I Kill (14 page)

Pierrot was silent. Then he gave a slight nod.

The man stood up and pressed the button on a tape recorder behind him. The notes of a guitar suddenly pierced the air. The woman observed her son’s face, taut with concentration, engrossed
in listening to the sound from the speakers. The music ended a few seconds later. The man crouched down next to Pierrot again.

‘Do you want to hear it again?’

The boy shook his head silently.

‘Do you recognize it?’

‘It’s there,’ Pierrot said softly, turning his eyes to Bikjalo as if he were the only person who mattered.

‘You mean we have it?’ The manager came closer. Pierrot nodded again, with emphasis.

‘It’s there, in the room.’

‘What room?’ asked Hulot, coming near.

‘The room is the archive, downstairs in the basement. That’s where Pierrot works. There are thousands of records and CDs and he knows each and every one of them.’

‘If you know where it is in the room, can you go and get it for us?’ Frank asked gently. He was desperate not to press him too hard.

Pierrot looked at the manager again, as if asking permission. ‘Go on, Pierrot. Bring it here, please.’

Pierrot got up and crossed the room with his odd loping gait. He disappeared from view, followed by his mother’s worried gaze.

Inspector Hulot went up to her. She recoiled with shame at the cheap dress she had hurriedly pulled on over her nightie.

‘Madame, excuse me again for the brutal way in which we woke you and brought you here. I hope you weren’t too frightened. You can’t imagine how useful your son could be
tonight. We are truly grateful to you for allowing him to help us.’

Now her momentary embarrassment melted into a surge of pride for her son.

Pierrot returned a few minutes later. He was holding a somewhat worn record sleeve under his arm. He placed it on the table and removed the vinyl record with extreme care to avoid touching it
with his fingers.

‘Here it is,’ said Pierrot.

‘Can we hear it, please?’ asked the younger policeman with his thoughtful voice.

The boy went over to the stereo, handling it like an expert. He pressed a couple of buttons, raised the lid, and put on the record. He pushed PLAY and the turntable began to spin. Then he
delicately took the arm and rested it on the LP. The notes that played were the same ones that an unknown man had sent them a little while before, daring them to put a stop to his wanderings
through the night.

There was a moment of general euphoria. Everyone found a way of applauding Pierrot’s small personal triumph as he turned around with an innocent smile. His mother looked at him with a
dedication in her eyes that his success could only partly repay. A moment, only one moment, when the world seemed to remember her son and give him some of the satisfaction it had always denied. She
started to cry. The inspector gently put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Thank you, madame. Your son was magnificent. Everything is fine now. I’ll have someone take you straight home in one of our cars. You go out to work, don’t you?’

The woman raised her face streaked with tears, smiling in embarrassment again for that moment of weakness. ‘Yes, I keep house for an Italian family here in Monte Carlo.’

‘Leave the family’s name with Sergeant Morelli, that man in the brown jacket,’ said the inspector, smiling back. ‘We’ll arrange for you to have a couple of
days’ paid leave for tonight’s disturbance. That way you can spend some time with your son, if you like.’ The inspector went over to Pierrot. ‘As for you, young man, would
you like to spend the day in a police car, talk on the radio with the switchboard, and become an honorary policeman?’

Pierrot probably didn’t know what an honorary policeman was, but the idea of driving around in a police car made his eyes light up.

‘Will you give me handcuffs, too? And can I work the siren?’

‘Of course, whenever you like. And you’ll have your own pair of bright shiny handcuffs if you promise to ask our permission before you arrest anyone.’

Hulot nodded to a policeman who would take Pierrot and his mother home. As they left, he could hear the boy say to his mother, ‘Now that I’m an
honourable policeman,
I’m
going to arrest Mme Narbonne’s daughter who’s always laughing at me. I’ll put her in prison and . . .’ They never did find out what would happen to Mme Narbonne’s
unfortunate daughter because the three of them reached the end of the hallway and Pierrot’s voice faded away.

