Bed of Nails (12 page)

“My name’s Guérin, Richard Guérin. I work at Police H.Q.
and for two years now, I’ve been handling all the suicides in Paris. Before that I was in murder and homicide.”

At the word “suicide”, Monkachi had given a start, before collapsing even further.

“Well I’ll tell you. What these three monuments have in common is that they’re built on alluvial soil. In other words, it’s unstable soil, it’s moving all the time and wants to get back into the bed of the Seine. So all three of them are sinking into the ground. They have to be propped up continually: it’s a gigantic task. The bridge is the easiest to deal with. But they had to strengthen the banks when they built it, because it pressed down much too hard on them. See the four statues of horses up there? They’re part of the weight needed to hold it down; they’re utilitarian, although at the same time they’re a bit over the top. The bridge is trying to push the banks apart – rather an interesting reversal of symbols, don’t you think? And the Grand Palais now, they’ve been pouring concrete into the foundations, ever since World War II, millions of cubic metres of concrete. They’re trying to keep it up in the air, but it keeps trying to sink in deeper. It’s permanently on the move. It’s a problem for a lot of these buildings near the river. Can’t you hear them, day after day, gradually sinking? I think it’s in the early morning, at dawn, that you can hear it best. They get older overnight. We keep doing them up; we want them to keep looking young and beautiful. So what do you think, Alex, because you’re looking for an answer too, aren’t you? Don’t you think all that’s a bit artificial?”

Guérin was now about three metres away from Monkachi. He calmly sat down on the pavement and breathed out, feeling tired. At the same time, he shot a glance across at Gittard. The policeman was making a sign of a fish swimming in water.

“Suicide, Alex, is a very delicate moment. It’s a difficult truth to swallow for the people left behind, even if they don’t know you.
Because it makes them doubt their own foundations. They can feel the ground shifting under their feet. It’s an important move, Alex, because of what it reveals. The hypocrisy of people who just accept it as your personal fate, instead of asking questions about the building they live in with you, that’s not worth dying for.”

Alex Monkachi slipped to the ground, his mouth, now dribbling saliva, against the paintwork.

“Who the hell are you? Who are you? You’re supposed to be cheering me up, telling me a lot of stupid stuff, making me feel better.”

“Can’t do that, Alex, sorry. Do you know what the connection is between you, my parrot Churchill and the Grand Palais?”

The unhappy candidate fluffed his answer. Guérin could hear a few muffled words.
Work. My life. Need someone to listen to me
.

“Give in? I’ll tell you. Probably nothing at all. Except the kind you might make up. You’re all of you alone, perched on some high rail, or on some shifting sands. And all of them, the parrot, the steel girders of that building, and a man, in spite of a few different features, I grant you that, are incapable of expressing what they think about their state. And so they let themselves die, because they think they’re less significant than an earthworm. I’m your friend, Alex, please believe that, I mean it. Stay with us.”

Guérin took off his cap and waved it at the police cordon. He turned his back on Monkachi, who stared at the dressings on the policeman’s head. “Tell me, Alex, have you recently met people who seemed full of good intentions, on the surface at least, and who might have persuaded you to kill yourself? People who, now you come to think of it, seemed to be friendly towards you, but really they just wanted you to die? Insidious friendships, you might say.”

Guérin looked at the banks, scrutinising the crowd at either end of the bridge. From the avenue Churchill, a group of three people,
one of them a woman, was moving discreetly towards the parapet. Lambert was with them.

“Tell me, Alex. Think back for me. Did you meet anyone who encouraged you to come here today?”

Alex wiped his nose with his fingers. He had let go of the balustrade and was leaning his back against it now.

“Every day, just about. Everyone, just about. Is it true the city’s sinking into the ground?”

“I reckon so, Alex. I’m glad to have met you before you died.”

“You’re crazy!”

“That’s fair comment.”

*

Lambert dropped him off at his flat. The boss, now exhausted, had retrieved his box file, and stood on the pavement with the car door open.

“Lambert, my boy, I’m sorry about yesterday. It won’t happen again. Thanks for your help … and for calling Ménard. Have a rest this afternoon. They’ll find someone else if they have to.”

He was about to shut the door, when Lambert leaned across.

“Boss, don’t thank me, I mean, I’m just doing like normal. Boss? About …”

“Savane used to be my second-in-command. He worked with me until …”

“… Kowalski!” Lambert was swift to add: “Boss, you did a really good job out there today.” He blushed. “Boss, I won’t let you down.”

