The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  Constantini and Duhamel were patrolling the neighborhood in search of witnesses. Two other vehicles were driving around Manéglise and the surrounding area. If Amanda Moulin really had panicked and had walked off somewhere with her son, she couldn’t have got very far.

  Except Marianne didn’t believe for a second that was what had happened.

  She approached the window and saw Lieutenant Lechevalier’s car come screeching to a halt outside the house. She waited while JB bent over the back seat and picked up a large plastic box, gathering a few sheets of paper that had scattered over the floor. Presumably the collection of documents found at Vasily Dragonman’s flat.

  JB had got here quickly. He was a good, efficient worker. Even if he was furious that he hadn’t been able to see his wife and kids since the day before—furious with his captain in particular. JB would be useful, the most useful of all of them when it came to sifting through every month of a three-year-old child’s brief life.

  The captain turned around and stared at Dimitri Moulin’s corpse. She wanted to think about something else.

  A bullet between the eyes.

  The shot was clean, precise. The work of a professional, not of a woman holding a revolver for the first time in her life, upset after an argument, or trying to defend herself, or take revenge; a woman who might have panicked and pressed the trigger in a moment of desperation. Marianne didn’t believe it was premeditated either. Even the most conscientious, the most submissive wife wouldn’t place a plate, a glass, a fork and a knife in front of the chair belonging to the man she was planning to kill as soon as he got home.

  The captain’s mobile buzzed. A text.

  Angie.

  Her friend was still worrying about the body found at Cap de la Hève. Marianne didn’t have time to call her back, to confirm that yes, it really was Vasily Dragonman who’d been murdered. The two of them would commemorate him by getting drunk one of these nights, but right now, her pretty hairdresser couldn’t say anything that would help her find her way through the labyrinthine passages of the psychologist’s brain. There was no rush; she would call her back later.

  Marianne Augresse put one foot on the first step of the staircase, then said to Officer Benhami:

  “Tell JB to join me in the kid’s bedroom. If the box is too heavy, you can help him bring it upstairs. We’ll stay up there while you play with your cotton buds and test tubes.”

  * * *

  JB had spread Malone’s drawings over the bed, about fifteen A4 sheets that Vasily Dragonman had kept in his file.

  The bedroom couldn’t have been more than fifteen square meters and had a slightly sloping ceiling on the wall opposite the stairs. Marianne was obliged to bend down to turn on the little CD player on the bookshelf, before hooking it up to the MP3.

  The recording broke the silence in the child’s room. A soft, calm voice, which could have been masculine or feminine. If you were only half-listening, you might even have thought it was the voice of a young child, the kind of voice you heard on cartoons, the kind of voice a cuddly toy might have, if it could talk; in Malone’s mind, at least.

  Because after listening more carefully, Marianne felt quite certain that it was a woman’s voice, although the higher-pitched sounds were sometimes a little exaggerated and there was a metallic ring to certain intonations. Marianne was fairly sure that the voice had been altered, probably put through some basic sound-processing software. That, too, should be easy enough to check.

  Gouti was just three years old, which was already pretty big in his family, because his mother was only eight and his grandfather, who was very old, was fifteen.

  What was the point of distorting Gouti’s voice?

  They lived in the biggest tree on the beach, which had roots shaped like an immense spider. Their place was on the third floor, first branch on the left, between a tern that was almost always away on trips and a lame owl who had now retired, but who used to work on the pirate ships.

  The answer seemed obvious. The voice had been modified so that it wouldn’t be recognized. So that, should Gouti and his heart end up in the hands of a stranger, or if Malone talked too much or wasn’t careful enough to hide his stories under his duvet, no one would be able to track them back to the storyteller.

  His real mother? Timo Soler’s girlfriend?

  This answer was only partially satisfying. How could anyone be identified if their voice was the only clue? Because the police already knew this person? That was the most logical explanation, even if it did not seem fully convincing. If the girl had a criminal record, if she’d known Soler because they belonged to the same criminal circles, it wouldn’t have been difficult to identify her, whether her voice was camouflaged or not.

  Marianne was hardly even listening to the story, which she’d played so many times the day before, but JB seemed entirely concentrated on the tale delivered by this robot voice, like something from a Japanese cartoon. As there was no space left on the bed, he’d unfolded the map on the little desk. He knew the rules. Marianne had already told him what kind of game they were playing: a treasure hunt! Picking up the game where Vasily Dragonman had left off. Same map, same clues, although they had one big advantage over the psychologist: they were going to look first at the areas around Cap de la Hève, because that was where Dragonman had been murdered. Because he was getting too close?

  The captain looked around Malone’s room for a few seconds. There were a lot of toys, almost too many for a family as poor as the Moulins, though Marianne knew it would be stupid to see that as abnormal. Malone was an only child, and everything in this room spoke of the parents’ love—or the mother’s, at least—for this child.

  The captain took a closer look at the fluorescent calendar hanging above the bedside table, with the rocket on one of the seven planets—today’s, Friday. So that was how Malone kept track of the days, when some kids his age were incapable of distinguishing evening from morning.

