Bed of Nails (2 page)

“Lambert?”

The big fair-haired junior jumped, slipping his hands under the desk.

“Yessir!”

“Could you go and fetch us some coffee, please.”

Lambert trailed off down the corridor, hoping not to meet too many people. On the way, he once more wondered why in the quai des Orfèvres no-one ever used first names. They said things like “Roman’s divorced again”, “Lefranc’s depressed”, “That dope Savane is in trouble”, “Guérin is completely nuts”, and so on. No
first names. To his mind, it was odd to talk in such a detached way among supposed friends.

Guérin listened as the trailing footsteps of his colleague died away, and stared into the distance. Invariably, the sound of old trainers dragging along on the floor reminded him of holidays and the luxury hotel for middle-income tourists in Morocco where he had once booked himself into a room. A palace with unreliable plumbing, where the waiters, with drowsy zeal, walked around slowly, dragging their feet, as they brought trays of mint tea. A week spent sitting on the hotel terrace, looking at the sea, into which he had not once dipped a toe, just listening to the waiters’ footsteps. Lambert’s shoes, echoing in the corridor of H.Q. reminded him of the sound of the waves washing over the beach. There was a direct link between his junior and the Atlantic tide. A link, one of many, that nobody had ever made. As the sound of the sea grew fainter, he wondered why Lambert went on calling him “boss” or sometimes “sir”, like the Moroccan waiters, whereas he had told him a hundred times just to call him Guérin.

He suddenly realised that there was another undeniable link between people being called “sir” and
holidays
. Hadn’t it been his own boss, Barnier, who had advised him to take that break? “
Guérin, why don’t you just get away from Paris and the squad for a bit? Things will have calmed down by the time you get back. Are you listening, Guérin, just take some leave, go away somewhere, anywhere
.” So the words “sir” or “boss” really had no business in the workplace. Guérin plunged into the file again, but was distracted by these exotic images and the direct connection he would always make from now on between disciplinary leave and Islam.

Lambert came back with two plastic cups of coffee: he put one on his boss’s desk: black, no sugar. The other one, frothy and heaped with half a ton of demerara, he put on his own desk. Before
sitting down, he went over to the wall and smartly tore a little sheet off the calendar. In red figures and letters, it now said: 14 April 2008. He went back to his seat and started to drink his coffee, still looking at the date.

Two years earlier, when he got back from Morocco, Guérin had been directed to this poky office. Two desks, a strip-light, two chairs, a few electric sockets and two doors, as if the way in and the way out were not the same. In fact, there wasn’t really a way out of this office. Behind one of the tables, a long thin strand of white coral with a human head sat facing a wall without a window, calmly contemplating the future. Since that day, it had seemed as if Lambert had never budged from his seat and that the future had definitely postponed its arrival until some later date.

The office was at the very end of the building, at the western point of the Ile de la Cité, in central Paris. To reach it you had to go through half of No. 36, or use a side entrance and an old service staircase. Barnier had handed Guérin the keys, giving him to understand that going through the other offices to get there would be a wasted effort. “
Your new assistant
,” Barnier had said. “
Your new office. Your new job. Suicides. Guérin. From now on, you’re Suicides and Suicides is you
.”

The second door opened into a much bigger room, of which their office was the antechamber. The archives of all the suicides in Paris. Or part of them anyway, the ones that ended up in the prefecture of police. Why they had been chosen, he and Lambert, as guard dogs for this endless vista of shelves and files, was a sign he had not yet interpreted. But he was a patient man.

