Talking to Ghosts Read online

  He woke to find himself alone, with birds waging war in the branches above and the light, which had paled to yellow, now spread at his feet. He struggled out of the deckchair and looked around. Traces of dust still hung over the deserted football pitch. He imagined himself the sole survivor of an apocalypse, which sleep had allowed him to come through unscathed, and took a few steps, tasting the illusory power of this solitude. A wasp buzzed around his face and he lashed out and saw it fall to the ground, where he crushed it with the toe of his espadrille. He picked up his book and walked towards the building, its windows and shutters closed now to try to maintain some semblance of coolness inside. He was sweating, his T-shirt was stuck to his skin and he tugged at it, shaking the hem to dry the sweat that trickled from creases and crevices where it had collected. It would probably be cooler inside. He longed for shade, for darkness. He also longed to take a shower and thought of the cold showers he used to take at home all the time, and how he used to run out into the garden afterwards without bothering to towel himself dry, just to feel the cool air wash over him for a few minutes. He dismissed the idea as he thought of the only options now open to him: those cold, tiled cubicles that constantly rang with the voices, groans and whistles of other boys.

  He took the stairs three at a time and shut himself in the dim light of his bedroom, and as he turned the key into the lock the door creaked on its hinges and the boy’s heart stopped as he peered into the darkness, trying to make out who was moving about in the room.

  He saw a stooped form sitting on the bed, saw the open urn sitting on his lap, saw the hand hastily withdraw.

  “Put it down.”

  “What is it?” the boy said.

  His name was Nicolas. He was tall and thin, his arms and legs were solid muscle, with long hands that lashed out and punched at random. Victor had seen him keeping watch at night over the table football. His eyes gleamed faintly in the darkness, broken only by a vertical strip of light between the closed shutters. His eyes were very pale, huge, wide with surprise or perhaps fear. He was much taller and stronger than Victor, but he stared at him anxiously, without the slightest expression of defiance, perhaps because he sensed this was something he could not understand. He put the lid back on the urn, hugging it to him, and wiped first one hand and then the other on his shorts to get rid of whatever had stuck to them with sweat.

  “Down,” Victor said.

  No air seemed to come from his throat. He took two steps and knocked over the other boy, just as he set the crimson urn down next to him on the bed. The intruder’s head hit the wall at the foot of the bed and he fell on his back, his arms and legs thrashing, and, feet together, Victor jumped on his stomach so that the boy could not even scream, his breathing coming in short, ragged gasps. Victor clamped his hands around the boy’s neck, his fingers squeezing the carotid artery like a vice, felt the boy’s hands gripping his wrists, still covered with a film of his mother’s ashes, and he focused his whole weight on his fingertips that gripped the boy’s throat. In that moment he could have dug straight through the skin, into the very pulse of the blood that he could feel pounding frantically beneath his fingernails, and he brought his mouth close to the boy’s face, already bloated by suffocation, feeing a sudden urge to gnaw off a hunk of flesh and spit it back in his face, but, as he was about to bite down, as his lips brushed the cheek just below the right eye, he felt someone yank him back and instinctively Victor grabbed a big hank of dark hair so as he toppled onto his back he pulled the boy’s crimson face towards him, the eyes bulging, staring and so swollen with terror they looked as though they might pop like the corks from a wineskin. Victor wriggled away from the hands gripping him, managing to headbutt the apoplectic face in front of him. The boy let out a groan and fell backwards, blood spurting from his nose or his mouth, and Victor pounded his head against the wall, the dull thuds setting off panicked cries from behind him. He felt an arm around his throat cutting off his breathing and he let go as voices screamed at him, Stop, Calm down, Are you crazy or something? What the fuck has got into you? Stop that right now.

  The bodies of the two boys were disentangled, one convulsed with pain and fear, the other paralysed with rage, a mute statue of fury, all muscle and nerves.

