Claire got up and went back into the house with her graceful walk. She came back shortly afterward dressed in a swimsuit. She turned on the light in the pool and slowly went down the three steps that led into the water. The children understood and got out of the pool. Séverine wrapped her long brown hair in a towel. She walked past her father, kissed him on the forehead, and announced that she was going to bed. Léo approached in turn and laid his hand on his father’s shoulder.
“We’re leaving at seven tomorrow morning, don’t forget.”
“I won’t,” he assured him. “I’ve already set my alarm. You’ll be on time.”
Gilles put his hand on his son’s. He didn’t dare ask for a kiss. Tomorrow, maybe when he was saying goodbye . . .
Claire slipped through the water without apparent effort. When she arrived at one end of the pool, she dove and came out again at the other end. She was capable of doing that for hours. And Gilles could follow her with his eyes just as long.
Night had now fallen. Gilles didn’t need to get into the water himself; he already felt refreshed. Claire came out of the pool. She took off her swimsuit and hung it up to dry. She knew that he was looking at her and she took her time. She knotted a sarong around her waist. Her breasts swung when she began to walk. She leaned down toward him. She ran her hand through his hair again.
“Are you coming to bed? I’m exhausted.”
“Was your session at the gym tiring?”
He’d promised himself he wouldn’t ask. And certainly not in that way. Was it a sudden attack of jealousy or an inappropriate professional reflex that led him to set this idiotic trap for her? He’d never know. To his great despair, Claire dove into the trap head-first.
“I don’t know what was wrong with the teacher today. She must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. She made us sweat more than ever before.”
And then she left him alone with his gloomy thoughts. The water in the pool still remembered her swimming movements and stupidly continued to ripple. Its bluish light made the branches of the palm tree dance stealthily.
As the old proverb had it: He is trapped who thought he was the trapper.
CHAPTER 11
The girl is playing along. She has understood. That’s good. It will be easier. He was reassured. Up to now, everything had gone well.
She was eating, drinking, washing herself. She no longer cried much and seemed to be resigned. Perfect. There would be no pointless violence. He didn’t like violence, but he wouldn’t hesitate.
The kidnapping had been disconcertingly easy. The young woman was asleep in the car and hadn’t awoken when he transported her. The hardest part had been convincing the taxi driver to make her drink the drug. But he’d turned out to be more venal than clever.
Everything was going according to plan.
A cool obscurity reigned in the house. It was agreeable. He didn’t like heat. He didn’t like summertime. In the past, during all the long vacations, he never left the house. Despite his mother, who badgered him about it. From the high window, she showed him the neighbor’s children in the distance who were amusing themselves in an inflatable pool. They were yelling and jumping around, gesticulating, fighting. “Go play with them, at least once, you’ll see, they’re nice,” she kept repeating all day long. She got tired when evening came. He preferred to read adventure novels and watch the Tour de France on television. He had no friends; he didn’t need any. He didn’t like the games children his age played.
And he didn’t like to please his mother.
He was going to have to go to work. Nothing had changed over the years. He still found it difficult to leave, even for a moment, the calm of this house. Each time it was a rupture, a divorce, a painful childbirth. Soon he was going to be able to enjoy peace. Finally. Stop this circus, these pretenses, this masquerade. Move once and for all to the other side of the world.
He mustn’t change his habits in any way. Mustn’t appear suspect. They’d never be able to identify him without his help. He had no ties, or almost none. He held all the cards in his hand. He was going to deal them out as he wished, cleverly mixing them up. He’d foreseen everything, but he hadn’t yet decided everything.
Only the outcome was inevitable.
He’d been afraid for a moment when he met a policeman at that idiot Barrère’s place. It had in fact been a policeman. He’d had no difficulty confirming that. God, how much he’d loved that short moment of fear. It had reminded him of games of hide-and-seek. The delicious shiver when his father approached the closet where he knew he was hiding. The hope when he pretended to go away. And the immense joy when he finally caught him.
They hadn’t played often. In any case, most of the time his father wasn’t playing. He was looking for him so he could punish him. For his thefts, his lies. Why was it always necessary to be naughty in order to be able to play?
He’d found the policeman nice. Firm gestures, dark eyes, assertive, with something about his mouth, childlike and fragile. An intelligent cop, sensitive and perceptive. It looked like the game would be amusing.
He was surprised by the silence in the newspapers. It saddened him. The young woman’s disappearance hadn’t been reported anywhere. Were reporters even stupider than the police? They would probably also need a little help.
Regretfully, he got up. He had to go out. Confront people, the heat, the light. It was getting harder and harder.
Courage, he said to himself, it will soon be over.
CHAPTER 12
Sebag didn’t like Collioure.
The “Jewel of the Vermilion Coast.” Flower-lined lanes leading down to the sea, where many-colored boats bobbed drowsily. A few painted façades. A strange round church tower that looked like a minaret. And an astonishing light that had attracted a handful of unknown painters at the beginning of the last century.
It was pretty, okay, but enough!
