Cemetery of Swallows (12 page)

Mallock had just enough time to ask him one question before he was taken away.

“Why, Jiménez? Was it to avenge Darbier?”

“No,
para que no hable!
”

“Who? And so he wouldn't talk about what?”

But Mallock didn't have a chance to hear the reply. So that Jimenez himself didn't talk in his turn, the guards took him away roughly and without waiting.

During the whole attack, Manu had remained immobile in his bed.

“Thanks, Amédée. My God, I really think I owe you my life.”

Mallock smiled at him. Julie's brother had been so shaken that for the first time in his life he'd finally been able to say
tu
to him!

Water was starting to fall out of the sky as Mallock was returning to Cabarete. He had seldom seen such a downpour. It was a compact mass of large, heavy raindrops. Vertical rivers that greedily rushed onto the aridity of the soil. The landscape, which had been dull and matte, became shining, colors became vivid and the greens became fluorescent. The windshield wipers couldn't keep up with such a deluge, and the
guagua
in which he was riding had to slow and almost stop while waiting for the rain to let up. It was almost 8
P.M.
when Mallock arrived in front of the Blue Paradise.

Shocked by the attempted killing and Ramón's death, Mallock had forgotten his rendezvous with Juan Antonio Servantes. The latter was waiting with a glass and a bottle of single malt in front of him. He must have come directly from his office, and hadn't changed clothes.

“Good evening, Commander. Would you like to go upstairs and freshen up a bit in your room or should we go right away? I know a very good little restaurant that I'd like to show you.”

Mallock decided it was pointless to tell him what had happened in Manuel's hospital room.

“Give me five minutes to take a shower and I'll be right back.”

Of course, a quarter of an hour later, they dropped anchor in the same harbor where Jean-Daniel had taken him the day before. But Amédée pretended to be astonished. Sometimes he acted in an almost civilized way, and was capable of the required minimum of hypocrisy.

 

Juan Antonio Servantes waited until the waiter had taken their order before leaning toward Mallock:

“I still don't know whether what I'm going to say will be of any use to you. And in fact, telling you this could put me in a difficult situation if you were indiscreet . . . ”

Servantes was beating around the bush. He was waiting for a response or a sign of encouragement. But Mallock knew only too well the virtues of silence. He endured three minutes of embarrassment and questioning looks without flinching.

The young diplomat finally cracked:

“Can I count on your total discretion?”

“Everything depends on what you've got to tell me,” Mallock said, resolved not to force a revelation. “I can't promise anything before knowing what it's about. It's up to you to decide.”

The bureaucrat was an intelligent young man: he understood that Mallock's very correctness, his refusal to make an unconditional promise to keep quiet, was the best guarantee of his possible silence. He lit a cigarillo, drank a sip of red wine, and settled back in his chair.

“You're a man of considerable experience, and I'm sure my physical appearance struck you as odd, associated with a name that is so . . . Mediterranean.”

No sign of denial on Mallock's part.

Servantes went on:

“You must also know that many former German military men, and especially the Nazis, took refuge in various countries in Latin America, forming small groups who regretted or yearned nostalgically for the Third Reich. You don't have to believe me, but my father belonged to the first category. He'd been mistaken about the notion of the Fatherland and about his
Führer
's true nature. As a soldier, he'd learned to obey and had taken longer than others to become aware of what he'd been asked to do. That's not an excuse, but it is the beginning of an explanation. Today, it's very easy to judge and condemn a whole nation. Germans are no better or worse than the other peoples that vilify them. However that may be, to come back to my father, he asked for no favors, for no leniency, and he never really tried to conceal himself. Sometimes it even seemed that he wanted to be captured, in order to atone, no doubt . . . ”

Juan Antonio Servantes hung his head.

“Not seeing punishment coming, he finally hanged himself shortly after my birth. My mother told me that he refused to be happy, and that my presence was too great a pleasure for him, a blessing he didn't deserve. In fact, I'd become an unbearable happiness for him.”

