Lost (17 page)

Stuart walked quickly along the wide market street that led from the Old Port to the Fritz Bar. Stunted palms giving no shade sprang from the hot granite pavements. There was an unpleasant smell in the air of burned rubber and rotting vegetables. He had thought the street deserted; now he noticed a silent audience of old women standing, alone or in pairs, on the rectangular pedestal of shade offered by their doorsteps. He stepped into the road to avoid passing too close to them and trod on a slice of pineapple fermenting in the gutter. He scraped his shoe clean, aware of the women’s scrutiny. They were looking at his fluorescent orange arm band with ‘Police’ printed in black, hovering between their desire for a little entertainment and their lifelong habit of obstruction. On the island there were different codes for men and women. The women never talked and never signed their statements, while for the men there was nothing that couldn’t be discussed at the right price. It was this combination of the women’s silence and the men’s loquacity that made his work so hard.

Paul’s call had come when Alice was still asleep. Stuart had taken it in the kitchen in front of Babette. The hideout had been found and an as yet unidentified body, but the child had gone. In the background Stuart listened to Babette noisily preparing a tray for Alice. Perhaps it had been the sight of Babette pushing through the swing doors with the tray for her – he did not know – but he had left without telling her.

He now turned into the narrow street that ran behind the Fritz Bar. A jagged line divided the street between sun and shade. People leaned out of the windows high up in the
decrepit façades on either side of him and he knew he was nearing the site. Someone shouted out something he didn’t hear and there was female laughter. He looked up and saw a middle-aged man in a vest, leaning from the third floor of the Hôtel Majestic. The shutters of the ochre building opened upwards, casting rhomboid shadows on the wall. The man in the Majestic was smoking a cheroot. He waved it in the air as he shouted.

‘You’re too late! You’re always too late. How can you ever expect any order on this island? They’re a bunch of kids but they run rings round you.’ The man had an Italian accent. ‘How old are you, anyway? You should have retired!’ he yelled.

As he turned the corner, Stuart smiled.

The street was barricaded. A CRS nodded at his ID and stepped aside to let him pass. Romano’s Pizza was at the end. The
sapeurs
’ red van shielded the entrance from view. He had told Paul to wait for him; he wanted to look at the body. He could now see Romano, a fat man with a grey ponytail, red shirt and black trousers, standing with his back to him, smoking with a raised elbow. Stuart walked past the proprietor without greeting him: the man was a big-mouth. A couple of teenagers in aprons stood beside him, their hands bleached with flour, looking impressed.

Two uniformed policemen were standing beside their vehicle not far from the entrance to the garage. Stuart recognised one of them, a blond youth with a crew-cut and a red face, whose uniform always looked too small for him. His face lit up when he saw Stuart.

‘How are you, Commissaire?’ he said, holding out his hand.

Stuart took it, patting him on the shoulder.

‘Good to see you.’ He held out his hand to the other cop who saluted with great austerity. Stuart nodded and smiled and turned back to the blond youth. ‘Not fed up yet?’ he asked him, moving away towards the garage door.

‘No, no, I love it here,’ he said, breathing in the freshness that was a figment of his imagination.

The boy came from La Rochelle. He was always enthusiastic when he saw Stuart, who was ashamed that he could not remember his name. The boy followed him to the entrance of the garage.

‘Is it a reprisal killing?’ he asked.

Stuart looked down the slope into the cool, dark interior. The garage was deep and narrow, wide enough for one car. There was a smell of diesel.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know what it is.’ He moved down the ramp towards Paul, who was standing at the far end with a small man in a suit.

‘Fausto Ribeira,’ Paul told him as he approached. ‘He owns the garage.’

Fausto had an exaggeratedly worried expression on his face and he stood there fingering the brim of the cane trilby in his hands. His moustache was the two pencil-thin strokes favoured by the Portuguese of his generation.

He pleaded with Stuart. ‘I have told everything to your colleague. I didn’t want to let the garage. It was for sale. I put an ad in “Person to Person”. He called because he saw by my name I was Portuguese. I said okay. He seemed a nice boy on the phone; he was respectful. He said he was from Lisbon. I’m from Braga but, as I said, he sounded nice.’

‘What name did he give?’

‘Santos.’ Fausto looked consolingly at them. ‘It’s a very common name. He said he was only staying on the island for the summer. He had a sweetheart. He said he wanted somewhere to keep his bike, just for the summer. He had plenty of money.’

‘He offered cash?’ Stuart asked.

Fausto hesitated. He looked down at his hat, then at Paul, then at Stuart.

‘Things are difficult for me. I done two bathrooms and a patio last month without getting paid. I had to lay off my
nephew. There’s no work and when there’s work they don’t pay you.’

