The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  Assuming that the suspect would be stupid enough to get his supplies in the neighborhood.

  JB and Papy had taken the first hour of the stake-out in order to make sure everything was in place. After that, two other agents would take over from them. The Rue du Hoc was still deserted, with the exception of a few customers at the pharmacy. It was as if the entire district had decided to take the day off, right in the middle of the week.

  Papy was developing his own theory as they sat there. Twenty-six percent of the Neiges quarter’s population was unemployed, according to the statistics provided by the local police. And the rate was double that among people aged eighteen to twenty-five. Why the hell would youngsters in search of work bother to get up any earlier than the employees at the Job Center?

  JB pressed his fingertip against the radio search button until he found a station.

  101.5. Cherie FM.

  Papy looked at him quizzically.

  “Are you serious?”

  Daniel Lévi was singing the ballad, “L’envie d’aimer.”1

  “That was my wedding song,” said Lieutenant Lechevalier, with a smile. “I still get shivers every time I hear it.”

  “You baffle me, JB.”

  He glanced outside. Still nothing happening. Not even a bin lorry. The cats and the seagulls seemed to be working part-time around the skips at the end of the street.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason. Well, lots of reasons, actually. You’ve got the body of a Greek god, JB, and the handsome face of a gangster. You’re a cop. Yet you live your life as if you work for the Post Office.”

  Daniel Lévi was still wailing on the radio, along with his crew of backing singers.

  “Sorry, Papy, I have no idea what you mean.”

  “For fuck’s sake, JB, do you really want me spell out what the whole force is saying behind your back?”

  “No. Not really.”

  Elton John was on the radio now, singing “Your Song.” Lieutenant Lechevalier turned up the volume. Inside the pharmacy, a mother was holding hands with her two children while she waited to be served.

  Papy decided to ignore his colleague’s wishes.

  “First of all, there’s your wife, Marie-Jo. We all wonder what the hell you’re doing with a girl like her. She gives you shit every time you have a stake-out at night, calls you ten times a day, forces you to be home by midnight even when we’re celebrating the end of a case we’ve been working on for weeks. You take care of everything—the kids, the shopping on Saturday, DIY on Sunday, the parent teacher meetings during the week—and on top of all that, she’s not exactly Miss World, your Marie-Jo, is she? You have to admit that!”

  JB did not get upset. He just looked a little surprised.

  “Is that really what people are saying behind my back?”

  “Well, yeah. You’re the sexiest guy on the force. You won a vote the other day, next to the coffee machine. All the policewomen fantasize about you. So, obviously, we’re intrigued by your Marie-Jo. Even the captain is sexier!”

  Lieutenant Lechevalier smiled openly this time.

  “Especially with her nose smashed in! You know, if Marie-Jo did ever dump me, I could definitely see myself with a woman like that.”

  “Like what? A woman with balls, you mean?”

  “Well, if you like . . . ”

  “And why would Marie-Jo ever dump you?”

  “Dunno. Because I’m a cop. Because I work crazy hours and get paid fuck-all?”

  Papy narrowed his eyes. A man in a hat, collar turned up, had just entered the pharmacy. He replied to JB without taking his eyes off this customer.

  “Yep, it’s official. You really do baffle me. All you have to do is be the first to find the Deauville robbers’ hoard, preferably a few days before Valentine’s Day. Then sneak a few trinkets into your pocket.”

  An old Rolling Stones hit was playing now: “Paint it Black.”

  JB lowered the volume without replying, but Papy wouldn’t let it go.

  “Or better still, you could give them to a different girl. Someone prettier, nicer, sexier.”

  JB remained silent for a moment, as if hesitating, then suddenly winked at his partner.

  Strange, thought Papy.

  He did not have time to wonder what that wink meant, though, because the woman in the pharmacy had taken off her white coat just as the guy in the hat came out carrying a bag of medicine.

  Lieutenant Pasdeloup aimed the camera at the man, zoomed in, then suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus Christ, it’s Zerda!”

