Cemetery of Swallows

by Mallock;

  On the coffee table in the living room, Mallock had made tea in a superb teapot from the late 1930s. The tea service matched, as did moreover the duplex’s furnishing, which was entirely art moderne.

  “Would someone prefer coffee, or something stronger?”

  Everyone opted for tea, a house mixture composed of Suchong lightened with a classic “breakfast tea.”

  Mallock:

  “My intention in inviting all three of you here was to persuade you to change direction. To re-center and concentrate on Tobias Darbier, to work, I repeat, on everything that might be used as extenuating circumstances.”

  Julie, Kiko, and Master Long drank their tea as one takes a drug. Hoping for immediate relief. They were still stunned by the morning session.

  “I also wanted to suggest that we stop the hypnosis sessions,” Mallock went on. “I found them too dangerous for Manu, and difficult for us who love him. But then during the lunch break I took the time to check certain aspects of his . . . revelations with two historian friends of mine.”

  Long didn’t even look up toward the superintendent. He stirred his tea and seemed to be elsewhere.

  “The names Manu gave us—the corvette captain Kieffer and his unit, the French Squadron, Commander Bourgoin, the first air infantry battalion—are all part of history. As for the Istre bridge and the switchyard at Courcy, these two sites were in fact dynamited before the landing by an unidentified commando unit.”

  All three of the guests put down their teacups. Mallock had caught their attention.

  “And there’s something else that is even more astonishing. His story of the parade of chariots on the Norman coast deeply disturbed me. Annoyed me in fact. But I found on the net a poster for the 1939 parade in Roman garb. It actually took place in various villages on the Côte de Nacre, notably in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. Part of the last recreational activities intended to help people forget about the phony war and say farewell to the 1930s.”

  Julie and Kiko sat there with their mouths open. Mallock even felt obliged to add:

  “Now, if I’ve been able to find this information, Manuel could easily have known about it earlier.”

  “He’d have to have planned this incredible scenario from the beginning. And he’d have to have guessed what it would occur to us to ask him under hypnosis. That’s impossible,” Julie grumbled.

  A silence fell over the apartment. They were all reflecting on what they knew, what they felt. Not sure what to think, they kept quiet.

  Finally, suspecting that it was up to him to speak, Master Long took a deep breath, like an athlete about to lift a great weight:

  “In the hope that it might help you, I’m going to tell you about my experience. But be careful to keep an open, critical mind.”

  He poured himself another cup of tea before beginning.

  “All my father’s knowledge, his works, like mine, led to certain lines of inquiry: life, death, God, reincarnation, our mental structure, what is acquired, what is innate, etc. Given the scientific quality of our approach and the number of cases analyzed, we could have transformed these lines of inquiry into a theory, even a dogma. We always refused to do so. Everyone has a right to his own convictions, his own beliefs. Ideologies, like religions, cruelly impose their certitudes. In fact, the only outcome is war. That is why we’ve never revealed our results. We talk about our methods, we train a few initiates, and we stop there. We do not wish our work to trouble the minds of the millions of people who believe, for instance, in reincarnation, or who reject it. What I can tell you, just between us, is that a tiny number of our patients have regressed toward an earlier life and have been able to describe it with precision. But for all that, without being able to provide us with incontestable proof. On the other hand, what proof do we have of the existence of God, of the resurrection of Christ, or the survival of the soul?”

  Everyone was hanging on the Master’s words.

  He put four sugar cubes in his cup, stirred the liquid, and continued without having drunk any:

  “Let’s look at the side of the supporters of regressions. Over several hundred years, there has never been any scientific proof that can be considered . . . unchallengeable. It’s a little as if the phenomenon were protecting itself against its revelation. Perhaps to keep its status as a belief? I don’t know, but it’s strange. If you think about it, it should be rather easy to provide this proof. You were a pharaoh? Then speak Egyptian to me. You were Marilyn Monroe? Were you murdered? By whom? Why? You were Caesar? Fine, speak to me in Latin.”

