The bell of the Opéra Municipal of Marseille echoed brightly from the gallery stairway to the marble of the main function room. It stopped abruptly when Michel de Palma burst into the Reyer Hall. Félix Merlino, the ancient cloakroom attendant, patted down the few locks of curly hair which still fringed his gleaming scalp.
“Ah, Michel! You’re the last!”
Merlino grimaced, making his massive chin rise and his pale lips droop.
“Hello, Féli, has it started?”
“Oh yes, it’s started! For the last time this year. Come on, Baron, get a move on …”
The Baron. Commandant Michel de Palma’s nickname. The idea had come from Jean-Louis Maistre, his blood-brother on the Brigade Criminelle, who had started calling him that one evening, as a joke after a few too many drinks. He thought it suited the “de” of his surname, his slender build and melancholy aristocratic manner.
The Baron pushed open the padded doors that led to the first balcony, paused for a moment, then glanced around at the audience, as he had always done ever since his father had initiated him into serious theater when he was still a little boy.
The auditorium was bathed in velvet, and crammed from the first row of stalls up to the gods. The air was laden with sour breath, musky perfumes and the dust of face powder. From the orchestra rose a riot of trills, scales and snatches of melody twisting around each other like superheated atoms. De Palma spotted Capitaine Anne Moracchini of the Criminelle and nodded to her discreetly. He was at least an hour late. In the ten years that they had been working together in the Police Judiciaire, this was the first time that he had invited her to the opera; at the very last moment, too, because this was the final performance of La Bohème that season.
Darkness had fallen when he sat down beside her.
The first few minutes passed by. Moracchini seemed totally wrapped up in the music, which trembled in the air around them. Then the old man in the gods who for years had been coughing at the start of each performance suddenly stopped. An electric sigh ran through the opera house and silence descended.
Rodolfo walked toward the front of the stage:
“Che gelida manina
Se la lasci riscaldar
Cercar che giova? Al buio non si trova.”
Instead of looking at Mimi, Rodolfo never took his eyes off the conductor and stood on tiptoe each time he hit the middle register and compressed his diaphragm.
“Chi son? Sono un poeta.
Che fascio, scrivo …”
In the end, Rodolfo didn’t do too badly for an end-of-season show, but de Palma felt disappointed. Under the cover of the applause, he crept out of the auditorium. In the Reyer Hall, Félix Merlino was pacing up and down, lowering his heels in slow motion so as not to make the parquet creak.
De Palma turned on his mobile. Two messages had been left that day, Saturday, July 5. The first had arrived at 7:58 p.m., just before he had entered the opera house, and the second at 8:37 p.m., presumably while Rodolfo had been sounding off in his garret in Montmartre.
“Good evening, Commandant de Palma. Maître Chandeler speaking. I’m a lawyer. The person who gave me your number would prefer to remain anonymous, but I’m taking the liberty of calling you. We don’t know each other, but I should very much like to meet you so as to discuss a case … as soon as possible would be best, if that’s alright with you. Say Monday the 7th? See you very soon, I hope.”
It was a male voice that made its nasal consonants sing slightly, both deep and smooth at the same time. The second message was also from Chandeler, leaving a different mobile number and begging him not to give it to anyone else.
Félix Merlino came up to the Baron and pointed at the phone.
“Turn that thing off at once. If ever I hear the damn thing ring, I’ll …”
“Don’t fret, Féli. In any case, there’s no need to worry considering the warblers on stage this evening.”
“You should have heard the first cast. Then you’d have really heard something …”
“Oh really? Because this lot sound like the mistral rattling the shutters in my ex-mother-in-law’s house.”
“That’s right! It’s a disaster tonight.”
“But they’re still applauding …”
“People clap anything these days. Not like before … You remember?”
De Palma raised his eyes to the ceiling and waved his right hand over his shoulder in a sign of shared nostalgia with Merlino.
“When things were as bad as tonight, they even had to call in the police sometimes to calm the audience down!”
Félix Merlino shook his head and, with his foot, swept away a scrap of lace which must have been torn off a gown.
“We haven’t seen you for ages, Michel. The other day I was talking to the pianist Jean-Yves, you know, the singing coach, and he asked after you …”
“You know I had a bad accident?”
“I read about it in the paper. But you look better now.”
De Palma did not reply, but looked at the square tiles of the parquet. Applause could be heard coming from the auditorium, muffled by the padded doors. Merlino walked reverently over to the varnished doors of the dress circle and opened them in the manner of a sacristan with a cathedral doorway.
Anne Moracchini tapped de Palma on the shoulder.
