Talking to Ghosts (40 page)

“I don't really know … My brother thought he was dangerous. When we saw what was on the computers, he said we couldn't leave him alive. Apparently he had files on all the fuck-parties in the area and all the big shots who were at them, a bunch of rich arseholes, T.V. presenters, writers and singers off their tits on coke, a few politicians … Anyway my little bro didn't want all this coming back to bite him, given we were both involved back in the day, before I got banged up. He used to hang around to keep the paparazzi out, he did it as a favour to some colleague from Toulouse he used to work with. Anyway, we got the
gendarme
to talk a bit and then we wasted him. It was one less problem.”

“Both of you?”

“Why? You surprised? Don't you get it? Your friend tried it once and he got a real taste for this shit. Once the rot sets in, it doesn't stop. You live by it and you fucking die by it. We might not be real brothers, but we're a lot like each other, him and me. You should know better than anyone what it's like, standing there like butter wouldn't melt, when if you didn't need me to drive you there, you'd be laying into me right now. You'd smash my face in and you'd get a fucking hard-on doing it …”

He trailed off, brought a hand up to the bandage that covered his ear and held it there for a moment, his eyes closed, breathing heavily through his mouth as the pain wrenched his face to one side. He clicked his tongue and waved his arm in a vague gesture.

“Fuck off, I'm done answering your questions. I'm thirsty.”

He struggled to his feet and stood, swaying a little before he could take a step. Then he walked into the kitchen. Vilar followed him and
stood in the doorway. With a large glass of water Sanz washed down a couple of pills he had in the palm of his hand.

“He split my head open, that little fucker.”

He splashed water on his face and drank some more straight from the tap.

“Where are the people who live here? What did you do to them?”

“They're in the garage, for fuck's sake. What, you think I butchered them and made a necklace out of their eyes? You watch too many movies.”

Vilar hesitated about leaving Sanz alone for a minute, but seeing him, head bowed, leaning heavily against the sink he decided the man could not go very far.

Even before he turned on the light, he smelled the acrid whiff of urine and heard the muffled cries. When the bare bulb came on, he saw two little girls sitting in front of a large chest freezer, tied back to back with a length of electrical wire, their mouths gagged with duct tape. Their eyes widened in terror when they saw Vilar appear with the pistol in one hand and the rifle slung over his shoulder, they struggled as much as their bonds would allow them. They had pissed themselves. He reassured them, told them he was a policeman, that it was all over, that they didn't need to be scared anymore. From the opposite side of the garage the parents, who were similarly trussed up, grunted vehemently through their gags. He told them that there was nothing to fear and looked among the tools on a shelf above the workbench for something to cut them free with. He took a pair of wire cutters and walked over to the father, who looked at him, his eyes filled with fear or hatred. Just as he was about to cut him loose, he got to his feet again. The man stared at him in astonishment and grunted something, shaking his head wildly, while his wife tried to crane her neck to see what was going on. Her eyes were pleading, filled with tears, her face was red and swollen.

Vilar set the wire cutters down at his feet and explained that he had something urgent he needed to do before he set them free. He told them the
gendarmes
would be here soon. He found a Stanley knife
and a couple of cable ties which he looped together so he would only have to pull them tight.

The man gave a strangled cry and the veins in his neck throbbed, the tendons bulged fit to burst. Vilar told him to calm down, said that he would send help and left the door ajar when he went out.

He went back to the kitchen, but Sanz was not there. He took out his pistol again, but there was no need to hunt in the dark for long: Sanz was lying on the sofa, one arm covering his eyes.

“Let's go.”

When he did not react, Vilar jabbed the muzzle of the gun into his ribs. Sanz started and looked at him, his eyes wide and vacant.

“Let's go. Move it. We've got a long journey ahead of us.”

Sanz did not move. His breathing returned to the regular cadence of imminent sleep. Vilar grabbed the collar of his polo shirt and lifted him up. Sanz cursed and struggled feebly as he was hauled off the sofa, collapsing onto all fours on the rug. Vilar grabbed him by the belt of his trousers and dragged him along. They bumped into the coffee table and the armchair, knocked over a plant stand and a potted plant. As he was being dragged through the door into the hall, Sanz yelled that that was enough, that he could manage by himself.