  Everything had been calculated. Planned in infinite detail. Malone had been manipulated for nearly a year by his adoptive parents; or by that woman, unknown to the Moulins, so that he would retain some trace of his life before, despite the efforts of his new family.

  Marianne sat down on the little bed, pushing the drawings out of the way and leaning back against a Buzz Lightyear pillow, the twin of another bearing the likeness of Woody. Below, she could hear the heavy footsteps of the forensics team. She had no desire to go downstairs. Marianne felt good, at peace, in this pastel-colored room that seemed like a sanctuary. JB brushed past her to pick up some large, multi-colored magnets, them used them to fix a few other drawings to the yellow radiator.

  She had been sharing the intimacy of this little room with him for several minutes now, and she had noticed how at ease her deputy seemed. In this unfamiliar environment, he had almost instinctive points of reference. You could tell it was natural for him to lift up the sheets of a bed and find the toy hidden there that was causing the bump; to tidy up a toy the way other men would pick up a scrap of paper; to find a book just by glancing along the spines of the hundred or so arranged on the bookshelf; to walk around the carpet without crushing any of the Playmobil figures or small cars scattered around, his movements assured and reassuring. Elegant.

  A Chippendale in a Toys R Us magazine.

  It was totally seductive. He was the cream of the crop. Those bodybuilders at her gym could sweat all their lives without even coming up to JB’s ankles.

  She imagined his giant shadow as he walked past the nightlight on his daughter’s bedside table to give her a goodnight kiss. And she felt, like a fantasy, what those parents must feel when they go to hide a coin from the tooth fairy under their child’s pillow, to tell a story in a whispered voice, to share a three-way hug—or ten-way if you included the cuddly toys; that daily complicity that gives couples who hate each other a reason to stay together, who go on putting up wi
th each other for those seconds of eternity that no orgasm can replace.

  For an instant, Marianne thought of the bedroom in her apartment, the one next to hers, unoccupied but crammed full of never-opened cardboard boxes, her dusty guitar, her collection of faded Peruvian dolls, and a drying rack hung with underwear that did not excite anyone. For an instant, she imagined it with a rainbow mobile hanging from the ceiling, pink cat wallpaper, giraffe curtains, a carpet covered in clowns . . .

  Christ, Marianne! Get a grip!

  On the wall facing her was a square painted slate-gray on which you could draw, erase your drawing, then start again. The box of chalks was lying next to it.

  To get her mind off the emptiness tugging at her belly, Marianne picked up a piece of white chalk. Then she wrote:

  Who is Timo Soler’s girlfriend?

  Is she Malone’s mother?

  Why did she disguise her voice?

  Why did she hand over her child to Amanda and Dimitri Moulin?

  Why did she give a cuddly toy the memories her son was going to lose?

  What was he supposed to remember? Was there a precise aim? For a precise moment?

  Does the answer exist, encoded in Gouti’s stories?

  The chalk broke as she was writing the ninth question mark. She picked up another piece.

  Who is Gouti? Why is Malone’s cuddly toy an agouti, an amnesiac rodent?

  She then changed her chalk to a pink one, and wrote in a mixture of joined-up writing and capital letters:

  WHO killed VASILY DRAGONMAN?

  WHO killed DIMITRI MOULIN?

  WHO will be the next victim?

  WHO is the killer? Who are the killers?

  WHERE is AMANDA MOULIN?

  WHERE is MALONE MOULIN?

  WHERE is TIMO SOLER?

  WHERE is ALEXIS ZERDA?

  WHERE is the loot from the Deauville robbery?

  Nervously, she used what remained of the chalk to trace a circle around all of these words, then wrote, diagonally:

  WHAT CONNECTS ALL THESE QUESTIONS?

  JB looked at her.

  “Is that all? Just twenty questions?”

  Marianne calmly put away the chalk, then checked her watch.

  “One last one, for good measure. Why hasn’t Papy called me back?”

  52

  Federico Soler. 1948-2009.

  In the Potigny cemetery, the dead were not very old. That, at least, was what Lieutenant Pasdeloup was thinking as he wandered slowly among the gravestones, doing macabre mental calculations.

  Sixty-one. Fifty-eight. Sixty-three.

  Seventy-seven, almost a record.

  The closure of the biggest mine in western France, in 1989, had not had much effect on the life expectancy of the miners who had become unemployed. For them, it was already too late. Or too early. Those who could, got away; the rest were trapped here. Behind the cemetery, Papy spotted the bell tower of the Polish chapel, Notre-Dame de Czestochowa, but the flags on the graves in front of him and the languages on the epitaphs betrayed the presence of a score of other nationalities who had washed up here and would now never leave.

  Italians, Russians, Belgians, Spaniards, Chinese.

  A few minutes later, the lieutenant stopped in front of another grave, larger, a coffin for two.

  Tomasz and Karolina Adamiack, the parents of Ilona Adamiack, who had changed her name to Lukowik when she married Cyril. The two of them had died in the same year, 2007 at fifty-eight and sixty-two respectively. Papy now had all the elements of the dossier in his head, the precise life story of the four members of what he thought of as the Gryzon´s Gang. Four kids, all born here, a few houses apart. The parents of Cyril Lukowik were the only people who still lived in the village, still at the same address: 23 Rue des Gryzon´s. Alexis Zerda’s parents had moved south, to Gruissan, on the Languedoc coast, about ten years before.

