The sun and ice, the mist and light of the early morning, were making it difficult to see out the windshield. Mallock adjusted the heat to try to clear his view. Two days of storms, snowfall, and rain had changed the landscape. The white walls bordering the autoroute had been replaced by cliffs of ice formed of gigantic stalagmites shining like glass in the sun. One jarring detail in this impressive setting: the superintendent was whistling. Very rare for Mallock.
It was probably the optimism that this winter sun and the arrival of his friends produced. Thirty minutes to get to Orly. He turned on his iPod: J. J. Cale, Arcade Fire, Bach, Evora, Taj Mahal, Stan Getz, Camille, Bebo Valdez, Brel, Trotignon, Poulenc, Robert Wyatt, Mozart, Grandaddy, Big Soul, Brassens, Calas, Delerue, Shakira, Andrews Sisters, Monk, Sonny & Cher, Divine Comedy, Coltrane, Brel, Carlos Gardel, David Bowie, Calogero, Zappa, Laurie Anderson… An endless list, and a personal compilation made with the same eclecticism as his melancholic, greedy bear’s brain. In the company of so much talent, time passed almost too fast, despite the beginning of a traffic jam at the juncture of the ring road and the autoroute. Mallock arrived five minutes late, but he wasn’t too upset about that. Mordome was waiting for him at arrivals. The two friends embraced one another and Mallock opened the car’s trunk for him.
“Did you sleep well?”
“Like a stone. But I’m still a little dull. And then I forgot one important detail: I don’t have my torture instruments. I hadn’t foreseen . . . ”
“Don’t worry, I’ve asked my new collaborator to bring her personal toolkit, and the guys from the Judicial Identity Office will also be there.”
“And even bodies?”
“As for that, I warned you. We’re not sure of anything. But at least we’ll have the pleasure of talking to one another.”
They smiled. The two friends were happy to see each other and to be working together again. Too bad they had to wait for the first gray hairs to realize that.
“By the way, do you know that you’re making headlines throughout the world?”
“With what? I’m working only on the Darbier case at the moment.”
“Yes, precisely! I flipped through various foreign rags in the plane. They talk about you and your mysterious investigation. Since the case with the poisoner, you’re a star, old man. And then this present ‘case’ is far from banal. The reincarnation business fascinates everyone.”
Mallock wasn’t surprised. Just worried. It was never good to be in the spotlight, and worse when it became international. The press, in any country, now had only three angles: polemics, coronation, and lynching. It wasn’t good, not good at all, more and more just show, beneath all these Klieg lights. How many pretty butterflies or vain thespians had burned their wings on them?
“What do they say about it?”
Mordome hesitated, searching for words, before he began. He knew that Mallock was sensitive to attacks:
“Honestly, they aren’t going easy on you. Since they showered you with praise during your last investigation, they’re going for the simplest thing: they’re questioning your abilities, especially your mental abilities. The English are talking about the ‘lunatic Inspector Mallock.’ I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think it’s better for you to know. Note that it hasn’t all been critical, you also have numerous admirers who—”
“Don’t bother, Barnabé. Anyway, I deserve some of the criticism. I’ve had problems from the beginning, and stuck my head in the sand like an ostrich. Though they’d spit out their venom even if I hadn’t!”
Three minutes of silence before Mordome went on:
“One thing surprised me, all the same. They seem damn well informed. They know everything: the hypnosis sessions, the theory of reincarnation, the existence of this Lieutenant Lafitte, Krinkel, everything. Are you sure you can trust your men and your communication networks?”
“Absolutely, they’re protected to death, Barnabé. Nothing comes out of the Fort. If there are leaks, they’re elsewhere.”
With this disturbing observation, silence fell again. It lasted until the arrival at the edge of the Forest of Biellanie. Mallock needed to think and Mordome needed to sleep a little.
The forest was crawling with people. And Mallock had to identify himself three times in order to come within five hundred yards of the well, where a kind of parking lot had been improvised.
He turned to Mordome:
“I put two pairs of boots in the trunk, one for you and one for me, but with the cold and the rain that has fallen, the ground is frozen. The rubber soles slip too much. Might as well keep our shoes on. I saw that you had . . . ”
It’s not only other people who talk without saying anything, his always vigilant little inner voice pointed out.
At the same moment, Jo and Julie came up to them.
“Marie-Joséphine, what a pleasant surprise!” Mordome exclaimed.
He took Jo in his arms and gave her a big kiss. Mallock looked at him, astonished.
“I did an internship of a month and a half with Professor Mordome, Superintendent, and that creates ties. I did mention it to you,” Jo said, turning toward her new boss.
“For me, they were six weeks of great satisfaction with this pupil, I have to admit,” Mordome added with a big smile. “So you’re the famous new recruit who was supposed to be bringing me an instrument case?”
“Exactly, Professor. I don’t have everything, but almost.”
Jo handed Mordome a good-sized steel pilot case.
“If you need anything else, just ask the crime scene technician over there by the well. He has a whole panoply of instruments in his van.”
