Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  By the time I open them again, Nicolas and Maria-Chjara are invisible, and I can just hear laughter in the water, playing, advancing and retreating. As soon as the laughter stops, I promise myself that I will block my ears, sew up my eyelids or, since it might be easier, just leave.

  And that’s what I should do, I know.

  Too late! Maria-Chjara comes out first. Naked. Impossibly beautiful, as I will never be, as hardly any other girl will ever be. So beautiful as to be cursed by all the other girls in the galaxy.

  She goes on laughing, slightly hysterically; it sounds as false as the notes from Nico’s guitar, and makes her a bit less sexy, I think, but having said that, she’s still got the edge on the rest of the field.

  She picks up her bikini top, her bottom, her white linen shirt two metres further away.

  Hurry up, my Nico, she’s going to slip through your fingers!

  Little by little I’m starting to understand the game. Thank you, Chjara.

  She’s already dressed as Nicolas leaves the water, his nakedness slightly shameful. Time for him to put a foot, a thigh, into his jeans, like a heron standing on one leg. Maria-Chjara kisses him for a long time, then runs away.

  For Nicolas to catch up with her, he’d have to be the world hopping champion.

  ‘A domani, amore mio,’ giggles the beautiful Italian girl. ‘Domani, t’offrirò la mia chiave.’

  And the filthy girl, while running, casts off one of her shoes.

  A few seconds later, when the darkness has swallowed her, Nicolas picks it up. My brother finds himself standing there like an idiot holding her flip-flop, a campsite prince charming in a kingdom of bikini-clad Cinderellas.

  I creep away.

  ‘See you tomorrow …’

  It will be 23 August.

  In fact, no, it’s five o’clock in the morning. The day when it’s all going to happen is already here.

  *

  * *

  ‘Forever Young’, he murmured.

  The yearning in that song, the desire to die young or go on for ever.

  They weren’t even given that choice.

  46

  22 August 2016, 8 p.m.

  Hidden by a hedge a short way off Oscelluccia beach, you might have thought that the guard posted outside the caravan had been joined by three friends, as solid and muscle-bound as he was, but more eccentrically dressed. The bodyguard whose task it was to keep an eye on the Italian singer was wearing an immaculate charcoal suit, while the three men surrounding him wore hunting gear (the first two) and a dark tracksuit (the third). If anyone had come closer – although the beach was almost deserted, and the caravan isolated from the beach – they would quickly have learned their mistake.

  Four dark faces, certainly. One black man and three men wearing balaclavas.

  Maria-Chjara studied them for a moment through the Velux of her dressing-room, then turned towards her guest, who was standing by a raspberry-coloured leather armchair.

  ‘You didn’t need to call your gorillas down from the maquis,’ the singer said. ‘I would have opened the door without them.’

  Clotilde stepped forward and peered through the window at the four men who were sharing a thermos of coffee, and almost seemed to have struck up a friendship. Their rifles rested modestly against two rubbish containers.

  Papé had been efficient. During their slow descent from Capu di a Veta, he had used Clotilde’s phone to call a few friends who would be capable of discreetly neutralising Maria-Chjara’s bodyguard.

  After the two-hour walk down to Arcanu Farm, Cassanu had been exhausted. He had collapsed on a chair in the middle of the yard, under the shade of the holm oak. Mamy Lisabetta had listened to his hoarse breathing and, ignoring his protests, had summoned Dr Pinheiro, whom he normally refused to see for anything other than his anti-flu vaccine. Pinheiro had immediately called an ambulance and ordered that the patriarch should undergo a period of extended observation, then a rest cure, at the Balagne Medical Centre. Clotilde had felt sorry in advance for the unfortunate nurse who would be given the task of telling Cassanu that he would have to spend a few more days in bed after the initial observation. At the age of almost ninety, the Corsican still walked several kilometres a day, or swam a few hundred metres.

  Clotilde turned away from the window.

  ‘I came to see you, Maria, the other day after the concert, without my escort, and you wouldn’t open the door to me then.’

  ‘But that evening you weren’t accompanied by Brad Pitt.’

