Cemetery of Swallows (36 page)

 

Léon arrived during this moment of silence. He brought in on his shoulders a few snowflakes from outside that mixed with the two little troops of dandruff that had already been camping out on his old overcoat for a few days. He didn't seem surprised by the presence of the two young women, whom he greeted with a brief “Mesdemoiselles.”

Julie wasn't satisfied with that.

“Don't you recognize me, Léon?”

“Oh, excuse me, Julie! It's that I've made such discoveries that they've completely discombobulated me. And then you're getting prettier and prettier. I don't know whether it's you or a woman who is still more beautiful . . . You're stunning, dear Julie.”

“You old pervert,” Amédée interrupted. “Cut the crap and spill it.”

Léon took a deep breath full of regrets.

“As soon as I came back here, two days ago, I investigated. I'll spare you the details, it was rather difficult. Anyway, I obtained more information about this SS
Oberleutnant
from two friends who are historians. Digging around and putting serious pressure on all my contacts, I found one who ended up telling me the whole story. I warn you, it's crazy. No one knows whether it's true or false. But there is concordant testimony. It's huge, but I can't go on without . . . ”

An impatient look from Mallock.

“Okay, okay, I'll go on. At the beginning, it's supposed to have been Himmler's idea. The other madman expressed the desire to gather together the elite of the elite of the
Schutzstaffel
, as if the SS itself were not enough for him. He already had a name for his collection of crazies, the SSS! The first S symbolized ‘supra.' It might have ended there, because at first Hitler didn't think it would be useful, but that other sicko, Joseph Goebbels, adopted the idea and put his own twist on it. And then, bingo, Hitler went for it. The idea put forth by the Reich's propaganda minister was to spread genuine panic among the enemy troops and civilians by means of a rumor, but a rumor that could be manipulated because it was well-founded and especially because it was unverifiable. Before German troops arrived in an area, terrifying stories invaded the region. To feed these horrors, they are supposed to have decided to train specialized units in
Gesamtterror
: absolute terror. Six battalions of six men each, with six madmen as their leaders. The Devil's 666. It was still this fascination with two-bit mythology and stupid Prussian legends. You can be sure that these battalions would have had the right and the duty to behave in the most ignoble way. Rape, disemboweling, decapitation, torture, everything was to be done without restraint and with the greatest perversity. There was only one imperative: strike people's minds. They were also ordered to let one or two witnesses escape each orgy of violence. On the other hand, they were to leave behind as little proof as possible, and they were not to let themselves be taken alive under any circumstances. Curiously, it's the last point that helped discredit this story. The notion that they committed suicide and erased proof made it a little too easy to justify the absence of tangible evidence, even though now, knowing what we know, it explains why we weren't aware of it. Am I making myself understood?”

“The last part is a little confused. But that's all right, go on.”

Mallock, like Julie and Kiko, had only one desire: to hear the rest. But his mind took off in a spiral: KKK, SSS, 666 . . . The three scars on Darbier's skull. He began to think about DNA's double helix. Couldn't the myth of the superior race be expressed by a triple helix? A crazy idea based on genetic mutation by selection. Mallock had to force himself to return to Earth and listen to Léon:

“The rumor had to remain, if not unfounded, at least unproven. And it worked, in part. That's what I wanted to say, in fact—”

“What about Krinkel?” Julie asked, thinking mainly about her brother.

“Klaus Krinkel, KKK. Well, as you now know, he really existed. His itinerary passes through St. Petersburg. But he disappeared in 1944, killed during the landing in Normandy. He's supposed to have led the first and only battalion that Goebbels managed to assemble. It can be assumed that it consisted of all the members initially foreseen for the six distinct commandos, the thirty-six men whom Lieutenant Lafitte and his unit ran into. Another troubling aspect of Manuel's story is this business of fighting Krinkel with a pitchfork. It fits amazingly well with what we now know. All the documents, the rare photos, and the descriptions given by various persons agree on one point: the leader of the SSS was a very handsome man who had nothing in common with Tobias Darbier.”

“So? They're nonetheless the same individual. We have his fingerprints and his DNA.”

