by Mallock;
Silence in Mallock’s living room.
“Tell us the rest, the rest,” Julie and the others began to cry.
“Well, guess what happened?” Amédée challenged them.
“The kids were severely scolded,” Jules ventured.
“They spent a fortune trying to put the apple back together?” Claude suggested.
“The remains were put in an urn, and that gave you the idea that . . . ”
“There was a big worm inside it?”
“No, a butterfly, and it flew away!” Kiko cried.
“Bravo, that’s very nice, Kiko, but no, nothing like any of that. The old lady, the princess’s great-great-granddaughter, bent over the pile of fragments on the floor. And the children heard her weep. Big sobs that she couldn’t stop.”
“I understand her, the poor woman, the damn kids,” Claude grumbled.
“They weren’t so bad,” Amédée went on. “The boy responsible for the disaster approached her. He was very upset. He loved his grandmother very much and was aware that he had made the mistake of his life: ‘I’m sorry, Granny,’ he said, ‘but please stop crying, we’re going to glue it all back together. You won’t see anything,’ he promised her. Then the grandmother turned around, with a big smile on her lips. ‘I’m not crying out of sadness, my darling. I’m overwhelmed by emotion. Look!’ And the old lady held out to the child a gold ring adorned with three stones that shone in the autumn sun, the little prince’s gift to the pretty princess, a gift he’d had the idea of concealing in the apple. By the time she ate it, he would be gone. Then she would discover the little marvel so cleverly hidden at the apple’s center. That way she would never forget him, he thought. But by deciding to keep the apple as a souvenir, the young woman never discovered the little prince’s lovely gesture.”
A loud murmur from the audience.
“There you have it, kids, that probably influenced me unconsciously and encouraged me to break the petrified piece in my turn. So . . . ”
“ . . . We must always listen to stories told by a very old man, even if he’s our superintendent,” Julie said, laughing.
“That’s the most marvelous ending imaginable,” GG decided.
But another person still had something to say.
“Nah . . . I prefer the Mallock-the-Magician version with the false golden heart,” Kiko mumbled, sulking.
The group greeted her point with a big collective laugh.
Of course, the rest of the meal was devoted to the subject of reincarnation. Those who believed in it before the case had it easiest. But those who had expressed doubts the day before continued to do so. As if Manuel’s adventure hadn’t changed their convictions at all. Belief had nothing to do with reality or truth, on the contrary. Mallock, who was still very pleased by his joke and the success of his story, decided he didn’t give a damn. Whether it was reincarnation or something else, it would probably get Manu out of prison; everybody was happy about that, and that was the main thing.
Like an echo of the magic heart, the bells of the Saint-Merri church sounded the twelve strokes of midnight. It was December 25, Christmas Day, and for once, with the snow falling and smiles on everyone’s face, it really felt like it.
Champagne.
Kisses.
The dinner went on until three in the morning.
When the guests had left, Mallock decided to do the dishes. He didn’t want to leave a mess like that for poor Anita to clean up. Just as he finished and was heading for his bedroom, the telephone rang. A smile on his lips, he went to answer it. At that hour, it was certainly one of his guests who had forgotten something. He hadn’t had time to make a tour of the apartment.
“Who’s the scatterbrain?” he asked when he picked up the receiver. He listened for two minutes and his smile froze.
“I’m coming.”
That was all he said. He walked over to the bar and poured himself a big glass of whiskey.
When he sat down on the couch, he couldn’t help sobbing.
Bob Daranne had just committed suicide.
A bullet in the mouth.
40.
Christmas, 3 A.M.
Without taking the trouble to consult their father, or even to inform him, none of his children had come.
So Bob had remained all alone in front of the big table full of food. Then he’d decided that enough was enough. He’d taken a gun and swallowed, as his only meal that night, a 7.65 mm bullet. He’d promised Mallock never to commit suicide with his service weapon, and he’d kept his word. He’d used one of the guns in his collection, a Browning M1910, the same model that had launched the First World War when it was wielded by Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 and that had allowed Paul Gorguloff to kill the president of the French Republic, Paul Doumer, in 1932. The caliber of this pistol was modest, and the emergency medics had been able to restart Bob’s heart three times. They were able to stabilize him before taking him to Cochin hospital. There, a whole team had done everything they could to save his life.
In vain.
Mallock’s tears were still flowing when he put on his overcoat to go to his friend’s house. His sons were going to arrive there and they would need him.
He’d loved this guy with a crew cut, and he’d go on loving him for a long time still.
Too often, life answers questions we haven’t asked. It tricks us, traps us, catches up with us. Very often we fall. But we get up again, as we did when we were children. I give up! Not hurt, not even dead. In the garden, as kids, we always began again. Beep beep! Even blown up, crushed under an army of anvils, we began the following episode, like the Road Runner, as good as new . . . When we’ve grown up, we still play with the same ideas of immortality.
And then life humbles us.
