Cemetery of Swallows (8 page)

André immediately attacked. With all the diplomacy he had left in his big orange body, and smiling constantly, he explained to the intern that it really wasn't necessary, that they were very grateful for his trouble, but that they had to leave because the ambulance was waiting. Then he asked him for a simple piece of cotton with a “dab” of alcohol. He was planning to give Manuel a shot of analgesics as soon as they were in the ambulance, but didn't have anything to use as a disinfectant. The little drop of alcohol took a quarter of an hour to reach them and cost André the last of his bills.

Twenty-five minutes later, they were finally in the ambulance. The two soldiers, three police technicians, and the two mustaches with riot guns had followed them. A kind of elite commando, they played their part. But oddly enough, they seemed to believe in it, their fear even making them sweat heavily. A local tradition or an excess of zeal?

Mallock, quite wrongly, decided not to pay any attention.

Another miracle: the all-white ambulance was there, where it was supposed to be. Manuel, who had emerged from his lethargy, had begun to moan. André decided to give him an initial shot in the hospital's parking lot, before the ambulance's bouncing around on the Dominican roads made this operation more dangerous.

While he was preparing the anesthesia, he turned toward Mallock.

“Do you really want to go with us? Personally, I don't see what's in it for you. You're going to waste your time in Puerto Plata. When we get there, he'll be taken straight to the operating room. It could be quite a while before . . . ”

“No problem, I've seen enough hospitals for one day. Could you try to reach Mister B . . . Jean-Daniel, so he could take me back to Cabarete?”

Just as Mallock was turning around to get out of the ambulance, Manu sat up on his stretcher and screamed: “The ogre's belly! You can't understand. And his teeth . . . my God, his teeth!”

 

When the ambulance finally left for the private clinic, five motorcyclists and two police cars followed it. Five short minutes went by before Mister Blue arrived at the Santiago hospital's parking lot. Good timing. His mauve minivan, his nice face and smile were a blessing. It's often like that, when one is on foreign territory, the slightest familiar face quickly becomes a friend.

The way back to Islabon and Cabarete ran between the Yásica and Jamao rivers. Surfaces carpeted with red earth, damp and rich. Vegetables, fruit trees, and grapevines grew there effortlessly. Even the logs used to make barriers along the road were rooting and becoming trees again. But here, too, the villages were mere jumbles of corrugated metal, billboards, mud, and rubble.

“They're really poor.”

“Probably,” Jean-Daniel replied, without much conviction. “But that doesn't excuse everything.” And he added, in his colorful language: “You don't shit where you sleep!”

Down deep, Mister Blue loved this country and its people. But like a demanding father, he was not prepared to excuse their weaknesses without a fight. He left that to right-minded tourists.

On the side of the road, a barrier consisting of three policemen in gray uniforms signaled to them to stop. Mister Blue drove on without slowing down. When he was alongside them, he shouted something accompanied by a smile.

“They're just trying to make ends meet,” he decided to explain to Mallock. “But you have to understand their position.”

Then he began to talk about this people, its strengths, its customs, and its obsessions from the past. All the muddy habits that a man who has experienced communism and dictatorship accumulates under his shoes. Then he fell silent. Probably to let Mallock admire the landscape and thus understand the reason for these things he'd taken too long to explain.

Minutes and miles passed. Curve after curve, the road tipping the car from right to left as a hand turns a glass of wine in order to assess its color. To be sure that Mallock was enraptured, the sun turned orange. On both sides of the road, the magical encounter between this golden tint and the green of the leaves, dazzling in its beauty, suddenly raised once again the question of God's existence.

“It's this same light, this sunset imprisoned in drops of resin, that one finds intact in a piece of amber.”

Mister Blue had broken the silence.

“Each of those stones is like a hologram going back to the dawn of our Earth. With this ochre and golden light, and these insects captured in full flight or as they are laying eggs. When I examine one of them for the first time before deciding to buy it, I always feel the same emotion.”

