After the Crash: A Novel

by Michel Bussi

  Malvina walked into the kitchen. Everything seemed clean and tidy. A blue dish towel hung from a nail. Anyway, she’d already searched this room, and found nothing. It was the same in every other room—Grand-Duc was a meticulous kind of guy.

  So, the house was a dead end. She needed to think.

  Malvina considered the telephone call her grandmother had received from the detective the previous evening. He claimed to have found something—finally. After all these years; on the very eve of Lyse-Rose’s eighteenth birthday. A few minutes before midnight, to be precise. He had mentioned an old newspaper, the Est Républicain, and a revelation he had had, simply by opening it eighteen years later.

  Yeah, right. The old bastard was clearly bluffing. It was pathetic.

  Her grandmother might have fallen for his lies, as she always had, but not Malvina.

  It was obvious to her that he had been playing for time. His contract ended on Lyse-Rose’s eighteenth birthday, so the money would stop rolling in. The old bastard just wanted to keep it flowing a while longer. Her grandmother, her head filled with years of religious bullshit, was prepared to believe anything. She had always put too much trust in that Grand-Duc, and he had known how to play her. Malvina noticed the copper plaque on the desk. CRÉDULE GRAND-DUC, PRIVATE DETECTIVE.

  Even his name was stupid!

  Yes, he’d known how to play them, her grandfather and her grandmother.

  But not Malvina.

  She was free. Clearheaded. She had been able to see through his double-dealing. Grand-Duc had always favored the Vitral family. He was on their side. He had always given Malvina funny looks, as if she were a circus freak. He was wary of her. But not wary enough…

  Malvina gave one last look at the desk, then walked through to the entrance hall. Her sharp eyes noted the umbrellas standing in a tall vase, the long coats hanging from pegs.

  She stopped in front of the framed montage of photographs above the hall window. A picture from the wedding of Nazim Ozan—Grand-Duc’s partner in crime—and his fat Turkish bitch; another of Nicole Vitral, of course, with her huge tits bulging out of her ugly dress. Grand-Duc would no longer be able to ogle the Vitral woman’s oversized mammaries as he put on his coat and picked up his umbrella before walking out into the street.

  Distractedly, Malvina looked at the other photographs in the entrance hall. Shots of mountain landscapes—the Jura Mountains, probably. Mont Terri. Montbéliard.

  She remembered. She had recognized the baby—her sister—when she saw her in the hospital there. She had been six years old. She was the only living witness.

  Lyse-Rose was alive. Those bastards had stolen her sister.

  They could say whatever they liked. Refusal to mourn and all that other crap.

  She would never, ever abandon her sister.

  Malvina shook herself. She had to do something. She went back into the living room, stepping over Grand-Duc’s corpse again, then examined once more the fireplace, the vivarium, the desk. She had broken into the house, smashing the bedroom window, half hidden by hollyhocks. She had left her fingerprints all over the place. The police would come here eventually; a neighbor would alert them. She needed to be careful. Not for herself—she didn’t give a shit—but for Lyse-Rose. She had to remain out of jail. So that meant erasing every last trace of her presence throughout the house. With luck, she might notice a detail that she had missed the first time. Maybe even that green notebook…

  What might that bastard have written in his notebook? Had he really discovered something—the truth—in that newspaper, on Lyse-Rose’s eighteenth birthday?

  He was probably bluffing. But what if he wasn’t?

  Could she take such a risk?

  No, she had to find that notebook…

  He must have given it to the Vitrals… Yes, that was the kind of thing he would do. Give it to them, as some sort of birthday present. And if that were the case, then that pervert Marc Vitral would probably have the notebook now. He was probably reading it at this very moment.

  7

  October 2, 1998, 9:28 a.m.

  A gorgeous female student, her brown hair cut short like a boy’s, was devouring Marc Vitral with her big ocean-blue eyes. The kind of eyes that most men would have dived into without hesitation. Marc hadn’t even noticed her.

