by Lucy Wadham
He pushed the door to the Palais and stepped into the cool marble interior. Lawyers in their robes were sitting on the stone benches all along the corridor, talking in hushed voices to their harrowed clients. There seemed to be more and more women in the profession. Coco decided that next time he would find an attractive woman to represent him. He was walking behind one now as he made his way to the main courtroom, admiring the coil she had made with her hair and the wisps of it on the nape of her neck.
Another gift had been Christine Lasserre���s transfer to Strasbourg three months after his arrest. She had carefully briefed the new investigating magistrate, a young Protestant from Uz��s, and managed to offend him. He had let Coco out of prison, announcing in a press conference that there were insufficient grounds for his incarceration and that he was against remand anyway, except for rapists. Coco found the blond-haired free-thinker repulsive, both physically and morally. Three months later the charges against him were dropped and he became a witness. That it should be luck and not Russo that had provoked his release made Coco happier than anything.
The foyer outside the courtroom was filled with people, all of whom he knew. He stood on the edge, in the grey light coming through the dirty atrium, avoiding their greetings. The journalist Lopez was talking to the female gendarme at the entrance to the chamber. When the Spaniard looked up and saw him he turned away. He could not see Alice Aron anywhere. She was due to appear today, but the trial had got off to a slow start because Karim���s lawyer had tried to push his mutilation charge through. Perhaps she would not come until the afternoon. Coco was more disappointed than he would have expected. He made his way towards the witnesses��� entrance, cursing himself for being so early.
*
Alice walked across the tarmac away from the plane. This time she had only a bag over her shoulder and nothing in her hands. As she walked towards the terminal it was not the former experience she remembered but the kidnappers��� video of it. She remembered his shot of Dan holding her dress, of Sam with his goggles on, jumping around, and of herself, her former self.
She walked through the same smells that now worked on her like an insinuation: kerosene, asphalt and the scent of the maquis, warm and cold like patches in a lake. Only the light was different and the people around her moving with her towards the terminal, looking trussed up for winter and peevish. This time she had no luggage to collect and as she walked towards the exit, she took in the scene ��� the conveyor belt, the trolleys and the waiting crowd ��� and she found herself looking in the empty spaces between these things, straining to see into the gaps in memory and perception and discover what she had never seen: the man with the camera.
The palm trees planted in two rows in front of the terminal had been encased against frost in huge bamboo crates. The sight was disappointing and she hailed a taxi and climbed in, eager to get away. But she did not know what to tell the driver. It was too early to go to the Palais de Justice and she did not feel like sitting in a hotel room. She could not remember the name of the main square in Massaccio, so she asked for the only place she could remember.
���The Fritz Bar.���
She looked out of the window at the freight depots and the car-dealers and the vacant lots, reading every sign, listening to the driver���s background humming against a barely audible radio, trying to keep her mind from wandering in search of Stuart.
She had not been back to the island since. When Madame Lasserre had called her a week later for the reconstruction of the shooting she had said that she could not leave Sam and they had managed without her. As they drove past an orange grove laden with fruit, she wound down the window to capture the scent, but she caught only the smell of wood smoke. She looked at the plane trees lining the road, their trunks blanched by winter and their mutilated branches pruned to nubs, and she thought she remembered Stuart saying he preferred winter, but she was not sure when he had said this. Most of her memories of him were truncated, like those trees. They drove past the tall ferries in the docks. This island, she realised, was where she had left herself behind.
The driver dropped her off at the same entrance to the pedestrian zone where Santini had dropped her. She walked to the main square and was relieved to see that here the palm trees were loose and moving in the warm wind. She sat down on an empty bench beneath a statue of an heroic islander on a very high pedestal, closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun.
She remembered sitting in the back of a police van in Cortizzio holding Sam. The sight of his pale face and his huge hollow eyes were a shock to her, but it was his silence that told her of the depth of the damage that had been done to him. She had sat there rocking him in her arms, believing in the illusion of her own calm until she screamed at the first-aid personnel, refusing to let them take him from her.
She remembered the consultant in intensive care, with his sleeves rolled up and thick dark hair on his arms, gently prising Sam from her. He shone a torch in his eyes, tested his reflexes and took his blood pressure with an abstracted air, as though he were trying to hear something a long way off. He had told her in an inappropriate sing-song voice that her son was out of danger, that the speech would return. In no time, he had said. It had taken Sam six months to speak. One month for every day in captivity. He would play with Dan, even fight with him, in perfect silence. Then one morning at breakfast he had told her that he wanted more sugar on his cereal and she had burst into tears.
She smiled at this thought and opened her eyes. She could smell something delicious on the breeze, like warm caramel. Across the square was a dark green kiosk that sold cr��pes. She rose and went to buy one with chocolate sauce. She returned to her bench and ate it, a little self-consciously and too fast, wiping the chocolate from her mouth with the back of her hand.
