The Beast of the Camargue
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Synopsis
For centuries the ceremonial order of the Knights of the Tarasque have met to bear the effigy of a mythical beast through the Provencal town of Taracson. But one summer's night the ceremony is broken by a gruesome discovery: a mutilated body found at the feet of the effigy, apparently torn apart by enormous teeth and claws. Can the monster of legend be more than just myth?
The case draws an unwilling Michel de Palma, of the Marseille murder squad, into the dark heart of a Provence where mythology and untold history are part of everyday life. As more dismembered corpses continue to appear, de Palma falls into a world colored by murky financial intrigues and the tortured history of post-occupation France. It's a world where de Palma's uninvited investigations could soon see him in mortal danger.
Release date: October 1, 2013
Publisher: Quercus
Print pages: 352
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The Beast of the Camargue
Xavier-Marie Bonnot
Last night, the mistral had stopped suddenly, just after nightfall. There had then been a moment of delirium, the bars had turned into bodegas full of heady music, gleaming faces and sleepless eyes.
The police patrols cruised around in second gear, laid back and bored to tears. A few brawls broke out between gypsies, Arabs and gorillas from the town hall outside a gaudy fairground. But the national police force turned a blind eye—no treading on the toes of the boys from the municipal brigade.
The last crackers had exploded far away, in the hidden nooks and crannies of the town, before the sun came up: the last fireworks of a party that weariness had now put to bed.
That morning, liquid heat poured down from the sky.
The man was lying on the riverbank, in the fetal position, arms wrapped round his knees. He opened his eyes and, through his twitching eyelids, saw the white shape of the towers of the castle above him, melting into the saturated light.
The man was drenched in sweat, his raven hair stuck to his forehead like strips of cardboard. In the distance he could hear vague noises, presumably the last party animals stumbling home. But he very soon changed his mind: it was the baying of an angry crowd that was echoing off the walls of the fortress.
The clamor made his head spin. He closed his eyes again.
The man had hardly slept for three days. Three days of solitude. A taste of acid bile twisted his lips and flared his nostrils. The pastis he had drunk had now worn off. Time to get going.
He sat up. In front of him, the Rhône flowed calmly by. A few crooked roots scratched at the placid surface like monsters, as though trying to hold back the river’s regal progress. He tried to stand, but then realized that his legs would not hold him for a while, so he lay back on the warm, dry grass and stared at the powerful branches of the acacia that clawed at the sky above him.
It was time to think, to go over the past three days.
On the first day, as soon as the sun rose over the Camargue, he had started watching out for white spoonbills, spending hours hidden like a crocodile in the rock samphire across the marshland, a few meters from the Redon lagoon.
He had been waiting for months for the spoonbills, since March, when thousands of gray mullet gather in the placid waters of the delta, within easy swimming distance of the empty beaches, still shivering with cold; the time of year when the cormorants and herons come to gorge themselves on the surface fish.
For some time he had been studying the habits of spoonbills, and the places where they came to rest on their way back from Africa. This was often at the foot of clumps of tamarisks. He wanted to be able to observe them in the dawn’s golden light, but spoonbills are capricious as well as rare. That year, he had had to make do with the gluttonous antics of the cormorants and herons.
That morning, those large birds had still not appeared. He had waited until noon before finally deciding to change his vantage point and heading further west, toward the Capelière nature reserve. He had exchanged a few words with the keeper. Chitchat, nothing more.
During the afternoon, he wandered around for some time, his loaded camera in one hand and his binoculars in the other, stopping now and then to observe.
He had walked to the ends of the earth. Then the first spoonbill appeared, immaculate, stretching its long neck through the reeds, at the edge of the marsh. A second came to rest on a half-submerged tree trunk, in the middle of the dark waters. The ground, cracked in places and spongy in others, led away toward the setting sun, the flat horizon and the sea, which the mistral was furrowing.
The spoonbills had then flown back into their mysterious habitat, and night fell on the tip of the Camargue. In the distance, beyond the straight lines of the marshland, the flames of the great Fos oil terminal rose red into the dark sky, like proud banners. At one in the morning, he went back to his car and drove home, further north in Provence.
Day two was the day of the beast.
He had decided not to take his car and to hitchhike instead. He had waited a good hour for a friendly driver to pick him up at the Tarascon exit. It was a solitary tourist, an Englishman burned by the wicked sun, who had said, in perfect French:
“I’ve been living in Mouriès for three years now.”
“Really?” he had replied, pretending to take an interest in his driver. “I come from Eygalières.”
“I’m going to Marseille today … taking the boat to Corsica,” the Englishman went on, waving a hand through the hot air toward an imaginary sea.
“You have a good journey,” he had said, for want of anything better.
The Englishman’s Land-Rover, an old model, about as comfortable as a church pew, made one hell of a din. By the time they reached the turning that led to the Thibert farmhouse he had fallen into a sort of torpor, before pointing to a lay-by on the long straight stretch of Route Nationale 568, between Arles and Martigues.
“You can drop me off there.”
The Englishman braked abruptly, without asking any questions. The man got out and waited for the Land-Rover to fade into the distance. Then he slipped off through a barrier of reeds, careful to avoid their long leaves, which were as sharp as razors.
He walked straight on, like a bush hunter, across the huge flat expanse covered with scrawny grass and partitioned in squares by barbed wire: an hour’s walk, perhaps more. Behind him, in the distance, rose the dark crests of the Alpilles hills and the peak of Les Opiès, bleached by the sun’s last gleams.
Far off, in the direction of the rank of cypresses, the sheep of Méril farm were just visible. Not pausing for a moment, he leaped over a fence and found himself in the middle of some heifers, presumably belonging to the Castaldi herd. He walked straight on, keeping close enough to the pitch-black calves so as not to be spotted by chance passers-by, but far enough away so as not to spook them. A couple of times, his gaze met their empty eyes.
But he knew them too well to be afraid.
The day was fading by the time he reached Départementale 35, which marked the eastern border of Vigueirat national park, just a few kilometers away from Thibert’s farm. He decided to spend the night on that strip of the Camargue. The end of the day was luminous, as thousands of stars came out over Provence. Before nightfall, he was back at the beach and had crept through the ruddy clumps of samphire, without being noticed. Then he waited, as he usually did, flat on his stomach among the pink sea daffodils, white sand camomile and yellow sandy everlastings.
Then he sang, and the beast came. He told it of the Festival marvels and then took his leave.
When darkness fell on sea and land, he unrolled his sleeping bag in a warm hollow of a dune, sheltered from the wind. He slept for a few hours. In the depth of his sleep, he toyed with his craziest dream: to liberate the beast on the Festival of Saint Martha.
On the night of July 29.
He would talk about it with the master. But, in any case, he didn’t give a damn for his advice. The monster listened only to him.
The Rhône flowed on, heavy with late spring rain. Beneath the walls of King René’s Castle, some children had climbed onto a little promontory over the green waters of the river by clinging to the ivy that snaked its way along the rocks.
The man had completely recovered his spirits. He stood up, slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked toward the cries of the crowd.
It was Monday, June 30. The third day.
The last bull race had just finished, and with it, the grand festival of la Tarasque.
The bell of the Opéra Municipal of Marseille echoed brightly from the gallery stairway to the marble of the main function room. It stopped abruptly when Michel de Palma burst into the Reyer Hall. Félix Merlino, the ancient cloakroom attendant, patted down the few locks of curly hair which still fringed his gleaming scalp.
“Ah, Michel! You’re the last!”
Merlino grimaced, making his massive chin rise and his pale lips droop.
“Hello, Féli, has it started?”
“Oh yes, it’s started! For the last time this year. Come on, Baron, get a move on …”
The Baron. Commandant Michel de Palma’s nickname. The idea had come from Jean-Louis Maistre, his blood-brother on the Brigade Criminelle, who had started calling him that one evening, as a joke after a few too many drinks. He thought it suited the “de” of his surname, his slender build and melancholy aristocratic manner.
The Baron pushed open the padded doors that led to the first balcony, paused for a moment, then glanced around at the audience, as he had always done ever since his father had initiated him into serious theater when he was still a little boy.
The auditorium was bathed in velvet, and crammed from the first row of stalls up to the gods. The air was laden with sour breath, musky perfumes and the dust of face powder. From the orchestra rose a riot of trills, scales and snatches of melody twisting around each other like superheated atoms. De Palma spotted Capitaine Anne Moracchini of the Criminelle and nodded to her discreetly. He was at least an hour late. In the ten years that they had been working together in the Police Judiciaire, this was the first time that he had invited her to the opera; at the very last moment, too, because this was the final performance of La Bohème that season.
Darkness had fallen when he sat down beside her.
The first few minutes passed by. Moracchini seemed totally wrapped up in the music, which trembled in the air around them. Then the old man in the gods who for years had been coughing at the start of each performance suddenly stopped. An electric sigh ran through the opera house and silence descended.
Rodolfo walked toward the front of the stage:
“Che gelida maninaSe la lasci riscaldarCercar che giova? Al buio non si trova.”
Instead of looking at Mimi, Rodolfo never took his eyes off the conductor and stood on tiptoe each time he hit the middle register and compressed his diaphragm.
“Chi son? Sono un poeta.Che fascio, scrivo …”
In the end, Rodolfo didn’t do too badly for an end-of-season show, but de Palma felt disappointed. Under the cover of the applause, he crept out of the auditorium. In the Reyer Hall, Félix Merlino was pacing up and down, lowering his heels in slow motion so as not to make the parquet creak.
De Palma turned on his mobile. Two messages had been left that day, Saturday, July 5. The first had arrived at 7:58 p.m., just before he had entered the opera house, and the second at 8:37 p.m., presumably while Rodolfo had been sounding off in his garret in Montmartre.
“Good evening, Commandant de Palma. Maître Chandeler speaking. I’m a lawyer. The person who gave me your number would prefer to remain anonymous, but I’m taking the liberty of calling you. We don’t know each other, but I should very much like to meet you so as to discuss a case … as soon as possible would be best, if that’s alright with you. Say Monday the 7th? See you very soon, I hope.”
It was a male voice that made its nasal consonants sing slightly, both deep and smooth at the same time. The second message was also from Chandeler, leaving a different mobile number and begging him not to give it to anyone else.
Félix Merlino came up to the Baron and pointed at the phone.
“Turn that thing off at once. If ever I hear the damn thing ring, I’ll …”
“Don’t fret, Féli. In any case, there’s no need to worry considering the warblers on stage this evening.”
“You should have heard the first cast. Then you’d have really heard something …”
“Oh really? Because this lot sound like the mistral rattling the shutters in my ex-mother-in-law’s house.”
“That’s right! It’s a disaster tonight.”
“But they’re still applauding …”
“People clap anything these days. Not like before … You remember?”
De Palma raised his eyes to the ceiling and waved his right hand over his shoulder in a sign of shared nostalgia with Merlino.
“When things were as bad as tonight, they even had to call in the police sometimes to calm the audience down!”
Félix Merlino shook his head and, with his foot, swept away a scrap of lace which must have been torn off a gown.
“We haven’t seen you for ages, Michel. The other day I was talking to the pianist Jean-Yves, you know, the singing coach, and he asked after you …”
“You know I had a bad accident?”
“I read about it in the paper. But you look better now.”
De Palma did not reply, but looked at the square tiles of the parquet. Applause could be heard coming from the auditorium, muffled by the padded doors. Merlino walked reverently over to the varnished doors of the dress circle and opened them in the manner of a sacristan with a cathedral doorway.
Anne Moracchini tapped de Palma on the shoulder.
“Well, for a night at the opera it was quite a success!”
“I’m sorry, Anne. I did try to get seats for …”
She looked at his mobile and pulled a wry face.
The police capitaine was wearing a black pencil skirt that revealed her knees, and a silk purple top onto which her dark hair tumbled down. Her legs were clad in sheer stockings that clung to the curve that rose from her fine ankles to her knees. When his cheek brushed against hers, he recognized the peppery notes of Gicky, and felt a thrill.
“You left before the end! Didn’t you like it? I thought it was really good,” she said, laying a hand on his forearm.
He did not want to disappoint her on their first night at the opera together by telling her what he thought of the cast.
“Yes, yes, it was fine,” he replied, with a wink at Merlino.
He had never seen her look so beautiful, so elegant. Usually she wore trainers or flat shoes, jeans, and a bomber jacket over a T-shirt or pullover, depending on the season. And of course the Manurhin revolver that she wore in the small of her back, to keep it inconspicuous.
“Come on, let’s have a drink,” said de Palma at last, rousing himself from this trance of admiration. He ordered two glasses of champagne and they went back to the main hall.
“It’s marvelous here! All this art deco stuff. What’s that on the ceiling?”
“A painting by Augustin Carrera, Orpheus Charming the World …”
“I sometimes wonder what the hell you’re doing in the force,” she said, with a sideways glance.
“So do I. But I have my reasons.”
“I hope you do.”
Moracchini gazed at the huge Carrera fresco, before examining the details of the metalwork and gilt masks along the cast-iron balconies. The Baron’s mobile rang.
“Change that ring tone, Michel. It grates!”
“M. de Palma?”
He knew the voice at once.
“Speaking. One moment please.”
The Baron sat down on a purple divan, set a little apart from the crowd.
“This is Yves Chandeler. I’m a lawyer.”
De Palma paused for a moment, taking control.
“Yes?”
“Um … did you get my message?”
“I did.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
He did not like the way this plummy voice prolonged each open vowel it came across. It suggested a childhood spent in Marseille’s best private schools, in a society that de Palma knew nothing about, but tended to despise.
Again, he imposed a moment’s silence.
“Not at all.”
“I’ll get straight to the point. When can I see you?”
He felt like saying that people seldom asked him questions that were more like barely concealed orders, that he had no idea why this man was calling him and that he did not want to see anyone except Anne Moracchini. Instead he replied perfunctorily:
“Monday, 4 p.m. in your office? Does that suit you?”
“Today’s Saturday so … yes, that will be perfect. I’m at 58 cours Pierre-Puget. I suppose you know where that is.”
“Indeed, not a very original address for a lawyer.”
“No, you’re right. Next door to the high court!”
“See you on Monday, then.”
He hung up without a goodbye. Moracchini walked over to him, holding her glass of champagne.
“I suppose that horrible ringing means that the interval’s over? And are you planning to let me go back to seat number 35 all on my own?”
“No, Anne, certainly not!”
He slid a hand around her waist.
It was 2 a.m. when de Palma drew up in front of the little house Moracchini owned in Château-Gombert, at 28 chemin de la Fare, the last remainder of her marriage.
“How about a nightcap?”
The air was alive inside the car. She looked at him hard. He lowered the window for a breath of air.
“No, I’m going home … I need to sleep. I don’t feel so good. In fact, I’ve …”
“You’ve got another of your migraines. Come here and I’ll give you a massage.”
She laid her long fingers on his temples and rubbed gently.
“What does your doctor say?”
“He says he doesn’t know, like all the doctors!”
Moracchini continued her massage, tracing small circles above his eyebrows, then she withdrew her hands like a caress, took hold of his temples and squeezed them gently.
“Do you remember, Anne?”
“Yes, I do, but I don’t want to talk about it …”
“Nowadays, I think about it less, but a month ago I kept on playing the film in my head like a loop from hell. Non-stop.”
She pressed the top of his skull softly and raked through his hair with her nails.
“I can still see myself going into the Le Guen cave and reaching the bottom. I’ve never told anyone, but if you only knew how frightened I was. Guts in a knot, balls on the ground.”*
“That’s pretty …”
“So to speak.”
He breathed deeply and shut his eyes.
“I can still see those marvelous paintings, how impressive they were. I can’t describe how I felt, seeing the hands of prehistoric men. And then I saw her. And he was behind me. I turned …” De Palma’s breathing speeded up. He closed his eyes and turned his head in a circle. “I can see myself spinning round on my left leg, and firing at him … Then he hit me smack on the forehead. It was like being struck by lightning.”
“It’s made you into a top cop, with a medal and accolades and all. Plus a good deal of jealousy. Well done. And I might add it’s not done away with your charm.”
“His strength was superhuman. I often think about that. My aim was straight, I can see myself lining it up … I’ll never get it out of my mind that he managed to dodge a bullet. He had the reflexes of a great prehistoric hunter, I’m sure of it. He was stronger and quicker than a normal man. Compared with him, we’re all degenerates.”
“You’re talking as if you admired him!”
“He dodged a .38 bullet! Lightning versus lightning. At incredible speeds. You can’t help respecting something like that. Do you see?”
“What I see is that he’s going to go down for life, and that it’s thanks to you.”
“You could also say that I missed him!”
“I’ve never said that.”
“In any case, I didn’t arrest him on my own.”
“Thank you, from all the little cops like me, Michel.”
Almost imperceptibly, she drew him against her breasts. He sensed that they were tense beneath the thin fabric. She stroked his forehead tenderly, just where the man who called himself “the Hunter” had hit him with his tomahawk.
“I’m going home, Anne.”
“As you want, boss.”
She moved her hands down to the nape of his neck, and met his mouth with lips swollen with desire.
Isabelle has just had her third child.
The Baron has received an invitation.
A pale blue card with a photo of the little fellow.
He is called Michel, just like him.
Isabelle wanted that. In memory of that firebrand policeman who crossed her path.
Isabelle has always been a friend to him.
And it is true that he has never let her down.
NEVER.
He has always prized the memory of the beautiful teenager he loved.
ALWAYS.
How could he ever forget her?
Isabelle wants Michel to be her third child’s godfather.
He is not sure if he will accept.
But he is thinking about it. He’s already refused twice.
She will end up thinking that he doesn’t care about her any more.
Poor Isabelle.
If only she knew how much the Baron thinks about her.
Night and day.
Day and night.
The paper had yellowed with the years.
It was written in the muscular hand of Commissaire Boyer, the father of police headquarters. Boyer the magnificent, who made people grow up in a single burst.
De Palma was naked on his bed. He still had Anne’s perfume on his lips. He could hear Boyer’s voice: “Bring him to me. Bring him in. Right here. I want to see him before the big farewell. De Palma, you go to the crime scene with Maistre. I think she’s still there. You’ll see about all that with Marceau. I want your opinion. You young people sometimes have new ideas.”
And Boyer the boss had written across the sheet of paper, with his big fat pencil, one end blue, the other red:
RAPE AND MURDER, in red.
And at the bottom, in blue: CASE UNSOLVED.
Name: Isabelle MERCIER.
Fair hair, 16 years old. 1m 63cm. 56 kilos.
28 rue des Prairies. 20th arrondissement.
Date of discovery of the body: December 20, 1978, at 9:56 p.m.
Case followed by Inspectors de Palma, Marceau and Maistre.
“Case unsolved,” the Baron repeated, smoothing the sheet between his thumb and index finger. The letters U.N.S.O.L.V.E.D. burned into his eyes.
“Bring him in!”
In his first notebook, the Baron had written: Isabelle Mercier.
And that was all.
*
At the top of the page, Isabelle’s photograph is stuck on with a paperclip.
It is an identity shot.
Black and white.
Isabelle is sixteen.
She is smiling shyly.
Her hair makes two commas on her velvet cheeks.
Maistre and de Palma arrive at 28 rue des Prairies.
It is the first time that Boyer the Terrible has entrusted them with a case.
And this one seems to mean a lot to him.
Isabelle is lying on her stomach.
Jean-Claude Marceau is looking out of the window.
The official photographer is staring at her, the corners of his mouth trembling.
“Maistre and de Palma …”
“Hello, lads. The old man is throwing you in at the deep end. Take a look. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
De Palma bends down.
He raises a lock of hair caught in the coagulated blood.
It is like a piece of caramel.
Beneath it, an eye stares at him dumbly.
An eye in the middle of nothing.
An eye without a face.
Jean-Claude turns round.
“To do that to a face, you really have to hit it hard. Fucking hard. Never seen anything like it, lads.”
Jean-Louis Maistre has gone to throw up.
De Palma swallows back his saliva.
He wants to keep the horror inside him.
And the horror is inside him.
Never forget.
“Hello, Maistre?”
“Have you seen what time it is, you bugger?”
“She’s back, Le Gros.”
“Isabelle?”
“Yes.”
“She’s never been away …”
“I dreamed she sent me a card for the birth of her third child.”
“That’s funny, Baron. I had a dream just like that, too.”
La Capelière, two old buildings standing side by side, belonged to the Société nationale de protection de la nature. In 1979 this ancient property, hidden away among the tamarisks that skirted the lagoon of Le Vaccarès had become the information center for the National Reserve of Camargue.
At the entrance, a notice on the ramshackle dry-stone wall displayed a pair of flamingos, face to face, and the acronym S.N.P.N. in the middle. The paint was wrinkled by the rising damp from the stagnant water, and baked into strips by the sun.
On the ground floor there was a small museum, the administrative offices and a laboratory. The first floor held a dormitory for students who were in residence, as well as the flat of the institution’s head, Dr. Christophe Texeira, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Provence. He was forty-five; his hair was speckled with gray and his face was dominated by his prominent chin and two dark eyes that kept in perpetual motion beneath his bushy eyebrows. His thick lips brought him great success with his female students. He seemed the happiest of men.
That evening, alone in the office that was also his laboratory, Christophe Texeira was finding it hard to concentrate: a report on the latest survey of the insects of the Reserve of Vigueirat, on the far side of the Rhône, had raised a tide of weariness inside him.
Texeira had come to the Camargue for its birds, but for the past two years he had been regularly asked to count its mosquitoes and spiders, not to mention the frogs and toads. That night, he was pacing up and down and occasionally glancing out of the window.
The moon was setting.
On the surface of the reed bed, the tips of the rushes were quivering in the lingering brightness. In the gusts of the salty breeze they intermeshed like lines of silver blades.
He peered through his binoculars, then slumped into his chair. What intrigued him that evening were the photographs laid out on his desk, beside the pink and green files of reports.
The pictures were magnificent.
A walker who had called by the previous weekend had managed to photograph some white spoonbills: two near Grenouillet and another which had strayed into the grass that runs between the canals toward Sambuc, near the stud farm at Loule.
It was incredible! This hiker had taken several pictures of these mythical birds while he, the head of the nature reserve and with a doctorate in biology, had hardly seen any on this side of the delta. Usually they gathered on the south bank of the Vaccarès, near La Gacholle. But not always.
“I’m looking for white spoonbills,” the visitor had said.
“That will be difficult,” Texeira had replied.
“They need to be told of love and marvels.”
Marvels!
The man looked distinctly eccentric: shoulder-length black hair, smooth face, as stocky as a prop forward, with the air of someone who doesn’t know what to do with all his muscles. What was more, he was dressed like something the cat had dragged in: Viet Cong sandals, a heavy wool sweater despite the heat, scuffed jeans and a patched-up haversack.
On the other hand, the Zeiss binoculars, the 200 mm narrow aperture zoom lens and the Nikon digital camera that hung around his neck made the biologist green with envy. Not to mention the pair of periscopic binoculars he glimpsed in the man’s bag.
These rare photographs had arrived through the letter box of the S.N.P.N. and had been postmarked: Tarascon, July 1.
The biologist could not remember the walker’s name, otherwise he would have telephoned to congratulate him.
In fact, had he ever got his name?
Texeira went into the entrance hall of the center, turned on the lights and glanced at the bulky visitors’ book on the table, beside the till.
Each page was divided into six columns, in which the visitors could note down the species they had observed, the places, dates and of course their names, and their addresses and jobs as optional extras.
On the page for Saturday, there were a good ten names, but they were just tourists, who had wanted to leave a trace of their visit and find something witty to say.
He looked at his watch again. It was nearly 1 p.m. He decided to get down to work and polish off the figures in his insect survey.
A few minutes later, he noticed that his new assistant had made yet another mistake: he came across a Cassida viridis and a Cassida sanguinolenta, two larvae, beside a Polistes gallicus, a variety of wasp. He would have to go back over the whole thing, label by label. He decided that it was high time to sleep on the problem and go up to his flat on the first floor.
As he closed the shutters in his bedroom, he noticed that the gate of the reserve was open. Grumbling, he pulled on his trousers and trainers, then went out into the gray night air.
He could have sworn he had closed the gate before going into his office. This gave him pause for thought: his memory was utterly infallible. He could see himself lifting the latch and could even remember thinking once again that he really should get it fixed because for some months now the accumulated rust had been making it ever harder to close.
So someone had entered the park after 7 p.m.
He decided to check, took the torch from the cupboard and set off down the path that ran alongside the Fournelet canal—the only practicable route for a visitor to this miniature bayou.
After five minutes spent weaving through creeks overgrown with ash trees and monstrous brambles, he came to a halt beside the observation hut of Les Aulnes, overlooking the swamp. He listened to the night air. At first, there was total silence, then, as the seconds crept by, the little sounds of nature swelled again.
A short while later, he felt everything stirring around him: there was a gentle slapping of stagnant water nearby, the scurry of tiny rapid feet among the clumps of rock samphire; no doubt a rodent fleeing some pressing danger.
Like a wild cat, he sprang up the wooden steps of the hut. The quiet waters gleamed like old silver beneath the moon. In the middle, a dead oak had slumped into the mud, poking its branches out of the filthy water like a drowning man waving for help. Up on its trunk, a little wader was sitting up for the night, surveying the glittering pond around it.
It took him a moment to realize that the song of the frogs had stopped. He was so used to their incessant racket that he hadn’t been paying attention. But now, Texeira pr. . .
The police patrols cruised around in second gear, laid back and bored to tears. A few brawls broke out between gypsies, Arabs and gorillas from the town hall outside a gaudy fairground. But the national police force turned a blind eye—no treading on the toes of the boys from the municipal brigade.
The last crackers had exploded far away, in the hidden nooks and crannies of the town, before the sun came up: the last fireworks of a party that weariness had now put to bed.
That morning, liquid heat poured down from the sky.
The man was lying on the riverbank, in the fetal position, arms wrapped round his knees. He opened his eyes and, through his twitching eyelids, saw the white shape of the towers of the castle above him, melting into the saturated light.
The man was drenched in sweat, his raven hair stuck to his forehead like strips of cardboard. In the distance he could hear vague noises, presumably the last party animals stumbling home. But he very soon changed his mind: it was the baying of an angry crowd that was echoing off the walls of the fortress.
The clamor made his head spin. He closed his eyes again.
The man had hardly slept for three days. Three days of solitude. A taste of acid bile twisted his lips and flared his nostrils. The pastis he had drunk had now worn off. Time to get going.
He sat up. In front of him, the Rhône flowed calmly by. A few crooked roots scratched at the placid surface like monsters, as though trying to hold back the river’s regal progress. He tried to stand, but then realized that his legs would not hold him for a while, so he lay back on the warm, dry grass and stared at the powerful branches of the acacia that clawed at the sky above him.
It was time to think, to go over the past three days.
On the first day, as soon as the sun rose over the Camargue, he had started watching out for white spoonbills, spending hours hidden like a crocodile in the rock samphire across the marshland, a few meters from the Redon lagoon.
He had been waiting for months for the spoonbills, since March, when thousands of gray mullet gather in the placid waters of the delta, within easy swimming distance of the empty beaches, still shivering with cold; the time of year when the cormorants and herons come to gorge themselves on the surface fish.
For some time he had been studying the habits of spoonbills, and the places where they came to rest on their way back from Africa. This was often at the foot of clumps of tamarisks. He wanted to be able to observe them in the dawn’s golden light, but spoonbills are capricious as well as rare. That year, he had had to make do with the gluttonous antics of the cormorants and herons.
That morning, those large birds had still not appeared. He had waited until noon before finally deciding to change his vantage point and heading further west, toward the Capelière nature reserve. He had exchanged a few words with the keeper. Chitchat, nothing more.
During the afternoon, he wandered around for some time, his loaded camera in one hand and his binoculars in the other, stopping now and then to observe.
He had walked to the ends of the earth. Then the first spoonbill appeared, immaculate, stretching its long neck through the reeds, at the edge of the marsh. A second came to rest on a half-submerged tree trunk, in the middle of the dark waters. The ground, cracked in places and spongy in others, led away toward the setting sun, the flat horizon and the sea, which the mistral was furrowing.
The spoonbills had then flown back into their mysterious habitat, and night fell on the tip of the Camargue. In the distance, beyond the straight lines of the marshland, the flames of the great Fos oil terminal rose red into the dark sky, like proud banners. At one in the morning, he went back to his car and drove home, further north in Provence.
Day two was the day of the beast.
He had decided not to take his car and to hitchhike instead. He had waited a good hour for a friendly driver to pick him up at the Tarascon exit. It was a solitary tourist, an Englishman burned by the wicked sun, who had said, in perfect French:
“I’ve been living in Mouriès for three years now.”
“Really?” he had replied, pretending to take an interest in his driver. “I come from Eygalières.”
“I’m going to Marseille today … taking the boat to Corsica,” the Englishman went on, waving a hand through the hot air toward an imaginary sea.
“You have a good journey,” he had said, for want of anything better.
The Englishman’s Land-Rover, an old model, about as comfortable as a church pew, made one hell of a din. By the time they reached the turning that led to the Thibert farmhouse he had fallen into a sort of torpor, before pointing to a lay-by on the long straight stretch of Route Nationale 568, between Arles and Martigues.
“You can drop me off there.”
The Englishman braked abruptly, without asking any questions. The man got out and waited for the Land-Rover to fade into the distance. Then he slipped off through a barrier of reeds, careful to avoid their long leaves, which were as sharp as razors.
He walked straight on, like a bush hunter, across the huge flat expanse covered with scrawny grass and partitioned in squares by barbed wire: an hour’s walk, perhaps more. Behind him, in the distance, rose the dark crests of the Alpilles hills and the peak of Les Opiès, bleached by the sun’s last gleams.
Far off, in the direction of the rank of cypresses, the sheep of Méril farm were just visible. Not pausing for a moment, he leaped over a fence and found himself in the middle of some heifers, presumably belonging to the Castaldi herd. He walked straight on, keeping close enough to the pitch-black calves so as not to be spotted by chance passers-by, but far enough away so as not to spook them. A couple of times, his gaze met their empty eyes.
But he knew them too well to be afraid.
The day was fading by the time he reached Départementale 35, which marked the eastern border of Vigueirat national park, just a few kilometers away from Thibert’s farm. He decided to spend the night on that strip of the Camargue. The end of the day was luminous, as thousands of stars came out over Provence. Before nightfall, he was back at the beach and had crept through the ruddy clumps of samphire, without being noticed. Then he waited, as he usually did, flat on his stomach among the pink sea daffodils, white sand camomile and yellow sandy everlastings.
Then he sang, and the beast came. He told it of the Festival marvels and then took his leave.
When darkness fell on sea and land, he unrolled his sleeping bag in a warm hollow of a dune, sheltered from the wind. He slept for a few hours. In the depth of his sleep, he toyed with his craziest dream: to liberate the beast on the Festival of Saint Martha.
On the night of July 29.
He would talk about it with the master. But, in any case, he didn’t give a damn for his advice. The monster listened only to him.
The Rhône flowed on, heavy with late spring rain. Beneath the walls of King René’s Castle, some children had climbed onto a little promontory over the green waters of the river by clinging to the ivy that snaked its way along the rocks.
The man had completely recovered his spirits. He stood up, slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked toward the cries of the crowd.
It was Monday, June 30. The third day.
The last bull race had just finished, and with it, the grand festival of la Tarasque.
The bell of the Opéra Municipal of Marseille echoed brightly from the gallery stairway to the marble of the main function room. It stopped abruptly when Michel de Palma burst into the Reyer Hall. Félix Merlino, the ancient cloakroom attendant, patted down the few locks of curly hair which still fringed his gleaming scalp.
“Ah, Michel! You’re the last!”
Merlino grimaced, making his massive chin rise and his pale lips droop.
“Hello, Féli, has it started?”
“Oh yes, it’s started! For the last time this year. Come on, Baron, get a move on …”
The Baron. Commandant Michel de Palma’s nickname. The idea had come from Jean-Louis Maistre, his blood-brother on the Brigade Criminelle, who had started calling him that one evening, as a joke after a few too many drinks. He thought it suited the “de” of his surname, his slender build and melancholy aristocratic manner.
The Baron pushed open the padded doors that led to the first balcony, paused for a moment, then glanced around at the audience, as he had always done ever since his father had initiated him into serious theater when he was still a little boy.
The auditorium was bathed in velvet, and crammed from the first row of stalls up to the gods. The air was laden with sour breath, musky perfumes and the dust of face powder. From the orchestra rose a riot of trills, scales and snatches of melody twisting around each other like superheated atoms. De Palma spotted Capitaine Anne Moracchini of the Criminelle and nodded to her discreetly. He was at least an hour late. In the ten years that they had been working together in the Police Judiciaire, this was the first time that he had invited her to the opera; at the very last moment, too, because this was the final performance of La Bohème that season.
Darkness had fallen when he sat down beside her.
The first few minutes passed by. Moracchini seemed totally wrapped up in the music, which trembled in the air around them. Then the old man in the gods who for years had been coughing at the start of each performance suddenly stopped. An electric sigh ran through the opera house and silence descended.
Rodolfo walked toward the front of the stage:
“Che gelida maninaSe la lasci riscaldarCercar che giova? Al buio non si trova.”
Instead of looking at Mimi, Rodolfo never took his eyes off the conductor and stood on tiptoe each time he hit the middle register and compressed his diaphragm.
“Chi son? Sono un poeta.Che fascio, scrivo …”
In the end, Rodolfo didn’t do too badly for an end-of-season show, but de Palma felt disappointed. Under the cover of the applause, he crept out of the auditorium. In the Reyer Hall, Félix Merlino was pacing up and down, lowering his heels in slow motion so as not to make the parquet creak.
De Palma turned on his mobile. Two messages had been left that day, Saturday, July 5. The first had arrived at 7:58 p.m., just before he had entered the opera house, and the second at 8:37 p.m., presumably while Rodolfo had been sounding off in his garret in Montmartre.
“Good evening, Commandant de Palma. Maître Chandeler speaking. I’m a lawyer. The person who gave me your number would prefer to remain anonymous, but I’m taking the liberty of calling you. We don’t know each other, but I should very much like to meet you so as to discuss a case … as soon as possible would be best, if that’s alright with you. Say Monday the 7th? See you very soon, I hope.”
It was a male voice that made its nasal consonants sing slightly, both deep and smooth at the same time. The second message was also from Chandeler, leaving a different mobile number and begging him not to give it to anyone else.
Félix Merlino came up to the Baron and pointed at the phone.
“Turn that thing off at once. If ever I hear the damn thing ring, I’ll …”
“Don’t fret, Féli. In any case, there’s no need to worry considering the warblers on stage this evening.”
“You should have heard the first cast. Then you’d have really heard something …”
“Oh really? Because this lot sound like the mistral rattling the shutters in my ex-mother-in-law’s house.”
“That’s right! It’s a disaster tonight.”
“But they’re still applauding …”
“People clap anything these days. Not like before … You remember?”
De Palma raised his eyes to the ceiling and waved his right hand over his shoulder in a sign of shared nostalgia with Merlino.
“When things were as bad as tonight, they even had to call in the police sometimes to calm the audience down!”
Félix Merlino shook his head and, with his foot, swept away a scrap of lace which must have been torn off a gown.
“We haven’t seen you for ages, Michel. The other day I was talking to the pianist Jean-Yves, you know, the singing coach, and he asked after you …”
“You know I had a bad accident?”
“I read about it in the paper. But you look better now.”
De Palma did not reply, but looked at the square tiles of the parquet. Applause could be heard coming from the auditorium, muffled by the padded doors. Merlino walked reverently over to the varnished doors of the dress circle and opened them in the manner of a sacristan with a cathedral doorway.
Anne Moracchini tapped de Palma on the shoulder.
“Well, for a night at the opera it was quite a success!”
“I’m sorry, Anne. I did try to get seats for …”
She looked at his mobile and pulled a wry face.
The police capitaine was wearing a black pencil skirt that revealed her knees, and a silk purple top onto which her dark hair tumbled down. Her legs were clad in sheer stockings that clung to the curve that rose from her fine ankles to her knees. When his cheek brushed against hers, he recognized the peppery notes of Gicky, and felt a thrill.
“You left before the end! Didn’t you like it? I thought it was really good,” she said, laying a hand on his forearm.
He did not want to disappoint her on their first night at the opera together by telling her what he thought of the cast.
“Yes, yes, it was fine,” he replied, with a wink at Merlino.
He had never seen her look so beautiful, so elegant. Usually she wore trainers or flat shoes, jeans, and a bomber jacket over a T-shirt or pullover, depending on the season. And of course the Manurhin revolver that she wore in the small of her back, to keep it inconspicuous.
“Come on, let’s have a drink,” said de Palma at last, rousing himself from this trance of admiration. He ordered two glasses of champagne and they went back to the main hall.
“It’s marvelous here! All this art deco stuff. What’s that on the ceiling?”
“A painting by Augustin Carrera, Orpheus Charming the World …”
“I sometimes wonder what the hell you’re doing in the force,” she said, with a sideways glance.
“So do I. But I have my reasons.”
“I hope you do.”
Moracchini gazed at the huge Carrera fresco, before examining the details of the metalwork and gilt masks along the cast-iron balconies. The Baron’s mobile rang.
“Change that ring tone, Michel. It grates!”
“M. de Palma?”
He knew the voice at once.
“Speaking. One moment please.”
The Baron sat down on a purple divan, set a little apart from the crowd.
“This is Yves Chandeler. I’m a lawyer.”
De Palma paused for a moment, taking control.
“Yes?”
“Um … did you get my message?”
“I did.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
He did not like the way this plummy voice prolonged each open vowel it came across. It suggested a childhood spent in Marseille’s best private schools, in a society that de Palma knew nothing about, but tended to despise.
Again, he imposed a moment’s silence.
“Not at all.”
“I’ll get straight to the point. When can I see you?”
He felt like saying that people seldom asked him questions that were more like barely concealed orders, that he had no idea why this man was calling him and that he did not want to see anyone except Anne Moracchini. Instead he replied perfunctorily:
“Monday, 4 p.m. in your office? Does that suit you?”
“Today’s Saturday so … yes, that will be perfect. I’m at 58 cours Pierre-Puget. I suppose you know where that is.”
“Indeed, not a very original address for a lawyer.”
“No, you’re right. Next door to the high court!”
“See you on Monday, then.”
He hung up without a goodbye. Moracchini walked over to him, holding her glass of champagne.
“I suppose that horrible ringing means that the interval’s over? And are you planning to let me go back to seat number 35 all on my own?”
“No, Anne, certainly not!”
He slid a hand around her waist.
It was 2 a.m. when de Palma drew up in front of the little house Moracchini owned in Château-Gombert, at 28 chemin de la Fare, the last remainder of her marriage.
“How about a nightcap?”
The air was alive inside the car. She looked at him hard. He lowered the window for a breath of air.
“No, I’m going home … I need to sleep. I don’t feel so good. In fact, I’ve …”
“You’ve got another of your migraines. Come here and I’ll give you a massage.”
She laid her long fingers on his temples and rubbed gently.
“What does your doctor say?”
“He says he doesn’t know, like all the doctors!”
Moracchini continued her massage, tracing small circles above his eyebrows, then she withdrew her hands like a caress, took hold of his temples and squeezed them gently.
“Do you remember, Anne?”
“Yes, I do, but I don’t want to talk about it …”
“Nowadays, I think about it less, but a month ago I kept on playing the film in my head like a loop from hell. Non-stop.”
She pressed the top of his skull softly and raked through his hair with her nails.
“I can still see myself going into the Le Guen cave and reaching the bottom. I’ve never told anyone, but if you only knew how frightened I was. Guts in a knot, balls on the ground.”*
“That’s pretty …”
“So to speak.”
He breathed deeply and shut his eyes.
“I can still see those marvelous paintings, how impressive they were. I can’t describe how I felt, seeing the hands of prehistoric men. And then I saw her. And he was behind me. I turned …” De Palma’s breathing speeded up. He closed his eyes and turned his head in a circle. “I can see myself spinning round on my left leg, and firing at him … Then he hit me smack on the forehead. It was like being struck by lightning.”
“It’s made you into a top cop, with a medal and accolades and all. Plus a good deal of jealousy. Well done. And I might add it’s not done away with your charm.”
“His strength was superhuman. I often think about that. My aim was straight, I can see myself lining it up … I’ll never get it out of my mind that he managed to dodge a bullet. He had the reflexes of a great prehistoric hunter, I’m sure of it. He was stronger and quicker than a normal man. Compared with him, we’re all degenerates.”
“You’re talking as if you admired him!”
“He dodged a .38 bullet! Lightning versus lightning. At incredible speeds. You can’t help respecting something like that. Do you see?”
“What I see is that he’s going to go down for life, and that it’s thanks to you.”
“You could also say that I missed him!”
“I’ve never said that.”
“In any case, I didn’t arrest him on my own.”
“Thank you, from all the little cops like me, Michel.”
Almost imperceptibly, she drew him against her breasts. He sensed that they were tense beneath the thin fabric. She stroked his forehead tenderly, just where the man who called himself “the Hunter” had hit him with his tomahawk.
“I’m going home, Anne.”
“As you want, boss.”
She moved her hands down to the nape of his neck, and met his mouth with lips swollen with desire.
Isabelle has just had her third child.
The Baron has received an invitation.
A pale blue card with a photo of the little fellow.
He is called Michel, just like him.
Isabelle wanted that. In memory of that firebrand policeman who crossed her path.
Isabelle has always been a friend to him.
And it is true that he has never let her down.
NEVER.
He has always prized the memory of the beautiful teenager he loved.
ALWAYS.
How could he ever forget her?
Isabelle wants Michel to be her third child’s godfather.
He is not sure if he will accept.
But he is thinking about it. He’s already refused twice.
She will end up thinking that he doesn’t care about her any more.
Poor Isabelle.
If only she knew how much the Baron thinks about her.
Night and day.
Day and night.
The paper had yellowed with the years.
It was written in the muscular hand of Commissaire Boyer, the father of police headquarters. Boyer the magnificent, who made people grow up in a single burst.
De Palma was naked on his bed. He still had Anne’s perfume on his lips. He could hear Boyer’s voice: “Bring him to me. Bring him in. Right here. I want to see him before the big farewell. De Palma, you go to the crime scene with Maistre. I think she’s still there. You’ll see about all that with Marceau. I want your opinion. You young people sometimes have new ideas.”
And Boyer the boss had written across the sheet of paper, with his big fat pencil, one end blue, the other red:
RAPE AND MURDER, in red.
And at the bottom, in blue: CASE UNSOLVED.
Name: Isabelle MERCIER.
Fair hair, 16 years old. 1m 63cm. 56 kilos.
28 rue des Prairies. 20th arrondissement.
Date of discovery of the body: December 20, 1978, at 9:56 p.m.
Case followed by Inspectors de Palma, Marceau and Maistre.
“Case unsolved,” the Baron repeated, smoothing the sheet between his thumb and index finger. The letters U.N.S.O.L.V.E.D. burned into his eyes.
“Bring him in!”
In his first notebook, the Baron had written: Isabelle Mercier.
And that was all.
*
At the top of the page, Isabelle’s photograph is stuck on with a paperclip.
It is an identity shot.
Black and white.
Isabelle is sixteen.
She is smiling shyly.
Her hair makes two commas on her velvet cheeks.
Maistre and de Palma arrive at 28 rue des Prairies.
It is the first time that Boyer the Terrible has entrusted them with a case.
And this one seems to mean a lot to him.
Isabelle is lying on her stomach.
Jean-Claude Marceau is looking out of the window.
The official photographer is staring at her, the corners of his mouth trembling.
“Maistre and de Palma …”
“Hello, lads. The old man is throwing you in at the deep end. Take a look. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
De Palma bends down.
He raises a lock of hair caught in the coagulated blood.
It is like a piece of caramel.
Beneath it, an eye stares at him dumbly.
An eye in the middle of nothing.
An eye without a face.
Jean-Claude turns round.
“To do that to a face, you really have to hit it hard. Fucking hard. Never seen anything like it, lads.”
Jean-Louis Maistre has gone to throw up.
De Palma swallows back his saliva.
He wants to keep the horror inside him.
And the horror is inside him.
Never forget.
“Hello, Maistre?”
“Have you seen what time it is, you bugger?”
“She’s back, Le Gros.”
“Isabelle?”
“Yes.”
“She’s never been away …”
“I dreamed she sent me a card for the birth of her third child.”
“That’s funny, Baron. I had a dream just like that, too.”
La Capelière, two old buildings standing side by side, belonged to the Société nationale de protection de la nature. In 1979 this ancient property, hidden away among the tamarisks that skirted the lagoon of Le Vaccarès had become the information center for the National Reserve of Camargue.
At the entrance, a notice on the ramshackle dry-stone wall displayed a pair of flamingos, face to face, and the acronym S.N.P.N. in the middle. The paint was wrinkled by the rising damp from the stagnant water, and baked into strips by the sun.
On the ground floor there was a small museum, the administrative offices and a laboratory. The first floor held a dormitory for students who were in residence, as well as the flat of the institution’s head, Dr. Christophe Texeira, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Provence. He was forty-five; his hair was speckled with gray and his face was dominated by his prominent chin and two dark eyes that kept in perpetual motion beneath his bushy eyebrows. His thick lips brought him great success with his female students. He seemed the happiest of men.
That evening, alone in the office that was also his laboratory, Christophe Texeira was finding it hard to concentrate: a report on the latest survey of the insects of the Reserve of Vigueirat, on the far side of the Rhône, had raised a tide of weariness inside him.
Texeira had come to the Camargue for its birds, but for the past two years he had been regularly asked to count its mosquitoes and spiders, not to mention the frogs and toads. That night, he was pacing up and down and occasionally glancing out of the window.
The moon was setting.
On the surface of the reed bed, the tips of the rushes were quivering in the lingering brightness. In the gusts of the salty breeze they intermeshed like lines of silver blades.
He peered through his binoculars, then slumped into his chair. What intrigued him that evening were the photographs laid out on his desk, beside the pink and green files of reports.
The pictures were magnificent.
A walker who had called by the previous weekend had managed to photograph some white spoonbills: two near Grenouillet and another which had strayed into the grass that runs between the canals toward Sambuc, near the stud farm at Loule.
It was incredible! This hiker had taken several pictures of these mythical birds while he, the head of the nature reserve and with a doctorate in biology, had hardly seen any on this side of the delta. Usually they gathered on the south bank of the Vaccarès, near La Gacholle. But not always.
“I’m looking for white spoonbills,” the visitor had said.
“That will be difficult,” Texeira had replied.
“They need to be told of love and marvels.”
Marvels!
The man looked distinctly eccentric: shoulder-length black hair, smooth face, as stocky as a prop forward, with the air of someone who doesn’t know what to do with all his muscles. What was more, he was dressed like something the cat had dragged in: Viet Cong sandals, a heavy wool sweater despite the heat, scuffed jeans and a patched-up haversack.
On the other hand, the Zeiss binoculars, the 200 mm narrow aperture zoom lens and the Nikon digital camera that hung around his neck made the biologist green with envy. Not to mention the pair of periscopic binoculars he glimpsed in the man’s bag.
These rare photographs had arrived through the letter box of the S.N.P.N. and had been postmarked: Tarascon, July 1.
The biologist could not remember the walker’s name, otherwise he would have telephoned to congratulate him.
In fact, had he ever got his name?
Texeira went into the entrance hall of the center, turned on the lights and glanced at the bulky visitors’ book on the table, beside the till.
Each page was divided into six columns, in which the visitors could note down the species they had observed, the places, dates and of course their names, and their addresses and jobs as optional extras.
On the page for Saturday, there were a good ten names, but they were just tourists, who had wanted to leave a trace of their visit and find something witty to say.
He looked at his watch again. It was nearly 1 p.m. He decided to get down to work and polish off the figures in his insect survey.
A few minutes later, he noticed that his new assistant had made yet another mistake: he came across a Cassida viridis and a Cassida sanguinolenta, two larvae, beside a Polistes gallicus, a variety of wasp. He would have to go back over the whole thing, label by label. He decided that it was high time to sleep on the problem and go up to his flat on the first floor.
As he closed the shutters in his bedroom, he noticed that the gate of the reserve was open. Grumbling, he pulled on his trousers and trainers, then went out into the gray night air.
He could have sworn he had closed the gate before going into his office. This gave him pause for thought: his memory was utterly infallible. He could see himself lifting the latch and could even remember thinking once again that he really should get it fixed because for some months now the accumulated rust had been making it ever harder to close.
So someone had entered the park after 7 p.m.
He decided to check, took the torch from the cupboard and set off down the path that ran alongside the Fournelet canal—the only practicable route for a visitor to this miniature bayou.
After five minutes spent weaving through creeks overgrown with ash trees and monstrous brambles, he came to a halt beside the observation hut of Les Aulnes, overlooking the swamp. He listened to the night air. At first, there was total silence, then, as the seconds crept by, the little sounds of nature swelled again.
A short while later, he felt everything stirring around him: there was a gentle slapping of stagnant water nearby, the scurry of tiny rapid feet among the clumps of rock samphire; no doubt a rodent fleeing some pressing danger.
Like a wild cat, he sprang up the wooden steps of the hut. The quiet waters gleamed like old silver beneath the moon. In the middle, a dead oak had slumped into the mud, poking its branches out of the filthy water like a drowning man waving for help. Up on its trunk, a little wader was sitting up for the night, surveying the glittering pond around it.
It took him a moment to realize that the song of the frogs had stopped. He was so used to their incessant racket that he hadn’t been paying attention. But now, Texeira pr. . .
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