After the Crash (2 page)

The detective glanced over at the vivarium, where the dragonflies
were making their dirgelike rattles and hums. The power supply
had been off for the last thirty minutes. Deprived of oxygen and
food, the dragonflies would not survive the week. And he had spent
so much money buying the rarest and oldest species; he had spent
hours, years of his life, looking after the vivarium, feeding them,
breeding them, even employing someone to look after them when
he was away.

All that effort, just to let them die.
It’s actually quite an agreeable feeling, Grand-Duc thought, to sit
in judgement on the life and death of another: to protect only in
order to condemn, to give hope in order to sacrifice. To play with
fate, like a cunning, capricious god. After all, he too had been the
victim of just such a sadistic deity.

Crédule Grand-Duc sat on the chair behind the desk and unfolded
the copy of the
Est Républicain
, dated 23 December, 1980. Once
again, he read the front page: ‘The Miracle of Mont Terrible’.

Beneath the banner headline was a rather blurred photograph
showing the carcass of a crashed aeroplane, uprooted trees, snow
muddied by rescue workers. Under the photograph, the disaster
was described in a few lines:

The Airbus 5403, flying from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont
Terri, on the Franco-Swiss border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and
flight crew on board, 168 were killed upon impact or perished in the
flames. The sole survivor was a baby, three months old, thrown from
the plane when it collided with the mountainside, before the cabin was
consumed by fire.

When Grand-Duc died, he would fall forwards onto the front
page of this newspaper. His blood would redden the photograph
of the tragedy that had taken place eighteen years earlier, it would
mingle with the blood of those one hundred and sixty-eight victims. He would be found this way, a few days or a few weeks later.
No one would mourn him. Certainly not the de Carvilles. Perhaps
the Vitrals would feel sad at his passing? Emilie, Marc . . . Nicole
in particular.

He would be found, and the notebook would be given to Lylie:
the story of her short life. His testament.
Grand-Duc looked at his reflection one more time in the copper
plaque, and felt almost proud. It was a good ending: much better
than what had gone before.

He carefully positioned the newspaper in front of him, moved
his chair forward and took a firm grip of the revolver. His palms
were sweaty. Slowly he lifted his arm.

He shivered, in spite of himself, when the cold metal of the gun
barrel touched his temple. But he was ready.
He tried to empty his mind, not to think about the bullet, an
inch or two from his brain, that would smash through his skull and
kill him . . .
His index finger bent around the trigger. All he had to do now
was squeeze and it would all be over.
Eyes open or closed?
A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead and fell onto the
newspaper.
Eyes open. Now do it.
He leaned forward. For the final time, his gaze rested on the
photograph of the burnt-out cabin, and the other photograph
of the fireman standing in front of the hospital in Montbéliard,
carefully holding that bluish body. The miracle baby.
His index finger tightened around the trigger.

His eyes were lost in the black ink of the newspaper’s front page.
Everything blurred. The bullet would perforate his temple, without
the slightest resistance. All he had to do was squeeze a little harder,
just a fraction of an inch. He stared into eternity. The black ink
below him came into focus again, as if he were playing with the
lens of a camera. This would be his final view of the world, before
everything went dark for ever.

His finger. The trigger.
His eyes wide open.
Grand-Duc felt an electric shock run through him. Something

Because what he was looking at was impossible. He knew that
perfectly well.
His finger relaxed its pressure slightly.
To begin with, Grand-Duc thought it must be an illusion, a hallucination provoked by his imminent death, some kind of defence
mechanism dreamed up by his brain . . .
But no. What he had seen, what he read in that newspaper, was
real. The paper was yellowed by age, the ink somewhat smeared,
and yet there could be no doubt whatsoever.
It was all there.
The detective’s mind started working frantically. He had come up
with so many theories over the years of the investigation, hundreds
of them. But now he knew where to begin, which thread to pull,
the whole tangled web came apart with disconcerting simplicity.
It was all so obvious.
He lowered his pistol and laughed like a madman.

The solution to the mystery had been here, on the front page
of this newspaper, from the very beginning. And yet it had been
absolutely impossible to discover this solution at the time, eighteen
years ago. Everyone had read this newspaper, pored over it, analysed
it thousands of times, but no one could possibly have guessed the
truth, back in 1980, or during the years that followed.