  JB nodded almost imperceptibly: he too had recognized the fourth Deauville robber, or at least the man who was strongly suspected of playing that role. He got out of the unmarked police car, forcing himself not to rush.

  The man was calmly walking along the sidewalk. After twenty meters, he went into the grocery shop on the corner. Lieutenant Lechevalier followed in his footsteps while Papy crossed the street to the pharmacy.

  There were about ten people in the cornershop, more than there were outside on the streets. Alexis Zerda—if it really was him—had stopped in front of the beer aisle. Lechevalier moved closer, pretending to look at the various brands of rum.

  And then he bit his lip with rage.

  Fuck it!

  Alexis Zerda raised a six-pack of Corona up to his eyes.

  Holding it in both hands.

  The bag of medicine had vanished.

  JB stared around in panic. Customers kept coming and going. Three were queuing at the till. Outside the shop, on the sidewalk, two women were serving themselves from boxes of fruit.

  Lechevalier went even closer to Zerda, just to be sure that he wasn’t hiding anything under his leather jacket, but in truth he had already understood. Zerda had handed the bag of medicine to an accomplice.

  A man or a woman that he’d not spotted. They could follow Alexis Zerda for hours, even days, as they’d been doing on and off for months, but he wouldn’t lead them to Soler.

  While Lieutenant Pasdeloup checked with the woman in the pharmacy what the man had bought from her—sterile compresses, Betadine, Coalgan and sticky microporous tape: the ideal combination for tending to an open wound—Lechevalier was passing behind Zerda.

  Back to back, face close to the rows of pastis on the shelf—Ricard, 51, Pernod—he turned his head just for an instant.

  It was enough. Identity confirmed.

  Not only did the man who was putting the Corona six-pack back down next to the Desperados look exactly like the portrait of the supposedly anonymous motorcyclist from Deauville, but JB spotted, beneath his hat, a large silver earring in his left ear lobe. And when the lieutenant brushed past him, he distinctly recognized a skull-and-crossbones tattoo at the base of his neck.

  1The desire to love

  21

  Marianne Augresse hesitated before answering, but as soon as she saw the name of her deputy on the screen, she feverishly pressed the green circle on her iPhone.

  “JB. Any news?”

  The captain felt a delicious rush of adrenalin in her veins while Lieutenant Lechevalier replied.

  “We almost . . . ” In a few words, JB described their stake-out at the pharmacy, the appearance of Alexis Zerda and the probable intervention of an accomplice whom they had not been able to identify. It took all the captain’s self-control to stop herself from yelling that it was hardly worth putting two policemen in an unmarked car if they were going to be fooled that easily. After the previous day’s fiasco, she knew it was better for her to stand by her men.

  Directly opposite Marianne, three rubber-clad creatures made aquatic-aerial movements as their kite-surfing sails caught the wind and bounced over the waves. Half-bird, half-dolphin, she thought.

  “OK, JB. Don’t lose Zerda. There are about a hundred pharmacies in Le Havre, so I d
oubt it’s coincidental that he went into the one in Neiges. It’s the first link we’ve had since January 6th between Alexis Zerda and the Deauville robbery, so let’s be positive.”

  JB replied quicker this time, reassured that his captain had taken the news philosophically.

  “I agree, Marianne. It’s a sign that the wolves are cornered and will have to come out of the forest, sooner or later. I’m going to get Bourdaine to follow Zerda. I’ll see you at the station?”

  “I’ll be there soon. Maybe just a little bit late.”

  Instinctively the captain covered her phone with one hand so that the lieutenant wouldn’t hear the seagulls in the air above her. Then she hung up and turned to Vasily with a big smile.

  “Sorry. An emergency . . . I’m all yours, though not for long.”

  The immense Le Havre beach stretched out in front of them. A crescent of bourgeois buildings was encircled by the wide concrete sea wall, which was brightened up by the presence of potted palms, European flags floating in the wind, and freshly mowed strips of lawn. An infinity of pebbles. Ferries drifting across the Channel. Marianne wondered how Nice had ever managed to steal from Le Havre the reputation as the most beautiful urban seafront in France.

  They walked, shoulder to shoulder, along a little pathway that consisted of a few planks placed over the pebbles, maintaining the illusion that they could approach the sea below them without spraining their ankles. The hundreds of white beach huts were ranged between the sea wall and the empty beach, like an extra line of defence against the sea.

  As soon as they were past the beach huts, Marianne twisted her neck round to look up at the psychologist, who was twenty centimeters taller than her.

  “I kept my promise, Mr. Dragonman. I ordered one of my officers to conduct a discreet investigation into the Moulin family. His conclusions are clear. I’m sorry, but the parents are clean. Malone really is their child, and has been ever since he was born, even if it sounds a little strange to phrase it like that. There’s no doubt.”

  The beach was a desolate place in November—the huts locked up, the seafront restaurants closed—compared to the hive of activity in summer. Marianne, however, adored this slightly melancholic autumnal atmosphere. All the place needed was a shady tree-lined terrace where she could sit and have a coffee, watching the ocean liners pass by in the background, and Vasily’s golden-brown eyes in the foreground.

  “A normal family,” she continued. “The couple have no secrets. Dimitri Moulin spent a few months in prison, but that was years ago. Since then, he’s been a perfectly ordinary husband and father, involved in village life.”

  Vasily frowned.

  “If your definition of a model father is . . . ”

  Marianne did not rise to the bait.

  “You can look at the problem from any angle you like, Mr. Dragonman, but it’s simply not possible that Malone isn’t their son . . . ”

  “I understand,” said the psychologist. “Thank you for trying.”

  There were large black and white photographs pinned to some of the huts, reminiscent of the Roaring Twenties and the days of the Titanic: transatlantic liners with couples on the deck, dressed in their Sunday best. If it were a hundred years younger, Le Havre would have been a very romantic place.

  While her gaze drifted over the posters, Marianne’s mind filled with idiotic questions: Was Vasily still single? Or in love with another girl? Aroused by walking with a woman next to the sea?

  Well, if he was, the bastard certainly wasn’t showing it. He seemed to be brooding, refusing to give up on his belief, like a child who wouldn’t admit that mermaids and unicorns don’t exist. He turned to her.

  “What is your earliest memory, Captain?”

  “Sorry?”

  The psychologist’s face was illuminated by a wide smile.

  “I love this test! Everyone has to think about it at some point. Go on, try to remember: what is your earliest memory? Not something you’ve been told, but a real memory, precise images.”

  “Well, um . . . ”

  Marianne closed her eyes, so that only the sound of the waves could distract her, and opened them again a few seconds later.

  “You’ve caught me off guard. I don’t feel very sure . . . I think I’d say a holiday at my aunt’s farm. I saw her milking a cow and I think I can remember picking up a little stool so I could copy her. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about that.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I don’t know . . . Four?” She hesitated. “No, probably five, or maybe even six. It was in the spring.”

  “So before that, for the first five or six years of your life, there’s just a black hole? You have to rely on other people to know what happened to you, correct? In terms of images, there are old photographs in an album. And emotionally, there are the stories your mother told you one Sunday after dinner. For landmarks, you have the places where you’ve been told you used to go: a nursery school, a house—yours, your babysitter’s, the house where you spent your first holiday.”

  He caught his breath, sucking in the sea wind, then went on:

  “Malone Moulin isn’t even four yet, Captain. Everything he’s experienced and will experience for several months to come he will forget. The only thing he’ll have left are those ‘ghost’ memories I mentioned. As I’ve explained before, the memory of a child under four is like plasticine, which adults can shape in any way they want. So I believe you when you tell me that Malone really is the son of Amanda and Dimitri Moulin; but in that case, we have to look at the case in a different way. Those memories didn’t enter his head by accident.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before the age of three, a child has no autonomous self-awareness. The ‘I’ is associated with what we psychologists call the ‘communal psyche.’ His mother, his father and his babysitter are, in a way, extensions of himself. So when Malone tells us about his previous mother and the memories that he associates with her, there is one thing we can be sure of: those early images do exist. And for them to exist, someone must have planted them in his mind, and then tended them. Someone who belongs to his communal psyche. Someone who has done all they can to make sure Malone remembers. As if he were their last witness. The guardian of a secret, if you like. Consequently . . . ”

