She always knew the police would come and that it would be because of him. It was inevitable. That man couldn’t be content with a single victim. You only had to watch him eat, a meticulous ogre sucking the honey from each cell of the honeycomb before tossing it aside, empty. Even when he wasn’t hungry, Paul’s appetite had gotten the better of him. Money, power, and little girls’ asses: he was insatiable.
Michelle didn’t have to know the names to be sure that there were others. She knew they existed. Somewhere in the nebula, they formed an army of phantom stars. One day, or perhaps one night, a thread would connect them, and their constellation would have a name. A constellation of ghosts.
Yes, Michelle always knew the police would come. There had been periods in her life when this certainty had retreated, a she-wolf frightened by the sound of the hunter’s footsteps. But on very calm nights, holding her breath so as not to scare it away, Michelle could feel the fetid breath of certainty on her neck and, possessed by a sort of drunkenness, she had to fight the desire to get up in the middle of the night, drive to a police station, and report him.
Paul Normand raped me. I was ten years old. And his greatest crime, the most disgusting, the most repulsive — much worse than his rancid cock — was that every time he made me believe I was lucky to be chosen among all the others.
It would be a relief to spit out his name, like when she sticks her fingers down her throat to make herself vomit. But once she’d emptied her stomach of all that bitterness, she would have to face the world and pay the consequences.
All those who had never had their neck squeezed so tightly that black and yellow marks were left there for days — those who had never had their throat brutalized by the pounding of a cock that thrusts by force — who’d been spared from the soundtrack of a man panting and groaning as he came — they would feel entitled to judge her, to condemn her.
Opportunist, liar, bitch, mercenary, careerist, calculating, profiteer, mytho-, nympho-, parano-, schizo-, manipulating, pathetic, sad, narcissistic, crazy, aggressive.
At best, she would be deemed fragile. But this was the worst epithet in her line of work, where one could recover far more easily from accusations of nymphomania than of a fragility that would worry any investor.
And so, Michelle had hoped that someone else would get up in the middle of the night, go into a police station, and beat the shit out of the silence, pounding it over and over again, right in the stomach. A single report would be enough for others to come out of the woodwork, and soon there would be a veritable stampede.
Be patient.
She always knew the police would come. She didn’t think it would happen today, in the middle of rehearsal with her troupe, the last run-through before their big show in Vegas. But she never thought she would make it there either, her name on the marquee of the Barroco: Directed by Michelle Sullivan.
When her assistant leans close and whispers that two investigators want to speak with her, Michelle feels a wave of heat come over her and the familiar shudder of disgust travel down to the small of her back.
Paul
The police advance toward her, excusing themselves to the acrobats and dancers who move back to clear a path. How handsome they are, Michelle muses. He, a milky-white Pierrot; she, an ebony Colombine. She can’t resist the urge to magnify images, to dramatize them. It’s stronger than she is.
The black woman holds out a dry, warm hand. “Géraldine Mukasonga, major crimes. And this is my partner, David Catelli, also major crimes.” The woman pronounces the word crimes in a voice like burnt caramel, rough beneath the sweetness. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Paul Normand.”
“What has he done?”
Pierrot and Colombine exchange a look. They communicate well, Michelle thinks. It’s fluid, they have no need for words. Acrobats are like that, aware of the slightest quivering in their partner’s body. Their life depends on it.
“He’s dead,” says Pierrot. “We found his body in the parking lot of a restaurant on Rue Ontario. A witness told us about you.”
Paul is dead, Michelle thinks. She never imagined he could die before he’d paid for what he’d done. He won’t have to go to prison, he won’t be shamed, publicly humiliated. It’s not fair. “Who told you about me?”
“A waitress at a restaurant. She remembered you as a child,” Géraldine says. “You were on a TV show he produced, and he brought you there for lunch.”
Family Life: bitter sperm and fake maple syrup. Michelle had never eaten crêpes again, and she’d never owned a television.
“Mademoiselle Sullivan, your first reaction when we mentioned Paul Normand’s name was to ask us what he’d done.”
“You said you were from major crimes,” Michelle replies, holding Colombine’s gaze for a long moment. “Should I have thought otherwise?”
“Paul Normand was murdered. Three bullets in the chest. Most likely from a hunting rifle.”
Michelle closes her eyes, to better imagine the scene. The images are magnificent — the dirty snow, the pink dawn, the expression on Paul’s face as he turns around to meet his assassin — filmed in forty-eight frames per second, so she can truly savor the giant’s surprise as he realizes his feet are made of clay and nothing will save him.
“He was mutilated as well.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Castrated, if you prefer.”
Michelle starts laughing. At first it’s an incongruous sound that escapes her throat — ruined from years of making herself vomit — then her laugh becomes a clear cascade, liberated from the fat hand of Paul. Castrated, the son of a bitch. In the immense rehearsal hall, in front of her troupe, her assistant, the technicians, and the two police officers, her wild laughter echoes as if there were ten, a hundred, a thousand people laughing. She couldn’t have imagined the scene if she’d tried.
“Would you like to tell us about it?” asks David.
Michelle’s gaze comes to rest on Olga, scouted at a gymnastics club in Komsomolskoye, whose graceful child’s body coils and uncoils in meters of shimmering red silk, defying the implacable laws of gravity to catch the light of the projectors. Her little Olga, so proud of being able to support her family of five in Chechnya. With me, she’s safe, Michelle thinks. With me, the only risk she runs is a mortal fall. That’s better than living with the snarling snout of a bear in your face every day, better than a shitty role on a shitty TV show, better than being humiliated by a despot in search of toys to break. Now I’m the one in power. I’m at the top, and yet I didn’t become a despot. Paul Normand raped me, but he didn’t break me.
“No,” she finally says, stunned to hear herself pronounce such a powerful word.
“Your testimony would be confidential,” David reassures her.
The black woman, for her part, says nothing, but her phenomenal eyes take everything in. Vigilance, thinks Michelle. She knows. We come from the same country, she and I, one that demands vigilance at every moment.
“You know how many women are directing shows like the one I’m preparing for in Vegas? Zero. I’m the only one. If I talk to you, if I tell you my story and it goes public, everything I’ve managed to do in my life, all my struggles, all my accomplishments, everything that’s mine will be taken away from me again, and I’ll go back to being precisely what I don’t want to be.”