She saw herself on the morning after Sam was retrieved, walking out of the hospital with him in her arms. The same consultant was standing in the sun with a cigarette in his mouth, rolling down the sleeves of his white coat. With him, their backs to her, were Paul and G��rard. Something had made her walk over to them and, as they turned and she saw their faces, she had guessed, exactly as she had guessed when Mathieu���s best friend had telephoned her, seconds before he told her. It was G��rard who said it: ���Stuart was shot last night. He died this morning.��� He had looked down on her, his face hard only for a moment, and then he had looked away, over her head, and squinted into the sunlight to hide his grief. She had stood there unable to speak, with Sam too big in her arms, and nodded slowly as the familiar coldness of loss crept over her.
Back in Paris she had looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and seen, with curiosity more than regret, how changed she was. Stuart���s death worked on her slowly, over months. She could not stop thinking about him dying that night while she was in the hospital with Sam, perhaps in the next room. She would wake up in the middle of the night and her heart would feel like a heavy stone she had swallowed. She sometimes felt as though she had dreamed of him and she punished herself for not remembering the dream. Anger settled in her. She hid it from the boys, but when she was alone it gripped her hard. Once she had picked up a plate and hurled it against the kitchen wall, then another and another until all twelve plates were broken and she had swept them up, terrified by her capacity for dissimulation, even to herself. What made her angry was the understanding that she would survive whatever happened to her.
When her mother came from England she had tried to talk to her about him. But she had found herself unable. There was so little to say. She could not tell her mother that she suspected he had loved her in a way that no one had or ever would. She did not even know his first name. Instead she began to talk, using his hand gestures. She remembered his codes perfectly.
She kept his present to her in a locked drawer. Sometimes she would take out his mother���s gun and look at it. She would smell the metal, rub it over her hands and smell her palms. She co
uld taste it. She would pull out the cartridge and the barrel would spring open. She would practise loading the tiny bullets, sliding them one by one, the last in the chamber. He had given her a box of twenty-five. On the box was written in yellow and grey fifties lettering: ���FIOCCHI cartucce pistola automatica. Smokeless 6,35 mm bullets���.
She stood up, moved by a sudden urge to speak to Stuart���s men again. She wanted to talk about him. She went to the call box and dialled the number, which she still knew by heart. She recognised Annie���s voice.
���Hello. It���s Madame Aron. Is G��rard there, please?���
���No. He���s not here any more.���
Alice thought she could hear her resentment.
���Is Paul there?���
���Hold on, please. I���ll see.���
The call box stank of cigarettes. While she waited, she pulled the neck of her sweater up over her nose.
���Hello?���
���Paul?���
���Yes.���
She could not help smiling.
���It���s Alice Aron.���
���Yes. What can I do for you?���
���I wonder, I���m in Massaccio, for the trial. Could we meet for a coffee?���
���I can���t. Sorry. I���m on desk duty; I can���t leave the office.���
She felt herself flush with shame.
���I see. Well maybe at the trial, then.���
���Not today. I was up yesterday.���
���Paul?���
���Yes.���
���Can I talk to you? Please.���
���Of course you can talk to me. What���s the problem?���
���I just wanted ��� Oh, nothing.��� She felt his silence as an act of cruelty. ���Forget it.��� She looked out through the glass door of the call box at a group of middle-aged women in fur coats. ���Where���s G��rard?��� she asked, wanting to punish him.
���He went back to Paris. Aubervilliers, to be precise.���
���Who���s commissaire now?���
���Mesguish.���
���And what about you? What are you doing?���
There was a moment���s hesitation.
���I���ve been sidelined.���
���What does that mean?���
���I work with the airport police. Professionally speaking, it���s a luxury grave.���
���What happened, Paul?���
���I don���t want to talk about it, Madame Aron. If you don���t mind.���
Alice did not answer. She was wondering what she had done to deserve this.
���Okay, Paul. I���ll see you, then.���
���Yes. All right. ���Bye.���
She hung up, slamming the phone into its cradle.
She stepped out of the call box and began to walk towards her hotel. She walked fast, trying to shake off her anger and shame. When she reached the H��tel Majestic she was out of breath. She was about to climb the steps to the lobby when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She spun round and was surprised to see that it was not Paul. It was Lopez.
He was panting, holding a hand to his heart.
���I���m sorry,��� he said. ���I smoke too much.��� He held out his hand and she shook it. ���Lopez. We���ve met once.��� His smile looked more like a grimace in response to the pain in his chest. ���You walk very fast.���
Alice smiled.
���Your hair,��� he said, pointing at her. ���You cut it all off.���
She touched her head.
���Yes.���
���It looks nice. Can I talk with you for a moment? Do you mind?��� He glanced once up and down the street. ���Maybe in the bar. Can I buy you a coffee?���
The bar was poorly lit by a candelabrum covered in opal spheres that hung from the middle of the ceiling. The room was large and empty except for a few low tables and chairs clustered around an ornate wooden bar in the corner. The carpet and the chairs and the curtains were all plum-coloured and so was the teenage barman���s uniform. There was a smell of dust and fried food.
���Here is good. No?��� Lopez said, holding his hand out to the triangle of chairs furthest away from the bar. ���We can talk here.��� He waited for her to sit, then sat down himself. ���I saw you in the call box in the square. I have been wanting to talk to you for a long time and when I saw you I thought it���s now or never.��� He smiled again, his brief, pained smile. ���How can I begin?��� He rested his small hands on his knees and slapped himself smartly. ���All right. I am a journalist. This you know.���
���I do.���
���Right.��� He smiled. ���I���m not a famous journalist or even a good one. I have worked for the daily newspaper here, the Islander, for many years. I���m not brave��� ��� he raised his eyebrows at her, inviting her to share the joke ��� ���not at all. I like my job but I don���t think of it as useful in any way. Do you understand me?���
Alice nodded.
���When your son was kidnapped I was sent to cover it. You remember the commissaire? Monsieur Stuart? Well, he asked me to keep the story out of the paper. I did not like Stuart. I thought he was just a narrow-minded policeman. But I said I would do what he asked because he said he would give me exclusive access and I believed him. I did not like him, but I knew he was honest.���
The barman appeared. She ordered a Coke and Lopez ordered a Kir.
���Stuart was not a liar. He made me angry because he did not call me often enough, but he kept his word. He would have kept his word if he hadn���t been killed.���
���How was he killed? How exactly?���
���I am surprised you don���t know.���
She did not answer; her throat was dry.
���I think that it was Paul Fizzi���s fault. He was a cowboy, but Stuart never saw this. And he was a drunk. He shot Garetta with a pump-action shotgun.���
Lopez paused as if for him this information was enough in itself.
���But he shot him because he was aiming at Stuart,��� Alice said.
���Maybe. Maybe not. What is certain is that he aimed at Garetta���s head. The bullet went right through the helmet and out the other side.��� Lopez sliced his hand through the air. ���When they took his helmet off the skull fell open like the lid of a teapot. Fizzi got away with self-defence because Garetta did take a shot at him. Lucky for him they found the bullet.���
���Are you saying that if Paul hadn���t been there, Stuart would not have been killed?���
Lopez considered this.
���I don���t know. Philippe Garetta was a dangerous man. He may not have needed Fizzi there to kill Stuart but maybe Fizzi scared him. Maybe something could have gone on between the two men. Maybe Stuart could have talked him out of it. He was subtle. But with Fizzi rearing up with his weapon ������ Lopez threw up his hands. ���What is certain is that Stuart could not have survived Garetta���s second shot. He fired a high-velocity bullet into Stuart���s chest and at close range. It would have fragmented inside his body. So ������ He opened his hands.
Alice covered her mouth.
���Are you all right, Madame Aron? I���m sorry. It���s nasty.���
She shook her head. She needed air. She stood up and walked away towards some double doors leading on to a dark courtyard covered in ivy. She would not cry. Lopez was behind her.
&nb
sp; ���Madame Aron. I���m so sorry.���
She pushed open the doors and went outside. The smell of frying was being propelled into the yard by a ventilator in the wall. She turned her back on Lopez and threw up on to the ivy. When she had finished, Lopez handed her a clean white handkerchief.
���I���m sorry,��� he said again, shaking his head. ���I didn���t come here to make you sick.���
Alice wiped her mouth and stood up. She felt tired out and relieved.
���I think I fell in love with Stuart,��� she said. ���I didn���t realise at the time, but I only knew him for five days and I loved him. I can���t seem to get over his death.��� She smiled at Lopez. He held out his arm.
���Come. Come inside. It smells bad here.���
She took his arm and followed him back inside. They sat down again.
���Coke is good for nausea,��� he said, nodding at her glass. She took a sip. ���I wanted to talk to you. Now I am very glad that I came. Are you feeling better?���
���Yes.���
���Today you are going to court. This afternoon you will testify. Do you know what you will say?���
Alice looked away. She had not been able to think clearly about the trial and she now felt ashamed.
���I don���t know. I���m very angry that Santini���s been let off. When I heard about it I lost heart. I don���t think the trial���s of much importance without him, really. I suppose I���ll just answer the questions.���
Lopez held up his finger. His eyes were shining with excitement.
���Listen, Madame Aron. I told you I wasn���t brave. But there���s someone who is.��� He looked at her, full of eagerness. ���Liliane Santini.���
Alice nodded.
���I���m sure.���
���She is.���
