presence of people, even rooms away from you. It was some atavistic instinct, he reckoned, from mankind’s earliest times as a cave dweller. Enter an empty cave which you meant to occupy yourself, and before you settled down in front of the fire it was a smart idea to make sure that no one else, man or beast, felt they had a prior claim.
Satisfied, Picaro padded up the concrete stairway that led to the back of the hallway. After neutralizing the alarm system within the stipulated two minutes, he cracked his torch and checked his map one final time. A left, a right, and then another right, and he should be in the library. Then a few steps across the room to the bound set of La Vie Parisienne – the flic had even set down the exact number of volumes there were in that particular run – and hey presto, open sesame.
Picaro cast a quick glance up the stairs as he passed through the hall. Despite the multitude of houses he had broken into during the course of his life, Picaro still couldn’t stop himself fantasizing about his own particular nightmare – that of an Alsatian – it was always an Alsatian – bounding noiselessly down the stairs, dewlaps flapping, saliva jetting into its mouth at the prospect of a piece of Jean Picaro’s thighbone.
Giving a little jump to settle his gooseflesh, Picaro eased himself through the doorway of the library. Jesus. He was getting too old for this. What did he need 3,000 euros for, anyway? His bank account was heaving. He owned his house outright. His son was apprenticed to the best electrical engineer in the business, and he had vowed to die rather than ever to go back to prison again. So what the hell was he doing it for? Habit? Addiction to the kicks? Or just because it was one of the few things he could still do well?
He bent down and felt around for the catch that the flic had told him was hidden under Volume Three of the collected periodicals.
A door, hidden in the bookcase, flicked open. With a cautious glance over one shoulder, Picaro stepped inside the concealed room.
‘ Putain de merde!’ he mouthed to himself, his eyes widening in horror.
The unconscious figure of a woman was tied to a chair in the very centre of the assembly table. Her head had fallen at an angle, and as Picaro played his torch across her, he saw that one whole side of her face was covered in what appeared to be a thin sheet of congealed blood.
18
Ever the professional – and ever mindful of his 3,000 euros – Picaro felt around under the table for the flic’s precious tape recorder. Exactly two metres to the right of the master chair, taped up inside the skirt, at the exact angle of the joist and the cross-brace. Yes. There it was. Picaro pocketed it.
He hesitated, and then made briskly for the door. What business was the woman of his? He’d done what he came here to do. He was already running late because of his previous caution. Why complicate matters? This way, he could get out of the house before daybreak with no one the wiser.
His gaze travelled inexorably back to the woman. What the hell had they done to her? Maybe she was dead, even? But no. He could see her breathing by the light of the torch.
As he played the light across her body, a memory came back to Picaro from his time at La Sante prison. A young lad, mixed race, not more than nineteen years old, who had fallen foul of one of the methamphetamine gangs. One day the gang had waited for him in the showers – for sooner or later, as Picaro had tried to explain to the boy, the bad guys always get you. What the hell else did they have to do with their time? But the boy had been too young and too cocksure to listen to him.
This one they’d condemned to a tournante – a gang rape. When Picaro found the boy, they’d left him tied to a chair, with his head through the seat, his belly over the backrest, and his hands and feet strapped to the legs – that way he would be available for anyone else to use who happened along.
At first Picaro hadn’t understood what he was looking at. It was like when his son had emerged, balls first, from his mother’s womb. Picaro had fallen back, his face ashen, shouting, ‘Christ, what’s that?’
‘It’s his testicles, Monsieur,’ the midwife had told him. ‘They swell up in a breech birth, because the legs are stretched back over the head.’
When he’d seen the state of the young man’s anus, Picaro had vomited. Then he’d untied the boy, straightened him out as best he could on the cold floor of the shower room, and gone to fetch the toubibs.
They’d stitched him up good, but the boy had never been right again after the attack. One day, about six months later, he’d cut off his own balls with a piece of broken glass.
Sighing, Picaro moved back to the table. Taking out his Opinel, he cut the cords binding the young woman to her chair, eased her towards him, and let her fall across his right shoulder.
With a hitch of his arms, he settled her weight more squarely. Then, feeling all kinds of a fool, he started back across the hall.
No point closing the door behind me now, he thought to himself. I might as well leave a fucking paper trail.
19
Picaro laid the woman gently on the rear seat of his car. He stood back and looked down at her in the cold glow of the interior lights. What he had imagined in the darkness of the sealed room to be blood, now proved to be nothing more than a strawberry birthmark. Poor bitch. She’d have been pretty without that. Sometimes you wondered what God was thinking of.
Picaro sprung back her eyelids and checked her pupils. She was doped – that much was obvious. He was briefly tempted to tie his chamois leather duster around her eyes so that she couldn’t identify him if she woke up – but with his present run of luck, she’d probably panic on awaking and cause a car wreck. Best to leave things be for the time being.
He’d arranged to meet the flic at the old parking place behind Pampelonne beach. A twenty-minute drive at the outside. He’d simply dump the female and the tape recorder on him, get the rest of his money, and then scram. The flic could sort her out. That’s what flics did, wasn’t it? Sort things out?
Three times on the drive to Pampelonne Picaro wondered whether he wouldn’t do better just leaving her on the side of the road. She hadn’t seen him yet. She hadn’t seen the flic. Why complicate life when you didn’t need to?
But the image of the girl tied to the chair in the centre of the table haunted him. What had that boy’s name been? The one in the prison? Chico? Chiclette? Something like that.
Stupid to put the chair on the table. What if the girl had woken up and thrown herself to one side in a panic? She could have broken her neck and paralysed herself. People could be dumb sometimes.
He saw the flic waiting for him in the curve of the headlights. Well. Here goes. What a man will do for three thousand smackers.
Picaro pulled up beside Calque. He got out of the car and looked around. Well. No unexpected reception committee. That was a good first sign.
‘Did you get it?’
‘Of course I got it.’ Picaro eased the tape recorder from his pocket and handed it to Calque.
Calque palmed him the remaining fifteen hundred.
Picaro jerked his thumb back towards the car. ‘I’ve got something else for you, too. No extra charge.’
Calque flinched, as if someone had fired a dried pea at the back of his neck. ‘What do you mean?’
Picaro opened the back door of his car and stood waiting for Calque to join him. They both stared down at the girl.
‘Don’t worry. She’s not dead. Someone drugged her and tied her to a chair. They left the chair on the table in that secret room of yours. I thought at first that it might have been one of those sex things – you know, a bondage thing, when they pop amyl nitrate and then half suffocate themselves in an effort to increase their kicks. But one look at her face told me otherwise. I thought about leaving her there, but I just couldn’t do it. She hasn’t seen me and she hasn’t seen you. My advice would be to abandon her here. But she’s your problem from here on in.
