Bed of Nails (27 page)

The little detective wasn’t put out, but he was anxious.

“You’re afraid something might happen in the club?” John winked. “Or to Ariel?”

Guérin’s neck and scalp blushed scarlet. He cleared his throat.

“Do you have a gun, Monsieur Nichols?”

“What? No. But I can get hold of one. You think that’s necessary? But I don’t know how to handle a gun.”

“It’s not for you, John.” Guérin stood upright. “It’s for me.”

The American creased into laughter.

“You don’t have a gun? You’re the
police
, and you’re asking
me
to get you a gun?”

“I’ve never had one.”

“You will help me, then?”

“You can use the phone in the other room.”

John went into the main room of the flat with caution. The parrot, rocking to and fro on its perch, stretched its neck out towards him with a fixed stare. John dialled the embassy number.

“Can I speak to Secretary Frazer, please? This is John Nichols.”

The switchboard put him on hold, to the strains of Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World”.

When Frazer answered, Churchill extended his neck at full stretch and screeched “Haaa! Assaaassin!”, the veins on his bare neck standing out.

On the landing John shook Guérin’s hand.

“Thanks for all this.”

“Forget it. Do you know what Churchill once said?”

“He said a lot, didn’t he?”

“He said in wartime the only real enemy is the truth.”

“Yeah, well, he was a politician and a soldier, so I guess he knew what he was talking about.”

“Till tonight then, John.”

*

Bunker was walking back down the road, after having hung about a while in the café. In fact it was almost six, and he had been soaking up red wine for getting on for three hours. His mission was completed. He was on holiday in the countryside now. The ordinary wine at the café was fine, he had no timetable and he didn’t need anything else. He had drunk until he didn’t feel like another mouthful. In the end, the barman had opened up. Between four and six, they’d been matching each other, glass for glass. Roger, with his balloon-like red nose, had told him all about the village. Bunker inspired confidence in professionals. He didn’t go into a bar to play chess, to a brothel to have a chat, or to a casino to write a book. When he stood leaning on the counter of a bar, the barmen facing him felt they existed for good reason. Tea-pissers can get lost, as Roger remarked after their eighth glass. A customer of Bunker’s capacity pleased him. Once he was launched, he was unstoppable. He told Bunker about when he lived in Cahors, and played football, the “honour division” of Montauban after the war, and how he had got married. He poured out his life story with the impression that he was having a proper discussion because Bunker listened with his granite face. In fact the old lag had said hardly anything. He simply nodded, asked the odd question, setting the barman off again when he looked like drying up. One question per glass. Until he was now fairly well tanked up.

“Another one, Roger, please? So you know the American?”

Roger filled the glasses, without bothering to wipe up the spillages.

“Old story, mate. I wasn’t here then, but I heard about it.”

Bunker raised his glass.

“Cheers. What’s it about then?”

“Oof,” (intake of breath). “Goes back to the days when there was
this commune here, a whole bunch of hippies. They lived down in that valley, this was before I came. ’Bout twenty of them, all young, I think. And there was this American guy with them. Some say he fell in the river and drowned, some say it was an accidental overdose, and some say he did it on purpose. Nobody really knows. Anyway, after that, they all left. There was this woman, she stayed on a bit. The dates, people don’t agree about, but she was certainly pregnant. Then she left too. So when this new American came back here, you know the big blond one, not the other, the old people round here said he was the spitting image of the guy who died. Well, course, he was his son, wasn’t he? His father’s buried here in Lentillac. Bertrand’s the only one left now of all of them, the old hippy. He’s got a farm. One night when I’d been here a bit, Bertrand, he’d had a few. He was sitting right there, just like you are. And some hunters came in. He doesn’t like ’em. Well, I don’t know how it came up, but he started to talk about guns and all that, and he said that was what was wrong with the world, weapons made everyone stupid buggers. That’s what he said: ‘stupid buggers’. And he got a bit carried away, and he told me the Yank who was here, the one who died, he’d been in Vietnam, and it had done his head in. Wars, hunting, nuclear weapons, Father Christmas, he mixed everything up. But I remember him talking about it. And I’ve got some mates who were in Indochina, and I can tell you, they weren’t too good when they came back neither. If you want any more, you’ll have to ask Bertrand.”

