Farr The Bombshell

'Sexy, kinetic, dazzling... Unforgettable'
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-263-7
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

Revolution has never looked so good... 'Heady and reckless and dangerously fun' New York Times 'Sexy, kinetic, dazzling' Chang-rae Lee 'Filled with sex, violence and glamour' Adam Johnson Corsica, 1993. As a sun-drenched Mediterranean summer heads into full swing, beautiful and brash seventeen-year-old Séverine Guimard is counting down the days until graduation, dreaming of stardom while smoking cigarettes and seducing boys in her class to pass the time. The pampered French-American daughter of a politician, Séverine knows she's destined for bigger things. That is, until three masked men emerge from an idling car, tear her from her bike, duct tape her mouth and wrists, and take her somewhere hidden from prying eyes. While her parents try to negotiate for her release, Séverine finds herself beginning to sympathise with the political motivations of her captors, and becoming attracted to the group's charismatic leader, Bruno. What follows is a summer of passion and terror, careening toward an inevitable, explosive conclusion, as Séverine steps into the biggest role of her life...

Darrow Farr is a Salvadoran-American writer. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 2017-2019 and received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Michener Center at the University of Texas. The Bombshell is her debut novel. She was born and raised outside of Philadelphia, where she now lives with her husband and son.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Farr, Darrow

Leseproben

2. Negotiations

At first, Séverine assumed the knocking at the door was her mother, waking her at an ungodly hour of morning. But then she smelled the stale cedar air and saw the crack below the door so close to her nose, and she remembered.

The lock clicked. “Your blindfold better be on.” The voice belonged to the man in the leather jacket, deeper than the others, and the way he rolled his ’s was more discernibly Corsican.

Séverine felt around for the rag, then tied it around her head. “It’s on.”

“Breakfast,” he said, and she sensed him set a plate on the blankets beside her.

“Haven’t you gotten a hold of my parents?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“So when am I going home?” she asked.

He closed the door without replying, which was an answer of sorts. The men’s demands must be obscene, something more problematic than money. But her father would make a more realistic counteroffer, in a manner that made them think this was what they actually wanted all along. That’s what he did—made everyone think they were walking away triumphant, like they’d pulled one over on Paul Guimard or the Parti socialiste. Only later would they realize they’d been finessed into compromising.

On the plate were three biscottes, each smeared with a layer of butter and raspberry jam, and a liter bottle of water, which she unscrewed and drank a third of in one go. When she finished eating, she pushed the plate into the corner with her foot and leaned against the back of the closet, hugging the water bottle the way she used to hold her stuffed bunny, Milou. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine herself back in her Paris bedroom with Milou, under the canopy of her antique Chinese wedding bed. It was a strange piece for a child’s room, but she’d loved its intricate carvings of temples and ginkgo trees and emperors and courtesans.

But her parents had sold her beloved bed to some collector when they moved, and Séverine now wept at the thought of it. They never should have left Paris; she hated her father for evicting her from that lovely life where she had cool girlfriends and partied every weekend and was popular at school. It had been the worst year of Séverine’s life, and this kidnapping was the cherry on top.

All of a sudden, her intestines knotted. She retied the blindfold and pounded on the door, crying, “I have to use the bathroom!”

The door opened, and the big, rough hand of the man in the leather jacket pulled her from the floor and marched her half a meter down the hall. He nudged her into the toilet and closed the door, leaning his weight against the pliant wood.

Trembling, Séverine pushed the blindfold up over her forehead and sat on the toilet seat. The room was even smaller than the closet, and she felt too aware that she was separated from the man by only a few centimeters of wood and plaster. However, she couldn’t hold it. She tried to go quietly, but her insides were so irritated. It didn’t take long for the man to walk away; he didn’t want to hear this either. The indignity of the situation brought fresh tears. When she finished, she was returned to the closet without a word. She could tell the man was just as embarrassed as she was.

The bergerie was strangely quiet. What she did hear was the constant smacking of a screen door in the back of the house. It didn’t sound like purposeful coming and going, rather restless pacing, the men’s attempts to busy themselves while they waited. It was only morning; no need to despair. At any moment, the telephone might ring; minutes later, they’d fling open the closet door and drive her to some obscure spot in the maquis. Before scurrying off, they’d instruct her to count to one hundred, and at ninety-nine, she’d untie her blindfold to find the police crashing through the trees with her parents close behind.

