She looked at him, puzzled.
‘Say that again. I must have misheard.’
* * *
He scraped the windscreen, poured hot water on it, and put the heating on full. Once he was behind the wheel he pulled slowly out of the car park. No salt spreaders had been this way, and the fierce wind blew the snow from the fields whirling onto the road. He drove across the white plain until he reached the A66, then took the A61 to approach Toulouse from the east. While he drove, he thought about Hirtmann. The prosecutor from Geneva. The man who haunted his dreams. The man who had abducted Marianne. In moments of lucidity he told himself he would never hear anything about him again, that Hirtmann had surely died in some seamy street in Latin America or Asia. And all he could do now was forget him. Or at least pretend to.
He was up to the challenge during daylight, but as soon as evening drew near, and the light receded from the furthest rooms in his head, he felt once again as if he were trapped in the lugubrious vice of his thoughts, and his soul cried out in fear. In the old days when he’d been investigating a particularly horrible crime, he would go home and listen to his beloved Mahler, the only antidote for the shadows, and things would shift back into place. But Hirtmann had stolen even that sanctuary from him: the Swiss man was also an admirer of the Austrian genius. A strange similarity which right from the start had underlined their dangerous spiritual proximity, back in that cell at the Institut Wargnier, the music soaring. He recalled Hirtmann: tall and thin in his overalls, his collar open onto his translucent skin, and above all the shock of that unflinching electric gaze – a shock as if from a taser. Then there was the way, too, that in a split second Julian Hirtmann had seen straight through him. Had deciphered him. Servaz had rarely felt that naked in the presence of another person.
He had received a postcard from Irène Ziegler from New Delhi, where she’d been sent. The gendarme was now Attaché for Interior Security at the Department for International Cooperation, a network of 250 police officers and gendarmes deployed in 93 embassies, and whose mission was to investigate various potential threats – terrorism, cyber crime, drug trafficking – that might be organised beyond the borders of France. There were only two sentences on her postcard:
Do you still think about him? I do.
He sometimes wondered whether Ziegler had applied for that position with the secret hope of one day picking up Hirtmann’s trail.
Once Servaz was in town, he headed for the Grand-Rond, then the Capitole. The streets were covered in snow: you could barely tell the pavement from the road, and the vehicles’ roofs wore thick white duvets. He left the car in the underground car park and walked across the place du Capitole; he needed another coffee. He drank two in a brasserie opposite the Hôtel de Ville while waiting for his appointment.
He set off again at nine thirty, slipping in the slush of ice and mud, which was transforming the square into a skating rink. He had never seen such a winter sports atmosphere in Toulouse. Fortunately, Charlène Espérandieu’s art gallery was not far away, on the corner of rue de la Pomme and Saint-Pantaléon.
The glass doors opened with a whoosh before him and his soles left damp prints on the pale parquet floor. There was no one there. The walls, lit by spotlights, were bare, and large cardboard boxes, most probably containing the artwork for the next exhibition, were scattered across the floor.
Servaz headed towards the rear where a narrow spiral staircase led to the mezzanine.
The sound of heels on the floor above.
The metal steps vibrated with his weight. His head emerged first, at floor level – and he saw a pair of high-heeled burgundy boots, slim legs in jeans, then the grey parka she had not yet removed, and finally the cascade of ginger hair gathered asymmetrically to one side of her face.
‘Martin?’
She was almost forty, but looked ten years younger.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I’m getting into contemporary art.’
She smiled.
‘You look well,’ she said as he emerged from the staircase. ‘Much better than last time I saw you, in that sinister place. You looked like a zombie.’
‘Back from the dead,’ he confirmed.
‘Really well,’ she said again, as if she were trying to convince herself.
‘Non venit ad duros pallida cura toros: “pale concern does not approach hard beds”.’
‘You and your Latin authors. This is—’
Charlène kissed him and her fingers pressed his arm fervently.
‘— really good news.’
Her cheek, still cold, lingered a moment too long against his own. He was wrapped in the scent of her hair and a light perfume. Then she stepped back. The cold air had made her cheeks red and her eyes were shining. She was still just as confoundedly beautiful.
‘Have you come home or are you still staying there?’ she asked.
‘I’m fed, housed and watered – it’s not so bad,’ he replied.
‘I’m glad. Glad to see you, Martin. Glad to see you like this. But you haven’t come just to visit me, have you?’
‘No.’
She hung her parka on the coat rack, turned on her heels and went over to her desk at the far end of the long room, in front of the upper part of the round arch opening that also served as the entrance to the gallery below.
‘Does the name Célia Jablonka mean anything to you?’
She turned her head, still with her back to him, giving him a view of her profile and her slender neck emerging from the mass of curly red hair.
‘The artist who committed suicide last year? Yes. She had a show here not long before.’
This time she spun around to face him and leaned on the desk. She gave him a piercing look.
‘Aren’t you fed up with being interested only in dead people?’
He decided to conclude that the double meaning was not intentional. That she was talking about his profession, and nothing else. Nevertheless, for a split second, his pain returned.
