1:19 P.M.
Laroche looks like an overwhelmed general, taken by surprise by an unforeseen development on the battlefield. He stands on the roof of a police van while the blanket of fog swirls about his face, making his hair go white and lending him the beard of a patriarch. The night-vision binoculars with their infrared beam, which are theoretically capable of helping them track a person in extreme conditions, hang uselessly around his neck.
About twenty officers are wandering around, barely able to recognise each other in the slowly fraying fog, like a riot squad in a square full of smoke after the protesters have thrown all their grenades then dispersed.
Aja approaches, accompanied by Jipé, who is clearly amused. Aja’s cool demeanour clashes with the wild-eyed expressions of the other cops. Laroche stares down at her from his high perch. He is too upset to bother with his usual diplomacy.
“Purvi . . . fantastic, that’s all we need! Aren’t you supposed to be leading the investigation in Saint-Gilles instead of sticking your nose in our business?”
Ordinarily, Aja would have replied without any attempt to be conciliatory, but she does actually feel sorry for the colonel, perched up there like a cockerel crowing orders at the hens below. The news will undoubtedly already have reached France—probably as high up as the Ministry—that a man and his six-year-old daughter have somehow managed to slip through the net, despite there being an unprecedented concentration of forces on the island.
Poor Laroche. He’ll probably end up being transferred to Kerguelen, or Crozet, or Tromelin. A police station all of his own, amid the terns and the penguins.
“You think this is funny, Purvi?”
The captain waves the white flag.
“No, Colonel, it makes me feel sorry. Most of all, sorry that I realized too late the cheap trick that Bellion was preparing.”
Laroche crouches down and jumps nimbly from the van, testing the grip of his new boots. He acts tough, as if an excess of authority can somehow make up for a lack of efficiency.
“No need to be sorry, Captain. He has us all fooled.”
Nervously, he lights a cigarette, then stares with surprise at Jipé’s helicopter. The company name, Up and Away, is painted on the side, along with the association’s logo—a wading bird in flight. He finishes his inspection with a glance at Jipé’s open shirt.
“Captain, did you thumb a lift here? You islanders are obviously more resourceful than I realized . . . And I don’t mean that bastard Bellion.”
A man wearing a white police hat is moving towards them, clutching a map that flutters in the wind. Rough concentric circles have been traced on it in felt-tip pen. Laroche points at it and gives orders. Spread out in a radius around the volcano. Make a systematic search of the area. Maintain radio contact at all times.
It’s a hopeless task, thinks Aja. One hundred square kilometers of forest to search . . .
“Are you interested in the island’s inhabitants, Colonel?” she asks. “I have a personal theory that our people are infinitely resourceful. I call it the Dodo Syndrome.”
“Aha?”
Laroche watches his men move away through the curtain of mist, their radios crackling like a chorus of cicadas. He takes a drag on his cigarette. If there’s any news, he’ll be the first to know.
“All right, Purvi, I’ll listen. What harm can it do? Teach me about your island. What is this Dodo Syndrome?”
Jipé winks at Aja. The captain doesn’t wait to be asked twice.
“People are often surprised, when they come to this island, to discover inhabitants who are not on holiday, who aren’t wearing flip-flops or flowery shirts over their tanned torsos. In fact, there are even people here who rush around all day, wearing ties, carrying folders, stuck in traffic jams, as stressed-out as Parisian commuters. So my Dodo Syndrome theory is really just a way of explaining why this idea—that Creoles are lazy by nature, with a tendency to daydream and other such crap—is all just a stupid cliché. You know about the dodo, don’t you, Colonel?”
Aja continues, without giving him time to reply:
“You will have seen images of it on the label of Bourbon beer bottles. It’s the island’s mascot. To be more precise, the experts here call it the solitaire. It’s very similar to the dodo found in Mauritius. Anyway, the experts think that the dodo, or the solitaire, arrived on Réunion by flying here. And then it stayed. Why wouldn’t it? This place was an Eden, an island with no predators. No mammals. No great apes, no big cats, no human beings. Not even any snakes or spiders. Our dodo originally resembled an ibis.”
