The Madonna of Notre Dame (11 page)

He thought about Djibril, and the fate he was now unable to change behind the walls of his prison. He thought of the advice the murderer had given him: pray, yes, but also act before it was too late, act while you still have the freedom of choice and action. Finally, he thought about his brother. To act, act before death comes for us, act before we turn to dust. Act before we’re buried under regrets and shovelfuls of soil.

He put his pouch back into his left pocket and, followed by a trail of fragrant smoke that escaped intermittently from his pipe, he turned right in the direction of the Palais.

The morning court session had ended with a flourish, with the case of a thirty-eight-year-old tile installer. The night before, in an advanced state of drunkenness, he’d hit his wife with a hammer in front of their three children aged twelve, ten, and seven. She was currently in the hospital with a fractured shoulder blade. When Claire Kauffmann asked him the reasons for his act, the man, sitting opposite her in the tiny defendant’s box, had at first shrugged before answering, “Tiredness.”

The deputy magistrate had slammed shut the file with the police report before suggesting an immediate trial.

With her heavy load of papers in the crook of her arm, she went along the endless corridors of the Palais de Justice, climbed steps in every direction, walked through creaking doors, along flaking walls, picking up along the way hastily scribbled bits of paper or Post-it notes that had fallen off doors they’d been stuck on in order to indicate that such-and-such a judge or such-and-such a deputy had been moved elsewhere owing to lack of space
or funds. She passed clerks of court, magistrates, and police; defendants who looked distraught, lost in this neon-lit labyrinth where even professionals sometimes struggled to find their bearings, some of them handcuffed and kept on a leash by a gendarme, their staring eyes expressing the boredom, the anxiety, and the tiredness of a night spent in the Palais cells.

She went to her office to put down her stack of files, and immediately grabbed that of young Thibault, the suspect in the Notre Dame murder case, whose twenty-four-hour custody was about to expire and needed to be urgently renewed. As she was going back out, the telephone rang. Her fellow deputy picked up while Claire Kauffmann paused in the doorway. “It’s Reception on the Boulevard du Palais side,” she said. “Apparently there’s a priest from the cathedral who wants to speak with you.”

“Later,” she replied. “Give him my direct line and ask him to call back in two hours’ time.”

Then she left, the file in the crook of her arm, walking in small, quick, high-heeled steps toward the Crime Squad, where Captain Landard and the alleged murderer were waiting for her.

Once in the room, she felt nauseous. The air was unbreathable and the cloud of smoke so thick, she guessed rather than saw that Landard was sitting, as usual, on the corner of his desk. Opposite him, handcuffed to his chair, the suspect seemed to be staring at the policeman’s shoes. Landard got up and went to the deputy magistrate. For a moment, they stood by the door, speaking in hushed tones.

“Is this a new interrogation technique, captain? Do you smoke your suspects like herrings?”

“Absolutely, Mademoiselle Kauffmann. At night, we marinate them in the humid basement of the cells. During the day, we smoke them under the fourth-floor roof. We alternate chill with stifling heat. A little combination that’s already yielded results.
The prisoners come out of it—how shall I put it?—softer, wiser, more inclined to talk.”

“Seriously, captain, may I open the window? You can’t breathe here.”

“If you insist. It’s a whole atmosphere I’m only going to have to reconstruct once your charming form is out of here.”

“Where’s Lieutenant Gombrowicz?”

“Down in the courtyard. I sent him out to have his sandwich. Shall we get on with it, madame? Shall we give our little blond angel a second round?”

“Don’t call him that, captain.”

“Does it bother you?”

“You know as well as I do that there’s nothing angelic about this young man.”

“No need to get all hot and bothered. It’s just a friendly little nickname.”

“I’m tired of people giving affectionate nicknames to perverts, you see? I’m tired of rapists being described as libertines or seducers. I’m tired of innuendos like ‘But what was she doing in the guy’s apartment at that time of night?’ I’m tired of gentle euphemisms violent husbands use to explain why they’ve sent their wives to Emergency. I’m tired of hearing ‘Of course I didn’t hit her. It was just a couple of slaps to calm her down.’ In our profession, words are important, captain, words have meaning, they have weight. The terms rape and murder have legal consequences, and I find it especially tendentious that a professional like yourself should call a defendant suspected of sexual assault and murder a ‘little blond angel.’ Have you got the form ready?”

Landard gave the deputy magistrate his seat behind the desk. She opened the window wide, sat down opposite Thibault, and studied him carefully. There was nothing angelic about him except the nickname. The night he’d spent in the cells had visibly
overwhelmed and broken him. Landard was laying siege to a fortress that was ready to yield. If the young man had something on his conscience, it would take less than an hour to make him confess.

“Young man, I’ve come to inform you that your custody is being prolonged by another twenty-four hours.”

The boy was still staring at the spot on the side of the desk left vacant by the captain’s shoes. He had not paid the deputy magistrate the slightest attention.

“Did you hear me? Are you all right?”

Without stirring, without even blinking, he began to talk, and Claire Kauffmann was suddenly struck by how very pale he was.

“They went to see my mother, madame. They went to see her and they made her talk. Then they showed her on their screens like a circus animal, her face streaming with tears, with more wrinkles than a mummy. They showed my mother in tears on TV to millions of viewers.”

