Cemetery of Swallows (24 page)

At the same moment, Mallock, who had continued to dig, grumbled:

“I think we're there.”

Without worrying about the state of his suit, he got down on all fours in the mud to dig at the earth with his big superintendent's paws. Julie caught herself smiling as she watched him. One really didn't know what he was going to do next. Mallock was unpredictable, and without her knowing quite why, that made her happy.

Amédée turned around:

“Pass me two or three sample bags, the plastic ones, quick.”

The young woman did as she was told, impatient. What had he unearthed? When he handed the bag back to her, she shined her flashlight on it to see better. The bag was full of birds' bodies, swallows, to judge by the shape of the wings. Weren't these little skeletons the proof that the legend of the forest and Manu's wild imaginings intersected in a single reality? Night smells were beginning to invade the clearing. Mallock and Julie looked at one another. They were going to have to take Manu's statements into consideration, and that was the problem. Where could all this lead them?

Night was beginning to fall on the clearing when they found a large stone. They spent a good half hour removing all the earth and uncovering the first layer of birds. Mallock felt a shock when he discovered a perfectly triangular form. He remembered the exact words Manu had used three days earlier: “I see a black triangle in the center of the circle. It seems to be growing larger. No, it's falling toward me! My God!”

Amédée no longer knew whether he should be glad or frightened. He felt a mixture of exasperation and excitement. He rejected the second feeling, preferring to mope in a frustrated rationalism that was more in keeping with his status as one of the Republic's main cops.

“Goddamn puzzle, what is this mess?”

 

A quarter of an hour passed.

No one had tried to answer the superintendent's question. Having raised and set aside the notorious stone, helped by Coudret's strong arms and the ladder he had been smart enough to bring along, Mallock had started digging again in the bird skeletons and mud. Above him, the full moon cast an almost violent light on the crumbling stones forming the edge of the well. A strong feeling mixed of unreality and earth had overtaken Amédée. He was in the swallows' well, in the midst of Manuel Gemoni's delirium.

Up above, Julie, kneeling at the edge of the hole, stared into the obscurity that covered the bottom of the excavation like blind asphalt. Mallock was no longer the eager beaver who had attacked the job without hesitation three hours earlier. He was now acting like a gravedigger or an archaeologist. No more big vertical blows of his foot on the edge of the spade. Mallock was now digging on a horizontal plane and bringing up much smaller quantities of birds and earth. He was taking precautions to avoid damaging Lieutenant Lafitte's body.

“But there's nothing down there, you fool,” he murmured as he thrust the shovel into the ground.

Then the spade struck an object that for Mallock, at that moment, could only be a human bone. Julie, perhaps because she had realized the state in which her superintendent found himself, climbed down into the hole to take over:

“We have to go more slowly now. Let me do it.”

In the darkness, she started disengaging the buried object. She spent ten minutes achieving her goal. A flashlight shone down from the surface: it was neither a femur nor a skull, but a cross laid horizontally, at the exact center of the circle. A cross of light-colored wood, carved and varnished. They all three looked at one another, incredulous. Two of them already knew what they were going to find underneath. Mallock took Julie's place at the bottom of the well to observe the object more closely. Although he was profoundly troubled and impatient, he decided to halt the excavation.

His voice was toneless:

“We'll come back as soon as possible, but with Judge Judioni, the forensic police, excavators, the whole show. Above all, we have to avoid procedural errors.”

And it was at the very moment when he put his hands on the edge of the hole to pull himself out that the attack took place.

Bounding out of the north side of the clearing, four huge dogs were running toward the little group. Taken by surprise, Coudret had only time to put his arm up to protect himself. The first dog sank his teeth into it. The game warden howled with pain. Amédée took advantage of this to leap back into the hole and grab his shovel. A second hound hesitated a moment at the edge of the hole and Mallock had time to aim his blow to strike the beast.

Julie shouted to Coudret:

“Try to keep him from moving!”

Seeing Julie's revolver, the game warden, his eyes closed, stopped struggling. Julie's Manurhin Police Special F1 was loaded with special .357 magnum bullets; they were much more powerful than the .38 cartridges normally provided. The young woman fired only once. A roar of gunpowder, a spurt of blood, the animal let go of the guard, shrieking shrilly before collapsing like a sack. With one beast stunned, another dead, the remaining two retreated.

“Are you all right?” Mallock asked Coudret.

“Fortunately, I had my overcoat. But with these rabid beasts, I'll have to have a shot in the ass and a few stitches.”

Then he turned with a smile to Julie:

“In any case, bravo and thank you, miss. Nice shot!”

Julie smiled, but she was still very pale. The unexpected violence of the attack was now making itself felt in her veins. She'd reacted well but she'd been very scared. And then killing a dog, that was a first for her. Very unpleasant. Like her superintendent, she loved animals, and dogs in particular.

Mallock turned his flashlight on the beast's cadaver. Then he bent down to examine it. As he stood back up he growled like a bear.

“What is it, Boss?”

“A black Doberman with a yellow spot on top of his head and different-colored eyes, does that remind you of anything?”

“Good lord!” Julie's pretty mouth swore.

When he got back to Paris, Mallock found a message waiting for him:
“It's been four days, Superintendent . . . Am I the one who's a dummy, or are you a triple idiot?”

The tone was bitter. Queen Margot was going to be thirty-seven years old, and before she met Amédée, she'd often been loved, even adored. She had sometimes loved in return. But she accepted less and less the idea of a couple, and still less that of marriage. To be reduced to the status of a man's woman, his other half, what a horror! And then, she'd already made her contribution.

She expected a lot out of life, but from men she expected too much. Everything and its contrary. Like many liberated women. She wanted a knight in shining armor who also did dishes, a fearless explorer who stayed at home, something half pale, half male covered with hair, half Chanel, half diesel.

Margot was much too intelligent not to see the trap into which generations of men and women had led her. But knowing about something is not always enough, and her requirements seemed to have doomed her to never being satisfied. So she'd ended up deciding to marry Mathieu, Count of Mas de Plaissac. Maybe because he used only the name Dumas and kept both his blue blood and his fortune to himself. And then because he was tender and paid attention to her. She had accepted his proposal with tempered passion! And she'd been happy with him. But she was not in love with him enough to abandon her career as a journalist and start giving him children. She was proud, and rightly so, of standing on her own two legs. A position that few women succeeded in taking and keeping in a world in which the great gravity of things, like the burden of conventions, often required men's powerful muscles and lightweight brains.

Gradually, the gap between the cruel realities of her trips into minefield territories and her chateau life, all Angevin sweetness, had a devastating effect on her. She had tried to convince herself that she'd get used to it. The exact opposite happened. The repeated shock, each time and at the same place, right in the heart, had ended up forming the most painful of gashes. You don't move, in a few hours, from a white-wine tasting in the darkness of a cellar to a child massacred with a machete in broad daylight, without blinking and developing a terrible anger. In Margot, and perhaps because she'd tried to deny it, this rage had grown and transformed itself into a resentment against the human race in general and against her husband in particular. Against herself. She, who considered herself the most guilty of all, like a kind of double agent, a traitor to both sides.

Margot and Mallock suffered from the same malady, lucid integrity. Toward life, as toward themselves. There was the same strange emulsion in their eyes, oil and water, execration and tenderness. Disabused, but still on a war footing, she shared with the superintendent the same despairing misanthropy.

 

They had begun to see each other, from time to time, when she could and when he wanted. They took from one another what they wanted, a mouth, a skin, strength, reflections of themselves, phrases, and great stretches of solitude. But the little adventure had lasted. And they'd exchanged more objects, tender feelings, verbs in the future tense, and even vacations with a view of the sea. Then one day her little female brain hadn't been able to keep from saying out loud what she was thinking to herself: “Girl, you're going to have to get used to it, this tender brute with his fifty years, this weird half-bear, half-tiger, is the love of your life.”

