A Prince Without a Kingdom (23 page)

The arrest of Voloy Viktor! At last, Avignon had found a way of dazzling his boss, Boulard, and gaining his respect. He had agreed. But the tailor kept putting off his promise. Week after week, he requested additional favors, which Avignon also granted. The cogs were turning. The Catalan met him in a cellar in Faubourg Saint-Martin. He offered him bespoke suits while whispering in his ear. Avignon stole files from Boulard’s office, got messages sent into prisons, and covered up political stories.

On the day when Lieutenant Avignon was finally due to meet with Viktor face-to-face, he realized that it was already too late. Avignon was now the person to whom all the traffickers came. He had become corrupt to the bone. There was no going back.

When Viktor was finally presented to Avignon, he recognized the tailor he had tried arresting two years earlier and who had been manipulating him ever since. Voloy Viktor was the tailor. And the tailor was just one of his many disguises. The arms dealer had played the game perfectly. Avignon was caught in the trap.

Avignon picked up his pace. He looked at the island around him. Who on earth could live on this barren outcrop of scree? Boulard must have made a mistake.

The fishermen had tried to make him understand there was nothing to see on the rock. Nothing. Avignon had shown them his camera and taken three stones out of his pocket.

“Me geologist. Me not tourist.”

He gesticulated at them, overpronouncing his words as if he were talking to the indigenous people of the Nicobar Islands.

Finally, he reached an area that was almost flat and that extended toward the north of the island. Two rabbits bolted in front of him. He had Superintendent Boulard’s directions before his eyes. The sketched map was clear enough. He had to take this high plateau for a few hundred meters, with the mountain on his left. Finally, Avignon climbed a small steep slope, headed back down into the grass, and came to a stop. His heart began to beat very fast.

The rock formation below him was in the shape of a rectangle, just like the one Boulard had drawn.

Avignon tucked himself between two rocks and surveyed all around him. It was as if he were in the ruins of an ancient capital, a temple that had been returned to nature. The invisible monastery had become a jungle. Dense vegetation surrounded the stone walls, insinuating its way into narrow cracks. The wooden and terra-cotta irrigation system was broken in many places, and the water ran into the earth. Climbing plants choked the branches of the orchard. A rabbit was asleep beneath an almond tree that had collapsed onto a terrace. Not a single sign of human life remained, just the memories of an ancient civilization.

A few years earlier, in Paris, the temples of Angkor had been reconstructed at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for the Colonial Exhibition. Avignon had visited them several times. He felt the same fear now as he had back in Paris in 1931: he was frightened of treading on snakes or of a tiger watching him through the palm trees.

Avignon dared to venture through a doorway, where he discovered dark and dank-smelling rooms that were completely empty. The floor was damp and the windows half blocked up; all that was visible was the moss invading the walls. Where had the builders of this place gone?

Avignon’s mission was a failure. He stood there in the shadowy room, his horizons having just shrunk again. No Zefiro. Everyone had vanished.

The policeman flanked a wall and stopped in front of a stone shelf that had been inset under a window. His eyes fell on a small pile of orange-colored strips. He bent over and discovered that they were carrot peelings. Peelings that hadn’t had time to turn black. Peelings that were less than an hour old. Avignon picked one up.

Rabbits
was his first thought. The island was clearly overrun by them. But did rabbits peel their own carrots? Avignon had no idea. Paris-born and -bred, he had never set foot in the countryside. The work had been carried out with a knife, however, which meant this had to be a very resourceful rabbit. Now, there were books about certain primates being able to manipulate tools. . . .

“Don’t turn around.”

But Avignon did, and what he saw wasn’t an orangutan. It was Pippo Troisi.

The man stood in the shadow cast by the vaults, holding a knife in one hand and a carrot in the other. He was a short, plump fellow with a beard of a few days’ growth: a sort of island tramp with a torn hat on his head.

“Clear off! You’re trespassing!”

“I’m looking for some people who used to live here,” said Avignon.

The man shook his head. They were each speaking in their own language, and neither could understand the other. Avignon uttered one of the rare words he had learned in Italian in order to ask where the monks were.
“Monaci?”

“They’re not here. Haven’t been for a long time.”

Avignon put down the piece of carrot peel. He had understood.

“Monks . . . where . . . are?”

He thought that by mixing up the word order, he would be easier to understand.

“Leave. Before I can say Arkudah.”

“You . . . monk?”

Avignon wanted to get closer, but the other man took a step backward and brandished his carrot. This movement brought his face into the light.

“I told you to leave,” repeated Pippo.

“What about Zefiro?”

“Who are you?”

“Me . . . friend . . . Zefiro.”

“I don’t know that name.”

With the tip of his carrot, Pippo Troisi signaled to the stranger to make for the door, adding, “Go away. Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

Avignon headed off, still inspecting the overgrown garden, before turning to face Pippo. With his trousers cut off at the knees and his threadbare shirt, this man resembled a hefty Robinson Crusoe who’d probably never known the time when Zefiro and his men lived here. A rabbit came right up to Pippo. He kicked it back into the bush.

“I’m off,” said Avignon, raising both hands as if in surrender.

Pippo Troisi followed him for a few hundred meters. Avignon had turned around several times to contemplate the ruins. At one point, retracing his steps, he had asked, “What about Vango? You . . . Vango . . . know?”

But Pippo Troisi just stared at him stupefied, and he had given up.

When they reached the side of the island from where the tiny fishing boat was visible, Pippo sat down on a rock. Cross-legged like a Huron chief, he watched Avignon’s descent.

The stones slid and rolled beneath Avignon’s feet. From time to time he glanced back up at the man, who never took his eyes off him. The lieutenant was suffering far more than he let on. He had staked everything on this voyage.