This was too much for both of them. Lambert straightened up inside the car, and Guérin slammed the door shut. He watched the car disappear, thinking again of Monkachi, of the nurse who had smiled at him, and how in the end he had been able to throw up into the gutter.

He put the box down in the hall, and was greeted by Churchill in the voice of his mother.

“Late back
agaaaain
! Late back
agaaaain
!”

“It’s only one o’clock, Churchill, I’m early today.”

The parrot raised its feathers into a red crest and adopted a new voice.

“Just a quickie, my angel. A quickie!”

Twenty years on a perch overlooking a bed as busy as a railway station.

“You’re being rude?
Maman
didn’t like you to be rude.”

Mention of his former mistress threw the bird into a frenzy. It spat out a string of insults, interspersed by tongue clicks and squawks. Guérin smiled briefly, enjoying the old bird’s rage.

He opened the washing machine, took out the yellow raincoat and put it on a hanger. The bloodstains had gone. Crossing the room, he hung it from a clothes-line on the balcony. The raincoat, like a yellow quarantine flag, began to sway gently in the breeze. Churchill had stopped squawking and was hiding his head under his wing. Guérin shut the French window and pulled the box file to the middle of the room.

Churchill jumped down from the perch and walking carefully crabwise came to peer over the files, pecking at the edges of the box. Guérin put the tape in the machine and sat down on an armchair. The parrot went round in circles, making a scratching sound on the parquet floor, in a ritual submission. He went round the room three times.

“So just stop being rude and making such a din. I’m tired.”

The parrot moved towards the armchair.

Once on his master’s shoulder, he started pecking the dressings, while saying quietly, “
Come
on, sweetie”, in the warm voice his mistress had used when encouraging a less than virile client. Churchill could mimic the intonations perfectly, though Guérin
didn’t suppose he had any idea what it was about. Still. The only thing the parrot had not inherited from anyone else was its anger.

Guérin had always needed, somewhere in his life, a man who could get angry.

He pressed “play”.

As soon as the naked young man started running between the cars, Churchill began to laugh.

When John P. Nichols had woken the first time, he had felt only pain as shadows danced before his eyes. Muffled sounds, smells, and a roof over his head. He had closed his eyes and gone back to sleep. The second time, he concentrated and saw a woman looming over him. A peroxide blonde, like a Dutch advertisement for peanut butter. She was brandishing an orange chainsaw in a plastic forest: her little breasts were naked and perky, and she was wearing tiny denim shorts. She was holding the machine as if it were a precious object, charged with horsepower, her lips were parted, and she was flashing her come-and-get-me eyes. Before he lapsed back into sleep, John stammered his apologies to this woman who was impatiently waiting for a brawny lumberjack to get the saw started for her with his big hands. He apologised for not feeling up for it, and slipped away into the plastic forest, with the feeling that the pain was subsiding.

Once the chainsaw had started spitting out sparks, and the blonde had slipped out of her shorts, while John used his teeth on a ring piercing her navel, a hooded man appeared and started licking his face. He woke up, and found a dog’s black snout up against his nose.

A barrel-chested voice filled the air.

“Down, boy!”

The dog, panting, rested its head on John’s chest.

A Husqvarna power tools calendar from the 1980s was pinned to the wall in front of him. On the page for April, the blonde, as faded as her photograph, had her shorts back on again. The surroundings briefly swam before his eyes, then he felt he had come down to earth again. Under the calendar, leaning up against an unlit wood-burning stove, were his rucksack and his bow. He was on a low camp bed in a wooden cabin. From his lying position, he could see a shelf with a few books, a dark cap hanging on a hook, some rough plank flooring, and two legs of a metal table. Between the metal legs, appeared the bottoms of a pair of trousers ending in two heavy leather boots.

“Here, boy!”

The dog, a mongrel with greying fur, wriggled to the foot of the bed.

The voice made the air in the cabin move and John felt it vibrate through his ribs. He raised himself on one elbow. His neck was stiff and his head heavy. His first immediate thought was “how clean it is here”. The hut was immaculate. He tried to turn on his side, but his stomach wouldn’t let him.

“Ah! Shit.”

The boots moved on the floor. His second, more developed, thought was to his impression of the face of the man who was leaning over him. He was the spitting image of Edward Bunker.

“Where the fuck am I?”

“You speak French? Yes or no? Where do you come from?”

“The U.S.A.”

“Can you get up?”

He really was Bunker: green eyes, hair not quite so white, but the resemblance went further than his features. It was the face of a wild beast who had worn his teeth down on the bars of a cage.

