Cemetery of Swallows (40 page)

To be sure, the sentence was more than magnanimous for a murderer, but there was the notorious “tourist” clause. In conformity with the agreements made with the Dominican authorities, this sentence was going to give Manuel a right to a return ticket and free residence on the island, once his sentence had been served in France. The Dominican government wouldn't do him any favors and would make sure all its own prerogatives were respected, its sacrosanct national sovereignty. Over there he would probably get fifteen to twenty years. And then there were Darbier's
brutos
.

In fact, they had to start all over.

As he put on that damned uniform that seemed to shrink a size every year, Mallock started sighing and swearing.

 

An hour later, his anger had given way to sorrow.

Mallock was facing a varnished coffin covered with a French flag. To his right, four young carrot-tops, hanging their heads, looked overwhelmed with grief. Perhaps they were, in fact. People don't all react the same way, and he didn't know enough to judge. With a lump in his throat, he thought that Bob had finally managed to do it, if only in a cemetery and around a muddy grave: he had gathered his whole family around him.

The melting snow had produced countless streams that were running through Paris with a great sound of rushing water. Beige torrents, thousands of gallons of café-au-lait attacking alleys and gutters. And also funeral vaults.

The Daranne family's vault was already three-quarters full of water. Mallock wondered how the morticians were going to manage. He could hardly imagine them lowering the casket into the brownish liquid, with bubbles gurgling out of it as the air inside the coffin escaped. Bob had experienced too many humiliating or ridiculous situations during his life, and it was out of the question for his death to be still another one.

“It's all right,” the undertaker replied. “We'll pump out most of the water, and then wait until the grave is perfectly dry. We'll probably put the earth back in the day after tomorrow. Don't worry about it, we do this all the time.”

Then he added:

“In any case, we can't do anything else. The coffin won't sink, it'll float. So you can imagine.”

Mallock had to repress a desire to laugh. Daranne had no peer when it came to always finding himself in grotesque situations. Mallock saw him again: tied to a lamppost, naked and in the middle of the winter, by a gang of hoodlums, jailed by the gendarmerie for soliciting because he was wearing stockings and a bra, emerging covered with garbage from a bin that had picked him up and dumped him in a waste disposal center, or still stinking of fish the day the Prefect made a surprise visit to police headquarters. There was also the evening when he'd begun to tell a young recruit the most horrible stories about the former head of the Paris police; she'd turned out to be the latter's daughter. Not to mention the numberless times his wife came to headquarters to read him the riot act and drag him off, humiliating him in front of his comrades. Bob had spent his life playing the hard-boiled cop and being rebuffed by everyone. The truth about him, apart from his uprightness and loyalty, was that though his brain was not very big, his heart was huge, and so was his awkwardness.

“Bob, I'm going to miss you,” Mallock murmured, with tears in his eyes and a painful laugh caught in his throat.

 

When the ceremony was over, Mallock, Julie, Jules, Ken, and Jo went to a café. They picked the closest one. They weren't ready to separate yet, or to speak either. It would be for the boss, his closest friend, to decide when the silence could be broken. Mallock knew that. He'd already assumed that responsibility when they were mourning earlier deaths, and particularly the most painful of them all, that of his Thomas. In the latter case, he had still not given the signal, and six years later silence continued to reign, it being forbidden to mention the subject in front of him. Three weeks before, he had surprised himself by breaking the silence he'd imposed on others by uttering Thomas's name while he was talking with Ken. Was that perhaps a sign?

“Some ten days ago, Bob took me to task,” he began. “He talked about a normal investigation, in which we arrest suspects, take fingerprints, canvass the neighborhood, the whole shooting match. What he said exactly was: ‘Little by little, we ferret out everybody.'”

The four young captains smiled the same melancholy smile.

Mallock continued:

“To him, the way the Gemoni case has developed didn't seem normal. Well, he may not have been wrong. Especially since we now find ourselves, as you know, with a sentence that raises a problem.”

Julie was looking sullen, the way she looked when she was trying to keep from crying.

“So in his honor and in order to set my own mind at ease, I said to myself that we should try to forget the investigation the way I've conducted it, which has probably been too personal.”

A general silence.

“I'd like us to give ourselves twenty-four hours to see if we haven't overlooked a quite different lead. We have to focus on the slightest bit of evidence that hasn't been used, or that doesn't fit with the version we've adopted. So far as I'm concerned, I have trouble imagining another explanation for all this, but Bob's words continued to haunt me, even before he died. And then, we don't have many other choices. Manuel is in great danger. I think you've understood that very well. If we reason in a very common-sense way, there may still be something to dig up. Consider the episode of the little music box. It was as if the lieutenant's spirit had made it start playing again. But it was probably more prosaic than that; it was the combined action of warmth and movement. Two tortuous stories for a single phenomenon. Isn't there another explanation of what happened? A different reality that is far more rational and that no one has yet glimpsed? An interpretation of the facts that might convince the most refractory critics and allow Manu to be freed?”

Mallock's harangue met with a total lack of reaction on the part of the group. Only the respect they owed Daranne's memory prevented them from protesting. Even Julie showed not the slightest enthusiasm.

Ken preferred to conclude:

“We'll bring you everything we find tomorrow night. But there isn't . . . ”

“Above all, no ‘buts.' Rack your brains. Think ‘differently.' Erase from your memory everything you now know.”

“That's easy to say,” Julie grumbled.

“We have to wipe away all the stupidities and hypotheses we've been working with since the beginning of the investigation.”

“And just how do we do that?”

Julie was too upset to have the slightest positive thought. Their stupid old Bob was dead and her brother was in great danger again.

Mallock decided to theorize a little to reassure his troops.

