Thursday, December 12
The day before, the doorbell had surprised Mallock as he was staring incredulously at Lieutenant Lafitte’s face on his screen.
It was Margot.
He’d gone downstairs to open the door. An hour later, they were sleeping beside one another. Mallock wondered how he managed to forget, each time, the happiness he felt in holding her in his arms. When he woke up, the queen was gone. He looked for the little note she always left in such cases. He searched the living room but found nothing. Disappointed, the big teddy bear deprived of honey stubbornly looked around in all the other rooms, even though everyone was waiting for him at the edge of the forest of Biellanie.
Since she hadn’t left a note, he decided to write one. He opened his e-mail and typed: “Since you’re constantly asking me if I miss you, I’m telling you once and for all: I always miss you!”
Then he thought for a few seconds and added, smiling:
“ . . . even when I’m with you.”
Once he was on the autoroute, he drove the 4x4 as fast as he could, but wasn’t able to make up for his late start. Too many trucks and too much snow. He arrived twenty minutes after the time that had been set. Mallock, the punctuality maniac, the person with a clock phobia!
A little crowd was impatiently awaiting him. From Judge Judioni to the excavator Dugnoux, from the well surrounded by earth to the dog’s body. Without hesitating, Mallock blamed his lateness on the numerous toll plazas that segmented the autoroute. It was out of the question to admit to them that he had wasted time looking for a love note, and then, disappointed, writing one himself. But he had the unpleasant impression that they all knew! Otherwise, why would they be smirking? Fortunately, as a diversion, he spotted Charles Coudret’s face.
His right hand was bandaged and his arm was in a sling.
“So, is it any better?” Mallock asked him, without bothering to greet the judge and his consorts.
“It’ll take more than a Doberman, even if he comes out of Hell, to defeat an old warhorse like me,” he smiled.
“So much the better. We’re still going to need old nags today,” Mallock said.
Coudret laughed.
“At your service, Superintendent!”
Mallock greeted everyone. The judge, wrinkled and emaciated, with an eternal smile pasted on his tanned face, responded with a pitiful:
“It’s nice of you to have deigned to join us.”
To which Amédée replied:
“The lofty magistracy before the lowly constabulary, Your Honor, it’s a matter of respect.”
Judioni grimaced. He didn’t like it when people stood up to him and even less when they mocked him to his face. But knowing Mallock’s reputation, and in conformity with his own, he preferred to give way at the beginning, the better to regain control later on.
“Okay, let’s go,” he yelled, his arm in the air like Alexander the Great ordering his elephants to invade a sandbox.
Mallock had no difficulty finding the footprints he’d found in the mud the day before.
“Don’t worry, the clearing isn’t too far away,” he said, noting the delicate city shoes the judge was wearing.
“What are we looking for?” the latter asked.
“If you had time to read my memo, you must have realized that we’re playing it by ear in this case. I don’t like that, but I can’t do anything about it.”
“But still, Superintendent? Although I may be able to put up with your usual charming artistic vagueness, my superiors won’t.”
Goddamn viper, Mallock thought.
“Let’s say, to make things simple, that one of the leads in the investigation brought me to this forest. And that whatever my doubts about the usefulness of this line of inquiry, I have to take it all the way. At least in order to be sure.”
“Sure about what? If you don’t mind my asking, Mallock.”
About what a fucking asshole you are, Mallock decided not to say, replacing it with a simple rectification:
“I’d prefer ‘Superintendent,’ if that’s okay with you, Judge.”
Judioni let a few seconds pass.
“According to your report, we owe this chance to wade through mud at the crack of dawn to your channeling séances. Whereas no new evidence has corroborated the statements made by your Manuel Gemoni. I hope you’re not leading me on a fool’s errand. It would be a mistake, Superintendent, to take me for I’m something I’m not.”
“Don’t worry about that, Judge, I take you for exactly what you are,” Mallock retorted, all smiles. “You’re not risking anything in that regard. And so far as this . . . ‘errand’ is concerned, let’s just say that in my view the very existence of this clearing, as well as the presence of a well full of swallows, are facts disturbing enough to continue to dig into this, in the literal as well as the figurative senses.”
They looked at each other. Predatory smiles. No love lost between these two.
The judge looked away first, on the pretext of the roughness of the terrain.
“You’re giving us a hard time, Superintendent.”
“Trekking in search of the truth is motivating, isn’t it? And then it’s a change for you.”
The attack was perverse.
Judioni preferred to talk about something else.
“To sum up, if I understand correctly, it’s the young woman that your Manuel is supposed to have killed that we’re looking for today?”
Mallock gulped.
How could he tell him that it was not the body of the victim but that of the murderer, imprisoned and alive in Paris, that he hoped to find at the bottom of the well?
He himself didn’t dare believe it, or at least he didn’t dare express the matter so crudely. He was perfectly aware that without having experienced the extraordinary sequence of events that had led him to this point, no one could understand the decisions he was now making. It was in total contradiction with logic and the long rationalist tradition of the criminal police in the French Republic. But on the other hand, you didn’t lie to a judge. Especially since his threats were not empty. He knew the man. Maybe it was better to evade the issue, to delay, to be ambiguous and equivocal, indulge in vagueness, anacoluthon, and amphiboly?
