After the War

by Hervé Le Corre

  In bed, while he waits for madame to finish her ablutions, he tries to read an adventure novel, maybe a Western, but he doesn’t understand it at all and finds himself turning the pages mechanically, mixing up characters and incidents, then tosses the book on the floor. Annette comes out of the bathroom and approaches the bed. She is wearing only the negligee that he bought for her last week. Darlac slips a hand under the sheets to touch his hardened member. He still feels the same desire for that body which has not aged, not put on weight, which is still almost youthful, with its slender curves. He still feels the same desire he felt for her that first day, when he saw her in ’45 improvising a striptease for Yank soldiers in a bar on the docks, dancing on a table.

  She no longer dances or sings. Well, only those stupid songs she hears on the radio.

  She comes towards him without looking at him, because he has forbidden her to in such moments. She takes him in her mouth—God, he loves that—then as he’s not satisfied, he slaps her then gets on top and penetrates her brutally. She barely struggles while he rapes her: a punch to the side of the head flattens her, face down. He pulls her hair and insults her, then lifts her face up to see the look on it. “Go ahead and blubber, you bitch!” he mutters, and grunts a flood of obscenities. He plunges harder, forcing himself deeper, so much that it hurts him, but he likes it anyway because he knows she’s suffering more deeply, body and soul, with every thrust he inflicts on her.

  When it’s over, she cries.

  Curled up in the foetal position, she turns her back on him. No sobs, not a sigh. He knows she’s crying though, because as always in these moments he touches her face to wet his fingers in her tears.

  “That’s it, go on. Cry your eyes out, you stupid bitch. You owe me that.”

  Deep sleep. A black hole, peopled by the occasional movements of shadows that pursue him until morning.

  Telephone. Downstairs. He lets it ring, five, six times. He knows she’s awake but that she won’t move. He knows it’s for him. He gets up, can’t find his slippers, goes out on the landing barefoot, walks downstairs. Grumbles. Yeah, yeah, I’m coming, shit.

  “Yes, this is Darlac. What? When? Oh fuck . . . And them?”

  He listens, running a hand through his short hair, down the back of his sweating neck. It’s the senior inspecteur, Carrère, who apologizes and then explains.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Darlac says that breathlessly. He hangs up, head spinning. The night dances slowly around him.

  He goes back up to the bedroom, turns on a lamp. He watches madame while he gets dressed in yesterday’s clothes. He knows she’s not asleep. He knows she’s listening out for his movements, his breathing, the slightest clearing of his throat, but he won’t tell her anything. He’s not in the mood for a crying fit or a discussion. He is still stunned by what he’s been told. The last thing he needs is a hysterical woman to deal with right now. He’d be capable of . . .

  Once he’s out in the street, he feels better and walks at a good pace to his car. The rain has stopped, but not the wind. Damp and lukewarm. A south-westerly. The city is deserted and glows dimly in the bleak shine of the ghostly street lights. He drives fast, never slowing at crossroads, crushing the steering wheel between his hands.

  As soon as he gets out of the car, he smells it: the stench of fire and cheap wine in the back of his throat. Two or three officers salute him and he responds with a grunt, pushing past a few onlookers in dressing gowns. He steps over fire hoses, walks through puddles, dazzled by the flashing orange lights on the police and firebrigade vehicles. Carrère is there, a cigarette in his mouth, and he turns towards him, wide-eyed with shock. He points to a smoking building, the windows smashed and gaping, the roof caved in. There are firemen in there, moving joists and tiles, and their lamps throw beams of light through the smoke still rising from the rubble. The canvas sign is hanging from its rods, dripping water.

  “It all burned in an hour. Petrol and gas, according to the firemen. And people heard an explosion before they saw the flames. Two other bottles exploded during the fire, which didn’t help. I called you cos I know you know the place. I’ve got two men in there looking, but in the dark, with all this rubble, I don’t know what they’re likely to find. We’re waiting for a generator so we can get some light.”

  An officer in a chrome helmet walks up, salutes, shakes the cops’ hands. He introduces himself: Lieutenant Bordes. There are trickles of sweat on his face, and a big black moustache.

  “We’re searching for any victims. The roof collapsed, probably because of the gas bottles exploding, and that set the rest off. Even the supporting walls got it. We found traces of petrol in what’s left of the kitchen. The gas was on. It’s arson.”

  He speaks in a gravelly voice, with a Béarnaise accent. Someone calls his name; he apologizes, and goes back to his men in the ruins.

  Darlac is still staring at what remains of the façade: part of a wall, two dark rectangles and a broken window frame. Carrère’s voice drags him from his reverie and he shivers a bit.

  “You O.K.? Not too shaken up? Are they relatives of yours? Arson . . . Christ! That’s all we need.”

