The newlyweds had stayed at the Hôtel Fontainebleau in a bright, clean room that looked out over the vast bay, the precipitous sugar-loaf mountain and the green-covered hills that reminded Anne Marie of her Mediterranean, of Algeria.
People walking backward and forward along the main street, the girls hand in hand, the men quietly smoking.
A television had been placed on the sill of the town hall, and when evening fell, the set was turned on and the Saintois watched the programs with innocent pleasure. Frantically they applauded the French team in Jeux Sans Frontières just as they applauded the arrival of seven gun-fighters in the dubbed Western.
Jean Michel, however, soon got bored. He grew more and more restless at the Hôtel Fontainebleau. “If I had wanted to watch television,” he remarked when Anne Marie suggested they sit down among the children, “I could have stayed in Paris.”
He spent a lot of time phoning his mother from the hotel.
17
Reconstitution
In the bright sunshine, she looked like a little girl.
“A lost child,” Anne Marie thought, and she felt an unexpected sense of empathy for Cinderella.
Anne Marie hated crime scene reconstitutions. She hated seeing the accused re-enacting the past and reliving those moments which had led to arrest. Necessary and often useful, the playacting was also painful and very sad.
The woman from Dominica wore a painted dress made of cotton with an elasticized waist that had moved upwards, accentuating sagging breasts and poor posture. Her hair was coarse; it had been combed and woven into plaits. Her scalp was marked off into irregular squares, and from each square there hung a plait, anchored by an elastic band.
Thin arms hung loosely in front of her body, hands clasped. Anne Marie did not notice the handcuffs at first. They pinched slightly against Cinderella’s blemished skin. Another, longer chain went from the handcuffs to a bored gendarme.
The brown eyes watched the gendarmes and the movement around her. Cinderella appeared distant, almost unconcerned, as if what was happening about her—the white men in their uniforms, the cameras, the crowd—had nothing to do with her.
“Coconut radio.” Le Bras, the gendarme from Tréduder with the Breton accent, pointed to the large crowd that had gathered. People stood by the edge of the road and on the dry, white sand of the beach. “They saw you coming from the aerodrome, madame le juge.” He shrugged. “Cheaper than the cinema.”
“And we’re the bit part actors.” Perspiration had formed along the skin of Trousseau’s forehead and on the sides of his nose. He mopped at his face with a handkerchief. He had undone the top two buttons of his shirt.
Anne Marie rubbed gently at the back of her left hand.
The crowd grew larger. Children had begun to appear, working their way toward the front. They had the features of the Saintois—yellow hair, brown or hazel eyes and a golden tan.
Anne Marie raised her voice, “Give her the doll.”
The order was repeated, and a gendarme stepped forward to unlock the handcuffs. Cinderella rubbed at her wrists and the crowd fell silent. Another man approached her and placed a pink doll between her hands.
Trousseau was sitting beneath a sea grape tree where he balanced the typewriter on his narrow knees. He was looking at Cinderella attentively.
She did not move.
Her lawyer, a man in a suit that was too short for his legs, brushed past Anne Marie and took Cinderella gently by the elbow. He spoke in her ear, in a calm, reassuring voice, using carefully enunciated Creole, while his intelligent eyes remained on the juge d’instruction.
Cinderella nodded.
She began to walk. With small, hesitant steps across the sand, the doll held to her breast, she went to the entrance of the wooden hut that she had once inhabited. Her feet left indistinct footprints in the hot sand. She wore plastic sandals; on the right foot, the strap was broken.
Nobody spoke. There was just the gentle murmur of the sea as it broke against the beach beyond the hut. Anne Marie, Trousseau, the lawyer and the gendarmes—they watched in silence, spectators to the play that the girl was about to re-enact.
In his hand, Le Bras held a notebook.
Cinderella put her hand to the doll’s mouth and made the gesture of smothering it. The doll seemed to move. It jerked slightly. Cinderella did not look at the pink face but stared directly ahead. Her face was devoid of expression.
