The First Fingerprint

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  Christine coughed. She looked less tense.

  “But you couldn’t bear it that a man like Le Guen stole this discovery right from under your nose.”

  Christine’s hand trembled a little. Moracchini gripped it tighter, and they stayed like that for some time. Then Christine slowly raised her head.

  “Le Guen … is a wonderful man,” she mumbled. “He gave us our … our Provençal Lascaux.”

  Her head drooped again. She breathed in deeply.

  “I … I never asked my brother to kill him. That was his own idea … he wanted to please me.”

  Christine gulped. Moracchini stroked the back of her hand with her thumb.

  “Can you explain how all this happened?”

  “There’s … there’s nothing to explain … My brother became a killer long ago … When our mother died … If you can call her a mother …”

  She stared at Moracchini, as though she could see her tormented existence mirrored there.

  “Thomas acts only in relationship with me. He … he interprets everything I say or do in his own way …”

  She squirmed in her chair and took a deep breath. Two beams of light glittered across her face.

  “He knew I was working on anthropophagy … One day last year, he brought me a woman’s leg.”

  The police photos ran through Moracchini’s mind like a sordid slide show. A half-naked woman on a blood-soaked mattress, her guts hanging out, her leg severed. A woman lying on leaves in a wood, wearing a mauve suit and high heels. A mash of brains and bone. A vision of de Palma lying on the stretcher. She was almost suffocating. She closed her eyes and concentrated.

  “What about Franck Luccioni?”

  “Thomas couldn’t bear it when someone grew close to me. When he came back from his trip to Australia last year, I thought he’d been cured, but …”

  “He wasn’t … The contact he’d had with shamans he’d met during his travels had in fact exacerbated his insanity.”

  “He couldn’t stand me having friends, or anyone touching or hurting me.”

  Christine let go of Moracchini’s hand and started rocking on her chair.

  “The only male friend I ever had was Franck … Poor Franck … If our father had lived, Thomas would never have turned out this way. If our father had lived, we’d all still be together.”

  “Why?”

  “When our father died, Thomas was struck dumb. He was incapable of saying anything …”

  For the first time since the start of the questioning, Christine’s knees relaxed.

  “Then what happened?”

  “He became so self-absorbed that he stopped going out … At certain times, he communicated only with signs.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “The only thing she could think of doing was to send him to a home. It was hell … Violence became his only defense …”

  Moracchini stood up and gently laid her hand on Christine’s shoulder.

  “Then you and your brother killed your mother …”

  She felt Christine’s entire body quake. It was enough of an answer.

  “It was then that he began to become interested in prehistory and everything to do with the first men. He saw it as the ideal state of humanity. Before our morality, before all the evils of our civilized society … In fact it was he who led me to start studying the subject … It was a passion we shared.”

  “What strange concepts!”

  “Strange to you … but if you knew these men and women, you wouldn’t think like that!”

  “I suppose not, but all this doesn’t explain such horribly violent murders!”

  “It may not excuse them, but it does explain them … When you’ve been humiliated all your life, you end up losing your reason …”

  “So it was you who enabled Thomas to meet primitive tribes?”

  “Yes, it was me. He came with me on several occasions, and I pulled strings with the Kajabbi mission to get him odd jobs. At the beginning, he did rather well …”

  “Why do you say ‘at the beginning’?”

  “Because after about a year, he started to miss me. He was beginning to lose the ability to speak again.”

  Christine twisted her fingers nervously.

  Vidal got nothing out of Thomas Autran. For an hour it felt as if he were questioning a slab of granite. On several occasions he had to stop himself from hitting the man in front of him. Yet he never let his hatred show, nor raised his voice. As time went by, he became more and more surprised that he was not succumbing to fatigue or anger. He was still in control of himself.

  After an hour, he showed Thomas irrefutable proof of his guilt: the results of the D.N.A. tests on samples taken from Caillol’s house and the negative hands. It was a perfect piece of evidence, but it did not draw a single word from Thomas Autran’s lips.

  At 4:30 p.m., Vidal handed him the transcript of his interrogation. He signed it without hesitating, without even reading it. The text accused him of murdering Franck Luccioni, Hélène Weill and Julia Chevallier, of kidnapping Sylvie Maurel and of the attempted murder of a police officer. Autran accepted the whole package without even trying to defend himself. At 5:00 p.m., he was taken back to his cell.

  Moracchini opened the window to let in the sea air.

  “Why did you ask Caillol to let Thomas out of hospital? You knew what would happen—you did just the opposite of what you should have.”

  “No, at the time, I had no idea.”

  Christine explained that Thomas had been interned a month after their mother’s death, and it was then that his unhealthy affection for her had intensified. Caillol had done a lot for him.