‘You’d never seen him before?’

The man shook his head.

‘He was young. I thought he was a bit young to have so much cash. But this island is full of kids loaded with cash. I don’t have to tell you that.’

‘You said you didn’t think he was an islander. Why?’

Fausto looked hurt.

‘He said he was on holiday. When I met him he was…’ He stroked his cheek with the back of his fingers.

‘What?’ Paul said.

‘He was coloured.’

‘Black.’

‘No, not quite black. Tanned. Very tanned. He spoke very bad Portuguese.’

Stuart turned to the boy from La Rochelle.

‘Take him back to the office, will you? Someone will take your statement, Monsieur Ribeira.’

Fausto followed the youth up the ramp into the sunlight, keeping a respectful two paces behind.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Stuart said.

Stuart listened to Paul Fizzi’s explanations. There was a workbench two and a half metres long and fifty centimetres wide, running the full length of what looked like the wall of the garage but was in fact a breeze-block screen built by the kidnappers. The workbench had been pulled back to reveal a heavy wooden panel low down in the screen wall. The panel, about seventy centimetres square, had served as a door. It now hung open on its hinges. On the inside, there was a plaster wall, thirteen millimetres thick. They had shot away an area of plaster and uncovered the metal case containing the electric locking mechanism. There were four .38 bullets, two lodged in the cement wall and two, found on the floor of the hideout, that had been compressed by the impact on the metal case. One of the compressed bullets must have
triggered
the locking device, enabling their escape. Paul had counted five impacts. If the shots were fired with a Smith and Wesson .38, as he suspected, then the kidnappers had been extremely lucky: only one bullet had remained in the chamber when the door had clicked open.

When Paul had finished he stood there awkwardly, scratching his eyebrow. It was sad that the more conscientious Paul tried to be, the more Stuart was aware that he would never make a good policeman. He turned away and crouched down in front of the entrance to the hideout.

There was a strong smell in the room, like unwashed feet. As he stood up, Stuart realised it was the corpse. The hideout, which was about two metres by three, was already overcrowded; there was Fabrice with his cameras, Gérard, the dead Portuguese and now himself and Paul.

Fabrice made for the exit.

‘I’ve finished,’ he said. ‘I shot a roll. I think there’s plenty.’

The others did not acknowledge his departure. Everything about Fabrice – the red spectacles, the grey, curly hair, the biro on a string round his neck – was in keeping with the dogged, disapproving behaviour of the militant unionist, and yet Stuart had come to like him.

Stuart stepped towards the body. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet. He bent down and touched the spilled liquid, still sticky. It looked like Coca-Cola.

Gérard and Paul stood and watched him as he peered at the body, keeping his shoes outside the limits of the congealed blood. From the look of the man’s clothes and his small, smooth hands, he was young. He had been shot twice. The bullet in his lower abdomen had caused abundant bleeding, which suggested a hollow bullet. The one in the back of the head had caused instant death. He had not been shot with the same weapon that had been used to open the door. He must have fallen forward on to what was left of his face and then been turned over.

‘To get the keys to the cupboard,’ Stuart said out loud.

‘He’s got a holster in his boot,’ Paul said. ‘They took his weapon.’

‘After they shot him,’ Stuart said. ‘They shot him first, in the stomach, from there.’ He pointed to the entrance. ‘He was holding a glass so he was taken by surprise. He must have trusted them.’

‘They had a key,’ Gérard said.

Stuart looked up at the sound of his voice, slightly effeminate, theatrical.

‘We think it was an accomplice,’ Paul said.

Stuart nodded.

‘Who had to shoot their way out,’ he said.

‘They open the door, shoot the person guarding the kid, take the kid and leave the other member of their gang shut in with the dead man.’ Paul paused, looking perplexed. ‘And they leave him a gun.’

‘They took the weapon from the dead man,’ Stuart said. ‘From the holster. It’s the right size for an S and W.’

Stuart stepped carefully around the body. He peered into the cupboard and was struck by the smell of urine. He thought of Alice waking up to discover that he had left without her. As he had driven through the gates he had imagined her watching him from the window. Now he was relieved that she had not had to see this place. There was no light for the child and no ventilation except for a few holes high up in the partition wall. There was a desiccated piece of ravioli on the thin foam mattress. If the boy had had a blanket, they had taken it with them.

‘Maybe somebody lost it,’ Paul said.

‘It’s either a sudden, very stupid fight, or it’s a second group who came in and took over,’ Stuart said.

‘How many people are there on this island ready to do a kidnapping?’ Gérard asked.

