by Michel Quint
Still, he didn’t exit the stairwell before reaching the ground floor. Once he was downstairs, he took a break to control his breath before facing the outside world and the inevitable scenes of panic he knew he would encounter.
The giant decorative ficus plant in the lobby, which was lovingly tended by the complex’s caretaker, had been overturned, its earth transformed into sticky mud that was oozing over the broken slabs of marble. One of the pipes had broken, and water was gushing into the hall to the left of the elevator and out into the street.
Oddly, without consciously realizing his fear, P.J. didn’t want to leave the building just yet. He didn’t want to get his feet wet, but they got wet anyway.
P.J. watched a ficus leaf turn in the air and twist toward the reef of broken glass, concrete, terra-cotta, and wood that crowded the building’s stairs. Suddenly, he noticed the strange color of the water. A thin stream of red was running through the pale brown.
He was just realizing that perhaps this was blood and that someone nearby, someone hidden by the protruding elevator, must be wounded—or worse—when he heard a wail, or rather, a furious howl. The blood and the cry were coming from the same direction: Berthet’s Dental Practice. The dentist had bought and merged the ground floor’s two apartments, where he both resided and housed his instruments of professional torture. P.J. instantly forgot about his pristine sneakers and waded through the water.
Gérard Berthet was lying in the doorway of his office. From the looks of it, the earthquake had left him unscathed, but the bullet that killed him had left a nice little hole between his eyes. P.J. ignored a wave of vertigo and walked across the waiting room. The screams were coming from Lydie Berthet, who was lying in the dentist’s chair being raped by a young man in black leatherette pants pulled down to his ankles.
CHAPTER III
Aix-en-Provence
Saturday, August 16, 8:03 a.m.
The old sycamores in the Cours Mirabeau were still sleeping, as was the rest of the city. The fountains trickled, continuing their endless conversation from the night before as birds chirped in reply.
When Rita and Pierrot exited the passageway that led to the courthouse, two crows flew out of the narrow corridor’s shadows and perched on a fountain’s slick ledge. After a night out in Aix’s old town, dancing and smoking, Rita was thirsty. She crossed the thoroughfare and dipped her hand into the circular basin. Pierrot watched her from the opposite sidewalk. He was sulking because Rita had let men hit on her all night. She’d been shameless. Completely shameless! There was no other word for it. A bunch of film techs were in Aix to make a movie about a festival. They’d been celebrating their imminent return to Paris, Channel 2, and their old ladies. Rita had been more attracted to them than to a remote-controlled, big-screen TV. She’d let herself be felt up on booth benches and on the dance floor by the cameraman and the director, all in an effort to mess with Pierrot!
They were twenty-two, with four years of college under their belts. More like four times the first year: they’d never been able to choose a major. First it had been modern literature, then psych, then . . . Rita, a wispy, snub-nosed, long-haired blonde, was leaning over the fountain, her celadon eyes gazing into the water. Brown-haired Pierrot had a long mustache—a must, considering he measured a commanding six foot two.
The walls of the passageway were clapping like sails with the shouting voices of early-morning soccer players: Max, Serge, Dédé, and Simon. Simon had shot the empty beer can; Max dove after it, but the makeshift ball darted under the goalie’s flank and made it into the drainpipe goal.
They were all the same age as Rita and Pierrot, and they lived near the highway in the same four-story concrete building, where underclothes and checkered kitchen towels hung like flags from the windows. They loved Rita and Pierrot, treating them like gods for having finished high school. They’d all dropped out to earn vocational certificates in welding. Dédé and Simon, who had been unemployed for a while, lived off of Serge and Max, who made metal doors and welded tanks for a small company outside of Aix. They also did some under-the-table work.
On late-summer nights, it was always the six of them. They were inseparable. It wouldn’t have occurred to any of them—not to Max, not to anyone—to spend time alone with a girl. The girl could either accept the group or get lost.
After the beer can soared into the goal, Simon and Dédé fell to their knees like Latin soccer stars, thanking the stadium gods, and Serge offered a hand to Max, who was grumbling about a tear in his jeans.
