Talking to Ghosts

by Hervé Le Corre

He was hardly back inside Sandra de Melo’s apartment when his mobile rang.

  “I see you’re visiting that Portuguese slut … Did she give you a decent blow job? You do know that’s her speciality?”

  Vilar ran to the windows, cursing at the fact the shutters were closed. The guy was downstairs. How was it possible?

  “How do you know that?”

  “That she sucks cock? Guess! I’ve even got it on video. Just like I’ve got one of your son.”

  Vilar almost ripped the handle off the door as he flung it open. He dashed along the walkway, took the stairs three at a time, slamming into the wall, because the mobile pressed to his ear threw him off balance.

  “Doing a little jogging? You think you can catch me, dickhead? What, you think I’m going to be waiting outside the door? You dumb fucks didn’t even set a trap – or ‘stake the place out’, as you’d say. Jesus, even I feel embarrassed for you.”

  Vilar arrived outside and looked around, started back towards his car, trying to catch his breath. He could hear the guy laughing on the other end of the line and he tried to think of something to say to needle him, to get to him somehow.

  “She talk to you, did she?” the voice growled. “Tell you who I was? That little whore knows nothing. I suppose she told you my name’s Éric? Well, good luck hunting. Makes no odds … I’m about to kill her anyway. I’ve got your mate’s car about fifty metres ahead of me. Just wait till you see the expression on her face when I’m done. Maybe later I’ll show you some more stuff about your son. Have to keep my priorities straight, can’t do everything at once. You got to understand, I’m taking a risk here with a guy like you. Then again, I get off on it, so I can’t really complain. O.K., shitface, see you round.”

  Vilar ran the last few metres and jumped behind the wheel. He called Pradeau, but the call went straight to voicemail. He left a brief message, knowing it was pointless: hide, make a run for it, do whatever you have to because this psychopath is right behind you and more than capable of creating a bloodbath. Then he called the station to tell them an officer was in danger and to ask that patrol cars be despatched to secure the likely route. The duty officer promised to do the necessary. Pradeau had probably taken the most direct route to the police station. At this hour of the night, it should take him about fifteen minutes. Vilar floored the accelerator as hard as he dared, one hand pressing the mobile to his ear, trying again to get through to Pradeau, the other hand gripping the steering wheel. He negotiated every red light at speed and quickly found himself at the intersection of the boulevard Georges V and the rue de Pessac, where heavy traffic forced him to slow to a crawl. Cars honked their horns angrily at the way he was driving. All he needed now was for the local traffic police to arrest him or give chase, try to breathalyse him. He called the station again, narrowly missing a moped that shot out of a side street, and waited to hear if Pradeau had got back safely.

  “He’s not here,” the officer on the phone said. “He took the woman directly to a safe house.”

  By now, Vilar could see the police station up ahead, rising up in the darkness, immense, white as an iceberg. He parked on the kerb, jerking the handbrake.

  “What? What safe house?”

  “Ah, that I don’t know. No-one’s told me.”

  “Where the fuck is he? I called not five minutes ago to say there’s an armed and very dangerous bastard on his tail, and what the fuck have you done about it? Would it really be so hard to get off your arse and do something to stop him being killed?”

  The guy mumbled, called someone over. There seemed to be a commotion. As though an alarm had finally gone off, Vilar thought.

  “Commandant Castel,” a voice said suddenly. “The officer has just been located. Place Jacques-Dormoy. We’ve got two units on their way to the scene. Bystanders thought it was a fight between a couple of drunks and called the police.”

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’ve paged Capitaine Daras.”

  It took him less than ten minutes to get to the place Jacques-Dormoy, weaving through narrow, potholed streets lined with parked cars where he several times had to swerve to avoid hitting vehicles parked haphazardly on the pavement.

  There were police everywhere. A dozen patrol cars. Every squad out tonight had clearly shown up the moment they heard that one of their own was in trouble. The metallic chatter of the radios mingled with that of the officers, while around the little square people peered out of their windows or gathered in groups along the pavements, waiting in this muted cacophony for some dramatic or tragic announcement. As he got out of his car, Vilar spotted a dog handler wearing blue fatigues getting his Alsatian to piss against a tree. Surveying the scene, illuminated by the convulsive blue flashes of the squad cars, Vilar felt his blood run cold because he knew all too well what was at the centre of this chaos of flickering lights: a place where nothing moved, where the noise and the voices suddenly fade, as though muffled by a wall of glass.

  He flashed his warrant card to silence a driver yelling at him to move his vehicle. From behind, he immediately recognised Pradeau’s car which had piled into a black Mercedes, hitting the driver’s door and smashing the window. The doors on the other side were open onto the road and as he drew closer, he saw someone in a white coat leaning into the back seat and, just then, he heard the scream, a long wail broken by groans and splutters coming from inside the car. He walked more quickly, dodging between the cars, weaving between the officers standing talking, breaking though the semi-circle surrounding the screaming child and the five or six men working the scene. One of them, a lieutenant called Gallin working with Mégrier’s team, a stocky blond man as short as he was fat, was just about to push Vilar aside when he recognised him.

  “Where’s Pradeau? Is he O.K.?”

  “We don’t know. There’s only the kid. Your partner’s not here.”

  “What do you mean there’s only the kid? Where did he go?”

  “We have a witness who says he saw two men fighting and that they then got into the other guy’s car.”

  “They just got in? Pradeau wasn’t injured? Where is he, this witness? And what about the woman?”

  “She left with them. The witness didn’t see much. He heard the car slam into the Mercedes, and he heard the screams, but when things got ugly he legged it.”

  Vilar felt his mouth go dry.

  “Are we looking for them?”

  “No,” a voice behind him said. “Why on earth would we be doing that?”

  It was Mégrier. He was snapping shut a mobile.

  “I mean, obviously we just came out to get a bit of air, go for a spin. We’ll give the kid a little injection so he keeps his trap shut and then we’ll all go home to bed. I mean, you hardly expect us to disturb the whole town at this time of night, do you? We were just waiting for you to tell us what to do. We knew you’d be worried.”

  The officers giggled silently at their commander’s comeback.

  “Do you take us for complete idiots or what? And where’s the beautiful Marianne Daras? Doing the horizontal mambo? I’m sure she’ll get here the moment she gets her knickers back on.”

  Vilar could think of nothing to say; he shook his head. He walked around Mégrier and stepped closer to the Peugeot where José was still wailing. Officers were taking fingerprints and collecting evidence around the vehicle and inside the car itself. A S.A.M.U. paramedic kneeling on the back seat climbed out shaking his head, he sighed, ignoring Vilar’s questioning look, then moved aside to let him pass. Now Vilar could see the boy, huddled on the back seat of the car, clinging to an unbuckled seatbelt that was bizarrely wound around him, thrashing about like a terrified animal whenever anyone tried to come near or speak to him. Vilar leaned one knee on the back seat, slowly reached out his hand and called the boy by name. He looked around for Toto the clown, saw it on the passenger seat, picked it up and handed it to the little boy who hugged and kissed the doll, no longer wailing. Vilar watched as the boy looke
d up at him with big eyes, looked right through this stranger leaning over him, staring into the distance at some place no-one else could reach. He curled up again and began to howl sadly, banging the clown against his forehead. Vilar withdrew his hand and got out of the car. He was shivering, in spite of his sweatsoaked shirt, in the sweltering heat of the night.

  “I don’t think there’s anything else we can do,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to give him a shot. He’ll end up hurting himself. Do you know the kid?”

  “His mother is a witness in a case I’ve been working on. The boy’s autistic, as far as I know. He looks like he’s in shock. He must have been terrified …”

  “We’ll have to take him to a psych unit. The children’s hospital won’t take him.”

  “A psych unit?”

  “You got a better solution?” The man’s tone was curt, impatient. José was wailing now and sobbing.

  “No, I’ve no solution.”

  He looked back at the boy, his eyes were wide with fear, crouching in the back seat of the car.