Stuart nodded at the corpse.

‘What did the doctor say? How long had he been dead for?’

‘Six to eight hours,’ Gérard said.

‘When is the autopsy?’

‘Three,’ Gérard said. ‘I’ll go.’

Stuart looked at Gérard and then at Paul.

‘You know who it is, don’t you?’ he said.

‘Who?’ Gérard said.

‘Mickey da Cruz,’ Stuart said. The three of them looked at the dead youth. ‘Look at the boots,’ Stuart said. ‘And the legs. Look.’

Gérard and Paul looked down at the corpse with its bowed legs and its gory head, their faces full of respect now that it had a name.

‘What got into him?’ Paul said.

‘Funny,’ Gérard said. ‘I always thought Mickey was an Arab.’

‘He always dressed like Lucky Luke,’ Paul said.

The words sounded like a kind of homage. They stood still for a moment, the three of them bound together by the ugliness of all the things they had seen. For a moment none of them was in a hurry to leave the stinking room and the dead Portuguese boy and go back to the surface where they were despised, in part for what they saw. Stuart welcomed back the familiar sensation of detachment. He was free, for a moment, from the terrible longing that had been growing inside him over the past few days. It was a pain that he recognised, not as something he had experienced before but as something that had been lying there all along, waiting to declare itself. Stuart realised that he missed Alice all the time, even when he was with her.

Now Paul and Gérard were watching him and he scanned the room for something with which to cover the boy’s ruined head. He fetched a checked tea towel from by the sink and laid it over the head, but it only lent a more cartoon appearance to the legs.

Alice walked down the narrow alley to the main square. She was light-headed with lack of food and sleep. It had been three days since she had dragged Dan behind her up this street. She now looked at her surroundings: at the golden light of evening cutting long shadows on the walls, at the cobbles and the weeds growing between them, at the telephone wires, running back and forth in slack lines and at the swallows far above. Like a convalescent who has long had to do without it, she felt the beauty of the object world and its irrelevance. The alley steepened and she slowed her pace. Santini was waiting for her. He had the money: nine million in the correct notes. Her heart beat faster at the thought of it.

She had been woken that morning by her heartbeat, chill with panic. She had run downstairs in her nightdress and met Babette in the hall. She was carrying a tray. The
inappropriateness
of the tray, the guilt at having slept, if only for a few hours, and the knowledge, even as she asked, that Stuart had gone, made her burst into tears. A policeman she had not seen before, crossing the hall, had looked up and seen her sitting on the stairs, weeping. Babette had made her some coffee, which she had drunk in silence in the kitchen, Dan on her knee. Stuart’s empty cup was still unwashed on the table. She had stared at it as if it were a fetish, willing him to call her. She had waited all morning, playing Pelmanism with Dan on the kitchen table, then noughts and crosses in spilled salt. This he enjoyed and he had wanted to play again and again. The policeman had sat hunched over Paul’s crossword magazine, raising his head occasionally to give Dan a wink and a smile. Babette stood at the sink, scrubbing mussels in a deep pot: God only knew who they were for. When
the policeman had left the room to go and piss, Alice had jumped up, pushing Dan too brutally from her lap and knocking over her chair. Babette and Dan had watched while she called Santini. His wife’s voice was full of kindness and Alice had felt herself weaken. She had delivered her message quickly and hung up.

At six, Babette had taken Dan for a walk and she had shut herself in the study to watch the kidnappers’ video and wait. While she sat there watching, the images of her son had begun to take on the colour of archive. Santini and Stuart had both disappeared. Sam may have been found but something had gone wrong. When the call came at last and it was Santini, she took it as a sign: she would cut herself off from Stuart. As the eight o’clock news began, she had turned the TV on loud and climbed out of the study window.

She emerged from the narrow alley into the main square. Three old women were sitting on folding chairs, their backs against the wall of the
mairie
, facing the orange sun. She felt them watching her as she walked towards the chestnut trees. She passed quickly beneath the trees, steeling herself against the sound of the breeze in their leaves.

She had taken Sam’s rucksack instead of her handbag, which her mother had bought for her in Rome on their last trip. The bag suddenly seemed like an ugly object from someone else’s past. Inside the rucksack she had put Stuart’s gun. She could feel it hitting the small of her back as she walked.

He had let her down. The kidnappers had made their request. All that mattered was that they got their money in time.

‘It won’t help you to give them the money,’ Stuart had told her. His remark now struck her as morbid, cruel even.

