Lost (26 page)

They were on the road up to the ridge called Palomba Rossa. Stuart sat crouched again in the front of Alice’s car. She was driving with her head forward, too close to the steering wheel. Stuart did not like it up here. He never had. Here, the sky and the wind took over. The crude wind moved the dark pines and the bracken. It was like the end of the world. Compared to this place the
maquis
was a scented garden.

In winter the road they were on was often closed because of heavy snowfall and the few villages beyond were cut off. It was a dead end, running out in an abandoned farm in the village of Castri. The map showed a forest track as the only way out. Stuart guessed that his man had either a four-wheel drive or a trial bike.

‘What can you see?’ he asked her.

‘There’s an open drop to my left and on the right there’s forest. Pine trees. We’re coming to another hairpin bend.’

It was the last one before the ridge.

‘Good. You can drop me off there. On the turn.’ She nodded, keeping her eyes on the road. ‘Take the bag and put it on the seat beside you.’ She had slowed right down. She reached into the back and tried to lift the bag. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Stop the car a moment. Stop and put it in the front.’ His heart was beating too fast. She stopped and put the bag on the passenger seat. ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he said. ‘Watching over you. You just leave the bag and drive away.’

‘Stuart?’

‘Yes?’

But she just stared at him. There was the pity again. He smiled at her.

‘I’ll be watching you,’ he said.

As he climbed out of the car he thought he heard her say something, but she had slammed the door and when he straightened up and turned she was already round the corner and out of sight.

He followed the steep road after her, but she had gone, and he ducked into the forest, which was now to his left. He moved quickly through the thin pines, keeping close to the road where the slope was gentler. For once there was not a breath of wind and he could hear the water dripping from the trees. He was trying to think what Alice had said to him, to decipher the words in retrospect, but he was left with nothing but the sound of her voice. Up ahead there was a fire-break like a grand avenue, leading straight down the hill to the lay-by. His man could park in the trees and get a clear view, unseen. When he came in sight of her tail lights through the trees, he spoke into his radio: ‘Fabrice. Come in. Where are you?’

‘I’m coming up behind you, Stuart. I’ve just passed a sign to the Palomba Rossa. Over.’

‘You’re a kilometre and a half away. Stop there. Park so you can cut off the road if necessary. In case he goes out that way. I’m going to wait at the lay-by. When I see him I’ll signal you. Then I’m switching off.’

‘Okay, Stuart. We’re here. Over.’

He could see most of the lay-by now. Alice had parked. He called Paul, who was making his way on foot with the two young cops.

‘I’ll signal when he shows, then I’m cutting out,’ he said.

‘We’re down below. I just caught sight of her lights. It’s not far but it’s steep,’ Paul said.

Stuart took his gun from its holster and watched Alice walk into the middle of the lay-by. She stopped a moment, holding the bag, and looked about her.

‘Not there,’ Stuart whispered. ‘Nearer me.’ But she obeyed the instructions she had been given and set it down, dead centre, in front of the fire-break.

As he watched her walk back to the car he began to feel very cold. He watched her car back and turn gracefully out of the lay-by and he felt as though all the heat were leaving his body. As he listened to her change gear he knew he had made some great mistake.

He stood with his hand on his gun, watching the bag. He gripped his gun and held his eyes wide open in the dark. He could hear owls calling each other in the forest behind him. The lay-by was like a silver lake. He felt the shock of recognition, as though the lay-by ahead of him, the thick darkness around him, this loneliness and sense of readiness were all he was. Everything he felt now was everything he had ever been.

He heard the sound of a bike sawing through the night and received it calmly like some signal he’d been waiting for. He called Fabrice, then Paul, and told them that an individual on a powerful trials bike was approaching along the fire-break, that they were to stand by, he was cutting out. He switched off his radio and took his gun from its holster.

The bike moved down the gentle slope. When he hit the lay-by the rider stood up a moment on the foot-rests and Stuart saw he was tall. He was wearing black leathers and a black helmet with a visor. He stood astride his bike and looked about him. The bag was a few metres away. He drove slowly up to it and stopped on the other side of the bag, facing Stuart. He put his left foot on the ground and Stuart saw he was in neutral. He kicked the bag with the toe of his boot. It would feel too soft. Get off the bike, Stuart thought. But the rider kicked the bag again. You want to check. You know you do. Get off the bike. Stuart counted four to five paces between them. But he was not going to get off. Stuart saw him let go with his left hand and pause for an instant. When he reached down Stuart was already out of the forest. By the time he had straightened up Stuart had thrown all his weight at him, hitting him in the chest with his shoulder, heard the grunt as the wind was knocked out of him and heard him
swear, clearly enough in spite of the visor to know that he was an islander. The bike was on top of him with the motor still making its ugly hacking sound. The man was on his side, flailing like a big black insect. Stuart stood over him and, using both hands, each shaking in perfect synchronicity, pointed his gun at him.