The archives were no longer consulted these days; they were the anachronistic remains of files now kept on computer, the paper copies made for insurance companies and rarely requested. Almost every month the question arose of chucking them out onto a rubbish dump. Guérin was now the only person who added to
them or spent hours looking at them, apart from the odd sociology student who came from time to time to investigate social behaviour. It was these students who allowed the archive to survive. The University of Paris had declared the deposit a research resource, and getting rid of it would cause a row. The oldest files went back to the industrial revolution, a time when suicide, as a sort of counterbalance to progress, had embarked on its golden age. Guérin, during the two years since he had listened to the waves on the beach, had become something of a specialist on voluntary death. Ten or so cases a week, hundreds of hours in the archives. He had become a walking encyclopedia on Parisian suicides. Any aspect you could think of: methods, social categories, seasons, family situation, time of day, trends, legislation, influence of religion, age, district – you name it. After the first week spent riffling through these dusty box-files, he had almost forgotten why he had ended up in this dead-end job.

Suicides was a dreaded chore at the Criminal Investigation Department. Not really an established service, but an aspect of police work that had a natural tendency to be separated from the other kinds of case. Every presumed suicide was the subject of a report, confirming or contesting the facts. Where there was any doubt, an investigation was opened: in almost every case, it was simply a matter of ticking boxes. If there was an investigation, it was taken out of Guérin’s hands and fetched up with characters like Berlion and Savane. The hierarchical powers that sent you to Suicides could only be overturned by even more powerful forces, of whose existence nobody was certain. The only exit paths out of Suicides were retirement, resignation on account of depression, committal to an institution – or even, and these cases were more frequent in this branch of the police force than any other – ending it all with a service revolver in the mouth. All these options, with varying orders of preference, had been wished on Guérin. The only
one no-one had anticipated was that he would take to it like a duck to water.

But that was what had happened.

As a result, Guérin had added a new layer to the pre-existing hate of his colleagues: the visceral repulsion inspired by perverts, who, when plunged into something everyone else thinks revolting, actually seem to be enjoying themselves.

Two years earlier, Guérin, aged forty and a top graduate from the Officer Training School, had already had both admirers and enemies. But everyone respected his competence, choosing to ignore certain odd aspects of his behaviour. Then there were the incidents, more and more frequent, outside the usual field of thinking and the classic methods of investigation. The incidents were put down to his Nobel-sized brain, which people hoped was working, even if it was not always easy to follow. But two years later, his career was over, he was personally disliked, and his assistant was universally considered a halfwit.

After the fall, Guérin had undergone psychological tests. They had tried to find something physically amiss as well, so that he could be fired. But no valid reason for early retirement had been discovered, either physically or mentally. If there was anything like madness in his makeup, it fitted quite easily into the tickboxes for normality. Dr Furet – an independent psychiatrist who had been consulted because of some administrative slip-up – had put a note in Guérin’s file which had inspired some gossip: “The subject, in a perfectly reasoned way, seems to think, just as some people see God as a concept unifying everything else, that the world can only be comprehended and explained, in other words that the subject’s police work can only be accomplished, if the idea is accepted (is that so absurd?) that
everything is connected
. No event can be understood or conceived in isolation without losing sight of its meaning, causality and effects. The subject is perfectly sane, and fit for police work.”

Furet had also said to Barnier who was gently pressing him to reconsider his diagnosis: “He may make mistakes, like anyone else, but sack him from the force and if you’re going to be logical, you should resign at the same time. And you could change the Minister of Justice while you’re at it.”

Guérin had stayed. In Suicides.

Poised on the edge of a landslide away from objectivity, the little lieutenant was still concentrating on the case of the kamikaze nudist, which seemed more and more suspicious. Looking for support from his junior, and anxiously rubbing his glossy bald head with one hand, he asked the question again.

“Really, what do you think?”

Looking up at the ceiling, Lambert spoke slowly.

“I didn’t hear it rain in the night.”

Guérin didn’t catch his meaning at first, then looked up too. The pink stain had, indeed, got bigger.

Their office was on the top floor, under the attics. Or more precisely under the drying room. The roof leaked, and rain tended to seep inside onto the clothes hanging up there, then started dripping, now laden with blood. The rainwater collected in a pool on the wooden floor, and trickled between the planks into the plaster in the ceiling below, where it created a rose-pink stain of variable shape, expanding and shrinking above their heads, depending on the amount of rainfall. Every time the stain shrank, it left a series of concentric tawny rings, like a cross section of amethyst. It had rained that night and into the morning. Heavy rain, announcing that spring was on the way. The pink stain had got bigger, a living amethyst, the mineral pulse of dead victims, whose clothes, stiff with blood, were stored in the attics. Police evidence, which in summer gave off an unbearable stench.