When he landed here in 1905, Matisse didn’t imagine that a century later the picturesque village would have become a major tourist site on the Mediterranean coast and that mediocre copyists with long, greasy hair, long beards, and dirty jeans would be pretending to be artists and luring customers with loud canvases that were to fauvism what punk was to Bob Dylan.
Sebag really didn’t like Collioure. And even less in the summertime. In the fall, on the other hand, in the streets one met only a few old Catalans and a small number of real talents. In the fall, the light was soft and caressing.
Gilles had dozed off during the trip from Perpignan to Collioure. He was tired. The preceding night, he’d ruminated for a long time on his dark thoughts, while Claire was sleeping like a baby next to him in bed.
He’d caught her in his trap, and that hadn’t helped him at all. On several occasions, he had been on the point of asking her where she was at the time of the gym class. But the fear of seeming ridiculous had held him back: did a little lie necessarily conceal a great deception? He didn’t know what to do, and that made his bad mood even worse.
And then, Léo had left this morning.
They’d gotten up early to go to the train station. Gilles had accompanied his son as far as the platform. Before getting on the train, Léo had casually offered his cheek. Sebag had had only time to give him a rapid peck. He would so much have liked to hug him!
Although the summer season was still just getting started, the sign on the parking lot at the royal chateau in Collioure said it was full. Fortunately, the gendarmes had agreed to meet them on the little parking lot above the Port Avall beach. Jacques parked the car next to the gendarmes’ blue van.
Sebag and Molina greeted Lieutenant Cornet of the research squad in Perpignan. He was a young, lanky guy. He had to be almost six feet three and his slenderness made him seem taller still. The young man shook their hands with pride and enthusiasm.
“We had no difficulty identifying the couple that was putting
the young woman up. Their names are Gérard and Martine Revel. They live in the Port Avall neighborhood, a little away from the tourist part of Collioure.”
“That’s surprising, for painters,” Sebag said, puzzled.
“Not necessarily for real painters,” Cornet replied, thus completely winning over Sebag. “Gérard Revel was born here, he’s a real native of Collioure who has been able to gain a small following in Spain. Or rather . . . in South Catalonia. His wife is also a painter.”
The lieutenant led them into a winding lane that started up the hill. They soon stopped in front of a white house and knocked at a door painted apple green.
“They know we’re coming, and are waiting for us,” Cornet explained.
There was no name on the door, just a metal plaque the size of a school ruler, on which were engraved two very stylized silhouettes. A man and a woman looking at each other.
The door opened and Sebag saw the man’s silhouette. His nose, long and prominent, contrasted with his other features, which were gentler, almost feminine. He had a shaved head. His massive figure and muscular arms held apart from his body showed that he’d spent hours in body-building gyms.
Gérard Revel moved aside to let the policemen enter. He pointed to a door at the right in the narrow hall. Cornet went first into a vast room, a sort of kitchen-dining room. They sat around a large table of worn wood blackened by time or by the perverse activities of a clever craftsman.
“I have to ask you to excuse my wife. She’s finishing a water color and will join us in a few minutes.”
As if to justify what he’d said, he put five large cups on the table.
“Can I offer you coffee?”
They all accepted his offer and their host filled four cups with black, fragrant coffee. Revel set in front of them a bowl containing rough cubes of brown sugar.
The room had the strange and calming charm of those old places that seem to have lived for a thousand years. The thick stone walls isolated them from street noise and the wooden furniture muffled fragments of voices. Fragments of life. The enormous fireplace with a stone mantel demanded respect. Behind the little windows with lace curtains, conversations had to be both trivial and essential. Muted and confidential. Here you didn’t chat, you spoke. And if you had nothing to say, you let the pendulum of the tall clock fill existence. These old clocks from Franche-Comté used to play the role now played by television. Less the stupefying effect.
“I’m ready,” Revel said, sitting down across from them.
Molina started the interview. Sebag observed. That was their technique when they worked together. Jacques conducted the conversation, while he attended to what the people said. Gilles tried to concentrate on “how they say it.”
“So you put up a young Dutch citizen named Ingrid Raven here for a few days?”
“That’s right.”
Molina took color copies of the photos of the young woman out of his hip pocket. He laid them out on the table among the cups.
“Is this her?”
Revel looked at the photos carefully. He pointed to one in which the young woman had blond hair.
“That’s her. And when we met her, she looked more like this photo than the others. But she also had a kind of tattoo on her right shoulder.”
“Do you remember what it was a tattoo of?”
During an interview, certain questions were asked to determine the reliability of the witness.
“It was a somewhat stylized swallow in flight.”
“You are very observant,” Jacques said, complimenting him.
“In my trade, that’s as useful as it is in yours,” Revel replied modestly. “And then Ingrid served as a model for me during her stay here. That helps.”
“How long was she here, exactly?”
“Four days and three nights. From Tuesday the nineteenth to Friday the twenty-second of June.”
“You’re not only observant . . . ”
Revel shrugged his broad shoulders.
