Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  But Halder seemed unhurried. Despite his intelligence, there was a strain of pedantry in the make-up of this black security guard that he seemed to enjoy. He switched on his mobile phone and listened sceptically to the message, like an astronomer hearing a meaningless burst of signals from outer space.

  ‘Have they caught him yet?’ I poured mineral water onto a towel and bathed my head, feeling the bubbles sparkle in my hair. Surprisingly, I seemed more alert than I had been since arriving at Eden-Olympia. ‘He called himself Alexei. He shouldn’t be too difficult to find. A man strolling around with one shoe on.’

  Halder nodded approvingly at my deductive powers. ‘He may have taken off the other shoe.’

  ‘Even so. A man in his socks? Besides, it’s an expensive shoe – welt-stitched. What about your surveillance cameras?’

  ‘There are four hundred cameras at Eden-Olympia. Scanning the tapes for a one-shoed man, or even a man in his socks, will take a great many hours of overtime.’

  ‘Then the system is useless.’

  ‘It may be, Mr Sinclair. The cameras are there to deter criminals, not catch them. Have you seen this Alexei before?’

  ‘Never. He’s like a pickpocket, hard to spot but impossible to forget.’

  ‘In Cannes? He may have followed you here.’

  ‘Why should he?’

  ‘Your Jaguar. Some people steal antique cars for a living.’

  ‘It’s not an antique. In a headwind it will outrun your Range Rover. Besides, he didn’t come on like a car buff. Not the kind we’re used to in England.’

  ‘This isn’t England. The Côte d’Azur is a tough place.’ Concerned for me, Halder reached out to pluck some damp grass from my hair, and then examined the blades in his delicate fingers. ‘Are you all right, Mr Sinclair? I can call an ambulance.’

  ‘I’m fine. And don’t worry Dr Jane. The man wasn’t as strong as I expected. He’s a small-time Russian hoodlum, some ex-informer or bookie’s runner.’

  ‘You put up a good fight. I’ll have to take you on my patrols. All the same, you’re still getting over your plane crash.’

  ‘Halder, relax. I’ve wrestled with some very tough physiotherapy ladies.’ I pointed to the faded passport-booth photo on the table. ‘This child – it looks like a girl of twelve. Is that any help? He mentioned the name “Natasha”.’

  ‘Probably his daughter back in Moscow. Forget about him, Mr Sinclair. We’ll find him.’

  ‘Who do you think he is?’

  Halder stroked his nostrils, smoothing down his refined features, ruffled by the effort of dealing with me. ‘Anyone. He might even be a resident. You’ve been wandering around a lot. It makes people curious.’

  ‘Wandering? Where?’

  ‘All over Eden-Olympia. We thought you were getting bored. Or looking for company.’

  ‘Wandering …?’ I gestured at the wooded parkland. ‘I go for walks. What’s the point of all this landscape if no one sets foot on it?’

  ‘It’s more for show. Like most things at Eden-Olympia.’

  Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse. Except for Halder, all the security personnel were white, and many would be members of the Front National, especially active among the pieds-noirs in the South of France. Yet Halder was always treated with respect by his fellow guards. I had seen them open the Range Rover’s door for him, an act of deference that he accepted as his due.

  Curious about his motives, I asked: ‘What made you come to Eden-Olympia?’

  ‘The pay. It’s better here than Nice Airport or the Palais des Festivals.’

  ‘That’s a good enough reason. But …’

  ‘I don’t look the type? Too many shadows under the eyes? The wrong kind of suntan?’ Halder stared at me almost insolently. ‘Or is it because I read Scott Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Halder, I didn’t say that.’ I waited for him to reply, watching while he twisted the Russian’s shoe in his hands, as if wringing the neck of a small mammal. When he nodded to me, accepting that he had tried to provoke me, I turned my bruised ear towards the intercom chatter. ‘I meant that it might be too quiet here. Your men have a job pretending to be busy. Apart from this man Alexei, there doesn’t seem to be any crime at Eden-Olympia.’

  ‘No crime?’ Halder savoured the notion, smirking at its naivety. ‘Some people would say that crime is what Eden-Olympia is about.’

