Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  I’ve no idea how long I stayed on the storage seat, lost in my thoughts, before a cop came to question me. He was young and smiling, he looked like a trainee. He held out a blanket, asking if I wanted to change. I nodded.

  “Follow me . . .”

  I got up and hopped on my one leg. The trainee turned, embarrassed. He looked around him as if hoping he would find my missing half-leg on the kotter. I half-expected him to peer over the side to see if a crocodile wasn’t waiting with gaping jaws to devour my other leg.

  Then I sensed his embarrassment turning to unease. He looked back at my face.

  Suspiciously.

  Perhaps he too had difficulty believing that the little one-legged Arab was completely innocent in this affair. No smoke without fire . . . After all, the Fil Rouge had assembled the evidence. I was the only person who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on two occasions, putting me in the frame for the murder of both Morgane Avril and Myrtille Camus. I was the last one to have spoken to Piroz before he was knifed in the back . . . And then there were all those grey areas in the Saint-Michel file.

  After all, I was still the ideal scapegoat.

  After all, perhaps I’d been lying since the start.

  I held out my hand so that the young officer would lend me his shoulder. Where had those Fil Rouge idiots put my prosthesis? I suspected that over the next few hours I was going to have to relate, time and again, the unlikely sequence of events of the past six days.

  And write it down as well, so as not to forget anything.

  The worst along with the best.

  The worst behind me, the best to come.

  Remember. It was the first scene of this story.

  I was having dinner with the prettiest girl in the world.

  She had just put on a blue tulip dress. Her breasts danced naked and free beneath the silk of a low-cut top into which I could plunge my eyes for as long as I wanted.

  Now I can tell you her name:

  Océane.

  I was about to make love with her.

  Those were the first lines of this story, and they will be the last.

  Thriller-lovers, sorry to disappoint you . . .

  It’s going to be a happy ending!

  45

  THE BEST TO COME?

  Champagne, Piper-Heidsieck, 2005 vintage.

  Logs are on the fire, by a dark, low table of an exotic wood that I don’t know, probably ridiculously expensive.

  I’m sitting in a leather armchair of the same light brown leather that they use to make Harley seats, gaucho boots, and the Stetsons that Texans wear. Worth a fortune! Being a gynaecologist must pay the bills.

  Océane is making some noise in the kitchen. My coupe of Piper-Heidsieck is on the table, just beside the pile of a hundred sheets of paper—one hundred and thirteen, to be precise. The story of my last six days. I’ve printed it out for Océane to read, and when she’s done, I’ll close the file. For ever.

  Who will open it again?

  Who will read it?

  Will it remain piece of introspection, forgotten at the back of a drawer? Will it become a breathtaking mystery novel with me as the main character?

  Who will you be, you who are gazing at the text? Will you even exist?

  Still uncertain of the answer, I decide to add a handwritten addendum to my diary, to bring it up to date.

  The police freed Océane late in the afternoon. Her lawyer has said she won’t face further charges. Self-defence. Confirmed by five witnesses. Frédéric Saint-Michel was going to shoot me, he would have killed me if Océane hadn’t fired first. The police disciplinary body is still investigating Piroz’s role in the affair. We’ll all be called as witnesses, probably several times. Commander Weissman and three of his deputies, after hearing my story, looked at me with a kind of unhealthy pity and asked if I wanted to press charges.

  Press charges? Against who?

  They didn’t seem to understand and let me go. The police have been quibbling, combing, scratching for two days, but I don’t think they really care any more. They’ve got a culprit, a motive, some confessions, and more evidence than they need.

  Frédéric Saint-Michel.

  Arrested. Judged. Executed.

  Case closed.

  I arrived at Océane’s place less than an hour ago. She lives in an isolated cottage in Lucy, a few kilometres from Neufchâtel-en-Bray, a doll’s house with dovecotes and mud-brick walls, straw and irises on the roof, set between four hedges. A well, a pond, a labyrinth of gravel that runs between impeccably maintained flower beds. Carmen must spend hours in her daughter’s garden.

  Océane ushered me in, pointed me to the leather armchair and asked me to open the bottle of champagne while she went upstairs to change. When she came back down a few minutes later, she had swapped her pullover and jeans for a blue tulip dress.

  The pen slipped from my hands. I felt the leather of the armchair melting beneath me.

  A wide turquoise ribbon ran behind her neck before dividing into two strips of fabric that covered her breasts and then ran under her belt, with a breathtaking neckline. The flower-shaped dress escaped beneath the belt into a silk corolla that opened up on a pair of pretty pistils encased in lagoon-blue fishnet stockings.

  She leaned over me, holding out a coupe, then disappeared to poke the fire. The dance of her long hair on her face seemed like a challenge to that of the flames in in the hearth.

  I thought she was breathtakingly beautiful.

  My heart was pounding fit to burst. To keep it from exploding, I focused my eyes on the curves of her dress. Océane was wearing nothing underneath, no parachute strap to help her escape, no bra.

  She came towards me.

  “Don’t imagine that I’m just being nice to you so that you’ll forgive me.”

