J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Paul… we ought to leave.'

Frances stood close to me, the beam from an upended film light shining on the damp silk of her breasts. With her wary eyes and half-open mouth she resembled a conspirator who had snatched too quickly at a new cover story, and was giving everything away in a flood of anxious sweat. Even now I held only part of her attention. She was waiting for the police sirens, her eyes searching the headlights on the coast road. Had she known of the ratissage in advance? Already I had enfolded her into a fantasy of my own, a dream of speed and violence that had hovered against the ceiling of my mind since I followed little Natasha to the Rue Valentin.

She leaned against me, listening to the cries of the Japanese women.

'Paul, the police will be here.'

'Forget them. We'll lock the doors and they'll think the house is empty.'

'My car's in the drive. The engine's still warm. Come back to Marina Baie des Anges. There are one or two things you ought to see…'

' Frances, I'm flying again…'

I stood on the terrace of her apartment, and let the wind play on the silk dressing gown, searching through its frayed seams like an affable pickpocket. As the sleeves filled with the night air I felt myself soar between the apartment towers of Marina Baie des Anges. The curving facades with their step-pyramid profiles seemed detached from the ground, floating above the swimming pools and marinas that lay between the causeways like sections of a stolen sea.

Three miles to the south-west was the Garoupe lighthouse on Cap d'Antibes, its beam tirelessly sweeping the shore. On the beach nearby, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had drunk their whisky sours at the Château of La Garoupe, but that had been another Riviera, as remote from this futuristic apartment complex as the casino at Monte Carlo was from the temple of Karnak.

Frances joined me on the terrace, setting the drinks tray on a table. 'Paul, view good enough for you?'

'All this curved space? We're coming in to land at Babylon airport. One day the whole Côte d'Azur will be like this.'

'On the drawing board it already is. Everything five minutes old is waiting for the clearance sale.'

'Everything? That's sad.' I slipped my arm around her waist and held her against the night. 'Memories, dreams…?'

'Yesterday's software. Lots of heavy discounts and knock-down prices. Sorry, Paul.'

She held the white-wine spritzer to her face, letting the wind carry the cool effervescence into her eyes. Tiny points of moisture glittered on the tips of her lashes. On the drive from Théoule she had been too distracted to talk, watching the rear-view mirror like a car thief. But when we left Antibes and reached the apartment complex at Villeneuve-Loubet she recovered herself and returned to the real business on her mind.

As we rode the lift to the fifteenth floor she leaned against my shoulder and pressed a hand to my diaphragm. Without turning on the lights, she stepped into the hall and led me straight to her bedroom. Still excited by the violence at the Cardin Foundation and the plaintive cries of the Japanese make-up girls, I quickly undressed her. But I was a poor lover, aware of Jane watching me from the back of my mind, and barely able to maintain the erection that had sprung to life so eagerly during the robbery.

When I came at last, an orgasm as faked as a bored housewife's, Frances had smiled the microsecond smile of an escort agency whore. She smoothed the damp hair from my forehead, already working out the next move in the game she was playing with me, like an older sister with a docile small brother who would end up trussed and gagged in the toy cupboard.

But the playrooms of the new Riviera were as large as the Cardin Foundation. The speed and thuggish efficiency of the fur thieves had impressed me. Standing at the rail as I sipped my drink, I thought of the swinging clubs, and felt again the blow across my shoulders in the Rue Valentin. In a reflex of anger I raised my right fist, ready to hit back.

'Paul…' Alarmed, Frances held my wrist. 'Calm down. You're safe here.'

' Frances… I was miles away.'

'You were going to hit me. Go on, if you need to…'

'It's the last thing I want to do. Frances, I like you… strange baggage and all. That robbery pulled a set of triggers I'd forgotten about.' I sat next to her on the wicker settee. 'I remember the hazings we used to dish out to new recruits at my RAF flying school.'

'Horseplay?'

'Hardly. They were brutal beatings. It took me years to admit I thoroughly enjoyed them.'

'So that's your special scene? I'll buy a riding crop.'

'Please… there's nothing special and it's not my scene. Memories jump the rails and speed off down the wrong track. All the same, why didn't I let you call the police?'

'I'd like to know.' She pointed to the extension phone on the table, sitting next to the manila envelope of Halder's photographs. 'I could call them now.'

She waited, cool as night. I liked her for the way she was still pushing her amateur conspiracy along, the big sister with baby brother in the pram, searching for a secret entrance to the park.

'It's too late.' I waved the phone away. 'Three hours after the crime – what do we say to the police?'

'Easy – we were so excited we had to go home first and have great sex. They must hear that all the time.'

'I bet. They don't need us – they have dozens of Japanese witnesses.' I took her hand, and tried to ease the blue shadows from her bruised wrist. 'It wasn't great sex – I'm sorry.'

'We'll try again. A different tack…' She leaned against my shoulder, but her face had darkened, as if I were tacitly blaming her for my failure. 'You think the gang came from Eden-Olympia? They looked awfully fit.'

'Off-duty security guards do the stick-work. Several vigilante groups are involved. The powers-that-be at Eden-Olympia aren't satisfied with the Cannes police, so they take action on their own.'

'Against a Japanese advertising agency? Why? For making a fur-coat commercial?'

'It could be racist, or some mad animal rights thing. Fanatical Greens always veer off-course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus. On the other hand -'

'Paul, not now…'

Frances placed my hand on her left breast, setting my fingers over her nipple. Despite my lacklustre performance, she was trying to rouse me again. I looked down at her face, with its lips that were almost white in the darkness, reflecting the light from the opposite apartments. Her wet hair seemed darker, and for a moment she resembled Jane. As a lover she had worked hard, careful not to hurt my scarred knees, sitting astride me like a determined first-aid worker trying to revive a comatose patient.

' Frances, did David ever come out here?'

'Of course. That's his dressing gown.' She stroked the lapels with the back of her hand. 'Along with an old tuxedo, it's all he left me.'

'I'm sorry.' Concerned for her, I said: 'I still can't grasp why he put you on…'

'The target list? Does it matter? Don't always look for motives – they don't explain everything.'

'Even so.' I lifted Halder's envelope from the table. 'While you were in the shower I glanced through the photos again. There's one you ought to see.'

'No thanks. They're a new kind of pornography.' She shivered in the night air, and stared at the photograph of Olga Carlotti, the business park's personnel manager, slumped across her desk.

'Nasty… poor woman. Did David -?'

'Shoot her? I'm afraid so. But have a look at the applicants' snaps on her desk. She must have been checking through them when she died.'

Frances covered her exposed breast. 'They're amiable girls from small-town lycées. I hope they got the office jobs they wanted.'