Lovers and Liars Trilogy (142 page)

“Rowland. Don’t.”

“I had no choice. So I worked. After a fashion. I spoke to the French police. I made some other calls. I realized something that we missed last night, which was actually very obvious—but still.” He glanced down at his watch. “So, I’d say we have a choice. We have two possible leads. We can either try to interview that maid whom Cazarès was visiting yesterday—though I’m pretty sure that Lazare will have her well protected from the press, under virtual guard. Or”—he turned back to look at her—“or we can talk to that girl Chantal. She’s with the police now, or should be, if we hurry.”

Gini stared at him. “You arranged for them to pick her up? When? This morning?”

“Yes.” He gave her one of his cool, unreadable green glances. “I can work quite well in adverse circumstances.”

“So I see. I’ll have to learn from you…” For a moment her face clouded; then she made a brisk gesture. “You’re right. It’s the next stage. Let’s talk to Chantal.”

Chantal was a small, thin, angry woman with brown urchin-cut hair and brown street-urchin eyes. Rowland and Gini first glimpsed her through the glass panels of a police interview-room door. The French plainclothes inspector who led them there was called Martigny. He was a short, dark-haired man with sharp eyes and a quiet manner. Outside the interview room, he continued to complete the rundown on Chantal which he had begun in his office a short while before. It was succinct, and in many respects, Rowland thought, predictable.

She was twenty-two years old, the daughter of a French-Canadian mother and an American father she had never known. Her mother had two other illegitimate children from whom Chantal had been separated at the age of eight, when she was first taken into foster care.

Her childhood, insofar as she ever had a childhood, had been spent in a succession of foster homes, from which she had a history of absconding. At fourteen she had served her first sentence, in a juvenile detention center in Quebec, for shoplifting. At sixteen, in Detroit, she had been arrested for car theft, and at seventeen, in New York, for prostitution and possession. She was virtually uneducated and semiliterate, and for the past three years she had been based in France. She was a registered heroin user, a dropout from a methadone program. In the past year, two charges of prostitution and drug trafficking had been brought, and subsequently dropped for lack of evidence. She was in danger of deportation, since none of her papers was in order, and she was not a woman—unsurprisingly—who was cooperative with the police.

For the past two hours, Martigny said, two of his best officers, a man and a woman, had been questioning her. Since there was no possible charge, she was about to be released. Her story, prized out of her by the use of threats, was that she knew no one by the name of Star, and never had. She couldn’t explain how her name and address came to be in the possession of some dead Dutch girl. Yes, she met lots of foreigners around Paris, and yes, she or one of her friends might hand out her address—she was generous that way: she had a room, a nice room, and sometimes people needed somewhere to crash. She couldn’t remember this Anneke, whoever she was; it was an offense now, was it, to hand another girl her address?

Martigny studied these two reporters who, according to his British colleague, had been helpful to the British police. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week; the woman had a bruise down the side of her face that suggested she’d been recently hit. There was a tension between them that might have been professional, or emotional, or sexual.

Martigny shrugged such considerations aside. Chantal spoke fluent English and French, he went on; they could try questioning her in either language, and he was prepared to allow them twenty minutes. Time made no difference: if he gave them all day, they would not persuade this woman to talk.

He left them there; the woman officer remained by the door as the interview began. Rowland and Gini faced Chantal across a narrow table scarred with cigarette burns. She sat opposite them, chain-smoking, biting her nails, averting her gaze, yawning, tapping the tabletop with her thin fingers and occasionally darting in their direction small brown glances of derision and hate.

The scar on her face was one of the ugliest Gini had ever seen. It ran from the outer corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. It had healed badly, into a long curving cicatrix that had left the skin puckered and inflamed. It gave her a deeply disconcerting quality, as if two women, not one, faced them across the table. Once pretty, and still pretty when she turned her face aside, she seemed to accept this inflicted ugliness with defiance. Whenever she answered one of Rowland’s questions—he was speaking to her quietly, in excellent French—she turned her scarred side toward him, Gini noted. Her mounting nervousness and impatience were very apparent; Gini wondered if she needed a fix.

