“Would you do it for two thousand?”
And Raisin replied:
“Yes. Five hundred now and the rest after.”
They’d just taken a big step. A kind of moronic one, obviously, but a step all the same. Two normal people would have changed their minds, would have found a way to unsay what had been said while still saving face, but not them. Their whole relationship was a sham. Each one told himself, through the mediation of the other, that he was more dangerous than people thought, that he wasn’t just a petty crook and a simple soul. They could have gone on pretending to be tough. To have made believe that the conversation had never taken place, and to have kept on telling themselves that they were really the sort to talk that way. They could have, but, in truth, that would have made huge demands on their respective capacities for abstraction.
They parted with a handshake, and each went his way, stepping briskly, to the rhythm of two hearts beating wildly in their rib cages.
Raisin had pondered the question for a long time. His father had owned a small.22 calibre long gun for years, never registered. It was in a closet in the basement, stored in its case along with an old box of bullets. When his mother died, Raisin was able to hide the rifle and save it from being sold off. No one in the family, or outside it, knew about its existence. He could easily kill someone with it and go somewhere to bury it. What was crucial, and this he’d learned from cop films, was never to be caught with the gun.
And so Sanguinet was going to die, because he’d refused to let Martial, after the deadline, change his bet on a football match, he who insisted in betting on sports even if he knew nothing about them, and kept on asking Sanguinet to alter his bets even though he knew the bookmaker couldn’t do so.
Sanguinet was a professional bookmaker and gambler. He held the bets on all the international sporting matches, and had feelers out everywhere that enabled him to lay money on local games. He also sold contraband cigarettes. He was the kind of harmless criminal that respectable men like to associate with, so as to mix with the underworld at little cost. The police never made trouble for him, never made him open the trunk of his Buick; several of them placed bets with him, and some smoked his cigarettes.
He was virtually a last-born. He was an only child at a time when families were still large, born of the curious union of a factory worker who arrived out of nowhere one filthy January night, and a woman whom he presented as his wife, but who strangely resembled him, and who for a long time was rumoured to be his sister. His father and mother were tall and bony, he was fleshy and short in stature. He’d lived with his parents until their death, and had never really worked.
He spent his days going back and forth between his clients’ houses and an assortment of bars. At night he sat on his porch behind the house, which gave on the woods that separated the golf course from the water purification plant. When a client had to find him he met him there, or knocked on the windows of the patio door if Sanguinet was watching television inside.
For a few days Raisin made a study of how he spent his time. One night, at an ungodly hour when good people were sleeping, Raisin went out with his rifle in hand and wound his way through alleyways and yards, trying not to rouse the dogs. He himself knocked on the glass. When Sanguinet opened the door, he managed, despite his nerves and clumsy hands, to shoot off the gun and fire a round into the gambler’s midriff.
Beyond that, Raisin had no plan. He’d not foreseen the noise of the discharge that jolted everyone awake nearby, nor the dumbfounded look that Sanguinet gave him after falling on his behind through the vertical blinds, to land on the dining room floor. Raisin had assumed he’d be capable of killing Sanguinet because he didn’t much like people, though he liked animals and would never have caused any harm to a cat or a pup. Unfortunately for him, that’s exactly what Sanguinet looked like with his blood-stained hands clutching his perforated belly, and his eyes wide open with fear.
Raisin tossed the gun into the flower bed, took Sanguinet in his arms as if he weighed nothing at all, and carried him, running, to the hospital, twenty minutes away, without pausing for a moment.
The small calibre bullet hadn’t caused much damage. They extracted it from Sanguinet’s abdomen and let him rest until the next day. Raisin stayed in the waiting room all during the operation, then spent part of the night at the wounded man’s bedside. No one could get him to say anything, nor make him understand that it was time to leave, nor even make him budge. No one, until the police arrived. They’d been alerted by the doctor on duty, who had to report any bullet wounds. Unable to get anything out of him, they handcuffed Raisin and put him in preventive detention, pending some clarification of what had occurred.
Constable Leduc couldn’t talk to Sanguinet until the next afternoon. Sanguinet immediately asked him where Raisin was.
“We’ve placed him under observation. He was in a state of shock. Is he the one who shot you?”
“Yes, but it was an accident. Go to my house, he must have left the gun there. It belonged to my father. I wasn’t sure whether I should register it or throw it away, so I asked Raisin to come and help me see if it was still working. That’s how it happened. We were sure it wouldn’t fire. Raisin must have forgotten to remove the bullet that was in the chamber, and when we went to close it up, it went off.
“Why did you ask Raisin to help you?
“He’s my friend.”
“You’re Raisin Tremblay’s friend? That’s news to me.”
“Aw, you know what I mean. He helps me with my rock garden in front, I give him some painting contracts, things like that. Sometimes he comes over for a beer. He knows about guns.”
“Raisin Tremblay knows nothing about anything. And are you going to tell me why you’d ask a semi-retard to help you try out your rifles at two in the morning?”
“I know, I know. It wasn’t a good idea.”
The two men stared at each other.
“Do you have any more questions?”
Leduc cleared his throat.
“Are you sure you don’t have any other answers to give me?”
Sanguinet kept to his story, and later that day, after having been released, he went to pick up Raisin at the police station. They didn’t exchange a word during the trip. Sanguinet left him off in front of the Blackburns and said goodbye, but Raisin got out of the car and went in without saying a word.
That night, Raisin took part of Martial’s five hundred dollars and went to buy a lot of beer at the corner store. He walked as far as the baseball field, where for the time being there was no last-born in sight, sat on the players’ bench, and downed, one by one, the twenty-four bottles in the case. Zigzagging home, he looked like a domestic bull to which one had administered a powerful sedative. At the steps to the Blackburns, his cat, which had again run off, was rolled into a ball in front of the door. Raisin grabbed the cat by the skin of its neck, kicked open the door, and heaved it inside. In the air, the terrorized animal, which was not a cat but a skunk, emptied its sphincters full force, showering Raisin and the walls with a foul liquid, part ammonia and part excrement.
Raisin felt sick, he wept from the pain and the sadness, and didn’t know what to do. He reeled, reeking, the three blocks to Sanguinet’s house, and knocked at the door. Sanguinet opened it, and without giving him a chance to dodge his embrace and the odour that came along with it, Raisin sobbed in his arms for a good half hour.
They spent part of the night cleaning Sanguinet’s house, slept for a few hours, with Raisin on the couch and Sanguinet in the bedroom, and on waking they went together to disinfect the Blackburns’ so they wouldn’t have to face the nauseating smell when they returned from their vacation.