Irene

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Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
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He looked at her face, saw the laughter in her eyes. A baby had been the subject of long discussions. They could not seem to agree. Camille’s opening gambit was to play for time, while Irène opted for intransigence. Next Camille resorted to the question of genetics, but Irène thwarted this by providing detailed research. At this point, Camille played his trump card: he refused. Irène trumped his trump card: I’m already the wrong side of thirty … The die was cast. And now the game was won. And so, for the second time he asked himself if Irène was beautiful. The answer? Yes. He had the feeling that he would never again ask himself this question. And for the first time since he could remember, he felt his eyes well with tears, tears of sheer joy, like life itself exploding in his face.

21
    Now here he was, lying in bed, one hand resting heavily on her belly. And beneath his hand, he could feel a forceful, muffled kick. Wide awake, he lay without moving a muscle and waited. In her sleep, Irène let out a soft moan. A minute passed, and another. Patient as a cat, Camille waited intently and there came a second kick, right under his hand, different this time, a sort of twisting motion like a caress. He felt as he always felt, his every thought blotted out by the absurd happiness of feeling it move, as though everything in his life had begun to move. All human life was here. It lasted only a fleeting moment before his thoughts were again interrupted by the image of a girl’s head nailed to a wall. He tried to dismiss the image, to focus on Irène’s warm belly, on all the happiness in the world, but the damage was already done.
    Reality had triumphed over imagination and images began to flash through his mind, slowly at first. A baby, Irène’s swollen belly, the cry of a newborn child he could almost hear. The film began to speed up: Irène’s beautiful face when they made love, her perfect hands, severed fingers, Irène’s eyes, the ghastly rictus grin of another woman, a smile slashed open from ear to ear …
    Camille woke feeling amazingly lucid. He and life had long been engaged in a battle of wills. Now, suddenly, he felt that the discovery of the bodies of these two mutilated women was about to turn abattle of wills into open warfare. The murdered women were no different from the woman he was caressing; like her, they had pale, rounded buttocks, firm youthful flesh, in sleep their faces were probably like hers, with that curious expression like a swimmer underwater, the same deep, regular breathing, the soft snore, the moments of apnoea that could panic a man who loved them as he watched them sleep; women with hair like Irène’s which curled about her heartbreakingly slender neck. Those murdered girls were no different from this woman he so loved. And yet, one day they had been – what? – invited, recruited, coerced, kidnapped, paid? However it had come about, they had been mutilated by men whose only desire was to dismember young women with smooth, pale buttocks, who had been unmoved by the pleading looks of these women when they realised they were going to die, they may simply have excited them, and so these young women who had been born to live had somehow come to die in this apartment, in this city, in this century where he, Camille Verhœven – an utterly unremarkable policeman, the runt of the
brigade criminelle
, a pretentious, love-struck troll – was stroking the beautiful belly of this woman who was constantly new, a miracle. Something was awry. In one last, weary flicker he saw himself devoting every ounce of his strength to two goals: first, to cherish this body he was stroking from which, in time, would emerge the most astonishing gift; second, to hunt down the men who had mutilated those women, who had fucked them, raped them, killed them, dismembered them, splattering the walls with their blood.
    Just before he drifted off, Camille had time to voice one last doubt:
    “I’m so

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