Cemetery of Swallows (18 page)

Much more time than she'd needed to fall in love with her superintendent.

It had happened three years earlier, almost at first sight, a sort of
coup de foudre
. Of course, she already knew him, particularly through the media, but that was their first face-to-face meeting for an interview. She'd been struck by his appearance, halfway between the simian look of a King Kong and the elegance of a Kipling, and then by his intelligence, a kind of treasure, an unhoped-for asylum. Yes, the word “asylum” was just right, because there was madness in Mallock. His iconoclastic and “drunken thinker” side could discombobulate sensitive souls.

Since then, she had suffered in silence, awaiting the slightest opportunity to see her bear, to speak with him. When she really thought about it, it wasn't him she was angry with. He had been quite decent, even a little too decent. No, it was herself she was angry with; she was a dolt, a ninny burdened with her heart's insubordinate urges and her pride's tetchiness.

Poor little Margot
, she silently moans as she shifts her bag to the other shoulder. Cameras, computer, batteries, all that's a lot for a little reporter to carry. She enters the arrival hall.

Despite the promise she's made to herself, she keeps her head down but looks around a bit, just enough to scan the crowd of people who have come to meet their friends and relatives, but not too much, so that no one sees that she's looking, that she's hoping.

He's not there, she knows it.

And she knows all the reasons, even if that doesn't console her. Does her superintendent really love her? That is, in fact, the only question. She's tortured by the lack of certainty. Because she herself is very well acquainted with this feeling that forces her to lift her eyes in hope.

She frowns, bites her lip, and quickly heads for the closest exit. The automatic doors swing open, lashing her face with snow and wind.

A man turns around, fascinated.

Margot Murât is really very beautiful.

That morning, the capital awoke covered in snow. After three days of heavy and continuous snowfall, Paris had once again become a white being, a Christo-like folly, a city wrapped in a cocoon. Meteorologists couldn't remember ever seeing such a quantity of snow.

Since the beginning of the week, leaving his old Jaguar in the warmth of his garage, Mallock had happily set out on foot for 36 Quai des Orfèvres early in the morning, wearing a pair of silver Moon Boots, totally ridiculous but very efficient. From the ground to the rooftops, everything, including the balconies, trees, and parked cars, was covered with three to six feet of piled-up snowflakes stuck to one another and determined to stay there. The street maintenance crews were too overburdened with snow removal and salting the streets to be able to deal with the rest. With the exception of access to historical monuments and certain sidewalks with a high tourist or commercial value, the exits from parking garages, and so on.

The preceding evening, Mallock, forgetting for this reason to go pick up Margot at the airport, had done more personal research on hypnosis. On the net, he'd found testimonials that were both disturbing and documented. Particularly in the second issue of the
Annales médico-psychologiques
, where there was a report on the case of a woman treated in 1953, at the Villejuif hospital, whose amnesia had been cured by three of the assistants. A complete erasure of the last twelve years of her life. According to Kiko, Master Kong Long had greatly increased the effectiveness of hypnosis by doing away with its disadvantages, thanks to various techniques drawn from Chinese medicine.

 

Today, no Moon Boots but instead heavy crepe-soled shoes. Mallock is heading for his garage. He is going to the prison where Manuel Gemoni is being held to attend the first session of hypnosis organized by this Long character. The first in a series of five.

Not one more, the prosecutor had said.

Before leaving his comfortable nest, Mallock took time to download some Desproges, Philip Glass, and Camille onto his iPod, so he could relax. He sticks the white earbuds into his ears. The young woman's voice rises, incongruously: “In bed as in war, we're all foot soldiers.”

Mallock begins to smile in a silly way.

 

At the same moment, an old man is heading for the same place. But he's not smiling. He's walking cautiously. Because of the snow, of course, but also because of his forebodings.

Master Long stopped practicing medicine a good ten years before, and now gives only a few lectures. Since this morning, forgotten visions have come back to him. All the massacres he survived. The genocide he escaped. He alone, while all the others perished.

