The Beast of the Camargue

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  Steinert was the sort of billionaire that Michel would have liked to have known. He himself knew next to nothing about the Provence next door to his native Marseille, nothing except for a familiarity with its murder cases, the memory of a school trip to Saint Rémy Museum on the far side of the Alpilles, and the name of Marius, the savior of Rome who gave independence to Marsiho, here at the foot of these modest peaks.

  The name of Marius had long dwelled in the Baron’s imagination; he could still clearly remember his primary school teacher showing him the image of the soldier’s trophies, engraved in the stone of Saint Rémy.

  The promoters of the future park must have thought of making Marius into one of the heroes of their tourist amusements. And they had already chosen the Tarasque of Tarascon as the mascot of “The Big South.” As he got back into his Giulietta, it seemed to de Palma that this was not such a bad business idea. He could imagine shelves full of cuddly Tarasques in the stores as souvenirs … the Tarasque and the Tarasquettes … two thousand years of oral tradition transformed into bar codes. He also sensed that this monster of the marshes had not cropped up in this investigation by chance. Everyone was interested in it, and this was starting to worry him.

  Mme. Steinert was alone on the patio. He felt he was looking again at Isabelle Mercier, as she had been in the Super 8 films that her father had loaned to the police.

  She did not stand up when he closed his car door and gave her a clumsy wave.

  “At least you’ll believe me now,” she called out, in a tinny voice.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  She lowered her head, her face disappearing behind the golden veil of her hair.

  “The hardest thing of all was seeing him, recognizing him even when he was—what is the word? Verstümmelt! Completely disfigured… It was … Unerträglich, unbearable.”

  She jerked her head back to toss her hair over her shoulders and spoke without emotion, as though she were reciting a text, focusing as she did so on a piece of Provençal cloth that presumably came from one of her new collections.

  “I’ve been trying to wipe that image since this morning …”

  “If you’d like me to leave,” de Palma murmured, “I can always come back tomorrow, or another day …”

  “Stay, take a seat. I’ve sent everyone home today. Even the three ‘thugs’ as you call them, who take care of my safety. I didn’t want to see anyone. Except for you. How odd.”

  She gazed at the Baron. Her eyes, usually azure, had turned turquoise, making them look hugely empty. He coughed so as to avoid having to say anything.

  “Have you heard the results of the autopsy?” she said, without taking her eyes off him.

  “Yes, and I think they can be trusted. The forensic surgeon is the best I know. No doubt about it.”

  “And you? What do you think?”

  De Palma sat down in front of her.

  “I think there’s no reason to look any further. It was just an accident. A stupid one, as all accidents are. If he had been murdered, the pathologists would have found something.”

  She kept on gazing at him, but her expression had changed. It had become familiar, even teasing.

  “You don’t believe a word you’ve just said, but I’m not blaming you. Not at all. It’s simply some problems between different police authorities, and hierarchies, something like that, that are worrying you or holding you back. But you know full well that my husband didn’t drown in fifty centimeters of water, or was it eighty …”

  “You know, sometimes …”

  “My husband was the best swimmer in his year at the engineering school in Munich. He was one meter ninety tall.”

  De Palma lowered his gaze and allowed a silence to settle between them.

  The facts were there and he could not deny them. No one could deny them.

  The sky gleamed like blue silk. It suddenly seemed to him that the stink of the swamp was sticking to his skin like a wet shirt, along with a smell of fish sauce and rotting seaweed.

  He looked back up toward her.

  The wind had blown a lock of her hair over the corner of her mouth, just where he had noticed two beauty spots. She looked dreamy, as though asking herself questions before providing the answers.

  “You know, we’d been out of love for ages …” she said, drawing out her words. “Not long after our wedding, he started to become strange. He read peculiar books, and had passions not readily shared with a young woman. He was much older than me. Our marriage was a mistake that I made, but I still had enormous affection for him. And respect, too. Immense respect … it’s more a friend I’ve lost than a husband.”

  She pointed toward the property then glanced around, as though trying to take it all in in a single sweep.

  “It’s for him that I’m going to stay here, and that I won’t touch anything for now. His soul is still here. At night, I can sense him roving around the buildings and up there on the hills. He loved the hills so much. Have you read Wuthering Heights?”

  “Heathcliff and Cathy …”

  “It was his favorite novel. He could talk about it for hours … hours on end.”

  De Palma felt as if he had just been bled dry. At that moment, he no longer knew who he was exactly, or what he was supposed to be doing there. Some dark force held him close to this woman.

  She stood up and went into the kitchen, then returned with two bottles of apple juice and a jug of cold water on an olive-wood tray.

  “I’m being a terrible hostess. You must be thirsty?”

  “A little, I must admit.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No, but I don’t want to abuse your hospitality.”

  “You’re a strange man, M. de Palma. It’s as if you’re afraid of me, or else you mistrust me. I’m a woman like any other woman. All I’m doing is fighting to know the truth about my husband’s death. And it will be known, believe me.”

