Super-Cannes

by J. G. Ballard

  I, meanwhile, was stuck in a lavatory on the Croisette, like any junkie after a fix, and with scarcely a greater grip on reality. At Easter my cousin Charles had flown down to visit us, and we amicably agreed that I would give up the pretence of helping to edit the firm’s publications. He enjoyed his stay, impressed by Jane’s newfound role as international career physician, but puzzled by my transformation into a suntanned but distracted consort, forever listening to the ghosts in the garden. I told him nothing about the secret life of Eden-Olympia.

  Meanwhile, my investigation into the Greenwood murders had stalled. Between myself and the truth stood an amiable bully with badly bitten fingernails. Although Wilder Penrose enjoyed my company, and generously allowed me to beat him at chess, I knew that he saw me as another of his experimental animals, to be stroked through the bars as I was fattened for yet another maze.

  Trying to lead him on, I listened to him enlarge on his psychopathic credo. He had recruited a dozen more bowling clubs, and I hoped that he would soon overreach himself and drive his demented apocalypse into the buffers. He pressed me to join one of the therapy groups, and I finally gave in, intending to take careful notes of the victims and their injuries.

  In the rear seats of cars stolen for the evening, I watched as the photographer – a financial analyst with a Japanese bank – recorded the ratissages on his camcorder. An empty mansion on Cap d’Antibes owned by an Egyptian property tycoon was broken into and thoroughly trashed. Another bowling team, made up of senior managers at Elf-Maritime, carried out a spectacular act of piracy in the Golfe-Juan marina, seizing a motor yacht owned by a family of Omani Arabs. They sailed the gaudy vessel to the Îles de Lérins, where it was beached and set alight. From the terrace of the Villa Grimaldi we watched the flames rise into the night. As sleek in their wetsuits as a chorus line of James Bonds, the corporate perpetrators raised their malt-whisky tumblers and toasted the cause of therapeutic psychopathy.

  Gold, I soon noticed, was a special target of the bowling teams. I pretended to play lookout when a hapless Saudi broker was brutally beaten in the underground garage at the Noga Hilton. Sexual assaults provided a unique frisson, and older prostitutes received special treatment, for reasons locked deep in childhood pathology. I tried to forget that I had held open the lift doors in a Mandelieu tower block as a handsome Spanish whore who ran a two-room brothel fought to shield her infant daughter.

  After this I almost broke with Penrose, warning him that his therapy programme was moving out of control. But he knew that neither I nor any other executives would go to the police. The camcorder footage incriminated us all, as he reminded me, and the radical therapy clearly worked. The members of the bowling teams glowed with health, and Eden-Olympia had never been so successful. The flow of adrenalin, the hair-triggers of fear and flight, had retuned the corporate nervous system and pushed profits to unprecedented heights.

  Even I felt better. I sat in the lavatory cubicle in the Blue Bar, listening to the play of water on my hand. As the pain eased, I slipped into a reverie of Jane and our drive through Provence, in those months long ago that now seemed like years …

  ‘C’est stupide … Monsieur!’

  ‘Paul, are you in there? Don’t die yet …’

  I eased myself from the washbasin, woken by the raised voices. A fist pounded on the plywood panel. I unlatched the door as a Blue Bar waiter fell against me. He peered into the cubicle, searching the floor between my feet for any sign of an addict’s gear.

  Behind him stood Frances Baring, blonde eyebrows springing in alarm. She pressed her hands to my cheeks, staring into my still sluggish eyes.

  ‘Paul? You’re hiding in here? Is someone after you?’

  ‘No. Why? Sorry, I fell asleep.’

  ‘I thought, maybe …’ She slipped a fifty-franc note into the waiter’s hand. ‘Monsieur is with me. Have a nice day …’

  Frances took my arm and eased me out of the cubicle. The scent of her body, the touch of her hands, quickly revived me. She wore a white trouser suit and sunglasses, as if she had stepped from one of the gangster generals’ helicopters. She leaned forward to kiss me, sniffing at my breath before our lips touched.

  ‘Frances, relax …’ I noticed the hypodermic wallet jammed behind the washbasin taps and stuffed it into my jacket. ‘My knee’s been creating hell – I gave myself a shot of Jane’s painkiller and drifted off… thinking about you.’