“Do you know what each piece of amber contains?”

“No, that's the name of the game. I try to guess by wetting them and looking through them, but I'm allowed to polish them, to “open a window,” as they say, only after I've negotiated a price and paid it. I've bought pieces of amber for next to nothing in which I've found treasures. But that's rare, unfortunately. Seven years ago I paid a relatively high price for a stone because I thought it contained at least a fragment of a lizard. That's an amber-hunter's dream. It was in fact there, and by a wonderful surprise, whole and almost intact. A miracle!”

“Will you show me that when we get back?” Mallock asked.

“Alas, I can't. I was forced to resell it in order to be able to continue to negotiate other pieces of amber. I've always regretted it. It was shortly afterward that I decided to construct a
cantina
next to my shop. It allows me to earn enough money not to have to separate myself from my most beautiful pieces. Ah, we're almost there! Come see me tomorrow, I'll show you.”

They covered the last miles that led to Cabarete without Mister Blue ordering his foot to press more lightly on the accelerator. He seemed determined to run over someone. If not a person, then at least a pig or a chicken.

“In St. Petersburg there was a room entirely covered in amber,” he went on without slowing down. “I believed that it was a legend until the day when I found, right here on the island, and very oddly, among the belongings of the father of one of my men, a black-and-white photo showing that room. Unfortunately, the poor guy had died in a collapse at one of my mines. For a reason that still escapes me, in his cabin he had a whole file on this treasure.”

Mallock would never have imagined that this room was also going to be part of the fabulous enigma that had brought him here. He felt he was nearing the stable and was dying to take a good shower.

“In the summer of 1941,” Jean-Daniel continued, “the Third Reich began its offensive on the Russian Front by bombarding Leningrad. Hitler wanted to wipe that city off the face of the Earth. But inside Catherine the Great's palace there was an exceptional room completely paneled in a kind of amber parquetry.”

“Made on this island?”

“No, it wasn't. It had been made for the palace of the king of Prussia, Frederick William I, by an architect named Andreas Schulte and a jeweler, Gottfried Tasso. In 1716, Frederick made the incredible decision to trade these fabulous panels to Peter the Great of Russia for two hundred and forty-eight elite soldiers he wanted to enroll in his guard. The exchange was made and this fantastic puzzle in amber was transported from Berlin to St. Petersburg. In 1755 a certain Rastrelli was finally able to reconstruct and install the amber cabinet between the green dining room and the great picture gallery in Catherine the Great's palace at Tsarkoye Selo. But the story doesn't stop there, Superintendent. In fact, at this point it becomes even more exciting.”

“Cabarete”: the sign announcing the city had a radical effect on the driver's behavior, unless the effect was produced by what he was about to say. Mister Blue turned his tanned face and South Seas blue eyes toward Mallock. He was no longer looking ahead of him, and accordingly the car was now moving very slowly. Behind him, people began to blow their horns, but not excessively. Mister Blue and his pickup were known in these parts.

“Two centuries later, two German officers who knew about Hitler's destructive intentions conceived a plan to save this little marvel. With the help of their men they managed, during the invasion of St. Petersburg, to dismantle the whole room and get it out of the country. The rest of the story is a little vague. The panels are supposed to have moved through Prussian palaces before disappearing again. The legend was born. Since then, historians, treasure-hunters, and members of the amber guild have been trying to find out what happened to the panels without ever being able to learn anything further. The location of the amber room is still completely unknown. Unless you listen to certain rumors.”

“What rumors?”

“More about that later!”

With that, Mister Blue's car stopped in front of the hotel.

“Many thanks for the ride . . . and for the story,” Mallock said with a smile.

“I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow, and
tómalo suave, ‘commisare.'
” 

In his penthouse apartment, a crate of mangos and red bananas was waiting for Amédée. After a long, lukewarm shower, he started to fall asleep as he was watching the sun sink into the sea. At the last moment, he asked his mind to give him a clue, a lead, something that would keep Manuel from being given the maximum sentence. But he dreamed only of the clicking of boot heels and rooms covered in amber.