She found the entrance to the four flights of stone steps, a narrow gap in a wall covered with ivy, angry with starlings. She could not see the birds but she could hear their screeching. She made her way down the steps, weaving through ten
or fifteen cats, some warming themselves on the stone, others gliding back and forth, taking no account of her. At the bottom of the steps there was a low wall on the other side of which was a steep drop to the brown sluggish stream below. Santini’s house was to the left, at the end of an alley. There was a smell of open drains and the sound of a radio coming from somewhere above her head: the news jingle as it ended. She passed under a bridge linking two houses and stopped in front of the wrought-iron gate. The bell rang inside the house and she heard a door open and soft shoes slapping the ground. An old woman stood before her, holding the gate open. Behind her was a courtyard full of chickens. The woman said good morning and stood aside to let her pass, betraying no curiosity. Alice followed her across the courtyard and up three steps to the front door. They stepped into a dark hall.

‘He’s in the kitchen,’ the woman said. She sounded out of breath. ‘Through here.’

They passed along a narrow, very brightly lit corridor. The woman halted in front of a door and looked at her.

‘I’m sorry about your son,’ she said. Alice recognised the gentleness from the phone call. The woman’s dark eyes shone. ‘I’d do anything to help you.’ She found Alice’s hand and gripped it hard. ‘Anything,’ she said. Then she let go and threw open the door to the kitchen, standing aside to let her pass.

Santini was sitting at the head of the table. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a tropical motif. He ran his fingertips up and down his forearm, folded across his chest, as though he were nursing himself. He did not stand up but let his wife pull out the chair to his right. She lifted it carefully so that it did not scrape the floor. Alice took off Sam’s rucksack, clutching it on her knee, and sat down. Santini put his hands, palms down, on the table, looking at them while he spoke.

‘I was right. Your son was in town …’

‘What do you mean was?’ He was not looking at her. He
would not be interrupted. ‘Where is he?’ She shouted: ‘Where is he now? Tell me!’

Santini looked calmly at her.

‘He was being held in a hideout in Massaccio by a group of three.’ He spoke without altering his tone, slowly and quietly, his deep voice reverberating in the small room. ‘The boy who organised it was shot this morning. They shot him and took your son.’

‘Who did? Where did they take him?’ Alice felt the room was listing. She reached out and gripped Santini’s arm. ‘Do you know who it was?’

He looked at her coldly. His eyes were like two yellow fishes.

‘No,’ he said, placing a hand over hers. ‘But we’ll find out.’

‘Take me there,’ she said, standing up. She was weak and dizzy and she could feel herself swaying. She fixed on his blue beard that floated above the dense jungle of his shirt. ‘Take me there.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Stuart’s there.’

‘So what? Take me there.’ Alice felt the floor was rising up to meet her. Someone was beside her, holding her elbow. ‘Please,’ she said.

‘Will you drink something?
Sirop
de
menthe
?’ His wife was helping her back into the chair. Alice heard her slippers on the floor as she moved about the kitchen and her voice, continual and soothing. ‘You have to take something, you’re very weak; you can see in your face, you haven’t had enough to eat, you need sugar. Then we can help you. You’ve got to get your strength up, hasn’t she, Claude?’

Alice looked into the glass of green liquid that was placed before her on the table. There were clouds on the surface. She picked up the glass and took a sip. The drink was ice-cold and sweet. She put the glass down.

‘Please take me there.’

‘Where do you want to go, dear?’

Santini’s wife sat down beside her. Alice faced Coco.

‘Please‚’ she said.

‘Where does she want to go?’ his wife asked again.

Coco glanced at her, then back at Alice.

‘How do you know they took Sam? I want to see where they had him. I want to see.’

‘No. Stuart’s still there.’

‘What does it matter?’

‘You could drop her off, Claude,’ the woman said. ‘My husband wants to help you. It’s just that Stuart’s always hounding him, isn’t he, Claude? He’d hold Claude responsible for your son if he could. That’s why he has to be careful; but he will help you, won’t you, Claude?’ Santini looked at Alice, ignoring his wife. ‘You could drop her off a little way away.’

Santini rose to his feet. He walked past his wife and stopped at the entrance to the kitchen.

‘I’ll take you to the Old Port. It’s a ten-minute walk from there. You meet me an hour later in the post office on the main square. If you’re late you make your own way back. But you should prepare yourself. They won’t let you through.’

Alice stood up and let Santini’s wife feed her arms into the rucksack.

‘Please eat something before you go.’ But Santini was out of the room and Alice followed him.

In Santini’s car on the road down to the coast, Alice looked out of the window at the hills, slipping into the distance in varying degrees of purple. The sky above the sea was red. She closed her eyes against the breeze.

She saw Sam’s skinny frame running towards her, up a sandy slope, the sea shining behind him. He was standing over her, grinning, with sand on his face.

