“You can stay and sleep here,” Marina suggested.
“You’re joking,” Julie corrected her. “He has to stay here. I strictly forbid him to leave in that state. And if he resists, I’ll handcuff him.”
They all broke out in loud, staccato laughter. With each burst Sebag sank further. His heavy body melted into the fabric of the couch while his mind, light, light, light, flew away like Professor Tournesol29 in an old advert from his childhood. He fled toward the past, or into the imaginary. How could he know? He saw his mother. Smiling in his father’s arms. He saw the face of a woman who was laughing behind them. Then another. Then two more . . . Then still others . . .
He opened his eyes. The orange light from the streetlamps lit the living room. He was lying on the sofa bed in his undershorts and a T-shirt. He pulled the blanket up to his chin. Shivered.
He thought about Claire. Looked for his phone. Found it. He had to tell her that he wouldn’t be coming home. He opened his text messages. Found one sent to his wife a few minutes earlier. He didn’t remember sending it. He put down his phone. Hugged the pillow.
A hoarse sound escaped his throat. He was snoring. While remaining awake. Strange sensation.
The dreams that invaded him again were no longer entirely dreams. Too real, too present. A man was leaning over him and laughing. Gérard. The vile Gérard. And yet, no, it wasn’t his father but a man with salt-and-pepper hair despite being barely forty. A face that he had looked for on the Internet and whose frozen image now haunted him.
Simon, Gérard, the same thing, the same laugh. Two first names that were banging against the walls of his fractured skull.
It was time to have done with it.
He threw back the blanket. Got up. His head was spinning, his stomach revolted. Goddamn hangover.
He also had to have done with this stupid stuff—alcohol and the rest.
Sebag had the curious sensation of being simultaneously exhausted and full of energy. Full of confidence as well. He had made a resolution. He would go straight ahead. Certain meetings were inevitable. To do what? To do it, precisely. He’d see what came of it. Maybe nothing or not much? Too bad! It was time that fear and uneasiness shift sides.
27In French, the English expression “coffee shop” is used to refer to a place where cannabis can be bought and/or used.
28Mouvement de la libération des femmes, a French feminist organization.
29A character in Hergé’s Tintin books.
CHAPTER 37
The sun had not yet come up when he arrived at police headquarters. He absentmindedly greeted the young woman cop who was on the front desk and strode quickly to the cafeteria, where he got a large cup of coffee. At home, he followed his wife’s advice and did without sugar, but at headquarters, what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Just too bad about the little nascent potbelly that had caused him to change the waist size of his pants several times over the past few years!
After ordering a second cup of coffee, he headed for the cells where people in police custody were held. He shook the hand of the officer assigned to guard them.
“Are there many?” he asked.
“Only three, it’s pretty calm. Even if the big muscleman Lieutenant Molina arrested yesterday made noise all night. He was either snoring like a chainsaw or blubbering. But his neighbors didn’t complain.”
“Have you given them their breakfast?”
“I was about to do that.”
“I’ll take Barrache’s.”
“No problem.”
The officer took a package of cookies and a carton of orange juice out of a cupboard.
“Would you have a tray?”
“Ah, no . . . This isn’t the Ritz, here.”
“How about a plate?”
“I have one of those. But it’s a paper plate.”
“That’ll do.”
Ménard managed to fit the cookies, the orange juice, and the coffee on the middle of the plate.
“Will you open the door for me?”
The officer walked in front of him and unlocked the three padlocks on the door. Then he stepped aside. The tiny room smelled of sweat and cold urine. In a corner, partly hidden by a metal screen, a dark hole was exhaling the early morning perfumes of badly maintained pipes. Alongside it a faucet was dripping into a sink stained by calcium deposits and dirt. Ménard gently kicked the mattress on which Barrache was sleeping. The night watchman opened one eye, then both.
“Sit up,” François said.
The guard obeyed without resisting. He put the old blanket over his narrow shoulders. Ménard sat down alongside him and put the plate on his knees. Barrache began by drinking the coffee.
“The food here is getting better; I didn’t get any yesterday.”
“That’s a little gift from me.”
With his nose in the coffee cup, Barrache thanked him:
“That’s nice but it isn’t enough to make me confess to something I didn’t do.”
Ménard observed the prisoner. Pressing his knees together to keep the tray from falling, he tore off the plastic surrounding the cookies. Three butter cookies frosted with chocolate. Barrache wolfed them down in a few hungry bites. Crumbs stuck to his beard and there was dark chocolate on his upper lip. François thought again of what Gilles had said in the boss’s office: “He’s kind of a good guy,” he’d said, “but we can‘t exclude the possibility that he’s a marvelous actor.”
Barrache put the plate down next to him and pulled off the straw attached to the back of the carton of fruit juice. He pierced the little hole with the pointed end of the straw and drank. All at once. Then noisily sucked up the last drops that might still be in the corners.
“A marvelous actor . . .”