Still a good distance above sea level, he made his way down in less than an hour. The fishermen were sleeping under the sail, which they had rigged up like a tent canvas. Avignon had to shake them in order to rouse them.

Pippo Troisi watched the boat heading off along the coast.

He waited a little longer before going on his way. First, he walked for five minutes toward what remained of the invisible monastery, then he took a barely trodden path that climbed the side of the hill. Feeling very out of breath at the top, he checked that the white sail was still heading off into the distance, berated a few rabbits in his way, and scrambled over a maze of rocks. He pushed a pile of branches to one side to reveal a circular opening that had been dug into the ground. Pippo dived headfirst into the tunnel and immediately got stuck, which was what happened every time. Due to his hips not being the slimmest part of his anatomy, his legs were left flailing on the outside. He tried to haul himself inside with his arms.

When he had finally squeezed through, he exploded into a tunnel that descended almost vertically and hurtled all the way to the bottom, where he was scooped up by two men. Two huge candles overflowing with molten wax illuminated a black stone crypt.

“They’ve gone,” announced Pippo, standing up.

Brother Marco, the cook who had been left in charge following Zefiro’s disappearance, turned toward the thirty monks from the invisible monastery.

“I don’t know who he was,” added Pippo Troisi. “But he was looking for Zefiro and Vango.”

If you remove the queen from a bees’ nest, you’re left with a drone colony that goes into decline. The hive loses its get-up-and-go and returns to its wild state.

Since Zefiro’s disappearance, the monks had lost their get-up-and-go. They lived in fear. They had abandoned their monastery, allowing nature gently to erase all traces of them, and had taken refuge in this underground tunnel. Pippo’s job was to play the role of a crazy Robinson Crusoe if a stray visitor appeared.

They called their new shelter “the citadel of women,” after the women who used to hide there in ancient times, when pirates pillaged the islands. The men would stay on the shore, defending their houses. Beneath the dark lava vaults, thirty monks in homespun cowls had now replaced those women.

At night, they couldn’t help thinking about the mothers, young women, and children who had waited in the darkness, just as they did, singing perhaps and afraid, just as they were, of the murderous hordes rising up. For as long as they didn’t know what had happened to Zefiro, the monks were frightened of invaders.

During the day, however, they ventured out into the open. They had given up growing any produce and had emptied the hives, moving the swarms of bees into holes in the cliffs. Pippo Troisi’s worst day came when he had to open up the rabbit enclosure. He watched their cheeky behinds disappearing off into the thickets. He despised those animals with a vengeance, and they in turn worshipped him more than ever for liberating them.

The monks lived like Stone Age hunter-gatherers. They had switched civilizations. At dawn, they set off to gather rotting fruit and vegetables from the former kitchen gardens, collect prickly pears, hunt the rabbits with bows and arrows, and fish for what they could. They left no trace of having passed by, covering over with earth any fires they had lit. In the evenings, Brother Marco was suspended from ropes to harvest his honey from the cliffs. He gave one spoonful to each monk, as a remedy.

The fruit trees provided for them when they were in season. But come winter, the survival of these thirty monks on the rock proved tricky. The sea was too rough for fishing. They caught birds with traps set on the rocks. Twice a week, a small team of pilferers took to the sea at nightfall and set off for the other islands, to raid the barns and henhouses. The next day, breathing in the smells of sizzling bacon and maize bread in the embers, they confessed in turn to one of their fellow monks, who, with his napkin already tied around his neck, forgave all their pillaging with the sign of the cross.

A few islands away, in his house in Pollara, Vango was staring at two objects on the table: a flask and a book. He had lit a fire in the fireplace and closed a few shutters.

Having just washed his face in a bucket of water, he was drying himself off using a towel embroidered with rosebushes. It was dark. For two days, he had scoured the house of his childhood and its surroundings for any clues left by Mademoiselle or her captors. He had found nothing apart from a book he didn’t recognize under the sink and a metal bottle floating in the well.

The flask was empty and had a stopper held in place by a metal lever. It might have been tossed there by a passing hunter who had come to sit by the edge of the well. There was nothing distinctive about its shape; it contained no cry for help rolled up like parchment with a secret address. And its insides smelled of nothing except old metal.

But there was a bear engraved on the neck, which was why Vango had put it down on the table. The animal seemed exotic. He stared for a long time at the snarling bear, which was standing on its hind legs.

The other object, the book, was a Russian dictionary. Vango realized that just because the book was there, this didn’t necessarily mean anything. He had never seen it in the house before, but Mademoiselle had lived here for three years without Vango. She could speak Russian, and might easily have obtained it for herself.

There was little chance that one of the thugs would have arrived wielding his dictionary like a handgun, only to toss it under the sink in his hasty departure as he carried off Mademoiselle. This book wasn’t a clue to anything at all, but Vango held it, opened it, and went into a long meditation.

He pictured himself with Mademoiselle, washed up on Scario beach, two castaways. He suddenly realized that what had survived of their past, the only things that hadn’t disappeared into the sea, were languages and songs, recipes and gestures. He had inherited words and flavors from Mademoiselle. But it had never occurred to him to find out any more about his inheritance.

Why did he understand the words in this Russian dictionary? Why did Mademoiselle cook that particular soup better than anyone else? Why had he always fallen asleep to the sound of Greek lullabies? Where did those thorny roses come from that she had embroidered on the towels but that didn’t grow on this island? They all came from the past, clamoring the secrets of his life, but he had never heard them before. Each moment of his childhood was a small parcel wrapped in a layer of tissue paper: it had never been opened.