by León Melín
Lucas sat in the middle of the room, the mirrors duplicating the accusation. How could he have done it ? Outside, the clouds dropped tears from the sky, ashamed for humanity, that he had done such a thing, that he could have done such a thing. What had the old man done to deserve it ? What had he ever done to Lucas ? He’d never spoken a bad word to Lucas, and now he was dead. His blood soaked into the red parts of the tiles, throwing into sharper relief the cream designs – the deer, its raised antlers caught by trees; a pack of hounds baying; beaters funnelling towards the sword of the knight in armour; his shield with three balls depicting the knightly virtues of chastity, faith and mercy.
Lucas looked at the cuckold, who had trusted him and now lay smashed to pieces.
Chapter 11 – Love
Lucas tried to pay his way out of the campsite and retrieve his ID card. If it wasn’t for the ID card, he would have left without paying, or at least, leaving his payment behind but avoiding another meeting with the family. The idiot son was nowhere to be seen, but the mother and father were in the little cabin.
The mother asked him his name, and checked his arrival date, which Lucas could easily remember because it was the last day of the 24 Hours. She counted each day of the stay on a calendar, counted them twice, and explicitly stated that she wouldn’t charge for the coming night, a most generous gesture. Even so, the bill was twice what Lucas expected. Maybe the individual day price was heavily multiplied by his long stay, or maybe it was just a Euro/Franc conversion factor, but he didn’t dare question it in case a conversation should begin. He paid. She held out her hand until he had painstakingly filled it with the new-fangled notes and coins up to the last 25 cents.
Smiling congratulations were the final part of the payment process, during which the bowing Lucas caught sight of the book the mother had been intensely reading when he had walked in. It was a cheap, romantic novel, titled “Un Amour Impossible”. Lucas looked up at the broad peasant faces smiling broadly at him. Were they laughing, at him ?
What was impossible about it ? Two people, adults, consented. There was no youthful, ignorant idealism. Both had had long relationships with other partners. Both knew the score. Lucas, descending the stairs of the cabin, was determined to prove them wrong; nothing was impossible, if one wanted it enough. And he did. He wanted nothing else.
- - -
At the station, Lucas tried to call Nicole. A bank of telephones were attached to the wall. He grabbed the receiver at the first cabin and pulled it to his ear; it never reached. The ear-piece somehow never passed his shoulder. Lucas pulled the phone again, straightening the already straight cable; it would never reach. Looking along the wall, he could see that the other phones were all installed higher. This one must be for children.
Nicole didn’t answer, didn’t want to speak to Lucas, to anybody.
“When will I see you again ? When ? Exactly ? Where ? I need to know, I ...” She pummelled him with her fists.
“We can get on with our lives, now; now that we know that we love each other. We can do our work, meet other people, have children, knowing the person we love, loves us back.”
But she didn’t answer. He couldn’t see her.
His imagination could make up what it wanted to see. The reality was probably different. . . The police, the coroner, the dogs, the newspapers, the TV crews.
There was no such thing as insanity any more. There were no psychological problems. Just different shades of sanity. Even the Le Mans psychiatric hospital had given up its role in favour of the flavour of the month, sports physiotherapy, or colonic irrigation.
Chapter 12 - Fear
The young Arab grunted, real Arabic grunt, not the Parisian equivalent. Like the real Ivory Coasters, whose eyes were yellowed from the sun and the fever, real Maghrebians could gutt almost from birth in a way that no European could ever manage. If Paris was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe, it was still possible to identify from which polis each person came from.
The hire car keys went into a wooden box, but the boy was too busy right now, with his paper and stapler, to attend any more. The company had his credit card imprint and would surely bill him for any dents and scratches it found.
Modern cars seemed to be made of plastic, so easily did the doors deform with a hefty kick. Even so, Lucas’ toes still hurt and he was glad he had been wearing sensible shoes the night he killed – the night Monsieur Saint-Jean had died.
