by James Brydon
On one of the tables lies a body covered by a sheet. This is how the detainees at al-Mazra’a finished their existence: shapeless lumps under tarpaulin in the hangars. Some of them were lucky enough to die believing that Allah would gather them in, their minds bathed in radiance before we brought darkness to them. A few hours of respite. Then came the next detainee.
Dr. Roussillon straightens his bow tie, nods professionally at me, and says, “Florian tells me you want to know about Anne-Lise Aurigny. Well, I’ll tell you what I can. The wounds and the mutilations were unusual enough to stay in my memory, even this long after the fact.”
Lafourgue winks and saunters off to one of the autopsy tables. Pulling back the sheet, he squints at the cadaver’s bluing flesh like a connoisseur.
“Lafourgue showed me the photographs. It looks as if Anne-Lise was beaten viciously, and at length. Was that the cause of death?”
“No. As you say, she was severely beaten and for a long time—I would say at least a couple of minutes. Both cheekbones were smashed; the jaw was crushed into several pieces. The retina in one eye was completely detached and the other eye was basically jelly. If she’d been left alive, she would have been virtually unrecognizable.”
“Was any kind of weapon used to beat her?”
Roussillon frowns. “I think so. Judging by the way the flesh tore, I’d say something heavy and uneven. He hit her so relentlessly that she must have been knocked unconscious.”
“But she didn’t die like that?”
“No. He left her for a while. Then he strangled her. With his hands this time. That surprised me. It would have been safer to use a rope. Hands leave traces.”
“Would she have felt anything by then?”
Roussillon shakes his head.
“Lafourgue said there was no evidence on the body. That seems unusual for what would appear to be such a violent crime.”
Roussillon nods and pushes his white hair back from his brow. “There was certainly a period of frenzy, at least when the beating took place. Although even then he didn’t hit her with his fists—that could have left incriminating scars. Perhaps he also strangled her in a frenzy, I don’t know. But what he did next was very calm. He removed and hid or destroyed her clothes. He washed the body inch by inch: her hair, her hands. He cut her nails. He took his time and scrubbed away all traces quite methodically. From the way he reacted to the murder—no shock, no panic, a total control of the situation—we thought it must be someone who had killed before.”
Lafourgue’s voice cuts across the room: “We looked for similar unsolved murders in Brittany in the last five years but nothing obvious stood out. If he has killed before, it was either farther away, long ago, or else he hid the body so well it was never found.”
“The strangest part is the final act of mutilation, though,” Roussillon continues. “It was made postmortem. Hours postmortem. He must have kept her body for at least six hours, cleaning it impeccably to erase whatever it could tell us about him. Then, at some point, he took something like a scalpel and cut a hole in her side about four centimeters wide and three deep.”
“There’s no reason for it,” Lafourgue says. “Nothing logical. She’d been dead for hours. It might be some kind of ritual. Something tribal brought over by jungle Negroes or some Muslim barbarism called for in the Koran. You’d know more about that than us. We didn’t manage to turn anything up, though. Maybe you’ll have more luck.”
“What about afterward? Has anything similar been reported since?”
“No. Not as far as I know.” Lafourgue picks up the sheet once again then lets it fall over the corpse’s ashen face. “What would you expect?”
“I don’t know,” I respond. “But I’m not sure the murderer had killed before. The fury of the beating seems spontaneous. It took him by surprise to feel so much bile clogging his insides. That initial violence was a shock: a canker bursting. But the way he responded to the crime is telling. The almost contemplative mastery of the situation—it’s like a wave of power. He wasn’t horrified by what he’d done. He was fascinated. Exhilarated. Rage drove him to crime, but rather than appalling him, it thrilled him. I think you should look for similar crimes committed afterward too. There’s a kind of transition here, as he feels Anne-Lise’s last breath shudder in her throat. Something new is born. I’m not sure he can go back now.”
Lafourgue shrugs. “I’ll look into it. Check with a few buddies that nothing’s come up. Whatever you want.”
“Killing isn’t just an action. It’s a way of life. An art.”
Lafourgue looks at me oddly. “I’ll follow it up.”
The air in the morgue seems thin and oxygenless. I feel trapped underground.
Killing is a way of life.
I arrive at al-Mazra’a in August 1957, with the service de renseignements under army jurisdiction and the green uniform feeling strange to me and scratching my skin. Al-Mazra’a is an old agricultural complex, silos turned into soldiers’ quarters and grain cellars into cells. The jeep bounces on the hard dirt road and, above us, the sky seems enormous, a vast dome of turquoise spiraling in concentric waves. It feels like standing in a great mosque, dwarfed by the gleaming, ethereal vault. I can see why so many dreamers stopped here, enchanted by the blue fire glowing majestically above them, drunk on the air it warmed.
I am sent immediately to report to Lieutenant-Colonel Lambert. Whenever I’ve heard his name mentioned, it is with a kind of awe. I stand outside his office for a long time, waiting for him to summon me. Finally he comes out and, without turning around, beckons me to follow. His gray hair is shaved close to his skull. His blue eyes blaze and demand my attention with a kind of magnetic force. The features of his face are drawn, thin, severe. Despite having been in Algeria for years, his skin is pale, as if immune to the sunlight. He moves with a rigid, unbending power and doesn’t once look behind to see whether I have followed his order or not.
Out in the full sun, behind an old hangar, French soldiers are standing beside three Arabs kneeling on the earth and staring blankly at the ground in front of them. They don’t look up as we approach. Lambert nods to the soldiers and his fingers reach down to his belt, flick open a stud, and take out a pistol. He beckons to me, again without looking, and presses the gun into my hand. He is small, but his fingers are so hard I can barely distinguish between them and the butt of the gun. There is an incredible concentration of sinew in his movements, something coiled and expectant.
He points to the first man kneeling down on the path, who seems no more than eighteen, with wispy stubble drawn in uneven lines across his cheeks. His jaw trembles where a tic pulls the skin in quick jerks. I can’t see his eyes.
“Shoot him,” Lambert says.
I don’t move.
“What is wrong with you, capitaine?” He leans on the last word. I had been warned that the army were contemptuous of the police ranks kept by those drafted into the service de renseignements. “Do you understand French? Shoot that man.” The pistol feels impossibly heavy in my hand, as if I couldn’t lift it even if I tried. Lambert stands just in front of me and I can smell the sweat rolling off his shirt. One of my legs begins to shake. In three years in the Resistance and ten in the police, I don’t remember my body shaking like this, with such uncontrollable insistence.
“Sir, I can’t shoot that man. He is unarmed and—”
“Capitaine, I could not care less what you think. You were given a direct order by a superior officer to shoot that man, and you are now disobeying that order. Shoot him.”
The heat is unbearable, as if the air were on fire.
“Sir, it would be a crime to shoot an unarmed and defenseless man.”
“Capitaine, this man is a terrorist who protects members of the FLN. And if he isn’t, then one of the others here is. I need to know what they know. If I don’t find it out, French soldiers will be killed. Do you understand? Now shoot him in the head.”
I’m not sure how long I stand there. The air
seems to be burning my throat. My mind races, searching for words, but there is only emptiness and silence. At some point, Lambert takes the gun out of my hand, walks over to the boy kneeling on the ground, and shoots him through the back of the neck. The body jackknifes and slumps to the ground. The head lolls back. The eyes are wide open in shock. Lambert gestures toward the other two men, still kneeling in the dust. One of them glances up quickly at the body, and then turns away almost immediately. Sweat is pouring down his face but he seems to be shivering at the same time.
Lambert’s voice is quiet and even: “Take them back to the warren and find out what they know.” He turns to me. “Where do you think you are, capitaine? In some Maghrebi prison station? You aren’t here to investigate according to the law. We are the law.”
“Colonel Lesage told me—”
“Lesage likes to pretend he has clean hands. He sends me recruits like you doped on propaganda and lies. He wants to pretend that this isn’t a total war, but it is. The government likes to hear his story—it’s good politics and it plays well with civilians—but it’s a myth. The fellagha are in every house and every field. They worm into every crack and every tiny space. We have to burn it all down if we want to eradicate them. The fellagha are a disease. We either destroy the entire habitat of the microbes or the plague will kill us all.”
Behind Lambert, the youth’s body lies sprawled in the sun. A great wellspring of blood, wine-dark, has pooled around his shoulders and traced a circle around his head.
“Capitaine, you now need to forget whatever Lesage promised you. You are here to save French lives. This is what the service does. We do it so that as few French soldiers as possible are flown home in tiny pieces, or with their tongues cut out, or charred beyond recognition, or castrated. Because that is what these people”—he cocks his head toward the corpse—“will do. Remember where you are. Perhaps, before now, you failed to properly appreciate the nature of your mission. Next time you disobey a direct order, I may well have to shoot you too. If that is what is necessary in order to protect France, then that is what I shall do. Lesage will not be able to save you. Do you understand?”
My throat is coated with dust. Words can’t get through. I just nod. Lambert points in the direction of the accommodation block. White lime-scaled farmhouses. The glint of the sun that comes bouncing off them is blinding, like a scimitar blade sawing at my eyes.
“When you walk back out of there,” he says, “you come out a soldier. Pas un flic. Now get lost.”
Somehow, the green army bag has found its way into my hand and my feet have started to move. The earth crunches beneath my steps, dusty on top but baked hard beneath.
Lafourgue’s face floats next to mine. “I said, is there anything else you want to know here?”
“No. But I want to see where the body was left. Can you take me there?”
“No problem. It’s not far outside Sainte-Élisabeth. On the coast road. It’s a nice drive.”
* * *
Lafourgue and I sit in silence as the car, swaying to and fro, chews up the road in front of us. On our left, stubble fields stretch out grayly. Stunted roots of corn poke through the earth like tiny, useless limbs. Grass dissolves into mud. On our right, the heathland tumbles down toward the cliffs. Brown clumps of gorse are bunched like fists, clutching tightly at their thorns. Behind them, the sea appears swollen, writhing glassy and pregnant in the bays.
We are about two kilometers out of Sainte-Élisabeth when Lafourgue swings the car into a sandy lay-by and says, “This is it.” As we walk back up the road, the wind bites at our faces. It carries the ice from the atmosphere and the dank leaching off the sea. Over on the horizon, a pale band is pushed back by the blackness of the sky.
Lafourgue said the killer came out of nowhere and vanished again. There was no connection between him and Anne-Lise. The crime was tangential to her. A wanderer, a predator, suddenly appeared from out of the night and found her in his field of vision. With no fingerprints, footprints, fibers, or witnesses to lead back to him, he simply melted back among the shadows, returned to invisibility, and left us staring vainly at empty signs. There is nothing to investigate: a brutal crime and a trail that goes nowhere.
I have to believe there is something else here: something logical, a crime that flows out of who Anne-Lise was, or what she was to somebody else. Something of the past that is retained and remembered in the present.
Night is closing in. Lafourgue cuts into the heather. As he strides over it, his feet stamp and sink into the saturated earth. He points down to a piece of ground much like another.
“Here. This is where the body was left.”
The fractured line of the cliffs snakes against the sea. The rocks glow white in the failing light. Over on the headland, the lighthouse stands blackly against the inky sky. The beacon hasn’t yet been switched on.
Lafourgue shrugs. “Why dump her here? There’s nothing around. She must have been killed miles away and then brought here. Why not bury her somewhere? Hide the body. Hope enough time passes for everyone to forget and stop looking for her.”
Gorse cracks beneath my feet. Thorns prick at my ankles. There is nothing to see here.
“Had enough?” Lafourgue asks.
I shake my head. The nothingness of it. Cleanliness. Order. The body wiped clean and purified. Traceless. That very nothingness becomes something to look at. No tracks or prints. Wasn’t that a sign in itself? The absence of information shrieks out and becomes something to guide us. An indication of a methodical cunning capable of suppressing all unwanted data given by a corpse. This isn’t the work of a vagrant or a violent, befuddled opportunist. It reeks of intelligence.
Nothing here is unplanned. Everything has meaning.
