First Blood (3 page)

“We won’t know until we try, right?”

Even with his hair awry and that exhausted look, he was attractive. It was no wonder women fell for him.

“We are talking about Constantin here, aren’t we?”

“What else would we be talking about?” he answered with a sly look.

“What exactly do you need?”

“Just to go back there and stay until the meeting takes place. To identify everyone. To collect proof, for once. You know I would do it alone if that were possible, but it’s too dangerous.”

Dangerous. The word made Eva tense up.

She shook her head.

“We can’t get authorization on such short notice. The chief was clear.”

“Of course we won’t get authorization,” Leroy grinned. “Why do you think I came to see you?”

That is not the blood that runs in my veins.

Never.

Neuilly-sur-Seine

“Madeleine?” Jonathan Reich banged on the bathroom door. “Please, please open the door.”

There was nothing but silence.

Jonathan had never had to face anything like this before, and he did not know what to do. Madeleine seemed to understand what was happening. She had always been able to stay in control during a crisis, no matter how serious it was. She had dealt with her mother’s death and then her father’s without shedding a tear. Every day, she sent armies of private detectives out to snoop into her enemies’ lives and dig up dirt. She initiated scandals that brought powerful men and women to their knees, and when their empires collapsed, she bought their shares for a pittance. She even came off looking brilliant, because she turned those businesses around and sold them off, pocketing huge profits in the process. Jonathan was no fool. He had always felt her destructive power. And despite it all, he loved her. He was crazy about the woman. Madeleine had changed his life.

He did not want to think about what he would have become without her.

He looked at the cell phone in his hand. Should he disobey Madeleine’s order and call for help? She was hurt. He did not understand how it could have happened, but his wife had cut her face. And there was all that blood.

“Madeleine, if you don’t answer, I’m going for help. Do you hear me?”

There was nothing but silence.

A few minutes before, she had been screaming horribly, and then the screams had stopped, replaced by sobs. Madeleine
was crying.
He had never, ever, seen his wife show the slightest emotion, even when the two of them were alone. That was just Madeleine. He remembered one of the Latino gangsters in the neighborhood where he grew up in Marseille. He had a tattoo in big Gothic letters that Jonathan never forgot. It read, “Laugh now. Cry later.” That was the kind of lesson that Madeleine knew by heart.

Laugh now. Cry later.

“Madeleine!” he shouted.

He kicked the door again and again until it wobbled on its hinges. He stepped back. He was going to break it down. He was. He had to find out what was going on in there. Something was happening to his wife. Something terrifying and incomprehensible. He had to know what it was.

He threw his right shoulder at the door full force. It almost knocked the wind out of him.

“Shit.”

He staggered back, determined to get the damned door open. Just as he was about to rush it again, he heard the lock turn.

“Madeleine?”

The door opened halfway, and Madeleine stepped back. He saw her splashing her face at the sink. Pink water was running between her fingers.

“My God.”

It was worse than he had imagined.

“What happened to you?”

Madeleine straightened. She came back to the door and opened it all the way. Her metallic eyes looked serious. Her lips were pursed, as they always were when she was thinking. With her right hand, she lifted her hair and brought it to the side of her face. Jonathan saw his wife as he had never seen her before. Her open blouse had slipped off her freckled shoulders, revealing the top of the star-shaped tattoo on her left breast. Her body seemed younger, her skin shinier, certainly from being wet—rivulets of water were running down her neck and onto her arms.

But the horror of those wounds.

“Don’t worry. It’s over now,” she said.

It was true. The water had cleaned her wounds. They had not closed, but at least they were not bleeding as much.

Jonathan trembled.

Her
two
wounds.

There were two gashes, one on each cheek. Jonathan had never seen wounds so deep. It looked like an ax had struck his wife’s face. He could see the bone beneath the muscle.

How repulsive
, he was thinking.

“What...”

“Don’t ask any questions,” Madeleine said in a low voice as she left the bathroom. “I need to think.”

