It’s odd: someone who’s assassinated so many people through her journalistic slandering has such a sudden and scared impulse to survive.
“Yes, but they were words! Just words!” cries Krazynski. “You can’t compare, please, I beg you, I was only doing my job—”
The bullets shatter her skull and cardiac muscle — one can’t call what she had a heart. Behind Krazynski the glass door splinters into a thousand fragments. It’s pretty, all that red and gray on the snow. How delicate death is, in the end. On the paved curb of the cul-de-sac, the tabby cat watches as if waiting to be alone with its mistress’s corpse, to better devour her.
Him
The snow crackles beneath Géraldine’s red Converse. Her coat is unbuttoned, her lovely head covered with a fur chapka hat; she faces the cold like an enemy from whom one must hide any sign of fear.
Géraldine and David duck beneath the yellow-and-black tape, weaving their way through a cluster of forensic technicians. Above the workers’ heads are clouds of gray mist rising like Native American smoke signals. The body is near the restaurant’s side entrance, between a dumpster, cement wall, and a mountain of hardened snow plowed to the edge of the parking lot. The sky is the same hazy pink as the froth on the lips of the corpse, drowning in its own blood.
The first thought that comes to Géraldine’s mind is the crime scene’s vulnerability. The killer had to act in a matter of seconds or risk being caught.
“A professional,” David says.
“Or not,” Géraldine mutters.
The corpse is laid out stiff on a slab of ice wearing an unbuttoned Armani blazer. The blood blooms over a lavender polo with its logo of a jockey in midswing. And then David sees what Géraldine is looking at now: the pants, unzipped, reveal boxers stained a deep red, suggesting a violence too intimate to be anything other than the work of a professional killer.
“Guys are still wearing Ralph Lauren, then?”
David nods. “Not so much in this part of the city.”
Rue Ontario is Montreal’s epicenter of misery, a street that lacks even the audacity to be a bit ethnic or colorful, qualities that would at least put a multicultural sheen over its dejection. Rue Ontario has remained filthy and white after all these years, pallid as an old candle stump left in an abandoned church.
Dr. Attila Mihalka approaches Géraldine and David, rubbing his hands together, beaming, icicles hanging from his long mustache. In theory, the forensic doctor is retired, but since his replacement is a wimp always teetering on the edge of burnout, the old Hungarian is back on the job, and he’s never been in such a good mood.
Géraldine points at the corpse’s bloody boxers and asks: “Am I dreaming, Doc Attila, or was he...?”
“Castrated? You’re not dreaming, my dear. Three bullets point-blank from a hunting rifle, and a beautiful castration — shlang. No mercy. Reminds me of Budapest in ’58, except there they hung us by our feet.”
“Castrated,” repeats Géraldine, dazed.
The old Hungarian nods enthusiastically.
“Did you find the... you know. His thing?” asks David.
“The pièce de résistance is missing, but I can tell you one thing: whoever did this wasn’t messing around. You can see the serration of the blade in the flesh, like on a deer. If I end my career on this case, I’ll be happy.”
Any minute and the old Hungarian will be jumping up and down, thinks David, who feels the toast he had for breakfast rising up his throat. Géraldine’s husky voice brings him out of his nausea.
“Pre- or postmortem castration?”
“Probably right after he was shot. It must have been agonizing because, you see, there was a lot of blood. It’s very vascular, a man’s...”
Géraldine turns toward David. “What do you think it means?”
David shakes his head, his face alarmingly pale. “I think it’ll help us find out who the victim is.”
“What do we know apart from his bad taste in clothes?” asks Géraldine.
“Nothing. No papers, no car keys, no cell phone. His pockets were empty; all that’s left is his money.”
Géraldine raises a delicate eyebrow. “How much?”
“One thousand in hundred-dollar bills.”
Géraldine kneels down and leans over the waxy face, its mouth open in a final gasp before death. Here’s a man who believed that everything was owed to him, she thinks, even life. Then she looks up at David. “And what do you make of that?” she asks, pointing to the tattered bills.
“I think he came here to buy someone’s silence. I think that when you wear suits like his, a thousand bucks is nothing, but for the murderer it’s a fortune. I think it wasn’t the first silence he’d bought, and I think — no, I’m sure — that this guy had no respect for the person he came here to see.”
Géraldine nods in agreement. She likes it when she can detect a rare tremble of anger in David’s voice. In the Nyamata massacres that had taken her entire family, the gentle ones had been the first to die. It’s not good for a man to be incapable of anger.
“Say, lovebirds, may I?” Attila’s voice brings them back to reality. The wind is glacial, and the doctor wants to leave with his castrated corpse.
Géraldine stands up, extending a leather-gloved hand to David. “Where are the swimmers?”
Attila the Hungarian strokes his mustache, and points his chin toward the Palace. “Eating.”
Clearly, some people never lose their appetite, David thinks, hurrying at Géraldine’s red-sneakered heels.
The Swimmers
Spreading thick layers of butter onto their toast, bursting egg yolks with ferocious stabs of their forks, planting their knives in the flesh of sausages as if a man hadn’t just been murdered and castrated in the adjacent parking lot, they eat. They’re carnivores, assassins, ogres. Five girls and three boys, sedated by chlorine, high on endorphins and caffeine.
I really must learn to swim, Géraldine thinks, impressed by their energy.
“You’re the ones who found the body?” asks David.
“It was Pat,” says a small blond girl, pointing to a man whose sweater hugs every muscle of his sculpted body.
Géraldine pulls up a chair and sits down at the end of the table. “Would you like to tell me about it?”
In a swift gesture, the man soaks up the last traces of his egg yolk with a piece of bread. Behind him, giant jars of skinned peppers recall the killing in the parking lot. “I’m always the first one out of the pool. I was getting ready to put my bag in my car when I saw the body.”
Géraldine looks up at him, trying to read his face. Its lines are clean and sharp, as if sketched in chalk. The man takes advantage of the pause to swallow his mouthful of egg-soaked bread and wash it down with a gulp of coffee. There’s nothing calm about him. “Did you touch him?”
“Yes. I felt for a pulse. I’m a first responder. I didn’t touch anywhere else. I got up and called 911. Your men arrived seven minutes and twenty-two seconds later.”
Seven minutes, twenty-two seconds. “Are you always so precise with your timekeeping, monsieur?”