Cemetery of Swallows (7 page)

He pointed to a table: “Sit down there, it's the coolest place and there's no fan right above it. What will you have?”

Mallock ordered a big glass of orange juice, tea with milk, and three fried eggs.

Later, when Mallock's plate was empty, Dr. André Barride arrived. He went directly up to Mister Blue to shake his hand and exchange friendly smiles. Then they both came over to Mallock.

Jean-Daniel introduced them. “Dr. Barride, this is the famous Superintendent Mallock.”

Like Mister Blue, André Barride was square-jawed and had a fighter's body. But his skin was much less tanned, uniformly orange, in fact, salmon-colored, and he weighed sixty or seventy pounds more. If age had caused his skin to sag a little, the muscles were still there, well hidden and ready for use at the first occasion. The doctor had an imposing build and even a bit of a potbelly, a big, flattened nose, and dark hair. As for his eyes, they were not South Seas blue but black, like two pools.

“There's no time to lose. We have to go first to Puerto Plata to negotiate a bed in the clinic and reserve a surgeon to assist me. Then we'll head for Santiago to get your friend out of the hospital.”

At a discreet sign from her boss, one of the waitresses brought them a drink. Without thinking much about it, Mallock downed it all at once. A wave of heat. It was rum, but fortunately, it had been made on the island, so that it was sweeter and not as strong as the industrial alcohol from Martinique. Although they had been able to produce cigars that could sometimes almost compete with the Cuban ones, their rum still had a long way to go.

“I'm also going to Santiago to purchase a few fossils. I'll be leaving around 3 or 4
P.M.
, so if you need me, don't hesitate to call.”

Jean-Daniel scribbled a number on the paper tablecloth, cut it off, and gave it to André.

“If you need help, you can reach me at this number starting at noon. Get going, boys, and good luck.”

The somewhat mocking tone in his voice, and Barride's grimace and worried look, attracted Mallock's attention. This wasn't going to be a pleasure trip or a cruise, it was going to be a hassle. He was right, but he was still far off the mark. Light-years off.

The flame trees in bloom were sprinkling with crimson drops the monochrome green of the island's vegetation. Taking his time, the doctor stopped here and there to drop off medicines, improvise free consultations, do his errands, or buy a little hashish.

“It relaxes me and keeps me from drinking too much,” he said as he lit a joint before getting back on the road. “Alcoholism is the main problem for Westerners who live in Africa or South America,” he went on. “A way of holding on, I suppose, of enduring the cultural gap, or maybe simply the temptation of a way of letting oneself go that will never be criticized or punished. So I prefer a little joint; does that shock you?”

Mallock reflected on his own weaknesses. He hesitated as to how to reply: “not at all,” which is what he thought, or “not really,” which was more in tune with his status as police superintendent.

“We all need crutches to put up with life,” he finally said, philosophically. “Having difficulty handling things in such a crazy world is actually a sign of good mental health, isn't it?”

André smiled as he cast a furtive glance at Mallock. He'd feared being stuck with a stuffy, pretentious bureaucrat. He felt relieved. Pothole: his pickup swerved. He swore and decided to slow down. These potholes were gigantic by European standards and axle-deep.

 

There were clumps of greenery on both sides of the road, and the low, mossy hills along the coast were studded with palm trees. The sky was a sumptuous blue. The sun bronzed the brown of the tree trunks and brought out the multitude of greens. Around every curve, Nature revealed all its generosity. Water and earth were copulating in the sun, and their children were dazzling. Time passed, punctuated by the peaceful appearance of donkeys alongside the road. They were tied up there to graze and clean up the shoulders. Twenty miles farther on, they entered a series of endless curves.

“We have to watch out,” Barride remarked, taking up a subject that miles and silence had put to rest. “The authorities here are serious about drugs.”

Taking advantage of this opening, Mallock brought up his favorite topic: “What do you think about this Darbier fellow?”