  The girl must have been even more intrigued by his reaction. The blond boy, lost in his sad thoughts, his eyes shining with tears, stared straight through her as though she were invisible. Men who did not notice her beauty were rare specimens and, naturally, she was only attracted to men who were inaccessible.

  But Marc could not stop thinking about Grand-Duc’s description of his parents, Pascal and Stéphanie. His only memories of them were old photographs. He lifted his hand and looked at Mariam. Thinking he was trying to persuade her to give him his present early, she looked disapprovingly at the clock.

  “Mariam, could you get me a croissant? I haven’t eaten anything this morning.”

  Mariam gave him a wide, reassuring smile.

  A few seconds later, she carried the croissant over to him on a plate. The noise in the café was deafening.

  Marc tore the croissant in half and shoved it into his mouth.

  9:33 a.m.

  He started to read again.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal

  I think you will agree with me when I say that fate was being an absolute bitch to both the Vitrals and the de Carvilles. First it tells them that the Airbus has crashed, that there are no survivors, stealing from them the two generations on which they had built their hopes for the future. And then, a few hours later, it joyfully announces a miracle: the smallest, most fragile being on the entire aircraft has been spared. And they are even able to celebrate that fact, to thank God, to put aside the deaths of their other loved ones… But then fate plunges its dagger into their backs a second time. What if that miracle child, the flesh of your flesh, the fruit of your loins, is not yours after all?

  On December 23, 1980, the police station at Montbéliard had been busy since dawn. The superintendent himself had taken charge—Vatelier, an experienced, dynamic policeman with a scraggly beard and battered leather jacket. Turkish Airlines had faxed over the passenger list at 7:00 a.m. Funnily enough, there had been two babies on the plane: two young French girls, born on almost the same date.

  Lyse-Rose de Carville, born September 27, 1980

  Emilie Vitral, born September 30, 1980

  A strange coincidence, you might be thinking. But I have done some checking, and the presence of babies on airplanes is far from unusual. On the contrary, it is a common occurrence, particularly on long-distance flights during the holiday season. Even as the global economy expands, families still feel that same, age-old desire to be reunited around a Christmas tree, or a birthday cake, or a bride and groom, or a coffin.

  So, two babies. How could Vatelier and his team know which one was the survivor? At first, the police team imagined that the investigation would be over quickly. There are many ways to distinguish one baby from another: the color of its eyes, its skin, its blood group, the contents of its stomach, its clothing, its belongings, its next of kin. With so much to go on, how difficult could it be?

  Except that speed was of the essence. There were journalists banging on the doors of the police station: this story was a godsend for the media. Who could believe it: one surviving orphan, and two families? But the child’s future was on the line here and you couldn’t just leave it in the hospital nursery for months while you decided who its parents were. The investigation had to choose quickly, so that the baby could be delivered safely to its family.

  At 2:00 p.m. on December 23, Léonce de Carville summoned a pack of highly paid lawyers to Montbéliard. He tasked them with shadowing Vatelier’s investigation closely, verifying each detail as it came in.

  In legal terms, it was a complex affair. But the Ministry of Justice took only a few hours to decide how the inquiry should be handled: the Montbéliard p
olice would investigate, but the final decision would be made by a juvenile-court judge, after a hearing involving all the parties and witnesses. Behind closed doors, naturally. The deadline for the decision was to be the end of April 1981, so that the child’s emotional stability would not be put at risk. In the meantime, the baby would be looked after by the nursery in the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital. The man chosen to lead the inquiry was Judge Jean-Louis Le Drian, a bigwig at the Paris High Court, author of a dozen works on abandoned children, the search for identity, adoption, and so on. He was the obvious choice.

  By the next day, December 24, Judge Le Drian had somehow managed to cobble together a small working group, none of whom were any more enthusiastic than he was about the idea of working on Christmas Eve: Vatelier, the Montbéliard police superintendent; Morange, the doctor who had overseen the miracle child’s recovery; and Saint-Simon, a policeman from the French Embassy in Turkey, who was in communication with them by telephone.

  Afterward, they all told me about that surreal meeting in a large office on Avenue de Suffren, with an unbeatable view of the Eiffel Tower illuminated against a white winter sky. They were facing a cheerless Christmas Eve, without tinsel or presents, their children waiting for them around the tree while they considered the future of a three-month-old baby.

  Judge Le Drian was in a difficult situation because he knew the de Carvilles slightly. He had met them once or twice at parties in Paris; the kind where hundreds of people crammed together into the splendid living rooms of Haussmannian buildings. I think I can imagine what he was thinking. At the back of his head, a little voice must have been whispering: Let’s hope that the kid is the de Carvilles’ granddaughter, otherwise this is going to be awkward…

  A fifty-fifty chance. Heads or tails.

  But at first it seemed that the coin was not going to fall the right way.

  When I met Judge Le Drian, years later, he still looked the same as he had at the time of the inquiry—sharp, precise, dressed impeccably, with a mauve scarf that was a shade lighter than his purple tie—and I wondered how this besuited man was able to persuade traumatized children to trust and confide in him. The judge had filmed all the meetings. He gave me the tapes; he felt he could refuse nothing to the de Carville family. Those tapes enable me to give a very accurate, detailed account of the inquiry. As for the verdict… well, I will let you be the judge of that, so to speak.

  “I will try to keep this as brief as possible,” Le Drian began. “I’m sure we are all busy men. I will start with the information concerning Lyse-Rose de Carville. She was born in Istanbul, slightly less than three months ago. Only her parents really knew her, and Alexandre and Véronique de Carville took everything relating to Lyse-Rose with them on the Airbus. Her toys, her clothes, her medicines, her medical card, all their photographs of her. Everything was lost when the plane went up in flames. Saint-Simon, have you uncovered any other witnesses in Turkey?”

  The nasal voice of the man from the Turkish Embassy crackled from the telephone loudspeaker that sat on the table: “Not really. Apart from a few Turkish servants who glimpsed Lyse-Rose through mosquito netting, the only eyewitness is her six-year-old sister, Malvina. You see…”

  Le Drian sensed that already things were going wrong. Whenever that happened, whenever he felt events tumbling out of his control, he would stand up and pull down one end of his scarf so that the two ends were exactly the same length. Just a nervous tic. And of course, the damned scarf kept slipping to one side or the other, without the judge even being aware that he had moved his neck at all. Superintendent Vatelier watched the judge’s mannerism, his smile barely concealed by his beard.

  “I spent a long time talking to the de Carvilles,” Vatelier said. “Well, mainly Léonce de Carville. They only know what their granddaughter looks like through some vague descriptions they were given over the telephone. Although they do possess a photograph of Lyse-Rose, taken at her birth, along with the letter they received containing the announcement…”

  “What does this photograph show?”

  “Not much.” Vatelier scowled. “It’s a picture of the mother breast-feeding the child, so you can only see Lyse-Rose from behind—her neck, one ear, that’s all.”

  Judge Le Drian pulled nervously on the right-hand side of his scarf. Clearly, things were not looking good for the de Carvilles.

  I apologize for skipping ahead, but I just wanted to mention here that in the weeks that followed, Léonce de Carville summoned several highly regarded experts who attested that the ear of the miracle child was identical to that of Lyse-Rose on her birth photograph. I have looked closely at the picture and the analyses, and my conclusion is that it would require a considerable dose of willful blindness to have any kind of certainty on the matter, whether for or against this supposition. Judge Le Drian clearly did not share the experts’ bias and he continued to explore the baby’s genealogy.

  “What about Lyse-Rose’s maternal grandparents?” he asked.

  Vatelier, the police superintendent from Montbéliard, consulted his notes.

  “Véronique, Lyse-Rose’s mother, is the fourth of seven children. The parents, the Berniers, are from Quebec and they have eleven grandchildren. Véronique was already quite distant from her family when she met Alexandre in Toronto at a seminar on molecular chemistry. The Berniers seem to be supporting the de Carvilles, albeit not very loudly.”

