The Cairo Diary (42 page)

He stood there without adding anything for a moment, beneath the stars. Marion could not tell if he was hiding his emotion as best he could, or if he was searching for something else to add.

“That night, he wrote that he saw Humphreys early in the evening—the conversation lasted a quarter of an hour—then Dr. Cork at almost midnight. Between the two, we know nothing.”

The old man's head rotated on his shoulders like an owl's, to take in Marion's reaction. “He was with me during that missing time.”

Marion's hands tightened around the diary until the leather was digging into her skin.

“The hours passed, and the shock treatment to which I was subjected disconnected me more and more from reality. I lost consciousness the next day. Only to wake up when the barrel was knocked over and the water flooded over me. It was completely dark; I was suffering from cold sweats, fever, and unbearable pains. I remained motionless for a long time. My throat had tightened up, and I was having difficulty breathing. Then I groped around and found some matches, and a candle. The monster's corpse was there. I don't know what really happened between the two. I think Jeremy came to check that I was dead, which is what he expected from the ghoul. And that he killed his slave so that he could not betray him in one way or another. The notebook was on the table. I opened it, and saw that it contained his words. I don't know what came over me, but I stole it. I hid it among my rags and the police arrived shortly afterward.”

A salvo of applause rang out beneath their feet. The concert was at an end.

“I didn't open my mouth again for five weeks after that. I didn't say anything about the notebook either; I kept it like a trophy, secretly. And I read it. One page from time to time, when I was alone. It was after I'd finished it that I got my voice back. I went to see my father, and asked him if he was really a murderer. Then we had a long conversation, whose epilogue I was not to learn until ten years later, when he left us. Jezebel admitted to me then what had happened that night, between them and Jeremy. For he did indeed come to the house. He got past the gates and entered the house; and he aimed a weapon at my father. He manhandled him to get him to confess that he was the child-killer. He yelled at him, holding a tin of cigarettes in his free hand, saying that it was proof that he had found in the monster's lair. Proof that he had been able to buy from Groppi's, since my father had given him the name of his supplier on the night they had dinner together. He became mad, struck my father, again and again. He wanted at all costs to make him confess in front of Jezebel. So that she would realize. Jezebel ended up seizing the revolver we kept there for our own defense, and she fired at the detective.”

Marion's eyes were fixed on him. George Keoraz was telling his story with great difficulty; his voice was less assured than usual, and his hands were shaking.

“Jeremy Matheson died instantly, with a bullet lodged right in the middle of his brain. Jezebel and my father did not know what to do. They panicked. They had just killed a police officer. A police officer who had accused my father, what's more—which could constitute a motive in the eyes of a particularly obtuse judge. So they weighted him down and put him in one of the mercury pools in the garden, while they waited to find a better place. A whole army of police officers turned up shortly afterward, not to arrest them but to bring me back. And my father eventually buried Matheson in the desert, a few days later. An investigation was opened into his disappearance, but it came to nothing. According to the people who knew him best, he had become more and more impulsive in recent months, sometimes irascible. His character changed, and the beast in him rose to the surface. Instinct was beginning to take hold of the hunter. For my part, I claimed to remember nothing; I lied because I didn't know what to say anymore. They concluded that the child-killer was the black giant, and everybody was happy. I found out later that Jezebel had searched in vain for Matheson's diary. He had confided its existence to her, and she was anxious to know what it contained in reality. I never managed to admit to her that I was the one who had it.”

George swallowed several times in succession, and turned to Marion. “Do you still doubt the identity of the real child-killer?”

She wanted to say something, but the strength needed to push out the words instantly evaporated.

“You are wondering why, aren't you?” guessed George. “Why did he do all this? He was a tortured soul. A man who had lost all notion of emotion. As Jezebel told him on the evening when she came to find him in his rail car. She could not work him out. Because he was not a man in other men's image. He was not really human. In a certain way he was unbalanced, but although sick he was conscious of his perversity, and it caused him pain. I think that if Jezebel meant so much to him it was because her strong, original personality had made him experience feelings again that he was normally incapable of feeling. And these odious crimes, through their extreme nature, made him feel emotion. He was nothing but an empty shell, weeping over the nothingness that he could not fill except with uncontrolled, immoderate sensations.”

A group of bats in formation skimmed the two human shadows on the top of the abbey church, more than a hundred yards above sea level.

“To define him, I must tell you that the major part of his delirious fantasies about my father's perverse personality were merely a transposition of his own. His pages of psychological analysis are nothing more than a transfer of what he was himself, to the scapegoat he had devised. He could eliminate his rival in love and exonerate himself in one fell swoop. Having said this, the criminal processes he attributes to my father's mind seem most grotesque when one reads his diary; on the other hand, they become more plausible once they are replaced by Jeremy himself. All one has to do is replace the intoxication with power that he claimed was the breaking point—as a point of departure—for my father with the terrible consequences of the war that turned Jeremy Matheson into a disembodied creature, and we can grasp his nature.”

George clapped his hands in front of him. “In the final analysis he was a damned soul. The war had succeeded in dehumanizing the child he had been.”

Marion shuddered.

The war. The tortures Jeremy had seen inflicted on that poor soldier.

George pointed to the diary. “Take hold of the first page, and tear the cover. Go on, don't be afraid, I covered the book myself, back then, so as to camouflage it.”

Marion followed his instructions and pulled on the leather. It grumbled as it tore.

“That's enough,” ordered George.

He leaned over and slid his fingers under the tear in the leather, searching for something.

“There…”

The old man drew out an old sepia photograph.

“There you are, look. That's Jeremy Matheson.”

Marion took it and looked at the author's face with a degree of apprehension. In appearance he was as he had described himself, a handsome man, but with an expression that darkened his face. In fact, it was even disturbing. There was an enigmatic glimmer in his eyes, as imprecise and changeable as those holographic photographs in which the facial expression changes when the viewing angle is altered. A look of cold, permanent anger, Marion decided, without much confidence.
Or a persistent suffering, which consumes him.

And then another flash of intuition came to her. A more disturbing one.

That glimmer of light belonged to a lifeless body, floating in the very depths of him. The glimmer of his soul.

In his eyes there was a terrifying fogging, which belonged to a consciousness that had been dead for a long time, having abandoned its body to drift aimlessly.

He was harboring his own corpse.

Beside Jeremy stood a magnificent woman. Marion had no difficulty in identifying her. Her class and her impetuous nature were imprinted on her features. Jezebel.

The photo had been taken on a beach. Jeremy was in short bathing trunks, in accordance with the fashion of the time, revealing a chest disfigured by a long, swollen-edged furrow.

Marion turned over the photograph.

Alexandria, September 1926.

“The photo was acting as a bookmark in the notebook when I found it,” commented George. “An error on Jeremy's part, committed because of his affection for Jezebel.”

George revealed the final cog in the insane mechanism that constituted Jeremy Matheson. “When he was a little drunk, on the evening they dined together, he told my father and Jezebel an anecdote in confidence. You have probably guessed that he lied about that, too. He did not see that young solder being mutilated and raped for so long by vile noncommissioned officers. He didn't see it, he lived it. He
was
that soldier.”

Marion ran her index finger over the slender curve of the scar on the detective's chest. The photo quivered in the wind.

“That was why Jezebel wept that evening,” emphasized George. “She understood. When he talked about the mutilations by bayonet, and a gash across the chest, she remembered that enormous scar on his torso. She grasped the sufferings he had endured during the war. After each slaughter, when he had to go and attack the Germans, he returned, astonished that he was still alive, covered with the meat of his comrades, and confronted another hell, while waiting for the next attack that would in turn burst open his flesh.”

Marion scrutinized the photograph and the man who had made her share his existence, what she had thought was his investigation, his pain. She imagined him wandering along the sordid alleyways of Shubra, to flush out the black giant, approach him, say a few words to him in Arabic. Then she imagined him bringing his “hired hand” down into the underground chambers, to shelter him there. Promising him food. And inciting him to liberate his anger with the children he would procure for him. Jeremy had savored the spectacle. He had also killed his own friend, the archaeologist who had told him about his discovery, this ideal hiding place. He had slaughtered Azim because he was on the point of uncovering the whole thing.

It was he who had burgled the Keoraz Foundation to consult the children's files, find out how to approach them and how best to bribe them. Marion closed her eyelids when she realized that he had perhaps knowingly chosen the hemophiliac boy, so he could feast his eyes on the interminable tides of blood that were going to flow.

The whole diary came together within her: the characters, the days, the heat, the architecture of Cairo. As she read, she had made a film play in her head, and now she experienced the whole thing again, this time on fast-forward.

Suddenly, the image silently froze.

And a new scene added itself to the others. This one didn't come out of the diary, but from the memories of a wounded old man.

*   *   *

It was an afternoon in March 1928.

Sharia Maspero was packed with passersby. French ladies simpered and laughed in the shade of their parasols, Cairo governesses pushed baby carriages in the shade of the palm trees that traced a strip of greenery between the street and the majestic Nile. Men in suits jostled each other and apologized politely on the sidewalk, outside large, five-storied modern buildings, all in stone and steel, and with open windows at the top, protected from the unbearably hot sun by drapes.

Recently made cars purred on the roadway, inviting the camel-drivers and carts pulled by mules to get a move on with blasts from their fake horns. And in the middle of this street, everyone cleared the way for the approaching train, which gave out metallic clicks and sparks amid its crowning glory of cables.

A woman with an Italian accent leaned toward a young boy dressed in leather sandals over white socks, shorts and a shirt stained from eating aniseed balls. An itinerant seller of oranges stopped beside them and offered fruit. The woman dismissed him with a firm refusal, showing that she was well used to such things.

“Don't forget to do your scales,” she reminded the child. “Every day.”

The streetcar squealed to a halt in front of them.

The doors opened and the boy climbed aboard, waving goodbye to the Italian woman.

“I'll see you next week,” she shouted, over the din of the closing doors.

The streetcar shook itself and picked up speed. The lively colors of the shop windows slid by as the train passed through the high-class districts.

The streetcar was very full. All the seats were occupied and the boy was hesitant to go back into the compartment reserved for women, where there were still some empty seats. He did nothing: “It's not done,” he had often been told.

He grabbed hold of a strap and was about to occupy himself by looking at the fine cars when he recognized a face among the passengers.

It was a rather tall man who was gazing at him, a smile on his lips. His expression broadened, giving way to real pleasure.

“Hello, George!” he said.

George recognized him. He was the guest who had been at their house the previous evening. A police officer, his father had told him.

“Do you recognize me?”

The boy nodded. “Hello, sir.”

The man didn't talk very loudly, just enough to be heard by the child.

“It's good luck for me that I've found you here,” he replied. “I was afraid I'd miss you. I had to run to catch the streetcar, you know.”

George nodded out of politeness. His gaze was immediately captivated by the roar of a car overtaking them.

“Do you like cars?” asked the police officer.

“Yes, I adore them. My father has a Bentley. Do you know what a Bentley is, sir? It's a very fast car, the fastest!”

Around them, two stern-looking men were reading their newspapers, and a little farther off another was picking his nose as he watched the landscape glide past.

“Oh, yes, I know what a Bentley is. And do you want to know something? My own car is even faster than a Bentley!”