Cemetery of Swallows (21 page)

“December 10, 2002, 3
P.M.
, interrogation of the accused, Manuel Gemoni, by Superintendent Amédée Mallock, in the presence of the persons registered in the log.”

Then without further ado, he asked Manuel:

“Your name, age, and occupation?”

“Jean-François Lafitte, twenty-four years old, lieutenant in the Free French forces, serial number 140, 651.”

“Why did you execute an old man named Tobias Darbier in the Dominican Republic?”

“He had tortured and murdered me.”

Mallock felt this sentence like a slap in the face and wanted to counterattack:

“And this woman, the woman you tortured and killed with a pitchfork, what had she done to you?”

“I didn't torture her . . . I put an end to her suffering.”

“You told us you had eaten her flesh. Do you confirm that?”

Manuel's face twisted with disgust:

“I didn't know that it was human flesh . . . ‘K' had told us that he would grant us a meal as a favor, and then we were so hungry . . . ”

“Who was that man? A member of the Ku Klux Klan?”

Manuel grimaced, astonished by this suggestion.

“No, he was an SS-man, an
Oberleutnant
. . . A monster, an . . . ogre.”

“Why these three K's? Are they initials?”

Manuel frowned with repugnance. He spoke calmly and without hesitating, but he left a short pause between each sentence.

“He had a double signet ring connecting the index finger and middle finger on his right hand. It was with that that he began to hit us before bringing out the hammers and setting up his system of ropes. Across the width of his ring, three ‘K's' were engraved. He never told us his real name. So we called him that among us.”

“Do you remember the number that was on his uniform?” Amédée was determined to obtain as many concrete facts as possible from this further interrogation.

“I did everything I could to memorize it in case I survived.”

“So what was the serial number?”

“OL 876, 482.”

“Not the slightest hesitation. Mallock was a little unsettled, but he didn't show it. Despite the recording, he took the time to write down the serial number on a piece of paper. Then he picked up the packet of transcriptions typed up after each interrogation. In this case, the second one.

“I summarize: ‘Four years after my last day in Normandy. I was a lieutenant-colonel in the Free French forces. I was assigned to a suicide mission. My twelve-man unit was supposed to parachute into the interior to prepare for the landing. Make contact with the Resistance, assess the enemy forces, and sabotage two strategic targets.' What happened afterward?”

Manuel's face froze into an expression of concentration, as if he were gathering together his memories.

“We jumped in the middle of the night, fear in our bellies and our faces covered with shoe polish. Not without a feeling of excitement, impatient to return to French soil. It was terribly cold, and the mission had gotten off to a bad start. The youngest of our comrades, not even seventeen years old, had crashed on the ground. We saw his parachute go up in flames. It was too dark, and we couldn't find him. There were now only eleven of us, without little Gavroche, and we had three days to accomplish as much as we could before the landing.”

“Take your time. Tell me about those days in detail,” Mallock said.

“The first day, everything went well, and we destroyed two objectives, a bridge and a switchyard, then we sent in a first series of intelligence data. We were proud of ourselves, excited, happy. If we'd been able to guess . . . Around six
P.M.
on the second day, when we were about to blow up a coastal battery in Saint-Jean, they fell on us.”

“Who was that?”

“An SS unit of about thirty hardened and completely insane men. At their head was that officer with his signet ring.”

“Can you describe him more precisely?”

Manu retched and then his whole body slackened. A tear began to form in the corner of his right eye.

“He was strange and very handsome, with an almost unhealthy regularity of features. He had brown hair combed back, full, well-defined lips, a perfect nose, and not the slightest trace of humanity. I'm happy to have been able to disfigure him before he put an end to my life.”

“Did your men survive?”

“They all died, massacred long before I was!”

“Could you be more precise regarding the way in which they were killed, and give us names and details?”

Mallock felt a little ashamed. He was focusing on what caused pain, like a journalist trying to make the person he's interviewing crack and thus win a bigger audience.

