After the Crash: A Novel

by Michel Bussi

  The Paris–Rouen train was one of those whose platform had not yet been announced. Marc crossed the entire concourse, slaloming through the masses, and sat down in the station bar, where he ordered an orange juice. The waiter took his money right away, as if he were afraid Marc might run away with the glass in his hand. Marc picked up his phone, and swore when he looked at the screen. Lylie had called.

  The call had come when he was underground, of course, as if Lylie were tracking his progress on a screen, waiting until he was out of reach.

  Marc listened to her message. It was barely audible.

  “Marc, this is Emilie. What on earth were you doing at the de Carvilles’ place? Listen, you have to trust me. Tomorrow, it will all be over, and I’ll explain everything to you then. If you love me as much as you say you do, you will forgive me.”

  For a moment, Marc did not move, the telephone still clamped to his ear.

  “Trust me… Forgive me…”

  Wait until tomorrow?

  No way. Lylie was hiding something from him: the “one-way trip” that only he could prevent her from taking. Marc tapped at the keys on his phone and listened to her message again. There was something about it that intrigued him.

  “Marc, this is Emilie…” He pressed the phone to his right ear and blocked his left ear with a finger. He needed to hear the message clearly, which wasn’t easy in this noisy station.

  He listened to the message for a third time. He was no longer paying any attention to Lylie’s words, but to what he could hear in the background. The sound was quite distant and muffled, but this time he was almost certain that he was right. Nevertheless, he listened to it one last time, just to be sure. And there it was again: behind Lylie’s voice, he could distinctly hear the sound of ambulance sirens.

  Marc put the telephone back in his pocket and tried to think as he drank his orange juice. He could find only two possible explanations. Either Lylie was standing close to an accident, or she was near a hospital. It was a clue, in any case. The first he had found.

  There was no point trying to find the location of a recent accident in Paris; Lylie would not stay there, and it would be impossible to locate. But, if the second theory were true, there was a chance. Doubtless, he would be faced with a score of addresses in Paris. But it was worth trying.

  He was haunted by another question: Why a hospital? What had Lylie done? The first image that came to mind was of her being injured, carried on a stretcher to the emergency department, a swarm of nurses buzzing around her…

  The one-way trip. Lylie had attempted suicide. She had not waited until tomorrow.

  For the third time that day, Marc called Jennifer, his colleague at France Telecom. As fast as she could, she sent him eighteen texts containing lists of all the one hundred and fifty-eight hospitals in central Paris.

  For more than half an hour, Marc talked to a series of switchboard operators. All the conversations went the same way:

  “Hello. Has a young woman by the name of Emilie Vitral been admitted to your hospital today? No, I don’t know which department… Accident and Emergency, maybe?”

  The shortest calls lasted a few seconds, the longest a few minutes. The response was always more or less identical: “No, sir, we have no one here by that name.” When he reached the twentieth number on the list, Marc stopped. It would take him forever to call all one hundred and fifty-eight hospitals and he realized he could be wasting precious time, chasing after a highly tenuous clue: the sound of ambulance sirens in the background of a phone message. They might simply have been speeding past as Lylie made the call.

  By now, the waiter had asked him three times if he wanted anything else. Marc asked for another orange juice just to keep him at bay. Was this how Crédule Grand-Duc had felt all those years? As if he were following a lead that he knew, right from the beginning, would probably go nowhere? Navigating his way through a dark and stormy night with nothing more than a match?

  Marc looked up at the departures board. Still no platform listed for Paris–Rouen. Everything was going too fast. Those siren screams… That blue envelope in his pocket, which he could open, in spite of Mathilde de Carville’s orders and the promise he had made to Nicole… And this notebook, with Grand-Duc’s narrative keeping him on tenterhooks…

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal

  By 1987, the reward for the bracelet had gone up to seventy-five thousand francs. That was a fortune back then, even for a piece of jewelry from Tournaire. As for my investigation, it was stagnating. There were no new leads, so I just kept plugging away at the old ones, rereading the same old files a dozen times.

  I went to Turkey for a few weeks, for appearance’s sake. The Hotel Askoc, the Golden Horn, the carpet sellers, twilight over the Bosphorus… the whole “Lylie Mystery Tour.” I also went back to Quebec, to see the Berniers, in temperatures of minus fifteen. Still I learned nothing new.

  And, of course, I returned to Dieppe. Twice, I think—once with Nazim and once without. Those are good memories, at least. I will tell you about them for that reason, and also because it is important to help you understand Lylie. Her psychology, I mean. Her environment, determinism, nature versus nurture, and all that crap. I will give you the details, and you can judge for yourself. This is important if you wish to form your own opinion.

  It was March 1987. The weather was awful. From what Nicole told us, we gathered that it had been like that for the past two weeks in Dieppe: forty-mile-an-hour winds and lashing rain. There was not a cat to be seen anywhere on the seafront. Nicole coughed at the end of every sentence, her lungs making her suffer.

  Nazim was happy. He enjoyed going to Dieppe. He liked rain. He liked Marc, too, even if Marc was a little scared of him. Like me, Nazim did not have children. But at least he had a wife. The lovely Ayla, with her curves and her kebabs. When it came to soccer, Nazim was, naturally, a supporter of the Turkish national team. Marc made fun of him: a few years earlier, Turkey had lost 8–0 to England in a World Cup qualifier. “Were they playing foosball?” Marc joked. Nazim wanted to prove to Marc that he was not bitter about this, so he brought him a Galatasaray shirt worn by the club’s left winger, Dündar Siz. The name Dündar Siz undoubtedly means nothing to you. Try translating it into French… You see now? Yes, Didier Six. The French player must have acquired Turkish citizenship in order to help Galatasaray win the championship the following year. Didier Six… How could Didier Six be anyone’s idol? The guy was a one-trick pony. He always did the same move, faking a shift to the outside then cutting in on the inside. Worst of all, he shot the ball straight into the goalkeeper’s arms from the penalty spot in Seville in 1982, during the semifinal of the World Cup against West Germany. He was playing for Stuttgart at the time, the traitor. People have been executed for less than that!

  So anyway, five years later, the best present Nazim could find to give to Marc was a Dündar Siz jersey. The shirt of a traitor living in exile under a false name! What a wonderful example for a young boy to follow. Marc, being young and naive, put the shirt on without asking any questions.

  As for little Emilie, she put on a fluorescent purple raincoat, with a hood that swallowed up her whole head so that only a few blond hairs emerged, and went out into the rain and the wind. Her boots were the same color as her raincoat. She jumped in puddles and went chasing after cats. Nicole was almost in tears when she told me why.

  At seven years old, Emilie was already a good reader. And she was a big fan of Marcel Aymé’s Contes du Chat Perché, with its talking animals.

  “Can you believe it, Crédule?” Nicole said. “At seven years old!”

  There cannot have been more than twenty books in their little household, and this was the only book for children. But I’m sure you are wondering what this has to do with chasing after cats… Well, Emilie loved the story about the farm cat who, to annoy everyone, would spend its day washing itself, continually rubbing its paw behind its ear—thereby invariably attracting rain for the following day. In
the book, it pours with rain for weeks on end, purely because of the actions of this wayward cat, so in the end, the farmer decides to get rid of it. It is saved just in the nick of time by the book’s heroines, Delphine and Marinette. So it seemed perfectly logical to Emilie that the reason Dieppe had been deluged for the past two weeks was because the local cats were also continually rubbing their paws behind their ears. Consequently, there was only one solution: she must persuade the cats to wash themselves in a different way. All the cats in Pollet. Imagine that, in a fishing district… Emilie spent hours sidling up to them, winning their trust, then gently explaining to them that her grandmother Nicole was unable to work because of their actions. And of course they, too, were suffering, because they couldn’t bask in the sun they loved so much.

  Emilie tried to persuade Nazim and me to help her catch the cats. There were some who wouldn’t listen to her—strays, mostly—so she wanted us to frighten them.

  “Come on, Crédule-la-Bascule! Come on, Mustache Man!”

  She took us by the hand, tried to drag us out into the pouring rain. Nazim laughed loudly, but stayed inside with his coffee. So did I. Only Marc did as she asked and went outside with her. When he came back, his clothes were soaking and as transparent as the shirt of Dündar Siz, isolated on the left flank at the Parc des Princes.

  On December 22, 1987, I went on my yearly pilgrimage to Mont Terri. I arrived in the evening, and left my luggage at the rental cottage on the banks of the Doubs. The owner, Monique Genevez—an adorable woman with a Franc-Comtois accent so strong that it almost reminded me of a Canadian’s—always reserved the same room for me: number 12, with a view of Mont Terri. She also kept back some Cancoillotte cheese for me, allowing it to age for at least a month in advance, so that I could eat some with a bottle of Arbois wine. My investigation was getting bogged down and I was turning into a nervous wreck, so I felt I deserved a few compensations.

  Before I had even parked my car that day, Monique was out of the house yelling at me excitedly: “Mr. Grand-Duc, there’s someone here to see you!”

  I looked at her, speechless.

  “He’s been here for two hours,” she told me. “He called several times last month. He wanted to see you. I told him you would be coming here, as you do always do, on the afternoon of December 22. I think it must be related to your investigation.”

  Surprised and excited, I rushed into the living room. A man in his fifties, wearing a long dark winter coat, was waiting for me. He stood up and came over to me.

  “Augustin Pelletier. I have been wanting to meet you for several months now, Mr. Grand-Duc. I saw one of your small ads in the Est Républicain. I had imagined that the investigation into the Mont Terri accident had been closed a long time ago, so I was surprised to discover you were still working on the case. I hope you might be able to help me…”

  I had been hoping for the opposite—that he would be able to help me—but never mind. Augustin Pelletier seemed like a sensible sort to me: a solid, responsible businessman, not a teller of tall tales.

  I sat next to him, in the entrance hall of the cottage. Through the window, you could see the whole mountain range, including Mont Terri. It was not yet covered with snow.

  “I will do my best, Mr. Pelletier. This is rather unexpected…”

  “It’s a long story, Mr. Grand-Duc, but I will give you the short version. I am looking for my brother, Georges Pelletier. He disappeared many years ago. The last sighting of him was in December 1980. At the time, he was living as a hermit on Mont Terri, in a little hut, not far from the site of the crash.”

  34

  October 2, 1998, 3:09 p.m.

  Marc looked up. The information on the departures board took a moment to come into focus.

  Paris–Caen. Platform 23.

  Many of the people around him on the concourse suddenly rushed toward Platform 23, like so many colored grains of sand pouring through the slender neck of an hourglass. Marc had read somewhere that more than a thousand people could be squeezed inside a train. The average population of a large village… When you thought about that, the density of the crowd packed together in the station hardly came as a surprise: all it took was two or three trains to be delayed and you would have several thousand people standing around, waiting.

  The platform for Paris–Rouen was still not indicated, so he had time to read a few more pages of the notebook. Had Grand-Duc really found a witness to the Mont Terri crash?

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal

  The clouds were coming from Switzerland. This was quite unusual. After years of experience, you see, I was becoming something of an expert regarding the climate of the Haut-Jura.

  “Georges is my younger brother,” Augustin Pelletier explained. “He was always more fragile than I. A complicated person. We were very different. He was only fourteen when he started running away from home. We were living in Besançon at the time. He hung around with one of the local gangs, and the police kept bringing him back to my parents. In the end, Georges was placed in an institution for two years.”

  I drummed my fingers on the armrests of my chair. I wondered where this story was leading.

  “Don’t worry, I will get to the crash, Mr. Grand-Duc,” Augustin told me hastily, obviously noticing my impatience. “At sixteen, Georges left home for good. I will spare you the details. He slept in the street. Alcohol. Drugs. He was a dealer, too, though he never did anything too bad. My parents gave up on him, and I did, too. At the time, I had a job, a wife who didn’t want me to get involved… I’m sure you can imagine what it was like. It’s not easy to invite a junkie to your Christmas party.

  “I managed as best I could,” he went on. “I kept in touch with Georges indirectly, through the social services and the police. But Georges did not want our help. Every time I offered a helping hand, he would slap me in the face. Metaphorically, if you see what I mean…”

  I saw, but I didn’t care.

  “I’m getting there, Mr. Grand-Duc. I was generally able to keep myself informed about Georges, although there were periods of time when he would disappear completely. For one or two years at the most. But in May 1980, I lost track of him for good. Georges was forty-two at the time, although he looked closer to sixty. I have not received any information about him for nearly eight years.”

  He was losing me. “Mr. Pelletier, I don’t quite see what this has to do with me, or with the Airbus accident.”

  “Bear with me. I was very worried. I asked the other homeless people in Besançon about him. In the end, I found out that Georges had left for the countryside. He’d had enough of city life, and of certain unsavory characters in Besançon. Other dealers, the police… Apparently, the last anyone had heard, he was living in a hut on a mountain somewhere near the Swiss border. Mont Terri. Or Mont Terrible, as everyone was calling it back then, because of the accident. I spent months searching for him, but without success. After that, I more or less gave up hope of ever seeing him again. My wife was perfectly happy with that situation, of course, but when I saw your ad, I started thinking. I thought: why not? If someone is still trying to work out what happened in that place, on that night, then maybe he will also find some trace of my brother…”

  My hands gripped the armrests of my chair like a captain at the helm of a three-master. I gazed through the window at the mountain peaks now lost in the mist. Was it possible that Georges Pelletier had been sleeping in that cabin on the night of December 22, 1980? Was it possible Georges was something I had never even dared hope for in seven years of investigating the case: an eyewitness to the crash?

  Perhaps this Georges had been the first person to appear on the scene… Perhaps he had found Lyse-Rose’s bracelet, lying next to the miracle child… Perhaps it was he who had dug that small grave…

  “Did Georges have a dog?”

  Augustin looked dazed. “Umm… well, yes. A small brown mongrel. Why?”

  I was already taking notes on the back of a brochure.

  “W
hat kind of cigarettes did he smoke?”

  “Gitanes, I think. I’m not sure, though.”

  “What size were his feet?”

  “I think about ten or eleven.”

  “What brand of beer did he drink?”

  “What brand of beer? I have no idea… Sorry, Mr. Grand-Duc, but why are you asking me all these questions? Have you found Georges? Is he… dead? Did you find his body?”

  We needed a moment of calm.

  Monique Genevez was the perfect hostess, bringing us tea and a local variety of Speculoos cookies, thicker and longer than the Belgian ones. Augustin did not touch them but I ate enough for both of us, while I told him all about my discovery the previous year: the hut, the cigarette butts, the grave. Augustin Pelletier seemed almost disappointed that I had not discovered any concrete evidence regarding his brother. Dunking my cookies in the tea, I reassured him: I could not promise that I would find his brother, Georges, even less that I would find him alive, but I could assure him that I would devote every ounce of my energy into looking for him over the coming months. I was not lying. He was my only potential witness and I was willing to scour the earth for him. Augustin’s journey from Besançon had proved to be a good investment. He now had a private detective working on his behalf, with all the costs paid for by Mathilde de Carville. He left me his business card.

  I only slept a few hours that night, partly because of my excitement, but mainly because of the bottle of Arbois wine that I drank to celebrate this news, washed down with a few glasses of my landlady’s excellent Vin Jaune.

  I left at dawn the following morning, fully equipped with a spade, a rake, a sieve, and other useful tools. I had decided to turn grave robber for the day, just to check if it really was Georges’s small brown mongrel buried under the pile of stones. I also took test tubes and waterproof bags so that I could send cigarette butts and beer cans to a friend who worked in the police forensics department. As I was passing the nature preserve headquarters, Grégory Morez waved me over. He had a good laugh. “Jesus, Crédule! Not exactly traveling light, are you?”