Bed of Nails (21 page)

“Drink up. I got nothing to do but listen.”

Like every time he talked about Alan, John’s American accent was stronger.

“The C.I.A., N.S.A., and F.B.I., the secret services, they’ve always got cutting-edge technology, but that’s not the only thing they’re into. They’re into psychology and social science as well. They call it ‘intelligence’.
Bullshit
. Torture isn’t the best way to get information. Eighty per cent of stuff you get that way isn’t reliable: pressure, lies, memory failure, phoney confessions, anything to stop the pain. The things that really work are spying and truth-telling drugs. Torture’s a form of psychological warfare. When people talk about gratuitous torture, they think it isn’t to get information, that it’s pure sadism. But really it’s the opposite, it’s the true torture. The idea is to demolish the enemy, then let a few go back home. To tell the tale. They demolish them, Bunk, so they won’t give you any trouble in future, you’re going to build a perfect world of tomorrow, using guys who don’t share your vision of democracy. And you let them loose like a virus, a virus of fear and silence. Torture means attacking an individual to terrorise a group. You create these lonely men, the walking dead, and they strike fear into people. And if you want to manufacture torturers, same thing. You take regular guys and transform them. You empty them out and then fill them with whatever suits you. You get a trained soldier, someone in the secret police, or a scientist who sees enemies everywhere. And around these guys, with films and newspapers, you build a world that tells them they’re absolutely right, paranoid and ignorant. And to make it all work properly and efficiently, you
need some specialists, intellectuals, people like me. Creating torturers isn’t something you can simply improvise. Then, after that, you find some guys like Alan. That’s not the hardest bit.

“He had no idea the Gulf War was about to happen, he only joined the army to get out of Kansas. He was recruited when he was still in the mud on Parris Island, the boot camp for the marines. Alan was good and ready for all this, a whole new custom-built family. Unbelievable what a man will do to get out of Kansas. His instructor, the one who found him, he was in the C.I.A. and he was heading up a new programme. So Alan spent four months in a training centre in the navy base in San Diego. At first he didn’t get what was going on with this special job. They never tell you directly, it’s all very gradually eased into place. You’re an
intelligence specialist
. And he was a good pupil. To create a torturer, first of all you show him what the other side did – in Korea, Japan, Vietnam. And on the other side, of course they’re doing the same thing, showing
their
soldiers what was done in Korea, Japan, Vietnam. You want to terrorise your enemies, and the result is just the opposite: you get to be so goddam disgusting that you’re the direct cause of the resistance. If they torture your father and mother, what do you do? Give them a hand burning the bodies? Don’t laugh, Bunk, there are professionals in the military who still don’t get it.

“Alan was in one of the first planes that took off for Iraq in ’91, with the Intelligence staff. This was a new war, a new generation, new technology. Nothing original about it. Just perfecting the old ways. You give your victims a cocktail of drugs, you mess up their biological clocks, light, sleep, you put them in cages too small to lie down, too low to stand up, or boxes where you
can
only stand up, for days. You alternate the things you do, the kind of humiliation, depending on the people you torture; you adapt it for religion, or culture or sex; you make threats, give them false information: your brother said this, your pal’s confessed, your father’s dead, that kind
of thing. And the guys in charge, they watch their men as closely as the prisoners: they’re sensitive machines, you’ve got to look after them. You can’t let it get out of hand, let the sadists go off and do whatever they want. The progress that’s been made in torture these days, it’s in the quality of the people doing it. Alan was very fragile before. Over there, he was one of the tough guys, a real asshole. He took it out on people’s bodies. He told me that when he was doing that, he could feel in his head that his father was proud of him. Or so his instructor was telling him. This guy, his commanding officer, he knew Alan’s whole life story. Successful torture is when you’ve destroyed the victim’s ideology. And a well-trained torturer gets his own ideology inside the other guy’s head. That’s what ideology is, Bunk. A distorting mirror, where the enemy has the same twisted face as you. Alan’s boss was just a machine for processing ideas that weren’t his own. But who has their own ideas anyway? If you’re a good subject, you can do everything they tell you to, and even get the feeling you’re free. Alan liberated himself in Iraq, you could say. But all the same, there was something inside him that put up resistance. A paradox. He thought the army had freed him from his past, and that he could start living a new life afterwards … his own life. So he got out. When he got back from the desert, he left the army. Well, what he did, he broke his contract, he deserted. But when he found himself out of the army, he couldn’t recognise the world he’d had described to him, and that felt strange. Strange to feel like the men he’d sent away with their balls ripped off.

