Alex

by Pierre Lemaitre

  At first, she took pleasure in turning him on. There was the dress she was wearing. She knows the effect it has on men. It didn’t fail – the moment he saw it she thought his jaw was about to hit the pavement. Then, Alex said, “Hi, Félix,” and laid a hand on his shoulder, brushing his cheek with her fingers, very briefly, a gesture of familiarity. Félix almost melted on the spot; it unnerved him too, because it could as easily mean “we’re on for tonight” as “let’s just be friends”, as though they were colleagues. It’s something Alex does to perfection.

  She let him talk about his work, about scanners and printers, the opportunities for promotion, the colleagues who were no match for him, the latest monthly figures; Alex even managed an approving “Oh!” Félix was pleased with himself, reckoned he was back in the game.

  No, what kept Alex distracted was the man’s face, which stirred up powerful, disturbing feelings, especially seeing the ferocity of his desire. This is why she is here. He wants her in his bed; it oozes from his every pore. It would only take the slightest spark for his manhood to explode. Every time she smiles at him, he looks so horny he might lift the restaurant table into the air. He was like that the first time too. Premature ejaculator? Alex wonders.

  Now, here they are in his car, Alex has hiked her skirt a little higher than she should and he can’t stand it. They’ve been driving for about ten minutes when he places a hand high up on her thigh. Alex says nothing, closes her eyes, smiling to herself. When she opens them again, she can see she’s driving him crazy; if he could, he’d fuck her right now, right here on the Périphérique. Ah, the Périphérique … they pass the Porte de la Villette – this is where Trarieux was squished by an articulated lorry. Alex is in seventh heaven. Félix slips his hand higher; she stops him. The gesture – calm, affectionate – feels more like a promise than a prohibition. The way she holds his wrist … If his dick gets any harder, he’s going to explode in mid-journey. The atmosphere in the car is warm, tangible, silence hovering over them like a flame above a detonator. Félix drives fast; Alex isn’t worried. And after the triple carriageway, a vast housing estate, a bleak, depressing tower block … He screeches into a parking space, turns towards her, but already she is out of the car, smoothing her dress with the palm of her hand. He walks towards the building with a bulge in his trousers she pretends not to notice. She looks up; the tower block must be at least twenty storeys.

  “Twelve,” he tells her.

  It’s pretty decrepit; the walls are filthy and scrawled with obscenities. There are a few ripped-open mailboxes. He feels embarrassed, as though it’s only just occurred to him that the least he could have done would be to take her to a hotel. But mentioning the word “hotel” as they were coming out of the restaurant would be tantamount to saying “I want to fuck you”; he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So now he’s ashamed. She smiles at him to let him know it doesn’t matter, and it’s true, it doesn’t matter in the least to Alex. To reassure him, she lays her hand on his shoulder again and, as he fumbles for his key, she plants a quick, warm kiss right in the crook of his neck, where it will make him shudder. He stops dead, tries again, opens the door, turns on the light and says, “Go on in. I’ll be right back.”

  It’s an apartment that could only belong to a single man. A divorced man. He’s dashed into the bedroom. Alex slips off her jacket, puts it on the sofa and comes back to watch. The bed isn’t made; in fact the whole place is a tip, and he’s hurriedly tidying up. When he spots her in the doorway he smiles awkwardly, apologises, tries to work faster, desperate to tidy everything away, to be finished. A room with no soul – the bedroom of a man with no woman. An old computer, clothes scattered everywhere, an antiquated briefcase, an old football trophy, a picture frame with a mass-produced reproduction of a watercolour, the kind you get in hotel rooms; the ashtrays are overflowing. Félix is on his knees next to the bed, leaning over to straighten the sheets. Alex comes over just behind him, lifts the football cup over her head in both hands and brings it down on his skull; with the first blow the corner of the marble pedestal sinks in at least two inches. It makes a muffled sound, like a vibration in the air. The force of the blow destabilises Alex. She staggers sideways, comes back to the bed looking for a better angle, raises her arms above her head again and, aiming carefully, brings the trophy down again with all her strength. The edge of the base smashes the occipital bone; Félix is sprawled on his stomach, his body wracked by spasms … As far as she’s concerned, he’s had it. Might as well save energy.

