The Madonna of Notre Dame (14 page)

Silence fell over them. The image of a bird banging against the bars of its cage briefly flashed before the priest’s eyes. “Tell me, Claire. When did it happen? Was it a long time ago?”

The young woman’s eyes froze. At first, Kern thought that they were lost in the void but then immediately realized that they were looking to the past.

“The summer when I was sixteen. One evening, on the beach.”

“Have you ever talked about it to anyone?”

“The sound of waves has made me want to vomit ever since. I tell people I get seasick. It’s my excuse for never going to the shore. No, Father, never. I’ve never told anyone about it.”

She brushed an invisible speck of dust from the fold in her skirt.

“It’s not too late, Claire.”

“How would you know?”

“We all carry our burden. That part of us that’s dead forever, and that we have to drag around wherever we go. Christ also carried his cross a very long way. He carried it to the end of his suffering. Three days later he was resurrected and, with him, the hope of a new life. The cross isn’t the goal but the baggage, Claire. Sooner or later one must resolve to put it down.”

Once again, the magistrate’s eyes grew misty. She chose to look away as Kern stood up.

“You know where to find me if you need me, don’t you? I’m here if you want to talk. Don’t hesitate.”

“Thank you, Father. But it won’t bring our innocent man back from the dead, you know.”

She looked much older now, and her childhood seemed to have vanished forever. She took a pencil and a notepad. “So, your Polish vagrant—where can one find him?”

Kern hesitated for a brief moment. “It’s of no importance. The case is shelved anyway, you said so yourself. Only a miracle could reopen the investigation and there will be no miracle, I think I can safely assure you of that.”

“What makes you suddenly so certain? If you have an important piece of information in your possession, it could contribute to reopening the case.”

“Who insisted that the case be shelved? The Paris prosecutor?”

“Yes. He called me very early this morning. I was still at home.”

“And the prosecutor probably received the same phone call from the Ministry.”

“I don’t understand. What has the Ministry got to do with this?”

“Mademoiselle Kauffmann, do you know who the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem are?”

“I came across that name in the file.”

“They don’t just carry the statue of the Virgin Mary once a year on the day of the Assumption, you know. It’s an order that dates back to the medieval Crusaders. Naturally, they no longer defend a fortress with a sword. Their aim is to support the Christian community in the Holy Land through charitable deeds. And also to evangelize modern Western society. Their network extends over thirty or so countries, including France.”

“So?”

“Did you know the capitular chapel of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher is situated at Notre Dame de Paris? It would have taken just a phone call to restore long-term calm over the cathedral. There’s only about five hundred yards between Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice, but the quickest way from one to the other is sometimes across the Place Vendôme.”

“Are you saying that your knights have their own entrance to the Ministry of Justice?”

“The Minister himself is one of them. That’s why I am now sure that your investigation is well and truly buried.”

Propped up against her chair, Claire Kauffmann had now completely recovered her calm. Only her eyes seemed strangely mobile, betraying the train of thought unraveling in her mind. Kern made a gesture suggesting he was about to hold out his hand to the young woman, then changed his mind. “The law
has found its culprit, Mademoiselle Kauffmann, that’s the truth. Apparently, the Church is also satisfied. A lunatic, a madman who will soon be forgotten. As for the victim’s parents, they’ll be asked to bury their daughter quietly, somewhere out of the way, that is, unless the poor child has already been buried.”

“No, not yet. The burial is tomorrow at three p.m. at the Montmartre cemetery.”

“They will seal her grave with official cement and the parents will have to accept that. ‘Your daughter was murdered by a madman, end of story, move along ladies and gentlemen, no point in making an official complaint.’ Who would want to reopen an investigation everyone considers to have come full circle? Who?”

Claire Kauffmann crossed her legs. She was breathing a little more quickly. She was looking at Father Kern with an odd intensity. “I have a run in my pantyhose.”

The priest couldn’t help sliding a glance down the young magistrate’s legs. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve snagged my pantyhose. I need to go out and change them.”

And mechanically, blushing, she grabbed a paper clip from her desk, unfurled it, and passed the tip over her knee. The sheer mesh that concealed her skin immediately burst open and the run extended three or four inches up her pale thigh. The young woman stood up and walked past Father Kern, who was speechless. She went to the door, grabbed the handle, and, without turning around, said, in a flat, almost inaudible, slightly trembling voice, “The Notre Dame case file is in my desk. The key’s in the lock. The search and interrogation reports, the postmortem results, the medical examiner’s report—it’s all there. My colleague’s in the clerk’s office, so won’t be back for at least half an hour. I’ll be away for ten minutes exactly. That’s how long I’m giving you. When I return, I’d like to see the file back the way
it was, where you found it. You may use the photocopier, if you wish. You just have to press the green button to get it out of sleep mode. Goodbye, Father.”

She half-opened the door and was gone in a flash. He heard her footsteps fading down the corridor.

How long did he stay there, his arms dangling, standing before the desk heaped with files, in that tiny room that smelled of paperwork and dust? How long before he realized just what the magistrate had whispered to him? Time seemed to have stopped, and the blood in his veins froze. In the distance, he heard the bells of Notre Dame ring for the nine a.m. Mass, and he finally came out of his torpor. Then, slowly, his heart beating like that of a child afraid to be punished by his parents, he walked around the deputy magistrate’s desk and unlocked the drawer.

