Cemetery of Swallows

by Mallock;

  “Really? That long? You’re hard on me. But then you must have your reasons,” Mallock said to her. “And then it’ll spare me having to look at your ugly mug. I mean, the one you’ve been wearing for the last two weeks. You look like you’re going to a funeral and that affects everybody’s morale.”

  Julie hesitated for only a few seconds. She’d probably just been waiting for an opportunity to talk about it.

  “It’s my brother,” she finally managed to say.

  “Manu? What’s up with him?”

  The mention of this name revived all the feelings and concerns the young woman had been bottling up inside her for several days. Her tears were welling up behind her eyelids, ready to overflow them.

  She tried to speak: “He’s been . . . They’ve . . . ”

  But she began to sob, furious with herself, and ashamed to let herself be seen crying, especially in front of her superintendent.

  “Excuse me, I’m sorry. Usually I can . . . ”

  Mallock went up to her. He felt like a dolt for having talked about her “ugly mug.” She fell into his arms. Embarrassed and worried, he awkwardly stroked her back. Then he continued with a series of little taps, more masculine and less compromising. But also more ridiculous.

  “Only macho jerks and hard-ass bitches don’t cry.”

  Then she opened up and told him about her sadness and her little girl’s fear of losing her big brother.

  Under Superintendent Mallock’s hard and intransigent shell there were herds of tenderness galloping free. Julie had always suspected as much. Today, as he held her in his arms, she had proof of it. She could clearly hear the hoofbeats of those herds.

  Once she’d calmed down, Amédée helped her to a seat and went back behind his desk to make a cup of tea for her. That was one of the rare things he knew about women. Those marvelous hominids had very few sorrows that couldn’t be assuaged by a cup of tea, a nice bouquet of flowers, or the purchase of a red jacket. He had only Lipton’s on hand.

  He performed the tea ceremony, like a kind of geisha. Like a man who respected traditions, at least when they were culinary. He manipulated the delicate Chinese porcelain with his big, meaty hands, lifting his pinky and bowing fussily. He scalded the teapot, poured boiling water on the tea leaves, emptied it out immediately, and repeated the procedure. When he finally decided to serve Julie her tea, his associate’s reaction seemed to prove him right as soon as she had taken a second sip. At the third sip, she began to contemplate the bottom of her cup, running the pretty tip of her tongue over her upper lip. At the fourth, she straightened up. At the fifth, she began her story.

  It was the first time Mallock had heard about the case. It was no longer a matter of a missing person; now it was a murder investigation. And what a murder! Her brother had just been wounded after having, it seemed, killed an old man in cold blood on the other side of the world.

  She knew nothing about the crime itself except the memorable sentence he’d uttered when he was arrested. Whether it was a motive that was still incomprehensible or a simple expression of madness, to the policemen who came to arrest him Manu had said: “I killed him because he had killed me.”

  The plane’s air-conditioning system is setting records.

  Amédée reaches up to adjust the ventilation control with his big fingers. A refined bear of a man, he has slender wrists onto which a butcher’s hands seemed to have been grafted. Glowing eyes like precious stones light up a face that is half Nick Nolte and half Depardieu, with the same hank of blond hair, a shapeless nose, and a delicate mouth. His body, six feet tall and weighing 220 pounds, makes him look more like the American, and it will not be too big for solving this unlikely case. Mallock, who likes to be in control of his environment and the development of his investigations, is preparing himself for some trying days. It will take two or three superintendents to cope with the strange enigma with which Manuel Gemoni is about to present him.

  That’s fine, Mallock is several.

  His thoughts return to Julie and what she told him in Paris.

  “Tell me everything, right from the beginning. What happened to Manu?”

  Mallock was fond of Julie’s brother.

  “It’s a very common thing, but when it happens to you, it’s not the same, it’s tragic,” the young captain began.

  “The facts, please. What happened?”

  “Manu disappeared exactly two weeks ago, without the slightest explanation. Jules and I looked for him everywhere. No gambling debts, no enemies, no depression or likelihood of suicide. As you know, he’s married to a Japanese woman, Kiko, and they have just had a marvelous little daughter.”

  She took a deep breath; she was still on the verge of tears.

  “Manu is two years younger than I, but I’ve always considered him my big brother. I don’t know if you remember, but he has a degree in archaeology and is a teacher-researcher at the College de France, where he works on everything that concerns ancient Egypt. He is sought after the world over.”

  Julie was proud of Manu. No doubt he must be proud of her, too. The young woman had had a brilliant career in the police. She was now entering what Amédée called his blood brotherhood, his right arm, a virtual hand whose five fingers corresponded to his five main associates.

  At five feet tall, with her wasp-waisted, feather-light body, Julie was its little finger. She stuck her nose into everything and used her pretty ears exactly where they were needed. She had no peer for uncovering the most . . . secret information. Mallock suspected she was making unhesitating use of her Corsican family’s various networks. When he said that it was his little finger that had told him, most of the time he was referring to Julie. Her acute intelligence and her ability to synthesize information were a kind of recourse for Mallock, a lifebuoy for use in the event that his own system of reflection failed.

  “Frankly, how could anyone have had anything against him? He is . . . was happy, and made everyone around him happy, too.”

  “That’s true, he’s a good guy,” Mallock agreed.

  “Plus,” she went on, piling up her arguments as if she were trying to finish convincing him, “they’d just moved into a spectacular apartment with a view of the Madeleine. I’ve never seen him so radiant. To the point of being annoying,” she added, trying to add a touch of humor.

  “And all that,” Mallock concluded, “didn’t prevent him from packing a bag and going out the door to kill an old man on the other side of the world?”

  “I know, it’s completely absurd!”

  “After all, Julie, people don’t kill somebody for no reason at all! This guy over there may be responsible for the death of one of his friends, or . . . ”

  To shut him up, she sniffed, with a charming wrinkling of her nose.

  “No, among the people around him, no one died, except for one of our aunts whom he adored, but it was a natural death, apparently.”

  “You know, Julie, there’s always a reason for things, even if it escapes us at the time.”

  “That’s just what Jules has been telling me from the start. But after all, you know Manu, he’s a model of balance and moderation. When he was a child, he was already wisdom itself. In a baby, that was pretty astonishing. People said he was the reincarnation of an old soul. Mama called him her ‘Little Gandhi.’ He didn’t even have the usual childhood illnesses, or go through an annoying phase, even when he was an adolescent. He had no weaknesses, none. Except, maybe . . . ”

  Mallock encouraged her to continue by simply nodding his head.

  “His only weak point was his fear of forests and the dark. Ever since we were children, it had been my job to protect him and reassure him when night fell. But even that peculiar panic has never prevented him from being one of the most courageous men I know. Once, when he was seven, I got lost in a little wood east of Ajaccio. In the middle of the night, he came to look for me.
He was terrified and dripping with sweat, but he found me and took me home.”

  Julie repressed a huge sob before saying something that touched Mallock’s heart.

  “Today, I’m the one who has to take him home.”

  The Airbus’s engines are humming with a reassuring regularity. At the end of the aisle, the food cart has just appeared. The sound of glasses clinking and liquids being poured. Amédée will soon be able to get some sustenance. And he likes to eat, and drink, too. A double whiskey, that will relax everything, the body and the mind, in a single, saving wave.

  As for the rest, as an experienced man used to the trials of life and the wrath of heaven, he has learned to guard against excessive hopes. He has given this meal that is advancing toward him one and only one objective, that of filling part of the void he has in his stomach. Period. But the naïve fellow has once again expected too much of the gods’ magnanimity. An unidentifiable chunk of meat swims among the remains of lukewarm vegetables. He waves it away and closes his eyes again.

