by Michel Bussi
Mona stopped devouring mussels and studied me intently.
“You’re not an easy one to work out, Jamal. Are you the worst kind of sexist, or the inventor of post-romanticism?”
She paused, as if looking for the flaw in my method.
“And you really only hand out three cards a day?”
I mimed the expression of a sheepish child who’s just been caught out.
“Are you kidding? Some days I hand out several hundred!”
She burst out laughing. “You fraud! And do they respond?”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I have a response rate of almost eighty percent . . . Almost everyone succumbs after three emails. I’ve slept with the most beautiful girls in the capital. I have a better strike rate than the boss of the biggest modelling agency in Paris.”
“Are you having me on?”
“Maybe, I like making up stories.”
Mona raises her glass of Chardonnay and clinks it against mine.
“Lovely, Jamal. Nil-all draw.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she asked: “If you’d bumped into me in the street, would you have given me a card?”
I knew that I mustn’t answer too quickly. I drank in every detail: her skin, the blusher on her cheekbones, the shadows of her eyelashes on her beautiful turned-up nose. Mona played along, assuming a pose and staring at the sea so that I could admire her profile. Then she stretched, offering me her breasts and her throat.
At last I replied, weighing each syllable:
“Yes, and I would only have handed out one card that day.”
Mona blushed. For the first time, I sensed she was embarrassed.
“Liar!” she managed to say.
Then she took a long breath before asking her next question.
“And your . . . your leg . . . Was it an accident?”
In the end, she was no different to the others. She couldn’t resist asking. I had my answer ready. I’d had it ready for years.
“Yes. Porte Maillot. The most beautiful girl was waiting on the other side of the carriage, I couldn’t let her go without giving her a card . . . I jumped on to the tracks, but the train arrived at that very moment!”
She laughed.
“Idiot! Will you tell me one day?”
“I promise.”
“You’re a funny guy, Jamal. Funny, but a liar! Besides, I’m sure that you wouldn’t have given me your card. I reckon you go for romantic women, elusive, evanescent beauties. Not direct girls like me. If you ask me, that’s the problem with your technique: you collect women like Panini stickers, but you don’t get the ones you need!”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Excuse me,” said a voice behind us.
André was standing there, holding two bowls of îles flottantes. He set them down, narrowly avoiding a tsunami, then blurted out the question that had been bothering him.
“Jamal, just now you were talking about a suicide. Is that . . . is that recent?”
Clearly, André knew nothing about this morning’s accident. Strange!
I set out the facts, neglecting to mention that I had found the Burberry scarf stuck to a piece of barbed wire on the cliff, and that it had been inexplicably found around Magali Verron’s neck. The further I got into my story, the wider André’s eyes grew. When I paused, the proprietor of the Sirène, white as his napkins, stammered.
“Your story reminds me—”
I interrupted him.
“The rape of Morgane Avril. Ten years ago.”
André slowly nodded.
“I was there,” he went on. “You might say I had a front-row seat! The Avril girl died right in front of my window. The Riff on the Cliff festival was a godsend for me. I must have sold litres of mussels, fries, and kebabs, my tables filled the whole of the sea wall, the weather was good that evening, young people came from all over the place. It was the first and last time such an event was held in Yport.”
“I understand.” I couldn’t find anything better to say.
“I’m not going to complain,” André said. “After the murder my hotel was full for six months. Journalists, police, forensic experts, witnesses, lawyers.”
“So that’s good news, then,” Mona said. “With this new death, your hotel will be full again!”
I wasn’t sure that André would enjoy Mona’s sense of humour as much as I did. He remained silent for a long time.
“I only hope,” he added at last, “that there won’t be any more.”
“More what?”
“More victims.”
“One every ten years,” Mona carried on. “That gives you a bit of a margin.”
André gave her a strange look, which passed through Mona as if she didn’t exist. I had the feeling it wasn’t so much contempt for Mona’s misplaced humour as the hope that we would share his concern. I turned towards him.
“Why, André? Why would there be more victims?”
He looked as if he had aged ten years in a single evening. He pulled up a chair and sat down beside us. He studied the black horizon for a long time, then spoke in a low voice.
“So you don’t know the whole story, Jamal? You only know about Morgane Avril?”
I thought again of the first lines of the newspaper articles I had read before dinner, the collapse of Captain Grima’s theory, the case assuming a national dimension.
“Four months after the murder of Morgane Avril,” André went on, “there was a second crime. A girl from Elbeuf, near Rouen. It happened in Basse-Normandie, another seaside town, towards the end of the holidays. She was in charge of a camp for teenagers. The same rapist. The same sperm. Strangled with a red Burberry scarf. Panic broke out in Normandy after that! They were afraid that the serial killer would keep going . . . But it stopped there . . . Two girls . . .”
He paused for a long time.
“Until this morning.”
I tried to suggest a rational explanation: “So the sick bastard must have been in jail for ten years, then he got out and started all over again?”
“He was never caught,” André said mournfully.
He remained thoughtful, lost in his memories. The chemical-tasting îles flottantes melted gently into their sea of cream. At last André went off to clear the table of the English couple, who had disappeared with their child, leaving behind them a sea of green purée.
Mona contemplated her desert as if it were an ice floe that had fallen victim to global warming.
“Terrible business.”
I thought for a while without even looking up at her.
Two murders.
A rapist who had gone into hiding for ten years and then struck again this morning.
Except that this time he hadn’t killed his victim.
Magali had thrown herself from the top of the cliff. After twisting the scarf around her neck.
The scarf covered with my prints.
Someone knew. Someone was playing with me, and was going to drip-feed me information.
Why me? What did I have to do with this whole business?
Mona’s fingers played with my card.
“Shall we go?” she said.
I didn’t reply. She seemed disappointed by the turn that the end of the meal had taken, as if she had been plunged too brutally into reality. She read out loud some of the words from my card.
“‘Thank you for this magic moment.’ Let me tell you something, Jamal. I would have loved for a stranger to slip a word like that into my hand on a suburban station platform. I think I’d have allowed myself to be seduced, whatever happened.”
She took the time to look out of the bay window, into the light from the street-lamps, the dance of the moored fishing boats. Empty. Or crewed by ghosts. Then she added:
“But having dinner wit
h a panoramic view of the sea isn’t bad either.”
She pushed back her chair and got to her feet. I rubbed my eyes, troubled by the unlikely series of events that had occurred since this morning, then I gave her a smile. Mona seemed to like it.
“I have a rule, Jamal. When I like a guy, I always sleep with him on the first date.”
12
WHY ME?
Mona opened the window. The sound of pebbles rolled by the waves invaded the room, making it feel like the cabin of a boat on the open sea. Mona was standing between the two curtains, naked, offering her skin to the flecks of foam carried by the wind as the waves crashed against the sea wall.
I was lying on the bed, admiring the view. The swell of Mona’s hips, her round bottom, her legs—the legs of a mermaid who had bade farewell to the ocean. The moon painted the night in chiaroscuro. The lights on the deserted beach danced on Mona; the neon red of the casino, the sandy yellow of the halogen lamps.
She turned. A pair of brown hazelnuts stood out on the golden dunes of her breasts. A few stray red tendrils grew from her shaved pubes.
Splendid.
In bed, once she had untied the elastic that held her ponytail, Mona’s hair had cascaded to her shoulders, lending unfamiliar volume to her mousy face. A gravity, almost—until she dispelled it with an explosion of laughter.
With Mona, everything was a game. A game filled with energy and invention, like the games of childhood. Hide-and-seek. Tag. Close your eyes, give me your hand, open your lips.
I had never experienced anything like it.
Neither of us had a contraceptive—she didn’t care. She pressed gently on my lower back to make me stay inside her.
She whispered my name before she came.
I looked at the alarm clock. Ten past three in the morning.
Mona pushed the window ajar and came towards me. I imagined her picking up one of the seashells stuck to the frame of the wall and covering her sex with it, like Botticelli’s Venus.
“I have a pied-à-terre in Vaucottes,” she said. “Do you know it?”
I knew it. I passed Vaucottes every morning on my run. That wooded valley with its little patch of beach was one of the prettiest oases along the entire coast. The only dwellings were a handful of nineteenth-century baroque villas.
“My thesis supervisor has a house there,” Mona said. “He gave me the keys, but I haven’t set foot in the place yet. Judging by the photographs, it’s an old cabin, elegant and sinister, like something out of Psycho . . .”
“Did you sleep with him?”
She seemed almost surprised by the question.
“Don’t be ridiculous! I’m as boring at work as I’m fun at sex. If I were to start combining the two . . . Disaster!”
She jumped on to the bed and began trailing her fingers along my back.
“Tired already? Do you go running very early? My mother always warned me: ‘Darling, never sleep with an elite athlete!’”
I kissed her on the lips and placed my hand on her right breast.
“Give me a few minutes. O.K.?”
I didn’t wait for her reply, I slipped on a pair of underpants and turned on my laptop, on the desk facing the bed. As I’d expected, this prompted a barrage of sarcastic remarks from Mona.
“I’ve pulled a geek! What are you doing? Tweeting to tell the world that you’ve just lost your virginity to the hottest girl on the coast?”
I sketched a smile. “No, it’s what André was telling us earlier. That double rape . . .”
“The one a decade ago, or yours, from this morning?”
“The one from ten years ago.”
“Can’t it wait?”
No. I need to know.
“Give me two seconds, Mona. Then I’ll tell you the craziest thing you’ve ever heard.”
I’d decided to tell Mona everything, from first time I caught sight of the Burberry scarf on the barbed wire to the last time I saw it: wrapped round the neck of the beautiful young suicide.
My old laptop took ages to get going.
“You couldn’t do me a favour, Mona? In my jacket pocket, in my wallet, there’s the password for the Wi-Fi here.
The sheet slid slowly over Mona’s curves as she wriggled across the bed to pick up my things. She called out the series of numbers and letters.
I typed in a few initial words at random.
Serial killer
Lower Normandy
2004
Burberry scarf
Google offered me a hundred answers, all along the same lines. Some words came up again and again in the headlines or summaries of the articles.
Myrtille Camus
Thursday 26 August 2004
Isigny-sur-Mer Leisure Centre
Raped
Murdered
One of the names settled in my head.
Isigny-sur-Mer
Though I couldn’t think why. I wasn’t even able to locate the village on the Normandy coast. I tried to concentrate, but at that moment Mona’s voice rang out behind my back.
“I see through your disguise—you’re an undercover cop!”
A cop?
Mona had gone insane! Startled, I turned to face her.
“Why would you say that?”
She waved a dented gold sheriff’s star under my nose.
My star!
Mona hadn’t merely looked for my wallet, she had searched all the pockets of my jacket.
“A childhood souvenir?” Mona asked.
“Exactly. Put it back, please.”
I thought again of that autumn morning when the social worker had delivered me home to my mother’s. I was seven years old. Instead of telling me off, my mother had taken me to the toy shop in the shopping centre on the other side of the dual carriageway. At the time I was watching a lot of videos of old westerns that my uncle Kamel collected. My mother had bought me that sheriff star that couldn’t have been worth more than five francs and fixed it to my jacket, then brought me home and plonked me down in front of a cowboy film. She wanted me to understand what side of the law I was to put myself on. For ever.
“Did you write those words?”
Instead of putting my star away, Mona was examining it from every angle.
“Five verbs,” she went on. “One on each point.”
Become
Make
Have
Be
Pay
I sighed.
“They’re principles, Mona. Guidelines, if you prefer. It’s a kind of compass.”
“Tell me!”
Mona’s eyes gleamed. It was too late to tear that star from her hands. The sheet had slipped once and for all from her bottom, but I felt even more naked than her. Feigning indifference, I plunged back into the Google answers.
Courrier du Bessin
A corpse was found late yesterday afternoon near the old lime kilns at Les Grandes Carrières, just outside Isigny-sur-Mer.
“Seriously,” Mona pressed. “What’s with these five verbs?”
“My compass. I told you.”
Again I pretended to be focused on my computer screen while she carried on rummaging in my wallet. A few seconds later she triumphantly displayed a piece of paper folded into four.
“Found it!” she shouted.
No one had ever gone through my belongings like that, no one had ever known about the five lines written on that piece of paper, but I did nothing to stop her from reading them.
As she read them out loud, I thought I could feel her heart beating beneath her breast.
1.Become—the first disabled athlete to run the Mont Blanc Ultra-Trail.
2.Make—love to a woman more beautiful than me.
3.Have—a child.
4.Be—mourned by a woman when I
die.
5.Pay—my debt before I die.
She fell silent and looked at me for a long time.
“I don’t understand, Jamal. Can you explain it for me?”
I clicked on another article.
Ouest-France. Bayeux edition.
The search for the rapist has been stepped up. Commander Léo Bastinet of Caen regional crime squad has been placed in charge of the Avril–Camus case. A criminal psychologist has been brought in by the Ministry of the Interior to assist . . .
“Can you explain it for me?” Mona said again.
Reluctantly, I took my eyes off the screen.
“I’m sure you’ve worked it out already, Mona. They’re what you might call my guiding principles. Ambitions, if you like. The goals I set myself to get over my disability. If possible, I want to tick those five boxes before I die. I don’t care when my ashes are scattered, as long as I’ve achieved those five goals.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Isn’t that what attracted you to me?”
I clicked on a PDF.
France-Soir
The serial killer terrifying Normandy. Witnesses give a vague description of a man in his twenties wearing a blue and white Adidas cap.
“Goal number one,” Mona observed. “The Mont Blanc run. I get that one. You’re training for it every morning. It’s at the end of the summer, isn’t it? You’ve got plenty of time. Goal number one achieved, then!”
I smiled in spite of myself. Did she have any idea of the difficulty of the course and the magnitude of the feat that I had taken it into my head to accomplish? The biggest trail in the world? My childhood dream. Not to mention the qualifying runs in the months leading up to the event . . .
“O.K.,” she went on sarcastically. “Thanks to me, you can also tick box number two: Make love to a woman more beautiful than me!”
Mona threw off the covers with a flick of her heel and stretched out her naked body on the bed as if inviting my approval.