The crowd waited.
Like an automaton, Cinderella stepped from the threshold of the shack—the grey planks were rotting and covered with black lichen—and headed toward the crowd. People moved aside, opening a momentary passage for her as she walked toward a fence beside an uninhabited hut.
Eyes wide, a little boy stared at her. He was naked except for a dirty pair of old swimming trunks.
The gendarme followed Cinderella closely.
There was a tree—Anne Marie could not recognize the round, almost rubbery leaves—and in its shade, Cinderella knelt down. A few dried leaves lay on the sand. She brushed them away.
Her legs and feet were marked with dark scars. She had pale, prominent heels. For a moment, she was motionless; then she turned to look round at the lawyer.
The lawyer nodded, smiled reassuringly. He was sweating in his dark suit.
The woman from Dominica began to dig. Excavating with her bare hands, the doll now lying face down on the ground, Cinderella made a hole. The crowd emitted a low murmur of disapproval.
“Tell them to be quiet,” Anne Marie said.
Le Bras walked away, and a few seconds later, the crowd fell silent.
When there was a neat pile of sand beside Cinderella’s hole, she stopped. There was no tenderness in her action as she set the doll in its shallow grave and as she started shoveling sand over the pink plastic. The white shawl, the golden hair and the chubby, pink limbs disappeared beneath the handfuls of dry sand.
A swell of anger rose from the onlookers.
“Silence,” Le Bras shouted.
Trousseau ran a finger along his moustache.
The girl stood up and stared at the ground. She had finished. A shy actress waiting for her applause.
No one moved.
The lawyer was standing beside Anne Marie. His breath smelt of garlic. Anne Marie had to lean forward to hear him because he was whispering. “She says the man kept watch.”
“What man?”
“Lucien Savon.” Drops of sweat had formed at the corner of his eyes. “It was his idea to do away with the child.” The lawyer turned his head. Out to sea, there was the distant sound of beating. It was growing stronger.
“Why kill the baby?”
He turned back to face Anne Marie. “He couldn’t afford to look after it—or her. He’s married.”
“The girl could have kept the baby—her baby.”
“She can scarcely look after herself—and she’s got no family here to take care of the child.” The face crumpled with vicarious suffering. “She’s not very bright. What little money she earns, she spends. She wouldn’t have been able to look after a child properly.”
“Most women are quite capable.”
The lawyer seemed upset by Anne Marie’s judgment. “Madame le juge, the girl’s retarded.”
“It was her child.”
“She came to the Saintes after the hurricane in Dominica. She can’t speak French—just her own patois.” He shook his head. “To stay alive she had to sell her body. A poor child.”
The crowd was now breaking up, moving toward the sea. Le Bras raised his hand to shield his eyes.
An Alouette was coming in fast from the sea, its nose down like an insect and the circle of its rotor blades a grim halo.
Anne Marie looked at the heap of sand where the doll was buried and remembered her first pregnancy.
The noise grew louder as the helicopter, like an angry insect, began circling the beach. The wind kicked up the sand and scattered the dry leaves, the flotsam, the forgotten sponge and
the seaweed.
In the bulb of the cockpit, his head submerged beneath a helmet, the pilot gestured downward with his thumb. He was hovering at about ten meters, and sand blasted against Anne Marie’s face and legs. She squinted, covering her nose and mouth with her hand.
The skids touched the sand, the pilot cut the engines, the high whine lost its deafening intensity. White letters that announced gendarmerie on the side of the machine.
The pilot jumped out and bent double, came scurrying toward Anne Marie.
“Le juge Laveaud?”
She nodded.
He gave a brief salute. “You are requested to come with me to Pointe-à-Pitre.” He handed her a slip of blue paper.
Cinderella still stood beneath the tree, the bored gendarme beside her. She was staring at the ground, as if she had never noticed the arrival of the helicopter nor the wind of the rotor blades that pulled at her shapeless dress.
“Immediately, madame le juge.”
18
Maison d’Arrêt
The chauffeur got out of the car and rang a bell.
A wooden peephole opened and then closed again, as if activated by a spring. There was the rattle of a bolt being drawn back and the large door opened inward.
The chauffeur stepped aside, and Anne Marie went past him into the cool air of the building. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom. A red tiled floor, several posters, a memorial stone buried into the wall and a long, bare desk.
“Your allergy, madame le juge—remember to rub it with green limes. Green limes and rum.” The driver gave a friendly wave, and his boots made a soft tattoo as he disappeared down the sunlit steps.
“You must sign here.”
The prison officer handed her a pen, and she placed a signature in the large book.
“This way.”
Trousseau and Anne Marie followed the officer along the stone corridor, down several steps to a door where another man was sitting on a stool. He stood up and removed the earplug of a radio from his ear. The smile was sheepish.
He nodded to both visitors and tapped lightly on a door that opened immediately.
A man beckoned them to enter. His nose had been broken; his hair was the color of sand and lay in thin streaks across a domed head. He wore dark trousers, a white shirt and a loosened tie. He was also wearing a gun in a shoulder holster.
He closed the door behind them. “Identification.”
Cold, professional eyes that moved unceasingly. They went from Anne Marie to Trousseau and then back again. They ran over her body, but without pleasure or male interest.
“Le juge d’instruction, Anne Marie Laveaud.”
“And him?” A nod toward Trousseau.
“Monsieur Trousseau’s my greffier.”
He took Trousseau’s card and compared the younger, less wrinkled face in the photograph with the blank face before him.
“Monsieur Trousseau’s my greffier.”
“Trousseau,” the man said.
“Monsieur Trousseau. Jean Alphonse Ayassamy Trousseau. But educated people call me Monsieur.”
There was no reaction in the eyes. The man with the gun pointed his finger at Anne Marie. “You can go in.” With his thumb he indicated Trousseau. “He stays.”
“Monsieur Trousseau comes with me.”
The man shook his domed, graceless head. “I’ve no orders to that effect.”
“Change your orders.”
“Let me see that case.”
Trousseau lifted the typewriter.
“Open it.”
Silence.
“Please open your case.”
Trousseau unlocked the small clasp; the bible picture-book lay on top of the portable Remington. The man touched it gingerly. “And this?”
“Dossier on Raymond Calais.”
“Either of you carrying a fire arm?”
Trousseau said, “I left my flame thrower in the helicopter.”
“Jokes like that can get people killed, pal.” He turned and opened the steel door. The rivets were hidden by several layers of coarse paint.
19
Cell
A smell of cigar smoke and human suffering.
A blanket on the floor.
Instinctively, Anne Marie put her hand to her throat.
The procureur was sitting on the narrow bed, talking to another man. He stood up, getting onto his small feet with difficulty. He panted slightly from the exertion as he greeted Anne Marie. They shook hands. He nodded toward Trousseau.
The procureur was holding a cigar between the fingers of his hand. His face had lost its childlike joviality. In the feeble light he appeared anaemic. “May I present Dr. Bouton?”
Anne Marie and Dr. Bouton shook hands. The doctor’s grip was dry and firm.
The procureur ran a hand through his hair. Despite the coolness of the cell—one wall of stone and two sidewalls of parallel iron bars—he had taken off his jacket and tie. He patted at his forehead with a red handkerchief. “You’d better take a look at that,” he said, gesturing with the cigar at the blanket.
Anne Marie knelt down, and even as she did so, she realized the action was quite pointless. She knew what was there, waiting for her.
It was Trousseau who interceded. He unceremoniously pushed her aside and pulled back the edge of the woolen blanket.
Pale blue eyes, now protuberant and sightless.
The eyes seemed to stare at Anne Marie. The leathery jaw lolled open and revealed a few yellow teeth and a tongue that stuck out—as if in one last, hopeless gesture of defiance.
Anne Marie forced herself to look at the face.
“Why?” she whispered.
Trousseau let the blanket fall back into place, hiding the pink triangle of the tongue.
