Jeremiah Granden
Thierry and Anouk
Inspector Thierry Botolph wore only his shirt, the hollow right
sleeve signaling amputation, as he gazed into the postcard sea.
Anouk, her head and crotch dyed a radiant blonde per Thierry’s
instructions, squatted for her jeans. Anouk’s belly was tight.
"How about having a drink near the water?" Thierry suggested.
***
The Marseilles police knew that Gustav Guy, a twenty-one year old
pseudo-gangster with bad acne, was diverting animal tranquilizers
from veterinary clinics and animal hospitals into the local drug
market. Thierry, who abhorred all puzzles and mysteries, was content
to work the case since its successful completion mainly involved
manipulating Gustav’s suppliers into confessing their roles in the
enterprise, so that he could bury the young criminal under a corpus
of written statements.
Possessing strong instincts for that part of his duties as a
narcotics detective, Thierry almost immediately decided that Anouk
would crack the quickest. He waited by the lovely twenty-year olds
car to intercept her as she left the animal hospital for a numbing
weekend of caring for her invalid father and when she showed up in
algae green scrubs he proceeded to bombard her with a series of lies
and innuendos designed to pressure and entrap. Thierry, of course,
had nothing concrete to implicate her with. It was up to Anouk to
provide him his material.
"…and the French prison system is, of course, very hard.
Particularly for the young," Thierry announced. The empty sleeve
dangling from the detective like it was part of a haunted sports
jacket gave Thierry a certain sense of gravity. His already
substantial level of charisma was only amplified by the aesthetic of
amputation. People assumed that the limb was severed by a mafia bomb
or something, when in reality it was lost to him through an ordeal
of illness and infection a few years ago.
"I hope it is hard," young Anouk said, her eyes becoming polar
water.
"Pardon?"
"I hope it is hard. Ruinous."
"If you know something..."
"I have been stealing from work and selling what I steal to a guy
named Gustav. I confess. I don’t care about prison. My life is a
prison."
"I am certain it won’t come to that if you…"
"Confess? I will either way. But I saw you when you came to go
through the records…"
Her hands trembled.
"I want you to force the truth out of me," she said gently.
"Pardon?"
She met Thierry’s eyes, attempting boldness. "Make me confess all
my crimes. Beat every dirty secret out of me. Use whatever weapon
you choose."
"That kind of talk … is very dangerous. I don’t think you know
what you are saying,"
Anouk’s face softened into a cheerful smile. She ran her finger
down his sleeve. "I have barely said no to anyone my entire life.
I’m sure it will be easy for a dangerous man."
***
Anouk, returning from an early morning jog, was met at her
apartment door by a restless, visibly exhausted Thierry. She said
nothing to him as she inserted the key into the latch.
He went straight for her spandex shorts. Thierry heard
inexperience in her quivering voice as she whispered in his ear.
Thierry left Anouk bottomless in the hallway. He clutched the wad
of pink spandex and blue cotton underwear in his good hand.
***
That Monday, the phone at Thierry’s desk hummed in its quiet,
electronic way.
"Gustav is fucking a veterinarian at the hospital. She is his
main channel."
Thierry barely recognized Anouk’s voice over the phone.
"What’s the name?" Thierry already knew the name.
"I don’t know," she answered and hung up.
***
Gustav’s other co-conspirators, not knowing to make the sort of
offer Anouk did, were promptly victimized by a ruthless fact-finding
campaign. One by one, Thierry shattered these individuals with his
bullying and mesmerism, turning the remaining pieces into narratives
that he, like some Neptune, gathered into an enormous wave that was
soon hurled at Gustav. The animal tranquilizer scheme was then
totally capsized and Gustav instantly drowned. The sobbing young man
signed a full confession with Thierry’s silver pen and that was
that.
***
"Your friend is gone. Off to jail."
The red wine coated Anouk’s teeth. "How many years?" she asked.
"Around two to five. He has already confessed."
"Are you going to let me go now then?"
Thierry nudged Anouk’s thighs apart under the table. Francophone
rap pulsed from a black speaker nearby.
"Do as you wish," Thierry laughed.
"That’s no fun."
***
Anouk was bent over wheezing. Thierry saw that she had her
jogging clothes on and wondered why she ran all the way to his house
at what must have been an unbridled, crazed sort of sprint.
Anouk had no answer for him. She limped past him toward the
bathtub, leaning against the wall and almost falling. Anouk turned
the water on and kneeled, her chest heaving, either unwilling to or
unconcerned with taking off her clothes. She didn’t bother with the
curtain either. Water sprayed off her saturated tee-shirt onto the
linoleum.
Thierry busied himself cleaning a filthy pot. Dreadful visions of
a dead woman in his house preoccupied Thierry, so he left the
kitchen after ten minutes of listening to the distant shower run.
Anouk’s stripped off clothes floated in the filling tub. She had
the face of a phosphorous, ecstatic Lucifer.
"Nothing will every destroy me," Anouk countenance implied as she
rose her hips to the surface.
***
In the dream Anouk, now chief of the Marseilles police, was
firing him for incompetence. "Your badge can go to another," she
said.
The police station was transposed over a beach. Thierry started
traversing the sand and found his lost arm lying there, slightly to
the left of a starfish. He was able to reattach it and it moved
freely, effortlessly. The nearby sea was quite dreary.
He called Anouk. She would be greeting her father’s daytime nurse
and getting ready for another day at the animal hospital.
"You must call in sick today. Don’t cancel the nurse," he said.
***
Everyone was naked except for Thierry who wore only his white
shirt. After their escapade on the beach Thierry and Anouk went to a
rowdy bar near the port. Thierry observed three Quebecois sailors
gawking at Anouk, so he bought them a few rounds of beer and
convinced them to go back to his house.
The sailors were tripping on acid. Two were in bed with Anouk,
their feet having pushed the sheets to the floor, in the midst of
passion. The third was lost in a psychedelic meltdown and wandered
the property singing pop songs in a jerky cadence.
Thierry found the sight of Anouk writhing between the two
foreigners eminently pleasing but he couldn’t shake a certain
disinterested feeling.
"Love is not enough," the third sailor sang.
It was a bored, glacial feeling. It was something that prevented
Thierry from getting full enjoyment from the ongoing orgy. He
couldn’t identify it.
"My brain is not enough," another verse went.
Anouk, her voice less innocent than it once was, had the
unnerving quality of a phantom now. Her words started frenzies in
the bed.
"My soul is not eee fucking nough," the sailor bellowed.
"It’s like being on a ship," Thierry decided. "A boring, hypnotic
ship where everything is just happening and all you do is drift."
"I hate books and love cows," the third sailor said to the
sitting amputee in a prophet’s voice.
Thierry tried to arrange the four words, cows, love, hate, and
book into a comprehensible idea when the sailor’s blade crossed his
body. The sailor ran it across the white shirt four times total.
Blood was everywhere.
The two Quebecois shouted panicked curses at their wayward
shipmate. Anouk’s scream, piercing, had a melodious quality.
Jeremiah Granden wrote "Thierry and Anouk" in an attempt
to leave the
detective story out in the rain in order to alter its aesthetic
nature and
reveal a few hidden threads of meaning. The author is delighted and
honored
to be making his debut as a fiction writer in The Mississippi
Review. He
lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife and two hounds. |