Bed of Nails (7 page)

The soldier, having checked, gave him the nod but vetoed the rucksack, and directed him to a café further down the avenue Gabriel where he could leave it. John trudged off, wondering whether it was the same for everyone, or whether his bow was the problem. On the window of the sandwich bar, a notice said in English, “
Luggage deposit, 2
€
an hour
”. So perhaps the rule applied
to everyone. Once inside, before he could open his mouth, a waiter in a maroon apron and cap pointed towards a door. John left his bag in the middle of piles of drinks crates and an assortment of other suitcases and rucksacks. A nice little business that cost nothing and must have brought in a tidy amount of cash for the owner. When he came out of the room, the waiter gave him a date-stamped ticket.

The Texan marine looked askance at his clothes once more, then reacted a little more warmly to his fur-trapper identity. No doubt sensing that John was a fellow hunter, the youngster was nostalgic for road trips in an S.U.V. with his mates, drinking Budweisers and blasting antelopes with M.16s.

“The visitors’ entrance, sir, in back and on your left”.

Going through the porch, John reached the inner courtyard. A queue of about thirty people waiting for visas. Men and women of every origin, dressed in their Sunday best. John, looking like a backwoodsman, walked past them all with his U.S. passport. He found the visitor’s entrance at the left. The three G.I.s at the door made him empty his pockets and pass through the security archway. They put his keys and Swiss army knife in a plastic bag, asked if he had a mobile, and gave him a numbered badge. While a young woman was checking his appointment once more against a list, Hirsh came towards him, holding out his hand. He showed no hesitation or surprise on seeing this Franco-American lumberjack.

“Thank you for coming so quickly, Mr Nichols. Forgive me for keeping you waiting, but I wasn’t sure when you’d get here.”

Hirsh had not let go of his hand and hardly moved his lips when speaking, keeping his sympathetic smile intact. John’s first impression, formed from their telephone conversation, was confirmed. This immaculate young man of a good family, thirty to thirty-two, international haircut, with a well-moisturised and mildly tanned
complexion, was not just in love with French literature. He was a fellow traveller of Alan’s, of a different type.

John managed to construct a smile he had not used before, one combining gratitude, seriousness and fellow-feeling, though unsure of the result. Frank Hirsh blinked, trying to find an adequate reaction. In the end he simply said.

“I understand.”

Well, if so, hell, he was the only one.

“We’ve got a car waiting, if you could follow me, Mr Nichols.”

They retraced the way he had come in, and John collected the keys and knife, before passing out in front of the marine on the door.

A big black S.U.V. with C.D. plates was standing under the flag. A blond crewcut driver, about John’s height, was at the wheel. The other two got into the back and the car started.

As they passed the sandwich bar, John turned round. “Wait, my bag.”

“Stop the car please.”

He came back out a minute later, as the driver waited with the boot open. John loaded his scruffy rucksack and archery materials, and the blond giant slammed down the tailgate: his neck was oddly short, almost as wide as his shoulders. Readjusting his uniform, and smiling slightly, he was estimating John’s weight with an expert eye. John got back in, intrigued by the bodyguard’s aggressive stance.

“Where are we going?”

“The Medico-Legal Institute. The, er, Mr Mustgrave’s body is under the authority of the French police, until we can repatriate it to the States.”

“So what’s all this about his parents?”

“Umm.” Hirsh shifted his athletic shoulders under the well-cut suit. “It seems they either don’t want to make the trip, or they can’t.
To be honest, it’s not all that clear, and I haven’t spoken to them directly. They’ve gone through all the legal formalities, using a lawyer in Kansas City, and they decided to ask you to carry out anything required this end. It’s not exactly regular, because it seems you weren’t informed they’d chosen to do this, umm, nor were you told about Mr Mustgrave’s death. Have you any idea why they did it this way, Mr Nichols?”

“Well, for one thing, it was me that got Alan to come to Paris.”

“Any reason why they wouldn’t want to come themselves?”

Hirsh was more ill at ease than he should have been. John was irritated by his hesitations, his careful precautions and the tinted windows of the smooth-running car.

