After the Crash (4 page)

Like everyone else, I must have heard the news of the crash in the
morning, or heard it on the radio, while I was doing surveillance
in the car park of the casino in Hendaye. Back then, I had no idea
that a few months later that accident would take over my entire life.
Ironic, isn’t it? If only I had known . . .

The Airbus 5403 from Istanbul to Paris crashed into Mont Terri
on 23 December, in the middle of the night. At 12.37 a.m., to be
precise. No one ever found out exactly what happened that night.
Until that point, it had been quite a mild winter, but on the morning of the 22nd, it had begun to snow – and it hadn’t stopped.
That night, there was a terrible snowstorm. Mont Terri is a bit like
a stepping stone between the Swiss Jura and the French Jura. The
pilot simply missed his footing. That was what people said at the
time, anyway: everyone blamed it all on the poor pilot, who was
burnt to cinders like everyone else in the cabin. What about the
black box, you may ask? All it revealed was that the plane was flying
too low and that the pilot had ended up losing control. The victims’
association and the pilot’s family sought to find out more, without
success. So the pilot was blamed, along with the snow, the storm,
the mountain, fate, Murphy’s Law, and sheer bad luck. There was a
hearing, of course. The victims’ families needed to understand. But
the public didn’t really care about that particular judgement.

The cabin was crushed at 12.37 a.m. It was the experts who calculated that afterwards, because there were no witnesses except the
passengers – and nothing could be learned from them, not even
a broken watch that might have indicated the time of the crash.
Before Christmas, ecologists had been fighting to save every pine
tree in the Jura mountains. In a few seconds, the Airbus uprooted
more trees than a century of Christmases. Those that were not torn
from the earth were set on fire, in spite of the snow. The aeroplane
ploughed a motorway through the forest, several thousand feet
long, before collapsing, exhausted. A few seconds later, it exploded,
and continued to burn all night.

The first emergency services did not discover the burning fuselage until an hour later. The reaction to the disaster was very much
delayed, as nobody lived within a three-mile radius of the crash
site. It was the inferno that alerted the valley’s inhabitants. And
then the rescue services were hampered by the snow: the helicopters
remained grounded, and the first firemen were only able to reach
the blazing aeroplane on foot, by following its scorched path. The
storm died down in the early morning, and for a few hours Mont
Terri became the centre of the world. There was even a trial, or
at least an investigation, I think, into why the emergency services
arrived so late. But not many people were interested in that judgement either.

Besides, the rescue workers must have thought that there was no
point rushing: it was clear there could be no survivors. But firemen
tend to be conscientious, even at 1.30 a.m., in the Jura mountains,
during a snowstorm. So, they searched anyway, if only so that they
hadn’t travelled all that way for nothing, and could do something
more useful than warming their hands for a few minutes by the
vast fire that had destroyed everything on this side of the mountain
– the fire that had transformed the bodies of the one hundred and
sixty-eight terrified passengers into ashes.

They searched, their eyes streaming from the smoke and the
horror. It was a young fireman – Thierry Mouchot, from the
Sochaux brigade – who found her. You may be surprised by this
level of detail, so many years later, but trust me, it’s all true. Later, I
would spend several hours talking to him, encouraging him to spin
out into eternity those few seconds, going back over all the details
to the point of absurdity. That night, he did not realise at first what
he had found. He thought it must have been a corpse – the body of
a dead baby. But it was the only body of a passenger on the Airbus
that had not been burned to cinders. The baby was very young –
less than three months old. It had been ejected on impact, from the
front left door of the Airbus’s cabin, which had been partially blown
open when the plane crashed into the mountainside. All of this
was reconstructed afterwards by the experts, proved in great detail
during the inquiry, as they attempted to calculate which seats the
baby and its parents had occupied on the plane. Have no fear: I will
come back to this shortly. Please be patient . . .

Mouchot, the young fireman, was convinced that what he had
discovered was a corpse: after all, the baby had been covered with
snow for more than an hour. And yet, when he bent over it, he saw
that the child – its face, its hands, its fingers – was hardly even blue.
The body was lying about a hundred feet from the blaze. It had
been kept warm by the protective heat of the burning cabin. The
young fireman quickly carried out mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,
exactly as he had been taught, followed by a very gentle cardiac
massage. He could never have believed he would be able to save a
newborn baby, particularly in conditions such as these.

The baby was breathing again, weakly. In the minutes that followed, the emergency services took care of the rest. Afterwards, the
doctors confirmed that it was the fire in the clearing, the heat produced by the molten cabin, that had saved the infant – a little girl
with blue eyes, very blue eyes for one so young, probably European
to judge from her pale skin. She had been ejected far enough from
the plane not to be burned alive, but close enough to benefit from
the protection of the fire’s warmth. What had consumed the other
passengers, including the child’s parents, had saved her life. That
was what the doctors said to explain the miracle.

Because it truly was a miracle!
Most of the national newspapers finished their special report on
the disaster late that night; they could not wait for the emergency
services’ verdict. Only one paper, the
Est Républicain
, took the risk
of waiting longer, of holding the presses, of making its staff stay up
even later, of sending out a general alert. A good editor’s hunch,
probably. The
Est Républicain
had at its disposal an army of freelancers in every corner of the Jura mountains, and they hung about in
front of hospitals, by police cars . . . News of the miracle first began
to spread at about 2 a.m. In its edition of 23 December, 1980, the
Est Républicain
was able to use the headline on its front page:
The
Miracle of Mont Terrible
. Alongside the photograph of the burntout fuselage, the newspaper published a colour photograph of the
baby being held by a fireman in front of the Belfort-Montbéliard
hospital. The brief caption told the story:
The Airbus 5403, flying
from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont Terri, on the Franco-Swiss
border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and flight crew on board, 168
were killed upon impact or perished in the flames. The sole survivor was
a baby, three months old, thrown from the plane when it collided with
the mountainside, before the cabin was consumed by fire.
France awoke to the news of this tragedy. In every household in
the country, the orphan discovered in the snow moved people to
tears. That morning, the
Est Républicain
’s scoop was taken up by all
the other newspapers, all the radio stations and television channels.
Perhaps you can recall it now? The wave of hot tears that rained
down in an outpouring of national grief.
One detail remained. The newspaper had published a picture of
the miracle child, but not her name. It was difficult, at two in the
morning: they would have had to get hold of Air France in Istanbul. That, at least, is what the editor must have thought. After all,
the name of the miracle child was not so important. True, adding
the blue-eyed orphan’s name to the caption under her photograph
would have increased the story’s emotional impact, but ‘The Miracle Child of Mont Terrible’ wasn’t bad either. And it preserved part
of the mystery until the baby’s identification, which was due to be
announced the following morning.
At the latest.
Now, let’s see . . .
How long have I been searching for that child’s name? Only
about eighteen years . . .

Marc’s concentration was broken by the raucous laughter of five
students sitting around a high table, about twenty feet away from
him. It looked as though the five boys were passing around photographs: probably snaps of their latest night out, the kind of pictures
they would keep all their lives, hidden away somewhere, a memory
half-glorious, half-shameful. Marc knew them vaguely – they all
belonged to one of the main associations that ran the university’s
social activities.

He looked up.
9.11 a.m., if the Martini clock was to be believed.
Mariam was talking to a girl dressed head to toe in black. The

So that is the precise moment when the mystery of Mont Terri
began. Maybe a few snatches of memory are coming back to you
now? I have reconstructed the events that followed with metronomical precision, but I will spare you the hundreds of hours I spent
interviewing witnesses. I believe a summary of the facts will prove
sufficiently edifying.

The orphaned baby discovered by the young fireman was placed
in the care of the pediatric department of the Belfort-Montbéliard
hospital, and watched over by an army of doctors. Léonce de Carville learned both pieces of news – about the crash and the miracle
baby – from the radio, at six in the morning (Léonce always woke
early). With a single telephone call, he cancelled his entire work
schedule for the day and headed instead to Montbéliard by private
jet. Fifty-five years old at the time, Léonce de Carville was one of
the hundred best known captains of industry in France. An engineer by training, he had made his fortune laying pipelines in every
continent on Earth. The de Carville business was subcontracted by
the world’s largest oil and gas multinationals. The de Carvilles’ success was due not so much to technological innovation in the oil
and gas pipelines they supplied, as to their ability to install them in
the most dangerous and complicated locations: underwater, under
mountains, in seismic zones, and so on. The business really took off
in the 1960s, when the de Carvilles invented a revolutionary technology to stabilise oil pipelines in areas of permafrost, a technology
the company managed to export – in the middle of the Cold War
– to both Siberia and Alaska.

