Free Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord Page B

guarding the camp, some of the grown-ups had kept him back, hidden him, and he hadn’t been taken away with the others.
    This was something all children wanting to survive should know, then: people are kinder to a child who smiles, even if it doesn’t always work.
     
     
    It was getting late, and because the food had been spicy and made Hector thirsty, he’d drunk quite a lot and was feeling rather drowsy. Everybody said goodbye, and Marie-Louise went with Hector to the car that had come to take him back to the hotel. It was a small four-by-four truck like Jean-Michel’s, with a chauffeur — not dressed like the chauffeurs in Hector’s country, though; he just wore a T-shirt, a pair of old bell-bottoms and some flip-flops. There was also a very young bodyguard carrying a very big revolver. When he walked past them to climb into the back, he could smell that they’d been drinking rum, but all things considered maybe it was a good way of not being scared when driving on the roads in that country. He waved goodbye to Marie-Louise and her family, who stood on the front step watching him leave, and the car drove off into the night.
    Hector felt quite happy: he told himself that he would have plenty of interesting things to tell Clara, because he would be able to tell her about what happened to him in this country.
    He would have liked to talk to the chauffeur and the bodyguard, to ask them if they were happy, but he was too drowsy. He fell asleep.
    He dreamt about Ying Li, which proves that psychiatrists’ dreams are no more difficult to understand than anybody else’s.

HECTOR’S LIFE IS NO LONGER PEACEFUL
    H E didn’t wake up completely but he did have the fleeting impression that the car had stopped, the doors had slammed and people had started shouting. However, because he was dreaming that he was sailing across the sea in a small boat with Ying Li to go back to his country, he resisted coming out of his dream.
    Well, that was a big mistake.
    Because when Hector did wake up completely, he had the impression that the driver and the bodyguard had changed. True, Hector had not paid much attention to what they looked like but he could see perfectly well that these were not the same men as before, and he tried to understand why. The other thing he tried to understand was why the car was still driving through the night. Because his hotel wasn’t all that far from Marie-Louise’s house, just about time enough for one dream, and yet they were still on the road.
    If Hector had been more awake, or a bit smarter (Hector was intelligent but not necessarily smart), he would have guessed what was happening, but instead he asked, ‘Where are we going?’
    The two Africans in front jumped out of their seats, nearly hitting their heads on the roof, and the car swerved sharply. They turned around, the whites of their eyes showing, and the one driving said, ‘Mercy!’ The other one took out a big revolver and pointed it shakily at Hector. At that moment, Hector saw that they were both wearing police uniforms. Then he understood what had happened.
    It was as Marcel had explained. Stealing a car is difficult without the ignition key, and so it’s easier for criminals to make you stop and give them your keys. In this country, some criminals had discovered that a good way of doing this was to pretend to be policemen! Obviously, when a policeman flags you down on the road you stop, otherwise you risk getting fined or even being shot at. So, at night, sometimes there were fake police roadblocks or, rather, real roadblocks but manned by fake policemen who were actually criminals. And it wasn’t that difficult to get hold of uniforms because everybody had a brother or a cousin in the police force who could lend them his jacket or helmet on his days off (the jacket was enough because in this country even the real policemen could wear just any old trousers or shoes, even battered trainers).
    Hector understood everything. The two fake