The Tenth Chamber

TWENTY-FOUR

Tuesday

Luc called Sara once, twice, three times then repeated the effort every hour or so. He hammered her mobile with messages. He got her home number in London from directory assistance and tried that. He called her office. When leaving messages got old, he hung up at the beep.

He was back at his flat in Bordeaux, a tidy bachelor pad in a high-rise, minutes from the campus. He was battling a rough sea of roiling emotions, barely keeping his head above the water.

Anger. Frustration. Grief. Longing.

Luc wasn’t the type to dwell on feelings, but he couldn’t avoid them. They were bashing him in the head, ramming him in the gut, making him punch the furniture, scream into a pillow, choke back the urge to cry.

He ducked calls. If he didn’t recognise the number he let them ring through. Reporters, including Gérard Girot from Le Monde, called him incessantly but he was under a gag order from the Ministry; press contacts were in the hands of Marc Abenheim.

Who could he talk to – other than Sara?

He would have called Hugo, but he was dead.

He would have met up with Jeremy and Pierre for a beer, but they were dead.

There were no women to turn to. All his relationships were dead.

His bastard of a father was dead.

His mother was in another world geographically and neurologically, in the first grip of Alzheimer’s, and what would be the point of distressing her? And he might have the bad luck of getting the dermatologist on the line.

That left Sara. Why wasn’t she picking up the phone or responding to texts and emails? He’d left her in hell at Nuffield Hospital, blazing off in a blind panic, oblivious to her needs. ‘There’s been an emergency,’ and he was gone. He alluded to the crisis in his messages. It was in all the papers. Other team members would have surely reached out to her. She had to know.

Where was she?

He wasn’t one to drink on his own, but he drained a bottle of Haitian rum left over from an old party over the course of the afternoon. In a boozy mist he came to this conclusion: Sara was done with him. This was more than a brush off, it was terminal. The bridge was burned to its pilings. Bad things happened to her when he was around. He’d hurt her once. He’d probably just hurt her again by ditching her in Cambridge. He was toxic. Cars veered at him on the pavement. People died around him. The next time he heard from her would be an email with an attached report on her pollen findings at Ruac, signed, With Best Regards, Sara. Or maybe not even that. Abenheim might have already contacted her and told her to communicate exclusively with him from now on. Maybe he forbade her to speak with Luc altogether.

Abenheim could go to hell. Ruac was his cave.

He ran a bath and while he was soaking he tried not to close his eyes because each time he did, he saw the covered bodies on the floor of the Portakabin, or Hugo, crushed in his car, or Zvi, broken at the river’s edge. He balled his hands into fists and realised his right hand was getting better, less red and less painful. He didn’t much care but he’d keep taking the Asian doctor’s pills. The phone chimed a few times. He let it ring.

Wrapped in a towel, he listened to his new voice messages. One was from Gérard Girot again, urgently requesting a comment. The next was from Pierre’s father, calling from Paris.