The Madonna of Notre Dame

by Alexis Ragougneau

  “They’re interested in yesterday’s incident during the procession.”

  “Naturally. They’re making a connection with this morning’s grisly discovery. That’s really bad publicity. And that unfortunate girl. Did you know her, François? Had you seen her in the cathedral before?”

  “No, Monsignor, never. I mean not until the ceremony on August fifteenth.”

  “Neither had I. To be honest, I’m not really sure what she was doing there, in that inappropriate attire.”

  “Any news about when we’ll reopen?”

  “I’ve just spoken to Captain Landard. He wishes to reopen from tomorrow. That’s good, even though we’ll probably have a crowd of journalists on our backs first thing.”

  “Isn’t it a bit soon, Monsignor? Wouldn’t it be better to wait for the first conclusions of the inquest or the appointment of an investigating magistrate?”

  “I understand where you’re coming from, François. However, I’m obliged to make a decision now. Considering the time difference with Manila, I won’t be able to reach the cardinal archbishop before midnight tonight. As for Monsignor Rieux de Molay, ever since he left for Lourdes early this morning, all I’m getting is his voice mail.”

  “I see. So you’re hoping to reopen soon?”

  “From my point of view, the sooner the better. The Virgin Mary’s faithful are claiming their home back. Besides, I get the impression the police want to check the old adage that a murderer always revisits the scene of his crime.”

  “If the young man is guilty of anything, do you really think he’ll come back to loiter in the vicinity?”

  “I don’t know, François. I don’t possess your in-depth knowledge of criminals. In any event, I simply wanted to let you know about the cathedral reopening and that I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Have a good evening, François.”

  “You, too, Monsignor.”

  At the very moment he was putting down the receiver, he noticed red marks on his wrists. He calmly removed his jacket, on the lapel of which a small Roman cross was pinned, and inspected his forearms. The marks went all the way up above his elbows. He knew what they meant. The disease was upon him again. Over the days that followed, he would be the scene of a struggle, another battle to fight, to add to the countless list of crises that had attacked him since his early childhood. The treatment for them had abruptly stunted his growth and made him into that four-foot-ten, ninety-five-pound ectoplasm in priest’s clothes.

  TUESDAY

  KNEELING IN FRONT OF THE LARGE, CRUCIFIED CHRIST NAILED to the south wall, hands joined under his chin and lips moving silently, Gombrowicz was praying. Except that what he was hearing was in no way the voice of God. The voice speaking to him through the earpiece belonged to his superior in the Crime Squad, Captain Landard.

  “Don’t overdo it, Gombrowicz. You look like a little girl in white ankle socks, taking her First Communion.”

  Gombrowicz raised his hands a couple of inches and whispered into the microphone he’d pinned to the cuff of his shirtsleeve. “My knees are beginning to ache. How do they manage to stay like this for so long without moving? There’s an old woman next to me and she’s been praying non-stop for half an hour. Still as a statue.”

  Landard burst out laughing. “Perhaps she’s dead, too. Give her a little nudge and see if she comes crashing down on the stone floor.”

  “No chance. I can guarantee this one’s virginity is still intact. No need to recork it with wax.”

  Shortly before opening time, Landard had set up his plan of action. Besides Gombrowicz, whom he’d positioned next to the Portal of Saint Anne, and who was keeping an eye on the entrance, three young athletic-looking lieutenants, with fanny packs containing their service weapons across their chests, had been deployed in the nave, camouflaged as worshippers or low budget tourists. At regular intervals, a pickpocket caught red-handed would bear the brunt of this, to say the least, unusual concentration of police forces in this place that represented a strong temptation for the petty thieves of Paris.

  Landard was settled at the helm of the cathedral audio-visual control room situated above the sacristy. Sitting at the console littered with blinking diodes, his walkie-talkie within easy reach, the captain acted like a minor monarch surveying his kingdom through cameras arranged all around the nave, which were generally used to film the great Sunday Mass for the Catholic TV channel, KTO. Mourad, whom Landard had practically requisitioned to guide him through the mosaic of plans and views of Notre Dame before him, was at his side. When the moment came, Mourad would be able—at least so Landard hoped—to point out, on one of the control room screens, the suspect’s blond head amid the crowd of anonymous tourists.

