by Mallock;
Wake up.
Headache.
“Serves me right,” Mallock grumbled.
Three puffs of opium in a moth-eaten bear’s body—that may calm pain for a while, but at a price. Raising his head, he saw the date and time on his computer screen: Saturday, December 14, 7:55. In three hours he had a meeting with his team at the Fort.
He lay back to assess his adventure in the mangroves. The opium had taken him back there. He remembered almost everything, and other things as well. The serpent, the DNA, the little hairless monkey, Satie’s music, the Caribs devouring the Arawaks, the bonfires of children’s arms, the mountains of teeth, the swallows, the dogs, the well, the flag, the flame . . .
Apart from a splitting headache, the opium seemed to have left no trace. He suddenly sat up on his couch, without even knowing why. That happened to him often, as when he went to open the door or answer the telephone before he’d even heard them ring. What he called his everyday clairvoyance. Once he was up, he remembered the vial the old shaman had given him. He must have gotten up for that reason. Unless he’d been thinking about his headache and the precious tablets. He went to look for the piece of amber. As he passed in front of the bar, he served himself a single malt, straight from the cask. And—this was a heinous crime—drowned it in Perrier. In a second infamy, he gulped down three mouthfuls to make the pills go down and to calm his heart a little; his blood was pulsing in his head.
Then he moved on to serious things.
He had a little goldsmith’s polisher, confiscated during the somber case involving jewelry fencing. He settled himself comfortably near the window that looked out on the garden and turned on the array of spotlights he’d had installed there. They projected an even white light, as warm as that of the midday sun. Thus the colors of the objects or photos he was examining were respected. He turned on the polisher and, as he’d seen Mister Blue do, carefully began to polish the piece of amber. He took care not to touch the silver stopper. He put on a pair of magnifying glasses, confiscated from the same jeweler, licked the surfaces of the stone, and raised his arm toward the light.
The landscape was sublime.
Suspended immobile inside the stone, tiny gnats several million years old were floating in a whiskey-colored sky. If Mister Blue had seen that, he’d have had a heart attack. He had some nice pieces, too, but none that was cut and hollowed-out like that. After having fiddled with it, Amédée managed to open the tiny silver catch. The smell of the fluid filled the room.
“Good Lord!”
In a flash, Mallock saw the smile of the old woman, handing him the vial.
And he knew what he had to do.
At 11 A.M., his clothes all wrinkled, he arrived at the Fort. Julie, Ken, and Jules were laughing.
“Where’s Daranne?” he asked.
His assistants looked at one another. Amédée didn’t like it at all when he felt they were like that, both embarrassed and in league against him.
Julie finally said:
“He’s probably still doing research on Manuel and the Gemoni family, putting on great airs of being a sneaky conspirator. Haven’t you had his report yet?”
Julie had not appreciated Mallock acting behind her back. On reflection, she wasn’t wrong.
“Well, yes, I have,” Mallock said. “But don’t take it that way, Julie, I always intended to keep you informed.”
“The way you’ve explained the inside story on this case?” Ken asked. “We’re completely in the dark. You give us research to do, but we don’t have the right to know anything more.”
“I also have to say, Boss,” Jules added, “that we’re swamped with work here. And we don’t see you very much.”
Amédée didn’t reply for a few seconds, He hadn’t been expecting such an uprising.
“What is this, a revolution?”
“No, Sire,” Ken retorted, “a simple revolt. You’ll have to wait for July 14 for the rest.”
Which made everyone laugh and had the enormous advantage of relaxing the atmosphere.
“So, what have I done this time?” Mallock asked, giving the signal for the free-for-all.
And he wasn’t disappointed.
Obviously, his absences from the Fort had been taken very badly, as had the obvious lack of explanations. He could have tried deception: “That was precisely the reason for this morning’s meeting.” But that wasn’t his thing. And then, honestly, he deserved these reprimands. The fantastic complexity of the case and the wave of depression that had struck him since his return from the Dominican Republic had made him a zombie superintendent, leaving the Fort without any real command.
