by Mallock;
Mallock was in a position to know that his own country had no lessons to teach. From the judges who cost too much and commercial tribunals that could be paid in stardust and a Scorpio luxury cruise to Saint-Martin, to venal Attorneys-General, crooked lawyers, and pompous magistrates. Wavy blue hair, long neck, and evasions for the 1 P.M. news, then a waxed jacket at night, to read the meters. The feckless judicial system no longer fed on anything but warmed-over ideology, virtuous laxity, and categorical mistakes.
Here, on the island, it was similar, but on a smaller scale, and on a larger scale with fingerprints left almost everywhere. The everyday practice of baksheesh and “greasing palms” was much too developed to be able to claim the slightest discretion.
Mallock had himself announced. And, while he waited, he decided to spare the seat of his pants by standing. A good decision. After only three minutes’ wait, two men came and escorted him to the office of Mr. Juan Antonio Servantes. Amédée felt a kind of regret. He would have liked to be forgotten in a corner so that he could scream and yell, have a pretext for being disagreeable. He was in the mood for that. He could pour into it his fear for Manuel, his sadness for Julie, and all the negative energy accumulated by his own impotence.
But a “Mistah superintendent from Paris” couldn’t be abandoned amid the common people. He was an influential man and this status incontestably put him at the top of the social ladder, alongside the notables who did him the supreme honor of recognizing him as one of their own. Too bad that would have allowed me to avoid waiting, Mallock cynically concluded, following the two henchmen of the official in charge of the Puerto Plata courthouse.
Juan Antonio Servantes resembled the stereotypical image of a white neocolonialist in a banana republic. His shoes, his watch, and his belt were tobacco-colored, made from the same arrogant, duly tanned crocodile skin. He walked toward Mallock, his hand extended to greet him, his shoulders, neck, and chin held excessively high out of his awareness of his office and his importance.
“Superintendent, what a pleasure to meet you!”
His slightly rolled “r” didn’t go well with his appearance. He was very much the handsome Aryan—the eyes, the imposing presence, and the blond hair. Stupidly, Mallock imagined him in an SS uniform. He would have been splendid. Maybe his father wore one of those beautiful black coats?
Prejudice, Amédee said to himself reproachfully.
Servantes’s office was full of files. Clearly he was a busy man. After an hour spent talking and making phone calls together, Mallock revised his judgment. Juan Antonio Servantes wasn’t his cup of tea, but like Delmont, he was doing everything he could, with a great deal of skill and persistence, to pave the way for Manuel’s release and repatriation. Without any fuss or the slightest affectation. What would have already been astonishing in a French bureaucrat became admirable in the case of a tropical expatriate. Everybody made snap judgments on the basis of appearance, but Mallock had no excuse.
To redeem himself, he asked the young official:
“Would you like to finish this conversation over dinner this evening?”
He hoped to be able to take advantage of the occasion to question Servantes about Tobias Darbier.
“I’d love to, Mr. Superintendent. I also have things to tell you. Where would you like to meet?”
“At my hotel, there’s a kind of bar, the Blue Paradise. Do you know it? It’s not very luxurious, but it’s quiet. How about meeting there around 8 o’clock?”
“That’s fine with me, I’ll be there at 8 sharp.”
Mallock thought he heard heels clicking. But with crocodile-skin loafers, that was impossible. He reflected that to make this diplomat really acceptable, the rest of the broomstick up his ass would have to be removed.
Late morning.
Amédée returned to the capital and its National Palace by way of the Matías-Ramón-Mella Bridge, the Avenue of Mexico, and Doctor Delgado Avenue. The famous palace, constructed in 1947 on Trujillo’s orders, was the seat of the executive power. Mallock smiled slightly. Two big pretentious lions framed the royal staircase leading to the imposing, four-story building. Built in a neoclassical style, with all the options and supplements, it was topped by an impressive dome 35 feet high and 36 feet in diameter. The Oficina Central Nacional, Interpol’s central office in the Dominican Republic, had been located there since the country joined the other two hundred-odd other members of the international police agency in 1953.
