Nazis in the Metro (7 page)

His first visit, the next morning, was to the pharmacist. He looked nothing like the portrait Gabriel had sketched of him in his imagination: rachitic and sickly, observing the world from behind glasses perched on the tip of his nose, dragging his infected carcass back and forth across a counter lined with bottles and potions. This apothecary had the physique of a butcher: a portly torso, hands like frying pans, prominent cheekbones, and a straightforward gaze, which met that of the detective. The Octopus stammered out a request for aspirin. The pharmacist slid the box out from a paper bag emblazoned with a red cross and handed over his change. Gabriel took two steps toward the exit, then turned around.

—Excuse me, but have you been here a long time?

The man’s lips curled into a smile tinged with irony.

—Why do you ask? Got your eyes on the place …

—No, I’m as incompetent at real estate as I am at
pharmacopoeia … It’s just that I was a journalist once, and I followed the story of Valérie Audiat, that young woman who was found next to a small lock in the swamp …

The reference to the crime made the man suspicious. His eyes hardened.

—It’s been talked about much too much, blathered about all over … People here would rather forget it … The press did a lot of damage.

Gabriel shoved the medication into his pocket.

—Those are some of the reasons I changed professions … I was a journalist, but … Now I edit and revise manuscripts … Peace and quiet are what I need. I remembered the area, and I said to myself that at the end of the season, it would be the ideal …

—For quiet, you can’t do better: with the amount of sleeping pills and antidepressants I sell, there’s no chance of a crisis within a radius of twenty kilometers! I imagine that with what ends up going into the waste water, even the fish are getting treated for their blues.

Gabriel wrinkled his brow to show that he was thinking.

—I actually think that I came into your pharmacy for an interview at the time, but I can’t put a face on the person who was here in your place …

—You won’t have a chance to see it again, except in a photo … I took over for him four years ago. He was very sick, and he died a few months later …

Gabriel leaned in toward the pharmacist.

—What did he die of, if I’m not being too indiscreet?

—Here, when we speak of it, we call it swamp fever.

Gabriel walked along the dock from which the flat-bottomed fishing boats, loaded up with the year’s last tourists, flooded the canals of the hinterland. For the length of a summer, perpetually unemployed men of a certain age were able to escape their government-subsidized lives by plunging long boathooks into the slimy depths. They braced themselves on the wooden handles, their bodies cantilevered over the water, and then propelled the skiffs forward with a single thrust of the pelvis, marking their paths with the tips of their poles on the river’s surface. Children scoured the banks for coypus; the women smiled, happy; and the men, their eyes glued to point-and-shoots and camcorders, immortalized their cropped version of reality in video and film. Back on the square, a young woman with a headful of curls and the profile of a sheep was attempting to unlock the door to the veterinarian’s office. Gabriel watched for a moment before approaching her.

—Would you like some help?

She turned around, and he noticed that she was slightly less ugly from the front than from the side. She handed him the crowded key ring.

—Yes, that would be nice … I don’t understand it at all, it only works half the time …

He looked at the nearly identical keys one by one, bending down to examine the mechanism itself. He tried a different key from the one the woman had been struggling with, and the cylinder turned effortlessly. She took a perfume-soaked handkerchief from her bag and pressed it to her nose and mouth, then entered the waiting room, the walls of which were adorned with cheap posters of cats, dogs, birds, and tortoises. A layer of dust obscured the covers of the old magazines that blanketed the floor. A rank, composite odor, like what trails in the wake of less than meticulous taxidermists, seemed to have been deposited in several distinct layers throughout the room. Every movement revealed more of its nauseating variety. Though he had wisely remained at the doorstep, Gabriel recoiled, suffocating.

—My God! It’s like being at a morgue during a strike!

The young woman with the graceless profile had crossed the room to open the two windows, holding her breath. She rejoined Gabriel on the sidewalk to air out her clothing and hair. She was breathing laboriously through her handkerchief. He wrinkled his nose.

—So, where does that stink come from?

She smiled to show that she understood what he was referring to.

—The vet I’m supposed to be replacing has been dead for a month …

—In my humble opinion, it’s high time to remove the body, or else it will be weeks before the stench subsides …

Her smile broadened.

—Don’t worry, he was at the hospital when it happened … The problem is that he didn’t have an assistant,
and everything was left as it was … The odor comes from the freezer … It was full to the brim with dead animals that need to be removed by special services, and the electrical company had the brilliant idea to cut off the juice! I had a feeling it wouldn’t be easy to move to Bonvix, but this, this is something …

—Where are you from?

—Rueil-Malmaison. I’d had enough of doggie-dogs and kitty-cats …

—I understand completely. My wife also takes care of hairy beasts, and it gets to her more than it should …

—That’s funny! You’re married to a vet?

—No, a hairdresser.

She leaned on his arm and collapsed in laughter. He pointed toward the minuscule terrace of the only bar in Bonvix, the Gantua, which was across from the disused train station.

—Can I offer you a coffee, while the air clears?

She glanced at her watch.

—The main thing is I can’t miss the corpse collectors. They’d better not be late …

—We’ll see them arrive. We won’t be able to miss them from there.

They settled in at one of the two tables exposed to the timid midmorning sun and, instead of coffee, ordered two pale Angle beers, which arrived tainted with oozing slices of lemon that the barman, with an air of self-satisfaction, had slotted on the mugs’ rims. Gabriel lifted his glass, after relieving it of the unwelcome intrusion.

—To your new job!

They let the foam dissolve on their lips. Gabriel knew enough to shut up, but he didn’t have to for long; the young woman quickly picked up the conversation.

—Are you on vacation in the area?