  ‘The multinational companies? All they do is turn money into more money.’

  ‘Could be … so money is the ultimate adult toy?’ Halder pretended to muse over this. He was intrigued by the stout defence I had put up against the intruder, but my excited sleuthing irritated him, and he was clearly relieved when the guards in the avenue walked up to the wrought-iron gate and signalled the all-clear.

  ‘Right…’ Halder glanced around the garden and prepared to leave. ‘Mr Sinclair, we’ll be stepping up patrols. No need for Dr Jane to worry. The Russian must have gone.’

  ‘Why? He could be sitting by any one of a hundred pools here. He’s looking for David Greenwood – he didn’t even know the poor man was dead.’

  ‘So he went back to Moscow for a few months. Or he doesn’t watch television.’

  ‘Why would he want to see Greenwood?’

  ‘How can I say?’ Wearily, Halder tried to disengage himself from me. ‘Dr Greenwood worked at the methadone clinic in Mandelieu. Maybe he gave the Russian a shot of something he liked.’

  ‘Did Greenwood do that kind of thing?’

  ‘Don’t all doctors?’ Halder touched my shoulder in a show of sympathy. ‘Ask your wife, Mr Sinclair.’

  ‘I’ll have to. How well did you know Greenwood?’

  ‘I met him. A decent type.’

  ‘A little highly strung?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so.’ Halder picked up the Russian’s shoe. He stared at the blurred photograph of the girl, rubbing her face with his thumb. ‘I liked him. He got me my job.’

  ‘He killed ten people. Why, Halder? You look as if you know.’

  ‘I don’t. Dr Greenwood was a fine man, but he stayed too long at Eden-Olympia.’

  I stood by the pool’s edge, and searched the deep water. The strong sunlight had stirred up an atlas of currents that cast their shadows across the tiled floor, but I could see the wavering outline of the silver coin below the diving board. Behind me the sprinkler began to spray the lawn, soaking the pillows of the chairs that Halder had moved in his hunt for evidence. The grass still bore the marks of colliding heels, the diagram of a violent apache dance. The raw divots reminded me of the Russian’s frightened body, the reek of his sweat and the sharp burrs on his leather jacket.

  I left the pool and retraced the Russian’s steps to the pumphouse. The wooden doors had jumped their latch, exposing the electric motor, heater and timing mechanism. The cramped space was filled with sacks of pool-cleaner, the chlorine-based detergent that Monsieur Anvers poured into the loading port. Twice each day the soft powder diffused across the water, forming milky billows that dissolved the faint residues of human fat along the water-line.

  I ran my hand over the nearest wax-paper sack. Its industrial seals were unbroken, but a stream of powder poured onto the floor from a narrow tear. Sitting down, my legs stretched out in front of me, I gripped the sack and pulled it onto the cement apron. A second vent, large enough to take a child’s index finger, punctured the heavy wrapper, and the cool powder flowed across my knees.

  I tore away the paper between the holes, and slid my hand into the sticky grains. They deliquesced as I exposed them to the sunlight, running between my fingers to reveal a bruised silver nugget like a twisted coin. I cleaned away the damp powder, and stared down at th
e deformed but unmistakable remains of a high-velocity rifle bullet.

  I upended the sack and let the powder flow across the apron. A second bullet lay between my knees, apparently of the same calibre and rifling marks, crushed by its impact with a hard but uneven structure.

  I laid the bullets on the ground and reached into the pumphouse, running my hands over the remaining sacks. Their waxed wrappers were unbroken, and the pumping machinery bore no signs of bullet damage. I assumed that the stock of detergent had remained here when the pool motor was switched off after David Greenwood’s death. Restarting the motor a few days before our arrival, Monsieur Anvers had decided to leave the punctured sack where it lay.

  I turned to the wooden doors, feeling the smoothly painted panels, fresh from a builder’s warehouse. The chromium hinges were bright and unscratched, recently reset in the surrounding frame. With my hand I brushed away the loose grains of powder and felt the apron beside the doors. The smooth cement had been faintly scored by a rotating abrader, and the steel bristles had left small whorls in the hard surface, as if carefully erasing a set of stains or scorch-marks.

