The Cairo Diary

by Maxim Chattam

  That was what took hold of Jeremy.

  The fear flowed out from the ancestral parts of his mind like the blood of a hunted animal that knows it is mortally wounded.

  Jeremy began to pant.

  The ghoul knew where he was when it extinguished the flames. He had to move. Immediately.

  Jeremy moved his pelvis sideways; he had enormous difficulty commanding his body to move.

  The claws whipped through the air, just in front of him.

  Then once again.

  The third salvo gouged the detective’s forearm, and he let out a howl of pain.

  He fell to his knees and dropped his Colt, which landed on the ground.

  The ghoul plowed into the wall just above him.

  Jeremy rolled forward; he detected a presence that just brushed past his shoulder. He rolled again, to move away from it.

  The monster snuffled behind him.

  Jeremy held his breath; it made him too vulnerable, giving away his position. He probed the earth beneath his palms, in search of his weapon. Advancing very slowly and carefully, in silence.

  The ghoul collided with a large object to Jeremy’s right.

  The next moment, there was an enormous crack as the wood of the barrel split open as it hit the ground, several gallons of water pouring out.

  The liquid reached Jeremy immediately, drenching his legs and his sleeves.

  Feverishly, he felt all around him.

  His weapon; he must find his weapon.

  His fingers came into contact with warm skin.

  The child’s ankle.

  He moved away and continued his desperate quest.

  He was beginning to suffer from lack of oxygen; he must breathe more of it in. Soon, it would be impossible for him to go on without breathing more deeply.

  The ghoul was moving somewhere behind him, ready to sink its lethal nails into his soft throat.

  A metallic surface met his fingers.

  It was his Colt.

  He seized it firmly and raised it in front of his face.

  His head was spinning. But he must not breathe in as hard as he needed to, must not allow himself to be pinpointed by the sound.

  Now there were two hunters.

  The first mistake would be fatal.

  He rotated around, very slowly, so as to face the direction in which he had seemed to hear the ghoul a moment earlier.

  Nothing.

  Water was trickling between his calves.

  The ghoul sucked in saliva through its teeth.

  Just in front of him.

  Less than three feet away.

  Jeremy pulled the trigger with all of his strength.

  Again.

  Again.

  His ears rang.

  An immense body collapsed into the flood of water and Jeremy opened his mouth to swallow as much air as he could.

  Then a sound of rasping rose up out of the damp darkness, mingled with muffled gurgles.

  The man deformed by sickness, destroyed by society, was dying in this cold tomb. Then he began to gasp convulsively.

  And silence returned.

  The detective remained motionless for several minutes. Unable to stand up. He waited for a sign from the creature.

  When numbness threatened to cut off his circulation, he got to his feet and set about relighting the candles with the aid of his lighter.

  The black giant was stretched out on the floor, with three bullets in his chest.

  He carried his sufferings away with him, and those of his victims.

  49

  Jeremy placed his Colt on the table and rushed toward the child.

  George Keoraz was sprawled on a vermin-covered straw mattress, the lower part of his body overlapping onto the soaked ground. The detective took the boy’s head in his hands, and bent over him to listen to his breathing.

  He could detect no sign of life.

  Jeremy was about to unbutton the little one’s shirt when he noticed that it was already open. He pushed back a shirttail, repressing the obscene images suggested by this detail.

  And he pressed his ear to the child’s chest.

  His skin was warm.

  No mechanism was beating inside the thoracic cage.

  His baptismal medal slid down his neck, on the end of its little chain.

  Jeremy parted the slender lips and probed the mouth with his index and middle fingers. At first sight there was nothing blocking the throat.

  It was then that the detective saw the marks on the child’s neck.

  What he had taken for an effect of the shadows that were so much in evidence here, was in fact deep bruising.

  George Keoraz had been strangled.

  The ghoul had played with him, taking him on his knees, to the point of squeezing his frail neck with its enormous hands, and tightening the pressure little by little, until the child’s legs stopped kicking.

  Until he became a docile doll that could be played with.

  Jeremy let go of the corpse, and covered the upper part of his face with his still wet hands.

  His rage echoed off the underground stonework, the sound growing as it ricocheted and reverberated.

  Then he stood up, and laid waste to the room.

  He overturned the few shaky bits of furniture, wading in the lake of water that covered the ground.

  And he sat down, exhausted, on the last stool still standing, facing the table.

  Flasks filled with brown liquids had fallen and shattered. The entrails of the dismembered cats and dogs were clumped together amid the debris of broken glass. Jeremy realized that all the corpses had been skinned at the hindquarters. The hunter in him understood immediately.

  The animals’ anal glands had been removed.

  There could be only one reason for that.

  To frighten animals.

  It was probably one of the giant’s old rituals, from the time when he lived alone on the street, to protect himself from famished stray dogs, a childhood memory of his village’s hunts, a local belief that required that children should be daubed with this substance to repel predators. It was a practice that Jeremy had seen before in southern Sudan. The smell of these mixed glands on human skin disgusted certain animals.

