Glenn Cooper - The Tenth Chamber

‘Sara, don’t listen to him!’ Luc shouted.

‘No, Sara,’ Bonnet said. ‘You should definitely listen to me.’

She took the cup in her shaking hand and started to raise it to her shaking lips.

‘Sara!’ Luc cried out. ‘Don’t.’

She looked at him, shook her head and drank it in a series of gulps.

‘Excellent!’ Bonnet said. ‘See, tastes pretty good. Now, professor, it’s your turn.’

‘I’m not going to do it,’ Luc said firmly. ‘Sara, if I drink this I can’t protect you.’

‘Look, this is tiresome,’ Bonnet said, turning the gun towards Sara. ‘Now I’m going to have to shoot her if you don’t cooperate. Just drink the tea and get it over with.’

Luc grimaced in his anguish. How did he know that Bonnet wouldn’t pull the trigger? He was certainly capable of violence. But if he succumbed and drank the tea, he’d be abandoning the only weapon he had, his mind. He cursed himself for coming without the gendarmes. It was turning out to be a tragically bad decision.

Sara reached for his free hand and he let her take it. She squeezed his fingers tightly and suddenly looked up as if startled by something. ‘Let me talk to him,’ she said to Bonnet. ‘I’ll persuade him. Just give us a moment alone.’

‘Okay, a moment. Why not?’ He got up and took a few steps back and stood next to Pelay who was leering at Sara lasciviously.

She leaned in trying to get as close to Luc as possible but whatever she said was going to be overheard.

‘What are you doing?’ Luc asked her.

‘Go ahead and drink it,’ she whispered.

‘Why are you saying that?’ he whispered back.

‘Do you trust me as a person?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Do you trust me as a scientist?’

‘Yes, Sara, I trust you as a scientist.’

‘Then drink it.’

Pelay crept close enough to hand Luc the cup and quickly backed away.

Sara nodded her encouragement and Luc threw his head back and chugged it down.

‘Okay, Pelay, go watch over the flock. I’ll stay here with our friends.’

He sat back down and Luc also crumpled onto his chair with a look of defeat on his face.

‘You know it’s funny,’ Bonnet said. ‘We had to force you to do something we do ourselves, willingly and gratefully. It’s a strange world, no?’

Luc was bristling with contempt. ‘What’s strange, Bonnet, is how you can pretend to be civilised when you’re nothing more than a murdering piece of garbage.’

The old man arched a brow. ‘Garbage? Me? No. What I do I do to protect my family and my village. I’ve lived a very long time, monsieur, and I’ve learned something important along the way. You take care of your own. If that means pushing others out of the way, then that’s the way it is. Ruac is a special place. It’s like a rare, delicate flower in a hot house. If the thermostat is disturbed, if the temperature goes one degree up or one degree down, the flower dies. You come here, with your scientists and your students and your cameras and your notebooks and really what you’re doing is turning the thermostat. If we let you do that, our way of life will die. We’ll die. So, it’s a matter of survival for us. It’s kill or be killed.’

‘Christ,’ Sara murmured in disgust.

‘These were innocent people,’ Luc hissed.

‘I’m sorry. From our side, each one was a threat. That one from Israel, he surprised us when we were checking to see what kind of locks you had on your precious cave. That guy Hugo, he had the balls to break into my daughter’s house and come down here on a tea night! What did he expect? And the ones at your camp ground last Sunday night? We had to take your computers and destroy your files. We had to blow up your cave to stop you people once and for all from coming to Ruac and we would have if that black bastard hadn’t killed my demo man.’

‘Pierre’s dead?’ Sara asked pathetically.

‘I’m sorry,’ Luc said. ‘And Jeremy. And Marie. And Elizabeth Coutard. And-’

She burst into tears and whispered, ‘Horrible, horrible,’ over and over.

‘And what was your justification for raping the women?’ From the look on Sara’s face, he wished he hadn’t said that. He told her the rest of the story, ‘The gendarmes said the rapists had immotile sperms.’

Bonnet did his usual shrug. ‘Boys will be boys.’

Luc simply said, ‘You’re a piece of shit.’

That only stoked Bonnet’s fires. He became animated, waving his arm. ‘Pelay said it would have been better if my men had flattened you two like bugs in Cambridge! I say what’s going to happen to you tonight is better.’

‘And the company?’ Luc asked. ‘You blew that up too?’

‘Nothing to do with us,’ Bonnet shrugged. ‘A happy coincidence. We were after you. What do we know about blowing up buildings? Pelay persuaded me we had an opportunity to get rid of you before you could do us more damage. If it happened in another country, it wouldn’t track back to us. So I said, why not? When they failed and the two of you split up the next morning, we decided to take her to get you to come to us. What a load of trouble you’ve caused us!’

Luc wasn’t sure if he believed him about their lack of involvement in PlantaGenetics. His water-tight theory was leaking.

‘And Prentice? You didn’t kill him?’

‘Fred’s dead?’ Sara cried.

‘I’m sorry,’ Luc said. ‘He died in hospital.’

‘I don’t know anything about that either,’ Bonnet barked, ‘but you know what?’ he continued. ‘None of your people would have died if we’d shot you and your chum Hugo the first time you set foot into my cafe. Just like we did when two jackasses found the cave for the first time, back in 1899.’

Sara curled her mouth into a smile of pure contempt. ‘You’ve got another secret, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes? What’s that?’

‘You’re infertile, aren’t you? All of you men are infertile sons-of-bitches.’ She laughed at his hurt expression. ‘Luc, it’s got to be a side-effect of the tea. They all shoot blanks!’

Luc managed a smile too. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen children in Ruac. How many children are there?’

Bonnet stood up, spouting a look of discomfort. ‘Not many, not enough. It’s a problem, it’s always been a problem. The men make the tea for a year or two and our little fish stop swimming. But we get by. We make it work.’

Luc thought for a moment. ‘You’re matrilineal, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘We’re what?’ Bonnet challenged, as if someone had insulted his mother.

‘The men can’t reproduce,’ Luc said. ‘Your bloodlines go through the women. So you’ve got to bring in outside males to keep the maternal bloodlines going. Who fathered your own damned children, Bonnet? Do you use stud service, like horse breeders?’

‘Shut up!’ Bonnet shouted. He pulled his gun again and waved it at Luc.

Luc taunted him; he had nothing to lose, ‘Does your little pistol shoot blanks too?’

Bonnet was shouting now, drowning out the incessant musette rhythms. The villagers stopped talking, turned, and watched him. ‘You think you’re so damned clever. You come from Paris, you come from Bordeaux, you come to our village and try to destroy our way of life! Let me tell you what’s going to happen to you tonight!’ He pointed his gun at Sara. ‘My son is going to screw this bitch good, then he’s going to put a bullet in her head! And she won’t even care because she’s going to be in love with the tea in a few minutes. And you, you’re going to be the stallion. You’re going with Odile. You’re going to be high as a paper kite and you’re going to give me a grandchild, thank you very much. Then I’ll personally put a bullet in your head! Then I’m going to march up to the top of the cliffs and set off the charges we planted tonight. With all the fancy new gates and locks and cameras they installed we can’t get inside it but that doesn’t mean we can’t blow the cliff up from above and collapse it into the cave! And then I’m going to burn this goddamned manuscript! And then no one else is going to ever know our secret! I don’t believe you wrote a letter to anybody. It’s a stupid bluff. No one else will ever know! And then I’m going to go back to my cafe and my fire brigade and my pile of Nazi gold and my quiet village and my tea and my good times and I’ll keep on living for so long I might forget that you bastards even existed!’