Devastated, Amédée went out of his apartment and then turned around to double-lock the door.
41.
Thursday, January 2, Early Morning
That morning, Mallock opened his eyes with a grimace. Outside, the sun was already shining brightly in a clear blue sky. The impressive rise in the temperature that had accompanied the new year had begun attacking the mounds of snow and ice. The thermometer had gone from fifteen to fifty degrees. In his bedroom, on the chair at the foot of his bed, Mallock saw his red fourragère, a decoration he put over his left shoulder after having donned his uniform for important ceremonies.
At 11 o’clock, he was going to the Père-Lachaise cemetery for Captain Daranne’s burial.
Bob’s. “His” Bob’s.
The telephone rang.
“No bad news today, I’ve had all I can take,” he grumbled before he picked up.
“The case was not dismissed,” Antoine Ceccaldi’s lugubrious voice announced.
Brought up for immediate trial, Manuel had just been given a so-called symbolic sentence that was not insignificant: three years in prison. With remissions, Julie’s brother would be out twelve to fourteen months later.
To be sure, the sentence was more than magnanimous for a murderer, but there was the notorious “tourist” clause. In conformity with the agreements made with the Dominican authorities, this sentence was going to give Manuel a right to a return ticket and free residence on the island, once his sentence had been served in France. The Dominican government wouldn’t do him any favors and would make sure all its own prerogatives were respected, its sacrosanct national sovereignty. Over there he would probably get fifteen to twenty years. And then there were Darbier’s brutos.
In fact, they had to start all over.
As he put on that damned uniform that seemed to shrink a size every year, Mallock started sighing and swearing.
An hour later, his anger had given way to sorrow.
Mallock was facing a varnished coffin covered with a French flag. To his right, four young carrot-tops
, hanging their heads, looked overwhelmed with grief. Perhaps they were, in fact. People don’t all react the same way, and he didn’t know enough to judge. With a lump in his throat, he thought that Bob had finally managed to do it, if only in a cemetery and around a muddy grave: he had gathered his whole family around him.
The melting snow had produced countless streams that were running through Paris with a great sound of rushing water. Beige torrents, thousands of gallons of café-au-lait attacking alleys and gutters. And also funeral vaults.
The Daranne family’s vault was already three-quarters full of water. Mallock wondered how the morticians were going to manage. He could hardly imagine them lowering the casket into the brownish liquid, with bubbles gurgling out of it as the air inside the coffin escaped. Bob had experienced too many humiliating or ridiculous situations during his life, and it was out of the question for his death to be still another one.
“It’s all right,” the undertaker replied. “We’ll pump out most of the water, and then wait until the grave is perfectly dry. We’ll probably put the earth back in the day after tomorrow. Don’t worry about it, we do this all the time.”
Then he added:
“In any case, we can’t do anything else. The coffin won’t sink, it’ll float. So you can imagine.”
Mallock had to repress a desire to laugh. Daranne had no peer when it came to always finding himself in grotesque situations. Mallock saw him again: tied to a lamppost, naked and in the middle of the winter, by a gang of hoodlums, jailed by the gendarmerie for soliciting because he was wearing stockings and a bra, emerging covered with garbage from a bin that had picked him up and dumped him in a waste disposal center, or still stinking of fish the day the Prefect made a surprise visit to police headquarters. There was also the evening when he’d begun to tell a young recruit the most horrible stories about the former head of the Paris police; she’d turned out to be the latter’s daughter. Not to mention the numberless times his wife came to headquarters to read him the riot act and drag him off, humiliating him in front of his comrades. Bob had spent his life playing the hard-boiled cop and being rebuffed by everyone. The truth about him, apart from his uprightness and loyalty, was that though his brain was not very big, his heart was huge, and so was his awkwardness.
“Bob, I’m going to miss you,” Mallock murmured, with tears in his eyes and a painful laugh caught in his throat.
When the ceremony was over, Mallock, Julie, Jules, Ken, and Jo went to a café. They picked the closest one. They weren’t ready to separate yet, or to speak either. It would be for the boss, his closest friend, to decide when the silence could be broken. Mallock knew that. He’d already assumed that responsibility when they were mourning earlier deaths, and particularly the most painful of them all, that of his Thomas. In the latter case, he had still not given the signal, and six years later silence continued to reign, it being forbidden to mention the subject in front of him. Three weeks before, he had surprised himself by breaking the silence he’d imposed on others by uttering Thomas’s name while he was talking with Ken. Was that perhaps a sign?
“Some ten days ago, Bob took me to task,” he began. “He talked about a normal investigation, in which we arrest suspects, take fingerprints, canvass the neighborhood, the whole shooting match. What he said exactly was: ‘Little by little, we ferret out everybody.’”
The four young captains smiled the same melancholy smile.
Mallock continued:
“To him, the way the Gemoni case has developed didn’t seem normal. Well, he may not have been wrong. Especially since we now find ourselves, as you know, with a sentence that raises a problem.”
