Cemetery of Swallows (42 page)

He went back to the living room and started searching again. Behind an old hi-fi, he found several audiocassettes piled up. He took one of them at random and slipped it into the player. In the large room, the quavering voice of an old man started telling a story, the story of his life.

“How did you know?” Jules asked.

“His fingers. Go have a look. They're deformed by arthritis. He couldn't write anymore. So I thought that maybe . . . ”

Forgetting the hierarchy, Julie planted a big kiss on her superintendent's badly shaved cheek.

Mallock went back to Wrochet's apartment the following day to classify and listen to everything. The development of events had quickly seemed to him to have its own logic, strange but obvious, almost simple.

Gaston Wrochet told a story of friendship and bravery. In his quavering voice, he brought Lieutenant Jean-François Lafitte back to life: “We formed an incredible pair, he with his big dark eyes and I with my sorceror's eyes.”

Far from being the serious, monolithic person Mallock had conceived, Jean-François seemed to be full of good humor and imagination. He played the piano, drew marvelously well, and, even though he was rather short, he attracted like a lighthouse all the young people he met. Girls too. An engineer, he had entered the army in Saumur and was quickly promoted to lieutenant after a lightning-fast training of three months. It was during this period that Gaston had come to know him, in “the great stroke of good and bad luck in my life.” His lieutenant had taken him under his wing, perhaps because Gavroche was by far the most at sea in the division, or perhaps because he was a war orphan and alone in life. For someone like Jean-François Lafitte, who was surrounded by love, that had seemed a very cruel fate. Much more than it did to Gavroche who, to judge by what he said in his confessions, didn't really suffer from it: “You know, I'd always been alone, so . . . The lieutenant was always there for everyone. And he didn't make much of it. He took it all . . . how to put it . . . lightly. We were all very worried about him when he was wounded. A bullet had been lodged in his neck. He was in danger of being paralyzed but that didn't seem to bother him. He simply put on what he called his bandage: a white silk scarf. How could anyone forget such a man?”

The first cassette ended there.

In fact, they were not all full, and none of them had been recorded on both sides. Gaston must have found that too complicated. The better to keep them straight, he had labeled each of the cases in a lovely old-fashioned hand. On the first one, he had written: “My first encounter with Lieutenant LAFITTE.”

On the second cassette, labeled “March, 1940/March, 1944,” the old man told all his anecdotes from the military period. Particularly, the three months of training before they parachuted onto French soil. His name change, as well. “It was my lieutenant who shortened Gaston Wrochet to Gavroche. It seems obvious when I think back on it, but he was the one kind enough to think of giving me that name. I was the youngest of the group and I had an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife. From that moment on, everyone called me Gavroche, even the British.”

The third cassette, “LA MISSION,” began with an account of the night in May, 1944. “He did everything he could to prevent me from going along. He never stopped telling me that I was much too young to die. Because as he saw it, this was a suicide mission.” The old man described in detail all the tricks he'd used to get into the plane. And then he had to jump: “In complete darkness, at an altitude of a thousand yards, when you feel your parachute catch fire you know you're finished and you say your last prayers.” But Gavroche had been lucky. Even under those circumstances, his parachute had slowed his fall sufficiently so that he survived a rough landing in a tree. He had remained there for six hours, caught between two branches, wondering who was going to find him first, a Frenchman or a Boche? By chance, he was the one to whom Lord de Gaulle had been entrusted, and the pigeon and he had kept each other a little warmer as they waited to be found. On the cassette, he talked about his long dialogues with the bird. Of course, he did all the talking, and it was funny and moving. Fortunately, he had been discovered by a group of resistance fighters. As early as the following day, he'd heard about two sabotage operations that had just been successfully carried out, and he'd recognized his lieutenant's style. Alone, and despite his new friends' advice, Gavroche had decided to try to rejoin his unit. He'd headed for the third regroupment site, Biellanie 3, where he thought he might find his squad.

From that point on, it was in a voice broken with sobs that he described what happened that night. He'd probably tried to tell the story several times before, but the emotion had been too strong. His voice was hoarse and trembling. Hidden in a tree, Wrochet the simple soldier had witnessed all the acts of violence perpetrated by Krinkel's unit, as overwhelmed by the sufferings of his friends as he was terrified by the idea of being scented by one of the dogs. Particularly because of his pigeon. So he'd decided to let it go, after having written the message informing the Allies of the failure of their last attack: “Saint-Jean mission compromised.”

