After the Crash Read online

‘No, you won’t do it. You’re stubborn, Marc, I know you. You’ll tear into it as soon as my back is turned.’

  Marc did not contradict her. Emilie lifted a slender hand.

  That damn ring sparkled in the light.

  ‘Mariam?’

  The landlady reacted instantly, as if she had been watching them, just waiting for such a command. She stood in front of Marc and Emilie’s table.

  ‘Mariam, I have a favour to ask you. I want to leave this packet with you. You must give it to Marc in one hour, and not a moment sooner! Even if he begs you, bribes you or blackmails you. And, now that I think about it, you must send him off to his class in one hour too – room B318!’

  Mariam looked at the package in her hands.

  ‘I’m trusting you with this, Mariam.’

  She had no choice. Emilie leapt up from her chair, shoved the jewellery box containing the Tuareg cross into her backpack, and kissed Marc chastely on the cheek. Her lips landed halfway between his cheek and the corner of his mouth. An ambiguous kiss, as if placed deliberately to taunt Mariam.

  Emilie pushed open the Lenin’s glass door and walked out onto the square in front of the university. In seconds, she was swallowed up by the swarm of passing students, vanishing like a ghost.

  The door banged shut.

  Mariam closed her fingers around the package. She would do as Emilie had asked, of course, but she did not like this game. Mariam had seen many couples break up: in such a situation, women could be amazingly determined and imaginative.

  Emilie was one of those women.

  This whole scene stank of a lie. Emilie had run away as fast as her legs would take her, and the gift she had left in Mariam’s hand was a time bomb. Marc should never have let her leave like that. That boy was too naïve, too trusting . . . Mariam still couldn’t decide if the girl who was fleeing from him was his sister, his wife, his mistress, or his friend; she could not figure out what connected the two of them; but she was certain that Emilie had only one goal in mind.

  To break that connection.

  4

  2 October, 1998, 9.02 a.m. Marc stared at Mariam as she stood behind the counter. The landlady had put Emilie’s gift in her cash register, while shooting Marc an unequivocal look. There was no point getting his hopes up: nothing would happen before the hour appointed by Emilie. Female solidarity. In desperation, his eyes fell on Crédule GrandDuc’s pale green notebook. Emilie had known what she was doing. Marc was stuck here with an hour to kill before his first class of the day: a soporific tutorial with a young professor who spent half the time answering his mobile phone. Emilie had trapped him.

  The Lenin was packed now. A tall guy asked Marc if he could take the empty chair from his table. Marc nodded distractedly. The red and white Martini clock on the wall told him the time was 9.03 a.m. Marc had no choice, but all the same he hesitated even to open the notebook. His fingertips stroked the shiny cover.

  An elderly professor, standing at the counter with a glass of beer and a copy of Le Parisien newspaper, was eyeing Marc’s place. He wasn’t wrong – Marc had only one desire at that moment: to run out after Emilie and throw this damn notebook in the bin.

  He looked through the window, as if he might spot her familiar outline amid the increasingly dense crowd; as if the swarm of humanity might stop moving and part like the Red Sea, so he could run after Emilie. His vision went blurred. His heartbeat accelerated. His throat tightened. He knew the warning signs so well: the tachycardia, the respiratory problems . . . He turned his gaze away from the square.

  As soon as he did so, he began to breathe more easily. His hands touched the pale green notebook again.

  So Emilie had won, as she always did. He too was going to have

  to confront his past. Marc took a deep breath and opened the notebook. Grand-Duc’s handwriting was small and dense. Slightly jumpy, but perfectly legible.