- - -
The street was still empty, quiet, the pavement dirty, and Lucas stood at its edge clasping his tent and sleeping bag, and his grip. The kiosk at the corner offered a return to the real world, which he had so missed in the past fortnight.
The newspaper headlines had written themselves – Hero Cop Murders Old Man. Lucas’ face, the face he remembered, the face he saw every time he looked in the mirror, the face he wore when he first joined the police over 20 years ago, was on every newspaper front page.
It was a young face; young, enthusiastic, alert, full of hope, life, mercy, forgiveness. The short hair and puppy fat made him respectable, honest, sweet, even cuddly, trustworthy.
His own face, the one he denied, that infrequently mocked him from shop windows and cracked toilet mirrors; that taunted him whenever he had to shave - which seemed to be less and less as he accustomed himself to stubble – his 2002 face, was care-worn and droopy, bone-formed and dented, scarred and scared now.
The Lucas nobody wanted was now wanted, badly. The Lucas who was haunted was now hunted. The Lucas he pictured himself to be. The real Lucas would still take time to hit the newspapers.
Lucas’ fingerprints were taken automatically when he left the police force. But the ongoing cases he’d handled, some going back years, some unclosed through incompetence, inefficiency or unimportance had meant that his prints were still active. The bat, the tunnel, the door handles would be covered in his recognisable marks, leading the cops directly to his identity, his method, his entry, his lair.
There would be no way that Nicole could have defended him, no chance that she could have hidden his involvement. The shock of her husband’s death – murder – the murder of her husband, followed almost immediately by the police finding the name of the supposedly secret contract killer would have left her doubly wounded.
Had she told them of her own role ? Probably not. Whatever else happened, Lucas was looking at a murder rap and no excuse was going to get him off. For Nicole to incriminate herself would benefit neither the prison-bound Lucas nor the husbandless heiress. The old man’s children would eventually inherit, but not before Nicole had died. Until then, Lucas’ dream – shared dream – of castle life had been snuffed out. There was no way that he could go back to her. There was no way that he could go anywhere.
His was the worst defence in the book of bad defences: “I was going to do it, but someone unknown got there first.” That had never worked in a thousand attempts, and it wouldn’t work now because ultimately what was tried was ‘you’. “You are hereby charged . . .”, “You will be taken from this place . .”, and it was the ‘we’, the judges and the jury who made a personal decision and you, Lucas, would not pass the test. “Are you, Lucas, fit to walk our streets ?” No. He had failed the first law of neighbourhood.
He couldn’t go back to the château. Nor could he go to his flat. His work was dead; his friends and family would all be traps. If they hadn’t already, then the car company would report him today. It was too late to pick up the key again.
He could, of course, hand himself in, collect the reward. His old chief would be pleased to see him, he would be looked after, and the prison system would always protect an ex-police officer who was responsible for the motiveless killing of an old man, leaving a pretty, young wife defenceless in a rich château. The lady would make a tempting target, once the local police got bored.
No, however much it was the right thing to do, however much the old Lucas, the young man, the police recruit, might have righteously done it, the new Lucas
, the murdering, amoral, money-mad Lucas would not.
He would either hide or fight. But hiding wouldn’t solve anything, couldn’t last longer than the – how many ? – four Euros in his pocket, how many notes in his wallet ? None. He had used his last few notes to pay the exorbitant campsite fees. If he hadn’t already checked out, he was sure that he could still have gone back. He was sure that the mother wouldn’t have recognised his name or his face from paper or TV. He hadn’t made an impact on her life and even a murder wouldn’t succeed in entering her tight-as-medical-hosiery life. Even if he could get back there, penniless and carless, he knew that checking in again would be different.
Surrounded as she was with satellite dishes, she would certainly watch television. She would know his name by now. And her infinitely sensitive antennae for trouble would keep him outside the wire fence of her campsite. And yet, the campsite idea was good, he had a tent, a sleeping bag. No rucksack and wearing a suit were drawbacks but he could survive roughing it for a bit.
