The Moment Before Drowning Read online

  “Someone from Sainte-Élisabeth,” he continues. “Someone still out there, in one of those quiet, unremarkable little houses. Like the ones we grew up in.”

  He turns and looks at me, suddenly calm.

  “I’ve heard it said that crime intoxicates. That it brings a sense of power, a kind of absolute, tyrannical domination of others. Is that something you’ve seen, in your pursuit of murderers?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Out there, in one of the little stone houses you walked past just a few hours ago, someone is drunk on Anne-Lise’s blood. When you wander through Sainte-Élisabeth at night, there isn’t just darkness. No, you can feel a kind of voracious patience, other atrocities just waiting to come into existence. The darkness has become a cloak, and behind it a predator is hiding, biding his time. Looking for the next chance. The next girl. You need to find whoever did this. Do you understand?”

  I can hear the haunting in Erwann’s voice. I want to ask him if he can hear a similar haunting in mine. He is unshaven and the dark curls of his hair tumble across his forehead. The skin on his face is drawn like parchment. I touch my own cheek. What can he see in me? Two years in Algeria but it could easily have been twenty. One dead girl whispers perpetually in the cavities of his skull. How many ghosts are shrieking in mine? There is no way to count them. You stop even trying to count. The numbers mean nothing.

  “Why me? What makes you think that I can find something that Lafourgue didn’t?”

  “Lafourgue is an imbecile.” His voice twists upward, distorted, as if it’s about to snap. Just for a second something breaks in his patience, and then he rediscovers his calm. “He did nothing for Anne-Lise. How could he? This was not the sort of crime he deals with every day. Here we have a man who is most commonly called upon to brutalize some gaping adolescent until he admits that it was indeed he who stole the flowerpots from Madame Lanier’s front porch in a moment of youthful high jinks. Perhaps he might even be required to mediate between two farmers, one of whom shot the other’s cow over the hedge in a dispute about field boundaries. This he can cope with. I imagine there is even a certain correlation between his mediocrity and the trivial crimes he investigates. But Anne-Lise? This was something altogether different. The reports in the papers feasted on the details: It was calculated. Methodical. Organized. Such incomprehensible wickedness, but with some kind of horrid, rational intelligence behind it. No obvious traces. No witnesses. Meticulously planned and carried out so as to give nothing away, and no hint at all as to why this girl should be chosen to end her days in such darkness.”

  For a while we sit in silence, and then Erwann speaks again.

  “I want you to investigate because I remember you before you were a detective. I remember you as a philosopher. Oh, I’m sure you’ll say you weren’t and that you were only a student. But you were trained in rigorous thought. In its sublimity and its darkness. Lafourgue’s ponderous mind simply could not penetrate whatever subtlety lies at the bottom of this crime. I believe that you will be able to do so.”

  I just nod. There is no use in trying to explain to Erwann that there is nothing philosophical about crime. That crime is just hunger and rage and poverty. That it’s desperation and opportunity. The inevitable, pathological repetition of pain branded into the soul. The slow collapse of an entire society, piece by piece, shred by exhausting shred.

  After Algeria, I don’t even know what crime is anymore. It should exist in some definable realm of moral failure. It should be something malignant and aberrant that can be identified, tracked, and punished. There must have been a time when crime seemed like something outside of me. Something I could localize, analyze, and counteract.

  I want to see it like that again. Now, everything malignant is within me. Let crime be something I prevent and avenge, not what I am.

  “Go and see Lafourgue,” Erwann says. “I told him that you might want to investigate Anne-Lise for yourself. Whatever you did or didn’t do in Algeria, he seems rather impressed by your reputation. He was even eager to meet with you. He’ll help you with whatever you want to know.”

  Outside, the wind lashes the roof and the first drops of rain bounce onto the frozen gorseland and are drunk by the earth.

  Day Two

  I wake up hunched in a chair, my joints stiff with cold. I couldn’t bring myself to lie in a strange bed staring up into the dark, waiting for sleep to arrive and bring with it a distorted pulse of memory in dreams. After Erwann left, I stared out into the night, fighting exhaustion until a brittle, fitful oblivion came over me.

