Chapter 5 - The Little Liar

They call it a personality test. Its validity depends on the goodwill of the tester and, it has to be said, on the defendant’s social background and how high profile the case is. Which amounts to saying that it usually runs to only a few pages. Five was all it took to get the measure of Marco Lange.

Alice had seen dozens of men like him come through the system. She had a name for them: “Kleenex men.” To summarize, his mother had had too many children and he too many stepfathers, he’d spent several years in foster care, had been expelled from school and then sent to a metal works, and of course he’d failed his apprenticeship diploma. That little sentence, “I failed my diploma,” was among those that Alice most frequently found in her clients’ files. Along with others like “I retook first grade” and “I didn’t know my father.”

He’d wanted to enlist in the army, picturing himself as a tank mechanic, but that hadn’t worked out either. Defendants’ life stories are full of broken dreams. He’d worked all over the place, always on the outskirts of towns, taking on a string of casual jobs until a builder took a liking to him and taught him plastering and decorating.

Marco Lange had had no better luck with women. He would be offered one side of a bed that some other man had just vacated, and another would be hot on his heels to hustle him out. Not one woman he’d met had decided to make a husband and father of him. When he was thirty, he’d pursued a woman twelve years his senior who was bringing up two children single-handed. She’d told him that companies near where she lived were hiring.

“I really believed in it that time, in the woman and the work,” he had said.

They’d lasted a little longer than any of the others. He’d stayed long enough to fix up her little house, extend her vegetable patch, and grow fond of the children.

“And then it ended.”

The breakup had gotten him down, and after that he’d tried to “do it with men,” but “didn’t really feel comfortable talking about it”—the tester had put his words in quotes. Marco Lange had decided to stay in the area, though. He was tired of moving around, and anyway, he said, it was the first time he’d felt settled anywhere. He’d even found accommodation, a first-floor room that looked out over a small courtyard.

“It didn’t get much daylight, but at least it was my place.”

That was where the police had come to arrest him.

Shown in profile on the police photo, his forehead bulges outward directly above black eyebrows, and he has a high hairline. Alice thought that when seen head-on, he could have been one of the workers taking a lunch break on that beam at Rockefeller Center in the famous photo from the thirties. A workman’s face with nothing obvious to date it. Or perhaps it was the poor-quality photocopy that made him look like that. Lange is in a short-sleeved shirt with the collar unbuttoned. It was springtime.

First statement in custody. He says he is single and unemployed. When an officer asks him if there’s anyone who should be informed, he says no, no one. The questioning begins like a routine conversation, he gives the names of his recent employers, explains that he left one “because of the pay,” another “because of a personality clash,” and that a third had fired him after he was off sick, “with depression,” he explained.

On the fourth page, the officer cuts to the chase.

New line, bold letters, side heading: “Sexual behavior.” Lange says that he “does it the normal way” with women. The questioner digs deeper. For fellatio, it’s a yes, often. For anal sex, only occasionally. Does he have “urges”? Yes, sometimes. “Inappropriate behavior”? Maybe, “just my hand on an ass.” Does he watch porn? Yes again. What type? Both. Can you be more precise? Fifty-fifty men and women. And children? Never. Was he ever sexually assaulted? No, “but one of my brothers was.”

Next session. Of course he knows the Charvet family. He worked there for several weeks, erecting a pergola and building a lean-to to accommodate a guest bedroom and a home office. Their children? He knew them too. Two girls. How did he get along with them? “At first things were good and then it soured, I was in a bad place at the time, drinking a lot. The client didn’t let me finish the job.”

“Do you know why you’re here?” the officer asks.

“You asked me that several times, I still don’t see what I did wrong.”

“Lange Marco is informed why he is being questioned in custody,” the report says.

“I don’t get it. I never raped anybody.”

The interview is suspended for two hours. Change of police officer. When the interview is resumed, the investigator notes that Marco Lange has eaten the sandwich he was offered. And the questions begin again. Sexual relationships, urges, erotic dreams, inappropriate behavior, schedule. He gets angry. Ends up saying yes, maybe, he said some stuff he shouldn’t have said to the Charvet girls.

“The younger one was the type to strut around half naked at her window.”

And then, “I gotta say, it was more the mom who did it for me. She always complained that her husband was never around. She sent me away like I was a scumbag, and plus she didn’t pay me.”

But all the way through he keeps saying he didn’t do anything, and he doesn’t understand why he’s being accused. At the end of his statutory forty-eight hours, Marco Lange is remanded in custody.

In nearby interview rooms, other people are being questioned. His last employer’s wife says she avoided being alone with him at the warehouse. She thought he “looked at her funny.” She even “got the impression” he was “fiddling with himself” in front of her. The waitress in a bar he often goes to says he has “wandering hands.”