Ménard scratched his head. He had nothing against Barrache. In the guard’s personal files taken from his house, as in his bank statements, he’d found no trace of another rented space. A bill for a garage, a barn, or a simple storage unit in which the suspect might have kept photos, documents, another computer . . . That had been his last hope.
Or rather his next-to-last hope.
This morning, he had decided to come surprise Barrache when he woke up. He’d hoped to discern in a still half-asleep look, in gestures over which the guard was not yet in full control, some sign of duplicity. But no! Even as he emerged from sleep, Barrache had been the same. A “nice guy,” a real one, who probably had a tendency to masochism as well as to fatalism. The ideal profile of victims of judicial error . . .
“Now you know that I’m not the informer you’re looking for?”
As he ate, Barrache had constantly looked in his direction with the damp eyes of a sad cocker spaniel. François had to accept it: the guard wasn’t an actor, either a good one or a bad one. He seemed simply incapable of the slightest deception. Sincere out of an inability to lie. Ménard didn’t answer Barrache’s question.
“Did you tell your wife you’d been arrested?”
“Why would I do that?”
“You never know. It might make her want to come back.”
Barrache shrugged. The cookie crumb caught in his beard quivered in its hairy nest.
“I can call her, if you want,” François suggested.
Ménard understood that he was on the wrong path. He was going to have to admit it to his superior, his colleagues, and Sebag. He wouldn’t do it in front of Barrache! People were always responsible for what happened to them. If this guy had been able to defend himself and if he had asked for the help of a lawyer instead of wallowing in the pleasure of being a victim, he wouldn’t have spent forty-eight hours in police custody. And he wouldn’t have caused him to lose this time that was so precious.
However, Ménard couldn’t exonerate himself of all responsibility with regard to this poor dope. Now he was going to try to reestablish a
connection between him and his wife. That would work or it wouldn’t. They could do whatever they wanted, what they could. But he would have given them a chance.
And afterward?
Afterward, he would let Barrache go and set out in search of another suspect.
Fortunately, he already had a little idea. Cantalou was in fact not the only connection between Abad and Valls. The investigations of the guard had led them to discover another one.
CHAPTER 38
He took a deep breath.
As he went out, he’d noticed that the temperature had fallen overnight. Winter, which had been hesitating up to this point, had finally found its starting point. In the distance, Le Canigou, pale in the mist, was displaying its creamy white flanks.
He took another breath.
He loved the fresh air. He liked the winter when he finally dared to.
He lengthened his stride to loosen up his legs after a night, one more night, during which he had slept fitfully.
On the Place de Catalogne, in front of the former Dames de France building, he jumped when he saw Mylène pass by quite near him. Sometimes he reacted that way. He knew so many people in Perpignan. He was always surprised to run into them here and there in real life. Fortunately, no one knew him. They didn’t know who he was, or what he did. He wasn’t anything for them. A nobody, anonymous, a shadow that passes by and is forgotten.
But he didn’t forget anything.
Mylène, who knew nothing about his life, no longer had any secrets for him. He had given her that name, but obviously he knew her real family name. He knew where she lived, where she worked, whom she frequented, who her husband was. He hadn’t yet found a hold on her, but someday he would.
He just had to be patient. She was so beautiful, she loved life so much.
He was smiling when he got to work. No doubt for the first time in months. He opened his locker and put on his uniform.
“You look happy now! Are you coming with us to Aimé-Giral on Sunday? The USAP is playing Carcassonne.”
He looked at his colleague for a long time. Why was this fool who no longer spoke to him except to give him orders suddenly talking to him? Because his wife had left him and because he needed new friends? He knew all about him, too.
He saw his own face in the mirror that he’d hung inside his locker: he was smiling again. He smiled too much. That was suspicious. How could you turn down an offer with such a smile of satisfaction? Don’t make waves, especially not waves, not now.
“Why not? Can I tell you tomorrow?”
“Sure. I’m going with Max and René. You’re welcome to come along.”
Tomorrow, he’d find an excuse. Out of the question to waste two hours watching thirty overweight men on steroids fighting like kids over a ball that bounced in unpredictable ways. He had other things to do. He hadn’t finished. The mission continued. In it, he had found the best of antidepressants, the most powerful of anxiolytics, and he intended to go on shooting up with them as long as possible. The machine was under way. It was not going to stop. The Eye would wreak still more havoc.
He couldn’t repress a spasm of laughter.
CHAPTER 39
Sebag was waiting in his car, which was double-parked in front of the Lycée René Cassin. It was almost noon and groups of students were already coming out through the open gates. Some of the young people were standing around in front of the school, waiting for friends, puffing arrogantly on cigarettes. He was surprised to see so many of them smoking. What about Léo, was he smoking too? Some time ago, he’d stopped complaining when his father smoked at home. That was probably a sign. And cannabis? In France, one young person out of two had already tried smoking joints before the age of eighteen. So why wouldn’t Léo do the same? And if he had, how could his father reproach him? Gilles’s head still ached from the previous night’s excesses.
