Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  "This is all totally beyond me, sister."

  "I told you. She was mad."

  "But why you? For heaven's sake, your convent is over a hundred and twenty-five miles away from Sarzac!"

  The nun remained silent, then said:

  "She had searched for me. She had chosen me."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I have not always been a Carmelite. Before receiving the call, I was a mother. I had to abandon my husband and my son. The woman thought that this would make me likely to accept her request. She was right."

  Karim stared on into that pit of darkness. He pressed her:

  "You're not telling me everything. If you thought she was mad, then why did you do as she asked? Why cover hundreds of miles to get a handful of photos? Why lie, steal, destroy?"

  "Because of the child. Despite that woman's madness, despite her wild words, I…I sensed that the child was in danger. And that the only way to help him was to carry out his mother's instructions. Even if it just served to calm her down."

  Karim swallowed hard. The pinpricks were covering his skin once again. He approached her and adopted his sweetest tone of voice:

  "Tell me about the mother. What did she look like?"

  "She was very tall, and big. She must have been at least six feet. Her shoulders were broad. I never saw her face, but I remember that she had a gleaming, black, wavy head of hair. She also wore glasses, with thick frames. She was always dressed in black. In pullovers made of cotton, or wool…"

  "What about Jude's father? Did she ever mention him?"

  "No, never."

  Karim gripped the wood of the prayer-stool and bent further over. Instinctively, the woman pulled back.

  "How often did she come here?" he asked.

  "Four or five times. Always on a Sunday. In the morning. She gave me a list of names and addresses – the photographer, and families that might possess the photographs. During the week, I set about obtaining the pictures. I went to see the families. I lied. I stole. I bribed the photographer with money she had given me…"

  "Did she then take the photos away?"

  "No. I've already told you. She wanted me to burn them… When she came here, she simply crossed off the names on her list…When all the names had been gone through, she seemed relieved. Then she completely disappeared. As for me, I took the path of the shadows. I chose darkness, isolation. The only eyes I can bear are God's. Since that time, I have prayed for the little boy every day. I…"

  She broke off, apparently suddenly catching onto something. "What brought you here? Why all these questions? My God, Jude isn't…"

  Karim stood up. The incense was burning his throat. He suddenly realized that he was panting, with his mouth agape. He swallowed hard, then glanced at Sister Andrée.

  "You did what you could," he said blankly. "But it served no purpose. A month later, the kid was dead. I don't know how. I don't know why. But that woman wasn't as mad as you think. And yesterday, in Sarzac, Jude's grave was desecrated. I am now practically certain that the demons she was afraid of were the persons responsible. That woman was living in a nightmare, sister. And that nightmare has just been resurrected."

  Head down, the nun groaned. Her veil was a cascade of black-and-white silk.

  Karim went on, his voice growing louder and louder. His harsh tones rose up in the church and he no longer knew on whose behalf he was speaking, for her, for himself, or for Jude.

  "I'm an inexperienced officer, sister. I'm a thug, and I work as a loner. But, in some respects, that's bad news for last night's bastards?” He grabbed the prayer-stool again. "Because I promised that kid something, understand? Because I come from nowhere and nothing, and nobody's going to stop me. This is personal business, now, get it? Personal business!"

  The policeman leant down. He felt the wood crack into splinters beneath his fingers.

  "It's time for you to get thinking, sister. Come up with something, anything that will put me on the right track. I have to get to Jude's mother?”

  Still bent over, the nun shook her head.

  "I don't know anything."

  "Think! Where could I find that woman? Where did she go after Sarzac? And before all that, where had she come from? Give me a detail, a lead, to help me continue my enquiries!"

  Sister Andrée was swallowing back her tears.

  "I…I think she came here with him."

  "With him?"

  "With the boy?”

  "Did you see him?"

  "No. She left him in town, near the station, in an amusement park. The fairground is still there, but I have never worked up the courage to go and see the stall-keepers. Perhaps…Perhaps one of them might remember the boy…That's all I know…"

  "Thank you, sister?”

  Karim ran off. His steel-capped shoes rang like pieces of flint across the huge courtyard. He stopped in the icy air, as stiff as a rake, and stared up at the sky. In a fleeting moment of panic, his lips mumbled:

  "Jesus Christ…where am I?…Where the fuck am I?"

  CHAPTER 32

  The amusement park stretched out in the dusk beside a railway line, on the limits of that small, deserted town. The stands spat out their light and music into nothingness. There was not one single idler, not one family that had come out for a stroll there that Monday evening. Far off, the dark sea opened its white jaws in a succession of violent waves.

  Karim walked on. A big wheel was slowly rotating. Its spokes were dotted with little fairy lights which were alternating, one lot on, the other lot off, as though in the throes of a series of short circuits. Musical horses cantered riderless around the carousel; identical-looking attractions, covered with tarpaulin, were being whipped by the wind: bran tubs, arcade games, pathetic amusements…Abdouf would have been unable to say whether he found the church or this fair the more depressing.

  Without hoping for much, he started questioning the stall-keepers. He mentioned a kid called Jude Ithero, then the date: July 1982. Generally, the faces remained as inscrutable as mummies. Sometimes he got a negative grunt. On other occasions, signs of incredulity: "Fourteen years ago! Whatcha expect?" Karim felt increasingly discouraged. Who was likely to remember? How many Sundays had Jude in fact spent there in all? Three? Four? Five?

  Telling himself that the kid might well have taken a lilting to one attraction in particular, or become friendly with a stall-keeper, he stubbornly asked round the entire park…

  But he completed his circuit without the slightest success. He stared at the coast. The waves were still spitting out their tongues of foam around the piles under the seafront. It looked like an ocean of tar. He felt as if he had entered a no-man's-land, where nothing whatever was to be learnt. A childhood memory resurfaced in his mind: the magical town in Pinocchio, to which all the naughty little boys were drawn by wonderful attractions, before being captured and then turned into donkeys.

  What had Jude been turned into?

  He was about to go back to his car when, across the wasteland, he spotted a small 'circus.

  He told himself that, in the name of his enquiry, he was going to have to explore every possible avenue. Shoulders slouching, he marched over to the canvas dome. It was not a real circus – more like a shabby tent containing a series of miserable turns. Above the entrance, a plastic banner announced, in twisted lettering: "The Fire-eaters". With two fingers, the cop raised the piece of cloth that served as a door.

  He stopped dead before the blinding spectacle inside. Flames. Dull sounds of scraping. The smell of gasoline in the air. The lieutenant had a fleeting image of a souped-up machine, made of muscle and fire, of brands and human torsos. Then he realised that, under the pale stage lights, he was watching a sort of waltz of the fire-eaters. Men with bare chests, gleaming with sweat and gasoline, were exhaling their inflammable breath onto the crackling torches. They then formed themselves into a menacing-looking semi-circle. Another swig of gasoline. More flames. Some of them bent down, while others leapt over their backs, spittin
g out a further dazzling incantation.

  The cop thought of the demons that had been pursuing Jude's mother.

  Every element in this long nightmare kept up the same atmospheric pressure, the same disturbing deadliness.

  "Each crime is an atomic nucleus," the cop with the crew cut had said.

  Karim sat down on one of the wooden benches and contemplated these apprentice dragons for a while. He sensed that he should wait there, then question these men. But why, he had no idea. At last, one of the fire-eaters deigned to notice his presence. He stopped his performance and, holding his blackened torch which was still spitting with fire, walked over to him. He must have been under thirty, but the lines on his face seemed to have been dug out by twice that number of years. Thanks to a spell inside, no doubt. His hair was brown, his skin brown, his eyes brown. And the piercing stare of someone who was always on the look-out for trouble.

  "You one of us?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "A traveler. You looking for work?"

  Karim pressed his hands together.

  "No, I'm a cop."

  "A cop?"

  The fire-eater approached and propped one heel on the bench just below Karim.

  "Well you sure don't look like one."

  The Arab could smell the man's flaming torso.

  "What's a cop supposed to look like?"

  "What are you after? It can't be illegal immigrants, can it?"

  Karim did not reply. He glanced round the patchwork canvas dome, the performers in the ring, then the thought occurred to him that this character must have been about fifteen in 1982. What were the chances of his having run into Jude? Zero. But he just had to ask.

  "Were you already here fourteen years back?"

  "Yeah, probably. This circus belongs to my folks?”

  Karim said, in one breath:

  "I'm on the trail of a little boy who might have come here round that time. In July 1982, to be precise. On several successive Sundays. I'm looking for someone who might remember him."

  The fire-eater searched for the truth in Karim's eyes.

  "You're not serious, are you?"

  "Don't I look it?"

  "What was this kid's name?"

  "Jude. Jude Ithero."

  "And you really expect someone to remember a kid who might have dropped into our circus fourteen years back?"

  Karim stood up and strode over the benches.

  "Forget it."

  The young man suddenly grabbed him by the jacket.

  "Jude came here a few times. He used to stay sitting there while we were rehearsing. Like he was hypnotised, or something.”

  "What?"

  The man climbed up a row and stood beside Karim. His breath stank of gasoline. He went on:

  "It was one hell of a hot summer, that one. Like you could fry eggs on the sidewalk. Jude turned up here four Sundays in a row. We were about the same age. We played together. I taught him to spit out fire. It was kid's stuff. What's the big deal?"

  Karim stared at the young fire-eater.

  "And you remember him, just like that, fourteen years later?"

  "That's what you were hoping, isn't it?"

  The cop raised his voice:

  "A11 I want to know is why you remember?”

  The man leapt down onto the circle of beaten earth, clicked his heels together and raised his torch to his lips. He sprinkled it with saliva tinged with gasoline. A shower of sparks flew out.

  "It's because there was something a bit special about Jude."

  Karim trembled.

  "Something about his face?"

  "No, not his face."

  "What then?"

  The young man spat out another volley of flames, then cackled: "Listen, man, Jude was a girl?”

  CHAPTER 33

  Slowly, the truth was taking shape.

  According to the fire-eater, the child he had met on four occasions was a young girl, carefully disguised as a boy. Hair clipped short, boyish clothes, boyish manners. The man was categorical:

  "She never told me she was a girl…It was her secret, see? But I noticed at once that something was odd. First off, she was really beautiful. A stunner, in fact. And then there was her voice. And her shape. She must have been about ten, or twelve. And it was beginning to show. Then there were other things. She had lenses in her eyes that changed their color. They were dark, but as black as ink. Artificial looking. Even though I was a kid, I still spotted that. And she was always complaining that her eyes hurt. They were stinging right into her head, that's what she said…"

  Karim gathered the evidence. Jude's mother's greatest fear was that the demons were going to destroy her child. Which is presumably why she had left her town and ended up in Sarzac. Once there, she must have adopted a new identity. And Karim should have realised that before. She had changed her child's name, thoroughly altered its appearance, and even its sex. That way, nobody could possibly find her out. But, two years later, the demons had turned up again in her new town, Sarzac. They were still looking for the child and were about to unmask him.

  To unmask her.

  The mother had panicked. She had destroyed all the documents, all the school registers, all the files that contained her daughter's assumed name. And, in particular, the photographs. Because, if the demons did not know her child's new name, they certainly knew her face. It was, in fact, the face they were looking for. The proof of her identity. That was why they must first have wanted to examine the school photos so as to pick out the features they were after. But where had these pursuing demons come from?

  And who were they?

  Karim questioned the young fire-eater, who was still brandishing his torch:

  "And did this little girl ever say anything about demons?"

  "Demons? No, the demons…" He pointed at the troop and chuckled. "…that was us. And Jude didn't say a lot. I told you, we were kids. I just taught her to spit out fire…"

  And that interested her?"

  "Not half. She said she wanted to learn…so as to protect herself. And protect her mum, too…A bit of a funny kid."

  "She didn't say anything else about her mother?"

  "No…And I never saw her either…Jude stayed with us for a couple of hours then, all of a sudden, she was gone…Like Cinderella.

  She vanished like that a few times, then never came back."

  "Do you remember anything else? A detail I could find useful?"

  "No."

  "Her name, for instance…She never told you her name, her real one, I mean."

  "No, but now I stop and think, there was something…"

  "What?"

  "I started by calling her 'Joode', like in the Beatles song. But that wound her up. She insisted on being called 'Ju-de', with a French pronunciation. I can still see her little mouth pouting: 'Ju-de'."

  The fire-eater smiled nostalgically, his eyes seemed to mist over. Karim figured that this dragon must have been head-over-heels in love with the girl. The man then asked him a question:

  "So what are you investigating? What's up with her? These days, she must be at least…"

  Karim was no longer listening. He was thinking of little Jude, who had been to school for two years under an assumed name. How had the mother managed to fake her identity papers and enroll her in that school? How had she managed to pass her off as a little boy and so fool everyone, in particular the teacher she saw every day?

  He had a sudden idea. He looked up and asked the human torch: "Is there a phone round here?"

  "Course there is. What do you take us for, bums?"

  Abdouf followed him as he led the way.

  He then found himself in a small shed of painted wood at the end of the ring. There was a telephone on a small shelf. He dialed the number of the headmistress of Jean-Jaurès School. The wind was slapping against the edges of the tent. In the distance, the fire-eaters continued their rehearsal. It rang three times, then a man's voice answered.

  "I'd like to speak to the hea
dmistress, please," Karim explained, mastering his excitement.

  "Who shall I say is calling?"

  "Lieutenant Karim Abdouf."

  A few seconds later, the woman's breathless voice panted into the receiver. The policeman asked point-blank:

  "Do you remember the teacher you mentioned, who left Sarzac at the end of the 1982 school year?"

  "Of course."

  "You told me that she'd taken CM1 in 1981, then CM2 in 1982."

  "That's correct."

  "So, she followed Jude Ithero from one class to the next?"

  "Yes. You could put it that way. But, as I told you, it's common practice…"

  "What was her name?"

  "Hang on, I'll look at my notes…"

  The headmistress rummaged through her papers.

  "Fabienne Pascaud."

  This name, of course, meant nothing to Karim. What was more, it had nothing in common with the child's assumed name. With each new piece of information, he ran up against a brick wall. He asked:

  "Do you have her maiden name?"

  "That is her maiden name."

  "She wasn't married?"

  "She was a widow. Or, according to my files, she was. How odd. She seems to have started to use her old surname again."

  "What was her married name?"

  "Hang on…There it is: Hérault. H.E.R.A.U.L.T."

  Another dead end. Karim was barking up the wrong tree again. "OK. Thanks, I'll…"

  There then came a blinding flash. If he was right, if this woman really was Jude's mother, then the little girl's surname must originally have been Hérault. And her first name…

  Karim thought again of the fire-eater's remark about the pronunciation of the kid's name. She had been adamant that it should be pronounced in the French way. Why? Because it reminded her of her real name? Her real, girl's name?

  Karim panted into the receiver:

  "Hang on a second."

  He knelt down and, his hand shaking, wrote the two names in the sand, in block capitals, one above the other:

  FABIENNE HERAULT JUDE ITHERO