Cemetery of Swallows (35 page)

It was sad, even if Daranne had brought it on himself. Authoritarian and not very affectionate with his sons, he'd made their childhoods an ordeal of screams and slaps. As for his wife, he'd treated her the way any macho does. Without malice, he'd simply seen her as a sort of maid with a lifelong contract, ensured employment with a whore option for Saturday nights, plus the quick little blow job on triumphant mornings. Given all that, it was hard to believe that he loved them, and yet that was just the way he was . . .

“I'm leaving this evening to repair a wall that has collapsed in Luc. I'll be back on Tuesday for Christmas. My sons are doing me the honor of coming to dinner at home.”

Mallock was uncomfortable. Daranne didn't usually reveal his moods. Should he pretend he hadn't heard anything or encourage him to spill his guts? Mallock chose the latter option.

“You aren't telling me everything and that bothers me. That's why I called you in. You worry me, old man.”

“I hope you're not afraid that I might do it again, Boss?”

Daranne was alluding to his attempt to commit suicide the first time his wife left him.

“No, not really. But a little. I've warned you that if you tried that again, I'd shoot you. But my impression is that professionally, things aren't going well. I sense that you're less involved, less interested in the investigations.”

Daranne scratched his head.

“You're right, I'm not with it. In everything, in fact. The tiniest gesture, the words I say, always off the mark. I don't know quite how to put it. If I say black, that's because it's white. I go to the right when I should have gone left. I even laugh wrong, not when you're supposed to. Every time, I look like a jerk. That's what getting old means, sometimes. In fact, I think I'm broken and too old to be fixed. Too unhip to make it worth the trouble. Do you see what I mean? And then, don't tell anyone but at the slightest little thing I start crying like a girl. It's hard to realize that you're worthless both professionally and emotionally. It's a helluva failure. There, see, just talking to you about it is setting me off again, I feel like I'm going to start bawling.”

Daranne grabbed a big Kleenex and blew his nose so violently that he let a series of farts out of his other end. Mallock looked at him and felt like weeping and laughing at the same time. It was true that Bob was really not with it.

Amédée took a deep breath:

“I know you don't much like people telling you this, but somebody has to do it. You're depressed again, Bob. And you know what you have to do. A little visit to the psychiatrist you saw the other time, a few ‘magic pills,' and you'll be good as new. So don't give me any shit about your macho notions. You saw that treatment helped you the last time, right?”

“Hmmph, maybe. But I don't know if I want someone to help me. If I'm no longer capable of handling it myself, then—”

“Then what? Are you going to mess around with your piece again, as they do in those stupid American films where the cop finds nothing more virile to do than sob and stick the barrel of a gun in his mouth?”

“I didn't say that, Boss, but . . . Anyway, the shrink I saw the last time has retired, so . . . And then, it's true that I feel out of it, completely out of it. For example, I don't understand anything about this business with Julie's brother.”

“Don't worry about that,” Mallock shouted at him, “I don't understand it either. I'm lost. Mallock has been knocked out. So? Am I going to shoot myself? Hell, no! I'm just going to continue . . . ”

Daranne was a little thrown off balance by his boss's outburst. He sensed that Amédée was sincere.

“Then why haven't you gone about it . . . normally?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. The way you conduct a normal investigation. We arrest a suspect, we take his prints, we put him under the tanning light, we suck his blood. We search his house and question his neighbors. Little by little, we ferret out everybody. It's always a family member or a neighbor, isn't it? Well . . . You haven't even made a neighborhood investigation, here in Paris.”

“Because we do that around the scene of the crime, silly. And in this case the scene of the crime was an island. Not here! I got involved after Tobias's murder, not at the time Manuel disappeared.”

Bob took on his beaten dog look again. Mallock felt bad. He didn't know quite what to do with either the man or the situation. He too had only one desire: to leave for Normandy, to shut himself up in his house and hibernate. His chronic fatigue and depression, along with the confounded tangle from which he'd been struggling to extricate himself since the beginning of this investigation, had consumed all his energy. He would need strength to straighten out the twisted path that lay before Daranne.

