Talking to Ghosts (28 page)

They watched in silence as the forensics officers bustled about, raking through the blackened rubble, sometimes showing each other charred artefacts that the boys tried in vain to identify. Then Victor signalled it was time to leave, giving Julien a little tap on the back of the head to shake him – nose pressed to the chicken wire, crouching behind a mimosa – from his rapt contemplation of the painstaking comings and goings of the two men in white amid this expanse of blackness. Calmly they walked back to their bicycles, pausing here and there to pilfer a few warm, pink grapes that were already sweet. The sun had dropped and already a little shadow began to pool at their feet and in the deep furrows, but the heat was still sweltering, and they could feel the sunlight coming over the leaves of the vines and hitting their faces. They shivered as a cool breeze blowing in from the estuary caught their bare legs. On the road down to the village, they let out whoops of joy, letting go of their handlebars, sometimes freewheeling, sometimes pedalling like demons. As they approached the house they slowed down, let their breathing settle to normal. Denis was sitting on the kitchen step smoking a cigarette, still covered in plaster dust, his hair almost grey. He hardly acknowledged their greeting.

“We've been waiting for you so we can eat,” he said as they passed.

“What the fuck were you up to? Where have you been at this hour?”

“We were watching river rats,” Victor said.

“We didn't notice the time. Sorry …”

“Well, don't do it again. Round here we eat on time, understood? Just look at yourselves, you're filthy.”

The man blew a long stream of smoke in the direction in which he
was idly staring. They went into the silent house. The T.V. was turned off. Nicole was in the kitchen making a large pizza, and as they went to get a drink from the fridge, she asked them where they'd been. They told her about the river rats. Nicole said how much she loathed the little beasts.

“Honestly, have you nothing better to do with your time? Those filthy things are full of diseases. And look at you, you're all red and sweaty. Go on, go wash your hands at least. Have you seen the time? I was wondering what you were up to.”

“Where's Marilou?”

“She's with Rebecca. Out the back. Go and tell them dinner's ready.” Victor felt his skin tingle. He went out onto the back terrace and saw her, sitting on a bench, her black hair hastily pinned up into a bun. Marilou was lying in the hammock chatting to her, but she trailed off when she saw Victor arrive. He said hello and took one of the white plastic chairs, his damp skin immediately sticking to it. The girls did not reply and they sat for a moment like this, not saying anything, Marilou almost dozing, her tanned legs crossed, Rebecca sitting cross-legged on the bench playing with her mobile, her back straight, almost stiff, her shorts hitched up over her thighs. A gust of wind darted between the branches above them and Victor hoped it meant there would be a storm tonight. He longed for a downpour, for thunder, for something violent that would shake everything from the torpor in which it was mired, a torpor into which he could feel himself sinking. Here, gazing at Rebecca's mute, headstrong beauty, he longed for a cataclysm that would sweep everything away, leaving behind it only desolation and sobbing and the despair of the survivors. He looked up at the drab sky, greyish-green perhaps, but leaden in the west as though something were brewing over the ocean.

Nicole called for them to come and eat and they got up without a word. Victor could feel Rebecca walking behind him, her breath almost ruffling his hair, so close that he had to resist the temptation to turn around suddenly so she would bump into him, and he let his hand dangle next to his thigh in the hope that she might brush against it.

They ate out on the terrace, talking quietly and laughing from time to time at the stupid things Julien came out with as he squirmed in his chair, blathering away, talking so fast that Victor worried he might betray them, and so gave him the blackest look he could muster.

It was cooler now, and from time to time the wind whipped up and they could sometimes smell salt or pine resin and sometimes the particular smell of damp pine needles, and Denis thought it was probably raining along the coast and that would put an end to the heatwave. Then Victor watched out for distant streaks of lightning or the rumble of thunder but nothing came and after a while his disappointment hardened into the familiar lump in his chest that had tormented him over the past three months. He caught Marilou's worried glances, she could always tell when he was sad, and now she turned her dark gentle eyes on him and he responded with a blink, because between them there was the unspoken bond that he had noticed the first time they met.