In the white maze of the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital, Léonce de
Carville wore that mask of dignity that would impress everyone
involved in the case.

‘Follow me, please,’ said an eager nurse.
‘Where is she?’
‘In the nursery. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine . . .’
‘Who is looking after her?’
‘Um . . . Dr Morange,’ the nurse answered, a little surprised. ‘He

Léonce de Carville did not have to say another single word to
make his meaning clear.
‘You are lucky, Mr de Carville. Dr Morange is one of our most
renowned specialists. He’s still here. You can ask him anything you
like . . .’
Léonce de Carville’s mouth cracked into what may have been
a smile or a scowl. He walked on, determined and assured, and
people quickly moved aside to let him pass.
*
The night before, the industrialist had lost his only son and his
daughter-in-law. He had been the one, the shrewd CEO, who
had pushed his son, two years earlier, into taking over the Turkish
subsidiary of the de Carville business. It was an open secret that
young Alexandre de Carville had been next in line to lead the multinational after his father’s retirement. Alexandre de Carville had
coped brilliantly with his baptism of fire in Turkey, where not only
his scientific training but also his diplomatic and political skills
were needed. He had had to deal with both a military regime and
a democratic government, as the country went through a volatile
phase. And he had been playing for the highest stakes: his ultimate objective was to win the biggest contract in de Carville history,
something that would make the company’s fortune for decades to
come. Alexandre de Carville had moved to Turkey with his family
to negotiate a deal for the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, the
second longest in the world at over a thousand miles, stretching
from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. More than half of
the pipeline would go through Turkey, ending at the little port of
Ceyhan, on the south-eastern Mediterranean coast, close to the
Syrian border, where Alexandre de Carville and his family had set
up a summer house. It was a long-term undertaking: for two years,
negotiations had stalled. Alexandre de Carville had spent most
of the year in Turkey, with his wife Véronique and their daughter
Malvina, who was six years old at the time. Following the news of
her pregnancy, Véronique had not returned to France: her fragile
health had led the doctors to advise against all travel. The child’s
birth had gone well, however: Lyse-Rose was born in the Bakirkoy,
the largest private maternity hospital in Istanbul. Léonce de Carville
and his wife Mathilde, who had remained in France, had received
an elegant card announcing the birth, together with a rather blurry
photograph of their new granddaughter. But there had been no
rush. The family reunion was scheduled for Christmas 1980. At the
start of the Christmas holidays, Malvina de Carville had flown to
France, as she did every year, one week before her parents. The rest
of the family – Alexandre, Véronique and little Lyse-Rose – were to
arrive a few days later, on the night flight from Istanbul to Paris on
23 December. In the de Carvilles’ vast family mansion at Coupvray,
on the banks of the Marne, everything was ready. In honour of her
little sister, Malvina – an adorable, mischievous dark-haired girl who
commanded an army of servants like a general – had ordered that
the route from the entrance hall to Lyse-Rose’s bedroom, including
the great cherry-wood staircase, should be decorated with pink and
white pompoms.
Malvina de Carville . . .
Allow me to digress for a few lines, so that I can introduce you to
Malvina. It’s an important point, as you shall soon discover.
I don’t think Malvina de Carville ever liked me very much. In
fact, that is something of an understatement. The feeling is mutual.
Even if I tell myself that she is not to blame for her madness, that
without this tragedy she would undoubtedly have grown up to be
a clever and desirable woman – well born, then well married – it
does not alter the fact that, with her ever increasing obsessions,
she has always scared the shit out of me. Unlike her grandmother,
she never trusted me; she must have sensed that I thought of her
as some kind of monster. I promise you, I am not exaggerating.
However adorable she may have been at six years old, a monster is
what she became: ugly, embittered, uncontrollable. Anyway, that
discussion is for another time. With a little bad luck, this notebook
could end up in her hands, and God knows how that shrew might
react!
So, let’s talk instead about the thing that made her go mad: the
so-called miracle, and what happened afterwards.