  The police had been waiting since morning, and the entire cathedral seemed to be holding its breath, gurgling with rumors, while waiting for the one all the Notre Dame staff was now calling “the blond angel.” A priest had come to say the two morning masses, interpreting with odd falseness a role he had nevertheless been playing for years. The duty sacristan, the guards, the reception staff, the volunteer speakers, the morning faithful, even tourists from the other end of the world, all seemed to be acting like automatons, as though absent, their eyes on that fixed point Gombrowicz was also staring at: the Portal of Sainte Anne, through which, sooner or later, the main suspect of a sordid murder case would, according to police sources, walk in and thrust himself into the net cast by the Crime Squad. Meanwhile, outside, on the square, a team from the TV station France 3 Île-de-France was installing a camera in anticipation of the lunchtime news, and they were soon joined by a van from the LCI station.

  “Landard to Gombrowicz. Landard to Gombrowicz.”

  “I’m listening, Landard.”

  “Still nothing?”

  “There are some Japanese, Germans, more Japanese.”

  “What the fuck is he doing? Keep your eyes open, guys. The kid isn’t far, I can feel it.”

  Sitting in one of the chapels south of the principal nave, just a few yards away from the crucified Christ beneath which Gombrowicz was revising his catechism, Father Kern was waiting. He was waiting for those worshippers, French or foreign, who wanted to see a priest. In the chapel dedicated to confession, a few years earlier, they had installed a large glass cage aimed at ensuring calm and confidentiality to both the one hearing confession and the one making confession. Ever since, the cathedral priests had called this chapel “the jar.”

  Sitting at the bottom of his jar, Father Kern was waiting: like almost everybody else this morning, he was waiting for a young man with blond, curly hair and a vaguely romantic, slender look, who, two days earlier, had attacked a young woman with a crucifix. The young woman had been found dead, and the blond angel seemed to be up to his neck in trouble.

  Sitting at his small confession table on which he usually kept two dictionaries—English and Spanish—Father Kern was waiting: waiting for night to inevitably fall over the city. In about ten hours at most, the red marks would reappear on his arms, ankles, and calves, just as the evening before, but this time they’d be accompanied by a violent bout of fever. The sharp, unbearable joint pain would probably come tomorrow. He knew this from past experience. The disease had definitely returned, attacking his body night after night, growing more intense day by day. How long would the crisis last? A week? A month? A year? Father Kern really couldn’t tell.

  Claire Kauffmann had barely slept a wink all night. She had watched the hours go by on the fluorescent screen of her alarm clock, tossing and turning in her sheets as she sighed, so much so that Peanuts, her cat, who snuggled up to her every night, this time had decided to abandon the quilted softness of the comforter in favor of the calmer kitchen floor. Usually, she managed to leave outside her bedroom door the images collected during her office hours at the Palais de Justice. She’d seen the worst one could possibly see. Besides, her bedroom had been furnished, decorated, and designed to give her, at least during the night, a few hours of amnesia, and to constitute an
effective citadel against the violence of the city. The metal blinds were always down. The heavy velvet curtains always closed. The door was padded. The carpet was deep. On the wall and on the shelves, there were childhood mementoes, a couple of plush toys, a pair of white shoes with straps worn only for one evening before she’d tipped into adolescence. Objects she liked to feel surrounded by when, alone in the dark, she felt sucked in by her thoughts, fears, and memories.