  The Italian woman stared directly into the eyes of Natale, who was sitting on the second armchair, which was apple green.

  Ill-shaven and his fair hair tousled, in his haste to join Clotilde, Natale had pulled on a pair of jeans with holes in them and a white polo shirt with a loose neck. Calm and handsome, he emanated a feline strength that contrasted with the brute force of the big bears planted outside the door. Clotilde tried to extinguish the embers of jealousy that were burning in her belly, but Maria-Chjara was taking it upon herself to stir them. She sat down on the little stool in front of her dressing table: a large mirror, a basin and dozens of coloured glass bottles, cotton buds, amber phials, tweezers, and sticks of make-up in every shade of red, purple and ochre.

  ‘What a pleasure,’ the singer continued, ‘old friends dropping in unexpectedly for tea. But you’ll forgive me, I must get ready. My concert begins in two hours. My audience awaits me!’

  She winked with amusement at her mirror, clearly in no doubt about the motivation of the pre-pubescent teenagers who came to see her diving into the pool in a transparent white bikini. Clotilde took one last look outside at the hooded men, then pushed back the curtain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to use force to get a meeting, but …’ The singer had slipped the leopard-skin dressing gown from her shoulders. It hung on the chair like an abandoned hunting trophy while Maria-Chjara, wearing only a pair of red panties and a red bra, offered them an unrestricted view of her back, and the rose tattooed from the curve of her neck down to her bottom. The dressing-room mirror brazenly exposed her other side.

  Natale sat as impassive as the fake marble of the furniture around them. A table, a chest of drawers, a statue of Venus and Cupid. As kitsch as it comes. A flat belonging to a high-class hooker for moneyed old men must look something like this, Clotilde thought mischievously. The fake leather, plywood and drapes concealing the wretchedness beneath.

  ‘You know,’ Maria-Chjara joked, ‘after twenty years spent playing starlets on Canale 5, I’ve seen every kind of soldier …’

  Tweezers, cotton buds, foundation flowed through her expert fingers. Two hours to mask her wrinkles.

  ‘Since it’s so urgent,’ the singer continued, ‘go on, don’t waste your time.’

  Clotilde began. She told her the whole story, and Maria-Chjara didn’t interrupt even once. She combined the details recalled by Cervone Spinello with her own memories of 23 August 1989; Nicolas’s planned trip to the Camargue, his borrowing of the Fuego, which he had tried to drive with Maria-Chjara sitting in the passenger seat, the apparently benign accident. There was no damage to the car … apart from the steering column, the bolt, the connecting rod.

  When Clotilde had finished her story, the Italian elegantly swung round on her stool. While she was talking, Clotilde hadn’t watched Maria-Chjara putting on her make-up, but the result was astonishing. She had painted on the face of a thirty-year-old diva: full, velvety red lips, big black-framed eyes, high, luminous cheekbones, a smooth, rounded brow. Miraculously rejuvenated, as if she were about to dive into the Trevi Fountain for a Fellini film, rather than into a plastic pool immortalised by dozens of iPhones switched to video.

  She rolled her stool across the jasmine carpet and she took Clotilde’s hand.

  ‘Of course, my darling, I do remember your brother. Nicolas was touching, he was different, he was handsome. Even more than that, there was a kindness about him that was disarming. A desire to seduce with
out ever really doing it, playing the guitar so badly, showily taking his clothes off when in fact you knew he was as modest as a child. He was so charming, the day before the accident. Right here, on Oscelluccia beach, by the campfire.’

  Clotilde cut in abruptly.

  ‘So why did Nicolas, that charming, touching boy, not say anything? Why didn’t he speak to my father? Why did he choose to get into that car a few hours later rather than admit to the accident?’

  ‘Nicolas couldn’t have done that.’

  Clotilde’s hand twitched but Maria-Chjara held it firmly in place.

  ‘Nicolas couldn’t have done that,’ the starlet repeated. ‘And you know that very well …’

  Tears were beginning to well up in the corners of Clotilde’s eyes. Her left hand sought Natale’s on the armchair next to her. Her right hand was clutched tightly between the Italian woman’s fingers, the crimson-painted grip of an eagle.

