Lost (2 page)

The morning heat sprang Antoine Stuart as he opened the wired-glass door to his flat and stepped on to the outside steps. He rented a room on the top floor of this large, clumsy house, built to resemble a chalet. The landlord had painted it peppermint green for the summer – to make it seem cooler, he had said, but it looked like icing sweating in the sun. Stuart locked the door and descended the steps. Behind the sound of a coffee-grinder, he could hear a child crying somewhere in the building. He had noted that parents these days seemed unable to leave their children alone.

The place was full of summer tenants who filled their balconies with brightly coloured inflatable junk and strewed their bathing suits among the vegetation. Stuart said a brief prayer for winter, when he could be alone again and feel the cool, protective silence of the floors below. He had taken the flat for the lock-up garage. He now threw up the metal door and felt for the torch that hung from a nail just inside. A single cicada ground away in the undergrowth. He crouched down and shone the torch beneath his car to check for a bomb. He replaced the torch, then climbed into the car, closed his eyes and turned the key in the ignition.

There were times when his fear of exploding into oblivion at the turn of the key occupied his body so powerfully it could rub out whole areas of him, shutting off parts of his nervous system so that he could not feel his fingers, his hands, his arms or his stomach. As he drove to work, all he could feel was his feet on the pedals, his physical self reduced to a pair of size forty-one shoes. He knew at such times that when his body returned it would be with one of his great white headaches.

Stuart backed out of the garage and down the ramp on to the road. He turned left in front of the parasol pine under which Coco Santini’s men had so often stood astride their motorbikes, smoking, watching his comings and goings, for no reason he could see other than to remind him at all times of who his enemy was. Now more and more, as testimony to his own dwindling importance, there was no one there.

He drove over the sleeping policemen in his street, his head kissing the roof each time. His brown Datsun had lost its suspension and was a disgrace, but the car cult on the island had always sickened him and so he kept his own in protest. He wound down the window, heard sprinklers working behind the hedges and caught the strong scent of eucalyptus.

He drove to the beach the back way to avoid town. The road wound through a series of garden suburbs in the low hills behind Massaccio. Dogs barked as he drove by. There had once been a craze for poodles, but now there was a preference for dogs that could rip your throat out. He saw Dobermanns everywhere, jogging along the beach at dawn with their skinhead masters, lying across the threshold to more and more cafés, or walking along the pavements wearing woollen caps with holes for their ears. For most of the kids on the island a pit bull was their first weapon. Stuart had never begrudged the islanders their violence. He understood it; he had been bred for it too. And he could see that it was the only thing they had that fitted in the modern world. But since Santini the violence had become incoherent. It was no longer the simple language of grievance and revenge. It was all around them like airwaves and no one understood it any more.

Stuart glanced at the empty road in the mirror. They were right: he was no longer worth tailing. He tried to remember when this feeling of detachment had begun. The symptoms were predominantly physical – a drying up in his mouth and nostrils, a tightening of his skin, as though he were withering fast, as though some hot wind were blowing and he was
shrinking a little every day. Soon Gérard, his deputy, would walk into his office and discover his remains, take him for a peach stone carelessly forgotten on his swivel chair, pick him up and bowl him expertly into the metal waste bin.

Stuart had stopped calling meetings. The secretaries, Annie and Inès, no longer hovered on the threshold of his office to ask when the next one might be. Narcotics no longer came to him to complain about Homicide, and Zanetecci from Central Office rang and rang on his direct line, but no one answered because he usually pulled it out of the wall. He would have liked to hide at work, but he had never dared close his door – he felt it to be somehow mean-spirited – and so Annie and Inès, just outside, were aware of his every move and he of theirs. On some days they chatted and laughed; on other days there were feuds and they worked in silence. Stuart often felt hemmed in by the women, affected by their moods, which flowed through the open door of his office and lapped at his feet like a toxic tide.

He drove into the car park. It was early and there were still spaces under the bamboo awning in the centre. Stuart chose this beach because he was not likely to meet anyone he knew here. It was a family beach with a huge inflatable castle for children to bounce on and there were no bars anywhere near it. Even Gérard did not know he came here and so no one could reach him. He slammed the door of his car and took off his shoes. He walked barefoot over the hot sand to the concrete steps that led down to the beach. He did not search for a spot but laid down his towel midway between the sea and the steps. There was a scattering of family units, arranged at neat intervals along the sand. As the sun climbed they would become less subdued and take out their beach toys, and the cries would mount and Stuart would be driven away.

He took off his jeans and his shirt and began to make a mound for his head, pushing the sand with his feet; then he arranged the towel over it and lay down. The few women he had shared a bed with did not like the way he slept. It didn’t
suit women, perhaps, if you slept on your stomach. He had sensed that he was expected to include them in his sleeping position, but to feel a head pressing down on his chest had suffocated him even then and would now be out of the question. He remembered what it felt like to be inside a woman. The memory would come to him suddenly and be followed, as now, by a sickening feeling, as though a bridge were giving way beneath him. Sometimes he saw his wife’s face below him, her eyes closed, her chin raised as though she were straining towards her own pleasure, biting her lip in concentration. With the memory of Maya always came the smell of almonds. When he had first met her she had called herself a
coiffeuse-shampouineuse.
That he had not jumped at the touch of her fingers, but closed his eyes, had been a sign. He had felt the cold, hard porcelain against his neck, listened to the scratching noise of her white coat while she moved, her fingers working, drawing a tree of pleasure that branched across his scalp, down his neck and down his spine, straight to his genitals. He had kept silent while the childish timbre of her voice ran on and on, and he had felt her desire for him, cold as ambition. It suited him that women seemed no longer to notice him, except for Annie at work – a woman, he could tell, given to pity.

He could feel the skin of his back starting to smart in the heat. He lifted his head and glanced at the group that had settled only a few paces away from him towards the steps. Two teenage couples languished side by side and intertwined. Stuart lay down again and closed his eyes.

‘You’ll get cancer.’ The voice was not familiar. Stuart raised his head and looked at the man’s shadow on the sand before him. He saw that the teenagers had gone. He sat up and shielded his eyes with his hand. It was Santini’s bodyguard, Georges Rocca. He was standing over him with his hands in the pockets of his black suit.

‘Did someone die?’ Stuart asked.

Georges squeezed the knot of his red tie.

‘Monsieur Santini wants to talk to you. He’s waiting in the car.’

Stuart brushed the sand from his hands.

‘Okay, but I haven’t had my swim yet. I won’t be long.’ And he stood up and walked past Georges to the water.

He dived in, opened his eyes and saw the milky sea, striped with bars of sunlight, heard the muted sounds of his own body moving through the water and felt the air bubbles run along on his neck as he rotated, turning and turning and smiling, letting the water enter his mouth and stream out again as he turned, smiling at the idea that Santini had sought him out.

When he returned to his towel, Georges had gone. He pulled on his shirt, wrapped his jeans in his towel and walked quickly towards the steps, leaving behind him the little mound he had made for his head.

When he saw Santini’s new black Saab in the car park he slowed his pace. Santini was sitting in the back, behind Georges. Before Georges had time to climb out, Stuart opened the back door and leaned in.

‘Stuart. Get in.’

Stuart nodded at the beige leather seats.

‘I’m wet.’

Santini opened his hand. ‘Please.’

When Santini used this word there was never any plea in it. Stuart climbed in next to him. He folded his arms. Santini could speak first. As Stuart waited he felt the salt water dripping pleasantly from his hair down the back of his shirt.

Santini looked away from him out of the window.

‘I was here for the zeppelin and I happened to see your car …’

‘What zeppelin?’

Santini turned his pale eyes on him.

‘Casino just launched one of those advertising zeppelins over the beach.’

It had been a while since Stuart had seen Santini and he
had put on a little weight. Stuart looked at his ink-black beard and considered for the first time that it might now be coming from a bottle.

‘I’m on the board of directors. So …’ He opened his hand again. ‘I saw your car. You can’t miss it. You should get the headlight fixed. It looks …’ Santini closed one eye and leered like Stuart’s Datsun.

Stuart smiled. He could feel Santini’s aggression, always there, just below the surface.

‘What’s this bullshit about Father Pierre, Stuart?’ Santini took a good-humoured tone.

‘What bullshit’s that?’

Santini pinched his nose and glanced at Georges’ reflection in the rear-view mirror.

‘They’ve just ruled against my visits. Like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Out of the blue.’ He was still using his pal’s voice.

‘I see.’

‘It’s pointless,’ Santini said.

Stuart raised his eyebrows. ‘Pointless for whom?’

‘For you. You won’t gain anything by stopping me from going to confession. It just looks petty.’

‘Confession?’

‘Yes. Confession. You can’t get to me through him. You know that. You’ve already tried. The man’s life is ruined. A year is a long time in a shithole like that and I’m all he’s got.’

‘La Santé isn’t bad as prisons go. Fresnes is a lot worse.’

Santini’s eyes took him in for a moment then slid over him in the way they did.

‘You’re getting petty, Stuart.’

‘You said.’

‘To me it’s proof you’ve lost it. I gather they’re sending Mesguish in. I’d say that’s pretty much the end, isn’t it?’ He paused. ‘You should go out gracefully.’

‘Listen, Santini. You ruined your priest’s life. Before you decided to use him, he was just a weak man and a not very good priest. You nudged him over the edge. We’ve talked. A
man who thinks he’s dammed hasn’t got much to lose.’

