Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
“Oh, It’s a lo-o-ong story – it could take a year or two, maybe three. Most people never get the chance. My ex-boyfriend doesn’t know how damn lucky he was.”
They both laugh. At the end of the meal, she no longer knows where she stands. They walk along the river bank. A biting cold. A hundred metres on, she slips her arm through his. A moment of complicity has brought them closer together. In the end, he manoeuvred skilfully: he gave up trying to impress. He said simple things: “The way I see it, you might as well just be yourself. Because sooner or later, people will find out who you really are. You might as well let them know from the start.”
“You were talking about postings to overseas territories.”
“Not just French
départements
! You can get yourself posted to foreign countries too. Though I have to admit, that’s pretty rare.”
Sophie is working out a timeline. Meet, marry, move abroad, work, divorce. Perhaps it is an illusion, this thought that she will be safer thousands of kilometres from here. But intuitively she knows she will be better able to hide. While she is thinking, the soldier lists friends who have been posted abroad, those who put in for transfers, those who are still hopeful. God, but the man is so tedious, so trite.
I
am afraid. The dead are surfacing. In the darkness. I can count them one by one. In the darkness, I see them sitting at a table, side by side. In the darkness. At the head of the table is Léo with a bootlace around his throat. He looks at me reproachfully. He says: “Are you mad, Sophie? Why did you strangle me? Is it really true that you’re mad?”; his eyes are probing, piercing. I recognise that puzzled expression, his head tilted to one side as though he is thinking. “It’s true, but it’s nothing new, she was always mad,” Vincent’s mother says. She is trying to be reassuring. I recognise that grim expression, the shrill voice, the eyes like a hyena’s. “She was crazy long before she started killing people and destroying everything around her, I said as much to Vincent, I said, ‘That girl is crazy . . .’ ” She says this solemnly, she closes her eyes for so long when she speaks you wonder if she will ever open them, she spends most of her time with her eyelids closed, gazing deep within herself. “You hate me, Sophie, you always hated me, but now that you’ve killed me . . .” Vincent says nothing more. He shakes his fleshless head as though pleading for mercy. Now they are all staring at me. They say nothing.
I wake with a jolt. When this happens, I can’t get back to sleep. I
go to the window and I stand there for hours, smoking and sobbing.
I even killed my own baby.
They
have been seeing each other for about two weeks. It took Sophie only a few hours to work out what makes the soldier tick. Now, she is simply honing her skills to match his interests, but she remains vigilant.
He allows her to drag him to see “24 Heures de la vie d’une femme” and pretends to enjoy it.
“In the novel it was different, there were only two generations of women,” Sophie explains, lighting a cigarette.
“I haven’t read it, but I’m sure it’s pretty good.”
“Yes,” Sophie says, “the book is pretty good.”
*
She has had to reconstruct a whole biography based on her new birth certificate: who her parents were, where she studied, it is a story she shrouds in mystery for fear of saying too much. The soldier is tactful. As a precaution, she encourages him to talk most of the time. In the evening, when she gets home, she makes notes, she has a jotter that contains everything she knows about him. There is nothing convoluted about his past. Nothing interesting, either. Born October 13, 1973 in Aubervilliers, just
outside Paris. Unremarkable primary and secondary schools, technical college, qualification in electromechanical engineering, enlisted in the army, assigned to the Signals Corps, certificate in telecommunications,
sergent-chef
, possible promotion to
adjudant
.
“So, squid, huh?”
“They’re sometimes called calamari . . .”
He smiles.
“D’you know, I think I’ll go for the steak.”
It is Sophie’s turn to smile.
“You make me laugh.”
“Usually when women say that, it’s not a good sign.”
*
The advantage of soldiers is their directness, that what you see is what you get. He turns out to be very much as Sophie supposed on their first few dates. She has discovered that he is unexpectedly sensitive, the man is not an idiot, he is simple and down to earth. He wants to marry, to have children, he is kind, and even caring. And Sophie has no time to lose. She had little trouble seducing him: he was already seduced, and Sophie was as good a catch as any other woman. In fact she was rather better because she is quite pretty. Since they started dating, she has gone back to buying make-up, she pays a little more attention to what she wears but is careful not to overdress. From time to time, it is clear that the soldier fantasises about certain things. It has been years since any man looked at her with such passionate longing – it feels strange.
