Another Sun Read Online Free Page A

murderers and gangsters who were sent out to Cayenne at the time of the
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. And before.
    “You wanted revenge.”
    A ship—a cruiser, perhaps bringing American tourists—sounded its horn in the harbor.
    “You wanted revenge because Raymond Calais took your land—land his father had sold you forty years ago.”
    “Old man Calais was just.”
    “You wanted to get your revenge on his son.”
    “Monsieur Calais was good to me. I was his foreman for more than twenty years.”
    “His son is dead.” She folded her arms. “You’re accused of killing him. Of shooting him point-blank through the chest.”
    Hégésippe Bray shook his head.
    “You told everybody you wanted revenge.” She leaned forward. “Did you kill Raymond Calais?”
    He did not speak.
    “Did you shoot him?”
    He waited before shaking his head slowly.
    “Then who did, Monsieur Bray?”
    The blue eyes stared at her.
    “Who killed Raymond Calais?”
    He spoke slowly. “I didn’t kill the son of my employer.”
    “Who killed him? Who shot Raymond Calais in the chest with a gun?”
    “You are a clever woman. You have studied. You speak French. You can read. You’ve been to school.” A wrinkled finger pointed toward the pile of well-thumbed Dalloz texts. “You’ve studied many things. And you have soft hands.”
    “Answer my questions.”
    “Very clever.”
    “Did you willfully murder Raymond Calais on the Sainte Marthe estate on September 7, 1980?”
    “Clever.” The leather of his face broke into a watery smile. “But you don’t understand nothing.”
    “It was your gun.”
    “I know whites,” Hégésippe Bray said. “People like you. With your skin. I have known many whites—criminals, hard men who did bad things. Men who murdered their mothers. With some, I even became a friend—if you can be the friend of a white man.” He spoke very slowly. “Hard men. They understood what they could touch. Things they could touch and see. Things they could kill.” He stopped. “What they could not see they never understood.”
    Tired by the exertion of speaking, the old man fell silent.
    “Did you murder Calais?”
    With a crooked thumb, he tapped his chest. “What a black man sees a white man can never understand. We are not the same. Weare different—like cats and dogs. We were never meant to live together.” He pointed at her chest, “You’re white and you have your books and your soft white skin. But a black man”—he made a gesture toward Trousseau, whose hands were now motionless on the Japy typewriter—“A black man sees things no white man will never see.” A grimace that extended the old, cracked lips. “White man, white woman.”
    “What do black men see?”
    “He had to die.”
    “You murdered him?”
    “I did not kill Raymond Calais.”
    “Sunday morning and there was nobody in the fields. You saw him and you pulled the trigger. After thirty-eight years. You killed Raymond Calais, you shot him in the chest. It was your revenge.”
    “You don’t understand nothing, white woman.”
    “I understand only too well.”
    “He had to suffer.”
    “So you shot him dead.”
    “To suffer as he had made me suffer.”
    The blue eyes were now cold and small, and they stared at something beyond Anne Marie.
    “Like a cockroach that flaps and kicks. You hold it in the candle flame and it knows it has to die. It kicks and its flaps its dirty wings.” He looked at her sharply. “You don’t understand.”
    “Understand?”
    “Raymond Calais was going to die. He’d lived enough and now it was his turn to suffer. Not shot with a bullet through his heart.” Hégésippe Bray showed her a toothless smile. “Die like a cockroach. In torment, endless torment.”

6
Pâtisserie
    A bicycle had been padlocked to the parking meter.
    “What would you like to drink, madame?”
    There was no door or front window. The cake shop gave directly onto the sidewalk. Anne Marie turned her glance away from the street to face