  “Indeed,” said de Palma, feeling vexed.

  “Don’t get angry.”

  He swallowed his glass of apple juice and poured himself another at once. Ingrid watched him, missing none of his gestures, which duly increased his irritation.

  “I must explain something very important to you if you want to understand my husband.”

  She breathed deeply, her chest swelling as if she wanted to draw out of herself something that had been weighing on her for far too many years.

  “You must understand that my husband’s father was here, during the German occupation.”

  She stared at the swaying lines of olive trees, as though memories that were not her own had come to haunt her.

  “And when I say he was here,” she went on, tapping the table with the nail of her index finger, “I mean here, in this farmhouse.”

  She fell silent for a moment. A warm breeze, scented with pine and scrub, blew down from the Alpilles and subsided beneath the huge plane trees.

  “It was my father-in-law who dug up the sarcophagus you saw over there. And many other things, too. I suppose that you must now be beginning to understand the particular associations that connected my husband with this place. I want you to understand that he was not like the other rich residents who live around here!”

  The questions clamored at de Palma. What role had William Steinert’s father played during the war? If he was in the Nazi party … Why had he, a great industrialist, buried himself in this hole?

  She guessed what he was thinking, and did not wait to be asked.

  “At the start, the industrialist wasn’t him. It was his elder brother, who died during the Dresden bombing in 1945. As there were only two children, my father-in-law took over the business. But he was no manager. He had trained to be an archaeologist and got his doctorate in 1939. In the spring of that year, just before war broke out.”

  “But … how did he end up here?”

  “The Nazis sent him to this region because during the two years before war broke out, he’d spent his winters here, studying old stones.�
��

  “So it was him who carried out the dig in the ‘Downlands.’ Then, in 1939, he was obviously forced to leave France. But soon afterward the Nazis sent him back. It must have been good propaganda for them. And let me tell you that he was clearly very well received by the people in the village since he came back on a number of occasions after the war. One of the few Boches not to be seen as the devil incarnate.”

  “When did he die?”

  “In 1980. He was seventy-six. He’s buried in a discreet grave in the cemetery of Eygalières.”

  She sat up in her chair and poured herself a glass of water. Her expression seemed less stern. De Palma noticed that the vengeful expression he had observed on arriving at the farmhouse had vanished. The color of her eyes had changed again.

  “Of course, I’d rather you didn’t mention all this to anyone. It’s unter dem Siegel des Verschwiegenheit, a well-kept secret in these parts, and no one mentions Karl Steinert. When my husband bought the lot in the graveyard, he had his father’s remains transferred there with the greatest discretion. He had the necessary money. So I’m counting on your discretion too.”

  She placed her hand delicately on de Palma’s forearm; instinctively, he laid his hand on hers.

  *

  For the past three days, Rey hadn’t drunk a drop of water or had anything to eat.

  For three days, he had been in a black hole, left there by the man he had taken at first for a policeman. The only thing Rey had managed to keep was a vague notion of time. In his prison, he could feel the variations of temperature when the sun rose or set.

  That was all he knew about the outside world.

  Despite the darkness, his eyes were burning in their sockets. His tongue was thick and hard with thirst, and his hands were shaking.

  The day before, when he had had his first visions, he had thought he had come down with a fever. Then the visions had gone, the same way they had come. It must have been his thirst playing tricks.

  First, he had seen his mother, with her nasty little eyes, saying to him in her sour voice: “Your father won’t come back, your father won’t come back … son of a bitch.”

  Then he had walked down a long corridor leading to a round room. In the center was an armchair with its back to him. He knew this room well. A hand as dry as dead wood emerged from the chair and beckoned him to come over. He approached slowly, with fear in his guts, his mouth twisted in disgust, before walking around it. Father Morand was sitting there, his weak neck propped up on a mauve cushion and twisted like a loin of veal. The man of God stared at him with his wicked eyes: “Come and kiss me, my son. Only you can kiss like that … Nearer, yes, like that …”

  He had woken up and chased away this image of his boarding school with a blast of insults bellowed into the night. He had howled like an animal for some time, then his howling had dwindled into a groan, from which two syllables occasionally emerged: “Pa … Pa.”

  Then sleep had overtaken him by surprise, suddenly, as if an invisible hand in the shadows had injected him with morphine.

  The final image that he had retained of the outside world was of a hut with a thatched roof, in the middle of a marsh. He was incapable of saying where it was.

  The man had taken off the blindfold near some rushes, then made him walk on, with a .45 dug in his back. They had crossed the reed bed along an unseen path before emerging onto a dry marsh, with stars of salt spangling its mud. On the far side, he had made out a hut, half concealed by some poplars and ash trees.

  And then, there had been a heavy blow on his head. Everything had wavered and turned white, just like when he used to shoot up.

  After that, he had found himself in darkness and had felt round the cellar where he was being kept prisoner, like a mole sniffing out the nooks and crannies of its little underground world. He had also yelled out.

