Cemetery of Swallows (16 page)

Under his funereal clouds, Mallock tries to go on living:

“I'm well aware that I shouldn't talk aloud, my dear. I must seem like a senile old man, but I miss you so much . . . ”

Today, Thomas would be ten years old. Opening a can of peas, Mallock speaks to him, and his voice resounds, somber and hoarse, in the solitude of the apartment.

“You've never tasted
confit de canard
, my baby? I'm sure you would have liked it. I would have made it with little potatoes cut into cubes and grilled slowly with garlic and parsley. You'd have loved it, my little fellow.”

And then there would be a cake with ten candles, and he'd blow them out and laugh.

Mallock talks and Mallock weeps.

Amélie's death reawakened in him the pain of Thomas's. And he was now mourning both of them. In fact, one after the other, in a sad kind of tennis game. When he concentrates to stop thinking about Thomas, he starts thinking about Amélie. And, on the other side of the court, she strikes him in turn. In the street it's the same thing: every child's cry reminds him of his Tom, every woman's skirt reminds him of Amélie. And then, all those faces that resemble theirs! When you lose someone, you see people who look like them everywhere, on every sidewalk. And in filmed crowds as well.

Outside, after having long wallowed in a kind of Indian summer, a substitute for spring, the weather had suddenly rushed without warning into a hard winter, an eternity of frost and ice.

In Mallock, everything is big—his belly and his heart, his hands and his fits of anger. So why would it be different for his sufferings?

His sadness weighs tons.

Heartache, sorrow.

Since his return from the Dominican Republic, Amédée has continued to live and act. To get up, eat, use his brain in service to the community. No revolt and no tears. Show nothing, fool people. Don't forget to respond scrupulously to all these smiles. And then even laugh. Laugh with others. A perfect management of appearances for an existence from which all desire has disappeared. In its place, emptiness and depression.

Ice-cold cotton swab. Shot. Morning, noon, and night, the daily injection of sadness. The coldness of the ether evaporating. Bandage. And the irrepressible desire to weep all his body's tears. To collapse in sobs, to vomit sad stuff. Amédée is well acquainted with sadness. It is a son who wakes up one morning, says, “Hello, Papa!' and then dies.

Mallock wolfs down an enormous potted duck thigh, presented skin side down. A skin lightly cut into squares to make it easier to detach it from its grease. The waterfowl comes from the Dordogne, and was prepared by Jules's mother.

 

Ten minutes later, he is startled by the ring of the telephone. Picking up the receiver, he says to himself that he really should adjust it. On the other end of the line, a smile is waiting for him. It's Margot Murât, or Queen Margot, as her colleagues call her. A leading journalist, she has been assuming in the meantime the difficult role of the superintendent's companion.

“You okay, teddy bear?”

“Okay,” Mallock lies, because he doesn't like to complain.

And then, it's almost true; just hearing her voice makes him feel better. Margot is doubtless the only person who can get him out of his moments of complete helplessness, instantly, by the simple miracle of her voice. How should he interpret that sign?

He decides not to answer that kind of question and instead asks a different one:

“Are you coming back to Paris soon?”

“Do you miss me, Superintendent?”

“Guess.”

That's the best Mallock can manage in the way of a declaration of love.

“We can see each other, if you want. I'm landing at Roissy this evening,” Margot continues, “at 10:10. I've written a great report and I'm giving myself three days' vacation.”

Mallock is happy, but the poor dope, he doesn't show it. On the contrary, he can't help adding an annoying question:

“And your husband?”

“My husband is not your problem.”

“You know that isn't true,” Amédée insists.

““You want me to get a divorce? When are we getting married?”

“I didn't say that, but . . . ”

“This kind of discussion has never gone anywhere.”

Margot is right and Mallock knows it. He's acting like a jerk.

“Call me when you're back in Paris,” he finally says.

“Maybe. You could also come get me, Mr. Grumpy.”

