Bed of Nails (8 page)

“Please sir! What’s that man doing?”

The whole class looked up.

*

Lambert parked the car in the rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, opposite the mosque, and close to the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes, the site of the Natural History Museum, with the Great Gallery of Evolution at its centre. He got out of the car and stretched. He was wearing a jacket in the colours of the French football team.

“Brilliant! I’ve always wanted to see the museum!”

Guérin was gazing sceptically at the obvious lump the Beretta 92 made under the tricolour jacket. Even Lambert was armed … He had always found it inappropriate that a man who found speaking quite a challenge should be carrying a weapon capable of firing off fifteen rounds in a few seconds. It was a totally absurd object, quite incompatible with the personality of his assistant. But the contradiction too was a logical link in a logical chain. Under Guérin’s raincoat, nobody could see whether he was armed or not. He could have been carrying a heavy sub-machine gun.

Guérin took the time to look at the street, hesitating in front of the mosque, assailed by an unpleasant impression, as the scent of mint tea stirred his memory. The anxiety that had engulfed his Moroccan trip returned with a blow to his solar plexus. A luminous flash of vertigo made him wince.

Lambert, trotting along ahead of the boss, went in first, holding up his badge.

A policeman from the
quartier
showed him the way.

Impressed by the hall’s huge dimensions and the exhibits on show, grandiose and morbid, Guérin felt his legs twitching with a mixture of unease and excitement.

Around the pool of blood a large crowd had gathered. Several men in suits – probably museum staff – four or five policemen,
some paramedics, a perplexed-looking man – most likely a pathologist – and three firemen who were fixing ladders. Everyone was looking up, following the progress of two other firemen who were abseiling down from the upper levels. Between the two men on ropes, and the pool of blood, floated the skeleton of a whale. In its thoracic cavity, impaled on a rib the thickness of a telegraph pole, was the naked body of a man whose blood was still dripping. Shrill excited voices echoed round the gallery.

A uniformed policeman greeted Guérin.

“They’re going to try and get him down, lieutenant. But it’s not going to be easy and the curator – that gentleman over there,” he pointed to a suit, “keeps going on that we’ve got to mind out for the skeleton and not damage it.”

“Any witnesses?”

“About thirty school kids, lieutenant, and three teachers, plus a dozen other visitors. They all saw him take his clothes off and jump from the balcony on the fourth level.”

“Is that the racket I can hear?”

“They’re in the café on the second floor, people are trying to calm them down. The cashier is asking for receipts for all the drinks and ice creams.”

Lambert had joined the group standing under the skeleton, fascinated by the bloodstain which functioned in the opposite way from the one in the office. Guérin had lost interest in the firemen and the technical problems. He left the scene and went up to the first floor, where he walked through a procession of giraffes, buffalo, gazelles, lions and other animals who seemed to be fleeing from a forest fire. Stopping in the middle of the large platform, he breathed in the atmosphere. Amazed and on edge, he murmured to himself:

“Weirder and weirder.”

With small, quick steps, he walked round the rim of the gallery
looking for the best vantage point to view the whale. He passed a glass case of birds and winced as he noticed a couple of stuffed parrots, much older, but actually in better condition than Churchill. The idea that they could live in couples depressed him for a moment as he thought sadly of Churchill, a bitter fifty-year-old bachelor, alone on his perch. But the image was quickly swept away by the pregnant intuition which had taken hold of him as soon as he had entered the Great Gallery. A final leap, in full view of the public and of dozens of extinct or endangered species! What a way to go!

As he was on his way up to the third level, he heard a shout: “Look out!” Then the thud of something soft hitting the ground, followed by a metallic clang, probably the ladder falling over. On the balcony of the third level, he found what he was looking for, the ideal vantage point. From here he could see all over the gallery, with a perfect view of the fourth-floor balcony, and down to the skeleton hanging below him. He went to the guard rail, looked searchingly at the wooden banister, then leaned over, taking care not to touch it: a pitiless sheer drop.

Under the whale, confusion was apparent. The rib had finally given way, to the audible despair of the curator, and the dead man had ended up reunited with his blood along with a piece of whalebone two metres long. The pathologist was standing with his arms crossed and his head bowed, while the firemen were at a loss.

Guérin ran back down towards the café. He went up to a policeman who seemed completely out of his depth, surrounded as he was by hysterical children who had started jabbering even more wildly on seeing the corpse fall to the floor.

“Lieutenant Guérin from Police H.Q. I want you to cordon off the whole of the balcony from the third level up.”