  When day fully breaks it is nearly nine o’clock and I wander down from the house toward the town. The wind hurtles off the Channel, snapping the leaves and making one great shimmer of the grass. The road winds down to the sea, where the squat gray houses stand next to the waters of the port, bobbing with fishing boats when the tide is high. At low tide, the sludge of the seabed, choked with kelp, stretches as far as the eye can see.

  Sainte-Élisabeth clusters around the harbor, and its uneven rows of buildings line the promenade running the length of the town. Everything tends down toward the waters. The sea is both life and death. The fishermen set out upon it each morning in the barely broken dawn and pray they will be among those who come back. Little plaques with dates and names run along the harbor walls. The town has lost many to the violence of the waves; bodies battered by the immensity of the swell, men who breathed their last in the churning tides. The corpses were often never recovered, or washed ashore days later, bloated and algae-ridden, shredded by fish, the skin swollen with salt. People would gather by the harbor, the women dressed in black, the children subdued, to remember those who died in the sea’s surges. There was a ritual in the silence of those standing on the promenade, staring out at the great, gray expanse where sea and sky meet. They could accept the violence of the sea. It was the violence of the land which they could never understand—that of poverty, disease, and the slow frustration of existence without horizons.

  Toward the end of the promenade is a bar with a cracked blue sign that reads, A l’abri des flots. Erwann told me that this was where I would find Lafourgue. As soon as I enter I can see his gray-coated bulk leaning on the bar. I don’t need anyone to confirm that this is who I am looking for. Something in his demeanor, an authority that borders upon violence, marks him out as a policeman and sets him apart from the groups of fishermen hunched over dominoes or newspapers. He turns toward me and, standing upright, lifts a single hand and raises it to his temple in mock salute.

  “Well, well, well. Jacques le Garrec. A genuine honor. This man,” his voice carries across the whole room, in whose dark corners the mutters suddenly fall silent, “this man fought the Germans at home and then he took the war to the Arabs abroad too. Gentlemen, we have a true hero in our midst this fine morning. Monsieur, let me get you a drink.” He gestures to a haggard-looking woman

  behind the bar whose unsteady hand pours two small glasses of a clear liquid. It smells chemical. Scarifying. Lafourgue stands to attention and raises his glass. There is silence in the bar. “To the war that goes on, and to men like Jacques le Garrec, the heroes who fight it. Amen.”

  There is a sudden, strange silence. Is it unease? Or fear? Lafourgue tips his head back and drinks and the sparse clusters of other early-morning drinkers do likewise. The tiny drop of liquid that I ingest burns my throat. My mouth feels gummy, as if covered in gasoline. Lafourgue’s gaze runs over the silenced bar like the beam of the lighthouse flashing across the land.

  “And in what way may I be of service to you?”

  He’s much older than me, in his midfifties perhaps, and not remotely like the lumbering clodhopper Erwann described. There is something imposing in his very presence. At first glance, his squat fingers clutching the tiny glass and the swollen mass of his cheeks and neck make him look overweight. But as I stand next to him I am aware of an incredible, rocklike solidity. His gray eyes are set deep in his head and gaze out imperturbably from some distant inne
r realm. His face seems almost square: chiseled and monumental. Yet it is his mouth that draws my attention. Something about the jaws, the teeth, the whole powerful, devouring machinery provokes a nearly constant fascination the entire time I am in his presence.

  “I’ve been asked to look into the case of a girl, Anne-Lise Aurigny, who was killed here last winter. I was told that you investigated the case at the time. Erwann Ollivier said that you might be able to help me.”

  “Ollivier. The would-be intellectual. Well, look into the case if you want. I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I doubt you’ll find much, though. It’s gone pretty cold by now.”

  “You should know that I no longer have any police powers and—”

  Lafourgue cuts me off with a nod. “No problem. You’re among friends here. We’ll keep the whole thing very hush-hush.” His voice descends to a murmur: “Jesus! They send you out as a soldier to do a job, to fight and kill an enemy: the Arabs. Sneaking little dirt vipers waiting in every hole and under every rock to slither out and attack you. And so you kill them. Like you’re supposed to do. Like they told you to and paid you for. Then they string you up for it. Some stunt in the newspapers so that we can pretend it isn’t a war at all, and that this isn’t happening a thousand times every day.”