  “I’m the one who has to take him home,” Julie had said gravely a few days earlier. Mallock had looked at her with tenderness, that particular tenderness he reserved for the marvelous little girls who had become women, courageous, beautiful women. Yes, her brother was a good guy and he had a wonderful sister. With her very light hazel eyes, her olive skin, her short hair, and her little, slightly hooked nose, she was beautiful enough to eat. But what made her still more beautiful was her lively mind, along with the methodical, stubborn side that is peculiar to feminine intelligence. Mallock was very lucky to have her on his team. And Jules was lucky to have her as his partner.

  “You hadn’t been able to track him down before these recent events?”

  “Yes, I had, just before I learned about this murder business last night, I’d finally found out where he’d gone. Too late.”

  “Why didn’t you ask the whole team for help right from the beginning, instead of trying to find your brother by yourself? In the Fort, within the blood brotherhood, we take care of each other. You ought to know that.”

  There was a touch of reproach in what Mallock said.

  “You were all busy with the most recent developments in the ‘massacre’ case, and I didn’t want to mess up everything with a personal problem that was far less important than the horror we had to confront this summer. I took advantage of Jules’s convalescence to put him to work. I really thought we were going to be able to handle it by ourselves.”

  Jules was still recovering from the bullet wound that had sent him to the hospital during the previous investigation. It had struck him in the forehead but was small-caliber, and it had saved him by passing between the two lobes of his brain. He had only a small, crescent-shaped scar.

  Mechanically, Mallock turned on the two tape recorders that he used so that he could listen to depositions again.

  “Tell me about the beginning of your investigation.”

  “ Jules and I began with the supposed contents of his bag, as it had been reconstituted by Kiko. She’d noticed the absence of certain clothes and toilet articles. Then we viewed together the videocassette that he’d constantly been watching and that, according to his wife, is supposed to have started it all.”

  “What kind of video?”

  “A documentary on historical and ethnological stuff. Manu not only watched it several times, but also took digital photos of it. He must have taken some of them with him, but the ones that remained allowed me to tell what he was looking at so attentively.”

  “The parts of the documentary that interested him?”

  “Exactly. There were one or two that seem to have fascinated him. In those pictures, we can see a town square, a few trees with trunks painted mauve, the color of a local political party, so far as I could understand, and a church constructed from pink earth. In fact, it is the presence in the photo of black people with green eyes and red hair that allowed us to identify the village: San José de Ocoa.”

  “Because?”

  “It’s a specific ethnic group found in only four places in the world. Ocoa was the only one that had the same vegetation. The church provided the final proof. In the film, that was also the most obvious thing.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “No, the crime squad and the guys from Foreign Affairs came to Manu’s house and confiscated all his personal effects. The morons even took fingerprints off the cassette and the tape recorder, as if they were weapons. Conservative steps, they said. They were meticulous.”

  At the time, Mallock felt personally insulted by such a procedure. Then he calmed down. Wouldn’t he have done the same thing?

  “That’s okay. I’ll take care of that later. On the other hand, I’d like you to have your brother’s blood tested as soon as possible. Have the authorities in Santo Domingo send us the blood. We have to find out everything about his physical condition. He might have been drugged or caught some disease there.”

  Julie felt a little better. Mallock’s use of the pronoun “I” helped her enormously. Not only were she and her close friends and relatives no longer the only ones, but the Mallock machine was in gear. And she was in a position to know how effective that was.

  Somewhat reassured, she went on: “After discovering where and when he’d gone, I had no difficulty in confirming his departure. I borrowed Ken’s computers and connected to the databases of the airline companies and the customs and immigration authorities. In two hours we found the schedule and the number of his flight. I also discovered that he’d paid for his ticket in cash and, more disturbingly, hadn’t bought a return ticket.”

  A one-way ticket to the ends of the earth, Mallock murmured, closing his eyes. And all those miles to go murder an old man whom he didn’t even know. What could he have been thinking?