Superintendent Mallock was well received. He was given several papers to sign and two officials carried out the repatriation in his company. An hour later, he was already outside in the sun again.
He decided to eat lunch on the street: white coconut, red bananas, and green mangos. Enormous clouds were passing overhead in the sky, sweating. But Mallock wasn’t. He was already beginning to get used to the climate and even to feel a certain bliss at having the great yellow circle always present above him.
At exactly 2 o’clock, he arrived at the clinic.
The authorities had posted policemen on guard duty in front of the main entrance and in the two hallways that led to Manuel’s room. This time the superintendent didn’t have to show his papers. The news of his presence, as well as his face, had spread all over the island. A message was waiting for him. Ramón and Jiménez were trying to reach him. A policeman dialed the number for him.
It was Ramón who answered:
“Jiménez says he has new information for you, Commander.”
“He didn’t tell you what it was?”
“No, he wants to tell you himself. He told me it might help Manuel. He would like all four of us to meet.”
Mallock was intrigued. Was this finally a breakthrough in this case?
“I’m just about to question him, could you meet me here?”
“That’s what Jiménez wanted, so far as I could tell, but he told me we’d need authorization to get access to Gemoni’s room.”
“No problem, I’ll put you on the list at the desk. I’ll wait for you.”
Mallock hung up, feeling hopeful. Two halls farther on, he entered Manuel’s new room. Julie’s brother was lying on a makeshift bed. A brand new splint surrounded his knee and his shoulder was in a cast.
He smiled when he saw Mallock appear.
“I’m very glad to see you. Please excuse me for the day before yesterday, but I didn’t even recognize you. I hope this trip around the world didn’t tire you too much, at least? I’m going to try as best I can to help you in your investigation.”
Amédée smiled. This was the real Manuel he had in front of him. With his big, soft eyes and his slightly old-fashioned politeness.
“No problem,” Mallock replied, relieved.
“I must have caused everyone great concern. I’m truly sorry about that.”
Mallock had an idea.
“Wait, I’ll be right back.”
Three minutes later he returned with a cell phone.
“We’re going to try to call your sister. She’s worried sick. I don’t think anything would please her more than to hear your voice.”
“And I’d like to hear hers!”
Mallock dialed Julie’s direct line at the Fort.
“Hello, Julie? Ah! Hi, Jules. Yeah, I’m fine, is Julie around? Thanks.”
He handed the phone to Manu. He realized, with dismay, that his fingers were still all sticky from the mangos he’d eaten for lunch.
“He’s going to put her on. But don’t talk too long, I borrowed the phone from a doctor here.”
Discreetly, he left the room on the pretext of wanting to smoke a cigarette. Something he never did. When he came back five minutes later, Manuel had hung up. His eyes were still wet.
“Thanks with all my heart, Superintendent.”
“Listen, Manu, if you can’t say tu to me, or call me Amédée, at least don’t call me �
��Superintendent.’”
Mallock had a fatherly feeling for Julie’s brother. He’d seen him as a young man, as a young lover, a young husband, and a young papa. Being addressed with the formal vous bothered him a little.
In general, he couldn’t get used to the idea that as he got older, it would become more and more difficult to get people to use the tu with him. Through a kind of pagan superstition, young people said vous to their elders as if, by putting them at a distance linguistically, they hoped to also distance themselves from death.
“Well . . . Amédée. I suppose you’d like me to tell you the whole story.”
“You think?”
9.
Private Clinic of Puerto Plata,
Manuel’s Story
Mallock, after hesitating between the indeterminate color of the sheets and the orange spots that stained the only chair in the room, decided on the bed.
“I’m listening. We all need to know what got into you.”
“I feel that I’m going to disappoint you. What I have to say makes no sense, not even to me.”