“Well, for a night at the opera it was quite a success!”
“I’m sorry, Anne. I did try to get seats for …”
She looked at his mobile and pulled a wry face.
The police capitaine was wearing a black pencil skirt that revealed her knees, and a silk purple top onto which her dark hair tumbled down. Her legs were clad in sheer stockings that clung to the curve that rose from her fine ankles to her knees. When his cheek brushed against hers, he recognized the peppery notes of Gicky, and felt a thrill.
“You left before the end! Didn’t you like it? I thought it was really good,” she said, laying a hand on his forearm.
He did not want to disappoint her on their first night at the opera together by telling her what he thought of the cast.
“Yes, yes, it was fine,” he replied, with a wink at Merlino.
He had never seen her look so beautiful, so elegant. Usually she wore trainers or flat shoes, jeans, and a bomber jacket over a T-shirt or pullover, depending on the season. And of course the Manurhin revolver that she wore in the small of her back, to keep it inconspicuous.
“Come on, let’s have a drink,” said de Palma at last, rousing himself from this trance of admiration. He ordered two glasses of champagne and they went back to the main hall.
“It’s marvelous here! All this art deco stuff. What’s that on the ceiling?”
“A painting by Augustin Carrera, Orpheus Charming the World …”
“I sometimes wonder what the hell you’re doing in the force,” she said, with a sideways glance.
“So do I. But I have my reasons.”
“I hope you do.”
Moracchini gazed at the huge Carrera fresco, before examining the details of the metalwork and gilt masks along the cast-iron balconies. The Baron’s mobile rang.
“Change that ring tone, Michel. It grates!”
“M. de Palma?”
He knew the voice at once.
“Speaking. One moment please.”
The Baron sat down on a purple divan, set a little apart from the crowd.
“This is Yves Chandeler. I’m a lawyer.”
De Palma paused for a moment, taking control.
“Yes?”
“Um … did you get my message?”
“I did.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
He did not like the way this plummy voice prolonged each open vowel it came across. It suggested a childhood spent in Marseille’s best private schools, in a society that de Palma knew nothing about, but tended to despise.
Again, he imposed a moment’s silence.
“Not at all.”
“I’ll get straight to the point. When can I see you?”
He felt like saying that people seldom asked him questions that were more like barely concealed orders, that he had no idea why this man was calling him and that he did not want to see anyone except Anne Moracchini. Instead he replied perfunctorily:
“Monday, 4 p.m. in your office? Does that suit you?”
“Today’s Saturday so … yes, that will be perfect. I’m at 58 cours Pierre-Puget. I suppose you know where that is.”
“Indeed, not a very original address for a lawyer.”
“No, you’re right. Next door to the high court!”
“See you on Monday, then.”
He hung up without a goodbye. Moracchini walked over to him, holding her glass of champagne.
“I suppose that horrible ringing means that the interval’s over? And are you planning to let me go back to seat number 35 all on my own?”
“No, Anne, certainly not!”
He slid a hand around her waist.
It was 2 a.m. when de Palma drew up in front of the little house Moracchini owned in Château-Gombert, at 28 chemin de la Fare, the last remainder of her marriage.
The air was alive inside the car. She looked at him hard. He lowered the window for a breath of air.
“No, I’m going home … I need to sleep. I don’t feel so good. In fact, I’ve …”
“You’ve got another of your migraines. Come here and I’ll give you a massage.”
She laid her long fingers on his temples and rubbed gently.
“What does your doctor say?”
“He says he doesn’t know, like all the doctors!”
Moracchini continued her massage, tracing small circles above his eyebrows, then she withdrew her hands like a caress, took hold of his temples and squeezed them gently.
“Do you remember, Anne?”
“Yes, I do, but I don’t want to talk about it …”
“Nowadays, I think about it less, but a month ago I kept on playing the film in my head like a loop from hell. Non-stop.”
She pressed the top of his skull softly and raked through his hair with her nails.
“I can still see myself going into the Le Guen cave and reaching the bottom. I’ve never told anyone, but if you only knew how frightened I was. Guts in a knot, balls on the ground.”*
“That’s pretty …”
“So to speak.”
He breathed deeply and shut his eyes.
“I can still see those marvelous paintings, how impressive they were. I can’t describe how I felt, seeing the hands of prehistoric men. And then I saw her. And he was behind me. I turned …” De Palma’s breathing speeded up. He closed his eyes and turned his head in a circle. “I can see myself spinning round on my left leg, and firing at him … Then he hit me smack on the forehead. It was like being struck by lightning.”