‘Stay out of the water, will you? There are big boys in there with harpoons.’

‘Why?’

‘They could be dangerous.’

‘The boys?’

‘The harpoons.’

‘Okay.’

He could fight her long and hard and then suddenly relent like that, as though he were showing her that he could yield and was her superior because of it. Something inside her that she did not care to look at made her want to dominate him. So often she thought she could feel his spirit fighting hers, resisting her, and she admired him for it. She saw his little legs kicking up the sand as he ran towards the sea and his pointed head on his frail neck.

Santini was driving fast along the waterfront. He turned and smiled at her.

‘All right?’ he asked. She stared back at him. ‘Don’t go putting your trust in the wrong people any more. It wastes time.’

He pulled up in front of three cement blocks that barred the entrance to the market streets.

‘You walk down that street. Take the second on the left and then first right. It’s a garage at the end. One hour,’ he said, reaching over her and opening her door, brushing her breast as he did so. She climbed out of the car and did not look back.

Alice began to run, following Santini’s directions. When she reached the garage she was out of breath. A young policeman in uniform was standing in front of the closed door. He stared impassively at her as she stood before him panting.

‘Where’s Stuart?’

‘Madame?’

He was burly and red-faced with a crew-cut.

‘I’m the child’s mother. Where’s Stuart? It’s urgent.’

‘The commissaire left a couple of hours ago.’

‘Is this where they kept him?’ she asked, looking at the garage door. ‘Let me in. I want to see.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, madame.’ He stared at her, his
thumbs hooked in his belt. ‘Did you say you were the mother of the victim?’

‘No. Oh, for God’s sake, where’s Stuart?’ She looked round for help. The street was empty. The muffled sound of accordion music came from a restaurant a few doors down. ‘You’re going to be in trouble when he finds out how slow you were.’ She could feel the weight of her gun and she wanted to use it. ‘Listen to me. I have to see him. It’s important.’ She could feel his doubt. ‘Hurry up!’ She spoke to him like a mother.

She followed him towards the squad car parked at the entrance to the street and watched him reach in through the driver’s door to use the radio. She heard a woman’s voice, then random noise. The sky was now dark blue and a chill breeze was blowing. She shivered.

‘Someone’s coming to fetch you.’

She nodded and turned her back on him, folding her arms against the cold. She could feel him hovering behind her. She crossed over to the other side of the road to wait for Stuart. The youth walked back to his position in front of the garage door.

When the brown Datsun pulled up it was not Stuart at the wheel. The driver leaned over the passenger seat and opened the door for her. It was Paul.

‘Where’s Stuart? What’s happened?’

‘Nothing. It’s all right. Get in.’

He drove fast along the narrow backstreets of the old town, using his horn to make people scatter, sometimes driving along the pavement, working the gears. Alice sat in silence, pressing her foot on to an imaginary brake. They pulled up in front of the gates to the compound. Paul opened them with the remote control.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she ordered.

He was chewing gum. He looked at her, interrupting his chewing for a moment; the expression in his eyes was bovine.

‘You’ll have to ask Stuart,’ he said. He drove into the
compound
and came to such an abrupt halt, slamming his foot on the brake and releasing it again, that her head was thrown against the seat back.

Without waiting for him, she climbed out of the car. Lamps like searchlights flooded the compound with artificial daytime. She ran up the steps to the building. The door clicked open before she had time to press the intercom.

She stopped in the doorway of Stuart’s office. He was standing behind his desk. A man sitting opposite him turned in his chair and smiled at her: it was Lopez. Stuart was looking in her direction but not at her.

Paul’s voice came from just behind her: ‘We found the video recorder. It was the size of a lipstick. Fabrice doesn’t think you can buy them on the island. He’s checking.’

Stuart nodded at Paul. Lopez rose to his feet and held his hand out across the desk.

‘No TV, no radio,’ Lopez was saying. ‘Nothing that could make a noise and alert the neighbours. Why jeopardise everything and look for another place? It was carefully chosen.’ Stuart was walking him to the door. ‘Why risk moving?’

Alice stood and watched. She could hear them talking but the meaning floated somewhere in another realm, inaccessible to her. She felt suddenly overcome with the kind of desolation she had not experienced since childhood.

‘There were three or four of them,’ Stuart said.

Alice watched, dazed. In her head she could hear the sound of wind in pine trees. She could not move. Then someone said her name and she reeled away from them into the room, making for the open window. Behind her the door closed. The sound of men’s voices faded in the hall. She pulled the rucksack from her shoulders and laid it on the window sill. She leaned out and looked down at the floodlit compound, feeling the breeze on her face.