  ‘I hate that stuff. One day we’ll be meeting in the local morgue. The barman said he’d seen you – an Englishman, très méchant.’ Still unconvinced, she closed the cubicle door. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

  ‘I’m fine, no problems with the knee.’ The sleep had refreshed me, and I felt almost euphoric. As we stepped into the crowded restaurant I pointed to the Croisette. ‘God, it’s dark.’

  ‘It usually is. It’s called night.’

  Frances steered me to the stools by the bar. Glad to see her, I watched as she fumbled in her purse for cigarettes and lighter. I liked her quirky humour, her sudden moods of self-doubt when she gripped me tightly and refused to let me leave her bed. She was still trying to turn me against Eden-Olympia, but approved of my taking part in the ratissages, sometimes telling me of a mansion that might be robbed. In return, she asked me to introduce her to some of the pilots at the Cannes-Mandelieu airfield, an engaging crew of French, American and South African flyers who towed the advertising pennants above the beaches of the Côte d’Azur in their ageing Cessnas and met to drink at a Thai restaurant in La Napoule. She commissioned one of the Frenchmen to take aerial photographs of the Var plain near the Sophia-Antipolis science park, ostensibly as part of her property surveys, and later I found his flying jacket at her apartment. But Jane’s anaesthetic took care of that pain too …

  I kissed the pearl lipstick on her mouth, but she was distracted by the noise on the Croisette. She stabbed her cigarette into a wet pulp, and pushed away her martini.

  ‘All this din,’ she complained. ‘Let’s find somewhere quiet.’

  ‘It’s the film festival – everyone’s enjoying themselves.’

  ‘Awful, isn’t it? You can get knocked down by the world’s oldest hooligans.’

  ‘Frances…?’ I pressed her hands to the bar. ‘What is it? You’re as nervous as a bird.’

  She glanced into the mirror of her compact, scanning the restaurant behind her. ‘I think I’m being followed.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. You look like a movie star.’

  ‘I mean it. That’s why I haven’t been in touch. There’s someone watching me when I leave the office. I’m pretty sure it’s one of Zander’s security men.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Nothing. He sits in a parked car on the roof deck, near where David was killed.’

  ‘Maybe he’s holding a vigil?’

  ‘Paul, I’m serious.’

  ‘He’s just doing his job. Frances, you’re an important person in the property office. You help them with the … recreational side of things.’

  ‘That’s quite a euphemism. Write it down.’ She frowned at the olive in her martini, as if suspecting that it might be bugged. ‘At least I don’t like doing it. You accept everything.’

  ‘Not true. I’m waiting for Penrose to go over the edge. Then the whole balloon will burst and the police will have to act. I hate the racism and violence, but the ratissages are just an adult version of “ring the doorbell and run”.’

  ‘That’s very tolerant, coming from someone as straitlaced as you. I’m glad no one rings my doorbell.’ She laughed at this, trying to reassure herself, and then stared at me like a shady boxing manager setting up one of his fighters. ‘Wilder Penrose impresses you, I can see that. Have you ever thought where it’s going to lead? And where he’s taking you?’

  ‘Frances … he’s not taking me anywhere. Stop working for them. Apply for a transfer. By the way, I assume you picked out the Arab yacht they set alight?’

  ‘So vulgar. A floa
ting brothel. I had a look round – it reeked of semen.’ She revived, the flames almost reflected in her eyes. ‘You should have joined in, Paul. You’d have fun beating up some rich Arab.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ I wanted to calm her, and took away her cigarettes. Lowering my voice, I said: ‘You’ve been trying to use me ever since we met. Why?’

  ‘Who knows? Revenge, anger, envy – invent a new deadly sin. We need one.’ She moved closer to me, and took a cigarette from the packet in my hand. Casually, she said: ‘There’s going to be an “action” tonight. A really big one.’

  ‘Ringing doorbells?’

  ‘More serious than that. They’ve rented cars and an ambulance. Because of the film festival they’ve had to bring them in from Marseilles and Dijon.’

  ‘That’s a lot of trouble to go to. How do you know?’

  ‘I booked the drivers’ return air tickets. If there’s an ambulance it means people will be hurt. I think they plan to kill someone.’

