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Writers of the greatest thrillers and mysteries on earth, who inspired those that followed. Their books are found on shelves all across their home countries – from Asia to Europe, and everywhere in between. Timeless tales that have been devoured, adored and handed down through the decades. Iconic books that have inspired films, and demand to be read and read again. And now we’ve introduced Pushkin Vertigo Originals – the greatest contemporary crime writing from across the globe, by some of today’s best authors.
So step inside a dizzying world of criminal masterminds with Pushkin Vertigo. The only trouble you might have is leaving them behind.
To Philippe Poire,
my faithful reader,
from his faithful author
F.D.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
1 The Encounter
2 The First Visit
3 The Outing
4 The Second Visit
5 A Piece of Advice
6 The Diversion
7 The Third Visit
8 The Fourth Visit
9 The Switch
10 The Cloth Bird
11 Lost Property
12 You Never Can Tell
About the Publisher
Copyright
1
The Encounter
How old does a man have to be not to feel like an orphan when he loses his mother?
When I returned after being away for six years to the small flat where Mother died, it felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity.
I sat down in the old armchair next to the window where she always did the darning and looked around at the silence, the smell and all the old things that had lain waiting for me. The silence and the smells had greater reality for me than the damp-streaked wallpaper.
My mother died four years ago and I learned of her death only when I got the funeral notice. I’d thought about her a lot since then but I hadn’t wept for her enormously. Now, as I crossed the threshold of our flat, I suddenly grasped that she had died. It hit me head-on.
Outside, it was Christmas.
What brought it home to me was coming back to Paris and to the crowded boulevards of its poorer districts lined with brightly lit shop window displays, and with illuminated trees at street corners.
Christmas!
I was a fool to come home on a day like that.
There was a smell that I didn’t recognize in her bedroom—the smell of her dying. The bed had been entirely stripped and the mattress rolled up in an old sheet. The people who took care of her had forgotten to take away the glass for the holy water and the sprig of blessed palm.
These sorry items were on the marble dresser next to a black wooden crucifix. There was no water left in the glass and the leaves on the sprig had gone yellow. When I picked it up, they fell on the bedroom carpet like golden flakes.
There was a photograph of me on the wall in the ornate old frame that had been used to display my father’s medals. The photo was about ten years old but it wasn’t very flattering. I looked like a sickly and repressed young man, with hollow cheeks, a sidelong glance and the kind of vague pouting expression that could only belong to someone very bad or very miserable.
Only a mother’s eyes could forgive a snap like that for being such a disappointment, and even find beauty in it.
I thought I was better looking now. The years had filled me out, and I had acquired a direct look and relaxed features.
I still had to say hello to my own room.
It was unchanged. My bed was made. The books I used to like were stacked on the mantelpiece, and next to the wardrobe key the little manikin I’d carved from a piece of hazel wood just for fun was still there.
I flopped onto the bed on my back. The bedspread had its familiar coarse feel and its good old smell of colourfast linen. I closed my eyes and said aloud, the way I used to in the morning to ask for my breakfast, “Hey there, Ma!”
Some people pray in a different way, with prepared sentences. But that simple call said in an everyday way was the best I could do. For a very short moment I hoped that by concentrating with all my heart and soul the past might answer me back. I think I would have given the rest of my life without a second thought to see my mother for just a second, standing behind the door. Yes, I’d give anything just to hear her asking in that voice of hers which was always slightly anxious when she talked to me, “Are you awake, my dear?”
I was awake.
And a whole life would pass by before I could go back to sleep.
My spoken words went on expanding and vibrating and filling the silence of the flat long enough to allow me to feel all the sorrow it held.
It wasn’t possible to spend the evening in here. I needed noise, light and drink. I needed life!
In the wardrobe I found my imitation camelhair coat with the mothballs Ma had naturally provided. It used to be a “generous” fit but now it was tight on my shoulders.
As I put it on I looked at my other clothes hanging inside their dust covers. These old outfits that no longer suited me seemed so crass! They spoke of my past more eloquently than my own memories.
They alone could say exactly what I had been.
I went out. Or rather, I fled.
The stair lady was muttering curses as she swept. Still the same old woman. When I was a lad she already had that wornout look of someone who’d come to the end of the line. I used to think of her as exceedingly old—almost older than she looked now. She looked at me without recognizing my face. Her eyes had got worse; and I had changed.
Oily drizzle was falling in stops and starts and the gleaming roadway multiplied the streetlamps. The narrow streets of Levallois were full of happy people. They were knocking off work bearing Christmas supplies and thronging around open-air stalls where fishmongers shucked bucket-loads of oysters under wreaths of coloured lights.
The delis and cake shops were packed. A limping paperhawker zigzagged from one pavement to the other calling out the news, but nobody gave a damn.