“So, Alan started to take heroin, because it’s a drug that cuts you off from the world. He was already pretty hooked on drugs anyway, coming out of the army. And afterwards he found it perfectly normal to be like the men he had tortured. To take his clothes off in the street, to roll on broken glass, not to sleep any more, to have nightmares and to have sex with guys he felt nothing for. The army
made a success of him, but the wrong way round: now he started warning Americans off going to war. That’s what his fakir show was all about. A fight inside one man, between the victim and the torturer, in front of the public that had created him. He was doing what he had done to his victims the other way round. So we worked together to try and fix what my colleagues had broken. When he got to Paris, the worst was over. He’d become a kind of image of himself and he was soon going to lose that. In the Caveau, when he met this embassy guy, Hirsh, he thought it was hilarious. Picking up a gay American diplomat who went to the same kind of hangout that he did? Another mirror image, another one claiming some kind of false victory. Having sex in Hirsh’s office, I don’t know how he managed it. It must have made him laugh so much. Then one day, meeting Hirsh at the embassy, he saw Frazer, the so-called secretary. That’s not his real name. The man who recruited Alan back in ’90, in South Carolina. He was with Alan in the Gulf. Frazer came to see Patricia this morning, and he beat her up. I’ve never seen him, but Alan told me about him. When she described him, I knew just who she was talking about. His real name’s Lundquist. Alan went nuts when he recognised him. He started injecting again. He just collapsed.

“That was two months ago. That’s when he came to see me. After that, and I know how, he blackmailed Lundquist. It’s not Alan’s dealer who wants me out of town, it’s Lundquist, Samuel Lundquist. His name is all over my thesis. Alan must have used my work to blackmail him. Patricia said that Lundquist gave Alan some money. Three days before he died.”

Bunker looking somewhat stunned had his glass to his lips, but forgot to drink.

“And you know the funny thing? The reason I didn’t publish my thesis, was to protect Alan. The F.B.I. contacted me when I’d done all the research, and they told me not to publish it, or Alan
would go to jail. He had signed a contract with the army,
security clearance. Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information
. Compartmented! That’s a real military euphemism. They were blackmailing me, they didn’t want any of my thesis in the public domain. Well, I signed up to the deal, and told Alan to get out of the country, to go to France. He died because he went back on the deal that was protecting him. So Lundquist – and the people who must be behind him – will be wondering what I’m going to do now. All that stuff, the first Gulf War, it was fifteen years ago, but of course now we’re into another never-ending war, with more torture. And in my thesis there are plenty of names of people still in post. When I was writing it, Alan and I, we’d decided we would spill the beans. I didn’t respect scientific objectivity, as my profs would say. But that’s what Alan wanted, and me too. But, now, what am I going to do? I’ve no idea, no
fucking
idea at all.”

Bunker waited for the rest. The kid’s indecision didn’t seem like a proper conclusion. John smiled and raised his glass.

“The girl, Patricia, she told me to get out of her life and never try to see her again. If that’s what interests you.”

“Ah. So she wasn’t lying.”

“Not this time.”

“So she said the opposite of what she thought.”

“Bunk, I called my mother in San Francisco. The F.B.I. came and did a search in the house. They took everything, my laptop, my notes, all the work I had left there. And I called my thesis supervisor. Same thing at U.C.L.A.: they took everything.”

The old keeper was twiddling his cap in his fingers, staring into the distance, over a playground, a tennis court, the park railings and the rue Guynemer. His boyish smile had vanished, leaving just an ersatz fixed grin, in contradiction to the anger in his eyes.

“Something there doesn’t fit, son.”

“The Aouch brothers …”

“Boukrissi’s just an ordinary crook, it must be your Lundquist who’s pulling his strings.”

“He may have killed Alan.”

“They know where I am. You’ve put a bomb under my cabin, sonny.”

John dropped his gaze, breathed out and then faced up to Bunker’s thermonuclear expression.