He waited a few seconds for his sorrow to subside and then added:

“To sum up, he hanged himself because of me.”

The young man choked up. To give himself time to recover, he filled the superintendent's glass and then his own. Although, or rather because, he was innocent, living was not easy. Juan Antonio Servantes was suffering and his wound was deep. The waiter came with two steaming plates of spiny lobster.

“Begin right away. It's better hot,” Juan advised.

Mallock looked at the young man and asked frankly:

“This Darbier whom Manu killed . . . Did you know him?”

The diplomat smiled painfully.

“Not personally, but Tobias Darbier was a legend among the people of the ‘exiled,' as my mother called us. In fact, ‘legend' isn't the right word, I should rather say ‘taboo.' Every time I asked her what the man had done that prevented any of his former companions from trying to take advantage of his success, my mother waved her hand, as if to tell me that there was nothing to know and that I had to stop asking questions about the guy.”

Juan waved his wrist in front of him, imitating his late mother's movement of denial.

“I think no one knew the whole truth. The man was surrounded by rumors and inspired fear. For us children, he'd become something frightening, the villain, the devil, the very face of fear and the dark. He was ‘the incarnation of the bogey-man in fairy tales.' I think he also bore all our little world's guilt, he was our collective bad conscience. In any case, he was a monster, not a man!”

Mallock thought of Manu again. He, too, had emphasized this point by speaking of an ogre.

“In Sosúa,” the young diplomat continued, “there was a group of Ashkenazi Jews who had been living there since the 1930s to escape the Nazi regime. Three or four years ago, I questioned members of one of these families. The little community was convinced that Darbier was a war criminal. There were rumors, confidences, reported declarations–there was hardly any doubt. But they didn't have enough proof to inform the Israeli authorities. And then, they were terrified. If there was a leak, if it was learned that they had accused Darbier, they were risking the worst. Rumors of torture were common on the island. It would be suicidal to attack a man who governed the territory where they lived, and who had made them rich. Because business is business, and they had dealings with him.”

“And your mother never told you anything more explicit about Darbier, about what he was supposed to have done?”

“She did. And that's what I've come to tell you.”

Juan Servantes sat up straight. Took a deep breath. Mallock recognized the importance these admissions had for the young man.

“My mother was really shocked when Tobias Darbier regained favor and then power in l996, for the third time, alongside Balaguer. In fact, it made her crazy with rage. According to her, he had gone beyond all limits of barbarity. And even if she refused to tell me more precisely, she finally fed me a few bits of information in the form of anathemas against the ogre. It was so violent and so astonishing, especially coming from her, that I still recall the exact words she used. She screamed at me that the mere existence of that man on Earth was ‘an insult to God,' his coming into the world ‘a blasphemy,' and his incredible survival ‘the devil's doing.' Caught up in her surge of hatred, she also told me something I hadn't heard before: the legend of his birth.”

Juan leaned toward Mallock and murmured:

“The scars this accursed Tobias had on his skull are supposed to have been made by his mother's teeth when he was born. It's said that she gave birth to him through her mouth.”

Amédée concealed his uneasiness by picking up his glass. He drank its content in little sips, while the young diplomat continued his story:

“The doctors are supposed to have pried apart and disjointed the poor woman's jaws in order to let the baby emerge. It's absurd, but most people around here believe it. And then my poor mother added that the man who succeeded in cleansing the earth of his presence would have ‘a place in heaven for all eternity, alongside the Lord.' Now, my mother was very religious, very orthodox in her Catholicism, if I dare say so. I was stupefied to hear her assure me that she would find it acceptable that someone who had committed a murder be admitted to heaven. It was that statement, more than all the rest, that really affected me. And that is perhaps also why, twelve years later, I am so concerned about Manuel.”

