Just as Faustina was saying this, the man in question got out of his car and waved at her eagerly as she walked down the street with her lover. Taking her by the elbow, Dany tried to turn the corner in order to avoid this unwelcome encounter, but she resisted.
“He’s going to approach you,” Dany grunted.
Patrick Breton-Mollignon hurried to catch up with them. He was tall and oddly-proportioned, his ungainly trot suggesting a camel walking on uneven ground.
“Tell him to go to hell,” Dany said in a low voice.
Instead of obeying, Faustina freed her arm and turned to the man, feigning delighted surprise. “Hello, Patrick! How lovely to see you!”
“I didn’t think you’d noticed me,” he said, trying to catch his breath.
Dany watched with contempt as this ridiculous individual attempted to walk faster, which was obviously a strain on his heart.
Faustina threw her arms around him. Clumsily, he banged his chin against her forehead before he could get to her cheek.
“My dear Patrick, this is Maître Daniel Davon.”
“Well, everybody knows Maître Davon,” Patrick Breton-Mollignon replied, proffering a limp, moist hand. “You’re about to have a book published, aren’t you?
“Excuse me?” Dany replied.
“We’re definitely talking about it very seriously,” Faustina exclaimed.
“Is it about the Mehdi Martin case?”
“We’re not allowed to say anything,” she added.
“So it is about the Mehdi Martin case. Well done, maître. I really must see the interesting bits, Faustina. I’ll publish them in the paper.”
“We can talk about it later . . . ”
“Maître Dany Davon and Mehdi Martin, that’s dynamite. I’m counting on you, Faustina, OK?”
Faustina lowered her eyes, assumed the expression of a schoolgirl about to swear an oath for the first time in her life. “I give you my word, Patrick.”
“Wonderful.” He turned to Dany “You do know you’re in the hands of the best with her?”
“The best what?” Dany asked, an amused glint in his eyes.
Faustina stifled a laugh.
Patrick Breton-Mollignon seemed unaware of their mocking complicity. “The best publicist. Faustina operates at such a high level, she’s left the competition way behind.”
Faustina felt obliged to protest. “Don’t listen to him, Maître Davon, he’s only saying that to flatter me.”
Dany raised an eyebrow at the formality of her address.
Turning his back on Dany, Patrick Breton-Mollignon moved closer to Faustina, his manner seductive and insistent, as if the other man wasn’t there anymore. “When can I invite you to lunch?”
“I’ll check my diary and call you.”
“You always say that.”
“When you get a call from me, you’ll realize I’ve often told you the truth.”
Having said that, she rose on tiptoe, planted a light kiss on his cheek, then walked off in the direction of her building, followed by Dany.
“Explain to me why you allow that drooling oaf to hit on you.”
“He edits the most important daily paper in the country.”
“He wants to fuck you.”
“That’s natural, isn’t it?”
“And you encourage him.”
“For as long as he runs Le Matin, he has a right to hope. I have to make a living.”
“How do I know you haven’t already—”
“Oh, no, please. He’s so bad in bed, do you know what they call him in the business? The boiled leek.”
Reassured, Dany smiled and raised his chin. “Definitely not the man for you.”
“How conceited you are!”
Even so, she agreed, and they went up to her apartment.
It was five o’clock. Faustina played the accomplished housewife by squeezing some fruit in order to make them a tropical cocktail. “I’m concocting something to match the parrots on the square.”
Dany was lost in thought, and it didn’t occur to him to help her. “He flirted with you right in front of me, as if I wasn’t even there.”
“Let’s just say as if you weren’t my lover.”
“The thought didn’t even cross his mind. Does he think you’re a saint who’s above earthly appetites?”
She burst out laughing.
“What then?” he insisted.
“I don’t think he imagines for a moment that I could go out with a man of mixed race.”
Dany winced. He stood up and started striding up and down the corridor, like a man working off excess energy, then rubbed his chin and came back toward her. “Are you sleeping with a man of mixed race?”
“More often than not, yes.” She tried to underline her words with a caress, but he pushed it away.
“Do you think of me as a man of mixed race?”
Aware of his growing aggressiveness, she tried to put an end to it. “Dany, you’re missing the point. I’m trying to tell you that idiot Patrick Breton-Mollignon is a racist since he can’t imagine us being together, and you’re getting at me.”
“Yes, I’m getting at you. I don’t give a damn about Patrick Breton-Mollignon. He’s a racist, but I’m just finding out that you are too.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You sleep with a man of mixed race.”
“Am I having a bad dream? Surely, if I sleep with a man of mixed race, that must mean I’m not a racist.”
“Wrong. You should say, ‘I sleep with you’ and not ‘I sleep with a man of mixed race.’”
“So you’re not a man of mixed race, then?”
He raised his hand, ready to strike her. His face was distorted in a grimace, and he was grinding his teeth. He dropped his hand and walked away.