She went down the stairs to the living room. Her husband rushed after her, his heart beating fast.

“No questions? Are you kidding me?”

Madeleine, looking vexed and overwhelmed, put up her hand to make him stop talking. Jonathan closed his mouth and looked down, submissive, as always.

“Thank you,” she said.

Her composure was back. She was the woman he had fallen in love with—the unyielding businesswoman capable of facing Chinese giants on their own turf and walking away with their guts in her hands. Still, she was injured.

“I don’t know what happened,” she finally said when she reached the leather armchair. It faced a large window. She sat down, taking her time. She was unreadable.

“You need a doctor right away,” Jonathan dared to say.

“What I need is a drink.”

She looked for a cigarette and lit up. Some drops of blood formed on her cheek.

“Glenfiddich,” she added.

“Okay, okay,” Jonathan said, shaking himself into action.

He opened the cupboard, grabbed a bottle of whisky, and picked up two crystal glasses. Trembling, he filled them up. He held one out to her and downed the other one.

“What did you do to yourself, Madeleine? You have to tell me.”

She took a sip.

“I have to know,” Jonathan said.

Madeleine blinked and grimaced, now fully aware that she really did not want him near her. Not bothering to move or speak, she gazed at her glass of whisky and the window in front of her.

It was pitch black outside.

She sighed.

“Yes, I know.”

“So are you going to tell me?”

“Yes.”

She looked at him with her cold, steely eyes.

“Turn the outside lights on, please.”

“Um, okay,” Jonathan said, walking across the room.

An instant later, bluish lights rose from the flowerbeds, shrouding the grounds in a ghostly aura. There were splotches of frost on the garden statues. Farther away, the street lamps towered over the boulevard.

Jonathan came back and poured himself another glass of whisky, which he drank as quickly as the first.

He waited.

“These are old injuries,” Madeleine finally said.

He looked and her and did not say anything.

“I’ve always had these horrible scars.”

Jonathan shook his head. “I don’t know what you are trying to say, but this is idiotic. You never had any injuries like that. You are...”

He stumbled over his words. “You are disfigured, Madeleine. If they get infected...”

“They will not get infected. I was sure something was going to happen. I knew it in my heart.”

“What do you mean?”

“I dreamed about it.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“That dreams are places of lucidity, Jonathan. Much more so than we dare to admit.”

She tensed her jaw, and Jonathan saw the bones move in the open wounds. He shivered. Somewhere deep down, he was actually finding that mutilated face strangely attractive.

“What kind of dreams were they?” he asked, shaking his strange fantasy.

“Dreams that are not good to venture into. Nightmares with sharp claws. All the things that I wanted so much to forget. But the flesh doesn’t forget.”

She lifted the whisky to her lips.

“Like these cuts?” her husband asked, still not understanding.

“Yes, like these cuts. I got them a long time ago. I thought I would never have to live through that again. The pain, the humiliation. But it seems I was wrong.”

She tossed her head back, lost in her memories. They were unpleasant. They pulled at her like hooks.

She shook her head.

“I had, uh, surgery. It was before we met.”

“The life you don’t want to tell me about.”

“The life you shouldn’t know about.”

She held out her empty glass, and he filled it.

“And the injuries just reappeared?”

“How perceptive of you.”

Jonathan shook his head.

“Don’t be that way with me, Madeleine. This is serious. In fact, this is impossible. A surgical incision cannot reopen in that way after so many years. It does not happen.”

Madeleine smiled, revealing even more of the bone and muscle. Jonathan turned away.

“You’re right. It’s never happened before. The operation was a particularly innovative one. The doctors said that the wounds were too deep to cover up.”

She took a deep breath, a distant look in her eyes.

“The blade that did this to me cut too deeply into my flesh. Yes. Yet I managed to make them disappear, didn’t I? Nobody even knew, not even you.”