She hangs up without saying goodbye, annoyed. He gets a dial tone. Pensively, Mallock puts down the receiver. He's happy that he heard her voice and that he will soon be able to hold her in his arms. Even if he's sorry she's married. The superintendent has trouble with the adulterous aspect of their relations. He wishes she were free.

“And why not a virgin, too, while you're at it?” Margot would have asked him.

 

Mallock runs his tongue over an upper right molar.

He thinks he's finished with his past, but his past hasn't finished with him. When you finally understand that your love for your mother isn't mutual, then you decide never to make the same mistake again.

Being normal is too painful.

After returning from his first vacation with Margot a few months before, Mallock had bought the apartment over his. The big bear had decided to enlarge his cavern. He hadn't asked himself why, not for a single minute! He'd had his apartment remodeled, made into a duplex, and at the same time he'd had all the doors reinforced. He'd had his little entry door transformed into a double security door with cameras. All the windows had been fitted with bulletproof panes, and detection systems installed in each room. A second Fort Mallock, so to speak. All that just for himself?

He hadn't been able to protect Amélie.

He'd replaced his little bed with a king-size one two yards wide. Still without suspecting his secret conjugal thoughts.

The new second story, which had been completely renovated, opened out on the courtyard in a semicircle like that of the living room, and across from it, there was another large window looking out to the south on a private garden, Douanier Rousseau style. It was in this vast space that he'd set up the office he'd so long dreamed about: a center for reflection equipped with a computer and sound and projection systems, his collection of unpublished recordings of the Beatles and, finally assembled in one place, his personal collection of books on all the techniques of criminal investigation.

He was standing in front of the latter when the doorbell rang.

 

On the security screen, a motorcyclist wearing a helmet stood outside his door. He identified himself by looking up at the camera. Mallock let him through the first security door and then clicked him through the second after going down to the ground floor. The policeman gave him a big bubble-wrap envelope. It contained the film that had so much disturbed Julie's brother and triggered his incredible punitive expedition to the Dominican Republic.

In the plane, he'd almost died.

Now he seemed to be out of danger. A miracle, the emergency doctor had said. Mallock was no longer concerned about that. He just wondered how he was going to untangle the whole affair in a rational way. He thought it was all over, not suspecting that the worst and most puzzling part was still to come.

He thanked the motorcyclist, closed the security door, and went back up to his office. The first report in the program, which was much older, appeared on the flat screen that covered the west wall of his cave.

Fifteen images per second, black and white, jerky stride and smiles: a group of explorers was parading, white and tall, among an army of Haitians, small with dark faces and toothy smiles. The film seemed to have been restored, but the gray tones were almost completely absent. The whole thing made you think of a Corto Maltese comic book. After the introductory scene, the cameraman had immortalized a celebratory dance, full of feathers and makeup, towering headgear and grass skirts. And then came a shocking sequence, the dinner. Scrawny little monkeys had been tied up and brought in. The natives attached them to bamboo chairs that they slid under the large table. The tops of their heads poked through holes that had been made in the wood. With blows of a machete, the Haitians attacked the heads and, with a twist of the wrist, sliced the tops of the poor animals' skulls off. With wooden spatulas, the guests could then enjoy their brains while they were still warm.

Mallock gritted his teeth.

He'd seen his share of dead human bodies and horrors, but even he found it impossible to bear seeing animals suffer. Like the sight of a child's body in the bushes, it made him want to kill somebody, to scream and commit suicide all at once.

The desire to be dead, to no longer be there, in any case on this planet.

Amédée remembered the little monkey playing the piano that he'd glimpsed in his dream. He didn't push his reflection any further. It wasn't the first time that such a coincidence had arisen in Dédé-the-Wizard's life.

End of the first segment of the program. The second was in color and Mallock recognized the Dominican Republic, on the other side of the island of Hispaniola.