The boys were just getting to their feet and exiting the passageway when it collapsed behind them.
CHAPTER IV
Aix-en-Provence
Saturday, August 16, 8:25 a.m.
The rapist trusted his virility, so naturally he’d left his Luger in the porcelain bowl where patients spit out splinters of their decayed teeth and blood mixed with saliva.
Lydie Berthet didn’t see P.J. enter the room and pick up the gun; she didn’t hear him speak, either. In the frenzy, she first saw the turgescent penis back away from her, and then the mocking gleam in the kid’s eyes dissolved, pink saliva bubbling out of the right corner of his lips.
When the assailant awkwardly pushed himself off of Lydie, she saw P.J., the car dealership owner who lived on the fifth floor. She took a deep breath, having been startled by the shot. The forceps were still rattling in their metal tray.
P.J. was similarly stunned. He was surprised by his own daring. Grabbing the pistol, he’d held it up to the bastard’s right temple and said: “Get up slowly, keep your hands up, and step back. Otherwise, I’m going to mess you up!”
The guy had done as he was told, but awkwardly, since his feet were caught in his shit-stained light-blue underwear.
P.J. had kept the gun to his head and walked the guy to a display case where a few dental molds had survived the quake. The kid strained his eyes, keeping his neck straight, trying to get a look at the pistol, his upper lip curled. The shot had rung out just as P.J. had begun to think that this jerk was scared. The bullet had shot through his brain like a comet, breaking a stunning plaster molar on the shelf behind him.
Lydie was half smiling because P.J. had raised the gun barrel to his lips and blown, just like Lucky Luke, as he watched the kid fall to the ground, a strange corpse with a patch of sun shining on his bare ass.
P.J. returned Lydie’s smile then helped her to her feet.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, I don’t normally kill people. I don’t know why I did that.”
P.J. slowly rubbed his hand over his forehead, as if to erase the stripes of light coming through the blinds. Lydie unceremoniously washed her intimate parts in the office sink. She was a brunette and very tall. In the broken mirror, P.J. was able to make out her sea-blue eyes and sharp features. She looked like Joan Crawford.
“He won’t be one of the survivors,” Lydie said. “I know him. He’s the caretaker’s son. You killed him with his dad’s revolver.”
“I don’t know why I did that,” P.J. repeated.
Standing behind Lydie, he was still holding the gun. Naked up to the hem of her yellow tank top, she turned to face him. She noticed his eyes wander down toward the soft curls of her pubis.
“You want to take your turn at raping me?”
Then she burst into tears, her hands flying to her ears.
P.J. took a step toward her and she rested her head on his shoulder, shaking with terrified, half-aborted sobs. He made a clumsy attempt at rubbing her back with the gun in his hand.
“It’s all over now,” P.J. said. “We’re getting out of here. The loonies are going to break out of the asylums. People are going to settle their scores, and then all hell will break loose. Nothing is off-limits. I just killed a kid and I don’t care. You won’t see your husband alive again. The border between life and deat
h just got real, and we’re survivors.”
She’d stepped away from him and was blowing her nose into the yellow pants she’d been wearing before the rape.
“I saw him kill my husband without so much as a word. He came into the waiting room just as Gérard was opening the office door. He shot him, that’s it. Was he looking for money? It’s all here.”
The Berthets had probably been getting ready to flee the premises. Prior to the kid’s arrival, Lydie had just zipped shut a bag full of money, checks, and papers.
P.J. tucked the pistol into his belt, against his back; it was uncomfortable, but nobody would be able to see it.
“Me too,” he said, patting his jacket pocket. “I was leaving, too. Come on, let’s go!”
He took her hand. Bit by bit, a hard light was rising in the orange sky. To get out of the building, they had to step over Gérard, whose eyes were open and studded with tiny asteroids of white dust.
CHAPTER V
Aix-en-Provence
Saturday August 16, 8:10 a.m.
