Cemetery of Swallows (37 page)

“But why so many precautions?” Mallock had asked. “After all, it was an honor; as in the First World War, everyone would have agreed.”

Léon grimaced.

“That has nothing to do with it. You don't realize it, but the First World War was a still greater trauma. Ten million dead! And don't imagine that the burial of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe took place without controversy at the time. The whole affair was a terrible mess. Seventy million men had been in uniform. A million and half French people had died and three hundred and fifty thousand had disappeared. In fact, these ‘absences' turned out to be an even bigger trauma for the families than the death of the victims. At the time, people were still very religious and considered these disappearances as a condemnation to nothingness beyond death. And then over several generations, millions of people had been wiped off the face of the earth, ranging from the sons of Edward Kipling to Louis Pergaud, by way of the aviator Roland Garros and writers like Péguy and Apollinaire. So something had to be done. According to my documents, the first person to have had the idea was the head of the memorial association Souvenir Français in Rennes, Francis Simon. The deputy from Chartres, Maurice something-or-other, took up the idea shortly afterward, adding the notion of the ordinary soldier. They had to take not an officer, but someone who would symbolize the peasant torn away from his field to defend his country. I'll spare you the details, but one year after the armistice was signed, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a proposal to bury a soldier ‘disinherited by death.'

“And then?”

Mallock was getting impatient.

“Then things went wrong. As so often happens in France. Everybody had to get his word in. The government wanted to take advantage of the second anniversary of the armistice to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Third Republic and transfer Gambetta's heart to the Pantheon. But then the royalists associated with Action Française and the Camelots du roi attacked the ‘whore'–that's what they called the Republic–and opposed the burial of the unknown soldier in the Pantheon. For its part, perfidious Albion was preparing to beat us to the punch. The British parliament had rapidly passed a law and arrangements had been made to bury their unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey in a few days. To top everything, it was learned that somebody named Binet-Valmer and his friend Boicy were getting ready to go dig up their own unknown solider and throw him on Gambetta's catafalque. Finally, all these people got more or less back in line. And on November 8, by some miracle, an agreement was finally made–except for the socialists, who thought that the unknown soldier was now a right-wing concept to which they would never submit! On November 11, after following Gambetta's heart to the Pantheon, the body of the unknown soldier, carried on a gun carriage, was placed under the Arc de Triomphe. But it was not buried until the end of January the following year.”

“And the choice? How did they make the choice?”

As always, Léon had all the answers.

“Eight groups of soldiers who were unidentified but wore French uniforms were exhumed in each of the areas most affected by the war: Flanders, Artois, Somme, Chemin des Dames, Champagne, Verdun, and Lorraine. Then the eight coffins were transferred to a casemate in the citadel of Verdun. After they were switched around several times so that no one would know where they came from, the coffins were placed in a chapel of rest on November 10. André Maginot, known as the Sergeant, had chosen a man named Auguste Thin, who had also been a volunteer, the son of a soldier who had disappeared during the war and a war orphan. It was Thin who, by placing a bouquet of flowers on the coffin, designated for posterity the man who was to become the unknown soldier.”

After explaining all this, Léon returned to his main revelation: the existence of a second soldier symbolizing the Second World War. The officer assigned in 1945 to find the body of this soldier had taken the initiative of limiting his choices to three places and three bodies. The swallows' spring was one of them. So they now had one chance in three of finding the long-sought body of Jean-François Lafitte. Even if, for Mallock, the probabilities were far more important. He remembered his dream in the amber chamber. A French flag snapping in the wind, and below it, a blue, white, and red flame: no matter how hard he tried to doubt his visions, they were becoming more and more troubling.

 

During the following three days, Amédée had not been idle; he'd been working all his connections. He had also drawn on the fortunate existence of a precedent, that of a soldier named Blessy, who had been disinterred in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. But in the end, it was above all the friendship shown him by the president of the Republic after the poison case that had allowed him to obtain the authorization to have analyses done on the body enclosed in the crypt hidden under the Arc de Triomphe.

In particular, it had been decided to leave this soldier in his place if nothing made it possible to identify him, which most of the “initiates” involved in the project thought the most likely outcome. In the contrary case, if it was indeed the body of Lieutenant Lafitte, it would be buried wherever his descendants chose. In that event, two options would present themselves: either closing up the crypt, leaving the soldier from the First World War alone in his tomb, or, continuing and respecting General de Gaulle's initiative, proceeding to choose the body of an unknown soldier buried during the Second World War. He would then join, with great pomp, and this time, before the eyes of the general public, his compatriot from the Great War. This second option was preferred by the president, but his advisors had instantly recommended that the French people make the final decision, probably by means of a referendum. “Sometimes it is good to let them have the illusion, if not that they control anything, at least that from time to time they serve some purpose,” grumbled Mallock, whose opinion had not been asked.

 

Mallock and Bob finally stood beneath the imposing monument. Like everyone else, they couldn't help looking up. A kind of reflex or mystical salute to the majesty of the place. On the ground, the mass of swirling snow was making the flame vacillate as much as the superintendent's certainties. Who would have thought that a journey to the Dominican Republic, a witch, a giant jungle vine, and a simple sentence—“I killed him because he killed me”—could have led him here? To this place dedicated to so many young men who had been slaughtered? What a journey!

As he entered the west pillar, Mallock tapped his shoes and tried to brush the snow off his clothes. Present inside the Arc de Triomphe were, in addition to the two cops, a representative of the president's office, Judioni, the representative of the Ministry of Justice, accompanied by a bailiff, the head curators responsible for historical monuments and for the Arc de Triomphe, Mordome, and two assistants carrying metal cases.

After a whole series of handshakes, even between the two great friends (Mallock, two hundred and twenty pounds, black T-shirt and black jacket on the one side, and Judioni, one hundred and forty-five pounds, pink shirt, and red tie, on the other) the little group headed for the first door, on which was inscribed “Warning: Danger” with a silver lightning bolt over it. Then they had to pass through two other access rooms that were closed by a series of locks and bars.

In the middle of the last room, a strong light shone from a trap door on the floor, splashing on the ceiling. Obviously, nothing had been set up for visitors. They had to use an iron ladder to descend into the final crypt, the most secret in France. The sight was astonishing. Mallock thought of the Blake and Mortimer comic books he'd devoured as a child.

 

Cut into the stone, the cenotaph was lit by two Balcar lamps. The soldier's coffin stood in the center, enigmatic as the untouched sepulcher of some priest of ancient Egypt. The two assistants, helped by Mordome and the curator of the Arc de Triomphe, started unscrewing the lid. Rust had infiltrated the fibers of the wood. Unpleasant creaks, like chalk screeching on a blackboard. The participants grimaced. Despite its modest size, the room had a sort of personal echo, a resonance that some people would call lugubrious. But how could it have been otherwise?

Mallock and Bob were obliged to come help the four men lift the lid and place it against one of the walls. As they turned it around, they noted with astonishment the reason it was so heavy. It was lined with lead, a sort of ship's ballast in reverse. Almost seven hundred pounds of metal to seal the secret of this identity.

Once the lid had been set upright at the back of the room, in the shadows, they all approached the catafalque to see what was in it. What were they hoping for? An empty bier? An Egyptian mummy covered in gold? A perfectly preserved man in a uniform, smiling from beyond death?

At the two corners, video cameras on tripods were recording the whole scene. The heads bending over the inside all saw at the same time the poverty of the contents of the treasury: bits of stone and bone in ochre and ivory tones!

“You can proceed,” Judioni declared, after having glanced at the two other officials to see if they agreed.

Then Mordome turned, as if Judioni's remark was of no importance to him, and said to Mallock in a loud voice:

“Mr. Superintendent, I am at your disposal.”

Amused, Mallock played along.

“Mr. Professor, I shall let you operate.”

Mordome, concealing a smile, opened the big leather instrument case he'd brought with him. It rolled open on the long trestle table alongside the coffin. The metallic sound of the instruments banging against each other resounded in the crypt: Granat calipers, anthropometric compasses, mallets, a Rowe clamp, a gouge, a periosteal elevator, a bone forceps, a stripper, Sims scissors, tongue clips, Halstead hemostats . . .

Mordome and his assistant began selecting from the earthy mass what most resembled bones, as well as various dried pieces of tissue or perhaps skin. Then they lined them up as if on parade in an order that meant nothing to anyone but themselves. In a separate plastic bag, they isolated what seemed to be hairs.

In the silence of the crypt, the calm, serious voice of the medical examiner resounded like a prayer:

“We can note the presence of numerous very large stones that have nothing to do with the corpse. They may have been put there to make up for the weight of the cadaver, which was probably incomplete, or perhaps out of negligence. To return to the skeleton, the cranium is intact, although fissured in several places, the main bones of lower limbs are also present and in relatively good condition, as well as a few vertebrae. Correction, or rather a clarification: the right tibia has been fractured.”

Mordome was silent for a few seconds, long enough to examine the two parts of the bone under a magnifying glass. When he resumed, he had his answer.

“The fracture occurred
ante mortem
.”

Then he went on in silence. With the help of his assistants, he continued his macabre inventory for twenty minutes. One of the assistants crushed a piece of bone with a mortar, put the resulting powder in a transparent liquid, and inserted the test tube into a small centrifuge they had brought with them in one of the large metal cases. A few minutes later, a minuscule print-out emerged with a sound like that made by an adding machine. Mordome read the result before carefully attaching the printed paper to the test tube.

It was at that moment that the imprudent Judioni thought he could intervene:

“Will you be finished soon, Doctor?”

To which Mordome replied without even deigning to turn around:

“I'll be finished when I'm finished. Don't worry, Judge, you'll know. That will be the moment when I turn around and say to you, ‘I'm finished.' Until then, I'd like everyone to be silent. One last thing, it's ‘Professor,' not ‘Doctor.'”

Without waiting for a reaction, Mordome started removing and vacuuming up everything that remained at the bottom of the coffin. The table, even though it was four yards long, was covered with bones and shapeless fragments. Then they conscientiously sifted the contents of the vacuum cleaner and sorted out the smallest pieces according to their size. The remaining contents of the sack, which were dark in color, must be earth. Mordome asked one of his assistants to analyze the latter, and then began to dictate again:

“The fact that we have discovered such a large quantity of earth and have found only part of the main bones, as well as the absence of most of the smallest bones, tends to prove that we are in fact confronted by a body, parts of which were removed, in a very rudimentary way, long after death. At least two years after death. We can also state, without the slightest doubt, that the body in question has spent time in the earth.”

Mordome continued to work for another quarter of an hour, and then asked:

“Mallock, could you come have a look at this?”

He'd forgotten to use the title “Superintendent.”

“I've found the body's atlas. The good news is that this vertebra is in fact deformed, perhaps as a result of a bullet, but the bad news is that no projectile remained in the neck, or in the axis, either.”

Mallock grimaced. That would not be enough for him to claim that they had found incontestable proof. Lieutenant Lafitte had been hit by a bullet that had lodged between two vertebra in the neck, the atlas and the axis. This was an acknowledged fact registered in the army's medical documents. Had the bullet been found between the two vertebra, Mallock would have had his proof.

“You don't have anything more? What about the soil?”

Mordome turned to one of his assistants, who handed him two sheets of paper, whispering, “It's positive.” The medical examiner rapidly compared the two soil compositions, the sample that had just been taken and the baseline sample.

“Here there is no doubt, it corresponds exactly to the one you had me analyze.”