  However, that night, Claire Kauffmann wasn’t able to throw the black veil of sleep over the image of the white Madonna found strangled on the stone floor in Notre Dame. Just as she would start to doze off, no sooner was her body about to abandon itself than the cathedral images would come back to mind. Not images from her working morning, not those of the investigation in progress, not those of a place filled with the reassuring presence of uniforms and technicians in white smocks, and illumined by powerful projectors that lit even the darkest corners. What Claire Kauffmann saw as soon as she closed her eyes, curled up deep in her bed, was the endless night before; it was the screams of the young woman in white echoing in the blackness of the huge church, that brought no response, no help, as she faced her murderer alone. It was as though an iron hand was forcing her, a magistrate of the French Republic, to watch the squalid spectacle of death going over a woman’s body, spreading open her thighs, caressing an oddly hairless, adolescent sex, and finally bringing close a candle that had just poured an obscene light over her skin. Then, as an extra step deeper into the nightmare, Claire Kauffmann would quit her position as spectator. The hand that held her by the wrist so tightly she felt like screaming along with the victim, would then force her to approach the dark silhouette busying itself over the corpse dressed in white. And all of a sudden, the magistrate would realize that the victim’s hair was not dark but blond, blond like her own, and she’d immediately feel the murderer’s clumsy touch on her own skin, the candle scorching her own thighs. She would try to scream but no sound would come out of her mouth. She would struggle but her body, as though dead, no longer belonged to her. Finally, she would open her eyes, breathless, her sheets drenched in sweat, and put the light back on, trying to fill her lungs with air, trying to slow down her breathing, trying to fix her eyes on a familiar object on her bedroom walls.

  Women constantly had to pay when confronted with men’s urges, whether sexual or murderous. Even in death, that girl had had to suffer the insults of a pervert. With candle wax. And what else? That’s not counting the invasive, suggestive looks of all those—police officers, technicians, onlookers, and tourists— who had paraded around her body. And yet the ordeal wasn’t quite over yet. There was still the postmortem, which would deflower her a little further. She kept picturing the medical examiner, a highly professional man with whom she’d worked several times in the past, scratching his scalp after removing his latex glove. She would then turn around in bed for the umpteenth time, and curl up even more.

  When the alarm went off, Claire Kauffmann got out of bed, still groggy from her nocturnal struggle between wakefulness and nightmare. She fed Peanuts. She drank her hot chocolate while listening to the radio news. At the end of the seven a.m. headlines, France Info had mentioned the Notre Dame murder. The press knew, so the whole media circus would now begin.

  Then Claire Kauffmann had a shower, displaying her nudity only to the eyes of Peanuts, who was lying in a corner, lazily slapping his tail on the bathroom floor. She got dressed, shielded her body, still damp, with a cotton bodysuit, carefully fastening the crotch, covered her legs and buttocks with a sheer summer pantyhose, sheathing, as she did every morning, her blond sex with at least two protective layers.

  She took the bus from the 17th arrondissement, where she lived, deploring the promiscuity, the forced contact, men’s sometimes insistent looks. Sometimes she’d be followed, over the course of the journey, by slimy types whose eyes she felt ogling her back. She wasn’t sure which were worse: those who, wretched and stammering, ended up slipping her their phone numbers, or those who didn’t come out with it but preferred to lag a few steps behind her, hands in their pockets, eyes on her behind.

  She arrived at the Palais half an hour late and her fellow deputy, with whom she shared an office, remarked on how unusual that was. She got down to work, reading, filing, taking notes, a Sisyphus with a pencil skirt and a blond bun, who tried every day without success to reduce the mountain of files on her desk. Finally, at about eleven-thirty, she made up her mind to call Captain Landard on his cell phone, seeing how he’d neglected to keep her informed of the progress of his investigation at Notre Dame.

  She found him highly agitated. At the other end of the line, Landard was speaking in a whisper and Claire Kauffmann struggled to make out everything he was saying.

  “I’m telling you, the kid’s here, Mademoiselle Kauffmann, the blond angel, in the cathedral, he came back, I was right. I saw him arrive on my control screen like an apparition, less than ten minutes ago, he was all you could see, he was almost fluorescent. Mourad, the guard who collared him the day before yesterday, has formally identified him. And guess where the kid went right away? Go on, guess, madame. Guess what the little bastard did as soon as he came in?”

  “How should I know, captain?”

  “I’ll tell you, madame. You’ll never guess. The son of a bitch went to confession.”

