Cemetery of Swallows

by Mallock;

  This amounted to a kind of blackmail, but after all, the presence and permission of a member of the family wouldn’t be a bad thing. Mallock had complied.

  Around 9:30, Mallock went down to the living room. After a slight guilty hesitation, he served himself a slug of whiskey before donning a transparent plastic raincoat over a red and mauve striped shirt, itself pulled over a yellow T-shirt. According to Mallock, elegance sometimes flirted with eccentricity when his inner carnival showed its branches and flowers, a colorful camouflage covering the drab grayness of his heart.

  Outside, Paris seemed to have been attacked by an invisible army whose artillery, still stationed outside the walls, was carrying out the traditional barrage before the assault. The icy rain had made the gutters overflow. It was running down the streets, carrying off clumps of dirty snow that looked like small, dingy icebergs.

  Mallock went into the storm without hesitating an instant. Heavy drops struck his face and a lightning bolt made his eyelids flutter. Thunder. Amédée loved it. It reminded him of the walks in the rain he’d taken on the deserted beach at Andernos when he had the opportunity. The showers and lightning followed one another round the basin with enormous rumblings, and he was walking along with a smile on his lips and his face turned up to the sky, looking completely out of his mind but happy. Practiced properly, this Mallockian sport recharged him with brilliant ideas and incinerated the last sad aftereffects of his life in the world.

  When he arrived at the prison, soaked to the bone, Jules and Julie were waiting for him. They looked at their boss’s clothes with a worried air. Either he always wore the same gray suit, chic but too big, or he let himself go, putting on anything at all, whatever his mood of the day suggested. On that day, he’d outdone himself, a plastic raincoat over a Hawaiian shirt!

  They went into Manuel’s cell to explain their plan to him.

  Julie’s brother didn’t hesitate a second.

  “Anything, I’ll do anything to get out of this nightmare.”

  “It’s not without risks,” Mallock insisted. “It will be just us, no medical assistants and no recording camera.”

  “We’ll stay here with you in your cell, but you’ve understood that it’s not without risks, haven’t you, my little Gandhi?”

  Manu smiled broadly when he heard his old nickname.

  “Yes, little sister, I’ve understood it all very well and I’m ready.”

  In that cell, only Mallock could have disabused him. Convinced him. We are never really ready to confront ayahuasca and all the substances that compose it: harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine, harmol, harmalol, dimethyltryptamine . . .

  But he decided to keep quiet.

  It was better not to know, so as not to be frightened.

  And not be frightened so as not to die.

  Or in order to die?

  BOOK 3

  32.

  The Forest of Biellanie, June, 1944

  Jean-François Lafitte’s Story

  God is with them, they say, but they’re wrong, it’s the Devil. Jean-François tries not to lose consciousness. His men have been thrown into the mass grave dug in the middle of the clearing. Now night has fallen, he has just disfigured “K,” and he’s waiting for death to come . . .

  From the old house on my right, south of the well, I hear the howls of a wounded animal. And there, covered with blood, leaning against my tree, I ask God to grant me a favor: to see the SS leave carrying their leader’s lifeless body. If he dies, nothing else matters to me! I want to see his stinking corpse return to the mud from which it should never have emerged. Let him die, so that Heaven may be avenged, so that the earth may be cleansed of his existence. Let him die screaming insanities at God, so that I can once again believe that the Devil is not the stronger party. So that everything is not hopeless.

  An hour has gone by, the screams have died down, but I still hear his voice. “K” is shouting orders and the words he is uttering resound like scraping metal. I also hear a child crying. The blow from the bayonet that I received in my back is causing me to suffer horribly. But it’s nothing in comparison to the pain I have in my mouth. My teeth were broken by “K’s” triple signet ring.

  On my left, the bastards have just set fire to the Canadian uniforms we were wearing. They’ve thrown in the remains of the woman I finished off.

  The wind is driving these execrable odors toward me.

  From the house’s chimney, another kind of smoke is rising.

  The first stars are appearing in the sky. They are like friends, and I start counting them, trying to forget everything. But I will have no respite. The dogs have come closer. I’m trying to make myself faint by banging my injured back against the tree. It’s impossible, I no longer have the strength.

  I will never see Marie again.

  A squeaking noise; the door of the old house opens and a black silhouette comes out. It approaches me, yelling at the dogs. The animals retreat, regretfully leaving their prey. It’s he. The bloody face of “K” appears in the firelight. Alive. And holding something. A piece of meat that he gnaws on one last time before throwing it to the dogs. It’s hard for me to identify the object that falls at my feet with a wet sound.

  Suddenly the fire flares up and illuminates the nearby undergrowth. I don’t understand at first. Or don’t want to understand.

  It’s a tiny human torso, the size of a doll, with its head blackened by fire and a largely devoured arm. The dogs rush toward it. In a few seconds, the remains have been divided up and swallowed.

  But the animals are not satisfied.

  They begin to lick me, all over my body, where my blood has coagulated. Their different-colored eyes shine like firebrands. I know that any moment now they are going to begin. Only a feeling of unreality allows me not to sink into madness. It isn’t possible. What I’ve seen, what I’m seeing. None of it is true! Once upon a time . . .

  “K” is leaning over me. “You can escape my dogs and die quickly. Do you want that?” He smiles at me, so I say: “Yes.” I’m ashamed, but I add, cravenly: “Please.” I’m already grateful to him. “But first you have to do something for me.” My eyes ask him what it is and he explains: “Take communion, take communion with me, for the glory of Jesus and Lucifer, those two rival brothers!” Then he hands me a bit of meat: “Eat this.” The bastard smiles: “Because this is my body, human flesh, the Eucharist!” I understand and close my mouth, horrified. “Do you think it’s cannibalism? No, my God, what an ugly name: it’s communion, my son, communion!” Then he explains to me, as I feel myself slipping away: “It’s a choice morsel, very delicate, a child’s cheek, and suckling child. You’re going to love it.”

  When I finally wake up I’m being carried by four men in black uniforms. Then I begin to vomit when I realize that my legs have been partly devoured by the dogs. Only a series of leather garrotes keeps what blood I still have from flowing away. “K” has just brought me back to consciousness by giving me smelling salts.

  The Nazi’s skull is covered with bandages. He’s shouting and laughing. The ogre has me in his hands, in his teeth. The monster hasn’t finished with me. He has put his metal teeth back in his mouth before leaning over my litter. Suddenly, still wearing his gloves, he approaches me and, God have pity, begins to devour me!

  I’ve regained consciousness for the third and last time. My body is no longer mine. It has secreted all the endorphins it contained, and I am no more than a scrap of brain with bones wrapped in cotton and bandages saturated with blood. “K” has finally given the order to throw me into the well. Before I fall, I think I see two violet-colored eyes hidden in the trees, at the edge of the clearing, two eyes that are weeping.

  Lying on the ground, which is covered with swallows’ bodies, I feel almost happy. “K” will not follow me into this abyss. The bogeyman is done with me. I’m like a dismembered mouse the cat has left behind. G
od be praised, I can finally go to sleep looking at the sky.

  But was I going to see Marie again someday?

  I don’t have time to answer that question. I perceive a regular figure standing out against the starry circle formed by the edge of the well: a triangle that begins to grow rapidly until it covers me with a complete obscurity.

  It is at that moment, and only then, that I am finally able to forget my sufferings and the bit of flesh that I swallowed in the hope of escaping the ogre’s dogs.

  May God pardon me!

  33.

  Tuesday, December 17

  The doorbell awoke a very crumpled Mallock. Whereas Manu’s account had touched his heart the day before, now the rest of his body was reacting. He glanced at the video monitor. Friend or foe? Friend, it was Anita coming to take care of her superintendent.

  “Hello, I’ll open the door for you. Could you pick up my mail, please?”

  “Of course, Superintendent.”

  There was nothing to do about it. He would never get his dear Anita to call him Amédée or even just Sir. After all, maybe she was right. Her big, bright smile when she handed him his pile of newspapers and mail calmed Mallock for a time. But not long. Reading the papers took his appetite away again.

  “One question remains unanswered: between the superintendent and the old man’s killer, who is the more insane?”

  That was how the first really complete article on the Gemoni case ended. A scoop for Le Figaro, which had put the story on the front page and given it a whole inside right page. The headline, “Mallock and His Ghost,” alluded to one of Maigret’s cases. In the introductory paragraph, the journalist asked: “What is craziest in this case, Gemoni’s earlier lives or Mallock’s methods?” The rest of the article revealed the whole chronicle of the case, from the day the young man set out to kill a former member of the Waffen-SS to the recent sessions of hypnosis Mallock had organized. All the details were there, including the names–misspelled, of course–of the main actors. Amédée was not really surprised. For two weeks, he and his men, as well as the judicial system, which was notoriously leaky, had managed to keep most of this case secret. What bothered him was that the journalist wrote in detail about the sensational hypnosis sessions. Who had leaked that information?

  He tried to reassure himself by saying out loud:

  “In any case, it doesn’t come from the Fort.”

  The silence of his apartment and Anita, who was already fully involved in cleaning up, had the courtesy to avoid contradicting him. There had been a painful precedent, and Mallock had fired the person responsible. He didn’t want to consider the possibility that a member of his current team might have been tempted again.

  The article was complemented by two boxes.

  The first was nicely titled: “Mallock Talks Rubbish.” Some hack violently attacked the now famous divisional superintendent. That was normal; people like nothing better than to lapidate those whom yesterday they adored and praised to the skies. By practicing the same lack of discernment and sense of proportion.

  The second box was a brief interview with Serge Klarsfeld. He skillfully ducked the issue, but one could read between the lines that before Manuel Gemoni’s revelations, he hadn’t known anything about this Darbier who had taken refuge on an island.

  What exasperated Mallock most of all was the fact that for once, the journalists weren’t wrong. Who was the crazier? Manuel and his macabre stories or Mallock, who listened to, and worse yet, encouraged him?

  He hesitated in front of the bar. It wasn’t even 10 A.M. Don’t go off the deep end, Mallock! You’re not going to let malicious scribblers force you to drink? Have a cup of coffee. For once, he listened to his little inner voice. The coffee machine was still groaning and spitting out the last drops when the signal on his Mac sounded.

  “Anita! Can you keep an eye on my coffee and bring it up to my office, please? I’m being called on the computer,” Mallock said to justify himself.

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Superintendent. I’ll take care of it.”

  A minute later he was in front of his monitor. Mordome had started a videoconference and appeared in a white shirt in the upper left corner of the screen. With two clicks, Amédée authorized the call. His face appeared in a rectangle alongside that of his friend, whose full name was Bernard-Barnabé Mordome. Mallock realized that his hair was unkempt and ran his fingers through it.

  “You’re looking good this morning,” the medical examiner laughed.

  Amédée smiled.

  “And how are you?”

  “My vanity is slightly wounded. I would point out that you haven’t called upon me at all in this reincarnation business.”

  For the great professor Mordome, who was usually so severe and abrupt, this was more than familiar, even affectionate. The two investigations in which he had participated with Mallock had made the two men friends. Even if the superintendent had not yet fully realized that fact.

  “I would point out,” Mallock said in his own defense, “that I haven’t had a cadaver to give you to work on. Otherwise, of course . . . Anyway, I hope the situation is going to change very soon.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “No, first, we have to wait for my friend Léon to join us. I’m not going to tell you all about it twice.”

  “Léon? The old queen you introduced me to last year?”

  “Be nice, please, he’s my friend.”

  “Oh, excuse me, I’ll rephrase: ‘the elderly Uranist to whom you introduced me last year?’ You’re the one who told me about his various sexual escapades. You know, if we go on calling the blind ‘visually handicapped’ and the deaf ‘acoustically challenged,’ we’re going to have to call fools ‘non-understanders’ and heterosexuals ‘non-sodomists,’ and why shouldn’t Blacks be called ‘non-Whites’?”

  Mallock came up with no pertinent retort. The politically correct language of the early twenty-first century exasperated and disturbed him as much as it did his friend the medical examiner.

  He just changed the subject by asking:

  “When are you coming back?”

  Bernard-Barnabé Mordome had been in New York for a week. He’d been asked to go to the land of serial killers and nutcases, the land of experts, as a specialist in the dissection of corpses. A form of recognition, so to speak.

  “Tomorrow. With the time difference, I should be landing at Orly about 8 A.M. Why?”

  “I’m organizing a second excavation near Paris in connection with this case. Orly isn’t exactly on the way there, but . . . ”

  “Would you be able to come pick me up?”

  “If that’s okay with you, and if it wouldn’t tire you too much, I could swing by the airport.”

  Mordome seemed to be reflecting. He had to consult the appointment book he carried in his head.

  “Okay, let’s do that. I’ll sleep in the plane and go straight on with you. That’s better in relation to the time difference.”

  Just as Mallock was about to thank his friend, Anita carefully set the hot coffee next to the keyboard.

  “Drink it while it’s hot, it’s better that way.”

  “Thanks, Anita. Don’t hesitate to make a cup for yourself . . . ”

  He always said that and she always replied:

  “I love coffee, but the doctor advises against it because of my stomach.”

  Mordome interrupted this acute dialogue.

  “Your conversation is fascinating, but I don’t have all day. Where is this joker of yours?”

  “Léon?”

  A groan of confirmation.

  “He’s near Angers, at the home of some friends. But so far as I can understand, his hosts have access to the net.”

  Mordome made a face.

  “Do me a favor: get in contact with him and call me later. I have to give an introduction an
d start a slide show, and then I’ll come back up. The conference is taking place in the main meeting room of my hotel. O.K.? I have to say that the name of your friend–Galène, if I remember correctly–doesn’t suggest that he would be up-to-date in matters of communication by Internet.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that.

  It was almost noon by the time the three men were finally lined up on their respective screens.

  Far from being useless, the videoconference validated his procedure. Even though they had brilliant minds, they, too, felt lost, and concluded that it was necessary to pursue the investigation of Darbier and the theory of reincarnation.

  “I understand why you’re concerned, Amédée, but go ahead. I’ve cut up my fellow humans lengthwise, sidewise, and every which way too long to believe this nonsense, or anything else, for that matter. But you have to follow your reasoning to its endpoint. One never knows. All religions flirt with the notion of life after death. Billions of humans believe in it. Whether redemption, reincarnation, or resurrection, it takes different forms but it’s basically the same thing. Paradise or a new life, that’s how religions retain believers, it’s the carrot and the stick at the same time. They all propose their version of the remedy for the same damned lethal malady, life.”

  Mallock addressed his friend:

  “You’re really nothing but an infidel, you don’t believe in anything!”

  “What about you? You’re a fine one to talk! You know, old man, that I’ve opened up bodies and I’d have really liked to find a little creature wrapped around a vesicle, a bit of soul that has remained stuck between two teeth, a diamond that’s still beating, embedded in a bone, but there isn’t anything inside. It’s obvious that religion and the idea of a life after all this shit has been invented. Besides, an amazing bunch of crooks has made a fortune out of all that. But you know, even I would be very happy if you could provide us with a proof. If metempsychosis is proven to us by His Majesty Amédée, I’ll already make my choice. I want to come back as a castrated Abyssinian cat, please.”