Don't Turn Out the Lights

by Bernard Minier

  He went and sat back down at the table and started the slideshow. The faces paraded past him again. A crowd of faces. How could he sort them? How could he find the man who mattered? Then he lingered on the picture that had caught his attention: Célia Jablonka and that astronaut, Léonard Fontaine. Very close together. So close they must have been able to feel each other’s breath on their faces. Was this a lead? He wasn’t at all sure. He typed the name into Google and realised why the civil servant had been so surprised he’d never heard of him. Apparently, Léonard Fontaine was an emblematic figure in the French space industry: the second Frenchman in space, the first to have been on board the International Space Station, and he had also spent time on a Mir station and flown on Soyuz missions as well as the Atlantis Space Shuttle; logged over two hundred days in orbit; he was a commander of the Legion of Honour, a Knight of the National Order of Merit, he had a medal for the Russian Order of Courage, three Space Flight Medals and two Exceptional Service Medals awarded by NASA; he was on the board for the National Air and Space Academy, a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, of the International Academy of Astronautics, and of the Space Explorers’ Association, whatever that meant. Lost in thought, Servaz recalled the photograph of the International Space Station he had given to Vincent and Samira …

  As happened every time when he thought he was onto something, he was overcome by a slight giddiness. Léonard Fontaine. At the same time, a second sensation, almost the opposite of the first, was nagging at him: the hunch that he had let something slip by.

  He had seen something. But what? And when? He couldn’t go through those five hundred photographs again!

  But that is precisely what he did. Not once, but twice. It was one twenty-three in the morning when at last he came upon the detail that had subconsciously caught his attention. A reflection, in a mirror … a huge mirror above the buffet, behind a small group of people: Célia Jablonka was visible there. And she was not alone.

  She was talking to a man. Or rather, the man was talking to her, in her ear, while handing her a business card: she held it between her index and middle fingers. She was smiling. Beaming. Servaz looked at the man again. In his thirties, short hair. He was wearing a coat, a grey jacket and a blue shirt. And glasses … He didn’t look anything like an astronaut with his woollen coat and specs, but he was good-looking nevertheless. A rather intellectual sort of look. Who are you? he wondered. In his suntanned hand, the stranger was holding a glass full of a green liquid and ice cubes. Caipirinha.

  26

  Synopsis

  Tuesday the first of January. A new year, new hope. Putting his feet on the ground that day, he was eager to get on with his investigation – but his impatience immediately came up against a specific and unavoidable fact: it was 1 January. And consequently there was little chance that anyone would feel like answering an investigator’s questions, no matter how motivated he was. On the other hand, he did not know how he would spend the day if he had to wait until tomorrow – so he might as well see what he could do.

  He tried to remember where he had put the Space Centre director’s business card. Once he’d found it, he took a look and a smile came to his lips: there was a mobile phone number. He checked his watch. One minute past eight. A bit early to get a director out of bed, the morning after New Year’s Eve.

  While waiting for a more appropriate time, he went down to the common room for a cup of black coffee. The room had not been cleaned, and a thick carpet of confetti and streamers cushioned his steps. The tables were covered with a jumble of paper cups, plastic champagne glasses and empty bottles. There was no one in sight. Servaz went over and looked at the bottles. Golden labels on a black background, remnants of gilt paper around the neck – his brain translated: champagne. Had they really been allowed to drink? He leaned over one of the bottles. The brand name didn’t ring a bell, but the number on the bottom left of the label immediately caught his eye: 0%. To escape the smell of grape juice, he went to drink his coffee in the little room on the north side, as far away as possible from this battlefield. He switched on the telly, then immediately switched it off again when he saw the images of celebration flickering across all the news channels. He turned his head and saw a snowman staring at him through the picture window. He wasn’t there yesterday … He looked sad, with his mouth an upside-down V, and someone had written ‘Martin’ across his chest.

  Servaz went back up to his room.

