The Beast of the Camargue

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  THE BEAST OF THE CAMARGUE

  Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  THE BEAST OF THE CAMARGUE

  Translated from the French by Ian Monk

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 2009 by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  Translation © 2010 by Ian Monk

  Originally published in French as La Bête du Marais by L’Ecailler du sud in 2009

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to permissions@quercus.com.

  ISBN 978-1-62365-277-7

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  To my father, who first told me the story

  of the Tarasque when I was his little boy.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The characters and situations in this novel are the product of my imagination, and are not based on reality.

  Some sections will probably bring a smile to the lips of specialists in prehistory or members of the Marseille murder squad. I have intentionally altered places, transformed research laboratories, shifted around hospitals, upturned hierarchies and metamorphosed the murder squad’s offices. I have also taken liberties with a number of official procedures.

  Without asking a single word of permission …

  My sincere thanks go first to Maurice Georges and Jérôme Harlay, two friends who spent many hours correcting this text and who have enriched it with their always pertinent remarks. My gratitude also to Michel Emerit, formerly professor of animal ecology at the University of Montpellier and correspondent for the Museum of Natural History, who was of great assistance thanks to his knowledge of the environment of the Camargue, and the documentation he supplied about its flora and fauna.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  In the original French, a large amount of Marseille slang is used. No attempt has been made to imitate its probably inimitable presence.

  … Alabre

  De sang uman e de cadabre,

  Dins nòsti bos e nòsti vabre

  Un moustren, un fléu di diéu, barruolo … Agués pieta!

  La bèsti a la co d’un coulobre,

  A d’iue mai rouge qu’un cinobre;

  Sus l’esquino a d’escaumo e d’àsti que fan pòu!

  D’un gros lioun porto lou mourre

  E sièis pèd d’ome pèr miés courre;

  Dins sa cafourne, souto un mourre

  Que domino lou Rose, emporto ço que pòu.

  … Thirsty

  For human blood and corpses

  In our woods and our ravines

  Roams a monster, a scourge of the gods … Have mercy!

  The beast has a dragon’s tail

  And eyes redder than cinnabar;

  On its back, its scales and spikes are terrifying!

  It has the muzzle of a great lion,

  And six human feet, to run faster;

  Into its cavern, under a rock

  Overlooking the Rhône, it carries all it can.

  Frédéric Mistral, Mireille

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  1.

  Last night, the mistral had stopped suddenly, just after nightfall. There had then been a moment of delirium, the bars had turned into bodegas full of heady music, gleaming faces and sleepless eyes.

  The police patrols cruised around in second gear, laid back and bored to tears. A few brawls broke out between gypsies, Arabs and gorillas from the town hall outside a gaudy fairground. But the national police force turned a blind eye—no treading on the toes of the boys from the municipal brigade.

  The last crackers had exploded far away, in the hidden nooks and crannies of the town, before the sun came up: the last fireworks of a party that weariness had now put to bed.

  That morning, liquid heat poured down from the sky.

  The man was lying on the riverbank, in the fetal position, arms wrapped round his knees. He opened his eyes and, through his twitching eyelids, saw the white shape of the towers of the castle above him, melting into the saturated light.

  The man was drenched in sweat, his raven hair stuck to his forehead like strips of cardboard. In the distance he could hear vague noises, presumably the last party animals stumbling home. But he very soon changed his mind: it was the baying of an angry crowd that was echoing off the walls of the fortress.

  The clamor made his head spin. He closed his eyes again.

  The man had hardly slept for three days. Three days of solitude. A taste of acid bile twisted his lips and flared his nostrils. The pastis he had drunk had now worn off. Time to get going.

  He sat up. In front of him, the Rhône flowed calmly by. A few crooked roots scratched at the placid surface like monsters, as though trying to hold back the river’s regal progress. He tried to stand, but then realized that his legs would not hold him for a while, so he lay back on the warm, dry grass and stared at the powerful branches of the acacia that clawed at the sky above him.

  It was time to think, to go over the past three days.

  On the first day, as soon as the sun rose over the Camargue, he had started watching out for white spoonbills, spending hours hidden like a crocodile in the rock samphire across the marshland, a few meters from the Redon lagoon.

  He had been waiting for months for the spoonbills, since March, when thousands of gray mullet gather in the placid waters of the delta, within easy swimming distance of the empty beaches, still shivering with cold; the time of year when the cormorants and herons come to gorge themselves on the surface fish.