“Alan didn’t get on with his folks. For a long time now, I’ve been the one who sent news of him home. But that doesn’t mean they actually like me.”

Hirsh was looking fixedly straight ahead.

“
What’s going on?
”

By raising his voice, John had been hoping to surprise him. The driver glanced eagerly into the rear mirror, but Hirsh didn’t rise to the bait.

“We’ll soon be there, Mr Nichols.”

“How did he die?”

Hirsh half choked, turning it into a diplomatic fit of coughing.

“You know the kind of work Mr Mustgrave did, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It was a dangerous way of earning a living, one where, how shall I put this, accidents could happen.”

“Can you just give it me straight,” John said in French, using the familiar “
tu
”. Hirsh tugged at the knot in his tie and no doubt put the
tutoiement
down to Nichols’ imperfect French.

“Mr Mustgrave died during his act, Mr Nichols. He died on stage.”

John felt a wave of heat go through him, and the stench of death that had been following him since he set out for Paris started to alert his nostrils. He pressed a button to lower his window. The inside of the car was suddenly lighter, and beads of sweat were visible on Frank Hirsh’s tanned temples.

The driver parked the car outside a dusty brick building near the Seine. The four-storey box was squeezed between the river bank and the overhead metro. The rails swooped down from a metal bridge across the river and vanished underground, after a large curve encircling the Institute. The building looked sad and gloomy, even if you didn’t know it was full of corpses.

The sudden proximity of Alan’s body made John feel off-balance as he got out of the vehicle. He could have done with a shot of alcohol before going inside.

Hirsh walked in front of him to the entrance, visibly shrinking. It was almost as if John were going to have to support him, rather than the other way round.

“You’ve already been here?”

“Correct, Mr Nichols.”

He could hardly be fond of morgues, after all. It must be a part of the job that a degree from Harvard or Yale didn’t prepare you for. Not that John had ever seen a whole lot of corpses at U.C.L.A.

Behind a small counter, a man with the complexion of some underground mollusc raised his head from a newspaper.

“Can I help you?”

The white-coated employee opened a metal door, and slid out a gurney. Without pausing, he pulled back the sheet to uncover the head.

John shut his eyes, opened them again for half a second, shut them again, passed his hands over his face, then took a proper look.

How often had he imagined this body as a corpse when Alan was still alive? When he had taken him into hospital, when he’d found him collapsed on his couch, in the last stages of overdosing and semi-comatose? How many times had he dragged him under a cold shower to make him vomit and come slowly back to life? The son of a bitch always allowed himself the luxury of a big smile when he returned to earth and found John leaning over him, beside himself with fear and anger. The smile that was the only thing between him and death.

John could stare as long as he liked now, his knees giving way under him, but he would never see that smile again. It seemed impossible. Alan didn’t do dying, Alan always recovered at the last moment.

Alan used to shave his head every day. It was a ritual of death, John had written somewhere, a habit from his army days. Now his hair was a millimetre long, dark and obscene on the retracted skin of the skull. Like a parasitical plant living on the dead. The inertia of life. Absurdly, John thought of his car freewheeling with the engine cut to the end of the road.

Alan’s earrings and piercings had all been removed, leaving only their holes in the flesh. In his hollow cheeks, larger holes were visible, into which he used to insert kebab skewers for his act; around them ran deep and dry wrinkles. The mauve eyelids were closed over his huge eyes, now disproportionately large in the face which had shrunk like that of a mummy. The grey lips were clenched over the teeth, the nostrils looked pinched and the skin was crisscrossed with lines.

He looked like nothing so much as a shrunken head of the Jivaro Indians, a skull with bulging eyes and Maori tattoos, as dead as old graffiti on a ruin.

In John’s mind, the image of a little grey dried-up rodent gathering dust behind an old sofa imposed itself over the face of the
corpse. Then his sight became blurred, and his eyes felt too dry from trying not to blink.

Hirsh, after a quick glance at the body, had moved away to give Nichols time to compose himself. A uniformed policeman approached John sympathetically, holding a form in his outstretched arm. John nodded. The policeman ticked a box and handed him some papers. He signed the bottom of the page, and the official disappeared from the cold store.

