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VINTAGE
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Copyright © P.O.L éditeur 2000
Translation copyright © Metropolitan Books 2000
Cover photograph © Getty Images
Emmanuel Carrère has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Published by Vintage in 2017
First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury in 2001
First published in French as L’Adversaire by P.O.L éditeur, Paris, in 2000
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Emmanuel Carrère, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book, and translated into twenty-three languages), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life as a Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov (winner of the 2011 Prix Renaudot), The Mustache, and most recently, The Kingdom.
On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting …
With these chilling first words, acclaimed master of psychological suspense, Emmanuel Carrère, begins his exploration of the double life of a respectable doctor, eighteen years of lies, five murders, and the extremes to which ordinary people can go.
‘As a writer, Carrère is straight berserk; as a storyteller he is so freakishly talented, so unassuming in grace and power that you only realize the hold he’s got on you when you attempt to pull away … You say: True crime and literature? I don’t believe it. I say: Believe it’ —Junot Díaz
The Mustache
Gothic Romance
Class Trip
I Am Alive and You Are Dead
My Life as a Russian Novel
Lives Other Than My Own
Limonov
The Kingdom
ON THE SATURDAY morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal. I usually devote Saturday afternoons and Sundays to my family, but I spent the rest of that weekend alone in my studio because I was finishing up a book I had been working on for over a year, a biography of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The last chapter described the days he spent in a coma before his death. I completed it on Tuesday evening and on Wednesday morning opened my newspaper to the lead article on the Romand case.
LUC LADMIRAL WAS awakened shortly after four o’clock Monday morning by a telephone call from Jacques Cottin, the pharmacist in Prévessin. The Romands’ house was on fire; their friends should come try to salvage as much of the furniture as possible. When Luc arrived, the firemen were bringing out the bodies. All his life he will remember the sealed gray plastic bags into which they had put the children: too horrible to look at. Florence had simply been covered with a coat. Her face, blackened by the smoke, was unmarked. Smoothing her hair in a desolate gesture of farewell, Luc’s fingers encountered something strange. He felt around, carefully tilting the young woman’s head to one side, then called over a fireman to show him, at the base of the skull, an open wound. It must have been from a beam that fell on her, the fireman said; part of the attic had collapsed. Luc then clambered into the red truck where the rescuers had placed Jean-Claude, the only one of the family who was still alive. His pulse was weak. He was in pajamas, unconscious, burned yet already as cold as a corpse.
An ambulance arrived and took him away to the closest major hospital, across the border in Geneva. It was dark, chilly, and the jets of water from the fire hoses had drenched everyone. Since there was nothing more to be done at the scene, Luc went to the Cottins’ house to dry off. In the yellow light of the kitchen, they listened to the sputtering of the coffee pot, not daring to look at one another. Their hands shook when they raised their cups, and as they stirred their coffee, the spoons made a dreadful racket. Then Luc went home to tell Cécile and the children what had happened. Sophie, their eldest, was Jean-Claude’s goddaughter. A few days earlier, as she often did, she had slept over at the Romands’ house, and she might very well have slept there again that night and wound up, like her playmates, in a gray plastic bag.
THEY HAD BEEN friends ever since medical school in Lyon. They’d gotten married almost at the same time; their children had grown up together. Each knew everything about the other’s life—the public image, but also the secrets, the secrets of honest, reliable men who were all the more vulnerable to temptation. When Jean-Claude had confided in him about an affair, talked about chucking everything, Luc had made him listen to reason: “And you’ll do the same for me, when it’s my turn to be an ass.” A friendship like that is one of the precious things in life, almost as precious as a successful marriage, and Luc had always been certain that one day, when they were sixty or seventy years old, they would look back together as from a mountaintop, after all that time, on the road they had traveled: the places where they’d stumbled, almost gotten lost; the ways they’d helped each other, and how, in the end, they’d come through everything. A friend, a true friend, is also a witness, someone whose attention affords you a clearer look at your own life, and for twenty years each of them had unfailingly, without any fuss, played this role for the other. Their lives were very similar, even if they hadn’t succeeded in the same way. Jean-Claude had become a leading figure in the world of research, hobnobbing with government ministers, always off at international conferences, while Luc was a general practitioner in Ferney-Voltaire. But Luc wasn’t jealous. The only thing that had come between them was an absurd disagreement, during the last few months, regarding their children’s school. For some unfathomable reason, Jean-Claude had really gotten on his high horse, so Luc had had to take the first step, saying that they weren’t going to quarrel over such a silly thing. The whole business had upset Luc; he and Cécile had talked it over several evenings in a row. How trivial it seemed now! How fragile life is! Only yesterday, there was a close, happy family, people who loved one another, and today—a boiler accident, charred bodies being taken to the morgue … His wife and children were everything to Jean-Claude. What would his life be like if he survived?
