The Beast of the Camargue (14 page)

“Could you copy this page for me?”

“Sorry, sir, but that isn't allowed.”

“Look, one more time, we won't quarrel, you'll just copy it for me and no one will be any the wiser. After that I'll leave you in peace.”

The archivist glanced at his watch, then placed page 29 on the Xerox glass.

At 12 p.m., the Baron double-parked his Alfa Romeo in front of a kebab shop on avenue de la République. He ordered a doner and chips, with cream sauce, tomatoes, onions and lettuce. His mobile rang.

“Michel? It's Marceau. The autopsy leaves no room for doubt: death by drowning.”

“He drowned!”

“Yeah. They've been at it since seven this morning, and it's just what I expected.”

“Who performed it?”

“Mattei, as usual.”

De Palma trusted Mattei's verdicts completely.

“I think the case will be closed any time now,” Marceau said, “and there's nothing I can do about it. There's no evidence at all.”

“There are your footprints!”

“Are you joking? Are you expecting me to go down on my knees in front of the prosecutor and tell him that I've found some
traces of boot-marks in the dry mud in the Camargue? Wake up, Michel!”

“Did you get molds made?”

“Yes, this morning. There's a team of technicians on hand. So it will be the last time we have to drag our feet over to that stinking place!”

De Palma tried to concentrate. The case was going to be out of the police's hands before long. He was torn between his desire to believe in the forensic scientist's conclusions and his own instincts.

“I'm going back to the commissariat to see what's going on. How about you, Michel?”

“I don't know. Maybe I'll go and see Ingrid Steinert, a courtesy call.”

“Did she call you this morning?”

“Yes.”

“So, see you later. I hope she won't stir things up for us. She'll have to accept that there's nothing more that I can do.”

After the Fairy Pines, the air shimmered as if emerging from a wood stove; the trees were cracking under the blaze of the sun.

De Palma looked at the photocopy of the surveyor's plan from the Chamber of Commerce. He climbed a hillock that overlooked the whole of the valley, then orientated the chart.

To the east lay La Balme farmhouse, its buildings rippling in the noon day sun. Then, standing out against the pure blue sky, the white lines of the chalk hills of the Alpilles contrasted with the brown, scrub-covered mounds and rust-red slopes that led to the legendary cliffs and viewpoints.

The Baron turned south, in the direction of the Camargue, and observed the plain. He selected a few landmarks from the map and noticed that, broadly speaking, the planned site for the park occupied what Mme. Steinert had called the “Downlands”: woods of little agricultural interest, close to the main roads and far enough away from La Balme farmhouse so as not to disturb the billionaire's seclusion.

Why had Clergue mentioned Steinert's hostility?

It was one of those places soaked in history, where people have been living since time began, fragile sites which have become retreats for billionaires and snobs of all descriptions, loaded with money and pride. The smallest plot of land could fetch a fortune. So de Palma supposed that an amusement park, which was bound to attract a lower-class clientele, would not have appealed to most of the people who had chosen to live in this luxurious ghetto.

Along the road between Aix and Tarascon, thousands of cypresses were swaying heavily in the thick air. De Palma thought he could hear the din of Marius's Roman legions.

Then his mind went back to William Steinert, a man from the north and its winters of snow and grayness, a descendant of the very Teutons who Marius had cut to ribbons not far from the Via Domitia.

Steinert was the sort of billionaire that Michel would have liked to have known. He himself knew next to nothing about the Provence next door to his native Marseille, nothing except for a familiarity with its murder cases, the memory of a school trip to Saint Rémy Museum on the far side of the Alpilles, and the name of Marius, the savior of Rome who gave independence to Marsiho, here at the foot of these modest peaks.

The name of Marius had long dwelled in the Baron's imagination; he could still clearly remember his primary school teacher showing him the image of the soldier's trophies, engraved in the stone of Saint Rémy.

The promoters of the future park must have thought of making Marius into one of the heroes of their tourist amusements. And they had already chosen the Tarasque of Tarascon as the mascot of “The Big South.” As he got back into his Giulietta, it seemed to de Palma that this was not such a bad business idea. He could imagine shelves full of cuddly Tarasques in the stores as souvenirs … the Tarasque and the Tarasquettes … two thousand years of oral tradition transformed into bar codes. He also sensed that this monster of the marshes had not cropped up in this investigation by chance. Everyone was interested in it, and this was starting to worry him.

Mme. Steinert was alone on the patio. He felt he was looking again
at Isabelle Mercier, as she had been in the Super 8 films that her father had loaned to the police.

She did not stand up when he closed his car door and gave her a clumsy wave.

“At least you'll believe me now,” she called out, in a tinny voice.

“I'm really sorry.”

She lowered her head, her face disappearing behind the golden veil of her hair.

“The hardest thing of all was seeing him, recognizing him even when he was—what is the word?
Verstümmelt
! Completely disfigured… It was …
Unerträglich
, unbearable.”

She jerked her head back to toss her hair over her shoulders and spoke without emotion, as though she were reciting a text, focusing as she did so on a piece of Provençal cloth that presumably came from one of her new collections.

“I've been trying to wipe that image since this morning …”

“If you'd like me to leave,” de Palma murmured, “I can always come back tomorrow, or another day …”

“Stay, take a seat. I've sent everyone home today. Even the three ‘thugs' as you call them, who take care of my safety. I didn't want to see anyone. Except for you. How odd.”

She gazed at the Baron. Her eyes, usually azure, had turned turquoise, making them look hugely empty. He coughed so as to avoid having to say anything.

“Have you heard the results of the autopsy?” she said, without taking her eyes off him.

“Yes, and I think they can be trusted. The forensic surgeon is the best I know. No doubt about it.”

“And you? What do you think?”

De Palma sat down in front of her.

“I think there's no reason to look any further. It was just an accident. A stupid one, as all accidents are. If he had been murdered, the pathologists would have found something.”

She kept on gazing at him, but her expression had changed. It had become familiar, even teasing.

“You don't believe a word you've just said, but I'm not blaming
you. Not at all. It's simply some problems between different police authorities, and hierarchies, something like that, that are worrying you or holding you back. But you know full well that my husband didn't drown in fifty centimeters of water, or was it eighty …”

“You know, sometimes …”

“My husband was the best swimmer in his year at the engineering school in Munich. He was one meter ninety tall.”

De Palma lowered his gaze and allowed a silence to settle between them.

The facts were there and he could not deny them. No one could deny them.

The sky gleamed like blue silk. It suddenly seemed to him that the stink of the swamp was sticking to his skin like a wet shirt, along with a smell of fish sauce and rotting seaweed.

He looked back up toward her.

The wind had blown a lock of her hair over the corner of her mouth, just where he had noticed two beauty spots. She looked dreamy, as though asking herself questions before providing the answers.

“You know, we'd been out of love for ages …” she said, drawing out her words. “Not long after our wedding, he started to become strange. He read peculiar books, and had passions not readily shared with a young woman. He was much older than me. Our marriage was a mistake that I made, but I still had enormous affection for him. And respect, too. Immense respect … it's more a friend I've lost than a husband.”

She pointed toward the property then glanced around, as though trying to take it all in in a single sweep.

“It's for him that I'm going to stay here, and that I won't touch anything for now. His soul is still here. At night, I can sense him roving around the buildings and up there on the hills. He loved the hills so much. Have you read
Wuthering Heights
?”

“Heathcliff and Cathy …”

“It was his favorite novel. He could talk about it for hours … hours on end.”

De Palma felt as if he had just been bled dry. At that moment, he
no longer knew who he was exactly, or what he was supposed to be doing there. Some dark force held him close to this woman.

She stood up and went into the kitchen, then returned with two bottles of apple juice and a jug of cold water on an olive-wood tray.

“I'm being a terrible hostess. You must be thirsty?”

“A little, I must admit.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No, but I don't want to abuse your hospitality.”

“You're a strange man, M. de Palma. It's as if you're afraid of me, or else you mistrust me. I'm a woman like any other woman. All I'm doing is fighting to know the truth about my husband's death. And it will be known, believe me.”

“Indeed,” said de Palma, feeling vexed.

“Don't get angry.”

He swallowed his glass of apple juice and poured himself another at once. Ingrid watched him, missing none of his gestures, which duly increased his irritation.

“I must explain something very important to you if you want to understand my husband.”

She breathed deeply, her chest swelling as if she wanted to draw out of herself something that had been weighing on her for far too many years.

“You must understand that my husband's father was here, during the German occupation.”

She stared at the swaying lines of olive trees, as though memories that were not her own had come to haunt her.

“And when I say he was here,” she went on, tapping the table with the nail of her index finger, “I mean here, in this farmhouse.”

She fell silent for a moment. A warm breeze, scented with pine and scrub, blew down from the Alpilles and subsided beneath the huge plane trees.

“It was my father-in-law who dug up the sarcophagus you saw over there. And many other things, too. I suppose that you must now be beginning to understand the particular associations that connected my husband with this place. I want you to understand that he was not like the other rich residents who live around here!”

The questions clamored at de Palma. What role had William Steinert's father played during the war? If he was in the Nazi party … Why had he, a great industrialist, buried himself in this hole?

She guessed what he was thinking, and did not wait to be asked.

“At the start, the industrialist wasn't him. It was his elder brother, who died during the Dresden bombing in 1945. As there were only two children, my father-in-law took over the business. But he was no manager. He had trained to be an archaeologist and got his doctorate in 1939. In the spring of that year, just before war broke out.”

“But … how did he end up here?”

“The Nazis sent him to this region because during the two years before war broke out, he'd spent his winters here, studying old stones.”

“So it was him who carried out the dig in the ‘Downlands.' Then, in 1939, he was obviously forced to leave France. But soon afterward the Nazis sent him back. It must have been good propaganda for them. And let me tell you that he was clearly very well received by the people in the village since he came back on a number of occasions after the war. One of the few Boches not to be seen as the devil incarnate.”

“When did he die?”

“In 1980. He was seventy-six. He's buried in a discreet grave in the cemetery of Eygalières.”

She sat up in her chair and poured herself a glass of water. Her expression seemed less stern. De Palma noticed that the vengeful expression he had observed on arriving at the farmhouse had vanished. The color of her eyes had changed again.

“Of course, I'd rather you didn't mention all this to anyone. It's
unter dem Siegel des Verschwiegenheit
, a well-kept secret in these parts, and no one mentions Karl Steinert. When my husband bought the lot in the graveyard, he had his father's remains transferred there with the greatest discretion. He had the necessary money. So I'm counting on your discretion too.”

She placed her hand delicately on de Palma's forearm; instinctively, he laid his hand on hers.

*

For the past three days, Rey hadn't drunk a drop of water or had anything to eat.

For three days, he had been in a black hole, left there by the man he had taken at first for a policeman. The only thing Rey had managed to keep was a vague notion of time. In his prison, he could feel the variations of temperature when the sun rose or set.

That was all he knew about the outside world.

Despite the darkness, his eyes were burning in their sockets. His tongue was thick and hard with thirst, and his hands were shaking.

The day before, when he had had his first visions, he had thought he had come down with a fever. Then the visions had gone, the same way they had come. It must have been his thirst playing tricks.

First, he had seen his mother, with her nasty little eyes, saying to him in her sour voice: “Your father won't come back, your father won't come back … son of a bitch.”