Jean-Christophe Grange - The Stone Council (Harvill Crime in Vintage)

Jean-Christophe Grang

TRANSLATED BY Ian Monk

Copyright Editions Albin Michel 2000

English translation Ian Monk 2001

Jean-Christophe Grang has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published as Le concile de Pierre by Editions Albin Michel 2000

ISBN 1 860 46996 5

FOR VIRGINIE LUC

Diane Thiberge had just 48 hours, not a minute more.

From Bangkok airport she was to reach Phuket via an internal flight, then head straight north to Takua-Pa, on the edge of the Andaman Sea. There, she could get a short night's rest in a hotel, before setting off northwards once more at five o'clock the next morning. By noon, she would be at Ra-Nong, on the Burmese border, where she would dive into the mangroves to collect what she was after. Upon which, she would simply have to repeat the same journey the other way round and catch the international flight to Paris the next evening. The time difference would play in her favour, as she would gain five hours over the time in Paris. She could then appear back at work on the morning of 6 September 1999. As fresh as a daisy.

But then the Phuket flight was delayed.

And nothing turned out as planned.

With her stomach in a knot, Diane rushed to the toilets. She felt a wave of nausea run over her, and said to herself: "It's just the jet lag. It's got nothing to do with my project." The next moment, she was sick, vomiting until her guts were burning in her throat. Her blood was hammering in her arteries, her forehead was icy cold and her heart was racing somewhere, everywhere, in her chest. She stared at herself in the mirrors. She was ashen. Her blond wavy locks looked more than ever out of place in this land of smooth, thin brunettes, and her size her huge height that had given her such a complex during her adolescence seemed even more grotesque.

Diane damped down her face, cleaned the nose-stud that decked her right nostril, then adjusted her tiny pair of hippy glasses. She went back into the transit lounge, floating in her tee-shirt like a ghost. The air-conditioning felt ice-cold.

She looked up again at the departure board. No news of Phuket. She idled around for a moment, then her eyes were drawn by the warning signs in Thai and English that were plastered up all over the lounge: anybody arrested carrying hard drugs in Thai territory would be sentenced to death by hanging.

At that moment, two policemen passed behind her. In khaki uniforms. With the criss-cross butts of their rifles. She bit her lip. Everything seemed hostile in this fucking airport.

She sat down and tried to stop herself from trembling. For the thousandth time that morning, she ran through her itinerary. It just had to work. This was her choice. Her life. There would be no going back to Paris empty-handed.

Finally, at 14.00, the Phuket shuttle took off. Diane had lost five and a half hours.

But now she would really encounter the tropics. Relief surged over her. Bluish clouds stretched away into the distance. Patches of silver lit up the sky. Beside the runway, pale trees swayed, while the dust was being blown about in piercing swirls. But more than anything there was the smell. The odour of the monsoon, scalding, suffocating, saturated with fruits, rain and decay. The headiness of life when it overcame its own limitations and turned to decomposition. Diane closed her eyes in delight and nearly fell down the step ladder fixed to the side of the plane.

16.00 hours.

She ran over to the car-hire counter, grabbed the keys from the receptionist's hand and rapidly found her vehicle. On the road, it started to rain. First a few drops, then a real downpour. The drumming on the bonnet was deafening. The windscreen-wipers were powerless against that red-brown mud. Diane drove on, her face up against the windscreen, fingers clutching the steering-wheel.

18.00 hours. Just before nightfall, the rains died down. The landscape glittered in the dusk. Gleaming paddy fields, dark houses standing on piles, golden buffalo with tapering horns. Or else carved temples with rolled-up roofs. But always the sky, streaked with lightning, marbled with darkness, which was now rolling down to her right in a languid blush.

She got to Takua-Pa at 20.00 hours. Only then did she wind down. Despite the delay, despite the rain, despite the panic, she was still on time.

She found a hotel in the centre of town, near a high water tank, and ate dinner below its canopy. Spicy prawns and white rice. She felt a lot better. The rain which had started falling again covered her entire body with a cool, healing halo.

That's when the girls appeared. Little girls with too much make-up, squeezed into leatherette miniskirts and dressed in tiny tops. Diane watched them. They looked ten, twelve at the most. They were like cases of indecent exposure on high heels. At the back of the room, big blond guys were already nudging one another. They were Germans, or Australians, as massive as bulls. Suddenly, Diane sensed some sort of hostility being directed against her, as though her presence were putting a block on whatever business had brought that little crowd together.

She felt the bile bite into her throat. Even then, at the age of 30, she could not imagine a sexual act without being overwhelmed by a feeling of utter disgust and nausea. She ran back to her room without turning round and without feeling the slightest compassion for those tiny children who were to be given over to male desire.

Lying under her mosquito net, she thought over her plan once more. Just before going to sleep, in her mind's eye she saw the warning signs at the airport, the police uniforms and the butts of the rifles. She felt as though she could hear the clanging of distant bolts, and the whirring of an even more distant helicopter

At five o'clock the next morning she was up. Her malaise had vanished. The sun was shining. The window was overflowing with exuberance, like the porthole of a ship open on a storm of vegetation.

Diane felt strong enough to overturn the entire jungle if she had to.

She headed off again and reached Ra-Nong before noon, just as she had planned. She took in the view of the sea. It seemed more like a scattering of marshlands amid the tangles of trees growing in the water. Somewhere, amid that watery maze, lay the border with Burma. A fisherman nodded and wordlessly agreed to guide her there. They slipped down at once into the dark waters. In the heat, the light, the walls of greenery that slipped by and the noise of the spluttering motor, Diane took in each sensation stoically, her throat dry, her skin white hot.

An hour later, they had reached a spit of sand with concrete buildings standing on it. Grey stone on dull earth. She set foot on the sand and felt a girlish surge of triumph. She had made it. There wasn't a single place on the planet that she couldn't have reached

Indifferent to the midday blaze, a group of children were playing around in front of the dispensary.

Diane stared at their black mops of hair and their dark eyes below the slight shelter of their lashes. She then went into the main building and asked for Teresa Maxwell. She was soaking with sweat. She felt as though she had just passed through a mirror. A mirror she had worn down by dint of dreaming.

An old woman arrived, wearing a navy-blue sweater from which a large white collar emerged, like two slices of pie. Below her short grey hair, her broad kindly face seemed to be frozen into an expression of constant wariness. Diane introduced herself. Mrs Maxwell led her to the back of a fretwork hall and into an office that lacked any furniture barring a wobbly table and a couple of chairs.