In the park, they looked at each other, petrified, their eyes wide. Houses were slumped into each other, like paralytics deprived of their crutches by some cruel child. Water was gushing out of a breach in the fountain, shooting garlands of green algae, some of which had just fallen at Rita’s feet. A sycamore tree buckled at the knees, crashing into the terrace of the well-known bar Les Deux Garçons.
The earthquake shook the city. Then, without a second’s respite, dense clouds of dust and smoke spread through the air in layers of gray and black, swirling and jumping over the walls of rubble.
At the end of the street, the tall windows of the casino were broken and the rest of the building was overtaken by yellow flames. The few buildings that had survived emerged from out of the powdery fog like the historic ruins on the banks of the Rhine. After a brief moment of calm, the survivors began to shriek the age-old rhapsody of disaster. High up in the gigantic barricades of rubble, where homes had stood, haggard and bloody ghosts began to appear.
“Shit,” said Pierrot. “What was that? An atomic bomb?”
“No,” Dédé answered, crossing himself out of habit, “an earthquake. It’s the end of the world! Some Jehovah’s Witnesses warned me about this the other day!”
Serge and Rita were watching a girl of about fifteen who was crying and desperately pulling on something. She was wearing a white nightshirt soiled with blood, and once they reached her they saw that she was clutching a hand with red-painted fingernails sticking out of a pile of rocks. When Serge tried to lead her away from the hand, she screamed and tried to bite him.
They returned to the fountain and noticed that Simon was missing.
“Where’s Simon?”
“I don’t know,” Max screamed. “Was he still in the passageway?”
Nobody knew where he was. The group freaked out, running around frantically like ants in a destroyed colony.
“He’s too small to get crushed,” said Pierrot, the only one who managed to remain calm.
People were milling around, their lips moving without making a sound, the shriek of sirens filling the air. All five friends started yelling Simon’s name, looking for him in the debris of the passageway. Pierrot, with one arm draped over Rita’s shoulder, searched through the crowd, pushing anyone who got in their way. He even hit a wild-eyed old man.
The others were running in all directions.
“Don’t be a jerk! . . . Simon! . . . Come on! . . . Joke’s over!”
It was useless. Dédé couldn’t even hear Max, who was yelling just a few paces behind him; this death fair was deafeningly loud.
Suddenly, Serge, a slightly ornery, gangly blond, signaled to them. He’d just dug through a shaky pile of wood and bricks, and he was now wearing a half smile on his pimply face. Two buildings had completely collapsed, spewing rubble everywhere and hiding the ground floor of the building between them. A store—it looked like a jewelry shop—was still standing. A car crushed by a piece of wall was burning, and the air smelled like rubber. Black smoke curled lazily through the shop’s shutters. They followed Serge inside.
“Asshole!” Dédé cried. “We thought we’d lost you! We thought you were dead!”
Simon, standing on a mahogany counter, was covered in diamonds. Pearls hung from his ears, and he’d placed a ruby tiara on his head. He was laughing and showing off his pearly white teeth.
Rita simply climbed up on the counter and gently kissed him. The light of her celadon eyes made the pearls glisten.
As an only child, he’d started paying attention to his image at a young age. Later, P.J. realized that he was often mistaken about people and the image they projected. He’d been taken in, for example, by Carbasi’s suits, his lifestyle, his way of talking. There were the friends P.J. imitated, particularly the way they chewed gum and acted possessive of girls.
Not that he was tempted by those girls, but they were part of the game; you had to swallow them down with the rest of the bitter syrup that was adolescence. As for Carbasi, a salesman at his father’s dealership, a guy with the big personality and the blinding smile, well, P.J. was fascinated by him.
Every morning, P.J. would look at himself in the mirror at the dealership and wait for the new associate, Marcel, to say: “Well, sir, are we going to make the chrome shine or what?”
