Cemetery of Swallows (27 page)

“To be honest, I was very lucky. I've always been encouraged and I benefited from a little . . . string-pulling.”

“Tell me more about that.”

“My father and mother are very important people in Martinique. That helps.”

Mallock got to the point.

“What would you think of working in my office?”

So this was it. Josephine was up against the wall. “Above all, don't cheat,” Ken had advised her. “Don't try to manipulate Mallock, he'll know what you're doing and he hates it. Be frank. Tell him what you want.”

So Josephine said:

“Ever since your last investigation, everybody wants to join the Fort. For my part, to be perfectly honest, I want more than that: I want to be part of your team, your blood brotherhood. They've told me that there might be a position since the departure of one of their number, and that's the job I'm dreaming about. It's the only reason that I wanted to move from the gendarmes to the police.”

Mallock reflected for a moment.

“You do realize that I couldn't offer you the salary level you could get elsewhere?”

“That's not the most important factor for me. My parents support me and I have . . . how to put it? another source of income.”

Mallock didn't immediately pick up on this last statement.

“What is the most important factor for you?”

“Solving cases. And working with the best people in the best possible climate.”

Mallock smiled. That had the merit of being clear. Ken must have briefed her.

“And what do you really not want to do?”

“Hold a position ‘in' the police. Otherwise I would have remained a soldier in the gendarmerie. That is a great and wonderful body, full of highly motivated people and values. I want to use what I've learned to . . . ”

“To be useful to others?”

“No, just to be useful. I want to put harmful people out of action and help victims. For my personal satisfaction. If that benefits the community, as I assume it does, so much the better.”

Altruistic, but not otherworldly. That pleased Mallock enormously.

“You should come in at the rank of captain, but you know that most of your career has been in the gendarmerie, and the equivalences have not yet been clearly established. Second lieutenant at 2,300 euros a month is the best I can offer you at the moment. You would be working under Ken, on the computer side, and you'd also be wearing a second hat—the Fort's expert on criminology and its interface with the laboratory of the forensic police on the ground floor. You know them already, that will be a plus. But there are no elevators, and you'll need good legs to get from one to the other. Does that suit you?”

In these last sentences, Mallock finally stopped using the conditional.

“When do I start?” was Josephine's only response.

Exactly the reply Mallock was expecting. Marie-Josephine Maêcka Demaya had just taken the position left vacant by Francis, alias Blockhead. Mallock gained by this change, and it was going to be very important for him.

Just as Jo was about to leave his office, Mallock said:

“Ah, I almost forgot. What is the other means of subsistence you mentioned?”

Marie-Joséphine Maêcka Demaya explained it to him in all honesty, and Amédée found himself unable to react. Was there a precedent? He doubted it. Was it compatible with being a cop in the criminal division? He doubted that, too. On the other hand, he didn't feel it was for him to forbid her to supplement a salary that would be modest in view of her skills.

As a second lieutenant of the criminal police in Mallock's office, and a model at Gaultier and Lagerfeld, Jo could at least claim to be atypical.

Manu's Fourth Interrogation

 

 

 

 

 

The fourth interrogation took place without Jules or Julie, who had both been replaced by Trencavel. Mallock was tense, stressed-out. This was now serious. The patience of the judge and the authorities had its limits, and there was no longer any question of being satisfied with hypotheses.

When Manu resumed his account, this time under the twofold control of acupuncture needles and chemistry, he went to the heart of the matter.

“They're urinating on the bodies of my men. The bastards! God, they're grotesque, standing around the grave in their uniforms with their pants down. The sons-of-bitches are laughing their heads off. I'd like to be able to kill them all, but I can't even move my hands.”

“Can you tell us exactly where you are?”

To make up for imposing Trencavel's presence, Mallock had diplomatically asked Master Long to conduct the interrogation.

