Caron doesn’t understand. This individual, obviously on drugs, maybe as mad as a hatter, who has broken into his home holding an automatic weapon, doesn’t fit any of the categories he usually uses to judge his fellow men. What kind of person tracks someone down just for his own amusement, for the sake of no more than a little entertainment? No, no, he’s lying to me. He did kill the old man. He knows I know. He’s here to finish the job, he thinks.
“I don’t believe you. You were the killer and… you’re going to kill again.”
“You’re obsessed! And what makes you think, tell me, that I’m this fearsome ogre?”
“My cousin hired you, didn’t he?”
“So that means I must be a killer, right? And that’s why you followed me the other day, isn’t that so? A killer, a real one, one that fascinates you, excites you! You, so morbid! So impotent! You, the half-man! Someone who takes his fury to the limit, for whom it isn’t enough to cut pieces off old dead guys, who can look someone else in the eye without blushing, without flinching. You think I’m that kind of man. And you idolize me.”
Caron starts to protest.
“But I’m not that man,” Franck continues, his tone suddenly uncertain. “No, my friend, you’re wrong. I’m no killer. Until today I’d never killed anyone. Yes, I confess. I killed that young flute player who spoke so badly about Manet.”
“Lyllian? But why?”
“Who knows? Did I really want to? Did he irritate me? Maybe it was just for the pleasure of making a pun about drawing a line under a friendship? Maybe I only acted on a whim, out of desire for a fresh sensation? For me, everything’s so boring, so worn out. I try new things… But I’m already tired of killing, I admit it.”
The redhead is perplexed. “I don’t understand at all…” He raises his voice. “Who are you, anyway?”
Franck considers the question at length. Then he lays out a line of coke on the table and snorts it before answering, “I’d like to be able to tell you something original. But I have the impression” (a veil of sadness comes over his eyes) “that I’m just a marionette, a rickety kind of nutcracker doll. Or worse, a fictional character that the author is trying to motivate with the most flagrant contempt for the rules of human psychology. A perverse author with a thirst for freedom, for fantasy – but who can’t do without fate, without the banal. I seem crazy to you… but I’m not; I’m just an ordinary little addict that any doctor could explain completely. You find me colorful, brilliant… wrong! That’s just a knee-jerk reaction to a drab world. You think I’m self-confident: well, maybe you’re braver than I am! You asked me who I am… What can I say? A mask – that’s what I am. A mask imposed somehow or other onto something shattered, that’s slipping, slipping. Glue doesn’t stick very well to nothing!” He gets unsteadily to his feet. “So ask yourself whether I deserve to have you for a fan club, with your damfool morbid little embellishments. I’m simply in the process of dying.”
As Franck is preparing to leave, the professor calls to him: “You… You haven’t told me… If you didn’t kill old Henderson, then who was it?”
Franck shrugs. “Who do you think it could be but that drug-sodden thief they arrested a few hours after the murder?”
“Alexander Marshall?”
“Most likely!”
Caron is uneasy, almost scared. “Then…”
Franck’s tone is serious, lugubrious. “Then things are exactly as they seem.”
He leaves.
On Francis Street, in front of Caron’s house, a number of vehicles are parked. They’re returning to the fold, thinks Franck. In kitchens, in living rooms, bachelors are pouring themselves a beer and families are mimicking happiness – the ambiance of a residential neighborhood at dusk. Franck gets into the 300C. He looks in his rearview mirror. Behind him, the black van hasn’t moved. Inside it, Le Carré’s two enforcers, hastily dispatched to capture Franck, are still bound and gagged. He lights a cigarette and drives away.
24
In the Ford squad car, Gomez and McCarthy are sitting in silence. Sinatra, too, is silent.
“Yes, Laura Henderson was right: I was crazy. Crazy to think that Hiscock had anything to do with the murder. Crazy out of arrogance. Crazily fanciful. Crazy for complications. It was all under our noses. It was under our noses all the time.” The sheriff has been repeating this since Jaspers burst into his office to announce that it was all over: “Marshall has just confessed.”
