After the Crash: A Novel

by Michel Bussi

  Marc smiled to himself. What a surprise his visit would be! After all, he and the de Carvilles were working toward the same goal now: proving that Lylie was not his sister, that Vitral blood did not flow through her veins. Surely they could find some common ground.

  Marc shivered as he thought again of Grand-Duc’s corpse.

  He grabbed his cell phone and called his grandmother’s number in Dieppe.

  Once again, he got the answering machine.

  For a long time now, he had called his grandmother “Nicole.” It was his way of answering the question that had puzzled him during his first ten years of life: should he call her “Mother” or “Grandma”?

  “Nicole? It’s Marc. Have you heard from Lylie? Recently, I mean. Since this morning. Call me back, please—it’s very important.” He paused for a second, then continued: “I know I don’t actually remember this, but you were very beautiful when you were fifty. I love you…”

  Marc’s left hand tightened around the cold metal of the rail. The fingers of his other hand danced lightly over the telephone’s keyboard.

  The phone rang. Seven times.

  “Lylie… Where are you, for God’s sake? Answer me! Call me back! Don’t go, Lylie. I’ve just left Grand-Duc’s house. He didn’t commit suicide. He’s… He… I think he must have discovered something. I can find out what it was, too. I will discover it. Call me, Lylie.”

  The platforms of the metro were practically empty at this time of day. Marc stared across at a large billboard ad for tourism in the Emirates, losing himself in the mysterious landscape shown on the poster. A few seconds later, the train appeared, sinking into the golden sands, in front of the Oriental palace, under the stars of a thousand and one nights.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal

  So I was hired for an eighteen-year investigation. Can you imagine? For eighteen years, this case has been stuck in my brain, like a piece of mental chewing gum, chewed for so long that it has lost all its flavor. Beware, reader, that the gum does not become glued to your own thoughts, massaged by your imagination, stretched out by your logic—because you may never get rid of it.

  The first few months of the investigation were extremely exciting. Despite the very generous deadline, I was filled with a sense of urgency. I read all the inquiry documents—hundreds of pages—in less than two weeks. During the first two months, I interviewed scores of witnesses: the firemen who attended the Mont Terri crash; all the medical staff from the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital; Dr. Morange; the de Carvilles’ friends and relatives; the Vitrals’ friends and relatives; the police, including Superintendent Vatelier; the lawyers, including Leguerne; the two judges, Le Drian and Weber; and who knows how many others…

  I was working fifteen hours a day, hardly sleeping at all. I was thinking about the case when I fell asleep and it was still buzzing around my head when I woke up. It was as if I wanted to solve the case as quickly as possible, or to please my client by demonstrating my zeal for the job, so she would give me a contract for life.

  In fact, my motives were not so calculated. I was genuinely fascinated by the mystery, and was convinced that I could discover something new; some clue that everyone had overlooked. I accumulated notes, photographs, hours of recordings. It was madness… I couldn’t have known, then, that what I was actually building was the foundations of my own neurosis.

  After a few weeks of analyzing all the evidence, I became fixated on finding out about one thing in particular. At the time, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

  The bracelet!

  That damned gold bracelet, given to her by her grandfather, which Lyse-Rose de Carville must have been wearing when the plane crashed. The piece of jewelry that had tipped the balance away from the de Carvilles in the mind of Judge Weber; the decisive grain of sand in the scales of justice; Maître Leguerne and the Vitrals’ lethal weapon. I had become convinced that this lethal weapon was a double-edged sword. Without that bracelet, the balance of probability fell toward the miracle child being Emilie Vitral. But if the survivor was Lyse-Rose, there was no reason why the delicate bracelet might not have broken during the plane crash. And if the bracelet had been found, somewhere in the vicinity of the plane… in that case, the situation would be reversed and the bracelet would provide irrefutable proof that Lyse-Rose was the miracle child.