What he learned about Manuel's victim, that son of a bitch Tobias Darbier, immediately touched him. The young man's declarations awakened echoes from his own past. The same memory of barbarism. All tortures, all slaughters are brothers. They share the same disgusting liturgy, the same ocean of tears. A similar alarm, the same smell of horror.

His own torturer was named Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge's hysterical cruelty. The raised arm and index finger of child informers. The pyramids of severed heads. And the heads thrown into plastic sacks. Genocidal socialists and revolutionaries.

Master Long is not at ease in France. He has always resented Western intellectuals, Sartre and his dirty hands and his pathetic imitators gulping down champagne when the Khmer Rouge entered Hanoi. Lenin, Mao, Stalin: the radiant “past” of communism consisted of at least a hundred million dead.

Alongside his body, sheltered in his pockets, Master Long's hands are trembling. Does he really want to hear the horrors that Manuel Gemoni is going to confide to him? He knows that whether or not there is a duty to remember, it's all going to start over.

Rwanda, Srebrenica, everything has already begun again.

The past whispers the future to us, but we never believe it.

 

A few miles away, in front of the church of the Madeleine, Julie is trying to find a parking place. The entrance to the parking garage is being cleared, and dozens of cars are already waiting. At the moment when she is just revving up to climb over a snowbank, Kiko appears at the foot of her building.

Julie leans over to open the door for her:

“It's good of you to have come down.”

“No, it's for me to thank you for giving me a ride.”

The two sisters-in-law embrace each other.

They've always liked one another, but this test has further strengthened their friendship. Julie puts the car in second and heads, at five miles an hour, for the hospital.

Despite the tons of salt already spread on the pavement, Paris's streets have become traps for overconfident drivers. Last Sunday, Jules had had brand new snow tires put on the cute 4x4 that Julie's father had given her “to express to you all the Gemoni clan's pride.” He was alluding to the wound and to Jules and Julie's active participation in the matter of the poisoner. But it was also a way of giving Jules, his future son-in-law, a new car, without Jules taking offense. All the Gemonis had been worried sick when the young man had been hit by a bullet in the middle of his forehead. The miracle of his healing had made him even more popular among his in-laws.

In any event, thanks to her tires and the quality of their traction, Julie performed miracles in this icy Paris, easily passing stalled cars by going up on the sidewalks.

“Do you really think we're right to want to be all present?” Kiko asks.

“It's very important that Mallock be there. He has analytical and synthetic powers that go far beyond anything you can imagine. What Manu is going to tell us is likely to be fragmentary or even unintelligible. And then, it's not without danger . . . ”

Kiko looks at her sister-in-law, waiting to hear the rest, worried.

“Mallock has asked that everything be recorded, both sound and image. These recordings will be immediately sequestered and remain at the disposal of the court. It was solely on that condition that the public prosecutor gave his assent. The revelations have to be able to be used by the prosecution, and not only by the defense. Knowing the truth is likely to allow us to do research whose results will be acceptable to the court. Two copies will be made for that purpose, during the hours following each session. Antoine Ceccaldi was furious. In his view, it was unconstitutional and not in conformity with the accused's basic rights But as the adverse party pointed out, our request wasn't either. Mallock finally persuaded Ceccaldi by making him see that since Manu is currently accused of premeditated murder, the risk of aggravating the reason for the indictment was practically nonexistent.”

“Practically?” Kiko asks.

Julie no longer has any possible escape hatches.

“Don't get upset, but Ceccaldi and Mallock are not entirely setting aside the possibility of other murders.”

“Manu, a killer! That's stupid, ridiculous. How can they believe such a thing? What's their game?”

“Calm down, they are far from believing that. Otherwise they wouldn't have opted for the recording.”

“Without asking my opinion or agreement? He's my husband, it was for me to decide, wasn't it?”

Kiko is transforming her fear and her pain into anger, which is much more bearable.

“You're too involved in it,” Julie interrupts. “But don't worry, although my opinion doesn't count, even though I'm his sister, ‘your' signed agreement will be obligatory before the first session can begin.”