Lucas had 4 Euros, which was, what, 20-30 Francs. Enough for maybe three coffees. Or a newspaper. He looked at the machine dispenser. For 4 Euros, he could buy the Sunday edition of le Figaro. A collector’s edition, with his photograph on the front page. Perhaps his sister would keep a copy. It was not a usual paper for Lucas’ family, or for his friends. It was not really a police paper, more for the rich.
It was the paper that Nicole read, kept by her fireside, as Lucas had seen when he first visited the château; also read by the surprisingly well-read cowboy, well-read for a fruit-picker. They had that in common, but it had been Lucas who had turned up at the shoe-shop supermarket; Lucas who had been carrying a gun and looking to do some work during the 24 Hours. It had been Lucas who had called on Madame Saint-Jean, not the well-read traveller with the murderous hands and the powerful physique.
It was the race that had caused such problems that an otherwise perfect place for a rendezvous had become impossible to find – except for a local or a chance meeting. Death by accident. Is that how Monsieur Saint-Jean had died ? Or, rather, almost died ? And what of the
cowboy ? After he failed to make the appointment, he would get in touch again, make contact, Le Figaro again ? The Sunday Edition ? Just about the time that Nicole realised that she was talking to Lucas, ex-Police hero and good
guy ?
And the cowboy had gone ahead, confident, daring in spite of the police involvement, in spite of the risk. He had done his job, perfectly. He even had a Number 1 Suspect, a patsy, to take the blame. Who would believe Lucas that an unnamed, sun-tanned man wearing a hat, had bumped off M. Saint-Jean for money ?
Why ? At the request of his wife ? When Lucas would do it for free, he could hear the lawyers, why pay someone to do it ?
The cowboy had done it, a professional who wouldn’t confess, wouldn’t get caught. Lucas would have to find him and convict him. Without convicting her. His dream, their dream, relied on him, his skill as a detective, hunter, killer. He would have to track down the traceless man, and do to him what he had done to Saint-Jean. Lucas would avenge the old man.
Chapter 13 - Hate
The cowboy had said that he was going to Bazas, and Lucas suspected that he would hitch-hike. The route from Le Mans would not pass through Paris. For a fugitive in Paris to get to Bazas there was only one way.
Public transport was out of the question; since terrorism had swept France in the wake of Algeria’s political problems, trains, buses, the Métro were awash with uniformed and ununiformed policemen, armed, well-trained and operating in waves that made it impossible to evade them; the fast-travelling, closed prisons of France were not suitable. Hitchhiking too was difficult, even if only for a short distance: the law; most drivers’ desperate shortage of time; and the relative locality of drivers would put Lucas at risk too often on the drive across France.
The natural starting point for a free and safe trip to Bazas from Paris was Rungis. The single largest enterprise in Europe, Rungis was more than just a vegetable market. It was the central crossroads for thousands of migrants – legal and illegal – brought millions of miles by the lonely, afraid, bored or poor drivers. If most of them had chosen their solitary profession because of their failure in the social arena, it didn’t remove the need for social contact and, when offered it, the drivers readily accepted it.
It was the abuser of the timeless rules of hospitality that had changed the public view of hitchhiking, and made it impossible to pick up or set down. But Lucas, armed and on the run, was far more dangerous to a Spanish fruit driver than they could ever be to him. Not the least pain would be a ban on driving in France that would cost the man his job.
Lucas knew Rungis well, homicide detectives visiting it so often they opened their own office. If guns, knives or explosives hadn’t been brought in through its fishnet security, the trucks provided the best routes for their users to arrive or depart the capital without the evidence of CCTV, tickets and credit cards. Schengen had ended the danger of cross-border stops, but even before that, the Mediterranean and Paris were linked by a human chain that no authority or law could stop.