Amédée grew frightened. If he didn't have enough determination to help his friend, if he didn't do anything, the dope might shoot himself. He abruptly made up his mind. Picked up the phone and dialed the number of his own shrink.

“Hi, it's Mallock. I know that I'm not supposed to do this, but listen . . . ”

A quarter of an hour later, Daranne, who had spoken to the psychiatrist, hung up.

“I'm supposed to see him on the 27th at 10
A.M.
Unbeliev­able, isn't it? I will have seen my sons the day before. My feelings should still be fresh.”

“I'd have preferred for him to see you sooner.”

“He couldn't. He seems like an unusually nice guy, especially for a shrink.”

“He is,” Mallock interrupted. “Now get out of here.”

He woke up at noon.
The answering machine was blinking, his inbox was overflowing, and the sun was shining. There are mornings like that when it isn't even morning anymore. Mallock grimaced. His back and his head still hurt. Outside, the day had begun. The world obviously had no problem getting along without him. That was a disagreeable feeling, even at his age. Why in the name of God can't we remain, once and for all, the center of the world? As when we were cooing with the nipple in our mouth? Instead of having to keep going on and on, farther and farther . . . as far as the brink, as far as the abyss? Until death follows!

The preceding evening, Mallock had drunk more than usual. And he usually drank quite a lot. But there was Bob's sorrow. His own concern. Judioni's voice. And his words: “a real bastard.” He didn't like that. And he didn't like playing the informer, either. Two or three years earlier, he would never have made the phone call in question.

Stool pigeon
, a little voice deep inside him whispered.

That would hurt for a few days yet, and then it would go away. But it made him doubt. Doubt himself and what he had become. Could it be that he had turned into a “real bastard” without even realizing it? He needed two glasses of whiskey to drown that incipient panic attack. To shut up that big wave of fear. He caressed his bottle of single malt affectionately. In moments like these, only alcohol could perform that miracle. And it did it without asking anything, without moralizing, and without making its patient wait in the antechamber of guilt.

Wasn't alcoholism great?

No, but neither was sorrow!

Mallock regularly found himself caught between the two and called upon to choose. He gave in to sobriety only when forced to.

One does not choose despair lightly.

 

Already 1
P.M.
Mallock put on his outfit for very cold days and went out to visit the bookstore run by his friend Léonid Scheinberg.

While he was in Nazi prison camps, the young man had promised to convert when he got out. The day of his baptism, in July 1949, he'd taken advantage of the event to change his name. This homosexual Jew who was also a freethinking erotomaniac made a very strange Catholic. Not the recruit of the century, the old priest at Saint-Placide who carried out the renaming must have said to himself. On that day Léon Galène, alias Léonid, who had had time to triple his weight since he'd arrived at the Gare de l'Est, had promised himself to do a ton of things, such as not speak for a year, see an aurora borealis, never lie again, either to himself or to others, eat ortolan, laugh underwater, open a bookstore, and do everything he could to recover the lightheartedness he'd had when he was three years old.

And the most incredible thing was that he had kept all his promises.

 

The little bells hanging from the ceiling tinkled. The shop was empty. At the very back, among the piles of books, stood Monsieur Léon. He was still very handsome, with his blue eyes, his big Ashkenazi nose, his full lips, and his silvery hair. He was short and always wore plain gray suits, blue silk ties, and two-tone shoes, flat black and patent leather. A kind of elegant uniform or a retro look, as we would now say.

“Greetings, wizard. So, you've been up to your old tricks!”

Surprised, Mallock wondered what his old friend was alluding to.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Don't play the innocent and give me a little time.”

“But I didn't say anything!”

“What about the photo you sent me, was that just an accident?”

Mallock almost asked what he was talking about but then changed his mind. They'd go into that later. Especially since he was hungry. The bear hadn't eaten much since the night before. Bear irritated, bear no eat, so bear starving.