“That’s enough, kids, the cup is full. I agree and I offer you my most inadequate excuses. Where do you want to begin?”
The meeting lasted four hours, without even a short pause for lunch. Since he was the accused, Mallock didn’t dare complain too much. As a result, it was past 3 P.M. when his assistants finally decided they’d heard enough.
“No more questions? Are you going to let me go, or should I consider myself held hostage for the whole weekend? If that’s the case, I remind you that I have a right to a telephone call and a sausage and butter sandwich.”
“Hmmm . . . now that you mention it, I think it smells like fish in here, doesn’t it?” remarked Julie, who had a delicate sense of smell.
Mallock took offense and thundered:
“It’s I, demoiselle! I stopped by my fishmonger on the way in, where I bought, for a great deal of money, a sublime little sea bass whose bright eyes and ruddy gills, as well as its cadaveric rigidity, can only emit exquisite ocean fragrances.”
This was followed by general laughter. They all needed to relax and make peace after the verbal assault made early that morning. At the same moment, Daranne came into Mallock’s office.
He was wearing an imbecilic smile under his dachshund’s mustache.
“What are you all doing here? Did I miss something?”
“We’ve sequestered the boss,” Ken replied with a grim face. “Where can we hold him until Monday? Do you have room at your place? And by the way, don’t you smell it?”
“What?”
“The fish.”
“Ah! Yeah, it stinks. What is it?”
“We’ve bought a fish for the prisoner so that he doesn’t die of hunger during his detention. You wouldn’t happen to have salt and olive oil on you?”
Daranne’s flabbergasted look was a kind of compensation for all of them and a great moment of loneliness for him.
Half an hour later, a smile on his lips, Mallock took home four photographs, one of Darbier, one of Krinkel, one of Jean-François Lafitte, and one of Manu, taken on the day of his daughter’s baptism.
At the back of the room that served as his studio, library, and office, Mallock had installed two 30-inch flat screens. On the right was a computer and a hard disk for backups. On the left was a scanner for negatives and another for opaque documents, a printer, and a 17-inch laptop. Everything was networked and connected by cable.
Although he had always been a passionate amateur photographer, Mallock had only recently gotten into digital retouching. But he’d spent his vacations boning up on various programs, including the indispensable Photoshop. At police headquarters, he let Ken, and earlier Francis alias Frank, use the equipment, without ever getting very involved with it himself. It was only at home that he touched the keyboard.
“Computers are even better when you don’t have to use them,” he’d been told by Vincent, his friend Jean-Claude’s right hand and the official installer of the Mac’llocks, as they called them.
Around 7 P.M., Amédée decided to prepare his bass.
He cleaned the fish and filled it with sprigs of fennel, peppercorns, and salt before frying it on both sides. Then he wrapped it in foil and let it cook while he opened a bottle of Pouilly
-Fumé. After taking off its aluminum carapace, he sprinkled the fish with a mixture of vinegar, finely sliced pepper, olive oil, and sea salt. On the news, as usual since the snow had begun falling, there was a series of idiots, corporations, and opposition politicians denouncing the negligence of the government and the street maintenance services. Mallock decided to eat his dinner without listening to them blab and instead to watch, for the fifteenth time, the DVD bonus of the Beatles video anthology. Paul and George, accompanying themselves on ukuleles, were singing as they sat on a bench. Ringo was marking the time by tapping on his thighs. Simple genius gathered under the banner of friendship and melancholy. Mallock swore. He would have given his right ball to be able to discover a previously unrecorded song by the Fab Four.
An hour later, regretfully, but with his balls intact, he got down to business. He sometimes brought work home. Today, he had relieved Ken of a job that he could do himself, and what was more, amused him.
