Cemetery of Swallows (15 page)

Amédée was surprised to find himself thinking that he was going to see Thomas again and that he had never taken his old Jaguar in for its technical inspection, before his heart sped up, then stopped. There was no long, luminous corridor, and still less a son standing there waiting for him.

Then he was cast into Hell.

 

Thousands of Carib savages were devouring Arawaks and sycophants. The earth was mauve and white, composed of guts and bones intertwined, woven with care. In the distance fires made of children's arms were glowing. There was a brief storm of red snow, luminous embers, descending from the sky. Then the cosmic serpent appeared, the one called Ouroboros in Africa, Shesha among the Indians, Typhon in Greek mythology.

Mallock was trembling but he was not afraid. It was the heart and the spirit of the universe that he was looking at, its source and its beginning. A single entity, God and Chaos. Infinitely large, disproportionately small. Simultaneously a universal serpent and a chromosome with bilious eyes.

Accompanying the magisterial arrival of the initial wonder, he heard Satie's first
Gnossienne
, played on a minuscule piano by a little monkey with a bare skin, whose yellow brain gleamed in the moonlight. The young animal was sitting on the edge of a well. Around him, three big, black dogs were keeping guard, while above them thousands of squawking swallows turned in a vortex as far as the firmament.

Mallock walked on, as far as the intersection of seven paths. On each, people were standing, sitting, and lying, strangers whom he recognized despite their differing garb. As he walked among them, there were also powerful feelings with bodies filled with water, incredulous eyes, finally obvious smiles. He felt horizontal rain, deflagrations of melancholy, a barrage of the imperial artillery, the army of leaden bullets, spit out of ancient muskets. Hundreds of sharp rancors fell from the sky. But love as well. Silent tongues. Tsunami joys.

And he saw himself swimming in the earth.

He was making broad breaststrokes to move forward, astonished that the earth offered so little resistance. Only his fingers felt the movement through matter, a little like a child when he scrapes up sand to build a castle at the seaside. Sometimes, the dreamer went around rocks, the biggest and most dense, sometimes he crossed great lakes of oil, slipping faster than the wind.

Mallock was still swimming in the earth when he suddenly felt himself pulled backward and upward. Piercing the surface, his body sprang up into full light. He had time to glimpse, in the center of a gigantic arch, another little monkey wearing a tarboosh and beating on a drum. Higher up, an enormous French flag, blown by the winds, was twisting in vast waves.

 

He woke up in the middle of a prodigious room.

A chapel of candles and amber, it was without any doubt the most beautiful thing he'd ever contemplated since his mother had taken him to town, when he was three years old, to see the crèche in the cathedral. The flames of thousands of candles seemed to come from inside the walls. Walls that looked as if they had been fabricated in a kind of melting gold, which simultaneously retained its mobility, its luminescence, and the reflective capacity of the purest mirrors. It took Mallock a few minutes to understand what he was looking at. Lit by a hole situated very high up on the ceiling and by hundreds of candles, it was the fabled amber room. Not affixed with precision to straight and vertical walls, as in the photo, but beautifully set into plaques on the walls of an immense cavern.

One of the twins, sitting alongside him, was wiping his forehead with a damp cloth. Mallock didn't have to say anything, the question marks were evident on all of his features.

The twin explained to him:

“You are just under my mother's house. My father discovered this natural grotto years ago. He closed it in and constructed this wooden hut just above it to protect the entrance.”

“But these amber plaques . . . How . . . ”

“You are going to learn all that. It takes time . . . Stay lying down, your heart has just started up again.”

Chameleons, the young man's gray eyes had taken on, in the candlelight, the color of gold. He dipped the cloth in cold water again, and put it on Mallock's forehead.

“The amber panels were stolen by
el Diablo
Darbier and his killers in a European city, just before it was destroyed. They brought this war booty to the island, where he thought it would be safe. My father happened by chance to find out where Tobias
el Diablo
had hidden it. The day Trujillo died, my father and three of his friends stole the crates and brought them all here. Only one of them was missing, the one that was supposed to contain a music box. It is thought that it was forgotten in Germany.”

Mallock listened, fascinated.

“Our father had always been very poor and full of love for his wife. He would never have been able to offer her all the gold in the world and the things that provide comfort. That pained him. After he discovered Darbier's treasure, he conceived the mad plan of constructing the most beautiful palace in the world for her, and for her alone, in her honor and in the honor of what she represented for him. He did not leave the panels in the crates, where the amber was languishing; he reconstructed the room as he saw it in his head. My father was will and strength incarnate. For twelve years he worked on the cavity of the grotto in order to be able to reconstruct the room like the dream he had of it.”

He paused long enough to dip the cloth in the cold water again and put it on Mallock's forehead.

“He died too soon. My brother and I finished the work in accordance with his plans. When our mother leaves us, we will leave her in it with the candles and fill it in with earth. No one will ever know.”

“But I now know the place . . . ”

The young man smiled and tapped him on the forehead in a friendly way.

“Now that you are dead, you've become much better, haven't you? It is the awareness of the imminence of his own end that makes man a dangerous animal. And you are not merely a man, you are half bear and you were a cat, and also a precious stone, and an old baobab tree as well, my mother said. And she also said that your own serpent is a kind dragon! And then, without wanting to disrespect you, you have to be able to find your way back,
gringo
. We have seen you walking, you and your arms, in the swamps!”

“With my headache, my bad back, and my pale white calves, you mean?” Mallock added with a big foolish smile.

The twin broke out laughing. A laugh that ricocheted for a long time on the thousands of pieces of amber that formed the most beautiful marquetry in the world.

Sitting in the fuselage of the 747, dry and clean, Mallock was wondering what he had actually experienced. A nightmare, a Mallockian vision, an opium dream? No, the object was very real. His left hand touched the strange vial cut from amber, a gift from the old witch. He had placed it in the middle of the tray and a ray of sun, amplified by the cabin window, gave it still more life. A very odd kind of energy. The stone seemed to contain a small electric lamp. All around it, the gray plastic Air France tray on which it was set was like a golden gouache.

He looked up and heard:

“Hello, Superintendent. Did you have a good stay on the island?”

A flight attendant was leaning over him, her body bent at the hip like a loving mother over her baby's cradle. Her breasts were in position.

Mallock put the vial back in his pocket.

“Do we know each other?”

“I know you. I was on your flight over and I even woke you without meaning to when I served your meal.”

“You have an amazing memory,” Mallock smiled.

“Not really. I've often seen your face in the newspaper. If you need anything at all, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm entirely at your disposition.”

Mallock mumbled a thank-you as he looked at her, and promised himself he wouldn't hesitate . . .

“Wait,” he added, as she stood up to leave.

He finished his champagne and handed her the glass. She took it and gave him a splendid smile.

“Another one?”

She was really very appetizing with her satiny skin and her lovely hands.

Calm down, Mallock
, he reprimanded himself.

“Thanks, that's very kind. I'm going to stop there with the champagne.”

She disappeared down the aisle.

As much as Mallock loved wine, he had little liking for this acidic drink, a symbol of the farewell glass, the endless party, and Christmas without Thomas. On the other hand, pretty women . . . Even at Easter or Trinity.

 

His back told him that he must have been seated for more than four hours already. In fact, they had taken off at 8:07. This time, the plane had flown straight from Puerto Plata to Paris. A direct flight that avoided crossing the island and stopping off in Saint-Martin.

At the airport, where the Interpol officers were waiting for them, he had had time to buy a complete set of colorful shirts before checking in. They were all intended for his friends, including one for Anita, his housekeeper. She wore a size XXXL; she was adorable, but really not slim.

When he got on the plane, he hadn't had time to look for his seat. The company had “spotted” him and insisted on putting him in first class: “Sorry about the flight over, but we're going to try to make it up to you.”

Mallock had ambiguous feelings with regard to this fame. The antisocial part of him hated being recognized or approached in the street. Since the 1980s, the media had paid attention almost exclusively to self-declared VIPs and brainless celebrities. Being put in the same category as these mediocrities was in no way flattering. On the other hand, he couldn't deny that his new fame now allowed him to have less paranoid, more open relationships with the people he met. He had to be honest with himself: he'd long been afraid of others.

He'd been like that from the outset, and then for various reasons that had steadily piled up. This recognition, which he thought not utterly undeserved, opened up for him an area of conviviality he would never have been able to construct on his own. With what he knew about people, without that big slap on the back on their part he might never again have held out his hand to anyone . . . Now, things were different, as when you walk down the street with a dog on a leash. People smile at you and come up to you, thanks to this nice mediator.

That was how Mallock used his fame: “with a collar and a leash,” and taking care that it didn't shit all over the place.

 

He looked at his watch and got up. It was time to see if everything was going well in the back of the plane. Given the small amount of traffic between the Dominican Republic and France, he had obtained the authorization to repatriate Manuel on a regularly-scheduled flight.

The last rows, isolated by a curtain, had been requisitioned and set up for the wounded prisoner.

 

Asleep, his body saturated with drugs, Julie's brother was delirious:

“My God, please! In the fireplace . . . that's not possible . . . ”

The two doctors turned to Mallock, their eyes reflecting the same professional concern.

“We've given him everything necessary to calm him. He should be knocked out. In fact, every injection we've given him has just made him even more absorbed in his nightmare.”

“Try something else?”

“Sorry, but to keep the toxic effects of the drugs from becoming a problem, we have to wait a while. I'd give him Haldol, but he's already on the edge of a coma. He remains coherent, but just barely.”

At that very moment, Manuel's body tensed like a bow. He grabbed Mallock's arm.

“Don't you understand? It's the ogre.”

Then he fell back on his stretcher, inanimate. One of the doctors pinched his arm, then stuck his middle fingers on each side of Manuel's jaw.

“Damn, he's going under! We're going to have intubate him.”

“What did you give him?”

Mallock was dying with concern. He didn't see himself bringing a cadaver or a vegetable home to Julie as the epilogue to his expedition.

“Nothing unusual,” the emergency doctor replied, “rehydration solutions, valium to calm him, and analgesics to reduce the pain. These reactions can't be explained by the drugs alone. I'm afraid he's still in danger.”

Mallock had a terrible foreboding:

“Did all your drugs come from Paris?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Are you sure?” Mallock insisted.

Then the other doctor said:

“To be precise, the rehydration solutions had been stolen when we arrived. But the Dominican authorities replaced them with equivalents.”

Mallock paled. What if Delmont was right? Did Darbier's
brutos
really have arms that long? Just then, as if to confirm him in his most paranoid fears, the electrocardiograph sped up.

“Shit! The heart rate is taking off. We're losing him . . . ”

“Ventricular tachycardia,” the second doctor said. “I'm going to defibrillate him, you ventilate him. Out of the way, superintendent.”

Mallock took two steps backward, then turned around and opened the curtains. The passengers had all turned around toward the place from which the sounds were coming, curious about the drama that was unfolding. Death at work, that always attracts customers.

He gritted his teeth.

Had the great superintendent allowed himself to be had, out of overconfidence, like a rank beginner?

When nothing really counts anymore, nothing has any taste, and barges full of sorrows rip up oceans of purple silk. When one doesn't give a damn about anything and nothing gives a damn about us. Just try telling superintendent so-and-so that it doesn't matter, that tomorrow will be better. Tell him all your bitter platitudes and your rose-tinted nonsense. Promise him swimming pools with children in them.