The Beast of the Camargue (42 page)

Shallow fresh and coastal waters, nests in colonies in trees, bushes and reed beds on marshy ground
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86 centimeters
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Can be observed in the Camargue in spring and autumn. Nests in North Africa. Groaning sound from nests (not in Camargue). Occasional clicking of bills
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Long neck, long feet. Flies with neck extended
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Feeds on aquatic invertebrates and small fish
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“Very interesting, Michel. But it doesn't tell us much.”

“I copied it from a birdwatcher's guide for the Camargue. Take another look.”

She read back through the notes, murmuring each word.

“Jesus, so it sings only when nesting, and that happens only in North Africa.”

“So the recording was a sound montage. A very clever one, but a montage all the same. I think we really are up against a madman of a kind we've never imagined before.”

“Any ideas?”

Moracchini had sat down on the edge of her desk; she was examining her nails and frowning.

“We'll have to investigate the ornithology freaks. All those obsessed with our little feathered friends. You never know …”

“Yeah, but in the meantime Chandeler is out there in the wilds, with the psycho.”

“What can I say?”

“Nothing. Just say nothing.”

As he emerged from the reed bed, the man knew at once that his prisoner had given him the slip. Without knowing why, he felt it, but he had had to prepare the beast. And that was not an easy thing to do. He had been making it fast for a while, and the storms that span in the sky above the delta had swamped the air with electricity.

The beast was more uptight and dangerous than ever before.

He took out his knife and ran inside the house. Inside it was quiet.
He stopped, his arms flailing in front of the staved-in trapdoor. In the late afternoon shadows, the white spoonbills were watching him with their glass eyes. They seemed to be laughing at the strange trick that fate had played on him.

He stayed still for some time. His mind was so clouded that he felt as if his cerebral convolutions were muddled together.

From the computer came the clicking of beaks and groaning. It was the spoonbills' song of love and grace during their nuptial display. He smiled as though emerging from his torpor. The recording was on a loop. It dated back to the days when he had worked for an Algerian oil company.

After a moment, it seemed to him that the stuffed birds were coming to life on their varnished wooden stands. He walked over to them on tiptoe, uttering little cries, like quiet groans.

Tears filled his eyes. He wiped the sweat that was running down his temples. His hands were trembling, his guts churning. He tried to get hold of himself, but shakes and painful spasms were knotting his entrails. He went closer to the birds, and stopped less than a meter away. With the tips of his fingers, he stroked their marvelously white plumage. He sank his fingertips into the down of their long graceful necks.

He asked the spoonbills to give him the strength to fight through the crisis that was now submerging him, but the trembling soon turned to convulsions, and he collapsed.

He came round some time later, unable to tell how long the attack had lasted. The spoonbills were still there, he could hear the dry clicking of their long, spoon-shaped beaks and the groaning of the males.

Mad with rage, he went outside and headed for a lean-to beside the house. He returned a few minutes later with a jerry-can of petrol. His eyes were red with fury, and saliva was dribbling from his lips, twisted downward by an unknown pain.

He went inside the house and methodically spread fuel at strategic points. Then he nervily struck a match and rushed outside, pursued by the fire's hot breath.

He stopped running a long time later, when he found himself on
the road to Salins-de-Giraud. A column of smoke was rising in the distance, a huge exclamation mark above the marshes.

At that moment, he thought of the beast. Only at that moment did he realize that she would be furious and that nothing could stop her.

Chandeler felt a bony hand shake him vigorously. He half-opened his eyes and saw a weather-beaten face with slanted eyes staring at him, its lips twisted upward in a grin that revealed two rows of ivory teeth.

“Wake up, sir! … Wake up … Can't stay here.”

Chandeler squinted and saw that two Asians were looking down at him nervously.

“Wake up, sir! … Not possible …”

He gathered the last of his energy to mumble a few words:

“Must … call … the police. I …”

“We not police, sir … We work in fields. Workers!”