  Pablo. Different shadows, a different fear. Vilar felt himself choking, everything around him was suddenly floating. He leaned on the bonnet of the car and shook his head.

  “You O.K.?” the doctor said.

  “Yeah, yeah … Just look after him. Don’t leave him crying in the dark like that. Give him something so he can sleep, so he can get some rest.”

  He felt sweat trickle down his back. His eyes were blurred from the dizziness – from the tears – and he stood for a moment, head bowed, hands resting on the warm bonnet. All he could hear now was the boy’s wail, shrill, deafening, right beside him in the darkness. A woman in a white coat came over and set a first-aid kit on the roof of the car. Slowly, she opened the door against which José was leaning and began whispering to him gently. The doctor Vilar had spoken to was also leaning into the car and they discussed what to do while the boy whimpered softly.

  Vilar walked away, watching as one by one the officers left the scene. An ambulance moved slowly off. Mégrier was giving orders to his men, juggling two mobiles simultaneously. In his pocket, Vilar’s own mobile rang. It was Daras.

  “Mégrier told me about Laurent. Shit. What the fuck did you do?”

  “We were trying to get Sandra de Melo somewhere safe. The guy must have followed her. He called me. He was tailing Pradeau’s car, threatening all sorts. What would you have done?”

  He heard Daras sigh.

  “How do you expect us to find them in the middle of the night when we’ve got nothing to go on?” she said. “We could put an officer on every street corner but we’d just be pissing in the wind. Besides, by now they’ll be long gone.”

  “So what are you planning to do?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. We can’t do more than Mégrier. He’s already got bodies on the ground. He has promised to call me the minute he hears anything. He’s been in touch with the big shots, the commissaires and the directors and they’ve told him to do his best, to get out all the officers he can. Jesus wept! I think I’m just going to take a pill and get some sleep so I can start again early tomorrow. Not that there’s anything we can do. We’re already trying to track down details for this Éric guy, we can’t do any more. With a bit of luck, we’ll have some information tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, yeah.” Vilar echoed her words mechanically, incapable of forming a coherent thought.

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll hang around for a bit. Tire myself out, because the way things are I won’t get a wink of sleep, and that wouldn’t help.”

  He broke off as he saw the frail form of the boy being lifted gently out of the car like some sacred effigy. Surrounded by doctors and police officers, his body seemed as though it might disappear. A huge firefighter was cradling him in his arms. To such a giant he barely weighed anything, he barely existed. Vilar wondered whether this boy would ever truly be aware of his own existence.

  “If you’d seen the kid screaming in the back of the car … The guys from the S.A.M.U. are just taking him away, sedated like an elephant. They didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing left of him but this howl. He saw everything, his mother was taken away from him, while he was there, bawling in the dark. You remember, I told you about him? And the girl, his mother, she’s a decent person.”

  They both hung up. Vilar turned away from the line of police officers and headed back to his car. He drove towards the train station, his mind blank, unable to think, then he went along the cours de la Marne, found a place to park in a narrow street next to the Marché des Capucins. All the windows in the alley were dark, the heat was stifling. From the vast mouldering dumpsters by the market came a stench of rotten meat and fish that made his stomach heave. He walked back towards the cours de la Marne, where the greasy smell wafting from a steakhouse forced him to double up between two cars, but he could only manage to vomit up a little bile. He headed towards the place de la Victoire, his eyes blurred with tears, an acrid taste in his mouth, weaving between the crowd that was gathered around the stalls offering various kinds of food. The place smelled of fried onions, pizza, grilled meat and hot fat, and as he walked he caught snatches of conversation – this seemed to be a nocturnal race of people who communicated only in monosyllables and in the rumblings of their bellies. Their faces were dazed, tanned or flushed with sickly colour by the garish neon lights. He stepped aside for five guys who came swaggering along, taking up the whole pavement, wearing baseball caps or bandanas in a pathetic attempt to look like American “gangstas”. He passed an African woman dressed in a red and gold bubu, pushing a buggy with a baby who stared out, wide-eyed at the garish lights and the milling crowds. Two little girls, their hair braided in cornrows, walked alongside, sometimes pressing themselves against her hips.

