Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
The
heat is stifling. Sophie is half-dead with exhaustion and yet sleep will not come. Close by, she can hear dance music. Electric music. Electric nights. Her mind cannot help but pick out the titles of some of the songs. Golden oldies from the seventies. She never liked dancing. She always felt too awkward. She would dance to rock music now and then, but always the same four steps.
A gunshot makes her flinch: it is a firework, the first of the display. She gets out of bed.
She thinks about the documents she is paying for. This is the only possible solution. It cannot fail.
Sophie throws the window wide, lights a cigarette and watches another firework streak across the sky. She is chain-smoking. She does not cry.
My God, what has she set in motion?
The
office is just as impersonal. The supplier watches her as she comes in. They both remain standing. Sophie takes a thick envelope from her bag, takes out a wad of notes and begins to count them.
“That won’t be necessary.”
She looks up. Immediately she realises that something is wrong.
“You have to understand, mademoiselle, our business is subject to market forces.”
The man’s tone is measured, he does not move.
“The laws of supply and demand are as old as time. Our prices are based not on the intrinsic value of our products, but on each client’s
need
.”
Sophie feels a lump in her throat. She swallows hard.
“And since we last met,” the man goes on, “circumstances have changed somewhat . . . Madame Duguet.”
She feels her legs give, the room begins to spin, she clings to a corner of the desk.
“Perhaps you would prefer to sit?”
Sophie
slumps into a chair.
“Don’t worry, you are in no danger. But we need to know who we are dealing with. We always conduct background checks. In your case, it was no easy matter. You are a very resourceful woman, Madame Duguet, as the police have discovered to their embarrassment. But we know our business. We now know who you are, but I can assure you that we will keep your identity confidential. In this business, we cannot afford the slightest indiscretion.”
Sophie has regained a little of her composure, but his words are slow to penetrate, as though they had first to pierce a dense layer of fog. She manages to say a few words.
“Which means . . .?”
This is all she can say.
“Which means that the price is no longer the same.”
“How much?”
“Double.”
Sophie’s panic is clearly visible in her face.
“I do apologise,” the man says. “Would you like a glass of water?”
Sophie does not answer. Here all her hopes come to an end.
“I can’t,” she whispers, as though talking to herself.
“I am quite sure you can. You have proved yourself to be enormously resourceful. Otherwise, you would not be here. Let’s meet again a week from now, if that suits. After that . . .”
“But what guarantee do I have that . . .?”
“Sadly, Madame Duguet, none. Other than my word. But trust me, that is worth more than any guarantee.”
*
M.
Auverney is a tall man, the sort people describe as “sprightly” by which they mean that, though old, he has aged well. Summer and winter he invariably wears a hat. This one is unbleached linen. Since it is a little hot in the post office, he holds it in one hand. When the man behind the counter beckons, he steps forward, sets his hat on the counter and hands over the delivery note. He has his identity card ready. Since Sophie has been on the run, he has learned never to look behind him, he knows that he has been under surveillance. He may still be. Just in case, as he leaves the post office, he ducks into the café next door, orders a coffee and asks for the toilets. The message is brief: “
[email protected]
”. M. Auverney, who gave up smoking almost twenty years ago, takes out the lighter he was careful to bring and burns the message in the toilet bowl. Then he calmly drinks his coffee standing at the bar. He props his elbows on the counter, rests his chin on his clasped hands, the very image of a man who is taking his time. In fact, he does so to stop his hands from trembling.
*
Two days later, M. Auverney is in Bordeaux. He steps inside an old building with an entrance as imposing as that of a prison. He knows the building intimately, it was he who oversaw its renovation some years ago. He has made this journey especially, just so that he can go in and come out again. As though playing cat and mouse. He came here because he knows that when you enter 28 rue d’Estienne-d’Orves and take the long, winding route through its cellars, you emerge from 76 impasse Maliveau. Here, the alley is deserted. There is a painted green door that leads to a courtyard which offers access to the toilets of Le Balto, a bar that opens onto boulevard Mariani.
