by Michel Bussi
Clotilde did the same, barely braking now. There were only four bends to take and she clung to the hope that she could still make it, that she could confront the red car, cut it off, crash into it, catapulting her own car into the ravine that she had survived long ago. It wouldn’t matter, if the crash saved her mother. Her daughter.
The Fuego was continually gaining speed like a rocket on a ramp.
The parapet had been raised, Clotilde remembered, she had noticed that when they left the bunches of wild thyme by the roadside. The wooden fence had been replaced by a small stone wall half a metre high. A vehicle, even going at speed, would bounce off the parapet, go into a spin, it might even flip, or carry on along the road, bouncing between the wall and the mountain like a mad ball in a gulley, but without toppling over the edge.
Two last bends, barely three hundred metres.
Too late.
In a second the Fuego would crash at full speed into the wall that separated it from a twenty-metre drop, bristling with thousands of rocks, red with blood, and anxious to quench a twenty-seven-year thirst.
Clotilde closed her eyes.
The Fuego was still there, behind her eyelids. In the sky, her father took a hand that she had thought was her mother’s, Nicolas chose to smile, to die smiling.
Cassanu cried out, gripped the wheel of the Passat and wrenched it to the left. The car bumped against the slope, beheading some branches of giant fennel that smashed in drops of gold against the windscreen, but it didn’t stop, it barely slowed down.
9.02 p.m.
The Passat was jumping about too much, still going at full speed, as the tyres struck the hollows and pebbles of the hillside. Despite herself, Clotilde opened her eyes.
She saw the Fuego deviate slightly from its trajectory, as if to avoid crashing straight into the stone wall above the precipice. For a moment, she thought the vehicle was merely going to skid along the wall, scraping against the stone, to lose a wing, or a door, but then slow down, brake, stop.
But no. She hadn’t understood. Jakob Schreiber must have photographed that turning a hundred times, studying it, taking a survey for his final moment.
The German didn’t crash against the parapet as her father once had; he threw the Fuego at an area just beside it, wooden logs that overlooked not the rocky slope, but an even steeper inlet.
The tree-trunks exploded. For one unreal moment the Fuego hung weightless in the sky.
Clotilde knew that her mother was inside.
That her daughter was inside.
The Fuego fell. A vertiginous plunge down to where, twenty metres below, the sea smashed against the rocks.
It was over.
65
23 August 2016, 9.02 p.m.
The Passat reached Petra Coda less than ten seconds later. Clotilde put her foot down hard on the brake. The car swerved and slid a few metres along the road, stopping in the middle, and preventing any other car from getting by.
Clotilde left it there, without even bothering to turn on the hazard lights, turn off the engine or put on the handbrake. She tore open the door and rushed over to the wooden barricade shattered a few moments earlier by the Fuego.
The red car was floating on the water, twenty metres below, bobbing on the waves like a cork among the reefs. It was impossible to tell what state the bodywork was in, but Clotilde imagined that it must have bounced against the rocks, twice, ten times; in spite of its speed, there was little chance that it had plunged straight into the deep, narrow inlet. Second by second, it began to sink.
Two thirds of the Fuego was already covered by the sea.
Another few seconds and it would sink once and for all into the turquoise water. She surprised herself by hoping that Valentine and her mother had been killed outright, on impact, that they would be spared the slow agony of drowning.
Her eyes smarted as she stared at the metal carcase barely protruding above the water.
My God.
Only the rear window was still above the waterline now, washed by the waves. Clotilde thought she could make out two silhouettes, two frantically moving shadows.
Was it an illusion?
She would never know. A moment later there was nothing above the surface but a joyful foam taking possession of its playground, enjoying itself once more by throwing a thousand fleeting bubbles at the bare rocks.
‘Get out of the way!’
Clotilde didn’t even think. She got out of the way.
Cassanu went right up to the edge, then he dived.
