Artifice

by Claire Berest

Genres: General Fiction; Cultural Heritage

Synopsis

'A breathtaking book confirming Claire Berest's inexhaustible talent as a storyteller' Elle

'Deliciously unique and unpredictable ... this novel blossoms like a poisonous flower' Le Journal du Dimanche

'An astonishing thriller' Libération

Abel Bac, a police officer, has been suspended from duty for unknown reasons. Haunted by a recurring nightmare, he walks the streets of Paris hoping to lose himself in the city, but somehow, he always finds his way home. All that gives Abel comfort are the ninety-four orchids which populate his small apartment.

In museums across Paris something strange is happening. A white horse appears in the library of the Pompidou Centre. Then stuffed wolves are displayed in a gallery, dressed in fine garments and drinking tea. The police are baffled and Abel, who is somehow linked to it all, is becoming more and more unnerved.

Soon, the hidden darkness of his life will rise to the surface and lead him to Mila, the mysterious artist at the heart of this enigma. And then he discovers that nothing about these events is coincidental . . .

Release date: August 1, 2024

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

Abel is numb, he can only see them falling to the ground, one after the other, unreal puppets killed off, men, women, in no order, he looks for Éric’s face, and now Éric is turning to him with the same expression, the empty eyes always there in the middle of his face, the way you might decide to stick a flower in your buttonhole once and for all, by way of signature, or to wear a black jacket, always the same one, to fix all this shit of having to display your identity. Éric is staring calmly at the head of a woman who is still moving on the ground, terrified the way only imminent death can terrify, and he shoots the woman, without spite, in the middle of her forehead, to finish what he has begun. The woman dies and Abel wakes up.

Abel Bac woke up, his body gripped by the nightmare’s immediacy, gasping for breath as if he had taken a lungful of seawater, bolt upright in the darkness of his room. He began to count backwards: ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one . . . Racing through the numbers at breakneck speed, like a deranged clock, then more slowly, trying to ease the familiar vice of the dream. You can have the same nightmare for twenty years and the terror is the same, as new, over the years the terror remains as fresh as ever. Abel went on counting . . . fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-five . . . when he heard a noise.

Abel heard a noise: scratchings on the woodwork, then the chinking of bracelets knocking together, a muffled bump, a rustle of things falling, stumbling footsteps. What was this racket? His eyes shocked wide in the half-light, Abel listened carefully to the unwonted commotion outside his front door. As if someone was fiddling with the keyhole. He got up and pulled on a pair of jeans. He reached the living room in five steps, the hall in three, he opened the door with a rough, ill-tempered pull, and a girl tumbled into him.

The girl tumbled into him. A dishevelled blonde, too much jewellery, boozy eyes, a reek of gin, he recognised his neighbour from upstairs. The one who had come by a few days ago to bother him with nebulous tales of recycling regulations in the building. ‘I do separate the plastics,’ he had repeated calmly, but without managing to stem her nervous chatter. So he had said nothing more until she stopped talking. Despite her apparent hopes, he had not invited her into his two-room apartment to continue their conversation on the importance of sorting the recycling. He had said goodbye.

This time, the girl was plastered. He looked at his watch: 2.27 a.m. He caught her just as she began to tip backwards. She could not stand up, was hardly on her feet at all. She muttered that her key wasn’t working. ‘Key . . . Don’ work, key . . .’ He glared at her from the height of his icy body. He righted her again and then propped her against the door frame, as he would a rickety piece of furniture awaiting repair. Abel gathered up the bothersome junk scattered from her bag and now strewn across his doorstep and stuffed it rapidly back into said handbag, which was hanging open and soaked through. ‘Your bag is full of water,’ he said.

‘Key don’ work,’ she moaned again, more loudly.

‘I realise. You’re on the wrong floor.’ He ran one arm under hers and gripped her firmly by the shoulder. ‘Up we go, madame.’

‘Madame? Madame?’ she spluttered, in a fit of alcoholic hilarity. ‘I’m a madame!’ The laughter was too much for her and she pissed herself, literally, thus in her eyes compounding the comedy of the situation. ‘Pissing myself!’ Abel wondered exactly which circle of hell he had stumbled into.