Santini spoke to Georges’ reflection in the rear-view mirror.

‘I’m bored of this.’

Stuart opened his door and climbed out.

‘I know how much you like prisons, Santini. The only reason you keep going to see him is to keep him sure.’ He leaned into the car. ‘And that was Madame Lasserre’s view and the reason why she put an end to your visiting rights. Which were an aberration in the first place.’

‘Drive, Georges,’ Santini said.

And to Georges’ credit, the response was so rapid that Stuart only just had time to take his hand from the door before the car ripped away in a sweep of floating sand.

Coco Santini could see from the way Georges kept glancing at him in the mirror that he was limbering up to talk to him.

‘What is it, Georges?’

Georges had lost a cap from one of his front teeth and so he kept his mouth closed, making his smile mawkish. He was ugly. His features slid; his eyes, nose and mouth looked as if they had been planted roughly and hazardously in greyish dough and there was a growth the size and colour of a muscat grape on the side of his nose. Georges was eternally grateful for Santini’s decision to employ him at a time when the fashion was for good-looking bodyguards. Coco had guessed, rightly as it turned out, that monsters would catch on.

‘I feel bad about last night,’ Georges said.

Coco looked at Georges’ hands on the steering wheel. He wore a square jet ring on his little finger with a tiny diamond in it. His appearance was often cause for concern. Because of it, there were a number of places – one restaurant where they served tiny, crescent-shaped vol-au-vents with the vegetables – that Coco couldn’t take him. But what did it matter? Georges Rocca was a human shield and there weren’t many bodyguards about whom you could say that.

‘Evelyne was great,’ Georges went on, encouraged by Coco’s silence. ‘She really was.’

‘Just as well there was someone there who can keep their head.’

‘You’re right, Coco. She can certainly do that. She certainly can do that.’ Georges glanced at him, unsure. ‘The Movement can be … impressive.’

‘No, Georges. The Movement is not impressive. Not ever.’ He held up his index finger to stress the point. ‘The Movement,
as you so wrongly call it – because a movement implies mass support, Georges – the FNL, you should say, is a band of second-rate criminals posing as freedom-fighters. They are an insult to the very idea of the independence movement. There is not a scrap of ideology left between them.’ There it was again, a shooting pain in the back of his neck. He closed his eyes. ‘The FNL is not a political movement, Georges. It’s a gang.’

‘You’re right,’ Georges said solemnly. ‘They’re not really a political movement at all.’

‘They’re extortionists,’ Coco said, rubbing his neck.

Coco consoled himself with the fact that Georges was too stupid to recognise the paradox: that he himself had helped to build up the FNL to the point where they could now hold a knife to his throat. Coco knew he had made a bad mistake today; probably the first mistake of his life. In exchange for the FLN votes at the election of the last Island Assembly, he had let them use his villa for an arms cache.

Coco had slept badly in anticipation of Georges’ call. He had known it was Georges because he could hear his breath whistling through his permanently obstructed nasal passages.

‘What happened?’

‘There were two Sam-7s in the delivery.’

Coco had then felt the pinching at the base of his neck.

‘I said no heavy arms.’

‘They think you’re Saddam Hussein.’ Georges gave a snort. ‘Just kidding.’ He kept talking: ‘It was not good,’ he said. ‘But Evelyne was … Evelyne was great.’

‘Shut up.’ Coco put his hand to the back of his neck. ‘What happened?’

‘I lost it when I saw the missiles and I hit a kid.’

‘Who?’

‘No one, just a kid. A new one.’

‘And?’

‘Evelyne drove him to the hospital. His nose was broken. She calmed everyone down. She was terrifie. Then we carried on filling the hole. It was fine after that.’

‘Is she refilling the pool?’

‘I think so.’

‘Did she start filling it last night? Did you see that she started filling the pool?’

‘She’s filling it. Coco, I said you’d have something to say about the Sam-7s.’

‘You’re an arsehole, Georges.’

He had pictured Georges rooting obscenely in his ear with his index finger, his posture of compliance.

Coco looked out of the window at the swamps around the airport. This land had always been useless. It was a disappointing blot right in the heart of his territory. There was no more malaria, but the land was still worthless. Only foreigners poured their money into it and watched it disappear into the sand. As he looked out over the marshes, he fondled his beard, pinching the coarse, blue-black hair and rolling it between his fingers. His wife, Liliane, had clipped it that morning before he left for the launch of the zeppelin. She had held his face with her small, cold hands, letting his head rest against her bosom. It was good to be tended by his wife. Without Liliane, he knew, he could lose sight of what it meant to be an islander.

‘Georges? What time was it when the kid was admitted to hospital?’

‘About two-thirty in the morning.’ He smiled solicitously at his boss. ‘Don’t worry, Coco. They admitted him as “X”.’

