The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  “What are we going to do, Captain?”

  Marianne did not respond. She stared at the Boeing 737 behind the window again, her mind running through what had just happened.

  Timo Soler had been abandoned half-dead in the airport parking lot, but the emergency services had been called in time for him to have at least some chance of surviving, however slim. That was logical, after all, since every episode of this story had been written in advance. Marianne was ultimately just a puppet in a toy theater, a character whose role had been plotted out, chapter by chapter.

  She thought about the second-to-last event, less than five minutes ago.

  A scream had echoed through the airport while she was questioning one of the women behind the check-in desks. It had come from the direction of the women’s toilets that were just beyond all the security checks. JB and Constantini had run straight over there and Marianne had followed, a few meters behind. She’d understood as soon as she saw the door smashed down by Constantini’s shoulder and, behind it, the body laid out on the floor.

  One more illusion.

  Amanda Moulin had been taken by surprise and knocked out in the women’s toilets. Her attacker had then dragged the unconscious body into the nearest cubicle, crudely gagged and tied it up. A rushed job.

  “He was hiding here,” JB said, pointing at the door of the maintenance cupboard opposite. “He was hiding in that tiny box room, waiting for Amanda Moulin.”

  Marianne observed the tiny cupboard, with its crushed cardboard boxes, its mops and bottles of detergent.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” JB went on. “How long was he waiting there?”

  “She . . . ”

  “She?”

  The captain examined the narrow rectangle, about thirty centimeters wide, one last time. Amanda Moulin, sitting on the toilet, the gag now around her neck, was looking shell-shocked.

  “She! Only a woman could hide in there. A thin, flexible woman.”

  Angie.

  The image of Amanda’s face slowly faded from her mind, along with that of the cupboard full of toilet paper and bleach. They were replaced by the Boeing 737.

  Security Man was still watching Marianne. Nervously, his gaze hopped from the flight attendant’s breasts, at eye level for him, to his henchmen’s machine guns, then back to the captain’s face. Security Man seemed unused to seeing a woman with a gun on her belt. A woman he was obliged to wait for while she made a decision.

  Marianne was thinking. Quickly. It was all clear now. Angie had taken Amanda Moulin’s seat on the plane! She must have gone into the airport a few hours earlier, before her poster was distributed to the customs officers. She must have booked a seat on another flight—it didn’t matter which one—and then she’d waited, hidden in the toilets. All she had to do was wait for Amanda Moulin—whom no one suspected at the time, whose poster was not plastered all over the walls of the airport—to arrive with Malone, get through the baggage check-in, past the customs officials, past passport control and the security checks. The last check—the one before boarding—was purely a formality, as the queue of one hundred and twenty passengers had to be herded onto the plane in a matter of minutes, the flight attendants merely glancing at the passports, and focusing on the seat numbers on the boarding passes. After all, the passengers’ passports had already been checked twice.

  A mother and a child. Two passports. A vague resemblance. All Angie had to do was conceal her face a little, and she’d have no worries about being stopped at this stage.

  The perfect plan. Angie had shown incredible daring.

  Security Man, at his wit’s end, seemed to be desperately seeking help, any kind of support, but the two soldiers looked as if they’d been turned to stone, the attendant to a wax doll.

  He was on his own. He sighed.

  “So, what should we do?”

  Marianne responded by pointing outside.

  “Is the plane to Galway still on the runway?”

  The man rolled his eyes and clapped his hands, then pointed at the Boeing on the tarmac.

  “Yes! And there are three others waiting in line behind it. The girl and the kid are on board, we checked. We’re just waiting for your orders, Captain. Judge Dumas has made it clear that the airplane mustn’t be allowed to leave without your agreement. I have fifteen men ready to go as soon as you . . . ”

  Marianne did not reply. Security Man lowered his eyes and grimaced. This was driving him mad. This indecisive police captain, wandering around with a disgusting cuddly toy in her arms, and no one even batted an eyelid. You’d think he was the only one who’d noticed. This whole episode was crazy.

  As if to torture the man even more, Marianne’s fingers began to squeeze the toy, running over the seam in Gouti’s fur. The captain re-read the four words on the toy’s label. Gouti’s secret!

  She couldn’t stop a small smile creeping across her face.

  Four words, before their very eyes, ever since the beginning, and no one had paid them any attention.

  Made in French Guiana.

  Yes, Angie had written everything in advance, this whole story, down to the last chapter! But it was up to her, Marianne, to choose the ending.

  Angie’s confidences at the table in Uno had been designed just for this. To prepare this moment. To make her hesitate . . . All those evenings, all those hours when Angie had pretended to be her friend.

  Manipulation?

  A cry for help?

  Security Man stood on tiptoes and shouted like a yappy little dog:

  “My God, what are we waiting for, Captain?!”

  Marianne’s calm reply sent him into a complete meltdown.

  “A phone call.”

  69

  Today, Léonce asked me to turn off his life support.

  Want to kill

  I couldn’t.

  Convicted: 7

  Acquitted: 990

  www.want-to-kill.com

  The child swung slowly, yet without any awareness of the danger.

