A Foreign Country

76

François heard the noise of the key at eight fifteen. Sometimes they woke him earlier, sometimes — like when Akim was on duty — they let him sleep.

The first day he was there Luc had told him to remain on the bed whenever somebody knocked on the door. If he wasn’t sitting down when they came in, if François didn’t have his hands raised in the air, palms open to show that they were empty, they would throw his food across the floor and then there would be nothing to eat for the rest of the day. So François did what he had always done and remained on the bed and raised his arms above his head, like a soldier in the act of surrender.

It was Valerie this morning. That was unusual. Behind her, Luc. No sign of Slimane, no sign of Akim. In the middle of the night he had heard a car pulling up outside the house and thought that he recognized the voice of the man who came inside and was greeted by Luc in the hall. One of the temporary guards the weekend when Slimane and Akim had gone to Marseille; ex-Foreign Legion, a macho, stubble-headed Aryan named Jacques who couldn’t cook like the others, had a kind of lazy, ruthless stupidity. François assumed that he was coming back on duty. He prayed that Slimane had been given a few days off. He prayed that he had seen the last of him.

‘We need to make a film,’ Valerie said, indicating that François should remain on the bed. She was carrying a newspaper. Luc had an iPhone in his hand.

‘What kind of film?’

‘The kind that proves you’re alive,’ Luc replied bluntly. Their attitude towards him was brusque, even nervous. François had always tried to read his captors’ behaviour, feeling that it would bring him to a better understanding of their motives and designs. Whenever they were curt like this, whenever he felt that he was being treated badly, he feared it was because they were planning to kill him.

‘Hold this,’ said Valerie, handing him a copy of Le Figaro. It was that morning’s edition. There was a lead story about Sarkozy, an advertisement for holidays in Mexico, something on the right-hand side about Obama and funding in Washington. Luc dragged a wooden chair from the hall into the cell and sat on it, facing François and pointing the back of the iPhone at his bed.

‘Say who you are,’ he said. Valerie was standing over him and moved slightly to the left when Luc told her that she was blocking the light.

‘My name is François Malot.’ Inexplicably, François felt as though he had done something like this many times before. He looked up at Valerie. She was staring at the blank wall behind him.

‘What is the date today?’ Luc asked.

François turned the paper around and recited the date, then showed the front page to the lens.

‘This is fine,’ Valerie said and indicated to Luc that he should stop filming. ‘What else does she need to know?’

François looked at them, trying to ascertain what they were thinking. He knew that he was being ransomed; he had been told that his ‘mother’ would pay. He knew nothing of her, only what Slimane had whispered to him night after night through the door. He had not wanted to believe any of that. In the first few hours of his captivity, François had thought that he was a victim of false identity, that they had taken the wrong man, killed the wrong family. Now, less than a month after his parents’ murder, he had begun to feel free of them in a way that made him feel shameful and guilty. Surely he should still be grieving, even though they had grown so much apart? What sort of a son cared only for his own survival and felt relief that his mother and father had been killed? He wanted to speak to someone about it, to Christophe and Maria; he believed that he might be going slightly mad. They never tried to judge him. They always understood what he was trying to say.

‘Tonight will be our last night in the house,’ Valerie announced. ‘This time tomorrow, we move.’

‘Why?’ François asked.

‘Why?’ Luc repeated, imitating François’ voice and dragging the chair back out into the hall. François looked out beyond the open door and glimpsed Slimane in the living room. He had a lurching premonition that he would never see the morning.

‘Because too many people have been to this house, too many people know you were here,’ Valerie replied. Slimane turned and smiled at François, as if he had been listening to the conversation all along. ‘We are in the process of making everything very simple.’ Valerie crouched down and ran a hand through François’ hair. ‘Don’t worry, little boy. Mummy will soon be coming to get you.’