  Then Marc began to read.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal It all began with a disaster. Before 23 December, 1980, I doubt if anyone – or hardly anyone – had ever heard of Mont Terri. I certainly hadn’t. Mont Terri is one of those little peaks in the Jura mountains, on the border between France and Switzerland, a peak located inside a loop of the Doubs river. It is a mountain where cows are pastured, a long way from anywhere, with the nearest towns being Montbéliard on the French side, and Porrentruy on the Swiss side. Although it is not especially high – 2,638 feet, to be precise – it is nevertheless not always accessible, particularly in winter, when it is covered with snow. Mont Terri is known, above all, for having been a Franco-Swiss département – known as Mont Terrible – during the Revolution. Since then, it has been forgotten by everyone except the hundred or so people who live there. When the Airbus 5403 from Istanbul to Paris smashed into its south-west flank on the night of 22-23 December, journalists opted to use the name ‘Mont Terrible’, rather than Mont Terri. You have to look at it from their point of view: ‘The Tragedy of Mont Terrible’ is a much better headline than ‘The Tragedy of Mont Terri’.

  Perhaps people still remember the accident today. Perhaps not. There are so many such disasters, and they are all alike. A few months before I began to write this, a Boeing 747 crashed near Tenerife in the Canaries, killing one hundred and forty-six people. The year after the tragedy of Mont Terrible, on 1 December 1981, a DC-9 from Ljubljana to Ajaccio crashed into Mont San Pietro, killing one hundred and eighty: the only air accident in Corsican history. But everyone has forgotten about that, apart from the Corsicans. Today, everyone remembers the crash at Mont Sainte-Odile . . . until the next crash takes its place in their memory.

  At the time, in 1981, people were talking about a chain of disasters. What a load of rubbish! All you have to do is look at the statistics. Trust me: I spent hours reading websites about plane crashes. They are staggeringly detailed, providing numbers of deaths plus other facts and figures about the moments before the final dive. This may seem unbelievable, but the statistics show that in the last forty years, there have been more than 1,500 aeroplane crashes, with more than 25,000 fatalities. A quick calculation reveals that this makes nearly forty crashes per year: almost one per week, somewhere in the world.

  So it’s not surprising that everyone has forgotten about the trag

  edy of Mont Terri back in 1980. One hundred and sixty-eight deaths are now just so many specks of dust. At the time, I too didn’t pay much attention to the Mont Terri disaster. That morning, I barely even registered the news. I was staking out criminals on the coast near Hendaye: a case involving the embezzlement of casino profits, against a backdrop of Basque terrorism . . . It was pretty dangerous stuff, but exciting: my specialty at the time. I had gone solo as a private detective five years earlier, after almost twenty years acting as a mercenary all over the world. I was nearly fifty years old, with a bad hip and a spine as twisted as a caduceus. Each week of stake-out, I put on over two pounds, which I would then take at least a month to lose. In short, being a private detective, even if it was rather a half-assed plan, definitely seemed to suit me just fine.

  Like everyone else, I must have heard the news of the crash in the morning, or heard it on the radio, while I was doing surveillance in the car park of the casino in Hendaye. Back then, I had no idea that a few months later that accident would take over my entire life. Ironic, isn’t it? If only I had known . . .

  The Airbus 5403 from Istanbul to Paris crashed into Mont Terri on 23 December, in the middle of the night. At 12.37 a.m., to be precise. No one ever found out exactly what happened that night. Until that point, it had been quite a mild winter, but on the morning of the 22nd, it had begun to snow – and it hadn’t stopped. That night, there was a terrible snowstorm. Mont Terri is a bit like a stepping stone between the Swiss Jura and the French Jura. The pilot simply missed his footing. That was what people said at the time, anyway: everyone blamed it all on the poor pilot, who was burnt to cinders like everyone else in the cabin. What about the black box, you may ask? All it reve
aled was that the plane was flying too low and that the pilot had ended up losing control. The victims’ association and the pilot’s family sought to find out more, without success. So the pilot was blamed, along with the snow, the storm, the mountain, fate, Murphy’s Law, and sheer bad luck. There was a hearing, of course. The victims’ families needed to understand. But the public didn’t really care about that particular judgement.

