Cemetery of Swallows (9 page)

 

Inside the building,
el comandante
Juan Luis Cappuccino Jiménez and
el capitán
Ramón Cabral fell all over themselves making excuses. Each was convinced that it was the other's turn to pick him up. Mallock didn't go on about it.

The series of witnesses, organized, perhaps a little too well, by the two policemen, left little doubt regarding Manu's guilt. Four Dominicans, a couple of Germans, and an Englishwoman all confirmed the identification they had already made concerning the murderer and the way the killing happened. The same facts, the same chronology, with perfect coherence and using practically the same words to describe the scene. Had they learned their lesson well? But what more could he ask for? And then Gemoni had confessed, as Ramón and Jiménez never ceased to repeat. They also showed him the photographs taken from the television program that had upset Manuel so much. They had been found, dirty and wrinkled, in his hip pocket. Mallock thought of Julie and felt devastated.

The pictures proved premeditation.

 

Except for a lunch break in the canteen next to the police station, Mallock, Ramón, and Jiménez worked nonstop until 4
P.M.
, when Amédée called André to find out if he could question Manuel. The answer was negative. The young man had still not come out of the fog of the anesthesia, and he needed, moreover, to catch up on his sleep.

“Sorry,” André concluded, “questioning him now would be pointless. He's going to sleep like a log for another twenty-four hours. Afterward, he'll be in better shape and able to answer all your questions.”

Mallock hung up, pensive. He felt a sort of uneasiness, without having the slightest idea what was troubling him on this point. Had Dédé-the-Wizard, one of his multiple nicknames, run out of inspiration again? Why had the investigation seemed to drag on this way from the outset? Was it due to the density of the vegetation, the heaviness of the heat, the spongy mud that slowed one's pace after every rain? Or was it something else altogether? A Mallock who couldn't concentrate, who avoided the cruelest hypotheses, for Julie and for himself, and who refused to associate the name “Manu” with the words “killer,” “mafia,” “assassin,” “madman”? But it was in that direction, and no other, that he now had to go, whether he liked it or not. He could no longer close his eyes to certain facts, or to the last image he had of Manu, his last words. The question was not and had never been: “Did he kill him?” The question was: “Why?”

After one of those deep sighs he so often heaved, Mallock asked his police buddies if one of them could take him to Cabarete. Jiménez agreed with enthusiasm, happy to put an end to a workday that had been much too long by local standards. A little nervously, Amédée went back to the suicide seat and the enormous fuzzy dice attached to the rearview mirror.

When they arrived in Cabarete, he went directly to Mister Blue's shop. He felt irascible and demoralized. Fortunately, Jean-Daniel was able to make him forget his nightmare for a few moments.

“Okay, to begin the show, a curiosity: blue amber!”

Without further ado, the adventurer turned on two neon ultraviolet lights attached over the display case. Each piece of blue amber was instantly transformed into so many minuscule aquariums in which age-old insects were suspended over a floor of artificial corals. So many crepuscular worlds frozen by the gods in a cosmogonic order. Within each universe, billions of things—stardust, insects' feet, amphibians' eyes—were hidden, still frightened, in the same electric mist, metaphorical reflections of the multiple questions and thoughts that had been amalgamating in Mallock's brain since the beginning of the investigation.

There was something infinitely poetic about the cerulean, electric shimmerings, the commemoration of a miracle or a genocide. A fatal twilight, a meteor shower, an atomic deflagration. The deinonychuses had stopped devouring the red, the diplodocuses had stopped grazing on the green, and all the dinosaurs had raised their heads toward the sky before dying. Gorged on light, the tree's resin had been immediately transformed into microscopic oceans.

The miracle of the blue amber was supposed to result from two extraordinary events: insects getting caught in a tree's resin at the very moment when an asteroid struck earth and put an end to the reign of the dinosaurs. By exploding when it struck the earth, it is said to have produced light so intense that it “exposed” the still soft amber, giving it that incredible bluish luminescence.

