Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
“Now listen up, big boy, I don’t plan to spend the whole night here. So I’m going to give you a chance to talk and, for your sake, I hope you’re planning to be cooperative because I’m not feeling especially patient right now. I haven’t had a wink of sleep in two days, so if you care about me at all, you’ll answer my questions and we can all get off to bed, me, you, your chick here, O.K.?”
Ravic’s French was never very good, his conversation is peppered with errors of syntax and vocabulary, so it’s important to communicate in a way he understands. Simple words accompanied by persuasive gestures. So, as I carefully choose my words, I plant the hunting knife into the remnants of his ankle, the blade cuts clean through and embeds itself in the floorboard. Probably leaves a hole in the parquet floor, the sort of damage that will cost him when he tries to get his deposit back, but who cares? Ravic manages to scream through the gag, he struggles and squirms like a worm, his free hand fluttering like a butterfly.
I think he understands the seriousness of the situation now, but I give him a moment or two to think about it, to let the information sink in. Then I explain:
“The way I figure it, you and Hafner planned to double-cross me from the start. Like him, you thought that a three-way split was less attractive than sharing the loot between two. And it does make for a bigger share, I’ll grant you that.”
Ravic looks up at me, his eyes are filled with tears – of pain, rather than sorrow – but I can tell I’ve hit the nail on the head.
“Jesus, you’re thick as pigshit, Dušan! You’re a fucking moron. Why do you think Hafner picked you? Because you’re a moron. Do you get it now?”
He grimaces, his ankle really is giving him grief.
“So, you help Hafner to double-cross me . . . and then he double-crosses you. Which confirms my initial analysis: you’re as thick as two short planks.”
Ravic does not seem to be overly preoccupied with his I.Q. right now. He is more worried about his health, about keeping count of his limbs. It’s a sensible preoccupation because the more I talk the angrier I feel.
“My guess is you didn’t go after Hafner – the guy’s too dangerous, you weren’t about to settle scores with him, you haven’t got the balls and you know it. Besides, you had a murder charge hanging over you, so you decided to lie low. But the thing is, I need to find Hafner, so you’re going to help me track him down, you’re going to tell me everything you know: every detail of your little agreement and everything that happened afterwards, are we clear?”
It sounds like a reasonable proposition to me. I remove the gag, but Ravic’s rather volatile temperament gets the better of him and he starts screaming something I can’t understand. With his one good hand, he makes a grab for my collar. The guy has a powerful fist, but by some miracle I manage to dodge him. This is what I get for trusting people.
And he spits at me.
Under the circumstances, it’s an understandable reaction, but even so, it’s a little uncouth.
I realise that I have been going about things the wrong way. I have tried to behave in a civilised fashion, but Ravic is a peasant, such subtle nuances go right over his head. He is in too much pain to put up any serious resistance so I lay him out with a couple of kicks to the head and, while he struggles to remove the knife pinning his leg to the floor, I go to find what I need.
The girl is sprawled across the bed. Never mind. I grab one corner of the filthy duvet and tug hard, sending her rolling onto her stomach, her skirt rucked up, revealing her thin, pasty legs and needle marks on the backs of her knees. Even if I hadn’t hurried things along, she was living on borrowed time.
I turn back just as Ravic manages to prise the knife out of his ankle. The guy is strong as an ox.
I put a bullet in his knee and his reaction, if you’ll pardon the expression, is explosive. He literally launches his whole body into the air and howls, but before he has time to get his bearings, I manage to turn him over, throw the duvet over him and sit on it. I try to find the best position: I don’t want him to suffocate, I need Ravic, but I need him to focus on my questions. And I need him to stop screaming.
I pull his arm towards me. It feels strange, sitting on him as he bucks and bridles like a fairground ride or a rodeo bull. I grab the hunting knife, force his hand flat on the floor, but he’s strong. I’m pitching and reeling like a big-game fisherman reeling in a 200-lb marlin.
I start by cutting his little finger off at the second phalanx. Usually, I would take the trouble to make a clean cut at the joint, but such refinements are wasted on Ravic. I simply hack it off, which is irksome to an aesthete like me.
