by Ed Gorman
I lowered my eyes, I never felt so old, so powerless, so silly too, but I made myself go on. “You can start singing again,” I said. “Samir’s looking for someone to take care of the cash register on weekends, it’d do me good to get out of here a little, and it could help pay for lessons. Maybe that’s all you need to make it work.”
She laughed again, rolling her head against the back of the couch, and then she said: “No, Grandfather, it’s over, my voice is gone, can’t you hear? It’s not there anymore. It’s gone, that’s all there is to it.”
It hurt when she called me Grandfather because there was no tenderness in her voice like when she called me Grandpa, it was more of an impatient tone of voice, kind of scornful, like the kids playing soccer in the little square in front of the park when they think I’m not getting out of the way fast enough. It hurt, and then it made me mad. It was also seeing her like that on the couch, sprawled out like a doll, occasionally scratching her knee or her nose, looking like she was bored, not giving a damn about anything. 1 went and sat down next to her. “You can’t lose your voice just like that,” I said, even if it’s what I thought when I opened the door — that grated, worn-out voice, almost unrecognizable. “It’s because you haven’t worked on it for a long time. I’ll make you herb tea, lemon and honey, and then those powders Samir sells for colds, you’ll see, it’ll come back.”
But she just closed her eyes and shook her head with an angry expression, and when I held out my hand to push back a strand of hair that was trailing over her cheek, she shoved it away impatiently. “No,” she said. “My voice is gone. Don’t you get it? It’s all over. Oh, leave me alone.”
She thought she was strong but she wasn’t as strong as all that; she couldn’t manage to brush away my hand and I left it there, near her cheek, even when she tried to push it away more impatiently, saying, “Stop it.”
I slid my hand down and placed it on her throat. “Your voice isn’t gone,” I said. “I’m sure I’d feel it if you sang something — there, now, I can feel it vibrating under my fingers. Your neck’s all cold, that’s why too, but it’s going to warm up.”
“Come on, leave me alone,” she repeated. “Leave me alone, I can’t breathe.” She could have screamed if she wanted to, there were neighbors, the two guys on the other side of the landing, and yet she whispered, and it was like a secret being born between us.
“Sing,” I told her. “Sing something. Sing that song by Piaf you used to like so much. ‘La Vie en Rose.’ Sing.”
Her throat vibrated under my hand when she murmured something, still softer, but I didn’t hear it. We stayed like that for a long time. She hadn’t opened her eyes again. She wasn’t trying to push me away anymore, she had her hands on her knees, quietly waiting for something, and that smile that didn’t look like hers was gone from her face. She didn’t move. I thought she was asleep.
3.
Arnaud hadn’t said a word while the old man was talking. He had opened his notebook and began mechanically taking notes after glancing over at the old man to make sure he didn’t mind. But his notes were such a mess that later he would be unable to read them or understand what they meant, aside from the last words he’d written in the middle of one page: La Vie en Rose.
Now the old man was silent. Armaud watched him. Big, fat tears were flowing from the old man’s eyes, like a child’s tears. He never would have thought such a deeply furrowed face could have so much emotion or so much water in it. At last the old man sighed, picked up his cup of coffee, and put it to his lips, then put it back down without drinking a drop.
“When her neck began to grow cold under my palms I understood,” he said. “I took away my hands and her head slipped onto my shoulder. I didn’t know what to do, so I laid her down gently on the couch and I got up. It’s funny what goes through your head at moments like that, sir, because I wasn’t really thinking and yet I went straight to the bedroom closet where I knew that long ago I’d put away the blanket we used to take for picnics in the park. I took it, I went back to the living room and wrapped Layla in it. All that time I was wondering what I was going to do, but I must have known already. I picked her up in my arms without any hesitation — it wasn’t easy, since skinny as she was, she still weighed a lot or maybe death just does that to you — and I walked to the door. The guy across the hall must’ve gotten tired or else he understood and didn’t want any trouble, because his door was shut.
“I walked down the three flights with Layla in my arms, I went out into the street where it was still very dark, you couldn’t hear a car, not even a moped, and I walked to the park gate that doesn’t close very well. Everybody in the neighborhood knows there’s a gate that doesn’t close and all you have to do is jiggle it the right way to open it, any ten-year-old can show you how. I pushed the gate wide with my shoulder and I took the park path to the spot where we used to have picnics back then. It must have been close to dawn, because a blackbird was singing in the trees, we must’ve stayed on the couch much longer than I thought, I may have fallen asleep with my hands on her throat. The smell of the flowers was very strong that night, I was surprised spring was in the air. I think I’d hardly been out of the house since the night I saw Layla in Pigalle.
“I stopped at a tree we used to sit under. I kneeled down and I put her down on the ground. I picked her up a little to tuck the blanket under her, I laid her out with her legs together and her arms straight down beside her body, I buttoned up her jacket to hide the bluish necklace around her throat, and then I got up. I looked at her for a moment. Oh, we were so happy under this tree, me and her. As I was walking back home, it started to rain and suddenly I couldn’t stand to think of her staying out there in the rain. I went up to get a pink nylon windbreaker she’d left behind when she went away; her mother had put it in the box she’d left on my doormat. I took it out of its plastic bag, went back down, and put it on Layla; first I slipped it over her head, then I pulled her arms through the sleeves, and finally I drew the hood over her face. I could hear the sound of the raindrops falling on the plastic. Did she have her pink windbreaker on when they found her? She didn’t get too wet.”
He was looking at Arnaud imploringly, and Arnaud lowered his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said in a low voice, “I couldn’t cross the police barrier. But she was under another plastic thing, a kind of gray tarp. No, I don’t think she was wet.”
The old man shook his head with a pensive expression. He picked up the cap on the table next to his cup and wiped his face with it, then kept it in his hand.
“After that, I came back up here and waited for someone to arrive,” he began again in a weary tone. “I waited for someone to come so I could tell my story. I will follow you to the police station. But the dog … I’d just like you to leave the dog at the grocery store on rue Piat.”
Arnaud capped his pen and shut his notebook. The coffee must have been boiling for hours, it was much too strong; he felt as if it had ripped the skin off his mouth and his heart was beating very fast. He was thinking of all those newspapers he’d skimmed through since the fall, all those sordid crimes, stabbings, shootings, skulls cracked against walls, that search for evil he’d thrown himself into to find an ideal killer, and he remembered the incredibly gentle handshake of the old man. He was looking at them at that very moment, those two hands clenched on his cap, which he was stroking softly, the way you pet an animal. Then Arnaud glanced up again and forced himself to smile.
“I’m not the police, sir,” he said. “I’m not going to put you in jail. Your story …” he went on hastily. “Don’t say anything. Don’t tell anyone anything. Layla did not come to see you. You were sleeping, you didn’t hear her knock, you didn’t open your door.”
But the old man was staring at him as if he didn’t understand. “Don’t say anything,” he repeated. “Why — ” He had mechanically put his cap back on, he looked ready to go, to follow the police who’d come knock on his door in a few minutes or a few hours.
&n
bsp; “I live outside Paris,” Arnaud suddenly heard himself saying. “I can take you in for a while if you like. We can go there now. No one will know you were here last night. No one will suspect you.”
But under the woolen cap, his face still reddened by tears, the old man was looking at him with incomprehension, almost with mistrust.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,” he said at last. “What you’re telling me there, that’s not my story. I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.” He continued to examine Arnaud’s face as if he was seeing him for the first time, as if he didn’t know how this stranger got into his kitchen, sitting in front of him with the coffeepot between them. He pushed back his chair and got up heavily. “Go away, sir,” he said. “Go away, please.”