  I am a patient, stubborn, meticulous man. When it comes to work, I can be completely obsessive. So, even though I knew that the police had searched the site around the burned Airbus for hours, I decided I would begin that search again. Armed with a metal detector, I spent seventeen days on Mont Terri in late August 1981, raking over every inch of forest. There had been a storm the night the plane had crashed. The bracelet might have fallen into the snow, become buried in the muddy earth. It’s not difficult to imagine that a policeman sent to search the area in such conditions—his fingers freezing, his feet soaked—might not be especially zealous.

  I was.

  Not that it did me any good.

  I will spare you the list of beer cans, coins, and other worthless pieces of junk that I discovered. I was basically doing the job of the man who looks after Mont Terri as part of the Haut-Jura nature preserve. His name is Grégory Morez. A good-looking man with designer stubble and wolfish eyes, his face craggy and tanned as if he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro every weekend. We ended up becoming friendly.

  I brought down three trash bags from the mountain, filled with all kinds of rubbish, but not a bracelet in sight.

  To be honest, I wasn’t really disappointed. I had suspected this might happen. But as I’ve told you, I am a stubborn man. I was simply obeying Mathilde de Carville’s orders to leave no stone unturned, taking it one step at a time.

  What I really believed was, if the bracelet had fallen somewhere near the miracle child on the night of the tragedy, it was perfectly possible that someone—a fireman, a policeman, a nurse—might have found it and simply kept it as a souvenir. Or maybe someone local had come to scavenge around the scene of the crash, after the plane had stopped burning. The bracelet was made of solid gold, valued at the time at exactly eleven thousand five hundred francs, according to the receipt. It bore a hallmark from Tournaire, on Place Vendôme, and was the kind of object that could make people greedy. And, of course, no one could possibly have imagined how important that damned bracelet would become afterward.

  My idea was very simple: to bombard the local region with small advertisements offering a lucrative reward for information that would lead us to the coveted trinket. The reward had to be considerably more than the object itself was worth. With the agreement of Mathilde de Carville, I gradually increased the size of the bait. We began at twenty thousand francs… This kind of fishing required patience, time, and dexterity, but I was confident that the fish would eventually bite. If the bracelet had been found, if it was hidden away in a drawer, jealously guarded by a casual thief, one day or another it would resurface.

  And I was right. On that point at least, I was right.

  My other main occupation during the first six months of my investigation was what I liked to call my Turkish vacation. Altogether, I must have spent nearly two and a half years in Turkey, and most of that time was during the first five years.

  I was accompanied by Nazim Ozan, who had agreed, without a moment’s hesitation, to partner me in my investigation. At the time, he was working, often illegally, on building sites. He was nearly fifty, and had had his fill of being a mercenary in the world’s most dangerous countries, surrounded by fanatical maniacs. And, most important, he had found love. He lived in Paris with a somewhat plump but still very lovely woman called Ayla. Like Nazim, she was of Turkish origin. God knows why, but the two of them were inseparable. Ayla was a powerful and fiercely jealous woman, and I had to spend hours negotiating with her whenever I wanted Nazim to come with me to Turkey. And, once we got there, he had to call her every day. I don’t think Ayla ever understood anything about the case itself. Worse still, I’m not even sure
she believed us. But she didn’t hold it against me. She even insisted that I be a witness at their wedding in June 1985.

  In spite of Ayla’s objections, I generally did take Nazim with me when I went to Turkey, where he acted as my interpreter. In Istanbul, I always stayed at the Hotel Askoc, on the Golden Horn, near the Galata Bridge. Nazim stayed with some cousins of Ayla, in the district of Eyup. We would meet in a café across from my hotel—the Dez Anj, on Ayhan Isik Sokak. Nazim took the opportunity to drink raki after raki, and attempted to initiate me into the pleasures of the hookah.

  As I said… my Turkish vacations.

  I have to admit, I think I have always been slightly cynical about the arts and traditions of the rest of the world: the idea of exotic foreign lands and so on. I suppose you could call it a sort of racism, but it’s an unbiased racism, a general skepticism toward the whole human race. I imagine it dates back to my former job as a mercenary—an armed garbage collector charged with emptying the world’s filthiest trash cans, or a door-to-door dynamite salesman, if you prefer.

  I’d had my fill of Turkish life within a week of being there. The incessant ringing from the minarets, the endless bazaar in the streets, the veiled women, the prostitutes, the smell of tea and spices, the crazy taxi drivers, the constant traffic jams all the way to the Bosphorus… In the end, the only Turkish thing I could bear was Nazim’s mustache.

  Anyway, I’m sure you’ve had enough of my amateur anthropology. I just wanted to demonstrate that my “Turkish vacations” were nothing of the kind, and I am serious when I say that I took refuge in my work. At least for the first few months, Nazim and I worked like madmen. We spent hours interrogating merchants in the Grand Bazaar, trying to find out who had sold the clothes worn by the miracle child. A cotton vest, a white dress with orange flowers, and a beige wool sweater… Can you imagine? The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul is one of the biggest covered markets in the world, with fifty-eight streets and over four thousand shops… Most of the vendors jabbered away in English or French, attempting to ignore Nazim’s translation so they could address themselves directly to me, as if there were a watermark of the French flag on my forehead.

  “A baby, my brother? You are looking for clothes for your baby? I have everything you need. Boy or girl? Tell me your price…”

  Four thousand shops, with two or three times as many merchants, spotting the Western fool at a hundred paces. But I held firm. I spent more than ten days pacing that maze, and ended up with a list of nineteen shops that sold all three items—the cotton vest, the white dress, and the wool sweater—in exactly the same style as the miracle child’s… And none of the vendors remembered having sold those clothes to a Western family.

  It was a dead end.

  Thankfully, there was still a great deal to be learned about Lyse-Rose and her parents, Alexandre and Véronique de Carville. The official inquiry has based its analysis of Lyse-Rose’s identity on two things: the photograph taken from behind, received in the mail by the de Carville grandparents, and Malvina’s testimony. So we had to start all over again in Turkey, in their coastal residence in Ceyhan. I was reasonably optimistic. Surely, in three months of life, Lyse-Rose must have been seen by quite a few people.

  I quickly became disillusioned.

  Apparently, Alexandre and Véronique de Carville were not very sociable, and tended to avoid contact with the indigenous population. They were the kind of people who remain cloistered in their white villa with its view of the Mediterranean. They even had their own private beach.

  To be more honest, it was Véronique who really lived like a nun—Alexandre worked in Istanbul most of the week. They occasionally had friends around—colleagues, French people—but only before Lyse-Rose was born. Once Véronique had given birth, she became a lot less interested in social gatherings. I was only able to find seven people—two couples who were friends with the de Carvilles, plus three business clients—who had been invited to the Ceyhan villa after Lyse-Rose’s birth. Each time, Lyse-Rose had been asleep, and all the guests could remember was a tiny baby covered in sheets who woke at regular intervals. Only one client, a Dutchman, had seen Lyse-Rose awake, and then only for a few seconds. Véronique had retired from the party to breast-feed her daughter and she could not do that in front of the Dutch industrialist. I did manage to find the man in question—a sales manager for the Turkish subsidiary of Shell—and he told me that he would be as incapable of recognizing Lyse-Rose’s face as he would her mother’s tits.

  At the Bakirkoy maternity hospital in Istanbul, where Véronique de Carville gave birth, more than thirty babies are born each week. It is a very chic private clinic, and I was welcomed with astonishing obsequiousness. The pediatrician, the only doctor to have looked after Lyse-Rose, had examined her about three times and pointed out to me that he saw more than twenty newborn babies every day. From a notebook, he provided me with Lyse-Rose’s birth information. Weight: seven pounds, two ounces; length: nineteen inches.

  Did the child cry? Yes.

  Were the eyes open? Yes.

  Other remarks: None.

  Distinguishing features: None.

  Another dead end.

  Véronique de Carville must have been bored out of her mind in her villa. There were a few staff members at her disposal. I managed to find a gardener—rather old, and a bit too nearsighted for my liking—who had seen Lyse-Rose lying in the shade of a palm tree one afternoon… covered by mosquito netting. His description of her was consequently vague.

  I am not going to give you a detailed list of all the hazy, half-assed, or completely useless witness statements that I accumulated during those months. Leave no stone unturned, Mathilde de Carville had told me. Obediently, I did exactly that. After all, one coherent witness was all I needed.

  At the Ataturk airport in Istanbul, a flight attendant remembered tickling a baby under the chin on December 22, just before the Airbus departed for Paris.

  “One baby, or two?”

  “Just one.”

  At least, that was what she thought; she wasn’t sure about either the date or the flight. But she was sure there had been only one baby.

  That damn flight attendant sowed another doubt in my overcrowded brain. What if there had been only one baby on board the plane?

  After all, how could anyone be certain about who was actually sitting in the Airbus that night? The passenger list was known, but what if one of them had failed to board? A baby, for example? Maybe even Lyse-Rose. A delay, a last-minute holdup, a kidnapping… I invented various scenarios in which Lyse-Rose might never have boarded that Airbus, in which she might still be alive now.

  The theory was utterly insane.

  But it wasn’t the only one. For instance, wasn’t it rather strange that there was so little tangible proof of this three-month-old’s existence? So few witnesses, no friends to cuddle her, no babysitter to look after her, no photographs. Practically nothing. It was as if that baby had never existed. Or, to be more precise, it was as if someone had wanted to hide her…

  The longer I worked on the case, the more paranoid I became. What if Lyse-Rose had not caught the flight because she was already dead? An accident at home? An incurable illness? A crime? But if that were true, then Alexandre and Véronique de Carville had taken their secret to the grave with them.

  Perhaps only Malvina knew. And she had lost her mind.

  My theories made Nazim laugh when I recounted them to him at the Dez Anj café. He soaked his mustache in his raki.

  “A crime? You’re losing it, Crédule!”

  Between puffs on his hookah, he brought me down to earth.

  “Listen, this kid didn’t live in a dungeon for three months. She must have gone out occasionally. So maybe some passerby, some tourist saw her. Maybe they accidentally filmed her… You never know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve got money. Why don’t you run some ads in the Turkish newspapers, with the photograph of the miracle child—the one taken by
the Est Républicain?”

  Nazim was right! His idea was genius. We bombarded the Turkish press, explaining what we were looking for and what we were offering in exchange: a fortune in Turkish currency.

  Early on the morning of March 27, 1982—I will always remember that date—I found a letter waiting for me in my cubbyhole at the Hotel Askoc reception desk. It had been hand-delivered. The letter was brief. It contained a name—Unal Serkan—and a phone number. But, most important, it contained the photocopy of a photograph.

  I ran across Ayhan Isik Sokak like a madman, almost getting myself crushed by the flow of vehicles. Nazim was waiting for me at Dez Anj.

  “What’s up, Crédule?”

  I shoved the photo into his big, hairy hands. His eyes widened. He stared at the picture in shock, just as I had a few minutes earlier.

  The picture had been taken at a beach.

  In the foreground was a dark-haired woman, clearly Turkish, suntanned and perfectly proportioned, posing in a bikini. In the background, you could make out the hills of Ceyhan and, surrounded by greenery, the walls of the de Carvilles’ villa. About ten feet behind the woman in the swimsuit, next to the legs of another woman, was a baby lying on a blanket. A tiny baby, only a few weeks old. Nazim stared speechlessly.

  The baby was Lylie—our Dragonfly, the miracle child of Mont Terrible—without any doubt whatsoever. Same eyes, same face…

  Pascal and Stéphanie Vitral had never gone to Ceyhan during their vacation in Turkey. They had never even been within a hundred miles of the town. There could be no doubt—finally we had the proof we were looking for.

  The miracle child found in the snow on Mont Terri was Lyse-Rose de Carville.

  October 2, 1998, 11:44 a.m.

  The phone beeped, just once, almost inaudible amid the din from the underground train.

  It was not a call to his cell phone, but a ringtone informing him that he had a message on his voice mail. A missed call.