“Does your husband employ a cleaner, or anyone else who looks after his office for him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ll have to find out.”
Steinert’s office was in fact a large flat, presumably dating back to the same period as the theater, and it was made up of three huge rooms that communicated directly one into the other, without a corridor. The ceilings were unusually high, with decorative moldings, like Bavarian cream cakes.
The owner could not have opened the windows for some time: a smell of scented tobacco and accumulated dust filled every nook of the first room, which served as a hall, and was furnished with a coffee-table and four old-fashioned upholstered chairs to take up the space.
Why this furniture? Was it a waiting-room? Did Steinert receive clients in this office?
She crossed the room without stopping. She was worried and seemed to be looking for something in particular.
The second room was very much more spacious. The two high windows and the shutters were closed, and also reinforced. The dying yellow gleam of evening filtered through the blinds. Ingrid turned on the light.
It was a library, with genuine rococo shelves in massive walnut, each shelf crammed to bursting with books, some displaying their spines, others piled up anyhow. The fine layer of dust that covered them showed that they had not been touched for some time, presumably since Steinert’s disappearance.
“My husband used to read a lot,” she said with emotion. “My God, all these books …”
For the first time, de Palma sensed that she felt sad when she thought about her husband.
He glanced at the spines of the books. Steinert did not seem to have arranged his books by subject, or by author, and still less in alphabetical order. Many of them were in German.
On the shelves facing the windows, the books were arranged more neatly, a sign that they had been considered more important, or maybe read less often than the others. However, the layer of dust was thinner than elsewhere.
The Baron’s lips formed the titles on the worn covers: Le musée de sorciers by Grillot de Givry; Sciences occultes et magie pratique; Les admirables et merveilleux secrets du grand et du petit Albert; Le matin des magiciens by Pauwels and Bergier; Les arts divinatoires; Orthodoxie maçonnique followed by La maçonnerie occulte et de la tradition hermétique by Jean-Marie Ragon; La science des mages by Papus …
De Palma gingerly took down the Traité de l’apparition des esprits, a tome written by Noël Taillepied and published in Paris by Guillaume Bichon in 1587. Although knowing nothing of the occult arts, he realized that this must be a very rare work, most probably owned only by initiates.
“Your husband seems very interested in the occult!”
“I didn’t know that. But I can see that most of the books here in German are on the same subject. Do you know much about it yourself?”
“Far from it,” he said, opening Les états multiples de l’être by René Guénon, the most renowned French mystic of the nineteenth century. “Some of these books seem extremely general, and not a high level, while others are far more specialized. This one, for example.”
De Palma was thinking hard. Every time he discovered something, it felt as though he were sinking deeper into molten tar, with nothing to stop this slow and progressive suffocation.
The third room was William Steinert’s actual office. Expensive paintings on the walls: a Léger, a De Staël, a couple of Bascoulès …
What a strange combination, de Palma thought. There was nothing symbolic in all this. But he understood the point of the alarm. On a shelf, there were several statues of Greek gods, which he was incapable of identifying, and two bulky Egyptian ushabtis, funerary figures, standing on a metal mounting; all of this must have been worth a fortune.
On the table lay a disordered pile of manuscript notes, mostly concerning Provençal myths and legends. On one page, Steinert had jotted down in his very fine, neat hand details about the mythical monsters found in the region of Tarascon.
The Drac, an amphibious dragon, used to spirit away big-breasted washerwomen to feed its young … Less interesting than the Tarasque, the heroine of Tarascon became a star of regionalist marketing … A hideous beast that consumed everything in its path … Tamed by Saint Martha shortly after Christ’s death. See monuments and abbey.
“Your husband writes?”
“Yes, he loved writing. Part of the reason why he’d partly retired from business was to devote more time to his passion.”
“A book about the myths and legends of Provence …”
“I didn’t know that.”
De Palma went round the office once again, examining the pictures. He lingered in front of a Bascoulès canvas, a scene of boats being loaded in the port of Oran. For a moment, he had the impression that the tugs were busy pushing at the huge black hulls of the freighters of the Paquet company, while blowing columns of smoke into the burning sky.
He went back into the library and examined every surface. Mentally, he photographed the exact layout of the furniture and of various books that seemed important to him, then he returned to the office to do likewise. He noticed that there was no computer or telephone. But there was a telephone socket on the wall.
“Curious for a man of such importance. I don’t see him casting a laptop around and only using his mobile … Still less, doing without the Internet.”
He took a long look at the office. The placing of the notes didn’t look natural. The pen lay well to the left, while Steinert was definitely right-handed, you could tell from his handwriting. Things had been moved about and then wiped clean.
Beside the pen, there was a feather measuring a good thirty centimeters, which was thin and extraordinarily white. De Palma picked it up carefully, stared at it for a moment, then put it back down where it had been.
“I don’t think that our visit has taught us anything of significance, apart from getting to know your husband’s character better. And first of all, that he was hiding some things from you.”
