The Beast of the Camargue (11 page)

“I can't, commandant …”

“You put your suspect inside for the night, then tell Delpiano that you've got a migraine and come and eat with me.”

“Michel, you know perfectly well that I can't do that.”

He hung up and gazed round his three-room flat. His ex-wife, Marie, had left with the walnut bookcase she had inherited from her mother, who had had it from her own mother, and so on for generations. As a result, the Baron's criminology books were now piled up on the carpet in two stacks a meter high. On top of one was
Précis d'analyse criminelle
, and on the other
Crime et psychiatrie
, which he must have read a good twenty times.

In place of the bookcase and sofa, which had also disappeared in the divorce, two big rectangular patches divided the space like archaeological remains. They were just about all that was left of ten years of marriage. Two rectangular marks and a few poorly framed photos.

Only the C.D.s and unobtainable vinyl had been given new shelves. Dozens and dozens of bootlegs of opera greats sung in marvelous theaters: Del Monaco and Callas in Verona in a superheated
Aïda
, Flagstad and Melchior in a forgotten
Tristan
… Then the collector's albums of the Stones bought in London in his carefree youth; all of Muddy Waters which he had brought back from the States; Jimi Hendrix … they all meant as much to him as his .45, the legendary piece concealed behind the boxed sets of the Beatles and of Rossini, whom he disliked and never listened to.

He slipped Strauss's last
lieder
into his C.D. player and sat down in front of it, his eyes fixed on the crystal display. Tomova-Sintow's vibrato flowed over his tired skin. He remembered that Marie had
given him this record on a wedding anniversary. He could picture her with her brilliant smile revealing her extraordinarily white teeth, as she waved the little package at the end of her long fingers. That night, they had made love several times, and she had admitted that she had not used any form of contraception for a month. But nothing happened. The child de Palma wanted and dreaded had not arrived. He would never arrive.

He lay down on the carpet, his hands clasped behind his neck, and fell asleep before the third
lied
, his mouth bitter with alcohol, with a deep crease down his forehead, alongside a faint scar shaped like a question mark.

A scar that hours of surgery had reduced.

A few months before, the Baron had been disfigured, his fine features split open.

Luckily for him, his nose had not been totally demolished and the bone of his forehead had mended. For the rest, the surgeon had removed strips of skin from his backside and stitched him back together patiently, over several hours, like an old granny patching some workaday jeans.

Looks wise, things had not turned out too badly: a remodeled nose that took a few years off him, and a scar ringed with pale purple streaks on his forehead which made him look dangerous when he scowled.

Inside, it was a different story. Migraines that wouldn't stop any more and that made him fear the worst of his demons, crude blood-red snapshots of agonies that came back more and more.

In Le Guen's cave, he had been afraid, with this fear he could no longer expel from inside him. It was a fear that invaded the hazy zone of his awareness, the zone he hardly ever dared to enter. If the Baron had never thought about revenge, it was no doubt to avoid transgressing his own prohibitions, gambling with his own taboos. The incubation time for revenge was far too long. He was a man of anger and storms, not a sneaky obsessive with no statute of psychic limitations.

In the middle of the night, a nightmare caught de Palma in the depths of sleep.

September 15, 1982. 9:30 a.m
.

The first anonymous call. A raucous voice
.

A supermarket bag hung from a green oak on the hill of Notre Dame
.

Inside the bag, a head
.

The neck has been severed just under the chin
.

He and Maistre examine it: there is a trace of sperm on the forehead, like a diabolical unction, the signature of Sylvain Ferracci, or the “Dustman,” as a hack on
Paris-Match
called him
.

11 a.m. A second call
.

A woman's voice. The trail will now begin
.

In a dustbin in Rabatau, some clothes: a woman's severe hounds-tooth suit, flesh-colored stockings stained with blood
.

12 a.m. A third call
.

A child's voice
.

Behind it, “Us and Them” by Pink Floyd
.

On the jetty of La Pointe Rouge, the torso and legs. The belly has been opened from the pubis to the sternum
.

A whirlpool
.

Maistre, the crack shot, withdraws a Beretta from the armory
.

He weighs the clip in his hand and slips it into the butt
.

De Palma watches him stroke the automatic's black breech
.

He is a certified marksman and can bring a man down firing blind at twenty meters
.

Maistre wants to get this over with. His eyes are red with fatigue and misery, and his brains a grenade with the pin pulled out
.

De Palma hardly feels any better
.

If they catch sight of Ferracci, he's a dead man
.

Everything happens so fast
.

A street corner, a chase
.

A cellar
.

De Palma sticks the barrel of his gun into the Dustman's mouth and shuts his eyes
.

He's going to press the trigger
.

He will if this creep doesn't stop screaming
.

Maistre approaches
.

De Palma's whole body is trembling
.

Slowly, his friend withdraws the barrel of the Manurhin from the predator's mouth
.

Streaks of light enter the Baron's head, they hit him, again and again
.

Thick blood runs down over his eyes
.

It's Marie's head in the bag
.

No, it's Isabelle–Ingrid who's winking at him
.

An obscene peekaboo from the hereafter dark dreams
.

He got up, swallowed two aspirins and stood in front of the bathroom mirror.

He looked long and hard at his face, made younger by the summer sun and the knife of the surgeon who had spent half a day refashioning his features. He pushed back his hair and examined the scar at the top of his forehead. Then he leaned closer to the mirror and looked at his nose, the only part of his face he had ever liked.

His nose had changed, and now looked like something molded out of plastic: it was an intruder in the picture, a part of himself torn away from him forever. He lowered his eyes and splashed water over his face, as if to purify himself.

At 6 a.m., Christophe Texeira left his office in La Capelière. He wanted to be at his observation post before sunrise and, most of all, to make himself scarce as soon as the first tourists showed up.

The day before, he had told Nathalie, his new assistant, that he would be out for most of the morning.

“How am I supposed to cope with all those groups and families?” she had protested timidly. “Do you realize?”

“You give them their tickets then escort them to the start of the green track. Then let them get on with it. Anyway, they aren't at risk. If there's an emergency, call me on my mobile. I won't be far away. I'll be in the reed hut, just by the samphire meadow, the place I showed you yesterday.”

Nathalie had adopted a sulky look which rather appealed to Texeira.

“I hope the ghost in the hut doesn't gobble you up.”

“No, he only moves at night.”

The two of them had discussed at length the voices he had heard in the night. Nathalie had made fun of him at first, then they had ended up deciding that the world was full of waifs and strays and that there was nothing they could do about it. There was no peace to be had anywhere, not even in the marshes of the Camargue.

There was no point sending for the gendarmes from Le Sambuc.

That morning, the biologist made his way rapidly along the straight path that led to the hut. The grassland and nearby marshes were silent. Only the
oup-oup-oup
of a hoopoe could be heard across that brown vastness.

The heat of the previous day still weighed down on the baked ground.

When Texeira reached the edges of the marsh, he noticed that the cracks in the earth had widened again. Some greenish samphire, impervious to thirst, still survived in that tiny Sahara.

Panting, he put down his bag, checked that his mobile was off, then took out his Zeiss binoculars and Reflex camera and hung them round his neck in case a rare bird happened to pass by.

A mauve gleam spread over the flat, salty waters. The level of the marshes had fallen again in the heat wave. He heard a faint noise: a little egret, completely white, emerged from the reed bed and advanced into the pond in search of its first meal of the day, making little plops with every step.

This bird was not very rare at that time of year, but he still took two photographs, pleased with this first encounter. The thought of the tourist who had sent him those shots of spoonbills crossed his mind.

The light was changing fast; the salt marsh was turning pink. In less than an hour, the sun would start its torrid trajectory, indifferent to nature's torments.

Texeira picked up his bag and strode toward the reed hut, with its whitewashed walls, in the only clump of trees on the reserve at the far end of the little canal.

He stopped twice to observe a redshank that seemed to be following him along the other side of the canal. He knew this nesting pair. His former assistant had pointed them out to him last spring, before going to join the team in Vigueirat. This specimen didn't look afraid, it must have got used to tourists and other lovers of high-class bird life.

Once at the hut, he put his bag onto a table half consumed by earwigs, took out his thermos and poured himself some coffee.

The window provided a discreet view over the entire marsh. He raised his binoculars and made a slow panoramic scan of its greenish waters. Nothing. Just plain solitude, slightly disturbed by a soft morning wind that ruffled the occasional tufts of reeds.

He would have to wait, perhaps for an hour, for the insects to come out of their hide-outs and offer themselves to the neighborhood's gourmet beaks. Making the most of the calm, he placed his
Zeiss on a tripod. Just at that instant, a black stork, an extremely rare bird, landed thirty meters from the hut, just below the haggard tree that had been sinking slowly into the swamp since time immemorial.

The large bird was so close that he could hear the heavy beat of its wings stirring the humid air. He did not have time to grab his Nikon before the stork flew off again, ponderously, toward the east.

Its sudden departure surprised him. He had been so careful not to make a sound.

Two squadrons of rooks landed behind a tamarisk and started squabbling over what was presumably a scrap of carrion lying there. The rooks' verbal jousting was disturbing his morning observations. He had to put a stop to it.

In less than two minutes, he had covered the distance. The rooks flew off to the far side of the marsh. At first he saw nothing unusual, and looked for their feast for some time among the twisted roots, wary of the deepish mud around the area.

Near the tree, there was nothing to be seen, but looking up he noticed a round shape, like an old leather football, just emerging from the water about three meters in front of him, out of reach.

He went back to the hut, fetched a long herdsman's pole and returned to the scene.

It took same effort not to sink into the muddy slime. The stick glanced off the surface of the object, so he tried to get at it from beneath and the pole caught onto what he took to be a bit of bone or a piece of a large bird's wing. Then, slowly, he dragged the thing back toward the edge.

At first, its weight surprised him. It wasn't a bird, but perhaps it was some big game animal, a boar maybe, which had drowned in the marsh.

Suddenly the object turned over in the water, in a peculiar slow motion. Texeira tried to step backward, but the warm mud sucked at his boots and kept him glued to the bank.

A nervous shudder captured him, before he finally dragged himself free.

The stringy weeds receded and the face of a man appeared, swollen,
with empty eye-sockets and jutting teeth, as though smiling at his terrible end.

At 2:30 p.m., the offices of the Tarascon gendarmerie were deserted. All that could be heard was the purring of computers awaiting the next rounds of questioning.

Marceau was alone, busy typing out the final report of an unpleasant case: a man who had been stabbed to death outside a bar by a gypsy after some row about slot machines. He had reached his final sentence when Commissaire Larousse rushed in, his tie askew, with a haggard look and rumpled hair.

“Marceau, I've just had a call from the boys in Le Sambuc. They've fished a dead man out of the marsh. It might well be our guy, what's his name again …?”

“Steinert, William … Could be.”

“O.K., I'm coming with you. Give me a couple of minutes and we'll take your car. Mine's had it.”

Marceau had always been fascinated by the way his boss could suddenly shift gear in response to events: but it had to be worth his while, he had to feel certain.

Conclusion: it really was Steinert who was floating somewhere in the Camargue surrounded by a squad of gendarmes in combat dress.

When the two officers parked on R.D. 36b, the sun was a white ball dancing over the Vaccarès lagoon. The air tasted of rusty metal, laden with rancid mud and the scent of hyacinths.

Marceau already felt nauseous.