who gave up on power. The obvious differences between them are two pay grades and fifty-two pounds. That, and about eleven inches. Put like that it sounds preposterous, and it’s true that when they’re together they look like cartoon characters. Le Guen is not very tall, but Camille is positively stunted. He sees the world from the viewpoint of a thirteen-year-old. This is something he gets from his mother, the artist Maud Verhœven. Her paintings are in the collections of a dozen museums abroad. She was an inspired artist and an incorrigible smoker who lived in a cloud of cigarette smoke, a permanent halo; it is impossible to imagine her without that blue haze. It is to her that Camille owes his two distinguishing traits. The artist left him with an exceptional talent for drawing; the inveterate smoker left him with foetal hypotrophy, which meant he never grew taller than four foot eleven.

He has rarely met anyone he could look down on; he has spent his life looking up at people. His height goes beyond a mere
handicap. At the age of twenty it’s an appalling humiliation, at thirty it’s a curse, but from the outset it’s clearly a destiny. The sort of handicap that makes a person resort to using long words.

With Irène, Camille’s height became a strength. Irène had made him taller on the inside. Camille had never felt so … he gropes for a word. Without Irène, he’s lost for words.

Le Guen on the other hand qualifies as colossal. No-one knows how much he weighs; he refuses to discuss it. Some people claim he’s at least 120 kilos, others say 130 kilos, and there are some people who think it’s more. It doesn’t matter: Le Guen is gargantuan, an elephantine man with hamster cheeks, but because he has bright eyes brimming with intelligence – no-one can explain this, men are reluctant to admit it, but most women are agreed – the divisionnaire is a very attractive man. Go figure.

Camille is accustomed to Le Guen’s tantrums; he’s not impressed by histrionics. They’ve known each other too long. Calmly he picks up the telephone and calls the divisionnaire back.

“Listen up, Jean: I’ll go, I’ll take on this kidnapping of yours. But the fucking second Morel gets back you’re putting him on it, because …” he takes a breath, then hammers home every syllable with a calmness that is filled with menace, “I’m not taking the case!”

Camille Verhœven never shouts. Or very rarely. He is a man of authority. He may be short, bald and scrawny, but this is something that everyone knows. Camille is a razor blade. And Le Guen is careful not to say anything. Malicious gossip has it that Camille wears the trousers in their relationship. It’s not something they joke about. Camille hangs up.

“Fuck!”

This is all he needs. It’s not as if they get kidnapping cases every day; this isn’t Mexico City. Why couldn’t it have happened some other day, when he was on another case, on leave, somewhere, anywhere! Camille slams his fist on the table. But he does so slowly, because he’s a reasonable man. He doesn’t like outbursts, even in other people.

Time is short. He gets to his feet, grabs his coat and hat and takes the stairs two at a time. Camille walks with a heavy tread. Before Irène died, he walked with a spring in his step. His wife used to say, “You hop like a bird. I always think you’re about to take off.” It has been four years since Irène died.

The car pulls up in front of him. Camille clambers inside.

“What’s your name again?”

“Alexandre, bos—”

The driver bites his tongue. Everyone knows Camille hates to be called “boss”. Says it sounds like a T.V. police show. This is Camille’s style: he is very cut-and-dried, a pacifist with a brutal streak. Sometimes he gets carried away. He was always a bit of an oddball, but age and widowhood have made him touchy and irritable. Deep down, he’s angry. Irène used to say, “Darling, why are you always so angry?” Drawing himself up to his four feet eleven inches, and laying the irony on thick, Camille would say, “You’re right. I mean … what have I got to be angry about?” Hot-head and stoic, thug and tactician, people rarely get the measure of Camille on first meeting. Rarely appreciate him. This might also be because he’s not exactly cheerful. Camille doesn’t like himself very much.

Since going back to work three years ago, Camille has taken responsibility for all interns, a blessing for the duty sergeants who can’t be arsed babysitting them. What Camille wants, since
his own imploded, is to rebuild a loyal team.