‘Take off your helmet,’ he said.

Stuart could hear an engine and he recognised the sound of Fabrice’s van. The thought of Fabrice with his red glasses, the one man he did not need at this point, reminded him that his man would try for his gun and then there it was, conjured from beneath him, from his right boot, of course. And as he looked down at the man’s weapon pointed steadily at his chest, Stuart thought: he’s taking my pulse and even though I have the positional advantage, he can feel my hesitation and he knows now that I’ve never shot anyone in my life and never will. Then there was the strange muted ping of the silenced bullet and the impact high up in his thigh, and to his astonishment he fell back and he heard Paul’s shout and, as his head hit the ground, he wanted to laugh, because he knew that one way or another Santini had probably won his bet.

A gentle wind was blowing in Massaccio, warm and dry and unhealthy. It came across the sea from the desert and left an invisible coating of sand that clung to the back of the throat, dried out the nasal passages and caused a barely perceptible frosting of the windscreen of Santini’s Saab. He ran his finger along the glass, then raised it to his tongue and tasted the salt.

The trial was in its third day and Santini was enjoying himself. There were police barricades forming a solid chain around the Palais de Justice. He walked towards them, kicking out his feet slightly with each step, like the actor Lino Ventura, whom he believed he resembled. A bus stopped just in front of him as he prepared to cross the street and a large group of teenagers began to pour forth, noisy and oblivious and overladen. Coco scanned the girls’ faces, each one uglier than the next. He thought of his beautiful Nathalie, then, stepping into the road, pushed her out of his mind.

A gendarme checking IDs looked mechanically at the twenty-five-year-old photo in his driving licence that bore no resemblance to him and opened the barricade to let him through. As he walked up the steps of the Palais he could feel a dusting of Sahara sand beneath his feet. His shoes were of the softest Italian leather and he wore them without socks, even in winter, because he disliked the feeling of elastic against his skin.

Things had been going his way. The case had taken a year and a half to come to court because Christine Lasserre had decided to put Mickey and Garetta in the same file. It meant they could not close the case until an exhaustive search had been made for the Scatti brothers who, to their credit, had
still not been found. This had given Coco plenty of time to convey his position to Karim and Denis in prison.

He pushed the door to the Palais and stepped into the cool marble interior. Lawyers in their robes were sitting on the stone benches all along the corridor, talking in hushed voices to their harrowed clients. There seemed to be more and more women in the profession. Coco decided that next time he would find an attractive woman to represent him. He was walking behind one now as he made his way to the main courtroom, admiring the coil she had made with her hair and the wisps of it on the nape of her neck.

Another gift had been Christine Lasserre’s transfer to Strasbourg three months after his arrest. She had carefully briefed the new investigating magistrate, a young Protestant from Uzès, and managed to offend him. He had let Coco out of prison, announcing in a press conference that there were insufficient grounds for his incarceration and that he was against remand anyway, except for rapists. Coco found the blond-haired free-thinker repulsive, both physically and morally. Three months later the charges against him were dropped and he became a witness. That it should be luck and not Russo that had provoked his release made Coco happier than anything.

The foyer outside the courtroom was filled with people, all of whom he knew. He stood on the edge, in the grey light coming through the dirty atrium, avoiding their greetings. The journalist Lopez was talking to the female gendarme at the entrance to the chamber. When the Spaniard looked up and saw him he turned away. He could not see Alice Aron anywhere. She was due to appear today, but the trial had got off to a slow start because Karim’s lawyer had tried to push his mutilation charge through. Perhaps she would not come until the afternoon. Coco was more disappointed than he would have expected. He made his way towards the witnesses’ entrance, cursing himself for being so early.

Alice walked across the tarmac away from the plane. This time she had only a bag over her shoulder and nothing in her hands. As she walked towards the terminal it was not the former experience she remembered but the kidnappers’ video of it. She remembered his shot of Dan holding her dress, of Sam with his goggles on, jumping around, and of herself, her former self.