  Master Long turned to Kiko and Julie:

  “The way Manuel spoke to us this morning disturbed me, too. Out of curiosity, has he always had this fascination for history and war in particular?”

  The two sisters-in-law looked at each other in silence and then replied in unison: “No.” Kiko went on: “On the contrary, you could never get him to read or watch anything that had to do with weapons.”

  “He can’t stand war films and hates uniforms,” Julie confirmed. “A phobia that can be connected with his fear of the dark and forests. He specialized in ancient Egypt. It’s on that terrain that he might have wanted to ‘play at’ reincarnations.”

  Long sighed. He was familiar with all the resistance he was going to have to confront. So he took the time to taste his sweetened tea:

  “Well, then, since one of us had to begin. After all the reservations I’ve just expressed, I have to tell you all that this morning’s session, as well as the facts you discovered, Superintend­ent, leave me few doubts regarding what happened to Manuel Gemoni.”

  Silence in the apartment.

  “I’m able to state that Manuel cannot lie when he is under a hypnotic process combining ayurvedic techniques and neurostimulation. And he could absolutely not remember anything other than his actual life, or else another one of his lives, even if that is, as I told you, extremely rare.”

  “Meaning?”

  Mallock was getting impatient. Master Long hesitated.

  “It’s difficult to have complete certainty.”

  “A certainty will be good enough,” Amédée said.

  Kiko and Julie were looking at Master Long as if petrified by the expectation of a diagnosis of life or death.

  Long finally said, apparently regretfully:

  “I believe Manuel Gemoni did in fact live an earlier incarnation, in which his name was Jean-François Lafitte.”

  Mallock took a deep breath, looked at the two young women, and concluded:

  “So even if I don’t much like it, our only choice is to continue to plunge into the unknown!”

  22.

  Paris, Prison de la Santé, Tuesday, December 10,

  Third Interrogation under Hypnosis

  Small electric heaters had been installed in the prison. The snow had almost filled all the internal courtyards, and the central heating system needed help to cope with the cold. In the medical room set up for the purpose, a third interrogation, not foreseen in the program, was about to begin.

  Two days had passed since the four people had met at Mallock’s apartment. Two days and two nights that had tested everyone’s nerves. At 3 P.M., a new time imposed by the prison’s administration, the tension in the infirmary was at its height.

  What further horrors was Manuel/Jean-François going to unveil to them?

  Kiko and Julie had the same downcast air. Mallock too. He really no longer knew what to do. And that was an unprecedented situation for him. Few circumstances could escape his powers of deduction and synthesis that way. Understanding and then making rapid, unhesitating decisions had become second nature for him. But here, he had to deal with a complex enigma that offered no irregularity, no crack through which he could penetrate it. And what an enigma! Gentle Manu’s killing of a monster, a woman devoured alive, the landing in June ’44 . . . And the KKK, Ku Klux Klan?

&nbs
p; In fact, there would have been only one way to emerge from this impossible rebus: decide to question Master Long’s techniques and start over from zero: “Stop! I’m not playing this game anymore, enough nonsense, everybody out!” But Mallock wanted to move ahead, to push further this unthinkable hypothesis of reincarnation. Driven by a somewhat morbid fascination, but also by the desire to clear things up. If he backed off now, he’d never know. Sooner or later, it would all fall apart, without his having to intervene. Or so he thought!

  Master Long, who could not be unaware of Mallock’s doubts, spent half an hour more preparing Manuel. He wanted to be sure that the whole process of freeing up the meridians and the chakras was performed perfectly. For him as well, the age of doubt had come.

  After a long telephone conversation the day before, they had decided that the superintendent would ask the questions from now on. On the one hand, to eliminate any suspicion of manipulation, but especially because they were now entering a domain that was primarily that of the police.

  They were dealing with the torture and murder of a woman.

