Cemetery of Swallows (20 page)

Manuel, his eyes wide open, was continuing:

“There aren't many of us. As Frenchmen, we owe it to our country to do well. My unit, ten men, is going to parachute into the interior to prepare for the landing. We are to make contact with the Resistance, assess the enemy's forces, and sabotage two strategic buildings.”

Long asked gently:

“Could you give us the names?”

“The Istre bridge and the switchyard at Courcy.”

Then Manu resumed his account:

“In fact, at first there were supposed to be two other groups of French forces assigned to the same tasks. But the preparation turned out to be a real hell. It was very important that none of us be able to reveal the imminence of the landing in the event that he was captured. We were attached to the SAS. The English had subjected us to a pitiless training, including torture sessions, and they kept only the twelve best men. Out of a hundred and seventy-seven, half of the men cracked and ten died. They called that ‘Operation French Kiss,' British humor. But we weren't the only ones preparing for combat. Over there I met the corvette captain Kieffer and his unit, true heroes, those guys; the French Squadron, placed under Commander Bourgoin's orders; the men of the first air infantry battalion, which was operating in Brittany. Me. Yes, I think it was me. I was wearing boots and standing up straight. I was hungry. Not really scared, but eager to eat. It's hard to be hungry for such a long time!”

Suddenly, like a radio that someone has turned off, Manuel stopped talking. After a minute of silence, Master Long tried to resume the dialogue:

“Manuel, you're thirty-three years old. We're in 2002. The facts you're relating go back more than fifty years. Are you aware that you weren't yet born . . . ”

“I was twenty-four at the time I parachuted into France. But my name is not Manuel.”

A second of hesitation.

“Who were you?”

“Who am I?”

“Your name, please.”

“Jean-François Lafitte, lieutenant in the Free French forces. Serial number 140, 651.”

In the room, the silence became much denser. Everyone had received this declaration as a personal challenge. A contradiction of their innermost beliefs, a slap in the face to the rationality inherent in them all. A silence in which madness also had its place, that of a Manu lost forever in a fathomless delirium. For a quarter of an hour, the young man continued to talk about his earlier life.

When the medication began to lose its effect, Master Long stood up and said:

“Thank you very much. It is now 11:21, and we're going to stop this session.”

He went up to Manu to remove the needles and begin the process of waking him. Mallock rose and invited Julie and Kiko to an informal meeting at his place. At that precise moment, he had the firm intention of doing everything he could to turn the investigation in a different direction.

He didn't yet know how.

 

3
P.M.
, rue du Bourg-Tibourg.

Everything was in perfect order in Mallock's duplex. Anita had once again put in extra hours. A bell rang. The three guests appeared on the screen of the security system's control panel. Amédée began the process of opening the security door. Between the two doors, Julie, Kiko, and Master Long took off their overcoats and the last snowflakes that were still sticking to them.

As she came in, Julie was struck by Mallock's apartment, just as she had been the first time she'd been there. She'd expected something much smaller, barely functional, and especially disorderly. The cliché you always find in crime novels. And on the floors, empty bottles and tattered newspapers. Maybe dirty underwear, if you're lucky. But on the contrary, the place was clean and refined. Few objects. A couple of pieces of furniture. Everything that could be had been built into the walls or put into drawers.

It was a bright, classy, zen kind of place.

When one has, as Mallock did, such a chaos of feelings and memories in one's head, one avoids adding to them. On the other side of his eyes, he needed flat, empty surfaces to counterbalance the tons of dirty, wrinkled stuff that filled his brain. A need for the matte infinity of the walls and the mute brilliance of objects. The garbage cans and ashtrays had to be empty and clean to contrast with the loads of damaged things and sacks of decomposing feelings that filled his belly and his memory.

On the coffee table in the living room, Mallock had made tea in a superb teapot from the late 1930s. The tea service matched, as did moreover the duplex's furnishing, which was entirely
art moderne
.

“Would someone prefer coffee, or something stronger?”

Everyone opted for tea, a house mixture composed of Suchong lightened with a classic “breakfast tea.”

Mallock:

“My intention in inviting all three of you here was to persuade you to change direction. To re-center and concentrate on Tobias Darbier, to work, I repeat, on everything that might be used as extenuating circumstances.”

Julie, Kiko, and Master Long drank their tea as one takes a drug. Hoping for immediate relief. They were still stunned by the morning session.

“I also wanted to suggest that we stop the hypnosis sessions,” Mallock went on. “I found them too dangerous for Manu, and difficult for us who love him. But then during the lunch break I took the time to check certain aspects of his . . . revelations with two historian friends of mine.”

Long didn't even look up toward the superintendent. He stirred his tea and seemed to be elsewhere.

“The names Manu gave us—the corvette captain Kieffer and his unit, the French Squadron, Commander Bourgoin, the first air infantry battalion—are all part of history. As for the Istre bridge and the switchyard at Courcy, these two sites were in fact dynamited before the landing by an unidentified commando unit.”

All three of the guests put down their teacups. Mallock had caught their attention.

“And there's something else that is even more astonishing. His story of the parade of chariots on the Norman coast deeply disturbed me. Annoyed me in fact. But I found on the net a poster for the 1939 parade in Roman garb. It actually took place in various villages on the Côte de Nacre, notably in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. Part of the last recreational activities intended to help people forget about the phony war and say farewell to the 1930s.”

Julie and Kiko sat there with their mouths open. Mallock even felt obliged to add:

“Now, if I've been able to find this information, Manuel could easily have known about it earlier.”

“He'd have to have planned this incredible scenario from the beginning. And he'd have to have guessed what it would occur to us to ask him under hypnosis. That's impossible,” Julie grumbled.

A silence fell over the apartment. They were all reflecting on what they knew, what they felt. Not sure what to think, they kept quiet.

