Amédée had decided to skip lunch. He’d gone to pick up Julie. At noon, they were both in the coveted vehicle, a big mustard-colored Toyota with snow tires and a ridiculous bull-bar. They were headed for the forest of Biellanie, in the middle of the Pays d’Auge.
Mallock took advantage of the situation to bring his assistant up to date on the latest information, particularly the information Ken had provided regarding the names mentioned and the military men’s serial numbers. They agreed in thinking that this was not enough. It was, to be sure, very strange, and it could offer the beginning of a proof, but no more than that. Even though this glorious event had remained unknown to the general public, since Ken had found the information, Manu could have learned about it through a combination of circumstances. On the other hand, if they found something in the forest of Biellanie that had a direct connection with the revelations he had just made, they would be confronted by a very different situation.
As implausible as the facts might appear, Mallock had decided to have done, once and for all, with this nonsense about wells, Nazis, and swallows. Even if Léon’s testimony had perturbed him, it was not enough to lead him to make a religion out of it. It has to be said that it took a lot to have any hope of converting a Mallock.
“In a mile and a half, you have to turn right. We’re almost there.”
Julie smelled good, and just for good measure she also read maps very well. Or, on the contrary, she knew how to use maps, and it was just for good measure that she smelled good.
In any case, it was a stroke of luck for Mallock. Without a GPS, but with a pretty Julie: he had a winner. The superintendent had never known how to use Michelin maps, with their complicated system of folding and their illegible hieroglyphs. This was a failing, or worse, a defect. “Look at the map before you leave” was an integral part of the complete panoply of the basic male, along with knowing how to light a barbecue, carve the Sunday leg of lamb, and knock back beers while watching soccer on television.
Julie said in a loud voice:
“We’re coming into Saint-Lyon, the village closest to the forest. But the forest of Biellanie covers more than 1,500 acres. We’ll have to find someone to tell us where to go.”
They entered the village at 3 P.M.
It was silent under the snow.
The flakes were falling, heavy and slow, orange in the streets where the electric lamps were helping out the sky, which was now failing to do the job. Elsewhere, everything was blue. Julie and Mallock got out of their rolling fortress and ploughed their way down the main street. For the first time since the beginning of the investigation, luck was on their side. At the third house they came to, they found an old couple who said they knew the forest well.
“So far as it can be known, that place,” the man said, insinuating much more.
The woman had been going into the forest for years to gather herbs, but not everywhere and never at night.
“It’s not a forest where you go for walks. There are even areas where you can’t go!” she explained in what was almost French.
Stirring a horrible substitute for coffee, Julie and Mallock learned a little more about the Coudret couple. After having poached for twenty years, the husband had been named game warden by the commune’s mayor. He’d really had no choice, since no one but Charles Coudret dared enter into what had become a foul and inextricable jungle.
The former poacher, who was now on the right side of the law, took loving care of the forest’s flora and fauna, in exchange for authorization to do a little hunting solely for his personal use.
“A well, you say?”
Mallock’s first question had been direct.
“There is in fact one, but it has been centuries since it has had any water in it. It’s not only filled in but practically invisible now. There must be not more than three of us in the village who know it exists. Who could have mentioned it to you?”
“A fellow who died and has been buried in it for half a century,” Amédée couldn’t keep from replying.
Julie went pale, whereas the man broke into laughter.
“OK, OK, it’s secret, I understand! Would you like a little Calvados?”
After an undrinkable coffee whose disgusting bitterness had stuck to the insides of their mouths, Mallock and Julie accepted his offer. That might go down better. At worst, it would serve as a mouthwash and a disinfectant.
The Calvados was pink. Pink candy!
“My husband makes it,” the old woman explained. “This year, the big lout used an old wine barrel. That colored it and as a result we’re having trouble selling it, but . . . ”
The husband, who obviously didn’t like his wife to discuss this thorny subject with strangers, interrupted her:
“This business of the well reminds me of the old legend of the cemetery of the swallows.”
Mallock and Julie were stunned. The nightmare persisted. Without realizing the effect that his words had had on his listeners, the repentant poacher went on:
“My grandmother told me that swallows used to come to drink at that well. They flew by and dipped up a little water. Then there was less and less water, so it was deeper in the well. One day, a swallow who couldn’t fly back up drowned. Then another, and another, until they completely covered the surface of the water. The birds made this well a cemetery. When one of them was sick, it went to the well to die. I resolved to check out that legend, but I always hesitated to do it, I don’t know why. The fear of being disappointed, maybe. And then it’s in the middle of the forest. I avoid going there because it’s a little dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Mallock asked.