  Through the square, which was marked out like a landing strip with recessed lights, weaved a host of shadows, chattering into mobile telephones, publicly declaiming their most private thoughts, some with the faint blue glow of a Bluetooth headset winking at their ears, others with their heads down, listening to music on their phones. From here and there came cries or laughter in this darkness spangled with lights and teeming with sleepwalkers. Vilar stopped in the middle of the square, its cobblestones transmitted all the heat of the day to the legs of the passers-by and, for a brief second, he had the precise impression of being surrounded by the dead. By a crowd of people who did not realise they had died. Oblivious and sombre, quickly swallowed by the darkness and dispersed into the void. He allowed himself to sink into this vertiginous feeling, his breath coming in gasps, an urge to cry caught in the back of his throat.

  Then a boy walked past. Ten years old, maybe, pushing a bicycle that was too big for him.

  Pablo. Vilar shuddered at the idea that his son could be right here, alone in the darkness, drifting in limbo, unable to see or hear him, while Vilar could do nothing to bring him back to the light. He felt himself choking, wanted to cry out. He spun around, shook his head in an attempt to ward off this nightmare.

  He headed for the bars with their dazzling terraces, not daring to look around him, crossed the street, weaving between the cars, and walked into the first bar he came to which was huge, heaving, deafeningly loud. He tugged the sleeve of a barman who initially tried to extricate himself, arrogant and aggressive, but seeing the man half slumped over the bar, he served Vilar the beer he had ordered. Vilar had to force himself to breathe, otherwise all his internal workings would have stopped dead. In that moment it seemed to him that to stay alive he had to make a conscious effort to breathe, to constantly check his heart was still beating, just as someone in the hold of a sinking ship – he had seen this in films – has to keep working the hand pump that both drains the breath from him even as it prevents him from suffocating.

  Breathless, Vilar gulped half of his beer so quickly he had a coughing fit that had him doubled over. When he finally managed to catch his breath, the thick wall of cotton that had been smothe
ring him had melted away. Pradeau’s pistol, tucked into his belt, was digging into his back. He thought about the evening, about Sandra de Melo somewhere out there in the darkness at the mercy of that psychopath, separated from her son; about the little boy separated from himself, torn away, torn apart, a boy who right now was bludgeoned by sedatives, thrashing in terrifying sleep. He wondered how Éric – since this seemed to be his name – would manage to cope with two hostages, one of them a police officer who would grab the first opportunity to take him down.

  He thought again about Pablo, about limbo, about the nightmare vision that had overwhelmed him in the square, and he knew that if one day he began to believe in these images, began to talk to them, a conversation with shadows, he would go mad.

  He looked around, because there was nothing else for him to do.

  Apart from a couple of old lags sucking in their stomachs to hide beer bellies while they chatted up drunk students, he had to be the oldest person in this milling crowd. He listened, but heard only a general hubbub in which he could not make out a single word, and once again he had the insistent sensation of being in a foreign country with an unfamiliar language, a feeling that faded as he gradually came back to the surface of things, of himself. He could now make out isolated words, voices, the throaty, sensual laugh of a girl standing behind him.

  All this was life. And nothing else. It was this or nothing, perhaps. These loud, pretentious young people crowded in here to exorcise a working day, a week of grovelling, self-denial, resentment and humiliation; to forget everything they have been forced to meekly accept; to drown the insidious sorrows that govern their lives. Young people who are already resigned, already wrinkled beneath their smooth, glossy skin, their limber backs already bowed. Reduced to silence, or to the scarcely articulate gabbling of drunken crowds. Vilar looked at the laughing faces, the shocks of hair, the bodies of the girls naked under bodysuits; curvaceous breasts and muscular abs visible through cropped T-shirts. He saw three or four faces of extraordinary beauty; suddenly he desperately needed a woman, right now; he felt his cock harden in a way it had not done in a long time and he thought about how he would like to grab one of them, fuck her roughly, right here, pounding into her, howling more with rage than with pleasure.