Manuel managed to smile. He did not intend to complain or bemoan his fate. He seemed to be more concerned to help this poor superintendent than the other way around, as if his own future were not really important, or in any case much less so than that of the people around him. Mallock remembered his sister’s comparing him to a holy man, or his mother calling him her “Gandhi.” There was something exceptional about Manu, in addition to his big, ebony eyes: a kind of wisdom and sweetness, something tranquil, outside time. With his broad forehead and his brown hair always brushed back, he almost seemed to have come out of a prewar film.
Manuel began his story:
“I got up that morning, making as little noise as possible in order not to wake Kiko and my little honey. I made myself coffee and went into the living room. I slipped into the video player a cassette that contained the documentary my neighbor had kindly recorded for me. I’d decided to watch it before going to market. I always go early to avoid the crowd. And there’s also more choice, isn’t there?”
Mallock smiled his approval.
“Go on with your story!”
Manuel’s eyes looked through Mallock’s body into a dark corner of the room. It was the look of a man trying to extract from the past, from the back of his skull, true images and words, in order to bring them back for his friend.
“Everything is still a little confused, but I remember very well what was on the cassette. Just before the main report, there was a short, horrible piece about Haiti. Two guys in British uniforms were laughing like mad as they devoured the brains of living monkeys. The principal documentary, which was about the manufacture of cigars, took us to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. It was toward the end of the film that my life changed.”
He lowered his head under the weight of the memory.
“I saw an old man’s face, and my heart stopped beating. When he appeared on the screen the first time, the camera followed him for three or four seconds. The second time he appeared, he was crossing a small square, with two swarthy men wearing white suits and dark glasses walking beside him. He passed in front of the camera, at a distance of less than two yards, without even seeming to notice its presence, and then suddenly he turned his head toward the lens. I have absolutely no idea what happened to me. There was no longer anything but that image in my life. For several days, I did everything I could to identify that man and that place. Believe me, I didn’t know who he was, and I didn’t even know then what I would do with that information if I succeeded in finding it.”
Mallock had said nothing; he hadn’t made the slightest gesture. But Manuel couldn’t help attributing negative thoughts to him:
“I’m not a liar, Superintendent, I even abhor lying. I know this story is absurd, but it’s the truth.”
Mallock repeated: “Go on with your story,” as his only encouragement.
“The next day,” Manu continued, “I bought a professional video player and a Betamax-formatted copy of the documentary: “Tobacco and Cigars in the Dominican Republic: A Mirage or a New El Dorado?” Then I spent hours watching these two scenes, using the slow-motion and stop-frame functions. There was something insane about the fascination and hatred that this old man’s face awakened in me. Then I ordered stills of them.”
“They found three of them on you, in poor condition, but still recognizable. Just so you know, that’s enough to prove pre-meditation.”
“There’s no point in denying it, there was in fact premediation,” Manuel admitted, “there’s no doubt on that score. I had only one idea in my head, and that was to find him and kill him. But I swear to you and repeat that I hadn’t the slightest idea of what led me to want to eliminate him.”
“Did he resemble anyone else, somebody who could have justified so much animosity?”
“That’s impossible. I’ve never felt such hatred for anyone in my whole life.”
Mallock thought the young man was very lucky. As for himself, he’d detested more than one man. Enough to fill the four thousand holes of Blackburn, in Lancashire.
“Why did your neighbor record this cassette for you? Maybe he wanted . . . ”
A sad little laugh from Manu.
“My God, leave that poor old man alone. Since I love cigars, he recorded a program broadcast on a cable channel. It was about the breaking of the agreements between Davidoff and Cuba, and the development of the quality of Dominican cigars.”
There was no lack of dead ends in this case. Mallock moved on to another subject:“Do you feel remorse for having killed him?”
“No, on the contrary. I’m glad to have done it. Every time I think about it I feel a kind of ferocious joy, a sense of euphoria. And at the same time that’s unbearable for me. The idea that I killed a man, his blood . . . ”
Manuel fell silent, overcome by emotion.
Mallock was confronted by either a brilliant actor—a possibility that could never be excluded—or one of the annoying enigmas that life sought to put in his way.
