Frank stood for a moment in the middle of the garage, between sunlight and shade, and then he, too, removed his gas mask. His face was deathly tired.
Morelli went up to him. ‘Frank, what happened? You look like you’ve been to hell and back.’
Frank turned to him and answered with the voice of an old man and the eyes of someone who could see no more reason in life.
‘Worse, Claude, much worse. All the devils in hell would cross themselves before going in there.’
FIFTY-NINE
Frank and Morelli watched the stretcher being carried out of the garage and their eyes followed the men sliding it into the ambulance. Lying there, covered with a dark canvas, was the body they had found in the shelter – the wizened, faceless corpse wearing, like a mask, the face of a murdered man.
After Frank had come out of the shelter in shock, all the men, one by one, had entered the bunker, emerging with the same expression of horror. The sight of that mummified body lying in its crystal case wearing the stiffened mask of No One’s latest victim was a sight that could stagger the soundest mind, a vision they would carry with them day and night.
Frank still found what he had seen hard to believe. He felt unclean and wanted to wash himself again and again as if to cleanse his body would disinfect his mind from the evil that hovered in that place. He felt ill at the mere thought that he had breathed that air, as if it were saturated by a virus so contagious that it could infect anyone with criminal madness.
There was one thing Frank could not stop asking himself. Why? He realized that the answer was unimportant, at least for now, but the question continued to bounce around in his head.
He had gone into the bunker through the reinforced door, scanning the room from top to bottom as he advanced through the smoke, his gun in hand and his heart beating so fast that it kept him from hearing the deafening music. When he turned it off, all that was left was the rasp of his breath inside the gas mask. Apart from the motionless presence of the body – displayed in its monstrous vanity in a transparent coffin – all that he had found were empty rooms.
He had stood there looking at the corpse, mesmerized, staring at its pitiful nudity, unable to remove his eyes from that horrible spectacle. He had stared for a long time at the face covered with its death mask, which with the passing of time was beginning to resemble the rest of the body. There were some clots of blood on the neck of the corpse that peeked out from beneath the torn edges of the mask, proof of the difficult nature of that unnatural attempted transplant.
What was the point of the murders? All those people killed just to persuade a dead man that he was still alive? What kind of morbid pagan idolatry could inspire that kind of monstrosity? What was the explanation, if ever there could be any logic to that funeral rite that had required the sacrifice of so many innocent people?
This is true insanity, he had thought. The ability to feed off oneself only to generate more insanity.
When he had finally been able to tear his eyes away from that sight, he had gone out to allow each of the men to enter in turn.
The noise of the ambulance doors slamming shut brought Frank back to the present, and he saw Roberts’s lanky figure coming towards him. There was a police car waiting with its engine running and the door open. Roberts did not look like he wanted to linger there.
‘Okay. We’re done here,’ Frank said in an expressionless voice.
Frank and Morelli shook Roberts’s hand and said goodbye in the same monotone voice. The inspector found it hard to look them in the eye. Although he had lived through the affair on a more marginal level, and although he was not as deeply involved from the beginning, Roberts now had the same look of profound weariness. He too, probably, couldn’t wait to go back to his routine, to the stories of everyday poverty and greed, to men and women who killed out of jealousy or desire for money or by accident. Madness that was momentary and not for ever, madness that he would not be forced to carry around in his memory for the rest of his life. Like everyone else there, all he wanted was to get away from that house as quickly as possible and try to forget that it ever existed.
Frank heard the thud of the door closing and the sound of the engine, and then the car disappeared up the ramp that led to the street. Gavin and his men had already gone, as had Gachot with his team. They had driven away down the road descending to the city, their blue vans loaded with men, weapons, sophisticated equipment, and the prosaic sense of loss that always assails armies, large and small, after a defeat.
Even Morelli had sent most of his men back to headquarters. A couple of them were still there checking on final operations, after which they would escort the ambulance back to the morgue.
The roadblocks had been removed and the long line of cars waiting at either end was slowly clearing, thanks to a couple of policemen who were directing traffic and keeping curious onlookers away. The traffic jam had kept the professional busybodies – the reporters – from reaching the house. When they had arrived, it was all over and, most importantly, there was no news: the only thing the media could share with the police this time was disappointment. Frank had delegated Morelli to speak to them and the sergeant had got rid of them quickly and efficiently. Actually, it hadn’t been too hard.
‘I’m going back, Frank. How about you?’
Frank looked at his watch and thought about General Nathan Parker waiting furiously at the airport. He’d convinced himself that he would appear before him wearing the relief of the finished nightmare like a new suit. He had so wanted it to be all over, and instead it was endless.
‘Go on, Claude. I’m leaving now too.’
They looked at each other and the sergeant simply raised his hand. They said as few words as possible, because both seemed to have used them all up. Morelli walked away, up the ramp to his car. Frank saw him disappear around the curve hidden by the trees.