Marshall had confessed. And then nothing more, just a buzz. He said where the weapon was. They found it. The DA has been informed. The press too. “Well done guys, you did great work.” The popping of flashbulbs, hands being shaken, hugs: a little glory. And that was all. Night has fallen. The police station has emptied. Everyone has gone home. Case closed. Only McCarthy and Gomez linger on.
“So, is that it, then?” asks the deputy.
“That’s it,” answers the sheriff.
And this evening already the headlines will roll: SUSPECT CONFESSES; HE WAS THE KILLER; BELLAMS DRUG DEALER CHARGED WITH MURDER.
A case like that wouldn’t provide the plot for a blockbuster. The residents of Watertown will shrug as they drink their coffee, as if to say, “I told you so.”
“My instinct! Like hell!” growls the sheriff. “More a lot of bullshit, that’s what! It’s just that I wanted to make a mystery of it, to silence the voice that was telling me that basically it had to be him.” The sheriff sighs. He adds, “I was hoping for a discordant note.”
More silence. Then Gomez speaks. “The good side of it is that it makes it easier for us to do our work… Take the young woman you find lying stiff in her kitchen, well, nine times out of ten all you have to do is talk to her boyfriend; he’s probably come home wasted and beaten the crap out of her, that’s all. The movies are all the poorer, but we—”
“We lose out too,” grumbles the sheriff. “Not as cops, not as moviegoers, but as human beings. Isn’t that so?”
Gomez doesn’t answer. He presses Play: “It Had to Be You.”
“Want me to drop you at home?” asks the deputy after a few moments.
“No, not at my place. I want to… reflect.” (He gives a weak smile.) “I want to be a cop for a little longer… Drop me at Captain Carl’s.”
“Any objection to some company?”
Captain Carl’s is an ordinary pub on Buffalo Street, patronized above all by family men who linger on after work, reluctant to slip back just yet into cozy habits, and in addition a few of the usual losers, and a few harmless crackpots.
“Good evening,” says McCarthy in a flat voice as he enters.
“Two heroes!” exclaims big Tommy, the pub’s owner. He comes out from behind the counter and literally throws himself on the sheriff, flinging his arms around him.
“You’ve heard the news already?” says the deputy, surprised. Tommy taps his BlackBerry with a knowing look.
“The press didn’t waste any time,” sighs Gomez.
“Neither did you!” exclaims the barkeep. “Congratulations! You saw right away who you were dealing with. In no time at all! A few hours and he was in the slammer. And I heard that—”
“Bring us a couple of beers.”
Tommy nods and goes off to fetch them.
“I can see we’re going to spend the week explaining that we didn’t do anything out of the ordinary,” says the deputy.
“I’m soon going to have to explain that to Charlene and the kids.” He can already imagine his wife hanging on his neck, hugging him, and whispering in his ear that she went out to get “a big pie and a bottle of wine,” as his two daughters shout their joy. Among the series of misapprehensions that await the sheriff, this will be the most painful. For him, the rowdy admiration his family shows him is a trial more than a source of gratification. He sees it as a misunderstanding, the commencement of a lie.
“Are you okay, Sheriff? You’re very pale.”
McCarthy tries to smile. “I’m thinking, that’s all. After these
days of craziness – or absence of craziness, if you prefer, it’s quite normal…”
As silence is about to fall again, Gomez risks a question that still bothers him. “But Sheriff, didn’t Doctor Olson’s report suggest there might have been two killers involved?”
McCarthy nods. “As of now, Marshall hasn’t said anything. We’ll question him again. What do you expect me to say? Maybe he was carrying more than one weapon… Now that he’s started talking I’ll make sure he doesn’t keep anything from us.”
McCarthy raises his beer glass. So does Gomez. Glumly, they clink glasses.
“Another round, Tommy.”
Gomez left an hour ago. The sheriff feels no desire to go home. He is comfortable here, with guys who, like himself, aren’t ready to go home. He recognizes Pasteur, the gas pump attendant who waved to him as he came in. He saw him laboriously searching his pockets for change, and – hesitatingly, guiltily – scraping together enough for a beer. Pasteur is a drunk of the lowliest variety – the kind that don’t have enough money to pay for their vice. He’ll pay for a second beer, then borrow from other customers. Then he’ll plead with the barkeep to grant him some credit before he sets off for home, whining and dissatisfied, made vicious by his residual thirst, ready to pick a fight with anyone. Then there’s little Griffith, who once had dreams but swapped them long ago for a job as a city employee and a lease on a German car. And Samson, a former neighbor the sheriff had lost sight of for a few years. And McGaffey, whom he arrested for dealing cannabis five years ago, but who doesn’t seem to hold it against him. Finally, Tarpist, a mustachioed seven-foot colossus, who was thrown out by his wife after she found more than four hundred videos on his computer depicting nude, leather-gloved, cigarette-smoking women. And then there’s me, he thinks, just as reluctant to leave here as those guys, just as loath to reflect, and who has just ordered another beer. He sighs. Yet I need to reflect, at least to convince myself that the whole thing isn’t a farce, McCarthy adds to himself.
When Tommy sets his beer down on the table, the sheriff looks at him curiously, thinking, Now there’s a guy who’d never have allowed himself to get carried away, who’d never have allowed his imagination to get the better of him. If I’d consulted him from the start, he’d have told me without a moment’s hesitation that Marshall was the guilty one. He’s not obliged to deal exclusively with people who are depraved, in crisis, driven by impulse. He knows them in their ordinariness.
“Thanks, Tommy!”
“You’re welcome, Sheriff. The next one’s on me!”
As McCarthy is taking his first gulp, Linda comes into the bar. With garish makeup, liberally sprinkled with perfume, atrociously bloated, and dull-eyed, she greets the drinkers, who look away. The only people she frequents are on the Internet. She met them on a “conspiracy website,” shortly after 9/11. She happened on a site explaining that the official version of the events was questionable. She posted a comment. Someone responded. Then she became convinced that the things she heard on television were untrue. She was completely won over by the theory of an inside job, which claimed that the Bush administration was behind the attack. Within a few weeks she was radicalized. By the time a member of the forum came for a visit, Linda was convinced that George Bush was conniving with an extraterrestrial brigade. After fifteen minutes, her visitor, a handsome electrician from Dorchester, a widower who organized bingo games to raise money for the blind, received a dummy call on his cell phone saying he had to deal with an emergency and made his escape. The business about extraterrestrials was too much for him. Ten years later, when she was leading a solitary existence and had gone partly crazy, the Edward Snowden affair burst on the scene. From that moment on, Linda was no longer alone. There was no one at home with her, no one around her, no one to answer her messages, but she did have the company of the US government, spying on her, listening to her, taking an interest in her.
Tactfully, Tommy goes up to her, greets her, asks for her news, and requests (indulgently, as if talking to a child) that she not bother the other customers. Big Linda protests, declaring that she just wants people’s attention for five minutes – it won’t take long – to talk about an earthquake deliberately provoked by the CIA, the Illuminati, and an extraterrestrial brigade. Tommy shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Linda. You’ll have to do that outside. But if you promise me you won’t cause a disturbance, I can serve you a beer.” Open-mouthed, torn between her convictions and her thirst, Linda hesitates. Then she looks up, and says, “Okay, I’m going.”
Good old Linda! thinks McCarthy. She may be nuts, but there’s something attractive about her. She can rage, recriminate, be dead set against the whole world, but she’d never harm a fly. Basically, she does her best.
McCarthy doesn’t much believe in the big – fantastic, Hollywood-style – oppositions between Good and Evil. In the abstract, they make sense, he thinks. But on a human level you find them all mixed up, interwoven, overlapping. And then, who is good? Who is evil? Most people are neither one nor the other; they are at the mercy of uncontrollable circumstances that govern their lives. So they do something, and then the politicians, the clergymen, and the cops come along and slice up what they’ve done, categorizing each piece as “good” or “bad.” The sheriff remembers a religious fanatic who worked on the police switchboard and was found partly responsible for a death after she implored a 911 caller to “not even mention such horrors,” and hung up on them. It was out of goodness, of course – a goodness that gave a psychopath from the Bellams time to saw up his girlfriend with no interference, despite three desperate calls to the police department. Maybe I’d be better off if I just didn’t give a damn… He sighs, and sips his beer.
“You don’t seem quite yourself, Sheriff,” Tommy intervenes. “Upset about that sonofabitch?”
McCarthy nods. “I was sure it wasn’t him… How dumb can you be!”
“I have to tell you that as soon as I read the newspaper I said to myself, ‘That’s the one!’”
“That’s what’s upsetting me…”
“Anyway, you were right to keep looking. I just tell myself that that guy’s a murderer and it’s obvious… But he mightn’t have been your murderer.”
McCarthy gives a bitter laugh. “Yes, that’s what my job comes down to: matching the right murder to the right killer.”
25
He told himself that sin penetrates the deepest intimacy, that it binds two people together no less than the most burning caresses, that private, intimate, shameful transgression makes us penetrate the existence of another as deeply as the carnal act makes us penetrate their body.
WITOLD GOMBROWICZ
PORNOGRAPHY
The bar is almost empty. McCarthy is starting on his third beer.
“Good evening, Paul.”
He looks up. The man is wearing a violet-colored velvet jacket. He recognizes him. “Franck!” he exclaims, in a slightly slurred voice. “I never thought I’d see you again! What are you doing here?”
“I came in to see you.”
The sheriff is astonished, almost wary. “Really? And how did you—”
“I saw you from the street. It doesn’t look as if you want to leave this place…”
“That’s right, Franck! That’s right! You’ve read me perfectly…”
“Because of your wife?”
“Oh come on, what must you be thinking?” He gives a nervous laugh. “Everything’s fine with my wife.”
“And with your daughters too, I know. Yet you’ve no wish to join them, not this evening.”
The sheriff smiles. “Right again,” he confesses, bitterly.
Franck leans toward McCarthy, and whispers, “Would you like to know what brought me in here, Sheriff? It was just that – the fact that you don’t want to go home.”
“I beg your pardon!?” McCarthy exclaims.
“May I sit down?”
The policeman nods.
Franck sits down, and continues, “Reality has playe
d a dirty trick on you, Paul. You were on the track of an unusual killer, some bloodthirsty, scintillating guy, an ogre, a fairy-tale character! And then – oops! – with a bounce of his shoulder he knocks you up against the hard truth, against the Bellams, against the obvious, against Alexander Marshall. It would take less than that to drive you out of your mind…”
The sheriff doesn’t reply. He shivers.
Franck goes on: “The obvious, Paul… It was all obvious. All as expected. Predictable. Banal. Your life is banal too. Nothing ever happens in it, except what must. You know Charlene is expecting you, that she’s bought a pie, that she’s dressed up for the occasion. Your poor little house is ready to welcome you – your castle that protects you, but suffocates you too. You’re afraid of losing your grip, Paul, and you feel, in spite of everything, that with this case you’ve crossed a line—”
“I’m going home very soon.”
“If you keep on drinking,” Franck goes on, “their surprise will turn to uneasiness. That’s why you’re here, why you’re lingering on… Isn’t that so? To undo the web you’ve spun… To enjoy a little lightheadedness.”
Franck covers the sheriff’s hand with his. McCarthy’s face clouds over. “And you – what has brought you here?”
The detective smiles. He leans in close. “You need an ally, Paul.”
26
As soon as you construct a fictional universe that has the false extremes of bourgeois mediocrity and pathological eccentricity as its two poles, the style that imposes itself automatically is a contorted one.
Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine Page 14
