Bed of Nails (10 page)

“Your pal, the fakir. He owes us five thousand. And he’s not here now, so you get to pay, Davy Crockett. You were his back-up, he said. We know your name. Nichols. You’ve got twenty-four hours. Five thou. Tomorrow, same place, by the fountain. Where you looked at the map. You don’t turn up, we’ll get you. You’re
dead
. Understand?”

A high-sided trainer kicked him in the ribs and he heard the two men run off. Spitting blood, John laughed and cried with his remaining breath:

“Aren’t you ever gonna die, motherfucker?”

*

After wondering for a moment if he should return to the Caveau, he dragged himself, limping, towards Saint-Sulpice. It was hard to have a clear idea of the damage. His temple throbbed and he could feel a lump there, but the pain was passing. It was Ariel’s steak that hurt the most. The guy had hit him in the stomach, but the liver and spleen seemed to be untouched. He might have a couple of cracked ribs, which he’d know about when he woke up next day. If he managed to sleep in the van. He couldn’t get back on the road in this state.

Once on his feet, his first thought had been: I can take down the tent in an hour, and they’ll never find me. Then he had felt a surge of anger, after the adrenalin and fear. Fucking drugs. He had met some of Alan’s dealers before, and sometimes paid his bills, but it was the first time he had been beaten up. The headache had come back, to the power of a thousand.

The nearer he got to Saint-Sulpice, the better his brain started to work. What kind of idiot would ever believe the word of an Alan Mustgrave, a man who lied through his teeth from dawn to dusk, when he said his back-up was some hippy who lived in the sticks in the southwest of France? Who in the world, once they took a look at him, would think he could ever lay hands on that much money? And who, for such a relatively small sum, would make such forceful death threats? This wasn’t Colombia, for God’s sake. Human life was a little more valuable in Paris, surely?

In the rue de Tournon, he leaned on the wall by the delivery space. Apart from idiots, who else? The answer, as he looked at where his van had been parked, made him laugh once more. Someone, on the contrary, who wanted him out of there as soon as possible.

Well, destiny had taken a hand,

Arrow and van, the whole shebang had gone.

“
Fuck
.”

John skirted round the Luxembourg Palace, on the opposite pavement to the gardens, in the shadows of the Senate colonnade. He passed the official metre measure in the wall on the rue Vaugirard, and felt pleased that human beings had agreed about one thing at any rate: the distance separating them. Whether you used metres or feet and inches, a kick in the teeth was the degree zero of intimacy, at least people could agree about that.

He limped across the street, then followed the Luxembourg Gardens railings. Between two street lamps, he waited for a car to go past, glanced around to see that no-one was in sight, and gripped the bars. He managed to haul himself over the metal spikes at the top, tearing his combat trousers, and let himself down the other side, stifling a groan of pain. As quickly as he could, he made for the cover of the first trees and hid behind a trunk. Nothing moved. He went deeper into the park.

His eyes grew accustomed to the orange twilight, that absence of total darkness common to all big cities. From the fountains, wisps of mist rose into the air. It was a cold night: winter had not quite loosened its grip.

He passed a fast-food kiosk made of varnished wood, its shutters closed, and moved on, then collapsed under what he thought must be a plane tree. Leaning his bag against its trunk, he lay down, trying to get his breath back. Once his heart had stopped pounding, and he had grown used to the sounds of the park at night, he unfolded his blanket and rolled up in it. Someone had just given him a warning to get out of town. It didn’t seem like bad advice. Train, hitch-hiking or even on foot, John would simply wait for daylight to get going.

As long as he didn’t move, his ribs were painless enough to let him doze off. The presence of the trees reminded him that the
essentials were somewhere else, far from here. His last thoughts, before slipping into the sleep of a guilty sentry, were about Alan Mustgrave. In fact, Alan’s debts were small beer compared to what was owed him. His last debtor, John Nichols, unfrocked Ph.D. in behavioural psychology, was wiping the slate clean once and for all. The logical end for a friendship with a haemophiliac fakir.

He didn’t know how long he had been sleeping when he woke up with a start, as the beam of a torch flashed in his eyes. It was still dark at any rate. The voice was low, and came to him hazily as his ears began to function.