Lydie, his ex, describes a kind, helpful man, but one who “can get aggressive when he’s had too much to drink.” She, too, is asked whether Lange is “sexually normal.” There must be some police norm for sexuality, Alice thought with a sigh.

Just reading the report, she could picture the scene. The witness was clearly not the type to be intimidated.

“We had sex, what can I say?”

“Did he ever ask you for anything unusual?”

“We gave each other a good time, that’s all. If you really want to know, it was me who showed him stuff. It doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t bother anybody, and it’s private.”

The officer asks how old her daughter was when she lived with Lange.

“Fifteen-sixteen.”

“How did he behave around her?”

Lydie balks.

“What are you dreaming up here? No way he was going to approach my daughter. And let me tell you, he had his hands full with me.”

But she does say that when she heard afterward that he “also slept with men,” now that “disgusted” her.

The investigation took a lot of interest in this bisexuality of Lange’s. The police had already identified one of his partners, the same kind of guy as him, a lightweight carried along by the tide, who said they’d had sex “just casually, in passing.” One young man said he’d turned down some insistent advances. Another claimed he’d felt “uncomfortable” about Lange’s intimate revelations at a bar. A friend of Lange’s described throwing him out of his place one evening when Lange was drunk and had asked his wife if she wanted to “suck him off.”

“I wasn’t sure I heard him right. I said, ‘Say that again,’ and he laughed. I came close to punching him in the face. That evening my wife and I agreed that he could rape someone.”

The police had also found a neighbor of the Charvets—a retired accountant, she described herself as—who had had her ceilings repainted by Marco Lange. She hadn’t forgiven him for damaging the casing of a wardrobe when he moved it.

“I saw what kind of man he was right away,” she said.

Oh, witnesses are wonderful! Even when they don’t know a thing, they can find something to say, Alice thought irritably. Once again, she felt the accuracy of Erri de Luca’s words: “Assessing an era through its legal documents is like studying the stars by looking at their reflection in a pond.”

Alice went back to the earliest entries in the file and reread the statements from Lisa’s parents on the day they’d filed their complaint. Bénédicte Charvet’s statement was much more extensive than her husband’s.

“As soon as she realized that I knew what was going on, Lisa locked herself in her bedroom. She didn’t open up and let me in till the middle of the night. She was so pale and she could barely stand. I took her straight to the emergency room. The doctor gave her a sedative and decided to keep her overnight for observation. My husband was away on business, I waited till he came home, and we went to the hospital together to bring Lisa home. Then she refused to come to the police station with us to make the complaint. She didn’t want to give her name, she said she was scared. I wouldn’t let it go, and in the end she told us it was someone we knew, someone we were mad at.”

Bénédicte Charvet is the first to mention Marco Lange. She should have been suspicious of him sooner, she said.

“He was a good worker at first. I kind of took pity on him, he told me about his life, he was so isolated. Then he started slacking. He arrived late, and always had some excuse.”

She’d been really angry with him one time when she’d found him knocking back a bottle of vodka at work. Certainly, after that, she said, “I told the girls to be careful. I thought he looked at me funny.” The same words as the builder’s wife.

“One morning when we were having coffee in the kitchen,” she added, “Lisa came down for breakfast. She was in her nightshirt. He looked at her and said, ‘Your daughter’s getting so beautiful. Even more beautiful than you. A real little woman.’”

She claimed she’d “felt just so uneasy” and had asked Lisa to go back up to her room.

“When I heard what Lisa had told her teachers, I immediately thought of Marco Lange.

Alice underlined the words “what Lisa had told her teachers.” Two of them, Pauline Valette and François Boehm, had been interviewed at length during the inquiry.

Pauline Valette, her French teacher, had been the first to be concerned about changes in Lisa’s behavior in class. She said she no longer recognized the lively, twinkly student from the beginning of the year. Lisa kept herself to herself, seemed to have neglected her appearance for a while when she’d been something of a coquette before.

“She didn’t dress the same, she took to wearing shapeless clothes. Between classes she always had some excuse to stay in the classroom instead of being with the other students in the schoolyard.”

At first, Lisa had told her teacher that things weren’t good at home, that she could no longer deal with her mother’s comments, and the worst thing was that she was sad because her parents were always fighting. Another time, she’d explained that it was “a girl thing.”

“She would come looking for me. She seemed to want to confide in someone. I found her touching. I tried to get her to trust me.”

She’d even given Lisa her phone number. Lisa had called her in the middle of the night and then immediately hung up. When she’d raised it with her, Lisa had explained that the call had been a mistake and she’d apologized. Another time, Lisa had asked if Pauline could drop her off at home so she didn’t have to take the school bus. She’d said the bus stop was some distance from her house and, when it was dark, she was scared of meeting the wrong kind of people, because it had happened before.

“I got the feeling she was telling me only half the story, like she was expecting me to work out the rest. It put me in a difficult position. She told me there was no one she could confide in, definitely not her mother, her father was never there, her sister worked the whole time.”

