Central Park by Guillaume Musso (ebook reader macos .TXT) 📕

at the foot of this bed: the bitterness, the reproach. I know what they’re all thinking—that it’s my fault Erik Vaughn is still at large. However horrible the things that happened to me, I have no one to blame but myself.

The pills I am given leave me in a haze of half-consciousness. Anesthetizing my brain, numbing my heart—this is the only way the doctors have found to keep me from slitting my wrists or jumping out the window.

Despite my wooziness, I hear the shrill creak of the door as it opens to reveal the heavy figure of my father. I turn to watch as he moves slowly toward my bed. Alain Schafer in all his splendor: salt-and-pepper mane, drawn features, three-day beard. He’s dressed in the same cop “uniform” he always wears—leather coat with a fur lining, turtleneck sweater, worn jeans, square-toed boots. On his wrist is an old steel Rolex Daytona just like the one Belmondo wore in Fear Over the City—a gift from my mother the year before I was born.

“How are you doing, champ?” he asks, dragging over a chair to sit next to me.

Champ. His old childhood nickname for me. He hasn’t called me that in twenty-five years. A memory emerges of him taking me to tennis tournaments on the weekends when I was a kid. It’s true that we won plenty of trophies together—me on the court and him in the stands. He always knew what to say and when to say it. Always knew how to encourage me with his eyes. The love of victory, at any price.

My father comes to see me every day. Most often in the evenings; he stays with me until I fall asleep. He’s the only one who understands me, who doesn’t judge me. The only one who defends me, because in all likelihood he would have acted the same way. An adrenaline junkie, he too would have risked everything; he too would have gone alone, gun raised, head down.

“I went to see your mother at the hotel,” he says now, opening a leather case. “She gave me something I’ve been asking her about for years.”

He hands me a photo album bound in faded cloth. I struggle to sit up, switch on the lamp above my bed, and turn the pages separated by glassine paper.

The album is from 1975, the year I was born. Pictures are stuck to the thick cardboard pages with captions written in faded ballpoint below each one.

The first photos are from the spring of that year. I see my mother, six months pregnant. I’d forgotten how much I look like her. Forgotten, too, how much my parents loved each other back then. As I flip through the album, a whole era comes to life through these yellowed photographs. I see the little studio apartment they shared on Rue Delambre in Montparnasse. The psychedelic orange wallpaper in the living area; the egg-shaped chair; the cube shelves filled with vinyl albums by Dylan, Hendrix, and Brassens; a Bakelite telephone; a poster of the Saint-Etienne soccer club at the height of its glory.

In every single picture, my parents are smiling and obviously thrilled at the prospect of becoming parents. They kept everything related to the big event, including the blood-test result that had announced my mother’s pregnancy, the first ultrasound, ideas for names scrawled in a spiral-bound notebook: Emma or Alice for a girl, Julien or Alexandre for a boy.

I turn the page and my throat constricts with emotion. The maternity ward on the day of my birth. A newborn baby screaming in her father’s arms. Beneath this picture, I recognize my mother’s handwriting: July 12, 1975: Our little Alice is here! And she’s just as sensible as her mom and dad!

Stuck to the opposite page is my hospital ID bracelet and another photograph taken a few hours later. This time, “little Alice” is sleeping peacefully in her crib, watched over by her parents, who have dark bags under their gleaming, euphoric eyes. And, again, my mother’s handwriting: We are starting a new life, full of new feelings. We are now parents.

Bitter tears roll down my cheeks at the description of these feelings, which I will never experience.

“Why the hell are you showing me this?” I say, pushing the album away.

Then I notice that my father is wet-eyed too.

“After your mother gave birth to you, I was the one who gave you your first bath and your first bottle,” he tells me. “Never in my life have I felt as moved as I was then. That day, when I took you in my arms, I made you a promise.”

His voice is cracking with emotion and he pauses for a few seconds.

“What promise?” I ask.

“I promised you that, as long as you lived, I would never let anyone hurt you. That whatever happened, whatever the consequences, I would always protect you.”

I swallow. “But you should never make promises like that, because it’s impossible to keep them.”

He sighs and rubs his eyes to wipe away the tears he can’t hold back. Then he takes a manila folder from his briefcase.

“I did what I could. I did what I had to do,” he says, handing me the folder.

Before opening it, I look at him questioningly.

That’s when he tells me: “I found him, Alice.”

“Found who?”

“Erik Vaughn.”

I am speechless. Dumbfounded. My brain cannot process what I have just heard. I ask him to repeat it.

“I found Erik Vaughn. He will never hurt you again.”

I am paralyzed by an icy wave. For a few seconds, we stare at each other in silence.

“That’s impossible!” I say finally. “Half the cops in France have been searching for him since he went on the run. How the hell did you manage to find him on your own?”

“Doesn’t matter. All that matters is I did it.”

I become irritated. “But you were fired. You’re not a cop anymore. You don’t have a team or—”

“I still have my contacts,” he says, his eyes never leaving mine. “Guys who owe me