  Protected in this way, the ghoul had prowled the streets, frightening potentially aggressive dogs.

  A whitish skin was floating like a jellyfish in the half-light.

  It was drifting toward the detective.

  Jeremy’s vision was blurred; he focused through his anger, which was ebbing little by little.

  It was a pair of trousers.

  He leaped up to seize them.

  There was no doubt that these were the ones Azim had been wearing on the night of his death. Keoraz had brought them here, into his lair, as a morbid trophy.

  When he noticed the metallic reflections caught by the candle flames, he began to tremble. Jeremy fell to his knees and picked up the metal tin.

  Nestor cigarettes.

  He opened the lid. There were about twenty left.

  Keoraz’s voice, honeyed and obliging, came back to him: “I buy them by the box at Groppi’s, they cost me a fortune! But this tobacco is worth every piaster…”

  He closed his eyes.

  Francis Keoraz had sacrificed his own son for his survival.

  Jeremy looked up at the menacing curves of his Colt on the table.

  He knew now what he had to do.

  But before that, he must testify. Explain everything. Secure his future. And Jezebel’s.

  Jeremy took his diary from his jacket pocket and sat down at the table for an entire hour. He wrote down everything he had just done. Made sure that nothing was missing.

  He went back and inserted an arrow into the account he had given of his night with Mr. and Mrs. Keoraz. This arrow led to Azim’s story. Jeremy wrote this according to what his colleague had told him briefly that night, on the telephone. He completed it with what the imam and Khalil had said, then his own deductions in light of w
hat he had just discovered, allowing himself a few purely imagined details.

  Everything was there. His private thoughts. And his investigation.

  In order to understand who Francis Keoraz really was.

  What kind of monster he truly was, beyond that poor unfortunate he had manipulated in order to commit the crimes.

  Once he had made the last full entry in the candlelight, Jeremy left the diary open and picked up his weapon.

  He was going to alert his police colleagues by telephone to the existence of this vile cellar, so that they could collect the child and to ensure that they had all the evidence in their possession. He would say nothing more on the telephone.

  Meanwhile, he personally was going to sort out the problem once and for all.

  Before society and its flaws got hold of the case. Before the millionaire could exercise his influence to save himself, before he could play with the permeable joints of the system.

  The rift of evil of which he was so fond was not going to stretch out its tentacles and engulf civilization; malign corruption would attain no hold on Jeremy Matheson: Of that he was very sure.

  Francis Keoraz was going to confess everything.

  Or die.

  The flame of one of the candles faltered, and a track formed, down the edges of which transparent wax trickled.

  Behind the burning halo, the detective’s silhouette faded away.

  The wax ran down about four inches, with increasing effort; its blood solidifying more as it traveled farther from its heart.

  Jeremy Matheson’s diary lay beside it, the hot rivulet bearing down on it.

  Then the trail of wax halted, broadening and swelling at the very end.

  It began to harden.

  And became white.

  And cold.

  The two candles went out.

  50

  Francis Keoraz will talk. Or die. I am leaving this diary here, and preparing to go, leaving in my wake the lifeless body of the child. And perhaps after I have left, death will summon up that sense of propriety that is invisible to the living, and cover this tomb with its cape, wrapping the room in a cold shroud, while the candles extinguish themselves, as if by magic.

  The diary ended on these mysterious words.

  Marion turned the pages that followed. There was nothing new, just the chapter added on at the very end concerning Azim’s wanderings, which she had already read previously. She examined the spine of the notebook, checking that no pages were missing. Everything was intact. Old, but completely undamaged.

  So ended the strange film that Marion had played to herself throughout her reading. These visions of a bygone age came to an end on a question mark.

  What next?

  She closed the book with the leather cover and gazed at it for a moment.

  What next?

  It couldn’t end like that. There was no conclusion, no epilogue, nothing.

  A little voice inside her played devil’s advocate: You weren’t reading an ordinary type of story, you were reading a true story. What were you expecting from reality? It isn’t perfectly ordered or structured; reality is a tale filled with weak points and blanks, and dotted with question marks, the answers to which are not always given at the end. Truth is like that, not otherwise. Imperfect and incomplete.

  Jeremy Matheson had not been able to save the child. He had confronted the ghoul before leaving for the Keoraz house, armed with his personal belief, and with too many pieces of evidence for it to be a coincidence.

  What had happened afterward?

  Did Keoraz confess? Threatened by Jeremy’s Colt, probably.… Under the Medusa gaze of his wife. Was Francis Keoraz charged? Or had he committed suicide in a moment of sudden lucidity?

  Having read the diary, there was another hypothesis, very probable despite its dramatic side.

  Jeremy had aimed his pistol at the child-killer to make him confess.

  Rage and disgust had pulled the trigger.

  Marion swore out loud. If only she had the Internet, in a short time she could have found out what happened via the press archives.

  There was still one problem.