Finally, suspecting that it was up to him to speak, Master Long took a deep breath, like an athlete about to lift a great weight:

“In the hope that it might help you, I'm going to tell you about my experience. But be careful to keep an open, critical mind.”

He poured himself another cup of tea before beginning.

“All my father's knowledge, his works, like mine, led to certain lines of inquiry: life, death, God, reincarnation, our mental structure, what is acquired, what is innate, etc. Given the scientific quality of our approach and the number of cases analyzed, we could have transformed these lines of inquiry into a theory, even a dogma. We always refused to do so. Everyone has a right to his own convictions, his own beliefs. Ideologies, like religions, cruelly impose their certitudes. In fact, the only outcome is war. That is why we've never revealed our results. We talk about our methods, we train a few initiates, and we stop there. We do not wish our work to trouble the minds of the millions of people who believe, for instance, in reincarnation, or who reject it. What I can tell you, just between us, is that a tiny number of our patients have regressed toward an earlier life and have been able to describe it with precision. But for all that, without being able to provide us with incontestable proof. On the other hand, what proof do we have of the existence of God, of the resurrection of Christ, or the survival of the soul?”

Everyone was hanging on the Master's words.

He put four sugar cubes in his cup, stirred the liquid, and continued without having drunk any:

“Let's look at the side of the supporters of regressions. Over several hundred years, there has never been any scientific proof that can be considered . . . unchallengeable. It's a little as if the phenomenon were protecting itself against its revelation. Perhaps to keep its status as a belief? I don't know, but it's strange. If you think about it, it should be rather easy to provide this proof. You were a pharaoh? Then speak Egyptian to me. You were Marilyn Monroe? Were you murdered? By whom? Why? You were Caesar? Fine, speak to me in Latin.”

Master Long turned to Kiko and Julie:

“The way Manuel spoke to us this morning disturbed me, too. Out of curiosity, has he always had this fascination for history and war in particular?”

The two sisters-in-law looked at each other in silence and then replied in unison: “No.” Kiko went on: “On the contrary, you could never get him to read or watch anything that had to do with weapons.”

“He can't stand war films and hates uniforms,” Julie confirmed. “A phobia that can be connected with his fear of the dark and forests. He specialized in ancient Egypt. It's on that terrain that he might have wanted to ‘play at' reincarnations.”

Long sighed. He was familiar with all the resistance he was going to have to confront. So he took the time to taste his sweetened tea:

“Well, then, since one of us had to begin. After all the reservations I've just expressed, I have to tell you all that this morning's session, as well as the facts you discovered, Superintend­ent, leave me few doubts regarding what happened to Manuel Gemoni.”

Silence in the apartment.

“I'm able to state that Manuel cannot lie when he is under a hypnotic process combining ayurvedic techniques and neurostimulation. And he could absolutely not remember anything other than his actual life, or else another one of his lives, even if that is, as I told you, extremely rare.”

“Meaning?”

Mallock was getting impatient. Master Long hesitated.

“It's difficult to have complete certainty.”

“A certainty will be good enough,” Amédée said.

Kiko and Julie were looking at Master Long as if petrified by the expectation of a diagnosis of life or death.

Long finally said, apparently regretfully:

“I believe Manuel Gemoni did in fact live an earlier incarnation, in which his name was Jean-François Lafitte.”

Mallock took a deep breath, looked at the two young women, and concluded:

“So even if I don't much like it, our only choice is to continue to plunge into the unknown!”

Third Interrogation under Hypnosis

 

 

 

 

 

Small electric heaters had been installed in the prison. The snow had almost filled all the internal courtyards, and the central heating system needed help to cope with the cold. In the medical room set up for the purpose, a third interrogation, not foreseen in the program, was about to begin.

Two days had passed since the four people had met at Mallock's apartment. Two days and two nights that had tested everyone's nerves. At 3
P.M.
, a new time imposed by the prison's administration, the tension in the infirmary was at its height.

What further horrors was Manuel/Jean-François going to unveil to them?

Kiko and Julie had the same downcast air. Mallock too. He really no longer knew what to do. And that was an unprecedented situation for him. Few circumstances could escape his powers of deduction and synthesis that way. Understanding and then making rapid, unhesitating decisions had become second nature for him. But here, he had to deal with a complex enigma that offered no irregularity, no crack through which he could penetrate it. And what an enigma! Gentle Manu's killing of a monster, a woman devoured alive, the landing in June '44 . . . And the KKK, Ku Klux Klan?

In fact, there would have been only one way to emerge from this impossible rebus: decide to question Master Long's techniques and start over from zero: “Stop! I'm not playing this game anymore, enough nonsense, everybody out!” But Mallock wanted to move ahead, to push further this unthinkable hypothesis of reincarnation. Driven by a somewhat morbid fascination, but also by the desire to clear things up. If he backed off now, he'd never know. Sooner or later, it would all fall apart, without his having to intervene. Or so he thought!

Master Long, who could not be unaware of Mallock's doubts, spent half an hour more preparing Manuel. He wanted to be sure that the whole process of freeing up the meridians and the chakras was performed perfectly. For him as well, the age of doubt had come.

After a long telephone conversation the day before, they had decided that the superintendent would ask the questions from now on. On the one hand, to eliminate any suspicion of manipulation, but especially because they were now entering a domain that was primarily that of the police.

They were dealing with the torture and murder of a woman.

 

Mallock began his questioning by identifying the suspect. A classic method: the policeman, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, makes a little pile of papers separated by carbon copies, taps them horizontally and then vertically on his desk to square them up, then slips them into his typewriter. After rotating the platen, he puts his hands on the keys, lifts his eyes, and asks: “Last name, first name, date of birth?”

But Mallock addressed the recording system: