Bed of Nails (18 page)

The bed squeaked. Bunker was snoring within minutes. He had left the light on, a prison habit which didn’t stop him sleeping. But for John it was his first night in prison and he slept not a wink.

A telephone call at eight in the morning. Guérin answered it and made a note. A hanging in the 12th arrondissement. An eighty-year-old widower, one of the most common statistics in suicide. He had sent Lambert. His deputy, still smarting from the dressing-down of the day before, had slunk off, his tail between his legs.

The videos had been no help. Possibly doctored, more probably just nothing. Guérin had called the witnesses named in his six files. He had managed to contact the concierge, the doctor and the theatre-goer. They could all remember the suicides, but they had forgotten the details. A blonde woman and two men, one with a beard: vanished into the arbitrary meandering of memory. The street vendor couldn’t be traced. Next, he called the refuge for the homeless to question Paco again. Guérin had kept his word, finding him a place at the centre, so that he could be examined and offered treatment, at least for a few days. But Paco had decamped overnight. Guérin spoke to the doctor who had seen him. He diagnosed double pneumonia, plus secondary infections, the kind of thing people pick up living rough: skin disease, parasites, early stages of cirrhosis. According to the doctor, Paco was not long for this world. A few months at most: as well as everything else, there were tumours everywhere, as big as fists, from the stomach to the lungs. The city had punched holes throughout the organism of the little Tunisian of uncertain age. He had slunk off to die alone in a hole
somewhere, like sick animals do, without making a fuss or attracting an audience.

Guérin couldn’t get hold of the fingerprint files from his office. He had called the lab. Ménard was a rotten apple, but better not to talk to anyone else. And the technician was off sick for three days.

Everything was falling apart, the elements were becoming atomised. The yellow raincoat had got bigger, or else Guérin had shrunk. Churchill was sulking, as he slipped into depression. The apartment had become a mausoleum to the memory of his mother, watched over by a neurotic parrot. There were no more temper tantrums or cackles, only silence. Guérin had lost the thread. He simply saw a parallel between his own condition and that of the world: they were both chaotic, no need to imagine any conspiracy, just a complex mass alternating between hazardous free will and anarchic disintegration. In that steaming cauldron, anything might make sense. Believing gave a shape to your illusions. But faith had to be shared. Out there somewhere, it
might
be that three insane people were methodically killing others. Nobody was going to help him find them. All he had was one newspaper cutting and a bloodstain on the ceiling. And the Kowalski affair was bound to resurface: the Kowalski nightmare, rather. Absence of proof and lingering doubt. Doubt about Kowalski.

Guérin slipped the cutting into his pocket. In the corridor, he turned his back on the service stairs and walked resolutely towards the inner reaches of No. 36, wedging his cap down over his eyes.

Today he needed to see them face to face, the colleagues who had chosen him as a scapegoat for their own sickness – the delusion, stupid or hypocritical, that you could live in a cesspit without picking up its stink.

Guérin walked through the offices, outstaring his colleagues. The stigmata of their constant lies had punched holes in their skin.
The ones who worked in Criminal Investigation wore themselves out as they aged. As young policemen, newly married, they were keen on justice, eager to go, and excited at carrying a gun. Once they reached forty, Guérin could read on their weary faces the divorces and the bitter awareness of the pointlessness of their task. The ones over fifty clung in disgust to the cause of all their failures and disappointments: their work. They had no choice. They handled their guns with anxiety, knowing that the bottle, nightmares and psychotherapy lay ahead. The prefecture of police was marinated in society’s turbid depths, registering, with every day that passed, more damage from mutually inflicted decomposition. Behind the hostile or evasive glances, Guérin found the evidence he was looking for: the shame that drove his colleagues. Shame over Kowalski – because that was the name that had become attached to it – now converted, out of cowardice, into hate for Guérin. He felt no satisfaction, rather a vague sense of pity, as he realised how much he scared them.

In the stairwell, he met Roman and Berlion. The two lieutenants gave off an aura of hunted beasts ready to bite. They reeked of musk and hostility, scents of the night from which they were emerging. Roman, on a lower step, but with his eyes on the same level, snarled at him.

