Emmanuel Carrère - The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception

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Epub ISBN: 9781473547858

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Copyright P.O.L diteur 2000

Translation copyright Metropolitan Books 2000
Cover photograph Getty Images

Emmanuel Carrre has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Published by Vintage in 2017

First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury in 2001

First published in French as LAdversaire by P.O.L diteur, Paris, in 2000

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Emmanuel Carrre, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book, and translated into twenty-three languages), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life as a Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov (winner of the 2011 Prix Renaudot), The Mustache, and most recently, The Kingdom.

On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting

With these chilling first words, acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrre, begins his exploration of the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.

As a writer, Carrre is straight berserk; as a storyteller he is so freakishly talented, so unassuming in grace and power that you only realize the hold hes got on you when you attempt to pull away You say: True crime and literature? I dont believe it. I say: Believe it Junot Daz

The Mustache

Gothic Romance

Class Trip

I Am Alive and You Are Dead

My Life as a Russian Novel

Lives Other Than My Own

Limonov

The Kingdom

ON THE SATURDAY morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal. I usually devote Saturday afternoons and Sundays to my family, but I spent the rest of that weekend alone in my studio because I was finishing up a book I had been working on for over a year, a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The last chapter described the days he spent in a coma before his death. I completed it on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning opened my newspaper to the lead article on the Romand case.

LUC LADMIRAL WAS awakened shortly after four oclock Monday morning by a telephone call from Jacques Cottin, the pharmacist in Prvessin. The Romands house was on fire; their friends should come try to salvage as much of the furniture as possible. When Luc arrived, the firemen were bringing out the bodies. All his life he will remember the sealed gray plastic bags into which they had put the children: too horrible to look at. Florence had simply been covered with a coat. Her face, blackened by the smoke, was unmarked. Smoothing her hair in a desolate gesture of farewell, Lucs fingers encountered something strange. He felt around, carefully tilting the young womans head to one side, then called over a fireman to show him, at the base of the skull, an open wound. It must have been from a beam that fell on her, the fireman said; part of the attic had collapsed. Luc then clambered into the red truck where the rescuers had placed Jean-Claude, the only one of the family who was still alive. His pulse was weak. He was in pajamas, unconscious, burned yet already as cold as a corpse.

An ambulance arrived and took him away to the closest major hospital, across the border in Geneva. It was dark, chilly, and the jets of water from the fire hoses had drenched everyone. Since there was nothing more to be done at the scene, Luc went to the Cottins house to dry off. In the yellow light of the kitchen, they listened to the sputtering of the coffee pot, not daring to look at one another. Their hands shook when they raised their cups, and as they stirred their coffee, the spoons made a dreadful racket. Then Luc went home to tell Ccile and the children what had happened. Sophie, their eldest, was Jean-Claudes goddaughter. A few days earlier, as she often did, she had slept over at the Romands house, and she might very well have slept there again that night and wound up, like her playmates, in a gray plastic bag.

THEY HAD BEEN friends ever since medical school in Lyon. Theyd gotten married almost at the same time; their children had grown up together. Each knew everything about the others lifethe public image, but also the secrets, the secrets of honest, reliable men who were all the more vulnerable to temptation. When Jean-Claude had confided in him about an affair, talked about chucking everything, Luc had made him listen to reason: And youll do the same for me, when its my turn to be an ass. A friendship like that is one of the precious things in life, almost as precious as a successful marriage, and Luc had always been certain that one day, when they were sixty or seventy years old, they would look back together as from a mountaintop, after all that time, on the road they had traveled: the places where theyd stumbled, almost gotten lost; the ways theyd helped each other, and how, in the end, theyd come through everything. A friend, a true friend, is also a witness, someone whose attention affords you a clearer look at your own life, and for twenty years each of them had unfailingly, without any fuss, played this role for the other. Their lives were very similar, even if they hadnt succeeded in the same way. Jean-Claude had become a leading figure in the world of research, hobnobbing with government ministers, always off at international conferences, while Luc was a general practitioner in Ferney-Voltaire. But Luc wasnt jealous. The only thing that had come between them was an absurd disagreement, during the last few months, regarding their childrens school. For some unfathomable reason, Jean-Claude had really gotten on his high horse, so Luc had had to take the first step, saying that they werent going to quarrel over such a silly thing. The whole business had upset Luc; he and Ccile had talked it over several evenings in a row. How trivial it seemed now! How fragile life is! Only yesterday, there was a close, happy family, people who loved one another, and todaya boiler accident, charred bodies being taken to the morgue His wife and children were everything to Jean-Claude. What would his life be like if he survived?