Ingrid did not reply, and felt ill at ease. Was it because of the presence of this police officer in her husband’s personal space, she wondered. Was it the discovery that he had hidden whole aspects of his life from her? She remembered that once, after the theater, her husband had invited her to visit his den, but she had refused, saying that she felt too tired. It had been one of the few occasions when they had made love late into the night. She felt swamped by emotion and decided to bring this visit to an end.
De Palma waited for her to go back into the hall before unbolting the shutters and the office window and blocking them with two wads of paper—in case he had to come back, without coming in through the front door …
“Did your husband have any enemies?”
“Of course. In his position, you always have enemies!”
He noticed a hammer on the desk, of the sort used by auctioneers, with a black handle and ivory head. It had a rare beauty and looked very old. He picked it up and made to hit out at something in mid-air.
“I mean people capable of taking his life … Had he received any threats? Was he worried the last time you saw him?”
“I’ll think about those questions, M. de Palma.”
He knew from the tone of her voice that she was lying. But as yet he did not know to what extent or for what reason.
As they left, de Palma told her that it was standard procedure to carry out a neighbor inquiry. But it would not be done by him, and for two reasons: first because he wasn’t allowed to, and second because he thought it wiser not to make things public. A neighborhood inquiry would happen, or it wouldn’t. But he sensed that in the end it would serve no purpose.
On the R.N. 568, he drove straight toward the big refineries at Fos. Two clouds darker than night had risen in the distance, above the flares of the oil terminal.
Several questions beset him. Why had Madame Steinert gone out of her way to show him her family photographs and her husband’s office? Why ju
st those two things? Why not the rest of the farmhouse? And the family?
Why did she always talk about her husband in the past tense, as though she was sure he was dead? She could just as easily have said nothing to him at all. So what was going on? He would take care not to ask her these questions for some time.
Third point: he was almost certain that Steinert had a computer and that it had been removed from his office. Was this for no particular reason, or because someone wanted to get at his hard drive? Maybe Steinert had removed certain objects himself, because of some threat or fear?
When he got home, he phoned Moracchini.
“Good evening, my lovely. Where are you at with your holdup?”
“We’ve just got the D.N.A. results. They’re negative. But Delpiano wants us to squeeze him anyway. I don’t like that.”
“You’ll always be a sentimental girl.”
“It’s because of his kids that it gets to me. I don’t give a damn about him …”
“So what about me, in all this?”
“What? You’re not going jealous on me, are you?”
“I’m asking you to dinner this evening.”
“I can’t, commandant …”
“You put your suspect inside for the night, then tell Delpiano that you’ve got a migraine and come and eat with me.”
“Michel, you know perfectly well that I can’t do that.”
He hung up and gazed round his three-room flat. His ex-wife, Marie, had left with the walnut bookcase she had inherited from her mother, who had had it from her own mother, and so on for generations. As a result, the Baron’s criminology books were now piled up on the carpet in two stacks a meter high. On top of one was Précis d’analyse criminelle, and on the other Crime et psychiatrie, which he must have read a good twenty times.
In place of the bookcase and sofa, which had also disappeared in the divorce, two big rectangular patches divided the space like archaeological remains. They were just about all that was left of ten years of marriage. Two rectangular marks and a few poorly framed photos.
Only the C.D.s and unobtainable vinyl had been given new shelves. Dozens and dozens of bootlegs of opera greats sung in marvelous theaters: Del Monaco and Callas in Verona in a superheated Aïda, Flagstad and Melchior in a forgotten Tristan … Then the collector’s albums of the Stones bought in London in his carefree youth; all of Muddy Waters which he had brought back from the States; Jimi Hendrix … they all meant as much to him as his .45, the legendary piece concealed behind the boxed sets of the Beatles and of Rossini, whom he disliked and never listened to.
He slipped Strauss’s last lieder into his C.D. player and sat down in front of it, his eyes fixed on the crystal display. Tomova-Sintow’s vibrato flowed over his tired skin. He remembered that Marie had given him this record on a wedding anniversary. He could picture her with her brilliant smile revealing her extraordinarily white teeth, as she waved the little package at the end of her long fingers. That night, they had made love several times, and she had admitted that she had not used any form of contraception for a month. But nothing happened. The child de Palma wanted and dreaded had not arrived. He would never arrive.
He lay down on the carpet, his hands clasped behind his neck, and fell asleep before the third lied, his mouth bitter with alcohol, with a deep crease down his forehead, alongside a faint scar shaped like a question mark.
A scar that hours of surgery had reduced.
A few months before, the Baron had been disfigured, his fine features split open.
Luckily for him, his nose had not been totally demolished and the bone of his forehead had mended. For the rest, the surgeon had removed strips of skin from his backside and stitched him back together patiently, over several hours, like an old granny patching some workaday jeans.
Looks wise, things had not turned out too badly: a remodeled nose that took a few years off him, and a scar ringed with pale purple streaks on his forehead which made him look dangerous when he scowled.
Inside, it was a different story. Migraines that wouldn’t stop any more and that made him fear the worst of his demons, crude blood-red snapshots of agonies that came back more and more.
