Alex (24 page)

“And I’m going to keep this, if you don’t mind, as a souvenir of our little encounter. But you can have this back.”

He holds out the driver’s mobile. Commandant Verhœven’s face suddenly changes; he’s not joking now. He slams the mobile down on the metal table.

“Now you’re going to start making calls. You’re going to stir up a shit-storm with the gypsy cab drivers. I need to track down a girl, about thirty-five, good looking, but she would have been filthy and in pretty bad shape. She was picked up by a driver around eleven p.m. Tuesday night, somewhere between the church and the Porte de Pantin. I need to know where he dropped her. I’m giving you twenty-four hours.”

Alex knows she has been badly shaken by her ordeal in the cage, that she’s experiencing post-traumatic stress. Just thinking that she might have died there, with the rats … it makes her tremble so hard she can’t get her bearings. Can’t recover her balance, can’t even stand up straight. Her body is hunched; excruciating muscle spasms wake her in the night, like the imprint of a pain that refuses to go away. In the train, in the middle of the night, she lets out a scream. People say that, in order to survive, the brain suppresses bad memories, preserves only the good, and that may be true, but it must take time because the moment Alex closes her eyes, she feels the dread twisting her entrails, those fucking rats …

By the time she emerges from the train station, it’s almost noon. On the train, she finally managed to sleep. Now she wakes to find herself on a street in the middle of Paris – it’s like coming out of a muddled dream. She’s still half-asleep.

She drags her rolling suitcase beneath the leaden sky. Rue Monge, a hotel: the only available room has a window on the courtyard and a faint smell of stale tobacco. She quickly jumps into the shower, runs it scalding at first, then lukewarm, then cold; she steps out into the inevitable white terrycloth bathrobe that transforms third-rate hotels into palaces for the poor. Hair wet, limbs stiff, starving, she stares at herself in the full-length mirror. The only thing about her body she really likes is her breasts. She looks at them as she dries her hair. She was a late bloomer. By the time they came, she’d given up waiting, then suddenly they sprouted when she was thirteen, no, later, fourteen. Before that she was “flat as a pancake”, that’s what the girls at school said. Her friends had been wearing low-cut tops and tight sweaters for years – some had nipples that looked like they were made of titanium; she had nothing.

The rest came later – she was in secondary school by then. At fifteen, everything suddenly fell perfectly into place: the breasts, the smile, the ass, the eyes, her figure. The sway of her hips. Before that Alex was ugly; she had what was politely called “an unprepossessing physique”, a body that couldn’t seem to make up its mind, androgynous, graceless, featureless. You could just about tell that she was a girl, but that was all. In fact her mother called her “my poor little girl” – she sounded heartbroken, but actually Alex’s unprepossessing figure confirmed everything she thought about her daughter. A botched job. The first time Alex put on make-up, her mother burst out laughing; she didn’t say
a word, she just laughed. Alex ran to the bathroom, scrubbed her face and looked at herself in the mirror; she felt ashamed. When she came back downstairs, her mother didn’t say anything. She just gave a discreet little smile, but it spoke volumes. Then, when Alex finally did begin to change, her mother pretended not to notice.

All that is in the past now.

She slips on a bra and panties and rummages in the suitcase. She can’t think what she could have done with it. She can’t have lost it – she has to find it. She tips the contents of her suitcase out onto the bed, checks the side pockets, racks her brains. She pictures herself standing in the street: what was she wearing that night? Suddenly she remembers, fumbles through the pile of clothes searching for a pocket.

“There we go!”

It is a small victory.

“You’re a free woman.”

The business card was already crumpled and dog-eared when he gave it to her – there’s a big crease down the middle. She dials the number. Staring at the card, she says, “Hello, Félix Manière?”

“Who’s speaking please?”

“Hi, this is …”

Her mind goes blank. What name did she give him?

“Is that Julia? Hello, is that Julia?”

He almost shouts it. Alex smiles, lets out her breath.

“Yes, it’s Julia.”

His voice sounds very far away.

“You sound like you’re driving,” she says. “Is this not a good time?”

“No, yes, I mean no …”

He’s so thrilled to hear from her; he’s getting confused.