  For some time he had been studying the habits of spoonbills, and the places where they came to rest on their way back from Africa. This was often at the foot of clumps of tamarisks. He wanted to be able to observe them in the dawn’s golden light, but
spoonbills are capricious as well as rare. That year, he had had to make do with the gluttonous antics of the cormorants and herons.

  That morning, those large birds had still not appeared. He had waited until noon before finally deciding to change his vantage point and heading further west, toward the Capelière nature reserve. He had exchanged a few words with the keeper. Chitchat, nothing more.

  During the afternoon, he wandered around for some time, his loaded camera in one hand and his binoculars in the other, stopping now and then to observe.

  He had walked to the ends of the earth. Then the first spoonbill appeared, immaculate, stretching its long neck through the reeds, at the edge of the marsh. A second came to rest on a half-submerged tree trunk, in the middle of the dark waters. The ground, cracked in places and spongy in others, led away toward the setting sun, the flat horizon and the sea, which the mistral was furrowing.

  The spoonbills had then flown back into their mysterious habitat, and night fell on the tip of the Camargue. In the distance, beyond the straight lines of the marshland, the flames of the great Fos oil terminal rose red into the dark sky, like proud banners. At one in the morning, he went back to his car and drove home, further north in Provence.

  Day two was the day of the beast.

  He had decided not to take his car and to hitchhike instead. He had waited a good hour for a friendly driver to pick him up at the Tarascon exit. It was a solitary tourist, an Englishman burned by the wicked sun, who had said, in perfect French:

  “I’ve been living in Mouriès for three years now.”

  “Really?” he had replied, pretending to take an interest in his driver. “I come from Eygalières.”

  “I’m going to Marseille today … taking the boat to Corsica,” the Englishman went on, waving a hand through the hot air toward an imaginary sea.

  “You have a good journey,” he had said, for want of anything better.

  The Englishman’s Land-Rover, an old model, about as comfortable as a church pew, made one hell of a din. By the time they reached the turning that led to the Thibert farmhouse he had fallen into a sort of torpor, before pointing to a lay-by on the long straight stretch of Route Nationale 568, between Arles and Martigues.

  “You can drop me off there.”

  The Englishman braked abruptly, without asking any questions. The man got out and waited for the Land-Rover to fade into the distance. Then he slipped off through a barrier of reeds, careful to avoid their long leaves, which were as sharp as razors.

  He walked straight on, like a bush hunter, across the huge flat expanse covered with scrawny grass and partitioned in squares by barbed wire: an hour’s walk, perhaps more. Behind him, in the distance, rose the dark crests of the Alpilles hills and the peak of Les Opiès, bleached by the sun’s last gleams.

  Far off, in the direction of the rank of cypresses, the sheep of Méril farm were just visible. Not pausing for a moment, he leaped over a fence and found himself in the middle of some heifers, presumably belonging to the Castaldi herd. He walked straight on, keeping close enough to the pitch-black calves so as not to be spotted by chance passers-by, but far enough away so as not to spook them. A couple of times, his gaze met their empty eyes.

  But he knew them too well to be afraid.

  The day was fading by the time he reached Départementale 35, which marked the eastern border of Vigueirat national park, just a few kilometers away from Thibert’s farm. He decided to spend the night on that strip of the Camargue. The end of the day was luminous, as thousands of stars came out over Provence. Before nightfall, he was back at the beach and had crept through the ruddy clumps of samphire, without being noticed. Then he waited, as he usually did, flat on his stomach among the pink sea daffodils, white sand camomile and yellow sandy everlastings.

  Then he sang, and the beast came. He told it of the Festival marvels and then took his leave.

  When darkness fell on sea and land, he unrolled his sleeping bag in a warm hollow of a dune, sheltered from the wind. He slept for a few hours. In the depth of his sleep, he toyed with his craziest dream: to liberate the beast on the Festival of Saint Martha.

  On the night of July 29.

  He would talk about it with the master. But, in any case, he didn’t give a damn for his advice. The monster listened only to him.

  The Rhône flowed on, heavy with late spring rain. Beneath the walls of King René’s Castle, some children had climbed onto a little promontory over the green waters of the river by clinging to the ivy that snaked its way along the rocks.

  The man had completely recovered his spirits. He stood up, slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked toward the cries of the crowd.

  It was Monday, June 30. The third day.

  The last bull race had just finished, and with it, the grand festival of la Tarasque.

  2.