‘You didn’t know the kid?’

‘No. He was a new one. A skinhead.’

They were all skinheads these days. Coco reflected on the days when the FNL could have been considered worthy of the great independence movements such as the IRA or even ETA. They were the days when Titi, the founder, had still been alive. It was rumoured that Titi had planned a summit with ETA. A Basque emissary had come to the island to talk to him. With the thought of Titi came another bout of pain in his neck.

He looked out at the vegetation, dense as rainforest, hanging over the road that led up to Santarosa. Evelyne had told him recently that his stress load was too great. She had said she could feel it in his trapeziums as she massaged him. First the cache, then the disagreeable encounter with Antoine Stuart and the business with Father Pierre, Evelyne would agree, made the stress load unacceptably heavy. Still, he had noted with satisfaction how Stuart had aged. There was not a patch of skin without a line running through it.

‘Georges?’

‘Monsieur?’

‘Do you know what the definition of real power is?’

‘No, monsieur.’

‘It’s not doing what you want, but never ever doing what you don’t want.’

Georges beamed, showing his ruined tooth.

Coco looked away. For the first time in his adult life he had done something he didn’t want to do. Against his better judgement he had given in to the arms cache and they had proved his mistake by adding the missiles. They had voted for Russo, the only man out there who did not threaten his interests, but they clearly believed they had come out on top. Now that Russo was safely in power he wouldn’t help. Russo never cared how Coco got him there: ‘I’m your benefactor, Santini,’ he would say. ‘Not your confidant.’

Coco now cursed himself for not having tried to make an alliance with the pompous old clansmen from the MPR, or even the socialists.

He rested his head against the seat back and practised the breathing exercises Evelyne had taught him: ‘In, out; in, out … Count your breaths and let them go,’ she had said. But it didn’t work. The pain in his neck persisted. He decided to break his summer rule and go down to have his siesta with Evelyne at the villa. He wanted to be sure the pool was filling up. He didn’t particularly want to screw Evelyne, just smell her. What he liked most about her was her smell: something
tangy like orange peel and something else, warm and soft, like vanilla.

‘Come and pick me up after lunch, will you?’

‘After your sleep?’

‘No. Before. I’m going to the villa.’

Georges glanced at his boss.

‘What time?’

‘Two.’

Now Coco was irritated. There were countless little signs of his disharmony. Changing his routine and going to the villa for his siesta was one of them. ‘Don’t refer to the FNL as the Movement any more, please, Georges.’

‘Okay, Coco.’

They were passing the petrol station at the entrance to the village. Really, it was time to leave Evelyne. Her body was losing its contours and had begun to depress him. In September he would look for someone else. Evelyne could stay in the villa until the cache had been emptied, then she’d have to move out. He reflected that she hadn’t done badly from her twelve years with him: her own driving school and a forty-nine per cent share in one of the most successful night clubs on the island. She wanted him to turn La Bomba into a revue bar. There was no reason why they shouldn’t stay in business together. She was good.

‘Has the Aron woman arrived yet?’ he asked. This new thought lifted him a little.

‘Last night.’ Georges looked at him, reining in a grin. ‘She didn’t go up to the house, though. They stayed at the Napoléon.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘What’s her first name, Georges? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Alice. But she’s English, so you pronounce it “Alès”. Like the town.’

Alice Aron. Since the cocktail party for the opening of the modern art gallery in Massaccio the summer before, Coco
had started hoarding images of her. He would see her heavy hair falling forward as she leaned down to listen to someone beside her. He saw her holding it back, gathering it with her fingers; her long neck; the quality of her skin. And with the image came the same intense excitement he had experienced as a child when he had hit his first rabbit, watched it struggle then fall.

‘She won’t be selling her house.’ Georges winked. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

‘Just drop me here. I’ll walk home.’

He got out in the main square. There was a youth with long, matted hair sitting on the dried-up fountain playing the guitar. Coco tapped on Georges’ window as he was about to reverse. Georges wound down the window.

‘Have the German hippie removed before you go.’

Georges looked in his wing mirror at the youth and nodded. Coco turned and walked towards the alley that led up to his house. A large blue Mercedes was obstructing the alley. Coco looked through the open window of the car. Beneath the pedals lay the Hertz hire contract in its envelope. The back seat was scattered with the debris of their journey: toys, sweet-wrappers, crisps. On the passenger seat was an incorrectly folded map of the island, an orange headscarf, and on her seat was a squashed packet of biscuits. There was a deep scratch on the paintwork the full length of the car. She might be young and classy, but she was a slob.

Yes, a woman had to be clean, that was essential. Clean Evelyne was. She was also a safe harbour at a time when things were shifting unpleasantly. Perhaps she had one more good year in her, Coco reflected, as he walked home.