“You ain’t got no right to be here. You listening? Get lost.”

John felt something cold and damp on his cheek and someone’s breath on his face. He tried to get up, but the pain in his stomach paralysed him. The light twirled round then disappeared.

Guérin arriving early at the quai des Orfèvres, went in at the main entrance and walked through the building. He was wearing a tartan cap and a dark overcoat. Nobody in the early-morning office paid him any attention. He surprised himself by looking at his feet, usually hidden by the long raincoat, as if they belonged to a stranger.

He pushed open the door to the archive room and went in.

Lowering his head and imagining he had blinkers, he went through the rows of shelves, stopping only at the last, at the very back of the room. He picked up the box-file, carried it as fast as he could down the old staircase and, when he reached the bottom, lifted the lid of a big dustbin. Sweating heavily, Guérin felt the weight of the files for a moment in his arms.

Forty-eight suicides. Forty-eight suspect pieces of his delirium. Collected over two years, according to criteria established only by himself. That was the problem.

The oldest ones went back to 2004: they had been unearthed in the archives, by searching day and night for unexpected connections. Before 2004, his criteria had not matched any case; the thread was invisible, even if it had been woven earlier and had been in preparation for some time. Since 2006 and Kowalski, particular cases had emerged out of his everyday work, like the man on the ring road the week before.

Forty-eight files. But the thread connecting them was just an idea in his sick brain. It was his own psyche and nothing else that he’d been studying and researching in the archives. 2004, the year when, for the first time, he had looked in the mirror and failed to recognise himself. The year he had started to lose his footing.
It runs in the family, sweetie, better watch out
. The year his mother, from her hospital bed, had given him the warning. 2004. Death of his mother and the birth of the Big Theory.

He had to cut the thread, even if it were an umbilical cord or an artery. The Big Theory only existed inside his head. Guérin had been up all night convincing himself of that. His final doubts fell into the dustbin with the box. If he didn’t do this now, then one day, and soon perhaps, he would find it impossible to return from the world of ideas, and the thread would wind itself tightly round his neck. The box hit the bottom of the empty dustbin. Going back upstairs, he began to feel almost at home in the new coat.

The office door was open and now all he had to do was apologise to Lambert.

He stopped dead.

Savane was sitting on the chair, hollow-eyed, with dark rings marking his face like bruises. A smell of sweat and alcohol invaded the room.

The big policeman rose to his feet, though he could hardly stand, and moved towards Guérin, pushing aside a table as he came. He looked as if he had come out of a rubbish dump after looking for his keys all night. In his enormous hand, with its swollen and grazed joints, he was holding some crumpled sheets of paper. Guérin tried to look him in the eye.

The mastodon was at his wits’ end, finished, defeated.

Savane stopped at the lights, a pace away from Guérin when their eyes finally locked. He held out the papers. Guérin took them without lowering his eyes and asked what they were, in the gentle
didactic tone he used for Lambert. Savane dropped his gaze, more dead than alive.

“The preliminary autopsies.”

His voice was broken, and he was rubbing the joints of his right hand with his left.

“Last night, I demolished these three guys from the Goutte d’Or. One of them probably won’t make it. Barnier’s suspended me, the committee will send me straight to the disciplinary panel and this time they won’t let me get away with it. It’s the end, I’m finished, they won’t even send me to Suicides.”

“What about Roman?”

Savane grimaced in disgust, then his shoulders drooped with fatigue.

“He’s saved his skin.”

Guérin was about to rub his head, but his hand met the cap and stopped, uncertainly.

“You found the kids on the run, then?”

Savane looked at his swollen hands, as if he were amazed to find them empty.

“Two of them, in a cellar in the rue Blanche. The Drugs Squad are pulling out all the stops to find the other one. The gang bosses got in twelve hours ahead of us. But I don’t regret it, at least those three gang leaders didn’t get away with it. But the one in intensive care, if he doesn’t pull through …”

Savane’s lips trembled. His jacket was filthy and stained with dried blood.

“Fuck it, Guérin, I don’t want to go in front of the panel with the press and all the rest of it. Nine years, for God’s sake, nine years I’ve been eating shit.”

He raised his head.

