The Madonna of Notre Dame (6 page)

The police had been waiting since morning, and the entire cathedral seemed to be holding its breath, gurgling with rumors, while waiting for the one all the Notre Dame staff was now calling “the blond angel.” A priest had come to say the two morning masses, interpreting with odd falseness a role he had nevertheless been playing for years. The duty sacristan, the guards, the reception staff, the volunteer speakers, the morning faithful, even tourists from the other end of the world, all seemed to be acting like automatons, as though absent, their eyes on that fixed point Gombrowicz was also staring at: the Portal of Sainte Anne, through which, sooner or later, the main suspect of a sordid murder
case would, according to police sources, walk in and thrust himself into the net cast by the Crime Squad. Meanwhile, outside, on the square, a team from the TV station France 3 Île-de-France was installing a camera in anticipation of the lunchtime news, and they were soon joined by a van from the LCI station.

“Landard to Gombrowicz. Landard to Gombrowicz.”

“I’m listening, Landard.”

“Still nothing?”

“There are some Japanese, Germans, more Japanese.”

“What the fuck is he doing? Keep your eyes open, guys. The kid isn’t far, I can feel it.”

Sitting in one of the chapels south of the principal nave, just a few yards away from the crucified Christ beneath which Gombrowicz was revising his catechism, Father Kern was waiting. He was waiting for those worshippers, French or foreign, who wanted to see a priest. In the chapel dedicated to confession, a few years earlier, they had installed a large glass cage aimed at ensuring calm and confidentiality to both the one hearing confession and the one making confession. Ever since, the cathedral priests had called this chapel “the jar.”

Sitting at the bottom of his jar, Father Kern was waiting: like almost everybody else this morning, he was waiting for a young man with blond, curly hair and a vaguely romantic, slender look, who, two days earlier, had attacked a young woman with a crucifix. The young woman had been found dead, and the blond angel seemed to be up to his neck in trouble.

Sitting at his small confession table on which he usually kept two dictionaries—English and Spanish—Father Kern was waiting: waiting for night to inevitably fall over the city. In about ten hours at most, the red marks would reappear on his arms, ankles, and calves, just as the evening before, but this time they’d be accompanied by a violent bout of fever. The sharp, unbearable
joint pain would probably come tomorrow. He knew this from past experience. The disease had definitely returned, attacking his body night after night, growing more intense day by day. How long would the crisis last? A week? A month? A year? Father Kern really couldn’t tell.

Claire Kauffmann had barely slept a wink all night. She had watched the hours go by on the fluorescent screen of her alarm clock, tossing and turning in her sheets as she sighed, so much so that Peanuts, her cat, who snuggled up to her every night, this time had decided to abandon the quilted softness of the comforter in favor of the calmer kitchen floor. Usually, she managed to leave outside her bedroom door the images collected during her office hours at the Palais de Justice. She’d seen the worst one could possibly see. Besides, her bedroom had been furnished, decorated, and designed to give her, at least during the night, a few hours of amnesia, and to constitute an effective citadel against the violence of the city. The metal blinds were always down. The heavy velvet curtains always closed. The door was padded. The carpet was deep. On the wall and on the shelves, there were childhood mementoes, a couple of plush toys, a pair of white shoes with straps worn only for one evening before she’d tipped into adolescence. Objects she liked to feel surrounded by when, alone in the dark, she felt sucked in by her thoughts, fears, and memories.

However, that night, Claire Kauffmann wasn’t able to throw the black veil of sleep over the image of the white Madonna found strangled on the stone floor in Notre Dame. Just as she would start to doze off, no sooner was her body about to abandon itself than the cathedral images would come back to mind.
Not images from her working morning, not those of the investigation in progress, not those of a place filled with the reassuring presence of uniforms and technicians in white smocks, and illumined by powerful projectors that lit even the darkest corners. What Claire Kauffmann saw as soon as she closed her eyes, curled up deep in her bed, was the endless night before; it was the screams of the young woman in white echoing in the blackness of the huge church, that brought no response, no help, as she faced her murderer alone. It was as though an iron hand was forcing her, a magistrate of the French Republic, to watch the squalid spectacle of death going over a woman’s body, spreading open her thighs, caressing an oddly hairless, adolescent sex, and finally bringing close a candle that had just poured an obscene light over her skin. Then, as an extra step deeper into the nightmare, Claire Kauffmann would quit her position as spectator. The hand that held her by the wrist so tightly she felt like screaming along with the victim, would then force her to approach the dark silhouette busying itself over the corpse dressed in white. And all of a sudden, the magistrate would realize that the victim’s hair was not dark but blond, blond like her own, and she’d immediately feel the murderer’s clumsy touch on her own skin, the candle scorching her own thighs. She would try to scream but no sound would come out of her mouth. She would struggle but her body, as though dead, no longer belonged to her. Finally, she would open her eyes, breathless, her sheets drenched in sweat, and put the light back on, trying to fill her lungs with air, trying to slow down her breathing, trying to fix her eyes on a familiar object on her bedroom walls.

Women constantly had to pay when confronted with men’s urges, whether sexual or murderous. Even in death, that girl had had to suffer the insults of a pervert. With candle wax. And what else? That’s not counting the invasive, suggestive looks of
all those—police officers, technicians, onlookers, and tourists— who had paraded around her body. And yet the ordeal wasn’t quite over yet. There was still the postmortem, which would deflower her a little further. She kept picturing the medical examiner, a highly professional man with whom she’d worked several times in the past, scratching his scalp after removing his latex glove. She would then turn around in bed for the umpteenth time, and curl up even more.

When the alarm went off, Claire Kauffmann got out of bed, still groggy from her nocturnal struggle between wakefulness and nightmare. She fed Peanuts. She drank her hot chocolate while listening to the radio news. At the end of the seven a.m. headlines, France Info had mentioned the Notre Dame murder. The press knew, so the whole media circus would now begin.

Then Claire Kauffmann had a shower, displaying her nudity only to the eyes of Peanuts, who was lying in a corner, lazily slapping his tail on the bathroom floor. She got dressed, shielded her body, still damp, with a cotton bodysuit, carefully fastening the crotch, covered her legs and buttocks with a sheer summer pantyhose, sheathing, as she did every morning, her blond sex with at least two protective layers.

She took the bus from the 17th arrondissement, where she lived, deploring the promiscuity, the forced contact, men’s sometimes insistent looks. Sometimes she’d be followed, over the course of the journey, by slimy types whose eyes she felt ogling her back. She wasn’t sure which were worse: those who, wretched and stammering, ended up slipping her their phone numbers, or those who didn’t come out with it but preferred to lag a few steps behind her, hands in their pockets, eyes on her behind.

She arrived at the Palais half an hour late and her fellow deputy, with whom she shared an office, remarked on how unusual that was. She got down to work, reading, filing, taking notes, a
Sisyphus with a pencil skirt and a blond bun, who tried every day without success to reduce the mountain of files on her desk. Finally, at about eleven-thirty, she made up her mind to call Captain Landard on his cell phone, seeing how he’d neglected to keep her informed of the progress of his investigation at Notre Dame.

She found him highly agitated. At the other end of the line, Landard was speaking in a whisper and Claire Kauffmann struggled to make out everything he was saying.

“I’m telling you, the kid’s here, Mademoiselle Kauffmann, the blond angel, in the cathedral, he came back, I was right. I saw him arrive on my control screen like an apparition, less than ten minutes ago, he was all you could see, he was almost fluorescent. Mourad, the guard who collared him the day before yesterday, has formally identified him. And guess where the kid went right away? Go on, guess, madame. Guess what the little bastard did as soon as he came in?”

“How should I know, captain?”

“I’ll tell you, madame. You’ll never guess. The son of a bitch went to confession.”

The blond angel had been confessing for half an hour. Unable to bear it any longer, Landard had left the control room to go see the scene with his own eyes. Shut up in his jar, as though put under glass like an extraordinary butterfly, the kid was talking endlessly, laughing, crying, shaking his head, gesticulating. And who was he confessing to? To a diminutive priest, almost a midget, who was listening without saying a word, resting his chin on his fist and who, every few minutes, would simply nod.

Landard was chomping at the bit. He felt like a ten-year-old
with an empty stomach and saliva in the corners of his mouth, his nose glued to the window of a delicatessen shop. He’d given the rector his word that very morning: no scandal or arrests inside the cathedral. They’d have to wait for the blond angel to come back out before picking him up. Outside, everything was ready: two officers had been repositioned at the exit and a third at the entrance, in case the suspect decided to lose them from the rear, in addition to Gombrowicz, still beneath his large crucified Christ, less than ten paces from the confessional. In case of serious problems, there were always the uniformed police in the square, placed there with the rector’s agreement, to keep the demands of the TV reporters at bay.

Landard reluctantly went to kneel next to his lieutenant, his eyes not turned up, but constantly flitting toward the suspect. “What do you think they’re telling each other in there?”

“Perhaps we should have placed a mic.”

“The priest wouldn’t have agreed. What you say inside there is confidential, you know. Who could have guessed that the kid would be devious enough as to go and confess?”

“Don’t worry, Landard. He’ll get to confess again before the evening, and this time at the Quai.”

Somewhat reassured by the prospect of the forthcoming interrogation, Landard went back to his prayers. Still, the blond angel didn’t seem to want to come out and Landard, whose knees where beginning to ache, realized the absurdity of the situation.

Finally, he made a decision. After all, he had his man shut up in a hermetic cage. What was he waiting for? For the bird to fly away? To hell with the promise made to the rector. It was time to intervene. He stepped out of the suspect’s sight and, with a whisper into his walkie-talkie, summoned the three lieutenants waiting outside. Then, as soon as the reinforcements had arrived, without any other procedure, Landard opened the glass door of
the confessional and let his men loose inside, the way he would have let dogs loose in a butcher’s shop.