André smiled. “Finally! I would have worried about a cop who didn't ask me questions when I was at his mercy.”

“Don't feel you have to answer.”

“I'm joking. But you have to recognize that here history is not written day by day, respecting the facts. Tobias Darbier became a legend on the island, and it's very difficult, today, to separate the true from the fantastic. Personally, I pay attention only to eyewitness testimony.”

“Have you heard any about Darbier?”

The doctor's eyes grew harder. He reflected for a few seconds. Mallock knew how to wait.

“There's one thing I've kept to myself for a long time. And now there you are with your question.”

Was he hesitating, or was he collecting his memories? No matter, it was for him to decide. And that is what he did, two miles farther on.

“Darbier is dead, and so is my patient, so I suppose I can talk now.”

A grimace of disgust.

“One day, I had X-rays made of an old man whom I'd been treating several months, in particular for kidney stones and arthritis. It wasn't easy to do; he could hardly move anymore. With the help of two members of his family, the radiologist and I spent four hours taking as many pictures as possible. It was trying; the poor man had had almost all his limbs fractured and his joints dislocated, it was terrible. When I asked him the cause of his injuries, he simply waved the question away. But to me it looked very much like the effects of
strappado
, a form of torture, favored by Torquemada and his death squad. The victim is hoisted to the ceiling using pulleys and with his wrists tied behind his back. Because of the weight, the joints all end up breaking. Then the torturers let him fall toward the ground, and by suddenly stopping his fall, break his bones, one after the other.”

André Barride frowned, as if blown away by the violence of what he was describing.

“Later, when the old man began to trust me, he told me that it was the infamous Darbier who had tortured him. Three days in a row. And he broke his joints, ankles, elbows, shoulders, wrists, and even fingers, not with ropes and pulleys, but with his bare hands. Then he worked him over with a hammer to break his bones. Thinking he was dead, he had his henchmen throw the poor man in a ditch alongside the road. When I asked him what Darbier wanted to know, he laughed in my face:
Nada. ¡Esta por la felicitad, señor!
The bastard practiced torture the way other people pay tennis or bridge, just for the pleasure of it. That gives you a good idea of what the man was like, doesn't it?”

Homo homini lupus
, Mallock murmured.

Although they were painful, all the horrors he learned about Darbier would be grist for his mill. He had set himself three tasks. The official one was to bring Julie's brother home in good condition. The two others were unofficial: to take advantage of the opportunity to discern whether there might be the slightest doubt about his guilt; and if not, to find as many extenuating circumstances as possible. On this last point, it seemed that there might be material that would strengthen the defense's case. But he still had to find people to testify, and then prove that Manuel knew about these practices, and that his act was connected with Tobias's barbarism, indeed could even be seen as a duty to take revenge if there was a victim who was associated with him. It wasn't clear that he could do that.

“Could you make a statement for me?”

“Testifying to all this?”

“Yes, with a copy of the old man's X-rays?”

Barride frowned doubtfully.

“I could, but that wouldn't prove that it was Darbier's work. As for the X-rays, they disappeared from my office a few days later, as if by magic. You'll have to get used to that; everything concerning that individual is highly volatile, especially human testimony. Anyway, be careful, his
brutos
didn't die with him, and they probably won't like this kind of investigation.”

By the time Mallock had digested this last bit of information, they had arrived in front of the entrance to the Puerto Plata clinic. It took them two hours to negotiate a room, the surgeon's fee, and the rental of an ambulance. The first one wouldn't start, and the second, which got there half an hour later, couldn't leave again. A dozen phone calls later, they ended up reserving a third ambulance that would wait for them at the Santiago hospital.

“For the happiness and the radiant future of the people” might have been the translation of the faded inscription that adorned the pediment of the hospital, a building covered with cracked stucco. Inside, the cast iron grilles and doors, like the armed guards with shotguns, made it look more like a prison than a place of healing. The
C
in
URGENCIAS
, put up backwards, formed with the
I
, which was also in bad shape, a symbol close to the hammer and sickle.

They spent more than half an hour getting through various barriers and making their way through the crowds that were piling up in front of each of them. Calmly, as someone used to such things, André presented the authorization for transfer, and then, armed with a few dollars, he shook the guards' hands. Finally they entered the part of the hospital reserved for emergency care, where they had to step over the ill and injured who were occupying the halls, at the same time being careful not to slip on an old bandage or a puddle of bodily fluids. The odor and the heat combined to make breathing unbearable.

In front of a steel door, two soldiers asked Barride for his papers. Mallock noticed that no one could enter without an official document countersigned by Delmont and the island's authorities. So many precautions to guard a poor, wounded Frenchmen seemed excessive. Unless they were there to protect him? From whom? In the farthest reaches of the hospital, behind a final grille protected by another pair of mustaches with riot guns, Manuel was waiting for them. He was in a room one of whose sides was being invaded by a mountain of old crutches and recycled casts.

Mallock was shocked. Manu no longer resembled the young man he had known. He was an aged and emaciated phantom of himself. A hysterical mummy with red eyes and protuberant bones, the mummy of a pharaoh who had gone mad on the brink of death. Far from all humanity, his expression looked like that of a murderer. As for his smile when he recognized the superintendent, it also resembled a grimace: a monstrous mask stapled on for the occasion.

What had happened to him?

For a week, Julie's brother had been bathed in a mixture of sweat, raw pain, and urine. With a constant desire to throw up. But overcoming this torture, making it almost bearable, he felt a marvelous happiness, a kind of satisfaction, a sweet euphoria that flowed through his veins like a river of morphine.

The old man, the monster who had haunted his nights and all the forests of the earth since he was a child, was dead. He didn't remember the exact moment when he attacked him, but he still felt on his lips the sugar of his blood, the strange humor of iron, and he saw perfectly the shiny dullness of the ogre's brains sprawled shamelessly in the dust of the square.

And, if he was prepared to admit the facts alleged against him and to recognize his full culpability, it was not out of contrition, but pride. To be sure, he still didn't know why he'd been led to kill him, but he felt satisfied by the idea that he'd done it. He had the incredible certainty that in this way he had atoned for multiple offenses against God and the people he cherished in his heart of hearts, without really being able to give them names.

Kiko, Julie, and his little baby had also resurfaced in his consciousness. All their love, and the infinite love he had for them, was coming back to life. He let them approach him, but timidly, with great slowness. And even holding them back.

For he knew that Hell was still within him.

 

Before opening the door, Amédée hesitated. He knew only too well the horror and the tears that openings could conceal. Behind them were hidden helplessness, bruised faces, agonies, murders, hearts burnt to ashes, incest, fears, odors . . . everything that constitutes man, and the rest as well. Mallock didn't like doors, he'd never liked them. Noble apartment doors for sordid crimes, hospital doors half-open on deathbeds, regrets, and bodies, under the same load of saltpeter and mold, secret doors hiding dirty eyes playing doctor with children's hearts, soft doors wetted by tears, or steel doors with codes and padlocks barring access to the shameful riches of a greedy world. Vocation and damnation. Mallock knew that he was doomed to open these doors, all of them, one after another, without ever being warned of the horrors awaiting him, and that he would have to go on opening them for the rest of his life.

 

When André entered the room before Mallock, he swore. The hospital's doctors, having removed the bullet Manu had received in his upper back, had put a full-body cast on him down to his stomach. His knee was traversed by a pin, and the bandages around it were saturated with pus.

André was furious, but he was able to restrain himself, at least until the young intern on duty announced that he had decided not to let the patient leave without removing the infamous pin. He must have been short of them. Without worrying about anesthesia, before André's incredulous eyes the intern grabbed an ancient drill, plugged it in, and attached the chuck to one of the extremities of the pin. Then he simply pushed the switch. Miraculously, the electricity wasn't working.