Aja points at the slender bird painted on Jipé’s helicopter.
“According to studies, it was a kind of streamlined, supersonic bird that could fly across entire oceans. But a few hundred thousand years spent living in paradise changed it completely. Without any enemies to threaten you, why bother flying? The skeletons found on the island are surprising in every possible way. Over successive generations, the dodo’s wings gradually atrophied, becoming nothing more than ridiculous, useless little appendages. And then why bother running? Over time, the slim ibises became more like fat geese. Then why bother reproducing? Egg-laying became rare. Why bother sticking together? The communities fragmented into thousands of isolated families. The skeletons reveal exactly the same evolution in the dodos of Mauritius, the solitaires of Réunion Island, the Rodrigues pigeons . . .”
Laroche listens, amused, to Aja’s fable, while remaining alert for the faintest crackle from his walkie-talkie.
“So what, Purvi? You can’t blame the birds, can you? They discovered paradise in these remote islands. They chilled out for hundreds of thousands of years. As for your aesthetic judgements about their obesity . . . well, at least your fowl had the privilege of becoming a species that was completely unique.”
Aja smiles. It’s not that Laroche is stupid. It’s simply that she doesn’t want to play on the same team as him. She watches the last members of the commando unit move across the Pas de Bellecombe car park. Helicopter pilots. Elite snipers. Radio operators. All of them white. Every single one.
Aja looks Laroche straight in the eye.
“The dodos were fatally naïve. They forgot that there is no such thing as paradise. No one will ever know how many thousands of them were here when the first colonists arrived on the island in 1665. The dodos did not flee from the sailors. Quite the contrary. They had forgotten what fear was. And by the time they rediscovered it, it was too late. They no longer had wings to fly with, no longer had the strength to run away, no longer had the courage to unite and defend themselves. The dodos were all slaughtered in less than one generation. By the end of the seventeenth century, there was not a single one left on any of the Mascarene Islands.”
Aja falls silent. Laroche spits his cigarette stub out onto the ground.
“And the moral of your story, Captain Purvi? I presume there must be one?”
“You’re an educated man, Colonel. I don’t need to dot the i’s for you. All of the dominant majorities, every elite, has sought to transform us into dodos. They want a nice, quiet henhouse. Comfort, safety, laziness. Those islanders who calculate their welfare benefit in terms of how many liters of Charrette rum it will buy them wouldn’t disagree.”
Laroche pulls a face and Jipé laughs. The colonel hesitates, then claps his hands.
“O.K., Purvi, I get it. Dodos, inhabitants of remote islands, women in the police force . . . same fate, same battle. Thank you for the geography lesson. I’d like to continue our discussion some day. I’ve been around a few of the other French islands—the Antilles, Mayotte, New Caledonia—and I would say you don’t realize how lucky you are here. Your island is a pacified Garden of Eden, it’s almost unique in the world, without any racism or ethnic tension.”
Aja maintains eye contact with the colonel. She doesn’t confirm or deny his statement.
Laroche smiles, shrugs, and puts his hands on his belt. Like a cerebral cowboy, straight out of a Clint Eastwood film.
“Well, Captain, we can sermonise on this later, if you like. Just one thing: I don’t suppose you’ve had any news about the murders of Rodin or Chantal Letellier?”
“I’ve delegated, Colonel,” Aja replies. “If I had any new information at all, you would be the first to know.”
Laroche nods, then turns around to talk to a technician while Aja walks towards Jipé. She checks that Laroche is not listening to her any more.
“There’s one question that keeps bugging me, Jipé. Why the hell do you think Bellion climbed up here with his daughter?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? Because of the microclimate. Because the fog is at its densest here, this is where it rises out of the canyon the fastest.”
“All right, but if Bellion had wanted to disappear into scrubland, he could have left his Nissan wherever he wanted and gone straight into a forest. Bébour, Bélouve, Plaine des Lianes . . . there’s no shortage of them. And he wouldn’t have had to take any risks, or give us any clue to his whereabouts.”
