"Very near there."
"What is the name of this couple?"
"Olivier and Christine Chabaud. Sadly, they are both dead, for many years."
"What did they do? Their occupations?"
"He was a boucher. She was a coiffeureuse"
"A butcher and a hairdresser?" Berger's tone hints that she doesn't believe him and knows damn well he is mocking her and all of us. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne is a butcher. He is dressed in hair.
"A butcher and a hairdresser, yes," Chandonne affirms.
"Did you ever see your family, the Chandonnes, while you were living with these other people near the prison?"
"Now and then I would show up at the house. Always after dark so people wouldn't see me."
"So people wouldn't see you? Why didn't you want people to see you?"
"It's as I've said." He taps an ash blindly. "My family didn't want people to know I am their son. There would have been much made of it. He's very, very well known. I can't really blame him. So I would go late at night when it was dark and the streets on He Saint-Louis were deserted, and I would sometimes get money from them or other things."
"Would they let you into the house?" Berger is desperate to place him inside the family house so authorities can have probable cause for a search warrant. I can see already that Chandonne is a master of the game. He knows damn well why she wants to place him inside the incredible Chandonne hotel particulier on lie Saint-Louis, a house I actually saw with my own eyes when I was recently in Paris. There will be no search warrant in my lifetime.
"Yes. But I wouldn't stay long, and I didn't go into all the rooms," he is telling Berger as he calmly smokes. "There are many rooms in my family's house that I have never been in. Only the kitchen, and, let me see, the kitchen and the servants' quarters and just inside the door. For the most part, you see, I have taken care of myself."
"Sir, when was the last time you visited your family's home?"
"Oh, no time recently. Two years, at least. I really don't remember."
"You don't remember? If you don't know, just say you don't know. I'm not asking you to guess."
"I don't know. But not recently, of that I'm sure."
Berger points the remote control and the picture freezes.
"You see Ms game, of course," she says to me. "First, he gives
us information we can't trace. People who are dead. Cash in a hotel where he signed in under an assumed name he can't re- member. And now, no basis for a warrant to search his family's home because he's saying he never lived there and has scarcely been inside it. And certainly not recently. No probable cause that's fresh."
"Hell! No probable cause, period," Marino adds. "Not unless we can find witnesses who've seen him in and out of the family house."
Chapter 12
BERGER RESUMES THE VIDEOTAPE. SHE IS ASKING Chandonne, "Are you employed or have you ever been?"
"This and that," he mildly replies. "Whatever I can find."
"Yet you could afford to stay in a nice hotel and eat at an expensive New York restaurant? And buy a good bottle of Italian wine? Where did you get the money for all that, sir?"
At this, Chandonne hesitates. He yawns, giving us a startling view of his grotesque teeth. Small and pointed, they are widely spaced and gray. "Sorry. I am very tired. I don't have much strength." He touches his bandages again.
At this, Berger reminds him that he is talking of his own volition. No one is forcing him. She offers to stop but he says he will continue a little longer, maybe just a few minutes longer. "I've been on the street much of my life when I can find no work," he tells her. "Sometimes I beg, but most times I find any job I can. Washing dishes, sweeping. Once I even drove a moto-crottes."
"And what is that?"
"A trottin 'net. One of those green motorcycles in Paris that cleans sidewalks, you know, with the vacuum that picks up dog shit."
"Do you have a driver's license?"
"No."
"Then how did you drive a trottin 'net?'
"If it's under one hundred and twenty-five CCs you don't need a driver's license, and the moto-crottes only go maybe twenty kilometers an hour."
This is all bullshit. Again, he is mocking us. Marino shifts in his chair inside my conference room. "The asshole's got an answer to everything, don't he?"
"Any other ways you get money?" Berger is asking Chan-donne.
"Well, from women sometimes."
"And how do you get money from women?"
"If they give money to me. I admit women are my weakness. I love women_the way they look, smell, feel, taste." He who sinks his teeth into women he brutalizes and murders says all this in a gentle tone. He feigns perfect innocence. He has begun flexing his fingers on the table as if they are stiff, splaying his fingers in and out, slowly, hair shining.
"You like the way they taste?" Berger is getting more aggressive. "Is that why you bite them?"
"I don't bite them."
"You didn't bite Susan Pless?"
"No."
"Sir, she was covered with bite marks."
"I didn't do that. They did it. I'm followed and it's they who kill. They kill my lovers."
"They?"
"I told you. Government agents. FBI, Interpol. So they can get to my family."
"If your family has been so careful to hide you from the world, then how do these people_FBI, Interpol, whatever_ know you are a Chandonne?"
"They must have seen me come out of the house at times, followed me. Or maybe someone told them."
"And you think it's been at least two years since you were in your family home?" She tries again.
"At least."
"How long do you believe you have been followed?"
"Many years. Maybe five years. It's hard to know. They're very clever."
"And how might you help these people, quote, get to your family?" Berger asks him.
"If they can frame me as if I'm a terrible killer, then the police might get into my family's house. They would find nothing. My family is innocent. It's all politics. My father is very powerful politically. Beyond that, I don't know. I only can say what has been happening to me, to my life, and it's all a conspiracy to get me into this country and be arrested and then put to death. Because you Americans kill people even when they are innocent. It is well known." His claim seems to make him weary, as if he is tired of pointing it out.
"Sir, where did you learn to speak English?" Berger then asks.
"I picked it up myself. And when I was younger, my father would give me books when I would show up at the house. I read a lot of books."
"In English?"
"Yes. I wanted to learn English very well. My father speaks many languages because he is in international shipping and deals with many foreign countries."
"Including this country? The United States?"
"Yes."
Talley's arm enters the picture again as he sets down another Pepsi. Chandonne greedily plunges the straw between his lips and makes loud sucking sounds.
"What kind of books did you read?" Berger continues.
"A lot of histories and other books to educate myself, because I had to teach myself, you see. I never went to school."
"Where are these books now?"
"Oh, I wouldn't know. Gone. Because I am homeless sometimes or move around a lot. Always on the move, looking over my shoulder because of these people after me."
"Do you know any other languages besides French and English?" Berger asks.