Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  "Sometimes, Maman would come and see us in the mountains and bring us some provisions. She never spoke to us about our origins, or those two years spent in Sarzac. She thought that this ruse was the only way for us to be happy…But I hadn't forgotten the past. I always carried with me a piano wire. And I continued to listen to the sonata in B flat. The sonata of the little corpse in the bathtub…Sometimes I flew into terrible rages…Just by gripping that piano wire, I cut deep weals into my fingers. Then everything came back to me. How frightened I had been in Sarzac, when pretending to be a little boy, those Sundays, near Sète, when I'd learnt to swallow fire, and that last evening, when I was waiting for Maman to leave with the little boy's body.

  "Maman never agreed to tell me who the killers were, those bastards who'd pursued us and run over my father. I scared her, yes, I scared even her. I think she realised that, sooner or later, I was going to kill those murderers…My vengeance was awaiting a little spark…All I now regret is that those birth papers came to light so late, after old Sertys and Caillois were already dead."

  Judith stopped speaking and took a firmer hold of the gun. Karim remained silent; and his silence was an interrogation in itself. Suddenly, the young woman started to yell:

  "What else do you expect me to tell you? That Caillois admitted the whole thing and begged for our forgiveness? That this crazy business had been going on for generations? That they were continuing to swap over babies? That they were planning to marry us off, Fanny and me, to one of those decadent university runts? We were their creation, Karim…"

  Judith leant forward.

  "They were nuts…Total madmen who thought they were working for the good of humanity by creating perfect genetic mixes…Caillois reckoned he was God, with his people under him…As for Sertys, he raised rats by the thousand in his warehouse…The rats stood for the population of Guernon…

  Each of them was named after one of the families, doesn't that remind you of anything? Do you realise just how warped those bastards were? And Chernecé rounded off the picture…He said that the irises of the superior race shone in a particular way, and that he would be a real fly on the wall, at the threshold of the world, brandishing his eye-shaped torches in the face of humanity…"

  Judith knelt down on one knee, the Glock still aimed at Karim, and lowered her voice:

  "Fanny and I really put the shits up them, believe me…The first day, we started off by sacrificing young Caillois. And our vengeance had to be at the same level as their conspiracy…The biological mutilations were Fanny's idea…She reckoned that we had to annihilate them totally, just as they had destroyed the identities of the children of Guernon…She also said that we ought to smash their bodies into a set of different reflections, like the shards of a broken mirror…I was the one who thought of the locations: water, ice and glass. And I was the one who did the dirty work…Who made the first of the flickers talk, with iron bars, fire and carpet cutters…

  "Then we stuck his body up in the rock and went to smash up Sertys's warehouse…After that, we engraved a message into the librarian's wall…And signed it Judith, to scare the bastards really shitless, to show them that the ghost had risen from the grave…Fanny and I knew that the others in the plot would then rush back to Sarzac to check what they thought they had known since 1982 – that I was dead and buried in that lousy little tip…So we got there first and emptied my tomb…Then we filled it up with the rats' bones we'd found in the warehouse – Sertys used to label them, just like a real fucking nasty fetishist…"

  Judith burst out laughing, then yelled once more:

  "Just imagine their faces when they opened the coffin!" She then became serious again at once. "They just had to be taught a lesson, Karim…We just had to make them understand that the time for revenge had arrived…That they were going to die horribly…That they were going to pay for the harm they'd done to our town, our family, us, the two little sisters, and to me, me, me…"

  Her voice grew softer. The daylight was glinting like mother-of-pearl.

  Karim murmured:

  "And what now? What are you going to do?"

  "Go back to Maman."

  The cop pictured that huge woman, surrounded by her sheets and brightly colored rags. He thought of Crozier, the loner, who must have gone to join her later the previous night. The two of them would be locked up, sooner or later.

  "I'm going to have to arrest you, Judith."

  The young woman sniggered.

  "Arrest me? But I'm the one who's holding the gun, little sphinx! One move, and I'll kill you"

  Forcing himself to smile, Karim approached her.

  "It's all over now, Judith. We're going to take care of you, we'll…"

  When she pressed the trigger, he had already drawn the Beretta he always carried strapped to his back, the Beretta which had allowed him to overcome the skinheads, his last card.

  They fired their bullets and two gunshots rang out in the dawn. Karim was unscathed, but Judith fell back gracefully. As though borne away by the rhythm of a dance, she wobbled for a few seconds, her throat rapidly reddening with blood.

  The young woman dropped the automatic, staggered slightly, then flopped down into the void. It seemed to Karim that a smile flickered across her face.

  He suddenly screamed and leapt up over the rocks to look for Judith's body, the little girl whom he had loved – he knew that now – more than anything else in the world for the past twenty-four hours.

  He spotted the bloody form as it floated off toward the river. He watched it draw away to rejoin the bodies of Fanny Ferreira and Pierre Niémans. In the distance, a brilliant dawn was rising, searing through the darkness of the mountains.

  Karim took no notice.

  He wondered how much sunlight would be needed to chase away the shadows that were folding around his heart.

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE GRANGÉ

  Was born in Paris 1961. Now an independent international reporter, he worked with magazines all over the world, as well as with various press agencies, before setting up his own news agency. Blood-Red Rivers, his second novel, became a huge bestseller in France and has since made into a film, The Crimson Rivers, directed by Mathieu Kassovitz and starring Jean Reno and Vincent Calles.

  ***

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