Yasmina Khadra - The Angels Die

He hadn’t said a word since we’d left the farm.

The sergeant took us to the station and ordered me to sit on a bench in a narrow room, watched closely by four officers, while he went with Alarcon into an office, leaving the door open. Their voices reached me intermittently.

‘It can’t be him,’ Alarcon sighed. ‘He spent the night by my bedside in the hospital. The doctor and the nurses can confirm it.’

‘Are you sure, Monsieur Ventabren?’

‘I tell you it isn’t him.’

‘Jérôme the milkman saw a black car leaving the farm just as he was arriving this morning for his delivery. It was exactly nine o’clock. Jérôme is categorical: your daughter’s body was still warm when he touched it …’

A black car!

This revelation sobered me abruptly. There was an explosion in my head. He did it! … As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a shadow of doubt. I knew immediately who had taken from me the person I cared most about in the world.

I heaved with nausea, but nothing came out. I felt like I was breaking into a thousand pieces.

I drove Alarcon home. A terrible stiffness had come over me and my gestures were like those of an automaton. I couldn’t think. I was wandering in a fog, guided only by my instinct. Alarcon was holding up. He was breathing through his mouth, eyes fixed, his face inscrutable. But as soon as he was settled in his wheelchair in the house, all the composure he had shown so far, all the almost martial dignity he had displayed in the village crumbled and he burst into sobs, bent double over his lower limbs.

Night fell. In the flickering light of the oil lamp, the shadows had the shape of misfortune. Outside, the rain started again, heavier than ever. I could hear the wind howling in the folds of the hill. I was cold, locked in a trance-like state. I don’t think I yet realised the destruction that was about to overwhelm the rest of my days. A sepulchral voice went round and round in my head: He did it! He did it!

We were too devastated to think of eating. I helped Alarcon to get into bed and watched over him until he fell asleep. In the kitchen, I found a hunting knife and put it in my pocket. The mirror on the wall reflected back a spectral effigy. I looked like nothing on earth. An automaton driven by a supernatural force, I got in my car and sped back to Oran.

Boulevard Mascara was deserted and the haberdasher’s was closed. The light was on in Gino’s window. I climbed the stairs four steps at a time … ‘Gino!’ It wasn’t a cry, it was no longer anything but a scream, a geyser of hatred and rage that shook the walls. Gino wasn’t in his room. His bed was unmade, but warm. The gramophone I had given him was on; a record was going round and round on the turntable with a monotonous scraping that bored into my brain. On a low table, an ashtray overflowed with stubbed-out cigarette ends next to a half-eaten plateful of cooked meat and a dirty glass. A bottle of wine had smashed on the ground, sending broken glass in all directions. A strong smell of alcohol pervaded the room. On a chair by the bed hung a pair of trousers and a shirt. An overcoat lay on the eiderdown, along with a pair of shoes. With a bitter gesture, I swept away the gramophone, which broke on the floor; the horn bounced off the wall, turned over and lay still. Gino couldn’t be far away. He must be hiding somewhere. I looked for him in the toilet, on the terrace, in the other rooms; he must have gone to buy something to get drunk on, hoping to drown his bad conscience. That likelihood stoked my hatred. My whole body shook. I sat down on a step in the middle of the dark staircase and waited, fire in my belly, the knife in my fist.

The thunder belched like a hydra in a trance, pouring torrential rain on the city. The howling of the wind filled the night with an apocalyptic fury. Struggling with the rage that was eating me up, I refused to think of anything, to ask myself what I was doing there. I was merely an extension of the knife gripped in my hand.

And Gino arrived. Dead drunk. A litre bottle under his arm. His pyjamas soaked through. His slippers saturated with rainwater. The lightning cast his wretched shadow on the walls. I didn’t give him time to say a word. I didn’t want to hear anything, forgive anything. If he’d thrown himself at my feet, begged me in tears, sworn it was an accident, that it wasn’t his fault, that the Duke had made him do it; if he had reminded me of our finest memories, the vow made to his mother, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Gino gave a start when the knife sank into his side. I felt his hot blood on my wrist. His breath, reeking of wine, almost made me feel drunk.

He clutched at the collar of my coat, made a gurgling sound and sagged slightly.

Another flash of lightning illuminated us.

‘It’s me, Gino,’ he said, recognising me in the dark.

‘Maybe,’ I retorted, ‘but not the one I knew.’

His grip weakened. He slid slowly down my body and lay at my feet. I stepped over him and went out into the street. The rain fell on me like a spell.

I went to Saint-Eugène to wait for the Duke. I was hoping he’d come back from a party or an evening meeting. His villa lay in wait behind its gardens, all its lights off. A servant in a hood was keeping guard near the gate, with a big dog at the end of a leash. Hours passed. Numb with cold in my car, I kept watch on the surrounding area. Not a single night owl appeared, not a single car. The torrents of water, reinforced by the gusts of wind, blurred my view.

I went back to the farm. In the beating rain. Dazzled by the lightning.

Alarcon was asleep.

Shivering with cold, I wrapped myself in a blanket and lay down on the padded bench seat in the drawing room without taking my shoes off.

A rattling sound woke me. Dawn had come. A woman was bustling in the kitchen. She told me she was the wife of a neighbour, who had sent her to Alarcon’s house to see if she could help in any way. She was making us something to eat. At about one, her husband and other locals came to console the grieving father. Alarcon didn’t have the strength to see them. He preferred to stay in bed and deal with his grief alone. The neighbours were poorly dressed peasants with rough hands, rugged swarthy faces and rumpled clothes, simple people who looked at their land in the same way they looked at their wives and felt nothing but contempt for wealth and show. They didn’t know much about boxing or about what went on in the city. They asked me who I was and I replied, ‘Irène’s fiancé.’

Late in the afternoon, a police car pulled up. An officer told us that the sergeant wanted to see Monsieur Ventabren and that it was urgent. ‘It seems there’s been a development.’ He didn’t say any more, ignorant himself of what it was about.

At the station in Lourmel, the sergeant led Alarcon and me to a cell with bars. An unkempt man was there, squashed behind a refectory table, his face flabby, his shoulders hunched. It was Jérôme the milkman, wearing a mud-stained coat with worn elbows. He was sobbing and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, his wrists handcuffed, his face as shrivelled as an over-ripe quince.

‘The inconsistencies in his testimony set us thinking,’ the sergeant said. ‘He kept contradicting himself and going back on his previous statements. Then he cracked.’

A terrible silence filled the police station.

Alarcon and I were transfixed with amazement. He was the first to break the silence. Getting his breath back from somewhere deep inside him, he asked in a shaky voice, ‘Why did you do it, Jérôme?’

‘It wasn’t me, Monsieur Ventabren,’ the milkman said, kneeling in front of him imploringly. ‘It was the devil. He possessed me. There was nobody in the house. I went in to deliver the milk. I put the jug on the table in the kitchen as usual. I was about to leave when I saw Irène washing herself. I didn’t do it on purpose. The bathroom door was ajar, I swear it; it wasn’t me who opened it. I said, Jérôme go home, what you’re doing isn’t right. But it wasn’t me. I would have gone home, as you can imagine, Alarcon. You know me. I’m no angel, but I have a sense of modesty, I have principles. In my head, I said to myself, What’s happening to you, Jérôme? Have you gone mad or what? Go away, don’t look, get out of here fast, except that the devil doesn’t listen to that kind of thing; he doesn’t ask himself questions, not the devil.’