Bed of Nails

by Varenne, Antonin

  On Christmas Eve 2008, a cold and rainy night, he sat at his desk, without knowing what the date was. The calendar had not been updated since the night of the fakir show. The files were piled up against the walls, the wastepaper baskets were overflowing, and the strip-lighting was crackling. Looking up, he contemplated the stain on the ceiling. Its amethyst rings had grown monstrously, the plaster was cracked and bulging, threatening to come down in chunks. The brown circles had grown, covering almost the whole surface of the ceiling.

  Richard Guérin thought about the Caveau again and of that night when, he felt sure, everything had almost fallen into place. For months he had hardly thought of anything else. He could memorise every face, every gesture of the evening, everything he had seen. Gradually in his waking dream, the faces of the living had been replaced by those in his files.

  A show put on for him. The Caveau. Inside his stricken brain, he arranged clues, tracks, ideas. His personal archive, in which he took refuge for days on end, abandoning his office, the quai des Orfèvres and Paris. A place free of material contingencies, where his reason reigned supreme. Guérin’s mind freed itself from the real world to achieve its ends. Under the vaulted ceiling of the Caveau de la Bolée, he reorganised to suit himself the distribution of the audience, choosing new clients for the tables, new conversations, imagining links and meetings between the dead. He could question them, push them to answer his questions, talk to them without having to explain his hunches. Guérin was free. The world was at last moving at the pace of his understanding of it.

  The imaginary, theoretical and dreamlike space into which he had escaped had gradually become his prison. As he explored it, every time staying a little longer, his return to the real world was becoming more difficult and inspired greater disgust. And fear. When he came round, he looked haggard, his cheeks hollow and his eyes feverish, a lost soul among his fellow humans to whom he could no longer speak. He had become afraid of not knowing which world he lived in now, the one in his mind or the more solid one of material reality. The satisfaction and frisson he felt on escaping it, he now sadly recognised as the dangerous pleasure that he might have got from drugs.

  Until the day when he stopped worrying about coming back, when reality itself became a dream, a poetic and incoherent chaos, causes and effects that obeyed no law. Until the day when he no longer recognised himself in the mirror.

  Inside his head, every element, every person, slotted into a place he chose for them.

  They were all there: Paco, Nichols with his bow and arrow, Kowalski with his ashen face, Lambert with his gun, Ariel, and his mother encouraging him: “That’s it, big boy, go on, you’ll find them. They must be there. Keep looking.” He moved the furniture round, reorganised the spectators into categories, added some new ones every day, tried every possible combination: he was king of his wax museum, free to put together, divide up and move the elements around to fill the last gap. The last black space in his memory, still unfilled. Because he had not been able to see everything that night, In a dark corner he must have overlooked, a table for three. A blonde woman and two men, the only living beings in the room that he had not been able to identify, distracted as he was by the necessary hazards of the Mustgrave affair.

  Nichols had drawn him into the place of all coincidences, and the solution had to lie there. There was no other possibility. Somewhere inside his mind lay the answer.

  Guérin looked up at the stain, that rainy Christmas night, as he walked round the vaulted room, going from table to table, an amiable maitre d’, enquiring if everything suited the customers. A man was hanging up by hooks, blood was running onto the stage, and that was the only sound he could hear, apart from the rain on the roof. He went towards the stage, the last table, laid in front of three empty chairs. He was coming to greet the absent ones, the guilty ones, those he never saw, but who were there. The people he was waiting for, and who one day would come towards him unmasked, their faces showing.

  Guérin was looking up at the stain, his head back and his throat stretched out. Around it a rope was tightening, and his shattered voice whispered in the deserted office: Goodnight.

  There they were. A thousand absent people, drinking champagne, and laughing at the haemophiliac fakir. Guérin sat at the table, suddenly deserted, to watch the show. He was waiting for someone to come and sit at his side.

  The telephone rang. He picked it up with a smile

  A new guest had just arrived.