—No. For that I would need the sea, palm trees, coral reefs, and for everyone to be speaking Creole, at least … I’m just getting some country air. I work for a publisher, revising manuscripts, improving novelists’ prose, strengthening sentences, toning paragraphs, sculpting chapters … You could call me a “professor of literary fitness” …

—I think that’s something I would love …

Gabriel played it cool.

—It’s frustrating more than anything else … You can’t imagine what it’s like to watch a guy whose sinking book you saved swagger all over the stage of a literary television show, and blush with pleasure while the host of the day flatters the quality of his style! I’ve had future winners of the Goncourt in my hands … If I read you the original, you would think I was making it up …

—I had no idea that’s how it worked …

—Oh! It’s the same in every profession. For example in your field, medicine … A whole team works for years on a virus, and when the vaccine is discovered everyone says it’s Professor Blank’s vaccine, not the vaccine created by Professor Blank and his team. There’s only one name on the nomination form for the Nobel Prize:
Dr. Blank
, period, done! Anyway. How did he die, your predecessor?

She looked at him, amused.

—Why do you ask me that?

—For my own protection … Yesterday, I had a sore
throat, and I went to see the pharmacist. He’s new too … The one before him keeled over from swamp fever, from what I’ve heard. If that’s the same thing that got your veterinarian, I’d want to take some precautions …

She lifted her arm to order a second round of Angles and lowered her voice as soon as the waiter had turned his back.

—You’re right, they both died from the same illness, but it has nothing to do with the swamp …

—What was it?

She leaned closer.

—AIDS … No one dares speak the word …

—AIDS! That’s no joke. I’ve heard that you could catch it from the dentist, or from an unsterilized acupuncturist’s needle … Did they get it because of their work?

—No, a crazy woman infected them five years ago … They weren’t the only ones: the two doctors in Bonvix and a surgeon from Niort who stayed in town were also infected, as well as a retired forest ranger … They won’t last much longer …

A pickup artist in a grey suit with polished dress shoes, Ray-Bans glued to his face, and a husky on a leash greeted the vet enthusiastically, hoping for an invitation to join them. He had to settle for a brief nod, and disappeared toward the dock, towed by his sled dog.

—She would sleep with them, to give it to them?

—No … She was a nurse …

Gabriel kept up the questions, to see to what extent André Sloga’s fiction was based on reality.

—How could someone pass on AIDS other than
by unprotected sex? Did they shoot up together without changing the needle? It’s crazy, almost all of the doctors …

The vet frowned.

—That’s the rumor … Each of them, for one reason or another, needed shots, and the nurse took the opportunity to fill the syringe with contaminated blood …

—Unbelievable! She’s been arrested, I hope …

—The police didn’t have to lift a finger: she was found murdered late one night in a stream, not two steps from here … To this day nobody knows who killed her, no more than they know why she was so angry at the forest ranger and all the medical professionals of Bonvix.

—You must be very brave to take over!

—Not really … I have two diplomas: veterinarian and nurse!

The Parisian papers had fattened their headlines to announce a fresh pipe bomb attack in the streets of the capital city. This time, the anonymous terrorists had deposited their deadly parcel in a supermarket, in the meat aisle. As Gabriel was buying up a fistful of daily papers, his eyes were drawn to a local tabloid, the
Voice of the Marshes
, set on a shelf dedicated to the news of the region. The first page was almost entirely devoted to the resumption of the highway project that was mutilating a regional park, and below it were the election cards for the game of liar’s poker that was playing out between Niort’s socialist mayor and its socialist deputy, Ségolène Royal. A small box placed at the very bottom, to the right, which referred readers to the back pages, contained this bit of text: “The Return of the Audiat Affair: Valérie’s Vengeance.” He left the newsstand and walked a hundred or so meters along the riverbank until he got to one of four benches that had been installed beneath the plane trees surrounding the monument to Bonvix’s dead. The full article comprised just a few hastily composed lines:

The piece was signed austerely by one “Fred. Lf.,” whose full name, Fred Ledoeunf, Gabriel found deep in the paper’s guts, on the second-to-last page.

In the center of the square, the bronze statue immortalizing victorious infantrymen pointed unwittingly, with an outstretched hand bearing a laurel branch, to the public toilets and telephone booth. Gabriel opened the shatterproof glass door and inserted his credit card into the slot. A sudden intuition made him dial the number of the hair salon. He didn’t immediately recognize Cheryl from the distant “hello” that she reserved for clients making appointments. The usual warmth returned to her voice once she’d identified him.

—You could have called me earlier, I didn’t sleep all night … Where are you this time? Chechnya, East Timor, Rwanda?

—Even worse … In the swamps of Poitiers!

He reassured her, promising to be back within a couple of days, and then dialed the number for the
Voice of the Marshes
.

An hour later he parked his Peugeot in the elevated lot in Fontenay-le-Comte, then took the pedestrian streets back into the historic district. The vaulted passageway the journalist had described opened up into a large interior courtyard paved with stone. The buildings around its perimeter were still recognizably those of an old farm: stables, grange, family home. A former barn was home to the offices of the
Voice of the Marshes
, and a meticulously restored sign reminded visitors that the paper, founded in 1868, had once been called
The Vendée Echo
.

Gabriel pushed open the glass-paned door that had been installed between two supporting posts and found himself in a vast, unpartitioned space into which a narrow glass transom cast a bit of diffused daylight. A worker was busy on an antique offset printer: running from the ink plates to the receiver, climbing onto the catwalk to give the rollers two or three turns by hand, continually adjusting the pressure of the grippers, the power of the suctions. The machine alone occupied three-quarters of the space; the piles of paper reams, pallets stacked with final editions, and disorganized heaps of back issues left only a tiny space for a newsroom, carved out of the most well-lit corner. Gabriel took advantage of a paper jam in the offset, caused by a sheet of paper falling prey to a sucker, to make his approach.