Vilar pitched him forward and he fell flat on his belly, then struggled to his feet.

Once they were outside and had closed the door behind them, they were swallowed by the night and for an instant Vilar was once again gripped by terror and had to breathe through his mouth so as not to suffocate. He ordered Sanz to walk on ahead and – inasmuch as it was possible to gauge in the darkness – stayed two or three metres behind, rifle aimed at his back, finger on the trigger. The bodywork of the car shimmered in the faint ambient glow. Vilar pressed Sanz back against the bonnet and shackled his wrists with one of the cable ties he had prepared. Sanz babbled incoherent curses and threats, clearly groggy from the pills he had taken, and Vilar hissed at him to shut his trap, told him he had nothing left to say. He pushed him onto the back
seat and lashed his ankles together. Then, he unloaded the rifle and stowed it with the cartridge pouch in the boot.

Sliding behind the steering wheel, he asked which way they were headed. When Sanz did not answer, he repeated the question.

“Nowhere. Let me sleep.”

Vilar turned off the engine and the headlights and sat in the shadows, his pupils dilating in the darkness. Blind. Nothing outside existed now. He listened to his heart hammering in his chest. Rage left him breathless.

“What did you say?”

Sanz muttered some obscenity, his voice slurred.

Vilar took a torch from the glove compartment, turned it on, then got out of the car and opened the back door. He lifted Sanz up, shone the beam into his drugged face and whacked his nose with the end of the torch.

“You fucking tell me where we're going – tell me where it is I've been wanting to go all these years, as you put it – or I'll skin you alive.”

Lying on the back seat, Sanz blinked into the torchlight, grimacing, but then suddenly a smile disfigured his face.

“Tell me,” Vilar growled, his fist gripping the man's polo shirt.

“You're looking for your son? Me too. Thing is, I found my son and he stabbed me in the thigh, the little queer, and then he smashed my face in. But that's O.K., I get it. What about you, what sort of state do you think your son will be in when you find him?”

Vilar lifted the bandage and gave a brutal tug. Sanz screamed and tried to struggle, but Vilar kept him on his back, his rigid arm pushing him into the seat. The gauze pad, which had been stuck in place with dried blood, made a ripping sound like Velcro as it came away, and in the torchlight Vilar could see the glistening wound: a deep, bloody gash that ran down along the scalp and through the outer ear, slashing half of it away.

“Talk, or I'll rip the rest of your face off.”

Sanz was whimpering now, lashing out weakly with his bound legs,
feebly hurling himself against the car door. Vilar hit him just above the mangled ear. Sanz spluttered and then let out a piercing wail that sounded almost like a child. Vilar wanted to hit him again, suddenly overwhelmed by the rage he thought he had mastered. Now that he was standing over this man, now that he had him at his mercy, he wanted to make him suffer; wanted to see him die. Wanted to watch the faint spark in his eyes snuff out.

He grasped the bloody, scabbed ear and Sanz screamed “No!” and his teeth beginning to chatter. “Head for Castillon. After that, I'll explain how to get there. I can't take this any longer.” He curled up and pressed the sodden remains of the bandage to his ear with his bound hands.

Vilar drove fast and, without passing another car or encountering any roadblocks, found himself on the road to Bordeaux. Once or twice on the dual carriageway he saw police lights in the distance, but they disappeared into the darkness like abstractions that might as well never have existed. He called the emergency services, alerted them to the people tied up in their garage. He would have liked to know what had become of Victor and the other kid that Sanz had mentioned. He asked but, knocked out by the tranquillisers, the man did not answer.

He convinced himself that Sanz could not have done them any harm, he had never attacked children. This whole time Sanz had been brooding about the discovery that he might have a son, and he seemed to have cast himself in the role of the misunderstood father. There was no end to his delusions. Vilar tried not to think about the boys, since there was nothing he could do. He gunned the engine, eager to get away from the Médoc as quickly as possible and leave all this behind him. He sped down the motorway, barrelled through the interchanges, crossed the suspension bridge over the river, oblivious to the city and its halo of light below.

