After the Crash (5 page)

In the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital, Léonce de Carville maintained
his usual reserve. But, for once, those around him did not take it for
coldness, but for modesty, humility, decency. He remained stoical,
even when he was shown his granddaughter for the first time, sealed
off from him by a wall of glass that rendered her screams silent.

‘That’s her,’ the nurse said. ‘The first crib, directly in front of us.’
‘Thank you.’
His tone was sober, calm, composed. The nurse gave him some
space. She had heard the news: Lyse-Rose was the only thing left in
this poor man’s life.

In that moment, the industrialist’s faith must have been shaken
– or dented at the very least. Of course, Léonce was not as fervent
a Catholic as his wife Mathilde. He had converted only out of consideration for his new family, so that his rational, scientific views
would not upset them or the other good (and highly influential)
Catholic families in Coupvray. But in such moments, it would have
been difficult, even for the most rational of men, not to think of
supernatural forces. Not to be torn between anger at a cruel God
who had taken your only son, and gratitude and forgiveness towards
a mean God who, perhaps out of remorse, had agreed to save your
granddaughter. But only her.

‘It’s a miracle,’ said Dr Morange, behind him. The doctor was
wearing a white shirt and a priest’s smile.
He looked exactly the same when I met him, years later, and he
told me everything that had happened.
‘She’s doing miraculously well. She is not suffering any after-effects
at all. We are keeping her in purely for observation, as a precaution,
but she has already fully recovered. It is truly astounding.’
Thank you God, Léonce de Carville must have thought, despite
himself.
It was at that moment that a nurse came to see Dr Morange.
There was a telephone call for him. Urgent, yes, and very strange.
Dr Morange left Léonce de Carville by the glass cage that contained
his granddaughter.
Now that he was alone, the poor man could finally let his tears
flow, thought the doctor, who – like everyone else in the world –
loved a tragedy with a happy ending. He took the receiver from the
nurse. ‘Hello?’
The voice on the line sounded as if it were coming from the end
of the world.
‘Hello Doctor, I am the grandfather of the baby, the one from
the plane. You know, the one that survived the crash, in the Jura.
The switchboard put me through to you. How is she?’
‘She’s well, very well. I think she may even be out of here in a few
days. Her paternal grandfather is already here. I could get him for
you, if you like . . .’
There was a silence. In that moment, the doctor sensed that
something had slipped beyond his control.
‘Doctor . . . I’m terribly sorry, but you must be mistaken.
I
am
the baby’s paternal grandfather. And my granddaughter has no
maternal grandfather. My daughter-in-law was an orphan . . .’
The doctor felt a strange tingling in his fingers. His brain seethed
with possible explanations. A hoax? A journalist attempting to find
out more information?
‘We are talking about the plane from Istanbul to Paris that
crashed last night? The miracle child? Little Lyse-Rose?’
‘No, doctor . . .’ The doctor heard the relief in the other person’s
voice. ‘No, doctor, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. The
baby that survived is not called Lyse-Rose. She is called Emilie.’
Sweat beaded on the doctor’s forehead. This had never happened
to him before, not even in the operating room.
‘Sir, I am terribly sorry, but that’s impossible. The child’s grandfather is here, in the hospital. Mr de Carville is here right now. He
has seen the baby and identified her as Lyse-Rose . . .’
There was an embarrassed silence on both ends.
‘Do . . . do you live far from Montbéliard?’ the doctor asked.
‘Dieppe.’
‘Ah . . . Well, I think perhaps the best thing, Mr . . .?’
‘Mr Vitral. Pierre Vitral.’
‘Well, Mr Vitral, I think the best thing is for you to telephone
the police station in Montbéliard. I believe they are currently trying
to verify the passengers’ identities. I’m afraid I can’t tell you any
more. But they will be able to provide you with the information
you need . . .’
Suddenly, the doctor felt bad: he was acting like a cold-hearted
bureaucrat, sending this poor, distressed man to the next office, just
to get rid of him. He knew perfectly well that as soon as the man
hung up, he would collapse, devastated, as if his granddaughter had
been killed for a second time. But the doctor quickly told himself
that this was not his fault. The story was ridiculous. The man must
have made a mistake.
They both hung up, and the doctor wondered if he should mention this strange telephone call to Léonce de Carville.

Pierre Vitral slowly replaced the receiver. His wife, Nicole, was
standing next to him, waiting anxiously.
‘So, is Emilie all right? What did they say?’
Her husband looked at her with infinite tenderness. He spoke
gently, as if he were to blame for the bad news he was about to give
her: ‘They said the baby that survived is not called Emilie. She’s
called Lyse-Rose . . .’
For a long time, Nicole and Pierre Vitral did not speak. Life had
been hard for both of them. Theirs was a marriage of two bad luck
stories, which they told themselves could turn into a positive thing,
like when two minus numbers are added together. Together they
had faced up to a lack of money, to the cruel blows of fate, to illness,
to the trials of daily life. They had never complained. It’s always the
same: if you don’t shout, you never get anything. As the Vitrals had
never protested against life, life had never bothered to correct the
imbalance that afforded them so much misery. Pierre and Nicole
Vitral had both ruined their health – Pierre his back, and Nicole
her lungs – in twenty years spent selling chips and sausages from
a specially remodelled orange-and-red Type H Citroën van. They
sold their wares on the seafront at Dieppe, and all the other beaches
of northern France, following the calendar of events and festivals,
as far as the region’s generally inclement weather allowed. They had
tempted fate by having two children, and fate had paid them back
by taking one of them: Nicolas had died in a moped accident one
rainy night in Criel-sur-Mer.
Bad luck had dogged the family’s footsteps for many years,
and then, for the first time – only two months before Christmas,
1980 – they had finally won something: a two-week holiday in
Gumbet.
Gumbet, as I imagine you are completely unaware, is in Turkey:
a resort on a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean, packed
with four-star hotels. They would be staying in luxury, all expenses
paid! They had won by pure chance: a lottery organised by their local
supermarket. It was their son Pascal’s ticket that had been drawn.
There had been only one condition: the holiday had to be taken
before the end of 1980. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best timing for
Pascal and his wife Stéphanie, who had just become parents for the
second time. There was no problem with Marc, their eldest, because
he was already two years old and could stay with his grandparents
while they were away. But Stéphanie was still breastfeeding little
Emilie, and in any case she had no desire to be away from her newborn daughter for two weeks. The tickets could not be exchanged,
so either they had to take the baby with them, or they would not
be able to go at all.
They went. They had never been on a plane before. Stéphanie was
a young woman with laughing eyes who saw the world as a huge,
crunchy apple, begging to be eaten. She and Pascal had thought
it would be wrong to turn their back on good luck, now that it
had finally smiled on them. They should not have been so trusting;
you should never trust a smile. Pascal, Stéphanie and Emilie were
supposed to land at Roissy on 23 December, then spend a day in
Paris so they could admire the Christmas lights. Another whim of
Stéphanie’s. She was an orphan, adored by the entire Vitral family.
Her presence made them feel good. In truth, she did not need a trip
to Turkey in order to be happy. Everything she wanted from life she
could find in Marc and Emilie, her little darlings, their father and
their doting grandparents.

Pierre and Nicole Vitral were together when they heard the news.
They were listening, as they always did, to the seven o’clock bulletin
on France Inter.

Facing one another, on either side of the cluttered kitchen table.
The two stoneware bowls – Nicole’s filled with tea, Pierre’s with
coffee – remained there for a long time afterwards, the whole scene
frozen in the moment when life stopped in that little house on Rue
Pocholle, Pollet, the old fishermen’s quarter that lay like an island
in the middle of Dieppe.
*

They lived in a street of semi-detached houses. There were ten
buildings in the cul-de-sac, each of them containing two dwellings.
Everyone could hear everyone else. Nicole’s shout alerted the whole
neighbourhood.