I’m prepared to bet that within fifteen minutes, Ravic will have told me everything I need to know. I continue to ask questions, but this is simply for form’s sake: he is not concentrating yet and besides, what with the duvet and me on top of him, to say nothing of his ankle and his knee, he is having trouble stringing a coherent sentence together.
I continue my work, moving on to the index finger – it’s incredible how much he struggles – and I think about my visit to the hospital.
Unless I’m very much mistaken, in a few minutes my Serbian friend is going to break the bad news to me. In which case, the only solution is to put pressure on the woman in the hospital. Logically, by now she should be prepared to be cooperative.
I hope so, for her sake.
*
5.00 p.m.
“Verhœven?”
Not even a courtesy “
commandant
”. The
commissaire
is obviously livid. No pleasantries, no extraneous chit-chat. Commissaire Michard has so much to say she does not know where to begin.
“I’m going to need a detailed report . . .” is her first reflex.
Bureaucracy is the last refuge of the uninspired.
“You assured the judge that this was to be a ‘targeted operation’, you spin me some story about ‘three known suspects’, then you turn the whole city upside down. Are you deliberately trying to piss me off?”
On the other end of the telephone, Camille opens his mouth to speak, but Michard cuts him off.
“To tell the truth, I don’t give a shit. But you’re going to stand down your men right now,
commandant
, call off this little show of force, it’s a waste of time.”
A clusterfuck. Camille closes his eyes. He was on the final sprint, only to be overtaken a few yards from the finishing post. Next to him, thin-lipped, Louis looks away. Camille jerks his thumb to let him know the operation is dead in the water, and waves for him to round up all the officers. Louis immediately begins punching in the numbers on his telephone. From the look on Verhœven’s face, he knows how things stand. All around, the other officers hang their heads, feigning disappointment, they will all be bawled out tomorrow, but at least they had some fun. As they head back to their cars, one or two flash a complicit smile, Camille responds with a fatalistic gesture.
The
commissaire divisionnaire
is giving him time to digest the information, but her pause is expressly melodramatic, insidious, pregnant with menace.
*
Anne is standing in front of the mirror again when one of the nurses appears. Florence, the older nurse. Though she is not exactly old . . . She is probably younger than Anne, but her desperate attempt to look ten years younger prematurely ages her.
“Everything alright?”
Their eyes meet in the mirror. As she records the time on the clipboard at the end of the bed, the nurse flashes her a broad smile. Even with those lips, I’ll never be able to smile like that again, thinks Anne.
“Everything alright?”
What a question. Anne does not feel like talking, especially not to Florence. She should never have let herself be persuaded by the other nurse, the young one. She should have walked out of the hospital, she feels in danger. And yet she cannot quite make up her mind, there seem as many reasons to stay as to go.
And then, there is Camille.
The moment she thinks of him, her whole body starts to tremble, he is alone, helpless, he will never manage to do it. And even if he does, it will be too late.
*
45, rue Jambier. The
commissaire
is already on her way. Camille will meet her there in fifteen minutes.
The Operation Verhœven raids have produced results, though not the ones anticipated. Desperate to be left in peace – to prosper, to live or simply to survive – the whole Serbian community came together to track down Ravic. The search turned out to be child’s play. An anonymous tip-off gives his location as 45, rue Jambier. Camille had hoped to find a live body; he is sorely disappointed.
At the first wail of a police siren, every adult in the building disappeared within seconds: there will be no witnesses, no-one to question, no-one who heard or saw anything. Only the children were left behind – there was nothing to fear and everything to gain, since the children will be able to tell them exactly what happened when they get back. Right now, uniformed officers have them corralled out on the pavement. The kids are eager and excited, laughing and catcalling. For children who do not go to school, a double murder constitutes playtime.
Upstairs, the
commissaire
is standing in the doorway of the apartment, hands clasped in front of her as though she were in church. Until the forensic technicians from
identité judiciaire
get here, she will allow only Verhœven inside, no-one else. It is a perfunctory and probably futile precaution, so many men have traipsed through this hovel that the forensics team will probably come up with at least fifty sets of fingerprints, stray hairs and sundry bodily fluids. The crime scene will be documented, but it is merely a question of protocol.
When Camille arrives, the
commissaire
does not turn, she does not even look at him, she simply takes a step into the room, her movements careful and deliberate. Camille follows her footsteps. Silently, each of them begins to detail the scene, to draw up a list of obvious facts. The girl – an addict and a prostitute – died first. Seeing her lying on her belly, turned towards the wall as though she is sulking, it is apparent that the duvet that discreetly covers Ravic’s body was jerked out from under her, hurling her against the partition. Were there only her pallid corpse, stiffening now with rigor mortis, there would be little to be said. They have witnessed this scene a hundred times. So many prostitutes die in circumstances such as these: an overdose, a murder. But there is another body which tells a very different story.
The
commissaire
moves slowly, walking around the pool of blood seeping into the grimy floorboards. The ankle, a mass of splintered bone, is attached to the leg by ragged ribbons of skin. Hacked? Slashed? Camille takes out his glasses and hunkers down for a closer inspection, his eyes move over the floor until he finds the bullet hole, then back at the ankle; there is evidence of knife marks on the bone, a short blade, possibly a dagger. Camille crouches lower, like an Indian listening for an enemy approaching, and sees the deep groove where a blade was buried in the wood. As he gets to his feet, he mentally tries to reconstruct this part of the scene. The ankle first, then the fingers.
The
commissaire
makes an inventory. Five fingers. The right number, but the wrong order: the index is here, the middle finger there, the thumb a little further away, each cut off at the second phalanx. The anaemic stump of the hand lies on the bed, the sheet is saturated with black blood. Cautiously, using a ballpoint pen, the
commissaire
lifts the hand away to reveal Ravic’s face. His contorted features speak volumes about the pain he suffered.
The
coup de grâce:
a bullet in the back of the neck.
“Come on then . . .” the
commissaire
says, her tone almost jubilant; she is expecting good news.
“The way I see it,” Camille begins, “the guys came in . . .”
“Spare me the bedtime story,
commandant
, anyone can see what happened here. No, what I want to know is what the hell you’re doing.”
*
What is Camille doing? Anne wonders.
The nurse has left, they barely spoke. Anne was aggressive, Florence pretended not to notice.
“Can I get you anything?”
No, nothing. Anne gives a curt nod, but already her mind is elsewhere. As every other time, she finds looking in the mirror devastating and yet she cannot help herself. She comes back, goes back to bed, comes back again. Now that she has had the results of the X-rays and the M.R.I. scan, she cannot sit still, this hospital room troubles and depresses her.
She has to run away.
She summons the instincts she had as a little girl for running away and hiding. What she feels has something in common with rape: she feels ashamed. Ashamed of what she has become, this is what she saw when she looked into the mirror.
What is Camille doing? she wonders.
*
Commissaire Michard steps back and leaves the apartment, carefully setting her feet in precisely the same places as she did when she entered. As in a well-choreographed ballet, their exit coincides with the arrival of the forensics team. The
commissaire
is forced to move along the hall in a crab-like fashion, given the size of her posterior, then comes to a stop in the doorway. She turns back to Camille, folds her arms and gives him a smile that says: so, tell me everything.
“The four robberies in January were the work of a gang led by Vincent Hafner, a gang that Ravic was a member of.” He jerks his thumb back towards the room, now lit by a blaze of forensics spotlights. The
commissaire
nods: we know all this, get on with it.
“The gang abruptly reappeared yesterday and robbed the jeweller’s in the Galerie Monier. The raid went pretty smoothly, except for one small problem – the presence of a customer, Anne Forestier. I don’t know exactly what she saw besides their faces, but something obviously happened. We’re still questioning her, insofar as her injuries permit, but we haven’t got to the bottom of it. Whatever it was, it was serious enough for Hafner to come after her and try to kill her. He even came to the hospital . . . [He raises a conciliatory hand.] I know, I know! We’ve got no hard evidence that it was him.”