“There’ve been wild dogs around there for years. People have even talked about wolves, but it seems that’s not possible. In the 1950s, well before the forest was fenced off and entrusted to my care, there were deaths. That much is certain. At the time, hunts were organized, but they didn’t catch anything except for some lousy wild pigs.”
He poured more Calvados for himself, and didn’t forget Mallock and Julie. In return, they gave him timid gestures of gratitude.
“If you want, I’ll take you to the well. You’ll never find it by yourselves. What do you say? Are you armed?”
Pick and shovel in hand, and equipped with yellow waxed coats lent by the couple, Mallock and Julie plunged into the forest, following a resolute Charles Coudret, who was carrying a wooden ladder and a hunting rifle.
The whole forest was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and no-trespassing signs. A genuine barrier. The only practicable entry was itself barred by an enormous gate with three padlocks that the former poacher opened and then closed again after him.
Inside, the forest was in a state of complete abandonment. Trees had fallen and others had grown, intertwining with each other. Only the little trail Coudret had blazed and maintained made it possible to penetrate this wall of vegetation. More recently, the great storm that had marked the end of the last millennium had uprooted the oldest trees. In each overturned stump little frozen lakes had formed in which the roots of the dethroned kings of the forest were reflected.
“You haven’t yet cleaned up after the storm?”
“It hasn’t been maintained for years. Explosives would have to be used to clear out the biggest stuff, and then you’d have to go in with a bulldozer. Besides, I don’t have anyone to help me!” He paused. “You’ve chosen your day well. People no longer know how to dress . . . ”
They heard three howls in the distance. Coudret pretended he hadn’t heard anything, unless it was just habit.
“Not too cold today,” he went on. “Have to say that with the snow that’s falling, it must be around freezing.”
Julie, with a twinkle in her eye, offered a lovely climatic joke in turn:
“Still, we little old ladies don’t mind wearing gloves!”
At any other time, Mallock would have smiled at this, but the place was too sinister. Like this whole investigation, in fact. Like the forest, it was inextricable and full of claws.
Charles Coudret seemed to know what he was doing. He slipped his hunting rifle under his right arm and, turning around, reassured Julie:
“Another eight minutes and we’ll be there!”
But it was Mallock’s painful back that received that news with the gratitude it deserved.
In fact, it was at least another quarter of an hour before they reached the clearing. Two trees had fallen across the path since Coudret’s last visit.
“I’ll come back with my chainsaw,” he grumbled as he helped Julie climb over the obstacle.
The clearing where the well was looked different from the rest of the forest. There was practically no snow in this forgotten place, just a thick layer of muddy clay, smooth and oily. Patches of moss, greenish crusts, covered parts of this diseased skin. The whole of the leprous surface must have covered some five hundred square yards, and one really had to know the place to locate what remained of the well. A granite mouth screaming at the stars, the circle of stone hardly projected from the ground. The circumference of its teeth was six to seven yards.
Their impatience to find out what was there and the imminence of nightfall made Julie and her two companions go to work immediately, without even having agreed to do so.
With their shovels scraping and the pick screeching, they dug for a good hour without saying a word. The soil was friable and the work went fast. Around the edges of the clearing, while the sun was struggling to help the three workers see what they were doing, other howls resounded.
Coudret grabbed his rifle:
“Those are the wild dogs I told you about. We’re right in the middle of their territory. Watch out, they’re dangerous.”
At the same moment, Mallock, who had continued to dig, grumbled:
“I think we’re there.”
Without worrying about the state of his suit, he got down on all fours in the mud to dig at the earth with his big superintendent’s paws. Julie caught herself smiling as she watched him. One really didn’t know what he was going to do next. Mallock was unpredictable, and without her knowing quite why, that made her happy.
Amédée turned around:
“Pass me two or three sample bags, the plastic ones, quick.”
The young woman did as she was told, impatient. What had he unearthed? When he handed the bag back to her, she shined her flashlight on it to see better. The bag was full of birds’ bodies, swallows, to judge by the shape of the wings. Weren’t these little skeletons the proof that the legend of the forest and Manu’s wild imaginings intersected in a single reality? Night smells were beginning to invade the clearing. Mallock and Julie looked at one another. They were going to have to take Manu’s statements into consideration, and that was the problem. Where could all this lead them?