I'm coming, little man, I'm coming, you don't have to be afraid anymore.

His eyes filled with tears. He felt again the hard, bitter lump in his throat. He felt exhausted with grief, with rage, with loneliness. Vainly he tried to imagine what he would find when he got there. He knew
only that he would get there at the darkest hour of night. Into the primordial abyss of all terrors.

Over and over he silently mouthed Pablo's name simply so that he could give some meaning to the journey, so he could keep on driving rather than pull over onto the verge to sleep, or to die after putting a bullet in the belly of the man who had been mutilated by a terrified boy, who now lay sleeping on the back seat. But sometimes his invocation produced no effect, no answer, stripped of its magic by the silence.

Driving at more than 150 k.p.h., the twinkling headlights of the cars he passed were reflected in the rear-view mirror which he checked every now and then to see whether Sanz had woken or was sitting up. He took the bypass around Libourne, stuck behind a Spanish truck he could not overtake on the narrow two-way road, sped past Saint-Émilion, his hands clutching the steering wheel. As he approached Castillon he shouted to Sanz to wake up because they were nearly there. When the man did not reply, he thought about stopping and knocking him about a bit, but then saw him sit up, framed in the headlights of the cars behind, rubbing his eyes, clicking his tongue and complaining that he was thirsty.

The tide drove him onward.

His panic subsided as the jetty retreated into the distance and the details blurred into a dark mess of shadows quivering against the light. Reeling from the pain, the man had staggered back in the water, thrashing his blood-drenched body and his arms, and for a long time the boy could hear his howls and his threats above the roar of the river. Then suddenly the figure disappeared, and Victor did not know if he had fallen into the water or made it back to the riverbank.

He tried to see if Julien had got to his feet again, but before long all he could make out was the silhouette of the dock jutting out into the water. The current had carried him into the middle of the estuary, and he was helpless against this power, this inexorable slowness. The banks were now no more than hazy lines weighed down by a sky that seemed about to push them underwater and drown them. Twisted leafless branches drifted alongside him, sometimes rolling so that their severed limbs ploughed the water like blind fingers trying to catch something in the rushing torrent.

Victor wondered which of the boat or the dead tree would better survive the whims of the raging current. He kept his mind busy with such thoughts, staving off the mounting panic that gripped him, adrift as he was on this roaring vastness that surged around him in its relentless power. Never had he felt so far from everything.

The sun was setting in swirls of dazzling flame and for a moment the boy was confused, lost in a blaze of phosphorus beyond which he
could see nothing. He sat in the back of the boat clutching the bag to avoid this brightness that threatened to consume him, reduce him to ashes, to an inconsequential dust that would immediately be absorbed by the water. He laid a hand on the urn inside the bag and whispered to his mother, sharing his terrified thoughts.

“Manou.”

Then the flames guttered out, leaving nothing but a fading golden glow, and the blue of the eastern sky grew gradually deeper. Two waves whipped past over the swell. They lifted the boat gently and he watched as these ripples moved away into the distance until all their energy was dissolved.

He was moving upstream. He passed the village, recognised the steeple of the church, tried to make out the details of the bank, hoping against hope that Rebecca or Marilou might be there, might see him pass and wave to him, but he was too far out, too small in this vastness for anyone to see him or even think to look for him out here. There was a rustle of trees, a slight backwash, as with every passing minute the river became dark, impenetrable even as the tide surged forward, causing the boat to lurch and roll at times, carving out hollows in the water in front of the bow.