In a flash, Clotilde remembered a conversation she had had with her Papé a long time ago: ‘All the young Corsicans used to dive into the sea there … your grandfather was the most daring of them all.’ She bit her lip hard.
Could a body, after all these years, preserve the memory of that perfect balance you had to attain in order to dive twenty metres without it shattering against the surface of the water? Maintain that ability to concentrate that was indispensable if you wanted to control your fall; aim for exactly the right point, reach the sea without crashing into the jaws of the cliff which parted only for a few metres? Remain sufficiently clear-sighted, to the very last moment, in order to judge the depth of the basin and avoid the submerged red icebergs planted like stakes in a moat?
Yes.
Yes, Cassanu’s body had not forgotten a thing.
Was it mere chance, or had Papé always been an exceptionally good diver? His leap described the perfect trajectory, a straight line, deftly avoiding the granite spikes so that he disappeared into the eddying water at the precise spot where the Fuego had plunged.
Nothing.
Clotilde saw nothing for endless moments. Cassanu hadn’t survived his fall, he had sacrificed himself, he hadn’t jumped in to save them, he had committed suicide to avoid facing his guilt.
Sirens wailed behind her. Doors slammed. Rushing footsteps, making the tarmacked road surface vibrate. Clotilde turned her head reluctantly for a moment, just a moment, before turning back to the water again.
All that mattered was the surface of that turquoise pool.
Pray pray pray.
Pray to see a body, a head, a hand splitting the surface.
Behind her, the new arrivals were moving about. Clotilde had had time to recognise, among the four or five uniformed officers, Captain Cadenat, Sergeant Cesareu Garcia, his daughter Aurélia, and Franck.
Franck had done what needed to be done. He had alerted the police, and they had come quickly; but what did the swiftness of their reaction matter now? One minute too late might as well have been an eternity.
Franck took her hand. Clotilde didn’t resist.
An eternity.
The Mediterranean never gave anything back, never.
Clotilde’s heart exploded.
‘There!’
Papé’s head and shoulders had just emerged; he was holding a body in his arms. Clotilde could see how desperately he was trying to lift it from the water. At last its head, its neck, its shoulders appeared.
Valou!
Alive.
Her daughter’s long brown hair floated like tentacles around her face. Franck gripped Clotilde’s hand even tighter. Valou didn’t cough, she didn’t spit salt water from her lungs, her mouth was covered with a bandage.
‘Shit!’ her husband shouted. ‘She’s bound and gagged, she won’t be able to make it!’
The rocks at the bottom of the inlet were too sheer, almost vertical and smooth-sided. There was no chance of Cassanu, let alone Valou, being able to hold on to them.
Cassanu had already dived again. Valou was floating as best she should, opening crazed eyes, probably using her legs – Clotilde didn’t know if they were tied or not – trying to keep herself on the surface.
‘She won’t make it,’ Franck said again. ‘Throw her a rope, damn it, a lifebelt, anything!’
The policemen looked at each other, perplexed. They had leapt into their vans as soon as Franck had called them, but had prepared for a kidna
p situation, not a sea rescue. They could never have imagined … They were waiting for the fire service, who were on the way.
Valou was trying desperately to keep herself horizontal on the surface of the water, but the waves were too powerful, rocking her back and forth before exploding against the rocks. Each one seemed as if it might drag her under, each one covered her as it swept past, but Valentine reappeared as soon as the wave subsided.
She was clinging on.
How can you cling to a void? To liquid?
Clotilde shouted, since her daughter had no voice.
‘Damn it all, is no one else going to jump in?’
The men hesitated.
The opening in the rock was narrow, the drop vertiginous, there were so many boulders sticking out of the water that you would have had to be a professional diver even to think about risking it. Even a good amateur hadn’t a chance in ten of making it, without missing and hitting the rocks.
Franck was the first to climb over the parapet.
‘We must be able to get down. Find a way, jump from lower down.’