A tragic smile illuminated Manuel's face:

“Thibaut Trabesse, a marvelous friend, was the first one. They caught him and ‘K' hit him with his signet ring until there was no longer the slightest human feature on his face. Thibaut was still alive, but he no longer had any ears, any eyes, teeth, jaws, or mouth, nothing but a mass of flesh, ligaments, and bones, his tormentor had spared his nose only to allow him to continue to breathe. And then—”

“And then?” Mallock asked.

“The bastard licked his fingers before ordering his men to hang Trabesse up by his feet. When that had been done, he went up to the body and opened up his abdomen with a bayonet. He finished his work by cutting off Thibaut's genitals. It took him half an hour to die, drowned in his own blood.”

Silently, tears were running down Julie's and Kiko's cheeks. Mallock heard only the sound of the words, with just one question in his head. Was it imagination or delirium, fabulation or truth? Manuel's rapid delivery bothered him. Only honest people can talk that way without having to think too much, without lies that have to be monitored. But a few criminals can do it, too, when they've learned their story by heart.

Manuel went on:

 

“Afterward, he dealt with the others. I remember Gaël Guennec and Lucien de Marsac. Their courage, their terror, and their pride. The most abominable thing is that the monster was no longer really trying to make them talk. For two days, he massacred my men, one by one, with a minuteness and a persistence that left us not the slightest glimmer of hope, not even that of being shot after having confessed everything we knew. Some of them did that, but he continued to torture them as if the information had no value for him. At the end of the second day, he had a grave dug in the middle of the clearing and all the bodies were thrown into it. Only then did he begin to deal with me.”

A delirious smile then appeared on Manuel's face.

“That was the moment I'd been waiting for. I'd found a pitchfork buried in the earth. Looking up toward the heavens I'd seen, like a sign from God, above the trees, a pair of luminous, almost violet eyes, those of Gavroche, the first to die in this doomed expedition. It was he who gave me the strength to make my attack. I finished off the woman they'd captured and then spun around to attack the ogre with tremendous blows of my pitchfork.”

“But you were alone against thirty men, right?”

“Maybe more, I didn't count them. I received some unexpected help: his own dogs, a couple of rather terrifying Dobermans. They were enormous, with different-colored eyes and a spot of blond on top of their heads, like a third eye. Incredibly enough, they attacked him and bit everyone who came toward me, including ‘K,' while I was trying to kill him. Unfortunately, he survived the attack and took his revenge on me. And on the dogs, too, moreover.”

Then Manuel began to describe with terrifying precision all the details of the tortures that were inflicted on him. In the room, people's throats were tight, their jaws clenched. He depicted each blow, each fractured bone, each amputation, as well as what he had felt at each stage. Mallock hesitated to interrupt his account even to let Kiko and Julie leave.

“But he stopped after a few hours, probably because he was no longer strong enough. He had lost a great deal of blood. I lay along a tree, a chestnut, I think, while he recuperated. There, I no longer really remember. I believe the dogs attacked me, and then I don't know anymore. When he came back out, he ordered his men to take me to the well and throw me in. But instead of crashing on the bottom or being drowned, I landed on something soft, rather like a mattress. Night had not yet fallen, and I could see a circle of blue sky above me. I turned my head and realized that I had landed on a multitude of dead birds. By their wings, I identified them as swallows. There were thousands of them, little skeletons, skulls, and feathers. Lifting my head to see the sky again one last time, I saw a black triangle appear, probably a stone held by four arms They threw it on me, and I believe I died at that moment.”

“Where was this clearing?” Mallock asked, intrigued.

Wells and swallows? These two words were both present and coded in his head. Another one of his intuitions?

“In the forest of Biellanie, in the middle of the Pays d'Auge. Practically equidistant between Saint-Lyon and a hamlet just outside Vignon.”

“How can you be so precise?”