The ambulance backed up and turned to leave the courtyard, and the man next to the driver gazed at him blankly through the window. He didn’t seem the least bit shocked by what they were carrying in the back. They were just transporting corpses, whether they had been dead an hour, a year or a century. It was a job like any other. There was a folded sports page on the dashboard. As the white van drove away, Frank could see the man’s hand reach for the paper.
He stood alone in the middle of the courtyard under the summer afternoon sun, unable to feel the heat. The air was filled with the listless melancholy of a dismantled circus, when the show must move on. There were no more acrobats or women in colourful costumes, no more lights or music or applause. All that was left was a pile of sawdust strewn with sequins and excrement. And a clown with streaked facepaint standing in the sun. The vision is gone and nothing is left now but reality.
Despite the thought of Helena waiting for him to come, Frank could not bring himself to leave the house. He felt that there was something he had mistakenly taken for granted. Like everything that had happened up to then, it was a question of details. Tiny details. The detail of the record cover in the video, the reflection of Stricker’s message in the mirror, words turned upside down that had turned out to have an entirely different meaning . . .
Frank forced himself to think rationally.
The entire time that Jean-Loup had been under police protection, there were men at the house day and night. How had he managed to evade them? How had he slipped away at night to stalk and slaughter his next victim, then return unseen bearing his vile trophy?
On the left side of the property, by the gate, there was a sort of embankment that fell steeply away. It was too dangerous to negotiate, considering that he would have had to travel the road at night and without a torch. Maybe he’d left through the garden. In that case, in order to reach the street he would have had to go out through the living room at the front of the house near the swimming pool, climb over the fence, and cross through the garden of the twin house where the Parkers were staying.
If that were the case, someone would have noticed
him eventually. On one side he’d had several well-trained policemen. On the other side had been Ryan Mosse and Nathan Parker, two men who most certainly always slept with one eye open. He could have got away with it once, but sooner or later all that nocturnal movement would have been discovered. So that theory didn’t hold water either.
Everyone had assumed that there was a second exit and the logic of construction said that there had to be one. In the event of a nuclear explosion, the house would cave in and the rubble would close off every avenue of escape. Still, the meticulous search of the underground shelter had revealed nothing, not a trace.
And yet . . .
Frank checked his watch again, for the umpteenth time. He put his hands in his jacket pockets, feeling the car keys in one and the hard shape of his mobile phone in the other. It made him think of Helena, sitting in the airport with her legs crossed, gazing around and hoping to see him in the crowd.
He thought of phoning her, in spite of Nathan Parker. He nearly gave in to the urge, but then thought better of it. He didn’t want to betray Helena and alert the general. Instead, he wanted him to sit there, furious with the entire world but unsuspecting, and wait.
Frank took his hands from his pockets and opened and closed his fists until he felt the tension ease. Then he turned and went back inside the shelter, stopping at the door and studying the underground lair of No One. In the shadows he could see red and green lights and the displays of the electronic equipment. He suddenly remembered all the stories his father had told him when he was a boy. Stories of fairies and gnomes and ogres who lived in terrifying subterranean worlds that they left to steal babies from their cradles and take them into their dens for ever. Except that he was no child and this was not a fable. This was a story with no happy ending.
He stepped forward and turned on the light. Despite its confines, the shelter was rather spacious. That woman’s paranoia and fears for the future must have cost her husband a pretty penny all those years ago. The construction was square and divided into three rooms. On the right was a small space that served both as a bathroom and storeroom. It contained every kind of tinned food imaginable, stacked in an orderly manner on shelves facing the toilet and sink, along with enough reserves of water to outlast any siege. The room that had held the corpse in its crystal coffin also contained a spare single bed, off to one side. The thought of Jean-Loup sleeping next to the dead body gave him a chill, as if an evil breath had touched his back, as if a stranger were standing behind him.
Frank turned his head slowly from side to side while opening and closing his eyes at regular intervals and projecting the images of the room on to his mind like slides.
Click.
A detail.
Click.
Look for a detail.
Click.
What’s wrong? There’s something strange about this room.
Click.
Something tiny, something incongruous.
Click.
You know what it is. You saw it. You registered it.
Click, click, click . . .
The room appeared and disappeared as if lit by a flash. He went on opening and closing his eyes, hoping each time that whatever he was seeking might magically appear.
The wall on the left.
The shelves on top, full of recording and electronic equipment that Jean-Loup used to filter his voice and transform it into No One’s.
The two Tannoy speakers set up for the best possible stereo effect.
A sophisticated CD and mini-disc reader.
A mixer.
A cassette player and DAT machine.
A record player for old 33s.
The records set up on the lower shelf.
LPs on the left, CDs on the right.
In the centre, the surface that he used as a desk.
Atop another mixer, a Mac G4 computer that ran the sound equipment.
At the back, against the wall, a black device that looked like another small CD player.
The front wall.
Metal cabinet, set into the wall, empty.
The wall on the right.
The doors to the other rooms and in the middle a wooden table and a small halogen lamp.
