Apocalypse Baby Read Free Page B

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 towards me, and could always be counted on to call and ask me to go for a coffee if he was inmy neighbourhood, 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 12th arrondissement, who’d ‘forgotten’ to pay a supplier. Their job was to suggest that he paid this longstanding 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 round, 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 yetafterwards, 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 on to 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