“Why?” Her body had begun to tremble.
“Why indeed, madame le juge?”
“How did this happen?” She turned to face the procureur. She wanted to control her voice but it seemed distant, strange—spoken by someone else. A cold rage had begun to swell up inside her.
“With the shoulder strap of his overalls.” Dr. Bouton wore steel-rimmed spectacles. His face was thin, pale and angular. He had a small mouth. Dr. Bouton was like a fish—like a shark—at the bottom of a murky sea. “Somehow managed to attach his overall to the bars.”
Anne Marie felt giddy. “How could he have done that?” The bars of the cell seemed to be moving.
“Hégésippe Bray wanted to die.”
A bitter taste of bile rose from the back of her throat. “I don’t believe that.”
“Believe what you choose, madame le juge,” the procureur replied. He sat down on the bench, his fat thighs apart. “I can only tell you what I know to be the truth. The only possible truth.”
“I don’t believe Hégésippe Bray.…”
The procureur jabbed with his cigar. “This is an old colonial prison. The architecture here doesn’t come up to the requirements of French penitentiary establishments. With a modern infrastructure, there is no way Bray could have killed himself. But the old man wanted to die—and without too much difficulty, he’s succeeded.”
“No.”
“Bray told the guard he did not want to live any more—not in a prison.”
“No.”
“Lower your voice, madame.”
Anne Marie felt sick—stunned and sick. The dingy cell seemed to sway. Then the door opened, and the white man with the pistol stood aside to let a woman enter.
“Ah!” the procureur said.
Dr. Bouton stood up. He shook hands with the woman.
“Maître Gisèle Legrand—who was appointed Bray’s lawyer yesterday.”
Trousseau said softly, “Lawyer? Bray’ll be needing an undertaker.”
The procureur swung round, opened his mouth to say something, but his features relaxed as he attempted a smile.
Maître Gisèle Legrand wore sober clothes; a jacket with a hint of pinstripe, a silk shirt that opened low on her deep, freckled chest. A grey skir
t that ended below her knees. Exclusive shoes—bought in Paris.
“We have already met.” Anne Marie shook hands.
Maître Legrand had fair skin, and there were freckles on her cheeks. She wore red lipstick and a lot of rouge. Her hair had been straightened and it now formed a thick plait—like a bread loaf, it seemed to Anne Marie, who could distinguish between the natural hair and the finer, more lustrous hairpiece.
The eyes were glassy. “Pleased to meet you, madame le juge.”
The procureur pulled back the edge of the blanket. Again the dead man’s stare and his loose jaw held Anne Marie’s attention. She leaned on Trousseau’s arm.
“Hanged himself,” the procureur said.
Maître Legrand nodded.
The procureur stood up, briskly rubbed his hands, straightened his shoulders and looked around the cell—at the scratched bars, the wall, the small bed attached to the stonework. “We should go somewhere else to talk.”
There was graffiti on the wall—a few initials, a few sprawling obscenities.
The procureur replaced the cigar in his mouth. “Somewhere a bit more congenial.”
20
Chair
She felt sick.
“Something to drink perhaps?”
Anne Marie rested her weight against the edge of the desk. “Hégésippe Bray did not kill himself.”
“Please sit down, Madame Laveaud.”
“No reason at all for suicide.”
“Evidently Hégésippe Bray thought otherwise.” The procureur shrugged. “He told the guard he didn’t want to return to French Guyana.”
“I had made it quite clear there was no question of his being sent back.” She nodded to where Trousseau sat on a folding wooden chair. “My greffier is a witness.”
Trousseau remained immobile, staring at the wall and at the calendar that had been pinned there.
Maître Legrand sat in a low armchair, her legs crossed and her chin tucked against her neck. Her eyes remained on the procureur. “Perhaps he didn’t believe you, madame le juge.”
The procureur had taken the comfortable armchair behind the desk. The dead cigar was stuck in the corner of his mouth like a morbid excrescence. “Please sit down, madame le juge.”
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