  21

  FRANCIS LAMBERT

  Francis Lambert, born in Nanterre, had grown up at the same pace as the skyscrapers round La Défense. At fourteen, he already looked like a leaning tower himself. He reluctantly signed up for a confectioner’s certificate. It hadn’t been his idea to start working so young. At sixteen, he was an apprentice in the boulangerie where his father worked. Francis trailed around in the flour of the bakery and seemed never to stop growing. In the Cité des Nuages, he was considered a decent defender, though rather slight in build. When he wasn’t at work, he was playing football. Outside his job, the estate was his world. He never went beyond it.

  His father was a common-or-garden racist, defending his right to what he had: his right to a decent life as a French citizen. For him, being French meant being honest, hardworking and – depending who he was talking to, usually in the café – white. Not Muslim anyway.

  A defensive racism, which fluctuated with the unemployment rate and the number of drinks he’d had. Lambert’s parents had split up when he was little and his mother had disappeared from sight. Francis lived among Arabs, Blacks and Asians as his natural milieu. He didn’t feel any anger or frustration at living where he did, only boredom. While his job didn’t interest him, at least he had one. The parents of other kids on the estate thought him a good role model. He had seen his friends slowly get sucked under. Drug-dealing, delinquency, fighting and self-segregation. He didn’t blame them. Some managed to escape, others got deeper in. Nothing to do with their I.Q.: the dealers on his block were probably brighter than he was. If you don’t have any choice, being clever is not enough.

  The bakery had to let him go, once a local supermarket started baking its own bread. The boss kept his father on, but gave Francis his cards: at nineteen, he had more of a chance of finding a job. He was unemployed for a year. He spent it playing football, in between visits to the job centre.

  A careers adviser asked him if he wanted to retrain. Lambert asked him how he could get to be a nurse. The guy smiled. His father guffawed. A month later, the agency sent him a suggestion: they were recruiting for the police. Lambert replied to the letter.

  He passed the first level exams. His image in the neighbourhood changed, but he was still liked: policemen who came from the estate were respected.

  His new status allowed him to rent a bedsit, a couple of blocks from his father. He left early in the morning, storing his uniform in the cloakroom overnight. He was posted to the station at La Garenne-Colombes.

  He worked there for two years, preparing for the exams to become an officer. Failed, twice. He asked to be moved to the Paris H.Q., because it seemed like a nice idea to work in the C.I.D. He enjoyed his new job which got him away from his home estate. He swotted away at the law books, conscientiously and laboriously. They took the piss out of him at the station in Colombes.

  Then a year later he got a new posting: the quai des Orfèvres, the Paris H.Q. He was twenty-three and couldn’t believe his luck.

  It was hard to see at first why Barnier had plucked him from his little commissariat in the sticks. He was told to go to Suicides and had not the faintest idea of what the work would actually be. He found himself alone in a tiny office with no windows, on the top floor of a building at the far end of the Ile de la Cité. Well, so what, he was out of his suburb and he was a trainee in H.Q. He stayed there, listening as a telephone rang and rang. He had been told not to touch it. He pushed open the door to the archives, glanced round at the shelves and shut it again. A week later, Ba
rnier reappeared, accompanied by a guy wearing a shabby yellowish raincoat.

  “This is your new assistant”, Barnier had said to the little newcomer, and vanished without saying anything to Lambert.

  Lieutenant Guérin had introduced himself, and told him he needn’t bother to wear his uniform to work. The next day Lambert turned up in a tracksuit. And then he found out why he had been chosen. At the coffee machine, an officer from the Vice Squad had called him, “the new puppy for that asshole Guérin”. Lambert had learned to live with the scorn everyone expressed for his boss, some of which rubbed off onto him.

  Little by little, doing small favours, he had built up a network of acquaintances: other junior employees who appreciated his simplicity. Lambert, with his long legs and his basic niceness, had become a link between his boss and the rest of H.Q.