The white coat wanted to cover Alan up again, but John stopped him. He pulled back the sheet and uncovered the rest of the body.

“Fucking hell!”

The stretched skin either side of the two slashes across the chest hung loose like the flabby breasts of an old woman. The ribs were exposed. Alan had lost weight yet again. A deep cut on his right forearm bisected the tattoo of a double crescent. It had not had time to form a scar. His whole body was covered with unhealed punctures, both from his act and from his needles, mostly on his arms and feet. The tattoos were just on his face and arms. Alan had only used ink on the visible parts of his body. His retracted penis and testicles were black.

John replaced the sheet and watched as the gurney slid back into the refrigerated compartment. Hirsh approached. Nichols was staring at the door of the locker as if he still needed to see, to be certain, and leave no room for any surrealist doubts. The embassy official put a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you O.K.?”

John moved his head slightly

“Where did it happen?”

“At the cabaret where Mr Mustgrave was performing: 6th arrondissement, a place called Le Caveau de la Bolée, if I remember rightly.”

John had no doubt whatever that Hirsh’s recollection was perfectly accurate.

“Did you sleep with Alan?”

Hirsh withdrew his hand from John’s shoulder as if he had been scalded. John turned towards him, but Hirsh was looking at the entrance. Standing by the door, under strip-lighting that flattened his boxer’s face, leaving no shadows, the embassy driver was observing them. Hirsh left the room quickly and his chaperone followed him out. John stood for a moment before going back to the locker. He touched the stainless steel handle with his fingertips, then walked out himself.

The light had changed, and despite the precocious spring, the late afternoon was quickly turning into evening. The driver was at the wheel. Hirsh stood alongside the open car door, his former aplomb in shreds. The young diplomat was clearly being watched, a shadow of scandal was probably hovering over his head. Alan, even when alive, was hardly the kind of person embassy staff should be hobnobbing with. Having died while suspended from hooks didn’t help. John wondered how they could ever have met.

“Can we drop you off somewhere, Mr Nichols? Do you need a hotel room?”

“When will Alan be sent back to the States?”

“It’ll take a couple of days, no more. Would you like us to keep you informed?”

“I’ll telephone. Just now I’m going to walk, I don’t need a lift.”

As they approached the back of the car, Hirsh pushed in front of John, opened the tailgate and grabbed his bag before the driver, who was also moving quickly, could get there. The driver gave a kind of grunt, which Hirsh ignored, turning instead to look Nichols straight in the eye, with a particular kind of smile: a mixture of thanks, sympathy, fear and sadness. Plus a reply to John’s unanswered question.

When he set out to seduce someone, Alan could be a monster. This diplomat had been there, and was still smarting from it. John replied to his pathetic grin with a short “Thanks.” Then he directed at the driver what he had been waiting for from the start: a ferocious look which the giant repaid in kind.

John shook hands with Hirsh, the official’s film star looks now crestfallen, and watched the car with smoked windows slide away. When it had disappeared into the traffic, he opened his hand to read Hirsh’s card.

The night porter had opened the service entrance at half past eight. About twenty staff, waiting and chatting outside, had stubbed out their cigarettes and filed in silently. After greeting the janitor as he went off duty, they had headed for the cloakrooms, where men and women separated. Once they had their uniforms on, they had taken up position. Cash tills, security, information, cafeteria, cleaning and maintenance. By five to nine, everyone was ready and the lights went on. At nine, the glass doors were unlocked and the first visitors had been admitted. They had each received a ticket with a photograph of a creature – monkey, frog or bird – and passed through the revolving doors to the Great Gallery of the Natural History Museum, where they gasped as they looked up to the ceiling. Children began at once to shout and run about, with their parents chasing after them. By half past ten, about a hundred visitors were scattered throughout the different levels. By midday there were twice as many. By mid-afternoon, as well as its thousands of dead animals, the Great Gallery contained two hundred and forty-eight visitors, including three school parties. On the first floor, on a bridge, a group of seven-year-olds had stopped with their teachers and two parents acting as helpers. As they looked at the skeleton of a whale suspended on cables, the teacher was asking if anyone had heard of
Moby-Dick
. A little girl, her finger pointing up in the air, had interrupted him.