“Am I in prison?”

Bunker raised his eyebrows, stopping a smile.

“You catch on quick, beat up or not.”

“I’m a psychologist.”

“A psychologist! Shit, Mesrine, get a load of that.”

The black dog sprang up.

“Down, boy!”

On Bunker’s hand, a cross tattooed with ink surrounded with little lines, no doubt symbolising the divine light of window in a prison high-security wing. Maybe he didn’t look all that much like the famous ex-con and crime writer from Los Angeles after all, but he was from the same stable. John was sure of it.

The dog poked its head through Bunker’s legs and looked at him as if it were meeting a shrink for the first time.

“Yanks come in bigger sizes of everything, eh? Shrinks don’t look like you round here. Not so bloody stupid either.”

“It’s not a prison …?”

“Way off. Public garden.”

“But you
were
in prison, right?”

The grizzled bear tensed. The dog shrank back at the same time, fur ruffled, looking fiercer than at first.

“Now tell me, what the fuck you were doin’ in my park?”

John groped for an honest answer.

“Someone stole my car. And I got beat up because of somebody else. And I like trees.”

The dog relaxed its ears, and sat down. On the keeper’s face, which had all the expression of a breeze block, loneliness was fighting a battle with distrust. John managed to twist himself to a sitting position on the bed, clutching his belly.

“I live in a hut too. Were you in for long?”

The old keeper put his hand behind his back and pulled out a small weighted cosh. It just fitted in his hand, dark, polished and in theory unthreatening, as harmless as the dog. John followed it
with his eyes, one hand on the back of his neck. It landed on the table. Crash.

“Long enough to know a dropout when I see one. You been in the shit long?”

He was still trying to give an honest answer, because Bunker clearly had a nose for the truth. A talent that years in jail must beat into you. But the big American couldn’t speak and just looked at him without saying a word.

“Yeah, I can see it wasn’t yesterday.”

John stood up slowly. The cabin was only about three metres by five, and between them they almost filled it. He didn’t find it hard to look unthreatening, but Bunker was still in a defensive position, legs apart. The old lag had the hard-boiled grin of a cock of the walk. His park-keeper’s costume fitted him about as well as a theory would a wardrobe.

The American bent down to look at the dog.

“What does ‘Mesrine’ mean? Sounds like a chemical or protein or something.”

Bunker’s thin lips parted and he ended up smiling. Between his incisors was a gap, oddly like a little boy’s. But the smile made him even more dangerous. An uncontrollable libertarian madness. The smile and the eyes were fuelled by some kind of nuclear reactor, that he must have been carrying round since his childhood. Logically enough, it had taken him to prison.

“Bloody hell, don’t they teach you anything at shrink school? Mesrine’s not a chemical! He was an enemy of the system! And how come you sometimes talk with an American accent, but not all the time?”

Bunker’s confidence in strangers was not that well developed.

“My mother’s French.”

Bunker looked serious and consulted an old clock with a scarred glass face.

“10.00 a.m., kid. Let’s have a quick shot of red.”

The idea of a glass of red wine made John’s stomach rise in revolt.

“Yeah, sure.”

The cabin was an improved garden shed, furnished by the joint efforts of the Red Cross and the ex-convict. A cell, clean and tidy. Three books, the unlit stove, a shelf for clothes, a naked bulb swinging from the ceiling, two chairs, a table, the camp bed and a mat for Mesrine. In one corner stood a small wooden chest, repainted God knew how many times, a hot plate and three bowls. The light entered through two windows with small panes, and behind one of them in a plastic pot some red geraniums were swaying in the wind. If it had had four wheels it would have been a gipsy caravan; made of canvas it would be a tepee; of corrugated iron, a shack in a shanty town, except that the floor wasn’t beaten earth. While Bunker was feeling around in his kitchen corner, John went over to his bag and checked that the bow was still in one piece. The confused memory of the latest events snatched a grimace from him. At least he was on his feet, and although he didn’t have much experience of being beaten up, it didn’t feel as if anything serious was broken. He scrutinised more carefully the photograph for April 1983 on the wall. A blonde pin-up, something between
Playboy
and Pierre et Gilles, a madonna for prison cells, faded but forever young, like a memory. He lifted the page and glanced at May. A garden strimmer this time. And more generous breasts. Twelve women for Bunker. John smiled at the thought of these girls, dreaming of an artistic career by posing nude and then ending up as fantasies for long-term prisoners. It was charity work. You had to give them that. Bunker put two Duralex glasses on the table, with an unlabelled litre of wine.