At the very beginning of the film, women were rolling cigars, or at least, contrary to the caption, the wrappers for them. After removing the central vein of the biggest and most beautiful tobacco leaves, they smoothed out the two parts on their thighs. The film lasted about twenty minutes and in it Mallock relived the atmosphere of the factories. He even thought he caught a glimpse of the strange Zagiõ with his gleaming teeth, sitting at the entrance to a humidification room.

A second part showed a tour of the island to visit the tobacco plantations. The camera moved through villages typical of the Dominican Republic, with their houses made of wooden planks and corrugated metal; some of them were larger and made of reinforced concrete with reinforcing rods pointing toward the sky. Mallock recognized the trees painted mauve and the ads for the local beer, Presidente. Then he came to the part that had triggered everything. In a shot of an almost completely deserted square, he saw a man accompanied by two bodyguards wearing suits. The man's skin was gray and his eyes yellow and bloodshot. Mallock thought again about what he'd been told regarding Darbier's birth. At the end of the shot, he moved out of the frame without his blond eyes having noticed the presence of a camera. Had he realized that he was being filmed, he would probably have seen to it that the video and the journalist were destroyed, and the course of his life, like that of Manu, would have been totally different.

Mallock replayed the sequence several times, trying to discover a clue, a detail, that would help him escape from this enigmatic mire in which he felt he was getting more and more bogged down, swallowed up alive. Nothing! There was nothing to be seen except this bloody old man crossing a bloody square.

Was Mallock blind?

 

The potted duck was grilled just right.

No more fat and a perfectly crunchy skin.

Amédée put the thigh on three layers of paper towel. Then he put it on a plate before sprinkling on the hot skin a few drops of sherry vinegar, chopped cilantro, ground pepper, and freshly grated ginger.

He sat back down in front of the screen to enjoy his duck.

A cultural channel was showing a very well-documented report on an animal reserve in South Africa. A young blond woman with full lips was explaining in English her strange job: she masturbated white rhinos to harvest their sperm. A new kind of white gold that the country sold at high prices to zoos all over the world. The beautiful woman mimed a mating dance in front of the animal to put him in the mood so that she could proceed to harvest the sperm.

Amédée watched, appalled. He was living in a world reduced to having nymphets in tight jeans jerk off endangered species.

It was better to laugh about it, and that's what he did.

The next morning, Anita rang his doorbell at eight o'clock sharp. Mallock's housekeeper was Mauritanian, and had always been extremely punctual. Small and very buxom, she had a vase-shaped face, a vast black moon. All the good will in the world was reflected in her face. She took care of Mallock's cave as though it were the most precious of palaces, and of Amédée as though he were the last of the Merovingian kings. Sometimes she prepared little dishes “from down there” for him and put them in his freezer, so that he wouldn't die of hunger. She was a gem, a black pearl, a marvel of humanity and kindness. Between Mallock and her a bond of fidelity had been woven that was strengthened by an affection that consisted essentially of silences shared and smiles exchanged.

“Good morning, Superintendent. I hope I didn't wake you up?”

“Well, actually you did; for once I slept like a log,” Mallock yawned.

“How was your trip? Not too difficult?”

What answer could he give?

“Let's say that I'm not sorry to be back to my apartment and my Anita.”

The Mauritanian woman blushed with pleasure. Or at least Mallock supposed she did. He took advantage of this to return to his bedroom and take out of his suitcase a colored top in size XXXL.

“A little souvenir from over there for my Anita,” Amédée announced.

“Monsieur, you're too kind! My God, how beautiful it is!”

Mallock assured her that it wasn't anything much. Nonetheless, he received two big, smacking kisses in gratitude.

“Shall I make you breakfast?”

“Thanks very much, but I've got an appointment on the square with one of my collaborators and a friend.”

 

In fact, Mallock had decided to follow Manuel's trial very closely. He had set only one condition: he would never have anything whatever to do with any lawyer, prosecutor, or judge. Julie and Kiko, Manu's wife, would serve as an interface between him and this world that he'd come to detest.