He wasn’t ready.
He had thought that when he left the rest home he would leave his anxiety behind, but fatigue, doubt, and weariness were dogging him.
‘Tell me about her,’ he said. ‘What sort of person was she? Did she seem depressive?’
Charlène gave him a curious glance.
‘She was a funny woman, cheeky. With heaps of talent.’
She turned to a low bookshelf, virtually the only piece of furniture in the immense room other than the little seating area and her desk, and pulled out a voluminous, glossy catalogue.
‘Here, have a look.’
He went closer. And read, ‘Célia Jablonka or Absent Art.’ She opened the cover and began to turn the pages. Photographs of homeless people. African families living five to a room of ten square metres. A man who had died from the cold being taken away by the emergency services. A stray dog. A filthy child rummaging in a skip. Another one begging in the Métro. And, alternately, supermarket shelves spilling with food, high-tech gadgets, toys, clothing on sale, shiny brand-new cars, people queuing outside multiplexes, crowded fast food chains, piles of video games in shop windows, rows of petrol pumps, overflowing dustbins, tips, incinerators … The message was clear, direct and basic; there was no need to think.
‘She refused any sort of sophistication or subtlety. She categorically refused to let her art take on any aesthetic or cathartic function. It was the opposite effect she hoped to produce. The message. Unfiltered.’
Servaz pulled a face. He hadn’t come to listen to considerations about art. And his favourite style was international Gothic.
‘Where were these pictures taken?’
‘In the street. And in a squat. Part of the exhibition was held there. Célia wanted the visitors to do more than just look, she wanted them to enter into the photographs, was how she put it. So there was a sound device inviting them to continue their visit at the squat, where they would see the remainder of the exhibition. Célia had stuc
k little posters all along the route to make it easier for them.’
‘And did it work?’
It was Charlène’s turn to pull a face.
‘Not really. A few brave souls went all the way to the end, but the clients from my gallery are not, well, not exactly the kind of people who are into soup kitchens.’
Servaz nodded.
‘I don’t know if I’m the best person to talk about her,’ she said apologetically. ‘I didn’t know her very well. But while the exhibition was on, at any rate, we talked quite a bit, and it seemed to me that her mood became darker as the days went by, that all the joy and enthusiasm from the beginning were progressively disappearing. Towards the end she seemed to have lost all her joie de vivre – and that’s why, well, her suicide didn’t really come as a surprise to me.’
Servaz was suddenly on his guard. This information alone should have reinforced the theory of suicide. And yet there was something not quite right about it. Or was he imagining things? Was he looking for something to cling to at any price – and what better opportunity for an investigator that an investigation that had missed the most important thing? There was nothing to substantiate this hypothesis. Except the hotel key.
‘You said you noticed a change in her over the course of your relationship?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘We met for the first time roughly nine months before her suicide, when she was planning the show at the gallery.’
‘And what was she like at that point?’
A crease came to Charlène’s brow.
‘Not at all in the same state of mind. She was full of energy and enthusiasm; she had loads of plans – and a dozen ideas a minute! But towards the end, she didn’t care about anything. She dragged herself from place to place. You had to constantly repeat things to her. She was like a ghost.’
What had happened in the meantime? he wondered. In the space of only a few months Célia Jablonka had succumbed to depression. Was it the first time? Or was it a relapse?
‘Do you have the address of the squat?’ he asked.
‘Why do you want to know all this?’
A question he should have asked himself. What exactly was he looking for? Célia Jablonka’s suicide wasn’t even his remit. The case had been closed long before.
‘I got this the day before yesterday in my mailbox,’ he said, taking the plastic square from his pocket.
‘What is it?’
‘The key to the hotel room where Célia Jablonka ended her life.’
Charlène looked at him, not understanding.
‘And do you know where it came from?’
‘Not the slightest idea.’
He could read the growing bewilderment in the eyes of his assistant’s wife.
‘And you don’t think that is completely freaky?’
* * *
He stopped outside the entrance to the squat. A banner was hanging above the door: ‘Self- Managed Social Centre. Occupy – Help Each Other – Self-Manage.’ The windows on the ground floor were walled up. The facade, which had seen better days, was graffitied with a colourful mural.
Servaz went into the courtyard, where weeds were breaking through the pavement. He headed towards the entrance at the back, next to which bicycles and cars were parked. As soon as he went through the glass door he realised the place was full of life: he could hear children shouting, mothers scolding; there were naïve drawings and posters on the walls, and coats hanging from rows of pegs; there were voices, laughter, footsteps coming and going.
On the yellow walls, posters proclaimed: ‘The police are in control, the law locks us up’, ‘Against evictions, for social self-defence and a popular offensive – on with the struggle’, ‘They won’t keep us quiet!’ ‘Fuck the mayor!’ An atmosphere of imminent insurrection reigned in this country; underground currents were at work, a counterweight to the resignation of broad swathes of the population.
Behind his back, a young woman called out, ‘Can I help you?’
