A Prince Without a Kingdom (19 page)

The sound of footsteps on the roof at night, when her parents were stargazing. Fragments of invisible lives. When her father arrived home, and the children were already at the supper table, the steam from the soup would settle back down on the bowl because of the open door. Or again, after a storm, when they used to put the twigs of broken bougainvillea in her mother’s hair. Papery flowers filled with drops of water. Or when it was too hot, the way the three sisters would sleep together with dampened sheets forming a tent around them. And silly memories: the tale of a beetle they tamed, of a cat locked by mistake inside the salting tub, funny moments, the day when this happened, the day when that happened, repainting the house white in June.

And then there had been the night when their father hadn’t returned, when he had gone fishing with Gio, who was Cafarello’s son, violent, unmarriable, and another man, the one with the donkey at Pollara, tall Mazzetta.

The three men had gone to sea. Laura Viaggi believed she knew what had happened. They had boarded a boat somewhere between the islands. There was much more on board than they had bargained for. Cafarello had turned crazy and bloodthirsty. And the next day, he had killed Laura’s father to seize his share.

Vango recognized that night. It was his night too. This was what he shared with Laura Viaggi: a night of gunpowder and blood.

The notebook ended with the words
I’ll go tonight.

There was no period. And the word
tonight
trailed off in its last letters, falling below the line.

Holding the closed notebook, Vango imagined what must have happened next. The confrontation on the bridge, above the Bronx Kill, on the way back to Hotel Napoli that night. The victory of the wolf against Laura the goat. Perhaps there were witnesses, enough to condemn Cafarello. And to end the story, a flash of electricity in Sing Sing prison.

The next day at midnight, Vango left America. He had ventured to the foot of the scaffolding on Zefiro’s tower. He had gazed up to see a glow at the top. Then he had returned to the landing pier. By chance, the ship’s departure had been delayed by twenty-four hours because of a breakdown. The atmosphere was festive: waiting turned into a party. Hundreds of passengers ended up dining in leisurely fashion down at the port, as a whiff of wine wafted among the suitcases and traveling coats. In every nook and cranny, children lay asleep. People were singing at the foot of the gangways.

The ship took to the seas at midnight, all lit up, waltzing and full of life again.

Dozing in his sitting room, which resembled a cigar box lined in walnut and leather, the Irishman woke with a jolt on hearing the ship’s horn sounding. He got up out of his armchair and padded over in his socks to grab a bottle from the desk before going to the window.

“
Barcàzza,
”
he said in Sicilian. Dirty boat.

He was weary of hearing the ships’ horns sounding, and he disliked immigrants, so he would soon be moving away from Manhattan’s docks in order to be nearer Midtown. But building work on his tower was still behind schedule.

The man they called the Irishman took a long swig from the bottle before catching his breath, like a seal emerging from the water. Apart from the origin of the whiskey, there was nothing Irish flowing in his veins.

He watched the lights of the ship disappear on the horizon until all he could see was his own reflection in the window. With his left hand, he stroked the Cossack scarf around his neck. In eighteen years, since the massacre on the boat in the Aeolian Islands, Cafarello had never parted with this bloodred scarf: it was a token of his spoils from the sea, and the fortune he had made.

Paris, January 1937

Superintendent Boulard was pacing the corridors of the police headquarters in his underwear. It was five o’clock in the morning. The building was pitch-black.

“Perishing cold!” muttered the superintendent as he shuffled over the parquet floor in his slippers, trailing a woolen blanket behind him and cursing the arctic temperatures.

He was trying to find somewhere less freezing cold to sleep a while longer, as he had done in the early hours for several weeks now. It was always the same story: Boulard would doze off under his desk at eleven o’clock, only to wake up in the middle of the night with feet like blocks of ice. He would then stride energetically up and down the corridors for an hour before hunkering down somewhere.

This morning, he pushed open the door to the HQ archives and came to a stop in an aisle. The mass of paper seemed to be giving off a particular kind of warmth, and he felt if he could only lie down between the boxes he would soon drop off. In the end, he found a warm spot by the shelf for Homicides, under the archives for Crimes of Passion. He wrapped his blanket around him and closed his eyes.

Since his poor mother had gone away, Boulard hadn’t set foot outside Police Head Office at the Quai des Orfèvres. But before seeking refuge there, he had taken a stroll around the back of the Sorbonne University in order to knock on the door of his faithful second-in-command, Avignon, who had been extremely embarrassed. After half an hour of talking in the communal hallway, Avignon had agreed to let his boss step inside his small apartment.

Boulard was dumbstruck by what he saw. It was the first time he had crossed the threshold of the man he had been working with for twenty years. Augustin Avignon lived alone in three dark rooms. The walls were covered with documents and newspaper cuttings relating to every case he and Boulard had ever solved together. There was no sign of any personal belongings. A mattress lay in the corridor. The doors to the kitchen cupboards had been dismantled so that books and files could be stacked inside. Boulard pretended not to notice the large photograph of him that was displayed in the tiny living room.

“May I?” ventured the superintendent, sitting down beneath his own portrait.

Avignon cleared the clutter from the sofa.

Boulard ran his finger over a dusty table flap.

“Do you own this apartment?”

It was the only polite question he could think of, faced with such a pigsty.

“Yes.”

“That’s good. . . .”

Boulard pursed his lips enthusiastically and scanned the room, as if he thought Avignon were sitting on a gold mine.

“Have you got any coffee, my boy?”

Avignon’s eyes bulged.

“Coffee?”

