When her bare feet touched the damp concrete just cleansed of Wellington’s blood, her legs — her big, fat, solid, earthy legs, their flesh dense and firm — buckled beneath her. She fell to her knees on the concrete, and Daniel, now freed, sped off to join Marko and Annika.
Marko hurried to her side and helped her up, his arm no longer trembling.
He held her close, and his tunic’s strong, tallowy smell, Marko’s manly new smell, filled her nostrils till it choked her.
“We’re leaving,” he said triumphantly. “I reserved a car, it’ll be here in thirty minutes. We’re going to spend the rest of our stay with your father’s friends.”
“We have to call them first,” she protested weakly.
“Out of the question. We’ll show up, and they’ll have to take us in. Suppose we called and they said it was impossible, what would we do? We’ve got to back them into a corner, there’s no other way.”
“We’re leaving, we’re leaving!” cried Annika in a burst of wild joy.
She began leaping about, stamping on the damp spot, her big, limpid, blue eyes almost popping out.
Ladivine was troubled to see that the little girl’s shorts had slipped down, her bottom partly exposed.
More disturbingly still, the fiercely modest Annika didn’t seem to care, and Marko himself was watching the child’s frenzied capers on the concrete with an amused, light-hearted, happy eye.
Then a bitter taste filled her mouth.
How could the big brown dog ever follow her into the bush, where Richard Rivière’s friends lived? How could the car not leave it far behind, and even if it did manage to follow her trail, wouldn’t it come to her dangerously depleted?
Now she was certain she didn’t want to leave, not the city nor the hotel, and she wouldn’t care if she was doomed to be imprisoned there forever, and she would blame no-one but herself and her perfectly lucid choices, and would thus resist the temptation to go to the trial and harangue the judges: Will the time come to judge Marko Berger, the murderer of a minor named Wellington, and myself, here before you, I who made no attempt to rescue that poor boy?
Caringly, Marko took Ladivine’s arm as Annika spun around and around on the slowly drying stain.
She was pivoting on one foot and propelling herself with the other, her arms arched around her hips.
Ladivine was convinced her bare feet were absorbing the damp of the concrete, soaking up everything that had spilled there.
“We have a very talented daughter,” said Marko. “She should start dance lessons when we get home.”
Couldn’t he see that Annika was dancing with Wellington’s death, that Wellington’s death had invited her to dance and now she couldn’t push it away?
Marko had a dreamy smile on his face. He was already thinking of going home, of Berlin, of the life quietly waiting for them there, ready to be put on again like a freshly cleaned and pressed garment.
She wished she could tell him that nothing was waiting for them to come home anymore, that their whole life, and their real life, was here, that they would never escape it, except with their death.
Or was Marko right about himself and the children, and she alone, Ladivine Rivière, had no life to go back to in Berlin, because she’d brought it with her, at its most essential, to this place?
She reflexively reached out to take Daniel’s hand and start up to their room, but the boy recoiled in something not far from terror.
“I can walk by myself!” he shrieked.
“Annika, we’re going,” said Marko, in a clear, firm voice.
The girl stopped spinning at once. She collapsed on the ground and lay prostrate, waiting, thought Ladivine, to recover her spirits and drive Wellington’s away. The four-wheel drive Marko had rented was already outside the hotel when they came down with the purse that was their only luggage.
Ladivine paid the bill, avoiding the clerk’s gaze, but as she turned to leave her eyes met the manager’s, standing in the lobby with his back to the light.
She thought she saw deep revulsion curling that usually distant, inexpressive man’s lips.
She nodded at him, as any departing guest would have done, and she felt as if her huge, heavy head was about to tumble off onto the carpet.
Making no reply, he stepped to one side and disappeared into the shadows.
She wanted to scream at him, “What of Wellington?”
Nothing came out but a sob that might well have passed for a sneeze. Marko and the children were already settled into the car, waiting.
She didn’t have to look around to find the big brown dog, across the street as always.
It was sitting up very straight on its haunches, its front legs proud and firm, the rust-coloured fur on its belly showing between them.
She held the dog’s gaze and gestured apologetically towards the four-wheel drive — but wouldn’t the dog know full well she had no wish to leave?
Wouldn’t it know, couldn’t it decipher her sentiments better than she herself, and didn’t it inhabit Ladivine Rivière’s skin more intimately than she herself, who sometimes felt she’d become nothing more than Clarisse Rivière’s bereaved daughter?
Marko gave a quick honk. She steeled herself and climbed in beside him, stunned at the coolness of the air-conditioned cabin, its appealing scent of new leather and jasmine air-freshener.
“This must have cost a lot of money,” she murmured, just to say something, caring little now for their financial condition.
“It’s not cheap,” said Marko, “but there’s no way around it, we can’t get there without a four-wheel drive. When you don’t have a choice, you just go along, right?”
She sensed Marko’s body quivering with a merry, childlike, vaguely malign excitement, not, as anyone else might have thought, because he was relishing the prospect of driving such a vehicle but because, Ladivine noted uneasily, his body, his face, even his hair, everything about him seemed different, more intense and more glowing, cruel, strong and fiery, as well as — strangely, given his usual sweetness and seriousness — far more gleeful, a hard, gemlike glee without cheer or merriment.
That fierce ardour filled the car with something cynical, and, Ladivine thought, something sensual.
How stifling it was, how disturbing!
She was sure Marko would laugh out loud if she spoke Wellington’s name, a new laugh, aggressive and sarcastic.
And the children? Would they laugh along with him?
Oh yes, they would, they were following Marko’s lead now, and who could blame them, since she herself was so uncertain, inspired so little confidence, since Wellington’s mere name made her tremble and gasp?
She could hardly expect the children to take trembling anxiety’s side, to embrace foolishness and pointless shame.
In all sincerity, she couldn’t even want them to.
On the GPS’s instructions, Marko drove down a narrow, potholed road through endless suburbs.