Mallock's headache was still with him in the tropics.
It also wanted to know the exoticism of the mangroves and bromeliads, the colorful beaches, the aromas of the jungle and the unfamiliar bamboo. It dreamed of the turquoise transparency of the creeks and the tentacular clumps of polyps. So it had gotten him out of bed around 4
A.M.
: “Let's go for a walk, you big lazybones, I'll hurt you less,” it had promised him.

So the superintendent went out into the night to walk on the sand and try to calm his old companion. The earth was still warm from the preceding day's sun. Amédée looked up at the stars. This time, he recognized the friendly constellation that connected him with his son: the Great Bear. It was there, but upside down, a little sheepish, its neck lying along the horizon. He stretched out on the sand, upside down too, with his head toward the sea. He spoke to Thomas, told him about the beach and the palm trees “that you would have liked so much.” Then he thought of Amélie and closed his eyes, suddenly nauseated by his solitude. Imprisoned in a coma from which she had never returned, she'd been buried with Mallock's ring and his heart. They spoke to each other, he about the past, she about the future, her Amédée's future. She told him: “I'm keeping your ring, take back your life.” He ended up saying: “Yes.”

 

Mallock returned to his suite around 8
A.M.
and called André.

“You were right not to come,” André told him. “I got home at midnight. Forty-eight hours from now, if you have the repatriation agreement, you can take him away. He will need a good year of physical therapy before he'll recover full use of his shoulder and especially his knee.”

“Can I come by to see him?”

“I don't know. In principle, yes, but call me a little later, I'm going back there. By then I'll have examined him again and I can give you an answer.”

Mallock thanked him and hung up. Then he called Julie, as he had promised before leaving. He did his best to reassure her.

“Don't worry, he's out of danger and I'm going to be able to bring him back to France. Where he is now the hygienic conditions are satisfactory. We can talk about the trial later.”

Then he added, to calm her: “I haven't had my last word yet.”

“Is he guilty?”

“I'm afraid he is.”

“Did he tell you why he did it?”

Julie's voice was trembling.

“He wasn't really in a condition to be questioned, but when he woke up he repeated that he has no idea.”

“That's inconceivable. People don't go off to the other side of the world to kill somebody without a motive.”

“Except for professional killers,” Mallock replied, without realizing what he was saying.

“What are you talking about? Manu would never . . . ”

“Calm down, Julie. I have to consider everything. If I don't keep a completely open mind in an investigation of this kind, I may as well give up. He killed a man, comma, he will be convicted, period. We have to do our best to see to it that he comes out of it as well as possible. And believe me, I'm going to do everything I can.”

Julie thanked him at least three times before she hung up. Mallock left his room, wondering how he was going to be able to keep his promise.

 

Jean-Daniel was waiting for him at the Blue Paradise. He was so friendly that each of his customers must have believed he was special. Mallock ate a copious breakfast. The fruit he'd eaten the day before had barely held him until the morning, and he was dying of hunger.

At 9
A.M.
, he had to face the facts: the policeman who was supposed to come pick him up and take him to the police station and prison in Sosúa was not there. He went out on the sidewalk and yielded to the temptation to take a
motoconcho
. Basically, two dollars to get him safe and sound to his destination on a motorbike. He told himself that the wind would do him good, and of course he didn't know the nickname the locals gave these strange taxis:
muertoconchos
.

After having risked his life at every turn, every pothole, every animal or human being they encountered, his ass and his back hurting, his hair in disarray, he arrived in front of a big building painted green and bearing a sign:
Policía Nacional
.

“Sosúa police station,” his driver confirmed, smiling amid a big cloud of dust.

Mallock felt a sort of dizziness, a great retrospective fear of the kind in which your whole life passes before your eyes in three seconds. With his thighs and calves traumatized, his legs could hardly hold him up. But he was alive. So he smiled back, grateful to have been spared by the island's merciful gods.