  ‘I doubt it. Who?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ She stared at herself in the mirror behind the bar. ‘It could be me. Or you. In fact, you’re much more likely.’

  ‘Hire cars and an ambulance? Return tickets to Dijon?’

  ‘Why not? They must be tired of you poking around. You haven’t discovered anything about David they didn’t already know. You’re no more part of Eden-Olympia than those African salesmen they’re always roughing up. Your wife’s practically moved in with one of their senior executives.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘No? I’m sorry, Paul. I didn’t mean that.’ She smiled dreamily, like a clever child, and then seized her purse. ‘I’m getting the Blue Bar blues. Let’s get out of here and see some healthy, life-enhancing porn …’

  We strolled arm in arm along the Croisette, stepping back when groups of limousine-chasers raced across the pavement, chattering into their mobile phones as they coordinated their celebrity hunt. I thought of Frances’s talk of a special action. But I was too easy a target, a crippled ex-pilot barely able to pump the clutch pedal of his rebored Jaguar, with a wife who was a key member of the clinic.

  But the threat nagged at me, as Frances had intended. She was forever playing with my emotions and loyalties, skilfully weaving them through the woof and warp of her own insecurities. Lying in bed beside me at Marina Baie des Anges, surrounded by the vast, curved night, she would watch me as I caressed her thighs, confused by the affection I felt for her. She had never understood the secret rationale of Eden-Olympia, and still assumed that its senior executives were giving in to a repressed taste for thuggery and violence.

  ‘Paul?’ She gripped my arm as I stopped to scan the traffic. ‘You’ve seen something?’

  I pointed to the central reservation, sealed off by railings to protect the palms from the graffiti artists. A stout man with reddish hair and a bottle nose stood on a patch of grass, staring over the crowd.

  ‘The Riviera News manager …’ Frances turned her back. ‘Is that –?’

  ‘Meldrum. Do you want to talk to him?’

  ‘No. He’s watching us. He knows something is on tonight.’

  ‘There is. You’re in the middle of it.’ I waited as the Australian jotted something into a notebook. ‘He’s a reporter, Frances. He’s covering his beat.’

  ‘Let’s get away. Here, anywhere …’ I could feel her shaking as she dragged me up the steps of a short-let apartment building. The flats had been rented out to small independent producers, and every balcony was draped with banners advertising the company’s latest film.

  ‘“Where Teachers Dare” … “Schoolgirl Killers” …’ I read out. ‘Manila, Phuket, Taiwan. What Meldrum calls one man, a boy and a dog operations …’

  ‘The man holds the camera while the boy … Paul, are you interested?’ Frances had calmed herself, and waited for me to reply. ‘They’re all on video. You sit on a bed and take your pick from six television sets.’

  ‘Group sex, donkeys, water sports? Krafft-Ebing meets Video-8?’

  ‘Please … this isn’t Surbiton or Maida Vale. It’s all very normal – paunchy men in their fifties having straight sex with fourteen-year-olds. Nothing pervy, thank you.’ She took my arm like a helpful tour guide. ‘Cahiers du Cinéma says the porn movie is the true future of film.’

  ‘In that case …’

  We entered the lobby of the apartment building. Beyond the glass doors was the reception bureau, which resembled the registration office of a paediatric conference. Two middle-aged Asian women with the faces of retired croupiers sat at a baize-draped table, beside a display board covered with room numbers and film stills. Leaflets and advertisement flyers were stacked on a desk, showing a selection of well-groomed and smiling children barely on the edge of puberty, as if illustrating a seminar on rubella or whooping cough.

  ‘Frances … hold on.’

  ‘What is it? Spoilt for choice?’

  ‘This isn’t for me.’

  ‘How do you know? Are you sure, Paul?’

  ‘Absolutely. You’ve had me wrong from the beginning.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ She seemed relieved, but added offhandedly: ‘David loved it here.’

  ‘Greenwood? That surprises me.’

  ‘It was a laugh. A huge joke. He was curious – in a way, he was working in the same field.’

  ‘A joke?’ I watched the Asian women. One of them was trying to smile, and a strange crevice appeared in the area of her mouth, a vent of hell.