  Perhaps he’s dead, and the convulsions are simply his autonomic nervous system.

  She comes closer, leans down, checking, lifts him by the shoulder: no, he looks as though he’s just unconscious. He’s moaning, but he’s breathing. His eyelids are flickering; it’s a reflex action. His skull is so staved in that clinically, he’s already half-dead. Let’s say two thirds.

  So, not completely dead.

  So much the better.

  In any case, with all the damage to his noggin, he represents no real threat.

  She turns him onto his back; he’s heavy, but he offers no resistance. There are ties and belts, everything she needs to tie his ankles and his wrists; it only takes a minute or two.

  Alex goes into the kitchen, grabbing her bag on the way, then comes back into the bedroom. She takes out her little bottle, straddles his chest, breaks a couple of teeth as she forces his jaws apart with the base of a lamp, bends a plastic fork in half and sticks it into his mouth to prop it open. She steps back, forces the neck of the bottle down his throat and calmly pours half a litre of concentrated sulphuric acid down his throat.

  This, unsurprisingly, rouses Félix from his stupor.

  But not for long.

  *

  She could have sworn buildings like this were noisy. In fact, at night, they’re very peaceful and the city spread out all around is rather beautiful seen from the twelfth floor. She looks for landmarks, but it’s difficult to find her bearings in this nocturnal landscape. She hadn’t noticed that the autoroute was so close – it must be the road they took coming here; maybe Paris is on the other side. Alex has a good sense of direction …

  If the flat is a shambles and he neglected the housework, Félix clearly took good care of his laptop: it’s in a nice neat case with separate compartments for files, pens and power cables. Alex opens it up, logs in and opens a browser. She has fun looking through the browser history: porn sites, online gaming; she turns back towards the room – “Naughty, naughty, Félix …” Then she types her own name into a search engine. Nothing. The police still don’t know who she is. She smiles, about to close the laptop, then changes her mind and types: police – wanted persons – murder, skips down the first few results and finds what she’s looking for. A woman is being sought in connection with a number of killings; there’s been a call for witnesses. Alex is considered “dangerous”. Given the state of Félix next door, the adjective is hardly unwarranted. And the E-FIT is pretty good. They must have used the picture Trarieux took to mock it up. They clearly know what they’re doing. That vacant stare always makes the face look a little dead. Change the hair and the colour of the eyes and you’ve got someone altogether different. Which is exactly what she is planning to do. Alex snaps the laptop shut.

  Before leaving, she glances into the bedroom. The football trophy is lying on the bed. The corner of the plinth is matted with blood and hair. The statuette is of a striker scoring what’s obviously a winning goal. Lying on the bed, the winner looks rather less triumphant. The acid has dissolved away his whole throat, which is nothing but a liquefied pulp of pink and white flesh. It looks as though if you jerked hard, you could pull the head right off. His eyes are still wide open, but a shadow has passed over them, a veil has snuffed them out: they look like the glass eyes of a teddy bear. Alex used to have one.

  Without turning away, Alex rummages in his jacket pocket for his keys. Suddenly she’s out in the hallway, then down in the car park. She triggers the c
entral locking at the last moment, just as she’s ready to get into the car. Five seconds later, she pulls away. She winds the window down – the smell of stale cigarette smoke is disgusting. It occurs to Alex that Félix has just given up smoking: good news for him.

  Just before she gets back to Paris, she takes a little detour and stops the car by the canal opposite the Fonderies Générales warehouse. Swathed in darkness, the huge building looks like a prehistoric animal. Alex feels a shiver down her back simply at the thought of what she went through in there. She opens the car door, takes a few steps, tosses Félix’s laptop into the canal and gets back into the car.

  At this time of night, it takes less than twenty minutes to get to the Cité de la Musique. She parks on Level 2 of the underground car park, throws the keys down a drain and heads for the métro.

  39

  Thirty-six hours to track down the gypsy cab that picked up the girl in Pantin. It’s twelve hours more than they planned, but at least they got a result.