“Um, it’s not over, yet. I … I met this French detective and he thinks Alan didn’t commit suicide. He wants us to share what we’ve got, work together.”

The ex-con’s jaw muscles clenched and unclenched. His gappy teeth ground like rusty hinges.

“Bunk …”

“Shut up!”

“I’ve got something else to ask you.”

Mesrine had pressed himself up against his master’s legs. Bunker’s lips didn’t move. The words seemed to come out of his forehead, from a swollen vein throbbing under the scar.

“Son, I told you to drop it. Your artist was right. Maybe you got your reasons, but you don’t half go round dumping other people in the shit.”

The cup of decaff reeked of pointlessness. Guérin fiddled with the stitches on his cheek to try to stay awake. He kept looking at his watch, checking that time was going past outside the room with no windows: 6.12 p.m.

Nobody in No. 36 was yet aware that the whole floor was smouldering away underneath them. Savane had relit the fuse by blowing his brains out.

The Big Theory was on the point of collapse, sabotaged by Kowalski’s return. It was sinking, and Guérin along with it, in a tangle of obscure, isolated trails. The Caveau, Nichols, three ghosts and Savane. The letter. An incoherent mess. One thought obsessed Guérin, a keystone with rocky foundations: he had to move in on Roman. And prove that the whole edifice was built on nothing. A precarious shell suspended from a set of illusions. Which he proposed to sweep away. There was no victory on the horizon. He would just have to introduce a wedge, and whatever the scale of the collapse, he would either be crushed or survive. Move in on Roman.

He stared at the door to the archive room, his arms folded, enveloped in a silence loud with questions. In his mind, he walked in between the shelves, revisiting the files, without remembering having ever found sufficient reasons for the suicides listed there. The dead have no way of justifying themselves, and the dossiers
could never contain all the possible elements behind their choice. The reasons of the dead have to be looked for in the living. The choice made by Savane. Move in on Roman.

All he lacked now was some excuse to move into action; but he could find none. He scratched at his stitches, glanced at his watch again: 6.14 p.m. Why was he so reluctant to do what he had to do?

The telephone rang. Guérin sat without moving, deaf to the sounds of the telephone that was shouting an answer at him.

It went on ringing. Lambert looked enquiringly at the boss, and in the end he picked it up. He listened, took notes, using his elbow to anchor a slip of paper. His voice echoing in the office sounded like Guérin’s.

“Car exhaust, underground garage, avenue Victor Hugo. Boss?”

Guérin was looking at Lambert with his head on one side: his face lit up with a friendly smile.

The little lieutenant took a deep breath and slipped Savane’s letter into his pocket, not worried now about his career, or the consequences, or the reasons of the people who were still in post. Death, the leader of the dance, had just made a phone call. The answer had come from the catacombs, the foundations of everything, delivered by a Hermes in a tracksuit.

In his little world of the archives, what could he ever change except the past? His mistake had been to think that he would act for the future.

He stood up, in the name of the dead.

“O.K., let’s go, Lambert, but I need to drop in at my place on the way.”

Guérin slipped a few tools into his coat pockets. A set of skeleton keys, a torch, a small clawhammer, and a pair of gloves. Churchill said nothing. Just a bundle of feathers, crouching on his perch. The parrot’s breast was now bare, revealing his sad, grey wrinkled skin.
His clipped wings were mere stumps. The bird who had never flown was methodically pulling out his plumage.

Guérin put some seed in his dish. The bird gave him a baleful look and went back to work on itself.

Avenue Victor Hugo: a parking space in the basement of a stone building. The man had made it a point of honour to die gripping the wheel in the official driving-school position, hands at ten past ten.

De Rochebrune, a writer, journalist, economist, publisher and essayist. Yes, he’d tried everything: the remaining possibilities must have seemed too trivial. His wife, talking non-stop, for fear of having to surrender to the evidence, insisted on telling her husband’s life story in detail. She drowned her lack of understanding in sociological explanations, a futile stream of words that Guérin let flow without interrupting. This man had left a much longer suicide note than Savane’s. A typescript of 200 pages on the passenger seat. This couple were both wordy. Either he’d written something really good before dying, or he hadn’t and was providing an explanation for his death. Box ticked.