“
You’d
have got to them first, you could have done it. What the hell have you done, Guérin? Why did you have to mess everything
up? Roman and me, we just went charging in like idiots, made a complete balls-up of it.”

Savane wanted to shout, but he choked on his words. Saliva filled his mouth and he struggled to speak.

“Shit, if you’d been there, we’d have found them like in the old days. What happened, what did you do, what the
fuck
did you do, Guérin? You’re not crazy, but what game are you playing, for fuck’s sake?”

If Guérin had put his hand on Savane’s shoulder, a hundred kilos of policeman would have fallen into his arms and started to cry like a raw recruit in the arms of a psychiatrist. All that was left of Lieutenant Savane was an empty husk of a man. Guérin would have been glad to do him that service, to open the door that generations of his colleagues had learned to keep shut. But Savane didn’t move and Guérin himself was paralysed, stuck somewhere two years earlier, standing outside a house in flames. Guérin tried to believe that Savane was telling the truth: he had spent the previous night trying to convince himself that he wasn’t going mad.

They stared at each other, two lovers terrified on a day of conflagration.

Alerted by the shouting, Lambert burst into the room, with a sporting newspaper under his arm. Savane, surprised in a state of total collapse, swallowed his anxiety and charged head down, sending Lambert flying against the wall, and throwing him a friendly, “Get lost, Forrest Gump!” before escaping down the corridor.

Guérin had taken off his cap and was rubbing at the dressings on his head, gradually tearing them away.

Lambert brushed down his tracksuit and wondered if the whole of the quai des Orfèvres was falling apart, or whether, on the contrary, things were settling down. He sat down at his desk, keeping
a wary eye on the boss. Guérin looked odd, even allowing for everything else and the dressings. He looked at the dark overcoat in puzzlement: the absence of the yellow raincoat was simply inconceivable. He laid down the newspaper, but decided to wait before turning to the football reports. After a few paces round the room, the boss had sat down and started to read the crumpled papers. Things looked as if they had returned to normal. Guérin had made Savane go away, the telephone would soon be ringing, he would have to tear another page off the desk calendar. Lambert relaxed on his chair.

“Know what? I met Chassin this morning. He’s in Homicides. The oldest guy in No. 36, never promoted, holds the record. Remember him? Retiring soon. Anyway, he was telling me about Padovani, the detective who disappeared. About the time you got to Suicides … well, here. Big fat guy, worked in Vice Squad. Chassin was saying they’ve stopped searching for him now, after two years. Officially missing, presumed dead. Did you know him? Still. Thirty years on the force, and nobody knew anything about him. They only started to talk about him when he went missing. Well, they were talking.”

Lambert cleared his throat.

“What did Savane want? Chassin told me he’s been suspended; it’s serious. Want my opinion, no great loss. Well, let’s say I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

Lambert looked up at the ceiling and observed the stain. It had shrunk a little since the last rainfall. Nose in the air and neck outstretched, he went on: “Lots of news today, eh, boss? Boss?”

Lambert still looking up into the pink circles, heard Guérin move a little and took it as a sign he was listening.

“I called the lab when I got in last night. I got Ménard, know him? The guy who worked on the double suicide at Bastille in the summer, husband and wife? I had a drink with him. Not that he’s
a bundle of laughs, I tell you. So, Ménard called me back late at night. He’s a workaholic, that guy, he’s sick. Anyway, he said he had twenty-three different sets of prints, just from half the railing, and he’ll be back on the job this morning. Ask me, he’s already back there, sniffing the dust, no wonder he’s always got a cold. He’ll bring all the results over here.”

Lambert looked down, timidly but proudly. After half a dozen beers last night he had taken a decision: instead of calling a doctor he’d called Ménard in Forensics. The boss was still deep in the paper.

“I thought you might be interested.”

Guérin wasn’t listening. His fingers shook as he held the preliminary sheets.

Savane was totally finished. It would be the last case he ever worked on. Even if he managed to escape from the administration – which was doubtful – he wouldn’t be back. A sad end to his career. Pigheaded as ever, he was probably sitting at his desk that very minute writing his last report, completely drunk, before chucking his chair out of the window and leaving, cursing everyone. A bad exit.