Shivering, Sebag closed the window and collapsed heavily into his chair. He allowed himself another swig of alcohol. The level of the bottle was going down rapidly. He was drunk, he smiled. He loved proverbs and was especially fond of giving them his own twist. He opened his mouth and said out loud: “Il faut soigner le mâle par le malt.”1
Shouts dragged him out of his torpor. He felt like his mouth was full of cotton. He was thirsty. For water. He got up as slowly as a boxer who has been knocked out, left his office, turned on the light in the hallway, and staggered to the water fountain, leaning on the wall. He drank a cup of water, then another. The shouts were coming from the ground floor. A loud voice was screaming. The same word. Over and over. Sebag frowned; he wondered: maybe Abad had been arrested after all, without him being informed.
He started to go downstairs but changed his mind. First he had to spruce himself up and regain a reasonable lucidity. In the restroom, he splashed cold water on his face and combed his hair in front of the mirror.
His father’s face was watching him.
His conjugal torments were reviving painful memories. He was feeling upheavals deep within him. It went far beyond Claire and that . . . that bastard Simon. But he sure as hell didn’t want to go digging around in all that shit. He had to get through this alone, overcome the obstacle without breaking the dam he’d constructed and that since his childhood had been holding back the crap.
He went down the stairs step by step, gripping the railing. No, that couldn’t be Abad braying like that. Abad had killed in icy rage. According to Elsa, he hadn’t said even a word to his wife before shooting her. That kind of behavior didn’t fit with the clamor downstairs.
He stopped at the door to the office of the watch, which handled emergencies at police headquarters. The room was badly ventilated and smelled like sweat and lack of sleep. On the wall, a vivid poster the color of end-of-the-night urine listed the emergency phone numbers: 15, 17, 18, 112, all losing numbers in the nighttime lotto. The clock on the wall read 2:16.
In the middle of the room, a solidly-built man was squirming on a chair. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. A long hank of blond hair fell over his massive shoulders. “Samson . . .” Sebag said to himself. Wearing a tank top that was too small for his powerful chest, the guy was in his forties and looked like he had come straight from the gym.
Except that his tank top was spotted with fresh blood. Delilah’s blood . . .
“This guy’s a real ox,” Sergis, the head of the watch, said. “He hit his wife, and when we got there, he punched one of my guys and the other one had to tase him to calm him down. The effect lasted long enough to get him here, but since then he’s recovered . . .”
“We have to cut his hair,” Sebag said.
Sergis look at him with curiosity. Sebag had thought out loud. All the alcoholic vapors had not yet dissipated. Fortunately, the irate body-builder distracted Sergis’s attention.
“I tell you, she’s a slut!”
“That’s not the point: You don’t hit a woman,” the policeman facing him said. “That’s a serious crime.”
“She’s not a woman, she’s a slut!”
The man’s eyes were bloodshot and a thread of saliva hung from the corner of his mouth.
“Do you know that she’s in the hospital?” the policeman went on. “They’re doing tests on her. You really went at her: she has at least a broken arm and a couple of broken ribs. Maybe even a fractured skull. You’re going to do jail time, pal. Several years, probably.”
“That’s not fair!”
The colossus suddenly stood up, taking with him the chair to which he was attached. His agitation made the muscles on his chest stick out of his tank top. A cop roughly pushed him down.
“What did his wife do to him?” asked Sebag, immediately regretting the question.
“We don’t know exactly,” Sergis replied. “But you can guess. He doesn’t answer questions, just keeps saying ‘slut.’”
“I heard that, yes.”
“I think we won’t get anything more out of him for the time being. We’re going to put him in a holding cell to sober up. It might take a while . . . looks to me like he’s really plastered.”
Sergis signaled to his men to take the guy away. Three policemen approached him, the first one brandishing his Taser:
“Stay calm, pal, or I’ll give you another jolt.”
The second policeman put a pair of cuffs on the irascible man’s ankles while the third quickly took the other pair of cuffs off his wrists, detached the metal chain from the rung of the chair, and then quickly reattached the cuffs. The man followed the policemen reluctantly, swearing all the way. Franck Sergis ran his hand over his cheeks darkened by a carefully trimmed three-day beard.
“I don’t know what’s up right now but it just goes on and on. Winter must be getting on husbands’ nerves. At noon we had a murder, and tonight beatings and injuries . . . I read in an official report that conjugal conflicts represent one-fourth of all acts of violence.”
“Do you think that’s really new? Maybe today women file more complaints, that’s all.”
“Yeah, maybe. In any case, there’s a lot of violence out there right now.”
Sebag nodded, pensively.
“And apart from that, nothing particular last night?”
“A couple that couldn’t quiet down their kid and asked us to help . . . More or less calm, actually.”
At night, you saw strange people pass through police headquarters, and sometimes there were bizarre scenes.
“No news about your guy, obviously; otherwise I would have let you know. How about you, did you spend a good night up there?”
“It was OK. I’ve got a comfortable chair,” Sebag replied, evasively.
He said goodbye to his colleague and returned to his office. Seizing the bottle of whiskey, he wondered what could lead a man to strike his wife. He had never for a moment been tempted to raise his hand against Claire. That kind of violence was completely foreign to him. The rage he felt would have been more likely to lead him to bang his own head against the wall.
In a crisis, there were two types of people: those who explode and those who implode. He was undoubtedly one of the latter.
He recalled again the text messages he’d intercepted that morning on Claire’s phone. They didn’t make him close his fists, they gave him cramps in his groin. The stomach upset he’d given to explain his absence was only half-invented. Every word struck him like a punch in the gut. Although he’d always had trouble learning poems at school or the words to songs, he would always remember these accursed phrases.
The first SMS read:
“At this holiday season, I’m thinking about you, my princess, my Heloise. I remember our mad embraces and our passionate discussions about a film, a book, or an exhibit. I miss them, I miss you.”
And the second:
“I’m heading into these holidays with a new serenity. I’m rediscovering the pleasures of family life. I hope that everything is going well for you and yours. I embrace you with tender love.”
Goddamn son of a bitch!
That second-to-last word made his guts writhe. Anything but that. Not tenderness . . . Sex, all right, a good lay, wild fucking, but not tenderness! And not that complicity regarding films or books. Who was he, that bastard Simon, to embrace his wife, his wife, with tenderness? Who was he to call her “my princess”?
He grabbed the whiskey bottle and allowed himself a long swig.
Not that, not us . . . Good God!
For years he’d thought that they were above all that, inaccessible to jealousy, to weariness, to the annoyances of everyday life together, and especially to that way of sleeping around and deceptions that concerned only other people, that existed only in films and not in their real life, not in their life!
Well, it d
id . . . There, he’d said it, it was done: they were just a couple like others, as commonplace, as weak . . .
One among all, one among many.
Goddamn son of a bitch!
He took another drink of whiskey and banged his head against the wall.
A black hole.
He must have sat back down and drowsed off, because a minute, an hour, or several hours later, a hand shook him vigorously.
“Come on, Gilles, we need you. Are you available?”
1“The male has to be cured by malt.” A play on Il faut soigner le mal par le mal (“Evil has to be cured by evil”). Unless otherwise noted, all explanatory footnotes have been added by the translator.
CHAPTER 8
Sprawled on his desk, his head in his hands, Sebag straightened up. With difficulty, he lifted two eyelids that weighed tons. His eyes flittered about before being able to focus and see Franck Sergis impatiently standing in the doorway to his office. The head of the watch was wearing his jacket, and seemed ready to leave. The swelling under the leather on his right side left no doubt. He was armed.
“The customs men have asked for our help. They intercepted a Go-Fast on the autoroute, but one of the cars managed to get away from them. It exited at the southern toll plaza and is headed for Perpignan.”
Sebag got up, took his jacket from the rack, and slipped it on. His movements were mechanical and awkward.
“Are you sure you’re operational?” Sergis asked with concern.
“I’m fine, don’t worry.”
“You sure?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
Franck considered Sebag’s state for a long time before saying:
“OK, then, I’m going to trust you on that. I’ll be waiting downstairs.”
He added before closing the door behind him: “And don’t forget to hide the bottle.”
Sebag heard the head of the watch run down the corridor. He opened his desk drawer, took out his gun, loaded it, and then slipped it into a holster that he strapped on under his arm. A ring of iron was pressing on his head. He took hold of the bottle with the intention of washing out his mouth and his neurons, but hesitated: alcohol and a gun didn’t go together. Wisely, he put both of them back in his desk drawer.
After running water over his head in the restroom sink, he joined Sergis in the lobby.
“All my guys are already out there. We’re going to form a team, if that’s OK.”
“My pleasure.”
Sebag handed him his keys.
“We’ll take my car, but you’re going to drive.”
“That’s OK with me.”
They raced down the stairs that led to the parking lot. Sergis started the motor and roared off.
“A squad car located the suspect’s car on the outskirts of the city, at the roundabout in front of the Méga Castillet cinema complex. It had to let him go on toward the Boulevard Kennedy. It’s a BMW 4 Series coupe, it’s powerful and the guy is driving too fast. It’s dangerous, even at this time of night, to chase him through the city.”
Sergis turned on the siren and ran a red light in front of the Arago Bridge. Only then did Sebag realize that it was still dark. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. It read 6:15. He put his hand to his forehead and felt a kind of bump; he remembered the wall. So alcohol wasn’t the only reason his head hurt.
“We’re going to try to cut him off by taking the boulevards,” Sergis explained. “It’s likely that the guy will try to go that way and head for Narbonne.”
The Go-Fast is a classic technique used by drug dealers to enter France over the Spanish border. In general, three fast vehicles follow one another on the autoroute at intervals of a few minutes. The first car spots the customs agents, the second carries the drugs, and the third follows to protect it from any rivals. That morning the first two cars had been intercepted, but the third managed to leave the autoroute at the southern toll plaza and was now driving at breakneck speed through the streets of Perpignan.
Franck Sergis and Gilles Sebag crossed the Basse River and passed in front of the glass-walled offices of the Indépendant, the local newspaper. The head of the watch had reasoned correctly, because at the end of the Mercader Boulevard, they saw the last vehicle they were looking for. Sergis positioned his car across the boulevard, but the BMW, after slamming on its brakes, turned right into the warren of narrow streets around the Palace of the Kings of Majorca. Sergis turned his vehicle around and followed the drug dealer. It had taken a fraction of a second for the policemen to size up their quarry: there was just one man in the car. Apparently, he was very young.
The BMW shot down the narrow streets without paying attention to the one-way signs, and what had to happen did: at the foot of the imposing walls of the palace, the fugitive soon found himself faced by a car coming in the opposite direction. The driver leaped out of his vehicle and started running. He was young, in fact. Not more than thirty.
Sebag unbuckled his seatbelt.
“Are you sure?” Sergis said, worried.
“Did you forget that I run marathons?”
Sebag didn’t leave his colleague time to question him further about the state of his health. He was already running after the drug dealer.
His head hurt with every step, but his legs and his breath were OK. That was the crucial thing.
The kid first ran alongside the fortress, then began zigzagging in the narrow streets of the city center. He didn’t seem to know Perpignan and chose his itinerary solely in relation to the length of the streets. He wasn’t going anywhere, and had only one objective: to lose the cop who was chasing him, and to do that, he first had to get out of his sight.
Sebag was aware of that. He had started out by sprinting to reduce the distance separating him from the fugitive, and now he was keeping back. No need to put the pressure on too soon. Being twenty years younger, the kid would necessarily be able to run faster. On the other hand, unless he was used to running, he was going to fade rapidly. Gilles had to manage his race, find the right rhythm, the one that would erase the night’s excesses.
Then everything would be possible.
After the Sainte-Claire convent, which is now occupied by the Centre de Documentation des Français d’Algérie, the young man took the ramp that went down to the museum’s parking lot. Then he ran down the pedestrian streets of the Réal quarter. Without trying to, and probably even without knowing it, he was moving east. He was running with his hands alongside his body and did not seem to be armed. Sebag did not regret having left his pistol in its drawer; it would have hindered his running.
The headache was going away and Gilles was beginning to feel strong again. The miracle of regular training . . . Gilles remembered his first marathon, that magical moment at the twenty-fifth kilometer when he had felt as fresh as he was on the starting line. Lacking experience, euphoric and presumptuous, he had then decided to modify his race plan and accelerate. A few minutes later he ran straight into the notorious wall at thirty kilometers.
He’d never made that mistake again.
The drug dealer started down the Rue Llucia; he was entering the North African quarter of Old Perpignan. If he continued to the end of the street, he would arrive at Place Cassanyes, where the daily market would be setting up. There he could slip away among the boxes, stalls, and vans.
But fortunately, he didn’t know the city!
Still obsessed with searching for short, narrow streets, he turned left toward the gypsy quarter. A mistake. Here people lived at night and things didn’t start up again until late in the morning. The deserted street ran uphill, and the kid slowed down. Sebag was playing for time. It was still too soon to pounce.
When he got to the Place du Puig, the drug dealer changed one of his priorities. Hoping to catch his breath, he chose a route that ran down a gentle slope. Rue Saint-François-de-Paule first, then R
ue du Ruisseau and Rue de la Révolution Française. Now they were in the downtown commercial center. The ground becoming flat again, the young man’s speed decreased once more.
A little patience . . .
The streets were getting broader, but they remained empty. The boy started zigzagging again, one street to the left, the next to the right. He had only one goal, to lose his pursuer, but he couldn’t do it. He was getting scared and began to cast worried looks over his shoulder. Each time he did that he lost about twenty centimeters.
Without accelerating, Gilles lengthened his stride. That was enough to shorten the distance.
The kid was now panicking. Only about ten meters now separated them. While continuing to run, he reached into a pocket of his pants and pulled out a knife. With a click, he flipped open the blade. The threat was clear but he had lost another meter.
Rue de la Fusterie, Rue des Cordonniers, Rue de l’Ange.
At each stride, Sebag ate away at the distance. He could hear the young man’s gasping breath; his adversary was in agony. Even if he turned around to fight, he wouldn’t be lucid enough.
This time Gilles accelerated.
A last turn. Rue Mailly. Gilles sprinted. He got nearer.
He remembered the advice Molina had given him one day about making the perfect tackle. He had listened only vaguely, but he recalled the main lines. “Grab whatever you can, a shirt, a leg, or a pair of balls, anything, and never let go, never, never, never.” As they ran by a bookstore, Gilles decided he was close enough. He pounced. His hands slipped over the fabric of the kid’s pants before he was able to grab the cuffs right at the bottom.
Crimes of Winter Page 6
