All Frank saw when they drove back past the glass doors of Parc Saint-Roman was a reflection of the sky. He turned his head to look out the rear window. As the car turned right on to Rue des Giroflées, he had a fleeting vision of Helena Parker leaving the building.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Guillaume Mercier was waiting in the garden when they reached his house in Eze-sur-Mer. As soon as he saw the Peugeot drive up, he pressed the remote on the gate and it opened slowly. Behind him was a white single-storey house. It had a dark roof and blue shutters with a Provençal look. Nothing fancy, but solid and functional.
The garden was quite large. On the right, past the house, there was a tall pine tree surrounded by a cluster of small evergreens. Beyond the shadow of the tree were some yellow and white lantana in full bloom, planted around a lemon tree. Laurel bushes ran around the property, over the grating set into the top of the wall, thus hiding the view from the road completely. Flower beds and bushes were clambering everywhere, contrasting skilfully with the neatly mowed lawn and flagstone footpath that matched the patio where Guillaume was standing. The house had a calm, peaceful air about it, a sense of comfort without the ostentation that often seemed obligatory on the Côte d’Azur.
Inside the gate, Hulot turned right and parked the car under a wooden carport next to a Fiat and a large motorcycle, a BMW Enduro.
Guillaume walked over to them with a lanky gait. He was an athletic-looking guy with a pleasant if not handsome face, and the muscular arms and sun-bleached hair of someone who plays outdoor sports. He was wearing a sky-blue T-shirt over khaki Bermuda cargo shorts and had on yellow sailing shoes without socks.
‘Hello, Nicolas.’
‘Hi, Guillaume.’ The boy shook the inspector’s hand and Nicolas nodded towards his companion. ‘This strong silent type is Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent.’
Guillaume put out his hand and pretended to whistle. ‘So the FBI actually exists – not just in the movies. Nice to meet you.’
As he shook the kid’s hand, Frank felt relieved. He looked into his eyes, dark and deep-set in a face freckled by the sun. He could tell that Guillaume was the right guy for the job. He had no idea if he was any good, but he knew he’d keep his mouth shut if they asked nicely and told him the seriousness of the situation.
‘That’s right, we’re very important in American movies and culture. And now we’ve gone global, as you can see.’
Guillaume smiled, but the grin barely masked his curiosity. He had probably guessed that they were there for something very important, since Nicolas Hulot had come as a policeman, not a friend of the family.
‘Thanks for helping us out.’
Guillaume nodded, shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘don’t mention it’, and led the way.
‘I don’t have much work right now. I’m editing a couple of underwater documentaries. Easy stuff. Doesn’t take much time. And I could never say no to this man here.’ He pointed his thumb at the inspector.
‘You said your parents are out?’
‘Out? Out of their minds is more like it. After Dad stopped working, they blew on the embers and found out there was still some life in there. They’re on their tenth honeymoon, or something like that. Last time they called, it was from Rome. They should be back tomorrow.’
They continued along the flagstone path, crossed the neat green lawn and reached the side entrance. To their right was a wooden gazebo with a blue canvas roof over a patio table. The remains of a dinner, most likely from the night before, were still on the table. ‘While the cat’s away the mice play, I see.’
Guillaume followed Nicolas’s gaze and shrugged. ‘Some friends came over last night and the cleaning woman didn’t show up today.’
‘Friends, eh? I’m a cop. Think I can’t see the table’s set for two?’
Guillaume opened his arms wide to say that anything was possible.
‘Listen, old man. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I’m not tempted by any artificial paradise. Can’t I have a little fun?’
He slid open the wooden door and invited them in. He followed and closed the door behind him. Once inside, Hulot felt the cool air through his light jacket. ‘Chilly in here.’
Guillaume pointed to the equipment lining the wall opposite, where two air-conditioners were humming.
‘This stuff is sensitive to heat, so I have to keep the air on high. If your rheumatism’s acting up, I can lend you one of Dad’s winter coats.’