“They could have talked to me about it earlier! Especially you!”

Kiko is furious, and her concern has just found a perfect sparring partner. And one who is, moreover, kind, very close to her, and boxing in the same weight class.

“But that's what I'm doing,” Julie replied. “Everything was decided yesterday afternoon. Mallock wanted to call you but I persuaded him not to.”

“Thanks a lot!”

“You don't understand. I wanted to tell you about it in person.”

“And I assume I'm supposed to be grateful to you for that?”

 

There was a moment of silence between the two sisters-in-law, each of them in the grip of a fear that was the same but took on a different face that matched the nature of their feelings. Then these feelings slowly receded and were replaced by the shadow of a doubt, strengthened by fear, and the same terrifying question:

What if it was discovered that their Manuel was in fact a psychopathic killer?

Inside his cell, Julie's brother had finally asked himself the same question. If he had committed other insane acts, would he remember them? Hadn't he had bouts of amnesia before? How else could he explain how easy it was for him to kill without even trembling or hesitating? Was he simply crazy?

Mallock and his lawyer had put the deal to be cut in his hands. The procedure of a recorded interrogation under hypnosis, though not unprecedented in the annals of the Paris criminal police, was nonetheless exceptional, even extraordinary. It was not without risks, either. Mallock had discussed this with Manu in detail. But Manu had not really hesitated. He wanted to know, whatever the cost, what had really happened and was hidden at the back of his head. He had agreed to be hypnotized and recorded without any reluctance other than that of his modesty. Being laid bare like that before the eyes of his friends and relatives was not so easy to accept. But the stakes were too high. Years in prison without Kiko and his little Maya—that prospect was simply unbearable.

Manuel grimaced. His knees was still in a cast and his shoulder was causing him enormous pain. During the night, he'd had a nightmare. Were his wounds to blame? Or was it these images that had surged up from his past?

He'd dreamed that his hand was armed with a sledgehammer and was trying to smash carcasses. Naked, tortured bodies that he struck methodically in order to break all their limbs, the alveolar, scaphoid, metatarsal bones, the ivory of the teeth. He'd dreamed of sophisticated assemblies of ropes at the ends of which people were screaming. He had dreamed of the rending of flesh, the bloody wrenching away of limbs, the stretching out of nerves and the crack of tendons giving way.

Had he dreamed all this, or did he remember it?

In a few minutes, if all went well, he'd know. He sat up on the edge of the bed, impatient and terrified.

Manuel's First Interrogation under Hypnosis

 

 

 

 

 

A room had been set up for the occasion in another part of the infirmary. A bed, three videocams covering all the angles, two Nagra tape recorders in parallel and five white plastic chairs with names written on them: Julie Gemoni and Kiko, representing the family, Maître Pierre Parquet, representing the prosecution, Maître Ceccaldi, attorney for the defense, and Mallock.

A police officer, in this case Jules, a bailiff, and two representatives of the prison would be present in the adjoining room, where there was a small control board and three monitors.

Mallock had hesitated to choose Jules rather than Ken to assist him, but then he'd thought about Manuel's possible revelations. Julie would need him near her. It wasn't very professional, but as he grew older Mallock had seen his heart soften to the point that it resembled a big caramel forgotten in the heat of the desert.

Manuel had taken his place on the bed before the little group entered the room. His thin body was still tanned on the arms, the torso, the face, and the feet. His cast and immaculate bandages seemed all the whiter. He turned his head toward Kiko and Julie, smiling sadly at them before closing his eyes again. Mallock had the sudden, striking impression that he was looking at a painting like El Greco's
Pietà
or Caravaggio's
Beheading of John the Baptist
.

Marked by his Christian upbringing, Amédée continued to wonder about God only out of habit and simple curiosity. If this superior being really existed, he was a God of suffering and not of mercy. An old man who had become, over the centuries, a little cynical and terribly disenchanted in view of the patent failure of his creation, a work that was increasingly contaminated by another force. These days, who except the Devil could lend any credence to the existence of God?