  Her lips pressed against mine as it to keep me from replying.

  “You should have seen your face the day you came into my surgery in Neufchâtel. As if you’d seen a ghost.”

  “An angel,” I murmured.

  She held a finger vertically against my lips. Mockingly.

  “And your adorable terror that morning when I jumped into the void from the cliff in Yport.”

  “An angel,” I said again.

  She clinked her champagne glass against mine.

  “May I?”

  Without asking my permission, she sat on my knees, delicately, with the flirtatious lightness of a little girl, as if to spare my artificial lightness. I held my breath.

  “You’re so . . .”

  Again, she put her finger to my lips.

  “Shhh . . .”

  She stared at me with her coal-black eyes, at point-blank range. A showdown, eyelash to eyelash, until I gave in, until I lowered my eye to her breasts, barely concealed by the two turquoise curtains of sheer fabric. I resisted the desire to cover her breasts with my two hands, to follow the swell of them with my fingertips, to circle her dark areolas a thousand times. Still sitting on my knees, Océane swayed closer to me. Her breasts crushed against my torso as her crotch rubbed against the fly of my jeans.

  I shivered.

  The beautiful girl was wearing nothing under her dress.

  Before I had time to wrap my arms around her waist, she sprang to her feet. Her fingers undid my belt and then, with the same movement, slipped my trousers and my boxer shorts down to my ankles.

  I pleaded with God not to let the sight of my steel tibia put her off. She didn’t even seem to notice. With the gesture of a princess she lifted her dress as if to avoid crumpling it when she sat down.

  Her thighs parted gently.

  Her lips trembled as I entered her body.

  Océane’s naked body was a cinema screen on which the wild shadows of the flames in the fireplace were projected.

  “You have
n’t asked me the question,” I murmured in her ear.

  The champagne ran down her throat. I felt a titillating desire to pour the bottle she was drinking from into the hollow of her neck, so that I could then plunge in my lips and tongue and drink.

  “What question?”

  “The one that everyone asks me. My leg. How did It happen? Before or after 2004?”

  “I couldn’t care, Jamal.”

  She pressed her hot body against me. I had never spoken seriously to an adult about my disability. And yet at that precise moment I no longer felt like playing, escaping, lying. After all, I would transcribe every word of this conversation with the woman of my dreams in the last lines of my story. My future readers also deserved to know the truth before the end.

  I slid my hand along Océane’s bare back and adopted a conspiratorial tone.

  “Sine I was born, I’ve spread dozens of versions, all different. I’ve even served up a few to the members of your Fil Rouge. Heroic exploits, tragic accidents. I was playing the crippled fireman, the unlucky robber, the reckless parkour athlete . . . But the truth is much simpler.”

  Her hand rested tenderly on my shoulder as her lips kissed my neck.

  “Some people are born with a twin sister—life multiples everything by two.” I looked at her and smiled. “For me, it divided everything in two. I was born with one kidney, one lung, one leg, one heart, of course, but it’s too weak. My mother, Nadia, was forty-six when she fell pregnant, my father was over fifty. As far as they were concerned, I was their little miracle. During the first fifteen years of her married life, she had had a child every three years. Then nothing for the fifteen years that followed . . . Until I came along.”

  Océane’s kisses made their way down my chest, my caresses fell to the small of her back.

  “My mother spent the last fifteen years of her life looking after me. By the time I was a teenager, I’d had eighteen operations. In total, I spent over twenty months in the hospital. I put the social security budget 9.3 percent deeper in deficit all on my own, at the age of ten. I grew up with the idea that I would never be an adult, that I hadn’t enough pieces in good condition in my engine to get very far along the road. That I was going to break down at any moment, and find myself abandoned by the side of the road. So I invented my future, I imagined the fate of an Achilles for myself—do you know what I mean? Accepting death, on condition that I would first enjoy life, fixing the bar not by numbering the years I had ahead of me, but the goals I had to achieve.”

  “Do you have lots of those?” Océane murmured.

  There was infinite tenderness in her voice. As if my confessions were arousing. I found myself regretting all the ridiculous versions I had been making up since my teenage years to seduce girls.

  “Five . . . The five points of my star.”

  She gently took the hand that I was running down her back and gripped it.

  “As you can imagine, my mother wasn’t about to let me go without a fight! A kidney, a lung, a decent heart—they exist, you can buy them, people donate them. She took her organ caddie around all the hospitals in France, she plagued the best surgeons. Operations costing millions of euros were billed to social security. Eighteen operations, just think. She gave me one of her lungs as soon as I had a thoracic cage the same size as hers, when I was fifteen. It was my last operation. The following winter finished off my mother.”

  Her five fingers gripped mine.

  “My last operation,” I said again. “I was the man who cost three billion. Robocop, to my friends in La Courneuve. A completely new body, apart from a leg and a foot, the only part of the human body that no surgeon in the world had been able to graft on. But having only one foot doesn’t keep you from moving forward as quickly as everyone else. Quicker, even. I started running on the day of my mother’s funeral. I’ve never stopped.”

  “I understand.”