  “There’s still something I don’t understand: why did your brother try to frame Caillol?”

  “Thomas is extremely intelligent, far more so than you or I. Despite his madness, he realized that the police would track him down, so he used Caillol as a scapegoat.”

  “O.K., now let’s go back to when he left France for the second time …”

  “I asked him to go.”

  “After the deaths of the divers?”

  Christine’s eyes clouded over. She went pale.

  “Did you hear my question, Christine?”

  She nodded her head nervously.

  “And what’s your answer?”

  “I …”

  “You didn’t know it was him?”

  “No.”

  A gust of fresh air spread through the office, carrying with it the din of the city. Moracchini sat down and stretched in her chair.

  “Why did you decide to disappear?”

  “After Franck’s death, I noticed a man following me. I knew about his father’s past, and I soon realized that I was going to have to vanish forever.”

  “How did Luccioni find out?”

  “I have no idea …”

  “What about the corpse we found in Sugiton creek?”

  “My brother set up the entire thing.”

  “And you did nothing to stop him!”

  “My brother’s ill. He doesn’t reason like you or me. He presented me with a fait accompli … But you’re right, I didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s odd that you’re not trying to defend him.”

  “I did that for years. I tried everything, but I’ve had enough. Anyway, sooner or later, all this was bound to happen.”

  Anne was not sure if Christine’s answers were a simple strategy to make herself look innocent, or if they reflected the truth. Fatigue suddenly swamped her; she had not slept for two days. But her brain was still working overtime.

  “If you had so much power over him, why didn’t you try to stop him from turning into a monster?”

  “I did … by entering into his madness. By making him believe that I could communicate with spirits …”

  Moracchini went over to her and spoke almost directly into her ear.

  “Christine, I really can’t swallow all this. In fact, I don’t believe you. So why don’t you tell
me everything? There’s a gaping wound, an awful trauma in your life. You love your brother more than anything, even more than you love yourself. You loved that little boy who was so gentle and happy, and you hated your mother who beat him like the crazy woman she was. That boy who was your other half, your flesh and blood … And that terrible mother who let you get away with everything because you were her daughter, and who tortured him because he was unwanted, who mistreated him so badly that the neighbors thought he was ill. It should be Martine Autran sitting here today. Whether it was an accident or not, she was behind your father’s death, and your brother avenged him. After that, he lost his sanity and started killing anyone who threatened to separate you. And you let him get on with it.”

  “I …”

  “I think that’s the explanation for Luccioni’s death … He must have known many of your secrets … he knew about the hand you brought back from the U.S.A., which he tried to sell to a fence because you’d asked him to … The same hand we found in your brother’s bedroom. You needed the money to start a new life.”

  “You’re right.”

  Moracchini drew back suddenly.

  “I know what you did during your first hours in custody. You had a long think and you said to yourself: ‘the only way to be with him again is to get as short a sentence as possible.’ Because, as you must realize, prison is going to separate you for decades. Perhaps forever. So you thought: ‘I’ll make them think that he’s the murderer, then at most I’ll be accused of aiding and abetting him …’ It was a good idea, Christine, but men and women have lost their lives, and this evening I’m sending you in front of the judge. What will you say to him?”

  “My only crime is to have loved my father and my brother more than anything.”

  “Your crime is to have followed your brother, and perhaps even encouraged or manipulated him. That’s what Commandant de Palma thinks. Your crime is to have taken part in the kidnapping of a woman and helped to draw our fellow officer into a fatal trap. These are the facts.”

  Moracchini could no longer control herself. She felt like slapping Christine Autran, but then she pulled herself together at the last moment.

  “Your CRIME IS TO HAVE TRIED TO MURDER OUR TEAMMATE! DO YOU HEAR ME?”

  Vidal was on his way back from the cells when he heard her outburst. He rushed into the office. Paulin and Salerno were already there, separating the Capitaine from Christine. Moracchini was at the end of her tether; fury and hatred twisted her features.

  Paulin had already decided to send the twins in front of the judge, and then examine the rest of the case file the following week. Given de Palma’s absence, it would be pointless for his teammates to go through his papers; they would find nothing of any use. De Palma was totally inscrutable. It was his main failing. Only he could take this questioning any further.

  The Commissaire took Moracchini by the arm and led her into the corridor. Despite his exhaustion, Vidal wanted to ask Christine a whole series of questions about her trips to the U.S.A. and the death of Anna McCabe. But he settled for asking her why she had so wanted to go inside Le Guen’s Cave.

  “For the past ten years, I’ve been working on shamanism. It might sound odd to you, but I thought I had acquired certain powers. I thought that the animal-spirits could heal my brother. So, I needed a gateway to the other world. My brother is utterly obsessed by Le Guen’s Cave. My only hope was to get him inside the sanctuary so that the spirits could do their work … I knew there was a second entrance, but I didn’t find it until the beginning of December. The first thing I did was to take my brother inside. And, for the first time for …”

  Christine was holding back her tears. Her chest rose and fell violently.

  “He was really mad with joy …”

  She was prostrate for a moment. After a long period of silence, she added:

  “But I’d forgotten about the Slain Man.” That was all she said.

  At 6:00 p.m., the police van took the twins to see the magistrate.

  On the floor of Le Guen’s Cave, the police found two diving suits and some oxygen cylinders. If Thomas and Christine Autran had managed to kill de Palma and Sylvie Maurel, they would have got away via the underwater entrance. The next day, divers were sent down to explore. They discovered that the gateway had been opened and one of the concrete blocks moved aside.

  33.

  “I have had to give up everything that I was.

  I have sacrificed my modesty, which was sweeter than anything,

  Modesty which, like the milky

  Silvery mist of the moon

  Envelops each woman and guards her soul

  From the horror of life. Do you understand, my brother?”

  Elektra’s voice rose from nowhere, a dark melody from the catacombs of his soul. De Palma tried to open his eyes, to move one hand, then the other, but an unknown force was pinning him to his bed, inert.

  “I had to sacrifice these sweet frissons for my father.

  When I experienced bodily pleasure

  Do you think that its sighs and groans

  Did not echo even unto my bed?”

  In the distance, a dark sun was rising, mounting rapidly in a red sky. Stone drawings of two Slain Men quivered on the horizon. Geometric shapes were taking on a human appearance: a man and a woman. De Palma recognized them at once: Thomas and Christine Autran, feeling their way toward the unknown meaningless of their madness.

  “The dead

  are jealous: and as a fiancé

  he has sent me hatred with hollow eyes …”

  He felt a sharp pain in his belly. Cold steel. Barely audible voices were all around. He did not recognize the one closest to him.

  “We brought him out of his coma yesterday morning. You can speak to him, but don’t be surprised if he doesn’t answer. It’s a little early for long speeches.”

  The needle emerged from his guts.

  “He’ll be able to go home soon …”

  “Thanks, Doctor …”

  It was Marie’s voice. He made a superhuman effort to open his eyes. His wife was there in front of him, leaning against a white wall. Beside her were his old father, his mother and Jean-Louis Maistre.

  “He’s opening his eyes!”

  “Are you O.K., Michel?”

  An intense pain dug into his forehead. His mouth was leaden and his tongue as hard as wood. The ward consultant came in and asked the visitors to leave.

  “Can you hear me, Monsieur de Palma?”

  The Baron tried to answer, but not the slightest sound came.

  “You have wounds to your shoulder and head. It’s been three days now. We’ve given you sedatives to help you cope with the pain, but you’re much better now. I’ll give you another jab tonight, then tomorrow I think you’ll be alright … You’re going to sleep now, O.K.?”

  The ceiling of the room started spinning and the medic’s face vanished into a blur. In the distance, a wood fire crackled in the darkness of the night. The trembling voice of an old man hammered out metallic sounds, in an unknown, rhythmic chant.

  At about the same time, Sylvie emerged from police headquarters after an interview lasting more than two hours. She had refused Vidal’s offer to drive her home. The sleeping pills and psychotropic medication which she had been given in large doses had left her in an altered state. She walked slowly across esplanade de la Tourette, thinking about the police officer who destiny had put in her path.

  That morning, she had seen a women his age and two old people outside de Palma’s hospital room. She had felt ridiculous with her bouquet of roses and turned on her heel.

  Near police headquarters, several sirens wailed in the humid evening air, and a police van set off for Les Baumettes prison. Sylvie listened to their din until they were swallowed by the Vieux-Port tunnel.

  She stopped on the square in front of Saint-Laurent church and gazed at vibrant Marseille laid out at her feet, curled up around the Lacydon. To her left was the Greek amphitheater and further
on place de Lenche with its dilapidated houses, the ancient agora of the Phocaeans. One world above another.

  The blood-red and gold sun sank into the sea beyond the islands, beyond the vast plain of the great hunters, now submerged forever.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My greatest thanks and admiration go to Henri Cosquer, who discovered the extraordinary painted cave which now bears his name and which, after a few changes, acted as the focus of this novel.

  Thanks also to Jérôme Harlay, my unpitying editor, and to François Thomazeau who gave me my title.

  Thanks to my wife, Eliane, for putting up with me.