  Guérin took care of him, without treating him as an imbecile or pitying him. The boss was incredibly intelligent. Lambert didn’t care what the others said about him. As for the work, he found some affinities with the suicides: these dead people reminded him of his tower blocks, no doubt because he always arrived too late to save them. And then there were the families. The families had always loved him, and Lambert had found a way of reciprocating.

  The boss treated him not so much like a son, more like a woman would a child who was not her own. The first time Lambert had found Guérin in the archive room, tearing away at his scalp he had realised that his job wasn’t all that far removed from nursing after all. They looked after each other, without anything being said.

  Lambert was happy. The office was a watertight chamber, a cell in which for hours he could think about anything he liked: his future promotion, the football results, gossip. He watched the stain on the ceiling change colour with the seasons. He fetched the coffee, picking up titbits of news in the corridor and brought fragments of outside life into the office. When the telephone rang, he was ready. He got up to follow the boss, and drove the car.

  He had taken up shooting, leaving football and his home estate behind. This solitary sport, like his life at the quai, suited him fine. He had become good at it, although he didn’t really like guns. Lambert thought that the decision to pull a trigger had to be taken too quickly, without giving you time to think. To compensate for the fear he felt for his gun, he never loaded it. The chamber of his Beretta, except when he was at the club, was always empty.

  Nichols had tried to save him. Lambert was touched by that, before he felt the impact.

  When he woke up in hospital, Guérin was there. The lieutenant was holding his hand.

  The first thing he said, when he was able to speak, was to apologise for ending up in hospital: “Not loaded, boss, it’s never loaded.”

  Lundquist’s second bullet, the one that missed Nichols, had done more damage.

  Lambert’s stomach was perforated and the bullet had lodged between two vertebrae, cutting the spinal column. Lambert came out of his coma after three days and went straight into surgery.

  In the reanimation ward, with tubes and catheters everywhere, he had panicked. He had regained consciousness but was unable to speak, move, breathe or swallow. There was a tube down his throat, he was on a respirator and his hands were strapped down. He couldn’t feel his body at all, and had no idea what his condition was. His eyes filled with tears. Guérin had put a hand on his forehead, spoken gently to calm and reassure him. Guérin had lied. Lambert guessed as much and gave a sad smile.

  The surgeon came to see him.

  The boss was still there with his faraway gaze, the one that stopped Savane in his tracks, the gaze that anticipated the future and made Lambert seem transparent. But that day, the junior guessed what Lieutenant Guérin was thinking. He had no need of a surgeon to explain.

  He had stayed two months in hospital before being allowed home. Guérin was still there, and had fixed up the flat, overcome by all the trainers and tracksuits which he had stuffed away in cupboards.

  Lambert would never run again. He would never trail along the corridor with the sound like waves on a beach. The surgeon had not been able to save his legs.

  He got a pension, and social services paid for a carer: a young student who came mornings and evenings to help him out of bed, to get into his wheelchair, to take a shower, have a meal and go back to bed again.

  His legs had gradually wasted away.

  Lambert would sit at the window, looking down at the estate he had returned to.

  Sometimes he took the lift, propelling his wheelchair between the tower blocks. People said hello, he chatted to friends, the ones who were getting on O.K., others who were in trouble. His wastepaper basket was full of brochures for holidays by the sea or in the mountains for people with reduced mobility. Going to the mountains in a wheelchair. He didn’t give a damn about going on holiday. What Lambert wanted was to be able to drag his feet through the bakery flour or along corridors of the quai, then flex his knees, and stand feet apart, holding a loaded gun to Lundquist’s head.

  Guérin came to see him less often. The boss was turning into a wreck, becoming incoherent. Or perhaps Lambert was just not listening to him any more.

  The visits disturbed him. He surprised himself by hating Guérin, who was still chasing his ghosts, while he, Lambert, was stuck in a wheelchair. In November, Guérin stopped calling altogether. Lambert went out less and less often.