“I didn't say we didn't, Amédée. This is another one of destiny's dirty tricks. By an irony of fate, it was by disfiguring him that Jean-François Lafitte saved his life, in a way. The sadistic nature of his crimes had placed him in the first rank of those to be put on trial after the war. He should never have been able to escape. The few testimonies to the atrocities he committed, whether in Poland on the Russian front, make us pensive. And here legend rejoins history. Everything I found out about this fine gentleman, even his nickname, ‘the Ogre,' has to be taken literally. You won't believe it, but there are abominable accusations against him and some of his lieutenants. Get this: even cannibalism. Horrifying stories of babies who disappeared. Keep in mind that I'm not saying they're true, and I think pain can lead astray people who . . . ”

But Léon stopped. Mallock's and Julie's looks had been unequivocal.

“Why are you looking at me like that? Have you found something? How did you . . . ”

“We found bones around the well. And unfortunately, Léon, they leave little doubt regarding this . . . legend that is no legend. Julie has just told me that the analyses confirm our worst fears. The size and the development of the little skeletons. And multiple tooth marks on the bones.”

Léon's cell phone began to vibrate. He flipped it open, holding it at arm's length to locate the green icon in the form of a telephone.

He then pressed it against his ear.

“Yes, it's Scheinberg. I was waiting for your call. Yes, the inscription. Well?”

Mallock noticed that Léon had for once resumed his birth name. Then there were two minutes of silence. The bookseller murmured a series of exclamations. During this time, Mallock was boiling with impatience. He suspected that the call was connected with the business of the cross, but he didn't see how a simple object could put his friend in such a state.

“Incredible!” Léon cried, closing his phone.

“Did you find out to whom the initials correspond?”

“It's not ‘to whom' but ‘to what.' I'd turned those notorious initials, ‘MPF,' every which way. I went through all the possible first names, then the composite names, like Marc-Paul. I moved from French to English, then to German. Finally, it was my two historian friends who freed me from that sterile effort. One of them looked at me as if I were the dumbest of the dumb. The letters mean ‘died for France': ‘
Mort pour la France
,' MPF. At first, I was doubtful, but I ended up accepting the obvious.”

Mallock was not really surprised, just vexed that he had not figured out the puzzle. Bravo, Wizard!

“But what was it doing at the bottom of an empty well in the middle of nowhere?”

“That, my dear, is what I've been trying to find out for the last two days. And I can tell you that I've annoyed a lot of people. All my contacts and the best experts have been exploited. Including the ones to whom you referred me. I labored a bit, but finally got lucky. An anonymous phone call, if you can imagine that. A man's voice, an old man, who asked me if I wanted to hear the story of that cross. He said he'd learned about our investigation through one of your contacts, Julie. I told him I refused to speak with people who didn't give their names. He hesitated, then asked me to forget his name immediately. So I promised, swore, crossed my heart and hoped to die. What the guy told me is so strange that I probably would have hesitated to believe it if I hadn't already had clues that led me in the same direction. If you said that this goes far beyond anything you could have imagined, you wouldn't be far off. We came to an understanding and he agreed to send a copy of all his documents to a third party whom we both know, a great specialist in this dark period, who was asked to analyze them and let me know his conclusions.”

And there Léon stopped. As if he had said everything.

“Go on,” Mallock said, encouraging him. “When will you have these conclusions?”

“I have them, Superintendent. That was the phone call I just received.”

“So? What was the result?”

Mallock would have gladly strangled him to obtain more quickly the words that Léon must have stored up in his big bald head long enough to make the tension mount. For once it was the bookseller who had exclusive possession of the information, and he wanted to take advantage of it. All's fair in love and war. But he took pity on Julie and Kiko, whose looks were imploring him to tell them what he'd found.

“Well, I think I can finally tell you exactly where Jean-François Lafitte's body is. It all begins with a decision made by a famous general!”

The fourth day of the snowstorm in Paris. And it wasn't over. Christmas would be whiter than it had ever been in the memory of Parisians. Mallock had difficulty opening the door of his building, which was blocked by several feet of white powder. Once outside, he walked as far as the rue de Rivoli, then headed for Châtelet.