“What are you thinking, Aja?”
“I’ve been turning this over in my mind. If he came up here, there’s only one explanation. He wanted to get to the other side of the volcano. He’d have had no chance along the coast road—he’d almost certainly have been caught. So there was only one solution: cut across the peak and try to get there on foot.”
Jipé thinks about this, going through his mental map of the island.
“So Bellion is headed somewhere between Saint-Benoît and Saint-Philippe? That’s nearly sixty kilometers of coastline to search.”
“Too much, I know. Especially as I feel sure he’ll reappear somewhere, and then go and vanish again straight afterwards. It’s what he’s done so far.”
Jipé looks up. Laroche is walking around the car park in his boots, mobile phone clamped to his ear.
“Are you going to mention this to the boss?”
“No fucking way!”
Halfway down the mountainside, the fog is beginning to disperse. At last, Aja can see a patch of ocean, to the east.
“Jipé, we have to be able to react if Bellion appears again . . . and we have to do it quickly. Could you lend me some equipment?”
“What kind of equipment?”
She hesitates, lowers her voice, and pulls the pilot further away from Laroche.
“Equipment for making a descent of two thousand meters in less than a minute. You know what I mean. A deltaplane, a paraglider, something like that.”
Jipé purses his lips, then looks over at the last members of the commando unit on the Pas de Bellecombe.
“I don’t want to make things difficult for you, Aja, but if I stick one of those X-men in a glider and let them go with the trade winds, they’ll end up in the middle of the Dolomieu, burned to a cinder.”
Aja winks and says in a whisper:
“I’m not talking about those clowns, Jipé. If you can get the stuff up here in one of your containers, I can pick out twelve of the most qualified and experienced officers from the island.”
Suddenly the sky opens up and sunlight floods down on them. Jipé grabs his sunglasses with professional efficiency.
“You’ll never give up, will you?”
She laughs.
“No way! It’s the Dodo Syndrome! I don’t want to end up all fat and flightless, ready to be plucked.”
“Laroche isn’t going to like it.”
“Who cares?”
1:27 P.M.
“Aja? It’s Christos! Are you still on the Pas de Bellecombe?”
“Yes. Have you been listening to the radio? Are you calling for a laugh?”
“No, just the opposite.”
“What?”
“Just wait a bit before you take out Bellion. I think I’ve uncovered a fault in our theory, the kind of thing that could make a whole cathedral come tumbling down.”
“Could you be a bit less abstract, Christos?”
“I have my doubts about the impartiality of Eve-Marie Nativel’s testimony.”
“Fuck! Can you give me the details?”
The second lieutenant fills her in on Armand Zuttor’s visit to the police station, the Jourdains’ escape to Mauritius, the telephone conversation with Graziella Doré, the list of seven employees, the interrogation at the Hotel Athena, Gabin’s account . . .
“Fuck,” Aja curses into the phone again. “How on earth will we make the ComGend swallow that? Laroche is not the kind of guy to change his mind over some vague family connection between Creole witnesses to an accident that happened ten years ago.”
“Mmm. But there’s more to it than that. It’s strange. When the ComGend drew up the list of Martial Bellion’s possible contacts on the island in order to put them under surveillance, why did they never mention Aloé Nativel, his ex-girlfriend? They must have known about her existence.”
Aja takes some time to think about this, but can come up with no explanation.
“I’m stuck here, Christos. Bellion might appear out of the mist at any moment. But I want you to forsake your siesta and find me Eve-Marie Nativel before sundown.”
“Easier said than done, Aja. According to the other employees, she spends all day Monday working for a Gros Blanc who pays her under the counter. And no Creole is ever going to snitch on their employer . . .”
Aja does not reply. All Christos can hear is the sound of the wind blowing.
“Aja? Are you still there?”
“I think I might have an idea.”
“You know a Creole who’d flip the old Nativel woman?”
“Yep . . . Laila . . .”
“Who?”
“Laila Purvi. My mother!”