  The blond angel had been confessing for half an hour. Unable to bear it any longer, Landard had left the control room to go see the scene with his own eyes. Shut up in his jar, as though put under glass like an extraordinary butterfly, the kid was talking endlessly, laughing, crying, shaking his head, gesticulating. And who was he confessing to? To a diminutive priest, almost a midget, who was listening without saying a word, resting his chin on his fist and who, every few minutes, would simply nod.

  Landard was chomping at the bit. He felt like a ten-year-old with an empty stomach and saliva in the corners of his mouth, his nose glued to the window of a delicatessen shop. He’d given the rector his word that very morning: no scandal or arrests inside the cathedral. They’d have to wait for the blond angel to come back out before picking him up. Outside, everything was ready: two officers had been repositioned at the exit and a third at the entrance, in case the suspect decided to lose them from the rear, in addition to Gombrowicz, still beneath his large crucified Christ, less than ten paces from the confessional. In case of serious problems, there were always the uniformed police in the square, placed there with the rector’s agreement, to keep the demands of the TV reporters at bay.

  Landard reluctantly went to kneel next to his lieutenant, his eyes not turned up, but constantly flitting toward the suspect. “What do you think they’re telling each other in there?”

  “Perhaps we should have placed a mic.”

  “The priest wouldn’t have agreed. What you say inside there is confidential, you know. Who could have guessed that the kid would be devious enough as to go and confess?”

  “Don’t worry, Landard. He’ll get to confess again before the evening, and this time at the Quai.”

  Somewhat reassured by the prospect of the forthcoming interrogation, Landard went back to his prayers. Still, the blond angel didn’t seem to want to come out and Landard, whose knees where beginning to ache, realized the absurdity of the situation.

  Finally, he made a decision. After all, he had his man shut up in a hermetic cage. What was he waiting for? For the bird to fly away? To hell with the promise made to the rector. It was time to intervene. He stepped out of the suspect’s sight and, with a whisper into his walkie-talkie, summoned the three lieutenants waiting outside. Then, as soon as the reinforcements had arrived, without any other procedure, Landard opened the glass door of the confessional and let his men loose inside, the way he would have let dogs loose in a butcher’s shop.

  The loud, metallic noise of the door bounced off the walls of the cell. There were posters of bare-breasted girls next to a postcard of a Van Gogh landscape, a group of crows flying
over a field of wheat. The prisoner raised his shaved head to the visitor, got off his stool, and held out a hand on which a tattoo in the form of a snake began, then disappeared beneath the turned-up sleeve and seemed to go up the entire length of his arm.

  “Is it Thursday already? I miscalculated the days, François. I’m really losing it. Hours, days, time in general.”

  Father Kern reassured the prisoner. “It’s me who’s come early, Djibril. It’s Tuesday.”

  Djibril sat back down, yawned, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and, with a gesture, offered his bed as a seat to the visiting priest.

  “Coffee?”

  Kern nodded. Djibril took a jar of Nescafé from a shelf, poured an estimated amount of coffee into a glass, and put an electric kettle on.

  “Black, as usual?”

  “Yes, please, Djibril, black.”

  Kern sat on the bed. They waited without speaking for the kettle to boil. Djibril filled the glass, immersed the spoon in it, and the sound of metal hitting against the sides reminded him of the key turning in his cell door, in the evening. Then he handed the coffee to the priest.

  “Mind your fingers, it’s hot.”

  Father Kern stirred the coffee. He was watching the coffee dissolve in silence, felt the smell rise to his nostrils, and the heat turning his fingers red. Yet he didn’t put the glass down, as though he wasn’t there, as though he was insensitive to the burn.

  “I thought you were at Notre Dame on Tuesdays.”

  Kern gave him a vague smile. “I’m going to give you a child’s answer: school closed early today.” He took a sip and held out his glass. “On second thought, I’ll have a lump of sugar. I didn’t have a chance to have lunch.” Referring to the television set mounted on the wall, which was showing the muted images of a German police series, he said, “Did you see the one o’clock news?”

  “I did, yes. Nothing else to do here. They brought your murderer out right through the main door, right under the noses of the cameras. And the prize for best direction goes to the Paris Police Headquarters for its spectacular cinematography.”