hold-up, he had paid a visit to his parents. No doubt about
He had driven into their farmyard one rainy afternoon in his car, a Ford with a roaring engine. His father stood waiting for him on the front steps. Alex felt proud of his clothes, his shoes, his new-man appearance with every last whiff of the soil gone.
He made a bit of a face at first, the father. Playing the village bullyboy as a nightclub bouncer did not seem to him like much of a trade. Still, it must pay well—you only had to look at the kid’s outfit! Alex’s manicured hands and fingernails were not lost on the older man, either, and he broke into a smile of welcome.
The two of them had sat facing each other in the main room. The father had brought out the customary bread, the salami, the pate, and the liter of red and started eating. Alex merely lit a cigarette, ignoring the mustard glass of wine that had been poured for him. The mother contemplated them in silence without taking a seat. Louis and Rene, the farm boys, were there, too. What could they talk about? The weather they were having? The weather they were about to have? Before long, Alex got up, gave his father an affectionate punch on the shoulder, and went out onto the village’s main street. Window curtains were discreetly pulled aside as the locals took a furtive look at the Barnys’ boy, the bad one, as he went by.
Alex went into the Cafe des Sports and, just showing off, bought everyone a round. A few old men were playing cards, thumping loudly on the table as they laid out their hands, and two or three youngsters pushed and shoved one another at a pinball machine. Alex was delighted with the impression he made. He shook hands with everyone and drank to the health of one and all.
Back in the street, he passed Madame Moreau, Vincent’s mother. She was a good-looking woman, tall, graceful, and well turned out. Or rather, she had been—for right after her son’s disappearance she had fallen apart, withered, and taken to dressing sloppily at all times. She slouched and dragged her feet as she made her way to the minimarket to do her shopping.
Every week, as regular as clockwork, Madame Moreau paid a ritual visit to the police station in Meaux in search of news of her missing son. All hope of finding him had been abandoned four years ago now. She had placed notices in all the papers, with Vincent’s photo, to no avail. The police had told her that there were thousands of disappearances in France every year, and most of the time no trace of the missing person was ever found. Vincent’s bike was in the garage; the police had returned it to her after a thorough examination. The fingerprints on it were Vincent’s. The machine had been found lying on an embankment with its front wheel buckled and no gas in the tank. A search of the forest around had turned up nothing.
Alex spent that night in the village. It was Saturday, and there was a dance. Annie was there, her hair as red as ever, her limbs a little thicker. She worked at the bean cannery in the next village over. Alex danced a slow number with her, then took her walking in the woods nearby. They made love in his car, lying uncomfortably on its reclining seats.
The next day, after kissing his folks goodbye, Alex left. Eight days later, he held up the Credit Agricole branch and killed the cop. Everyone in the village must have clipped the front page of the paper with Alex’s picture on it, along with the picture of the cop and his family.
Alex unrolled his bandage: his wound was inflamed, its edges bright red. He sprinkled his thigh with the powder his friend had given him, then bound himself up again, pulling the bandage good and tight over the fresh dressing.
His hard-on was still there, almost painful itself. He masturbated furiously, thinking about Annie. He had never had a lot of girls. He usually had to pay them. It had been much better when Vincent was around. Vincent had chicks falling all over him in droves. They often went to dances, the two of them. Vincent would dance; he would get every cool girl from miles around to dance with him. Alex used to sit at the bar and drink beer. Watching Vincent doing his number. Vincent smiled at the girls with his great smile. It had them eating out of his hand. There was a motion of the head he had, cute, a sort of come-on, and then his hands would be roving up and down his partner’s back, from her thighs to her shoulders, caressing her. He would bring girls over to the bar and introduce them to Alex.
If things worked out, Alex would go with the girl after Vincent, but things didn’t always work out. Some of them simply couldn’t help putting on airs and graces. And they didn’t always like Alex, who was muscular, hairy as an ape, and very solidly built. No, they would rather have Vincent—puny, hairless, delicate Vincent with his oh-so- pretty face!
Lost in thoughts of an earlier time, Alex jerked off. Laboriously mobilizing his shaky memory, he tried to pass all the girls he had shared with Vincent in rapid review. And to think that Vincent had abandoned him! The bastard! He was probably in America by now, getting laid by starlets!
A naked calendar girl adorned the whitewashed wall next to Alex’s bed. He closed his eyes as warm creamy sperm flowed into his hand. He wiped himself off with a spare dressing and went down to the kitchen to make coffee. He made it very strong. As the water was heating, he thrust his head under the tap, pushing aside the piles of dirty dishes that cluttered the sink.
He sipped from his steaming bowl of coffee and chewed on the remains of a sandwich. Outside, it was already stifling, the sun now high in the sky. Alex turned the radio on and listened to a quiz show on Radio Luxembourg called
He didn’t give a shit because he had not lost the money. In
He stretched out on the couch and returned to his pastime, a jigsaw with more than two thousand pieces. A chateau in the Valley of the Loire: Langeais. He was close to getting it done. In the attic, the first day, he had come across several Heller model kits, complete with glue, paint, and decals. So he had built Stukas and Spitfires, as well as a car—a 1935 Hispano-Suiza. They all stood on the floor now, mounted on their plastic bases and carefully painted. When he ran out of kits, Alex built a model of his parents’ farm: the two main buildings, the outbuildings, the fences. By gluing matches together he achieved a clumsy, naive, touching replica. All that was missing was the tractor, so he cut one out of a piece of cardboard. Later, on a return visit to the attic, he turned up the jigsaw puzzle…
The farmhouse where he was hiding out belonged to a friend of his, a guy he had met working as a nightclub bouncer. You could spend a few weeks there without fear of unannounced visits from curious neighbors. The friend had also supplied him with a phony identity card, but Alex’s now notorious face was liable to be displayed in every police station in France, and in the “most wanted” section, to boot. The cops hate it when one of their own gets killed.
The pieces of the puzzle obstinately refused to fit together. Alex was working on part of the sky. It was all blue, very hard to do. The chateau’s turrets, the drawbridge—all that had been easy, but the sky was another matter. Cloudless and empty, it was very tricky. Alex got irritated, which made him try even more unlikely joins; he was continually assembling patches of sky only to pull them apart again.
On the floor, just near the board on which he had laid out the jigsaw, crawled a spider. A squat and repulsive spider. She picked a corner of the wall and set about spinning a web. The thread flowed continually from her rounded abdomen. She came and went carefully and laboriously. With a match, Alex set fire to the just- completed portion of her web. The spider panicked, checking her surroundings, looking out for the advent of some enemy; but since the concept of matches was not inscribed in her genes, she soon went back to work.
She spun tirelessly, joining up her thread, anchoring it to rough spots on the wall, making use of every splinter of wood in the floor. Alex found a dead mosquito and tossed it into the newly constructed web. The spider rushed over, circled this carrion, but disdained it. Alex divined the reason for her lack of interest: the mosquito was already dead. Hobbling, he went out to the front steps, delicately gathered up a moth hiding under a tile, and placed it in the web.
The moth struggled to escape the viscous toils. The spider promptly reappeared, turning the prey this way
