The Madonna of Notre Dame (15 page)

“Get ready for quite a ride, François. Don’t be surprised if you meet a few ghosts on the way.”

“I meet ghosts during my sleepless nights, Djibril. Every night, I also take a trip around purgatory. And it hasn’t killed me yet.”

Kern turned the handle. The abrupt click of the mechanism made the prisoner take a step back.

“This time, you could well go as far as hell, priest. Your nice prayers will be of no use to you there. In fact, perhaps you’d better remove the cross from your lapel. Where you’re going, it will only make it easier to spot you, trust me.”

The door opened, revealing in the corridor a guard’s uniform. Father Kern looked at the prisoner one more time, then disappeared down the corridor lit with pale fluorescent lights.
Behind him, the reinforced door closed again with a cavernous thud.

Luna Hamache had only just been buried when Father Kern arrived at Section 14 of the Montmartre Cemetery. Heavily, almost in slow motion, doubly knocked out by grief as well as the heat, a group of thirty or so people milled around the grave at a respectful distance from a couple who remained rooted right on the edge of the pit, perfectly still, as though cut in stone. Both in their fifties, the dead woman’s parents presented faces without tears, as though they hadn’t yet comprehended the exact reason for their being in this cemetery, as though the plain, bare coffin that was now resting at the bottom of a grave had not belonged to their daughter but to somebody else, a stranger whose funeral they were attending by chance. The father, especially, seemed alienated from himself. His gaze had trouble lingering on the bottom of the pit and would regularly stray toward the entrance to the cemetery, as though Luna would appear there at any minute, in the full bloom of her youth, and prove the gravediggers and death wrong.

A young woman went up the line, handing out a white rose to each person, and Kern noticed that almost the entire group was made up of young people dressed in white. With a solemnity at odds with their age—they were all in their twenties—Luna’s fellow students paraded before the grave, which was still wide open, and threw their flowers on the lid of the coffin, suppressing a sob or muttering a few words that were immediately absorbed by the noise of the surrounding traffic. While they paraded like this, Kern caught the eye of a man who was standing apart, one shoulder against a tree, his arms crossed. The
priest made a sign to Lieutenant Gombrowicz, to which the latter responded with a nod.

Finally, two gravediggers from the Paris municipality came to say a few words to the dead woman’s parents. Her mother nodded twice, mechanically, then gave a circular look of thanks to those who were standing around the grave. The group broke up with difficulty, as though everyone had lead soles on their shoes, while the cemetery employees began work without delay on closing the grave. Luna’s parents watched them a little while longer, then the mother took her husband by the arm. They walked a few steps down the alley, like two old people unsteadily supporting each other, suddenly alone in the world and deprived of their main reason for remaining standing. On their way, they saw a little man with a thin hatchet face and a cross on his lapel. He went up to them and shook their hands warmly.

“I’m Father Kern. I’m the one who found your daughter’s body in Notre Dame on Monday morning.”

Luna Hamache’s mother looked at him for a moment without saying anything, while the father kept his eyes fixed on the entrance to the cemetery. She finally spoke, but her hesitant voice revealed her distress before the representative of the very place where her daughter had died.

“Thank you for coming, Father. We received a note from your rector this morning.”

“Monsignor de Bracy, yes.”

“He wrote that he’d had a prayer said. Of course, it was nice to receive the letter, but ...”

“But it doesn’t explain anything. Does it?”

“Did you know my daughter? Had you already seen her in Notre Dame?”

Her eyes filled with pleading and Kern found himself stammering one of the most minimalistic replies he could have. “No,
I’m sorry, Madame Hamache, I didn’t know Luna. We’ve all prayed for her.”

“I don’t understand. Nobody is explaining anything to us. The murderer’s suicide has left us totally distraught. The authorities seem to have forgotten us already. They seem to have moved on already. It’s like a wall without a door, we don’t know where to knock to find out more about the attack that ... As for Luna going to the Assumption ceremony, she never mentioned she had an interest in the Catholic faith. As you can see, we’re what they call nowadays a mixed couple. We’ve always allowed our daughter the freedom to choose whichever religion she thought best. Until now it’s a matter she’d never talked to us about. We’re trying to understand but nobody seems able to tell us anything, not your rector and not you, Father. We bury our daughter and, with her, something of an unresolved mystery.”

Kern felt a sense of unease grow in him. He should try and soothe the pain of these two parents, and the cross he wore on his lapel seemed to have largely contributed to the spontaneous outpouring of Luna’s mother, yet he was aware of the real reason for his being at the cemetery. His true motivations were those of an investigator, and he was bringing with him more questions about Luna than answers to her mother’s queries.

“Your daughter was twenty-one, Madame Hamache. An age of much questioning, and also an age where one searches for some form of independence. Perhaps she didn’t speak to you at all about it. Perhaps she had a sort of secret garden.”

“We did feel she was somewhat distancing herself in the past few months. Yes, a desire for independence we couldn’t satisfy.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean, Father, is that we’re not rolling in money. At the beginning of the academic year, Luna wanted to move out and get a little apartment nearby, with a female friend from the
university. She’d sometimes spend the night away from home. More and more often, in fact. But we couldn’t afford to help her with rent. My husband studied in Algeria, you see. His qualifications have never been recognized in France. Our marriage couldn’t change anything. For twenty years, he worked doing odd jobs at an IT firm. He did small repairs, helped out around the office, took care of deliveries. Three years ago, they fired him. He can’t find another job at his age. We live on my salary as a home care worker, so we can’t give our daughter a good start in life. Well, anyway, she doesn’t need it now.”