He wondered what they were all doing now, trying to picture Marilou's dark eyes, trying to feel again Rebecca's kisses on his lips. He smiled in spite of everything. Then he thought about Julien and he felt a shudder in his chest that made him turn to look back into the gloom. He pictured again the brutal punch, heard once more the dull, blunt thud, saw the little body fall backwards like a lump of wood. Surely noone could die from a single punch. Lots of punches, maybe. And besides, the kid had taken his fair share of beatings in the past, the kind of beatings that left him sprawled on the ground while he was punched and kicked anywhere it might hurt. He had told Victor about it one night when they were on the terrace staring at the stars, picking out the constellations that Julien could never seem to recognise. Staring up at the sky, Julien had talked about it in a neutral tone, pretending not to care about the thick leather strap, talking about his mother screaming,
huddled under the table to avoid the blows, about his father laying into him, talked about the terrifying sight he had discovered coming home from school – his father's body lying in the bath, the head half blown away, brains splattered on the bathroom tiles.

The kid had said all this then suddenly fallen silent, heaving a sigh, bowing his head, and had stayed motionless for a long time while Victor tried to think of something to say – grisly images of blood and human remains flitting through his mind, corpses sprawled in impossible poses – wondering how he would have reacted had he seen his mother so horribly mutilated. He had tried to share in the horror that still terrified Julien, but his own horrors quickly engulfed him again, keeping him at a distance from the other boy's tragedy. They had sat in silence, each with their own ghosts.

Victor suddenly wanted to see them all again. He wanted to feel their presence. Wanted to hear their chatter and their laughter. He wanted to feel Marilou's furtive eyes on him, to see Julien's scrawny frame dangling precariously between two garden chairs. He tried to use his crude plank to steer towards the bank. He grunted with the effort, slashed at the water with his makeshift oar to subdue the rising tide, to break the back of this monster. He managed to turn the bow of the boat towards the bank, but now the swell lashed the side of the boat, threatening to capsize it. He struggled on for some minutes more, tossed on the current, then fell back into the boat and howled in frustration. He lapsed into a sort of tired stupor.

He could see the wharfs of the old Pauillac refinery coming towards him. The beacons were lit now. Further upriver, a red marker buoy bobbed on the water. He did not know what time it was, but he knew it was late. Nine o'clock possibly. A lighthouse appeared in front of him and he quickly made out the dark mass of the island, bristling with tall trees whose tops still flickered in the setting sun. The estuary was narrowing, and along the banks lights gradually appeared, some blinking, others steady. Victor watched the night draw in, expanding and settling into the crevices of the shore, then spreading to erase the contours of the landscape, obliterating colours until that instant when the blue in
the west faded completely from the starless sky. He waited for the moment when everything is in darkness, when eyes grow wide to drink in the dense shadows to make out the faintest trace of light on things.

The boat moved so close to the island that he could hear the last of the birds chirrup as they went to sleep. He picked up his paddle again and steered towards a clump of trees that seemed to dip into the water. The current was clearly weaker now, because he was able to draw alongside, grasp a low branch and wedge the boat against a tree stump and tie it up.

Night had now enveloped everything. The river lapped and sang against the boat. From time to time, a light from the far bank trembled on the water. In the distance, he could see the wharfs at Pauillac, the lights of the marina. The headlights of passing cars. Other people going about their ordinary lives while he was so far from everything, so alone, happy perhaps, for the first time since she died. He knew that it would be possible to feel that wholeness again. There would be other moments like this, simple and mysterious. The darkness and the murmur of things. He felt strong and sure as though in some impregnable refuge.

He took the urn out of the bag and hugged it to him.

Manou. Look how beautiful it is, and here we are sitting peacefully. Look, over there. And sometimes the fish jump out of the water. Can you hear them?

He felt himself suffocating and, with something like a whimper, sucked air into his lungs.

I know you're here and I know I'll never see you again. I talk to you, but you don't answer anymore, but I know you're listening.

He ate in the darkness, groping, unable to see his hands. He let his fingers feel their way, taking the knife, opening a tin, scooping mouthfuls that he chewed slowly, solemnly, savouring the moment as much as the food.

Then he lay down in the bottom of the boat on the fisherman's blanket and studied the sky, waiting for a star to flicker on just for him, letting sleep wash over him, driving out his tiredness, and still he could see nothing in the heavens, no sign, nothing but that useless powdery light that was probably already dead.