  The cabin was crushed at 12.37 a.m. It was the experts who calculated that afterwards, because there were no witnesses except the passengers – and nothing could be learned from them, not even a broken watch that might have indicated the time of the crash. Before Christmas, ecologists had been fighting to save every pine tree in the Jura mountains. In a few seconds, the Airbus uprooted more trees than a century of Christmases. Those that were not torn from the earth were set on fire, in spite of the snow. The aeroplane ploughed a motorway through the forest, several thousand feet long, before collapsing, exhausted. A few seconds later, it exploded, and continued to burn all night.

  The first emergency services did not discover the burning fuselage until an hour later. The reaction to the disaster was very much delayed, as nobody lived within a three-mile radius of the crash site. It was the inferno that alerted the valley’s inhabitants. And then the rescue services were hampered by the snow: the helicopters remained grounded, and the first firemen were only able to reach the blazing aeroplane on foot, by following its scorched path. The storm died down in the early morning, and for a few hours Mont Terri became the centre of the world. There was even a trial, or at least an investigation, I think, into why the emergency services arrived so late. But not many people were interested in that judgement either.

  Besides, the rescue workers must have thought that there was no point rushing: it was clear there could be no survivors. But firemen tend to be conscientious, even at 1.30 a.m., in the Jura mountains, during a snowstorm. So, they searched anyway, if only so that they hadn’t travelled all that way for nothing, and could do something more useful than warming their hands for a few minutes by the vast fire that had destroyed everything on this side of the mountain

  – the fire that had transformed the bodies of the one hundred and sixty-eight terrified passengers into ashes.

  They searched, their eyes streaming from the smoke and the horror. It was a young fireman – Thierry Mouchot, from the Sochaux brigade – who found her. You may be surprised by this level of detail, so many years later, but trust me, it’s all true. Later, I would spend several hours talking to him, encouraging him to spin out into eternity those few seconds, going back over all the details to the point of absurdity. That night, he did not realise at first what he had found. He thought it must have been a corpse – the body of a dead baby. But it was the only body of a passenger on the Airbus that had not been burned to cinders. The baby was very young – less than three months old. It had been ejected on impact, from the front left door of the Airbus’s cabin, which had been partially blown open when the plane crashed into the mountainside. All of this was reconstructed afterwards by the experts, proved in great detail during the inquiry, as they attempted to calculate which seats the baby and its parents had occupied on the plane. Have no fear: I will come back to this shortly. Please be patient . . .

  Mouchot, the young fireman, was convinced that what he had discovered was a corpse: after all, the baby had been covered with snow for more than an hour. And yet, when he bent over it, he saw that the child – its face, its hands, its fingers – was hardly even blue. The body was lying about a hundred feet from the blaze. It had been kept warm by the protective heat of the burning cabin. The young fireman quickly carried out mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, exactly as he had been taught, followed by a very gentle cardiac massage. He could never have believed he would be able to save a newborn baby, particularly in conditions such as these.

  The baby was breathing again, weakly. In the minutes that followed, the emergency services took care of the rest. Afterwards, the doctors confirmed that it was the fire in the clearing, the heat produced by the molten cabin, that had saved the infant – a little girl with blue eyes, very blue eyes for one so young, probably European to judge from her pale skin. She had been ejected far enough from the plane not to be burned alive, but close enough to benefit from the protection of the fire’s warmth. What had consumed the other passengers, including the child’s parents, had saved her life. That was what the doctors said to explain the miracle.

  Because it truly was a miracle!

  Most of the national newspapers finished their special report on the disaster late that night; they could not wait for the emergency services’ verdict. Only one paper, the Est Républicain, took the risk of waiting longer, of holding the presses, of making its staff stay up even later, of sending out a general alert. A good editor’s hunch, probably. The Est Républicain had at its disposal an army of freelancers in every corner of the Jura mountains, and they hung about in front of hospitals, by police cars . . . News of the miracle first began to spread at about 2 a.m. In its edition of 23 December, 1980, the Est Républicain was able to use the headline on its front page: The Miracle of Mont Terrible. Alongside the photograph of the burntout fuselage, the newspaper published a colour photograph of the baby being held by a fireman in front of the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital. The brief caption told the story: The Airbus 5403, flying from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont Terri, on the Franco-Swiss border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and flight crew on board, 168 were killed upon impact or perished in the flames. The sole survivor was a baby, three months old, thrown from the plane when it collided with the mountainside, before the cabin was consumed by fire.