Since the beginning of this case, Mallock had been very lucky and enjoyed great freedom. He had taken advantage of his notoriety to lead the investigation down paths that others would not have been allowed to follow. In normal times, with a normal superintendent, a normal judge would not have let himself be mystified this way without demanding an explanation from the cop in charge.
But after all, a guy like that doesn’t deserve the truth, Mallock decided, giving one last glance at the judge’s hesitant steps in his fancy shoes. He wouldn’t know what to do with it. Not used to it. So after having thought about it, and in total contradiction of his good intentions, Mallock decided to lie.
“Absolutely, Judge, it’s the young woman in question.”
Sometimes you have to know how to make it simple.
Ten minutes’ walk and a few acerbic exchanges later, the whole group arrived at the clearing. In the full sunlight, the place, though it did not have the disturbing appearance it had had the day before, still retained a good share of its mystery.
The ruined well, the hundreds of swallow skeletons, the triangular stone, and the dead dog made up a strange picture, half rebus, half enigma. “You’ll never discover the secret of the swallows’ cemetery!” the clearing seemed to say to the new arrivals.
After having noted the exact placement of the cross, the forensic team set it outside the well and began digging. Mallock restrained his desire to get down in the well and dig along with them. He waited, smoking a cigar, one of the robustos he’d brought back from the Dominican Republic. He took the opportunity to photograph the scene and to examine the cross more closely. It was in fact the initials MPF that were carved on it. And the wood had been varnished, at least three coats. At its tips there were four ornaments in gilt bronze, in the form of leaves. The work was professional, not something done hastily. On the wood one could also see, despite the time passed, what might be the remains of fingerprints, though much too faint. Then Mallock had an idea. Using a screwdriver, he started detaching the bronze tips. The metal leaves yielded easily, and the nails, though rusty, were too small to offer much resistance. Under the central leaf at the bottom of the cross, a clear thumbprint had survived. Mallock signaled to one of the forensic men and asked him to take the print. Pointless? Probably.
But in this case, everything seemed pointless confronted by a truth that escaped all discernment.
An hour and a half later, logic reminded Mallock’s memories of its presence. One of the shovels made a metallic sound. It had just hit a stone. Continuing to dig carefully, one of the specialists uncovered the top of the stone. Then another stone next to it. But nothing was ever to be simple in this case. They were all expecting a new discovery. Further down, it was the rational that was waiting for them. They had arrived at the bottom of the well, and there was no body of either a man or a woman.
Hiding both his disappointment and his profound perplexity, Mallock ordered soil samples taken at different depths before slipping away to escape Judge Judioni’s possible, and very legitimate, questions.
It took him barely a quarter of an hour, walking in the reverse direction, to reach his car. A tiny, lonely cloud in the form of an inkblot passed in front of the sun. Mallock shivered. In relation to Manuel’s statements, he had one more cross and one less body.What the devil was he going to do with an equation like that?
A cold, platinum-colored sunlight was reflecting off all the chromed parts of his car. Since he’d come out of the forest, Mallock hadn’t stopped thinking. He threw three coins in the basket at the toll plaza and swore as he floored the accelerator. He’d made up his mind. Since it seemed increasingly evident that he couldn’t control events, he was going to speed them up; from now on, he was going to be the one who struck the blows. Head-butts, straight to the solar plexus.
Mallock knew how to do that.
But one question remained.
Who was the enemy here? Who was the man to bring down? A dead Krinkel, a living Manu, or a phantasmal Lafitte? Was he going to have to plunge into the depths of the irrational or return to the shore, get out of the water, stand on terra firma, and see Manuel Gemoni for what he probably was, a deranged killer?
Amédée was well aware that had Manu not been Julie’s brother, that’s exactly what he would have thought and done. Wasn’t it time for him to regain his spirits and follow, with his complete divisional superintendent’s panoply, his favorite recipe: first an investigation, a carbon copy, then an interrogation, another carbon copy, and then bam! Incarceration? But that was just it: Julie was involved, and he couldn’t let her down.
Although . . . a little part of Amédée began to murmur down deep in the great Mallock.
A flash suddenly returned his attention to the road. He let up on the accelerator, slowing the car. Too late, there was a damned radar!
What was it with this shitty society, Mallock began to grumble, in which you can no longer drive, eat, smoke, or work as much as you can, or tell the truth to anyone you want, in the words that come to you? What was this fucking purgatory in which men, reduced to the lowest common denominator, lived only emasculated, assisted, insured, Botoxed, lobotomized, obsessed with lotteries, liposuctioned, and snagged by radars? Goddamn soft life, in which people went with their tails between their legs, self-censored, and with careful steps, to pick up their registered mail or the results, duly reimbursed, of their colonoscopies!
When he arrived in Paris, Amédée was still grumbling. The sun had set, and as dark fell snow began to fall on the capital again.