  Papy lingered a while longer in the small, empty cemetery. Before entering it, he had quickly made a tour of the village. In the center, everything had been almost completely reconstructed. Traces of the village’s past were reserved for insiders. Small iron trolleys used as flowerpots at each entrance to the village; a Rue de la Mine; a Stade des Gueules Rouges (Red Faces Stadium) with its Mining Petanque court; a water tower in the shape of a derrick.

  As if that time were lost.

  As if the children who had grown up here were lost.

  No more mine, no more parents, no more work.

  It wasn’t an excuse, just an explanation.

  Here, in Potigny, dire poverty. Over there, in Deauville, barely fifty kilometers to the north, the sea.

  Two villages of the same size, in the same region, but which did not even seem to belong to the same world.

  It wasn’t an excuse; but it was a temptation . . .

  Papy approached the cemetery gates, on his way back to his car. Yes, it was easy to understand why the Gryzon´s Gang had wanted to go shopping in Deauville, using a Beretta 92 and two Maverick 88s instead of a chequebook or a credit card. It wasn’t even a question of necessity. More like identity.

  Being born in a Norman mining village? What a joke! Growing up in one of those little cottages in the Pays d’Auge, without any cows or apple trees . . . who could believe it? Not even a local singer like Pierre Bachelet to give themselves a semblance of pride. Nothing but some crappy mining tunnels, worked for a few decades and then abandoned. A sacrificial generation, from all over the world, who came only to end up dead and forgotten here, in this tiny cemetery. Apart from the Poles, perhaps.

  It was the opposite of his own life, thought Papy, pushing open the gates. His own family—children, grandchildren, and ex-wife—had dispersed all over France, all over the world. For a few seconds, he thought about his daughter, Anaïs. It would be 7 A.M. in Cleveland now. She was probably still asleep.

  His phone buzzed as soon as he got back to the street. Marianne. A message left fifteen minutes ago. Papy had turned off his phone in the cemetery. Not out of fear of disturbing anyone—he was the only living person there—but out of respect, out of superstition rather than religion. While it hadn’t been proven that the radiation from smartphones was toxic for the living, maybe they disturbed communication between ghosts in the hereafter.

  “Papy? Are you in Potigny?”

  The captain’s voice sounded loud and excited in his ear.

  “Yeah.”

  “Fantastic! It was maybe a good idea, in fact, you going there. I want you to collect everything you can find on Timo Soler. We’re looking for a girl, you know that, right? And maybe even a child that he might have had with her. Timo Soler must still have family, friends, neighbors in the village?”

  Lieutenant Pasdeloup pictured Federico Soler’s grave and the information collected about his son. Timo had been raised solely by his father, until his father’s death in 2009, at the age of sixty-one. Lung cancer. His mother, Ofelia, had gone back to Galicia when Timo was just six.

  “Timo Soler left Potigny eight years ago. Since then, silicosis has wiped out the generation that knew Timo as a teenager. Seriously, it’s worse than a cholera epidemic.”

  Marianne’s response was a slap in the face.

  “Well figure something out, Papy. You’re the one who wanted to visit Potigny. It’s your responsibility. Find an old teacher, his friends at the football club, a priest, a baker who knew him as a kid, anyone.”

  Anyone . . .

  The streets of Potigny were deserted. The shops were new. The village seemed to have exorcised the ghosts of the mine long ago.

  “I had no way of knowing, Marianne.”

  “Knowing what?”

  “Knowing what would happen this morning. There’d been nothing new on the Deauville robbery for ten months!”

  Marianne sighed. Papy reached the long, straight sho
pping street that ran through the village.

  “So what were you hoping to achieve from this little pilgrimage of yours?”

  “I have a feeling, an intuition. It’s too early to say, but it’s a sort of matrix that would connect all the pieces of the puzzle, something that would explain everything. The Rue des Gryzon´s, their adolescence here, the empty spaces on their CVs, and all the entries on their criminal records. Also the things Malone Moulin said, that story about the rocket, the fact that this kid has an agouti . . . ”

  “You’re really beginning to annoy me, Papy! Do you realize how much fun we’re having here? We’re listening to the stories told by a cuddly toy and trying to draw fairy tales on a treasure map. To be honest, you’d be more use to me here. You know this area better than any of my men. Thanks to you, JB’s going to be stuck in a child’s bedroom, looking at drawings, and he can’t even pick up his own kids from school or kiss his wife.”

  Just then, Lieutenant Pasdeloup spotted the school, at the end of the street. Opposite it, a pretty girl was emerging from a hairdressing salon. Short skirt, high heels, and blonde hair—although the last detail was perhaps only about ten minutes old.

  Papy couldn’t help laughing as he thought of the captain’s last words.

  “What’s so funny, Papy?”

  “Sorry, Marianne. It’s just an image that clashed with what you were saying. JB is the perfect father—that’s true. But if you think he leaves the station at four o’clock to pick up his kids . . . ”

  “What?”