He began by running the negatives of Manu and Darbier through the slide scanner, then digitalized the photos of Krinkel and Jean-François, which were on paper, using a different device.
Half an hour later, he had the four photos lined up on the left-hand screen of his computer, and on the other screen, well-arranged, the different palettes and tools necessary for the job of retouching the images. And there was work to be done. The two prints had suffered from age, traces of stamps, and much handling. Mallock worked for a good hour on cleaning up the proofs. Once he was satisfied, two whiskies later, he took ten minutes to calmly compare the faces of the four men, playing with overlays and transparencies.
The results were clear. Although the two faces were apparently different at first glance, Krinkel’s features, dark and handsome, and those of Darbier, blond and disfigured, corresponded perfectly once one made a meticulous comparison of them. The same distance between the eyes, the same high-set ears with respect to the nose, the same jaw within a millimeter or two. For Mallock, the identity of the two was not in doubt:
Darbier was Krinkel. They were dealing with one and the same person.
He’d done the same for the lieutenant and Manu, superimposing the images after having put them on the same scale. Here despite a strong resemblance, the morphology of the two skulls also disconfirmed the first impression. They did not correspond. There were a few similarities in the height of the forehead and the breadth of the mouth, but there was no doubt that it was not the same man.
Mallock swore.
Obviously! It wasn’t the same person. That was impossible. What a dimwit! How could he have allowed himself to be drawn into such nonsense? In Krinkel’s case, there was a logic. The former Nazi had simply taken refuge in the Dominican Republic. His age, like the rest, corresponded.
But for Manu and the lieutenant, it was simply . . . impossible.
And yet, despite that, or maybe because of it and that word “impossible,” just to clarify matters and finally rule out the far-fetched hypothesis that was ruining his life, the next day Mallock found himself roaring down the road in pursuit of the fiancée of a goddamn phantom.
30.
Sunday, December 15, Visit to Marie Dutin
9:12 A.M.
Mallock is driving on the autoroute du Sud. Or at least what remains of it. After two weeks of uninterrupted snowfall, there is a seven-foot-high snowbank between the north and south traffic lanes. At the sides of the road, a kind of white, beige, and black hill now accompanies the cars.
Enclosed in this icy basin, Mallock is driving fast, much too fast. Simply because he’s sick of not understanding anything, and because he’s also afraid of being late for his rendezvous. You don’t make an old lady wait who has agreed to meet you without even knowing you. He’s always been afraid of not arriving on time. That’s the way it is. Being late for the last excavation in the forest didn’t help matters. He feels the fear growing and getting more elaborate, to the point of taking his breath away. Like all those who have been late one time when it was too, too serious, irredeemable. The time, for instance, when he found his mother at the end of a rope.
Amédée runs his tongue over his upper left molars, clears his throat, looks to the left, then to the right, like a windshield wiper.
In one short hour, he has a rendezvous with Marie Dutin, the lieutenant’s fiancée. “I’ll have to send you on your way at 11 A.M.,” she told him, “it’s Sunday.” Mallock didn’t understand at first. Now he does. The old lady undoubtedly goes to Sunday mass. How many prayers and genuflections has she made in sixty years of mourning? How many loads of tears and regrets all tied up in little packages? How many candles lit, her eyes shining?
Take the exit, the third little town, and, after the bakery, a dead-end street to the right with the sweet name of Ampélopsis.
In front of Mallock is a modest house with a blue roof. He adjusts his tie before ringing the bell. The door opens with a squeak like a cat’s meow. Behind it, a little body less than five feet tall appears. The old lady standing before him is very cute, with a charming smile and a carefully made-up face. Powder, two circles of rouge on her cheeks, and mauve, almost fluorescent mascara.
“Please come in, Superintendent. You didn’t have too much trouble finding me? It’s not easy with all the twists and turns. But no, of course, how stupid I am! You took the autoroute. I hope you’re not too tired? Oh! but you must be. It’s a long way, after all. Can I make you a cup of tea? Milk or lemon? Did I tell you about the mass? At 11 o’clock sharp I’ll have to leave.”