Before heading to school, he’d stand on the running board of the old Dodge, the one they kept parked under the sycamore trees. Then he’d check his reflection again in the side mirror, spit on his comb, and run it over his head. With his hair slicked back and a tie in his pocket, he could hold his own, especially with the studded leather jacket and the platform buckle shoes. All that was missing were the ruffled shirts like the ones Elvis wore, which his father would never let him have.
He had to get rid of the pleated pants that Auntie Millie ironed every night. Millie, or Great-aunt Emilie, was a widow from Toulouse whose husband had deserted the marines during the Great War. She’d been in charge of the Sinibaldi household ever since P.J.’s mom had split and P.J. had been brought into this world of deserters and mechanics.
In short, P.J. was torn between contradictory images of life and had trouble becoming himself. He didn’t know who he would be until the first annual banquet of Saint Eligius, which was hosted by the Renault dealership, during which he and Valérie were treated to a small glass of rosé and Provençal tripe. Valérie called him P.J. that night, whispering the nickname into his ear during a slow dance.
He had just turned fifteen years old.
CHAPTER VI
Aix-en-Provence
Saturday, August 16, 8:15 a.m.
“Dirty whore!”
Martine looked offended, so Ettore, having regained his sangfroid, added, “I’m not talking to you! Get dressed! In five minutes, the Cours Mirabeau is going to be more crowded than Canebière Street when Marseille wins a game!”
The old building continued to shake as they returned to their bedroom. The apartment was still intact, but the furniture was scattered, as in a shipwreck, and they kept hearing the sound of wood frames cracking.
Ettore opened the blinds. The sight of the devastated avenue left him speechless. He didn’t even bother knotting his tie, which was out of character. Monsieur Ettore was planning on leaving the house in a slovenly state, in a dark three-piece suit and a light tie. Nothing more. He was worried about his BMW 733i.
“It might be totaled! Do you know how much you have to lay down for a 733?”
Wearing nothing but a transparent bra and a black garter belt, Martine was making up her eyes in a shard of mirror she’d picked up off the carpet.
“What about the girls?”
“Later. How am I supposed to check on them if I don’t have a car? Think for a change, girl!”
Martine simply shrugged her beautiful, round shoulders as Ettore, with
perfect aplomb, left the apartment. In this time of crisis, he preferred to be elsewhere, with an eye on his capital.
He figured he’d pick up his BMW, which was an important work tool. If it was wrecked, then he’d think of something else to do. In any case, he would find a place to leave it if he couldn’t use it to check on his girls. What really bothered Ettore was that he was supposed to receive the details for a delivery of coke at the end of the day. Clearly, that wouldn’t be happening now. He would have to wait and see, but he knew he’d probably have to lie low for a while, which was bad for business. To be fair, it was an act of God, and He was the real boss! Thinking this, Ettore quickly made the sign of the cross and then peered into the stairwell. Part of the banister was missing, but the rest appeared intact. Since his apartment was only on the second floor, he made a dash for the ground floor. His leg was aching, which was strange; the weather service hadn’t announced storms. Then again, it hadn’t predicted an earthquake!
The tiles in the lobby had come loose, and he had to avert his gaze from a bleeding corpse, a poor little lady who had sat down only to die shortly thereafter.
“Not a pretty sight,” he said to himself, grimacing. “Jesus, life’s not fair!”
Once outside, he noticed that the buildings on either side of his apartment had collapsed. He had to do some climbing to get to his car, which was parked on a nearby road. Unfortunately, he’d just had his nails done.
Ettore made an effort not to see or hear anything. When he reached his car, he breathed a sigh of relief: It was intact. Or almost. The BMW was like a giant bug with its unmoving antennae sticking out into the thick hum of the hot morning.
If he wanted to get out of there, he’d have to avoid the side streets, which were completely obstructed by debris and rescue teams. He would have to remove some of the rubble and try to take the Cours Mirabeau, which was rather wide. Later, he’d decide between the Alps or French Riviera. If necessary, he’d force his way through, because the roads would be swarming with doctors, cops, and priests. There were going to be a lot of souls to save. A lot of looting, too. People were going to let loose. Who knew what would happen?