He pointed it out to the uniform, who was laden with sandwiches.

“Just close all this off, and I’ll send you a lab team. I want the fingerprints from ten metres of the banister, either side of the column, see what I mean?”

He was still pointing his finger at the place. “Understand?”

“Yessir.”

“Are there C.C.T.V. cameras here?”

“I don’t know sir, we’ll have to ask the museum security people.”

“Get working on that balcony right away.”

The policeman put down the sandwiches, radioed his colleagues and hurried off, only too glad to get away from the schoolchildren.

The security officer whom he ran to earth at the information desk, holding animated discussions with the staff, told him that no, there weren’t any cameras inside the museum, only at the entrance.

Ten minutes later, Guérin was coming out of the video room, a hard disk under his arm and in a high state of excitement. His big eyes darted here and there looking for a fixed point.

“Where’s Lambert?”

The policeman the question was addressed to took a step backwards.

“Who?”

“My deputy. Fair hair, football jacket, mouth hanging open.”

“Oh right, him. He went over there.”

Guérin found Lambert in a corner of the ground floor admiring a badly lit creature: a small member of the whale family about three metres in length with a long twisted horn sticking out of its forehead.

“Boss, did you know a thing like this existed? A … what’s it say …? Narwhal?”

“They won’t exist much longer. Come on Lambert, we’ve got work to do.”

“It says here it’s a tooth. But what use would it be?”

“That’s why they’re dying out: it’s like you, Lambert. Get a move on, we’re going.”

Lambert hurried along behind the boss as they walked out.

In the car, driving with one hand and scratching his fair curls with the other, he went on.

“Yeah, but really, what use is that, a tooth in the middle of your forehead? Awesome, though! If I could choose, I’d spike myself on a narwhal tooth, not a cachalot.”

Guérin paid no attention to his deputy’s ramblings. He was looking, as if it were the Holy Grail, at the little box full of ones and zeros sitting on his knees, as if he feared to lose a single drop of Christ’s blood. He was ecstatic, on the point of shouting with joy, tapping his head as if sending a message in code.

“Don’t you agree, boss?”

“What?”

“I said they’d do well to keep quiet about this, the museum people. Because a place like that, once it gets around, everyone will want to come there to do themselves in. What about the report, boss? We didn’t speak to the pathologist, we don’t know the suicide’s I.D., nothing.”

It was getting dark now, and Lambert was quite right. Suicides went in waves of fashion even if it meant breaking their own rules. Rebellion by suicide!

Guérin took out his notebook and started to scribble furiously.

Lambert failed to follow up his intuition, which was just a passing thought, and went on to something else.

“The brigadier-
chef
in the 6th arrondissement, remember him, Roger, he’s called? The one who had to deal with the man who jumped in the river at New Year? He was there just now. He remembered me, he said he got his death of cold after going in the water that time. And he said this guy, well a witness told him, anyway, this guy shouted something when he jumped.”

Guérin was covering his notebook with signs Lambert could make neither head nor tail of, shorthand presumably, arrows, circles, little men and death’s heads. Lambert turned at the lights and said gently.

“Boss, are you O.K.?”

“What did you say?”

Guérin, hallucinating, was scratching the skin on his bald head until the blood started to run down his cheek.

“Nothing …” Lambert’s voice died away, “Just that the guy shouted ‘Thanks!’ when he jumped.”

“To the office, young Lambert. To the office.”

“Boss, stop it.”

Lambert had never been able to find any scientific words for what went on inside Guérin’s head. When a crisis struck, he just put it to himself in his own way: the boss’s brain was boiling over. He never mentioned this to anyone else, although he would have liked to understand, in order to feel reassured. But better not to let anyone else hear about his boss’s funny turns. Of that he had no doubt at all. The only way he would settle down, as Lambert well knew, was to follow his own logic until the carriages got back on the track again. Hoping that the boss would find his way home. He speeded up. Their car had no siren, so he just lowered the sun visor, which had a black-and-white sign reading
Police
.

He parked in front of the little side entrance to No. 36, praying that the encroaching night would be dark enough to cover their arrival. He glanced along the quai des Orfèvres in the dusk. Nobody. Guérin was already getting out of the car, clutching his hard disk. He had stopped mutilating himself but was still very hyper. Stifling a curse, Lambert reached into the glove compartment and grabbed a woolly bundle. Then he followed the boss, who was wandering about in the middle of the road. In his yellow raincoat, he reminded
Lambert of that musical comedy with people dancing in the rain. Except that when Guérin went loco, he – Lambert – was the umbrella protecting him from the showers of shit. As further precaution, he jammed the crumpled wool cap advertising Berettas on Guérin’s head.

