Paris Noir - Aurelien Masson [23]
“It’s fine right where it is,” Big Brother answered. “I won’t touch it. These works have a soul, madame. They belong to no one. They should be in a museum. And museums should be free.”
She didn’t understand: These drawings belonged to her and she could wipe herself with them if she wanted to. Her ransom had been devalued by those stupid words. These guys were total morons!
“You see, madame, I was sent to Yugoslavia during the war.”
“Oh! It must have been frightful,” she said, feigning great compassion. “You must have suffered a great deal.”
“Me? Oh no, don’t worry. But the Bosnian farmers, yes. They suffered a great deal, as you say.”
He stopped talking for a moment.
“Have you read Dante, madame?”
“When I was young. How boring!”
“Too bad,” he said, very curtly.
She was sorry she’d given her opinion about Dante. She had almost forgotten she was at their mercy. At hismercy. He terrified her. He was not like the others. Not like the ones you see on TV. The ones who had burned cars for two months. Those people were far from her world, far from her. This one was getting too close to be harmless, like the sun to the earth. He was in her home! In her home, my God! She’d been so dumb she felt like crying.
He interrupted her thoughts and began speaking again.
“Yes, madame, hell exists. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw it in those devastated farms where everything had been looted, destroyed, trampled on. I’m not talking about human beings, I’m talking about objects, madame, just objects. Believe me, they have a soul. Like you and me.”
He was preventing her from thinking. He was trying to distract her—worse, he was lecturing her. He horrified her now.
“So leave the paintings and take my jewels, take all of them. They’re in the safe, behind the Dubuffet you like so much. The key is stuck to the bottom of the frame.”
She was on the verge of hysteria.
“That is not very prudent, madame. Anybody could find it there.”
Rachid came back into the living room. He wasn’t alone anymore. When she saw him, Madame Hauvet began blubbering softly.
“Silence!”
He was accompanied by a pale girl. For Big Brother, she seemed to have come out of a Modigliani. For Rachid, she was just kind of skinny and tall. Above all, she was scared to death.
Her whole body was trembling, her eyes still foggy with sleep. She couldn’t be more than sixteen.
“That’s my darling granddaughter!”
The old woman was sobbing now.
“Shut the fuck up!”
She stopped sobbing and Big Brother turned the portrait over, removed the key, and opened the safe. Inside, an ebony box: He lifted the cover. Necklaces, bracelets, several pairs of earrings. He examined the contents under the light of a lamp and closed the little box of black wood again.
“I thought I could trust you,” he said. “You’re really disappointing me.”
“I don’t understand … no, I don’t understand.”
But she did understand. The jewelry was fake. That’s why she wasn’t protecting it. The Dubuffet was a copy as well. Big Brother knew that too. But he liked to give any human being a second chance, even a third one. In Bosnia he had learned that men and women in some places never even got the slightest chance.
He walked up to the old lady, turned her over on her belly, grabbed her hand, and cut off her little finger with the large knife. He threw it onto the white carpet. A spot of blood began flowering like a rose. He had stuck her head into the couch cushion to stifle her screams.
Rachid hardly had a chance to hold her up in his arms— the girl who looked like a Modigliani model fainted. He laid her gently out on the carpet.
When the old woman stopped moving, Big Brother turned her over so she wouldn’t get smothered to death. When she came to, he said, “Now let’s stop playing games. Where are the jewels?”
The old woman was trying to speak through bloody lips. She