  How long now? He was no longer sure. But he could remember yelling during the first two days. No one had come. He had heard nothing, and it was this utter silence that was now driving him crazy. He could cope with the darkness, but this almost total absence of sound was unsettling him and affecting him physically.

  The temperature was rising. Soon his body was going to be covered with a layer of salt water, that seeped out inexorably from every pore of his exhausted skin, and his thirst would grow even more unbearable. He wondered how many days he had left to live: two, or maybe three.

  Maybe less.

  From what he had read about survival, Rey knew that you couldn’t last long without water. He knew that madness would take hold of him and not let go until his body had dried up like a corpse in the sun.

  He had counted the days. Tomorrow it would be Tuesday, July 29. The festival of Saint Martha.

  He almost smiled. It brought back old memories. The snapshots of his childhood and the pleasures of his life as a man before it had all fallen apart and he had ended up underground.

  He scratched his face several times as if to punish himself for all his errors.

  The mayor of Eygalières was still on duty when de Palma requested an appointment with him from his secretary, a chubby brunette with false nails that turned the tips of her fingers into claws.

  “And you are Monsieur …?”

  “De Palma, I’m a journalist.”

  “O.K., I think he’ll see you when he’s through. He shouldn’t be long.”

  The Baron walked over to a revolving display decked with brochures about the town and browsed through some of them.

  “Has M. Simian been mayor for long?”

  The secretary looked up from her register and gave him a challenging look.

  “This is his fifth term of office, and I think he’ll be standing again.”

  “So he’s popular here!”

  “Very,” she said nodding her head and whistling. “He gets re-elected every time, with a landslide.”

  “Is he right or left wing?”

  The secretary swayed her hand.

  “In the center, more like. But officially the right, the U.M.P.”

  The office door opened. The mayor was a small man, balding, with bifocal glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He held out his hand to de Palma and looked him straight in the eye.

  “My secretary tells me that you’re a journalist?”

  “Yes, I’m freelance. At the moment I’m working with Villages magazine, we’re doing a report about the mayors of small towns in Provence which have become the country retreats of the rich.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place! But I must point out that the rich people you’re talking about are extremely discreet, and rely on me to maintain that discretion.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s not what it’s about.”

  Simian walked round his desk, sat down in his chair and opened his arms to invite de Palma to take a seat too.

  “So? I’m listening.”

  “We’re trying to see how it works out for the local people, those who want to stay here and can’t afford a single patch of land any more. How do they cope?”

  “For me that’s a constant problem. I am a farmer’s son myself, and my father used to be mayor of Eygalières … what I mean is that we’ve seen how things have changed. I must admit that there’s not much the town hall can do. Land is bought and sold at the prices agreed on by the various parties. It’s the law of the market.”

  “But you could issue some decrees about how the land is to be used, or something like that?”

  “Yes, but that wouldn’t change the property prices.”

  The mayor discoursed on various aspects of the problem. De Palma simply took notes while waiting to get to the heart of the matter. The man in front of him was clearly a wild old bird, an expert at sounding sincere.

  “Have you heard anything about plans for a leisure park in the region?”

  “Not a thing. Who told you about that?”

  “Someone who said they worked for S.O.D.E.G.I.M., I can’t remember their name.”

  “Never
heard of it. You must be misinformed.”

  The Baron searched through his notebook.

  “Here it is: Philippe Borland … he’s the chairman of S.O.D.E.G.I.M.”

  The mayor twisted his mouth to express his ignorance. Then he stood up and walked over to the map of the district on the wall.

  “We have zones that can or cannot be built on, for various reasons, as you know. I try to keep a harmony between the residential areas and the more traditional rural environment. And I must tell you that it’s a peculiarly difficult balancing act.”

  He pointed at various plots of land and circled his finger around them.

  “The people who live here have considerable means …”

  “By the way, one of your residents has just passed on! Did you see the papers?”

  “William Steinert? Yes, I read about him. It’s sad.”

  “Did you know him?”

  The mayor’s attitude changed. Clearly the question upset him.

  “We had very little to do with him. He was very discreet. Like all the big landowners we have here.”

  Anne Moracchini had discovered in police records that William Steinert had been questioned about the illegal funding of the local right-wing party, though the case had subsequently been dropped. But it did mean that Steinert must have known the mayor of Eygalières, as well as the other politicians in the area.

  “A colleague told me that he owned half the district.”

  “Half would be an exaggeration. Let’s just say that he owned a lot of land.”

  “Indeed,” de Palma said, looking at the map. He placed his index finger on the Downlands. “And what’s this zone here?”

  The mayor took off his glasses and nibbled one of the side-pieces.

  “It’s called the Downlands. It’s woodland. We need a bit of greenery.”

  “An old boy in the village told me that there are Greek or Roman remains there. Is that true?”

  “No, it’s not! That’s just an old story, nothing more.”

  “And can this land be built on?”

  “I … I’d have to check the zoning regulations. There might be some available plots there. I can’t remember. You know, our district is quite large!”