  I felt the bullets between my fingers, guessing that they had not been deformed by their impact with the pine doors or the detergent sack. A larger object, with a bony interior, had absorbed the full force of the bullets. Someone, security guard or hostage, had collapsed against the pumphouse doors, and had then been shot at close range, either by himself or others.

  I listened to the cicadas in the Yasudas’ garden, and watched the dragonflies flitting around the tennis court. According to Wilder Penrose, the three hostages had been killed inside the garage. I imagined the brief gun-battle that had taken place near the house, as David Greenwood made his final stand against the security guards and gendarmes. He had murdered the hostages in an act of despair, and then sat down against the pumphouse, ready to kill himself, staring for the last time at the skies of the Côte d’Azur as the police marksmen approached.

  But no one, holding a rifle to his own chest, a thumb outstretched to the trigger guard, could shoot himself twice. Whoever the victim, an execution had taken place beside the swimming pool of this quiet and elegant house.

  A Range Rover of the security force cruised the avenue, and the driver saluted me as he passed. I stood outside the garage, the remote control unit in my hand. The doors rolled noiselessly, and light flooded the interior, a space for three cars with wooden shelves along the rear wall.

  For all Penrose’s assurance that the garage had been rebuilt, the original structure remained intact. The concrete floor had been laid at least three years earlier, and was slick with engine oil that had dripped from some of the most expensive cars on the Côte d’Azur. Cans of antifreeze stood on the shelves, along with bottles of windscreen fluid and an Opel Diplomat owner’s manual.

  I carefully searched the floor, and then examined the walls and ceiling for any traces of gunfire. I tried to imagine the hostages trussed together, squinting at the light as Greenwood entered the garage for the last time. But there were no bullet holes, no repairs to the concrete pillars, and no hint that the floor had been cleaned after an execution.

  Almost certainly the three men, the luckless chauffeurs and maintenance engineer, had died elsewhere. At least one of them, I suspected, had been shot in the garden, sitting with his back to the doors of the pumphouse.

  I closed the garage and rested against the warm roof of the Jaguar. It was a little after six o’clock, and the first traffic was leaving Cannes for the residential suburbs of Grasse and Le Cannet. But Eden-Olympia was silent, as the senior executives and their staffs remained at their workstations. Jane had asked me to collect her from the clinic at 7.30, when the last of her committee meetings would end.

  A fine sweat covered my arms and chest as I walked back to the garden, a fear reaction to the garage. I had expected a chamber of horrors, but the ordinariness of the disused space had been more disturbing than any blood-stained execution pit.

  I stripped off my shirt and stood by the diving board. Calming myself, I stared down at the dappled floor, a serene and sun-filled realm that existed only in the deeps of swimming pools. A water spider snatched at a drowning fly, and then skied away. As the surface cleared, I saw the bright node of the coin, a gleaming eye that waited for me.

  I dived into the pool, broke through the foam and filled my lungs, then turned onto my side and dived again towards the silver pearl.

  7

  Incident in a Car Park

  ‘THEY’RE RIFLE BULLETS, steel-capped,’ I told Jane in her office at the clinic. ‘Probably fired from a military weapon. Two of them were in the pumphouse. The third I fished out of the pool an hour ago.’

  Jane watched me as I leaned across her desk and placed the three bullets in her empty ashtray. Stolen from a pub in Notting Hill, the ashtray was a reassuring presence, proof that a small part of Jane’s rackety past still survived in this temple of efficiency.

  Jane sat calmly in her white coat, dwarfed by a black leather chair contoured like an astronaut’s couch. She touched the bullets with a pencil, and raised a hand before I could speak.

  ‘Paul – take it easy.’

  Already she was playing the wise daughter, more concerned about my adrenalin-fired nerviness than by the unsettling evidence I had brought. I remembered her under the roadside plane trees near Arles, calmly sucking a peach as the engine steamed and I rigged an emergency fan belt from a pair of her tights.