The heathland isn’t a dumping ground. It’s a temple. The place was carefully chosen. This is the spot where she needed to lie. Here is where the killer wished not to dispose of but to display her body. He arranged it so that she was nestled in the heather, the hibernating plants miming death and clutching her in their sleeping grip, and the whiteness of her body lay framed by the chalky expanse of the rocks and the howl of the sea.
Is it not all the product of a particular kind of order? A glinting, pathological precision?
But not just precision: something like art. The cadaver offset by the gray, eternal heave of the sea. The heather imitating decay. Flesh returning to earth. The body surrendering to one final contortion as rigor mortis set in, fixing Anne-Lise forever in that ambiguous pose that was both chaste and wanton. It radiates an eerie symbolism, like a medieval painting; something darkly allegorical; a mystery resistant to understanding: the too-nourished flesh blanched lily-white in death, and the hole in her flank like the spear wound in the side of Christ crucified.
The pale band on the horizon has been squeezed to the faintest ribbon of glitter where sea touches sky. The lighthouse beacon has been switched on and its artificial brightness sweeps across the earth. Then the frail beam is flung out into the immensity of the night.
Lafourgue grabs my elbow and steers me back toward the road. The first drops of rain are beginning to crystalize in the air swollen with spindrift and burst fatly on the car roof.
“I’ll lend you a car, so you can start to make your own investigations tomorrow,” he says. “For now, let it go. I’ll take you home.”
* * *
I am fully expecting the knock on my door that tells me Erwann has arrived. He appears in a flood of icy water dripping off his skin and soaking his clothes. He shudders by the fire in the grate as I tell him what I saw today and explain that there is nothing in Lafourgue’s case file that suggests a direction for the investigation.
“Lafourgue is an idiot,” Erwann says. “A hopeless yokel bumped up to the rank of police inspector simply because he hurled a few bombs at unarmed German supply trains during the war. In some spurious attempt at moral regeneration, we have populated important social positions with dismal little opportunists quite incapa
ble of living up to the dignity of their roles. Lafourgue is a drunk and a bully. Of course he would be incapable of grappling with a crime like this. Please don’t let that put you off investigating. You can’t imagine the relief I felt when I heard you were coming back to Sainte-Élisabeth and I realized there would be someone here with the ability to offer justice to Anne-Lise.”
Once again, I see Lafourgue’s cold, gray eyes and the powerful frame of his jaws. He is certainly a bully, but I did not sense any of the stupidity Erwann mentions. There is something measured and deliberate in his every gesture, a calculated force that is the antithesis of stupidity.
“Lafourgue seems to have focused on an ex-Nazi called Christian de la Hallière and Anne-Lise’s boyfriend, Sasha Kurmakin, a child of refugees. Did you know them?”
“A little. I warned Anne-Lise about them both. De la Hallière isn’t an ex-Nazi at all: he’s a pure, unreconstructed Fascist. He walked through hell on the Eastern Front, and all because he believed so much in Hitler’s ideals of a judenrein and kommunistenrein Europe. He came through it minus three toes lost to frostbite but with his convictions strengthened and an encyclopedia of depravity and suffering stamped into his brain. Kurmakin is different. He’s just a child. Anne-Lise knew that. She was just dallying with him. Playing at being a normal teenager. He was . . . picturesque. She couldn’t really take him seriously.”
“So you don’t see him as dangerous then?”
“It depends what you mean by dangerous. Imagine that you give a precious object—something gorgeous but fragile, breakable—to a child. Now, the child doesn’t want to break it. In fact, he’s fascinated by it. Captivated by its shimmering magic. He feels proud to hold it, like that makes him the owner of it. It gives him a sense of power, an illusion of his own specialness. The problem is that he’s not special. He’s a stupid, clumsy child. He doesn’t mean to do any harm, but he can’t escape his infantile crassness, so he smashes the precious object without being fully aware of what he’s doing. By the time he looks down and sees the shards, it’s too late. In that sense, Kurmakin is dangerous.” Erwann’s tone is condescending, but there are flecks of venom in his words.
