The Madonna of Notre Dame (8 page)

“I see what you’re getting at. You’re trying to accuse me of a racist attack. But the Virgin Mary isn’t racist. How could she be? The Virgin Mary is a model to all the women in the world, whatever their skin color.”

Landard felt the boy and his motive slipping away from him, so he raised his voice and brought his face a couple of inches away from the young man’s. “Earlier, you told us that you were still living with your mother. In Saint-Cloud, right? How’s your mom going to feel when she finds out that her son is suspected of killing a girl?”

The boy’s breathing suddenly quickened. “My mother? What does my mother have to do with all this?”

“How’s she going to feel, Thibault? Do you think she’ll come to your trial? Do you think she’ll bring you oranges when you’re in Fleury prison?”

“Leave my mother alone. I didn’t kill that girl.”

“Then why did you hit her, Thibault? Tell me why.”

Upset, Thibault started mumbling something, then, suddenly, the words crowded in his mouth and gushed out, like a powerful jet of water from a faucet because the washer’s come loose. “Because she was a whore! Because she was mocking the Virgin Mary in her white dress. I hit her because she deserved it! Because she was strutting about before our very eyes in that provocative prostitute dress! I hit her to teach her a lesson! I hit her because she was asking for it! I hit her to urge her to be pure, humble, good, I hit her to urge her toward virginity!”

Thibault had off-loaded in spite of himself, and immediately seemed to regret it. He apologized for his choice of words. Opposite him, however, Captain Landard seemed suddenly filled with hot air, like a balloon, as though he was about to take off from the top of his desk.

“Write that down, Gombrowicz, ‘I hit her to urge her toward virginity.’”

Gombrowicz was tapping away on his keyboard. He found the abrupt change of pace of the interrogation somewhat disturbing.
Landard waited for the computer keys to stop rattling, then lit another cigarette and took a drag contentedly.

“Gombrowicz, will you call the little magistrate on her direct line, please?”

Once again, he leaned toward the suspect. “Tell me, Thibault. How about we take a little trip to your mother’s to have a look inside your drawers? Do you think we’ll be there before nine p.m.?”

He closed his door and double-locked it. He remained there for a moment, his forehead against the wood, his hand tense on the handle, listening for the city noises outside, which he could hear as though through a dense fog that had descended abundantly on this late afternoon of August 17th. In the street, a car drove by. The sound of a woman’s footsteps. A child laughing. Then nothing.

He let go of the door handle, then went into the apartment, which was simple, bare, tidy, and where he had now been living for fifteen years. He abandoned his jacket on the back of a chair. Went to drink a glass of water. Or rather, he just filled it while staring at the clock on the white wall without really seeing it, for what might have been a long or a short time, standing there, holding the glass, before putting it down in the sink, still full.

He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, looked at his hands, resting on his knees like a well-behaved child during the class photo, then stood up again and opened the closet in front of the bed. He took out a shoe box and placed it on a small table in the corner of the room, beneath a wooden crucifix nailed to the wall. He took an old Bayard alarm clock out of the box, then a magnifying glass, and an inkstained pencil case, and pulled
open the zipper. There, he found pliers and four screwdrivers of different colors and sizes, which he lined up on both sides of the alarm clock. Finally, he took a black and white photo from the bottom of the box, and placed it in front of him, leaning it against the wall. He switched on a reading lamp fixed to the edge of the table, picked up the alarm clock in one hand and one of the four screwdrivers—the one with a faded red wooden handle—in the other. Slowly and with childlike application, he unscrewed the metal cover and finally opened it, revealing a mechanism that was at once basic and complex, as well as its manufacturing date: 1958. Then, with equal meticulousness, surrounded by a silence that was penetrated only by the sound of his breathing, and the faint ticking of the clock in the kitchen, he started taking the entire device apart.

A little before eight p.m., he put the two final pieces down in front of him. The entire alarm clock lay before him, in separate parts.

He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. In the combination of daylight and lamplight, he saw that the red splotches had settled on his wrists and elbows. He could also feel them spreading under the table, on his calves, and up to his knees in this curious mixture of burning and itching he hadn’t felt before. For the first time that evening, he looked away from his alarm clock and let his eyes linger on the photo propped up against the wall. Two boys, one about seven years old, the other perhaps ten, were standing with their arms around each other, staring into the lens, in a posture that evoked soccer players prior to a match. As a matter of fact, there was a ball on the ground, waiting for one of them—either the younger, small and dark, looking like a sickly chick, or the elder, blond and straight like wheat—to animate it with a powerful kick. The decor resembled that of a public school or an old-fashioned boarding school, with its paved
courtyard surrounded by a high wall and, in the background, the corner of a single building whose only visible opening gave a glimpse of a stained glass window.

Once again, he put his hand into the shoe box and took out an old-fashioned-looking mercury thermometer. Still staring at the black and white photo, he slid the metal tip under his tongue and waited, motionless, in the fading light of the day that was slowly giving way to the cold, clinical glow of his reading lamp. Finally, he took it out of his mouth and read it: it was over a hundred and four. He placed the thermometer on the edge of the table.

Without a sound, without a sigh, Father Kern began putting his Bayard alarm clock with its 1958 mechanism back together.

