Cemetery of Swallows (39 page)

His whole audience paled. Hearing Mallock say such things was something new.

“What did you do, Boss?” asked Jules, who was no longer smiling.

Mallock looked like a mischievous child as he dropped his bomb in the middle of his audience:

“Since I couldn't count on this cadaver to authenticate the lieutenant, I simply had a clockmaker friend of mine construct a heart-shaped music box. No one knows about it, if it still exists. It was safer to bring it with me into the crypt than to stake everything on chance. Like a magician, I distracted people's attention, and while I had my back to them, I rubbed the locket in the dirt, turned on the music box, and voilà! The case was in the bag.”

A leaden silence fell over the room. No one dared speak. Mallock continued to smile.

“Well? What's your problem? Did I say something stupid or what?”

Julie spoke first:

“Surely you didn't really do something like that?”

“Why not? You're not going to tell me that you're sorry I did it? Manu is going to get out of jail. That's what counts, isn't it?”

Kiko came to his defense:

“It's all right with me. As you said, so far as you're concerned, the end justifies the means.”

The room fell silent again.

Mallock, suddenly uneasy, seemed to wake up:

“You're not going to turn me in over this, are you?”

His friends unanimously reassured him. Of course, they would keep this to themselves. They didn't approve of it, but they had no choice.

That was when Mallock said, in a severe tone:

“And the law? What are you going to do about the law? Aren't you ashamed?”

Looking at the stunned faces of the people around him, Mallock broke into laughter, an enormous laughter that brought tears to his eyes.

“My God, did you believe me? I was joking. Good Lord, you're gullible. The little gold music box was really in the tomb where I found it. I'm a police superintendent, not a faker, kids.”

“You scared the hell out of me!”

Mordome, like all the others, was relieved.

Mallock explained:

“Sorry, with all this tension I wanted to let off a little steam. The discovery of this heart-shaped gold music box was a moment of pure magic. It was like a miracle! No matter how much I hoped for it, I couldn't really believe it. Finding the bullet in the vertebra, yes. But finding this object, never in a million years. When I saw it in the dirt, shining and immaculate, tears came to my eyes. That's why I didn't turn around right away, if you want to know the truth. A hell of a sensation after so much uncertainty, investigations, and mystery. I could have wept. In fact, I did weep!”

Finding this golden object embedded in the lieutenant's petrified flesh must in fact have been extraordinary.

“I sincerely believe that except for Carter, when he was the first to stick his head into Tutankhamen's tomb,” Amédée went on, “there are very few people who have had the good luck to experience such an emotion.”

“Was that any reason to scare us half to death?”

GG had been afraid for his friend. That kind of manipulation could have had terrible consequences for Mallock's career, and then some.

“The idea of the hoax came to me as I was making the soufflé,” Amédée admitted. “But I didn't think you would be so easily deceived. Besides, I'm not sure how I should take that.”

“In any case, the discovery of a golden heart that makes music in a bit of fossilized intestine is pure ‘Dédé-the-Wizard,'” Julie said.

“There's nothing magical about it, you know. I didn't have a vision, I really heard the music, and I even know why. It's the lieutenant's ghost that gave me a sign, helped by our favorite professor.”

Mallock turned toward Mordome.

“When you picked up that piece of intestine the first time, you put it down on top, next to the lamp. Then you picked it up again and even shook it. The heat of your palm and of the lamp, plus the movement, must have been what started the music. What remained of the oiled parts came back to life, so to speak. As is often the case in such moments, the slightest details then came back to me. Remember, at the end of the third interrogation, it was Jean-François Lafitte himself who told us, in Manu's voice, ‘I had no other choice, so I swallowed it . . . ' After that, it was easy. The little pouch was the only thing in the coffin that could contain something; the rest was bones or soil. You even told me that it was probably a piece of the intestine, and you added that it had seemed to you ‘heavy.' So I grabbed the mallet like a madman.”

“Another great story to put down to Mallock the Wizard's credit,” Jules concluded in his turn.

“Not entirely,” Amédée insisted. “Since you're behaving so well, I'm going to explain where my . . . inspiration came from. At least I believe it did. And you can be sure that this is no joke, I promise you, on my honor. It's a marvelous story.”

Julie glanced at her Jules: they loved it when Mallock started recounting his memories.

 

“One of the various things I did to cope with my herniated disks was a course of physical therapy. Stretching and exercises for the abdominal and dorsal muscles. I did that in the swimming pool near my apartment. And it was there, four or five years ago, that an old historian who was splashing around in the water with me told me a very wonderful story that was one hundred percent true. To respect his request for discretion—I think he intended to make a book out of it—I'll limit myself to the essential points. The young son of one of our emperors—the choice is limited—had been sent to be brought up in the home of a . . . let's say Austrian, princess. The problem was that the tutor who'd been sent with the little prince fell in love with the aforesaid princess. I know, I know, this seems silly, but the worst thing is that it's all perfectly true. The princess's family asked the Emperor of the French to bring his kid home, along with his tutor. You follow me?”

“Absolutely, Boss,” Julie replied, taking advantage of this pause to serve herself a little more soufflé.

“When he was about to leave, the little prince, who despite his young age had also fallen in love with the princess, went to find her to say farewell. Like the adorable child he was, he gave her the most beautiful thing he could think of: an apple!”

“An apple? And that's what put you on track for . . . ”

“Patience! patience! During the following decades, no one dared throw away or sell the famous apple, which had become Historical with a capital ‘H,' and it has still remained in the princess's family. Over time, more than two centuries, it slowly petrified. In the late 1960s, children were playing in the room where the relic was displayed, resting on a cushion and covered with a glass cloche. A particularly clumsy kick of the ball changed history! And the apple, as it fell, broke into countless pieces.”

Silence in Mallock's living room.

“Tell us the rest, the rest,” Julie and the others began to cry.

“Well, guess what happened?” Amédée challenged them.

“The kids were severely scolded,” Jules ventured.

“They spent a fortune trying to put the apple back together?” Claude suggested.

“The remains were put in an urn, and that gave you the idea that . . . ”

“There was a big worm inside it?”

“No, a butterfly, and it flew away!” Kiko cried.

“Bravo, that's very nice, Kiko, but no, nothing like any of that. The old lady, the princess's great-great-granddaughter, bent over the pile of fragments on the floor. And the children heard her weep. Big sobs that she couldn't stop.”

“I understand her, the poor woman, the damn kids,” Claude grumbled.

“They weren't so bad,” Amédée went on. “The boy responsible for the disaster approached her. He was very upset. He loved his grandmother very much and was aware that he had made the mistake of his life: ‘I'm sorry, Granny,' he said, ‘but please stop crying, we're going to glue it all back together. You won't see anything,' he promised her. Then the grandmother turned around, with a big smile on her lips. ‘I'm not crying out of sadness, my darling. I'm overwhelmed by emotion. Look!' And the old lady held out to the child a gold ring adorned with three stones that shone in the autumn sun, the little prince's gift to the pretty princess, a gift he'd had the idea of concealing in the apple. By the time she ate it, he would be gone. Then she would discover the little marvel so cleverly hidden at the apple's center. That way she would never forget him, he thought. But by deciding to keep the apple as a souvenir, the young woman never discovered the little prince's lovely gesture.”

A loud murmur from the audience.

“There you have it, kids, that probably influenced me unconsciously and encouraged me to break the petrified piece in my turn. So . . . ”

“ . . . We must always listen to stories told by a very old man, even if he's our superintendent,” Julie said, laughing.

“That's the most marvelous ending imaginable,” GG decided.

But another person still had something to say.

“Nah . . . I prefer the Mallock-the-Magician version with the false golden heart,” Kiko mumbled, sulking.

The group greeted her point with a big collective laugh.

 

Of course, the rest of the meal was devoted to the subject of reincarnation. Those who believed in it before the case had it easiest. But those who had expressed doubts the day before continued to do so. As if Manuel's adventure hadn't changed their convictions at all. Belief had nothing to do with reality or truth, on the contrary. Mallock, who was still very pleased by his joke and the success of his story, decided he didn't give a damn. Whether it was reincarnation or something else, it would probably get Manu out of prison; everybody was happy about that, and that was the main thing.

Like an echo of the magic heart, the bells of the Saint-Merri church sounded the twelve strokes of midnight. It was December 25, Christmas Day, and for once, with the snow falling and smiles on everyone's face, it really felt like it.

Champagne.

Kisses.

 

The dinner went on until three in the morning.

When the guests had left, Mallock decided to do the dishes. He didn't want to leave a mess like that for poor Anita to clean up. Just as he finished and was heading for his bedroom, the telephone rang. A smile on his lips, he went to answer it. At that hour, it was certainly one of his guests who had forgotten something. He hadn't had time to make a tour of the apartment.

“Who's the scatterbrain?” he asked when he picked up the receiver. He listened for two minutes and his smile froze.

“I'm coming.”

That was all he said. He walked over to the bar and poured himself a big glass of whiskey.

When he sat down on the couch, he couldn't help sobbing.

Bob Daranne had just committed suicide.

A bullet in the mouth.

Without taking the trouble to consult their father, or even to inform him, none of his children had come.
So Bob had remained all alone in front of the big table full of food. Then he'd decided that enough was enough. He'd taken a gun and swallowed, as his only meal that night, a 7.65 mm bullet. He'd promised Mallock never to commit suicide with his service weapon, and he'd kept his word. He'd used one of the guns in his collection, a Browning M1910, the same model that had launched the First World War when it was wielded by Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo in 1914 and that had allowed Paul Gorguloff to kill the president of the French Republic, Paul Doumer, in 1932. The caliber of this pistol was modest, and the emergency medics had been able to restart Bob's heart three times. They were able to stabilize him before taking him to Cochin hospital. There, a whole team had done everything they could to save his life.

In vain.

 

Mallock's tears were still flowing when he put on his overcoat to go to his friend's house. His sons were going to arrive there and they would need him.

He'd loved this guy with a crew cut, and he'd go on loving him for a long time still.

Too often, life answers questions we haven't asked. It tricks us, traps us, catches up with us. Very often we fall. But we get up again, as we did when we were children. I give up! Not hurt, not even dead. In the garden, as kids, we always began again. Beep beep! Even blown up, crushed under an army of anvils, we began the following episode, like the Road Runner, as good as new . . . When we've grown up, we still play with the same ideas of immortality.

And then life humbles us.

Devastated, Amédée went out of his apartment and then turned around to double-lock the door.

 

 

 

 

 

That morning, Mallock opened his eyes with a grimace. Outside, the sun was already shining brightly in a clear blue sky. The impressive rise in the temperature that had accompanied the new year had begun attacking the mounds of snow and ice. The thermometer had gone from fifteen to fifty degrees. In his bedroom, on the chair at the foot of his bed, Mallock saw his red
fourragère
, a decoration he put over his left shoulder after having donned his uniform for important ceremonies.

At 11 o'clock, he was going to the Père-Lachaise cemetery for Captain Daranne's burial.

Bob's. “His” Bob's.

The telephone rang.

“No bad news today, I've had all I can take,” he grumbled before he picked up.

“The case was not dismissed,” Antoine Ceccaldi's lugubrious voice announced.

Brought up for immediate trial, Manuel had just been given a so-called symbolic sentence that was not insignificant: three years in prison. With remissions, Julie's brother would be out twelve to fourteen months later.