“I don't know. I'm covered with blood. My body is alien to me, it no longer belongs to me. It's . . . it's . . . like a pile of flesh humming around me. Krinkel took revenge for my attack by tearing off my ear with his teeth. He ripped the hair and the skin from my head, too, with a bayonet. My whole body is vibrating with pain.”

In the room, there were five horrified men—Antoine Ceccaldi, Kong Long, Pierre Parquet, the prosecutor's representative, Mallock, and Professor Raymond-Roger de Trencavel.

White-haired, blue-eyed, 5'2”, tanned, all dried-up, with a nose like a wedge of Brie, he normally wore a perpetual smile engraved on his overly-large jaw. An heir to the Cathars and their memory, Trencavel was a direct descendant of Tédéric de Trencavel. For him, the massacre of the Cathars was not something abstract but a living trauma that had marked his heart and shaped his mind forever. For the Trencavel of today, Innocent III, Archbishop Arnaud Amaury, and Simon de Montfort were monsters on the same level as Hitler or this Krinkel. His ancestor Tédéric de Trencavel had been killed at the age of twenty-four but left a son, and his descendants regarded it as their duty never to forget. That morning it was the great-great-great-grandson of Tédéric's great-great-great grandson who had just injected his truth serum into Manuel Gemoni's veins.

He was stunned by Manu's words.

“They've set aside the body of Charles, a big blond Lorrain, at the edge of the forest, and they're playing with it . . . My God, they're . . . I can't remember any more . . . ”

Manu's eyes were full of tears. Under the double control of Kong Long and Trencavel, he was theoretically incapable of lying. And for Mallock, it was the nightmare that was continuing. He had to hang on, wait for his time to come. A single, simple clue provided by Manuel would suffice to allow the investigation to finally take an acceptable direction. But in the meantime he was obliged to follow the young man, without questioning, without balking, straight ahead and farther and farther, step after step, to the very bottom of his mad fancies. He was obstinate and wouldn't omit anything. The truth still had hundreds of possible faces. They had to start over on firm ground, dig at ground level, smooth it out down to the last fact, and take samples of everything to be sorted out later. The legitimate defense of a superintendent in distress.

Then Mallock tried to trap him:

“So they threw this Charles's body in the well?”

But Manu didn't hear him. This time, he would respond only to Master Long's voice.

The latter therefore asked the superintendent's question again:

“Could you tell us, please, if they threw the remains of your friend Charles into the well?”

Manu's eyes were red with sadness and anger.

“No, not him, nor the others . . . They dug a grave in the middle of the clearing . . . That's where they finally put the Lorrainer's body . . . his body and those of all my men . . . Yes, in a big cavity, right in the middle . . . I'm the only one who died in the well, I think . . . ”

“You're talking nonsense, Manu,” Mallock started to roar. “There isn't anything in that damned well.”

Master Long put his hand on Mallock's shoulder:

“Please, Superintendent, let me run the session.”

He then reformulated, in the form of a question, Mallock's untimely interjection:

“No body has been found in the well. Are you sure that you . . . died in that place?”

Even Kong Long was stumbling over his words. Manu, for his part, seemed to be thinking before he replied. It was the first time he had done so.

“There was a circular opening above me . . . yes, a little circle of stars . . . so I must have been in the well when the triangle crushed me.”

Manu had remained calm, as if impervious to Mallock's attack. Had he even heard it?

“Just before I was pushed into the well,” he added, “I managed to save Marie's gift . . . it was the most important thing for me, then . . . ”

“What gift are you talking about?”

“A heart, it was a heart of gold that played an air of Satie's when you opened it . . . a
Gnossienne
, I think . . . yes, a little heart with our photos inside it.”

Mallock froze. Once again that feeling of déjà-vu. He'd been told about that music. It was already connected with this case. But where and when?

Forgetting again that he couldn't question Manu directly, he asked:

“How did you hide it?”

If he succeeded in finding such an object, it would finally be a proof. But of what? To do what? To deduce what?

“I had no choice, I took off the chain and I swallowed the little jewel!”

No body, so no music box. It seemed as if nothing could intersect.