Claire Kauffmann was hanging on to the roof strap. Her knees, which she kept close together, swayed left and right whenever the car swerved, and, with her left arm, she clutched against her chest the bag containing the Notre Dame file.

As they pulled up to a red light, Landard backtracked brusquely and the engine of the Peugeot 308 roared as he swerved to the right into a bus lane and drove toward the Seine without touching the brakes. He crossed Pont de Saint-Cloud at full speed. In the back seat, handcuffed and huddled against Gombrowicz, the blond angel sometimes looked at the road and sometimes into Landard’s eyes, which he could see in the rear-view mirror.

“Do you really think it’s necessary to drive like this, captain? We’ll easily be there before nine p.m. to start the search.”

Landard turned on another burst of siren as they approached the bridge exit. “It’s for the sake of the young man’s mom,
madame. I wouldn’t like her to miss the start of her movie because of us. With a bit of luck we’ll get there just after the news, while the commercials are on.”

The magistrate rolled her eyes to the sky while the policeman stared at his suspect in the rearview mirror. “I bet your mom enjoys watching TV, doesn’t she, Thibault? I bet she saw you come out of the cathedral on the one o’clock news. She must have thought, ‘But that boy, there, with handcuffs and a jacket over his head, that’s my boy!’ Then she’ll have watched the eight o’clock news just to make sure. Tell me, Thibault, do you think your mom will have recognized you despite the jacket over your head?”

Landard turned and repeated his question while looking his suspect straight in the eye. Gombrowicz, whose hamburger and fries were slowly finding their way back up, against all digestive logic, unclenched his teeth to admonish his superior.
“Putain!
Keep your eyes on the road, Landard, before you drive us into a lamp post!”

They drove around a line of cars entering the westbound highway and headed toward Saint-Cloud. A few minutes later, they stopped, straddling the sidewalk, outside a 1970s building. White as a sheet and his face glowing with sweat, Gombrowicz got the blond angel out of the car, holding his arm, while Landard was already walking into the building, closely followed by Claire Kauffmann.

In the elevator, they refrained from talking, the four of them crammed like sardines in a can. Claire Kauffmann could smell the odor of cold tobacco absorbed by Captain’s Landard’s jacket, and the scent of cheap deodorant wafting from Lieutenant Gombrowicz’s moist armpits. She could also hear the young suspect’s breathing quickening as they rose and drew closer to his mother’s door.

A little woman in a robe, with thinning hair and a stooped, sickly form, opened the door. When she saw her handcuffed son, she began to moan, her eyes wide and panic-stricken. With a hand deformed by arthritis, she covered her mouth, which was wide with surprise. She would not close it again—or barely—for the rest of the search.

What struck Claire Kauffmann when she first walked into the hallway was the stuffy smell: How long had it been since the windows had been opened? The blinds were closed. By the window, she noticed that strips of wide, brown Scotch tape had been stuck over the Venetian blinds, preventing light and air from coming in between the slats. A glance around the place informed her that all the other openings in the apartment had suffered the same treatment. The blond angel and his mother lived in a veritable tomb consisting of a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a small living room.

An old-looking television set was blasting a commercial for an insurance company. Landard had estimated the time of his arrival well. “Is Thibault’s father not here, madame?”

“He passed away, inspector. He died twenty-one years ago, in a car accident on the road to Satory. He was a soldier. I was six months pregnant when it happened. Thibault never knew his father.” She turned to her son and put her fist in front of her mouth again. “Thibault ... The police ... What have you done now?”

Claire Kauffmann pulled the file out of her bag. “Madame, your son has been arrested as part of a murder investigation. He will remain in custody until noon tomorrow, unless his custody is extended by twenty-four hours. These police officers are here to search your son’s room in order to help their investigation. Do we have your permission?”

“Good Lord! Thibault! So it was you on TV. It was you at Notre Dame. What have you done now?”

“Will you permit us to see your son’s room, madame?”

With a hesitant hand gesture, she showed them a door at the end of the corridor. Landard headed there first, walking along walls with faded wallpaper patterned with flowers that seemed to have wilted years earlier. Touching the door handle, he turned to the young suspect, whose arm Gombrowicz was still holding.

“All right, Thibault, my boy? Do you mind if we take a look? Now do pay attention to where we search and what we take away because at the end you’ll have to sign a little piece of paper for us. All right?”

He leaned on the handle and opened the door. Inside, there was the same stifling air as in the rest of the apartment. Landard groped for the switch on the wall. Once the light was on, he couldn’t stop himself from swearing.

The young man then entered, followed by Gombrowicz and Claire Kauffmann. The magistrate and the two policemen stood for a moment, taken aback, their eyes sliding along the walls, shelves, cupboard, and display cabinets. Gombrowicz, who’d turned even paler because of the lack of oxygen in the place, turned to his superior. “Honestly, Landard, have you ever seen anything like it?”

The blond angel’s room was a veritable museum devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Lined up against walls papered with the same wilted floral pattern, from floor to ceiling and everywhere in between, there were statuettes of all shapes and sizes that seemed to be watching the three visitors with searching eyes. In the few unoccupied gaps on the shelves, childlike drawings, framed under glass, had been fixed to the wall. They all had the same subject: Mary, in all her forms, all her representations, was ever-present and celebrated.