Chandeler heard a torrent of onomatopoeias flooding his weakened mind. He thought for a moment that he was hallucinating again. Since being kidnapped, he had constantly been wandering between the real world and nightmare visions.

He tried to stand up, but immediately felt powerful arms catch hold of him and raise him from the ground to carry him to a trailer coupled to a vineyard tractor. All at once he found himself lying in the middle of some crates that smelled of raw earth and greenery, with the sun blazing in the sky up above him.

Four people sat beside him in the cart. Four Asians to whom he gave a smile of gratitude. Then the procession crossed a field that was out of his line of sight and turned down a sunken lane bordered by ash trees and poplars.

It must be quite late in the day, the blue sky was becoming tinged with pink and orange. A smell of diesel and smoke enveloped him,
the tractor almost stopped and the engine shifted up a gear: now they were driving down a tarmac road.

He gradually recovered his spirits as he exchanged glances with his saviors. After escaping, he had walked for some time until, exhausted, he had found a stream, where he had drunk his fill of water, and a place in a curly bush, away from prying eyes. It was next to a field, maybe a vineyard, he could no longer remember. What did it matter? He had fallen asleep.

For some time, he observed the men who had rescued him, and realized that they must be illegal migrant workers. He had heard tell of this sort of workforce trafficking in the Camargue. Several big landowners had been caught red-handed using modern-day slaves. They generally came from Thailand or Cambodia, and worked like coolies for a handful of euros.

The man who greeted him in the farmyard of La Fraysse must be foreman, or something like that. The Asians vanished into the buildings.

“The workers found you just as they were finishing work. I am Fabrice Luciano, I'm the manager here.”

“Chandeler, member of the bar in Marseille.”

The foreman recoiled.

“How did you come to be in such a state, on the edge of a strawberry field?”

“I … I … it's too long and too crazy to explain. I must speak to the police.”

“I can take you to Marseille if you like.”

“No, no, I must call the police!”

“Listen, sir, I … how can I put it? The workers who brought you wouldn't like the police to know that they were working here … if you see what I mean.”

“I must speak to the police. Let me call them.”

“So long as you don't tell them what happened here. I don't want to see any policemen or gendarmes around here.”

“O.K. I'll call a friend.”

At 7:12 p.m. de Palma's mobile rang.

*

It all went very quickly. Less than an hour later, de Palma arrived at La Fraysse with Moracchini and Romero. Chandeler was sitting at the big dining room table and finishing the meal he'd been given.

When he saw the police officers, he stood up and wrung their hands for some time.

“It's the first time in my life that I'm glad to see a policeman.”

“There's a first time for everything,” de Palma replied. “Now, tell us about it all.”

Chandeler's expression changed abruptly, a veil of terror covered it. It was only after a long silence that he started the tale of his kidnapping: on leaving the court in Marseille, where he had been defending an industrialist accused of bribing civil servants, a man had approached him then discreetly stuck a gun in his belly.

“He was forty-five to fifty years old. A meter eighty, maybe more … He was about my height in fact, and I measure one meter eighty-five. Dark, shoulder-length hair, small blue eyes and bushy eyebrows. A thin nose … Unshaven. He was wearing a safari jacket, jeans and sandals.”

Chandeler had not argued with this man's orders and had got into a nearly new Ford Scorpio. This detail had struck him: it must have been a hire car. Then they had driven toward Martigues, Fos and the Camargue.

De Palma produced a map of the Rhône delta and unfolded it on the table.

“Try hard to remember. We're on the long straight line of the R.N. 568. At some moment you turn left. Is it this road?”

“Yes, that's it. Beside it, there's an old caravan and a wrecked fridge.”

“Then you drive on.”

“We drive for quite a while down the same road. There are mown fields on both sides … I mean, there's nothing in them … We continue and arrive at a junction, there's a signpost pointing to Sambuc. We drive …”

Chandeler reflected, his eyes closed, rerunning the journey in his mind.

“On the right, there was a large expanse of water, and on the left reeds everywhere. And then …”

Chandeler plunged back into his memories. He frowned.

“I want to remember, but I can't.”

“Did you drive for long in that direction?”

“No, not at all.”

“How many minutes,” Moracchini asked.

“No more than five.”

She looked at de Palma.

“It sounds like it was near La Capelière.”

“There's been a fire there!” the foreman said.

“A fire?”

“An old farmhouse has just burned down. It nearly set light to the entire region.”

“Could you take us there?”

“No problem.”

De Palma looked at Chandeler, he seemed completely wrecked.

“I suggest you stay here for the moment. We'll come back soon and drive you to Marseille. O.K.?”

Chandeler simply nodded in reply.

Astride the main branch of an old ash tree, he watched two cars pass by on the road to Sambuc. The first was a Japanese 4×4 of a make he didn't know, the second a Peugeot 406. Cops, he thought.

Previously, he had observed the dance of the fire engines and the vehicles of the gendarmerie converging on the blaze.

The sun, still heavy with light, was sinking into the silver of the Vaccarès. There were flamingos, non-migrants, pecking in the depths of the water before disappearing into their secret reed beds.

Cops won't find anything, he thought. Nothing. Except for Chandeler, who would no doubt give his description. And the lawyer would provide a host of useful details to the police. The second car, that was it: not gendarmes, but cops from Marseille, the P.J. and perhaps even that damned plainclothes detective he'd seen in Morini's bar and then spotted again in the lawyer's office the other evening. That one, he knew by instinct he had to beware of. The same type as Marceau, violent but gifted with sensitivity. That said, he had
nothing against him and would do nothing as long as this officer did not interfere with the beast's designs.

He turned toward the fire. There was no more smoke, the firemen and gendarmes must now be combing through the house. But everything must have burned.

Why had he set it ablaze? Was it a fit of folly, as uncontrollable as it was unforeseeable?

In fact, he had no idea. It was not the first time that his nature had overcome him. He saw marvels and then all at once everything would collapse, at the slightest snag, the smallest detail that spoiled the whole. It was like a blot of pollution in the midst of nature. A flower of dishonor in the vastness of his pride. He had to destroy, even if it meant losing everything.

The memories of the past few months returned to him. He had the feeling of having accomplished a good part of his mission. The Tarasque had accomplished what was expected of it. The park would never exist. That was the main thing. He had eliminated one of the brains, Morini, and some of his best soldiers. A pity about Chandeler.

He sincerely regretted the death of Steinert. It had made him sad, truly: they had shared so many things together.

Steinert had wanted to see the beast.

And he, the Knight, had always refused to show it to him. It was Bérard who had made the decision. Steinert had not been initiated. Or not sufficiently.

But Simone's son had been more stubborn than a mule, he had wanted to see all the same. So he had looked for it. Until the day when he had found it. You always end up finding what you look for.

How had he done it? He didn't know. He supposed that Steinert must have followed him. And the beast would have eaten him if he had not run like a thing possessed.

Unfortunately, it was dark, and William had not seen the marsh. And he hadn't been able to save him, otherwise the beast would have escaped.

He had had trouble bringing it back into its lair, among the rushes. Several times, he had sung the song of the servants of the beast to calm it down and, finally, it had consented to follow him.

Sadness filled him. William would never know the end of the story. He would never know that everything had been achieved.

The Vaccarès was completely absorbing the sun. Like a tranquil monster that methodically swallows its prey before slowly digesting it. A light wind rustled the parched leaves of the tree. He sniffed the air like a wild animal gauging the danger. Just as Bérard had taught him, the old man, the chieftain.

Bérard the magician.

Wisps of charred wood and scorched tiles tickled his nostrils. The face of the old shepherd surged up again, as though his old master had returned across the river of death to give him strength.

He stayed in his tree until nightfall. Then he climbed down, as agile as a wild cat which decides that the hunting hour has arrived. It must have been past nine o'clock when he disappeared into the rushes, dry and sharp as sickle blades.