“It’s made you into a top cop, with a medal and accolades and all. Plus a good deal of jealousy. Well done. And I might add it’s not done away with your charm.”
“His strength was superhuman. I often think about that. My aim was straight, I can see myself lining it up … I’ll never get it out of my mind that he managed to dodge a bullet. He had the reflexes of a great prehistoric hunter, I’m sure of it. He was stronger and quicker than a normal man. Compared with him, we’re all degenerates.”
“You’re talking as if you admired him!”
“He dodged a .38 bullet! Lightning versus lightning. At incredible speeds. You can’t help respecting something like that. Do you see?”
“What I see is that he’s going to go down for life, and that it’s thanks to you.”
“You could also say that I missed him!”
“I’ve never said that.”
“In any case, I didn’t arrest him on my own.”
“Thank you, from all the little cops like me, Michel.”
Almost imperceptibly, she drew him against her breasts. He sensed that they were tense beneath the thin fabric. She stroked his forehead tenderly, just where the man who called himself “the Hunter” had hit him with his tomahawk.
“I’m going home, Anne.”
“As you want, boss.”
She moved her hands down to the nape of his neck, and met his mouth with lips swollen with desire.
Isabelle has just had her third child.
The Baron has received an invitation.
A pale blue card with a photo of the little fellow.
He is called Michel, just like him.
Isabelle wanted that. In memory of that firebrand policeman who crossed her path.
Isabelle has always been a friend to him.
And it is true that he has never let her down.
NEVER.
He has always prized the memory of the beautiful teenager he loved.
ALWAYS.
Isabelle wants Michel to be her third child’s godfather.
He is not sure if he will accept.
But he is thinking about it. He’s already refused twice.
She will end up thinking that he doesn’t care about her any more.
Poor Isabelle.
If only she knew how much the Baron thinks about her.
Night and day.
Day and night.
The paper had yellowed with the years.
It was written in the muscular hand of Commissaire Boyer, the father of police headquarters. Boyer the magnificent, who made people grow up in a single burst.
De Palma was naked on his bed. He still had Anne’s perfume on his lips. He could hear Boyer’s voice: “Bring him to me. Bring him in. Right here. I want to see him before the big farewell. De Palma, you go to the crime scene with Maistre. I think she’s still there. You’ll see about all that with Marceau. I want your opinion. You young people sometimes have new ideas.”
And Boyer the boss had written across the sheet of paper, with his big fat pencil, one end blue, the other red:
RAPE AND MURDER, in red.
And at the bottom, in blue: CASE UNSOLVED.
Name: Isabelle MERCIER.
Fair hair, 16 years old. 1m 63cm. 56 kilos.
28 rue des Prairies. 20th arrondissement.
Date of discovery of the body: December 20, 1978, at 9:56 p.m.
Case followed by Inspectors de Palma, Marceau and Maistre.
“Case unsolved,” the Baron repeated, smoothing the sheet between his thumb and index finger. The letters U.N.S.O.L.V.E.D. burned into his eyes.
“Bring him in!”
In his first notebook, the Baron had written: Isabelle Mercier.
And that was all.
*
At the top of the page, Isabelle’s photograph is stuck on with a paperclip.
It is an identity shot.
Black and white.
Isabelle is sixteen.
She is smiling shyly.
Her hair makes two commas on her velvet cheeks.
Maistre and de Palma arrive at 28 rue des Prairies.
It is the first time that Boyer the Terrible has entrusted them with a case.
And this one seems to mean a lot to him.
Isabelle is lying on her stomach.
Jean-Claude Marceau is looking out of the window.
The official photographer is staring at her, the corners of his mouth trembling.
“Maistre and de Palma …”
“Hello, lads. The old man is throwing you in at the deep end. Take a look. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
De Palma bends down.
He raises a lock of hair caught in the coagulated blood.
It is like a piece of caramel.
Beneath it, an eye stares at him dumbly.
An eye in the middle of nothing.
An eye without a face.
Jean-Claude turns round.
“To do that to a face, you really have to hit it hard. Fucking hard. Never seen anything like it, lads.”
Jean-Louis Maistre has gone to throw up.
De Palma swallows back his saliva.
He wants to keep the horror inside him.
And the horror is inside him.
Never forget.
“Hello, Maistre?”
“Have you seen what time it is, you bugger?”
“She’s back, Le Gros.”
“Yes.”
“She’s never been away …”
“I dreamed she sent me a card for the birth of her third child.”
“That’s funny, Baron. I had a dream just like that, too.”