  ‘Cervone Spinello is right about one thing. I did want to be sure that Nicolas knew how to drive before agreeing to go off on that trip in the Fuego. Your brother really did steal the keys to your father’s car, and he suggested that we take a short test-drive over to the Galéria. But what happened next is slightly different from the account you’ve been given by the campsite manager. Nicolas drove cautiously and confidently.’ Her fingers gently closed around Clotilde’s, like the retractable claws of a cat. ‘And I can assure you that I pushed the test to the max, kissing him on the neck, hands under his shorts, or in mine. He got us back safe and sound to the Euproctes campsite. Without once going off the road.’

  Clotilde remembered Cervone’s words. Nicolas bending to look under the engine of the car. ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing,’ bringing his black hands towards Maria’s white lace dress, and Maria recoiling, cursing, fleeing.

  Who was lying?

  Her voice trembled. ‘But Cervone heard you talking in the car park.’

  ‘That’s true. I don’t remember the precise words, once we got out of the car, but I told Nicolas that since he had passed the test, I would agree to get into the car with him that night. But on one condition …’

  Maria-Chjara’s fingers tightened again on Clotilde’s, and as if an electric current had passed through them, Clotilde’s returned their grip.

  ‘On the condition,’ she continued, ‘that we went on our own, just the two of us, without those other fools from the campsite.’

  Maria-Chjara’s words had a miraculous power, like some super-strength painkiller that could eradicate a migraine in an instant.

  Cervone Spinello had invented it all!

  Nicolas wasn’t guilty of anything, he wasn’t responsible for anything. That story about an accident was nothing but a monstrous defamation.

  Clotilde had managed to hold back her tears, and now she was filled with a sweet euphoria. Maria-Chjara, on the other hand, was openly weeping, tears spilling down her cheeks and leaving thin, pale rivulets in the ochre powder she had so patiently applied.

  ‘I waited for your brother, Clotilde. I waited for him the next day. I had put on my very best dress, a shower of stars around my eyes, roses in my hair. I waited for him all night. I wanted him to be my first. Your brother, and no one else. So I waited beneath the stars until they went out one by one When the last one had faded, I thought he was an utter bastard and I went to bed feeling nothing but contempt for the male of the species. The next morning, at dawn, I found out. The accident … The unthinkable …’ The crimson nails sank into her hand, but Clotilde didn’t draw back. ‘I swear, Clotilde, I swear, every time I make love, and God knows it happens often enough with all kinds of men, I never forget to think of your brother. If I was a writer, I think it would be a dedication, or something like that. Yes, Clotilde, I never forget to dedicate to him that “little death” that he never knew. Which I had refused him, out of defiance, out of stupidity. And perhaps even today, if I seldom say no, even to the most awful jerks, if I rarely wake up next to my conquest of the night before, it’s so that Nicolas will forgive me.’

  Maria-Chjara went on sobbing as she spoke, but Clotilde had stopped listening. Her brain was concentrating only on certain truths.

  Maria-Chjara wasn’t lying, that much was obvious.

  So Cervone had made it all up.

  But why?

  Out of jealousy? Out of spite?

  Or was Cervone’s game simpler than that? She had only to connect two facts: Cervone had made up the story of an accident to explain the damage to the Fuego’s steering. But Sergeant Cesareu Garcia was unequivocal: the bolt had been tampered with, the steering rod had snapped, and the policeman hadn’t mentioned a twisted steering column. He had talked about sabotage. Who could have an interest in lying about the cause of her parents’ accident but the saboteur himself?

  Maria-Chjara got to her feet and smiled as she looked at the disaster in the mirror.

  ‘With only a few minutes to go before the concert, it’s going to be difficult to paint a new masterpiece.’ She put out her tongue at her reflection. ‘They don’t care anyway, they don’t come to see me for my beautiful eyes.’

  With the skill of one accustomed to performing the gesture on a daily basis, her fingers deftly removed her bra while her other hand plucked her white bikini from the clothes-rail.

  ‘According to clause 1 of my contract, I am to dive into the pool precisely at the end of the second verse of “Boys Boys Boys”, wearing a bikini. According to paragraph a) of clause 1: a bikini size 36 C.’