  He paused. Ahead of them, on another hut, a sepia image of a man with a moustache wearing a bowler hat, pushing aside the veil on a hat in order to kiss a pretty, short-haired girl.

  “And consequently,” the psychologist went on, “if someone made so much effort to ensure Malone would remember these things then, naturally, it is in other people’s interests that Malone should forget them.”

  “Malone’s parents?”

  “For example. This might seem stupid, but everything that boy has told me gives me the impression that these things are clues that have been deliberately placed in his brain, like beacons, landmarks that will help him when the time comes.”

  Vasily was getting carried away. He was waving his arms about and his lips were trembling slightly. The captain found this charming, intriguing, even convincing. Except that his argument had one major fault.

  His hypothesis presumed that some Machiavellian person was filling Malone’s head with memories by constantly repeating to him the details of a previous life.

  And that was what struck her as wrong.

  Because the being that was supposedly filling his head was Gouti, his cuddly toy. That is what Vasily had told her.

  Ridiculous.

  Marianne let the swell cradle her thoughts for a while, as if they could rise above the clouds and accept the dreamlike, the supernatural. She did not want to pour derision on Vasily’s passion. Nothing in this romantic landscape invited that response. Against all logic, she decided to take the psychologist’s fears seriously, or at least to pretend to.

  “So that wo
uld be the explanation? That Malone is in some kind of danger. And these memories serve to protect him?”

  “Maybe. How else do you explain his fear of rain? The way he always feels cold? As for all the other factors, they don’t resemble a classic case of trauma. The images are too precise.”

  A gust of wind blew Marianne’s hair across her face. Hair like the tentacles of a dead octopus, red face, her coat buttoned up to her chin . . . so many sexy details to add to her smashed nose.

  “Come on,” said Vasily. “Let’s go inside. I want to show you something.”

  He pointed at an open, empty beach hut a few meters further on, identical to a dozen others that were being repainted by a local government employee.

  Two meters by two meters. Inside, the persistent smell of damp contrasted with a surprising sensation of warmth. But clearly Vasily Dragonman had not led the captain into this private nook in order to kiss her.

  He knelt down and spread out a 1/25,000 map that he’d taken from his backpack. In order not to step on it, Marianne had to lean against the wooden wall. The paper was covered with colorful arrows, cross-hatched geometrical forms, circles in different colors.

  “I’ve been trying to get a clearer picture of what’s going on,” Vasily explained, looking up at her. “So I’ve attempted to represent Malone’s stories on paper. You see, I’m not so eccentric really. The hypothetical-deductive method. Isn’t that how the police proceed too?”

  Marianne observed the map in more detail, almost amused by it. It was true: she and her men often used identical material to organize investigations, based on witness accounts of varying reliability.

  “According to Malone,” Vasily went on, “his house—the previous one—was by the seaside. He could see the sea from his bedroom window. So I cross-hatched all of the inhabited coastal areas. There aren’t that many, in fact, if you take into account all the cliffs, nature reserves, industrial zones, and so on. Next, Malone constantly talked about a pirate ship. Those are my circles. I’ve circled all the places where it’s possible to see a boat, any kind of craft from a fishing vessel to a super-tanker. Everywhere that has a view over the fishing port, the marina, the commercial port. I even thought about the wooden boats in the playgrounds in Mare-Rouge, Saint-François and Bléville. Look, Captain, even if you cross-match the areas of habitable seaside with the views of a ship, the space that’s covered is hopelessly vast. It includes a good part of the central zone of Le Havre that was rebuilt by Perret, for example.”