After the Crash

by Michel Bussi

  The baby was Lylie – our Dragonfly, the miracle child of Mont Terrible – without any doubt whatsoever. Same eyes, same face . . .

  Pascal and Stéphanie Vitral had never gone to Ceyhan during their holiday in Turkey. They had never even been within a hundred miles of the town. There could be no doubt – finally we had the proof we were looking for.

  The miracle child found in the snow on Mont Terri was LyseRose de Carville.

  2 October, 1998, 11.44 a.m. The phone beeped, just once, almost inaudible amid the din from the underground train. It was not a call to his mobile, but a ringtone informing him that he had a message in his voicemail. A missed call.

  Marc’s trembling hand reached into his pocket.

  20

  2 October, 1998, 11.42 a.m. As Ayla Ozan sliced the grilled mutton meat it fell in thin slivers onto the stainless steel countertop. Her mind was elsewhere. This did not make her any less competent at her job; in fact, if anything, she was better at making kebabs when lost in her thoughts than when she wasted her time chatting and joking with customers.

  The queue was beginning to lengthen, as it always did just before lunch. Her little takeaway on Boulevard Raspail had plenty of regulars.

  Although Ayla’s face did not show it, she was worried. Deeply worried. She had not heard a word from Nazim in two days now. This was not like him at all. The meat continued to rain down under the blade of the carving knife. Ayla imagined stroking the blade over the back of Nazim’s neck, his temples. She loved cutting her giant’s hair. Her hand was trembling slightly; she never trembled when she shaved Nazim.

  Ayla was not the type to be easily scared. She had seen other people full of fear when she fled Turkey for Paris with her father after the coup d’état of 12 September, 1982. At the time, her father had been one of the central figures in the Demokratik Sol Parti, and they had only just managed to escape the clutches of the army. Thirty thousand arrests in only a few days. Almost her entire family had ended up behind bars.

  She had arrived in Paris without luggage, without friends, without anything at all. She had been thirty-eight years old, spoke practically no French, and had no qualifications. Yet she had survived. You can always survive, if you really want to.

  She had opened one of the first kebab shops in Paris, on Boulevard Raspail. Back then, French people had no desire to eat grilled meat in that way, outside, in front of other people, surrounded by flies and the city’s pollution. Her customers were Turks, Greeks, Lebanese and Yugoslavs. That was how she had met Nazim.

  He came in every lunchtime. She couldn’t miss him with his big moustache. It took him almost a year – three hundred and six lunchtimes exactly, Ayla had counted – to ask her out for dinner. They went to a Turkish restaurant (but a chic one) on Rue d’Alésia. Since then, they had never been apart, or hardly ever.

  Married, for life.

  Ayla shivered, in spite of herself.

  Always together, or nearly always.

  The only thing that ever took Nazim away from her were those damn trips to Turkey with Grand-Duc, for that stupid case involving the rich kid who had died in a plane crash. A private investigation funded by billionaires. Ayla picked up three hot aluminium envelopes stuffed with kebabs and yelled: ‘Number eleven! Number twelve! Number thirteen!’

  The customers raised their hands, like schoolchildren or people queueing at the welfare office, holding up their tickets. Ayla only had one pair of hands: she couldn’t go any quicker. She threw a packet of frozen chips into boiling oil.

  She had thought all that shit was over and done with. Thanks to her restaurant – if you could really call it that – she had managed to put aside a bit of cash, day after day. She had built up a nice little nest egg now.

  She was too old to be carrying bags of meat, burning her fingers on the fryer. She dreamed of returning to Turkey with Nazim, being with her family once more. She had almost enough money now. She had done the calculations over and over again. She had spotted a little house on the coast, near Antakya – a bargain. The weather was always good down there. She and Nazim still had plenty of years ahead of them; their best years.

  So what the hell could that jackass be up to now? What stupid plan had Grand-Duc got him mixed up in?

  Three more aluminium sheets. She wrapped the kebabs like presents.

  Number fourteen. Number fifteen. Number sixteen.

  ‘Just one last time, I promise,’ Nazim had told her. He had got all excited again, when Crédule called him two days ago. His eyes had sparkled like a child’s and he had taken her in his arms, lifted her up like a feather. Nazim was the only one who could do that.

  ‘We’re going to be rich, Ayla. We only need to sort out one last thing, and we’ll be rich!’

  Rich? Who cared about that? They already were rich: had almost enough to buy the house in Antakya.

  ‘Is this really the last time? You promise?’

  Ayla’s hands were trembling. The carving knife deviated from its usual straight line, mangling the meat into an inedible mush.

  The more she thought about it, the more frightened she became. This silence. This sudden absence of news. Even when he went to Turkey, Nazim called her every day. And Crédule wasn’t answering his phone either. She had been calling for the past two days. Yes, the more she thought about it, the harder it was to bear the passing minutes. She had a bad feeling about this. Were it not for these last customers, she would have run up to Butte-aux-Cailles like a madwoman and banged on Grand-Duc’s door. In fact, that was exactly what she was planning to do, once she had closed the shop.

  Number seventeen. Number eighteen.

  She was well aware that Nazim was no angel. He had even confessed to her some of the terrible things he had done over the years. He had told her when they made love, when she let him rub his moustache all over her body, when she laughed, shivering, as he tickled her breasts, her thighs, her pussy, with his bristly upper lip . . . Afterwards, when he had come, he told her everything. He couldn’t help himself. He had never hidden anything from her. She knew the names and the places; she knew where Nazim had hidden the evidence. She was his life insurance. An investigation funded by billionaires . . . It was better to take precautions when the money was flowing too easily, because there would always come a time when you had to be accountable for what you had done.

  That was another reason she wanted to leave, to go to Antakya. So that Nazim could leave all this shit behind.

  Number nineteen.

  She sighed. No, Nazim was no choirboy. Without her, he would be incapable of making the right choice, of distinguishing between good and evil.

  21

  2 October, 1998, 11.45 a.m. The train slowed down as it came into Place-d’Italie, shattering the darkness with a thousand sparks. Marc grabbed his mobile phone and put it to his ear.

  ‘Marc, you are incorrigible! I asked you not to call me, not to try to get hold of me or to look for me. I told you: I made an important decision the day before yesterday. It was very difficult and painful, and it took me a while, but in the end I made it all by myself. You won’t understand what I’m going to do. Or you won’t agree with it. I know how you feel, Marc. I know you mean well. Don’t take that the wrong way – it’s meant as a compliment. I admire your moral sense and your devotion. I know you would accept anything, forgive anything, if I asked you to. But I don’t want to ask this of you. I wasn’t lying when I talked about a journey in my letter. Departure is set for tomorrow, and it’s a one-way trip. Nothing can stop this now. That’s just how it is. Take care of yourself.’

  Marc had to fight the urge to hurl the phone at the door of the train. The network functioned only intermittently on the metro. Lylie had called him . . . and his phone had not rung. She had got his voicemail . . .

  He was trembling. What had she meant?

  ‘Departure is set for tomorrow . . .’

  ‘A one-way trip . . .’

  ‘Nothing can stop this now . . .’

  Was
it possible?

  Marc found it hard to imagine such a thing.

  So dark, so macabre.

  Not Lylie!

  And yet, the more he thought about it, the more the message

  between the lines seemed to become clear.

  A one-way trip.

  The miniature aeroplane. The decision taken on her eighteenth

  birthday.

  It all fitted.

  Lylie had decided to put an end to all her doubts, her obsessions,

  her past.

  She had decided to kill herself.

  Tomorrow.

  Lylie threw the kebab, in its aluminium packet, in the bin near the lake. She had barely touched it. She wasn’t hungry. She walked over to the water’s edge. Montsouris, supposedly the biggest park in Paris, was also, she thought, the most sinister. At least in October. The bleak, filthy waters, the skeletal trees, the view over Avenue Reille, with its grey buildings of various heights, like a concrete hedge trimmed by a blind gardener.

  The park’s ducks had flown south a long time ago, and the stone lovers, shivering on their marble plinth, looked as if they would rather just get dressed and go home.

  Lylie walked alongside the lake. It was strange, she thought, how your mood could transform a place. As if your surroundings instinctively mirrored what was in your head. As if the trees, sensing her pain, had lost their leaves in sympathy.

  Lylie had switched off her phone again. A few minutes earlier, she had given in and called Marc. He had left her so many messages, had sounded so worried; she owed him that, at least. It had been a relief when she got his voicemail. She was not up to answering his questions right now.

  Lylie headed towards the Allée de la Mire and sat on a bench. The children’s laughter, coming from the little playground, made her turn her head.

  Two toddlers were playing there, watched by their mother, who was sitting on a bench, reading a blue-and-white paperback.

  Twins. The little girls were wearing the same beige trousers, the same red button-up jacket, the same shoes. It was impossible to tell them apart. Nevertheless, every time their mother looked up at them, she addressed each one directly: ‘Juliette, don’t stand up on the swing’; ‘Anaïs, don’t push your sister on the merry-go-round’; ‘Juliette, you’re supposed to go down the slide, not up it,’ and so on.

  The little girls sometimes held hands and sometimes separated as they rushed from one ride to the next, as if they were trying to mix up their identities. Which one was which? Lylie followed their progress the way you follow a card trick. She lost each time, incapable of guessing, after a few moments, which one was Juliette and which Anaïs. All their mother had to do was look up for half a second and she knew instantly: ‘Anaïs, do up your laces!’; ‘Juliette, come over here so you can blow your nose.’

  Lylie watched, enthralled, and felt a strange emotion rise within her. The girls were identical in every way, and yet they both knew who they were: Anaïs was not Juliette; Juliette was not Anaïs. Not because they felt different, but simply because their mother could tell them apart, she knew their names, and she never got them mixed up.

  Lylie stayed there, watching them, for a long time. Finally, the girls’ mother put away her book, stood up, and called: ‘Juliette, come down from the climbing frame. Anaïs, hurry up with the rope ladder. We’re going home. Daddy is waiting for us.’

  The mother gently stroked her swollen belly. She was a few months’ pregnant.

  Twins? Another little girl?

  Lylie closed her eyes. She saw a baby, only a few months old, screaming alone on a mountaintop. Its scream was lost in the vast forest, muffled by the falling snow.

  Unable to stop herself, Lylie burst into tears.

  22

  2 October, 1998, 11.48 a.m. Dugommier.

  Daumesnil.

  Still no phone coverage.

  Marc had not yet recovered from the shock of Lylie’s message. He

  felt worried, helpless. What else could he do but rush blindly on, almost randomly through the tunnels beneath Paris? In desperation, he opened Grand-Duc’s notebook to see if it held any more clues. All he could do was keep reading, in the hope that he might eventually find Lylie.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal Léonce de Carville had his first heart attack while I was in Turkey, on 23 March 1982, only a few days before Unal Serkan delivered the photograph of Lyse-Rose de Carville, taken on the beach.

  There was no connection between the two events.

  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really care about Léonce de Carville’s coronary. I had met him several times, as part of my investigation, and I think he regarded me as some kind of expensive bauble that his wife had bought. In truth, I think he also hated the fact that his wife had taken such an initiative – hiring me – without consulting him. I was the living proof that his bulldozer approach to the case had failed. He deliberately dragged his feet when it came to providing me with information for my investigation, drip-feeding it to me via his overworked secretaries. So perhaps you will understand why I didn’t burst into tears when he fell, stricken, on the lawn of the Roseraie. After all, his wife was the one writing my cheques, not him.

  I know you don’t care about any of this. What interests you is the photograph taken on Ceyhan beach. You want to know what happened next. I’m getting to that . . .

  Unal Serkan was one slippery customer. I had already spoken to him several times on the phone, offering him a fortune – two hundred and fifty thousand Turkish lira – in return for the original negative of the photograph. This had been going on for weeks now. I could tell Serkan was after more money. He wanted to see how high he could push the bidding.

  Finally, he agreed to meet me on 7 April, early in the morning, on Avenue Kennedy, at the foot of Topkapi overlooking the Bosphorus. He was a small, fidgety guy whose eyes pointed in different directions – one towards Europe and the other Asia. Nazim came with me to translate. Serkan wanted a deposit of fifty thousand pounds. If I said no, he would sell the picture elsewhere.

  Elsewhere? Who would want it? The Vitrals? Did he think we were stupid?

  I didn’t agree, obviously. He was not getting a single penny from me unless he handed over the negative. He, too, refused to budge an inch. We almost came to blows, right then and there, in front of the statue of Ataturk. Nazim had to separate us.

  Going back to the hotel, I had a strange feeling. Not as if I had just made a mistake. Quite the opposite, in fact. As if I had dodged a bullet.

  I called France and asked to be sent all the newspapers and magazines that had published articles about the Mont Terrible tragedy. They arrived three days later, on 10 April. After less than an hour, I had the explanation I was looking for. The hideous blue vase on my bedside table exploded against the vermilion rug hung on the wall.

  Unal Serkan had not taken much trouble. On 8 January 1981, Paris Match had published a series of photographs of Lylie, lying in her crib at the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital nursery. In one of them, Lylie was in exactly the same position as she was in the photograph of the beach in Turkey, supposedly taken one month earlier

  – leaning slightly to the side, her right leg bent, left arm under her head.

  Unal Serkan’s photograph was a fake, and not even a good one. He had simply replaced the sheets in the crib with a beach towel of the same colour and texture. All he had needed after that was a picture of his girlfriend.

  I wanted to tear down every rug I could find from the walls of that room. I spent two hours pacing around and, gradually, I began to calm down. In the end, I wasn’t even angry with Unal Serkan. It had been a clever idea, and undoubtedly worth a try. It might easily have worked. Who wouldn’t want two hundred and fifty thousand Turkish lira in return for a simple photomontage? I never saw Unal Serkan again. I had bigger fish to fry.

  I spent the next few weeks in Turkey dreaming up other theories, which Nazim found increasingly woolly and unconvincing. He was right. It was probably due to the
hookah. I had ended up developing a taste for it, in spite of my misgivings. The hookah, raki, and the inevitable keyif; afternoon tea served on a silver platter, in carved glass beakers, so hot it burns your lips as you refresh yourself between increasingly insane questions.

  ‘Nazim, what if Lyse-Rose wasn’t Alexandre de Carville’s daughter?’

  ‘What if she wasn’t?’ Nazim sighed, blowing on his tea. ‘How would that change things, Crédule?’

  ‘It would change everything! Think about it: what if Alexandre de Carville wasn’t the father. What if Véronique had taken a lover and that lover had blue eyes! That would change all the variables in terms of genetics, her eye colour, all the little resemblances we’re looking for. Don’t you think?’

  ‘A lover, Crédule?’

  Nazim gave me an amused, mischievous look with his dark brown eyes. It was exactly the kind of look that Ayla must have fallen for.

  In books and films, investigating adulterous affairs is portrayed as being one of a private detective’s most boring chores. But to be perfectly honest, spying on other people’s sex lives is one of the best parts of the job. I had no difficulty discovering that Alexandre de Carville was not exactly a model of virtue. I had suspected as much. A young, rich, powerful man living in a city where the harem is an age-old tradition, with a wife who stayed at home and looked after the children almost three hundred miles from where he worked . . . It was hardly a surprise.

  Over time, I managed to turn up half a dozen extramarital adventures undertaken by the handsome Alexandre. Curiously, women seem to confess quite easily to affairs when their lover is dead; even more so when the wife is dead too.

  Alexandre de Carville was not afraid of clichés. He had humped his secretary on his glass desk at the company headquarters in Istanbul. I saw them both – the glass desk and the secretary – and they were both equally cold and elegant. He also had a three-month affair with a very hot and very young local girl who wandered around the streets of Galata in a miniskirt, her navel exposed, under the searching gaze of black-veiled women. She had taken him to nightclubs. I found her; she is married now. Two kids. She’s still not wearing a veil, but she’s not wearing miniskirts anymore either. I’ll skip over Alexandre’s adventures in hammams, with belly dancers, and with various prostitutes and escorts, often in the company of business clients. According to my research, his most faithful lover was Pauline Colbert, a single French businesswoman, who claims to have been the last person to have had sex with Alexandre de Carville, on 22 December 1982: the very day he flew out with his family on the Airbus 5403. It was clear to me that the fact of having made a man come – several times, as she was keen to specify – less than twenty-four hours before he was burnt to a crisp, was deeply exciting for her in retrospect. She had an ordinary face, but a sexy body, and I got the impression that it wouldn’t have taken too much effort on my part to persuade her to add a private detective to her tally of conquests.