  Mallock began his questioning by identifying the suspect. A classic method: the policeman, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, makes a little pile of papers separated by carbon copies, taps them horizontally and then vertically on his desk to square them up, then slips them into his typewriter. After rotating the platen, he puts his hands on the keys, lifts his eyes, and asks: “Last name, first name, date of birth?”

  But Mallock addressed the recording system:

  “December 10, 2002, 3 P.M., interrogation of the accused, Manuel Gemoni, by Superintendent Amédée Mallock, in the presence of the persons registered in the log.”

  Then without further ado, he asked Manuel:

  “Your name, age, and occupation?”

  “Jean-François Lafitte, twenty-four years old, lieutenant in the Free French forces, serial number 140, 651.”

  “Why did you execute an old man named Tobias Darbier in the Dominican Republic?”

  “He had tortured and murdered me.”

  Mallock felt this sentence like a slap in the face and wanted to counterattack:

  “And this woman, the woman you tortured and killed with a pitchfork, what had she done to you?”

  “I didn’t torture her . . . I put an end to her suffering.”

  “You told us you had eaten her flesh. Do you confirm that?”

  Manuel’s face twisted with disgust:

  “I didn’t know that it was human flesh . . . ‘K’ had told us that he would grant us a meal as a favor, and then we were so hungry . . . ”

  “Who was that man? A member of the Ku Klux Klan?”

  Manuel grimaced, astonished by this suggestion.

  “No, he was an SS-man, an Oberleutnant . . . A monster, an . . . ogre.”

  “Why these three K’s? Are they initials?”

  Manuel frowned with repugnance. He spoke calmly and without hesitating, but he left a short pause between each sentence.

  “He had a double signet ring connecting the index finger and middle finger on his right hand. It was with that that he began to hit us before bringing out the hammers and setting up his system of ropes. Across the width of his ring, three ‘K’s’ were engraved. He never told us his real name. So we called him that among us.”

  “Do you remember the number that was on his uniform?” Amédée was determined to obtain as many concrete facts as possible from this further interrogation.

  “I did everything I could to memorize it in case I survived.”

  “So what was the serial number?”

  “OL 876, 482.”

  “Not the slightest hesitation. Mallock was a little unsettled, but he didn’t show it. Despite the recording, he took the time to write down the serial number on a piece of paper. Then he picked up the packet of transcriptions typed up after each interrogation. In this case, the second one.

  “I summarize: ‘Four years after my last day in Normandy. I was a lieutenant-colonel in the Free French forces. I was assigned to a suicide mission. My twelve-man unit was supposed to parachute into the interior to prepare for the landing. Make contact with the Resistance, assess the enemy forces, and sabotage two strategic targets.’ What happened afterward?”

  Manuel’s face froze into an expression of concentration, as if he were gathering together his memories.

  “We jumped in the middle of the night, fear in our bellies and our faces covered with shoe polish. Not without a feeling of excitement, impatient to return to French soil. It was terribly cold, and the mission had gotten off to a bad start. The youngest of our comrades, not even seventeen years old, had crashed on the ground. We saw his parachute go up in flames. It was too dark, and we couldn’t find him. There were now only eleven of us, without little Gavroche, and we had three days to accomplish as much as we could before the landing.”

  “Take your time. Tell me about those days in detail,” Mallock said.

  “The first day, everything went well, and we destroyed two objectives, a bridge and a switchyard, then we sent in a first series of intelligence data. We were proud of ourselves, excited, happy. If we’d been able to guess . . . Around six P.M. on the second day, when we were about to blow up a coastal battery in Saint-Jean, they fell on us.”

  “Who was that?”

  “An SS unit of about thirty hardened and completely insane men. At their head was that officer with his signet ring.”

  “Can you describe him more precisely?”

  Manu retched and then his whole body slackened. A tear began to form in the corner of his right eye.

  “He was strange and very handsome, with an almost unhealthy regularity of features. He had brown hair combed back, full, well-defined lips, a perfect nose, and not the slightest trace of humanity. I’m happy to have been able to disfigure him before he put an end to my life.”