When dinner was over and Julien had taken his turn at clearing the table, they stayed out in the garden watching the last flashes of sun that managed to steal between two grey banks of cloud as night drew in. Rebecca was lying on the bench, knees raised, arms folded over her stomach. She was staring at the sky, a look of disgust on her face.

Victor and Marilou talked about storms. They hoped there would be a violent storm tonight.

“You coming?” Rebecca said suddenly to Victor.

She was already on her feet, hands on her hips, almost impatient. As soon as they set off, she took and squeezed his hand, her fingers interlaced with his, and pressed it against her leg. They walked in silence away from the village, which disappeared as they rounded a corner. Victor found it difficult to breathe, feeling her warm skin against the back of his hand, his mouth was dry and tiny shivers ran through him like insects driven mad by the cool gusts of an evening breeze.

“He's dead, that old sack of shit,” Rebecca said. “Can you believe it?”

Victor nodded. He wanted to tell her everything. “So now you've had your revenge,” he said.

She turned towards him with a start. “Why do you say that?”

“No reason … just from the way you talk about him, I always thought you hated him …”

“I fucking despise him … And that's putting it mildly. I would have slit his throat myself if I could have.”

She set off walking again, taking long strides. Victor could hear the soft swish of skin rubbing together with every step she took.

As soon as they came to a path between the vines, she pulled him in and started walking quickly, almost dragging him behind her. To the west, a dark purple mantle stretched across the sky. Victor glanced behind him.

When they reached the middle of the carefully tended field, its monotony broken only by branches coiling up in search of something to cling to, Rebecca flopped down onto a grassy bank and told Victor to sit too. He sat next to her, panting, his face red, feeling slightly feverish. She slid closer until their hips were touching and he felt her weight as she leaned towards him, instinctively hunching his shoulders when she put her arm around his back and pulled him towards her, letting her head fall against his neck, her lips seeking out his salty skin.

He had only to turn towards her. He closed his eyes and aimlessly thrust out one arm to encircle her waist, something he had seen in films. He felt her tongue flick between his lips and he did the same, something he had done before with girlfriends at school, though he knew this was something new, especially when she took his hand and slid it under her T-shirt and his palm found the curve of her breast.

She lay back and pulled him against her. He dared to slip his hand between her thighs and his throat tightened as his fingers fleetingly brushed the cleft mound through the sheer fabric. Rebecca squeezed her thighs shut, trapping the boy's fingers and moaned softly, then said, “No,” her mouth pulling away from his.

Night had fallen without them noticing. They lay side by side beneath the now dark sky in the midst of which a storm rolled and thundered, shooting pale sheets of lightning over the river. Rebecca got to her feet, saying it was going to rain. Above him, in the vanishing
light, Victor could make out her long legs and felt the urge to press his mouth where they met to taste what he had felt. She turned away and walked off without a word and he bounded after, afraid of losing her in the darkness.

They walked in single file across the uneven ground, twisting their ankles on dry clods of earth. Rebecca touched his hand, nothing more, as she turned to make for her home, and Victor stood, watching her disappear, head bowed, beneath the grubby light of the streetlamps. He set off again, his head still reeling. As he walked, he sniffed his fingers and brought them to his mouth.

In the two days that followed, he felt a little stunned, as though he were recovering from a fever. Sometimes he would see Marilou staring at him quizzically. She obviously suspected something. Sometimes he wondered if it had really happened and wanted to know whether it would happen again, whether it was possible for such pleasure, perhaps even happiness, to last forever.

That first night, he did not dare touch the urn or talk to his mother. The following day, in the dark, allowing the cool air filtering through the venetian blinds to lap over him, he wept. He begged forgiveness from this life that pushed him so hard, distanced him, attracted and compelled him. He felt so miserable that he could see no choice but to go away, become feral so he would no longer know anything, no longer say anything and subsist like an animal on instinct and silence. Far from everything.