Rungis was more, too, than just a crossroads. Illegal immigrants, who had most reason to kill, and least reason not to, easily
found work in the market of the myriad tiny offices inside, their limitless availability and foreign language skills a killer advantage over the contractually-limited and xenophobic Frenchmen.
Bazas was on the main road south to southern Spain. Lucas was looking for a truck that had dumped its load of watermelons and was returning with Dutch raspberries. The Spanish driver would be much less likely to buy or read a French newspaper; and once he had broken the law, with its career-ending threat, much less likely to go to the police. Above all, once at Bazas, a driver heading into Spain would still have 12 hours of driving before getting to his southern Spanish destination; and not, as a French driver would have, 5 minutes before arriving at his destination and “You’ll never guess who I had in my cab ? Baseball-bat Lucas !”
Baseball-bat Lucas ! Baseball-bat Lucas ! How cruel could people be, to give him that moniker. It fitted the papers well, but not the facts. And how it hurt when his own brother was killed by a baseball bat.
The rucksack cowboy must have remembered his previous moment of fame. Any other weapon would have served him as well; his awesome hands would have been capable of finishing off the old man. Maybe the cowboy had been following Nicole, staking out the Château. He’d have been surprised at seeing Lucas – at first. But he had brilliantly pulled together a perfect crime. Nicole was in the clear. The cowboy was not even in the picture. There was only one problem for the cowboy – Lucas was free.
The cowboy couldn’t have expected that Lucas would visit the Château that night – he couldn’t have imagined that an ex-Police Officer would consider murdering someone. It had been the worst coincidence for him that both should choose the night of the full moon for the murder. Fool moon. Werewolf moon.
Baseball bats were common enough weapons in the US, but in France they were relatively unknown – especially in domestic violence. Lucas had never seen the weapon that had so done for his brother-in-law, so that that night at the Château the bat had had no special significance. A bat was nothing to Lucas – had been nothing.
Now, after the mammoth walk from the centre of Paris to Rungis, Lucas could feel the bat, he was now personally affected. The cowboy had set out, not just to kill the old man, but to destroy Lucas at the same time. The bat pinned the blame firmly on Lucas,
“ . . . Poor, penniless, friendless, luckless, campsite copper, besotted with beautiful widow, psychologically traumatised by the in-service death of his brother, gets revenge.” The cowboy was rewriting Lucas’ biography.
- - -
The heavyweight paper and his few possessions had left his arms tender and trembling. Over a coffee he read through the paper.
Le Figaro was a foreign country to Lucas. The weight, its small si
ze – its density; the texture of the warm paper; the peculiar, narrow-shouldered, upright font; all spoke of France’s civil servants, senior government and establishment. Their iron-grey hair, ill matching suits, “yes, of course, we’d love to help, but . . .” “Yes, in practice, you are right; but logically . . .” In the corruption of the establishment, le Figaro was at once a tool and a symbol. They stood on its front page and declaimed, and by printing their words, the paper made them real, true. Nobody could argue with what was written in a paper.
No criticism of government or industry, of an individual was ever made by the French press, the Figaro and others. It was left to the few satirical papers, cheapened by nudity, to throw muck. If Le Fig was a tool of the establishment, it had also become a tool for murder, an anti-establishment weapon. Somehow.
At first glance, it didn’t seem a likely method. An advert – “Murder. Gun for Hire”. Or – “Husband wanted dead. No timewasters, please”. The editorial was bland. Correspondents and special envoys filled blocks of text like children discovering the bold and italic fonts on a word processor. Adverts – for cars, suits, other magazines – would probably be too expensive, too noticeable. Perhaps they contained some code, a cryptographic language, symbolised by the idiotic € foreign invasion.
Once, perhaps, a murderer and a client could find themselves by accident. Twice would take a system; a process; a code; a note. The public had to know how to access the murderer. And he had to recognise the cry for help. None of the articles could represent this communication. The vagaries of the editorial system would ensure that there was no smooth flow of information, unless the rucksack cowboy was an employee of the paper – but his tan was not got in the bureau.