Jonathan nodded. He had kissed his wife’s cheeks all these years. He had caressed them without ever detecting the slightest scar, much less any surgery.

“So, what happened?”

Madeleine continued to look into the distance, at the grounds and the pathways that led to the gates, where wisps of blue fog sprawled close to the ground.

“I don’t know, Jonathan.”

She was lying to him. He knew it. She knew that he knew it, and she did not care.

“Maybe I made a mistake,” she murmured.

“What mistake?”

“I got in touch with someone, an old friend.”

“Do I know him?”

Madeleine smiled. “No, you don’t know him. His name is Ismael. He’s a friend from before.”

“From your former life,” Jonathan said with a sigh.

“Yes, my former life.”

“Why did you call this guy, this Ismael?”

“I wanted to know if he was having dreams too.”

“And?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.”

For the first time, Jonathan Reich recognized something in his wife’s voice that he had thought he would never hear in his lifetime.

He heard fear.

A deep, untamed fear.

Les Ruisseaux

11 p.m.

The housing project was on just the other side of the beltway. Its tall columns of buildings blistered with satellite dishes, overturned garbage cans, walls covered in graffiti, and teenagers driving scooters with no lights reminded Eva of Dante’s famous phrase, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

She swallowed hard.

The unmarked Renault crept along from one traffic circle to the next.

Leroy stopped to let a hairless dog cross the street.

There was nothing official about this assignment. They had to remember that they were not supposed to be here. If things turned bad, they could count only on themselves.

Eva found the idea exhilarating.

She swallowed hard again. Daydreaming again. Like usual, these days. She balled her fists in her jacket pockets and lowered her chin ever so slightly so a curtain of white hair would fall over her face.

Behind the wheel, Leroy had put his hat back on and looked serious. He did not find the situation exhilarating at all. But he had sworn to bring Constantin down, and he would do it. He still believed in justice. He was ready to fight the entire world for it. Eva hoped he would not lose his illusions too soon. Like the others.

“We’re almost there,” he said.

They drove along a deserted road with broken streetlamps. A wispy fog hovered above the ground. Beneath it, frost crystals glittered in the lights of the car.

At an intersection, they passed a burned-out car that had been ignited during their raid two weeks earlier.

“Did you see that? The mayor tried to remove it, but the city workers were pelted with stones. I imagine it will stay there for some time.”

Eva nodded. It was no secret. No cops or city workers ventured into these neighborhoods anymore; they were systematically insulted and attacked. Most of the youths who grew up here would never leave the projects. It was a parallel world, closed off and inward looking, with its own economy. Dealers with handguns were a common sight. And those were the small shots. Higher up in the ranks, they had more sophisticated equipment, actual weapons of war.

These thoughts were exciting Eva, and she immediately felt ashamed.

Are you sinking that low? Is danger the only thing that can get you to react?

To get you to forget this obsession of yours?

It was not the right time to be thinking about that. Her obsession could wait. It was safe on her computer. For now, she had to focus on their goal. She had to be attentive to what was going on here. They were not safe.

She made sure her Beretta was loaded and slipped it into the holster on her belt.

Be a cop. That’s what you do best.

That is the only damned thing you know how to do.

She was there to help her colleague. Admittedly, it was outside standard procedure, but if something did happen in this place tonight, it would help them bring a case against Constantin. After the humiliation they had experienced in his hands, who would hold it against them?

“Here it is.”

Leroy parked at the curb, next to a low wall topped with green fencing. He turned off the ignition and made sure the doors were locked. Eva noticed how nervous he was. She saw it in a thousand tiny details: the way he blinked too frequently, the stiffness of his neck, how he clenched one hand on his thigh and dug the fingers of the other into his jeans.

“You’re a ball of nerves,” she said.

“It won’t be long now,” he said, taking out a tiny digital camera. “You’re with me, right?”

Eva blew her bangs off her forehead. She, too, was more nervous than she would have liked.