“He lives alone?”
She nodded her small white head. “I’ve lived here fifteen years. He was here when I moved in. I’ve never seen anyone else go up those stairs. Except once.” Her wrinkled mouth puckered in a sneer of disgust. “A whore...”
Without reacting to her remark, Victor asked, “Do you know his name?”
She shook her head no. “But everyone on the block calls him Suitcase Man. He’s a scary one, that’s for sure.”
Robitaille, who had finally caught his breath, cut in: “And what exactly is the problem, madame?”
“Besides the screaming?” She fixed her owl’s eyes on the cop. “There was blood dripping from his suitcase.”
Victor walked up to the staircase, crouched in front of the first few steps, and brushed them with his fingertips. He stood, his index finger covered with blood, and followed the trail of drops up the stairs.
Breathless, his chest heaving, Arthur Zourek sits down in the snow and leans against Florence’s headstone. Reaching out his arm, he grabs the handle of his suitcase and pulls it to his chest, cradling it gently as the wind blows and blood spreads dark over the snow.
A melancholy smile crosses the old man’s face.
“My little princess suffered too much, Flo. I had to take her with me, I had no choice. You see, Flo — together for eternity. I’m coming to join you.”
He digs in the pocket of his jacket and takes out a half-empty bottle of pills. Twisting the top off, he brings it to his lips and swallows the remaining tablets. Then he hears shuffling behind him. He raises his eyes and makes out the silhouette of a young man leaning over him. Behind him, gnarled branches blown by the wind seem to reach out to grab him.
“Bonjour, Arthur. How are you today?”
The old man nods in greeting to the visitor, a man of around thirty, whose long black hair is flecked with snowflakes and blowing in the wind. “Salut, Jérôme. You should put on some clothes, you’ll catch a cold.”
The young man pulls the lapels of his jean jacket closed, a contemptuous smile curving his lips. “Perhaps you have a coat for me in there?”
Arthur Zourek hugs his suitcase even more tightly. “There’s nothing of interest to you in here,” he says in a sharp voice. “Nothing, you hear?”
Jérôme shrugs his shoulders and pulls a flask from his jacket pocket. He throws his head back and takes a long swig. “I have what I need to keep warm. You want some?”
Zourek shoots a disdainful look at the flask. “No. I don’t drink alcohol.”
The half-open door squeaked loudly as Robitaille gave it a push. The two policemen cautiously entered the Suitcase Man’s dark apartment.
“Police!” Victor called out.
Flashlights in one hand, pistols in the other, the men moved silently, each covering the other. Robitaille buried his nose in his forearm. A fetid odor of decaying matter and cat urine filled the room. “Oh god, it reeks in here.”
He turned on the living room light, and a mountain of random filth appeared: a soiled mattress, a lamp with a ratty shade, a cooler, a TV in a solid wood case, a teddy bear’s head on a stand, suitcases, dirty clothes, a turntable, records, an overturned sofa, dusty picture frames, and many stacks of newspapers.
Victor headed for the kitchen, where a pan of dried spaghetti sauce congealed on the stove. On the counter, fruit flies swarmed around rotten fruit and cartons of Chinese food. Garbage bags full of empty cans were piled in a corner, and bundles of old lottery tickets lay on the table.
A corkboard was fixed to the door of the pantry. Amid a jumble of papers, a few black-and-white photographs stood out. Victor examined them for a moment. In one of them, a little girl of six or seven wore a polka-dotted dress. Barefoot in the grass, she smiled timidly at the camera. In another, which looked to be from the same period, a man of around thirty stood with a young blond woman. An uneasy feeling came over Victor. The couple wore a look that was almost frightening.
Leaving the pantry to take a look around, Victor made his way down the hallway. Suddenly he recoiled, his heartbeat quickening. Bloody footprints were still wet on the wood floor. He thought he should alert Robitaille, who was inspecting the dining room, but he was unable to move, rooted to the spot by the force of his imagination.
What would he find at the end of this hallway?
Not a dead child. He wouldn’t be able to bear it.
After shaking off the thought, he followed the trail of footprints and traced them back to another room. The door was ajar. The hallway was dark, and for a moment everything seemed to sway before him. An irresistible force drew him forward. His eyes were glued to the strip of light showing under the doorframe, and his heart pounded wildly in his chest. He stepped up to the door and knocked loudly.
“Police!”
Not a sound. Victor lunged at the door and pushed his torso through the opening, pointing his pistol into the room, ready to fire at the slightest provocation. For a moment, he thought the room was empty — until he saw what was there on the floor.
It took a moment for the nausea to come over him. His gallery of phantoms had just come alive again, the one that had haunted him since that July day in 1976 when his father had savagely murdered his mother and his brother Raymond, before turning the gun on himself.
Victor swallowed. He felt an immense pressure in his chest. At his back, his partner’s voice startled him.
“Oh fuck. We’d better call backup.”
Robitaille’s eyes widened in horror as he saw what Victor had been staring at: on the ground, a kitchen knife bathed in a pool of blood, strewn with short hairs.
A message had been traced with fingers on the floor: Together for eternity.
Defying the cold, the howling wind and snow gusts bending the cemetery trees, the young man in the denim jacket slowly approaches Zourek, whose face is now livid.
“There was another disappearance, Arthur. Right next door to you. What a coincidence, eh?”
“Why are you telling me this, Jérôme? What are you trying to insinuate?”
The young man stares at him with eyes full of reproach. “You know very well why I’m telling you this. There were others after—”
“Nasty little liar! You think you can mess with me?”
“Why so aggressive? After all these years...”
Arthur Zourek’s vision begins to blur. “You took her from me... She was my life...”
Jérôme shakes his head. “You’ve never accepted the truth. I’m the one who should be angry.”
Zourek’s eyes open wide as he murmurs, “The bloodshed did me good. It calmed me.”
The young man clenches his fists. “What are you hiding in that suitcase, Arthur? Let me see.” Jérôme steps forward and fixes the old man with his sullen eyes. Before Zourek can react, the young man grabs the handle of the suitcase and yanks at it with all his strength. The old man clings to it with the force of his despair.
Suddenly the buckles give way and the lid of the suitcase opens, sending its contents flying through the air before falling silently on the snow, near the front of the headstone. Struggling against his fatigue, the old man crawls forward and retrieves a small, blood-soaked corpse. He hugs it to his chest, murmuring words of comfort.
As they continued to search the apartment, the policemen discovered another room, meticulously clean. A little girl’s room frozen in the 1950s. They’d also found, near the pool of blood, a photo album with a warped cover.