A third possibility: Manuel was simply crazy. Schizophrenia could explain the twofold feeling he had with regard to this crime. For a moment he began to hope that the psychiatrist would confirm the young man’s insanity. Wasn’t that the best solution? They take him home and have him cared for. He’s put in a psychiatric hospital and the case is closed. Then he thought of Julie and was angry with himself.
Well then, since he cannot and must not be either mad or guilty, let’s go with the enigma, he said to himself.
That was the only choice left, and fortunately it fell within his competence.
It had grown muggy. Outside, a storm was building. The clock in the room showed 3 o’clock.
Manuel resumed his narrative:
“I spent my first week on the island in a kind of fog. The combination of heat, palm trees, rum, hate, and contradictory feelings seemed totally unreal. But I quickly understood that this man was anything but unknown in the Dominican Republic. People gave me strange looks when I showed them the photos.”
Mallock, who knew Tobias’s history, was not surprised.
“I finally understood that they were afraid of him, terribly afraid. And that’s what caused me the most problems. To get people to talk I had to pay them. A bad idea: they led me all over the island, telling me all sorts of nonsense. I was so blinded by my desire to find this guy and do him in that I didn’t see anything. A stupid moth caught in the glass chimney of a kerosene lamp. Since I didn’t want to use my credit card, for fear it would allow me to be located, I used my remaining cash to buy a weapon. That wasn’t easy, either. All I could find was an old, prewar gun, half rust and half oil, with five bullets in it. After that, I was broke, so I left my lovely four-star hotel and slept outside. A bad trade. But things are odd. I should have been afraid, even terrified at the idea of being on the streets on
an unknown island. But I wasn’t. As I went out the door of the hotel, I felt an extraordinary excitement, a kind of blood-thirsty exaltation. Yes, that’s it. The night smelled of blood and I loved it!”
Mallock listened to Manuel’s account. Contradictory feelings coursed through him, each trying to draw him into its camp.
“It was at that point that I began to fall lower and lower,” Manuel went on. “From village to village, from garbage can to garbage can, I hunted my prey all over the island. I washed myself with water from the ditches or potholes. I ate rotten fruit that had fallen off trucks. I no longer had any pride, any desire, or often any strength, but I never gave up. After a rainstorm that covered me with mud, the sun reappeared and I set out again, coated with dry clay. It was really strange, Amédée, I left a trail of pottery along the road like bread crumbs. Partial molds of my body that detached themselves and fell to the ground, sometimes making a sound like a broken saucer.”
Manu’s face was looking more and more serious.
“I wouldn’t have lasted long if people I met along the way hadn’t helped me. I always found, at the very last minute, someone who gave me a hand, made it possible for me to go on, as if they were aware of the mission I’d been given and approved of its goal as much as they shared the reasons for it. That was all the odder because I myself didn’t know those reasons, and I still don’t.”
Manuel clenched his jaw and furrowed his brow. Fear. Pain. His eyes grew larger and his lips disappeared in the chalky white of his face.
“I was hunting a dangerous animal . . . and on its own territory.”
Mallock saw the significance of this. Manuel looked like he was hallucinating, thus giving preponderant weight to the most rational hypothesis: a fit of madness.
Although puzzled, Mallock encouraged him:
“Go on, Manu.”
“Finally I was given the name of the place that corresponded to the photos I’d brought with me. The people who informed me said it must be San José de Ocoa. I went there and waited. For several days, I don’t know exactly. A month or two, maybe. But one day, the bastard walked past me without paying any more attention to the bum I’d become than the donkey that people were burying. I got up and walked toward him. I recall the second when I was finally able to point my revolver at him. I see everything in my mind’s eye–his suffering, the blue of the sky, the pink of the church, his yellow eyes, and the red impact of my bullets. His fucking revolting brains. Then nothing. I found myself in a hospital, my body imprisoned by pain and my mind submerged by that feeling of accomplishment I already mentioned.”