For a moment, Faustina glimpsed two ways of getting herself out of this situation: the first, the gentle one, was to try to understand why he hated the mention of his being of mixed race, what buried pain explained his anger, what childhood traumas came rushing back into his consciousness as soon as someone saw only his physical appearance; the other option, the offensive one, consisted in demolishing his argument.
He interrupted her as she hesitated. “Is that what you say to yourself when you’re in my arms: I’m screwing a man of mixed race?”
Faustina was taken aback because that was literally, word for word, what she had said to herself on that first evening as she was marveling at her discovery of Dany’s body. If she were to admit that, he would be furious.
“So what should I say: that I’m screwing Santa Claus?”
“You’re so coarse.”
“Coarse maybe, but not a racist! You’re out of your mind, Dany. If I’d turned you down, you would have accused me of being a racist. I reciprocated and you say I’m a racist anyway. What was I supposed to do? Sleep with you without realizing you’re of mixed race? Sorry if I’m not that kind of idiot.”
“You really don’t get it.”
“And what do you think when you sleep with me? I’m screwing a blonde?”
Dany stood there with his mouth open for a second, as she had done earlier. She deduced that she had hit the target.
“Tell me the truth, Maître Dany Davon: have you had any black lovers?”
“I forbid you—”
“Answer me.”
“I—”
“No black ones? How about lovers of mixed race?”
“You—”
“No point in lying, because the ones you’ve already mentioned were white. You sleep only with white women.”
“Yes.”
“So then you’re a racist.”
“It’s not the same thing. In Europe, everybody’s white. There’s nothing unusual about it. It’s the norm.”
“Really?
Oh, but I thought that, when it came to sex, you weren’t into the norm. So it’s all right to try something a bit out of the ordinary as long as it’s with white women, is it? You want to know something? You’re the full-blown racist, you’re the one who hates black and mixed-race people. At least I can assure you I haven’t gone for men with prejudices. You can’t.”
“I’m within my rights to like white women.”
“Is it because you like them, or because they make you forget you’re of mixed race?”
Although Faustina might have been pleased with her answer for the moment, she regretted it almost immediately: her words were like a bombshell in their effect on Dany. He screamed, his features twisted with exasperation, and began hitting at everything around him. Vases, dishes, the telephone, the TV set, framed photographs, everything was hurled to the floor. He barely caught his breath before lunging into the next room where he swept the books off the shelves and stamped on them. Clinging to the wall, Faustina yelled at him to stop, knowing that if she went any closer, he would kill her.
Suddenly, running out of things to hit, he froze, his legs apart, his chest heaving, his hands open, ready to strike again. He stared at her with bloodshot eyes.
At first, she held his gaze, then, aware that she had to respect the archaic code of submission, she lowered her eyes.
He groaned, looking more human again, and left the apartment, slamming the door as he did so.
Once she was sure she was alone—and safe—Faustina sat down on the floor and allowed herself to weep; she didn’t know what she was crying over but her tears gave her a comforting feeling of ordinariness.
For the next four hours, she threw away whatever Dany had smashed and tidied whatever had escaped the massacre. The more she erased the marks of violence, the better she felt. She gave up trying to understand what had been behind that fit of rage. A “psychopath”—that was all Dany was. A psychopath, which meant he was “not to be associated with,” and also meant it was “pointless trying to understand what’s beyond understanding”; he joined a gallery of monsters, like Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin, possibly Mehdi Martin, the serial killer defended by Maître Davon—they were both crazy, so it was no wonder they got along!
Her affair with Dany was over. Good. She’d started to get bored anyway . . . Of course, it was nice to fuck passionately for hours on end, in eighteen thousand different positions. Even so, repetition was boring. Especially since they had gone so over the top that she’d already had vaginitis twice. She had felt flattered the first time, as if she had been decorated for valor on the battlefield: the inflammation of the mucous membranes was a kind of a trophy, the proof that she had been brave in the battle of love. But the required abstinence had complicated their lives over the following days, so that she and Dany wanted to bite each other when they couldn’t make love. As a result, a second case of vaginitis had led her to take an unplanned, prudent trip to her mother’s. As she vacuumed up the pieces of glass from the gaps in the floorboards, she realized she had endangered her health. As for the swingers’ clubs, she hadn’t enjoyed them for very long. That had always been her problem: she quickly tired of people and activities.
She was startled by the sound of a key in the lock. A shadowy figure slipped into the corridor. Dany stood before her. She froze.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice.
She didn’t react.
“Faustina, I’m sorry. My anger wasn’t aimed you, you took the brunt for the others.”
“What others?”
“Those who only see me as a man of mixed race.”
The long silence that followed brought a fragile peace. Faustina sensed that Dany was being sincere: he was suffering, he was ashamed.
She wondered if she too was suffering and realized that she was more than anything annoyed at having spent four hours tidying up.
“I beg you, Faustina, forgive me. I’ll replace everything I smashed. And more. Please . . . ”
She looked at his full lips, his fine features, his firm skin, his very white eyeballs. A powerful wave rose within her, which she took for forgiveness and which must have contained a certain amount of desire. She opened her arms, and he immediately took refuge in them.