They began to climb the sixteen steps to the building’s top floor, to the row of former maids’ rooms, doll’s-house cells for living in. ‘Which one is your studio?’ She did not respond. Three doors. He took a punt on the furthest one, over which a charming garland of kraft-paper origami flowers dangled. ‘Got to throw up,’ she warned. ‘That’s not my problem,’ he panted. Abel was hunting for the bunch of keys that had scraped at his door. Not here. Shit. With growing irritation, he propped his female parcel against the wall again. ‘I’m coming back.’ All the way down the sixteen steps, peering at the staircase, he spotted the keyring’s gleam in a corner of the landing, grabbed it and ran back up, taking the steps four at a time. ‘Got them now,’ he muttered.

Abel found the young woman sunk into a foetal huddle on a flocked Bienvenue! doormat. Like a little kid, he thought. A naughty drunk kid. Third door, the garland, the key bit, bingo, at last he had it open, and a waft of jasmine enveloped him like a ghostly cough. He gripped the girl, took her bag too, and dropped the lot on the unmade bed.

Too much jasmine for seventeen square metres. Abel gagged.

He considered his charge and wondered if he ought to do something about her trousers, which were soaked. He weighed up his options. But the barely imaginable notion of approaching this woman’s intimate regions forestalled his making any attempt. He turned her head to the side, to stop her choking on vomit. Correct steps taken. Au revoir.

At 2.38, he went to get a bucket from his own apartment, filled it with three bleach tablets, two capfuls of white vinegar, and warm water, and armed himself with the mop. He buckled down to washing off the central stairs which were covered in pee. In his head, he was counting backwards again. To calm down.

2.53. Abel was back in bed, white sheet up to his chin, eyes wide open. He knew he would not be able to sleep again. He put on a T-shirt and a jumper – both clean. Not from the day before. Which day before, anyway? He tended to muddle his insomnias because the nightmares stopped him from dividing periods of time with any certainty.

He went out into the snow-white night of the Paris boulevards. He would go for a walk, as he usually did.

Abel Bac went out for a walk feeling as if he had lice, lice on his head. A colony of vermin to remind him of his body, to give him no peace. A stealthy but urgent itching. He scratched, a bit; the move opened the floodgates of an urge to scratch everywhere, to work his over-clipped nails into his scalp until it was raw. Now he dug deep, clawing himself, freely creating red furrows under his hair, out of sight. The satisfaction of scratching, the way we take pleasure in a soothing pain, pain in service of forgetting. Perhaps there really were lice living on his head. Lice caught through the inevitable bodily proximities, a professional hazard. Or were they literally in his head? Fabricated. The lice of his feelings.

Abel Bac stopped at the all-night pharmacy on place Clichy with its flashing green cross, siren song to the 18th arrondissement’s local hoods. He did not join the queue, the pharmacist knew him. He was a good client.

‘I’d like a headlice shampoo.’

‘That’ll be the third this month. You’ll end up damaging your scalp.’

‘And a pack of paracetamol.’

‘Of course, as usual.’

‘It’s for my plants, not me.’

‘Of course.’

The line of harrowed faces hoping for methadone or any kind of painkiller looked askance at Abel, not appreciating his circumvention of the queue. But no-one said a word. Abel frightened them. It wasn’t his face but what they could not see. It wasn’t that pair of faded blue eyes, high seas in prospect; it wasn’t the still childish chin pressing full lips forward to match, nor the cheekbones razor-scraped in ice-cold water that alarmed them. No, it was the barely visible tension of his muscles, which vibrated like a red alert.

He put the shampoo and the pills in his backpack and adjusted the straps, feeling vaguely guilty for giving way to the impulse, then brushed aside his guilt with a sweep of his hand and stepped outside again. Back to his night-walk.

Abel entered his trance, step by step, finding the rhythm, so his body alone could choose its path; a touch too fast at first, he needed to taste the unfolding landscape, to let his brain capture the details, a shop window, a face, to let it record a burst of conversation, scraps of sounds, speech, music floating from the bars’ half-closed doors, to find a point of balance amid this merry-go-round.

Nor must his trance move too slowly either, he let the drumming of his limbs beat the pavement, his feet shrug off their tingling, let the details gleaned around him become streaks, snags, to be forgotten before they were fully grasped, let his arms’ swing match the pace of his steps, let the speed send a little sweat down his neck and warm his body. And, at last, he succeeded in getting lost. Which had become so difficult, and ever rarer.

Abel always knew where he was, he knew the city too well, his senses were sharp and would not let him lose track. A glance at a street sign, the familiar form of a square, an over-bright massage salon, a frustrated face: everything was information. Not to mention the smells. He predicted before even seeing them the restaurants, a bakery in a basement, the corner where vagrants would piss. Everything smelled. Everything leaked. Very occasionally he did manage to get lost. After an hour or two of walking to the automatic rhythm of his liberated limbs, his etherised head, suddenly he felt it, he was lost. And then the joy took hold. Not knowing where he was at all. Not even sure which neighbourhood he was in. To look around, serenely, at the unfamiliar windows, the unknown and dormant apartment blocks, and the few passersby with messageless faces. Everything settled inside him. The elation was worth the effort. The fleeting moment when he lost all sense of himself.

And then he could shake himself, deliberately discover where he had got to and start back, worn out and happy, the way tramps always end up returning to the fold when blue daybreak is safely moored to the sky.

He had set his quota at four night-walks per week. He forced himself to rest on the remaining nights, otherwise the lack of sleep became too much. When he slept, he dreamed about Éric, and he couldn’t let himself wander too far that way. Tonight, he had not planned to walk. He had counted on some sleep. But the sozzled neighbour had messed with his schedule. She’d made him get up, so he didn’t feel this incident need be classed as a failure of self-control.

Tonight, he did not get lost.

He knew the entire route he had taken. He had gone down the rue d’Amsterdam, turned off at rue de Liège, then taken rue Moncey, recognised the vintner with a promotion on natural wines, then Blanche, the dead flowers on rue de La Rochefoucauld, the Gustave Moreau museum, on as far as boulevard Haussmann, it was incredible all these maps in his head, the diagrams, the cut-throughs, shortcuts, landmarks, how could anyone tidy it all up . . .

He’d powered along rue Tiquetonne before heading back up boulevard de Sébastopol, had a moment’s intoxication, a doubt, then recognised the maroon drapery of that restaurant on the rue des Vertus, the grey armature of some streetlights, the manhole cover. He had given up.

Back at his harbour, place Clichy, like a bull to his manger, where every alley was familiar, every skewed garden a memory, the sun was up now, and the Métro had opened, the kiosquier was bustling about, the early risers treating themselves to a croissant at the bistro to dip in their strong coffees. Abel stumped up to his apartment to change his T-shirt before going for a coffee at the Carolus. As he made his way up the four flights of his staircase, he remembered it was Thursday – his laundrette day. Then, at his own landing, he saw a newspaper on his doormat, probably a mistake, he left it there and went inside. It was as if the night air confined inside rushed out around him. In one movement he pulled off his T-shirt and flung it into the laundry basket to join a dozen identical white T-shirts. In fresh clothes, he did not linger but swung the door to behind him and came again to the newspaper lying folded on his mat. It was the Parisien, easily recognisable from its sky-blue banner stripe; he left it there and went down to the Carolus.

At the bar, the owner Ahmed automatically served Abel as soon as he stepped inside, a strong black coffee, a double, and called into the kitchen: ‘Bread and butter!’ This character moved through his early-morning routines: taking the tables outside, changing the binbags, turning on the machines, bringing in the day’s papers, checking the approximate cleanliness of floors and tabletops, flicking the T.V. over to a rolling news channel.

And serving the cop’s strong coffee, of course.

‘Are you coming off shift or on, boss?’

‘Leaving work.’

‘Here’s your bread and butter.’

‘Thanks.’

A half-baguette cut longways, the two hulls of bread smothered in margarine. Abel was unwinding, his bodily exhaustion was acute, he gulped down the buttery spread.

‘More butter.’

‘On its way.’

The morning street life filtered in, lining up at the bar, they were almost all men, labourers, dustmen, local grandads already scratching at their lottery tickets, overgrown urban youth, the noise intensified as the men hailed each other and dug into their small talk. Abel could relax amid their exchanges, lose himself in the growing buzz, he was not alone here. He appreciated the regular racket of the coffee machine when Ahmed knocked the grounds out in its wooden drawer. Hammer. Metronome. That knock was squarer than the fragments of conversations swarming around him. There was still a mild whiff of rollies: Abel knew that, when the blinds went down, Ahmed would run lock-ins for the local Moroccans, they liked to play cards, and the old ashtrays would emerge from the cupboards again.

