Free Bed of Nails by Antonin Varenne Page A

three metres in length with a long twisted horn sticking out of its forehead.
    “Boss, did you know a thing like this existed? A … what’s it say …? Narwhal?”
    “They won’t exist much longer. Come on Lambert, we’ve got work to do.”
    “It says here it’s a tooth. But what use would it be?”
    “That’s why they’re dying out: it’s like you, Lambert. Get a move on, we’re going.”
    Lambert hurried along behind the boss as they walked out.
    In the car, driving with one hand and scratching his fair curls with the other, he went on.
    “Yeah, but really, what use is that, a tooth in the middle of your forehead? Awesome, though! If I could choose, I’d spike myself on a narwhal tooth, not a cachalot.”
    Guérin paid no attention to his deputy’s ramblings. He was looking, as if it were the Holy Grail, at the little box full of ones and zeros sitting on his knees, as if he feared to lose a single drop of Christ’s blood. He was ecstatic, on the point of shouting with joy, tapping his head as if sending a message in code.
    “Don’t you agree, boss?”
    “What?”
    “I said they’d do well to keep quiet about this, the museum people. Because a place like that, once it gets around, everyone will want to come there to do themselves in. What about the report, boss? We didn’t speak to the pathologist, we don’t know the suicide’s I.D., nothing.”
    It was getting dark now, and Lambert was quite right. Suicides went in waves of fashion even if it meant breaking their own rules. Rebellion by suicide!
    Guérin took out his notebook and started to scribble furiously.
    Lambert failed to follow up his intuition, which was just a passing thought, and went on to something else.
    “The brigadier-
chef
in the 6th arrondissement, remember him, Roger, he’s called? The one who had to deal with the man who jumped in the river at New Year? He was there just now. He remembered me, he said he got his death of cold after going in the water that time. And he said this guy, well a witness told him, anyway, this guy shouted something when he jumped.”
    Guérin was covering his notebook with signs Lambert could make neither head nor tail of, shorthand presumably, arrows, circles, little men and death’s heads. Lambert turned at the lights and said gently.
    “Boss, are you O.K.?”
    “What did you say?”
    Guérin, hallucinating, was scratching the skin on his bald head until the blood started to run down his cheek.
    “Nothing …” Lambert’s voice died away, “Just that the guy shouted ‘Thanks!’ when he jumped.”
    “To the office, young Lambert. To the office.”
    “Boss, stop it.”
    Lambert had never been able to find any scientific words for what went on inside Guérin’s head. When a crisis struck, he just put it to himself in his own way: the boss’s brain was boiling over. He never mentioned this to anyone else, although he would have liked to understand, in order to feel reassured. But better not to let anyone else hear about his boss’s funny turns. Of that he had no doubt at all. The only way he would settle down, as Lambert well knew, was to follow his own logic until the carriages got back on the track again. Hoping that the boss would find his way home. He speeded up. Their car had no siren, so he just lowered the sun visor, which had a black-and-white sign reading
Police
.
    He parked in front of the little side entrance to No. 36, praying that the encroaching night would be dark enough to cover their arrival. He glanced along the quai des Orfèvres in the dusk. Nobody. Guérin was already getting out of the car, clutching his hard disk. He had stopped mutilating himself but was still very hyper. Stifling a curse, Lambert reached into the glove compartment and grabbed a woolly bundle. Then he followed the boss, who was wandering about in the middle of the road. In his yellow raincoat, he remindedLambert of that musical comedy with people dancing in the rain. Except that when Guérin went