The Decoy (34 page)

'I met her only once. But I noticed the ring.'

'It's…
distinctif,'
he agrees, turning it over in his hand. 'For a man,
ne c'est pas?'

'It's a signet ring. It's been in his family for a long time. Look,' she takes off the torc and shows him. 'It's the same design.'

Another man, also impossibly well dressed, comes in and whispers in the first policeman's ear. The first policeman looks up. 'Your husband is outside.'

'You must arrest him. Then you can talk to the detectives in New York. Detective Durban and Detective Positano. Weeks, Lowell. Tell them I've got the ring. Tell them he branded me with it. They'll understand.'

'He… branded you?' The policeman looks puzzled. 'I'm sorry, my English…'

'Hot. Burn. Szzzz.' She mimes the sizzle of a hot brand on flesh.

'Wait here,' he says.

===OO=OOO=OO===

She waits. She waits for an hour. The wound on her thigh grows a blister, a thin red dome of scalded flesh. She tries not to touch it.

Eventually the policeman returns. He sits down opposite her and blows his lips out. He smiles at her; he has nice eyes.

'So,' he says, 'I have talked to your husband.'

'Have you arrested him?'

He holds up a hand. 'Wait a minute. He tells me you were recently in a hospital in America. Is that right?'

'That's right.'

'You were prescribed some drugs, I think. Some
medication.'

She nods.

'Are you still taking your drugs?'

She shakes her head hopelessly. 'I didn't need them,' she says. 'It was all a mistake.'

'Your husband is very worried about you, I think,' he says gently. 'He is going to arrange for you to see a doctor at the hotel.'

'No,' she says. 'You can't do that. He'll kill me.'

The policeman smiles. 'This is your wedding day,' he says gently. 'It is a big day. A big strain, yes? And you have been drinking absinthe. Your husband has told me this. Absinthe is not a legal drink in France today. Too many people were…' He makes a gesture to indicate a disease of the mind. 'Go home, Mrs Vogler. Your husband will look after you.'

She stands up. 'He did this,' she says. She drops her trousers to show him her thigh.

'Your husband says you burned yourself deliberately, with a cigarette,' he says calmly. 'He will buy some cream at the pharmacy. Please, madame. Cover yourself up.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Meekly, she allows herself to be taken from the police station, to be escorted into a taxi. He strokes her hair, crooning to her. 'My precious, my precious. What were you thinking of?'

On the way back, he stops the taxi to make some purchases from a pharmacy and the garage next to it. When he gets back into the taxi he has a large bag in his hands.

At the hotel, he locks the door of their room and runs a bath for her. She waits, numbly, for it to fill. 'Come here,' he calls gently. She goes into the bathroom. He is stirring the water with his hand. Not too hot, not too cold.

Obediently, she undresses and steps into the water. Though the water is cool, the blister on her thigh stings. She lies down and he washes her, tenderly, as he washed her the first time they made love, soaping her hair and rinsing it. When he has finished, he brings her the bottle of absinthe.

'Drink this.'

She takes a long gulp.

'It will take away the pain,' he says. She doesn't know if he means the pain in her thigh, or the pain of what is coming next.

'I didn't get it quite right, did I?' she says. 'I thought it was Stella who'd had enough, that she was tired being adored by you. But it was you, not her, who wanted an end to it. Like Baudelaire, who found it easier to worship a goddess than to love a woman. Did she phone the apartment from her hotel? Is that how you knew where she was that night? You've already told me you were going through her e-mails.'

He looks at her with an expression of infinite regret. 'It was more than that,' he says quietly. 'It was someone I met. A stranger, a girl in a bar. She read to me, one of my own translations, and her voice… It was a perfect moment, a revelation, complete and unrepeatable. That was when I saw that it was over with Stella.'

'You killed her. You went to that hotel room and you killed her.'

'Yes,' he says. 'Yes, I killed her. And then she was perfect again.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The room next door is very crowded. There's the assault team from the CRS —
the French special force — in full riot gear, nursing their tear-gas guns and stun grenades. There's Connie Leichtman and other observers from the FBI. There's the surveillance team provided by the French authorities, including the policeman who stood in for the
maire.
And there's Frank, feeling naked without a gun of his own, pressed up against the wall, a pair of headphones clamped to his head.