As long as he doesn’t cry. I hate men who snivel.
She giggled: Dany’s skillful fingers were already trying to take off her skirt.
The following day, Faustina demanded that Dany come to the party she was organizing in her apartment. “You’ll see, you’ll like my friends: they’re all gays.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s right, I don’t know why, all my friends are gays. They’re sure to love you.”
In truth, she knew perfectly well why her friends were men who liked men: it allowed her to hold court. In their eyes, she was the woman, the temptress, the seductress they wanted not to possess, but to be.
Her mother had taught her about this power early on. “After fifty, sweetheart, you’re a woman only in the eyes of homosexuals. As far as heterosexuals are concerned, you become a cast-off.” Faustina hadn’t waited that long to exalt her femininity, and had made friends with the gay men life pushed her way. She enjoyed talking about men as coarsely as they did, had the freedom of knowing they admired her without desiring her, and liked the fact that she was relieved of her sometimes difficult role of sex object: with them, she could laugh and joke without any ulterior motive.
Dany looked worried. “Are you sure you want me to stay?”
“Absolutely. Are you scared they’ll eat you up like a delicacy? It’s what’s going to happen, you know. Don’t worry: they’ll look at you, sniff around, listen, but they won’t leap on you.”
“You’re a real bitch,” he exclaimed, laughing.
“I know. It’s part of my charm.”
When those Faustina referred to as “the boys” arrived, Dany felt comfortable. The remarks they made were funny, bitchy, sometimes hilarious; he was flattered by the lingering looks they gave him. Caressing him, serving him first, boasting of his legal exploits, Faustina treated him like a king, and the eight other guests approved of his privileged status.
Tom and Nathan brought up the subject that was most on their minds: the obscure business of the anonymous letters. “We’ve discovered four anonymous letters,” Tom said. “Our two, and then when we talked to the florist, who has to be the most malicious woman in Brussels—”
“In the world, my dear, in the world,” Nathan corrected.
“—we discovered two more: the one Xavière received and the one—she found out by chance through his wife—received by that degenerate aristocrat at Number 6.”
“If that one’s straight, then I’m the Queen of Spain.”
“That’s not the point, Nathan!”
“It is the point. To be snubbed by a pervert who’s always got his hand on his zipper, ready to open it, I mean, that’s rich!”
“Anyway,” Tom continued, “it’s always the same modus operandi: a yellow envelope, a yellow sheet of paper, an identical message: Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.”
Faustina gave a start. “I got one, too!”
Her words created a stir. She rushed into her bedroom and, after a few curses that echoed around the apartment, returned with the paper.
Tom and Nathan were delighted: their theory of an eccentric writing love letters to the residents of the square was confirmed.
“What was your reaction to the letter?”
“Do I need to tell you?” Faustina replied, the color draining from her face.
“Yes, you do. It’s vital to the investigation.”
She turned sheepishly toward Dany. “I thought he’d sent it.”
Dany came closer and read the note. “It’s not my handwriting.”
“We believe you, Dany,” Tom said. “Especially as there’s no reaso
n for you to have sent us this.”
“Which is a shame, really,” Nathan said. “I’d have loved it.”
Faustina gave him a little slap on the head. “Hands off my man, you.”
“Don’ hit me, massa, don’ hit me,” Nathan moaned, putting on his Gone with the Wind voice.
This sent a wave of embarrassment through the group. In exercising his sardonic imagination, Nathan had dispensed with political correctness to the point of forgetting that putting on a slave voice in the presence of a man of mixed race wasn’t exactly tactful. Faustina feared the worst.
Rising above it, Dany chose to ignore the incident, grabbed the sheet of paper, and turned it over and over. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there, my friends, since I’ve never dealt with a poison pen case.”
“Oh, but this person’s no crow, he’s a dove, a Cupid. These letters are messages of affection, not hatred.”
“Well, one thing I can guarantee is that he or she is left-handed. Look at the way the T’s are crossed . . . from right to left.”
“The Cupid is left-handed!”
“Let’s think,” Dany said. “The writer of a poison pen letter is usually someone who’s frustrated, dissatisfied, marginalized.”
“That narrows it down,” Faustina said.
“He often has a physical deformity.”
“I can’t think of anyone like that around here.”
Tom looked at her. “Did receiving the message have consequences?”
“You’re joking! Of course not.”
“You thought Dany had written it. That brought the two of you together.”
“We were already together. Let’s say it made him take root—not in my heart, since I don’t have one, but in my life.”
“It was the same for Nathan and me, it had a positive effect. We haven’t been apart since.”
“I’m even picking out wedding dresses,” Nathan said. “Cream, of course, I wouldn’t dare white.”
They considered this. Faustina formulated out loud what everyone else was thinking. “It’s rather embarrassing to think that a stranger wishes me well. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”