Apocalypse Baby. Виржини Депант

don’t know she’s missing, which means the police haven’t been called in yet. Though I’d have been willing to bet that the Galtans are well-connected enough to get the police to give this case more priority than they would for some ordinary missing person. The kids go back in to class. They’re empty headed, noisy, and over-excited. Interchangeable profiles. I’m not interested in them. It’s mutual, I haven’t registered in their field of vision. That’s my strength: I’m dispensable. I stay there most of the afternoon, reading every word of a newspaper a customer has left on a table, and ordering more coffees. Guilt at hanging about instead of starting the inquiry nags at me a bit, but not enough to prevent my enjoying the afternoon off.

      ON THE PAVEMENT outside the bar where Cro-Mag works, a group of Goths are smoking, and laughing a lot, which seems contrary to their philosophy to me, but then I’m no specialist. None of them takes any notice as I push through the throng to go in.

      Cro-Mag welcomes me warmly. Given his lifestyle—alcohol, hard drugs, up all night, surviving on kebabs and cigarettes—he’s looking good. He still has the kind of loopy energy most people lose after thirty, and in him it doesn’t look forced. His earlobes are deformed by the huge earrings he wears, his teeth are nicotine orange, but at least he’s got them all, that’s something. He leans across the counter to whisper that she’ll be along soon. From a distance, it must look as if I’ve come in looking for drugs and he’s telling me where to find a dealer. Scratching his chin, and tipping back his head in a virile but unattractive movement, he adds, “These days, she’s sniffing around this girl who comes in often. It wasn’t hard to get her to drop by.”

      I order a beer at the bar, I’d have preferred a hot chocolate because it’s cold outside, but I’ve got a date with the Hyena and I don’t want her to think I’m a wimp. I don’t often touch alcohol in bars, it gives me a headache and I don’t like losing control. You never know what you might be capable of once you lose your inhibitions.

      I’ve known Cro-Mag a long time. Over one winter, about fifteen years ago, we slept together. I’d thought him rather ugly, but after we’d had a lot to drink, he’d insisted so much that we should go home together that it was tempting. Then one day he turned up with a girlfriend in tow, from some distant province, dark-haired and pretty enough not to be ashamed to be seen with a type like him. Cro-Mag avoided me for a while after that, feeling guilty and afraid I’d ask for explanations or make a scene. But I’d stayed calm, so he’d become affectionate toward me, and could always be counted on to call and ask me to go for a coffee if he was in my neighborhood, or to invite me if he threw a party. It was via him, two years ago, that I’d heard they were looking for staff at the Reldanch Agency.

      He tips out some peanuts, puts one saucer down beside me, gives me a friendly wink and goes back to filling glasses behind the bar. He’s only too willing to talk about the Hyena: he loves describing their adventures. They used to work together. They even started off in partnership. Debt collecting. Their first customer was a so-called textile merchant, in tiny premises in the twelfth arrondissement, who’d “forgotten” to pay a supplier. Their job was to suggest that he pay this long-standing bill off as soon as possible. Before they went there, the Hyena proposed to Cro-Mag that she’d be the bad cop and he could be the good cop, and he’d felt insulted. “Have you seen what I look like?” A reasonable response: Cro-Mag is built like a colossus and with his small, dark, close-set eyes, his expression veers between a scary stupidity and bestiality. Being more impressed by his mission than he wanted to admit, he’d given the guy a brutal shaking, counting on his energy to make up for his lack of experience. The guy was whining, but you could see that he was playacting just to get them to stop. The Hyena had stayed in the background, not saying a word. Then just as they were leaving, she had wheeled around, grabbed the man by the scruff of the neck, smiled, and snapped her teeth three times in his ear. “If we have to come back here, you turd, I will personally bite your cock off with my teeth, got that?”