“You got a problem, Guérin? Lost your way?”

Shame, splitting open the hatred and seeping from infected internal wounds. Guérin looked from one to the other. Two fugitives.

“Kowalski was guilty. It’ll come out one day, there’s no way it won’t, and you know it. You’re in it up to your necks. But there’s no justice in this world, so it’ll only be on your consciences. If I were you, Roman, I’d keep away from Savane for a while.”

Roman grabbed Guérin by the collar and pulled him down a step. Berlion intervened.

“Give over, he can’t do anything.”

Roman’s huge hand was pressing on his throat. Guérin smiled, standing on tiptoe, and managed to croak:

“What’s the police coming to, when you can’t count on your pals?”

Roman let him go. Guérin pulled his crumpled raincoat round him and went on down.

On the way, he tried to find the connection between this world where no revenge was possible, and a fakir who had died of a haemorrhage. Obvious. The connection was a perfect parallel. The world of men, a bed of nails, on which they were balancing clumsily as they tried to run away from one another.

*

The sign creaked as it swung in the wind: ridiculous in broad daylight. A fairy-tale wizard, painted in a naïve, realistic style, peering over a top-hat. The Caveau de la Bolée.

A cutting from the
Parisien
and someone at police H.Q. with a weird sense of humour had sent him here. Chance, the fantastic double of his rapidly disappearing rationality, had drawn Guérin to the club.

The sheer stone wall had no opening except the huge door without a handle. He lifted the bronze knocker and let it fall. He knocked again twice and stepped back. A bolt squeaked and a small, plump woman covered in tattoos opened the door.

“What do you want?”

She looked as if she had just got out of bed; her lips and eyelids were puffy with sleep. Guérin checked his watch. 11.00 a.m. How could anyone be so late getting up? He introduced himself politely. She replied in a husky voice:

“We shut down the music at one in the morning, I’m not responsible for anything that happens in the street after that.”

“I’m here about the man who died.”

A ray of sunshine lit up the silver stud in her eyebrow. Ariel blinked the light away as if it were an insect.

“I’ve already had the police round. Just get off my back about this business.”

“I’m investigating a series of suicides.”

She started to close the door.

“So what? This was an accident, I can’t tell you any more.”

Guérin took his cap off and put his head to one side. His eyes rolled.

“I don’t believe in accidents. Or suicides. I’m looking into murders.”

The woman’s pale cheeks were freckled. She slid her thumb into a strap of her tank top, adjusting one of the cups of her bra. Guérin bit his tongue as he saw the curve of her breast.

Ariel leaned towards him. Guérin had gone red then white. He put his hand up against the stone wall.

“Are you O.K.?”

The little policeman stuttered.

“I … I’m not sure.”

A cognac and a strong coffee. A lesbian and a detective sitting together, a cigarette consuming itself in an ashtray. Three overhead bulbs and in the half-light the smell of absent bodies, as if a packed house had only just left.

“Feeling better?”

“Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

“On duty?”

“No, I don’t drink, full stop.”

Ariel tipped the cognac into her own coffee.

“Cyclist’s breakfast.”

Guérin looked at his watch again.

“Mademoiselle, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to ask you some questions. Monsieur Mustgrave, that was his name, yes? He died in circumstances … well, I’m not quite sure how to put this, but in circumstances that may be connected to my enquiry.”

Ariel swallowed her hot and alcoholic drink, and was probably wondering when she had last been addressed as Mademoiselle.

“Why did you say murder?”

“I can’t tell you that. Are you prepared to answer my questions?”

The coffee cup rattled on the saucer.

“What are you frightened of?”

Guérin’s head sloped several degrees to the side.

“Of your answers, Mademoiselle. I’m afraid of coincidence …”

Ariel’s mouth formed an O, in a tender pout revealing plenty of chrome and steel. She pulled up the straps of her tank top. The studs on her nipples stood out through the fabric. Guérin’s head was almost on his shoulder.

“Are you afraid I might want to give you a spanking?”

“
I beg your pardon?
”

“Only joking,” she said cheerfully. “It’s my motherly instinct being aroused. What do you want to know?”