They had tried to transmit to their children the principles of a healthy life, of decency and sincerity. The result was that Claire had lived in mendacity and dissimulation, while he chain-smoked and got high on marijuana with his colleagues in the evening. Not to mention his alcohol problem: secretly swigging down whiskey at the slightest annoyance, that was not exactly setting a good example!
Do what I say, not what I do.
And now he was about to break away from his personal principles as well as his professional ethics. Damn! Sometimes it was hard to follow the rules one set for oneself. But did that mean he should stop trying? No. Tomorrow he would resume his normal way of life.
Tomorrow . . .
Fatigue closed his eyes for a moment. He had risen silently at 5:30 in the morning. Marina and Julie were still sleeping. He had gulped down a quick breakfast in a nearby bar before getting on the road. He’d arrived “on-site” around 11 A.M., a good hour in advance, which he’d used to make a brief reconnaissance.
A buzzer sounded in the lycée’s courtyard and immediately triggered a rush. A turbulent, noisy river flowed out into the street. Among the open, pimply, smiling faces, serious, impassive faces were carefully making their way. Gilles got out of the car and leaned on it. He examined the crowd. Using his status as a cop, he had gotten the information he needed. The man he was waiting for would come out at noon by the main door.
He had no difficulty spotting him. Tall, athletic, with an ease and suppleness in his figure that drew the eye. Gilles managed to put himself in the man’s path. He too must have at some point done an Internet search to see what Gilles looked like. He felt stronger for that; jealousy also existed on the other side.
“Could you spare me a few minutes?”
He pointed in the direction of his car:
“We can talk better inside.”
Simon Bidol said nothing. His eyes jumped from the car to Sebag.
“We could chat in a bar but I wouldn’t want to embarrass you before your students and your colleagues. And your daughter. She goes to this lycée as well, doesn’t she?”
Simon Bidol just nodded.
“Are you scared?”
Bidol made up his mind, a little out of curiosity, a lot out of pride. He walked to the car, opened the passenger-side door, and got in. Gilles sat down behind the wheel. He started the car and headed out into the traffic going toward the city center.
“Have you settled into your new life?”
“More or less.”
A muffled voice. Restrained.
“You don’t miss Perpignan too much?”
Silence again. Gilles watched him out of the corner of his eye. Bidol had a delicate, sweet face that a three-day beard did little to harden. Except for the wrinkles on his broad forehead, he didn’t look like he was fifty-one.
“You must be comfortable here. You’ve got a nice house, a beautiful wife, beautiful kids. What are their names again? Oh, yes. Robin, Victor, and Agathe . . . Agathe is the one who’s in lycée, right?”
The history-geography teacher put his hands on his knees. He gripped them. His veins swelled. He had nice hands. Gilles imagined them slipping over Claire’s skin. Watch it . . . He mustn’t let his anger rise.
“Your wife doesn’t know, of course?” Sebag asked.
“No.”
Bidol cleared his throat. His answer had been barely audible.
“What would happen if she found out?”
“Are you planning to tell her?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Bidol sighed and looked at the street in front of them.
“You can never tell, but that affair has been over for a long time, so I believe that Michèle would try to understand and forgive. Like you. But she would certainly be hurt.”
He paused before adding:
“Like you.”
Bidol knew things he shouldn’t have known. Anger was growing.
“I asked her to avoid any contact with yo
u!”
“She did that, I promise you.”
His delivery was rapid; he was worried.
“I’m the one who contacted her after the holidays. I wanted to know how it was going. Claire would be extremely unhappy if you left her. I don’t want her to be unhappy.”
“I forbid you to write to her!”
“I am no longer writing to her. Claire also forbade me to write to her. She answered my message but she made it very clear that it was the last time. There has been nothing else since then.”
Sebag felt a mad desire to know the content of that exchange, but he couldn’t stoop so low as to ask. And that was all the better! It could only have hurt him.
After driving around downtown Bayonne and crossing the Nive River, he took the bridge over the Adour. By means of a slight movement of his shoulder and arm, he moved the jacket away from his right side, revealing the butt of his weapon. He heard Bidol gulp. Claire’s former lover felt an urgent need to speak.
“I’m sincerely sorry about what happened, but what’s done is done: we can’t turn back the clock. You have to think about the future. Claire loves you, she has never loved anyone but you, and your children also love you. You have to think about them, too . . .”
Gilles took deep pleasure in this moment. He wasn’t especially proud of himself, but he wasn’t ashamed, either. There was nothing wrong with doing yourself good! Bidol was afraid. Not too much. He was doing a good job of keeping himself under control.
At a roundabout, Sebag turned to his right to take a secondary road that ran along the Adour. Houses became rarer. A dense silence filled the inside of the car. Bidol’s right hand had left his knee and rested on the door handle. Gilles drove a few more kilometers before leaving the riverbank and starting down a dirt road that led off among fields and forest.
“Where are we going?” Bidol finally asked.
“You’ll see.”
The teacher put his left hand in the inside pocket of his overcoat and rummaged around.
Crimes of Winter Page 29