“So is that a yes or a no?” Alex says, laughing.

He’s beaten, but he’s a good loser.

“For you, it’s always ‘yes’.”

She pauses for a second or two, long enough to appreciate the rejoinder, to savour what he said, what he said to her.

“You’re so sweet.”

“Where are you? At home?”

Alex sits down on the bed, swinging her legs in front of her.

“Yeah … you?”

“At work.”

The silence that follows is a like a little dance, each waiting for the other to show their hand. Alex is supremely confident. It never fails.

“I’m glad you called, Julia,” Félix says eventually. “Really glad.”

No shit. Of course he’s glad. Now that she hears his voice, Alex can picture him more clearly: a guy who’s been battered and bruised by life and started to put on weight, those stubby legs and that face … it upsets her to think about it, that poignant face, the sad, far-away look in his eyes.

“So what are you up to at work?”

As she says this, Alex lies down on the bed facing the window.

“Just checking the figures for the week because I’m off on holiday tomorrow and if I don’t check everything myself, when I get back in a week, well, you know …”

He stops dead. Alex is still smiling. It’s funny, she can turn him on or off simply by batting an eyelid or going silent. If she were sitting opposite him, all she would have to do is smile a certain way, give him a sidelong glance, for him to stop in mid-sentence, or change the subject. She fell silent, and he immediately
shut up – he sensed it wasn’t the right thing to say.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s not important. What about you? What are you up to?”

The first time, as they were leaving the restaurant, she played him the way she knows how to play men. It’s a recipe she knows by heart – the slightly forlorn walk, the stooped shoulders, the look: head down, eyes wide, almost naive, the lips melting beneath his gaze … That night, on the street, Félix had been oozing sexual frustration from every pore, almost desperate at the idea of bedding her. So it isn’t much of a challenge:

“I’m lying down,” Alex says, “… on my bed.”

She doesn’t go overboard. There’s no husky voice, no unnecessary razzmatazz, just enough to sow doubt, confusion. Silence. She thinks she can hear the neuronal overload triggered in Félix’s brain as he struggles for words. He laughs idiotically and when she doesn’t react, when she invests her silence with all the tension she can muster, Félix’s laugh chokes and dies.

“On your bed …”

Félix has left his body. Right now, he has become his mobile telephone; he has fused with the signal as it moves across the city between him and her. He is the air she breathes, slowly swelling her firm belly crowned with those little white panties; he is the very air in the room, the tiny particles of dust that swirl around her; he cannot say another word – he is incapable. Alex smiles gently; he can hear it.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because you make me laugh, Félix.”

Is this the first time she’s used his name?

“Oh …”

He doesn’t quite know how to take this.

“What are you doing tonight?” Alex says.

He swallows hard, twice.

“Nothing …”

“Fancy inviting me to dinner?”

“Tonight?”

“O.K.,” Alex says coldly. “Obviously I called at a bad time, I’m sorry …”

And her smile widens as she listens to the torrent of excuses, rationalisations, promises, explanations, details, reasons. She checks her watch: it’s 7.30 p.m. She interrupts him in mid-flow:

“Eight o’clock?”

“Sure, eight o’clock!”

“Where?”

Alex closes her eyes, crosses her legs on the bed: this really is too easy. Félix takes more than a minute to come up with a restaurant. She leans over to the nightstand and jots down the address.

“It’s really nice,” he promises her. “Well, it’s nice … You’ll see for yourself. And if you don’t like it, we can always go somewhere else.”

“If it’s really nice, why would we go somewhere else?”

“It’s … I don’t know, it’s a matter of taste …”

“Exactly, Félix, and I’m very interested to find out your taste.”

Alex hangs up and stretches like a cat.

The magistrate has insisted that every last member of the team be present. Le Guen, Camille, Louis, Armand. Because finally they’ve come up with something. Something big, something major, something new, which is why the magistrate has insisted that Le Guen assemble all his troops. Hardly has Camille stepped into the office of the
brigade
than Le Guen tries to calm him with a forceful stare. Camille can already feel tension welling up in his belly. Behind his back he is rubbing his hands frantically as though about to undertake a major surgical procedure. He watches the magistrate arrive. From the way he’s behaved since the start of the investigation, it’s clear he believes that the proof of intelligence is having the last word. And today, he has no intention of being beaten.