  “Did your men survive?”

  “They all died, massacred long before I was!”

  “Could you be more precise regarding the way in which they were killed, and give us names and details?”

  Mallock felt a little ashamed. He was focusing on what caused pain, like a journalist trying to make the person he’s interviewing crack and thus win a bigger audience.

  A tragic smile illuminated Manuel’s face:

  “Thibaut Trabesse, a marvelous friend, was the first one. They caught him and ‘K’ hit him with his signet ring until there was no longer the slightest human feature on his face. Thibaut was still alive, but he no longer had any ears, any eyes, teeth, jaws, or mouth, nothing but a mass of flesh, ligaments, and bones, his tormentor had spared his nose only to allow him to continue to breathe. And then—”

  “And then?” Mallock asked.

  “The bastard licked his fingers before ordering his men to hang Trabesse up by his feet. When that had been done, he went up to the body and opened up his abdomen with a bayonet. He finished his work by cutting off Thibaut’s genitals. It took him half an hour to die, drowned in his own blood.”

  Silently, tears were running down Julie’s and Kiko’s cheeks. Mallock heard only the sound of the words, with just one question in his head. Was it imagination or delirium, fabulation or truth? Manuel’s rapid delivery bothered him. Only honest people can talk that way without having to think too much, without lies that have to be monitored. But a few criminals can do it, too, when they’ve learned their story by heart.

  Manuel went on:

  “Afterward, he dealt with the others. I remember Gaël Guennec and Lucien de Marsac. Their courage, their terror, and their pride. The most abominable thing is that the monster was no longer really trying to make them talk. For two days, he massacred my men, one by one, with a minuteness and a persistence that left us not the slightest glimmer of hope, not even that of being shot after having confessed everything we knew. Some of them di
d that, but he continued to torture them as if the information had no value for him. At the end of the second day, he had a grave dug in the middle of the clearing and all the bodies were thrown into it. Only then did he begin to deal with me.”

  A delirious smile then appeared on Manuel’s face.

  “That was the moment I’d been waiting for. I’d found a pitchfork buried in the earth. Looking up toward the heavens I’d seen, like a sign from God, above the trees, a pair of luminous, almost violet eyes, those of Gavroche, the first to die in this doomed expedition. It was he who gave me the strength to make my attack. I finished off the woman they’d captured and then spun around to attack the ogre with tremendous blows of my pitchfork.”

  “But you were alone against thirty men, right?”

  “Maybe more, I didn’t count them. I received some unexpected help: his own dogs, a couple of rather terrifying Dobermans. They were enormous, with different-colored eyes and a spot of blond on top of their heads, like a third eye. Incredibly enough, they attacked him and bit everyone who came toward me, including ‘K,’ while I was trying to kill him. Unfortunately, he survived the attack and took his revenge on me. And on the dogs, too, moreover.”

  Then Manuel began to describe with terrifying precision all the details of the tortures that were inflicted on him. In the room, people’s throats were tight, their jaws clenched. He depicted each blow, each fractured bone, each amputation, as well as what he had felt at each stage. Mallock hesitated to interrupt his account even to let Kiko and Julie leave.

  “But he stopped after a few hours, probably because he was no longer strong enough. He had lost a great deal of blood. I lay along a tree, a chestnut, I think, while he recuperated. There, I no longer really remember. I believe the dogs attacked me, and then I don’t know anymore. When he came back out, he ordered his men to take me to the well and throw me in. But instead of crashing on the bottom or being drowned, I landed on something soft, rather like a mattress. Night had not yet fallen, and I could see a circle of blue sky above me. I turned my head and realized that I had landed on a multitude of dead birds. By their wings, I identified them as swallows. There were thousands of them, little skeletons, skulls, and feathers. Lifting my head to see the sky again one last time, I saw a black triangle appear, probably a stone held by four arms They threw it on me, and I believe I died at that moment.”