But Mallock persisted:

“And what did you do with the chain?”

Amédée hadn't realized that Manu had just answered him without passing through Master Long.

“I wouldn't have been able to swallow everything, so I threw it on the ground and stepped on it so that they wouldn't find it . . . It must still be there.”

Mallock tried to reassure himself a little. Between the alleged common grave and the golden chain, there would be enough evidence to justify one last investigation around the well. But if he came up empty-handed this time . . .

Manu was now beginning to speak on his own, leaving his audience stupefied.

“You know, Superintendent, I saw the ogre . . . the bastard was eating children's fingers . . . ”

The macabre detail was horrifying.

“There was a blazing fire on the hearth and the walls were shining like amber,” Manuel added. “It's not possible, what I saw . . . not possible . . . It's impossible . . . my God . . . impossible . . . what I did . . . ”

Then he began to laugh like a madman.

Mallock and Long had enormous difficulty in regaining their composure and ordering the session stopped in order to take care of Manu. What they had felt this time was an irrational fear, a God-awful terror. The anxiety in which Manuel was immersed had spread to the whole room, and the participants in the interrogation all had pale lips and hoarse voices.

“It's dreadful,” Trencavel summed up, closing his instrument case. His hands were trembling so much that Mallock had to help him. “It was as if he'd brought Lucifer into the room with him. In my opinion, this man is not hiding anything. As terrifying as it may seem, what he's telling us is, at least for him, the truth,” Trencavel added.

“I no longer know what to say,” Master Long remarked. “It's strange that he spoke to you directly, but it's not impossible. You questioned him the last time and your voice has remained in his subconscious.”

“In any case, we mustn't take him so far. It's really becoming too dangerous, and then it's useless, isn't it?” Mallock said.

But Long contradicted him:

“On the contrary, Superintendent. Manu is clearly confronting a traumatic event. I don't know how, but we have to allow him to . . . get past this moment, express it out loud, articulate it. That may be the key. If not for your case, at least for a possible cure for him.”

They parted, saying they would think about it and call each other.

 

Outside, what was going on in Paris—wind and snowflakes blowing furiously around—was resembling more and more the kind of snowstorm encountered in the Alps or the Juras. The streets, which cars had abandoned, were full of bundled-up people walking with their heads down. They were battling cold, blindness, and loss of balance, especially when a big gust of snow caught them from behind.

Back home, Mallock ate a quick supper and then stretched out on the couch in his office. After carefully lighting his favorite opium pipe, he closed his eyes and commanded his mind to replay, in a private show, the slightest details of the events that had taken place in the gloomy swamps of the Dominican Republic.

He had the odd impression that he'd forgotten something back there, a word, a smell, or a sound, some fact that he now urgently needed. Breathing in the poppy and the coursing of the opiate through his veins might help him free up his imagination.

For inconceivable things were still hidden, horrors that even Mallock, in his normal state, would have been incapable of guessing.

After his attempt, Mallock had collapsed from fatigue, leaving the opium pipe at his feet. He'd hardly fallen asleep before finding himself embedded in a tree, wood and flesh coalesced, with Thomas in front of him, howling with fear.

The shadow of a creature was turning around his son at great speed, as if in an accelerated film. This vision alone was terrifying in itself, but afterward, it grew much worse. The shadow suddenly stopped, bent over Thomas, and broke one of his fingers. Then it attacked his limbs, one after the other, meticulously. Between each offensive, it began to revolve around him again with a shrill whistling. A sound of crinkling. Of rattling. Something midway between wind passing through a narrow passage and the cry of a swallow. Tom was calling to his father, screaming with pain, and begging him to help him. Mallock would have unhesitatingly uprooted his muscles and dislocated his body if only he'd been able to. But he was fused with the tree. After playing at length with Thomas's bones, the shadow sprinkled his torso with white spirit. Then it lit a match. Then Amédée had to watch his son burn for what seemed to him an eternity before he could finally wake up.