He slid a few metres on his bottom, holding on to the branches of the few clumps of broom that grew among the rocks. The four policemen followed him.
‘Quick!’ Clotilde cried again.
Papé had just resurfaced. He looked exhausted, his body racked by coughing, spitting water, blood, his guts, but he was holding another body. With the last of his strength, he lifted it up to the surface.
Maman!
Eyes closed. Unconscious.
But she was breathing, she was definitely breathing. Because if Papé was trying to keep her alive, to save the woman he had hated so much, the one he had sentenced to life imprisonment, it was because she was alive!
This time, Cassanu didn’t dive again. He passed an elbow under Palma’s arms, the way you might support a floating package, a deflated mattress, a sagging life-jacket. With his other arm, he tried to reach Valentine.
They would only be able to survive like that for a few moments.
Franck and the policemen were stuck half-way down. Trying to climb down had been a very poor idea. Without equipment, there was no way of doing it – there were no further bushes to cling to, the walls of the inlet were almost vertical, and there were other rocks below so it was impossible to jump. The one narrow fissure that also led down to the inlet was back up level with the road. They only noticed it now. Too late. They had to climb back up.
Still no sign of the firemen.
It’s hopeless, Clotilde thought.
Well, as there was nothing else for it … After all, Cassanu had given it a go.
Clotilde stepped forward and prepared herself. Never in her life had she dived from a board higher than three metres.
Too bad.
A firm hand held her back, gripping her wrist.
The hand of a giant, the kind you don’t resist. Sergeant Cesareu Garcia didn’t let go, didn’t speak, he merely gave her a look that said: no, that’s enough, enough people have died, one more sacrifice wouldn’t help anyone.
There were only three of them now, standing beside the broken barrier.
Cesareu, Aurélia and her.
‘Let go of me.’
She tried to pull away, but the sergeant didn’t budge. Clotilde felt a wave of hysteria welling up inside her, she had to act, she couldn’t let her daughter and her mother perish like this.
‘Listen,’ said Aurélia.
Listen to what?
The wind was blowing from the sea. Perhaps it would carry the sound of a fire engine’s siren coming towards the mountains? She listened intently but could hear nothing. Nothing but the wind blowing stronger and stronger, at least that was how it seemed to her, creating waves that were getting higher and higher, and ever more deadly.
She lowered her eyes.
Cassanu had managed to get hold of Valou’s shoulder, he was still clutching Palma, and they all pressed tight together, like bales fallen from a cargo-ship. Floating desperately, being dragged under, rising again, shaken, soaking, exhausted. With no other hope but to hold on, hold on, hold on.
Why? Until when? Who could reach out a hand to help them?
‘Listen,’ Aurélia repeated.
For years Clotilde would reproach herself. She never really got over the fact that Aurélia had recognised the sound before she did, even if she had almost never heard it. That engine noise.
In the moment, Clotilde merely poured all of her emotion into her voice, shouting as loud as she could:
‘There! There!’
She called out to Papé:
‘Hang on there! Please God, hang on, you’ll be rescued!’
A hundred metres away, behind the last rocky cape that concealed the rest of the Revellata Peninsula, the Cave of the Sea-Calves, the lighthouse, and Punta Rossa, a small boat had just appeared.
Bigger than a rowing-boat, smaller than a trawler.
The Aryon.
Engine down, splitting the waves, slaloming easily among the reefs that it seemed to know by heart. Natale, at the wheel, wore a red windcheater and his fair hair was whipping about in the wind.
Never had Clotilde’s heart beaten so hard.
Within a few moments, Natale had closed in on the three bodies floating in the water. He turned off the engine and leaned down to grab Valentine first.
It wasn’t easy, the powerful waves made the boat roll as soon as the engine was turned off; Valou, her arms trapped, was unable to help him. Only Cassanu was able to help, pushing the girl’s body up, while trying not to let go of Palma. Natale leaned so far over the railing it looked as if he might fall in.