“Thanks, Jo,” Mallock said. “Could you take a series of soil samples all around and on the triangular stone? If there is in fact a cadaver under there, at least some hair must have survived. For the rest, where are we?”
“At 7 A.M. the specialized team began scanning the soil. And they found several interesting things. But when it comes to digging, that’s another matter. The earth is like permafrost and they had to use heavy-duty equipment.”
At the same moment an officer who had recognized Mallock came up to the group with a friendly smile:
“Hello, Superintendent. I believe I have good news.”
His team of technicians had been working since dawn.
“Southwest of the well, at a distance of about thirty yards, we discovered that the soil didn’t have the same composition, and that this extended over a regular surface three yards by five.”
Captain Jean-Marie Mireille was a tall, husky man with a combination of mustache, nose, and glasses that seemed to be all of a piece, like the pasteboard masks people put on to disguise themselves.
“Let me tell you. At first, we thought we’d found a pile of stones,” the gendarme went on. “It could be the walls of what used to be a house. That’s usually what we find in this area. With the Gauls, the Merovingians, and the Romans, not to mention still older constructions, the soil of our lovely country is a genuine museum. Sometimes there are even several layers of successive habitation. I remember having found one site that went back more than ten thousand years.”
Mallock’s frown, followed by a clenching of his jaw, gave Mireille the hint. Maybe he shouldn’t go too much into history and get on with it.
“To come to the point, we ran all this data through our imaging programs and I can tell you right now that we are, a priori, above a tomb or an ossuary. We have identified at least three human skulls, for the moment, and what seem to be military helmets. Is that what you’re looking for?”
Following the instructions Mallock had given, neither Jo nor Julie had said what the precise and final goal of these excavations was. But everyone–even gendarmes, Daranne would have said, like a good cop but a bad comrade–knows how to read. The case had been in all the newspapers, along with Amédée Mallock’s . . . divagations and fanciful ideas. Another reason for the Mallock in question to be a little careful, for once, about what he said:
“It was one of the possibilities. In any case, you’ve done a good job.”
The gendarme gave him a big smile. Amédée was reassured to note that there was in fact a row of real teeth and a very pink tongue hidden under the cardboard nose and his mustache’s brush of black whiskers.
He asked politely:
“When do you think you’ll have finished excavating the grave, Captain?”
The war between the police forces was real, and between the two ethnic groups you had to mediate gently and use kid gloves.
“My men have just begun. The ground is frozen. We’ll need a good two hours to reach the right level, Superintendent.”
Charles Coudret appeared behind him. The gamekeeper seemed astonished to see Mallock again:
“I thought you’d finished with my clearing after the session last week. You didn’t find anything, did you?”
Amused by Coudret’s use of the possessive, Mallock smiled at the good man:
“That was another reason to come back. I’m tenacious, some would say stubborn. How is your bite?”
Coudret lifted his forearm and held it horizontal.
“I’m getting the stitches taken out the day after tomorrow. Afterward I’ll be as good as new. Can I stay and watch, without bothering you?”
“Of course, this is your land, isn’t it?”
“That’s kind of you. Would you like some chestnuts, Superintendent?” the gamekeeper asked.
Just then the judge’s car arrived at the site and Jack Judioni got out with great pomp. Mallock greeted him vaguely and from a distance, amused to see him coming equipped with big yellow boots and a fluorescent orange hard hat.
Busy taking photos of the site a few yards away, Jo looked at Mallock. Instead of attending to the judge and trying to win over the officials who were growing more numerous with each new search, there he was hanging out with the local forest warden. Her divisional superintendent’s sympathies and priorities were as disconcerting as he himself was.
But the judge was a good-looking man, she decided, like a true female.
Around 1 P.M., something changed.
Mallock was still peeling and eating the chestnuts Coudret had brought him after grilling them in his fireplace, but he had understood. They still heard the sounds of the shovels, but the metallic concert was now dominated by the sound of rakes and spatulas scraping the earth. The two teams of excavators were talking less loudly. Some of them had fallen silent, while others were murmuring.
There was no doubt; they’d found bodies.
Mallock waited another good quarter of an hour, long enough to finish off the last four stubborn chestnuts, and then got up. Captain Mireille was coming to see him.
“We’re there. It is in fact a grave. We’ve found ten skeletons.”
“There should be eleven,” Mallock grumbled.
The gendarme looked at him, astonished. Nonetheless, he had been warned. Mallock, alias Dédé-the-Wizard, lived in another world, with his own certitudes and information that came from no one knew where. But from that to divining the number of bodies in a grave that no one even knew existed two hours earlier?
He accompanied the Parisian superintendent as far as the grave, with a mixture of respect and fear. Mordome was already there, on all fours, brushing soil from the skull of the eleventh skeleton that he had just discovered underneath number three.
He got up when Mallock arrived.
“Stop right there. I can’t tell you their first or last names. Let’s say that they have been there for more than fifty years and less than eighty. On the other hand, six of them have been severely tortured.”
“Severely?” Mallock asked.
