Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine Read online

  Quentin Mouron is a poet and a novelist. He was born in Lausanne in 1989 and is Swiss and Canadian. In 2012 he won the Prix Alpes-Jura for his novel Au point d’effusion des égouts. He has written three other highly acclaimed novels before Three Drops of Blood and a Cloud of Cocaine, which is his first work to be made available in English.

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 0ET

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in French as Trois gouttes de sang et un nuage de coke by Éditions de la Grande Ourse, Paris, 2015

  The translation of this work was supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

  Copyright © 2015 by Éditions de la Grande Ourse, Paris

  English translation © W. Donald Wilson, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher

  The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  eBook ISBN: 978–1–908524–843

  Typeset by Tetragon, London

  Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  Am I really capable of that? Is it even serious? Absolutely not! Not in the least! It’s just my imagination playing a game, a fantasy for my own amusement. A game! Yes, that’s what it is, a game!

  DOSTOEVSKY

  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  When a person loses all hope and purpose, he can sometimes become a monster out of sheer boredom.

  DOSTOEVSKY

  NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

  For my parents

  Contents

  First Day

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Second Day

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Third Day

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  FIRST DAY

  1

  The black pickup is standing at the corner of Parker and Mount Auburn. Old Jimmy Henderson has left the engine running and is consuming the last of the slice of pepperoni pizza bought from the eatery on the corner. The cabin smells of frying oil, fresh blood, and stale tobacco smoke. The floor is strewn with food wrappers and empty drink cartons. A piece of deer carcass wrapped in plastic is lying on the passenger seat. A hunting gun – a Winchester 12 pump-action shotgun – leans against the dash. A deodorizer depicting the crucifixion hangs from the rearview mirror.

  Mount Auburn Street is quiet. The grocery store has just closed and night has fallen. In his rearview mirror Jimmy can see the First Baptist Church, now converted into mid-range apartments that are much coveted by neighborhood families. He once knew such a family, the Wallaces. The husband is dead now. He was tinkering with an old Corvette in a friend’s garage when a clumsy slip of his screwdriver sent fuel spurting from the tank. He was smoking at the time, so he set off a huge explosion. His widow still mourns for him. The urn containing his ashes sits on the kitchen table. “We eat together every evening, just the two of us,” she says. The First Baptist Church was built in the early twentieth century. Enormous, squat, and square, it has neither the austere charm of some small Boston churches nor the stiff majesty of the Church of the Holy Cross. This is the perfect setting for modest dramas – perfect for this person’s drinking problem, for that one’s gambling addiction, for infidelities – and perfect for old Mrs. Wallace weeping in front of her urn. For old Jim, outside in the street, it’s an entertaining picture. Seen from inside, at the table, through the widow’s eyes, everything has a different consistency. She can hardly be expected to find it amusing.

  Jimmy turns on his headlights. He is about to drive off when he notices the figure of a man walking toward Mount Auburn from the end of Parker Street. He isn’t the sort you expect to come across in Watertown: he is too impeccably dressed. People do dress up around here, of course. The big downtown families give cocktail parties to which tuxedos are worn – this isn’t the boondocks, after all. But there’s always something affected, forced, and ostentatious about the big shots who are invited. The man approaching is elegant. His dark overcoat is sober and perfectly cut, as are his trousers. He is wearing gloves. His shoes are patent leather. He comes closer. Jimmy can make out his face. About thirty. Good-looking. Dark hair. Clear eyes. Regular features. He comes up to the truck and stops.

  “Good evening,” stammers Jimmy. The man gives a slight bow.

  2

  Standing at the corner of Phillips Street and Mount Auburn, the Church of the Redemption is a bunker surmounted by a blinking neon cross. Around it is a metal railing to which a “For Sale” sign is attached. When Franck reaches the front of the church, three men are engaged in a lively conversation on the steps.

  He clears his throat, and calls out, “Good evening.”

  The men jump.

  “I’m sorry,” says Franck, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  At first no one answers. A mustachioed fifty-year-old looks him over from beneath his lowered brow, while the other two, visibly uncomfortable, keep their eyes glued to the concrete.

  The mustachioed man finally asks, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  Franck smiles, graciously. “God hasn’t granted me that good fortune.”

  “So where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Franck thinks that the speaker resembles an actor whose name escapes him, in some series (the name of which also escapes him). But he is certain he’s talking to a cop. “From New York.”

  “Don’t tell me you came all the way from New York just to hear three miserable Clementi sonatas!”

  “I came from Toronto, to be precise.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I live in New York, but I came here from Ontario.”

  “So you’re just passing through?” asks the cop, his tone more abrupt than intended.

  Franck, who has stopped smiling, looks him in the eye. “I’m here for a few days.”

  The cop turns away and looks at his watch. “It’s time to go in.”

  “Do you mind if I ask your name?” says Franck.