  He heaves himself upright again, his bulk silhouetted against the faint wash of daylight streaming through the terrace doors, and barks across the bar: “This man is a first-class hero. He laid his life on the line to liberate France from Nazi domination and then he did it all over again in Algeria. This is a man who has lived with death bravely, year after year, to save his country. Let us raise a glass in his honor.”

  The bar is now eerily quiet. Men put down their crosswords and playing cards and reach obediently for their glasses. They drink meekly, and then stare down at their hands waiting for the next order. Lafourgue exhales contentedly.

  “Listen,” he says, “by all means look into the case. Poke around in the files, put the wind up a few local degenerates, let me know if you need a bit of pressure applied on a suspect.” He grins and bunches his hand into a fist. “But you won’t get anywhere. The crime scene, the whole trail leading out from the victim, her past, it all leads nowhere. You know why? Because the girl was a whore. A filthy little bitch dragging that perpetual itch of hers all over the countryside, letting her whore’s reek go floating all around and drawing the attention of every man passing within a mile of her. Most times, you can’t catch the killer of a creature like that. There’s no pattern to her existence. No motive. No history. She just got too close to the wrong guy, God knows who he was, some prowler passing through who toyed with her and killed her.”

  “Was there evidence of sexual contact before death?”

  Lafourgue shakes his head. “Not this time. But your man didn’t leave any traces. There’s nothing left for you to find.” He downs a final gulp of the clear alcohol and reaches for his hat. “Come on. I’ll drive you to the police station and you can go through whatever files you want. Then we’ll go and talk to André. Dr. Roussillon, that is. He’s the doc who did the autopsy. There are some peculiar details that you’ll need to hear, and André can explain them so much better than me.”

  * * *

  Lafourgue’s office is chaos, with sheaves of papers heaped on the desk, filing cabinets open, and an old shirt lying creased in one corner. He hands me a thin manila file containing a handful of photographs and a few paragraphs of typewritten notes and leaves me alone. Who was Anne-Lise: Erwann’s ethereal being or Lafourgue’s whore?

  The pictures are clear, forensic. A close-up of her face. Or what used to be her face. The hair is still her—strands of glitter falling about her shoulders. The rest isn’t anything. A huge tear runs from the hairline down the cheek. The head looks split in half. I can see where the eyes were, but now they are just swollen lumps of flesh, gummed shut. Sightless. She must have died blind, in agony and darkness, feeling some predatory fury destroying her face. The jaw hangs loose, cracked on one side. Those teeth still left in her mouth jut horribly, knocked into queasy angles. Her top lip is split right up to the nose so that her mouth looks like one more shapeless hole torn into her head. Erwann said she was beautiful. By the time she died, she wasn’t even human.

  Another photo, this one from where she was left. Claws of winter heather stretching out toward the sea. Anne-Lise lies on top of them, white—pure, bone-white—against the knotty fingers of gorse clutching at the frozen land and waiting for spring to live again. For Anne-Lise, this is the end. She’s been stripped. Her clothes were never found. The killer either destroyed them or kept them, hid them away in some secret recess as a shining and unrelinquishable prize. He wanted Anne-Lise to be found naked. One hand lies across her breast, like a gesture of modesty or a vain hope of protecting her body. The other hand is flung outward and seems to scratch at the ground. Desperation? Or ecstasy? A parody of pleasure. In death she mimes both chastity and wantonness. A brutalized girl with torn flesh where her face used to be, abandoned to the insects and the frost to fight over her remains.

  According to Lafourgue’s brief notes, there were three suspects, all of whom he saw as quite likely perpetrators.

  First picture: a man in his thirties, his dull eyes staring vacantly over the photographer’s shoulder. Gray stubble roughens his skin in uneven patches. His hair springs up in clumps. Streaks of dirt smudge both cheeks. Julien Kerbac, a down-and-out who roamed the land from Saint-Malo along the coast to Saint-Cast, bunking in cowsheds and ditches. A haggard drifter at home in the wilderness. Lafourgue seemed to have picked him out because of a history of violence: drunken brawls, erratic behavior, and verbal abuse. Once he got high on paint thinner and exposed himself to a local farm girl. I can see no evidence of a connection between him and Anne-Lise. He was just one of the usual suspects.

