Cemetery of Swallows (43 page)

Looking at the last inscription on the cover of the ninth cassette, Amédée read: “END: December 4, 1
A.M.
” On that date, Manuel had just been imprisoned. Then Mallock remembered the storm that had ravaged the capital on the night of December 3. The one that had shattered his neighbor's window and crushed the beautiful Christmas tree put up by the caretaker.

It had thus been a month since Captain Wrochet, Gavroche, had died of a cardiac arrest caused by the cold, the day before he was planning to turn himself in to the police. Had he done so, he would have spared everyone a great deal of suffering and questions. Mallock thought, promising himself never to admit it, that in the end that would have been a shame . . .

It was 7
P.M.

While he was listening to the last cassette, Gavroche's apartment had been invaded by the night and the cold. The captain's frozen body had been carried away by the men from the morgue. Rising to leave the hypnotizer's apartment, Mallock glanced out the window in the hall. Outside it was really dark. Obscurity as a malady, a malediction. What if there were never any sun?

Sometimes, Superintendent Amédée Mallock doubted everything.

Even the dawn.

No snowflakes in sight.
The autoroute
is deserted.
Mallock is driving fast to a different place, still determined to find peace there. The day before, Margot took a plane to Iran. He wasn't able to admit that he was scared for her. That, and a little more. Now he's angry at himself. But it's too late. Stupid bear. He turns off the radio, swearing. He's forgotten his iPod. In front of him, the promise of snow; the sky is loaded with it. His heart, too. A big glass of whiskey would have fixed all that, but he has a long way to go, so he abstained. All he can do now is sigh. It does no good to wash his hands, change his clothes and his memories, sadness still burdens him, like a persistent odor.

He'd so much like to recover his earlier euphoria. The one he had when he was twenty. With those moments of joy like so many clear skies. Three days earlier, Manu's release provided him with one of those moments. When you smile, your body feels light, and you're convinced, deep in your heart, that you'll never die. And neither will the people you love.

Amédée still feels the sweetness of Kiko and Julie holding him in their arms and covering him with kisses. And then Manu's smile, his tears as he embraced his baby. Yes, that was definitely one of those moments. Why was he so incapable of retaining them, of saving them somewhere on his big hard disk and playing them back in his moments of sadness?

When he was a child, he always caught the five rings with the little wooden stick.

*

Snow begins to fall again, suicidally, on his windshield.

Mallock starts counting up his troops: Jules, Julie, and Ken, of course, and then the little new one, Jo, Marie-Joséphine Maêcka Demaya. And soon there will be the big, lanky guy of Kabyle origin, Habib Al Azred, who has already been nicknamed Wik, a diminutive of Wikipedia. Five collaborators, a reconstituted hand, Mallock in complete form.

It's dangerous on the shoulders of the autoroute: cars are beginning to stop to put on chains. Amédée slows down, imagining the denouement of Manu's story, with his smiles, his tears of joy, Julie's thanks. These are the big moments in a cop's life. Even for him. So why not take advantage of them? The hell with it!

He accelerates in the storm.

A genocide of snowflakes.

 

Nothing is ever perfect enough for Mallock. There's always a hair in the soup, a piece of eggshell in the omelet, a pit in the clafoutis. But in this case, for once he's right. After having hesitated, he decided to keep to himself one fact that is more than disturbing. A few sentences that throw a strange shadow, a soupçon of doubt, on the perfect ending of this whole perfect investigation!

He opens the glove box.

Inside it is a cassette identical to the ones found at Gaston Wrochet's apartment. On the cover there is no number, no title. It contains the old man's doubts about what really happened. Little details that don't fit, and especially the business about the music box. Gaston, who read the newspapers, is certain about it. On the cassette he states that he has never seen this jewel or even heard the music. “Neither Marie nor my lieutenant ever showed me such an object. I would have remembered that.” But then how was Manu able to mention it and speak about it on several occasions if Gaston Wrochet was not aware of its existence? Further on, old Gavroche added: “I don't say that it didn't exist, I don't know about that, but not knowing about it, I never spoke about it.” He ended with a hypothesis: “I suppose it's only the result of Manuel's imagination.” But Mallock absolutely cannot accept that hypothesis, since even as the snow continues to slow cars, he has the little golden heart, snugly tucked away in his pocket.

Amédée thinks back to what Mister Blue said when it was raining: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The adventurer was right, and especially Shakespeare. But there you have it, a professional police superintendent likes to put everything in its place and hates above all finding himself at the end of an enigma with a doubt or with a piece of the puzzle left over. So he's made up his mind that he'll throw the cassette in the sea once he gets there.

Interchange. Toll plaza. A series of little villages.

Mallock finally slows down. Before going on, he makes a little detour to visit someone, a stop in Ampélopsis.

Two inches of snow cover the lane. Right in front of him stands a cute little house with a blue roof. He rings the bell. Waits. The door opens prudently. Behind it an old lady squints her pretty eyes the better to see who her visitor is.

“Ah! Mr. Superintendent. How happy I am to see you again. Come in, come in quickly, I'm going to make you some tea.”

Mallock wipes his feet on a cast-iron grill half buried in the earth.

“Thank you, Mademoiselle, I hope I'm not disturbing you?”

“Certainly not. And then I haven't yet had a chance to thank you. It's thanks to you that I finally know what happened to my Jean-François.”

“I'm sorry, but I can't stay. I have to be in the Arcachon Basin before seven o'clock.”

Marie Dutin looks at him with astonishment.

“Did you come just to say hello to me?”

She still has the same silvery hair, powdered skin, and shining eyes, little diamonds bordered in mascara.

“Not quite, I have something to return to you, and I wanted to do it in person.”

Mallock thrusts his hand into his pocket and brings out the music box in the form of a heart, just protected with tissue paper. This is the most elegant way he's found to put the last piece of the puzzle in the right place and finally close the investigation.

The extra piece will soon be sleeping with the fishes, and everything will have been said.

The old woman looks at the object without being able to identify it. Then she suddenly understands and her eyes fill with tears.

“Sweet Jesus, it's not possible!”

Her fingers begin to tremble like slender twigs as she tries to take the jewel Mallock is holding out to her. A little embarrassed to be the cause of so much emotion, he helps Marie by putting the object in the middle of her open palm.

That is where it belongs. The music box seems to fit there naturally, like a cat curled up on its favorite cushion. The old lady's face is now twisted with emotion.

Her chin is shaking and she has difficulty speaking:

“I kept it only a few days, you know. And it was so long ago.”

“It still works,” Mallock told her. “I took the liberty of having it serviced.”

The old woman holds the heart to her marveling face. Then with her other hand, awkwardly, she pushes on the latch. The two yellowed photos appear, as the music begins playing the notes of another life. Overwhelmed, the lieutenant's fiancée nonetheless manages to smile through her tears.

But her whole body is trembling.

Gently, Mallock takes her in his arms.

Jean-Denis Bruet-Ferreol, who writes under the pseudonym Mallock, was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1951. He is not only an author, but also a painter, photographer, designer, inventor, artistic director, and composer. Since 2000, he has dedicated himself to digital painting and crime novels.