Lord de Gaulle had flown off, passing over the clearing and the well where Lieutenant Jean-François Lafitte was being tortured. Gavroche was sure that he must have seen and recognized the pigeon.

Without omitting the slightest detail, Gavroche then described all the atrocities committed by the SS
Gesamtterror
unit. Everyone had to know what had happened in that clearing. For him, it was a revelation, the bloody, howling nature of barbarism, its terrifying cry, its infinite character. An unsuspected potential of humanity. A capacity hidden from ordinary mortals. Plucking the eyes out of a living person as one might swallow an egg, listening to his death agony as one might delight in symphony, disemboweling one's fellow man until his last cry as one might a fish. He'd never gotten over it. What he'd seen, but also his inability to do anything about it. “I asked myself whether I shouldn't hang myself from a branch and have done with life. A bit of parachute cord, a final jump, and bingo! No more Gavroche. Three days went by before I could make up my mind to climb out of the tree and walk the earth once again, on a planet the Nazis had soiled forever; I felt a terrible shame.”

On another cassette, he recounted his return. On the case he had written “MPF 45/46.” By a fortunate concatenation of circumstances, Gaston Wrochet had become one of General de Gaulle's aides-de-camp when he returned to France. And when the general had asked one of his close associates to volunteer to find and choose the person who was to become the Second World War's unknown soldier, Gaston had not hesitated. With the greatest secrecy, he had gone with two other veterans to dig up their lieutenant at the bottom of the well, leaving there the regulation cross that Gavroche had decorated with bronze leaves at its extremities. Then, to be sure that his lieutenant would be the soldier chosen and honored, he had separated his remains into three parts, supplementing them with stones to provide the necessary weight. Whichever coffin was chosen by lot, his friend would be the one elected.

At the time, that had seemed to him important. More than that: vital!

Initially, he'd thought that he was doing that for his lieutenant, and then he'd understood that it was a desperate attempt to redeem himself. He was angry at himself for not having come down from his tree and gotten himself killed in turn by making a gallant but doomed effort to come to his friends' aid. He forgot that his friends were already dead and his lieutenant dying.

Guilt is not an exact science.

But his extravagant plan had worked, and Gavroche had felt the presence of his lieutenant under the Arc de Triomphe as a kind of consolation. For what, he didn't exactly know: his death, his torture, his disappearance, his absence? A little of all of that, probably.

When he had returned to civilian life, he had opened an office of neuropsychiatry specializing in hypnosis. The intensity of his gaze, even if some people claimed it was of no importance, gave him a certain aura and credibility. In fact, his hypnotic abilities proved to be superior to those of his colleagues. Despite this advantage, which quickly became known and renowned, he continued to study other healing techniques and to practice his art in various countries. For him, the important point was to do something, to give people hope again, and especially to alleviate bodily suffering. This last point was an obsession for him, and although everyone admired him for that, he knew exactly where this vocation really came from, from what he sometimes called his “original sin.” On the fifth cassette, Gaston Wrochet expanded on his methods and experiments, his art and the medications he used in connection with it. One felt that he still needed to transmit things, as if he were afraid of carrying off with him some detail that would have made it possible for someone to escape suffering.

 

The sixth cassette recounted his life as a healer and professor, and it was only starting with the seventh cassette that he finally came to his meeting with Manuel Gemoni and lifted a corner of the veil. “I am not about to forget my encounter with Manuel. From that day forward, I lost my peace of mind and the health of my body.” Then came the sound of him blowing his nose noisily, but without ceasing to talk. “He appeared before me, like the statue of the Commander before Don Juan. It happened in the Palais des Congrès a little more than three years ago. That man was the spitting image of my lieutenant, his twin, his clone . . . his reincarnation. My heart had always been my weak point and I had already had a minor heart attack, but this was much more serious. It made no impression on him. He continued on his way without even seeing me. But I felt ill and thought that if I sat down for a few minutes everything would be all right.” For the same reason, before he was shot down, Krinkel had thought he recognized Gemoni. He too had been convinced that it was Lieutenant Lafitte, whom he had tortured sixty years earlier. Everything was suddenly so obvious. “This second attack almost caused me to finally rejoin my lieutenant, if I also deserve to be in Paradise.” The old man then explained in detail how much this attack had weakened him physically. Shortly afterward, he decided to take up residence in Paris so he would not have to move around too much. Then there was another coincidence. An apartment opened up in Gemoni's building. “The floor just above. All the way up, a lovely place in the attic. Exactly what I'd been looking for. And then, once the first shock was over, I realized I wanted to see him again. So I decided to move in. That just shows that fate isn't to blame for everything, we often give it a helping hand.”