  It seemed to Julie that she heard her superintendent’s brain starting up, like a powerful steam engine. She felt the heavy circumvolutions of his imagination shaking the ground under her feet, eating up the steel rails she’d just put in front of him. She knew he wouldn’t stop until he’d reached the terminus: the solution of the enigma.

  She was infinitely grateful to him.

  The food cart comes back to his row:

  “Sorry to have awakened you again, superintendent.”

  Superintendent! Damn, he’s been recognized again. Since the last investigation, he’s had trouble not being noticed.

  “What would you like to drink?”

  The flight attendant’s smile is so dazzling that Mallock catches himself counting her teeth. It isn’t possible that she has only thirty-two. At least twice that many.

  “Whiskey, please.”

  “Ice cubes?”

  Mallock looks at the label on the bottle:

  “Yes, please. And a little soda.” A nectar like that can be drowned ruthlessly.

  After the past, the future. Mallock has started thinking about what he has to do when he gets there. Dublin, the big boss of the 36, the occupier of the prestigious Office No. 315 and his direct superior, had been clear. If he was okay with Amédée being responsible for this investigation, even though it involved someone who was close to him in a way, that was because his favorite superintendent had improved with age, like a fine wine whose bottle was embellished with the flattering label: “As seen on television.” His presence would satisfy the egos of the local authorities and it would be easier for him to get access to the investigation’s files. The procedure of extradition might thereby be simplified. For its part, the chancellery had begun working to arrange the repatriation of its citizen, probably with the help of Interpol, the Dominican Republic having contacted the international police organization.

  The old man Manuel had killed was named Tobias Darbier. He had a French passport. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had emphasized that the victim and the murderer were of the same nationality. A little incentive on the ec
onomic level had made it possible to foresee a satisfactory outcome. A “transfer agreement” had been signed, and then everything had moved very quickly. But many promises had been made in order to permit this extradition.

  Far too many promises, Amédée was to discover later on.

  For once, he thought he would play the starring role, that of the savior. The one who is awaited and who arrives at the right moment, with trumpets, drums, and lightning bolts. Zorro the horseman, the great superintendent, all askew, with his little cape flying behind him. Mallock the centaur and flawless knight. Obsolete and ridiculous, like a medieval hero with his plumes and revealing tights.

  As a child in the schoolyard, Amédée was already the boy who gallops straight ahead, slapping his thigh, shooting invisible arrows and defeating a whole army of bad guys all by himself. Mallock had the hero’s whole panoply. And while he’d gotten older, he hadn’t grown up. So yes, he took pleasure in this mission. He would go find little Gandhi and take him home.

  A mixture of Cyrano and Don Quixote, Mallock was poorly adapted to his time and to life on Earth as a whole. He had seen hypocrisy and mendacity win out and the words of the Just become inaudible, but he continued nonetheless to fight to save sand castles from the rising tide. An emperor of paradox and the king of the oxymoron, Mallock combined in a single heart modest pride, tears, and fierceness, tender hardness, empathy, and misanthropy. Thanks to a kind of melancholy-based glue, he managed to construct out of all these contradictions a homogeneous, almost monolithic whole. People talk about the hopes of youth; Mallock was instead the despair of age.

  A questionnaire appears, falling from on high. Great, something to do. He starts to check the “tourism” box, but then chooses “business” instead, wondering what diplomatic intrigues and administrative complications—two redundancies in a row—he is going to have to cope with. The Dominican authorities no longer oppose Manuel Gemoni’s extradition or having him tried in France, on the condition that they be allowed to send two observers to monitor the trial as a whole. Regarding that aspect of the accord, it only remains to choose the observers’ hotel—the George V or the Crillon?—and to agree on the amount of their expense account. Aside from that, the Dominican officials ask that everything be done in due form and in conformity with their national prerogatives. Face has to be saved, and no one must be able to interpret this accord as an indication of weakness on their part. Dispatching someone like Mallock, and not a simple captain, helped calm the last local sensitivities.