“I'm asking you to carry out an act of . . . descotomization.”

His four lieutenants gave him quizzical looks.

“It comes from
scotoma
. In ophthalmology, it's a part of the visual field that has gone dark, blind in a way, as a result of damage to the retina. In psychology, scotomization is the psychic act that consists of erasing, in a selective way, an event that is often painful or even intolerable for the person who has suffered it. It's a denial of reality, an auto-therapeutic act that consists of removing this traumatic memory from one's consciousness. Today, despite what we've discovered, you've got to persuade yourselves that there's another solution, something that has escaped our visual field. Imagine an inkspot that concealed part of the story . . . ”

“O.K., we're all going to work together and the devil be damned if we don't find something.”

Jo had just positioned herself within the group for the first time.

“There's a fourteenth-century Franciscan monk,” she went on, “who formulated a principle known as ‘Occam's Razor.' It consists of always choosing the simplest, shortest, most obvious solution. And in Manuel's case, without accusing anyone, it can't be said that we made things simple!”

“Jo's right, we have to look for something obvious, far removed from all my divagations.”

This last sentence sounded odd to the team. In fact, no one believed it, really. The story had been worked over far too much for them to be able to hope they could still dig up something.

Friday evening, Amédée could only note how few clues and new leads his lieutenants had come up with. Captain Ken Kô Kuroda, the nice-guy KKK, had made two piles.

On the right he'd put the pieces of evidence corroborating the thesis they'd already adopted. They were too numerous for Mallock to be able to consider them all. Among the new ones, the only ones he had asked for, were those brought in chiefly by Jo. The two DNA samples had been analyzed and checked. Jean-François's lock of hair, which Mallock had borrowed from his fiancée, did in fact correspond to that of the hair found in the well and that taken from the coffin. In the same way, the DNA of KKK the ogre, also found near the same well on the scalp the lieutenant had torn off, had proven to be identical with that taken from Darbier's corpse.

On the left, in a much smaller pile, was the evidence that was deemed to be new and did not fit into the logic of the first explanation. There wasn't much, in fact. Nothing decisive or really useful.

However, Jules had ended up taking the matter seriously and had even undertaken, with Julie's help, the neighborhood investigation that Bob had called for. The result was forty-eight files, beginning with a photo of each of the persons visited over the past two days. Mallock looked through them without seeing anything strange. On top of the pile, Ken had put a red “X” on one salmon-colored file. Mallock opened it without enthusiasm.

It was over, and down deep he knew it.

All that was lacking was his agreement, an admission that he couldn't do any more, to close the case and move on to other things. That decision was much too painful for him not to try desperately to gain time. He opened the folder without succeeding in repressing a deep sigh.

 

In the course of a fingerprint comparison that Jules had instituted to see if a point of intersection could be found among all the prints that had been taken during the investigation, an ambiguous outcome had appeared. Although only partial, two prints seemed to belong to the same individual. One of the prints came from the cross found underground, the other from the videocassette that had started everything.

It was impossible: with sixty years separating them, only contamination could explain the phenomenon. The cross and the cassette had been moved around a little too much. Someone could have touched the two pieces of evidence, forgetting to wear gloves. But who? If it were a member of the police forces, his prints would have been identified. Without mentioning that the evidence had rapidly been sealed up in protective plastic bags. They had to find someone who could have had access to the two objects before everyone else and who did not think about protecting himself. That was implausible. Once again, the investigation of the swallows' well was challenging the superintendent and driving him into a corner.

 

After he got home with the principal files of the counter-investigation, Mallock fell asleep and dreamed about this fingerprint. When he awoke with a start around 2
A.M.
, he had only one image in his head, a strange image, just a screaming color: violet, a vibrant mauve, almost fluorescent. A color and the certainty that he had to call someone, the lieutenant's fiancée.

Calling a lady of that age at such an hour required him to offer her abundant excuses.

And that's what Mallock did.

“How can I ask you to pardon a call at such an hour of the night? I'm ashamed to call you so late, Madame, but I have to ask you a question. You're the only person in the world who can answer it. I hope I haven't frightened you?”

“Don't worry, Superintendent. You know, at my age people sleep only by fits and starts. I was awake and was getting ready to make myself some herbal tea. What can I do for you?”

Mallock stammered. Put up against the wall like that, he felt a little idiotic. Especially since his question was anything but orthodox.

“Regarding Lieutenant Jean-François Lafitte, if I ask you what the color violet means to you, or reminds you of, can you think of anything?”

Marie Dutin didn't really seem surprised by the question. When you're over eighty, you've already heard everything.

“The color of the ribbon on his Croix de Guerre,” she replied without hesitation.

“But the ribbon has green and orange stripes, if I remember correctly?”

“Usually. However, because at that time the Croix de Guerre were being made in great haste, they sometimes ran out of striped ribbon, and they used pieces of violet-colored regulation ribbon so they could still have the necessary length for the decoration. My Jean-François's ribbon was practically mauve, with only a small part striped red and green. He wouldn't have been happy about that. It wasn't a color he particularly liked.”

Mallock waited a moment before speaking again. He wanted to leave her time to think. Urged on by her interlocutor's silence, the old lady seemed to hesitate before continuing:

“There's something else, but I don't think it's related.”

Mallock sat straight up. Without knowing exactly what it was, he knew that what she was about to say was what he'd been waiting for.

“Please tell me anyway. What are you thinking of?”

“You're going to think I'm foolish. But the color violet always makes me think of Gavroche, the young soldier my Jean-François took with him.”

“Why?”

“Well, he often wore mauve pullovers and shirts.”

“Is that all?”

Mallock was surprised. No vision, no sudden illumination.