  The two ropes that held the cracked wooden board were frayed and attached to the swing’s frame by rusted snaplinks. The rain and the years had also left their mark on the other equipment: a worm-eaten bar, asymmetric rings, a rope net full of holes.

  The child wasn’t moving: the swing was just swaying on its own, its movements not slowed or accelerated by the slightest gesture, not even a blink. The child’s gaze was fixed, as if, for him, everything else was moving: the grass, the trees, the house, the entire earth.

  From the conservatory, Marta Lukowik observed this child, covered from head to foot, from mittens to hat, for a long moment, then put her coffee cup down on the table. A whole series of plants and shrubs were growing in the glass-walled room, carefully arranged in earthenware pots lined up next to the windows: orange trees, lemon trees and gooseberry bushes providing a sophisticated mix of colors.

  Josèf, sitting opposite Lieutenant Pasdeloup, pointed to the little garden enclosed inside three high brick walls. Papy thought he was going to talk about the child.

  “You wouldn’t guess it, but that’s south-facing. We had the conservatory built in 1990, just after the mines closed, with the compensation we received. Madness . . . ”

  He coughed and pulled a cup of coffee towards him.

  “We’re still paying for it, twenty-five years later, but maybe I wouldn’t be alive today if I wasn’t spending my days under glass, surrounded by all these plants.”

  His cough transformed into a phlegmy laugh. Marta dropped a sugar cube into her husband’s coffee, without him even asking her.

  “And with the three walls around the garden,” Josèf added, “the neighbors don’t bother us.”

  He flinched as his lips came into contact with the hot coffee.

  Papy tasted his. It was bitter. It hadn’t been easy, persuading Josèf Lukow
ik to let him in, and showing this retired miner his police ID had not helped matters. It had only been when he mentioned the names of Timo Soler, Angélique Fontaine, and Alexis Zerda that Josèf had opened the door a centimeter wider.

  The reaction was especially marked when he mentioned Alexis Zerda’s name. Papy had responded instinctively.

  “Alexis Zerda is dead. He was shot, less than an hour ago. We found his body on the old NATO base.”

  The door had opened then, and Josèf had said simply:

  “We’ll go through to the conservatory. Marta, make us some coffee.”

  That was all. As if Josèf had no wish for the lieutenant to hang around in the hallway with its old-fashioned wallpaper, as if he didn’t want his gaze to linger on the Solidarność posters, on the photograph of Wawel Cathedral or the portrait of Bronisław Bula above the shoe rack.

  Visitors were taken to the conservatory.

  Where the neighbors wouldn’t bother them.

  Papy gulped down his coffee, forcing himself not to grimace, then stared brazenly at the child on the swing.

  “So what happened?”

  Marta Lukowik put her hand on her husband’s. A wrinkled hand, covered with brown spots, as worn as the snaplinks of the swing, tired out from years of carrying children, before they grew up and left those hands behind. Lieutenant Pasdeloup realized that Marta’s hand, placed on her husband’s, meant that it was too late, that he should tell the whole story. A wordless connection. It was up to her husband to find the actual sentences, but it was the wife who was confessing.

  Josèf coughed again.

  “Alexis called us after the robbery in Deauville. I call him Alexis, you know. For us, Zerda was Darko, his father. I spent twenty years at the bottom of that hole with him.”

  Marta’s hand pressed more heavily on her husband’s.

  “He was the first one to call us, before the police, before the journalists, before the neighbors. Cyril had been killed by the cops in Deauville, on Rue de la Mer. Along with Ilona, who had also been shot. I remember, it was nearly noon; Marta was listening to Radio Nostalgie as she brought a camellia out into the conservatory. She turned the tuner to France Info. That was all they were talking about. Alexis was right. The pot fell from her hands. You can still see the mark, there.”

  He pointed at a dent in the tiled floor.

  “Marta and I didn’t like the cops much, even before that . . . ”

  Papy didn’t rise to the bait. In the garden, the child was still swinging, gently, regular as a pendulum.

  “Alexis Zerda wanted to meet you?”

  “Yes. We saw him barely an hour later, near the pond in Canivet. The place where all the kids used to go fishing, in the old days. He was alone. Both of us went to see him. Marta was driving. I was trembling too much. It’s in moments like that that the bloody arthritis in my right hand comes back.”

  Papy understood then that Marta’s hand placed on Josèf’s was a way of calming it, immobilizing it, like a caress reassuring a frightened bird.

  “Alexis was standing in front of the pond, near what remains of the hut in the bulrushes that he built when he was ten, for trapping frogs and moorhens. Two sheets of corrugated iron and three rotten planks. Alexis was shaking too. It was the first time I had ever seen him like that. Even when he was summoned by the teachers at the secondary school for extorting money from young Leguennec, he never lost his contempt for authority, that look of defiance, the same attitude his father had when he looked at the foremen in the mine. But that day . . . no. For the first time, he seemed how can I put this? vulnerable. And we all knew why.”