*
“Where exactly are we heading?”
“I thought we said we were going to see ‘Alien’.”
“No, I mean us. Where do we stand?”
Sophie
knows exactly where they stand. She has barely two months to carry out her plan. Less the time required to publish the banns. She cannot change her mind now. There’s no time. With any other guy, she would have to start again from scratch. There is no time. She looks at him. She has become accustomed to his face. Or perhaps she just needs him. The result is the same.
“Do you know where you stand?”
“Me? Yes, I think so. But you already know that. What I don’t understand is why you changed your mind, why you called me back.”
“I didn’t change my mind, I just took time to think.”
“No. You changed your mind. On our first date, you’d already made a decision, and it was ‘No’. I don’t understand what made you change your mind. Or why.”
Sophie lights another cigarette. They are in a brasserie. The evening has not been as dull as she had expected. She has only to look at him to know that this man has fallen in love with her. Has she been canny enough to be convincing?
“You’re right. The first time we met, I wasn’t blown away . . . I . . .”
“You met other guys. And they were worse, so you thought to yourself . . .”
Sophie looks him in the eye.
“Well, didn’t you?”
“Marianne, I get the feeling that you’re a terrible liar. No, actually, what I mean is you’re a very good liar, and you’ve lied to me a lot.”
“About what?”
“How would I know? Maybe about everything.”
Sometimes,
she sees such anxiety in his face that she feels a pang of guilt.
“I suppose you have your reasons,” he says. “I’ve got my own ideas on the subject, but maybe I’m better off not prying.”
“Why?”
“When you decide to tell me, you’ll tell me.”
“So what
are
your ideas on the subject?”
“There are things in your past that you can’t bring yourself to talk about. But I don’t mind.”
He looks at her, hesitates. He pays the bill. Finally, he takes the plunge.
“I think maybe – I don’t know . . . maybe you were in prison or something like that.”
He looks at her again, a sidelong glance. Sophie thinks rapidly. “Let’s say something like that. Nothing terribly serious, but I don’t like to talk about it.”
He nods sympathetically.
“But what is it exactly that you want?”
“I want to be an ordinary woman, with a husband and kids. That’s all.”
“I have to say, you don’t exactly seem the type.”
Sophie feels a cold chill down her back. She tries to smile. They have left the restaurant, the night is ink black, the cold wind whips their faces. She has slipped her arm through his as she always does now. She turns to face him.
“I was thinking of asking you to come home with me. But maybe you’re not the type.”
He swallows hard.
*
He does his best. He is very attentive. When Sophie sobs, he says,
“We don’t have to . . .” She says, “Help me.” He wipes away her tears. She says, “It’s not about you, you do know that.” He says, “I know.” Sophie thinks that this man might be able to understand everything. He is calm, unhurried, careful, all things that she never expected of him. It has been a long time since she had a man inside her. For a while, she closes her eyes as though she is drunk and desperately wants the world to stop spinning so fast. She guides him. She encourages him. She breathes in his familiar smell which until now she has caught only at a distance. It is the anonymous smell of male lust. She manages to choke back her tears. He is careful not to put his weight on her, he seems to be deferring the moment of climax, she smiles up at him. She says, “Come . . .” He is like a callow boy. She hugs him to her. He is under no illusion that this is love.
They lie there in silence, she looks at the time. Each of them knows what they do not have to say to the other. They are both casualties of life, and for the first time she wonders what happened to him that hurt so.
“What about your story, the real story?” she says, coiling his chest hair between her fingers.
“I’m a pretty ordinary guy.”
And Sophie wonders whether this is his answer.
When you work night shifts, everything is out of sync. As he is drifting off to sleep, Sophie gets up and goes downstairs to catch the shuttle bus.