Luc phoned the emergency room in Geneva: the patient had been placed in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber; the prognosis was guarded.
Luc prayed with Cécile and the children that he would never regain consciousness.
WHEN LUC WENT to open his office, two policemen were waiting for him. Their questions seemed odd. They wanted to know if the Romands had any known enemies, if they’d been involved in any suspicious activities … Seeing Luc’s astonishment, the police told him the truth. An initial examination of the bodies revealed that the victims had died before the fire, Florence from head injuries inflicted by a blunt instrument, Antoine and Caroline from bullet wounds.
That wasn’t all. In Clairvaux-les-Lacs, in the Jura Mountains, Jean-Claude’s uncle had been delegated to break the tragic news to the injured man’s parents, a frail elderly couple. Accompanied by their doctor, he had gone to see them and found the house locked, the dog mysteriously silent. Worried, the uncle had broken open the door to discover his brother, his sister-in-law, and the dog lying in their own blood. Like Antoine and Caroline, they had been shot to death.
Murdered. The Romands had been murdered. The word echoed through Luc’s brain, stunning him. “Was it a robbery?” he asked, as if that word might reduce the horror of the other one to something rational. The police didn’t know yet, but two crimes striking members of the same family fifty miles apart were more likely to be an act of revenge or a settling of accounts. The officers asked again about possible enemies, and Luc, at a loss, shook his head. Enemies? The Romands? Everyone loved them. If they had been killed, it had to have been by people who didn’t know them.
The police needed to find out exactly what Jean-Claude did for a living. A doctor, the neighbors said, but he didn’t have an office. Luc explained that he was a researcher at the World Health Organization, in Geneva. One of the officers telephoned, asking to speak to someone who worked with Dr. Romand, perhaps his secretary or one of his colleagues. The receptionist did not know any Dr. Romand. When the caller insisted, she connected him to the personnel director, who consulted his files and confirmed that there was no Dr. Romand at WHO.
Then Luc understood and felt hugely relieved. Everything that had happened since four that morning—Cottin’s phone call, the fire, Florence’s wound, the gray bags, Jean-Claude lying severely burned in the hyperbaric chamber, and now this business about crimes—all of it had happened with perfect verisimilitude, an impression of reality that left no room for suspicion, but now, thank God, the scenario was going awry, revealing itself as what it was: a bad dream. He was going to wake up in his bed. He wondered if he would remember everything and if he would dare tell Jean-Claude about it. “I dreamed that your house was on fire, that your wife, your children, your parents were murdered, and that you—you were in a coma and no one at WHO knew anything about you.” Could one say that to a friend, even to one’s best friend? The idea occurred to Luc (it would haunt him later on) that in this dream, Jean-Claude served as a double, bringing out into the open Luc’s own fears—of losing his loved ones but also of losing himself, of discovering that behind his social facade he was nothing.
IN THE COURSE of that day, reality became even more nightmarish. Summoned to the police station in the afternoon, Luc learned within five minutes that a note in Jean-Claude’s handwriting confessing to the crimes had been found in his car and that everything people thought they knew about his career and professional activities was a sham. It had taken only a few telephone calls and elementary inquiries to tear off the mask. The World Health Organization? No one there had ever heard of him. The national registry of physicians? He wasn’t listed. The hospitals in Paris where he was said to be on the medical staff? He was not accredited there, nor was he a graduate of the medical school in Lyon where Luc himself, and several others, swore nevertheless to have been students with him. He had begun his studies, yes, but had stopped taking his exams at the end of the second year, and from then on, everything was false.
At first, Luc simply refused to believe this. When someone tells you that your best friend, your daughter’s godfather, the most respectable man you know has killed his wife, his children, his parents, and that in addition he has been lying to you about everything for years, isn’t it normal to go on believing in him, even in the face of overwhelming proof? What kind of friendship would let itself be so easily convinced of its error? Jean-Claude could not be a murderer. There had to be a piece missing from the puzzle. It would be found—and everything would take on a new meaning.
For the Ladmirals, those days were an unspeakable ordeal. The disciples of Jesus saw him arrested, tried, executed as though he were the lowest of criminals, and yet, even though Peter faltered, they continued to have faith in him. On the third day they learned that they had been right to remain steadfast. Cécile and Luc tried with all their strength to stand fast. But on the third day, and even before, they had to admit that their hope was in vain and that they would have to live with not only the loss of those who had died but also the grief of trust betrayed, of life completely corrupted by lies.
