The Beast of the Camargue (44 page)

Moracchini's hair was full of long pine needles. She drew her Manurhin and hefted it in her hands.

“You're probably right, Anne, there's very little chance that he's here. But we still have to go. No two ways about it.”

“If you say so,” she replied, watching him push forward under cover of the vines.

She let him go on for a few meters and headed for the drive so as to block any possible escape route.

She had not reached her objective when a first shot rang out. The bullet ricocheted in front of her, raising a clod of earth. She dived down onto the dusty path, and rolled over to take cover behind a row of vines.

“Are you O.K., Anne?” De Palma cried out.

She just had time to reply before a second shot hit the drive at random. She realized that the sniper could not see her and concluded that he must be in the house and firing from a first-floor window, just behind the pine tree that must be blocking his line of sight.

The Baron had crawled toward the farmhouse, flattened to the ground. A breeze blew sour stenches that came from the pens, and the smell of oil from the farming machinery. Black flies danced in the air around him, and mocked his jeopardy. There was dust in the sweat of his forehead and his clothes were covered with dirt.

When he was no more than ten meters from the buildings, he stood up and studied the windows. Everything was still. Despite Moracchini's fears, there was no dog. He concluded that the herd had gone out and that the dogs were guarding the animals.

He decided to move on to where he could flatten himself against the wall, when he heard the characteristic sound of a motorcycle starting up. It was coming from the garage he had noticed when he was at the far end of the drive.

“The car, Anne!” he shouted. “Get to the car!”

The double doors of the garage banged against its walls and a big motorbike rocketed out. De Palma stood up and fired. The driver bent down over the handlebars and started weaving to right and left. De Palma fired again and again, fanning his shots. When the clip was empty, he threw down his gun, drew his Colt .45 and ran after the bike. A single bullet hit the motorcyclist, who jerked in his saddle.

Thirty meters further on, Moracchini braced herself in firing position and aimed at the motorcyclist. Three shots rang out. None of them hit their moving target. The bike slalomed once more, then swerved left into a field and disappeared.

When de Palma came over to her, fury was still gleaming on his face. She said nothing, but flicked open the cylinder of her Manurhin, removed the still-warm casings and filled the empty chambers with three new .38 shells.

“We have to search the house,” she said, frowning.

“Forget it. I think we'd better go and see Chandeler. He's expecting me.”

Chandeler was sitting in his chair, a glass of Islay, his favorite whisky, in his hand.

Moracchini and de Palma walked toward him. Both of them had seen enough dead men to know that the killer had been there just before them. A trickle of blood still glistened on the gray-veined marble of the living room, sketching its Chinese calligraphy as far as the lawyer's luxurious Persian rug.

Chandeler had looked death in the face. He had probably even talked with his executioner. Vincent Soubeyrand had put a bullet in his head, a hollow-point which had left a neat round hole in his forehead and blown apart the back of his skull. Pieces of brain were stuck to the armchair.

She put a hand on the corpse's forehead.

“This happened less than an hour ago,” said de Palma, leaning over the body.

“It was a nine-millimeter, for sure. And I'll eat my hat if it wasn't a SIG that killed him.”

Chandeler's murderer had folded his victim's hands over his stomach and placed a white feather between his fingers.

“Jesus, all of this really gives me the creeps,” Moracchini said, taking a step backward.

De Palma picked up the feather and took a long look at it.

“The signature hasn't varied from the start; but he can't take them to the Camargue any more for the creature to eat them. He's panicking, Anne. He no longer knows where to turn and he's going to start shooting in all directions.”

“Do you have any idea of the place where he's hiding?”

“No. Chandeler was our last chance to find out. He's crafty and he's been observing us for some time now. He knows how we operate. He's always at least one move ahead of us.”

“And we can't even give out his description.”

Saint Joseph's was a private secondary school whose surrounding wall took up a large part of one side of rue de Beaucaire, just a few meters away from Tarascon town hall.

It was 5 p.m.

In front of the gates, children were running in all directions, excited by their first day back at school.

The Baron spotted Gilbert Sicard, who was watching them come out. Two days before, Sicard had replied to the message de Palma had left on his answering machine. The former history student had become a teacher and was now headmaster of a Catholic school.

“Good evening, M. de Palma. Come into my office.”

They crossed a concrete playground planted with three ancient plane trees. The classroom windows looked out over a shadowy courtyard, and a gray door led to the headmaster's office at the far end.

“This is all very sad …” Sicard said, weighing in his hands a copy of his dissertation, before putting it down on his desk.

“You're just about the last chance I've got.”

Sicard had an odd-looking face: round, with eyes like marbles and thick oval glasses perched on an aquiline nose.

“I must tell you that I myself come from those very same villages. My mother was born in Maussane and my father came from Fontvieille.”

Sicard opened his thesis and riffled through the pages with his thumb.

“There are things missing from my version,” he said. “But you must understand that I wrote it in 1966. I was very young at the time.”

He knew the history of his native village thoroughly. He spoke at length about the period of the Occupation, and named one after the other the families that had collaborated with the Nazis. The Reys had been the most involved. One of their sons, Christian's uncle, had died in Pomerania in the SS uniform of the Charlemagne Division. The Reys had consolidated their fortune and had not been among the families investigated during the subsequent purge. Christian Rey's grandmother had even been part of the kangaroo court that had judged Simone Maurel.

“These are very painful stories,” he said, closing the cover.

He then spoke of the bogus resistance fighters who had shot Simone Maurel's brother. De Palma noted the names of Gabriel Morini and Sébastien Marceau. Emile Maurel had been shot down without any semblance of justice. Gabriel Morini and Sébastien Marceau had gone to La Balme and had killed him in the guise of belonging to the resistance.

“Why do you think they did that?”

