When he got back to Paris, Mallock found a message waiting for him:
“It’s been four days, Superintendent . . . Am I the one who’s a dummy, or are you a triple idiot?”
The tone was bitter. Queen Margot was going to be thirty-seven years old, and before she met Amédée, she’d often been loved, even adored. She had sometimes loved in return. But she accepted less and less the idea of a couple, and still less that of marriage. To be reduced to the status of a man’s woman, his other half, what a horror! And then, she’d already made her contribution.
She expected a lot out of life, but from men she expected too much. Everything and its contrary. Like many liberated women. She wanted a knight in shining armor who also did dishes, a fearless explorer who stayed at home, something half pale, half male covered with hair, half Chanel, half diesel.
Margot was much too intelligent not to see the trap into which generations of men and women had led her. But knowing about something is not always enough, and her requirements seemed to have doomed her to never being satisfied. So she’d ended up deciding to marry Mathieu, Count of Mas de Plaissac. Maybe because he used only the name Dumas and kept both his blue blood and his fortune to himself. And then because he was tender and paid attention to her. She had accepted his proposal with tempered passion! And she’d been happy with him. But she was not in love with him enough to abandon her career as a journalist and start giving him children. She was proud, and rightly so, of standing on her own two legs. A position that few women succeeded in taking and keeping in a world in which the great gravity of things, like the burden of conventions, often required men’s powerful muscles and lightweight brains.
Gradually, the gap between the cruel realities of her trips into minefield territories and her chateau life, all Angevin sweetness, had a devastating effect on her. She had tried to convince herself that she’d get used to it. The exact opposite happened. The repeated shock, each time and at the same place, right in the heart, had ended up forming the most painful of gashes. You don’t move, in a few hours, from a white-wine tasting in the darkness of a cellar to a child massacred with a machete in broad daylight, without blinking and developing a terrible anger. In Margot, and perhaps because she’d tried to deny it, this rage had grown and transformed itself into a resentment against the human race in general and against her husband in particular. Against herself. She, who considered herself the most guilty of all, like a kind of double agent, a traitor to both sides.
Margot and Mallock suffered from the same malady, lucid integrity. Toward life, as toward themselves. There was the same strange emulsion in their eyes, oil and water, execration and tenderness. Disabused, but still on a war footing, she shared with the superintendent the same despairing misanthropy.
They had begun to see each other, from time to time, when she could and when he wanted. They took from one another what they wanted, a mouth, a skin, strength, reflections of themselves, phrases, and great stretches of solitude. But the little adventure had lasted. And they’d exchanged more objects, tender feelings, verbs in the future tense, and even vacations with a view of the sea. Then one day her little female brain hadn’t been able to keep from saying out loud what she was thinking to herself: “Girl, you’re going to have to get used to it, this tender brute with his fifty years, this weird half-bear, half-tiger, is the love of your life.”
For Queen Margot, the superintendent’s green eyes and astonishing humanity seemed to be a remedy for all her ills, or at least a marvelous balm. Everything in that man was too big for her to be able to resist: his heart, his suits, his hands, his angers, his mind, his nose, and his sadness, his damned character. He was like a hundred-year-old oak, still green, with enigmatic branches and big leaves full of shadows. No guy had ever had the effect on her that Mallock had. When she was near him, she was finally willing to be fragile, protected, mortal, and warm, sheltered from things that cut. She loved his compassion and the fact that he was fundamentally and forever . . . inconsolable!
That evening, Mallock didn’t call her back. The incorrigible homebody won out over the lover.
And Margot remained alone.
After taking off his icy clothes, Mallock began to draw a bath before he went upstairs to send an e-mail. He wrote a nice note to Margot to explain his weariness, the late hour, and the mud that covered both his boots and his every thought. He ended with a “Je t’embrasse,” which, for an introverted bear like himself, represented an exceptional proclamation of fondness. “I love you” was out of the question; he could never have written that. And besides, that was a declaration that Thomas had tattooed on his heart and that Amédée reserved for him, to repeat to him every night before going to sleep. The superintendent had a heart as big as a castle, but his son and the memory of Amélie still occupied most of the rooms.
The bathtub probably was still not full.
Mallock took advantage of this to glance at the digital photographs he’d taken in the clearing. He took the card out of his camera and slipped it into his cell phone, which was connected to his Mac. Thanks to his computer-savvy friends who kept an eye on developments for him, he always had the most reliable and effective devices on the market. That’s indispensable when one is, like Mallock, scared of the mouse.
Amédée opened his pictures in raw form the better to view and optimize the images taken a few hours earlier: the clearing, the well, the swallows, the dead dog, and the cross. For all the visuals together, he had only to boost the definition, the clarity, and the color, while at the same time bringing out the dark parts. Without waiting, he started printing these photos in the background. He had set aside the last photos, particularly one that was much less legible than the others. He had to do some work on that one. Taken as night was falling and in the depth of the hole, despite being illuminated by the two flashlights, the cross and the soil on which it was lying were lost in the same bunch of dark pixels. Mallock almost gave up. His bath would soon start running over, and he could photograph the object again the next day, in broad daylight.
By zooming in on the cross, he saw what seemed to be letters on it. There seemed to be three of them. At first he thought they read “8bw.” The shape of the W was strange. Suddenly he swore: “What a moron!” He rotated the image 180° and read it again. Once it was right-side-up, he could read “MPF.” Thus these were not Jean-François Lafitte’s initials, which were what he secretly expected to find. But in any case, what would he have done with such a discovery? Other than wade still further into the irrational?
As he was going downstairs to turn off the bathwater, a signal appeared on his screen indicating that he had a call. He hesitated to respond. It was Margot.
“Did you get my message?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Superintendent, but I wanted to see you, tonight.”
The queen didn’t beat around the bush. Mallock did.
“I’m just about to take a bath. I’m covered with mud because—”
“I know, you explained that to me. By the time I get there, maybe my teddy bear will have had time to dry all his fur?”
“That could be,” Mallock replied, smiling.
Seeing her so pretty, in the little window on screen, he felt his desire to see her in person, to touch her, being rekindled, And that desire was far stronger than his desire for solitude.
“Fine, I’ll expect you,” he concluded before hurrying downstairs to turn off the faucets in the bathroom at the last minute.
After his bath, wearing a white bathrobe and armed with three inches of whiskey, the damp bear went back upstairs to check his e-mail one last time. Ken had sent him a new report.
In sum and as expected, he’d received confirmations from the British Foreign Office and the Veterans’ Association.
Both Klaus Krinkel and Jean-François Lafitte had in fact been in France in June, 1944! The French lieutenant had disappeared without a trace at that time. For his part, Krinkel, considered one of the “craziest” of the officers, belonged to one of the SS divisions. And God knows the latter had included some amazing psychopaths. But despite his charm, Ken had not been able to acquire many further details. He’d concluded that his interlocutors didn’t know them, either, and proposed to contact the German authorities. To dig around in the files assembled by Serge Klarsfeld’s Nazi-hunting organization. So far as Jean-François Lafitte was concerned, Ken had been able to find the young lieutenant’s sister. On the telephone, she’d told him that she didn’t know much, but she had given him the name and phone number of her brother’s fiancée at the time of the tragedy, a certain Marie Dutin. Finally, he told Mallock that at 10 A.M. the next day the judge, the forensic team, and the rest would be waiting for him at the southern edge of the forest.
Ken wound up his report by saying: “You’ll find the basics of what I dug up in the attachments. Good night, Boss. Everything’s O.K.” Smiling, Amédée opened the two images attached to the message.
His smile froze on his face.
Krinkel’s identity card, showing his face and chest, dressed in an SS uniform, that was quite a sight! Mallock immediately felt uneasy. It took him a few seconds to recognize the nature of the impression that had gripped his guts: it was an irrational fear.
This face of a killer with slicked-back hair, close-shaven cheeks, the imaginary odor of soap that emerged from them and even the absence of the slightest whisker, and of the slightest humanity, were obscene. The impeccable creases of his uniform, the perfect seams, the signs, insignias, and symbols, each detail screamed his hatred. Each external perfection clashed with the infernal chaos that could be divined inside him. The starched collar and the ironing concealed a crumpled soul. The rampart of cleanliness was opposed to the dirtiness of the urges still retained. He was like a peaceful lake in a volcano before it erupts, like impeccable order in the service of the Devil.
What Mallock had before his eyes was nothing less than a new race of psycho killers, different from the ones he had fought up to this point. A psychopath nourished, lodged, and exonerated by a government, a fucking bastard authorized to give free rein to his most demonic instincts. The two kinds of trash in a country, the bureaucrat and the psychopath, combined in one and the same person.
Mallock had a hard time getting back to his investigation and the one question he had to ask. Was this Krinkel, whom he was gazing at in disgust, the same person as the infamous Darbier, the old man Manuel had killed? For the moment, it was hard to draw that conclusion, but it was not impossible. As for the second photo, that of Jean-François Lafitte, it left him speechless. Beyond all reason and against all logic, the young soldier who died in 1944 exactly resembled Manuel Gemoni.
The security phone’s ring made him jump.