The Madonna of Notre Dame (16 page)

“Are you looking for me?”

“Excuse me?”

“You were at the cemetery earlier on. I saw you talking to Luna’s parents. Are you looking for me now?”

“You’re Nadia, aren’t you?”

“Did you just follow me all the way here?”

“Followed you? No, Luna’s mother told me where to find you.”

“You know Luna’s mother?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And what does Luna’s mother do for a living?”

“She’s a home care worker. Why do you ask?”

“Just checking.”

“Good Lord—checking what?”

“You’re one of Luna’s mother’s patients, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. She’s helping me with my physical therapy. Over time we’ve become friendly. She often talked about Luna. As you can see, I have health problems, problems with my joints. What about you? Were you a friend of Luna’s?

“From the university, yes. Are you a cop?”

“A cop? Not at all. You think I’ve got the build for it?”

The girl gave him a slight smile. “Then what is it you want?”

“It’s hard to say. I’d like to talk about Luna. I didn’t really know her but her mother said you were her best friend.”

She suddenly disappeared inside, allowing Kern the time to glimpse a few insignificant details at the back: the white tiles of a bathroom, a pink shower curtain with mauve hearts, a bathtub equipped with old-fashioned faucets. Nadia reappeared as quickly as she’d gone, holding a cell phone, the strap of a Louis Vuitton bag wedged in the crook of her arm. She locked the door and stuffed the keys into her bag. “I’m sorry, I have an urgent appointment and I’m running late. And something else:
I’ve only just left the cemetery, Luna is six feet under. I really don’t feel like talking about her right now.”

“Yes, of course. I understand. Another time, maybe.”

“That’s right.”

She walked away, leaving behind a heady, sugary scent that seemed to be coming from her hair or the hollow of her neck. Left alone in the middle of bicycles and scooters, in this overheated courtyard, with the fever slowly spreading through his body, and starting to doubt his investigative abilities, Father Kern wondered how many lies he’d just had to tell in less than a minute in order just to get a glimpse of a vague, fleeting bit of bath overhung with a shower curtain.

He walked at random, going back up the street he’d come down earlier. When he reached the boulevard, he paused outside a shop window and began to fill his pipe. He did so with the utmost care, isolating himself from the surrounding noise, focusing his attention on the pinches of tobacco he was pushing one after the other deep into the chamber with a slightly trembling finger. It was only after drawing a few puffs that he noticed he’d stopped outside one of the many sex shops lining the sidewalk. Leaning forward, he examined with a curiosity that had nothing fake about it the various pieces of red and black vinyl underwear, the high-heeled boots and pumps, the nighties with strategic transparency, and the satin nurse’s uniforms, while above him, the swirls of Virginia-scented smoke assumed the purple color of the three neon letters that formed the word SEX. He suddenly straightened up and looked around, animated by an urgency that seemed to have unexpectedly come over him. He walked over to Rue Blanche once again, passing Nadia’s building without even glancing at it, then, a couple of dozen yards farther on, disappeared into a shop above which there was a luminous @ sign. Father Kern practically assaulted the counter
behind which, slumped on his stool, wedged between a fan and a photocopier, sat an Asian man with dark rings under his eyes.

“I’d like a computer. I need to use the Internet.”

“You can’t smoke in here, boss.”

Kern went back out to empty his pipe on the sidewalk, then repeated his request. The other man looked at him with a gloomy expression.

“It’s one euro for fifteen minutes. Three euros for an hour.”

Kern took out his wallet and put a ten-euro bill flat on the counter. “I need at least two hours. And give me a spot out of the way, please.”

As it happened, it took him less than forty minutes to find what he was looking for. Father Kern was savvy with the basic functions of the Internet thanks to Mourad, the cathedral guard who, the previous summer, had agreed to give him a few IT lessons after closing time in the evening. Consequently, the priest had been able to discover countless websites dedicated to collectors of old alarm clocks. At one point, he’d even considered buying a computer, but had never been able to drum up the courage to venture into a store, despite Mourad’s offer to go with him.

“I need to make a phone call.”

“Have you finished with the machine, boss?”

“Yes, I’ve finished.”

“You booked two hours.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You’ve got over an hour left.”

“I won’t be needing it. What I do need, however, is to make a call.”

“Can I give your computer to somebody else?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll lose your hour.”

“Never mind that. I’d like to make a phone call now.”

The man on the stool held out his arms toward a row of numbered glass doors with wooden frames. “You’ve got a choice. Pick whichever you like. Where are you calling?”

“What do you mean where?”

“Which country, boss? Morocco? Tunisia? Algeria?”

“An orange Fanta. And the check.”

Gombrowicz had sat at a table from which he could see the end of the street. The waiter brought his drink. “Wouldn’t you like to sit outside?”

“I’m comfortable indoors.”

“Are you sure? In this heat, you’d be better off at a table outside if you want to see what’s going on there.”

The police officer gave the waiter an intense look. Then, without saying a word, he turned once again and fixed his eyes on the spot he was staring at outside. The young man, whose cheeks were covered by thick sideburns, walked away with a deep sigh which lasted as far as the counter.

Gombrowicz remained there for an easy half an hour, sitting alone indoors, while customers went to and from the tables on the sidewalk in the vague, diesel-smelling draft caused by the passing buses. He finally got up, after leaving the money for the check in the small plastic dish abandoned next to his glass. He remained in the doorway for a moment, looking down the street, taking the time to light a cigarette before being turned out by the waiter with sideburns, whose comings and goings between the sidewalk and the interior were incessant. He left the café running, neglecting the traditional, automatic “Thanks, bye,” as though seized by a sudden urgency to stretch his legs. He crossed the street after letting a bus with a German license plate
drive past, and hurtled down the sidewalk across the road, to a shop he dashed into like the wind.

“The guy in the light-colored suit who just left, what was he up to?”

“You can’t smoke here, boss.”

Gombrowicz took out his police ID from the fanny pack he wore across the shoulder. “I asked you a question, Bruce Lee.”

“He bought six dozen spring rolls.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“He used the Internet, boss. What else?”

“Is that all?”

“Then he made a call.”

“Where to? Do you know?”

“No idea.”

“Which computer did he use?”

“The one down there.”

The police officer sat at the station and put his hand on the mouse. He clicked on the search history of the session that still hadn’t expired. Once he’d scrolled through everything, from the first to the last page viewed by the previous user, he sat back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and stared up at the ceiling.

“Please, boss, you can’t smoke in here.”

“Old pervert.”

“What did you say, boss?”

“I said: disgusting asshole.”

And while Gombrowicz was diving back into the stifling heat of Rue Blanche, the Asian man got up, seemingly against his will, from his stool. He went to the computer the police officer had just left. His vacant eyes suddenly lit up when he read the screen:

“North African student, 22, affectionate and sensual, entertains mature and polite men for relaxation and intimacy in Paris
18th. Dark hair—hazel eyes—5 ft 4, 120 lb—natural 34C. 7 p.m. to midnight. Relaxing massage. Manual or oral finish. Affectionate or severe. Four-hand massage possible with a sympathetic friend.”

And below the cell phone number, there was an amateur photo taken with a flash, showing a dark-haired young woman with a blurred face posing naked in her bathtub, lifting her heavy breasts with her hands while the curve of her waist, her buttocks, and her sex disappeared behind a pink shower curtain with mauve hearts.

A police officer from the Police Inspection Committee and a female magistrate from the Legal Inspection Committee at 36 Quai des Orfèvres took her testimony during the lunch hour, in a small room that was sometimes used as an interrogation room for criminals caught in the act. They’d fired their volley of questions at her, constantly coming back, like waves, to that moment when everything had gone haywire, when she’d decided to open the window and remove the young prisoner’s handcuffs. And Claire Kauffmann had thought, “
How many times are they going to ask me the same question? They keep coming back to it. Each time, they change one or two words in the way they phrase it, but it’s always the same question. Are there really so many different ways to report an act that took two or three seconds? Are there so many different angles to view the situation from? Isn’t the truth just the truth?
” And the young magistrate would reiterate her explanations over and over again, each time also altering two or three words in her statement.

She’d broken off right in the middle of a sentence, suddenly remembering her morning conversation with Father Kern, wondering
if her command that Landard should untie Thibault, a command that had turned out to have such dire consequences, had been dictated by a legal or a moral decision on her part. And the policeman sitting opposite her, who, from the moment the interrogation began, had kept moving his cup of coffee from one side of the table to the other, had rushed into that moment of hesitation. “Basically, you’re wondering if you weren’t too humane toward the suspect, aren’t you?” And since Claire Kauffmann hadn’t replied on the spot, he’d insisted, “You’re wondering if this brief moment of weakness or—how shall I put it?—of compassion, was the cause of his death, right?”

She came out of the interrogation session feeling completely drained, incapable of forming any thought, however basic, and able only to ask herself if she’d made the right decision in specializing in criminal law. They’d sent her back to her job, to her role as a Sisyphus in pencil skirt and tight hair bun. She didn’t yet know if she’d be disciplined. For the investigators, it was a matter of establishing whether young Thibault should have been questioned in a hospital environment rather than in the Crime Squad offices. In other words, the investigation was turning away from her, clinging to technical questions, to procedure, leaving her to face her own questions alone.

She looked at her watch and realized she wouldn’t have time for lunch before her next hearing at two o’clock. So she briefly went back up to her office to pick up the file of the tile installer who’d struck his wife with a hammer. On her way, she checked that Father Kern had put the Notre Dame file back in her drawer. She drank a glass of water. Then she appeared in the hearing chamber as though in a foreign country.

The case was settled in the presence of the tile installer’s wife, who’d just been released from the hospital. Claire asked for a prison sentence without parole, with special surveillance. She
acted like a robot, speaking in the staccato phrases people at the Palais were beginning to be familiar with, without ever lifting her nose from her paperwork.

Finally, after the hearing, she ended up in the huge waiting hall of the Palais de Justice, disorientated and nauseous, stomach empty, with a splitting headache, her heavy files wedged in the crook of her arm. She drowned in the hubbub of the crowd made up of visitors, magistrates, lawyers, and gendarmes. The clicking of her heels on the marble floor sounded distant, reaching her ears only through the echo they produced in the immensity of the place, and which blended in with other surrounding sounds. It was suddenly as though her footsteps no longer belonged to her, as though they were somewhat alien to her. And, all of a sudden, she felt like screaming. And the scream she felt rising from the depths of her bowels reminded her of another scream, the only one she’d ever really let out in all her life.