  The bell of the Opéra Municipal of Marseille echoed brightly from the gallery stairway to the marble of the main function room. It stopped abruptly when Michel de Palma burst into the Reyer Hall. Félix Merlino, the ancient cloakroom attendant, patted down the few locks of curly hair which still fringed his gleaming scalp.

  “Ah, Michel! You’re the last!”

  Merlino grimaced, making his massive chin rise and his pale lips droop.

  “Hello, Féli, has it started?”

  “Oh yes, it’s started! For the last time this year. Come on, Baron, get a move on …”

  The Baron. Commandant Michel de Palma’s nickname. The idea had come from Jean-Louis Maistre, his blood-brother on the Brigade Criminelle, who had started calling him that one evening, as a joke after a few too many drinks. He thought it suited the “de” of his surname, his slender build and melancholy aristocratic manner.

  The Baron pushed open the padded doors that led to the first balcony, paused for a moment, then glanced around at the audience, as he had always done ever since his father had initiated him into serious theater when he was still a little boy.

  The auditorium was bathed in velvet, and crammed from the first row of stalls up to the gods. The air was laden with sour breath, musky perfumes and the dust of face powder. From the orchestra rose a riot of trills, scales and snatches of melody twisting around each other like superheated atoms. De Palma spotted Capitaine Anne Moracchini of the Criminelle and nodded to her discreetly. He was at least an hour late. In the ten years that they had been working together in the Police Judiciaire, this was the first time that he had invited her to the opera; at the very last moment, too, because this was the final performance of La Bohème that season.

  Darkness had fallen when he sat down beside her.

  The first few minutes passed by. Moracchini seemed totally wrapped up in the music, which trembled in the air around them. Then the old man in the gods who for years had been coughing at the start of each performance suddenly stopped. An electric sigh ran through the opera house and silence descended.

  Rodolfo walked toward the front of the stage:

  “Che gelida manina

  Se la lasci riscaldar

  Cercar che giova? Al buio non si trova.”

  Instead of looking at Mimi, Rodolfo never took his eyes off the conductor and stood on tiptoe each time he hit the middle register and compressed his diaphragm.

  “Chi son? Sono un poeta.

  Che fascio, scrivo …”

  In the end, Rodolfo didn’t do too badly for an end-of-season show, but de Palma felt disappointed. Under the cover of the applause, he crept out of the auditorium. In the Reyer Hall, Félix Merlino was pacing up and down, lowering his heels in slow motion so as not to make the parquet creak.

  De Palma turned on his mobile. Two messages had been left that day, Saturday, July 5. The first had arrived at 7:58 p.m., just before he had entered the opera house, and the second at 8:37 p.m., presumably while Rodolfo had been sounding off in his garret in Montmartre.

  “Good evening, Commandant de Palma. Maître Chandeler speaking. I’m a lawyer. The person who gave me your number
would prefer to remain anonymous, but I’m taking the liberty of calling you. We don’t know each other, but I should very much like to meet you so as to discuss a case … as soon as possible would be best, if that’s alright with you. Say Monday the 7th? See you very soon, I hope.”

  It was a male voice that made its nasal consonants sing slightly, both deep and smooth at the same time. The second message was also from Chandeler, leaving a different mobile number and begging him not to give it to anyone else.

  Félix Merlino came up to the Baron and pointed at the phone.

  “Turn that thing off at once. If ever I hear the damn thing ring, I’ll …”

  “Don’t fret, Féli. In any case, there’s no need to worry considering the warblers on stage this evening.”

  “You should have heard the first cast. Then you’d have really heard something …”

  “Oh really? Because this lot sound like the mistral rattling the shutters in my ex-mother-in-law’s house.”

  “That’s right! It’s a disaster tonight.”

  “But they’re still applauding …”

  “People clap anything these days. Not like before … You remember?”

  De Palma raised his eyes to the ceiling and waved his right hand over his shoulder in a sign of shared nostalgia with Merlino.

  “When things were as bad as tonight, they even had to call in the police sometimes to calm the audience down!”

  Félix Merlino shook his head and, with his foot, swept away a scrap of lace which must have been torn off a gown.

  “We haven’t seen you for ages, Michel. The other day I was talking to the pianist Jean-Yves, you know, the singing coach, and he asked after you …”

  “You know I had a bad accident?”

  “I read about it in the paper. But you look better now.”

  De Palma did not reply, but looked at the square tiles of the parquet. Applause could be heard coming from the auditorium, muffled by the padded doors. Merlino walked reverently over to the varnished doors of the dress circle and opened them in the manner of a sacristan with a cathedral doorway.