  “OK. Let’s keep digging on that side,” said Le Drian. “In the meantime, shall we move on to Emilie Vitral? Apparently, she left more clues behind…”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Vatelier sighed, “although her medical card, her suitcase, her feeding bottles, and her bibs also went up in smoke with the plane. But here are the details: in the first two months of her life, her grandparents saw her five times, two of which were at the hospital in Dieppe in the week following her birth. They also saw her on the day the family left for Turkey, when Pascal and Stéphanie brought Marc to stay with the grandparents. The baby was fast asleep at the time.”

  The superintendent turned to Dr. Morange, who spoke for the first time: “I was present when the Vitrals saw the baby in the hospital at Belfort-Montbéliard. They recognized their granddaughter immediately.”

  “Of course,” said Le Drian. “Of course. They were hardly going to say the opposite…”

  The judge sighed wearily, and pulled on the left-hand side of his scarf.

  “Well, we weren’t about to put four babies in a lineup and make the grandparents pick out the right one, were we?” said Vatelier.

  “Maybe you should have,” Le Drian replied. “It would have saved us a lot of time.”

  With a shrug, the superintendent continued: “Just to make things even more confusing, the Vitrals do not possess a single photograph of their granddaughter. From what they tell me, Stéphanie had made a little photo album of her daughter, containing twelve pictures, and she took it everywhere with her. Presumably that, too, was destroyed in the fire.”

  “And the negatives?” the judge asked.

  “The police force in Dieppe did a thorough search of the parents’ apartment, but for the moment, they have not found anything. I imagine Stéphanie must have taken them with her.”

  Perhaps…

  I, too, searched for those damned negatives. Can you believe it? Not one single picture of the baby! Anyway, there’s no point in my prolonging the suspense, at least not in this particular instance. We never found them. Other than the theory that they had disappeared along with the plane, or that the Vitrals were simply making up the story about the album, I also wondered whether Léonce de Carville might be involved: he could have gone to Pascal and Stéphanie’s apartment before the police arrived and gotten rid of any evidence that could compromise his position. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  Judge Le Drian’s neck was beginning to sweat. This case was shaping up to be a legal minefield.

  “All right,” he said, “we’ve gone through almost everyone now. So what about the rest
of the Vitral family… Is that a dead end, too?”

  “Pretty much,” said Superintendent Vatelier. “The child’s mother, Stéphanie, was abandoned by her mother. She was raised in an orphanage in Rouen. She was only sixteen when she met Pascal Vitral on a café terrace and fell in love. So little Emilie—if she is the one who survived—has no living kin other than her grandparents, Pierre and Nicole, and her older brother, Marc.”

  Judge Le Drian stared out the window, above the lights of the Eiffel Tower, in search of a star that might guide them through this dark Christmas night.

  The arguments and counterarguments went on like this for hours, and I could describe every detail. Not only do I have the films of the meetings, I have also gone through almost three thousand pages of notes accumulated by Judge Le Drian during the weeks that followed. And that’s without even mentioning my personal research. Fear not, I will come back to these discussions in a moment, at least for what seem to me to be the most important points. But I think you must already be getting a sense of the investigators’ difficulties.

  Which side of the coin would land faceup? Heads or tails? I still don’t know.

  I am simply passing on all these clues to you. Now it’s your turn to sift through them…

  But I can hear you asking questions: What about scientific proof? Their clothes? Blood type? Eye color? And all the rest?

  Don’t worry, I’m coming to that.

  You won’t be disappointed.

  8

  October 2, 1998, 9:35 a.m.

  Marc ate the rest of his croissant without even looking up at the clock, or at the beautiful student, or at Mariam. Around him, the Lenin was alive with noise and movement. And so, too, visible through the café’s windows, was the square outside the university. Even if he had his doubts about Grand-Duc’s revelations, Marc had to keep reading, storing away all the information he discovered.