‘Have you seen this, my boy? They’re all out of ideas now, these artists.’

Ahmed held a newspaper out to him – he could keep up the chat with all his clients at once, he knew their professions, their rituals and tastes. Ahmed pronounced artists more like aarrrgh-tistes, and he washed his hands a lot, all the time actually.

Abel looked at the front page of the already crumpled Parisien, object of the proprietor’s aspersions. In the journal’s grainy central photograph he saw a white horse held at the harness by two policemen standing in front of the Pompidou Centre.

‘They snuck a geegee into the gallery! The hack gotta be as lively as the art in there,’ Ahmed said, pleased to have caught his customer’s attention. ‘Poor creature.’ And he was off to wash his hands.

Abel focused on the photograph. He made a few slow circuits of the horse in his head. He was wondering what this horse reminded him of. It was there, but beyond his field of vision. He gave up, nodded in punctuation to Ahmed’s gambits, but Ahmed was already lining up further coffees on the bar; Abel left a five-euro note on the counter by the row of white saucers, and made for the door. Then he paused and returned to snatch up the Parisien.

Ahmed saw but made no comment.

Back at his landing on the fourth floor, Abel noticed an earring stuck between the floorboards in front of his door: it was a little gold swan mounted on a ring. A souvenir from his inebriated neighbour. He pocketed it. The untouched, plastic-wrapped Parisien was still on the mat. He opened it: the same edition as the one swiped from Ahmed, with the white horse on the front page. He looked around, trying to penetrate the other doors on the floor, to guess which the paper ought to be addressed to. A name was indeed printed on the poor-quality plastic label that he’d torn apart, and the ink had leaked, blurring, bleeding through the addressee’s name. He looked more closely and deciphered ‘Abel Bac’. He had never subscribed to the Parisien.

He went inside and prepared the paracetamol bought the night before at the pharmacy: five pills dissolved in a large bottle of mineral water. And now he undertook to pour a little into each plant, avoiding watering them from above but instead topping up the water in the dish of pebbles beneath each one so it would rise naturally through the soil and up into the stems.

His bower of orchids.

He had ninety-three, scattered all over the living room. Covering the floor, perched on the few items of furniture, on the windowsills and in pots hanging from the ceiling. Soon to be a hundred. If none of them died.

Abel’s floral surroundings were so foreign, so ecstatic, that they were never the same to him. They shifted, transformed. When he entered his apartment, he felt the opposite of habituality. His orchids provoked endless wonder, the way the moods of skies seen through a single window are infinitely volatile.

It was a field of faces, now calm, now all screaming mouths, from yellow to mauve, from white to pink.

He could go and wash.

Undressing, Abel felt the earring at the bottom of his pocket and put it in the top drawer along with the rest: the gleanings of his walks. He took some time over his ablutions, to regain some energy, access the strength not to sleep and make it to the evening. In the end he allowed himself to look at his watch, which lay on the bedside table: it was 8.10. He took a notebook from the pile next to the bed and, in his telegraphic style, noted his observations from this latest walk. The roads he had taken, the people encountered, any slight differences: some new graffiti, a broken window, a new billboard. Abel completed his lists. Next he went through the notebooks where his insomniac moments were set down: was it possible that he’d subscribed to the Parisien, one exhausted evening, in the grip of lord knew what obsession, and instantly forgotten? If so, it could only have happened recently. He found nothing of the kind mentioned in his tiny, precise, densely black-inked writing. He put the notebook back on the pile. Nice and straight.

At 8.30 he was seized with a panic over what to do with this day. What should one do when deprived of the logic of timetables so perfectly established until now? He was all at sea. His routine settled fifteen years earlier: precise time-keeping, Métro, cases, operations, hearings, paperwork, colleagues. The foundation structure obliterated. It was a week since he had been suspended from his role as police lieutenant in Paris’s 1st district crime squad, D.P.J. 1. Thanks to a single snitch to the I.G.P.N., the national police inspectorate. But, dammit, who had gone digging up his past?

Camille Pierrat alternated between anxiety and irritation. That Abel had not replied to a single one of her messages was unsurprising, but that he had not even turned his phone on for a week was worrying. She had checked. In order to do so, she’d made a little systems tweak which was never O.K. and over which she risked getting into serious shit. S. . .