  “I’m sorry. I’m Paul.”

  Aged around fifty, with graying hair, Paul McCarthy has been sheriff for about a decade. He is one of the most respected figures in Watertown and an active member of the Church of the Redemption.

  Inside, half the seats are occupied. The audience is made up of families and elderly folk. The concert is free. As they enter people are invited to make a donation to be shared between the pianist, the church, and a charity in aid of Haitian children. McCarthy takes out a twenty-dollar bill and slips it into the little metal cashbox. Franck does likewise. His entrance has been noticed. No one here dresses up to go out, or wears patent leather s
hoes. McCarthy turns to Franck: “Would you like to sit with us to hear the concert?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “My wife and daughters are sitting up front. Let’s join them.”

  The McCarthys, followed by Franck, leave the church. Outside, snow is falling on the red brick buildings. The sheriff’s cell phone rings and he moves away. Franck takes the opportunity to approach the pianist. “I’ve always considered Clementi a third-rate composer, but you were able to make him quite appealing.”

  “Thanks. He’s not my cup of tea either, to tell you the truth.”

  “But maybe your bread and butter!”

  “That’s a hard thing to hear!”

  “Not at all, I’ve very sharp ears!”

  They laugh.

  McCarthy goes past without seeing them, almost at a run.

  “Paul, you’re not staying?” asks the pianist.

  “I have to go.”

  “There’s an emergency?”

  The sheriff stops and turns around. He sighs. “A murder.”

  Franck and the musician had indeed heard sirens a moment before. As they move toward the street they can make out the blue and red flashing lights further on, a few blocks away, at Parker Street.

  “My God… it’s rare for that to happen around here,” murmurs the pianist.

  “Well, it has to happen somewhere,” Franck replies. Then he nods and brusquely holds out his hand to the pianist. “Very glad to have met you – sincerely.”

  3

  By the time Sheriff McCarthy reaches Parker Street, the crime scene has already been secured. Two unmarked cars are parked on Mount Auburn. The sheriff’s deputy, Gomez, is there, along with Jaspers and a third, younger man whose first name he has forgotten. McCarthy surveys the scene. The door of the pickup is open. A bloodstained white sheet covers the body.

  “Jimmy Henderson. Lives in the neighborhood,” begins Gomez.

  “I know him.”

  Living just a few blocks apart, Paul McCarthy and old Jimmy used to bump into one another regularly in the 7-Eleven, at the car wash, at the service station, and, more recently, at a book club devoted to Western novels. They had never exchanged more than a few words, but they weren’t total strangers. So the sheriff’s voice trembles slightly as he asks, “Any idea what happened?”

  Gomez lifts the top of the sheet. McCarthy is dumbfounded. He has seen dead bodies in Watertown before – the tragic residue of drunken brawls outside bars or nightclubs, victims of muggings committed by drug-starved addicts or illegals awaiting deportation; he has also had to deal with the settling of scores between motorcycle gangs; he even saw the lifeless corpse of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber, before the Feds took it away. Bodies with their throats cut like old Jimmy’s aren’t rare. Yet this is the first time he has been confronted with a corpse with the eyes slashed, the tongue cut out, and the cheeks gashed up to the ears.

  “For God’s sake!”

  Mechanically, he registers the details. He lingers over old Jim’s black pickup, a rust-eaten 1998 Ford F-250 with a dent in the left rear fender and paint chipping off in places. It is the kind of vehicle turned out by the thousand each day, anonymous, modestly customized by three bumper stickers: Support Our Troops, Go Red Sox, and – eliciting a sorrowful smile from McCarthy – Born to be Free. The sheriff looks in the back of the truck: wrapping for a fishing rod, a full gas can, an emergency triangle, and a padlocked metal box. He takes this out and shows it to Gomez.

  “Have the keys turned up?”

  Gomez pulls out a plastic bag. Attached to a key ring honoring the US Navy are three metal keys, in addition to a more substantial one for the pickup.

  “One of these?”

  “Find it for me.”

  The deputy pulls on a pair of vinyl gloves.

  McCarthy turns to the body under the sheet. A pair of brown boots at least fifteen years old protrude from under it. The soles are worn. The jeans, with their hems too high on the leg, are also worn and patched. Probably bought in some supermarket.

  Gomez opens the box: fishing line, weights, a Phillips screwdriver, an empty Marlboro cigarette package, Laramie cigarette papers, and an outdated advertising flyer for automobile accessories. Gomez next shows him the Winchester, and then the package of meat. Anticipating the sheriff’s question, he says, “Venison, from the smell.”

  McCarthy nods. “Jimmy was a hunter.”

  Yes, Jimmy was a hunter. He was an ordinary guy; perfectly ordinary. In this country there must be millions of hunters in their seventies who drive a Ford truck, eat their pizza on the corner of an empty street, smoke Marlboros they leave in a box, support the armed forces, wear brand-name boots, and prefer to use cheap fishing line from Walmart rather than a Seaguar line that breaks just as easily. Millions! But, thinks McCarthy, those millions don’t end up with their throats cut and their eyes sliced open.

