The serious-faced man lets a thin smile curve his lips. “Pat Visconti. I’m a bus driver, I have a schedule to follow. I’m always on time.”
“He’s an ironman,” adds one of the girls. “Pat has a stopwatch built in his ass.”
Pat and his internal stopwatch grate on Géraldine’s nerves. She catches David looking at her, attentive as always. Sometimes it occurs to her that they’re too intimate, prisoners of a Kevlar cocoon that no one else can access. If they weren’t protected by the fact that he’s married to an adorable woman and she’s plagued by a traumatic past, they’d be dumb enough to sabotage their alloy of steel and titanium with a love affair.
Concentrate on the victim, Géraldine.
“Can we get someone on the identification of the victim?”
Géraldine feels someone touch her sleeve. A perfume of bleach and artificial musk invades her nostrils. And then a voice, gravelly from smoking: “I know him.”
Cynthia
It’s been thirty-two years since Cynthia started waitressing at the Palace. Her hair has gone from platinum blond to flamenco black to auburn. This morning, Cynthia is a redhead. She says her fox’s mane gives her courage. She needs it today.
She’s never spoken of what she saw. It was so long ago, and the humiliation still stings when she thinks about it today. But now the man is dead, and a woman is willing to listen to her. And so, seated in a corner booth, meticulously tearing apart a paper napkin, Cynthia tells her story.
She was twenty-three years old, raising a child by herself and working two shifts per day, serving up massive amounts of trans fats to already obese customers. One day a man sat down in her section, joined by a dark-haired, freckled little girl. The man was well known, preceded by his reputation and influence — all of Quebec watched Family Life on Thursday nights. He was the head honcho behind the popular sitcom that featured rambunctious cherub-faced children and parents overwhelmed by adulthood.
Everyone knew the Family Life producer had grown up in poverty, had started from nothing, and had made it to the top through flair and determination. Family Life was the childhood he’d always wanted — it offered an innocent and candid vision of adolescence and spurned the resignation of adult life. You have to believe in your dreams, the man often repeated in interviews. His success was proof of it.
The young waitress had never seen the darling little brunette before, but the child must have been full of promise for such an important man to want to take her to lunch. He’d ordered crêpes for the girl. For himself, eggs and bacon, but no butter on his toast.
“If I want to have a chance with you, my dear Cynthia, I’ve got to watch my figure,” he teased her. Cynthia had blushed, she remembers, and hurried back with fresh coffee to top off his cup. He always left a big tip, and showed sincere interest in her; he flirted by acting as if he had no chance with her, when they both knew he had every chance in the world. Some mornings, Cynthia would forget that he was married with children, and daydream that they fell in love. All the other waitresses, jealous of the tips and attention from the famous man, would mock her adoration of him. All except Diane. But Diane was old, Diane was bitter.
And then one morning, when Cynthia had forgotten to give him his confiture, she’d turned around and seen the man’s hand, a manicured hand, anchored by a fat gold signet ring, on the frail shoulder of the child. An ogre’s hand, a bear’s paw, so fat, so heavy, so implacable, resting there on its fragile prey, that all the blood in Cynthia’s heart turned to lead. A paternal hand, that’s all, the young waitress had tried to convince herself. He’s married, he has children, that’s all, no more, it can’t be that, this is the man who’s had every success and still comes to eat at the Palace, in my section, the famous man who hasn’t forgotten his roots, it’s me, me he’s making a play for, not her, a little girl...
The man raised his head, he met Cynthia’s eyes for a moment, and his expression transformed, terrifying. It didn’t last long, only a few seconds, and the charming smile returned. He left a more generous tip than usual, and when she saw that extra bill, Cynthia knew. She’d seen correctly, and he was paying her to feign blindness.
“He never came back to the Palace,” Cynthia now tells Géraldine, her eyes lowered, all the shame in the world on her tired shoulders. “It’s funny, you never would have thought he’d come back just to...” She pauses and looks into her lap. “Never mind.”
To be shot down like a dog. Cynthia doesn’t say the words, and yet Géraldine hears them very clearly.
“His name is Paul,” says Cynthia. “Paul Normand.”
Valérie
The first thing you notice about her is her cleavage, accentuated by a Donna Karan cashmere yoga top and the smattering of freckles covering her chest. Her face has been lifted and remodeled, cheeks tightened, lips plumped, wrinkles removed. But the cleavage doesn’t lie. Paul Normand’s wife has overindulged in the sun, her husband’s credit cards, and laziness. Above her balloon-like breasts are a thousand brown spots; even Valérie can’t cover up her aging skin.
Her eyes, periwinkle blue, are like her life: vacant. The number you have dialed is not in service, and all the namastes in the world can’t slow the march of time, nor the ravages of a life so carelessly lived.
Even with her senses dulled by white wine, even anaesthetized by all the chemicals that are supposed to make her less anxious, less depressive, but that really just allow her to bear her own passivity, Valérie must have seen something. You don’t spend three decades of your life with a pedophile and not once see him place his hand on the thin shoulder of a little girl in need of love and attention. Little girls in need of love and attention: there had been hundreds in his life. He’d devoured them like sweets, without a hint of remorse, right under the nose of his wife, who stood by and let him do it. Faced with the alternative — giving up the vacations he paid for in the Grenadines, and bringing charges that would make all those good times look like nothing but a constant stream of shit over the years — Valérie had never had an attack of conscience. She’d turned her head and swallowed more pink, yellow, and blue pills, enjoying the sun on the deck of the sailboat, forgetting everything in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, a cocktail in hand.
And now she had the spots to show for it. All over her chest. Like the markings of a permanent shame.
With Valérie, there’s no need for a weapon. It’s enough to press down on her throat with both thumbs until she stops breathing. She barely resists, complicit even in her own murder.
Paul
Géraldine jots the name down in her notebook: Paul Normand. Beside her, David hunches over his smartphone, already scouring the web. He’s shocked to discover the number of pages devoted to the impresario and his protégés.
“And the little girl, the dark-haired child, she has a name?” Géraldine asks the copper-haired waitress.
Cynthia stares at a couple in front of her and wonders how long they’ve been together. “I don’t know. He always called her sweetie. You’d have to watch the credits at the end of the show, they always list the names... Seems to me it was a boy’s name, a unisex name, Renée or Claude... Danielle perhaps?”
Michelle