Guérin looked at the stain in silence. The sound of the waves,
Lambert’s trainers, the truck’s wheels skidding on the wet asphalt, the blood-tinted stain on the ceiling, all merged into a kind of three-dimensional and stereophonic idea: modernisation would never be able to do without these large rooms with their crammed shelves. Everything had to have its place.

He stood up, opened the door to the archives, and walked in between the rows of files. At the end of the room, he pulled down a large box from a shelf, and put the ring-road dossier into it, along with the video cassette. Polishing his head, like a housemaid cleaning a silver soup tureen, he walked away from the murmur of the archives, cellulose sediments whose music he alone could hear.

He sat back down in the office and, like Lambert, looked up at the stain again. The imperceptible movement of water and blood, spreading slowly as if by capillary action, was accompanied by the regular scraping of their chairs on the ground, as they shifted their buttocks backwards, anticipating the deluge.

The telephone rang several times before either of them heard it.

It rang on average about one and a half times a day, with two extremes over the year: the peak was in June and early July, when the sunshine increased social agitation like a chemical reaction affected by heat, and the lowest point was from December to January, when the cold seemed to make life move sluggishly, depriving people of the energy to harm themselves.

Guérin looked at his watch, answered the telephone and took down the details in his notebook, then the faded yellow raincoat stood up, like a ghost.

From the doorway he looked back at his junior who was still absorbed in gazing at the ceiling.

“Coming? We’ve got work to do.”

Lambert followed Guérin who was rubbing his head again awkwardly.

“You’ve got to stop showing things from our files to other people. I told you to watch the tape, not to organise a film show. Do you understand?”

Red-faced, Lambert pulled up the zip of his tracksuit top.

“Yes, sir.”

White clouds on a blue-grey background were streaming across the sky, propelled by winds at high altitude but leaving the world below at rest. As he emerged from their isolated staircase, Guérin paid them no attention.

While his assistant started the staff car, he thought once more about the T.V. programmes he had watched the night before, in an effort to relax. He racked his brains to try to find the link, because he knew there was one, between the vanished civilisation of Easter Island and trout fishing in Montana. A little exercise to distract him from his lack of desire to look at the dull eyes of a corpse.

Lambert started whistling “Le petit vin blanc”. He liked driving, feeling the engine doing all the work while he made no effort.

As they drove along the bank of the Seine, Guérin wondered if the inhabitants of Easter Island – since thousands of them must have been employed in carving those stones as high as houses to please their chiefs – had perhaps fished the local waters so much that they ended up starving to death. It made sense, since there was no longer a tree left on the island to produce so much as a single nut, once they had finished putting up their statues. The last of them, since there was no more wood to transport them, had even remained in the quarries. Deforestation, soil erosion, overpopulation, running out of food, over-fishing the sea and you were back to square one: zero population. As for the fishermen in Montana, they were complaining about the cutting down of forests, land degradation and the pollution of the rivers from copper mining. The trout were dying out, decimated by parasites that flourished in waters
where the ecological balance had been disturbed, and now young people were emigrating from the state because there was no work for them on unproductive farms without crops. So the link was the trees. The cause in one case was the carving of great rock sculptures, in the other the timber and mining companies. And the result: the end of an outdoor sport, and the wiping out of a whole civilisation.

Besides, when the giant sculptures had appeared on television, Churchill had cackled with laughter. He never missed a chance to mock humans whenever they deserved it. In conclusion, Guérin told himself, nowadays it was no more reasonable to swim in the sea than to dig the ground, since Man, an unbalanced species, had already buried countless pieces of evidence of his crimes in the earth. More even than were left on the surface.