Just after that sentence, a telephone could be heard ringing and it was apparent that the old man was doing his best to answer it. Then he could be heard talking in the distance until the end of the cassette. He hadn't realized it, since the rest of his account was found at the beginning of the ninth cassette, the eighth containing only advice and recommendations for the benefit of his students.

On cassette No. 9, he described the first documentary on the Dominican Republic. Klaus Krinkel appeared twice in the film. “Then I really almost fell apart. I don't know how my heart survived it, but my head sustained a serious blow. My hatred for that man drove me crazy. That bastard wasn't dead! It wasn't possible. It was unbearable. Suddenly I saw in Manuel the hand of fate. It was my god or my lieutenant who was showing me the way. I even told myself that I was being given a chance to redeem myself, to kill the bastard. As I should have done in '44, by jumping out of my tree to rip his throat out with my teeth. But I was now too old, and my heart condition made it impossible for me to do anything. So everything seemed to me simple, obvious, as if it had been written. An irony of history, another one: the day before that broadcast, my young, pretty Japanese neighbor, Gemoni's wife, had run into me and asked if I could do anything to treat her husband's terrible headaches. She'd read an article about the technique I used. She was the one, in fact, who asked me to hypnotize Manuel!”

That's why Manuel was so willing to undergo hypnosis
, Mallock thought.

“Just imagine! Sending my lieutenant's perfect double to kill the man who had tortured and killed him. It was written. I had no chance of persuading Manuel to do it and didn't even try. For me, my eyes and my abilities as a hypnotizer were part of a plan, a great design, an incredible puzzle that had just appeared in front of me, for me and for my lieutenant. I was insane, no doubt, possessed by hatred, but I regret nothing, now that I know Manuel was able to return alive. As soon as I've finished these recordings, I will go turn myself in to the police.” Then there was a weird, almost childlike laugh: “I believe the superintendent in charge of the case is going to have the surprise of his life when I tell him the whole story!”

Mallock smiled. He didn't hold it against Gavroche; he knew he'd won, though it had been very close. If he hadn't come to the right conclusions, thanks to Bob, he wouldn't be here now. To be sure, the body of a certain Gaston Wrochet would eventually have been found, frozen to death in his bedroom, but no one would have connected it with the Gemoni case. All his effects and the precious cassettes would have ended up in the garbage. And Manu would have ended up in prison.

The old man continued his confession: “In five short sessions of hypnosis, plus a few suitable medications, I managed to condition him perfectly, to program him, as it were. All that remained was to try it out. So I lent him the cassette on which I'd recorded the documentary. And there, I was in for a surprise. He reacted even more violently than I'd expected. I didn't even need to give him the clues I'd collected. I'd programmed one or two sessions afterward, but they did not prove necessary. I believe that the horrors I witnessed, and that I had described in detail to Manuel, convinced him to act. On that subject, let it be noted that the theory that holds that we cannot make someone do something under hypnosis that he would not normally do is false. Hypnosis is far more powerful than one can imagine. In addition to my own practice, I refer to the experiments conducted by Hippolyte Bernheim, which were known to Freud and took place in the Saint-Charles hospital in Nancy. In substance, the murder of an unfortunate door, which had been designated as a dangerous man to a patient under hypnosis. A murder carried out with the help of a letter-opener. As well as the false trial that followed and the manipulation of the confessions obtained by Bernheim by simple suggestion.” The old man blew his nose again, then the sound of a vaporizer could be heard, probably to administer a medicine. “Where I have no excuse is that I put his life in danger. He could have been killed. But as I already said, I had gone mad. Now I'm going to be able to right all the wrongs I caused and put an end to this masquerade. Tomorrow morning, I will call the police and my little neighbor to explain everything. I'm aware of all the suffering I've caused Manuel's whole family and his friends, but I am still sorrier that I used him, in a cowardly way, as a weapon. I have no excuse other than my hatred for Krinkel.” Thus ended Gavroche's confessions.