  4

  Franck is walking in the night. It is snowing. This is his first time in Watertown, but he is familiar with the atmosphere of these eastern towns, sometimes poignant when the moonlight slants through a veil of falling snow, sometimes disturbing when a cry from an alleyway or nearby house shatters the nighttime silence.

  As he is going along Palfrey Street, a panhandler emerges from a cross street. He stinks of alcohol and urine. His beard is tangled and filthy. Greasy hair sticks out from under the edges of his woolen hat and seems to spill over his face. He walks with a limp.

  In a voice hoarse from years of poverty, excess, and exposure to the elements he asks, “Could you spare some change, mister?”

  Franck stops. He doesn’t answer. The panhandler grows bolder: “Mister… Please… I’m…”

  “I know,” Franck interrupts him curtly. “I know perfectly well what you’re going to tell me.”

  “If you could—”

  Franck slips his hand into his pocket. “How much do you want?”

  “Five dollars, two dollars, even a buck! If you only knew… Let me explain, let me tell you my story—”

  “It’s not your story, buddy, it’s the story they all tell. Do you know how you’re going to end up? Murdered by some guy just like you, at a street corner just like this, on a night just like this. He’ll have worked for Ford too, or GM, or Walmart; like you, he’ll have begun to drink, then lost his job, and then his wife; he’ll also have had to suffer the contemptuous looks of women he desired, and eventually have given up the very idea of sex. Like you he’ll have seen his future and his past melt into a murky present. Like you he’ll have become a shadow among the shadows in a town that can barely claim the name. I know that story well, my friend.”

  Franck stops speaking, and stands still. Eyes raised to the dark tops of the low buildings and the utility poles, he is reflecting: each time this guy asks somebody for money, maybe he gets something, maybe he’s ignored, or maybe he gets a beating. A strange guy. Weightless, entirely without substance. Merely a shadow. If he’s still alive, it’s because it hasn’t yet occurred to anyone to kill him. Would there be any more concern for his corpse than for a bag of garbage? Likely not. Anyone can slip him a coin, or slit his throat and – no, not slit his throat, let him go hang. That’s it: his life hangs entirely on the whims of passersby.

  Franck takes out a five-dollar bill. He throws it to the panhandler, who gazes at him open-mouthed.

  “Now clear off!”

  5

  The Grand Conference Hotel, which stands in the heart of Watertown, has an absurdly magnificent air in comparison with the rest of the town. The massive art deco style building was erected in 1927, requiring the sacrifice of thirty or so traditional homes. The developers, banking on an imminent recovery of the economy (which since the end of the war had left the Boston region deep in the doldrums), wanted to make Watertown the natural destination for the business meetings of executives working in Boston (or “for Boston,” as they liked to say). This ambition lasted for two years, with some measure of success, but then the Great
Depression of 1929 forced the owners to sell off the huge building for a song, after which it remained empty until the early 1950s. When the city of Boston later became prosperous again, it became the breast at which the surrounding municipalities could suckle. The Watertown hoteliers did a roaring business until the mid-1970s. The recession, along with the various economic upheavals of the past forty years, put a damper on the Grand Conference Hotel’s prosperity. But today it remains an establishment with an international reputation that is able to boast a substantial clientele.

  Sitting at the hotel bar, Franck is sipping a glass of Nuits-Saint-Georges. Around him, businessmen are conversing in hushed tones or are absorbed in the screens of their tablets. A young woman – who might have been attractive if she didn’t look so vacuous – is clinging to the arm of her admirer, a dapper guy of about fifty who, Franck surmises, is something of a rake thanks to Viagra and the occasional dose of laxative. This little world bathed in the subdued lighting of the hotel bar doesn’t impress Franck any more than the world of the street – the world of addicts, beggars and welfare cases – or the world of ordinary Watertown folk consumed by their neuroses. These are not really worlds or universes, he reflects, setting down his glass, but more like those dolls that fit one inside the other. Sometimes, because of some irregularity, one of them has to be forced, smoothed down, or eased into place. Even so, the same interests always prevail together; only the way they do so is different… And yet… in a crime, the way you wipe your knife clean…

  For Franck, any communication with individuals at the bar, even reduced to a minimum (in other words, usually a glance of understanding followed by a nod), is tiresome. If he does sometimes enjoy a chat, even on the most trivial of subjects, his inability to experience episodes of social existence on a primary level, to allow himself to go along with a set of conventions which deep down he calls “the comic illusion,” doesn’t allow him to derive any great pleasure from the barstool exchanges occasionally sanctioned by the intimate atmosphere of the Grand Hotel. If only these people weren’t so fatuous, or were simply less credulous…