Gini felt very calm, curiously so, as if marooned on a flat sea, beyond the breath of any emotion at all. This had the effect of heightening her surroundings, so she saw the girl, and her reactions, with an intense precision. She felt that if she could just continue to do so, she need not remember or think about anything else.

Her silence—she had not spoken once since they entered—seemed to be irritating Chantal. At first the girl had ignored her, fixing her eyes on Rowland’s handsome face, and answering him rudely, but also boldly. Perhaps this was the way she addressed her johns, Gini thought, this odd mixture of flirtation and contempt. She seemed eager to place Rowland in the same category as the rest of the male sex—an importuner who might require only answers now, but who, given the chance, would make a more basic, and sexual request.

All of Rowland’s patient questions were being blocked. Chantal’s eyes flicked in Gini’s direction again. She yawned, lit another cigarette, then interrupted him suddenly, in English.

“So why’s
she
here?” She gestured at Gini. “She have a voice, or what?”

“We work together. I did explain,” Rowland replied in a level voice. The girl’s accent, speaking English, betrayed her hybrid origins: it was not Canadian, not American, or British or European, but somewhere between all four. Gini saw Rowland register this.

“What’s happened to your face?” Chantai turned to look at Gini. “You walk into a door? Someone’s fist?” She gave an insolent smile and jerked a thumb at Rowland. “His?”

“What’s happened to
your
face, Chantal,” Gini replied, and felt Rowland tense.

Chantal gave Gini a considering look. “Go fuck yourself.” She drew on the cigarette. “That’s my business, all right?” She pursed her lips, then turned back to Rowland. She gave him a long, blatantly sexual stare. “Why don’t you tell her to fuck off,” she said to him. “And that tight-assed bitch at the door. If you and me were alone, who knows—I might open up then…” She passed her tongue across her lips as she said this, and leaned forward, so the threadbare sweater she was wearing was drawn tight across the outline of her small breasts.

She had perhaps hoped to embarrass Rowland, certainly to disconcert him. When her moves produced no effect whatsoever, she seemed disconcerted herself. She glanced away, looked down, seemed almost to shrink back into herself. She hunched her shoulders and folded her arms across her chest. She suddenly looked much less sure of herself, even vulnerable. That body language was telling: watching it—the attempt at sexual appeal, the insecurity when it was rejected—Gini saw a possible approach. She leaned forward.

“I know how you got that scar anyway,” she said. “A man named Star did that to you with a razor, in England last year. I feel I know Star quite well by now. He’s unstable. He has a cocaine habit, and he has mood swings—rapid ones. When that happens, he’s capable of using a razor on a woman, and disfiguring her—or worse. Why is that, Chantal? Does he hate women? Does he have some sexual problem with women, perhaps?” Chantai had tensed. She bent her head and began to pick at her nails. Gini glanced at Rowland, who nodded.

“You know what I think he told you, Chantal?” Gini kept her eyes on the girl’s bent head. “I think he told you that you had—the soothing gift. That’s what he says to women, isn’t it? He told Anneke that. I expect it’s what he’s telling Mina Landis right now. And I’m sure she’ll believe him. After all, she’s only fifteen years old. She’s a great deal more gullible than you are because, unlike you, she’s led a very sheltered life. Yet even you believed him, didn’t you, Chantal? You went right on believing you could control him—until the day he cut your face.”

Chantal’s head jerked up. She gave Gini a venomous look. “Look—I don’t
know
him, you stupid bitch. How many fucking times do I have to say it?”

“Oh, you know him, Chantal.” Gini sighed. “And you know how he lies too. He didn’t tell you the truth about the other girls, did he? Did you know he had Mina here with him in Paris? Because he does, they were seen together yesterday. Has he admitted that to you? Or does he spin you some different line—that Mina’s like Anneke, like all the other little girls—disposable? Whereas you—you are the constant in his life? Is that what he told you, Chantal?”

It was instinct, a house of cards put together on the spur of the moment, but as soon as the words were out, Gini knew she was on the right track: Chantal’s face went white. There was just one small convulsive movement of the hand, hastily covered up. She flicked the butt into the brimming ashtray in front of her and lit the last of her cigarettes.

“Fuck you. I’m getting sick of this. I’ll say this one last time. I don’t know Star. Never did. I don’t recognize your description—nothing. So get the fuck off my back.”