The solution was so obvious: it jumped out at you . . . but on
one condition.
The newspaper had to be looked at eighteen years later.

The question had been nagging at Mariam for almost a month.
She ran the Lenin Bar, at the crossroads of Avenue de Stalingrad
and Rue de la Liberté, a few yards from the forecourt of the University of Paris VIII in Saint-Denis. At this hour of the morning, the
bar was still mostly empty, and Mariam took advantage of the quiet
to clean tabletops and arrange chairs.

The couple in question were sitting at the back of the café, as
they usually did, near the window, at a tiny table for two, holding
hands and looking deep into each other’s blue eyes.

Lovers?
Friends?
Siblings?
Mariam sighed. The lack of certainty bothered her. She generally

had a keen instinct when it came to her students’ love lives. She
snapped out of it: she still had to wipe down the tables and sweep
the floor; in a few minutes, thousands of stressed students would
rush from the metro station Saint-Denis – Université, the terminus
of Line 13. The station had only been open for four months, but
already it had transformed the local area.

Mariam had seen the University of Paris VIII slowly change
from its rebellious beginnings as the great university of humanities, society and culture into a banal, well-behaved suburban
learning centre. Nowadays, most professors sulked when they were
assigned to Paris VIII. They would rather be at the Sorbonne, or
even Jussieu. Before the metro station opened, the professors had
had to cross through Saint-Denis, to see a little of the surrounding
area, but now, with the metro, that too was over. The professors
boarded the metro on Line 13 and were whisked off towards the
libraries, laboratories, ministries and grand institutions of Parisian
culture.

Mariam turned towards the counter to fetch a sponge, casting
a furtive glance at the intriguing young couple: the pretty blonde
girl and the strapping, spellbound boy. She felt almost haunted by
them.

Who were they?
Mariam had never understood the workings of higher education,
with its modules and examinations and strikes, but no one knew
better than her what the students did during their break time. She
had never read Robert Castel, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,
or Jacques Lacan, the star professors of Paris VIII – at most, she
might have seen them once or twice, in her bar or in the campus
forecourt – but nevertheless she considered herself an expert in
the analysis, sociology and philosophy of student love affairs. She
was like a mother hen to some of her regulars, an agony aunt to
others, helping them through their heartaches with professional
skill.
But despite her experience, her famous intuition, she could not
fathom the relationship between the couple at the window.
Emilie and Marc.
Shy lovers or affectionate relatives?
The uncertainty was maddening. Something about them didn’t
fit. They looked so alike, yet they were so different. Mariam knew
their first names: she knew the first names of all her regulars.
Marc, the boy, had been studying at Paris VIII for two years
now, and he came to the Lenin almost every day. A tall boy,
good-looking, but a little too nice, like a dishevelled ‘Little Prince’.
Daydreamy, and somewhat gauche: the kind of provincial student
who still didn’t know how things worked in Paris, and who lacked
the money to look cool. As for his studies, he wasn’t a fanatic. As far
as she understood, he was studying European Law, but for the past
two years, he had seemed very calm and thoughtful. Now, Mariam
understood why.
He had been waiting for her. His Emilie.
She had arrived this year, in September, so she must be two or
three years younger than him.
They shared certain traits. That slightly common accent, which
Mariam could not locate, but which was indisputably the same.
And yet, in Emilie’s case, the accent somehow seemed wrong; it did
not fit her personality. The same could be said of her name:
Emilie
was too ordinary, too bland for a girl like that. Emilie, like Marc,
was blonde and, like Marc, she had blue eyes. But while Marc’s
gestures and expressions were clumsy, simple, unoriginal, there was
a
je-ne-sais-quoi
about Emilie, a strikingly different way of moving,
a kind of nobility in the way she held her head, a pure-bred elegance
and grace that seemed to suggest aristocratic genes, a privileged
education.
And that was not the only mystery. In terms of money, Emilie’s standard of living appeared to be the very opposite of Marc’s.
Mariam had a knack for evaluating, in an instant, the quality and
cost of the clothing worn by her students, from H&M and Zara to
Yves Saint Laurent.
Emilie did not wear Yves Saint Laurent, but she wasn’t far off.
What she was wearing today – a simple, elegant orange silk blouse
and a black, asymmetrical skirt – had undoubtedly cost a small fortune. Emilie and Marc might be from the same place, but they did
not belong to the same world.
And yet they were inseparable.
There was a complicity between them that could not be created in only a few months at university. It was as if they had lived
together all their lives, perceptible in the countless protective gestures that Marc made towards Emilie: a hand on her shoulder, a
chair pulled out for her, a door held open, a glass filled without
asking. It was the way a big brother would behave towards a little
sister.
Mariam wiped down a chair and put it back in position,
her mind still churning over the enigma of Marc and Emilie.
It was as if Marc had spent the previous two years preparing
the ground for Emilie’s arrival, keeping her seat warm in the lecture hall, a table near the window in the Lenin. Mariam sensed
that Emilie was a brilliant student, quick-witted, ambitious and
determined. Artistic. Literary. She could see that determination
whenever the girl took out a book or a folder, in the way she
would skim confidently over notes that Marc would take hours to
master.
So, could they be brother and sister, in spite of their social
differences?
Well, yes. Except that Marc was in love with Emilie!
That, too, was blindingly obvious.
He did not love her like a brother, but like a devoted lover. It was
clear to Mariam from the first moment she saw them together. A
fever, a passion, completely unmistakable.
Mariam did not have a clue what this could mean.
She had been shamelessly spying on them for a month now. She
had glanced furtively at the names on files, essays, placed on the
table. She knew their surname.
Marc Vitral.
Emilie Vitral.
But ultimately, that did not help. The logical supposition was
that they were brother and sister. But then what about those incestuous gestures? The way Marc touched Emilie’s lower back . . . Or
perhaps they were married? She was only eighteen: very young for
a student to marry, but not impossible. And, of course, it was technically possible that they just happened to have the same name, but
Mariam could not believe in such a coincidence, unless they were
cousins or belonged to a more complicated kind of family, with
step-parents or half-siblings . . .
Emilie seemed very fond of Marc. But her expression was more
complex, difficult to read. She often seemed to stare into space,
particularly when she was alone, as if she were hiding something,
a deep sadness . . . It was that melancholy which gave Emilie a
subtle distance, a different kind of charm to all the other girls on
campus. All of the boys in the Lenin stared hungrily at her, but –
probably because of that reserve – none of them dared to approach
her.
None except Marc.
Emilie was his. That was why he was here. Not for his courses.
Not for the university. He was here purely so he could be with her,
so he could protect her.
But what about the rest? Mariam had often tried talking with
Emilie and Marc, chatting about any old subject, but she had never
learned anything intimate. But one day, she was determined she
would find out their secret . . .

She was cleaning the last tables when Marc raised his hand.
‘Mariam, could you bring us two coffees please, and a glass of
water for Emilie?’
Mariam smiled to herself. Marc never drank coffee when he was
alone, but always ordered one when he was with Emilie.
‘No problem, lovebirds!’ Mariam replied.
Testing the water.
Marc gave an embarrassed smile. Emilie did not. She lowered her
head slightly. Mariam only noticed this now: Emilie looked awful
this morning, her face puffy as if she hadn’t slept all night. Was she
worrying over an exam? Had she spent the night revising, or writing
an essay?
No, it was something else.
Mariam shook the coffee grounds into the bin, rinsed the percolator, and made two espressos.
It was something serious.
As if Emilie had to give Marc some painful news. Mariam had
witnessed so many conversations like that: farewell dates, tragic
têteà-têtes
, with the boy sitting alone in front of his coffee while the girl
left, looking embarrassed but relieved. Emilie looked like someone
who had spent the night thinking and who, by early morning, had
made her decision and was ready to accept its consequences.
Mariam walked slowly towards them, the tray in her hands bearing two coffees and a glass of water.
Poor Marc. Did he have any inkling that he was already doomed?
Mariam also knew how to be discreet. She placed the drinks on
the table, then turned and walked away.