  “Because he’d almost been killed? Because Cyril and Ilona were . . . ”

  “No,” Josèf cut in, punctuating his reaction with another coughing fit. “Alexis couldn’t have cared less about our son or our daughter-in-law, or even Timo, who had been wounded. In fact, that probably suited him: fewer people to divide the loot between, fewer witnesses. I never had any illusions about young Alexis, you know. When I saw him for the first time, it was here, in this garden, at Cyril’s fifth birthday party. This might seem strange, but you can guess, almost every time, what a very young kid will become. And little Alexis . . . well, let’s just say he wasn’t the kind of kid who wanted to share his cake.”

  Papy did not remark on this and turned the conversation back to the subject in hand.

  “So what made him feel vulnerable then?”

  “The last witness who was still alive.”

  Lieutenant Pasdeloup played a card.

  “Angélique Fontaine?”

  Josèf smiled, and so did his wife.

  “No. Angie would never have told the cops anything, and he knew it. No, what scared Alexis was the kid. That was why he took the risk of coming to see us. Because of the kid.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Nearly three. The kid had been with them all through the planning of the robbery. In his mother’s arms, playing next to them, eating with them. Obviously, the cops would question the boy. Even at that age, he was smart, clever, chatty. The kid would have talked. At the very least, he’d have recognized Alexis’s face in the photographs the cops would have showed him. At worst, he’d have repeated bits of conversation, dates, names of places, streets, shops. Kids are sponges when they’re that young.”

  “The testimony of a three-year-old child? You think the judge would have paid attention to that?”

  Josèf looked across the conservatory. Imperceptibly, the swing had begun to slow, perhaps because it was tired of having to do all the swinging by itself.

  “We did some research,” the retired miner went on. “Since those pedophilia cases in the nineties, judges have listened to what kids say . . . And quite right, too.”

  “What exactly was Alexis Zerda’s plan?”

  Josèf’s abrupt response made Marta jump.

  “To swap the kid.”

  He was suddenly gripped by a coughing fit, stronger than the previous ones, so Marta took up the story, in her gentle voice.

  “It was the only solution, really. The police were bound to discover the existence of that child. So they were bound to come and question him, and the kid would have told them everything. Even if we’d asked him to lie to the police—if it’s even possible to ask a three-year-old kid to do something like that—the cops would have realized that he was hiding something and they’d have got it out of him eventually. The solution that Alexis Zerda came up with was very simple, if you think about it: he just had to make sure the cops questioned the wrong child. He had to replace him with another child, if possible a less chatty one . . . Better still, a kid incapable of communicating, traumatized, lost in his own little world. It was the only solution,” Marta repeated.

  Her hand remained firmly on top of her husband’s, but she couldn’t stop her voice trembling. Josèf added:

  “Alexis would have killed the kid if we hadn’t agreed. He’d have killed the kid to stop him talking.”

  The child in the garden had got off the swing. Either that, or he’d fallen off. He was lying in the grass, on his side. The tall grass covered his ears, his shoulders, his thighs. Almost without his head moving, his cheek caressed the nearest tufts, as if it were an animal’s mane.

  Marta stood up and asked the lieutenant if he wanted another coffee. He accepted, even though he felt sure he wouldn’t be able to finish it. When Marta returned with the pot, Papy spoke again.

  “Right. He had to swap the kid so the cops wouldn’t question him. I get that, but still, it must have been quite some magic trick, mustn’t it?”

  Josèf took up the story again:

  “Alexis had an idea. He’d found a donor. A mate of his who he’d shared a cell with in Bois-d’Arcy. Dimitri Moulin. His kid, Malone, had fallen down some stairs and was almost a vegetable. It was the perfect solution. It just took a fe
w thousand euros to convince the father . . . ”

  He looked at Marta, then continued.

  “It was a bit more difficult to convince the mother. She refused to be separated from her child, even for a few months. So, with the father’s help, they tampered with the results of the hospital’s latest analysis. They made the mother believe that her child was doomed, that he had only a few months left to live. We had to play along, that was the deal. We spent hours on the phone with Amanda; to start with, she would call us ten times a day, then gradually less often, and in the end she hardly called at all. We continued to send her messages, letters, photographs, to reassure her. Well, I say reassure her . . . Basically, just to tell her that Malone was still alive. There was nothing else to say. No progress to mention. Malone eats, Malone swings, Malone looks at butterflies, Malone looks at ants. Malone doesn’t speak, Malone doesn’t play, Malone doesn’t laugh. Yes, we kept giving her updates, but by then we’d understood . . . ”

  He couldn’t continue his sentence. Tears ran down his wrinkled face. At the bottom of the garden, the child stared at a point in the grass that he alone could see, presumably some tiny insect.

  Papy came to Josèf’s aid.

  “You’d understood that, in Amanda’s heart, the other child had taken the place of hers. Is that what you mean?”

  “That’s right,” confirmed Marta. “Of course, we now have access to his medical files.” She glanced at the little boy’s body stretched out in the grass. “In reality, the kid could stay like that for years. He’s not even in pain anymore.”

  Her voice was infinitely gentle.

  “Alexis’s plan might seem complicated, but really it was very simple. He just had to swap the children for a while, enough time for the child to forget his life before, or at least forget any faces, names and places that might be compromising. It was inevitable. After that, Alexis couldn’t have cared less what happened to the two kids.”