Old Georges was buried two days later. Rebecca called around to the house while Mass was still being said for the filthy old pervert (as Denis called him at dinner one evening), but she gave Victor only the same distant look she had always had for him and barely spoke to him, just wandered down the garden, chatting and laughing with Marilou and humming silly songs.

As he came to, he realised scissors were cutting away the back of his shirt and was aware of the silent agitation that reigned around him. He was lying on his stomach and when he tried lift his head to see what was happening, a woman's voice told him not to move.

“How are you feeling? My name is Doctor Ferrière, I'm a paramedic.”

He tried to answer, spat out soil and gravel. He felt a damp patch between his legs, at the top of his thighs. It was not blood.

“I think I'm O.K.,” he managed to say. “I just want to go home. What did he do to me? Oh fuck, I've pissed myself.”

He moved his legs, tried to lean up on his elbows.

“Please, don't try to move.”

He was vaguely conscious of comings and goings in the convulsive light of the torches and the blue strobing from the police cars. A cacophony of voices, shouts and arguments was suddenly superimposed over the doctor's voice. He felt fingers pressing on his back around the wound the man had made. People were talking over his head and he could not understand what they were saying.

“It's superficial,” the woman said. “It's nothing more than a scratch.”

“Pierre? You O.K.? Jesus, you gave us a scare. Are you taking him to hospital?”

Daras was crouching next to him. She took his hand and was forcing herself to smile.

“Where's the guy?” he asked. “Did you get him?”

“He took off. We're looking for him everywhere, but I'm not exactly hopeful. Pradeau managed only to wound him.”

She stood up quickly and Vilar felt himself being lifted and put on a stretcher.

He said that he could walk, thank you, but one of the men carrying the stretcher advised him not to move until they got him into the ambulance. Daras mumbled something into her police radio, an order maybe, Vilar could not make it out. He felt as if he were floating in a soporific haze.

“This guy …” he managed to say. “He can't have slipped through our fingers just like that. You said he took a bullet?”

“Yeah. But Pradeau was only shooting to wound, and the guy managed to run off. We were this fucking close to catching him.”

The paramedic was blonde and rather young. She sat next to him and looked at him with a gentleness that softened the curt tone of her deep voice.

He realised he was trembling. He tried to take a deep, calm breath, to focus entirely on that breath. He could still feel the tip of the knife in his back.

“He tried to hit the spinal cord.”

“Don't worry, he didn't get that far. He slashed you a little, the wound is about two, maximum three centimetres, nothing serious.”

She was smiling. She seemed competent. She explained that she was going to give him an injection to calm him. He did not bother to answer, simply closed his eyes. He let her do her job, he felt the injection, felt himself being swabbed with a cold liquid, felt the sutures pinch his skin. He felt alert to the slightest sensation in his body and was surprised to discover he felt no pain.

The doctor asked him again if he was determined to go home and had him sign some sort of discharge form, apologising that this was something she was obliged to do.

He found himself in the back seat of his own car without knowing how he got there, looking out at his fellow officers talking on the pavement while the security guards climbed back into their vans and their
patrol vehicles. He felt sleepy, stupefied, and remembered that the blonde woman from the S.A.M.U. had given him a sedative injection to stop his tremors. The alcohol he had drunk earlier was turning off his brain, like the lights in a village hall after a party, when eventually all that is visible is the glow of the green exit signs.

He woke up the next morning in his own bed with no idea who had put him there or how. As he rolled over, he barely felt a twinge from the wound. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he waited for the first shooting pains signalling a migraine, but nothing came, so he stood up and found himself steady on his feet with a craving for coffee and buttered baguette that made his mouth water. He felt none of the panic he had experienced the night before. He felt a trilling of residual adrenalin, nothing more.

He was tucking into bread and jam, waiting for the coffee to brew, when the doorbell rang. He started, the hand clutching a spoon froze in mid-air. From outside he heard Pradeau call out. When Vilar opened the door, Pradeau waved a bag of croissants under his nose.

“Jesus, you're looking good. Did that blonde from the S.A.M.U. stay behind and administer intensive care, or what?”