She walked through the same smells that now worked on her like an insinuation: kerosene, asphalt and the scent of the
maquis
, warm and cold like patches in a lake. Only the light was different and the people around her moving with her towards the terminal, looking trussed up for winter and peevish. This time she had no luggage to collect and as she walked towards the exit, she took in the scene – the conveyor belt, the trolleys and the waiting crowd – and she found herself looking in the empty spaces between these things, straining to see into the gaps in memory and perception and discover what she had never seen: the man with the camera.

The palm trees planted in two rows in front of the terminal had been encased against frost in huge bamboo crates. The sight was disappointing and she hailed a taxi and climbed in, eager to get away. But she did not know what to tell the driver. It was too early to go to the Palais de Justice and she did not feel like sitting in a hotel room. She could not remember the name of the main square in Massaccio, so she asked for the only place she could remember.

‘The Fritz Bar.’

She looked out of the window at the freight depots and the car-dealers and the vacant lots, reading every sign, listening to the driver’s background humming against a barely audible radio, trying to keep her mind from wandering in search of Stuart.

She had not been back to the island since. When Madame Lasserre had called her a week later for the reconstruction of the shooting she had said that she could not leave Sam and they had managed without her. As they drove past an orange
grove laden with fruit, she wound down the window to capture the scent, but she caught only the smell of wood smoke. She looked at the plane trees lining the road, their trunks blanched by winter and their mutilated branches pruned to nubs, and she thought she remembered Stuart saying he preferred winter, but she was not sure when he had said this. Most of her memories of him were truncated, like those trees. They drove past the tall ferries in the docks. This island, she realised, was where she had left herself behind.

The driver dropped her off at the same entrance to the pedestrian zone where Santini had dropped her. She walked to the main square and was relieved to see that here the palm trees were loose and moving in the warm wind. She sat down on an empty bench beneath a statue of an heroic islander on a very high pedestal, closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun.

She remembered sitting in the back of a police van in Cortizzio holding Sam. The sight of his pale face and his huge hollow eyes were a shock to her, but it was his silence that told her of the depth of the damage that had been done to him. She had sat there rocking him in her arms, believing in the illusion of her own calm until she screamed at the first-aid personnel, refusing to let them take him from her.

She remembered the consultant in intensive care, with his sleeves rolled up and thick dark hair on his arms, gently prising Sam from her. He shone a torch in his eyes, tested his reflexes and took his blood pressure with an abstracted air, as though he were trying to hear something a long way off. He had told her in an inappropriate sing-song voice that her son was out of danger, that the speech would return. In no time, he had said. It had taken Sam six months to speak. One month for every day in captivity. He would play with Dan, even fight with him, in perfect silence. Then one morning at breakfast he had told her that he wanted more sugar on his cereal and she had burst into tears.

She smiled at this thought and opened her eyes. She could
smell something delicious on the breeze, like warm caramel. Across the square was a dark green kiosk that sold crêpes. She rose and went to buy one with chocolate sauce. She returned to her bench and ate it, a little self-consciously and too fast, wiping the chocolate from her mouth with the back of her hand.

She saw herself on the morning after Sam was retrieved, walking out of the hospital with him in her arms. The same consultant was standing in the sun with a cigarette in his mouth, rolling down the sleeves of his white coat. With him, their backs to her, were Paul and Gérard. Something had made her walk over to them and, as they turned and she saw their faces, she had guessed, exactly as she had guessed when Mathieu’s best friend had telephoned her, seconds before he told her. It was Gérard who said it: ‘Stuart was shot last night. He died this morning.’ He had looked down on her, his face hard only for a moment, and then he had looked away, over her head, and squinted into the sunlight to hide his grief. She had stood there unable to speak, with Sam too big in her arms, and nodded slowly as the familiar coldness of loss crept over her.

Back in Paris she had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and seen, with curiosity more than regret, how changed she was. Stuart’s death worked on her slowly, over months. She could not stop thinking about him dying that night while she was in the hospital with Sam, perhaps in the next room. She would wake up in the middle of the night and her heart would feel like a heavy stone she had swallowed. She sometimes felt as though she had dreamed of him and she punished herself for not remembering the dream. Anger settled in her. She hid it from the boys, but when she was alone it gripped her hard. Once she had picked up a plate and hurled it against the kitchen wall, then another and another until all twelve plates were broken and she had swept them up, terrified by her capacity for dissimulation, even to herself. What made her angry was the understanding
that she would survive whatever happened to her.