The captain of the CRS is also wearing headphones, but the captain's English isn't good, and it's Frank he's looking to for a signal. He raises an eyebrow.

Frank holds up his hand, palm outwards. Wait.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Not perfect,' she says. 'Passive. She wasn't Stella any more, not after the things you did to her. She was just a body. Just flesh.'

'Don't spoil this,' he croons. 'Don't let's argue, Claire.'

'You were one of his customers,' she says flatly. 'Charon's. That virtual edition of
Les Fleurs du Mal
was for you.'

'A fitting tribute to the poems.' He picks up a book from where it lies on the floor. 'Read one,' he says. 'Read one out loud for me, like you did that first time.'

She looks at the page he has marked and, in a flat toneless voice, she begins to read.

I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years.

An old cabinet stuffed with dead ideas—

bundles of abandoned verses, old receipts and bills,

dusty locks of hair, and long-forgotten wills—

is not more full of secrets than my aching head.

It's a sarcophagus, an immense grave where the dead,

those bodies I have loved, are tumbled willy-nilly,

prodded and nudged incessantly

by morbid reveries, like worms:

It's a house of shuttered, closed-up rooms

where closets full of wedding clothes

are slowly pulled to lace by moths.

She lets the book fall from her fingers into the water. Christian is weeping. He weeps as he opens a canister of petrol and lets the liquid flow into the bath. It floats on the water, a greasy, iridescent slick. Rainbows lap at her skin. He sets a box of matches on the side of the bath.

'I won't hurt you,' he says. He laces his fingers around her neck. 'No pain. I promise.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Now,' Frank screams.
'Allez, allez.'
The captain turns and shouts to his men. For a fraction of a second, nothing happens. Then—

===OO=OOO=OO===

The room explodes. It fills with serge-blue uniforms and men in riot gear and shouting in two languages at once.

Christian turns and takes a step backwards. One of the CRS immediately looses a tear-gas round, and the room fills with acrid smoke, from which only the policemen in their riot masks are protected.

Claire, pulled from the lethal bath by Connie and Frank, cowers on the floor, wet and naked, her bruised throat choking on the fumes. Stinging tears come quickly to her eyes.

Or perhaps — who knows? — they were there already.

La Martine, just outside Lyon, has a long and chequered history. Originally a lunatic asylum, it was used by the Gestapo during the war as an interrogation centre. Now a prison, it houses some of Europe's most high-security prisoners, including, by an ironic twist of fate, some of those same Nazis whose victims were once tortured there. Perhaps because of its proximity to Interpol headquarters, it has become the nearest thing there is to a prison of the world.

Dr Constance Leichtman arrives there one frosty morning in early December, as so many have done before her, to conduct an interrogation. She's shown into a small pastel-coloured room where, once upon a time, the questioners used lengths of rubber hose, baths full of shit and piss, truncheons and thumbscrews. She's brought a pen and paper, a small recording device and a pack of cigarettes.

Christian Vogler is brought in. He's wearing the prison uniform, loose-fitting jeans and a denim jacket. In one hand, he carries a pack of Gauloises and a lighter.

'I brought you some more cigarettes,' she says. 'I'd heard you were smoking now.'

'Everyone smokes in here,' he says. 'It isn't like America.' He sits down opposite her.

'Are they treating you well?'

He shrugs. 'It's tolerable.'

She lights a cigarette herself, then holds out the flame to his. 'I've got a proposition, Christian.'

'Yes?'

'They'll have to decide in which country you're to stand trial. It could be America, it could be here. Here is better for you, I think. Remember Jeffrey Dahmer, murdered by another convict? They're rather more civilized here. I'll bet they can't even bring themselves to serve you terrible coffee.'

He waits for her to continue.

'I could arrange for you to stay here, perhaps. While I study you.'