‘Carlos Santana,
Lotus,’
Frank mused, leaning against the table looking thoughtfully at the record sleeve that the boy had brought from the archive. ‘Recorded live in
Japan, 1975 . . .’

‘Why did that man want us to listen to a song recorded in Japan thirty years ago?’ Morelli wondered, picking up the sleeve. ‘What did he want to tell us?’ He looked at it
carefully and turned it over.

Hulot watched out the window as the car with Pierrot and his mother drove away. He turned and looked at his watch. Four thirty.

‘I don’t know, but we’d better try to find out as soon as possible.’ He paused before expressing everyone’s thought. ‘Unless it’s already too
late.’

Allen Yoshida signed the cheque and handed it to the caterer. He had brought the staff of his favourite Parisian restaurant, Le Pré Catelan in the Bois de Boulogne, down
for the party. It had cost him a fortune, but it was worth it. He still had the rarefied taste in his mouth of the frog and pistachio soup from that evening’s menu.

‘Thank you, Pierre. It was all magnificent, as usual. As you can see, I added a tip for you on the cheque.’

‘Thank you, Mr Yoshida. You’re very generous, as always. You don’t have to show me out, I know the way. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, my friend.’

Pierre gave a slight bow that Yoshida returned. The man walked out silently and disappeared behind the dark wooden door. Yoshida heard his car start. He picked up a remote control and pointed it
at the panel on the wall to his left. The panel opened silently, revealing a series of screens, each connected to a closed-circuit camera located in different corners of the house. He saw
Pierre’s car drive out the front gate and his security guards close it after him.

He was alone.

He crossed the large room with remains of the party everywhere. The catering staff had removed what they were supposed to and left discreetly, as usual. His servants would arrive the next day to
finish the job. Allen Yoshida didn’t like having people in his house. His help came in the morning and left at night. He asked them to stay over only when necessary, or else he used an
outside company. He preferred to be alone at night, without the fear that indiscreet eyes and ears might accidentally discover something he wanted to keep to himself.

He went out into the night through the enormous French doors that opened on to the garden. Outside, a skilful play of coloured lights created shadows among the trees, bushes and flower beds, the
work of a landscape architect he had brought down from Finland. He loosened the bow tie of his elegant Armani tuxedo and unbuttoned his white shirt. Then he slipped off his patent leather shoes
without untying them. He bent down and removed his silk socks as well. He loved the feeling of his bare feet on the damp grass. He walked over to the illuminated swimming pool. In daylight it
seemed to stretch to the horizon, and now at night it looked like an enormous aquamarine glowing in the dark.

Yoshida lay down on a teak chaise longue by the pool and stretched his legs. He looked around. There were a few lights out at sea and the moon was on the wane. In front of him, he could make out
the glare of Monte Carlo, the home of most of his guests that evening.

He turned to look at his house. He loved the place and felt privileged to own it. He loved its old-fashioned lines, the elegance of its construction combined with its functional severity. It had
been built in the early thirties for the screen goddess of the era, Greta Garbo. When he purchased it, the house had been closed up for years and he had had it renovated by a brilliant and
eye-wateringly expensive architect.

He had given him free rein, asking only that he retain the spirit of the house. The result was a resounding success: impeccable style married to the most advanced technology. A residence that
left everyone dumbfounded, just as he had been the first time he had crossed the threshold. The fee had contained a seemingly endless number of zeros, and he had paid it without batting an eye.

He leaned against the back of the chaise longue, moving his head to stretch his neck. He slipped his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a tiny gold bottle. Unscrewing the
cap, he tapped a pinch of white powder on to the back of his hand. He brought his hand to his nose and sniffed the cocaine directly, then rubbed his nostrils with his fingers to remove the residue
of powder.

Everything around him was proof of his success and power. Still, Allen Yoshida had no illusions. He remembered his father who used to break his back unloading crates of fish on to his truck from
the refrigerated cars when they came in from the coast, and then drove around to supply New York’s Japanese restaurants. He remembered when he came home from work, preceded by the stench of
fish that he could never get rid of, however much he washed his hands. He remembered their dilapidated house in the rundown neighbourhood of the city and he remembered as a child hearing his
parents talk about how they needed to repair the roof and the plumbing. He could still hear the pipe gurgling every time they turned on a faucet, and the rush of rusty water that poured out. You
had to wait a couple of minutes before the water ran clear enough so that you could wash. He had grown up there, the son of a Japanese man and an American woman, straddling two cultures, a
gaijin
in the Japanese community’s limited way of thinking and a Jap for white Americans. For everyone else – blacks, Puerto Ricans, Italians – he was just one more
half-breed on the city streets.

He felt the lucid rush of the cocaine start to circulate and he ran a hand through his thick, shiny hair.

It had been a long time since he had had any illusions. Actually, he’d never had any. Everyone who had come to his home that evening was there not for the man he was but for what he owned.
For those billions of dollars. None of them were really interested in knowing whether or not he was a genius. What they cared about was the fact that his genius had helped him amass a personal
fortune that made him one of the world’s ten richest men.

Nothing else counted very much for anyone. Once you achieved the result, it did not matter
how.
Everyone knew him as the brilliant creator of Sacrifiles, the operating system that
competed with Microsoft on the world computer market. He’d been eighteen when he had launched it, when he’d created Zen Electronics with a loan from a bank that believed in the project
after he had shown a group of astonished investors his system’s simple operations.

Billy La Ruelle should have been with him to share in the success. Billy, his best friend, who had studied with him at the same computer school, and who had come home one day with the dazzling
idea for a revolutionary operating system that ran in a DOS environment. They had worked on it in absolute secrecy, he and Billy, for months, day and night, on their two computers linked via a
network. In a tragic accident, Billy had fallen from the roof when they had gone up to fix the TV aerial the day before the Bulls–Lakers play-off. He had slipped on the sloping roof like a
sled on ice and had found himself hanging from the drainpipe. Yoshida had stood there watching, immobile, as Billy begged him for help. His body was suspended in the air and the left side of the
metal sheeting was giving way under his weight. Yoshida had seen his friend’s knuckles grow white in the effort to hold on to the sharp edge of the drainpipe, and to his life.

Billy had fallen with a scream, looking at Yoshida with desperate, widening eyes. He had landed with a thud on the concrete in front of the garage and lain there motionless, his neck bent in an
unnatural position. The piece of drainpipe that had broken off had ironically fallen right into the basketball net attached to the wall outside the house where he and Billy let off steam during
their breaks. As Billy’s mother ran out of the house screaming, Yoshida had gone into his friend’s bedroom and downloaded everything on the hard drive on to floppy disks before erasing
it so that nothing remained. He had slipped the disks into his back pocket and then run out into the courtyard, over to Billy’s lifeless body.

Billy’s mother was sitting on the ground. She had her son’s head in her lap and was stroking his hair. Allen Yoshida had cried his crocodile tears. He had knelt down beside her,
feeling the hard surface of the disks in his pocket. A neighbour had called an ambulance. It had arrived in record time, preceded by a siren that was strangely similar to the cries of Billy’s
mother, and stopped with a screech of tyres and brakes. Paramedics had calmly carried off his friend’s body, covered with a white sheet.

An old story. One to forget. Now his parents lived in Florida and his father had finally managed to rub his hands clean of the stench of fish. And even if he hadn’t, anyone would swear
that the stench was perfume – thanks to Allen’s dollars. He had paid to put Billy’s mother through rehab for her drinking and had bought his parents a house in a nice
neighbourhood where they lived without any hassle, thanks to the money he sent them every month. No rusty water, no boarded-up stores. Once, when they had met, his friend’s mother had kissed
his hands. As often as he washed them, he had felt that kiss burning on his flesh for a long time.

Yoshida got up and went into the house. He took off his jacket and threw it over one shoulder. The dampness of the night penetrated his thin shirt, making it stick to his skin. He picked a white
gardenia from a bush and brought it to his nostrils. The cocaine had numbed his nose, but he could still smell its delicate fragrance.