For more than an hour, Mallock traveled over these interior seas. In each case, Mister Blue sought the best possible angle before putting them on the glass plate of his old microscope. The silence in the room was disturbed only by his informed commentaries. After a dozen blue stones, he turned off the ultraviolet lights and moved to different specimens tinted by a Jurassic moss, green amber.

Finally, in the third and final act of his show, he brought out his most beautiful fossils, drowned in crystalline golden amber, specific to the Americas.

“In Europe,” he explained to Mallock, “people sought amber without insects, in order to be able to cut it for jewelry or objects. But it was a much less transparent stone, much milkier than this one. The famous amber room was made with this kind of amber. Moreover, I am going to show it to you. One never knows—if you wake up someday on the inside, you'll have to be able to find your way!”

He broke out laughing at his own joke as he looked for a photo in one of his multiple drawers:

“Damn, where did I put it? Ah, here it is!”

In an old snapshot, Mallock saw a room in Louis XV style with strange panels. The faded black and white probably didn't do justice to the amber cabinet.

Jean-Daniel put the photo back and resumed bringing out his most beautiful pieces of amber, as so many treasures.

“You must have a small fortune in this shop. Aren't you afraid . . . ?”

Mister Blue smiled: “You do what you have to do. I go to the shooting range twice a month with Ramón, the most respected policeman in the area. But of course you know him, I forgot. Naturally, I'm the one who buys all the ammunition, including Ramón's, all his friends', and even his family's.”

“Is he married?”

Oddly, Mallock had imagined Double-cream to be a bachelor who still lived with his mother.

“Since he was sixteen years old. He's a good fellow, Ramón. He devotes everything he earns to his little family: seven children, two boys and five girls. And with what remains, he helps out two other families in need. So I'm happy to help finance the target practice sessions. And then they allow the men to relax a bit; they laugh like crazy, and that also has the advantage of letting all the would-be burglars know that they'll meet with strong resistance on my part.”

“The art of dissuasion.”

“Exactly. And of reputation, as well,” Jean-Daniel went on. “They take me for Buffalo Bill, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Wilson all rolled into one.”

Normally, Mallock would probably have laughed, but he hadn't forgotten that the next day he had to call Julie, and that the news wouldn't be good. Mister Blue, a subtle psychologist, understood his friend the superintendent's mood, just as he divined, more or less, the reason for it.

“Are things going badly for the young Frenchman?”

“Not well,” Amédée conceded. “I don't really see how I'm going to get him out of this mess. However, I was convinced, deep down, that he couldn't be the killer, and that I'd immediately locate the mistake that had been made. If you knew him, you'd understand. He's a rather exceptional young man. I hope there's a good explanation for his act, because for the moment, at this point in the investigation, he's in danger of receiving the maximum sentence.”

The two men fell silent, engaging in the kind of meditation such a pronouncement calls for.

“The worst thing is that I haven't much to go on,” Mallock resumed. “Between Manuel, who seems to be in a bad state, and the local police forces, who are very satisfied with what they have, I'm afraid I'm going to go home empty-handed.”

Mister Blue observed a second silence, as pregnant as the first, but longer. He was reflecting.

“Listen. I'm going to close the shop. My girls will take care of the bar, and we're going to go eat a good meal in the only restaurant around here that's worth going out of your way for. As far as your problem is concerned, I have only one solution to propose. Tomorrow I'm going to the mines to buy stones. Near the most remote of my deposits, there's an old woman who is—what?—rather unusual.”

“A historian of the island?”

“Not exactly,” Mister Blue smiled. “She doesn't know this island,
she is this island, and then some
. How can I explain it to you? We undergo things, whereas she knows, she's . . . ”

He stammered, almost ashamed of what he was trying to say.

“Listen, I've always been a rational kind of guy, but I've seen things, and then . . . I mean, after all, it doesn't cost anything. You can always try to meet her. It's not easy, but I think she likes me and she'll make an effort if I ask her to.”