‘Why would they say the baby was called Lyse-Rose? Huh? Who
told
them that was her name? The baby? She said her name to the
firemen, did she? A three-month-old baby on that aeroplane, a
little girl with blue eyes . . . That’s our Emilie! She’s alive. How can
anyone say she’s not? They’re plotting against us because she’s the
only one who survived. They want to steal her from us . . .’

There were tears in her eyes. The neighbours began to come out
of their houses, in spite of the cold. She collapsed into her husband’s arms.

‘No, Pierre, no. Promise me . . . promise me they won’t take our
granddaughter. She didn’t survive that crash just for someone else
to steal her from us.’

In the little bedroom that adjoined the living room, two-year-old
Marc Vitral, woken by his grandmother’s cries, began to scream. He
could not possibly understand what was happening, though, and he
would not retain any memory of that terrible morning.

Marc stopped reading, and wiped the tears from his eyes.
No, of course he did not remember that morning. Not until he
read this account of it.
There was something surreal about discovering each detail of the
tragedy that had consumed his childhood in this way.
The noise and movement around him in the bar was making his
head spin. The five guys from the student association got up and
left, still laughing, and the glass door banged shut behind them.
Marc breathed slowly, trying to calm himself down. After all, he
already knew almost all of this story. His story.
Almost all.
The clock said it was 9.25 a.m.
And he had only just begun.

Malvina de Carville knocked on the glass with the barrel of her
Mauser L110. The dragonflies barely stirred. Only the largest, with
its sparkling red body and gigantic wings, attempted to raise itself
an inch or two into the air before falling to the floor of the vivarium, where it lay piled up with dozens of other insect corpses. Not
for a moment did Malvina de Carville think of switching on the
oxygen in the tank or lifting the glass lid to allow the survivors to
escape. She preferred to watch the creatures suffer. After all, she was
not to blame for this massacre.

She hit the glass with her revolver again, harder this time. She
was fascinated by the insects’ despairing attempts to flap their heavy
wings in that thin, deadly air. She stood watching them for several
minutes. Let them all die, these dragonflies – what did she care?
They weren’t why she was here. She was here for Lyse-Rose.
Her
dragonfly. The only one that mattered. Malvina moved off into the
room. Surprised by the living-room mirror, she found herself staring at her own reflection. A shiver of disgust ran through her. She
hated that white hair slide, the way her long, straight hair parted
neatly in the middle; she hated her sky-blue wool jumper with its
lace collar; she hated her flat chest, her skinny arms, her six-stonesomething body.

People in the street thought she must be a fifteen-year-old girl,
at least when they saw her from behind. She was used to seeing the
shock in their eyes when they were confronted by her face. She was
a twenty-four-year-old teenager, dressed as if she’d just been transported from the 1950s.