“It's almost two o'clock. I'm afraid the restaurant won't take us anymore.”

“Go ahead, I'll join you. Were you planning to go to the Marseillais?”

“Well, yeah, unless you've got a better idea.”

“Frankly, I don't care. You will understand why when I bring you the result of my research.”

“Is it positive?” Mallock asked with dread.

Léon hesitated.

“Let's say that it's the chef's surprise. It's even the surprise of all surprises.”

Mallock stifled his curiosity and went out into the street, heading for the Paris-Marseille restaurant.

 

When he got there, the owner laughed and shrieked:

“Oh my God, I can't believe it. Mooosieur Superintend­ent!”

“The comedy of repetition is your thing, César. You're not going to serve up the same refrain every time I come here, are you?”

“Especially since I have no excuse, I was expecting you.”

“How's that, you were expecting me?”

“Well, yes! Your harem is already there. I seated them at the back. You're going bad, Superintendent, you're making them wait for you like a real macho from back home.”

“What harem are you talking about?”

“Your girls, the two lookers from last time . . . Do you have more than one harem?”

From the back of the room, Kiko and Julie were smiling at Mallock.

“Great minds think alike, girls. Did you come back to try to seduce big César?”

They both got up to embrace their superintendent.

“How about you, you don't come here just for the cuisine, do you?” Julie asked mischievously.

César backed away, raising his arms.

“Oh, damn, a firing squad, a trio of cops. I'm getting out of here before you do something you shouldn't.”

Laughing, Mallock took a chair and sat down at the table next to them.

“Am I bothering you? Because I can go . . . ”

“Of course not. On the contrary, Kiko and I were just talking about going to see you to find out where we are. And then I've got some hot new information.”

With this weather, anything hot was welcome.

“Go ahead, Julie, out with it.”

“Jo tried to reach you this morning. I was the one who took the call. She confirmed that the hair found on the site, next to the well and the chain, the hair that is supposed to be Krinkel's, if we believe Manu's account, does in fact correspond to the samples brought back from the Dominican Republic.”

“What samples?”

Mallock was at a loss.

“The ones you asked Daranne to get behind my back, Superintendent. The ones taken from Darbier's corpse.”

“It's not good to be bitter, Captain,” Mallock smiled, happy with the news.

There was no longer any doubt, Klaus Krinkel and Tobias Darbier were one and the same person.

“Finally, something concrete, expected, and logical. I was beginning to lose the habit. And what about Manu's blood tests?”

“The Judicial Identity guys handled that. But there, too, I had the results this morning through Jo. Negative. There was nothing in Manu's blood, no alcohol, no drugs.”

Mallock gave a little growl like a bear going back into hibernation. He would have liked to find a nice cocktail of drugs. Well! As with all the information in this case, he'd have to deal it.

“Nothing else?”

“Yes, but I don't know if Kiko needs to hear it.”

Kiko gave her a dark look.

“I have more right to know everything about this case than the two of you put together. It's the future of my husband and my family that is at stake. Not yours! What's the problem? Are you afraid I'm going to transmit information to Manu? I've sworn to you that I will never say anything. I want to know the truth, not fabricate it.”

Julie heaved a deep sigh before turning to Mallock and saying:

“The little bones we found are in fact human. They are apparently those of two children aged six and fourteen months. We even have their names. They correspond to statements filed a few days afterward. One at the office of the village's mayor, the other in a gendarmerie a little farther away.”

Julie paused before declaring, as if regretfully:

“There were, in fact, traces of charring and marks made by teeth on those bones. Human incisors and canines, but especially molars.”

It took Kiko several seconds to grasp what Julie was saying. At the instant she understood, her hand flew to her mouth to try to keep a cry from coming out. Silence fell around them. Each was fighting with his demons and trying to control them. Rage and anger for Mallock, despair and incredulity for Kiko, a desire to weep for Julie.