“The gendarmes told my wife and me about your visit this morning. It didn’t take us long to check the dates.”
“How did you meet Ingrid Raven?” Molina asked.
“It was my wife who met her. Martine does guided visits at the museum in Céret. Ingrid was part of the group she guided on Monday—June 18. They talked for a long time afterward. My wife is a specialist in fauvism, and so is Ingrid. We continued the discussion over this same table at noon on Tuesday; Martine had invited her. Since she was nice and a little short of cash, we wanted to make her stay in France easier by putting her up.”
Sebag wrote in his little blue schoolboy’s notebook all the details about the young woman’s activities. There were still four days left unaccounted for.
“Did her stay go well?” Molina continued.
“More or less . . . ”
“Meaning?”
Revel spread his arms and put his hands flat on the table in a gesture of openness and sincerity.
“She’s a pretty girl, with a very pleasant figure, and not only for a painter. She’s also a person who is . . . how to put it . . . rather forward.”
“Did she make advances to you?”
Jacques was a good interviewer, but Gilles sometimes reproached him for being too directive. He thought that during an interrogation the silences and hesitations lied less than the words.
“Not just to me.”
Molina met his colleague’s eyes and held back the question he was about to ask. Revel took the time to drink a bit of coffee. Sebag did the same. It was tonic, strong, and slightly acidic. With delightful notes of cocoa and almond.
“She posed nude for us,” Revel went on. “For both of us at the same time. She made it clear that she was attracted to both of us.”
He drank the last drop of coffee, then picked up the pot and offered it to his guests. Cornet and Molina declined with a gesture; they hadn’t yet finished their cups. Sebag gladly accepted.
“This is a Central American coffee, isn’t it?”
Gérard Revel did not hide his astonishment and pleasure.
“It’s a mixture of coffees from Guatemala and Antigua. Congratulations. It’s rare to find a true coffee lover.”
“It’s also rare for a coffee lover to drink such good coffee.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Faced with this exchange of worldly remarks, Molina grimaced with annoyance. For his part, Sebag found this pause necessary before beginning a more intimate phase of the interview. He decided to re-start the conversation himself.
“And how did you react to Ingrid’s advances?”
Once again, Revel spread his arms wide.
“What man hasn’t fantasized about sleeping with two women at once?”
Sebag wondered whether women had the same desires. All night, he’d imagined Claire in the arms of a lover. Why only one, after all? Did women deceive their husbands more when they slept with two men at the same time? Or with a man and another woman? He forced himself to drive away these inopportune thoughts.
“So you agreed?”
Molina had taken over again.
“No. And I don’t know if I’d have done it. Fantasies are not necessarily meant to be realized. In any case, I didn’t have time to say anything at all.”
“Why?”
“You wouldn’t ask that question if you knew my wife. She didn’t appreciate the proposition, and even less my hesitations. She threw Ingrid out of the house.”
“Do you know where she went?” Jacques asked.
Revel suddenly crossed his arms and stared at his coffee cup.
“She called a taxi and left. Afterward, I don’t know . . . ”
His arms tightened even more. His right hand was rubbing his left bicep. For the first time, he was not entirely at ease.
Sebag guessed that he needed a little help.
“Did she find the taxi’s number in the phone book?”
Revel looked at Gilles but didn’t answer.
“She didn’t call a taxi at random, did she?”
The painter silently shook his head and looked at Sebag. Then he made up his mind.
“Since you seem to be well-informed, I have no reason to hide anything whatever from you. After all, I don’t know anything about this guy.”
In the doorway behind Revel a pretty brunette appeared. Her wild mop of hair was streaked with strands of auburn. Her figure was feline, her profile Greek, her eyes severe and lively. An image faithful to the engraving on the front door. Revel told them what they already knew:
“This is my wife Martine.”
Martine Revel had come in at a bad time. Sebag half stood up as a sign of politeness.
“Please sit down, madam, your husband was telling us about Ingrid Raven’s departure.”
The pretty brunette sat down cross-legged on an ottoman. Molina took the lead again, addressing himself to Revel.
“You were saying that Ingrid didn’t call just any taxi.”
Revel looked at his wife out of the corner of his eye. Sebag divined that he was embarrassed to have already arrived at the point of giving the police names. Even in serious matters such as disappearances or murders, there was always a certain uneasiness when the time came to implicate other people. A complex about betraying someone. Revel would have liked to resist longer. Not for glory but to avoid burdening his conscience.
“As you seem to know already, a man named Lopez came to get her. He really is a cab driver. He’d met Ingrid at a party we’d taken her to. Wednesday or Thursday evening.”
“Wednesday evening,” Martine Revel said.
Her tone was firm. She had no hesitations, and she was not embarrassed about informing the police.
“Which party exactly?” Jacques asked.
“A vernissage for an exhibit in Perpignan,” Revel replied. “Ingrid came to France to study fauvism but she is also interested in contemporary art.”
Summertime All the Cats Are Bored Page 10