“For money, Monsieur! Or rather, for land. The Maurel family was the richest in the region and it has to be said that Simone's parents hadn't always been very straight when they bought land. Just before the war, they had got their hands on the Downlands by paying off old Morini, an Italian lumberjack who had married a girl from Eygalières, a girl called Bérard … Justine Bérard. He was an old drunk who had sold the land to Maurel for a song. The Maurels wanted it all, and for that the younger members of the Morini family could never forgive them! That transaction ruined them in fact, do you see?”

De Palma saw the jigsaw coming together.
Because that's where they should have looked. In the family
. He opened his bag and took out the photograph he had found in Bérard's house. Sicard took it and stared at it for some time, as though running a magnifying glass over each person in the shot.

“Where did you find this picture?” he asked with a frown.

“I'd rather not say.”

Sicard put the photograph down and folded his hands. A glint of bitterness turned his eyes cold.

“It's the Tarasque,” he said, still staring at the picture. “The Knights of the Tarasque who are standing round the monster are descended from the most powerful families of Tarascon and its vicinity. You can see Bérard, Emile Maurel, Lucien Soubeyrand … At the end of the fifteenth century, King René codified the brotherhood of the Tarasque in such a way that the sons of the great families of the region came together instead of fighting duels. In those days, it was only the sons of the powerful who had the right to serve the monster. Before the war, this tradition was still in force and that must have made a lot of jealous people. Especially because these families are very traditional. The Bérards descended from one of Mistral's daughters, and I think that the Soubeyrands were connected with Roumanille. In this part of Provence, let me tell you that is quite something!

“Let me tell you also that during the war they had quite a problem choosing a side, because most of them were Catholic fascists. But they were also patriots, Bérard and Soubeyrand above all. Etienne Maurel, too. They formed the Vincent network and were in the resistance right from the start. They were also members of the
Félibrige
, that famous literary circle … Bérard was even its laureate once.”

Sicard opened his hand and pointed a thumb toward the ceiling.

“So here we have tradition, jealousy, revenge … In the series of murders that happened last summer you can find all of that. According to what you told me earlier, it was a conflict between two conceptions of Provence: traditionalists and those who wanted to use its folklore for more commercial ends. It's more complex than that. I know nothing about the plans for the leisure park that you mentioned. I do know that the real motive was revenge.”

Control of the Tarasque had changed hands, and Vincent Soubeyrand, the heir to an epoch, could not bear that fact. In the middle, there was Bérard, the former head of the Knights and the master of them all. Old man Soubeyrand had died in the 1950s after his fall from fortune, and his son Vincent was badly unbalanced. He was notoriously violent, and from what Moracchini had managed to unearth so far, he had been jailed several times for assault and wounding during village dances and election campaigns.

“What about Steinert?”

“As a matter of fact, I don't know much about him. I always thought it odd that he bought the La Balme farmhouse. I don't know why, but I said to myself that there was a secret behind all that.”

“He was the son of Simone Maurel and Karl Steinert.”

Sicard stared at the photograph. His eyes were wide, and shone like a mirror reflecting flames from a fire.

“If there is anyone who should have been out for revenge, it was him. And he didn't do it. That will be the final truth of this tragedy.”

He uttered this last remark in a murmur that lost itself in the silence of the empty school.

It appeared on the front page of
La Provence
.

Giant Crocodile Shot in the Camargue

After the panther of the creeks, this might have sounded like another hoax, if the farmers of the Camargue had not been finding the carcasses of bull calves and colts in the swamps of the delta … Completely devoured by jaws of an exceptional size…

… According to the first examinations carried out by specialists from the Natural History Museum of Marseille, the creature was a Nile crocodile, a species increasingly rare. It is now extinct in Egypt itself, where the animal once symbolized the god Sobek. Only a few specimens of this formidable predator have been identified recently, but further upstream, in the region of the great African lakes.

This crocodile had already ravaged flocks of sheep and had devoured a wild colt. It was the local farmers who decided to organize hunts which resulted in the finding of the reptile …

How did such a creature come to be living wild in the Camargue? That is the question which the gendarmerie of Tarascon are now looking into …

Moracchini put down the newspaper and rubbed her eyes.

Daniel Romero arrived in the office, three parallel wrinkles marking his forehead. His gestures were nervous. The day before, he had been given a dressing-down by a magistrate and he was worried already
about the appointment he had at 11 a.m. with Delpiano, the head of the squad.

“Have you seen the news?”

Romero shrugged his shoulders without even glancing at the paper.

“Have we got the D.N.A. results?”

“Yes, they arrived not an hour ago.”

“And?”

“It's certainly the monster they killed yesterday. It devoured the bodies of Christian Rey and the others. We're on the right track.”

Romero muttered something then looked at his watch.

“Have you called Michel?”

“I've been trying for an hour, he can't be found. Neither on his home number nor on his mobile.”

“Yesterday, he told me that he was going to take a trip to the Camargue. He wanted to check a few things out.”

Moracchini picked up
La Provence
again and crumpled its pages as she turned them.

It was the end of October. Over the delta, clouds had gathered and were weighing on the sky still red from the sun.

The Baron was alone, barefoot, on the long beach of Beauduc.

All day long he had been searching the reed beds around the observation hut once again, with rage in his heart. He had found precisely nothing.

Texeira had joined him late that morning and had told him about the black stork he had spotted, not far from the buildings of La Capelière. They had then called up the memory of William Steinert, and the hunt which the farmers had organized since the previous week to find the crocodile.

The sea breeze was shifting the sand across the surface of the beach. It made his ankles itch. He sat on the ground and leaned back against a breakwater. In front of him, the gray black trunk of a poplar lay like a huge carcass on the golden sand. The next storm would probably roll it out to sea, or deposit it further along the delta.