Fuck it. She didn’t care.
They could all go screw themselves, all those people who’d
been telling her the same thing for the past eighteen years, all
those shrinks, supposedly the best in the country, whom she had
exhausted, defeated, one by one. All those child psychiatrists, those
nutritionists, those specialists on this and that. And her grandmother. She was sick of the tune they’d been singing to her all these
years. Refusal to grow up. Refusal to age. Refusal to mourn. Refusal
to forget Lyse-Rose.
Lyse-Rose.
She knew what they meant when they talked about mourning
her, forgetting her. They might as well say kill her.
She turned and walked towards the fireplace. She had to step
over the corpse. Not for anything in the world would she have let
go of the Mauser in her right hand. You never knew. Although it
didn’t look as if that bastard Grand-Duc was going to get up any
time soon. A bullet in the chest. And his head in the fireplace.
She grabbed the poker in her left hand and clumsily dug around
in the hearth.
Nothing!
That shithead Grand-Duc had left nothing behind!
Increasingly annoyed, Malvina started to bang the iron rod
around the fireplace, smacking Grand-Duc in the face and raising
a cloud of black smoke. There had to be
something
: a scrap of paper
that hadn’t been burned, a clue of some kind . . . But no, she had to
face facts. There was nothing here but tiny flakes of black confetti.
The archive file boxes lay scattered over the floor, the dates written in red felt tip on the side: 1980, 1981, 1982-83, 1984-85, 1986-89,
1990-95, 1996 . . .
All of them empty.
A blind, uncontrollable rage rose within Malvina. That piece of
shit detective was really taking the piss. Was this what her grandparents had paid him for, for eighteen years? Not just his salary but all
his expenses, his travel, his costs . . .
For a pile of ashes!
Malvina dropped the poker on the polished floorboards, leaving
a black gash in the wood. It was their money that had paid for this
bastard’s house, in the ultra-chic Butte-aux-Cailles neighbourhood.
Their money
. And for what, in the end? So that he could burn all the
evidence before shutting his big fat mouth for ever.
She tightened her grip on the Mauser.
Malvina de Carville felt no more compassion for Grand-Duc
than she did for the dragonflies in the vivarium.
Less, in fact.
He had got what he deserved: shot through the heart in his own
home, his eyes, nose and mouth buried in the warm embers of his
lies. He had known the risk he was running when he started double-dealing. Well, now he’d lost. Why waste tears over that? The
only thing she regretted was that he could no longer talk. But she
wasn’t going to give up. She would not abandon her little sister. She
was there for her, always. Her Lyse-Rose, her little dragonfly. She
had to keep searching. She had to find something.
That notebook, for example. The book containing Crédule
Grand-Duc’s notes. From what she had gathered, it had a pale green
cover. Where could he have hidden it? Who might he have given
it to?
Malvina walked into the kitchen. Everything seemed clean
and tidy. A blue dishcloth hung from a nail. Anyway, she’d
already searched this room, and found nothing. It was the
same in every other room – Grand-Duc was a meticulous kind
of guy.
So, the house was a dead end. She needed to think.
Malvina considered the telephone call her grandmother had
received from the detective the previous evening. He claimed to
have found something – finally. After all these years; on the very eve
of Lyse-Rose’s eighteenth birthday. A few minutes before midnight,
to be precise. He had mentioned an old newspaper, the
Est Républicain
, and a revelation he had had, simply by opening it eighteen
years later.
Yeah, right. The old bastard was clearly bluffing. It was pathetic.
Her grandmother might have fallen for his lies, as she always
had, but not Malvina.
It was obvious to her that he had been playing for time. His
contract ended on Lyse-Rose’s eighteenth birthday, so the money
would stop rolling in. The old bastard just wanted to keep it flowing a while longer. Her grandmother, her head filled with years
of religious bullshit, was prepared to believe anything. She had
always put too much trust in that Grand-Duc, and he had known
how to play her. Malvina noticed the copper plaque on the desk.
CRÉDULE GRAND-DUC, PRIVATE DETECTIVE
.
Even his name was stupid!
Yes, he’d known how to play them, her grandfather and her
grandmother.
But not her.
She was free. Clear-headed. She had been able to see through his
double-dealing. Grand-Duc had always favoured the Vitral family.
He was on their side. He had always given Malvina funny looks,
as if she were a circus freak. He was wary of her. But not wary
enough . . .
Malvina gave one last look at the desk, then walked through to
the entrance hall. Her sharp eyes noted the umbrellas standing in a
tall vase, the long coats hanging from pegs.
She stopped in front of the framed montage of photographs
above the hall window. A picture from the wedding of Nazim Ozan
– Grand-Duc’s partner-in-crime – and his fat Turkish bitch; another
of Nicole Vitral, of course, with her huge tits bulging out of her
ugly dress. Grand-Duc would no longer be able to ogle the Vitral
woman’s oversized mammaries as he put on his coat and picked up
his umbrella before walking out into the street.
Distractedly, Malvina looked at the other photographs in the
entrance hall. Shots of mountain landscapes – the Jura mountains,
probably. Mont Terri. Montbéliard.
She remembered. She had recognised the baby – her sister –
when she saw her in the hospital there. She had been six years old.
She was the only living witness.
Lyse-Rose was alive. Those bastards had stolen her sister.
They could say whatever they liked. Refusal to mourn and all
that other crap.
She would never, ever abandon her sister.