He flopped down in a chair and demanded coffee.

“You on the other hand don't look so hot,” Vilar said. “You're the one in need of critical attention.”

“Too much booze, too many fags, too much brooding. I didn't nod off until gone seven this morning. Still, plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead.”

He sipped his coffee, lit up a cigarette. Vilar took one from his pack and went to open a window. They smoked in silence. Pradeau stared out of the window, lost in thought.

“We didn't even find the fucking bullet. I hit him in the neck, I'm pretty sure, but it was only a flesh wound. It can't have been a through-and-through or he'd be dead. Now I've got to fill out some fucking report explaining the incident. I'm going to have Internal Affairs crawling up my arse.”

“There's a guy dead, isn't there?” Vilar said. “The only one taking
any serious risks was me. They're not going to hassle us over this, are they? You get to save a colleague's life, the guy gets to do a runner, everyone's happy, no?”

Pradeau said nothing, staring at the ashtray into which he was stubbing out his cigarette. He stifled a yawn and poured himself more coffee.

“What is it?” Vilar said, “You really don't look good.”

Pradeau sighed and gave him a beaten, helpless look.

“My father called at about five this morning, completely hysterical. I'd only just nodded off and the phone scared the shit out of me. My mother collapsed in the toilet and he couldn't manage to get her up. Wanted me to come around. Shit. I told him to call a neighbour and he started sobbing down the line that it was too early to go waking people … Can you believe it? It's not O.K. to wake the people next door, but it's fine for me to drive a hundred kilometres on fuck-all sleep just to help my mother stand up? Fuck's sake, what am I supposed to do? He refuses to put her in a nursing home, he doesn't want to be separated from her, but there are days when he wishes she would just die quickly so he could have a bit of peace because he can't take it anymore. And if that wasn't bad enough, these last six months she doesn't know him from Adam. The other day when she saw him in the kitchen she was terrified he was a burglar. She recognises his voice sometimes, so when he talks to her she calms down. It's like she's just found something familiar she thought she'd lost forever. I tell you, it fucking does my head in, all this shit.”

In the silence that followed, a bird trilled, a fire engine siren honked in the distance.

“Why don't you take a week off, go sort things out with your father?”

Pradeau shrugged and shook his head. He smiled sadly.

“You've no idea what you're talking about. Just leave it.”

Vilar stood up. There was nothing he could do for Pradeau. He wanted him to leave. There was nothing anyone could do for anyone. “I don't know what to say.”

“Then please, don't say anything. Each to his own. You've got your shit, I've got mine, that doesn't make it
our
shit. I never know what to say to you either.”

Vilar was desperate to find some way out of this blind alley they were in.

“Last night, the guy … did you see him? What did he look like?”

At first Pradeau stared at him dumbfounded, as though he didn't understand what he was saying. Then he nodded slowly.

“Tall, light brown hair, bright eyes, a prominent chin. I got a good look, I talked to him while he was crouching over you with the knife.”

Nothing like the guy he had seen at Madame Huvenne's place, nothing like the witness he spoken to in the lobby of the tower block. A shudder ran down Vilar's spine. He felt as though the wound had suddenly developed a nasty itch.

“The guy I saw before had dark hair. There are two of them, I'm sure of it. Two at Morvan's place to make him disappear without a trace. There's the one I had on the line who talked to me about Pablo, and the one who killed Nadia. I don't know how, but they found each other and they're in this together.”

“That just brings us back to Marianne's woolly theories. I don't buy it. There's one guy, he's clever, but he'll end up getting himself caught. End of story. At Morvan's house we found fibres, two hairs, nothing concrete. You and Marianne, you're too determined to make this two people. And if there were two of them, then why would they put themselves to so much trouble? Take so many risks? I think you're both kidding yourselves. It's all bullshit.”

“Call it bullshit if you will, but it's unlikely that the same guy would be going around abducting a kid and terrorising whores.”

“Unless he's a pimp … Someone trafficking women and kids. What do we know?”