Arnaud hesitated, then did as he was told. He stood up, slipped his notebook and pen into his pocket. The old man remained standing behind the table while Arnaud walked over to the door and went out. In the stairway he found the same stench of urine and soup; the door to the apartment across the hall was slightly open, but he was not tempted to take a look inside. He walked quickly down the three flights, just as he was leaving through the doors of the building, he saw the police coming — three men who seemed to know where they were going — and he turned his face away so their eyes would not meet.
He headed back to the park. Most of the police cars had disappeared; so had most of the onlookers. When he passed through the gates, he saw that the yellow tape was still there but they’d taken the body away. He stopped on the path. He looked for a long time at the lawn, soaked by the downpour. In the grass under a tree, there was an oval in a softer green on the spot where the body had protected it from the rain. Suddenly he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He turned around and saw his friend.
‘‘Hey, you sure took your time,” Legendre said. “I hope you came up with something, at least. Me, I drew a blank, nobody wanted to tell me a thing and then the cops threw me out. So tell me. What happened?”
But Arnaud was looking at the soft oval of grass again. He felt tears welling up in his eyes, tears that seemed to him as big and childish as the old man’s. He didn’t know where he got that absolute ignorance of the human psyche. All he knew, with absolute certainty, was that he would never write his book; but that wasn’t what was causing this inconsolable sorrow. Legendre had lit a cigarette and was staring at him in amazement.
“For Chrissake, what’s with you, man? What did you see in that building?”
Arnaud shook his bead without answering. The last onlookers were moving away, and couples, strollers, and children were coming in through the gates of the park. In a few weeks, a few months, no one would remember Layla M. except for the old man in his cell and me, he told himself. He thought of the pink nylon windbreaker the old man had taken down to cover the corpse with, and as his tears turned into sobs, he remembered the pink plastic hats the Japanese tourists were wearing a few hours earlier in front of the plaque for Edith Piaf. They had seemed so bright and cheery in the grayness of the morning.
DOMINIQUE MAINARD is a novelist, short story writer and translator and has developed her passion for New Zealand literature through the works of Janet Frame, whose writing she has translated since 1994 (Owls Do Cry, Joëlle Losfeld). After publishing three short story anthologies, including Le Second Enfant, for which she received the Prix Prométhée de la nouvelle in 1994 (La Différence), and Le Grenadier (Gallimard, 1997), Mainard published her first novel in 2001, Le Grand Fakir (Joëlle Losfeld). She received two awards for Leur Histoire (Joëlle Losfeld, 2002)
- the Prix du Roman FNAC (2002) and the Prix Alain-Fournier (2003), a novel that was later adapted for film by Alain Corneau
- Les Mots bleus (2005). She was born in Paris in 1967, where she returned to live after being raised in the Lyon region and later spending five years in America.
Sack O’ Woe
BY JOHN HARVEY
The street was dark and narrow, a smear of frost along the roof of the occasional parked car. Two of a possible six overhead lights had been smashed several weeks before. Recycling bins — blue, green, and gray — shared the pavement with abandoned supermarket trolleys and the detritus from a score of fast-food takeaways. Number thirty-four was toward the terrace end, the short street emptying onto a scrub of wasteland ridged with stiffened mud, puddles of brackish water covered by a thin film of ice.
January.
Tom Whitemore knocked with his gloved fist on the door of thirty-four. Paint that was flaking away, a bell that had long since ceased to work.
He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt and sweater, a scuffed leather jacket — the first clothes he had grabbed when the call had come through less than half an hour before.
January 27, 3:17 a.m.
Taking one step back, he raised his right leg and kicked against the door close by the lock; a second kick, wood splintered and the door sprang back.
Inside was your basic two-up, two-down house, a kitchen extension leading into the small yard at the back, bathroom above that. A strip of worn carpet in the narrow hallway, bare boards on the stairs. Bare wires that hung down, no bulb attached, from the ceiling overhead. He had been here before.
“Darren? Darren, you here?”
No answer when he called the name.