  France awoke to the news of this tragedy. In every household in the country, the orphan discovered in the snow moved people to tears. That morning, the Est Républicain’s scoop was taken up by all the other newspapers, all the radio stations and television channels. Perhaps you can recall it now? The wave of hot tears that rained down in an outpouring of national grief.

  One detail remained. The newspaper had published a picture of the miracle child, but not her name. It was difficult, at two in the morning: they would have had to get hold of Air France in Istanbul. That, at least, is what the editor must have thought. After all, the name of the miracle child was not so important. True, adding the blue-eyed orphan’s name to the caption under her photograph would have increased the story’s emotional impact, but ‘The Miracle Child of Mont Terrible’ wasn’t bad either. And it preserved part of the mystery until the baby’s identification, which was due to be announced the following morning.

  At the latest.

  Now, let’s see . . .

  How long have I been searching for that child’s name? Only about eighteen years . . .

  5

  2 October, 1998, 9.10 a.m. Marc’s concentration was broken by the raucous laughter of five students sitting around a high table, about twenty feet away from him. It looked as though the five boys were passing around photographs: probably snaps of their latest night out, the kind of pictures they would keep all their lives, hidden away somewhere, a memory half-glorious, half-shameful. Marc knew them vaguely – they all belonged to one of the main associations that ran the university’s social activities.

  He looked up.

  9.11 a.m., if the Martini clock was to be believed.

  Mariam was talking to a girl dressed head to toe in black. The

  landlady did not even glance at Marc.

  He sighed, and started reading again.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal So that is the precise moment when the mystery of Mont Terri began. Maybe a few snatches of memory are coming back to you now? I have reconstructed the events that followed with metronomical precision, but I will spare you the hundreds of hours I spent interviewing witnesses. I believe a summary of the facts will prove sufficiently edifying.

  The orphaned baby discovered by the young fireman was placed in the care of the pediatric department of the Belfort
-Montbéliard hospital, and watched over by an army of doctors. Léonce de Carville learned both pieces of news – about the crash and the miracle baby – from the radio, at six in the morning (Léonce always woke early). With a single telephone call, he cancelled his entire work schedule for the day and headed instead to Montbéliard by private jet. Fifty-five years old at the time, Léonce de Carville was one of the hundred best known captains of industry in France. An engineer by training, he had made his fortune laying pipelines in every continent on Earth. The de Carville business was subcontracted by the world’s largest oil and gas multinationals. The de Carvilles’ success was due not so much to technological innovation in the oil and gas pipelines they supplied, as to their ability to install them in the most dangerous and complicated locations: underwater, under mountains, in seismic zones, and so on. The business really took off in the 1960s, when the de Carvilles invented a revolutionary technology to stabilise oil pipelines in areas of permafrost, a technology the company managed to export – in the middle of the Cold War

  – to both Siberia and Alaska.

  In the white maze of the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital, Léonce de Carville wore that mask of dignity that would impress everyone involved in the case.

  ‘Follow me, please,’ said an eager nurse.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the nursery. Don’t worry, she’s doing fine . . .’

  ‘Who is looking after her?’

  ‘Um . . . Dr Morange,’ the nurse answered, a little surprised. ‘He

  was on duty last night . . .’ Léonce de Carville did not have to say another single word to make his meaning clear.

  ‘You are lucky, Mr de Carville. Dr Morange is one of our most renowned specialists. He’s still here. You can ask him anything you like . . .’

  Léonce de Carville’s mouth cracked into what may have been a smile or a scowl. He walked on, determined and assured, and people quickly moved aside to let him pass.