  Now that she had read everything, Marion still could not see what would lead an individual to want to get the diary back at any price. What did it contain that was so precious? Nothing … nothing but the truth about an old story of child murders.

  The truth … and the confidences of a wounded man.

  Jeremy had given himself up to it wholeheartedly.

  Jeremy …

  Marion did a quick calculation. If he was still alive today he would be a little over a hundred years old. Difficult.

  But possible.

  Joe and Brother Gilles were the only old men on the Mount.

  Neither of them seemed that old. And yet, was she capable of assessing their precise ages? No …

  Then there was Sister Luce.

  Jezebel?

  No, nothing about the nun suggested the elegance and grace of which Jeremy spoke. Even with time, Jezebel couldn’t have lost it all, and Sister Luce had a fearsome profile, as sharp as her nature.

  Jeremy.

  Marion kept coming back to him. A lover. That was what he was. He attracted her to the point where she saw him everywhere.

  What if you proceed in the other direction?

  What data did she have to help her identify the mysterious figure who was harassing her?

  Whoever it was knew both the Mount and the abbey well.

  Everyone here was capable of that.

  Whoever it is has the keys—not just to the abbey, but to my house. Exactly the same bunch as the brotherhood has.

  So, someone from among the brothers and sisters.

  A copy could have been made.

  What else did she know?

  It’s a very athletic shadow …

  That had been proven by their high-speed chase.

  Brother Damien. He often ran in the mornings.

  Ludwig. Used to play rugby.

  Don’t forget the kid. Grégoire. He works out.

  Three possibilities.

  What else?

  The riddle … it’s someone who likes to play. The moment I arrived, I was presented with that intellectual challenge. And according to the second letter, there might well have been others, if I hadn’t found the notebook, which caused offense.

  Brother Damien was a game-player; he liked crosswords.

  And yet he didn’t have the right profile. Was he hiding behind a mask? That seemed unlikely …

  Marion couldn’t seem to get Brother Gilles out of her mind.

  Too fragile to run through the abbey. No …

  How about a double act?

  Brother Gilles giving the orders, and Brother Damien subject to his authority, using his physical condition in the service of the older man.

  The portrait didn’t fit.

  The old monk was too much of a killjoy and too dull-witted to appreciate mental games, and still less riddles. Marion couldn’t see him in his cell, enjoying himself as he created a puzzle for her arrival, just to welcome her and test her ability to respond. That wasn’t his style at all.

  There’s a direct relationship with one of the protagonists in Matheson’s diary. If not, they wouldn’t try to take it back from me at any price.

  The idea of a two-man team worked.

  The evidence was right under her nose.

  Marion couldn’t refute any longer what, by default, had to be the sole answer to her questions.

  For several days already, she had been thinking about it, but refusing to accept it as a probability. She liked the old man too much.

  See what’s staring you in the face! Even his name is a clue!

  It was as simple as that.

  Joe was Jeremy.

  And now everything took on a new meaning.

  51

  Marion switched on the light in her living room.

  The brightness emphasized the warmth of the materials there. Fabric,
velour, wood. For the first time, she noticed a similarity with Jeremy Matheson’s rail car.

  Joe was a diminutive of Jeremy.

  He played chess, stimulated his mind with intellectual games, and had the mentality of a man who enjoyed playing with riddles.

  He wasn’t acting alone, of course.

  Grégoire.

  The young man was much closer to Joe than she had supposed.

  “He needs life, and a male presence; I don’t think I’m wrong about that,” Joe had said during their dinner.

  Grégoire executed his commands.

  As the ghoul had executed those of Francis Keoraz.

  It was the youth she had pursued that same afternoon, who had panicked at the thought of being caught before abandoning the book to run away. Grégoire was clearly fascinated by this man who would have been a good model for his father, who undoubtedly told him stories as crazy as in those fantasy films he was so mad about. And he had at last found in Joe a means to escape the Mount’s monotony.

  Jeremy had taken refuge in France before the war, to flee his own country. For what reason? Was he wanted for the murder of Francis Keoraz? Or did he wish to be forgotten by his fellow countrymen after the notorious affair, which had probably earned him a sad kind of fame that he would gladly have done without?

  He had ended up far from everything here, in the shadow of the church. Preserving his private diary as the last witness of his former life.

  Marion slipped on her trench coat and picked up Matheson’s diary before stepping out into the cool of the night.

  She headed straight for Joe’s house.

  * * *

  After she had hammered on the door several times, it finally opened.

  Marion tensed as she guessed that it wasn’t the old man standing behind it. She relaxed as soon as she recognized Grégoire.

  He gazed at her with a resigned look.

  They didn’t say a word.

  Marion held the diary under her arm. The youth noticed it, and his gaze traveled to Marion’s face.

  Eventually she asked, “Is he in?”

  Grégoire remained impassive. Finally he withdrew, making way for her.

  When she was in the main room of the house, Grégoire replied, “Joe isn’t here. He’s up there, at the abbey.”