*
They are still together: Véronique and the manager from the fast-food restaurant. She killed them both in the same way. She cannot
remember how. They are lying side by side on the steel autopsy table in the morgue. Like man and wife. Covered by a white sheet. Sophie walks past the table and, although they are both dead, their eyes are open and they watch eagerly as she passes. Only their eyes move. As she moves around the end of the table, passing the backs of their heads, blood slowly begins to ooze, they smile
.
“’fraid so!”
Sophie whips round
.
“It’s like your hallmark. A few swift blows to the back of the skull.”
The manager of the agency is wearing a pale-yellow shirt and a green tie. His tight trousers make his paunch look bigger, his flies are undone. He steps forward like a pathologist, he is pedantic, self-assured, precise, surgical. And smiling. A sardonic smile
.
“Sometimes just the one.”
He is standing at one end of the slab, looking down at the skulls of the deceased. Blood drips to the floor, fat drops splashing on the concrete, spattering the turn-ups of his trousers
.
“Take our friend here [he bends down and reads the tag] . . . Véronique. That’s right, Véronique. Five stab wounds to the stomach. To the stomach, Sophie, honestly! Well, never mind, let’s move on. This man here [he reads the tag] . . . David. In his case, you had a weapon to hand. A baseball bat David kept purely for decorative purposes, and here he is, his skull caved in with the logo of the Cincinnati Reds. Some deaths are absurd, don’t you think?”
He moves away from the table and walks towards Sophie. She backs against the wall. Still he keeps coming, smiling:
“And then there is me. I was a little luckier: there was no knife, no baseball bat around, I had it easy, I can’t complain. I’m sure if you could have, you would have smashed my head against the wall and I would be dead, like the others, from a fractured skull. I, too,
would be bleeding from the back of the head.”
Sophie watches as a bloodstain suddenly spreads down the back of his yellow shirt. He smiles
.
“Just like that, Sophie.”
He is standing right in front of her, she can smell his acrid breath
.
“You are a very dangerous woman, Sophie. And yet men fall in love with you, don’t they? You have killed many. Do you plan to kill all the people you love, Sophie? All those who get close to you?”
These
smells, these gestures, these moments . . . In Sophie’s mind they are an omen of what is to come. She will need an escape plan. When the time comes. But all of that is in the future; right now she needs to fake it. To fake it convincingly. No outward show of passion, this is a relationship based on mutual benefit, but one that promises more. They have spent four nights together. Tonight is the fifth. The second in a row. Because she needs to speed things up. She has managed to swap shifts for a few days with one of the girls on the other cleaning team. He comes to pick her up. She slips her arm through his, tells him about her day. By the second time, it is already a habit. As for everything else, he is attentive to the smallest detail. Sometimes it seems as though every gesture is a matter of life and death to him. She tries to reassure him, tries to make their new-found tenderness seem less contrived, less artificial. She cooks for him on the two-ring hotplate in his tiny apartment. Gradually, he relaxes. In bed, he does nothing unless she makes the first move. She does so every time. And every time it terrifies her. She pretends. Sometimes, for an instant only, she imagines she could be happy. The very thought makes her cry. It
is something he never sees because it comes at the end, when he has fallen asleep, when she is staring at the dreary bedroom in the murky darkness. At least he does not snore.
Sophie spends long hours like this, watching the images of her life unspool. As always, the tears come of themselves, foreign to her, unrelated to her. Little by little, she slides towards the sleep she finds so terrifying. Sometimes, she reaches for his hand and grips it tightly.
It
is a dry cold. They are leaning on the wrought-iron railings, the fireworks have just begun. Children scamper along the tree-lined avenue, parents stare into the heavens, mouths agape. The sound of war. The explosions are sometimes preceded by an ominous whistling. The sky glows orange. She presses herself against him. For the first time she needs him, truly needs to nestle in his arms. He slips an arm around her shoulders. It could be anyone. It is him. It could be worse. She strokes his cheek, turns his face towards her. She kisses him. The sky glimmers blue and green. He says something she does not catch because a rocket explodes at that moment. From the look on his face, it was something nice. She nods.