You’d have thought Boulard had asked for six bottles of Château d’Yquem 1921. Avignon headed into the kitchenette.

The superintendent began to explain his situation. The threats from the Russian, his mother’s departure, his need to find a refuge, to get down to work properly again. And above all his desire to be done with the Vango affair once and for all.

From the other side of the room, Avignon avoided Boulard’s gaze.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” he asked suddenly.

The superintendent looked surprised.

“Why?”

Avignon seemed even more agitated. He rummaged about in a box, perhaps looking for a coffee press.

“I don’t know. . . . Someone might have followed you.”

“Relax,” said Boulard, shaking his head.

Avignon stopped what he was doing and turned toward Boulard, who glanced briefly around him, taking in the closed shutters and the photos on the walls. He felt stifled. What was going on in this man’s life? He understood Avignon’s absences for the past few months rather better now. His deputy was in a bad way.

“You’ve been working too hard.”

Such words had never been expressed before by the superintendent.

“Haven’t you got a lady friend?”

He had never asked a question like that either.

“You take things too seriously. You should lighten up.”

This was a feast of expressions that had never escaped Superintendent Boulard’s lips before, of which the last was not the least.

“Can I sleep at your place, my boy?”

Avignon broke into a sweat. His eyes had glazed over. Boulard could sense his discomfort.

“Of course, if it would cause any problems with your neighbor . . .”

“Why do you mention my neighbor?”

“I bumped into him, and he said hello.”

Avignon nearly leaped out of his skin.

“So someone did see you come in here?”

The superintendent went over to Avignon.

“You don’t look well. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I’ll base myself at the Quai des Orfèvres. Don’t mention to anyone what I’ve just told you. Let’s have a meeting tomorrow morning, when we’re both feeling calmer. I’m counting on you.”

A few seconds later, Boulard was gone.

He had left Avignon lying on the kitchen floor, both hands stuffed inside a cardboard box, with the handle of a steel meat cleaver clenched between his teeth.

Avignon had intended to plunge this cleaver into his boss’s chest. It was a unique opportunity. Voloy Viktor would have been pleased with him. But he couldn’t bring himself to commit such an act against the man he had admired and betrayed for so many years.

And so Superintendent Boulard had taken up residence in the police headquarters. It was the only place where Rasputin the Vulture wouldn’t come for him. Nobody, apart from Avignon, knew that Boulard stayed behind every night to sleep in this great building. One morning, a secretary had screamed when she discovered a pair of men’s underpants in her desk drawer. Boulard had taken the precaution of not reclaiming them from lost property on the second floor.

On this particular January night, lying on his shelf at the back of the archive room, the superintendent couldn’t get to sleep. For the thousandth time, he was piecing together what he called his “constellations.”

It was his way of cogitating.

When he closed his eyes, he could make every element of his investigation appear in an imaginary night sky. In his head, he would draw all the links that might exist between the isolated stars. Boulard was now convinced that Father Jean, murdered in his bedroom at the seminary in 1934, had not been killed by Vango. No, the opposite was the case: Father Jean had died for refusing to hand Vango over to his killers.

So there had to be a connection between the bullets fired at the facade of Notre Dame Cathedral as the young man tried to escape and the murder of Father Jean, as well as to the Russian who was still after Vango’s skin. The departure of the superintendent’s mother on account of the Russian was a dark planet to add to this constellation.

From the outset, there had been a luminous triangle connecting Vango, Ethel, and the zeppelin in the middle of this sky. The triangle obsessed Boulard. He had gleaned some information from Ethel about the famous voyage around the world in 1929, but he knew that he hadn’t yet probed that particular constellation enough to make her talk.

What he found interesting in this approach was the emergence of unexpected links from the gloom. And so, between one constellation and another, he might discover a connection — between Madame Boulard and Ethel, for example. Strange as it seemed, it was perfectly possible that such a connection existed. And in the same way, hopping from star to star, there might be a bridge between the predatory Russian and the round-the-world zeppelin trip.

But in the early hours of the morning, as he breathed in the smell of old paper, the superintendent wanted to make his sky look even bigger. Whenever an investigation came to a standstill, he would attempt to link it to other investigations. With his eyes still closed he would review the important cases from recent years, conjuring up other starry canopies. He would recall unsolved murders, holdups, swindles, and cases of organized crime. This morning he lay in the dark for an hour, trying to match up the cases with the witnesses and dates from the Vango mystery. It was as if he were asking the hundreds of suspects he had encountered in his life to try on Vango’s glass slipper.

The room was almost silent. Right at the back, a gentle chewing noise was coming from the corner with the yearbooks: an archivist mouse was painstakingly at work.

Suddenly, the superintendent leaped to his feet. He ran over to the door and pressed the big switch: one after another, the overhead lights came on. A maze of shelves appeared before him, ten meters high, as Boulard strode toward the middle of the archives. An extraordinary choreographed dance began to take place from one end of the room to the other. The superintendent kept pushing around a ladder on rollers, climbing up it, rummaging through piles of paperwork, then climbing back down again. He transferred the files clamped under his arms to a box, then ran to the other end of the room and peered hard at the labels of archive boxes while hopping from foot to foot. He selected one, pulled out a wad of index cards that made up an old diary or record of admissions to the police headquarters for 1935. Out of breath and only half-satisfied, he scratched his chest through his undershirt and started pushing the ladder on rollers again, like a soldier moving his catapult at the foot of a fortress. On reaching the intended spot, Boulard threw his head back and commenced his ascent of the great wall.