Frank stopped suddenly.
Another small CD player.
He walked to the back of the room and carefully examined the black box. He wasn’t a stereo aficionado, but from what he knew, it looked like a fairly ordinary model made of black metal with a small display in front. It didn’t even look very new. There were wires coming out that went to a hole at the bottom of the shelf. There was a series of numbers on the bottom, written on the metal in white marker pen. Someone had tried sloppily to erase the numbers, but they were still legible.
1-10
2-7
3–4
4-8
He was puzzled. He pressed the EJECT button and the tray on the left of the display slid out soundlessly. There was a CD with writing on the gold surface, again in marker pen, this time in red.
Robert Fulton-‘Stolen Music’.
That damned record again. That music was following Frank like a curse. He stopped to think. It was natural that Jean-Loup would make himself a digital copy of the record, so that he could listen to it without ruining the original. Then why, when he killed Allen Yoshida, did he need to take the actual LP? There was certainly some symbolic meaning, but there could also be another reason . . .
Frank turned to look at the modern CD player next to the other components of the sound system and then turned again to the other, much more modest, piece of equipment. And he wondered: Why would someone with a CD player like that use a cheap thing like this?
There were many answers to that question, each one with some merit. But Frank knew that none of them was right. He leaned his hand on the black metal of the device and ran his fingers over the numbers written in white as if he expected them to be raised and palpable.
A theory is a journey that can last months, years, sometimes an entire lifetime. The intuition that ignites it runs through the brain at the speed of light, and its effect is immediate. One moment all is darkness and the next, everything is light.
Frank suddenly realized what that second player was for and what the numbers that someone had tried to erase from its surface meant. They were the numbers of a combination, presumably for a lock somewhere. But where? He pushed the tray back in and pressed the start button. A series of numbers appeared on the display, showing the track being played and the elapsed time since it had started.
He watched the seconds ticking over slowly on the small, illuminated rectangle. After ten seconds he pressed the button that moved from the first track to the next. Then, he waited until the number 7 appeared and went to the third track. When the display showed 4, he went to the fourth. And when he read the number 8, he pressed the stop button.
Click.
The click was so faint that Frank would not have heard it if he hadn’t been holding his breath. He turned in the direction of the sound and saw that the metal cabinet to his right had moved over a few inches. The two sides were so perfectly matched that they seemed to be part of the wall.
He stuck his finger into the crack and pulled. Sliding along two runners on either side, the metal cabinet came forward about a yard, revealing a round door behind it. In one corner of the metal door, there was a wheel that looked just like the one in the laundry room. When they had searched the bunker, they hadn’t asked themselves why this cabinet was completely empty. Now that he had an answer, Frank found the question that nobody had thought to ask. The cabinet was there to hide a second entrance.
Frank turned the wheel counterclockwise without any effort until he heard the lock click, then he pushed and the door opened, sliding soundlessly on its hinges. Jean-Loup Verdier must have spent a great deal of time on technical knowledge and maintenance. Behind the door was the opening of a round cement tunnel, about a yard and a half in diameter. It was a black hole that started from the shelter; wher
e it ended, God only knew.
Frank slid his phone into his shirt pocket, removed his jacket, and pulled the Glock out of its holster on his belt. He knelt on the ground, wriggled past the rods holding up the metal shelves and crawled into the tunnel entrance. He halted a moment, staring at the tunnel and the darkness it promised. He could see no more than a yard in the dim light of the tunnel, partly obscured by the cabinet and his own body. It was probably dangerous, very dangerous, to squeeze blindly into that tunnel.
Then he remembered who had escaped through the tunnel and everything that person had done, and he decided to follow.
SIXTY
Pierrot peeped out from behind the bushes where he was hiding and looked on to the street, relieved to see that all the cars and people who were waiting had left, along with the policemen who had been stopping them. Good. Now it was good, but before he had been really afraid . . .
After leaving the radio station, he had walked up to Jean-Loup’s house, his knapsack on his back. He had been a little nervous because he wasn’t sure that he would be able to find the street, even though he had been to Beausoleil several times in Jean-Loup’s car, which was called a Mercedes. He hadn’t paid much attention to the route because he had been too busy laughing and looking at his friend’s face. He always laughed when he was with Jean-Loup. Well, not really always, because there was someone who had said that only fools laughed all the time and he didn’t want people to think he was a fool.
And anyway, he wasn’t used to going around by himself because his mother was afraid that something would happen to him or that people would make fun of him, like Mme Narbonne’s daughter, the one with the crooked teeth and pimples who called him ‘retard’. He didn’t know what a retard was and when he had asked his mother, she had turned her back to him, but not fast enough to keep him from noticing that her eyes were wet with tears. Pierrot had not been too worried about that. His mother’s eyes were often damp, like when she watched those movies on TV where there were two people kissing at the end with violin music and then they got married. The only thing he had really been worried about was that his mother’s damp eyes meant that sooner or later he would have to marry Mme Narbonne’s daughter.