Bunker allowed the conversation to drift on to other less interesting subjects, knocked back a few more glasses, and left to go back up the road.

On the way out of the village, he pushed open the gate of the cemetery. A few dozen graves in the evening sun, an ancient lime tree and a view out over the valley. A nice place. He found it quickly. No flowers, just a simple headstone and a dusty slab.

Patrick Nichols
1948 Austin Texas
1974 Lentillac France

Bunker sat on the edge of the Michaud family tomb opposite that of John Nichols’ father.

Mesrine lay at his feet, indifferent to the scenery, because the ground was warm.

Bunker, chin in hand murmured to himself.

“Stupid little bugger.”

Without knowing whether he meant the father or the son.

When he reached the track, he wondered whether to go on down the road, as far as Bertrand’s farm. But he was pretty far gone already and had learned more than he wanted to know. He decided to put it off until the next day. There was plenty of time. Mesrine was already bounding in the direction of the tepee.

“O.K. dog, we’ll just be
chez nous
tonight. We’ll have a bite to eat.” Bunker set off down the track, wondering what was happening in Paris. He was slightly annoyed with himself for not telling the kid how much he was enjoying himself here. He hadn’t thanked him, or even told him to take care of himself.

It was still warm. Encouraged by the wine, Bunker promised himself he’d have a dip in the stream.

Mesrine rushed up the next incline. The sun was slowly sinking behind the northern ridge, bathing the southern slope in a golden glow. Bunker could see the big oak tree. He was back in time for his first real sunset in twenty-five years.

The cook, as hirsute and pale-skinned as before, had exchanged his apron for a black T-shirt. He didn’t really have the build of a bouncer, but was perfect as doorkeeper for a S and M show. A well-dressed couple went in, thirty-somethings, the woman pretty and blonde, the man a smooth type in a suit, ill at ease in a place where no-one cared how much money he was making. The Gorgon with the Gauloise held the door open, without paying them any attention. As he saw John approach, he raised an eyebrow.

“Tonight, super show. Boss’ll be pleased to see you. She’s on edge, first show since that night with Alan.”

“Lots of people?”

“We’ll soon be turning them away.”

“A friend of mine should be coming, man with a walking stick. Is he here?”

“Not yet. But I’ll see he gets in.” He moved aside to let John pass. “
Enjoy the show
,” he said in English as he glanced distrustfully down the rue de l’Hirondelle

John went in, clenching his fists.

The hangings had been pulled aside. On the stage there were some accessories, dimly lit. A table, some skewers, hooks suspended in the air, a knife, bottles, and torches. The room was packed, the audience squeezed up in the aisles. A hundred, maybe more.
Electro-rock music was playing from side speakers, pulsing away in a heartbeat rhythm. Some people were crammed together round tables, others were standing. The coat racks were overloaded and clouds of smoke from the red candles on the tables wafted under the lights. It was as dark and stifling as an oven.

Most of the faces were young: gelled hair, tattooed arms, piercings. Goth pin-up girls in long black coats, with boots covered in buckles and smiles etched in black make-up to match their nails. Some of the guys wore make-up too, looking like a mixture of owls and crows. Night birds, their pupils dilated by pills and powder. Vampires who flocked to see fakirs in this place with its antique stone walls, white-faced disciples of morbid poetry. Disguises, masquerades, eternal teenagers under long shapeless coats, their flesh either hidden or covered with cosmetics; originality and conformism, a perpetually chewed contradiction. Men watching men, women watching women. They merged together, a mass of bodies.

The audience sitting at the tables was older, less noisy, all wearing black too, but more soberly dressed. John Lennon glasses, post-Goth-punk intellectuals, waiting in silence. Women with tightly pursed lips, grinding their teeth instead of laughing. Habitués of extreme conceptual art. They liked watching S and M shows with timid little pats on the bottom, to pass the time intelligently and relieve the boredom of sex. They had come to watch a man suffer without complaining, although they themselves probably moaned all day long, boring their shrinks, their partners and their friends to death with their egotistical agonies. They had come to watch a real-life actor, a living man, piercing his skin. A plucked parrot, a Saint Sebastian in search of his
amour propre
. Self-love was what the audience came looking for. Giving yourself a scare by watching a man suffer was one way of getting through to your inner self.

