After the Crash

by Michel Bussi

  Emilie had insisted that she wanted to pay for Marc’s things too, at first. It was her money, after all, as Nicole had explained to her. But on this point her grandmother refused to budge. For her, it was a question of honour. She had made a moral commitment with Mathilde de Carville.

  A line in the sand. Not one centime of the de Carville money would be spent on her grandson.

  This may seem strange, I grant you. But how would you have acted, in Nicole’s place? The decision is not as easy as it seems. Yes, Mathilde de Carville knew exactly what she was doing, that evening in May 1981, when she gave the cuckoo’s egg to Nicole Vitral. Along with the sapphire ring.

  Yet there is an unexpected moral to this story. As far as I was able to tell, the cuckoo’s egg did not actually hatch. Marc was not jealous. Ever. And his attitude had nothing to do with the desire to obey his grandmother. Jealousy was simply not in his nature. He was happy for Emilie, and that was all.

  And there was another miracle, perhaps even more curious still: in spite of all the gifts she received, all the gold and sweetness that enriched her life, Emilie was not transformed into a spoilt brat. She remained the same lively, humble, happy, straightforward girl she had always been, never feeling the slightest scorn for the cramped living room, the tiny houses of Rue Pocholle, the grey sea and the hard pebbles beneath her bare feet.

  Emilie grew up. She had the Vitrals’ blue eyes and the de Carvilles’ refined tastes. The kindness of the Vitrals . . . and the money of the de Carvilles.

  Go figure . . .

  Marc looked up from the notebook. There were tears in his eyes. The train sped past the ponds of the Poses. Barges loaded with

  sand floated the other way back up the Seine. He saw it all again:

  the recorder, the sofa, the piano with Emilie sitting at it, playing

  Chopin, Berlioz, Debussy. He did not know any of the music, but

  it moved him all the same. Emilie sitting straight-backed, her fingers moving constantly over the keys. The piano was silent now.

  Still in the living room in Dieppe, but covered in a thick layer of

  dust. Marc remembered Lylie’s clothes too. How could he forget

  them? Her dresses and skirts, becoming more beautiful with every

  year.

  How could he have been jealous?

  Nobody ever understood that. Not Grand-Duc, not Nicole, and

  certainly not Mathilde de Carville.

  The train stopped at Val-de-Reuil, the station in the fields, a long

  way from the town. Marc hesitated. He would be in Rouen in fifteen minutes. He took out his mobile phone. There was time for

  him to call a few more clinics. He tried three – without success.

  No one by that name had been admitted. Oh well. Marc no longer

  believed in this line of inquiry. More than anything, he wanted to

  finish reading Grand-Duc’s notebook.

  His adolescence, narrated by a private detective. As if his own

  diary had been written by someone else.

  40

  2 October, 1998, 4.48 p.m. Nicole Vitral walked slowly towards the stall at the end of the fishing port.

  ‘What do you have today, Gilbert? Nothing too expensive.’

  ‘Sole,’ the fishmonger replied. ‘Straight from the boat that came in last night. Just one?’

  ‘Two.’

  Gilbert’s eyes goggled like one of his dead fish. ‘Two? Is Emilie home? Marc? Or do you have a lover?’

  ‘It’s for Marc, you idiot!’ said Nicole.

  ‘All right, I’ll give you a nice one then. How is he?’

  Nicole gave an evasive answer, something banal, then paid for the fish.

  ‘Thank you, Gilbert. I’ll be round to bring you some leaflets from the town council later this week. About the future of the port.’

  The fishmonger sighed. ‘Not more of that rubbish! Those councillors should be worrying about us shopkeepers, instead of the dockers. We’ll be the first to go bust, believe me, even before the fishermen . . .’

  Nicole had already turned to go. Gilbert Letondeur was the best fishmonger in Dieppe, but he was also a right-wing arsehole, in league with the ship-owners and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Nicole knew that her view of things was rather black-andwhite, but that’s just how she saw things. Dieppe, for her, could be divided into two opposing camps. And, in spite of the van from which she had sold chips on the seafront, she had never aligned herself with the forces of capitalism. A traitor!

  Doubly a traitor, in fact, because she ate the enemy’s fish.

  She walked on, towards the seafront. She was glad of the dry weather, the calm wind. The seafront was a hive of activity and colour, covered with white marquees, each draped with a foreign flag – for ten days every two years, Dieppe played host to the International Kite Festival.

  The sky was already full of multicoloured objects in all shapes and sizes, some floating motionlessly high above, some circling and swooping. Looking up above her, Nicole spotted a Chinese dragon, an Inca mask, a gigantic blue cat . . .

  She watched them and felt a wave of nostalgia. Back in the 1980s, Dieppe had been the first port in France to stage a kite festival. Since then, the event had been replicated on every windy beach in northern Europe. Nicole had been there with Pierre for the first two festivals, in 1980 and 1982. How joyful it had been. And lucrative, too. Their daughter-in-law Stéphanie had been heavily pregnant during the first festival, but she had still helped them on the first weekend. Pierre and Pascal, her doting father-in-law and husband, had had to persuade Stéphanie to sit down and rest. Emilie had been born a few days later, on 30 September.

  And then there had been the Airbus crash . . . and then the trial, and the verdict. Pierre Vitral had lived through one more festival, in 1982, before falling asleep for the last time on 7 November, in Le Tréport. The festival had become part of Nicole’s life, a symbol reminding her that life and death hung by a thread, at the whim of the wind. Nevertheless, Nicole continued to work on the seafront during the festivals that followed, without Pierre to help her. She had no choice: the kite festival was the biggest earner on her calendar.

  Marc and Emilie were too young to remember all this. For them, the festival was always like an early Christmas: something they looked forward to for weeks ahead of time. It gave Marc the opportunity to impress his little sister with his kite-handling skills. He had been given a kite in the shape of a giant red-and-gold insect by a neighbour. It had a long, beribboned tail and transparent paper wings. Marc called it ‘Dragonfly’, of course. Some people – fools

  – still called Emilie by that name sometimes. Some of the shopkeepers in Dieppe, for instance.

  Emilie would run from stand to stand, sampling all the different countries. Peru, China, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Ecuador, Yemen, Quebec . . . The kite as a tight cord linking all the children of the world: all they needed was a bit of a breeze, nothing else.

  The art of taming the sky, purely for the fun of it.

  Flying ever higher. No passengers. No crash. After 1980, Nicole had never been able to look at the sky in the same way.

  Little Emilie would run for miles. Japan, Mali, Columbia. She would come back to the van, her eyes ablaze. All the world’s tribes meeting here, in her backyard. ‘Grandma, have you seen, have you seen it all?’

  Nicole left the seafront, almost in tears. For the first time in her life, Emilie would miss the kite festival this year.

  She went into the baker’s.

  ‘A baguette, Nicole?’

  ‘Yes, please. And a Salammbô too.’

  ‘Really? Is Marc back?’

  A Salammbô was Marc’s favourite cake. Or, at least, it had been

  when he was ten years old. Nicole knew it was ridiculous to continue trying to make her grandson happy with the same things that

  had lit up his childhood. But it made her happy, and Marc was

  always polite about it.

  Ni
cole looked at her watch. He would be here in two hours. She

  walked towards the ferry bridge that separated Pollet from the rest

  of Dieppe, and thought again about their telephone conversation.

  Mathilde de Carville had given Marc the DNA test, with instructions not to open it, because it was for Nicole.

  That cow!

  Nicole had to wait for a while, as the ferry bridge was lifting

  up to let a ship pass. Nigerian flags. Bananas? Pineapples? Exotic

  hardwoods?

  What did Mathilde de Carville think – that she was the only one

  to have thought about a DNA test? That Crédule Grand-Duc was

  her lapdog? That he had taken Emilie’s blood without her grandmother noticing?

  The line of cars lengthened in front of the bridge. The combination of sea air and petrol fumes made Nicole cough. That de

  Carville woman was not as cunning as she imagined. And GrandDuc was not the bastard he pretended to be. He had ordered two

  DNA tests. Two blue envelopes. One for each grandmother. Nicole looked up at the Chinese Dragon kite, waving high above

  the roofs of the seafront. She smiled. In the middle drawer of her

  chest of drawers, under lock and key, she had kept the blue envelope given to her by Grand-Duc. The results of the test comparing

  her blood to Emilie’s. It would, of course, confirm the results that

  Marc was carrying with him, comparing Emilie’s blood to Mathilde

  de Carville’s.

  Finally, the ferry bridge lowered into place and the cars began to

  move again.

  Nicole had opened the envelope in 1995. So, she too had known

  the truth for the past three years.

  She needed to talk to Marc about this. Tonight. She could still

  save a life. If she waited any longer, it would be too late. She should

  have acted before, of course, but that was easier said than done. She thought about the test result.

  A relief? Yes, perhaps. As long as she could accept losing

  everything else.

  41

  2 October, 1998, 5.11 p.m. The train sped along the coast of Deux-Amants, crossed the railway bridge at Manoir-sur-Seine and passed through the station at Pont-de-l’Arche. Marc did not even notice the cold of the window against his forehead. He switched on the reading light above his head.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal The early years of the 1990s were dead years. There were more trips to Turkey and Canada, and my annual pilgrimage to Mont Terri. Nazim even staked out the cabin for days at a time. But we never found anything new.

  This was the beginning of my depression, I think: between 1990 and 1992. The end of my illusions.

  Nothing was happening on the Georges Pelletier front either. He had just vanished. The reward for the bracelet had stopped going up, and was stuck at seventy-five thousand francs. After all, what was the point in going any higher?

  I had not worked on the case at all for almost three weeks when I received the telephone call from Zoran Radjic. The small ads, offering seventy-five thousand francs for the bracelet, continued to appear in a dozen newspapers every week, paid for in advance by direct debit.

  ‘Crédule Grand-Duc?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘My name is Zoran Radjic. I read your ad about the reward for a missing gold bracelet. I think I have information that might be useful to you.’

  I was wary, of course, after being conned by that Turk years earlier.

  ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘Yes . . . I think so.’

  In spite of myself, I was excited. Credulous, as ever.

  We met a few hours later, in a bar – l’Espadon, on Rue Gay-Lussac. We both ordered a beer. Zoran Radjic looked every bit the local conman. With his weasel-like face, furtive eyes, and slicked-back hair, he looked so obviously shady that you wondered how he managed to achieve anything.

  Was it possible that this man might actually deliver the only piece of useful evidence we’d had? A bracelet taken from Mont Terri twelve years earlier. All the other details – eye colour, musical talent, the grave next to the cabin – were nothing compared to this. If I could only get my hands on that damn bracelet, I’d be home and dry: the miracle child ejected from the aeroplane would, without any doubt at all, be Lyse-Rose de Carville.

  ‘Go on,’ I told him, wishing to give away as little as possible. ‘I saw your ad yesterday. I don’t read the papers very often . . .’ Zoran was playing with his silver signet ring.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘This goes back to 1983 or ’84. The guy who showed it to me

  wasn’t in the best of health. A junkie, you know? Back in those days, I used to help people out when they were in the shit . . . Well . . . to be honest, I used to deal drugs too. And this guy was desperate for a fix. I sort of knew him. He’d been hanging around in the area for a while. He was flat broke, so he wanted to swap some jewellery for his next fix. It was a bracelet. Gold, according to him.’

  He played casually with his signet ring. I wasn’t going to fall for his stalling, so sat back and waited for him to continue.

  ‘I’m guessing you’d be interested in the guy’s name . . .’

  ‘I know his name,’ I said. ‘What I’m looking for is evidence. Or, better still, the bracelet itself. The seventy-five thousand francs is for the bracelet. Anything else . . . we’ll negotiate.’

  The signet ring disappeared into his right hand. He made a fist.

  ‘OK, I’ll play along. We might not be talking about the same guy, after all. How much for the name?’

  And there it was: the ring reappeared in his left hand. How did he do that?

  ‘Ten thousand,’ I said. ‘Assuming it’s the right name.’

  ‘No way. How do I know you’re not going to fleece me? I give you the name, you tell me it’s the wrong one, and then you piss off. And I’ve been had.’

  Maybe this guy was not as stupid as he looked.

  ‘Fair enough. Have you a pen?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘I’ll write the name on my beer mat. You write the name on yours. If the two names are the same, you’ve won ten thousand francs. Then we can move on to the next step.’

  He grinned. The signet ring had somehow been moved to his right hand again. ‘Cool. I like this sort of game.’

  We both hunched over our beer mats, hiding what we were writing from the other with our hands.

  We turned the mats over at the same time.

  Georges Pelletier. On both beer mats.

  I felt a shiver run down my spine. So, Georges Pelletier had offered the bracelet to this crook. It was all coming together.

  But I was still cautious. I had spent five years wandering around Paris, searching for Georges Pelletier. Word spreads fast among lowlifes. So perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that he knew the name of the man I was looking for.

  ‘All right. The ten thousand is yours. I’ll write you a cheque.’

  Radjic pulled a face. A cheque? He was strictly a cash-only kind of guy.

  ‘Did you see the bracelet?’

  ‘Yes. How much for the info?’

  ‘Ten thousand, if I believe you. Tell me about it.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  Maybe this guy, with his disappearing signet ring, had a bit of talent as a magician, but I still had a trump card up my sleeve. I’d learned a few tricks myself, over the years.

  ‘If you’ve really seen it, you shouldn’t even have to ask what I want to know.’

  He smiled. I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing or not.

  ‘Ten thousand more, that’s the deal? Can I trust you?’

  ‘I’m straight as a die,’ I told him. ‘Anyone can tell you.’

  Radjic’s hands moved quickly, and he dropped the signet ring on the table. He was nervous. Or he wanted me to think he was, that sly bastard. I picked up the beer mat and wrote on it: ‘Lise-
Rose. 27 September, 1980.’

  Exactly the same words as the ad.

  I passed him the beer mat.

  ‘Is this what was engraved on the bracelet?’

  ‘No idea about the kid’s date of birth, sorry, but yeah, that’s the right name . . .’

  He rubbed his hands together. The ring was back in its original place, on his finger.

  Gotcha! I thought. Another conman.

  ‘. . . except I think it’s spelled wrong. Lyse was written with a y, not an i, as far as I remember.’

  I felt another electric shock go down my back. Radjic had not fallen into the trap I had set him.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’ve won another ten thousand. So, did you swap the drugs for the bracelet?’

  ‘Well, if I’d known it was worth seventy-five thousand francs, obviously I would have done . . . But no. I never took anything but cash in return for what I sold.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Or perhaps a cheque.’

  ‘So, Pelletier disappeared with his bracelet . . .’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you see him again after that?’

  ‘Never. Given the state he was in, I doubt whether he lasted much longer.’

  Damn!

  I wrote the cheque without any qualms. Mathilde de Carville could afford twenty thousand francs, even if my doubts persisted. After all, the name of ‘Lyse-Rose’ had been in all the papers at the time of the crash. This might have been the easiest twenty thousand Zoran had ever made.

  He looked carefully at the cheque, then offered me his hand.

  ‘Thank you. Oh, I do have one more piece of information. This one’s on the house.’

  The hairs on my arms stood up.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I just remembered. There was another reason I didn’t accept Pelletier’s bracelet. It was damaged, you see. The chain. There was a link or two missing.’

  The room seemed to spin around me. My God! Nobody in the world, except me and Nazim, knew about that missing link.

  42

  2 October, 1998, 5.29 p.m. For once, the Paris–Rouen train was on time. It pulled up in the station at exactly 5.29 p.m. The Rouen–Dieppe train would leave in nine minutes. Marc had made this connection dozens of times since he first moved to Paris. Nine minutes was easily enough time. After regretfully closing Grand-Duc’s notebook, he walked over to the sandwich shop. There was only one person waiting in line. Marc bought a slice of apple tart and a bottle of San Pellegrino. Nicole would undoubtedly have prepared a feast for him tonight, but that didn’t alter the fact that he was hungry now. It had been a long time since that ham sandwich on the train to Coupvray.