In Le Guen’s cave, he had been afraid, with this fear he could no longer expel from inside him. It was a fear that invaded the hazy zone of his awareness, the zone he hardly ever dared to enter. If the Baron had never thought about revenge, it was no doubt to avoid transgressing his own prohibitions, gambling with his own taboos. The incubation time for revenge was far too long. He was a man of anger and storms, not a sneaky obsessive with no statute of psychic limitations.
In the middle of the night, a nightmare caught de Palma in the depths of sleep.
September 15, 1982. 9:30 a.m.
The first anonymous call. A raucous voice.
A supermarket bag hung from a green oak on the hill of Notre Dame.
Inside the bag, a head.
The neck has been severed just under the chin.
He and Maistre examine it: there is a trace of sperm on the forehead, like a diabolical unction, the signature of Sylvain Ferracci, or the “Dustman,” as a hack on Paris-Match called him.
11 a.m. A second call.
A woman’s voice. The trail will now begin.
In a dustbin in Rabatau, some clothes: a woman’s severe hounds-tooth suit, flesh-colored stockings stained with blood.
12 a.m. A third call.
A child’s voice.
Behind it, “Us and Them” by Pink Floyd.
On the jetty of La Pointe Rouge, the torso and legs. The belly has been opened from the pubis to the sternum.
A whirlpool.
Maistre, the crack shot, withdraws a Beretta from the armory.
He weighs the clip in his hand and slips it into the butt.
De Palma watches him stroke the automatic’s black breech.
He is a certified marksman and can bring a man down firing blind at twenty meters.
Maistre wants to get this over with. His eyes are red with fatigue and misery, and his brains a grenade with the pin pulled out.
De Palma hardly feels any better.
If they catch sight of Ferracci, he’s a dead man.
Everything happens so fast.
A street corner, a chase.
A cellar.
De Palma sticks the barrel of his gun into the Dustman’s mouth and shuts his eyes.
He’s going to press the trigger.
He will if this creep doesn’t stop screaming.
Maistre approaches.
De Palma’s whole body is trembling.
Slowly, his friend withdraws the barrel of the Manurhin from the predator’s mouth.
Streaks of light enter the Baron’s head, they hit him, again and again.
Thick blood runs down over his eyes.
It’s Marie’s head in the bag.
No, it’s Isabelle–Ingrid who’s winking at him.
An obscene peekaboo from the hereafter dark dreams.
He got up, swallowed two aspirins and stood in front of the bathroom mirror.
He looked long and hard at his face, made younger by the summer sun and the knife of the surgeon who had spent half a day refashioning his features. He pushed back his hair and examined the scar at the top of his forehead. Then he leaned closer to the mirror and looked at his nose, the only part of his face he had ever liked.
His nose had changed, and now looked like something molded out of plastic: it was an intruder in the picture, a part of himself torn away from him forever. He lowered his eyes and splashed water over his face, as if to purify himself.
7.
At 6 a.m., Christophe Texeira left his office in La Capelière. He wanted to be at his observation post before sunrise and, most of all, to make himself scarce as soon as the first tourists showed up.
The day before, he had told Nathalie, his new assistant, that he would be out for most of the morning.
“How am I supposed to cope with all those groups and f
amilies?” she had protested timidly. “Do you realize?”
“You give them their tickets then escort them to the start of the green track. Then let them get on with it. Anyway, they aren’t at risk. If there’s an emergency, call me on my mobile. I won’t be far away. I’ll be in the reed hut, just by the samphire meadow, the place I showed you yesterday.”
Nathalie had adopted a sulky look which rather appealed to Texeira.
“I hope the ghost in the hut doesn’t gobble you up.”
“No, he only moves at night.”
The two of them had discussed at length the voices he had heard in the night. Nathalie had made fun of him at first, then they had ended up deciding that the world was full of waifs and strays and that there was nothing they could do about it. There was no peace to be had anywhere, not even in the marshes of the Camargue.
There was no point sending for the gendarmes from Le Sambuc.
That morning, the biologist made his way rapidly along the straight path that led to the hut. The grassland and nearby marshes were silent. Only the oup-oup-oup of a hoopoe could be heard across that brown vastness.
The heat of the previous day still weighed down on the baked ground.
When Texeira reached the edges of the marsh, he noticed that the cracks in the earth had widened again. Some greenish samphire, impervious to thirst, still survived in that tiny Sahara.
Panting, he put down his bag, checked that his mobile was off, then took out his Zeiss binoculars and Reflex camera and hung them round his neck in case a rare bird happened to pass by.
A mauve gleam spread over the flat, salty waters. The level of the marshes had fallen again in the heat wave. He heard a faint noise: a little egret, completely white, emerged from the reed bed and advanced into the pond in search of its first meal of the day, making little plops with every step.
This bird was not very rare at that time of year, but he still took two photographs, pleased with this first encounter. The thought of the tourist who had sent him those shots of spoonbills crossed his mind.
The light was changing fast; the salt marsh was turning pink. In less than an hour, the sun would start its torrid trajectory, indifferent to nature’s torments.
The Beast of the Camargue Page 8