A smell that could be from a backed-up foul-water pipe or a blocked drain.
The front room was empty, odd curtains at the window, a TV set in one corner, two chairs and a sagging two-seater settee. Dust. A bundle of clothes. In the back room there were a small table and two more chairs, one with a broken back; a pile of old newspapers; the remnants of an unfinished oven-ready meal; a child’s shoe.
“Darren?”
The first stair creaked a little beneath his weight.
In the front bedroom, a double mattress rested directly on the floor; several blankets, a quilt without a cover, no sheets. Half the drawers in the corner chest had been pulled open and left that way, miscellaneous items of clothing hanging down.
Before opening the door to the rear bedroom, Whitemore held his breath.
A pair of bunk beds leaned against one wall, a pumped-up Lilo mattress close by. Two tea chests, one spilling over with children’s clothes, the other with toys. A plastic bowl in which cereal had hardened and congealed. A baby’s bottle, rancid with yellowing milk. A used nappy, half in, half out of a pink plastic sack. A tube of sweets. A paper hat. Red and yellow building bricks. Soft toys. A plastic car. A teddy bear with a waistcoat and a bright bow tie, still new enough to have been a recent Christmas gift.
And blood.
Blood in fine tapering lines across the floor, faint splashes on the wall. Tom Whitemore pressed one hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.
He had been a member of the Public Protection Team for nearly four years: responsible, together with other police officers, probation officers, and representatives of other agencies — social services, community psychiatric care — for the supervision of violent and high-risk-of-harm sex offenders who had been released back into the community. Their task — through maintaining a close watch; pooling information; getting offenders, where applicable, into accredited programs; and assisting them in finding jobs — was to do anything and everything possible to prevent reoffending. It was often thankless and frequently frustrating — What was that Springsteen song? Two steps up and three steps back? — but unlike a lot of police work, it had focus, clear aims, methods, ambitions. It was possible — sometimes — to see positive results. Potentially dangerous men — they were mostly men — were neutralized, kept in check. If nothing else, there was that.
And yet his wife hated it. Hated it for the people it brought him into contact with, day after day — rapists, child abusers — the scum of the earth in her eyes, the lowest of the low. She hated it for the way it forced him to confront over and over what these people had done, what people were capable of, as if the enormities of their crimes were somehow contaminating him. Creepin
g into his dreams. Coming back with him into their home, like smoke caught in his hair or clinging to the fibers of his clothes. Contaminating them all.
“How much longer, Tom?” she would ask. “How much longer are you going to do this hateful bloody job?”
“Not long,” he would say. “Not so much longer now.”
Get out before you burn out, that was the word on the Force. Transfer to general duties, Traffic, Fraud. Yet he could never bring himself to leave, to make the move, and each morning he would set off back into that world, and each evening when he returned, no matter how late, he would go and stand in the twins’ bedroom and watch them sleeping, his and Marianne’s twin boys, five years old, safe and sound.
That summer they had gone to Filey as usual, two weeks of holiday, the same dubious weather, the same small hotel, the perfect curve of beach. The twins had run and splashed and fooled around on half-size body boards on the edges of the waves; they had eaten chips and ice cream, and when they were tired of playing with the big colored ball that bounced forever down toward the sea, Tom had helped them build sandcastles with an elaborate array of turrets and tunnels, while Marianne alternately read her book or dozed.
It was perfect: even the weather was forgiving, no more than a scattering of showers, a few darkening clouds, the wind from the south.
On the last evening, the twins upstairs asleep, they had sat on the small terrace overlooking the promenade and the black strip of sea. “When we get back, Tom,” Marianne had said, “you’ve got to ask for a transfer. They’ll understand. No one can do a job like that forever, not even you.”
She reached for his hand, and as he turned toward her, she brought her face to his. “Tom?” Her breath on his face was warm and slightly sweet, and he felt a lurch of love run through him like a wave.
“All right,” he said.