So far as the case was concerned, Amédée’s brain had continued to work in the background, and his mind was made up. There was only one place to dig now, and much more deeply than in the clearing: Manu’s head! If the truth was to emerge, it wouldn’t be from the well, but from his damned noggin. Mallock simply had to be sure that it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as the phrase went.
He had an idea of how to do that.
He parked his car on a sidewalk near police headquarters on the Quai des Orfèvres by ramming into a kind of mountain of dirty snow and immaculate new flakes. When he got to his office, he immediately dialed Master Long’s number. Long, who wanted to do some Christmas shopping near Châtelet, suggested they meet in Mallock’s cavern: the offices of the criminal police.
“It would give me great pleasure to visit Maigret’s lair,” he said.
“In half an hour?” Amédée proposed, only too happy not to have to go out.
“Let’s say in two hours. I have sixteen grandchildren.” Kong Long hung up with a laugh.
While he waited, Mallock opened the report Daranne had just deposited on his desk. The work he’d asked for when he was still in the Dominican Republic. It was, as always, solid investigative work done the old-fashioned way. Bob had looked into what Manuel Gemoni knew. Sixty typed pages, poorly presented and a pain to read, but apparently exhaustive.
The upshot was that nothing connected Manu directly with the Dominican Republic, Darbier, or any Israeli activists. Only the very insular personalities of Julie’s and Manu’s two grandfathers might offer something to look into. The stories told about the two old men were full of superlatives. They knew the whole world, they had defeated the Nazis practically single-handed, and they had hung out with all the godfathers of all the mafias of Italy and of the universe.
But what could he do with this information?
A single, very complicated hypothesis occurred to Mallock: the idea of a contract put out on Darbier that Manu had agreed to carry out in exchange for a small fortune or a family clan’s eternal gratitude. Unless he’d been brainwashed to force him to accomplish this mission? But then why choose Manu, when there were plenty of professional killers? The whole thing just didn’t make sense, and Mallock decided to drop it.
He immediately moved on to another hypothesis.
Amédée worked without stopping, and never ceased to learn things. During each investigation, no matter how modest, he analyzed every hypothesis, whether impossible or probable, with the same energy, and never failed to examine systematically all the dead ends and byways. Mallock wasn’t always right, but very often he was. Too often, for those who were jealous of him. They were wrong; Mallock didn’t compare himself with anyone, he assessed, tested, and challenged himself. For him, the point was not to be better than others, but simply to try to become better than he was, and never to stop trying.
Master Long came into Mallock’s office carrying big bags filled with presents from the Samaritaine department store. A few pieces of confetti adhering to his goatee showed that he had come by way of the Christmas festivities and display windows. Amédée closed Bob’s report and gave the professor a warm welcome. Then, without wasting any time, he began. What he had to say wouldn’t please the old man, and Mallock didn’t like wounding people unnecessarily.
“As you know, Master, we have obtained authorization for only five interrogations. I want to make them as advantageous as possible for our side. To ensure that, I would like the next interrogation, the fourth, to be conducted after Manu has been injected with benzodiazepines.”
There was a silence that Mallock respected. Each one in his turn.
Now it was for Long to counterattack:
“Have you lost confidence in me?”
“That’s not the problem. By combining your procedure with one that is, shall we say, more Western, I could make what Manuel says more credible. That’s where we are at this point. We can’t worry about personal sensitivities any longer. Believe me, mine have already suffered a great deal!”
Mallock realized he wouldn’t have the patience to negotiate at length.
“My reticence is not a matter of defending my . . . procedures,” Long replied. “You know, if hypnosis is the embarrassing past of psychoanalysis, it is also its future. Time is on my side.”
“So what are your objections?”
Long made a doubtful face accentuated by his goatee. Finally he said:
“Well, apart from the fact that I don’t much like chemical substances, I don’t really have any.”
“So we agree to use benzodiazepine to be sure?”
“What exactly do you want to inject into him? A truth serum?”
Mallock scratched his index finger and the tip of his thumb. In the bottom of the well, a spider must have bitten his fingers, because they were now itching terribly.
“I’m fortunate enough to know a specialist who has devoted his whole life to exploring the concept of reality. Raymond-Roger de Trencavel. This guy has a kind of personal obsession: truth. After thirty years of experimentation and research, he knows everything about his subject, from the precise reliability of the different types of lie detectors to the effects of LSD. Benzodiazepines, used in the dosages he has determined, produce remarkable results, but their use remains illegal, and under normal circumstances I wouldn’t resort to him. Here, it’s different, and we have the full permission of Manuel, his family, and his lawyer. Just between us, it would be stupid to deprive ourselves of his services. Besides, Trencavel told me that he had heard of your work. He’s eager to meet you. When would that be convenient for you?”
“You have a funny way of asking people’s opinions,” Long said, shaking his head.
Mallock nobly concealed his personal victory behind a smile of boundless gratitude. He even saw Kong Long out of the building and helped him load all his presents into the taxi.
Nice, no?