The Beast of the Camargue (33 page)

It seemed to happen in slow motion. He fired once and saw the .38 bullet hit the ground. When the man turned round, he corrected his aim and pressed the trigger. The shot hit the man in the left leg; he made to fire back but the Baron put a second round into the same place.

The man fired once, and then again. The Baron just had time to duck before another window blew apart. When he stood back up, the man had vanished. De Palma ran out after him.

He stopped dead when he heard a powerful motorbike roar away on the dirt path.

The farm was still vibrating from the shots and there was a reek of burned powder. Most of the sheep had taken shelter in the field just behind the barn, a few more were lingering in the garden.

De Palma went back to the dining room. The lock on the door that led to the bedrooms was an old model, easy to open. In the farm's stock of tools he found a length of thick wire and fixed up a makeshift key. Thirty seconds later, the lock gave way.

The walls of the shepherd's bedroom were covered in a faded yellow wallpaper dotted with pale blue and pink flowers. To the right of the window, a huge wardrobe occupied all of the space; to the left was a single chair, with a black suit jacket draped over its back. The brown walnut bed was covered with a thick eiderdown and a hand-knitted bedcover.

He opened the wardrobe. On the upper shelf, there were some piles of ironed shirts and below that some carefully folded black corduroy trousers. An old hunting rifle lay in front of the pair of trousers. He opened the breach. It was loaded with two Tunet double zero cartridges.

The rest of the room told him nothing. There was a Christ made of yellow metal mounted on ebony on one of the walls, and a dried olive branch nailed up above the bedstead.

At the far end, a door led to another connecting room. When he opened it, it felt as though something invisible had been released, as if an impalpable form passed by him and fled outside.

There were a few dusty sticks of furniture and some old photographs hung on the walls: sepia portraits of past generations; a group of people in a glass-fronted frame; a papier-mâché Tarasque with a man in a costume like a musketeer's, with knee breeches, buckled shoes, frilly shirt and broad hat. It was Bérard, posing beside the monster as a Knight of the Tarasque. Other knights were standing behind him.

To the left of the beast stood several officials, no doubt from the Tarascon town hall, and two taller men in Nazi uniforms.

The Baron remembered what Bérard had told him about the Resistance and the protection old Steinert had given him. He took the photograph down and turned it over. Behind it, Bérard had written in a fine hand: Festival of the Tarasque, 1942.

He hung it back up, then looked around the room. He saw at once that it had been ransacked. The chest of drawers had been searched. There were two dog-eared breviaries, a copy of the Provençal edition of Frédéric Mistral's
Mireio
, a
Trésor du Félibrige
and a few books by Roumanille and Daudet. As he closed one of the drawers, his foot struck some object. He bent down and picked up an ancient tome from the floor: Agrippa's
La philosophie occulte ou la magie
. The preface stated that this edition dated from 1911, but that the text had been written in 1540. It was a work for an initiate.

He sat on the bed and thought for a moment. Someone had come to search the place and had been disturbed. What had he been looking for? A book about magic?

De Palma reconstructed the scenario: on seeing him arrive, the man had locked the door leading to the bedrooms and had escaped through the rear window, which was not very high. So he probably had not had enough time to find what he had come for.

De Palma searched both rooms meticulously, but found nothing
unusual apart from that book about magic. He thought of the tomes he had seen in Steinert's office and tried to make connections, but he had to give up: he did not know enough about the occult arts to take this line of inquiry further.

He took down the framed photograph again and studied it closely: 1942, the festival of the Tarasque, with the Nazis in attendance … But it was just a picture like thousands of others.

All the same, Bérard had gone out of his way to tell him about that period. It had been the childhood of Steinert, the Boche's son, as they called him after the war. William's father had saved him from that shame, but his mother, Simone Maurel, had had her head shaved and her brother had been shot in the yard of the La Balme farmhouse.

He replaced the photograph and stepped back. The men and women posing beside the Tarasque were staring at the camera, their smiles fixed for posterity, not realizing that they were covering themselves with shame by consorting with the enemy.

They all seemed to belong to a single family, gathered around a ridiculous monster. One of them had placed his hand on a Nazi officer's shoulder. Bérard was puffing out his chest.

De Palma was sure that it was all there, in that photograph, but he was incapable of decoding it. Only Bérard could do that. The south wind pushed the black smoke of the blaze toward Les Fontaines.

The sheep had returned to the yard and were bleating for their missing master. De Palma let them into the pen and tipped some bundles of hay into the mangers. As he closed the doors again, he realized that he was going to have to return to the scene of the fire on foot.

On the road from Maussane to Fontvieille, several fire engines were parked end-to-end on the curb. Groups of firemen were talking, their faces running with sweat, their white hoods lowered round their necks.

When de Palma arrived, he saw that a gendarme officer was conferring with the commandant of the brigade.

“Good evening, Capitaine. I'm Michel de Palma from the Marseille P.J. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Have you got your papers?”

He produced his tricolor card and brandished it under the gendarme's nose.

“So how can I help you?”

“I just wanted to know whether you consider this to be arson or not.”

“It was arson,” the head fireman replied. “No doubt about it.”

The gendarme glared.

“Look,” he said. “I want to know what you're doing here.”

“I'm investigating. On my personal initiative.”

“Initiative my ass.”

“Listen, Monsieur, I have every reason to believe that this fire is connected with a case that we are investigating. Now, you can always refuse to talk, but I'll mention that fact in my official report. What do you say to that, Capitaine?”

“Piss off,” the gendarme replied, and turned on his heels.

“He's had a hard day,” the fireman said. “He's got his knickers in a twist.”

The capitaine slammed the door of his 406.

“As I just told you, this was definitely arson. A classic technique: an insecticide spiral, a wick on the end, and petrol in a container. You light it then walk away. The spiral burns down, and the fire starts several hours later.”