      The way Cro-Mag tells it, it was like coming into contact with the Incredible Hulk, only not green: she’d mutated into a monster, anyone would have run a mile from her. And yet afterward, she was depressed, and thought it hadn’t worked. “Couldn’t smell fear on him. Smells like fucking ammonia, it’s so gross if you smell it on someone, makes you want to hit them at once.” Cro-Mag had been even more worried than during the confrontation itself: “You’re sick,” he said, “you’re really sick.” The moment she’d grabbed the man by the neck, he’d felt as if something had splashed onto him. He called it “the urge to kill, naked, something you can’t fake.” The man had paid up that same evening. Gradually, they’d found their rhythm: he’d make the first approach, she’d go in to underline the message. A sort of alchemy surrounded them, so they made excellent persuaders. He liked to recall that it was him who’d given her the nickname: “if you’d seen her in action, in those days, you couldn’t think of anything else. A hyena; the more vicious and sadistic she was, the more she enjoyed it.” Cro-Mag was full of theories about that period in his life, and I guess he’d worked them out by talking to her. “Fear’s something animal, it’s beyond language, even if some words spark it off more than others . . . you have to feel your way, it’s like with a girl, you’re on a date but you don’t know her, you move your hands around in the dark until the precise moment when it starts to work, all you have to do then is hold it there and you can reel her in. So whether you’ve got someone who’s dumb but obstinate, or someone who’s imaginative and nervy, you have to make them get the message loud and clear: next time we’ll go for the jugular, you won’t get away, and you know that.” He’d loved working with her, he boasted about it willingly to the kids who hung around his bar as if he was giving them important lessons for life: “We made a good team, we agreed on the basics, such as: take long breaks often, the job works better if you’re feeling relaxed; always accept a bribe if it’s substantial, and, above all, when in serious danger, running away is not harmful to your health. We talked a lot about girls, too. It’s important to have interests in common. You can’t talk about the job all the time, too stressful.” And then one rainy morning, in the thirteenth arrondissement, they were going after a Russian—Russians had started arriving in Paris, this was a long time ago—and Cro-Mag had complained about his stomach ulcer. The Hyena had asked him, “Are you fed up with this job?” and it had been like a lightbulb going on: yes, he was fed up with getting up every morning not knowing whom he was going to threaten next, whether there would be many of them, whether he’d be frightened or, worst of all, whether he’d feel sorry for them and ashamed of what he was doing. He was fed up with clenching his buttocks every night when he put the key in his front door, with a hollow in his stomach at the thought of finding some men waiting for him in the living room, or his girlfriend’s body lying mutilated in the kitchen, or being pinned to the ground by a squad of cops. Yes, he was fed up with living in constant terror, without earning enough to move out of his one hundred square feet in Belleville. The only reason he was hanging on was to work with her. She had said, “If you give it up, yes, I’ll miss you. But you’re capable of doing something else. I’m not. I can’t stand being crossed. Whereas you can adapt, it’s a shame for you to wear your health out doing a job you hate.” Cro-Mag says that made him want to cry, because he realized at that moment he was going to give it up and that it was over, being a team with her. But also because he knew she was telling the truth: she was beyond saving, unfit for normal life. The difference between the truly tough and those who opt for redemption is that some people have the choice, others don’t. Every time he reached this part of their story, he got emotional, spontaneously, as if he’d abandoned an injured teammate on top of a mountain, knowing he couldn’t last long, and was now feeling guilty at being able to escape on his own two legs and get back to normal life. “The Hyena, she’s pure tragedy, when you get close to her, you really understand what it is to be lonely, sad, and unfit for the world.” When he went on like this, it was obvious that he loved her. Not “loved” as in “I want to eat your pussy,” but like when someone’s whole attitude is dear to you and every memory you share is covered with a fine golden sheen. Well. In the two years I’ve been doing my present job, I’ve had many occasions to hear things about her, and I’ve learned that she has inspired the same feelings in many people, so don’t try to tell me she suffers from loneliness . . .

      They’d carried on meeting,