The Madonna of Notre Dame

by Alexis Ragougneau

  “The journalists were well informed. I guess the cathedral people couldn’t help talking. They already knew about the attack on Assumption Day. They knew who the police had set a trap for. And the kid swam right into the net thinking he was coming to confess. Did they show his face on television?”

  “They put a jacket over his head. Then they stuffed him into a car and put a revolving light on the roof. What a bunch of clowns! I mean, Police Headquarters is five hundred yards away.”

  “He’s just a boy, Djibril, he’s lost. They came to get him while I was giving him absolution. It took four of them to push him down to the floor.”

  “You absolved a murderer? I guess you’ll say that’s what you always do when you’re here. Every Thursday, you talk to and forgive guys who got life.”

  “Who said the boy’s the killer?”

  “Seems the press has already tried him. You think he’s innocent?”

  “I think he’s terribly guilty. Guilty of having misinterpreted the Scriptures, of turning the Virgin into an idol, of having given in to easy intolerance, easy stupidity. This boy is crazy and lost. He’s not a murderer. He didn’t kill that girl.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything, Djibril. It’s just that the boy came to me. He confided during confession. He told me about his obsessions, his confused sexuality, his Virgin Mary fetish, his urges. He told me about the attack the day before yesterday. I agree that he needs help. But he said that after the incident at the procession, he went home to bed.”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “Naturally, they asked me to repeat the entire conversation to them.”

  “And?”

  “Let’s just say that I didn’t tell them everything. I used the argument of the secrecy of confession.”

  Djibril put the kettle back on and opened the jar of Nescafé again.

  “The crazy kid reminds you of your brother, doesn’t he?”

  Kern stared into his glass and, for a few seconds, toyed with the tip of his spoon. In the fifteen years he’d been visiting Poissy as prison chaplain, he’d met a lot of prisoners. Most of them had no interest in religion but needed an attentive ear in which to confide, someone outside the circle of the prison administration, who would sit and listen to them without judgment. After all, they’d already had their trial, their guilt had been established by a magistrate and reinforced by a prosecutor, and they were not about to forget that. The Law had sentenced most of them to fifteen years to life: only those with heavy sentences were locked up at Poissy.

  There, he’d met Djibril. A six-foot-six giant weighing two hundred and forty pounds, with a shaved head, and covered in tattoos. Sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of twenty-two years before parole. A holdup gone wrong; a gas station in Beauce, a female cashier taken as hostage, several hours of siege by Special Forces, a risky exit improvised on an impulse or rather panic, under the influence of alcohol found on the premises and consumed in order to silence fear; at the end of the night and the terror, there was a dead gendarme, the father of an eleven-year-old child, lying in his own blood at the foot of a pump of Lead-Free 98. And so, contrary to expectations, a bond had formed between the priest and the murderer. Over the months, Djibril had opened up. He’d told his story to the little man with a cross on his lapel. It had been quite a long fall, actually, which had started on the top floors of a high-rise in Montreuil. A lookout, then a petty dealer, then the head of a gang. Expulsion from school. Gradual alienation from the family and several stints in jail. The first contact with a different kind of boss, the kind who isn’t interested in small-time but in jewelry stores, banks, and security transport. A difference in scale, from block to district, from district to town, from town to region, then to the entire country. Also, the first nicknames—the Bull, the Tattooed, the African. The assault rifle, the grenade, the war weapon replacing once and for all the knife or the box cutter. Violence, adrenaline, escape as your daily fix. A sadly typical and, in a way, very French pattern, in this section of France which the majority does not want to see. Until, one night, that disastrous exit from a service station shop somewhere in the Beauce region. The trial, the sentencing, and a couple of news reports on television. And then the prison cell. Time passing in slow motion, the desperately empty visiting room, the silence amid cries. The chaplain’s visit once a week.

  It wasn’t so much a friendship between Kern and Djibril, but rather a relationship of listeners with mutual respect, as though, during the course of his weekly visits, Kern had grasped the limits of his own experience. He didn’t know much, and certainly no more than the man sitting opposite him, who had killed, had understood the immensity of his crime, and had the rest of a lifetime to regret it and forgive himself.

  “I don’t know, Djibril. I haven’t thought of him in ages. Maybe you’re right, maybe, in spite of myself, this boy reminds me of my brother; his bewilderment, the violence inside him, all hidden under the mask of an angel.”

  More than once, Kern had had the strange sense that he was the one more in need of confiding. That never happened to him with any of the other prisoners at Poissy. With the others, he’d listen, then speak, and a conversation might sometimes follow that would calm the atmosphere of the cells, so thick it was often difficult to breathe. Djibril’s cell had the same atmosphere, the same everyday objects with which prisoners had to content themselves, the same obscene posters next to the same sentimental pictures cut out from the same magazines—except for one difference: there was a Dalloz penal code towering on one of Djibril’s shelves, precariously balancing on a stack of law books and, on the small table, right next to the kettle, there was a wad of correspondence coursework. After a two-year basic qualification, the man sentenced to life was studying for a degree in law.

  He gave Kern more coffee. “What this kid needs is for you to spare him the same end as your brother.”

  “Why do you think I come here every Thursday? I’m trying to spare you all from the same end as my brother!”

  Kern drank his coffee in a single gulp. This time, he felt it burn him right through. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  The prisoner laughed, then made the sign of the cross. “I absolve you, my son. But can you forgive yourself? For being alive, I mean, while your brother died alone in his cell?”

  Kern made no reply, and Djibril stood up, his full stature towering over the small man. “Keep saying your prayers, François, but don’t let that stop you from acting in order to avoid the worst. You can turn destiny around. By the time I understood that, it was far too late.”

  “I know. “

  “You see, prison gives you time to think, to play the short movie of your life over and over again, and turn things around and around in your head in every direction. And to admit that there’s no way to turn back.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You keep rehashing your thoughts. That’s the real torture here: you keep going over your mistakes while you wait to drop dead. Like purgatory before hell.”

  Then he took the emaciated hand the priest was holding out to him in his huge paw. Kern felt a slight shudder. The prisoner had a much more concrete understanding of limbo than he, a priest, would ever have in his life, and he thought: In truth, I know nothing: he’s the one with real knowledge.

  “Thank you, Djibril.”

  “No problem. It’s nice to feel useful. But don’t let that make you forget to visit me. You know, if I don’t have my little priest to talk to, I bottle up my anger and I start hitting my pals in the cafeteria. Over nothing. Over a piece of bread. Just to kill time. It’s the survival of the fittest, and the fittest isn’t always the most clever one or, as you’d say, the most Christian.”

  “In twenty-two years on the job, I’ve never heard such a string of nonsense.”

  Landard had just joined Gombrowicz in the corner of the office and was allowing himself another Gitane. It was about four in the afternoon. T
he attic room was sweltering, suffocating, and filled with an increasingly thick cloud of smoke every time Landard exhaled.

  At the other end of the room, barely nine feet away, the blond angel, handcuffed to his chair, was now just a form lost in the fog. Landard carried on with his opinion. “The kid’s a complete loon. Piece of cake for a court-appointed lawyer. I can already imagine the statement for the defense: ‘My client is crazy, your Honor, his mother made him eat his poop when he was little, he pleads diminished responsibility.’ And abracadabra, straight to the funny farm without needing to go through the prison stage. I’m telling you, Gombrowicz, the law is badly designed. It’s not right this kind of freak should get a vacation on the house.”

  Landard went back to sit on the desk, while Gombrowicz got behind the computer.

  “OK, Thibault, so we were talking about the procession.”

  “May I have a glass of water? I’m terribly thirsty.”

  “In a minute, Thibault, first the procession.”

  The young man appeared to search his memory, then asked, in his strange, rattling voice, “Procession?”

  “Yes, the day before yesterday. The Assumption, remember? The Mass, the procession ...”

  “The Assumption procession?”

  “That’s right, my boy. The statue of the Virgin, the priests, the Knights of the Holy-whatever, and the number in white who was wiggling her ass just a couple of yards away from you. Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember, but your choice of words—”

  “Did you know the girl, Thibault? Perhaps you can tell us her name.”

  “Never seen her before.”

  “Then why did you start hitting her?”

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Yes, but tell us anyway, and my colleague and I will do our best to understand.”

  The young man looked at Landard, then at Gombrowicz, then at Landard again. And a hint of a smile appeared on his lips despite the obvious stress caused by the interrogation.

  “The Virgin Mary ordered me to.”

  Landard slapped himself on the thigh. “Fuck! Here we go again! The Virgin, the saints, and the little boy Jesus Christ.”

  “You see, you don’t understand at all.”

  “Write it down, Gombrowicz, make sure you write it down: ‘It’s the Virgin Mary who ordered me to attack that young woman.’ And do you happen to know why the good Virgin may have asked you to punish that pretty girl?”

  “Not the faintest idea.”

  “Not the faintest—are you taking us for a ride, by any chance, Thibault? The Virgin Mary wouldn’t have told you to give the girl a hammering the day before yesterday because she was a bit North African around the edges, would she, by any chance?”

  Thibault walled himself up in a deep silence. Landard crushed his Gitane right under Gombrowicz’s nose, in an ashtray overflowing with butts. The lieutenant, who was struggling to breathe and was beginning to sweat, grabbed it and emptied it in the garbage can with a sigh. That’s when the young man started to speak again.

  “I see what you’re getting at. You’re trying to accuse me of a racist attack. But the Virgin Mary isn’t racist. How could she be? The Virgin Mary is a model to all the women in the world, whatever their skin color.”

  Landard felt the boy and his motive slipping away from him, so he raised his voice and brought his face a couple of inches away from the young man’s. “Earlier, you told us that you were still living with your mother. In Saint-Cloud, right? How’s your mom going to feel when she finds out that her son is suspected of killing a girl?”

  The boy’s breathing suddenly quickened. “My mother? What does my mother have to do with all this?”

  “How’s she going to feel, Thibault? Do you think she’ll come to your trial? Do you think she’ll bring you oranges when you’re in Fleury prison?”

  “Leave my mother alone. I didn’t kill that girl.”

  “Then why did you hit her, Thibault? Tell me why.”

  Upset, Thibault started mumbling something, then, suddenly, the words crowded in his mouth and gushed out, like a powerful jet of water from a faucet because the washer’s come loose. “Because she was a whore! Because she was mocking the Virgin Mary in her white dress. I hit her because she deserved it! Because she was strutting about before our very eyes in that provocative prostitute dress! I hit her to teach her a lesson! I hit her because she was asking for it! I hit her to urge her to be pure, humble, good, I hit her to urge her toward virginity!”

  Thibault had off-loaded in spite of himself, and immediately seemed to regret it. He apologized for his choice of words. Opposite him, however, Captain Landard seemed suddenly filled with hot air, like a balloon, as though he was about to take off from the top of his desk.

  “Write that down, Gombrowicz, ‘I hit her to urge her toward virginity.’”

  Gombrowicz was tapping away on his keyboard. He found the abrupt change of pace of the interrogation somewhat disturbing. Landard waited for the computer keys to stop rattling, then lit another cigarette and took a drag contentedly.

  “Gombrowicz, will you call the little magistrate on her direct line, please?”

  Once again, he leaned toward the suspect. “Tell me, Thibault. How about we take a little trip to your mother’s to have a look inside your drawers? Do you think we’ll be there before nine p.m.?”

  He closed his door and double-locked it. He remained there for a moment, his forehead against the wood, his hand tense on the handle, listening for the city noises outside, which he could hear as though through a dense fog that had descended abundantly on this late afternoon of August 17th. In the street, a car drove by. The sound of a woman’s footsteps. A child laughing. Then nothing.

  He let go of the door handle, then went into the apartment, which was simple, bare, tidy, and where he had now been living for fifteen years. He abandoned his jacket on the back of a chair. Went to drink a glass of water. Or rather, he just filled it while staring at the clock on the white wall without really seeing it, for what might have been a long or a short time, standing there, holding the glass, before putting it down in the sink, still full.

  He went into the bedroom, sat on the bed, looked at his hands, resting on his knees like a well-behaved child during the class photo, then stood up again and opened the closet in front of the bed. He took out a shoe box and placed it on a small table in the corner of the room, beneath a wooden crucifix nailed to the wall. He took an old Bayard alarm clock out of the box, then a magnifying glass, and an inkstained pencil case, and pulled open the zipper. There, he found pliers and four screwdrivers of different colors and sizes, which he lined up on both sides of the alarm clock. Finally, he took a black and white photo from the bottom of the box, and placed it in front of him, leaning it against the wall. He switched on a reading lamp fixed to the edge of the table, picked up the alarm clock in one hand and one of the four screwdrivers—the one with a faded red wooden handle—in the other. Slowly and with childlike application, he unscrewed the metal cover and finally opened it, revealing a mechanism that was at once basic and complex, as well as its manufacturing date: 1958. Then, with equal meticulousness, surrounded by a silence that was penetrated only by the sound of his breathing, and the faint ticking of the clock in the kitchen, he started taking the entire device apart.

  A little before eight p.m., he put the two final pieces down in front of him. The entire alarm clock lay before him, in separate parts.

  He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. In the combination of daylight and lamplight, he saw that the red splotches had settled on his wrists and elbows. He could also feel them spreading under the table, on his calves, and up to his knees in this curious mixture of burning and itching he hadn’t felt before. For the first time that evening, he looked away from his alarm clock and let his eyes linger on the photo propped up against the wall. Two boys, one about seven years old, the other perhaps ten, were standing with their arms around each other, staring into the
lens, in a posture that evoked soccer players prior to a match. As a matter of fact, there was a ball on the ground, waiting for one of them—either the younger, small and dark, looking like a sickly chick, or the elder, blond and straight like wheat—to animate it with a powerful kick. The decor resembled that of a public school or an old-fashioned boarding school, with its paved courtyard surrounded by a high wall and, in the background, the corner of a single building whose only visible opening gave a glimpse of a stained glass window.

  Once again, he put his hand into the shoe box and took out an old-fashioned-looking mercury thermometer. Still staring at the black and white photo, he slid the metal tip under his tongue and waited, motionless, in the fading light of the day that was slowly giving way to the cold, clinical glow of his reading lamp. Finally, he took it out of his mouth and read it: it was over a hundred and four. He placed the thermometer on the edge of the table.

  Without a sound, without a sigh, Father Kern began putting his Bayard alarm clock with its 1958 mechanism back together.

  Claire Kauffmann was hanging on to the roof strap. Her knees, which she kept close together, swayed left and right whenever the car swerved, and, with her left arm, she clutched against her chest the bag containing the Notre Dame file.

  As they pulled up to a red light, Landard backtracked brusquely and the engine of the Peugeot 308 roared as he swerved to the right into a bus lane and drove toward the Seine without touching the brakes. He crossed Pont de Saint-Cloud at full speed. In the back seat, handcuffed and huddled against Gombrowicz, the blond angel sometimes looked at the road and sometimes into Landard’s eyes, which he could see in the rear-view mirror.

  “Do you really think it’s necessary to drive like this, captain? We’ll easily be there before nine p.m. to start the search.”

  Landard turned on another burst of siren as they approached the bridge exit. “It’s for the sake of the young man’s mom, madame. I wouldn’t like her to miss the start of her movie because of us. With a bit of luck we’ll get there just after the news, while the commercials are on.”