After the Crash: A Novel

by Michel Bussi

  “I told you, I’m fine!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes! Stop bugging me and go back to sleep.”

  Malvina turned her back on Marc. Her comforter was touching his in a way that seemed strangely intimate.

  Four in the morning. It was now or never. He had to do something, or it would be too late.

  Malvina was already asleep again.

  What could he do? He gazed up into the dark sky. Stars appeared and vanished, presumably hidden by invisible clouds moving in the wind. Like false shooting stars on which people would make wishes that never came true. Like the flashing lights of an airplane, confused with the distant constellations beyond. Closer. More ephemeral.

  Marc kept thinking about the last lines in the green notebook: Grand-Duc’s aborted suicide attempt.

  Had he been bluffing? Or had he really discovered something that night, after finishing his account of the eighteen-year investigation? Some new piece of evidence that he never wrote in the notebook… Marc tried to remember Malvina’s exact words, when she had spoken about this on the train. Before his eyes, the only two constellations he was able to recognize—Ursa Major and Lyra—had disappeared.

  Grand-Duc called my grandmother the day before yesterday. He was still alive then. He told her he had found something. The solution to the mystery, or so he claimed. Just like that, at five minutes to midnight on the last day of his contract! Just before he was about to shoot himself in the head, with the edition of the Est Républicain from December 23, 1980, spread out on the desk beneath him. He said he needed a day or two to gather evidence, but he was absolutely sure that he had solved the mystery. Oh, and he needed an extra one hundred and fifty thousand francs…

  Marc considered her words. If he had not been lying, then Grand-Duc had discovered the solution to the mystery in his office, next to the fireplace where his archives were burning, at five minutes to midnight. The next morning, Marc had performed a thorough search of that office, but he had not found anything apart from a corpse. Nor had Malvina. What had they missed? Marc tried to imagine the scene of the detective’s suicide. The pistol pressed to his temple, the old newspaper laid out in front of him. Why had Grand-Duc not pulled the trigger? What had he heard? Or seen?

  Or read?

  The idea came suddenly. Of course—the newspaper! The edition of the Est Républicain that had appeared on December 23, 1980. This would have been the last thing the detective saw before squeezing the trigger.

  What if the solution to the mystery was printed in an eighteen-year-old newspaper?

  Marc got up quietly, being careful not to wake Malvina. He threw his belongings into his backpack, then pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote on the back:

  Gone to buy croissants.

  Marc

  He left the note on the floor, close to Malvina’s head. He left the guidebook there, too, but kept the map for himself. One last time, Marc looked at the shape of Malvina’s small body, lost under the oversize comforter. She would have no problem finding her way back down the mountain.

  Outside, the sun had not yet risen, but the sky was beginning to lighten, the stars fading one by one. Dawn on the last day. Marc thought of Lylie, in her white-walled room.

  He set off.

  57

  October 4, 1998, 6:05 a.m.

  Six in the morning. Grand-Duc stretched out inside the Xantia. He was parked on a path where tufts of grass grew between wheel ruts, near Dannemarie, about a hundred feet from the chalet in which Mélanie Belvoir—or, rather, Mélanie Luisans, as she called herself now—lived.

  From that position he could easily see any vehicles coming from the village long before they could see him. See without being seen. Rule 1 of being a private detective. It had been years since he had spent a night doing a stakeout. The experience reminded him of his younger days, before the de Carville contract: all those nights he had spent watching people enter and exit casinos on the Basque coast or the Côte d’Azur. Nazim’s Xantia was almost as uncomfortable as the old bangers he used to drive then.

  The detective took a Thermos from the glove compartment and poured some coffee into a plastic cup. The liquid burned his lips as he sipped it.