  Second picture: a boy of around eighteen, eyes exploding into the camera, radiant with hatred. He stares so intensely that the glare suffuses the whole picture. His hair is jet-black, so smooth it’s almost liquid, gushing down his cheeks and falling around his neck. The high cheekbones appear to stretch the skin upward, making it unbearably translucent and frail. Lafourgue’s painstaking script reads as follows:

  Sasha (Aleksandr) Kurmakin, b. 1940, son of Russian émigrés who escaped the Communist menace. Both parents politically unaffiliated and no known associates. Clean records. Kurmakin himself a school dropout despite exceptionally high grades. Member of Communist Party as of ’57. Actively involved in distribution of pro-Russian propaganda. Spotted several times in Communist-backed demos against the army’s defense of the colonies. Known agitator with links to various leftist and militant groups. Romantically and almost certainly sexually connected to victim. Possible motives for murder include jealousy, some sort of sexually deviant violence growing out of control and leading to death, anarchic experimentation with crime.

  Third picture: a man in his late forties, smiling like this isn’t a mug shot but a portrait. Even so, the smile appears a little wan, slightly contemptuous: courteous, but letting the suggestion appear in the strained lines at the corners of the mouth that he has other places to be. His hair is smooth and parted in the center. There is a refinement about the narrow, delicate features, but something cold as well. The eyes glint like glass. Two dead pools with shimmering reflections. Lafourgue’s notes read as follows:

  Christian de la Hallière, 48, direct descendant of Knights Templar. Owner of run-down Château de la Hallière about 2 km west of Sainte-Élisabeth. Family fortune squandered long ago. Joined the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme in ’41 as a Fascist of long-standing conviction. Fought on the Eastern Front ’41–’42, and later in Poland as part of the Division Charlemagne of the Wehrmacht. Exile in Tunisia after the war. Returned to France in 1947 after the amnesty to find “the land I fought for overrun by the Jews and Communists I defended it against.” Well known to Anne-Lise although the nature of the relationship is not clea
r. C de la H denies sexual contact.

  Nowhere in Lafourgue’s notes is there any mention of tangible evidence: fibers, fingerprints, witnesses. Motives or leads are sketchy at best, if not completely absent. There is nothing here that could lead back to whoever reduced Anne-Lise’s face to torn flesh and dumped her on the heather. Whatever investigation he undertook, it ended in blankness.

  I return the file to Lafourgue.

  “I’m sure you’ll want to talk to André now,” he says.

  * * *

  The morgue is an old stone building with tiled walls, and Lafourgue leads us down into the basement. As we descend the stairs, my chest heaves and contracts. The air is being squeezed out of my lungs. Cold steps leading downward, out of the world of light. The tramp of feet in unison.

  At al-Mazra’a, the detainees are taken straight down into the mazy warren of basement rooms, where dingy corridors run in all directions. Bulbs glare on the ceiling but seem to emit very little light. The detainees follow us through the warren and at first their steps match ours. Then you start to hear it: the pace slowing, shuffling, feet desperately trying to prolong this walk. As soon as they step into the warren, they begin to forget the world. Everything shrinks to this long parade through the labyrinth, manacled between two or three soldiers. No one knows what lies at the end of it. Some look around, eyes flitting from side to side. Others just stare at the ground. Perhaps in their heads they are praying. Sometimes their mouths move mechanically, asking Allah to clear their minds and make their bodies ready.

  “Are you okay? Le Garrec . . . ?” The words sound far away. Lafourgue is standing at the bottom of the stairs talking to a man in long black rubber gloves and a white smock. I force myself to step down to meet them. Three metal autopsy tables, scrubbed down and gleaming, stand in the center of the room.

  There is always some blood left on the chairs, on the walls, on the floor. A new detainee will see it the moment he comes in: ghostly rust-brown imprints leaching into the plaster and worming into the pores in the stones. The final traces of the vanished. That molecular evidence remains in the secrecy of the interrogation rooms, tiny flecks of memory preserved in the engulfing wave of a war.