IF THEY COULD at least have protected their children! Simply told them—and that was awful enough—that Antoine and Caroline had perished with their parents in a fire. But there was no use trying to hush it up. Within a few hours, the region had been invaded by reporters, photographers, TV crewmen. They pestered everyone, even the schoolchildren, who all knew by Tuesday that Antoine, Caroline, and their mommy had been killed by their daddy, who had then set their house on fire. Many of them began to have dreams that their homes were burning and that their daddies were doing what Antoine’s and Caroline’s father had done. At the Ladmirals’, Luc and Cécile had dragged their three children’s mattresses into the master bedroom because no one dared sleep alone anymore. Without yet knowing what it was they had to explain, Luc and Cécile would sit on the edge of the mattresses, soothing, caressing, trying at least to reassure. But they could tell that their words had lost their former magical power. Doubt had crept in, which nothing except time could dispel. Both they and their children had been robbed of childhood, for never again would the little ones nestle in their arms with the trust that is miraculous but normal, at their age, in normal families, and it was in thinking about this, about what had been irreparably destroyed, that Luc and Cécile began to cry.
THE FIRST EVENING, their group of friends gathered at their house, and they came over every evening that week. They stayed until three or four in the morning trying to weather the blow together. They forgot to eat, they drank too much, many began smoking again. These late nights weren’t funeral wakes—in fact they were the liveliest evenings the house had ever known: the shock was so great it stirred up a maelstrom of questions and uncertainties that short-circuited bereavement. Each of them went at least once a day to the police station, either summoned there or to check on the progress of the investigation, and they talked about it all night long, comparing information, constructing hypotheses.
The Gex region is a plain some twenty miles wide stretching from the foot of the Jura to the edge of Lake Geneva. Although situated in French territory, it is essentially a residential suburb of Geneva, an aggregate of well-to-do villages that have become home to a colony of international officials who work in Switzerland, are paid in Swiss francs, and for the most part are not subject to income tax. All enjoy more or less the same way of life. They live in former farmhouses that have been comfortably remodeled. The husband drives to his office in a Mercedes. His wife does her shopping and attends to her charity work in a Volvo. The children go to the Ecole Saint-Vincent, an expensive private school in the shadow of Voltaire’s château. Jean-Claude and Florence were familiar and valued members of this community, where they had kept up their social position, and now everyone who knew them was wondering: Where had the money come from? If he wasn’t who he claimed to be, what was he?
The prosecutor assigned to the case promptly announced to reporters that he was “prepared for anything”; then, after an initial examination of various bank accounts, he suggested that the motive behind the crimes was “the imposter’s fear of being unmasked and the abrupt cessation of an as yet ill-defined illicit enterprise in which he was a key figure and which for years had been bringing in considerable amounts of money.” This statement fired everyone’s imagination. People started talking about trafficking in arms, currency, organs, narcotics … a vast criminal syndicate operating in the disintegrating former socialist bloc … the Russian mafia. Jean-Claude traveled a lot. The previous year, he had gone to Leningrad, bringing back some nesting dolls for Sophie, his goddaughter. In a fit of paranoia, Luc and Cécile wondered if these dolls concealed compromising documents, microfilm, or a microprocessor—something that the killers in Prévessin and Clairvaux might have searched for in vain. Because Luc, who was finding himself more and more isolated, still wanted to believe in some kind of plot. Perhaps Jean-Claude was a spy, a peddler of scientific or industrial secrets, but he couldn’t have killed his family. They had killed them, they had concocted evidence to frame him for the crimes, they had even gone so far as to destroy the traces of his past.
“AN ORDINARY ACCIDENT, an injustice can bring on madness. Forgive me Corinne, forgive me my friends, forgive me good people of the Saint-Vincent school board who wanted to punch my face in.”
That was the text of the farewell note left in the car. What ordinary accident? What injustice? wondered the “friends,” who all gathered at the Ladmirals’ every evening. Several of them were also among the “good people,” members of the school board, and the police went after them relentlessly. Each person had to provide a detailed account of the disagreement provoked at the beginning of the school year by the replacement of the principal. The police listened almost distrustfully. Wasn’t that it, the injustice that had caused the tragedy? The members of the board were dismayed; they had argued, yes, perhaps someone had even talked about punching Jean-Claude in the nose—but you’d have to be crazy to imagine a connection between that quarrel and the massacre of an entire family! You would have to be crazy, the police admitted, and yet the connection had to exist.
Appalling evidence came from Corinne (the newspapers, which had been instructed not to give her name, called her a “mysterious mistress”). The previous Saturday, Jean-Claude had met her in Paris; they were to dine in Fontainebleau with his illustrious friend Bernard Kouchner, one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders. A few hours earlier, according to the autopsy, Jean-Claude had slain his wife, his children, and his parents. Of course, Corinne had had no idea of what he had done. En route to their dinner engagement, in a remote corner of the forest, he had tried to kill her as well. When she had resisted, he had backed off and then driven her home, saying that he was gravely ill and that this explained his attack of madness. Learning of the slaughter on Monday and realizing that she had almost become the sixth victim, Corinne had contacted the police, who had called Bernard Kouchner. He had never heard of Dr. Romand and had no house in Fontainebleau.