  I stepped into the Croisette and the safety of the television lights. A stretch limousine with Eden-Olympia pennants slowed to a halt, held up by the crowd that surged aimlessly along the pavement like a tide swilling to and fro among the piers of a tropical harbour. I could see clearly into the rear seat, where Jane sat between Alain and Simone Delage. All were in evening dress, Jane with Wilder Penrose’s mink stole around her shoulders. She was staring at the sea, as if unaware of the film festival and lost in her thoughts of modem links and mass medical screenings. She was tired but all the more beautiful for it, and I felt proud of her and glad to be her husband, despite what Eden-Olympia had done to us.

  On the jump seat sat Pascal Zander, eyes fixed on Jane’s cleavage. He was aggressively drunk, gesturing in a coarse way at Alain Delage, who seemed bored by him. Simone held Jane’s hand, trying to distract her from Zander, murmuring a commentary on the crowd into her ear.

  When the traffic failed to move, Alain spoke to the chauffeur. The front passenger door opened and Halder stepped from the car, smartly dressed in dinner jacket and black cummerbund, gold cufflinks flashing at his wrists. He noticed me on the steps of the apartment building, and glanced at the display of film titles hanging from the balconies. Barely pausing, he raised his palms to the night air, as if puzzled by my choice of film fare for the evening.

  ‘Paul, who was that?’ Frances waved as the limousine moved off. ‘I think I saw Halder …’

  ‘Jane with the Delages and Pascal Zander. She seemed very happy.’

  ‘Good. No one died of boredom during the film. They’re off to the party at the Villa Grimaldi.’

  ‘Zander looked drunk. Too drunk for a security chief.’

  ‘People worry about him. They say he’s going to be replaced. Pity me, Paul. I have to see him at the party. Those roving hands should be up there on the Noga Hilton with the samurai …’

  I watched the tail lights of the limousine, and for a moment thought that Jane had turned to look back at me. ‘The Villa Grimaldi? I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Did they send you a ticket?’

  ‘I’ll gate-crash.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the gates.’ She stared gloomily at my stained shirt and leather sandals. ‘I can get you in, but it’s black tie.’

  ‘They’ll think I’m one of the security guards.’

  ‘They’re dressed like Cary Grant.’ She pondered this sartorial impasse, still trying to integrate me into her scheme. ‘We’ll go back to Marina Baie des An
ges. David’s old dinner jacket is there. I think you’re allowed to borrow it.’

  ‘David’s old tux …?’ I took her arm. ‘Yes, I’d like to wear it. Something tells me it’s going to fit …’

  32

  A Dead Man’s Tuxedo

  BEHIND US, MARINA Baie des Anges wrapped itself into the night, its curved towers enclosing a deeper darkness of sleep, dreams and seconal. We set off towards Antibes on the RN7, the beach of Villeneuve-Loubet to our left. A windsurfer tacked across the waves, watched by his wife and teenage son, sitting on the shingle slope below their parked car. As the sail caught the shifting air it seemed to vanish for a few seconds, then appeared again as if emerging from a defective space-time.

  Frowning at the prospect of the Villa Grimaldi party, Frances leaned into the steering wheel, following the BMW’s headlamps as they swerved across the steep camber. I lay back in the passenger seat and let the night air sweep across me, carrying away the last musty scents of Greenwood’s dinner jacket.

  The dead man’s tuxedo was a tight squeeze, the seams straining against my armpits. Frances had taken the suit from the wardrobe in her bedroom, holding the garment to her shoulders and reluctant to share it with me. She sat on the bed and watched while I smoothed the bruised lapels. A scent of past time clung to the fabric, memories of medical society dinners in London, cigar smoke and long-forgotten aftershave that rose from the worn silk lining.

  Yet I felt surprisingly comfortable in the dead doctor’s hand-me-down. Gazing at myself in the wardrobe mirror, I sensed that I had become Greenwood and assumed his role. Frances was almost deferential, aware that through me her former lover had returned to her bedroom.

  With one of her white yachting shirts and a black tie fashioned from a crepe hatband, I passed muster. We were leaving the flat when I noticed my leather sandals.

  ‘Jesus, Frances – my feet!’

  ‘So? You’ve got two of them.’

  ‘Look at those toes – they’re the size of lobsters.’