Vilar leaned back against the sink and nodded.

“Obviously, we don't know anything. I personally don't think it holds up, but it's not so far-fetched. If you're right, though, I'll kill the guy myself when we track him down. I don't give a shit about anything else. I want to see him grovelling at my feet, I want to look him in the eye while he lies there bleeding. Shit, how could you have missed him? You were what? Three, four metres away?”

“I was trying to wound him. We need him alive. And anyway, it all happened so fast, you know what it's like … I saw him sticking a knife in your back and I did the best I could. I hit his shoulder, or maybe his neck, like I said. The bullet must just have grazed him.”

Pradeau fell silent and looked thoughtful. Between his fingers, he held an unlit cigarette.

“You O.K.?” Vilar said.

“You want to talk about something else?”

Pradeau shuddered, as though someone had jabbed him.

“And what exactly do you … No, it's fine. Carry on,” he said wearily.

Vilar decided to ignore Pradeau's apathy.

“So who is this guy?”

“Which one?” Pradeau said, smiling crookedly.

“I don't know. The man from last night. Or the one I saw at the old biddy's place in Bacalan. Maybe they're the same guy.”

“That's something we won't know till we've got him in front of us and we can beat seven bells out of him – and no bullets, because that won't answer any of your questions.”

“Last night I screwed up,” Vilar said, who seemed to be thinking aloud, staring vaguely at the impressionist landscape on the calendar hanging on the wall.

“I should have twigged, when he said that the kid used to say hi to everyone in the building … He gave himself away, and I missed it. Instead of ducking the question, he raised the stakes. He's not afraid of anything. And what with everyone blubbing and screeching behind me and the kid bleeding out on the floor, I lost control. Shit, he was right there in front of me, I could smell the cigarette smoke on him. What is he looking for, the bastard?”

Pradeau's face contorted.

“Intense emotions. Maybe he wants to feel alive. Maybe it's a game to him?”

“If it is, it's Russian roulette, with all the chambers loaded.”

“Could be there's something in that,” Pradeau said, getting to his feet.

He pocketed the cigarettes and his lighter.

“I have to go. We have to question the dead kid's friends – what was his name again? Ah, yes, Sofiane – they're probably the same two little thugs you saw him with in the lobby that time. The neighbours gave us their names and addresses. You never know, maybe these two clowns were there when it happened and ran back home to Maman without saying a word. They act like big men when they're in a group, but when they're on their own or they're faced with a really vicious fucker, they shit themselves. We'll shake them up a bit, the cowards, teach them a bit of respect. At least we won't have made the trip for nothing.”

He said goodbye, promising to call later, and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

It was almost 10.00 a.m. Vilar drank some more lukewarm coffee, cursed the fact he had no cigarettes. Then he turned on the T.V. and watched an American thriller on a cable channel, “The Deep End”, the story of woman who kills the man who has been abusing her son and then goes after everyone else involved. The movie was set beside a lake in a majestic, tranquil landscape, lovingly filmed in luminous, saturated colours. Vilar pictured himself in that house. He wondered if he would have the courage to do what the mother in the film did. Of course, he thought. As he did every time the question was asked, every time it occurred to him when he woke from a nightmare or from a deep depression. He would kill anyone and everyone who … He had no words to finish the sentence forming in his mind. Impossible to imagine doing anything else. Impossible to imagine himself resisting the urge to destroy that sort of predator. And yet he understood the law, and he agreed with it. Self-defence … he abhorred all those brainless vigilantes – in films and in real life – including the ones he himself had banged up. He had always despised what they had become, a ragbag of savage, snivelling impulses motivated only by grief or hatred, inadvertent psychopaths who were almost happy to have found, in stalking a killer, their
raison d'être
.

And suddenly, as always, reason, or perhaps some mad hope, came and placed a hesitant finger between the bullet and the firing pin. What if he ended up killing the one man who knew where Pablo was now?
His very last hope? He had spent whole nights wrestling with this question, feverish with exhaustion, nerves wound like barbed wire around his body.