I walked on aimlessly, churning over the sorrow that gripped me in the gut. I stopped in front of the narrow window of a small book and stationery shop that also sold odds and ends. It was one of those local shops where you can get all kinds of stuff: prayer books in the season of first communions, fireworks around the 14th of July, exercise books at the start of the school year and Christmas decorations in December. Shops like that were all my youth, and I love them all the more as they decline and vanish.
That’s why I felt so intensely the wish to go in and buy something, for the sole pleasure of the smell that brought back lost sensations.
Four or five women had squeezed into the narrow space. The saleslady looked like an aged widow. The look of someone in mourning forever! There was a smell of cocoa wafting from the room at the back.
I was glad there were people inside the shop. It meant I could linger, inspect its inexpensive treats and rediscover images of my childhood that I felt in special need of that day.
The place was like a fairy grotto piled high with glittering treasures. Christmas tree decorations were stacked on the shelves: glass birds, paper Father Christmases, baskets of fruit made of painted cotton and all those dainty balls as fragile as soap bubbles that help to make a tree into a fairy tale.
I was next to be served. There were people waiting behind
me.
“What can I get you?”
I pointed to a silver cardboard birdcage sprinkled with glitter-dust. Inside it an exotic bird made of blue and yellow velvet stood on a golden perch.
“That one,” I stammered.
“Will that be all?”
“Yes.”
The saleslady put the cage in a little cardboard box and tied it up with a ribbon.
“Three twenty!”
When I went out I was feeling better. I couldn’t grasp exactly why the purchase of a Christmas decoration I had no use for had suddenly put me back in touch with my past.
It was a mystery.
I went into a bar for an aperitif. The place was full of overexcited men talking about what they were going to do for the rest of the evening. Most of them had packets under their arms or in their pockets.
I was tempted to catch a bus to go and nose around the big department stores on the Grands Boulevards.
But when I thought about it I preferred to stay in my own neck of the woods. The crowd in Levallois was humbler but also noisier and warmer than in the centre of town. At every step I saw faces that “said something” to me but nobody recognized me.
At a crossing someone shouted out at the top of his voice “Albert!” I turned round like a flash. But it wasn’t me that was meant, it was a tall spotty lad wearing a pastry cook’s checkerboard jacket strenuously pedalling a delivery tricycle.
My old quartier! Its smell of wet soot and cooking oil! Its wobbly paving stones! Its dreary frontages! Its bars! Its stray dogs that the pound had given up trying to catch!
I walked for more than an hour under the greasy rain, taking my fill of a thousand tiny, heady, bittersweet emotions that took me back fifteen years. At that time I was in secondary school and Christmas had lost none of its magic.
Towards eight I went into a big restaurant in the centre. It was more like a traditional brasserie with mirrors, wooden mouldings, napkins in rings, huge leather bench seats with climbing plants behind them, a counter you could sit at and waiters in black trousers and white jackets.
There were check curtains on the windows and in summer the houseplants were put out on the pavement. The place had the feel of a “highly regarded” provincial establishment. And it certainly was well regarded. Throughout my childhood, whenever I turned up my nose at a meal my mother served, she would sigh, “So go and eat at Chiclet’s!”
I did dream of being able to eat there one day. It seemed to me that only very wealthy and substantial people could afford such luxury. Every evening on my way home from school I stopped outside the restaurant and stared through its huge and misted windows at the opulent part of humanity holding court inside.
Outside mealtimes weighty gentlemen went there to play bridge. As the time to serve lunch or dinner drew nearer, the gaming tables would vanish one after the other like ships wrecked at sea. There was just one lifeboat left at the back of the room with waiters hovering impatiently around it until the truly indefatigable conceded the last rubber…
I went in for the first time in my life.
Although I’d been old enough and rich enough to patronize the restaurant before I went away, I had never dared go inside.
But that night I dared. And I did something more. I sauntered in. I dropped into Chiclet’s like I was a regular.
During my long absence I had decided so often that I would go to Chiclet’s when I got back, I had rehearsed so many times how I would stand and how I would move my arms that I was now performing an almost habitual act.
I had a momentary bout of dizziness because of the smell. I did not recognize it and could not have imagined it in advance. It wasn’t like that of ordinary restaurants. Chiclet’s smelled of absinthe and snails, and of old wood too.
At the back there was a very tall Christmas tree decked in fairy lights and tinsel that made the old-fashioned brasserie feel like a fairground.
The waiters had all pinned a tiny sprig of holly on their white jackets and the owners, M. and Mme Chiclet, stood at the bar serving free aperitifs to long-standing customers.
The couple had an elevated notion of the role of restaurateur. They were always dressed up to the nines, and gave the impression they were welcoming guests rather than serving customers.
She was a stout woman who, despite her dark dresses and chunky jewels, wasn’t far removed from being just a blowsy cashier-at-a-big-café. He was a wan-faced man with thinning hair plastered down on the top of his skull who wore outdated suits. He must have been chair of a heap of trade bodies and waved his hand like a prelate to intervene in a debate or to give someone else the floor.