  Three unmarked cars are following behind, and they’re making for the rue Falguière. Not far from where she was kidnapped. This worries Camille. The night of the abduction, they spent hours questioning neighbours without coming up with anything.

  “Did we miss something that night?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  But still …

  *

  This time the taxi driver is Slovakian. A tall guy with a face like a knife blade and feverish eyes. He’s about thirty, prematurely balding, mostly on top, like a monk. He recognised the girl from the E-FIT. Except the eyes, he said. Hardly surprising – here her eyes are given as green, elsewhere they’ve been described as blue – she obviously uses coloured contact lenses. But it’s definitely her.

  The taxi driver is driving ridiculously carefully. Louis thinks about saying something, but Camille gets in ahead of him. He lurches forward towards the front seat, his feet finally touching the floor – in this car, some sort of four-by-four, he can almost stand up, which simply irritates him more. He lays a hand on the driver’s shoulder.

  “Go for it, my friend – no-one’s going to clock you for speeding.”

  The Slovak doesn’t need to be told twice. He brutally floors the accelerator and Camille finds himself sprawled on the back seat with his legs in the air: not really a good idea, the driver realises immediately. He slows down, mumbling apologies – he would give a month’s salary, give his car and his wife for the commandant to forget this incident. Camille sees red; Louis turns to him, puts a steadying hand on his arm. Do we really have time for this shit? Not that his look says this, it says something more like We’re a little strapped for time to be indulging in tantrums, however transitory, don’t you think?

  Rue Falguière, rue Labrouste.

  En route, the driver gives them his account. The fare agreed was twenty-five euros. When he approached her at the deserted taxi rank near Pantin and suggested it, the girl hadn’t quibbled, simply opened the car door and slumped onto the back seat. She was exhausted and she smelled: sweat, dirt, who knows. She said nothing during the journey, her head bobbing as though she was trying to ward off sleep; it had all seemed suspicious to the Slovak. Was she on drugs? When they got to her neighbourhood, he turned to her, but she didn’t look at him, just stared out of the window. When he turned towards her she turned away as though she was looking for something or had lost her bearings, and she pointed to a space on the right and said:

  “We’ll wait for a bit … Pull over here.”

  This wasn’t what they’d agreed. The driver got on his high horse. As he tells the story, it’s possible to imagine them: the girl sitting silently in the back seat, the driver furious – he’s been ripped off once too often and is not about to be pushed around by a girl. But the girl doesn’t look at him, she simply says: “Don’t piss me about. Either we wait, or I’m getting out.”

  No need for her to add “without paying”. She could have said “or I’ll call the police” but no, they both know she won’t; they’re both in a tricky position. They’re on equal terms. He doesn’t know what she’s waiting for. She wanted him to park facing the street; she stared at a particular spot (he points up ahead, they look, but they don’t know what they’re looking at beyond something up ahead). Was she waiting for someone to arrive? Was she meeting someone? The driver didn’t think so. She didn’t seem dangerous, more anxious. Camille listens as the driver talks about the wait. He can guess that, having nothing better to do, the driver’s imagination will have started to dream up stories about the girl, stories of jealousy, of a love affair gone wrong, wondering if she is watching for a man, or maybe a woman – the other woman, or maybe the ex has got another family; it happens more often than you’d think. He glances in the rear-view mirror. Not bad looking, this girl, or she would be if she cleaned herself up. But she’s so shattered, you have to wonder where she’s been.

  They spent a long time there waiting. She was on the alert. Nothing happened. Camille knows she was watching to see whether Trarieux had realised she’d escaped, whether he was lying in wait for her.

  After a while, she took out three ten-euro notes and got out of the car without a word. The driver saw her walking away, but he didn’t bother to watch where she was going. He didn’t want to hang around here in the middle of the night, so he cleared off. Camille climbs out of the car. On the night of the abduction, they combed the area as far as here – what happened?

  The other officers get out of their cars. Camille points to the buildings in front of him.

  “The doorway of the building where she lived is visible from here. Louis, call in for two teams of backup now. The rest of you …”

  Camille allocates their roles. Everyone’s already bustling around. Camille leans on the door of the taxi, thinking.