Instead, the rest of the morning passed in a fog of shallow sleep during which she floated on the surface of strange, tense, thirsty dreams where someone was standing in the doorway of the closet watching her sleep, and she couldn’t tell if she was being rescued or in danger.

In the afternoon, the man in the leather jacket came with lunch.

“What’s happening?” Séverine asked.

“You’ll know when you’re going home,” he replied. “It’s not like we’re gonna keep you around for fun once we’ve reached an agreement with Jonnart.”

“Jonnart?” She was not expecting him to invoke the minister of the interior. There was the familiar burning she always felt upon hearing his name, the irrational dread that whoever had brought him up knew about the party two Christmases ago. “What about my father?”

“This is beyond his pay grade,” he said, closing her in.

He’d brought a sandwich on a fresh baguette, cut on the diagonal; it looked like the ones sold at her old bakery on Rue des Tournelles and tasted just as good, too, with a light smear of butter and mustard, lean ham, and sharp Gruyère. It revived her enough so she could begin the tedious work of picking the duct tape from her hair.

The rest of the day passed at an agonizingly slow tick. She was uncomfortable and anxious; the isolation and lack of light were unspooling her senses. Never in her life had she been so full of nervous anticipation and so bored—no TV, no magazines, not even a clock to watch. All she had were her tormenting thoughts: questions she had no answers to, memories that only intensified her discomfort. She cried out of self-pity, but also because there was nothing else to do.

Screw that. No, once she got out of here, she’d tell her parents what they could do with the bac. She’d ask her American grandparents to release a portion of her trust fund, and she’d go off to LA and be in movies, like she was born to do. No more wasting time.

Séverine spent the rest of the day wiping her tears with the hem of her enormous dress and standing very slowly to stretch her legs and reach her arms up to the ceiling, feeling drugged by the rush of blood. She could only wait for the next event to occur and hope it was in her favor. It enraged and flustered her that she was now a person who things happened to, when all her life, she’d felt like the force happening unto others.

As the day dragged on, the slit of sun beneath the door faded until someone flicked on a watery light in the hallway. Shortly thereafter, the front door opened and closed. She knew it was Bruno—she could sense an attention directed towards him; not only hers, but that of the men inside the house.

“So?” the other man asked.

Bruno said nothing as his boots stomped in the direction of the closet. Séverine quickly retied her blindfold, and the door swung open.

“Am I going home?” Séverine asked.

“They’re not capitulating to our demands.”

“Who, my family?” Séverine exclaimed, scandalized. “I don’t believe you.”

“No, your parents have held up their end of the deal. I mean the state,” Bruno clarified.

She paused, processing what that meant. “How much did you get from my parents?”

He hesitated. “Five million francs.”

Séverine let out a laugh like a bark. Five million francs! It was a ridiculous sum, a Hollywood amount of money. There was no way her parents had five million francs in cash, ready for withdrawal. They must have had to ask all their rich friends for help, or her American grandparents, or secured some kind of government loan. The nerve of these men, who understood nothing about how things like money or politics worked. To be so ignorant, and so vindicated!

“Five million francs,” she repeated coldly. “That’s not enough?”

“No,” Bruno said. “It’s not. Honestly, it’s not an unreasonable ask.”

“Then why am I still here?” Séverine asked, jaw clenched.

“The government doesn’t give a shit about us, but I thought it would give a shit about you. I guess I was wrong,” he said with a bitter, exhausted laugh and shut the door.

Séverine didn’t move, frozen in disbelief. Five minutes later, the man in the leather jacket delivered a bowl of beef stew and a bottle of water. The meat was tender, but she dropped the spoon in the full bowl and pushed it into the corner. Twenty-four hours had passed, and with each hour that slipped away, the chance of some rescuer kicking through the door seemed less and less likely. The disbelief began to curdle into unease. Someone—Jonnart—was fucking this up, and she was paying the price.

It was not good to think that way; she must trust her parents. Surely, her panicked mother was at the commissariat, refusing to sit, making rude demands in her heavily accented French to the overwhelmed police; her father in his office at the prefecture, on the phone, speaking calmly although his nostrils flared with each breath, a sign he was on the brink of a rare eruption.

Although she knew some version of this scene must be transpiring, sitting in the darkness, hearing her captors’ clinking utensils...