At last he managed to haul Valentine into the bottom of the boat.
Palma’s turn.
She was moving. She was moving now. Enough so that her body wasn’t a dead weight. She did her best to help them, and curled up so that Cassanu Idrissi could pass one arm under her waist, another under her thighs, and raise her up towards Natale as a groom carries his bride across the threshold of their new shared home.
Clotilde had a sense that their eyes met in that moment. That some words were exchanged in that look.
In Papé’s eyes, she read, ‘Sorry.’
In her mother’s, ‘Thank you.’
Palma joined her granddaughter lying on the floor of the Aryon.
Saved.
Finally Natale held out his hand to Cassanu.
Papé had fought for almost seven minutes against the sea, the waves, the current, the rocks.
The battle was not equal, yet he had succeeded. He had held his ground.
The old man was exhausted.
At least that was what the police concluded, it was what the Corsican journalists put on their front pages, the story the hunters told, with great pride, at the Euproctes bar. It was even what Clotilde would say to Valou, and Palma, every time either of them asked her how it had ended.
That Papé had fought to his very last breath.
None of the witnesses ever said what they thought they had seen.
Natale Angeli held out his hand. It was barely a few centimetres from Cassanu’s.
He didn’t take it. He let himself sink.
66
23 August 2016, 9.30 p.m.
There had seldom been so many people on the coastal road at Petra Coda.
Not for at least twenty-seven years, at any rate.
Parked in the midst of this complete chaos were three fire engines, two ambulances, four police vans, and an impressive number of tourist vehicles stuck on the only road connecting Ajaccio and Calvi; only a few motorbikes and the evening athletes – joggers and cyclists – managed to get past, turning their heads towards the precipice as they did so.
Firemen had thrown down a rope ladder and were securing it to the rocks with steel grips, a coastguard Zodiac searched the inlet where Cassanu had disappeared, but in vain. The Aryon was firmly moored using steel chains that complemented the polyester ropes. Once it had been stabilised
in this way, Palma and Valou were helped up the rope ladder, using a winch, and framed on either side by battle-scarred rescuers who were more used to saving hikers from the mountain tracks.
Thus escorted, they reached the road, and were almost obliged to force their way through a row of rubberneckers, policemen and locals: Keep back, keep back. The granddaughter and her grandmother were wrapped in a gilded foil blanket. It’s all fine, it’s all fine, an emergency doctor who looked like a young Harrison Ford had quickly pronounced, but he still insisted on them being transported to the medical centre in Ajaccio. The ambulance door was wide open, the stretchers prepared, the engine was running, the driver drew on his cigarette, ready to get going. Palma raised a weary hand: Gently, gently. Clotilde barely had time to hug her daughter and her mother before the first-aid workers separated them: Later, madam, later.
Natale was the last to climb up to the road using the rope ladder, without the aid of a winch or an escort. Cesareu Garcia helped him off the final rung, with a firm hand to hoist him up, a sound clap on the back, a physical, manly, almost silent way of saying: Well played, my boy, the kind that is enough for an exhausted man returning from heroic deeds, leaving the fiery pit or exiting the pitch victorious.
Franck had walked a short way towards the cars to fetch Valentine some dry clothes, a pullover, a pair of trousers, some trainers.
Aurélia was chatting to Harrison Ford, adopting the professional persona of a nurse who managed such situations with competence and compassion.
Clotilde, without even thinking about it, found herself face to face with Natale once more. She still found him incredibly attractive, with his blue eyes swept by his salty hair, his untroubled, heroic smile. She was filled with an irresistible desire to throw her arms around him, a spontaneous impulse, a natural and obvious need to shout Thank you, thank you, thank you into his ear, and to tell him that she had always known he would untie the moorings, that the Aryon would sail again, that they only had to go back down the rope ladder, set sail and run away. Her daughter, her mother had been saved; they had been found again. Everything had been sorted out. It was time to go.