It was still very beautiful. A new Paris, as if just revealed. A mad Paris, without the dirtying flow of automobiles. Without the carbon-laden air of urban vehicles. An unprecedented capital covered by several feet of immaculate snow. Rounding off the angles, draping the façades, it was nature that was taking back, in the form of snowflakes, its place within the city, a village of snow with heavy stone buildings. It was the sound of the wind, too, and that of silence, a voiceless phantom taking its revenge on the usual noise of the city. It was a few hundred Parisians skating on a snowy, frozen-over Seine. It was the beige, dirty Tour Saint-Jacques and the crunching sound of Mallock's footsteps as he trudged over these unprecedented mounds of snow. It was, impatient and amazed, his life that was leading him, in the cottony cold of this baptismal day, toward a revelation that might be going to change everything.

No more cars, no more buses, only the Metro was running, more or less, to irrigate the capital. So let's take the Metro. Mallock wasn't really a regular, but you have to make the best of things. And then it was a direct shot on line No. 1. A dozen stations where he would breathe in the smell of the plodding, feverishly impatient crowd. By chance, the superintendent chose a car that was full of women reading. All around him, their eyes were flicking back and forth, following the lines of ink in novels about other things and other places, following the thread of words to discover their meaning. The meaning of all this. So long as someone reads, there will be hope. Mallock was convinced of that, even if he wasn't quite sure why.

Not all the exits from the stations had been cleared. About one out of three. The others, buried in snow, had to await the transit authority's teams, which were, of course, overloaded. After the Concorde station, he had to continue on as far as Charles de Gaulle-Étoile before he could get out.

Outside was the Champs-Élysées under the snow.

The landscape was incredible.

The city, enlarged by its milky epidermis, resembled a lost metropolis, an Atlantis extending for miles. Toward the east, the whiteness of the snow set off the yellows and browns of the bas-reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe, a monumental edifice sculpted by a huge giant in the ivory of a titanic tusk. To the west, the gaze lost itself in the white stretching as far as the rolling plateaus of the Tuilieries in the distance.

Just as he emerged, the storm accorded the sun a few seconds to illuminate the scene and dazzle forever those who were lucky enough to be there. Mallock, fascinated by what he saw, had not immediately noticed Bob, who had probably just gotten out of the same train in the Metro.

“Damn, it's really coming down, Boss!”

Daranne had always had the rare ability to make any trace of poetry evaporate.

“You said it, pal!” Mallock replied in the same vein.

“So, is it the big day?”

Bob wore a magnificent child's smile. Mallock was delighted. It had been so long since he'd seen that kind of expression on Bob's face. He'd been right to choose him for the opening of the tomb.

“Who told you it was the big day?”

“You did, Boss. I don't even know what it's about. I thought I understood that all the others wanted to come, but that's all. I am very grateful to you for having taken me with you, but I can't be too late, I've got my special meal to prepare for lunch. I'm in a terrible rush. Did I tell you my kids were coming?”

Mallock didn't have time to answer, because in a moment the sky clouded over and a snow squall swept over the square.

“It's going to start snowing again, Bob. Let's hurry.”

Daranne followed him as they headed for the Arc de Triomphe. The path that had been cleared to allow access to the monument was particularly slippery. Mallock took advantage of their slow progress to bring his collaborator up-to-date.

Three days earlier, Léon had delivered his revelation and they'd all been stunned.

At the bottom of the well, there had been only three identical sculpted crosses with the inscription MPF. The order came directly from General de Gaulle. The great man had made one of his democratic unilateral decisions. In his view, for this war, they needed a very special unknown soldier. They had to choose a body and entomb it next to the bier from the First World War. Considering the comments the Allies would not have failed to make and the reactions to be expected from the veterans of the Great War, he had decided to proceed secretly. “We shall inform the French people when the time comes,” he had declared, how long that would be depending on his own will. De Gaulle was far too intelligent not to have already seen the limits of democracy and universal suffrage. The successive presidents of the Republic had been kept informed of the existence of this second unknown soldier, but none of them thought it useful to reveal a secret that had become awkward.