M. Auverney walks slowly up the boulevard to the taxi rank
and asks to be driven to the bus station.
*
Sophie stubs out her cigarette, the last in the pack. Since morning, it has been overcast. The sky is fleecy. There is a bracing wind. The waiter, having nothing to do at this hour, loiters by the door next to the terrace table where Sophie has just ordered a coffee.
“It’s a westerly, that . . . Not a chance of rain.”
Sophie responds with a low-key smile. Do not engage in conversation, but do nothing that might make you stand out. After a last glance at the sky to confirm his prognosis, the waiter goes back to the counter. Sophie checks her watch. In the months that she has been on the run, she has trained herself to an implacable self-discipline. She will leave at 2.25 p.m. Not before. It is a five-minute walk, no more. She aimlessly thumbs through the pages of a women’s magazine: “
Ten Things You Need to Know if You’re a Scorpio!”, “Are You Cool Enough to be a Hipster?”, “Tease Him and Please Him!”, “Brit’s Playlist!”, “Lose 5 Kilos in Just 5 Days!”
*
It is 2.25, at last. Sophie leaves some coins on the table and gets up.
It may be a westerly wind, but it is bitterly cold. She turns up the collar of her jacket and crosses the boulevard. At this time, the coach station is almost deserted. Sophie has only one concern: that her father will not have had the same self-discipline. That he will still be there, waiting to see her. Her relief is tempered when she sees that he has obeyed her instructions to the letter. There is no familiar face among the few customers in the snack bar. She crosses the room, goes down a short flight of steps to the toilets and takes the plain brown envelope from behind the cistern. As she emerges onto the street, the first fat raindrops are pounding the pavement. Westerly wind indeed.
*
The
taxi driver is patient.
“Look, as long as the meter is running, I don’t care,” he said.
He has been parked here for almost a quarter of an hour, his customer in the back staring distractedly out of the window. “I’m waiting for someone,” he tells the driver. He has just wiped the misted window. He is elderly, but seems fit for his age. A young woman who has been waiting for the traffic lights to change now crosses the street, turning up the collar of her jacket because it has started to rain. She glances briefly at the taxi, continues on her way and disappears.
“Never mind,” the customer says with a sigh. “I can’t wait around all day. Take me back to the hotel.”
His voice sounds strange.
Marianne
Leblanc. It has taken a real effort to get used to it. Sophie has always hated the name Marianne, though she is not sure why. Probably some girl at school who bullied her. But Sophie had no choice. This is what she has been given: Marianne Leblanc, whose date of birth is eighteen months from her own. It hardly matters, though. It is almost impossible to guess Sophie’s age. She can pass for thirty or for thirty-eight. The certificate is stamped October 23. “As you know, notarised copies of birth certificates are valid for only three months,” the supplier told her. “But that should give you enough time to sort yourself out.”
She can picture him that night as he sets down the birth certificate and slowly counts the money. He does not even have that satisfied smirk of a businessman who has just made a good deal. He is methodical. He is a cold man. Sophie probably did not say a word. She cannot remember now. The next thing she can picture is arriving home, the gaping wardrobe, the open suitcase. She sees herself haphazardly cramming everything into the case, pushing back her fringe, feeling a wave of dizziness and clutching the kitchen door to steady herself. She takes a shower – the water
is freezing. As she dresses again, dazed and exhausted, she makes a last tour of the apartment, checks that she has not forgotten anything important, but by now she cannot see anything. Already she is on her way down the stairs. It is a slow, clear night.
By
now Sophie has got a nose for finding unlicensed studios, unauthorised sublets, cash-in-hand jobs, in short, all the little tricks she needs to settle into a new town. When she arrived here, she combed through the small ads, systematically looking for the worst jobs on offer, those for which no reference would be required. Two days later, she was working with a team of office cleaners – mostly Black and Arab women – under the firm hand of a motherly sadist from Alsace. Salaries are paid in cash every fortnight. The managers of Quik-Kleen consider the quota for declared employees to be reached when half of its cleaners receive a pay slip. Sophie is part of the other half. For form’s sake she protests, while praying to God they will not listen.
At 10.00 every night, Sophie goes outside and waits on the pavement. A shuttle bus comes to pick her up. The teams are dropped off, first at an insurance firm and later at an I.T. company. The “day” finishes at 6.00 a.m. sharp. “Lunch” is eaten in the bus en route between the two jobs.
*
She
has only two and a half months to carry out her plan and it is vital that she succeeds. At the beginning of the month, she had her first meetings. She signed up with a dating agency. Later, she may subscribe to others, but even a single agency is expensive. She stole 1,400 euros from the manager’s office, just enough to fund her initial searches.
Her identity as Marianne Leblanc was guaranteed only as a “medium-term solution”, which means she does not have long. She has settled, therefore, on a golden rule: take the first man who comes along. Although she is utterly desperate, trembling constantly from head to foot, sleeping barely three hours a night and shedding weight with every passing day, on her first date Sophie realised that the word “first” was meaningless. She had drawn up a short checklist: the man must have no children, an uncomplicated private life – as for everything else, she is prepared to make do. At the agency, she pretended that she was not particularly fussy in her criteria. She offered banal phrases: “a simple guy”, “a quiet life”.
René
Bahorel, forty-four, a simple, quiet guy.
They had agreed to meet in a brasserie. She recognised him at once, a chubby-cheeked farmer with terrible B.O. He looked exactly as he had sounded on the telephone. A hearty character.
“I’m from Lembach,” he says knowingly.
It takes her twenty minutes to realise that this means he is a wine-grower who lives somewhere in the back of beyond. Sophie lit a cigarette. He tapped the pack on the table with his finger.
“Let me tell you straight off, if you’re with me, you’ll have to quit.”
He smiled broadly, visibly proud of expressing his authority in what he considers a tactful manner. Like all men who live alone, he is garrulous. Sophie does not need to do anything, she merely stares at him and listens. Her mind is elsewhere. She feels a desperate urge to get away. She imagines the future, visualises the first physical submission to this man and feels the need for another cigarette. He talks about himself, about his smallholding. There has never been a wedding ring on his finger, or if there was, it was long ago. Perhaps it is the stifling heat of the brasserie,
the clamour from the tables where diners are ordering their main courses, but Sophie feels a wave of nausea rising in her stomach.
“. . . I mean, obviously, we get E.U. subsidies, but it’s still a nightmare. What about you?”
The question comes out of the blue.
“What about me?”
“What do you think? Are you interested in farming?”
“Not particularly, to be honest . . .”
Sophie said this because, regardless of the questions, it was the right answer. René says, “Oh.” But the guy is a Weeble, he might wobble, but he won’t fall down. You have to wonder how farmers end up being run over by their own tractors. His vocabulary might be limited, but certain words recur with a worrying insistence. Sophie tries to decode what she is hearing.
“So, your mother lives with you?”
René says, “Oh, yes”, as though reassuring her. Eighty-four years old. And still “fit as a fiddle”. It is terrifying. Sophie imagines herself lying beneath the weight of this man while the old woman prowls the corridors, the shuffle of slippers, the smell of cooking. For a second, she pictures Vincent’s mother in front of her, her back to the stairs, Sophie places her hands on her shoulders and pushes so hard that the old woman seems to soar, her feet do not even touch the first steps, it is as though she had just had a shotgun blast in the chest.
“Have you met a lot of women, René?” Sophie says, leaning towards him.
“You’re the first,” he says, as though this is some kind of achievement.
“Well, take your time deciding . . .”
*
Sophie
put the birth certificate into a transparent plastic folder. She is afraid of mislaying it as she has mislaid so many important things, terrified of losing it. Every night, before she goes to work, she picks up the folder and says aloud:
“I open the wardrobe.”
She closes her eyes, visualises the gesture, her hand, the wardrobe and repeats: “I have opened the wardrobe.”
“I pull out the right-hand drawer; I have pulled out the right-hand drawer . . .”