For Queen Margot, the superintendent's green eyes and astonishing humanity seemed to be a remedy for all her ills, or at least a marvelous balm. Everything in that man was too big for her to be able to resist: his heart, his suits, his hands, his angers, his mind, his nose, and his sadness, his damned character. He was like a hundred-year-old oak, still green, with enigmatic branches and big leaves full of shadows. No guy had ever had the effect on her that Mallock had. When she was near him, she was finally willing to be fragile, protected, mortal, and warm, sheltered from things that cut. She loved his compassion and the fact that he was fundamentally and forever . . . inconsolable!

That evening, Mallock didn't call her back. The incorrigible homebody won out over the lover.

And Margot remained alone.

 

After taking off his icy clothes, Mallock began to draw a bath before he went upstairs to send an e-mail. He wrote a nice note to Margot to explain his weariness, the late hour, and the mud that covered both his boots and his every thought. He ended with a “
Je t'embrasse
,” which, for an introverted bear like himself, represented an exceptional proclamation of fondness. “I love you” was out of the question; he could never have written that. And besides, that was a declaration that Thomas had tattooed on his heart and that Amédée reserved for him, to repeat to him every night before going to sleep. The superintendent had a heart as big as a castle, but his son and the memory of Amélie still occupied most of the rooms.

The bathtub probably was still not full.

Mallock took advantage of this to glance at the digital photographs he'd taken in the clearing. He took the card out of his camera and slipped it into his cell phone, which was connected to his Mac. Thanks to his computer-savvy friends who kept an eye on developments for him, he always had the most reliable and effective devices on the market. That's indispensable when one is, like Mallock, scared of the mouse.

Amédée opened his pictures in raw form the better to view and optimize the images taken a few hours earlier: the clearing, the well, the swallows, the dead dog, and the cross. For all the visuals together, he had only to boost the definition, the clarity, and the color, while at the same time bringing out the dark parts. Without waiting, he started printing these photos in the background. He had set aside the last photos, particularly one that was much less legible than the others. He had to do some work on that one. Taken as night was falling and in the depth of the hole, despite being illuminated by the two flashlights, the cross and the soil on which it was lying were lost in the same bunch of dark pixels. Mallock almost gave up. His bath would soon start running over, and he could photograph the object again the next day, in broad daylight.

By zooming in on the cross, he saw what seemed to be letters on it. There seemed to be three of them. At first he thought they read “8bw.” The shape of the W was strange. Suddenly he swore: “What a moron!” He rotated the image 180° and read it again. Once it was right-side-up, he could read “MPF.” Thus these were not Jean-François Lafitte's initials, which were what he secretly expected to find. But in any case, what would he have done with such a discovery? Other than wade still further into the irrational?

As he was going downstairs to turn off the bathwater, a signal appeared on his screen indicating that he had a call. He hesitated to respond. It was Margot.

“Did you get my message?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Superintendent, but I wanted to see you, tonight.”

The queen didn't beat around the bush. Mallock did.

“I'm just about to take a bath. I'm covered with mud because—”

“I know, you explained that to me. By the time I get there, maybe my teddy bear will have had time to dry all his fur?”

“That could be,” Mallock replied, smiling.

Seeing her so pretty, in the little window on screen, he felt his desire to see her in person, to touch her, being rekindled, And that desire was far stronger than his desire for solitude.

“Fine, I'll expect you,” he concluded before hurrying downstairs to turn off the faucets in the bathroom at the last minute.

After his bath, wearing a white bathrobe and armed with three inches of whiskey, the damp bear went back upstairs to check his e-mail one last time. Ken had sent him a new report.

In sum and as expected, he'd received confirmations from the British Foreign Office and the Veterans' Association.