When her mother came from England she had tried to talk to her about him. But she had found herself unable. There was so little to say. She could not tell her mother that she suspected he had loved her in a way that no one had or ever would. She did not even know his first name. Instead she began to talk, using his hand gestures. She remembered his codes perfectly.

She kept his present to her in a locked drawer. Sometimes she would take out his mother’s gun and look at it. She would smell the metal, rub it over her hands and smell her palms. She could taste it. She would pull out the cartridge and the barrel would spring open. She would practise loading the tiny bullets, sliding them one by one, the last in the chamber. He had given her a box of twenty-five. On the box was written in yellow and grey fifties lettering: ‘
FIOCCHI
cartucce
pistola
automatica
. Smokeless 6,35 mm bullets’.

She stood up, moved by a sudden urge to speak to Stuart’s men again. She wanted to talk about him. She went to the call box and dialled the number, which she still knew by heart. She recognised Annie’s voice.

‘Hello. It’s Madame Aron. Is Gérard there, please?’

‘No. He’s not here any more.’

Alice thought she could hear her resentment.

‘Is Paul there?’

‘Hold on, please. I’ll see.’

The call box stank of cigarettes. While she waited, she pulled the neck of her sweater up over her nose.

‘Hello?’

‘Paul?’

‘Yes.’

She could not help smiling.

‘It’s Alice Aron.’

‘Yes. What can I do for you?’

‘I wonder, I’m in Massaccio, for the trial. Could we meet for a coffee?’

‘I can’t. Sorry. I’m on desk duty; I can’t leave the office.’

She felt herself flush with shame.

‘I see. Well maybe at the trial, then.’

‘Not today. I was up yesterday.’

‘Paul?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I talk to you? Please.’

‘Of course you can talk to me. What’s the problem?’

‘I just wanted … Oh, nothing.’ She felt his silence as an act of cruelty. ‘Forget it.’ She looked out through the glass door of the call box at a group of middle-aged women in fur coats. ‘Where’s Gérard?’ she asked, wanting to punish him.

‘He went back to Paris. Aubervilliers, to be precise.’

‘Who’s commissaire now?’

‘Mesguish.’

‘And what about you? What are you doing?’

There was a moment’s hesitation.

‘I’ve been sidelined.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I work with the airport police. Professionally speaking, it’s a luxury grave.’

‘What happened, Paul?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Madame Aron. If you don’t mind.’

Alice did not answer. She was wondering what she had done to deserve this.

‘Okay, Paul. I’ll see you, then.’

‘Yes. All right. ‘Bye.’

She hung up, slamming the phone into its cradle.

She stepped out of the call box and began to walk towards her hotel. She walked fast, trying to shake off her anger and shame. When she reached the Hôtel Majestic she was out of breath. She was about to climb the steps to the lobby when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She spun round and was surprised to see that it was not Paul. It was Lopez.

He was panting, holding a hand to his heart.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I smoke too much.’ He held out his hand and she shook it. ‘Lopez. We’ve met once.’ His smile looked more like a grimace in response to the pain in his chest. ‘You walk very fast.’

Alice smiled.

‘Your hair,’ he said, pointing at her. ‘You cut it all off.’

She touched her head.

‘Yes.’

‘It looks nice. Can I talk with you for a moment? Do you mind?’ He glanced once up and down the street. ‘Maybe in the bar. Can I buy you a coffee?’

The bar was poorly lit by a candelabrum covered in opal spheres that hung from the middle of the ceiling. The room was large and empty except for a few low tables and chairs clustered around an ornate wooden bar in the corner. The carpet and the chairs and the curtains were all plum-coloured and so was the teenage barman’s uniform. There was a smell of dust and fried food.

‘Here is good. No?’ Lopez said, holding his hand out to the triangle of chairs furthest away from the bar. ‘We can talk here.’ He waited for her to sit, then sat down himself. ‘I saw you in the call box in the square. I have been wanting to talk to you for a long time and when I saw you I thought it’s now or never.’ He smiled again, his brief, pained smile. ‘How can I begin?’ He rested his small hands on his knees and slapped himself smartly. ‘All right. I am a journalist. This you know.’