He blows a slug of ash from the end of his cigarette onto the floor. 'Study me?'

'Your relationship with Charon. I want to know how it worked. Who fed off who? Did you see yourselves as artist and patron, or as fellow artists working in different media? Would your own desires have remained unrealized if it hadn't been for the images he created? There's a lot of material here, Christian. If you give it to me, if you're seen to be co-operating, it might help.'

He thinks for a while. 'I have some questions, too.'

'Then, as a fellow academic, I will try to answer them.'

'About Claire mostly.' He looks away from her. In the windowless room the smoke gathers in thick, soft layers, like skeins of wool. 'How much of it was real?'

'Ah.'

He waits.

'She's a remarkable person, Christian. Finding her was the key. Right at the beginning of all this, I spent several days with her. I had to make sure she hadn't been involved in Stella's death herself, of course, but I also wanted to see how strong she was. That was when I realized the extent of her talents —
and of her courage.'

She looks around for an ashtray. There isn't one, so she flicks ash onto the floor. 'She was studying a kind of Method acting, you know. She was very committed to that approach, the idea that an actor must inhabit a fictional character with absolute authenticity. She agreed to put herself in my hands without reservation. I told her the part she would have to play, but other than that, she had no idea what was going to happen.'

'And what was that part?'

'I told her she had to fall in love with you.'

He seems to sigh, though it might just have been a long release of smoke. 'What about the hospital? The drugs she took? The disorders the doctors said she was suffering from?'

'We needed you to be convinced that she was no longer working for us. As I said, she was prepared to inhabit the role with absolute authenticity. She'd been in something similar in England, you see, so I knew she could carry it off.'

He nods, thoughtfully. 'You followed us to France, of course.'

'Yes. After the scare Charon gave us, we couldn't take any more risks.'

'I did wonder why all the taxi drivers were being so friendly,' he murmurs. 'And what about the marriage?'

'You're not married, Christian. The ceremony you went through had no legal standing. Not that Claire knew that, either, at the time. She had to trust us completely.'

'As you say, a remarkable actress.' He glances at her. 'As are you.'

'I'm no actress, Christian.'

'Not in the real world, perhaps. But in the virtual one… You're one of the players, aren't you? One of the characters down there in Necropolis.'

'Care to guess which one?'

'I've been giving it some thought. You're Helios, aren't you? The Greek god of light. Dr Leichtman.'

She nods.

'An unusual way of conducting a scientific study, if you don't mind me saying. It's hardly common for the scientist to be one of the rats as well. I suppose you were in communication with Charon, weren't you? Telling him what to do. When to kill. Jerking his strings.' He sits back and crosses his arms. 'A part of you must be quite upset he's dead. Creatures like that are rather magnificent, aren't they?'

Connie pauses before she says, 'The Internet is a powerful new weapon for us, Christian. All the data you could ever need, if you can just get hold of it.' She exhales smoke from the corners of her mouth, sabre-toothed. 'And now we have even more data. Nearly a thousand people accessed Charon's website to participate in his little snuff show. All of them will be logged, traced, followed up and assessed. The ones who seem as if they might develop into killers themselves will be invited into the hidden parts of Necropolis, where we can keep a closer eye on them.'

'Poor bastards,' he says. 'But I notice that you didn't answer my question.'

'No,' she says. 'And now it's your turn to answer some of mine. Let me set up this microphone and we can get started.'

They remain inside the little cell all day. Within a couple of hours, her cigarettes are finished, and she starts reaching across the table to share his.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Her friend hasn't showed.

That's what you'd think if you saw her, waiting on her own at the bar of the Royalton, trying to make her Virgin Mary last all evening: just another young professional waiting for her date. Perhaps a little prettier than most. A little more confident. A little more daringly dressed. She hasn't come straight from the office, that's for sure.

The bar is packed, and when a table finally becomes free, she goes and sits at it, putting her drink on the table and her bag on the other seat, to keep it unoccupied.

'Excuse me?'

She looks up. There's a man standing in front of her.

'This is my table. I just went to the restroom.' He points. 'I left my drink to keep my place.'