“We can say that. For example, in one case all the bones of the head have been fractured. Whoever did it was really relentless. In some cases the legs and feet have been crushed by blows from a sledgehammer. Also in vivo.”
That was Tobias Darbier’s signature. Mallock remembered what he had been told by both Doctor Barride, in the Dominican Republic, and Manuel, during his first interrogation: the terrible death of his friend Thibaut Trabesse, massacred by Oberleutnant Klaus Krinkel. Were all the horrors he’d heard during these last weeks true, then? Mallock suddenly felt sick. The sight of these broken bones covered with earth had just overwhelmed him. Up to that point, the whole story had remained imaginary. The ogre was only a virtual bogeyman, a fairy-tale character who had emerged from Manuel’s nightmares. And Mallock had been only a lost superintendent, trying to find his way back to the path of reason.
These bones crushed by human brutality, these fractured tibias and teeth rising, like white cries, out of their gangue, had just made the scale’s needle swing toward Manu and his incredible revelations.
Mallock climbed down into the grave and knelt down, both to avoid falling and to be at the right height to pick up a bit of bone. He chose a jaw fragment. He put it on the index and middle fingers of his right hand and caressed it slowly with his thumb.
“What are you doing, Amédée?”
Mordome, who knew him well, had noticed his friend’s state of mind.
“Barbarism, you have to actually touch it for it to touch you, Barnabé. See it to know it. Damn and double damn!”
Mallock put the fragment of a jaw back exactly where he’d found it, and then added:
“There is so much passion in these bones, you understand?”
“If you say so.”
Mordome hated sentimentality, especially concerning his daily lot: the bodies of people murdered by his fellows. There’s nobody in a dead body, he kept telling his students. Even if, paradoxically, he inculcated respect for the victims in them.
“Eleven bodies,” Mallock repeated, without taking offense at the apparent insensitivity of his friend. “Except for the youngest member of the unit, Gaston Wrochet, they’re all there. Though we still have to prove that they’re soldiers.”
Jo, who had come over to them, interrupted him:
“That’s no problem. Not far from the well, the second team has just found the remains of a fire. In them they identified several partly melted pieces of metal: military insignias and uniform buttons. For the moment, they haven’t been able to determine their exact origin, but they’ll get there.”
At the same moment, Julie joined them.
“Boss? Isn’t Lieutenant Lafitte supposed to have buried a chain? The one that held the famous heart?”
“According to Manu, yes. You know that as well as I do.”
“No, it was during the interrogation on Friday, the one with Long and Trencavel, that he’s supposed to have told you that. I wasn’t there. But I heard something about it.”
“Ah! Right, in fact. Well, he told me that he’d taken the heart off the chain so that he could swallow it, and then he threw the chain on the ground. He said he stepped on it so that the Germans wouldn’t find it. You’ll need to look for it near the . . . ”
Without saying a word, Julie slowly opened her hand. In it there was soil and, shining as on its first day, a golden chain.
Of course, Mallock didn’t react as his collaborators expected him to. No sign of satisfaction, or even of astonishment. He turned to the gendarmerie captain and gave him an order that no one understood at the moment:
“Halt the search in the grave and around the well, Captain. We have what we need. A hundred yards to the south, you’ll find the remains of a house. I would like you and the guys from Judicial Identity to dig around it. But carefully.“
“We’ll get on it right away, Superintendent.”
Jean-Marie Mireille seemed to have adjusted to the situation. With someone like Mallock, you had to not try too hard to understand. And then one of the great joys of the soldier’s profession is clicking his heels and obeying blindly, even stupidly. Only those who have never practiced this sport will scorn its frank and subtle pleasure. However, Mallock detained the captain and the head of the crime scene squad before they climbed out of the grave.
He searched for words and then said:
“We’re looking for bones that have been burned and perhaps gnawed. Little bones . . . ”
“What do you mean by ‘little’?”
A deep sigh from Mallock.
“Bones of children, maybe even babies.”
Apart from Julie, who had been there when Manuel made his latest revelations, everyone present looked at Mallock as if he had finally lost all common sense.
Then he finished:
“What we’re looking for is in fact the remains of a meal.”
Captain Mireille and the other witnesses took several seconds to accept the relation between the words “meal” and “babies.” When they understood, a new stage was reached in silence. As they moved away to mark out a new search zone, an immense wave of cold bore down on the clearing. The vanguard of a storm that was still gathering strength in the icy upper spheres of the Arctic.
At nightfall, the first little skeletons were found. Charles Coudret decided it was high time for him to go home. His wife must be waiting for him, and now he no longer had any forest. His woods were cursed from now on, forever contaminated. My God, babies eaten! Overwhelmed by what had happened in his forest, he left without saying farewell to his friend the superintendent.
There are times like that, when one doesn’t dare look any more, ashamed simply to be a human being.
As the last bits of sky were melting among the branches, Mallock finally understood what there was at night in addition to everything you could see during the day. What terrorized Manu when he was young. The extra thing that was in his room.
This monster that came when night fell, the mysterious element that disappeared when the sun returned, was obscurity.