Madame Hamache’s chin began to quiver, and she clenched her jaw. Kern waited. His questions were turning into an interrogation, but conducted with the gentleness of a confessor.

“Do you know who she wanted to share the apartment with?”

“Yes, of course, with Nadia. Her best friend. They study— studied—at the university together.”

“Was Nadia here today?”

“She was the one who distributed the roses, earlier. You must have seen her. She’s also the one who asked Luna’s friends to wear white. Nice girl, Nadia. She wanted to say goodbye to her in her own way. She’s been deeply affected by my daughter’s death. She was the one who called us on Tuesday morning to say there was the picture in
Le Parisien
, and an appeal for witnesses.”

“I thought it was Monsieur Hamache who’d read it in the paper.”

“No, it was Nadia. After she called, my husband went downstairs to check the paper in the café. Afterwards, we called the police.”

Hearing his name mentioned, Luna’s father had emerged from his torpor. He turned to look at the priest, as though noticing him for the first time, and Kern immediately felt the piercing,
distraught look that seemed to ask him precisely why he was at the cemetery. Kern stammered a few phrases of comfort. The words came out of his mouth like the lines of a bad actor, as a kind of annoying reflex, and he mentally blamed himself for these fake-sounding platitudes. He said goodbye and walked away along the alley by the grave. After a few steps, he turned to Luna’s parents again.

“Madame Hamache, what was your daughter studying?”

And, for the first time, the dead young woman’s father unclenched his teeth. “History, monsieur. Luna was doing a degree in history. She was going to be a teacher.”

Paris was once again in the grip of a stifling heat wave and the air was heavier than ever. Pollution made it even harder to breathe. Kern left the cemetery by Avenue Rachel. Lieutenant Gombrowicz seemed to have discreetly vanished at the end of the ceremony. Outside the Irish pub on the corner of Boulevard de Clichy, the group of students dressed in white was slowly breaking up with a great deal of hugging. Their immaculate clothes now looked out of place, naive, almost comical, far too much at odds with the urban chaos, the noise of car engines, the smell of gas, and the volley of abuse hurled by the drivers. The priest hesitated. Should he approach the young people? Or wait for their expressions of affection to come to an end? Should he introduce himself with his true identity? Try and obtain information about their friend who was now lying at the bottom of a grave, and to whom they’d come to say a final goodbye? He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out his tobacco pouch, and, as he did whenever he struggled to make up his mind, began to fill his pipe, trying to focus on this harmless activity instead of the stream of
conflicting thoughts invading his mind. At the exact moment he was wedging the ebonite tube between his teeth, the young woman who’d handed a white rose to each of her friends left the group. She crossed Boulevard de Clichy, her heels making a clicking sound, and everything became crystal clear. The entire city became concentrated in that pale form that was now walking down the median strip toward Place Blanche. He took the time to light his pipe, drew a few fragrant puffs, then began trailing after Nadia, about twenty yards behind her.

It was a kind of drunkenness, a return to childhood, to the adolescence he’d never experienced: he was playing at following a woman, playing at being a detective in the heat of the city, on this packed boulevard that on either side of the median strip formed a kind of multicolored conveyer belt made of automobile steel, rearview mirrors, and glass windows. Kern smoked his pipe and walked casually, totally absorbed by the strange enjoyment this tailing gave him. An entire battalion of gendarmes in uniform could have followed him in turn, and he wouldn’t have noticed.

Nadia left the boulevard when she reached the square, and took Rue Blanche. The priest thought this was a good time to approach her, and picked up the pace. He was just two or three yards away from her when the young woman stopped outside the door of a building adjoining a café. She made a friendly gesture at the waiter serving outside, then reached out for the security keypad with her hand. Taken aback by this sudden stop, Father Kern overtook the young woman without daring to speak to her, just seeing the long, slender fingers skipping on the keypad. He didn’t have the presence of mind to memorize the code and was annoyed with himself because of that. The lock clicked abruptly. Nadia pushed the door and disappeared inside.

As a last resort, he sat at a sidewalk table outside the café,
choosing a spot from where he could see the door. The waiter, an outsized beanpole with a balding head and cheeks decorated with thick sideburns, immediately approached. He wiped the table with a sponge. Kern ordered a draft beer and put his pipe down on the marble surface, which was still wet. Many years earlier, when he was about sixteen or seventeen, he’d gotten blind drunk with his older brother, on a particularly bad evening when his joints were just too painful. The experiment had not been particularly conclusive, so Kern had decided to swallow his cortisone tablets as the only possible stopgap to his pain.

An old woman with a shopping bag slowly approached, obviously suffering from the heat. She stopped outside the nearby door and, in turn, keyed in the combination that would give access to the relative coolness of her home. Her memory and her hands, less agile than those of the young woman who’d entered earlier, made her press heavily on the keys, giving the priest enough time to memorize the code. Kern drained his glass, paid, and went to the door. However, before letting his increasingly numb fingers run over the keypad, he took care to unclasp the small metal cross on his lapel and slipped it into his wallet. He pushed the door and entered a brownish corridor partly taken up by a block of dilapidated mailboxes. He perused the labels without finding any Nadias, and went past the staircase, to a door leading onto a small courtyard. At this time in the afternoon, the light had already largely abandoned it, so the place looked like a well. Bicycles, a stroller, and children’s scooters had been put there hastily. To the left, a door indicated the entrance to a small first-floor apartment, probably a studio. Kern was about to turn back when the door opened wide. Nadia was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, one shoulder against the frame. She’d changed her clothes, and was now wearing a colorful summer dress.