Thierry Jonquet - Tarantula

You are trembling. You want to smoke. You miss the opium: yesterday he gave you some, and you took it. That moment, always in the evening, when he comes to see you and fills the pipe for you, is one of your greatest delights. The first time, you were nauseated, you threw up. But he persisted. It was the day you could no longer deny the evidence of your eyes: your breasts were getting larger! He caught you by surprise in your cellar, weeping. To console you, he offered you a new record. But you showed him your breasts: your throat was tight; you could not utter a word. He left and came back a few minutes later with the necessaries: the pipe and the greasy little balls. A poisoned gift. Mygale is a spider with more poisons than one. You let yourself be talked into it, and thereafter it was you who asked for the drug if he ever forgot the daily ritual. The disgust for opium you felt in the first days is long gone. One day, after smoking, you fell asleep in his arms. You exhaled the last puffs from the pipe; he sat close up against you on the sofa. Mechanically, he caressed your cheek, stroking the smooth skin. Unwittingly, you had helped him transform you, for your beard had never developed. As kids, you and Alex had watched eagerly for the first whiskers to appear, the first down on the upper lip. It was not long before Alex had grown a moustache, sparse at first but soon quite thick. As for you, not a hair manifested itself. For Mygale, this was simply one less thing to worry about. Of course—and he told you this himself—it wouldn’t have made any difference: the estrogen injections would have made you smooth-cheeked, anyway. Still, you hated yourself for corresponding so well to his intent, with your beautiful girlish face, as Alex used to say once upon a time …

As for your delicate, finely jointed body, it had driven Mygale wild. He had asked you, one evening, if you were homosexual too. You did not understand this “too.” No, you were not queer. The temptation might have entered your mind now and then, but no, there had never really been anything like that. And Mygale was not that way, as you had suspected at first. You thought of the time he had approached you, to feel you. You had mistaken his examination for a caress. You were still chained up, remember, it was right at the beginning. Timidly, you had reached out to touch him. And he had struck you!

You had been shattered. Why was he holding you captive if not to put you to use as a sexual plaything? That was the only explanation you had been able to find for the treatment he had meted out to you. He had to be a vile homosexual maniac in need of a tame boy-toy. This thought filled you with rage at first, but then you told yourself: to hell with it, I’ll play the game, let him do what he wants to me. But one day I’ll get away, and I’ll come back with Alex, and we’ll blow his head off!

But it was a different game you ended up playing, drawn in gradually, unknowingly. A board game whose rules were set by Mygale: a game of snakes and ladders you were bound to lose. One square for torture, another for a gift; one square for injections, another for the piano. One square for Vincent—another for Eve!

Lafargue had had an exhausting afternoon, operating for hours on a child with a badly burned face. The skin of the neck had retracted, obliging him to perform a laborious series of small grafts.

He dismissed Roger upon leaving the hospital and returned alone to Le Vésinet, stopping on the way at a florist and having him put together a magnificent bouquet.

When he saw the door to Eve’s upstairs rooms unbolted and wide open, he dropped his flowers and flew up the stairs in great alarm. The piano stool had been knocked over and a vase broken. A dress and underclothes were strewn across the floor. The bedspread was nowhere to be seen. A pair of high-heeled shoes, one half-mangled, lay forlornly by the bed.

Richard recalled his mild surprise at discovering the gate to the property open, though Roger had closed it behind them that morning. Could a delivery person have left it like that? Lise would certainly have placed some orders before leaving on her vacation. But what of Eve’s disappearance? Had she run off? Had she talked some delivery man, when he found himself in an empty house, into unbolting her door?

Richard cast about vainly for answers, his panic mounting. Why had she never put on the clothes she had obviously laid out in readiness on the bed? Why was the bedspread missing? No, the delivery-man hypothesis was clearly nonsense. Admittedly, something of the sort had happened a year earlier—and it had happened, indeed, while Lise was off. By chance, Richard had got home just in time to overhear Eve, from behind her barred door, begging a delivery man to open it for her. He had been able to reassure the man that everything was as it should be, that his wife was severely depressed, hence the bolts on the door.

Whatever doubts Roger and Lise might have formed had likewise been dispelled by the invoking of Eve’s supposed “mental illness.” Besides, Richard was affectionate toward the young woman, and over the last year had allowed her out more and more often. On occasion, she even took dinner downstairs. The madwoman spent her days playing the piano and painting, and Lise did the housework in her rooms without thinking twice about it. In fact, everything seemed normal. Eve was continually showered with gifts. One day, Lise had lifted the white cloth covering Eve’s easel, and the sight of Richard portrayed as a transvestite sitting at the bar of a night club merely strengthened her belief that all was decidedly not quite right with her mistress’s head. Monsieur Lafargue was more than decent to put up with her the way he did. Most people would have had her put away. Of course, it wouldn’t look so good, would it, for a big noise like Professor Lafargue to have a wife in the loony bin. Especially when his daughter was already there…

Richard let himself fall back onto the bed. Clutching Eve’s dress, he shook his head in desperation.

The telephone rang. He dashed downstairs and grabbed the receiver.

“Lafargue?” The voice was unfamiliar. “I’ve got your wife.”

“How much do you want? Tell me right now. I’ll pay it.” Lafargue was shouting, but his voice cracked.

“Take it easy. That’s not it. I don’t give a shit about money. At least, we’ll see if you can give me some money, too.”

“For God’s sake, tell me! Is she alive?”

“Of course she is.”

“Don’t you hurt her!”

“Don’t worry. I won’t mess her up.”

“Well, then?”

“I have to see you. Have a little chat.”

Alex told Lafargue to meet him at ten o’clock that night in front of the Opéra Drugstore.

“How will I recognize you?”

“Forget about it. Believe me, I know you. Come on your own. No funny business, either, or she’ll know about it, I guarantee you that.”

Richard agreed. His caller had already hung up.

His reaction echoed Alex’s just a few hours before: he reached for a bottle of scotch and took a long slug straight from it. Then Richard went to the cellar to make sure that nothing had been disturbed down there. The doors were all locked, so all was well from that angle.

Who was this guy? A criminal, obviously. But he wasn’t interested in a ransom, or not for now, anyway. He wanted something else, but what could it be?

The man had said nothing about Eve. In the early days of Vincent’s captivity, Richard had been at pains to conceal every trace of his presence. He had even laid off the predecessors of Lise and Roger, these two having been taken on only once the situation with Eve was somewhat “normalized.” At first, he had been afraid lest the police pick up his trail. That Vincent’s parents had not given up hope in the investigation he knew from the local papers. True, everything had gone smoothly: he had cornered Vincent in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere, and he had studiously covered his tracks. But one could never be quite sure. He had, after all, lodged a complaint concerning the attack on Viviane, and the possibility of a connection being made through some fortuitous circumstance could not be dismissed.