He fell silent and sat back in his chair to let the waiter fill their glasses again. He waited until the waiter had left to continue:

“I'm not a practicing Catholic, and hardly even a believer, but I did in fact detect a kind of . . . saintliness in Manuel. He has an extraordinary good will toward the people and things around him, and then there is this acceptance of his destiny. Either he is completely mad or . . . Anyway, I'm really no longer sure what to think. Do you believe in God, Commander?”

“No, nor in the devil. God forbid. Come on, let's eat.”

They both attacked the lobsters. But they were already completely cold.

 

Mallock returned to his hotel around midnight. The rain had stopped. He decided to go back to the beach to try to fight off a new fit of sadness. In the distance, at the exit from the bay, he could see white lines in the dark, the last ocean waves still playing with the coral reef, pink barriers for baby waves.

The superintendent stretched out on the sand. He imagined himself digging into the sand with his face and his webbed feet in order to give birth to his pains there. So many little soft eggs whose inhabitants would soon wriggle free from the sand and run off to the sea.

Half asleep on the beach, Mallock smiled. At himself and at his internal lunacies.

This evening, he imagined himself a giant tortoise, a survivor from the Jurassic. Sometimes an aquarium phenomenon for laughing children, sometimes a wheezy deep-sea diver, a tranquil observer of deep ocean trenches. His eyes, too, were full of tears. And his child, too, had been devoured by the crabs. Since then, the superintendent's life had been askew, his heart the wrong way round, waiting to have, like these nice animals, his back recycled in the form of combs and his abdomen cooked up in a soup!

Mallock's night was traversed by black uniforms, white lightning bolts, and eviscerated regrets suspended from hooks. There was the red of the flags and blood, and then the frightening drums, broken crosses, and things draped in leather. Anyone else would have called it a nightmare, but not Mallock. He had recognized the characteristic blue odor of his visions, as well as the cold imprint they left at the very back of his head in the morning. For the first time in this case, Dédé-the-Wizard had just received a message from heaven, from the beyond or from his own subconscious, which was sometimes faster and much smarter than he was.

He woke up with a question.

If Tobias Darbier was a war criminal and Manuel had executed him for that reason, why hadn't he admitted as much? He wouldn't have escaped a trial, but any attorney could have emphasized the extenuating circumstances. Unless he had been paid to do the job? A contract? Mossad? That Jewish community on the island? Was that plausible? Bad question. Everything was possible and everything had to be considered.

He had only one day left to learn more about the ex-emperor of the island. He got up, grimacing, and dragged himself over to the telephone. A first call to talk with Delmont about the preceding day's events:

“Jiménez has never been suspected of being a
bruto
, or of hanging out with Darbier?”

Mallock had gone straight to the point.

“No, otherwise he wouldn't have been assigned to this case. The investigation will tell us more, but we already know that in absolute terms, few people on the island are beyond Darbier's powers of corruption and his ability to do harm. The fact that Jiménez is both a good policeman and a
molo
—that's what the
brutos
call the non-
brutos
—probably played a role in his recruitment by Darbier's team. That made him a person above any suspicion.

“What about Ramón? His family?”

“I know, superintendent, it's very sad, but it is not, unfortunately, within my jurisdiction.”

Silence. Sometimes there's nothing to be done, and Mallock hated that. Out of personal pride. Out of hatred of destiny. And out of empathy as well.

“Could you at least check to see if everything is in order for the burial and the payment of his pension? You must have a Dominican counterpart in that area?”

“I promise, I'll keep an eye on it.”

“Why not both?”

“I wouldn't have thought you so sentimental, Superintend­ent.”

“Me?” Mallock interjected. “I'm a real softie, Mr. Ambassa­dor. But don't spread that around, it could do me great harm.”

Delmont laughed a long time, like a diplomat, a little dose of pure amusement accompanied by five or six seconds of professional laughter. He interrupted this great musical moment by begging Mallock to excuse him: