“So?”
“Did you know the capitular chapel of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher is situated at Notre Dame de Paris? It would have taken just a phone call to restore long-term calm over the cathedral. There’s only about five hundred yards between Notre Dame and the Palais de Justice, but the quickest way from one to the other is sometimes across the Place Vendôme.”
“Are you saying that your knights have their own entrance to the Ministry of Justice?”
“The Minister himself is one of them. That’s why I am now sure that your investigation is well and truly buried.”
Propped up against her chair, Claire Kauffmann had now completely recovered her calm. Only her eyes seemed strangely mobile, betraying the train of thought unraveling in her mind. Kern made a gesture suggesting he was about to hold out his hand to the young woman, then changed his mind. “The law has found its culprit, Mademoiselle Kauffmann, that’s the truth. Apparently, the Church is also satisfied. A lunatic, a madman who will soon be forgotten. As for the victim’s parents, they’ll be asked to bury their daughter quietly, somewhere out of the way, that is, unless the poor child has already been buried.”
“No, not yet. The burial is tomorrow at three p.m. at the Montmartre cemetery.”
“They will seal her grave with official cement and the parents will have to accept that. ‘Your daughter was murdered by a madman, end of story, move along ladies and gentlemen, no point in making an official complaint.’ Who would want to reopen an investigation everyone considers to have come full circle? Who?”
Claire Kauffmann crossed her legs. She was breathing a little more quickly. She was looking at Father Kern with an odd intensity. “I have a run in my pantyhose.”
The priest couldn’t help sliding a glance down the young magistrate’s legs. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve snagged my pantyhose. I need to go out and change them.”
And mechanically, blushing, she grabbed a paper clip from her desk, unfurled it, and passed the tip over her knee. The sheer mesh that concealed her skin immediately burst open and the run extended three or four inches up her pale thigh. The young woman stood up and walked past Father Kern, who was speechless. She went to the door, grabbed the handle, and, without turning around, said, in a flat, almost inaudible, slightly trembling voice, “The Notre Dame case file is in my desk. The key’s in the lock. The search and interrogation reports, the postmortem results, the medical examiner’s report—it’s all there. My colleague’s in the clerk’s office, so won’t be back for at least half an hour. I’ll be away for ten minutes exactly. That’s how long I’m giving you. When I return, I’d like to see the file back the way it was, where you found it. You may use the photocopier, if you wish. You just have to press the green button to get it out of sleep mode. Goodbye, Father.”
She half-opened the door and was gone in a flash. He heard her footsteps fading down the corridor.
How long did he stay there, his arms dangling, standing before the desk heaped with files, in that tiny room that smelled of paperwork and dust? How long before he realized just what the magistrate had whispered to him? Time seemed to have stopped, and the blood in his veins froze. In the distance, he heard the bells of Notre Dame ring for the nine a.m. Mass, and he finally came out of his torpor. Then, slowly, his heart beating like that of a child afraid to be punished by his parents, he walked around the deputy magistrate’s desk and unlocked the drawer.
Kern drank his coffee in one gulp. He’d let it cool down for several long minutes without saying anything, making the liquid spin at the bottom of the glass, as a reflection of the dark thoughts he was prey to, looking worried, absorbed, stalling for time because his indecision was so great it was preventing him from doing what he’d come to do. Opposite him, sitting on the stool that looked too fragile to bear his weight, leaning his elbows on his knees, holding the jar of Nescafé in his paws, Djibril was watching the diminutive priest with his piercing eyes. “You look like a guy who’s come to confess but doesn’t know where to begin, François.”
The priest put the glass down at the foot of the bed he was sitting on. He plunged his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a stack of photocopies folded three times. Without a word, he held it out to Djibril. The prisoner put down the jar of instant coffee and began to look through the document, which had been stapled at one of the corners.
“Are these the committing magistrate’s records?”
“No, those of the public prosecutor’s office. Now that the case is closed, they won’t be appointing a judge.”
“Much simpler, this way. Those little judges are too independent. They could go and stick their noses somewhere it stinks, right?”
“I don’t know. What do you think of the file?”
“At first glance, it doesn’t look very thick.”
“They already got their culprit, so why go look elsewhere?”
“How did you get it?”
“The young magistrate in charge of the case let me see it.”
“She’s taking a big risk.”
“I know. She’s breaking the confidentiality of the investigation.”
“From what you’re telling me, that’s not her only problem. She’s also got the General Investigators hot on her heels, right?”
“What do you think of the file? You’re quite right, I don’t know where to begin. I glanced at it on the train. There’s nothing interesting in the interrogation transcripts. As for the search, how can I put it? Well, it just confirms that the kid wasn’t comfortable with his sexuality.”
A wide smile spread across the prisoner’s face. He was paying particular attention to one of the pages in the file. With his thumbnail, he opened the staple that kept the sheets together. Father Kern briefly pictured a bulldozer gently tearing a nail out of a plank.
“I really like this one. Do you mind? In any case, it’ll look better here than at your place. Just a question of consistency. After all, I’m the murderer here.”
Keeping his naughty boy expression, he stuck one of the drawings seized from young Thibault’s home to the wall. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep the others for my friends. All right?”
Kern knew Djibril too well to let himself be rattled by his blasphemous provocations. He nodded without saying anything. The prisoner looked a little longer at the photocopy on his wall, which was insignificant in the midst of photos taken from porn magazines, then sat back down and resumed looking through the rest of the stack. Kern picked up where the prisoner had interrupted him. “The crime scene investigations have yielded nothing, or not much. Too many people involved, too many marks. It was to be expected. We’re talking about the most visited monument in France here. As for the postmortem report, they found young Thibault’s DNA on the victim. Among others. Once again, she spent the day in all the bustle, in the middle of a crowd. Does what Thibault left on her correspond to the first attack or to the murder? Nobody can tell. The poor girl definitely died of strangling but the marks on her throat say no more. One assumes the murderer wore gloves, and that the body was moved after death. I don’t know. All the pieces of information cancel one another out. Where to go from here? Where to look? After all, I’m just a priest, I know nothing about being a policeman.”
Djibril was reading. He didn’t even bother to look up from the file. “If you were working for the cops, François, you wouldn’t have come to see me and I wouldn’t have opened my door to you. So to speak, of course. Not that I get to decide who opens my door.”
“Of course, there’s that strange thing of the wax in her vagina, which suggests the theory of a madman, a lunatic, but—”
“You must search around the girl.”
“Excuse me?”
“You must search around your dead girl. In this file of yours, there’s barely enough information about her to fill a postage stamp.”
“She was a student without any background.”
“The cops totally botched their investigation. From what
I’m reading here, they just paid a superficial visit to the girl’s room at her parents’ apartment and stopped there.” He handed the stack of papers back to Kern and concluded, with a smile, “In other words, a bad job—the kind they say we Arabs do.”
Kern put the file back in his jacket pocket and looked at his watch. “I’ve only just got time to get there.”
“Where?”
“Her funeral. It’s in Montmartre at three.”
The two men stood up and shook hands.
“Leaving already?”
“Thanks for your invaluable help, Djibril.”
“I’ll have my secretary send you an invoice. Keep me posted, will you? It’s important to me.”
“You’re hooked now, aren’t you? The priest and the prisoner. We make quite a pair of investigators.”
Djibril smiled. Kern felt him distance himself, escape through his restricted cell to a time and space where he could never follow. The priest knew full well that, despite the doors, the visiting rooms, the hours devoted to his activity as chaplain every week, the boundary between the outside and the inside of the prison was impassable. With every extra minute of being locked up, the walls in this purgatory of iron and concrete grew thicker. Djibril was gradually slipping away from the world, and nobody and nothing could ever bring him back among the living.
Kern squeezed the prisoner’s icy hand a little tighter. “What you’ve just done for me ... I don’t know. Your advice, this conversation. Isn’t that proof of good behavior? Perhaps I could mention it to the sentencing judge, so he relaxes—”
Djibril let go of the priest’s hand. “Don’t bother, priest. For him I’m just a murderer—period. And he’s right. There’s no redemption possible here. Besides, all we did was talk about the weather, you know that perfectly well. The photocopy you’ve just let me read doesn’t officially exist.”
“That’s true. You’re right. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”
“You’re wrong, François. I’ve already started to be rewarded. As of today, I’m going to think about something else. Put my imagination to work, think about your case while I clean my teeth at night. You know, in Poissy this kind of occupation is priceless. Here, my life revolves around this kettle and my jar of coffee.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“You know it is, priest.”
The priest walked around the three-foot-high wall that separated the bed from the toilet bowl, and reached the cell door in a couple of strides.
“Get ready for quite a ride, François. Don’t be surprised if you meet a few ghosts on the way.”
“I meet ghosts during my sleepless nights, Djibril. Every night, I also take a trip around purgatory. And it hasn’t killed me yet.”
Kern turned the handle. The abrupt click of the mechanism made the prisoner take a step back.
“This time, you could well go as far as hell, priest. Your nice prayers will be of no use to you there. In fact, perhaps you’d better remove the cross from your lapel. Where you’re going, it will only make it easier to spot you, trust me.”
The door opened, revealing in the corridor a guard’s uniform. Father Kern looked at the prisoner one more time, then disappeared down the corridor lit with pale fluorescent lights. Behind him, the reinforced door closed again with a cavernous thud.
Luna Hamache had only just been buried when Father Kern arrived at Section 14 of the Montmartre Cemetery. Heavily, almost in slow motion, doubly knocked out by grief as well as the heat, a group of thirty or so people milled around the grave at a respectful distance from a couple who remained rooted right on the edge of the pit, perfectly still, as though cut in stone. Both in their fifties, the dead woman’s parents presented faces without tears, as though they hadn’t yet comprehended the exact reason for their being in this cemetery, as though the plain, bare coffin that was now resting at the bottom of a grave had not belonged to their daughter but to somebody else, a stranger whose funeral they were attending by chance. The father, especially, seemed alienated from himself. His gaze had trouble lingering on the bottom of the pit and would regularly stray toward the entrance to the cemetery, as though Luna would appear there at any minute, in the full bloom of her youth, and prove the gravediggers and death wrong.
A young woman went up the line, handing out a white rose to each person, and Kern noticed that almost the entire group was made up of young people dressed in white. With a solemnity at odds with their age—they were all in their twenties—Luna’s fellow students paraded before the grave, which was still wide open, and threw their flowers on the lid of the coffin, suppressing a sob or muttering a few words that were immediately absorbed by the noise of the surrounding traffic. While they paraded like this, Kern caught the eye of a man who was standing apart, one shoulder against a tree, his arms crossed. The priest made a sign to Lieutenant Gombrowicz, to which the latter responded with a nod.
Finally, two gravediggers from the Paris municipality came to say a few words to the dead woman’s parents. Her mother nodded twice, mechanically, then gave a circular look of thanks to those who were standing around the grave. The group broke up with difficulty, as though everyone had lead soles on their shoes, while the cemetery employees began work without delay on closing the grave. Luna’s parents watched them a little while longer, then the mother took her husband by the arm. They walked a few steps down the alley, like two old people unsteadily supporting each other, suddenly alone in the world and deprived of their main reason for remaining standing. On their way, they saw a little man with a thin hatchet face and a cross on his lapel. He went up to them and shook their hands warmly.
“I’m Father Kern. I’m the one who found your daughter’s body in Notre Dame on Monday morning.”
Luna Hamache’s mother looked at him for a moment without saying anything, while the father kept his eyes fixed on the entrance to the cemetery. She finally spoke, but her hesitant voice revealed her distress before the representative of the very place where her daughter had died.
“Thank you for coming, Father. We received a note from your rector this morning.”
“Monsignor de Bracy, yes.”
“He wrote that he’d had a prayer said. Of course, it was nice to receive the letter, but ...”
“But it doesn’t explain anything. Does it?”
“Did you know my daughter? Had you already seen her in Notre Dame?”
Her eyes filled with pleading and Kern found himself stammering one of the most minimalistic replies he could have. “No, I’m sorry, Madame Hamache, I didn’t know Luna. We’ve all prayed for her.”
“I don’t understand. Nobody is explaining anything to us. The murderer’s suicide has left us totally distraught. The authorities seem to have forgotten us already. They seem to have moved on already. It’s like a wall without a door, we don’t know where to knock to find out more about the attack that ... As for Luna going to the Assumption ceremony, she never mentioned she had an interest in the Catholic faith. As you can see, we’re what they call nowadays a mixed couple. We’ve always allowed our daughter the freedom to choose whichever religion she thought best. Until now it’s a matter she’d never talked to us about. We’re trying to understand but nobody seems able to tell us anything, not your rector and not you, Father. We bury our daughter and, with her, something of an unresolved mystery.”
Kern felt a sense of unease grow in him. He should try and soothe the pain of these two parents, and the cross he wore on his lapel seemed to have largely contributed to the spontaneous outpouring of Luna’s mother, yet he was aware of the real reason for his being at the cemetery. His true motivations were those of an investigator, and he was bringing with him more questions about Luna than answers to her mother’s queries.
“Your daughter was twenty-one, Madame Hamache. An age of much questioning, and also an age where one searches for some form of independence. Perhaps she didn’t speak to you at all about it. Perhaps she had a sort of secret garden.”
“We did feel she was somewhat distancing herself in the past few months. Yes, a desire for independence we couldn’t satisfy.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean, Father, is that we’re not rolling in money. At the beginning of the academic year, Luna wanted to move out and get a little apartment nearby, with a female friend from the university. She’d sometimes spend the night away from home. More and more often, in fact. But we couldn’t afford to help her with rent. My husband studied in Algeria, you see. His qualifications have never been recognized in France. Our marriage couldn’t change anything. For twenty years, he worked doing odd jobs at an IT firm. He did small repairs, helped out around the office, took care of deliveries. Three years ago, they fired him. He can’t find another job at his age. We live on my salary as a home care worker, so we can’t give our daughter a good start in life. Well, anyway, she doesn’t need it now.”
Madame Hamache’s chin began to quiver, and she clenched her jaw. Kern waited. His questions were turning into an interrogation, but conducted with the gentleness of a confessor.
“Do you know who she wanted to share the apartment with?”
“Yes, of course, with Nadia. Her best friend. They study— studied—at the university together.”
“Was Nadia here today?”
“She was the one who distributed the roses, earlier. You must have seen her. She’s also the one who asked Luna’s friends to wear white. Nice girl, Nadia. She wanted to say goodbye to her in her own way. She’s been deeply affected by my daughter’s death. She was the one who called us on Tuesday morning to say there was the picture in Le Parisien, and an appeal for witnesses.”
“I thought it was Monsieur Hamache who’d read it in the paper.”
“No, it was Nadia. After she called, my husband went downstairs to check the paper in the café. Afterwards, we called the police.”
The Madonna of Notre Dame Page 10