  The carer tidied the flat every morning, clearing up the mess created by Lambert in fits of rage that were getting more and more violent. He wasn’t bothering to eat. He drank a lot of beer and pissed himself sitting in his wheelchair. The bedsit began to stink. Lambert would belch, roll himself over to the window and yell.

  He had a nightmare. Always the same, in black and white, and it scared him so much he became insomniac.

  His father occasionally paid him a visit. One night they were drinking lager and watching T.V., his father on the couch, him in his wheelchair. After the film, his dad got up to go home, a couple of blocks away. The old man was a bit drunk. He hesitated on one foot, not knowing what to say. He felt sorry for his son, but couldn’t find the right words.

  “Want a hand to get to bed?”

  “No.”

  He shook Francis’ hand, hesitated, then bent down and kissed him on the forehead. As he closed the front door, he said to himself, well, at least his son didn’t have to work, he was supported by the French state.

  Lambert dreaded going to bed, he was afraid of the dream.

  A pack of beer on his thighs, he pushed his way to the window and looked out. The estate was deserted. There were lights on in the flats, but no-one on the streets. Lambert threw an empty can on the floor and opened another.

  Three teenagers came out of the building opposite and went over to a lamp post. They were sharing a joint. The rain had turned into flakes. It was snowing.

  At first the dream had been the same: the cars, the crashes and the skinny young man running with his arms spread wide. Then the scene changed and now it was himself, Lambert, who was running between the cars, going up the ring road with long strides and smiling.

  The dream terrified him and enraged him. Because he could feel the asphalt under his bare feet, the wind on his skin, that marvellous weariness in his thighs and the regular rhythm of his breath as he ran. When the truck came hurtling towards him, he would wake up screaming and banging his lifeless legs.

  A few weeks ago, the dream had become a vision, and staying up drinking no longer protected him. He couldn’t get rid of it. For whole days, with his head thrown back looking up at the ceiling, eyes open, he was running up the périphérique into the traffic. The naked man was smiling, and Lambert was weeping. He had stopped sleeping altogether.

  He pushed his wheelchair over to a cupboard. His jacket in Brazil’s team colours was stiff and smelled of mildew. He threw his half-full beer can at the shelf, splashing his Zidane T-shirt, and knocking over his shooting trophy.

  He was a good shot. He wouldn’t have missed him,
standing in the correct position as he was. But Lundquist had a loaded gun. Being nice wasn’t an option with shits like him. Wasn’t his life worth more than Lundquist’s? Guérin had aimed too low. Lambert wouldn’t have missed, firmly planted on both legs.

  *

  The youths, two white and an Arab, had met up at the bottom of the staircase, escaping from family meals that went on for ever. They had gone out to hang about under the street lamp. The hall with its broken windowpanes was no warmer than outside; might as well get some fresh air. A joint was passed round, the talk was about the evening, films, holidays in the mountains they would never take. Kids having a bit of fun. Snowflakes started to fall, as if suspended in the halo of light from the street lamp.

  “Shit, man! It’s really Christmas now!”

  They let the little flakes cover their hoods, looking up at the sky. No snowball fights yet, but it made them laugh. The flower beds round the flats started to turn white.

  The young Arab wiped the snowflakes from his eyelashes and raised his arm, pointing a finger in the dark. His voice alerted the others.

  “What the fuck’s he doing?”

  They all looked up.

  “Can’t hear, what’s he shouting?”

  A man in a yellow jacket was contorting himself, twelve floors up, on the windowsill. The top half of his body was already hanging into the void.

  ANTONIN VARENNE travelled a great deal and completed an M.A. in philosophy before embarking on a career as a writer. He was awarded the Prix Michel Lebrun and the Grand Prix du jury Sang d’encre for Bed of Nails.

  SIN REYNOLDS is the translator of C.W.A. award-winning crime novels by Fred Vargas.