  Victor was pushed to one side and rolled against the wardrobe door where he curled into a ball, hands on his head, fingers gripping the hank of hair that he had ripped out. He heard the other boy panting and coughing, snivelling and sobbing like a child. He closed his eyes, turning his back on the cacophony of voices murmuring vague, useless, anxious or reassuring platitudes that drowned out the moans of the boy who for some reason they were now calling Thomas.

  Someone leaned over his shoulder and said that they would have to have words about this later, that it was a serious matter, and then the noise abruptly faded, and the silence was so dense he could hear his heart pounding with hatred, wracking his whole chest. He lay curled up on the carpet for a long time, maybe an hour, moving only to stretch a hand out and pull the upturned urn towards to him, hugging it to his neck. Fragments of memory came to him: images, a few happy feelings. He heard voices echoing within him, dominated by his mother’s: the tone of the voices was so clear, so precise in their inflections that for a moment he thought that they were in this very room talking to him, he felt almost sure that if he turned he would see all these strangers whispering into his ear with that kindness that made him smile in spite of himself, so he did not turn around, he clung to this pleasure like a child slowly unwrapping a present, savouring the moment when it will finally appear.

  He must have been dreaming. He remembered a film he had seen once in which unearthly voices heralded the appearance of mournful ghosts who demanded that the survivor exact revenge for the agonies they had endured. He wondered whether his dead mother might not be calling to him from the beyond and at first the thought frightened him, though later it reassured him since it was so easy to respond to her request. But Victor did not believe in the afterlife, he did not believe in salvation, and so he turned back to the empty room, shrugging off the idea. All that remained of the living, he was convinced, was contained in the urn that he now opened to study the grey ash so recently profaned, and he began to cry, his tears falling into the vessel, leaving darker spots, a fine drizzle on parched soil.

  That evening he found himself alone at dinner. The two brothers had initially walked towards his table but changed their mind and sat some distance away, staring at him gravely, holding their forks aloft, before starting to eat with the same mechanical gestures. The conversations seemed less raucous. The girls seemed quieter than usual, and Victor caught them looking at him and turning away as soon as he looked back, but they did not laugh, they only talked in low voices.

  Victor got up to stack his plate and his cutlery on the trolley and headed into the T.V. lounge where the sound of the set drowned out the voices of the younger kids who had raced to play table football before the older boys chased them away, as they always did. The boy called Nicolas was nowhere to be seen. Victor sat on a red sofa near the open window, through which a warm breeze blew, stretching his legs out, staring out at the dark green shadows of the grounds framed against the grey-green sky, marked by high clouds that perhaps heralded a storm. He was not looking for anything, was not thinking about anything, or maybe he was thinking so many impossible things that it amounted to the same thing. He strained to isolate the muffled roar of cars on the motorway from the muddle of sound.

  The following day Victor was summoned to the director’s office, with Bernard and Farid, to be questioned about the incident the night before. The director ran a worried hand over his close-cropped grey hair. He demonstrated his irritation at Victor’s frequent silences and his mumbled, often unintelligible answers, by taking deep breaths, his nostrils flared, his beady eyes staring from behind his thick glasses before sinking back heavily into his armchair.

  Head bowed, glancing up surreptitiously at the men, Victor explained through clenc
hed teeth that it had been the other boy’s fault for touching … He could not bring himself to name the object, alluding to it with faltering words and silences.

  The three adults explained to him that such violence could not be tolerated, that it was no way to settle a disagreement. Naturally they understood that he had experienced a terrible tragedy; what had happened to his mother was appalling, it was shocking, but it was no excuse. He was an intelligent young man, surely he could understand that if he were to perpetuate the sort of violence his mother had suffered, there would be no end to it. They explained the concept of a vicious cycle. They patiently took it in turns, speaking in the same placid tone, despite the different timbres of their voices, but their words, which were intended to placate, became a garbled murmur, fraying like a piece of fabric against a blade as they began to grope for something new to say, for anything to say, and finally, faced with the boy’s obdurate muteness, they trailed off into silence.

  That night, when it got dark, he listened to some rap on his MP3 player, lying on the bed and staring out of the open window. He grew tired of the swaggering proclamations of the ghetto and grabbed his mother’s Walkman and slotted in one of the cassettes the police had randomly packed, on which she had recorded a few of the old-fashioned, elegiac singers she would hum along to, suddenly dreamy and sad whenever she heard them on the radio.

  When these songs from the past had died away, he noticed that a still, deep silence had settled all around him, and the moment was so tender that he suddenly found himself wishing that day would never dawn again.

  6

  Vilar slept through the night only to be woken, sweating, heart hammering, by a nightmare, the same nightmare he always had: someone was ringing his doorbell and he ran to open it, but his legs refused to respond, he could see the dark door at the far end of the hall, quivering from the intense ringing, he choked with fear at the thought of what would happen, panting as he tried in vain to run, and then suddenly he would find himself on the threshold, the door would open, and a sobbing man would place Pablo’s lifeless body in his arms and vanish into thin air, and Vilar would hear himself crying out as he hugged his dead son close, but when he finally looked down the face was not that of his son, the features faded, became blurred, anonymous, though in his mind he knew that it was Pablo, my son, my son, Ana, come quick, help me, but Ana did not come because the nightmare always stopped on that moment of utter isolation, that dizzying drifting through space, that howl as white-hot metal seared the terrible truth into his brain: Pablo is dead, Pablo is dead.

  Vilar wiped away the tears streaking his face with the back of his hand and glanced at the clock radio. He waited for his pounding heart to be still, trying, as he always did, to picture the face of the man from the nightmare, who vanished as he howled with grief, a face that seemed ordinary, familiar, a mask at once recognisable and impossible to make out. But the pale screen of the ceiling remained blank as the morning light slowly crept over it, stealing through chinks in the shutters.

  He got up. He did what people usually do in the morning, he did it unthinkingly, motivated only by the need to get moving, to get through another day. He wondered when these “heart-rending dawns” would end, tried to remember where that phrase came from, a poem maybe, something he had studied in some other life. Not his early-morning life, jolting and creaking like some rickety train along a disused railway line. Sometimes he reached for the communication cord, the emergency button that would stop the train, but could never quite bring himself to press it.

  Courage or cowardice? He had weighed these words, measured their elusiveness, endlessly rehashed this fruitless argument. In the end he had decided to act according to his preference, or his utter lack of preference. To act on instinct.

  He basked in the sun out on the balcony that morning, sitting on a plastic chair, sipping a cup of coffee. He listened to the birds trilling and rustling the leaves of the trees in the park. The heat was sufficiently mild that he closed his eyes and surrendered to it. The moment was sufficient unto itself: it evoked no past, aroused no feeling of nostalgia, and the longer he could drag it out the longer he could stave off the future.

  The phone rang. Vilar felt himself rudely torn from this luminous interlude. Stepping back into the dark apartment, he could hear nothing but a faint buzzing.

  “It’s Daras. We’ve tracked down the three people involved in the train station stabbing. They’re at 25 rue des Douves. We’re meeting up outside the police station at Les Capucins. Half an hour. Get your arse in gear.”

  He felt a tingle beneath his skin. That nervous electricity, those galvanic shocks that shot down to his fingertips. He stood motionless, staring at the telephone, savouring this feeling, his eyes closed, massaging his temples with his fingertips, then he managed to get ready within five minutes. His movements felt easy, lithe, confident. He turned away from the window and all its pointless light.

  The police station at Les Capucins, next to the covered market, looked like a matchbox laid on its side. A squat, narrow, brown building, it was singularly ugly, the windows conspicuously barred.

  As he drew up beside the cars already parked there, Vilar imagined the possibility of the three duty officers having to withstand a siege some night, remembering a film he had seen years ago, John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13”, because the station’s layout and its surroundings lent themselves to that sort of sordid, violent scenario. The first man he saw as he got out of his car was taking a pump-action shotgun from the boot of a Peugeot and checking that it was loaded. His name was Garcia, and he wore a bulletproof vest. Vilar abandoned any attempt to consult his increasingly selective memory for the man’s first name – Didier, Denis? Or maybe Gérard? What did it matter, he thought, and shook Garcia’s hand.

  “Is it war? Have they found Bin Laden?”

  Garcia screwed up his mouth.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  Ever since the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers, Garcia had made a personal crusade of tracking down terrorists. He saw himself as a soldier in the war between good and evil, between Western values and barbaric obscurantism. His voice took on a tragic quality whenever the subject was mentioned: Western civilisation was at stake, and he was not about to allow people to joke about such things. Rumour had it he had applied for a transfer to the intelligence services, the R.G. or the D.S.T., so that he could join the grown-up version of hide-and-seek, and jokers would ask him when he planned to take the entrance exam for the C.I.A. Vilar laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Relax, pal, and take it easy on the ammo.”

  He spotted Daras talking on her car phone and walked over. She hung up and flashed him a half-smile.

  “Glad you could make it. Hope I didn’t get you out of bed?”

  “No. I was drinking coffee on my balcony, listening to the birds singing, that kind of shit. It was really sunny.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. Unconvinced.

  “Marianne, I was having a moment, O.K.? I was almost happy.”

  A police radio crackled in her pocket. She brought it to her ear and listened, nodding.

  “Game on.”

  They piled into two cars. Daras, Vilar and a lieutenant from Galand’s squad in a clapped-out 306, the others in a brand-new Renault estate. It took only a few seconds to arrive in front of 25 rue des Douves. Two cars from the G.I.G.N. Special Ops unit pulled up at the same time and officers in combat gear jumped out: some took up positions with backs flat against the front of the building, others crouching in the hallway, waiting for orders.

  As he got out of the car, Vilar noticed that the street was cordoned off at both ends and swarming with officers. Pradeau appeared out of nowhere, carrying a gun.

  “One of the guys has a record for aggravated assault and possession of a firearm,” he said. “It was Daras who insisted we come tooled up. You’re not carrying?”

  Vilar pushed back the flap of his jacket.

  “No, I’ve
got nothing. Just this. At least this way people will know who I am.”

  He took a police armband from his pocket and slipped it over the sleeve of his jacket.

  The apartment was on the first floor. They plunged into the dark hallway, Daras leading the way, as usual. Two men in helmets carrying a battering ram ran past her, and everyone else moved away from the entrance and out of the line of fire. The apartment door splintered like a Chinese paper screen and Garcia disappeared inside, waving his gun, kicking over furniture and roaring “Police!” The others following him spread out through a dark flat, stumbling over the junk strewn across the floor: chairs, clothes, glasses, bottles. The place reeked of dope and stale sweat, of mildew and smelly feet. A voice shouted “Light!”, someone threw open a shutter with a loud bang, and sunlight flooded into a living room looking like a rubbish tip, piled with pizza boxes, Chinese takeaway boxes, beer cans, and empty wine bottles. The ashtrays were overflowing with cigarette butts and the remains of spliffs. Hunkering down amid the chaos, an officer started to make an inventory.

  They found the three suspects in the bedrooms, in bed – alone or accompanied – together with two others. They identified the girl who had been spotted at the crime scene by her short orange hair. When they asked her to stand up, the hulking skinhead she was snuggled up to hurled himself at the two policemen trying to prise them apart, and the ensuing tussle amid the sweaty sheets was swiftly concluded by a rifle butt to the recalcitrant thug’s face. The girl yelled something about making a formal complaint about police brutality, and one of the officers mockingly suggested she might like to get some clothes on first. Hands cuffed behind his back, her self-appointed bodyguard was left sprawled naked on the bed; someone would see to his bloody, broken nose later.