Kern drank his coffee in one gulp. He’d let it cool down for several long minutes without saying anything, making the liquid spin at the bottom of the glass, as a reflection of the dark thoughts he was prey to, looking worried, absorbed, stalling for time because his indecision was so great it was preventing him from doing what he’d come to do. Opposite him, sitting on the stool that looked too fragile to bear his weight, leaning his elbows on his knees, holding the jar of Nescafé in his paws, Djibril was watching the diminutive priest with his piercing eyes. “You look like a guy who’s come to confess but doesn’t know where to begin, François.”

The priest put the glass down at the foot of the bed he was sitting on. He plunged his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a stack of photocopies folded three times. Without a word, he held it out to Djibril. The prisoner put
down the jar of instant coffee and began to look through the document, which had been stapled at one of the corners.

“Are these the committing magistrate’s records?”

“No, those of the public prosecutor’s office. Now that the case is closed, they won’t be appointing a judge.”

“Much simpler, this way. Those little judges are too independent. They could go and stick their noses somewhere it stinks, right?”

“I don’t know. What do you think of the file?”

“At first glance, it doesn’t look very thick.”

“They already got their culprit, so why go look elsewhere?”

“How did you get it?”

“The young magistrate in charge of the case let me see it.”

“She’s taking a big risk.”

“I know. She’s breaking the confidentiality of the investigation.”

“From what you’re telling me, that’s not her only problem. She’s also got the General Investigators hot on her heels, right?”

“What do you think of the file? You’re quite right, I don’t know where to begin. I glanced at it on the train. There’s nothing interesting in the interrogation transcripts. As for the search, how can I put it? Well, it just confirms that the kid wasn’t comfortable with his sexuality.”

A wide smile spread across the prisoner’s face. He was paying particular attention to one of the pages in the file. With his thumbnail, he opened the staple that kept the sheets together. Father Kern briefly pictured a bulldozer gently tearing a nail out of a plank.

“I really like this one. Do you mind? In any case, it’ll look better here than at your place. Just a question of consistency. After all, I’m the murderer here.”

Keeping his naughty boy expression, he stuck one of the
drawings seized from young Thibault’s home to the wall. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep the others for my friends. All right?”

Kern knew Djibril too well to let himself be rattled by his blasphemous provocations. He nodded without saying anything. The prisoner looked a little longer at the photocopy on his wall, which was insignificant in the midst of photos taken from porn magazines, then sat back down and resumed looking through the rest of the stack. Kern picked up where the prisoner had interrupted him. “The crime scene investigations have yielded nothing, or not much. Too many people involved, too many marks. It was to be expected. We’re talking about the most visited monument in France here. As for the postmortem report, they found young Thibault’s DNA on the victim. Among others. Once again, she spent the day in all the bustle, in the middle of a crowd. Does what Thibault left on her correspond to the first attack or to the murder? Nobody can tell. The poor girl definitely died of strangling but the marks on her throat say no more. One assumes the murderer wore gloves, and that the body was moved after death. I don’t know. All the pieces of information cancel one another out. Where to go from here? Where to look? After all, I’m just a priest, I know nothing about being a policeman.”

Djibril was reading. He didn’t even bother to look up from the file. “If you were working for the cops, François, you wouldn’t have come to see me and I wouldn’t have opened my door to you. So to speak, of course. Not that I get to decide who opens my door.”

“Of course, there’s that strange thing of the wax in her vagina, which suggests the theory of a madman, a lunatic, but—”

“You must search around the girl.”

“Excuse me?”

“You must search around your dead girl. In this file of yours,
there’s barely enough information about her to fill a postage stamp.”

“She was a student without any background.”

“The cops totally botched their investigation. From what I’m reading here, they just paid a superficial visit to the girl’s room at her parents’ apartment and stopped there.” He handed the stack of papers back to Kern and concluded, with a smile, “In other words, a bad job—the kind they say we Arabs do.”

Kern put the file back in his jacket pocket and looked at his watch. “I’ve only just got time to get there.”

“Where?”

“Her funeral. It’s in Montmartre at three.”

The two men stood up and shook hands.

“Leaving already?”

“Thanks for your invaluable help, Djibril.”

“I’ll have my secretary send you an invoice. Keep me posted, will you? It’s important to me.”

“You’re hooked now, aren’t you? The priest and the prisoner. We make quite a pair of investigators.”

Djibril smiled. Kern felt him distance himself, escape through his restricted cell to a time and space where he could never follow. The priest knew full well that, despite the doors, the visiting rooms, the hours devoted to his activity as chaplain every week, the boundary between the outside and the inside of the prison was impassable. With every extra minute of being locked up, the walls in this purgatory of iron and concrete grew thicker. Djibril was gradually slipping away from the world, and nobody and nothing could ever bring him back among the living.

Kern squeezed the prisoner’s icy hand a little tighter. “What you’ve just done for me ... I don’t know. Your advice, this conversation. Isn’t that proof of good behavior? Perhaps I could mention
it to the sentencing judge, so he relaxes—”

Djibril let go of the priest’s hand. “Don’t bother, priest. For him I’m just a murderer—period. And he’s right. There’s no redemption possible here. Besides, all we did was talk about the weather, you know that perfectly well. The photocopy you’ve just let me read doesn’t officially exist.”

“That’s true. You’re right. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

“You’re wrong, François. I’ve already started to be rewarded. As of today, I’m going to think about something else. Put my imagination to work, think about your case while I clean my teeth at night. You know, in Poissy this kind of occupation is priceless. Here, my life revolves around this kettle and my jar of coffee.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“You know it is, priest.”

The priest walked around the three-foot-high wall that separated the bed from the toilet bowl, and reached the cell door in a couple of strides.