  At nine o’clock sharp, he reached for his phone. The director of the Space Centre was a bit surprised by his call:

  ‘Good God, do you know what day it is?’

  ‘No, what day is it?’

  A sigh on the other end.

  ‘Make it quick. What do you want?’

  ‘Léonard Fontaine.’

  ‘Again? You don’t give up easily, do you, Commandant? Well then, what about Fontaine?’

  ‘Any spicy titbits? A scandal? Accusations of harassment? Some malicious gossip, for Christ’s sake! I thought you were a bit vague last time.’

  The silence was abnormally long.

  ‘What are you playing at, Commandant? Look, I will be obliged to submit the matter to your superiors. Not only, as I already told you, does the Centre have nothing to do with astronauts, but I will be the last one to spread gossip about anybody, do you hear me?’

  ‘Loud and clear. Do you mean that there was some – some gossip?’

  He heard the dialling tone: the director had hung up. Right, perhaps Servaz had not taken the right approach. Who could fill him in on the astronauts’ darker side? The problem was that he did not know where to begin, and he could not go and see his colleagues from the technical service – those who were science and technology buffs – and ask them to give him a hand. An Internet search, typing in the names, one after the other, of the thirteen astronauts who had attended the gala, yielded heaps of information like the stuff he already had, but no new contacts.

  As he scrolled through the pages on Google and the dozens of entries that had nothing to do with the purpose of his search, he eventually came, on page 11, to one column that piqued his interest. It referenced a book entitled The Black Book of Space Conquest. It had been written by one J.-B. Henninger. Servaz wrote down his name and it took him an additional ten minutes to find an address and telephone number: the journalist in question, although he was French, lived in the Spanish Pyrenees, which placed him just under three hundred kilometres from Toulouse. At last, luck had given him the little nudge that he’d been waiting for. It was time to find out what Henninger was up to on 1 January. The telephone rang for a long time, but no answerphone picked up, and Servaz began to doubt whether the number was still valid, when all of a sudden a strident voice boomed down the line.

  ‘HELLO?’

  Servaz held the receiver away from his ear. The man must be deaf.

  ‘Monsieur Henninger?’ he asked, automatically raising his voice.

  ‘Yes! That’s me!’

  ‘My name is Servaz, Commandant Servaz! From the Toulouse police! I would like to talk to you!’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About the book you wrote: The Black Book of Space Conquest.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘Um … no, I just found out about it.’

  ‘Ah! I thought as much. The circle of my readers is almost as small as that of the astronauts it describes. How can I help you, Commandant?’

  ‘I have some questions for you.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I would like to know if any of the French astronauts have been involved in any scandals.’

  ‘Forgive me – what sort of scandals?’

  ‘I don’t know … violence, harassment … that sort of thing – the sort of thing you find almost everywhere but, apparently, not among astronauts.’

  There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. ‘Reprehensible behaviour, stories that have been hushed up, secrets that are not all that flattering – is
that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you have a name in particular?’

  Servaz gave it to him. He waited a long time for his answer.

  ‘Let me give you my address; we cannot talk about this over the telephone,’ said the man suddenly. ‘And besides, I will need to verify your identity.’

  Servaz felt his pulse race. The most excellent Henninger might be deaf, but he did not seem all that surprised by his odd question.

  ‘When can we meet?’

  ‘What exactly is going on, Commandant?’

  ‘I will tell you when we meet.’

  ‘Right. Fine. I’ll be expecting you.’

  ‘Do you mean, today?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s in a hurry, aren’t you? Why? Have you got something else planned? Apparently not.’

  * * *

  The address Henninger had given him was in the Cadi-Moixero Park, the largest natural park in Catalonia. Henninger’s house was nestled in the countryside among sylvan pines, birch trees, maples and aspens, and as Servaz stepped out of the car he felt as if he were in Canada. He breathed in the pure, invigorating air, listened to the silence, and almost expected to come upon a dam built by beavers or a bear rubbing itself against a tree. It was a place of extraordinary beauty. A place, he thought, where he would have gladly spent several days or several weeks. Or even years?

  He turned to look at the house: it was built entirely of wood, with a south-facing terrace overlooking the valley.

  The man who came out of the house did not, however, look anything like a Canadian lumberjack. He must not have been any taller than one metre thirty, and he was leaning on a cane that sank deep into the snow with his every step. Other than that, he had a full beard and was very muscular, and he had a vice-like grip as he shook Servaz’s hand.

  ‘Hello! I hope you didn’t have any trouble finding it. You’re lucky they cleared the road yesterday.’

  He spoke as loudly as he had on the telephone. One of the frequent symptoms of achondroplasia – the most common form of dwarfism – is recurrent ear infections, which leave the sufferer with a tympanosclerosis leading to varying degrees of deafness. It was fortunate, thought Servaz, that he had no neighbours. Henninger studied him with a critical eye.

  ‘So you’re a cop?’

  ‘In the crime squad, the CID in Toulouse,’ Servaz confirmed.

  ‘Since when have the crime squad been interested in astronauts?’

  ‘I hope you don’t intend to make me freeze outside?’ asked Servaz.

  The little man burst out laughing.

  ‘No! But your story aroused my curiosity. I won’t pretend that I haven’t been bursting with impatience ever since I spoke to you on the telephone.’

  The house’s interior made Servaz want to stay even more. Wood-panelled walls, chestnut floorboards, old armchairs that looked deep and comfortable, a fireplace where three big logs crackled as the flames bit, a bar with copperware, books piled everywhere and a large window overlooking the forest.

  Servaz looked around him.

  ‘Why did you settle here?’ he asked.

  ‘You mean, why this side of the Pyrenees? For a very simple reason: when you fly over these mountains from France to Spain on board a commercial airliner, you notice that the cloud cover collides with the peaks the way Saruman’s armies collided with King Théoden’s fortress.’

  ‘Whose armies?’

  ‘Never mind. Two minutes earlier, you were flying over impenetrable cloud cover, and then once you’re past the mountains you suddenly see rivers, roads, villages, lakes, and not a cloud on the horizon. It’s the same thing when you go through the Envalira tunnel and Andorra from north to south: two times out of three, you go from an overcast sky to dry and sunny weather. That is why I settled here. To be able to gaze at the stars as often as possible.’

  Servaz had already noticed the huge telescope on its tripod waiting for more favourable nights. Henninger invited him to take one armchair while he plopped down into the other, where he looked like a child sitting in a grown-up’s seat.

  ‘I often wonder where my passion for space came from. The fact is that by the age of seven or eight I wanted to be an astronaut; I used to draw rockets, spacesuits and planets, I gazed at the moon through my bedroom window, dreaming of the day when I would stand on it. As you can imagine, it was as I grew up – so to speak – that I realised that I would never be an astronaut.’ He smiled. ‘That merely increased my interest in the profession and in space itself. To know that I would never be able to leave the earth’s atmosphere behind, that I would be doomed to dreaming of space from down below, trying in vain to imagine what it must be like to be up there … as an adolescent, I devoured science-fiction novels. Last year I was able to fly at zero gravity for the first time on board an Airbus A300 ZERO-G. Of course, I know that means nothing compared to what they experience up there. It is the ultimate human adventure, unsurpassable. There is nothing beyond it: to leave the earth behind … but who knows? Perhaps we will live long enough to see space tourism within our reach. More and more private companies are exploring the possibility.’

  Servaz noticed that his gaze had wandered far away. It lasted only a second, then he was present once again.

  ‘But you came here for something far more down to earth, I believe,’ said Henninger.

  ‘In fact, the one who interests me most is Léonard Fontaine. When I mentioned his name over the telephone, you seemed to react.’

  ‘Why him in particular?’

  Yes, why him? wondered Servaz. After all, Célia might have met another astronaut at the party …

  ‘Him, or someone else,’ he corrected. ‘Have there been, to the best of your knowledge, any scandalous incidents of any sort involving an astronaut?’

  Henninger took some time to think.

  ‘Space agencies are almost as secretive as information agencies, but there are incidents that make it into the press from time to time: we found out that a couple of Soviet cosmonauts had serious psychological problems in the past, or that American astronauts admitted to having suffered from isolation or even slight forms of depression during their stay on the International Space Station. We also know that there have been incidents, situations of tension or crisis on board both the Mir and the International Space Station over the years, but these events have been buried deep within very confidential reports and they rarely see the light of day. But the two most notable incidents, the Judith Lapierre affair in 1999, and the Nowak affair in 2007, both happened on earth.’

  He leaned forward.

  ‘From 1999 to 2000, the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems conducted a series of experiments to test human response in conditions of isolation in space. One of these tests consisted of isolating several trial participants for 110 days in a replica of the Mir station on earth. On 3 December 1999, three international subjects and one Russian were invited to join the four Russians who had already been staying in this confined space since the beginning of summer: an Austrian, a Japanese, and Dr Judith Lapierre, a beautiful thirty-two-year-old woman who held a doctorate in health sciences, sent by the Canadian Space Agency.’

  Henninger stood up, went over to the bar, and came back with a little joint, which he lit carefully.

  ‘Would you like some?’ he said.

  ‘No, thank you – you seem to forget I’m with the police.’

  ‘And you seem to have forgotten that we are in Spain, and that here, consumption is legal.’

  He reached for a Zippo, lifted the lid, rolled the switch and brought the flame up to his joint.

  ‘Less than one month after their arrival, while they were celebrating New Year’s, the Russian commander, who was drunk, tried twice to force a kiss on Judith Lapierre, then he touched her and tried to drag her out of sight of the camera in order to have sex with her. This led to a fight between two Russian cosmonauts. It was so violent that the walls were splattered with blood. Judith Lapierre took pictures
of the wall with her digital camera and sent them back to Canada via email. As for the Austrian and Japanese participants, they asked their respective countries to intervene in order to bring the Russian commander to his senses. They were told that such behaviour was normal for Russians and that they would either have to accept it or leave the experiment. The next day there was a second incident, where one of the cosmonauts had to hide the station’s kitchen knives, because the two belligerents from the day before were threatening to kill each other. Given the overwhelming tension, the Japanese astronaut decided it was impossible for him to continue the mission and he left. As for Lapierre, she was reluctant to give up so easily. After fitting her room with locks, she decided to stay on. Following the incident, Dr Valery Gushin, the project coordinator, blamed Lapierre for spoiling the atmosphere of the mission by rejecting the commander’s kiss. Once she was home again, Judith Lapierre took the Canadian Space Agency to court because they had refused to come to her assistance: she eventually won her case after five years of proceedings.’

  The little man leaned further forward.

  ‘The second incident involved Lisa Marie Nowak, an experienced NASA astronaut who had flown with the Space Shuttle Discovery. On 5 February 2007, Lisa Nowak was arrested at Orlando airport and put on trial for the assault and attempted kidnapping of a female officer from the US Air Force, Captain Colleen Shipman, who was having an affair with another astronaut, William Oefelein, with whom Nowak had just broken up. In Nowak’s car they found latex gloves, a wig and dark glasses, as well as a BB gun and ammunition, pepper spray, a knife with a four-inch blade, big bin liners, and a rubber hose. Nowak had sprayed Shipman with the pepper spray in the airport car park, but the victim managed to escape and call the police.’ He leaned even closer. ‘I was not given access to the file; however, given the gear found in her car, I think it looked more like attempted murder, don’t you? However, the prosecutor decided otherwise. He reduced the initial charges, even dropping the attempted kidnapping, and in the end Lisa Nowak got off with two days in prison and a year of probation.’