He spun around. He had expected to see a young woman with dreadlocks and a rasta cap, smoking a joint, but standing before him was a woman wearing jeans and a jumper, with an intellectual’s glasses and her hair in a tight chignon.
‘I’d like to see the director of the centre.’
‘The … director? And who are you?’
Servaz took out his warrant card and the young woman suddenly seemed to have noticed a bad smell.
‘What do you want? Isn’t it enough that—’
‘I’m investigating the death of Célia Jablonka, the artist who held an exhibition here. It has nothing to do with your squat.’
‘It’s not a squat, it’s a place where people live. A self-managed social centre where we try to make up for the shortcomings of the administration and the state.’
‘Right.’
‘We have taken in twenty-five homeless families here. We give them a roof, financial aid, and access to legal counsel. We relieve them of their isolation, and teach them how to confront the hostile environment of French justice, and to overcome their fear of cops’ – she accentuated the word – ‘prison guards, and judges. This is not a squat.’
‘Got it, it’s not a squat.’
‘Wait there.’
She vanished up the stairs. A little black boy came riding in on a tricycle and stopped to look at him. ‘Hello,’ said Servaz, without getting a reply. The child pedalled across the vestibule and disappeared. After he had waited for five minutes, he heard footsteps on the stairs. He looked up. The man who appeared was over six and a half feet tall and incredibly thin. What struck Servaz above all was his face – hollow and wrinkled, but burning with the flame of an ever-present youth. The flame was in his huge, deep-set light eyes, and it was of a feverish purity; it was in his smile as it broke into a radiance of wrinkles. He had a beaky nose and a certain beauty tinged with melancholy.
‘Do you want to have a look around?’
His eyes twinkled with amusement. He was proud of what he was doing here. And Servaz felt a rush of spontaneous liking for this man who was certain he had chosen the right battle.
Someone who was neither resigned, nor cynical, nor apathetic.
‘All right,’ said Servaz.
An hour later, they had seen all the workshops; one of them repaired bicycles, another was a screen-printing workshop. Servaz had expected to meet undocumented African families, but he also met Georgians, Iraqis, poor or laid-off workers, students, and an elegant young Sri Lankan couple whose English flowed easily; and then there were the children bundled up in warm winter clothes, ready to go out and play.
‘The thing is, everything you’ve just seen could stop from one day to the next,’ said the director of the centre finally, collapsing into a battered leather armchair by a window that looked out onto the courtyard.
Servaz sat down in the other armchair. He knew there was no winter truce where evictions from illegal occupancy were concerned.
‘So you have come here because of Célia?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you want to know? I thought the case was closed.’
‘It is.’
The man gave him a puzzled look.
‘I’m trying to understand what it was that drove Célia to want to end her life.’
‘Why? Since when do the police ask that sort of question?’
Good point.
‘Let’s just say there are some grey areas.’
‘What do you mean by grey areas?’
‘Tell me about her,’ he said, to put a stop to the questions. ‘Did you notice a change over the last months?’
The grey eyes probed him once again, then the man delved into his memories.
‘During the last few days, Célia had completely lost her mind.’
He lit a cigarillo and blew out the smoke without inhaling it, never taking his eyes off the policeman across from him.
Servaz no longer felt the cold.
&n
bsp; ‘She had gone completely mad,’ reiterated the giant, looking him right in the eyes, his own eyes two spheres of concentration.
‘She thought she was being persecuted; her behaviour was increasingly paranoid. She was convinced someone was following her, spying on her, that they were after her. Even here, she had stopped trusting people. Including me,’ he added with real sadness in his voice. ‘In the beginning, I didn’t pay too much attention to her behavioural problems. But as the weeks went by, her symptoms got worse. She was more and more hostile and suspicious; she challenged my loyalty and accused me of plotting against her; the slightest little thing out of the ordinary would make her completely freak out. As if the entire planet had it in for her.’
Now Servaz was hanging on the fellow’s every word. He might have forgotten the cold weather, but another sort of shiver went down his spine.
‘And do you know what she was afraid of?’ he asked.
Once again, that focused gaze levelled at him. The sound of a car horn from the street.
‘Not what, but who. Not long before her suicide, she claimed that someone wanted to hurt her, someone wanted to destroy her life.’
He remained silent for a moment. His eyes narrowed.
‘Why are you coming now, one year later, to question me about Célia? Have you reopened the case? Because I find it all a bit strange, to say the least. I get the feeling your investigation is just a touch, as it were, unofficial – or am I mistaken?’
‘No.’
‘So why does Célia Jablonka’s case interest you? Did you know her?’
‘Not at all.’
‘What department are you in? I don’t remember seeing you among the investigators last year.’
‘The Criminal Affairs Division.’
The man frowned. ‘You will understand why I’m puzzled: since when has the crime squad taken an interest in suicide? Unless, of course, it wasn’t really a suicide.’
‘Célia Jablonka did commit suicide. There’s not the slightest doubt about that.’
‘All right, all right, and if she did … then it’s a very strange business,’ said the tall, thin man. ‘And you don’t look like you’re doing all that well yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
Don't Turn Out the Lights Page 10