As often happens with people living alone, Marie Dutin was making up for her thousands of hours of silence by asking the questions and also giving the answers.
Mallock limited himself to smiling at her and saying:
“This is really a very pretty place you have here.”
That always pleases people. And then he wasn’t lying, not really. “Pretty” isn’t the appropriate adjective. In fact, the home of the lieutenant’s fiancée is clean and tidy. Spick and span. Once you’ve crossed the threshold, you’re suddenly transported into the prewar period. Inside, time has stopped, frozen in the furniture polish.
Everything in Marie’s home is period. Her furniture, her radio, her clothes, and her makeup.
Her sadness, too.
Her Jean-François loved her like that, so she has remained that way. Plucked and redrawn eyebrows, powder and Guerlain foundation in generous layers, mauve eye shadow, like her eyes, and a bright scarlet mouth whose redness age has caused to wander into the vertical wrinkles of her upper lip.
Everything is old-fashioned here, even the beige memorial plaques surrounded by red ribbons and lace.
The walls are hung only with the past, as well.
Photos of relatives, dead friends, and, of course, her fiancé. A handsome young man in black and white, enlarged and retouched, embellished like his memory. Frozen on the ramparts of memory, there he is in civilian clothing, in a tennis outfit, in a dinner jacket too big for him, and in uniform, with a white scarf around his neck.
Nothing but him and no more than him for a whole wretched life of tears and sorrow.
Mallock comprehends and Mallock has compassion.
He feels even more awkward than usual with his big clumping shoes planted right in the middle of this doll house. So he hesitates. Why not simply drink his tea and leave, excusing himself for having bothered her? But once a cop, always a cop. And then he absolutely needs to stock up new facts, whether to corroborate Manu’s crazy ideas or to find something to confound him.
Once he is seated in an armchair as old as it is uncomfortable, he asks Marie’s permission to record their conversation. She agrees with a nod of her head. Her gray hair, perfectly lacquered, does not budge by a millimeter. Mallock thanks her and turns on the little digital recorder that he always carries with him. He taps the microphone, looking at the needles of the meter. Finally something that works in thi
s damned case.
He sets it carefully on a lace doily in the center of a pedestal table surrounded by a gilt railing. Then he says:
“Sunday, December 15, 10:17. Interrogation of Mada . . . Mademoiselle Marie Dutin. Recording made with her authorization.”
He clears his throat.
“Dear Mademoiselle, please excuse in advance the involuntary coarseness of some of my questions. I am probably going to stir up some very cruel memories, but—”
“Oh! I’m failing in all my duties. I believe I promised you some tea, did I not?” Marie asks, hanging her head.
“That’s very kind of you, but if you have no objection, I’d prefer to tell you first what brings me here.”
Marie waits silently. Something she knows how to do marvelously well. That and tea, like a kind of compulsory vocation.
Mallock finally begins:
“I was very mysterious on the telephone and I beg you to pardon me for that.”
Marie smiles at him, her two hands folded on her flowered dress.
“In the framework of a police investigation, I have come to know of the existence of your fiancé, Lieutenant Jean-François Lafitte. The circumstances of his tragic death, which remain rather obscure for me, could perhaps help me understand better another event . . . that concerns . . . It’s really very hard to explain. How can I tell you?”
“Ask me your questions, Superintendent. I’m not made of porcelain.”
Mallock smiled gently before saying:
“So far as you know, was Lieutenant Lafitte actually buried?”
Because the superintendent thought he’d received authorization to handle the porcelain a little, he’s surprised to see the old maid’s eyes fill with tears. But those little pearls were never far away, and knew the way to the outside only too well. Tears share the same memory with the soul. And some of them are able to reach the ocean, like so many baby turtles, with their eyes closed.