Julie was looking sullen, the way she looked when she was trying to keep from crying.
“So in his honor and in order to set my own mind at ease, I said to myself that we should try to forget the investigation the way I’ve conducted it, which has probably been too personal.”
A general silence.
“I’d like us to give ourselves twenty-four hours to see if we haven’t overlooked a quite different lead. We have to focus on the slightest bit of evidence that hasn’t been used, or that doesn’t fit with the version we’ve adopted. So far as I’m concerned, I have trouble imagining another explanation for all this, but Bob’s words continued to haunt me, even before he died. And then, we don’t have many other choices. Manuel is in great danger. I think you’ve understood that very well. If we reason in a very common-sense way, there may still be something to dig up. Consider the episode of the little music box. It was as if the lieutenant’s spirit had made it start playing again. But it was probably more prosaic than that; it was the combined action of warmth and movement. Two tortuous stories for a single phenomenon. Isn’t there another explanation of what happened? A different reality that is far more rational and that no one has yet glimpsed? An interpretation of the facts that might convince the most refractory critics and allow Manu to be freed?”
Mallock’s harangue met with a total lack of reaction on the part of the group. Only the respect they owed Daranne’s memory prevented them from protesting. Even Julie showed not the slightest enthusiasm.
Ken preferred to conclude:
“We’ll bring you everything we find tomorrow night. But there isn’t . . . ”
“Above all, no ‘buts.’ Rack your brains. Think ‘differently.’ Erase from your memory everything you now know.”
“That’s easy to say,” Julie grumbled.
“We have to wipe away all the stupidities and hypotheses we’ve been working with since the beginning of the investigation.”
“And just how do we do that?”
Julie was too upset to have the slightest positive thought. Their stupid old Bob was dead and her brother was in great danger again.
Mallock decided to theorize a little to reassure his troops.
“I’m asking you to carry out an act of . . . descotomization.”
His four lieutenants gave him quizzical looks.
“It comes from scotoma. In ophthalmology, it’s a part of the visual field that has gone dark, blind in a way, as a result of damage to the retina. In psychology, scotomization is the psychic act that consists of erasing, in a selective way, an event that is often painful or even intolerable for the person who has suffered it. It’s a denial of reality, an auto-therapeutic act that consists of removing this traumatic memory from one’s consciousness. Today, despite what we’ve discovered, you’ve got to persuade yourselves that there’s another solution, something that has escaped our visual field. Imagine an inkspot that concealed part of the story . . . ”
“O.K., we’re all going to work together and the devil be damned if we don’t find something.”
Jo had just positioned herself within the group for the first time.
“There’s a fourteenth-century Franciscan monk,” she went on, “who formulated a principle known as ‘Occam’s Razor.’ It consists of always choosing the simplest, shortest, most obvious solution. And in Manuel’s case, without accusing anyone, it can’t be said that we made things simple!”
“Jo’s right, we have to look for something obvious, far removed from all my divagations.”
This last sentence sounded odd to the team. In fact, no one believed it, really. The story had been worked over far too much for them to be able to hope they could still dig up something.
42.
Friday, January 3, 7 P.M.
Friday evening, Amédée could only note how few clues and new leads his lieutenants had come up with. Captain Ken Kô Kuroda, the nice-guy KKK, had made two piles.
On the right he’d put the pieces of evidence corroborating the thesis they’d already adopted. They were too numerous for Mallock to be able to consider them all. Among the new ones, the only ones he had asked for, were those brought in chiefly by Jo. The two DNA samples had been analyzed and checked. Jean-François’s lock o
f hair, which Mallock had borrowed from his fiancée, did in fact correspond to that of the hair found in the well and that taken from the coffin. In the same way, the DNA of KKK the ogre, also found near the same well on the scalp the lieutenant had torn off, had proven to be identical with that taken from Darbier’s corpse.
On the left, in a much smaller pile, was the evidence that was deemed to be new and did not fit into the logic of the first explanation. There wasn’t much, in fact. Nothing decisive or really useful.
However, Jules had ended up taking the matter seriously and had even undertaken, with Julie’s help, the neighborhood investigation that Bob had called for. The result was forty-eight files, beginning with a photo of each of the persons visited over the past two days. Mallock looked through them without seeing anything strange. On top of the pile, Ken had put a red “X” on one salmon-colored file. Mallock opened it without enthusiasm.
It was over, and down deep he knew it.
All that was lacking was his agreement, an admission that he couldn’t do any more, to close the case and move on to other things. That decision was much too painful for him not to try desperately to gain time. He opened the folder without succeeding in repressing a deep sigh.
In the course of a fingerprint comparison that Jules had instituted to see if a point of intersection could be found among all the prints that had been taken during the investigation, an ambiguous outcome had appeared. Although only partial, two prints seemed to belong to the same individual. One of the prints came from the cross found underground, the other from the videocassette that had started everything.