  “Everyone in the neighbourhood knows me. You just have to ask in any stairwell in La Courneuve. I’ve been ill from birth, I couldn’t have been the rapist of Morgane and Myrtille.”

  “Forgive us.”

  I took advantage of the opportunity to steal a long kiss from her.

  “You know, I’ve grown up one day at a time, with death on my heels. Every year in my letter to Santa, I would ask Father Christmas for one last year of life . . . So if you’d let me drown in Saint-Marcouf, basically I wouldn’t have regretted a thing . . .”

  “Not even the five directions of your star?”

  I hesitated.

  Had I changed? Had I given up on my ambitions?

  I moved my hand from hers and rested it on her firm, round, full breast.

  “My star can go on shining after my death, can’t it?”

  Océane shivered. Her hand took mine. She pressed it against her breast for a long time, then guided it over her skin, slowly, lower and lower to the edge of the world.

  Océane slipped her dress back on over her head with a perfectly natural gesture. The silk enfolded her like a second skin.

  “I’m hungry. Will you finish your journal while I put the final touches on our feast?”

  Océane cooked?

  I watched her crossing the room, mechanically picking up the champagne coupe to put it away, and then disappearing into the kitchen.

  That was a few minutes ago.

  Since then, sitting on the leather armchair, I’m faithfully transcribing every word, every gesture, every emotion that I felt during the hour that has just passed.

  That’s how my story will end.

  In a few moments I will read it to Océane. We will probably make love again.

  It’s a lovely story, isn’t it? The disabled Arab who everyone thought was guilty, finishing his life in the arms of the woman of his dreams. What do you think?

  Probably too cute an ending for a thriller, I grant you. But what about a nice little romance? Beauty and the Beast . . .

  I look up. Above a Norman dresser carved with fruit, a circular skylight with a lace curtain opens on to the sky. Stars sparkle against the pitch-dark background.

  Which is mine?

  Which will I use to find my bearings as I pursue the five points of my destiny?

  My mind drifts to my previous life, the one I am about to rejoin on Monday, at the Saint Antoine Institute. Ibou, who will think I’m a lunatic, Ophélie, who will have collected new photographs of guys. That jerk Jérôme Pinelli, who will be green with envy.

  Océane is singing in the kitchen. I think I recognise “A nos actes manqués” by Fredricks Goldman Jones. Can’t swear to it.

  My pen slows down on the white page. I have to be careful in the choosing the last words in my story.

  Have I won?

  Has death finally stopped stalking me?

  I hold my pen in the air for several seconds, until the sound of an oven door closing makes me turn my head. Océane appears holding a tea towel. A strong smell tickles my nose. Sauce chasseur, the one I wasn’t allowed to try in the cafeteria. Mushrooms, shallots, cream, and wine.

  “Are you sure?” Océane says to me. “You haven’t told anyone where you are?”

  “Absolutely certain!”

  I’ve respected her privacy, I haven’t told anyone about my visit to her house. This beautiful girl is probably ashamed of her awkward lover. Worried that Carmen won’t approve. Afraid that Uncle Gilbert will complain. Afraid that Mon will make a scene?

  Not Mona, Alina!

  Jealous?

  I love this air of mystery. The fact that our love is clandestine lends even more spice.

  My pen rests on the page for the last time. I want to find a pretty phrase to end with. I’m slowing to a halt. I bite the cap of my ballpoint.

  “It’s ready!” Océane calls.

  Never mind. I’ll opt for the easy solution.

 
They were the first words of this story, and they will be the last.

  For a long time, I was unlucky.

  Fortune never favoured me.

  To be completely honest, I still have trouble believing that it’s swapped sides.

  THE END

  IV

  EXECUTION

  Rosny-sous-Bois, August 10th,2014

  From: Gérard Calmette, Director of the Disaster Victim Identification Unit (DVIU), Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie, Rosny-sous-Bois

  To: Lieutenant Bertrand Donnadieu, National Gendarmerie, Territorial Brigade of the District of Étretat, Seine-Maritime

  Dear Lieutenant,

  I am sending you this brief letter to inform you about one particular issue raised by the case of the three skeletons found on July 12th, 2014 on the beach at Yport. I may succinctly remind you that these three individuals, whom we have named, for the purposes of the inquiry, Albert, Bernard, and Clovis, died at different dates: Albert during the summer of 2004; Bernard between autumn 2004 and winter 2005; Clovis between February and March 2014, and that the explanation of their deaths is criminal poisoning with muscarine, a dose which according to experts led to the death of each of the three individuals, through cardiac arrest, less than thirty minutes after the absorption of the poison.

  But as research progresses, we find ourselves confronted with a strange detail that obliges me to ask you a question for which I apologise in advance, Lieutenant.

  Might your forces have neglected to send us one of the pieces of evidence from this inquiry? To put it another way, we are missing one of the pieces of the puzzle and ask you to check very carefully that it has not gone missing.

  Let me explain. We have been able to reconstruct the skeletons of Albert and Bernard in their entirety from the bones that you have given us. This is a precise piece of palaeontological work, but one to which we are accustomed.