  He had time. Mélanie Belvoir was not due to return until 9:00 a.m. She was a nurse in the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital, and she worked the night shift. Yesterday, Grand-Duc had spent a long time talking to her on the phone before she finally let down her guard. He had recorded their conversation, naturally. Afterward he had spent several hours at Monique Genevez’s cottage, transcribing the interview on his laptop. He had printed out a copy, which now lay in an envelope on the passenger seat next to him. All he needed was Mélanie Belvoir’s signature on the document.

  Grand-Duc drank more coffee. It tasted of plastic.

  How much would Mathilde de Carville be willing to pay for that envelope? A lot of money, undoubtedly. A fortune. At least as much as he had earned during the last eighteen years…

  Grand-Duc felt no qualms about screwing the de Carvilles for all he could get. They could afford it, after all. And no amount of money, he suspected, would ever compensate him for the burden of his conscience.

  He bit his lip as a wave of guilt swept over him. This reward really ought to have been shared between him and Nazim. Not fifty-fifty, of course, but his friend would have had enough to buy a villa in Turkey. However, Nazim had refused to follow him on this. He seemed to think the de Carvilles had paid enough already, and that the case was over. Crédule Grand-Duc knew he shouldn’t have raised his voice: Nazim was adorable, but he was also very nervous.

  “I’ll go to the police, Crédule,” he had warned. “I will, I swear, if you don’t leave me in peace. This whole business has been eating away at me for so long…”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Grand-Duc had smelled a rat then. Nazim was not the type to make idle threats. The detective had demanded explanations, guarantees, and then everything had spun out of control. Nazim had pulled a gun on him, but Grand-Duc had been quicker to squeeze the trigger. That was all. He had never wanted, or intended, to kill Nazim. But it had happened, and when Nazim’s head fell into the fireplace, an idea had sparked in Grand-Duc’s mind. All he had to do to make his friend’s face unrecognizable was to push it a little farther into the flames. He had pulled him out briefly, to shave what remained of his mustache, and to dress him in Grand-Duc’s own clothes, shoes, and watch, just in case Lylie or Marc became too curious.

  He had not intended to kill Ayla either, but he’d had no choice. Grand-Duc knew her; she would go straight to the police. Nazim had not taken part in the murder of Pierre Vitral, but he knew about it, and he had undoubtedly told his wife everything. It was hardly Grand-Duc’s fault if Nazim wasn’t astute enough to keep secrets from her. She had called him, the day before, and left several panicky messages. He’d had no choice but to return to Paris, and to tail her discreetly from her kebab shop to his house, and then to the forest in Coupvray. Which was, as it happened, the perfect place to kill her. After that, he had driven back to the Jura Mountains, doing one hundred and ten miles per hour, in order to get there early enough to follow the mailman and finally put this case to rest.

  Grand-Duc forced himself to finish the contents of the plastic cup. The coffee was bitter, hard to swallow.

  Nazim Ozan. Ayla Ozan.

  For years they had been his best friends. His only friends. And now he had murdered them.

  What a farce life was!

  Yes, the de Carvilles could pay for all of that.

  Grand-Duc checked the time, displayed in retro green digits on the Xantia’s clock.

  6:15 a.m.

  He still had time. He was the earliest bird, and he was going to catch this worm.

  58

  October 4, 1998, 6:29 a.m.

  Marc parked the van in a parking lot in the center of Montbéliard. It had taken him about an hour and a half to come back down Mont Terri, then thr
ee-quarters of an hour to drive here. He had gone into the first café he could see that was open, and the waiter had given him the address of the Est Républicain: 12 Place Jules-Viette.

  The offices were closed, although that was hardly a surprise, given the hour. But he couldn’t give up on his final hope: solving the mystery of Lylie’s identity before their baby was aborted. In less than four hours’ time…

  A metal grille on the window made it impossible for him to see inside the offices. Marc turned around and noticed three trucks in the parking lot where he had left his van, all painted with the Est Républicain logo. Clearly, the delivery of the morning newspapers had not yet been completed. All was not lost.

  Marc walked quickly to the back of the building, where three workmen were standing in front of a warehouse entrance, loading a van with piles of newspapers wrapped in clear plastic. From a radio, he heard the cheery voice of a DJ announcing the day’s horoscope.

  “Good morning,” Marc said to one of them. “Are the offices closed?”

  He bit his lip. It was a stupid question, and he knew it. The workman looked at him and replied without even bothering to remove the cigarette from his mouth.

  “You’re in luck. I’ll be at my desk in five minutes…”

  For one brief moment, Marc felt hope fluttering inside his chest.

  “Just give me time to put on my skirt and makeup, and I’m all yours.”

  The man’s colleagues sniggered. Marc swallowed his embarrassment.

  “Come back in three hours, kid,” one of the men told him. “We’re kind of busy right now.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Marc said, “but this is urgent. Is there really no one who could open the offices for me? I just need to check something…”

  “He could always ask Superbitch,” one of the men suggested.

  The other two laughed.

  “All right, if you insist,” the first man said with a sigh. He pressed an intercom in the doorway of the warehouse.

  “Mrs. Montaigu? There’s someone here to see you, at the warehouse entrance.”

  A few minutes later, Mrs. Montaigu appeared. “Superbitch” was an elegantly dressed young woman with a small waist and nicely tanned legs, but her face was pinched in an expression so severe that it seemed almost comical. Clearly the years she had spent arduously climbing the company ladder had taken their toll. A small pair of spectacles was posed at the end of her nose. She held a stack of papers in one hand and a pen in the other.

  “What is it?” she asked irritatedly.

  Marc tried to think quickly. What story could he invent that would persuade this unsympathetic woman to open the offices so early? Should he take out the Mauser and threaten her with it? Probably not a good idea.

  “So?” Mrs. Montaigu demanded, glancing at her watch.

  In a panic, he stammered: “Um, listen… I need to check an old edition of your newspaper. Very old, in fact. The edition from December 23, 1980…”

  The woman managed a small smile. “I assume it must be urgent, given the look on your face.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Maybe not, but I don’t see why it can’t wait until nine o’clock.”

  The three workmen were following this conversation closely. Mrs. Montaigu had already turned on her high, thin heels when Marc shouted: “Wait!”

  She turned around, her face a mask of pure annoyance.

  Without thinking, Marc told her the truth. “Please… my wife is pregnant. And she is due to have an abortion in three hours because she has doubts about the identity of her parents. I have good reason to believe that the truth about her identity can be found in that edition of your newspaper…”

  Mrs. Montaigu stared at him, aghast. The three workmen had stopped what they were doing to eavesdrop on the conversation. Superbitch gave them a fierce look, and they got back to work. She then turned her furious gaze on Marc.

  “So you think you have the right to prevent your wife from having an abortion, do you? And you really believe that…”

  “For fuck’s sake!” Marc yelled. “Don’t give me a stupid lecture! I just want to look at that newspaper. All I’m asking for is a chance…”

  The woman appeared to be too shocked to respond. Marc took advantage of her silence to press his point: “You remember the airplane that crashed into Mont Terri?”

  Mrs. Montaigu shook her head. Not surprising, thought Marc; she would probably only have been about ten years old at the time. He had no choice but to keep going.

  “The Est Républicain scooped every other paper in the country when it discovered there had been one survivor. A baby. They called her ‘Dragonfly.’ The miracle child. That baby is my wife…”

  Clearly, the woman had no idea what he was talking about. She was out of her depth, and she didn’t like it.

  “Marcel,” she said to the oldest of the three workmen, “do you remember this crash on Mont Terri?”

  Marcel, who had been waiting for this moment, discreetly dropped his cigarette butt to the ground. “Absolutely,” he replied. “It was the biggest event this region had ever seen. Christmas 1980. Nearly two hundred people dead…”

  “And the newspaper was involved?”

  “We were ahead of everyone! None of the Paris papers had the story, but we did. The child who survived. It was all over the TV by the next day. The newspaper included an article about it every day for months. I’ll spare you the details, but…”

  “Do you remember the name of the girl?” the woman interrupted.

  “Of course. It was Emilie Vitral.”

  Mrs. Montaigu turned to Marc. “And you are?”

  “Marc Vitral.”

  “Her husband?”

  Marc hesitated. “Yes… Well, actually… it’s a bit complicated…”

  “What time is your wife supposed to have the abortion?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Here?”

  “No. In Paris.”

  The woman sighed. “This is unbelievable…”

  “Please… all I want to do is look at that old newspaper. I swear, if I save the life of my child, I’ll make you the godmother!”

  Superbitch laughed coldly. “Whatever you do, don’t do that. I can’t stand kids.”

  Finally, after another sigh, she said, “All right, follow me.”

  Marc was taken to a large room in the basement where the archives were kept. The room was windowless, the walls unpainted, and the only light came from fluorescent strip lights on the ceiling. Back issues of the Est Républicain were filed in wooden cabinets, classified by year and month.

  Marc opened the drawer labeled 1980, December. He found the edition he was looking for and placed it on the table in the middle of the room.

  The front page was mostly covered by a large color photograph of the burning remains of the crashed Airbus. It was a scene of utter devastation. But below this was a smaller photograph showing a baby being held by a fireman outside Belfort-Montbéliard hospital. Lylie. The caption beneath it read:

  The Airbus 5403, flying from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont Terri, on the Franco-Swiss border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and flight crew on board, 168 were killed upon impact or perished in the flames. The sole survivor was a baby, three months old, thrown from the plane when it collided with the mountainside, before the cabin was consumed by fire.

  And that was all.

  Marc spent a long time looking closely at the photographs—the faces in the background, the fuselage in flames, the trees, the snow—and rereading the caption.

  But there was nothing new here at all. Nothing.

  All he had found was another dead end. The very last one.

  Marc sat with his head in his hands, then leaned back and stared at the blank walls. Only then did he bother looking at the other stories on the front page. Not that there was much: Sochaux’s 3–1 win over Angers; a strike at a glasses factory near Morez in the Haut-Jura; details of Father Christmas’s appearances in the regi
on’s villages…

  And a very short piece, right at the bottom of the page, no more than a few words. A missing persons ad.

  Mélanie Belvoir. 18 years old. Missing since December 2.

  Next to these words was a small color photograph.

  Marc almost fainted. It was impossible. It had to be a fake, a forgery.

  The face of this eighteen-year-old girl, Mélanie Belvoir, was instantly and heartrendingly familiar to him. It was Lylie’s face.

  This was not the photograph of a girl who looked like her. It was her. The same azure eyes, the same cheekbones, the same smile, the same dimple on her chin. Only the haircut differed: Lylie’s hair was slightly shorter.

  The photograph published in this newspaper eighteen years ago was an exact replica of Lylie’s current ID photo: the one on her student card, the one on her travel card, the one that Marc kept in his wallet.

  It was unbelievable!

  On the same page of the newspaper, dated December 23, 1980, were two photographs of Lylie: one showing her at three months old, in the arms of a fireman; the other at eighteen years old, beautiful and smiling, just as she had been the last time he saw her, two days ago, on October 2, 1998.

  Was he going crazy?

  Was he dreaming? Would he wake up at any moment, covered in sweat, next to Lylie?

  Or, far worse, next to Malvina, in the cabin on Mont Terri…

  59

  October 4, 1998, 7:12 a.m.

  The rays of sunlight shone through the holes in the cabin’s roof, moving across the floor until eventually they touched Malvina’s face. To begin with, she savored the pleasant warmth on her skin, then turned over a couple of times beneath the comforter before finally opening her eyes.

  Half asleep, she reached over to touch the comforter next to hers. Her hand found only dry earth. Marc had vanished. Only a note remained in his place:

  Gone to buy croissants.

  Marc