John laughed inwardly and his laugh turned to a grimace. Sebastian, they said, survived the arrows because the archers loved
him too much. They dared not aim at his heart. Fakirs and martyrs have to consider the public’s love for them as their most serious hope. The path to holiness on one condition: persuade them that you are dying in ecstasy under the blows. It’s a show.

But that evening in the Caveau, it wasn’t love that had drawn them along. They were there because of death. The death they had either missed, or wanted to see again. How many of these people had been present when Alan died?

John unbuttoned his shirt and wiped the sweat from his chest. How many of these were making a return visit?

Saint Sebastian had survived the arrows and then died when he was beaten to death by a less scrupulous public.

The guy on stage was going to need a stiff drink.

An Asian waitress in a bra and skirt, tattooed to the eyebrows, and with the muscles of a karate specialist or a ballet dancer, was gliding between the customers, holding a champagne bucket above her head. She put it on a table just in front of the stage. John watched the well-dressed couple from the door sit down there, joining another wealthy pair of Parisian bourgeois. The women were sexy in a classy way with maximum slit skirts and décolleté, clothes that if they had been red instead of black would have made them look like whores. They had highly varnished nails and whitened teeth. They exchanged greetings without looking each other in the face. The two men, in casual shirts and dark jackets, shook hands in an exaggeratedly virile way. What a jolly start to the evening. Later, after the S and M act, they would have a little coke in a nightclub full of people like themselves, till the sweat poured into their eyes as they discuss bankers’ bonuses; then some partner-swapping; the exchange of like for like in a penthouse with mirrors, brought together by their possession of capital that would soon, after all, be exhausted.

The most expensive tables, up by the altar, were occupied
by addicts of the chic frisson, the ones Ariel had talked about. Aficionados of “this incredible act, you’ve just got to see it”, which would make their anaesthetised libidos explode, liberating the well-calibrated fantasies of a sterile class obsessed with its own preservation. An animal crowd all round them, so they could slum it a bit. And a front row seat for the smell of blood,

Leaning on a wall to right of the stage, bending his head because of the low ceiling, Lambert was wearing a yellow tracksuit, the only splash of colour in the whole room, but one hardly noticed him. His long form melted into the wall, as he leaned on an old poster for white magic. The tall, fair-haired policeman raised his gaze slowly towards John and their eyes met. Lambert was no longer wearing the happy smile of a kid watching planes taking off. It must be his new face that allowed him to merge into the mass of the Caveau. Lambert slowly turned his head towards a table on the other side of the room. John followed the direction of his gaze.

Guérin was sitting down. Ariel, in a tank-top, her arms glistening with sweat, was serving him a glass of beer. She was watching him intently, part mother hen, part she-wolf. Guérin was looking round, perhaps for a table with three people. A blonde woman and two men. He looked like a choirboy who had wandered into a brothel.

The
patronne
slipped between the tables and crossed the room in her leather pants, rubbing up against people as she passed. She was either trying to get the clientèle aroused, or looking for a little warmth in the icy furnace. She arrived in front of John and stood on tiptoe, straining to make herself heard.

“I kept you two seats like you asked. That little table there, just behind your pal. Where did you dig him up from?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Ariel was indeed on edge. She glanced round the room, as
disgusted as when it was empty. “What’s all this about? Alan still?”

John nodded. Ariel dropped back onto her heels again and tugged up her bra straps. She grinned, to give herself confidence.

“Go and sit down, I’ll bring you a drink. It starts in a couple of minutes.”

John made his way across the room, apologising to people, trying to shrink his shoulders so as not to jostle into them. But the bumps were hard, the bodies he met unyielding. He sat down at the table. On a card alongside the candle, Ariel had written
Reserved for Saint John Pierce
. John picked the card up to look closer. He turned his back on Guérin who did not see him smile.