  She turned her breasts to face Natale, but this time Clotilde felt no jealousy. Maria-Chjara’s revelations had completely won her over.

  ‘So, Brad, treat yourself, have a good look. A private session. They’re not mine, so enjoy. Or not mine yet – at 3,500 euros a boob, I’ve had to take out a ten-year loan. Paying for your youth on credit is one hell of an invention, isn’t it?’

  Contorting herself to put on the tiny white bikini top, Maria-Chjara addressed Clotilde.

  ‘Don’t be cross with me, darling. You must be nearly the same age as me, you’re pretty as a picture, your lover is bewitching, so don’t be cross with me. Men love you for your smile, your energy, your elegance, while with me it’s only my tits they’ve ever looked at, ever since I was fourteen. They are, you might say, my identity. My double identity! It was either that, or follow my father into the broccoli business and I don’t have much time for vegetables!’

  She burst out laughing.

  This time it was Clotilde who took her hand.

  ‘You sing well, Maria. I heard you singing “Sempre giovanu” recently. You’ve always had a beautiful voice. That was what attracted men, your singing, not your body.’

  Clotilde immediately reproached herself for having used the past tense, but Maria-Chjara didn’t notice, or didn’t seem annoyed by it.

  ‘Thank you, my darling. That’s kind. Excuse me now, I have to go for a dip.’

  She exploded with laughter again and stared for one last time at Natale, adjusting her bikini top, which was already slipping down to reveal two dark nipples, studiedly symmetrical. Then she turned round, gently whistling the tune to ‘Boys, boys, boys’, this time without glancing in the mirror.

  ~

  As soon as they left the caravan, the hooded guards disappeared into the night. Natale took Clotilde’s hand to help her through the crowd that was beginning to swarm on to the beach. They were walking in the opposite direction to the groups of excited young dancers approaching the stage, a bit like suddenly turning around in a corridor of the Métro. Clotilde, lost in thoughts, allowed him to guide her.

  The teenagers and young adults, noisy, glittery, fluorescent, formed a kind of carnival around her which, rather than making her feel intimidated or distracted, prolonged the feeling of serenity that lifted her heart above the seething tide of spectators.

  Nicolas hadn’t killed her parents.

  The steering of the Fuego had been sabotaged.

  Cervone Spinello was more than
a suspect. He was starting to look like the guilty party. The death of her father, her mother and her brother would be avenged. Light had been cast on the areas in shadow. Why had her wallet been stolen from their bungalow? Why had that breakfast table been laid? The letters signed with a P? To conceal the murder of her family twenty-seven years ago? Clotilde, in the end, would know, would understand, would start her life afresh.

  The crowd on the beach continued to thin out the further they went from the neon signs of the Tropi-Kalliste. Clotilde took advantage of the fact to take out her phone.

  She would deal with Cervone later on.

  Tomorrow morning, at dawn.

  Before that, she wanted to make the most of this night.

  She let go of Natale’s hand and moved a little further away. He stood slightly off to one side, studying the groups of teenagers, viewing with apparent envy the bottles of alcohol that were being passed from lip to lip.

  Where are you?

  Clotilde had just pressed the ‘resend’ button on her phone: she had already sent the message to Franck and Valentine ten times that day, but had received no answer from her daughter or her husband. She waited for a few moments. Still nothing.

  Perhaps they didn’t have much network coverage on the high seas, but Franck and Valou wouldn’t be sailing at night. Valentine’s indifference was nothing new, she rarely replied to her mother before she’d received ten texts from her, and even more rarely on the same day.

  Franck, on the other hand …

  Clotilde examined the blank screen one last time, then looked up towards the black and deserted part of the beach, closed off by jagged rocks that looked like hairy monsters. As they strode over the first few rocks, tufts of samphire crunched under her feet. A few metres from the shore, at the foot of the sleeping reefs, the shadow of a little moored fishing boat danced. The Aryon was waiting, rocked by the peaceful waves, attached to its rusty ring by a threadbare rope.

  The music behind them was like a powerful wind, driving them out towards the sea.