“I was in charge of the maps. It was part of my role as lieutenant to always know exactly where I was leading my men.This time, I led them directly into Hell.”

At that moment, Mallock prepared to leap.

He asked the question that had been burning his lips for such a long time:

“What is the relation between what you have just told us and your misadventure in the Dominican Republic, sixty years later?”

Manu didn't hesitate a second:

“It's obvious: ‘K,' the ogre! He's the one I shot on the square. I killed Tobias Darbier because he killed me . . . and because he murdered all my men.”

Mallock sighed. In the end, at least there had been a kind of logic in Manu's delirium. But that wasn't going to help him. How could he construct a defense on that basis?

Amédée gave a hard look at the professor, who approved this silent request. It was time to put an end to this third session. Manuel was covered with sweat and his heart was pounding. The other people present were in no better condition. They all seemed to be awakening from the most grueling of nightmares. As he had earlier, Jules was trying to console Julie and Kiko. The lawyer put his papers in his briefcase, taking long enough to regain his composure and make his hands stop trembling.

“3:57
P.M.
, end of the third interrogation of Manuel Gemoni, conducted by Superintendent Amédée Mallock,” the latter said for the recording equipment.

A technician stopped the recording and the participants in this difficult session left the room without saying a word.

 

Outside, snow was falling in tiny, scattered flakes. Mallock had decided to go home on foot. It was quite a long walk, but he needed time to think with his head in the cool, fresh air. He'd hesitated to take a taxi that morning. For three days his car, buried in his parking garage, had been inaccessible. The ramp was frozen. So for the trek home he'd taken along a heavy overcoat and crepe-soled shoes.

Mallock had taken Julie aside and asked her to check this story about the forest of Biellanie, and, if it existed, suggested that they go there together to have a look at it. Then, the whole little group had furtively said goodbye, without looking at each other too much. Hope was no longer in their camp, and none of them had the strength or the desire to talk about it. Mallock began his long march a little too fast, as if to drive it all away. He fell flat on the sidewalk and took the opportunity to swear a bit. For several days he'd been looking for a pretext to do that.

Alone, under the falling snow, he screamed:

“Goddamned son of a bitch of a stupid shitty snow!”

His oaths didn't resound strongly enough to satisfy him. The streets of Paris were muffled, soundproofed by the accumulation of billions of crystals on the buildings and pavement. With all the strength of his lungs he shouted: “Shiiiiiiiit!”—which did not resound much more than his first effort.

He got up and resumed his walk, angrily brushing off the snow that had adhered to his overcoat. It was not only his inability to help Manuel that had put him in such a state, nor even his sadness about Julie and Kiko. There was something else. He was experiencing, without being able to defend himself against it, a regular attack by the most militant irrationality. His world of deduction and synthesis could handle intuitions and even visions without too much difficulty, but no more. And here he had to cope with something quite different. What troubled him the most was the perfect coherence of Manuel's remarks and the precision of the details he'd given. He hadn't yet checked them, but he knew that a liar always uses the vaguest possible words and approximations.

 

He'd had the Calmel sisters, semiologists and friends of his, listen to the transcription of the first two interviews. They had been clear: “So far as we're concerned, your guy is not lying.”

Trained as psychiatrists, the two semiologists had gone together to the United States to study and write an essay on the semantics of criminal discourse and thus create a new profession, a new weapon to be used against murderers. How, for example, could the criminal's real intentions be deciphered? They proposed to carry out linguistic analyses, such as the “pronominalization of discourse” or its “cognitive dissonances.” And to find the “point of congruence” that would allow them to put an end, for instance, to a hostage situation. These same exercises were also intended to study the messages left or sent by serial killers, as well as telephone conversations among criminals. A special unit using these techniques to arrest criminals had just been set up in the United States, thanks in large part to their work. In return, when Karyn, the elder sister, was making this transfer of competence, Clémence had taken advantage of it to increase her knowledge of behavioral psychomorphology.