Nicolas grabbed his neck and gave him a bear hug.
‘Respect your elders or what you’ll hear cracking will be your neck, not my joints.’
Guillaume raised his arms in surrender.
‘Okay, okay. I give up.’
When Hulot let go, Guillaume collapsed on to a leather armchair in front of the machines. He smoothed down his ruffled hair and waved them on to the couch against the wall between the two windows. He pointed an accusing finger at Nicolas. ‘Don’t forget that I surrendered only out of respect for your age.’
Hulot sat down and leaned back against the padded cushions of the couch, pretending to be out of breath. ‘Thank goodness. Between you and me, you might be right about the rheumatism.’
Guillaume spun around in his chair and faced Frank and Hulot. His expression was suddenly serious.
Good, thought Frank. The boy knows when enough is enough.
He was even more convinced that this was the right person. Now he just hoped that Guillaume was an expert, like Nicolas said he was. He had other hopes as well. Now that they were coming to the point, Frank realized that his heart was beating faster. He looked out the window for a moment at the the dappled sunlight below the swaying lemon tree. The peace and quiet of that place made everything seem far away.
His mind momentarily reflected on his own story, and Helena’s, and that of a general who refused to lose at any cost, of an inspector who wanted only to find a reason for outliving his son, of an insatiable killer acting out his madness and ferocity. If only it were all so far away.
‘Have you been following the No One story?’ Frank asked, returning to the present. His voice barely rose above the sound of the air-conditioning.
Guillaume eased back in his chair.
‘The murders in Monaco, you mean? Who hasn’t? I listen to the programme every night on Radio Monte Carlo or Europe 2. Their ratings must be incredible by now.’
Frank turned back to the garden. A faint breeze rustled the laurel bushes against the wall.
‘Yeah. Five people have been killed. Four of them were horribly defaced. And we haven’t made much progress because we don’t have the faintest idea of who the killer might be or how to stop him. Aside from the little information he gave us himself, that madman hasn’t left the slightest clue. Except perhaps for one tiny detail.’
His pause gave Nicolas the floor. The inspector sat up on the edge of the couch and handed Guillaume the videotape he pulled from his jacket pocket.
‘This is really the only trace we have. There’s something on this tape that we want you to look at for us. It’s very important, Guillaume, and people’s lives may depend on it. So we need your help and your discretion. This is confidential. Absolutely confidential. Do you understand?’
Nodding gravely, Guillaume took the cassette from Hulot and held it in his hand as if it might explode.
‘What’s on this?’
Frank looked at him carefully. There was no irony in the boy’s voice.
‘You’ll see. But I have to warn you that it’s not easy to watch. Just so you know what to expect.’
Guillaume said nothing. He got up and went over to draw the curtains to keep the glare off the screen. In the deep-gold diffused light he sat back down and turned on the flat screen and the computer monitor. He inserted the tape and the coloured bars appeared on the screen, then the first images.
As Guillaume took in the scene of Allen Yoshida’s murder, Frank decided to let him watch the whole thing. He could have skipped directly to the
point that interested him without any further explanation, but now that he knew him, he wanted the boy to understand who they were dealing with and how important his own role was. He wondered whether Guillaume felt the same horror that he, Frank, had when he had seen it for the first time. He had to admit in spite of himself that the movie was a sort of diabolical work of art, for the purpose of destruction not creation, and yet it did convey emotion.
A minute later, Guillaume reached out and paused the tape. The killer and his bloodied victim were stopped in the position that fate and the camera had dictated.
‘Is this real or fake?’ he asked in a low voice, looking at them wide-eyed.
‘Unfortunately it’s very real. I told you it wasn’t pretty.’
‘Yes, but this butchery is beyond belief. How can this be possible?’
‘It’s possible. It really happened, as you can see for yourself. And we’re trying to stop this butchery, as you rightly call it.’
Frank could see two dark patches of sweat under the boy’s arms that hadn’t been there before. He was sweating despite the cold in the room, a physical reaction to what he had just seen.
Death is hot and cold, both at the same time. Death is sweat and blood. Death is unfortunately our only true reminder that life really exists. Come on, kid. Don’t let us down.
As if he could hear Frank’s thoughts, Guillaume leaned back his chair with a little squeak, as if to get further away from the images he was seeing. He pressed the button and the figures resumed their dance, up to the mocking final bow and the ending static. Guillaume stopped the tape.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.
Frank could tell from his voice that he wished he were elsewhere; he wished he had not just seen that figure of death and his surreal bow, soliciting the applause of an audience of the damned. Frank went over and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘Rewind it, but slowly so we can see.’
Guillaume turned a wheel and the images started flowing swiftly in reverse. In spite of the rapid backward motion, usually an entertaining caricature of human movement, the vision lost none of its horror.
‘Here, slow down. Now stop.’
At Guillaume’s careful touch, the image stopped a few frames too soon. ‘Go forward, just a little bit. Very slowly now.’
Guillaume moved the handle gently and the film advanced frame by frame like a series of overlapping photographs.
‘Stop!’ Frank stood next to Guillaume and pointed at the screen, touching it with his finger. ‘There, right there, on the cabinet. There’s something leaning there that looks like a record sleeve. We can’t see that. Can you isolate it and enlarge it so we can read what it says?’
Guillaume moved over to the computer on his desk, still looking where Frank was pointing.
‘I can try. Is this the original or a copy?’
‘It’s the original.’
‘Good. VHS isn’t the greatest support, unless it’s the original. First I’ll have to make a digital image. We’ll lose a little quality, but I can work better that way.’
His voice was steady and calm. Now that he was in his element, Guillaume seemed to have overcome his shock. He started clicking the mouse at the computer screen. The same image that was in front of Frank appeared on the monitor. Guillaume typed for a second and the image grew clearer.
‘Okay. Now, let’s see what happens if we highlight that part.’
He used his mouse to draw a square with a broken line around the part of the frame that Frank had indicated. Guillaume pressed a button on his keyboard and the screen was filled with an electronic mosaic of coloured pixels.
‘You can’t see anything.’ The words escaped Frank’s lips and he immediately regretted them.
Guillaume turned to him and raised his eyebrows. ‘Keep calm, ye of little faith. We’ve only just begun.’
He typed a flurry of commands and an image appeared on the monitor, sharp enough to make out a dark record sleeve. In the centre of the picture was the silhouette of a man playing a trumpet. He was bending backwards in the stance of a musician reaching an impossibly high note, to his own and the audience’s amazement. It was the supreme moment, when an artist forgets time and place and is possessed by music itself, as both its victim and executioner. The white letters below the picture read:
Robert Fulton-Stolen Music.
Frank said the words on the screen aloud, as if he were the only one in the room who knew how to read. ‘Robert Fulton – Stolen Music. What does that mean?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Nicolas, standing behind them now. ‘Have you heard of it, Guillaume?’
The boy continued to stare at the picture on the monitor.
‘Never seen it before. Never heard of Robert Fulton. But I would guess it’s an old jazz record. It’s not really the kind of music I listen to.’
Nicolas went back to the couch and Frank scratched his chin. He paced back and forth with his eyes half closed. Then he started to talk, but he was obviously thinking out loud: the monologue of a man with a heavy burden on his shoulders.
‘Stolen Music. Robert Fulton. Why did No One need to listen to that music during the murder? Why did he take it with him? What’s so special about it?’
The room was filled with the silence of unanswered questions, the silence on which the mind feeds as it devours infinite distances searching for a sign, a trace, a clue. Chasing an answer that keeps receding to the horizon.
The clatter of Guillaume’s fingers running over the keyboard marked the end of that momentary pause, during which the only sound had been the hum of the air-conditioning.
‘There’s something here, maybe.’
‘What?’ Frank spun back towards him as if he had just been released from a hypnotic trance.
‘Just a minute. Let me check.’
Guillaume rewound the tape to the beginning and started watching it very slowly, stopping the images occasionally and using the zoom to make out a particular detail that interested him. It was cold in the room, but Frank could feel his temples throbbing. He didn’t know what Guillaume was doing, but whatever it was, he wished he could do it faster.
The boy stopped the image at the point where the killer was bending over Yoshida in a position that could be interpreted as confiding. He was probably whispering something into his ear and Frank was sorry there was no soundtrack. No One was far too smart to give them a sample of his natural voice, even through a ski mask.
Guillaume returned to the computer and transferred the fragment he had captured from the video to the LED monitor. He used the arrow of the mouse to select a portion of the image and typed something on the keyboard. There was another blotch, as the first time, that seemed to be made of coloured pieces placed haphazardly by a drunken artist.
‘What you see here are the pixels. They’re like the tiny mosaic tiles that make up the image, the pieces of a puzzle, basically. If you enlarge them a great deal, the picture is very confused and illegible. But I –’ his fingers flew over the keyboard, alternating with the mouse – ‘I have a program that examines the pixels damaged by enlargement and reconstructs them. There was a reason that I paid a fortune for this junk. Come on baby, don’t let me down.’
He hit the RETURN key. The image resolved a little but was still confused and indecipherable.
‘Shit, no. Let’s see who’s smarter now, you or me!’
Guillaume leapt over to the monitor, threateningly. He ran his hand through his hair and then his fingers went back to the keyboard. He typed furiously for a few seconds and then stood up and started fiddling with the equipment on the shelves in front of him, pressing buttons and turning levers. Red and green lights started flashing.
‘Here we are. I was right.’
He went back to his chair and moved it in front of the screen where he had stopped the image. A couple of buttons were pressed and suddenly there were two images side by side, the picture of the LP cover and the one he was examining now. He touched t
he first with his finger.
‘Here, see this? I checked, and this is the only place where you can see the entire album cover. Not completely though, because, if you look here, the top left corner is covered by the sleeve of the man with the knife. We didn’t notice it in the enlargement because the sleeve is dark, like the cover. But there are mirrors on the opposite sides of the room and the record’s reflection is bounced from one to another. I thought I saw a slight difference in colour compared to the picture I got from the video.’ Guillaume’s fingers again flew over the keyboard. ‘I thought that, in the image reflected in the mirror, the complete one here in the centre, we might see the label on the cover.’
He pressed the RETURN key with the cautious finger of someone launching a missile to destroy the world. Slowly, before their eyes, the confused blotch on the monitor blended together and took shape. Dark letters, slightly distorted and out of focus but legible, appeared against a gold background.
‘The label of the shop that sold the record, perhaps. Here we are: “Disque à Risque”, Cours Mirabeau something or other, Aix-en-Provence. Can’t read the building number. Or the phone number. Sorry, you’ll have to find that out yourselves.’
There was a note of triumph in Guillaume’s voice. He turned to Hulot with the gesture of an acrobat acknowledging the audience after a triple somersault.
Frank and Nicolas were speechless.
‘Guillaume, you’re fantastic!’
The boy shrugged and smiled. ‘Come on, don’t overdo it. I’m just the best there is, that’s all.’
Frank leaned down on the chair and bent closer to the monitor. Incredulously, he read the writing on the screen. After so much nothing, they finally had something. After so much aimless sailing on the sea, they finally had, far on the horizon, a dark line that could be land, but might simply be a mass of dark clouds. They were looking at it now with the fearful eyes of someone expecting another deception.
Nicolas stood up. ‘Can we print these out?’
‘Sure, no problem. How many copies?’
‘Four should do it, I think. Just in case.’