Night was beginning to fall on the clearing when they found a large stone. They spent a good half hour removing all the earth and uncovering the first layer of birds. Mallock felt a shock when he discovered a perfectly triangular form. He remembered the exact words Manu had used three days earlier: “I see a black triangle in the center of the circle. It seems to be growing larger. No, it’s falling toward me! My God!”
Amédée no longer knew whether he should be glad or frightened. He felt a mixture of exasperation and excitement. He rejected the second feeling, preferring to mope in a frustrated rationalism that was more in keeping with his status as one of the Republic’s main cops.
“Goddamn puzzle, what is this mess?”
A quarter of an hour passed.
No one had tried to answer the superintendent’s question. Having raised and set aside the notorious stone, helped by Coudret’s strong arms and the ladder he had been smart enough to bring along, Mallock had started digging again in the bird skeletons and mud. Above him, the full moon cast an almost violent light on the crumbling stones forming the edge of the well. A strong feeling mixed of unreality and earth had overtaken Amédée. He was in the swallows’ well, in the midst of Manuel Gemoni’s delirium.
Up above, Julie, kneeling at the edge of the hole, stared into the obscurity that covered the bottom of the excavation like blind asphalt. Mallock was no longer the eager beaver who had attacked the job without hesitation three hours earlier. He was now acting like a gravedigger or an archaeologist. No more big vertical blows of his foot on the edge of the spade. Mallock was now digging on a horizontal plane and bringing up much smaller quantities of birds and earth. He was taking precautions to avoid damaging Lieutenant Lafitte’s body.
“But there’s nothing down there, you fool,” he murmured as he thrust the shovel into the ground.
Then the spade struck an object that for Mallock, at that moment, could only be a human bone. Julie, perhaps because she had realized the state in which her superintendent found himself, climbed down into the hole to take over:
“We have to go more slowly now. Let me do it.”
In the darkness, she started disengaging the buried object. She spent ten minutes achieving her goal. A flashlight shone down from the surface: it was neither a femur nor a skull, but a cross laid horizontally, at the exact center of the circle. A cross of light-colored wood, carved and varnished. They all three looked at one another, incredulous. Two of them already knew what they were going to find underneath. Mallock took Julie’s place at the bottom of the well to observe the object more closely. Although he was profoundly troubled and impatient, he decided to halt the excavation.
His voice was toneless:
“We’ll come back as soon as possible, but with Judge Judioni, the forensic police, excavators, the whole show. Above all, we have to avoid procedural errors.”
And it was at the very moment when he put his hands on the edge of the hole to pull himself out that the attack took place.
Bounding out of the north side of the clearing, four huge dogs were running toward the little group. Taken by surprise, Coudret had only time to put his arm up to protect himself. The first dog sank his teeth into it. The game warden howled with pain. Amédée took advantage of this to leap back into the hole and grab his shovel. A second hound hesitated a moment at the edge of the hole and Mallock had time to aim his blow to strike the beast.
Julie shouted to Coudret:
“Try to keep him from moving!”
Seeing Julie’s revolver, the game warden, his eyes closed, stopped struggling. Julie’s Manurhin Police Special F1 was loaded with special .357 magnum bullets; they were much more powerful than the .38 cartridges normally provided. The young woman fired only once. A roar of gunpowder, a spurt of blood, the animal let go of the guard, shrieking shrilly before collapsing like a sack. With one beast stunned, another dead, the remaining two retreated.
“Are you all right?” Mallock asked Coudret.
“Fortunately, I had my overcoat. But with these rabid beasts, I’ll have to have a shot in the ass and a few stitches.”
Then he turned with a smile to Julie:
“In any case, bravo and thank you, miss. Nice shot!”
Julie smiled, but she was still very pale. The unexpected violence of the attack was now making itself felt in her veins. She’d reacted well but she’d been very scared. And then killing a dog, that was a first for her. Very unpleasant. Like her superintendent, she loved animals, and dogs in particular.
Mallock turned his flashlight on the beast’s cadaver. Then he bent down to examine it. As he stood back up he growled like a bear.
“What is it, Boss?”
“A black Doberman with a yellow spot on top of his head and different-colored eyes, does that remind you of anything?”
“Good lord!” Julie’s pretty mouth swore.