“Let me show you their photographs.”

Gini reached into her bag. She took out the pictures of Mina and Anneke and handed them to Rowland, who silently passed them across. Chantal jerked her head away.

“Look at them, Chantal,” Gini said in a quiet voice. “I think you never met either of them—but you knew about them, didn’t you? You knew about them and you wondered what they looked like. Didn’t you? Wondered what made Star interested in them, when he had you?” She paused. “Look at them and you’ll see. Two different girls—yet in one respect they’re alike. They both look younger than their age. They both look like children… Is that when it started to go wrong for you, Chantal? When you started to look too much like a woman? Was that it?”

She stopped. Rowland had quietly laid his hand on her arm in warning. Chantal bent her head to the pictures. She was now chalk white, and beginning to shake.

“How old were you when you looked that innocent, Chantal? Eight? Nine? Ten?”

“You fucking cunt.” Chantal scraped back her chair and rose unsteadily to her feet. “Listen”—she swung around to the impassive policewoman—“get her out of here. Get me out. You can’t fucking keep me here. I have rights…” She was trembling violently.

Rowland said quietly, “Gini—she needs a fix.”

“I know that. I could see that when we walked in. Chantal, show me your arms. Show me what else he did to you…”

Gini rose as she said this. Neither Rowland nor the policewoman moved. There was a silence; then, to Rowland’s astonishment, Chantal allowed her hands to be taken and the thin sleeves of her pullover to be gently eased back. The needle tracks ran the length of both arms, like barbed wire, from elbow to wrist.

Without speaking, Gini drew the sleeves down again. Chantal’s hands flexed and she began to bite her lip. She was beginning to sweat, and the trembling in her limbs had increased. Gini looked at Rowland, and one look was enough of a hint.

He came around the table and said in a low voice: “If we get you home—will that help?”

Chantal shot a quick look at the policewoman, who was careful to appear deaf; she gave a nod.

Rowland put his arm around her and began to draw her toward the door. “Let us take you back. The police are finished with you. We’ll get a cab. That will be quicker, okay?”

When they were outside the station, Gini turned to the girl. All the blood had drained from her face; her forehead was clammy with sweat.

“You’re late?” Gini said. “How late?”

“Over an hour. Nearly two. Those pigs do that…”

Gini pitied her then. All the defiance and bravado had gone. She could not focus her eyes; they had that look Mitchell had described, that dead-eyed yet frantic look of animal need. She swayed. Farther up the street Rowland had succeeded in flagging down a cab. He climbed into it and the car accelerated toward them, then came to a halt. Chantal surfaced, just momentarily, from her glassy state, and gave Gini one quick, sharp street look.

“You and him?”

“He has been, yes.”

“I thought so. I can always tell.” She swayed again. “Just get me back to my room.”

She half fell, half slid into the rear seat beside Rowland. She lay back with her eyes closed. The tremblings intensified and became a series of spasmodic jerks. Gini held her hand and averted her face.

The room on rue St. Séverin was a terrible place. In a space twelve feet square was crammed a double bed, a table and chairs, boxes, piles of clothes, a huge television set. It smelled of poverty and an attempt to make a home without means; from the restaurants below, cooking smells drifted up. Two women lived here, Gini realized, Chantal and—presumably—the older woman who had answered the door to her the previous night. The remains of a breakfast lay on the table: two cups, two plates, some croissants and jam. On top of the unmade bed were two bundled nightdresses, one blue, one pink. The room was very cold, and smelled damp. An effort had been made to keep it clean. The dishes in the sink were neatly stacked. There was a cat-litter tray on the floor, and in a corner, half hidden behind a pile of cheap paperbacks, was a thin black cat. Curled up in a ball, on the bed, was a thin, timid lurcher dog. Gini bent to it and stroked its gray bristling fur. Then she turned to the windows. Through the net curtains she could just see the outline of the church. It was still raining; the thin light was already beginning to fade. She stared at the curtains and the church, because she could not bear to watch what was happening with Rowland behind her. “Help me,” Chantal was saying. “You have to help me. I’m spilling it. I can’t hold my hand steady… Christ. I burnt my hand.”