Everybody knew Corinne in Ferney, where she had lived before her divorce and subsequent move to Paris. No one, however, was aware that she had had an affair with Jean-Claude except for Luc and his wife, who held it against her. They considered Corinne a troublemaker, capable of saying anything at all to make herself interesting. But since the theory of some sort of plot became less tenable with each passing day, a crime of passion conveniently filled the gap. Luc recalled what Jean-Claude had confided to him and how deeply depressed his friend had been after the affair ended. Luc could easily imagine how Corinne might have driven Jean-Claude insane if they’d gotten back together: the shuttling between his wife and mistress, the growing tangle of lies, and on top of that the anguish of illness … Because Jean-Claude had also confessed to him that he was suffering from cancer, for which he was being treated in Paris by the eminent oncologist Léon Schwartzenberg. Luc mentioned this to the police, who checked his information. Dr. Schwartzenberg didn’t know Jean-Claude any more than Kouchner did, and the inquiry, which was expanded to include the oncology departments of every hospital in France, never turned up any file anywhere for a Jean-Claude Romand.
THROUGH HER LAWYER, Corinne succeeded in forcing the press to stop calling her the monster’s mistress and to refer to her as just “a friend.” Then it was learned that she’d handed over to him 900,000 francs in savings that he was to have invested for her in Switzerland and that he had embezzled instead. The mysterious smuggling intrigue turned out to be a common swindle. There was no more mention of espionage or organized crime. The investigators thought that he had betrayed the trust of others in his circle, and reporters hinted that these people didn’t dare make a fuss because the investments he’d tempted them into were illegal: that explained, perhaps, why the prominent citizens of Ferney were acting so aloof … These insinuations exasperated Luc. As the murderer’s “best friend,” he was besieged by strangers in leather jackets who waved press cards, stuck microphones in his face, and offered him small fortunes to go through his photo albums. He systematically turned them away, to avoid tarnishing the memory of the dead, and the result was—he was suspected of tax fraud.
Other revelations came from Florence’s family, the Crolets, who lived in Annecy and whom the Ladmirals knew well. They, too, had entrusted money to Jean-Claude: the father’s retirement bonus plus, after his death, a million francs netted from the sale of his house. And not only did they know that this money, the fruit of a lifetime’s labor, was irrevocably lost, but their grief was compounded by an agonizing suspicion: M. Crolet had died in a fall on a staircase when he was alone with Jean-Claude. Had he been yet another victim of his son-in-law?
EVERYONE WAS WONDERING: How could we have lived beside this man for so long without suspecting a thing? Everyone tried to remember a moment when some suspicion, something that might have led to some suspicion, had almost crossed their minds. The president of the school board kept telling people how he had not been able to find Jean-Claude in the directory of international agencies. Luc himself remembered that he’d been struck by something a few months earlier, after learning from Florence that Jean-Claude had ranked fifth on his medical board exam in Paris. What astonished Luc wasn’t this achievement but the fact that he hadn’t learned of it at the time. Why hadn’t Jean-Claude mentioned it? Questioned, accused of being secretive, Jean-Claude had shrugged, said he didn’t want to make a big deal of it, and changed the subject. It was extraordinary, this ability to deflect conversation whenever it turned to him. He did this so well that you didn’t even realize it, and thinking back on it later, you wound up admiring his discretion, his modesty, his desire to show others to advantage instead of himself. Yet Luc had felt vaguely that there was something not quite right in what Jean-Claude said about his career. He’d considered calling WHO to discover exactly what it was he did there—but had decided the whole thing was absurd. And now he kept telling himself that if he’d gone through with it, maybe things would have turned out differently.
“Perhaps,” said Cécile when he told her of his remorse, “—perhaps he would have killed you as well.”
WHEN THEY SPOKE of him, late at night, they couldn’t manage to call him Jean-Claude anymore. They didn’t call him Romand, either. He was somewhere outside life, outside death, where he no longer had a name.
AFTER THREE DAYS, they learned he was going to live.
Made public on Thursday, the news hung heavily over his parents’ funeral, which took place the next day in Clairvaux-les-Lacs. Services for Florence and the children had been put off to allow completion of the autopsies. These two circumstances made the ceremony even more unbearable. Standing there in the rain, how could one believe the words of peace and solace the priest forced himself to speak as the coffins were lowered into the ground? No one could find comfort in meditation, some calm inner space, some