“It wasn’t an accident?”

Coffee cognac. Her leather trousers squeaked on the chair. She leaned forward.

“Will you want me to say this in court?”

“No, this is just for me.”

Ariel chewed a metal piercing in her pink tongue.

“Well. I’d call it a pre-prepared accident.”

“I’m looking for three people who might have been in the audience that night. A blonde woman, middle-aged, and two men, about the same, one of them had a beard or stubble. Does that ring a bell?”

“No, absolutely not.”

Her breasts were resting on the table. Guérin tried to assemble his ideas out of the twilight.

“These people were, well, let’s say rather more la-di-da than your usual clientele.”

“It was full to bursting that night, I didn’t spend all evening looking at their faces. Anyway, heck, don’t you tell me the toffs don’t come here. Take a look at the drinks prices, and tell me if the workers can afford a bottle of champagne here.” She was sitting up straight, gripping the table.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Offend me? What planet are you on? I’m not offended, I’m bloody angry.”

“Please, please calm down.”

“You’re going to get your punishment, little boy.”

“
What?
”

“Oh my God, it’s test your I.Q. night, is it?”

“Do I gather someone has already been round asking you this?”

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

“Yes. Does that worry you?”

“Yes.”

“Incredible. Why should I trust you?”

“I’m looking for murderers.”

“You think that’s going to make me feel better? You could have told me I was pretty.”

“But you
are
pretty.”

Ariel gave a grin and slapped her leather-clad buttocks with both hands

Guérin gave a start.

“I’m going to have another. Not tempted?”

“Yes.”

*

Le Bourget airport. North-west freight hangar, 2.30 p.m.

The hearse is grey, with scrolled leaves on the smoked windows.

A representative from the funeral directors signs the paper handed to him by an embassy official; a customs officer stamps the pages of the form and checks the seals on the coffin. The Stars and Stripes are draped over the shining black wooden box, which carries a sticker saying “Proudly made in America”.

The American observes from a safe distance, arms folded.

An airport vehicle draws up alongside the hearse, pulling a luggage trailer. Three airport staff load the casket onto it. The American hasn’t budged. The convoy leaves the hangar and slips under the wing of a 747 cargo plane, close to where a loading ramp has been lowered.

John P. Nichols vanishes into the stairwell.

It’s a day of sunny periods and passing clouds that bring the temperature down sharply. The wind ruffles his long hair. On his face the bruises are turning yellow and fading. He puts his hands on the rail and looks down at the Boeing. A Gitane is burning between his fingers. Various vehicles are busy around the aircraft. Like insects dashing around. The baggage ramp is hauled up, closing like the vagina of a sea monster. A tractor is hitched to the 747’s nose, lights flashing, and a man is waving his fluorescent batons. The plane reverses off the stand, the pilots adjust their headphones and turn their attention to the instrument panel.

First stop Detroit, to unload top of the range German cars, then on to Kansas City, where the coffin will be deposited on American soil, along with spare parts for agricultural machines. The import–export transit of machines and veterans’ corpses.

There’s another man on the terrace. John turns his head quickly.
A tall man, with curly blond hair, gazing at the runways, hands in pockets. Just watching planes take off and land.

The Boeing swivels, the tractor detaches itself. A roar from the engines and the plane begins to taxi. The engines roar again, then subside as it rolls over the tarmac. An Airbus without windows lands with a scream and a puff of smoke from the landing gear. The U.S. plane moves towards its take-off position. The engines now open up properly, thrusting their tons of steel and fuel forwards. John grips the handrail. The plane’s nose lifts, the roar of its engine fills the air. The Boeing starts its ascent into the sky. Alan’s coffin is leaving the ground, disappearing.

John imagines Alan’s parents, in dungarees, on the other side of the Atlantic, waiting to welcome their son home. They haven’t seen him for ten years. He smiles. He’s thinking of an embalmer in Kansas City, working hard to put make-up on the tattoos. Alan’s dead, he won’t give a toss what he looks like in church. John turns his back on the runways of this gloomy airport with no travellers, and walks away.