Pauline Valette also said that during an end-of-semester parent-teacher meeting she’d discussed Lisa’s well-being with Bénédicte Charvet.

“Mrs. Charvet was mostly concerned about her daughter’s poor academic results. She said Lisa was a complicated kid and kept comparing her with her older sister.”

In her statement, Pauline Valette went on to mention that Lisa did not attend a school trip that her class had been planning for weeks. She’d come to school with bruises on her face and said she’d fallen off her bike.

“I can’t say exactly why but it felt like she used that as an excuse not to come on the trip.”

“There was no denying,” she added, “that Lisa Charvet was suffering. She seemed to be permanently on the brink of tears.”

Very implicated, this Pauline Valette, Alice thought.

François Boehm, the history teacher, was equally concerned. Lisa had felt faint during one of his lessons. The same thing had happened in science class during a presentation on reproduction. The school nurse had said that Lisa was just hypoglycemic.

“François and I agreed that we needed to keep an eye on Lisa Charvet. But we didn’t really feel we had any support from older teachers, and certainly not from the principal.”

Pauline Valette apparently felt a lot of resentment toward this principal, Luc Fayolle.

“He criticized us for worrying about her too much and asked us to take a step back. He said there were plenty of other students with problems. He put it down to our ‘inexperience.’ He’s about to retire, he’s lost interest in it all.”

All the same, the principal took things in hand. Among the documents taken from the school’s administrative services during the investigation was a sort of cafeteria diary devoted to Lisa Charvet. Salmon and rice, sausages and mashed potato, spaghetti carbonara. The menus were copied out in the same careful handwriting, with occasionally wobbly spelling. “Monday: Lisa Charvet only had a main course, spinach risotto, and hardly touched it.” “Tuesday: Lisa Charvet ate her egg mayonnaise first course but didn’t really touch her main course couscous.” “Thursday: Lisa Charvet returned her pollock and steamed potatoes and her fruit compote untouched” (underlined twice), “Friday: Lisa Charvet gave her cordon bleu to someone else and didn’t eat her chocolate mousse.”

There were ten pages like this, written out in a spiral-bound notebook. Alice could picture the cafeteria monitor in her pale-blue paper hat, circulating apparently casually between tables to spy on young Lisa’s tray and check she wasn’t giving someone else her portion of sausage.

And then one Saturday morning events took a dramatic turn. Lisa had not handed in her French homework the day before. She’d run away in tears when Pauline Valette had tried to hold her back at the end of class. Mrs. Valette had then taken Lisa’s best friend Marion aside to ask whether she knew anything. Marion obstinately refused to talk, the teacher had persisted, and Marion had snapped: Lisa had confided in her that a man was abusing her. It had happened several times. She’d made her swear not to say anything.

Pauline Valette and François Boehm decided there and then to summon Lisa to the staff room with Marion.

“What Marion had just told me confirmed all my fears. I’d already discussed it several times with my coworker from the history department. We wanted to be sure. And that was when Lisa admitted that she’d been raped.”

Alice scowled at the word “admitted.” Admissions are for perpetrators, not victims. The two teachers had relayed this to the principal. Luc Fayolle had immediately called in Lisa’s parents and contacted the Board of Education and district attorney.

Lisa was questioned three days later. She was seen by a female police officer who talked to her in a cozy, familiar way, as if to a ten-year-old.

“So, is it okay if we film you, if we record what you say when we’re talking?”

The answer is yes. The police officer asks which class she’s in, whether she has brothers and sisters, and what she’d like to do in life.

Alice tried to picture Lisa five years younger, under the white light of a small-town police station, sitting opposite a woman in uniform coaxing her to describe what she’d been through.

“The first time was at my house. I was home alone, he rang the doorbell, he said he was there to pick up his tools. We talked some, and then … then he hugged me and kissed me, he started running his hands all over me, and he … put his hand in my panties. I was paralyzed, I couldn’t move … I just let him do it. The second time was in his car. He took out his penis, he got a hold of my head and forced me … He said he’d punish me if I told my parents about it …”

“For the record, the minor is crying throughout,” points out the police officer. She asks for specific details. Yes, it was Marco Lange. No, Lisa doesn’t remember if he ejaculated. But he insulted her, that she remembers.

“He said it was all I was good for.”

Her statement, which had started at 17:51, ended at 19:16. The adults—her parents and teachers—said a whole lot more than she did.

Next came a medical report supported by a pipette, a sample slide, three swabs, and a blood sample. A young girl, as seen in legal proceedings. “A genital examination identified normal labia majora, labia minora, and vulval opening. The hymen is intact and has a one-finger-width aperture. The perineal examination found no lesions around the anus, and the radial folds are intact. No rectal examination was performed.”

A virgin then, Alice thought.