Claire Kauffmann turned to the police officer. “What’s he saying? What’s he talking about?”

“Didn’t you watch it? They interviewed his mother, and showed it on the one o’clock news.”

“You’re joking! Which station? Who told them the identity of the suspect?”

“No idea, madame. I guess they found out, they were doing their jobs, just like you and me.”

“And who showed him the interview?”

“We had a little break during our chat, about ten minutes ago. Gombrowicz clearly needed some fresh air, so I sent him downstairs and Thibault quietly watched the news while we were waiting for you, just like an old couple over a TV dinner.”

At the mention of the television report, the young man suddenly
looked dizzy. Claire Kauffmann walked around the desk and put a hand on his shoulder. “Captain, remove his handcuffs.”

“That’s not very prudent, madame.”

“Captain Landard, I’m asking you to remove his handcuffs immediately. I’m calling a doctor.”

Landard complied, let the deputy magistrate do as she saw fit, and, hands in his pockets, went and stood comfortably at the other end of the room. She picked up the receiver. While the number was ringing, she turned again to the young man. He finally raised his eyes, which had been totally emptied of everything, toward the young woman, and she noticed for the first time how pale his eyes were, an almost translucent gray, a gray like tracing paper, as if they were only slightly masking the inside of his soul. He joined his hands, which were now free, and recited in a whisper: Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners. Now, and at the hour of our death.

Then he stood up and ran.

Deputy Kauffmann’s phone had now been ringing in vain for three hours. Father Kern had never considered it important to get himself a cell phone, a quirk he now bitterly regretted, forced as he now was to leave his jar between confessions to go to the antediluvian pay phone in the sacristy, which nobody had used since the advent of mobile phones. In order to reach the device, which had been stuffed at the end of the corridor linking the cathedral and the sacristy, he had to go all around the ambulatory through the north side, so as to avoid at all costs the south end, where, as usual, Madame Pipi had parked her behind and her
flowery hat for the day. A little earlier in the afternoon, as Kern was walking across the cathedral between two attempts to reach the Palais de Justice, he’d caught the eye of the old lady with the hat, and her expression was even more raving mad than usual, as though a flow of anguish was about to burst out, a torrent, a scream about to explode any moment now amid worshippers and tourists. Kern had decided to make a detour, struggling to look away from the glistening eyes staring at him from beneath the plastic poppies, since he considered his phone call to Claire Kauffmann to be more urgent than Madame Pipi’s confessions.

However, once he’d reach the pay phone, he’d still have to wait to be alone, wait for the sacristan to go and polish the silver in some other distant corner of the cathedral, wait for the duty guard to finish his break and his coffee—since the staff coffee machine was in the sacristy—wait for a worshipper coming to ask for a few drops of holy water for her sick relative to leave, the precious liquid lapping at the bottom of a plastic bottle. And when the coast was finally clear, it was always the same reply he heard on the line: a tone that was becoming increasingly irritating and gave the impression that the entire Palais de Justice had been evacuated as the result of a bomb explosion.

It was now past four o’clock. Father Kern hung up the receiver again, promising himself to try his luck once more in a few minutes. Like the day before, he could feel his temperature rising, and this only increased his double feeling of urgency and nervousness. He would leave early, this evening; his night, he knew already, did not bode well.

He sat down on one of the wooden chests in the corridor of the sacristy. The stained glass windows of the Chapter cloister spread a green-tinted light on his back. Nearby, on the right-hand side, behind the leather-lined door between him and the cathedral, the anonymous mass of tourists emitted a dull hubbub
worthy of the Tower of Babel, which echoed endlessly, from morning till night, beneath the vaults of the great aisle.

Father Kern looked at his watch and went toward the pay phone, but was immediately interrupted by Mourad, the guard, who had come in by the external door that gave onto the presbytery. The two men looked at each other for a moment, both embarrassed by each other’s presence, then Mourad greeted the priest with a weary gesture and disappeared into the sacristy. Kern sat back down. He would have to wait again before he could phone.

He heard the rumble of the coffee machine. Shortly afterward, Mourad reappeared, holding a plastic cup. He collapsed more than sat on the other end of the carved chest on which the priest was already sitting. They remained there for a moment, in the relative silence of this corridor, which was disturbed by Mourad’s repetitive sighs and the sound of the plastic stirrer at the bottom of his cup. Father Kern began to stuff his pipe.

“You don’t look too well, Mourad. Something not right?”

“Not right, Father, not right at all.”

“What’s going on? Tell me.”

“An injustice, Father, that’s what’s going on. An injustice like I’ve never known in my whole life.”

“You’ve just come from the presbytery, haven’t you?”

“That’s right, Father.”

“Did you go and see the rector?”

“That’s right, Father. A little earlier, I got a call on my walkie-talkie, ‘Mourad, the rector wants to see you.’ You know, Father, we don’t get summoned up there often.”

“I know.”

“So I go up to the presbytery as fast as I can, knock, and walk into the rector’s office. You’ll never guess what he wanted to talk to me about.”

Father Kern took the time to light his pipe before replying. Heavy, fragrant curls of smoke rose above his head. “It was about your rounds last Sunday night, wasn’t it?”

The guard sat up straight on the chest. “Good grief, does everybody here know?! Everybody in the world seems to know that I didn’t do my rounds after closing! Everybody except me!”