“I thought so,” de Palma said. “If you find out anything else, could you give me a ring?”

“No problem,” the fireman answered, taking the card that the Baron handed him.

Ingrid had put her arm through Bérard's and was walking him up and down the patio of La Balme, like a nurse.

“How is he?” the Baron asked.

“I've been expecting you for some time … I think he should be taken to hospital,” she whispered. “He seems to have lost his reason.”

Bérard's face was still just as listless. He looked as though he was staring into an unknown world, and had lost the spark that kept him so bright.

“Can you hear me, M. Bérard?”

The shepherd did not answer.

“I'm the police officer from the other day. Do you remember me?”

“I'm sure that he's in a state of shock, and should be hospitalized. I called the mayor of Eygalières. He told me that Bérard has no family, and that no one there will have the time to deal with him until tomorrow.”

“And you think it can't wait till then?”

“Not only think. I'm sure it can't! And you can't expect him to go home by himself in that condition.”

An ambulance from Tarascon came to fetch Bérard at 8 p.m. Ingrid and the Baron decided to go with him.

At 10:32 p.m., the old shepherd died. The doctors at the hospital failed to make any real diagnosis. They just mentioned his great age and the psychological shock.

That evening, Ingrid took de Palma's hand and squeezed it tight. She put up her hair, which had tumbled down over her shoulders. Her profile stood out against the crude light of the neon lamps. Between her cheek and the lobe of her ear, there was a beauty spot shaped like an ace of spades.

At two in the morning, de Palma dropped Ingrid off at La Balme. He told her about the photograph he had seen on the shepherd's bedroom wall and realized how hard it would be to use it now that Bérard was dead.

He left the farmhouse, drove up toward Eygalières and parked Maistre's 205 by the entrance to an olive grove, where the road to Maussane met the sunken track that led to Les Fontaines. No one could see the car from the main road.

He took a torch from the glove compartment, closed the car door quietly and headed off down the path, keeping the beam of light fixed on the ground.

To the right, the dark ranks of vines looked like ridges of coal in the shadows. There was a fragrance of ripe grapes and warm pine resin. Each footstep crunched in the sharp little stones along the
track. Suddenly, the Baron dived in among the trees and advanced into the darkness.

Les Fontaines farmhouse was about forty meters away, out in the open. He switched off the torch and felt his way forward in the moonlight. Five minutes later, he was crossing the yard.

The flock was calm. He slipped into the doorway, used his wire in the lock and went straight up to the bedrooms. Everything was eerily silent. He found the photograph, took it down and played his torch over the faces of the people around the Tarasque.

It was at that moment that he sensed he was not alone.

The photograph comes to life
.

The crowd surges with clamor
.

“La tarasco, la tarasco …”

The crowd opens like a wound
.

Before the papier-mâché monster that is rushing toward it
.

“La tarasco, la tarasco …”

Bérard is holding on to the monster's tail
.

He steers it with precise gestures
.

“La tarasco, la tarasco …”

Bérard calls out: “Laïssa la passa … Laïssa la passa …”

The knights join in: “La tarasco dou casteu … Lagadigadeu …”

The children run away screaming
.

The monstrous mouth clacks its teeth
.

One of its knights finds a girl in the crowd
.

She is beautiful and dark, like a gypsy virgin
.

The beast's servant captures her
.

Two other knights force her up onto the animal's neck, chanting: “Lagadigadeu …”

The virgin roars and wriggles her bare legs
.

“La tarasco, la tarasco …”

Bérard grips the beast's tail so as to make a seasaw movement
.

The entire crowd sings: “La tarasco, la tarasco …”

The neck rises
.

The virgin bounces upward
.

“La tarasco, la tarasco …”

She straddles the Tarasque
.

Her thighs are half naked
.

She grabs at the hideous monster's mane
.

“La tarasco, la tarasco …”

People are laughing and giggling
.

People are sparkling, their eyes lit up with pastis
.

Glasses clink
.

On the terrace of the Café du Centre, people are chatting in German
.

In German and in Provençal
.

De Palma spun round and pointed his torch at the window. A livid face stared at him from outside, its features carved out by the beam of light.

He drew his Bodyguard. The face vanished at once, and he heard the thud of a body landing on the ground. He ran to the window, opened it and played his torch over the farmyard. It was empty. In the pen, the sheep were jostling each other, barging against their mangers.

The temperature had dropped. The muggy heat of the past few days was over. Breezes were blowing between the clumps of rushes, making wrinkles on the smooth waters.

Moracchini and the two forensic technicians jumped off the punt that Texeira had lent them. Just behind them, de Palma and Romero were sitting in an inflatable dinghy, making a first reconnaissance tour around the reed hut. At each push, Romero's pole splashed loudly in the water.

Richard, a forensics veteran, entered the hut first. He stayed there for half an hour before emerging carrying an armful of bags which he placed in a plastic crate.

“We'll put the seals on later, when we get back to the office,” Romero said. “I'll just note down what they are.”

“There's quite a lot of stuff,” said Richard. “It looks rich.”

“That's good news,” Moracchini said, looking at the packets.

Richard had listed the contents of each sample and the number of the marker.

“I'm just going to take a couple more shots, then we'll go down into the hole.”

“As you like.”

De Palma and Romero examined the bank that ran around the hut. They didn't see much, apart from bird tracks in the sodden earth. They were all over the place.

But no traces of human feet.

They went back to the place where de Palma and Texeira had noticed, some days earlier, that the bottom of the marsh had been disturbed.

The water level had risen slightly and there was nothing usable. But the Baron still wanted to explore in the northerly direction given by the footprint he had found. He advanced through the reeds, but the vegetation grew so dense that he had to concede defeat: it was impossible to go this way.