  Darlac does not reply. He walks towards the rubble, stopping in the burned-out doorway, his feet in a puddle. The air is saturated with the smell of wine and cork, mingled with the bitter stink of charred wood and rubber. He enters under what remains of the bar’s low ceiling, the plaster fallen away to reveal the hollow bricks beneath. The firemen are working by torchlight, more or less. There are four of them clearing the ground, breathing heavily, groaning as they lift up a beam, a half-burned cupboard. They are throwing tiles behind them. The two detectives, a little way away from the ruins, look hesitantly around, pushing the rubble away with their feet, hands in the pockets of their raincoats. Darlac watches them, forcing himself not to yell at these two cretins who seem to imagine that the clues are going to jump up at them, playing for time while they wait to go back to the office so they can sit in the warm and type up the procedures. He can’t see a thing, his eyes stung by the smoke that still floats in the air, rises up from the depths of this disaster. He ventures into a chaos of collapsed beams, and thinks he can see the stump of a chair. One of the sleuths spots him, and both salute him.

  “Haven’t found anything,” one of them says.

  “In your pockets, you mean? Is that it? You’ve got nothing in your pockets, and yet you’ve been searching through them for quite a while now?”

  The detective does not understand. He hesitates.

  “Oh, just fuck off, you morons.”

  “But . . .”

  “Let the firemen do their jobs. They’re busy working. Get your fat asses out of here.”

  The two cops turn quickly, tripping over the rubble, and walk away grumbling. He watches them brush dust off their raincoats, turn up their collars, light cigarettes as they walk towards their boss.

  The firemen clear, lift, probe. They talk in low voices. One of them has climbed up into what remains of the upstairs, and Darlac can hear the floorboards creaking as he walks, plaster falling in pieces or crumbling into clouds of dust, and his colleagues, afraid that he might come down through the ceiling at any moment, shout up at him to watch out.

  Darlac does not dare move. He has the impression that, if he takes even one step forward, he will step on a body. He is afraid of profaning this place where the night is condensing. But he ventures forward anyway, on tiptoes, stuff squeaking and cracking under his soles. He sees the zinc mass of the bar, a couple of meters away, but cannot get his bearings. To his right, the stone staircase is now just a flight of steps falling into darkness. He tries to catch his breath. He has the feeling he must have forgotten to breathe since he came in here. He hears a van maneuvering behind him, a man yelling over the noise of the engine to guide the driver. Two spotlights mounted on the roof illuminate the scene. The shadows of the m
en, looming huge on those walls that are still standing, have round backs and move slowly like predators busy eating the corpse of a prey. Against the back wall, the first floor has collapsed in an inextricable pile of floorboards, beams and bricks. He can see a sideboard, leaning crookedly against a beam, its open doors vomiting pale linen. The foot of a bed, sticking out of a heap of stones.

  He remembers the bombardments during the war. Those houses with their bowels exposed and the people you would see standing dazed in front of their ruins, amazed to be alive. And then there were those they found beneath it all: in their beds, crushed under a sink or a stove, depending on what they were doing at the moment the bomb crashed through the roof and exploded. Not always in one piece. Or, burned to a wall, traces of human beings, the macabre mark of a body that barely existed at all anymore. Sometimes people called them, him and his men, to record what had happened, particularly when thieves had been seen in the vicinity by the civil defense, just in case those assholes tried to complete the work of the English-Canadian ammunition by quickly grabbing a wallet or a few family jewels.

  He hears the firemen walking in glass, crushing shards of broken bottles under their boots. Then one of them yells “Stop!” and everyone freezes, goes silent, and the silence thrums only with the drone of engines.

  “There’s one!”

  The others move forward. He hears Carrère asking to be let through, because for now this is his investigation. Darlac rushes over, heart trembling. He doesn’t understand the emotion that has taken hold of him. Emile and his wife were distant relations, never close to him, just another couple of stooges. But the girl? What was her name again? Arlette. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, getting so upset like a woman. That girl was nothing special. Just a pretty kid who got men like him hard. He could have had her for free, as often as he wanted. But he hasn’t eaten that kind of pie for several years now. Lost his appetite, maybe.

  He moves closer. The men, bent over a pile of burned debris with the legs of overturned tables and chairs sticking up out of it like bits of dead bodies, pant and groan with effort, speaking with their hands and eyes. In the lamplight he glimpses feet with black swollen toes, a bare ankle, the other one sticking out from a trouser leg. A man’s feet. A rubber sole melted on the heel, like a huge black blood clot.

  There’s a cross beam lying on the corpse, so four of them strain to lift it up and throw it aside. After that, they clear away bricks and rubble and the man’s body, revealing a woman’s body, face down on the ground.

  They are lying in a soup of sweat, wine and water, amid a clutter of smashed furniture, broken bottles, half-burned rags, plasterboard. They are covered now only by scraps of cloth nibbled by the fire. Their faces are unrecognizable, their flesh raw, blackened, grilled. Mouths gaping. Teeth bared, white and shining. The bloody mask of their final screams.

  A fireman steps aside to puke. He’s young. Maybe these are his first burn victims. It’s true that there’s that smell now. The men breathe heavily, wiping their mouths with the backs of their gloved hands.

  Darlac gets out of there, feeling as if his heart has swollen to fill up his entire chest and is banging against his ribs like a giant fist, chewing up his stomach. He stands in front of the windowless façade and lights a cigarette, but throws it away after the first drag, feeling sick.

  A yell. Like someone being strangled.

  “Here! Another one!”

  “I thought there were only two.”

  Carrère beckons him over from the doorway. Darlac, breathless and dizzy, tries to run on his stiff legs.

  The girl’s body is under a bed that they’re lifting up, curled up like a foetus, covered in her coat. All he can see are her pale slender ankles.

  “Asphyxiated,” says the fire-brigade lieutenant. “Look. No burn marks. She must have hidden under the bed when the house caught fire.”

  Carrère scribbles something in a notebook, not looking at what he writes in this shifting darkness.

  “Take off the coat, so I can see.”

  Silence. The face still hidden by her hands, black hair spilling all around. Carrère reaches out a hand, softly, slowly. He whispers, “Here, like this,” like someone who’s scared of hurting a child. The glow of a lamp flickers above.

  The mouth is wide open, eyes half closed.

  “She’s a kid,” says the lieutenant.

  He takes off his helmet and wipes his forehead. Turns his face away, eyes staring into blackness.

  “Don’t touch anything else,” says Carrère. “Wait for the photographer.”

  Darlac moves away, breathing fast, trying to calm the creature that is stirring inside him. He can’t understand anything. How could they have known the kid was there? And surely they wouldn’t have killed her with the others. And why such ferocity? Burning a building, and the people inside it? This isn’t Sicily! They would have picked her up and taken her to the Crabos or the Parisian, the famous Robert. He goes through their faces the way he would with a witness, showing mugshots of dickheads for an identification. What about him? And this one? And the witness frowns, hesitates, asks to see one again. Yeah, maybe this one, but it was pretty dark. Darlac knows them all, the men he is mentally viewing now. He knows their voices, their mannerisms, their habits, their vices, from the venial to the truly vile, their breaths reeking of tobacco or alcohol or rotten teeth, the smell of their sweat and their feet, and the rest, for those who only ever wash their cheeks after they’ve shaved. He knows their warts and beauty spots by heart, the shapes of their eyebrows and their hair, the colors of their eyes, even to the subtlest shades, blues, greens, hazels, blacks, and all their baleful reflections. And this memorized police file gets him nowhere all. He sees himself surrounded by this ring of Bordeaux gangsters with their political affiliations, Gaullists and collaborators, henchmen and Wanted posters, all these faces spinning around him endlessly like warpainted Indians in one of those Westerns, dancing round a cowboy who you know is going to come to a sticky end.

  And then it hits him in the pit of his stomach. He came here. Him. The other man, that ghost. He was here, in this very square. Yes, that’s it. He went in through that door on the side of the bar. He hid in the courtyard. Or in the bog. He waited until the bar closed, until everything was quiet. Apparently this guy has something against café owners. The man is a walking nightmare, circling around Darlac. He’d better not sleep anymore, if he doesn’t want him to come. Or sleep with one eye open, so he can trap him and send him back to limbo.

  Carrère comes over, slowly crossing the road, head down. He looks up at Darlac, revealing a drawn and frightened-looking face, eyes shining.

  “Can you believe it?” he asks with a sigh. “Believe what?”

  “All this shit . . . There were two of them living there, and suddenly we find that kid. I mean, where the hell did she come from? You’re related to them—do you know anything?”

  “No, not a thing. I only see them about twice year, if that . . . Anyway, calm down. What’s up with you? You’ve seen dead bodies before, haven’t you? What I want to know is who did this. There’s no point snivelling over the victims. There’s a guy on the loose in this city who’s just burned three people to death.

  “All the same . . . what was she doing here, that girl? Her face isn’t harmed. We could get a decent photo and publish it in the papers. And maybe the customers or the neighbors saw something, someone suspicious lurking around . . . Everyone knows each other round here, it’s like a village.”

  He’s talking to himself, eyes on the ground, rubbing his chin. The two detectives show up at a trot, as if they’ve just found the arsonist’s business card in the ruins.

  “What have you got?”

  “Nothing. We just came to see if you still needed us.”

  Carrère stares at them, dumbstruck. He looks like a good guy, this Carrère: a serious cop, intelligent, human, an
eagle in a henhouse, a nugget of gold in a bucket of gravel, but now you can see him holding his breath to avoid screaming with rage at these two morons, keeping his fists balled deep in his pockets so he doesn’t punch them in their stupid faces.

  “Alright, you can go.”

  They don’t move, so he leans over them, almost on tiptoes, holding his hand to his mouth like a megaphone.

  “Fuck off,” he says equably. “Vanish.”

  They walk away without a word, without the slightest hesitation.

  “Where did those two twats come from?” Darlac asks. “I’ve never seen them before.”

  “They were transferred last month: one from Nantes, the other from Paris. They must have done something dodgy, but I don’t know what yet, cos I haven’t had time to dig into it. They sent them to us cos Commissaire Verne says they won’t do as much harm down here.”

  “Are you leading this investigation?”

  “Dunno. We’ve got stuck with the findings, and we’ll have to type up all the paperwork, but it might still slip through our fingers. Often does. Why? You want to investigate it for the families—or for yours, anyway?”

  In a quick, brutal movement, Darlac grabs him by the back of his coat, then lets him go.

  “Never say that. Fuck. Don’t even go there, or you’ll . . .”