  She prodded the bullets, moving them around the ashtray. ‘Are you all right? You should have called me. This Russian – what’s Halder playing at?’

  ‘I told him not to worry you. Believe me, I’ve never felt better. I could easily have run here.’

  ‘That’s what bothers me. The Russian didn’t hurt you?’

  ‘He brushed my shoulder, and I slipped on the grass.’

  ‘He spoke English?’

  ‘Badly. He said his name was Alexei.’

  ‘That’s something.’ Jane stood up and walked around the desk. Her small hands held my face, then smoothed my damp hair. She paused at the swollen bruise above my ear, but said nothing about the wound. ‘Why do you think he was Russian?’

  ‘It’s a guess. He mentioned someone called Natasha. Do you remember those touts near the taxi ranks at Moscow Airport? They had everything for sale – drugs, whores, diamonds, oil leases, anything except a taxi. There was something seedy about him in a small-time way. Poor diet and flashy dentistry.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Eden-Olympia.’ Jane pressed my head against her breast and began to explore my scalp. ‘Awful man – I can see he upset you. He might have been lost.’

  ‘He was looking for something. He thought I was David Greenwood.’

  ‘Why? There’s no resemblance. David was fifteen years younger …’ She broke off. ‘He can’t have met David.’

  I rotated my chair to face Jane. ‘That’s the point. Why would David have any contact with a small-time Russian crook?’

  Jane leaned against the desk, watching me in a way I had never seen before, less the tired house-doctor of old and more the busy consultant with an eye on her watch. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he was hoping to sell David a used car. Someone from the rehab clinic might have mentioned his name.’

  ‘It’s possible. Doctors doing charity work have to mix with a lot of riffraff.’

  ‘Apart from their husbands? Paul, these bullets – don’t get too involved with them.’

  ‘I won’t …’

  I listened to the lift doors in the corridor as Jane’s colleagues left the clinic after their day’s work. Somewhere a dialysis machine moved through its cleaning cycle, emitting a series of soft grunts and rumbles, like a discreet indigestion. The clinic was a palace of calm, far away from the pumphouse and its bullet-riddled sack. I gazed through the cruise-liner windows at the open expanse of the lake. A deep shift in the subsoil sent a brief tremor across the surface, as a pressure surge moved through a ring main.


  Proud of Jane, I said: ‘What an office – they obviously like you. Now I see why you want to spend your time here.’

  ‘It was David’s office.’

  ‘Doesn’t that feel …?’

  ‘Strange? I can cope with it. We sleep in his bed.’

  ‘Almost grounds for divorce. They should have moved you. Living in the same villa is weird enough.’ I gestured at the filing cabinets. ‘You’ve been through his stuff? Any hints of what went wrong?’

  ‘The files are empty, but some of his records are still on computer.’ Jane tapped a screen with her pencil. ‘The La Bocca case histories would make your hair curl. A lot of those Arab girls were fearfully abused.’

  ‘Thanks, I’d rather not see them. What about the children here? Is there a lot of work for you?’

  ‘Very little. There aren’t many children at Eden-Olympia. I don’t know why they needed a paediatrician. Still, it gives me a chance to work on something else. There’s a new project using the modem links to all the villas and apartments. Professor Kalman is keen that I get involved.’

  ‘Fine, as long as they don’t exploit you. Is it interesting?’

  ‘In an Eden-Olympia kind of way.’ Jane played distractedly with the bullets, as if they were executive worry-beads supplied to all the offices. ‘Every morning when they get up people will dial the clinic and log in their health data: pulse, blood-pressure, weight and so on. One prick of the finger on a small scanner and the computers here will analyse everything: liver enzymes, cholesterol, prostate markers, the lot.’

  ‘Alcohol levels, recreational drugs …?’

  ‘Everything. It’s so totalitarian only Eden-Olympia could even think about it and not realize what it means. But it might work. Professor Kalman is very keen on faecal smears, but I suspect that’s one test too far. He hates the idea of all that used toilet paper going to waste. The greatest diagnostic tool in the world is literally being flushed down the lavatory. How does it strike you?’