The magistrate is immaculately dressed: sober grey suit, sober grey tie – the efficient elegance that distinguishes shrewd justice. Seeing this Chekhovian costume, Camille assumes Vidard is planning on being theatrical. He might just as well save his breath. His part has already been written for him: the play might be called “Chronicle of a Breath Foretold”, because the whole team already know what’s going on. The plot goes something like this: “You’re all a bunch of halfwits.” Because Camille’s theory has just taken a serious body blow.

The news came through two hours earlier. The murder of one Jacqueline Zanetti, a hotel owner in Toulouse. Severely beaten about the head, then tied up and bumped off using concentrated sulphuric acid.

Camille immediately put in a call to Delavigne. They knew each other when they were starting out – he was the
brigade
commissioner in Toulouse. They called each other eight times in the space of four hours; Delavigne is straight-up, loyal, and seriously embarrassed for his friend Verhœven. Camille has spent the whole morning in his office listening in on witness statements and interrogations: he might as well be there.

“There can be no doubt,” the magistrate says, “that we are dealing with the same killer. The methodology has been almost identical in each murder. According to the case file, Mme Zanetti was murdered in the early hours of Friday morning.”

*

“The name of the hotel is on file,” Delavigne told Camille earlier. “It operated as a brothel – very ‘discreet’ as they say in English.”

Delavigne is fond of peppering his conversation with English words. It’s his shtick. It pisses Camille off.

“The girl arrived in Toulouse on Tuesday, checked in to a hotel near the station under the name Astrid Berma. The following day, Wednesday, she checks in to Zanetti’s place, the Hotel du Pré Hardy, under the name Laura Bloch. On Thursday, in the middle of the night, she beats the woman with a telephone. Right in the face. Then, she finishes her off with sulphuric acid, clears out the hotel cash register – roughly 2,000 euros – and disappears.”

“She’s not short of identities, I’ll give her that.”

“No, obviously not.”

“We don’t know whether she’s travelling by car, by train, by plane. We’ll check out the train station, the car hire companies and the taxis, but it’ll take time …”

*

“Her fingerprints were found everywhere,” the judge emphasises. “In the hotel room, in Madame Zanetti’s private sitting room – obviously she doesn’t care about being caught. She knows she’s not on file, so she’s got no reason to worry. It’s as though she’s taunting us.”

The fact that there’s an investigating magistrate and a division-naire in the room doesn’t stop the other officers from following Camille’s rule: at briefings, everybody stands. Leaning in the doorway, Camille says nothing. He waits to see what’s coming.

*

“What else?” Delavigne says. “Well, Thursday evening she went with Zanetti to a dance hall called Le Central, very ‘picturesque’ as they say in English …”

“In what sense?”

“It’s a dance hall for lonely old people. Spinsters, ballroom dancing fanatics. White linen suits, cravats, dresses with frills and flounces … Personally, I find it ‘amusing’, as they say in English, but I suspect you’d find it depressing.”

“I get the picture.”

“No, no I really don’t think you do …”

“It’s that bad?”

“You can’t begin to imagine. Le Central should be on the Japanese tourist circuit as the ‘pinnacle of achievement’ as they say in …”

“Albert!”

“What?”

“Could you ease up on the English? It really pisses me off.”

“O.K., boy.”

“Good … so their night out – is it connected to the murder?

“
A priori
, no. At least none of the witness statements corroborate the theory. The evening was ‘marvellous’, it was ‘delightful’, someone even referred to it as ‘sublime’, so it was obviously deadly dull, but there were no problems, no arguments, apart from the obvious romantic tiffs which the girl took no part in. Very withdrawn, according to the witnesses. It was as if she was only there as a favour to Zanetti.”

“Did they know each other?”

“Zanetti introduced her as her niece. It took less than an hour to find out she had no brothers or sisters. A niece in her family is about as likely as a virgin in a brothel.”

“What would you know about virgins?”

“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong! The pimps in Toulouse know all about virgins.”