“Where are we, Lambert? What are you doing?”

“Nothing, boss, nothing, er, let’s go and look at the videos. We’ll go up the side stairs.”

Guérin brandished his hard disk and looked triumphantly at his assistant. A cup-and-ball toy with a spinning top perched on it, advertising a make of guns. The blood, by now soaking the last few strands of black hair that formed a wispy crown round his head, was reaching the corner of his mouth and trickling onto his neck.

“Right, young Lambert, let’s get to work!”

Lambert took out the keys, unlocked the door and they went past the row of stinking dustbins. Their entrance was through the garbage area outside the office kitchens. The heavy-handed humour of Police H.Q. He put his arm on Guérin’s to steer him up the steps. The little man was losing his surge of energy and starting to collapse, out of breath.

They reached the office safely without meeting anyone. Lambert breathed again as he closed the door. The ghostly glare from the strip-lighting drew a little cry of hope from the small room, which never saw daylight: after the first flash, it settled to its usual pale twilight.

Guérin pulled the woolly hat off and sat down at the desk. Still chasing his ghosts, he was shaking all over and his large, wounded head bobbed dangerously.

“Call Forensics, and tell them to send a team to the Natural History Museum. Fingerprints and anything else on the handrail of the third floor. I’ve had it cordoned off.”

Lambert, filled with pity, watched as his boss tried, with clumsy
gestures, to connect the hard disk to his computer. The light made him blink hard. Soon he would be seeing the dangerous moment once more.

“Boss, shouldn’t you clean up a bit first?”

“What are you talking about?”

With his chin, Lambert gestured to his bald cranium. Guérin peered at him enquiringly, then felt it with his hand and contemplated his fingers, now smeared with blood. Slowly he looked up at his tall fair deputy. Deep in Guérin’s eyes, two little men in yellow raincoats stood terrified and frantic, calling for his help to get them out of there.

A muscle twitched on Guérin’s cheek and his gaze faltered. Lambert had the impression of hearing a windscreen splinter.

“It was … er, Churchill, he pecked me this morning … the old parrot …”

“Yeah, O.K., boss, but still better clean it up.”

Guérin wiped his bloodstained hand on his raincoat.

“I’m going to watch these videos … get me a paper towel, it’s nothing, it’s not serious, just a scratch.”

Half his head was scored with bleeding grooves.

Guérin is completely nuts
. As Lambert grabbed a paper roll from the coffee machine room, the sentence hammered over and over in his head.
Guérin is completely nuts
. When he opened the office door again, the room was empty. He went into the archive section, called out, then looked for the boss between the shelves. Gone. Back in the office he saw that the hard disk was still sitting there, but the cap had disappeared. He put out the light and went downstairs. Lambert searched his conscience, where he found an overwhelming desire to have a beer. Could a dog get his master certified?

John walked along the Seine, protected by the night, which gradually hid his tall silhouette against the background.

So Alan has sex with an embassy official. Then he dies during a stage act, hanging from butcher’s hooks. The embassy official turns up in the morgue, because he has to see to the repatriation of the body of his lover. The embassy keeps a close eye on this deviant staff member whose nerves are rather too fragile. That’s all. But there seem to be too many things going on here. The persistent impression that everything had been rehearsed in advance, ever since the moment the gendarmes had turned up at the tepee, was giving him a migraine. Alan was free to sleep with whoever he liked, yeah, but to pick a man from the embassy was unlikely, stupid and dangerous. Perhaps he had actually fallen in love? A sort of delicious swansong, like falling for a priest. Doing something stupid and dangerous was more likely, coming from Alan. But if he had learned one thing, it was not to die on stage. Piercing his skin made him happy. John had had to admit that in the end. But wait, he’d started doing drugs again. He must have gone on stage when he was stoned. End of story. O.D. on stage, hanging in the air. The fakir’s apotheosis. Perhaps after all it was better than a backstreet, or a stinking latrine. The audience would certainly have a hangover from it. Would it have changed anything, if John had been there? He had picked Alan up twenty times, but he couldn’t be there
round the clock. Pointless to speculate. End of, again. Should he wait for the ceremonial send-off of the coffin? That sort of farewell wasn’t his thing. He should just get back home, away from this whole scene. John felt as if he were holding his breath all the time in Paris, and that he could really only start to grieve once he was back in his camp in the sticks.