The dinner service had barely started and there weren’t many customers yet. A splay-footed lad came up to take care of me. He helped to relieve me of my overcoat, hung it on a circular coat stand and, with a nod of his chin towards the restaurant, asked:
“Do you mind where?”
“Near the tree, if it’s possible…”
I really would have liked to take my mother to Chiclet’s. She had never been inside. She must have dreamed of it all her life as well!
I settled into the bench seat opposite the Christmas tree and ordered a fine repast. I suddenly felt all right. All right as when you’re hungry and about to eat. All right as when you’re tired and about to go to bed. The only real pleasure in the world is to satisfy a need.
What I was satisfying at that moment was not an appetite but a childhood dream.
I set about counting the number of lights on the tree. They fascinated me. As I neared the end of that useless arithmetical exercise a small voice close by me gurgled:
“That’s pretty.”
I turned around and discovered a fairly ugly little girl of three or four sitting at the next table and also looking at the tree. The girl’s head was a bit too large, her face was flat, her hair was reddish-brown and her nose like a radish. She resembled Shirley Temple as an infant prodigy. Yes, that was exactly right. Shirley Temple minus the good looks.
The child was with a woman, presumably her mother. She had seen me turn towards them and was smiling at me, as all mothers smile when you look at their child. I had a shock.
The woman looked like Anna. She had dark hair as Anna did, the same dark and almond-shaped eyes, the same dusky complexion and the same witty, sensual lips that scared me. She might have been twenty-seven, which is what Anna would have been. She was very pretty and smartly dressed. The little girl didn’t have her eyes, or her hair, or her nose, but in spite of that she still managed to look like her mother.
“Eat up your fish, Lucienne!”
The child obediently forked a sliver of sole on her overlarge plate. She steered it clumsily towards her mouth while looking all the time at the tree.
“It’s big, isn’t it?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Did it grow here?”
I laughed. The woman looked at me again, and was visibly pleased by the way I had reacted. Our eyes crossed for a few seconds, then she lowered her gaze, as if I had upset her. I stole a glance at myself in the huge mirror opposite. I wasn’t bad looking at all in a “battered by life” way. Wrinkles can be attractive in a thirty year old. I had a set of them in the corners of my eyes, plus a couple of very deep ones on my forehead.
There was something strange about a young woman and her daughter eating out in a restaurant on Christmas Eve. Seeing the two of them sent a pang to my heart. Their shared loneliness was more tragic than mine, which was, in the last analysis, pure and simple solitude.
The peace I’d felt since coming into the restaurant abruptly turned to gloom. All my life I’d suffered these sudden dips. I never knew how I’d feel from one minute to the next. I was always uneasy and permanently on the alert. I oozed anxiety and always had. It was painful, but I’d ended up getting used to it over the last six years.
I ate my oysters then my pheasant with straw chips, washing it down with a bottle of rosé. Now and again a remark by the girl gave me
an excuse to look at her mother and each time I did so I felt the same shock at how much she looked like Anna. Our game lasted through the whole meal. I call it our game because the young woman passed the ball, so to speak. When I turned my head towards her, she turned towards me. And with perplexing regularity her face expressed in turn interest, then sadness, then modesty.
We finished our respective meals at almost the same time. The child’s dawdling had made up for my late start. The woman ordered a coffee and the bill. I did the same.
The restaurant had filled up meanwhile. The waiters were racing around. You could hear orders being yelled in the kitchen like commands in the engine room of a ship. Conversations were getting louder. You could have been in a railway station. The clinking of cutlery and glassware and the popping sounds of corks being drawn made a lively melody, a hymn to earthy enjoyment that, because I’d now eaten, I found vaguely repugnant.
Waiting customers stood with their backs to the bar on the lookout for tables becoming available. Our bills were brought without delay; when they came back with the change, the waiters also brought our coats. Ravenous customers delighted to take our places were already gathering round our tables.
The woman buttoned up her daughter’s velvet-collared woollen coat before putting on the astrakhan that the waiter was holding wide open for her, which made him look like a monstrous bat.
We came together again at the exit. I held the door open. She thanked me and her heart-rending gaze hit me point blank. She had eyes I couldn’t describe but could have looked at for hours without stirring, without speaking, and maybe even without thinking.
They went out. The girl was whispering things that I couldn’t hear and that her mother didn’t seem to be listening to.
The rain had stopped and it was getting colder. A strange kind of cold in a winter that was too mild. There definitely would not be snow. Traffic was getting thinner. The cars that went past threw up wet mud. Some of the shops were beginning to close. I stood outside the restaurant like a post, without knowing what I was going to do. The woman’s gaze was still inside me; it was taking time to evaporate.
Bird in a Cage Page 1