  “Can I go now?” the driver says in a whisper, as though he’s afraid of being overheard.

  “Huh? No, you’re staying with me.”

  Camille looks at the guy, with that face like a wet weekend. He gives the driver a smile.

  “You’ve been promoted. You’re the personal chauffeur of a police commandant. This country offers great opportunities for social mobility, or didn’t you know?”

  40

  “Very nice girl,” according to the Arab grocer.

  Armand dealt with the Arab grocer. He’s always happy to deal with shopkeepers, especially grocers, which is a bonus that doesn’t come along every day. He’s a little intimidating when he conducts the interview because he looks like a homeless person, he wanders up and down the aisles, he’s quick off the mark with ominous implications and in the meantime, he helps himself: a pack of chewing gum, a can of Coke, another can, all the while rattling off questions. The shopkeeper can see he’s stuffing his pockets with bars of chocolate, bags of sweets, biscuits, snack bars: Armand has a sweet tooth. He’s not finding out much about the girl, but he carries on – What was her name? So she always paid cash, no credit cards, no cheques? Did she come in often? How did she dress? And the other night, what exactly did she buy? – and once his pockets are full, he says “Well, thank you for your cooperation,” and goes to dump the loot in the squad car where he keeps a supply of plastic bags for such occasions.

  *

  Camille was the one who found Mme Guénaude. About sixty, overweight, with a hairband. She’s plump and flushed as a butcher’s wife, but she won’t look him in the eye. And she’s in a state, she’s in a real state, fidgeting like a schoolgirl who’s just been given the come-on. The sort of woman police commandants find infuriating; and precisely the sort to call the police out on the slimmest pretext, ever the self-righteous homeowner. No, she tells him, she wasn’t just the girl’s neighbour, she was … how can she put it? Did she know the girl, yes or no? It’s impossibly frustrating trying to understand her answers, which are anything but.

  Within four minutes, Camille is all for having old mother Guénaude strip-searched. Gabrielle. She reeks of lies, dishonesty and hypocrisy. Of s
pite. She and her husband had a bakery. On January 1, 2002, God himself appeared on earth in the form of the changeover to the euro. And when He is made flesh, He doesn’t stint on miracles. Having multiplied the loaves and fishes, He now multiplies money. By seven. From one day to the next. God is a great simplifier.

  After she was widowed, Mme Guénaude started renting out all her property cash in hand – she only did it to be obliging, she insists. “If it was just me …” She wasn’t here the day the police flooded the area questioning witnesses. “I was staying at my sister’s.” Still, when she got back and found out that the girl the police were looking for looked astonishingly like her former tenant, she didn’t call them. “I couldn’t be completely sure that it was her. I mean obviously, if I’d known …”

  “I’m going to have you banged up,” Camille says.

  Mme Guénaude turns pale; the threat has clearly had its effect. To set her mind at rest, Camille adds, “With all the money you’ve got put by, you’ll be able to buy all those little extras from the prison canteen.”

  While she was living here, the girl called herself Emma. Why not? After Nathalie, Léa, Laura, Camille is ready for anything. Mme Guénaude needs to sit down to look at the E-FIT. She doesn’t sit down; she collapses. “Yes, that’s her, that’s definitely her. Oh I’ve come over all queer …” She clutches her chest, and Camille thinks she might be about to join her husband in the kingdom of the wicked. This Emma only stayed for three months, never had anyone round, and she was often away, in fact just last week she’d had to leave urgently; she’d just come back from a temporary job in the provinces – she had a crick in her neck, she’d taken a tumble – she said she was going to the south of France, paid two months rent, a family emergency, she’d said; she was very put out at having to leave so quickly. The former baker rattles off her story – she doesn’t know what else to do to satisfy Commandant Verhœven. Had she the nerve, she’d offer him money. Looking at the little policeman with his cold eyes, she vaguely senses that this isn’t relevant. In spite of the jumble of information, Camille manages to piece together the story. Mme Guénaude points to the sideboard; there’s a scrap of blue paper in the drawer with her forwarding address. Camille is in no rush – he has no illusions, but he opens the drawer just the same as he extracts his mobile from his pocket.