“But what could she know about Manuel?”

“The wrong question, Your Honor. She knows, period, and without any direct object, without explanation. She doesn't receive her information by, let's say, traditional channels. And even if she doesn't know your particular case, she'll open up your mind. I've resorted to her on two occasions, and I'm still astonished.”

“But who is she, this woman?” Mallock asked.

He really didn't feel like going off on a wild goose chase with the local witch or fortune-teller. He didn't care at all for tarot-crooks, Sunday astrologers, blind seers, and illiterate numerologists.

“You have to see her to understand,” Jean-Daniel insisted, a little hurt by the superintendent's reticence. “But I won't force you. Be here at nine o'clock Friday morning if you want to meet her. I'm doing this for you. It doesn't amuse me. On the contrary, that old . . . ”

“I get it,” Mallock cut him off. “It's nice of you, and at the point where I find myself . . . ”

“O.K. In the meantime, I'm going to close up and we'll go enjoy ourselves,” Mister Blue concluded.

They sailed off in the direction of the harbor in question. And in fact it was extremely good.

The superintendent is in the sea.
There's no one on the shore. Only dark phantoms with cut-off arms extended by pipes are walking there. Banished gardeners, Haitian thieves exiled from the other side of the island, doomed to tourist paradises in perpetuity.

Dawn. The sky begins to weep, a monsoon, a dense cluster of raindrops that fall while the sun persists, transforming this deluge into a curtain of golden pearls.

The superintendent embraces the waves with his arms, as one embraces a faithful companion. It seems to him that here, more than elsewhere, by slipping into an apnea, he could melt his pains and free his tears, banks of jellyfish children who will leave him and return one last time to bid him farewell before disappearing behind the mother-of-pearl of the coral.

At 9
A.M.
, Mallock goes back up to his penthouse.

This morning bath does him good. He feels a little better.

Then he summons all his courage and telephones Julie:

“Nothing to report,” he lies. “I think I'll be able to see him this afternoon. Don't worry. Everyone here likes him.”

“But why?”

“Let's say that the man he killed was not much appreciated around here. I'll tell you all about it.”

He hung up and called the ambassador.

“Hello, Monsieur Delmont. I'd like to know where we are with this. No problem?”

“I was about to call you, Superintendent. The authorizations have been negotiated and I'm hopeful, unless there's a last-minute reversal. In the series of things we have to swallow, one is that they want you to go in person to the National Palace to sign the final papers of repatriation at the Santo Domingo branch of Interpol, and take the documents authorizing the expulsion by the Dominican Republic to the courthouse in Puerto Plata. These are signs of allegiance and good will. I hope that doesn't bother you too much?”

“We'll do what we have to. In any case, I intend to go see Manu.”

He felt much too relieved to take umbrage. Repatriating Manuel meant saving his life. And that's what he was there for, nothing else.

“How is he?” Delmont asked. “I haven't had time to call André.”

“The operation went well, but he was still in a fog yesterday. I hope he'll be able to travel, I have no desire to say here forever, although . . . Anyway! We'll see. No special instructions?”

“Regarding Manuel?”

“No, the fools at the courthouse.”

“Oh, yes! Well, no, nothing in particular . . . Or rather yes,” the ambassador went on, “I'm clearly not quite awake yet. Ask for Juan Antonio Servantes, he's the one assigned to your case. I spoke to you about him, I think.”

“A Spaniard?” Mallock replied, astonished.

“About as much as I'm Tibetan. He's the product of a post-war import, if you see what I mean. We had a few of those around here, people who came here to recover their health. Germanic down to the heels of their boots.”

They both laughed and hung up, promising to keep each other up-to-date.

Just as angels pass without being noticed, a first clue had just passed through the room. Mallock didn't hear it, but a corner of his mind put it aside for later. Then he realized that he still hadn't grilled Delmont about Darbier. He might know more than the two policemen. Or at least he would have a different version, official and even, and, with a little luck, unofficial.