Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  The cop from Paris straightened up and lowered his eyes. He imagined the girls spread over the desert sand, covered in lacerations, innards exposed, prey to the buzzards. All these images in his head. He stared at the screen, short of breath.

  “That was so long ago. When there are serial killings, they’re normally closer together in time. And in space. Normandy and Cairo aren’t exactly next door…Could we be dealing with an itinerant? Did Interpol turn up any other cases like this?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Which doesn’t mean anything. As little as ten years ago, this kind of telegram was pretty rare. Spending time on paperwork is the last thing most cops do, and only if they feel like taking the trouble. Our Egyptian colleague was a meticulous policeman. Which is almost a paradox.”

  Sharko paused a moment. His eyes continued to run over the telegram while his brain was already in overdrive. Three girls in Africa, five men in France. Lacerations, skulls opened, eyes removed. Sixteen years apart. Why such a long wait between the two series? And especially, why the two series? The inspector returned to the cursory description dispatched to Interpol.

  “The author of the report is Mahmoud Abd el-Aal. The name of the Egyptian officer who cast the first stone?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Is this paper the only thing we’ve got?”

  “For now. We first got in touch with Interpol in Egypt, then International Technical Cooperation in Cairo, who shunted us over to an inspector at the French embassy, Michael Lebrun, who’s in direct contact with the authorities over there. The early intel isn’t exactly promising.”

  “Why not?”

  “This Abd el-Aal apparently hasn’t been active there since this business.”

  Sharko paused a moment.

  “Can someone get us access to the file?”

  “Yes. His name is Hassan Noureddine, and he’s the chief of police in charge of the squad. Something of a dictator, according to Lebrun. The locals are keeping mum—they don’t like having Westerners sticking their noses in their business. Torture of defendants and jail time for dissidents is still common coin in Egypt. We won’t get anywhere on the phone, and they refuse to send their files here, electronically or by mail.”

  Sharko sighed. Péresse was right. The police in Arab countries, and especially in Egypt, were still light-years from the Europeans—corrupted by money and power, focused entirely on internal security.

  With a click of his mouse, Péresse sent the telegram to the printer.

  “I called your boss. He’s okay with us sending you over there. Cairo is four hours away by plane. If you don’t mind, start with the embassy. Michael Lebrun will get you into the Cairo police. He’ll direct you to Hassan Noureddine.”

  Eugenie suddenly burst into the room, livid. Sharko turned his head toward the girl, who started yanking on his shirt.

  “Come on, come on. Let’s get out of here,” she whined. “No way we’re going to that horrible place. I hate all that heat and sand. And I’m afraid of flying. I don’t want to.”

  “…spector? Chief Inspector?”

  Sharko turned back toward Péresse, hand on his chin. Egypt…Not quite what he’d been expecting.

  “Sounds like a bad James Bond movie.”

  “We don’t really have much choice. We handle the groundwork, and you—”

  “The paperwork, I know.”

  With a sigh, Sharko picked up the printout of the telegram. Several lines sent haphazardly, lost between two continents, with which he was going to have to make do. He thought of Egypt, a country he knew only from travel brochures, back when he still looked at brochures. The Nile, the great pyramids, the crushing heat, the palm groves…A tourist factory. Suzanne had always wanted to go; he’d refused, because of his job. And now that same lousy job was tossing him onto the cursed sands of Africa.

  Lost in thought, he stared at Eugenie, who was sitting in the captain’s seat and playing with rubber bands, snapping them against Péresse’s ass.

  “What’s so funny?” the Rouen cop asked, turning around.

  Sharko raised his head.

  “I suppose I’m to leave as soon as possible?”

  “Tomorrow at latest. Do you have an official passport?”

  “Required. I’m supposed to expedite international investigations, even though that never actually happens.”

  “Here’s proof that it does. Watch yourself—in Cairo, you’ll be bound hand and foot. The embassy will saddle you with an interpreter, and you won’t get anywhere unless the locals want you to. You’ll have to walk on eggshells. Keep me posted.”

  “Am I allowed to carry a weapon?”

  “In Egypt? Are you joking?”

  They shook hands politely. Sharko tried to slip out and leave the little girl behind, but Péresse called him back one last time.

  “Chief Inspector Sharko?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Next time, try not to send one of my sergeants to do your shopping for you.”

  Sharko left the building and headed for his hotel, Xeroxes of the reports under one arm, the jar of Pink Salad and candied chestnuts in the other. He was heading into an especially unwholesome business, apparently.

  And about to dive into the guts of a burning hot city that reeked of spices.

  The mythic city of al-Qahira.

  Cairo.

  12

  After a revolting lunch with her daughter—a slab of overcooked meat with no sauce and boiled potatoes—Lucie swung by her place, a small apartment surrounded by the student dorms of the Catholic university. The tree-lined boulevard overflowed with neo-Gothic buildings, including the university, which regurgitated its several thousand students through the city’s arteries. With all those young people around her, and her daughters growing up, Lucie felt a bit older every day.

  She unlocked the door, went in, and dropped her bag of dirty clothes in the laundry room. Quick, crank up the washing machine to get rid of those horrid hospital odors. Then she dove under a cool shower, letting the spray beat against the back of her neck, nibble at her breasts. Those two days away from home, eating mush, taking bird baths, and sleeping folded in half, showed her just how much she loved her little existence, with her girls, her habits, the movies she watched every evening, cozy in the rabbit slippers that her twins—and her mother—had given her for her birthday. It’s when you veer away from the simplest things that you realize they aren’t so bad after all.

  Once dried, she chose a light, supple blue silk tunic that she let fall naturally over her hips, over calf-length pedal pushers. She liked the curve of her legs, toned by the jogging she did twice a week around the Citadelle. Since her daughters started going to school and eating in the cafeteria, she’d managed to regain some measure of balance between work, leisure, and family time. She had once again become, as her mother said, a woman.

  She stopped at her computer to check her online dating account. Her failure with Ludovic hadn’t soured her on that kind of relationship. In fact, she couldn’t quite do without these virtual, neatly wrapped interchanges. It was worse than a drug, and more than anything it saved time—which, as with everyone else, she found in short supply.

  Seven new messages had accumulated on her profile. She looked them over quickly, rejected five off the bat, and put the other two aside: dark-haired men of forty-three and forty-four. The self-confidence a man gave off at around forty was what she was seeking first and foremost. A strong, dependable presence, who wouldn’t drop her for the first airhead that came along.

  She went out, the back of her neck nicely refreshed. It was then that she noticed the slight grating of her key in the lock. Something seemed to catch when she gave the second turn. Lucie leaned down, looked closely at the metal, tried again. Although she managed to lock the door, the trouble persisted. Annoyed, she opened up again, ran her eyes over her living room, checked in the other rooms. She explored the closets where she kept her DVDs and novels. Apparently, nothing had been touched. She imm
ediately thought of the phantom presence at Ludovic’s. Whoever had rifled through there could easily have noted her license number when he left and gone to her house. Anyone else would have thought the lock was just getting old, that it was time for a drop of oil. Lucie shrugged her shoulders with a smile and finally headed out again. She really had to stop worrying over nothing. Which didn’t keep her from staring at length into her rearview mirror after driving off, and reassuring herself that the film, that weird-ass film, was perfectly safe at Claude Poignet’s.

  Getting to Liège in an old rattletrap with no air-conditioning, along the bone-jarring highways of Belgium, was no mean feat, but she managed it nonstop. Luc Szpilman opened up for her. An off-putting safety pin ran through his lower lip.

  “Are you the one who called on the phone?”

  Lucie nodded and showed him her official card. She had justified the visit with a version of the truth: the police were interested in one of the films Ludovic Sénéchal had made off with, owing to the violent nature of its imagery.

  “That’s me,” she said. “Can I come in?”

  He looked her over with a beady, porcine eye. His hair looked as if it had exploded on his head, like the guy from Tokyo Hotel.

  “Come on in. But don’t try telling me that my father was mixed up in some kind of trafficking.”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  They sat in the spacious living room, reached by a series of steps that plunged the area below ground level. A glass roof opened onto a limpid, deep blue sky. It reminded Lucie of a kind of giant vivarium. Luc Szpilman uncapped a beer; his interlocutor opted for water. Somewhere in the house someone was playing a musical instrument. The notes danced, light and mesmerizing.

  “The clarinet. It’s my girlfriend.”

  Surprising. Lucie figured him for someone whose partner played electric guitar or drums. She decided not to waste any time and cut to the chase.

  “Were you still living with your father?”

  “Sometimes. We didn’t really have much to say to each other, but he never had the guts to throw me out. So yeah, I alternated between here and my girlfriend’s place. Now that he’s not here anymore, I think the choice is made.”

  He downed half the bottle—a Chimay red with double the alcohol content—and set it on the glass tabletop, next to an ashtray holding the remains of a few joints. The detective tried to size him up: rebellious kid, probably spoiled as a child. His father’s recent passing didn’t seem to have left much of an impression.

  “Tell me about the circumstances of his death.”

  “I already told the police everything, and—”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  He sighed.

  “I was in the garage. Since the old man didn’t have a car anymore, that’s where we set up our instruments. I was working on a piece with a bud and the GF. It was probably around 8:25 when I heard this huge crash from upstairs. First I ran in here, because when the news is on, you can’t budge my old man from his chair. Then I went upstairs and I saw the attic door was open. That was weird.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “My dad was over eighty. He still got around pretty well, sometimes he even went for a walk in town to go to the library or something, but he never went up there anymore—the steps were way too steep. When he wanted to stare at one of his movies, he always asked me.”

  Lucie knew she was on the right track. Something sudden and unexpected had triggered a reaction in the old man, pushing him to go up without asking his son for help.

  “And after that, in the attic?”

  “That’s where I discovered his body, at the foot of the ladder.”

  Luc stared at the floor, pupils dilated, then got hold of himself in a fraction of a second.

  “His head was in a pool of blood. He was dead. It felt weird seeing him like that, motionless, eyes staring. I immediately called emergency.”

  He grabbed up his beer with a firm hand, letting nothing show. Somewhere in all this was a late-born son who’d seen his father as just some clumsy geezer, a guy who could never play football with him. Lucie nodded toward the painting of an elderly gentleman, firm gaze and black eyes. A mug as severe as the Great Wall of China.

  “Is that him?”

  Luc nodded, both hands around his beer.

  “Papa, in all his glory. I wasn’t even born yet when he had that painted. He was already fifty. Can you imagine?”

  “What was his occupation?”

  “Curator at FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives, and he went there regularly to poke around. FIAF’s mission is to ‘preserve the international cinematic heritage.’ My father spent his life in films. It was his great passion, along with history and geopolitics of the past hundred years. The major conflicts, Cold War, espionage, counterespionage…He knew all about that stuff.”

  He raised his eyes.

  “You said on the phone there was a problem with one of the films from the attic?”

  “Yes, probably the one he was trying to get to that evening. A short from 1955, which opens with a scene of a woman getting her eye slashed. Does that ring any bells?”

  He took a moment to think.

  “No, not a thing. I never watched his movies. Those old spy chestnuts didn’t interest me. And my father always watched them in his private screening room. He was nuts about cinema, a real fanatic, able to watch the same film twenty or thirty times over.”

  He gave out a nervous laugh.

  “Dad…I think he pinched a lot of those reels from FIAF.”

  “Pinched?”

  “Yeah, pinched. It was one of his little quirks as a collector. He couldn’t help himself. Call it an obsessive tic. I knew he made deals with a fair number of his colleagues who did the same thing. Because, theoretically, those films never left the building. But Dad didn’t want those reels to rot in some soulless corridor. He was the type who’d pet film cans the way you’d pet an old cat.”

  Lucie listened, then told him about the little girl on the swing, the scene with the bull. Luc continued to deny and seemed sincere. Then she asked him to show her the attic.

  In the staircase, she understood why Szpilman Senior had stopped going up: the steps were practically a sheer vertical. Once at the top, Luc went to the ladder and slid it to the far corner.

  “The ladder was exactly here when I found the body.”

  Lucie gave the place a good once-over. A fanatic’s inner sanctum.

  “Why was it moved?”

  “A ton of people have been by here, and others will probably still come. Since yesterday morning, the movies have been selling like hotcakes.”

  Lucie suddenly felt a connection forming.

  “Did all the visitors buy something?”

  “Uh…no, not all of them.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There was this one guy who came just after your friend. He seemed kind of strange.”

  He walked one step at a time, not as sharp as before. The beer, apparently.

  “Tell me more.”

  “He had really short hair. Blond, buzz cut. Under thirty. Solid guy, wearing combat boots, or something like that. He poked through everything in the attic. It was like he was looking for something specific among the cans. In the end, he didn’t buy anything, but he asked if anyone had already been here or had removed any of the films. So I told him about your Ludovic Sénéchal. When I mentioned that film he’d taken, the unmarked one, the guy said he’d like to make a deal with this Sénéchal. So I let him have the address.”

  “You knew it?”

  “It was on the check.”

  So it all started here. Like Ludovic, the mysterious individual must have come across the ad and rushed over. He’d come just a bit too late, and Ludovic, who lived close to the border, had made away with the prize. Did this mean the other guy had been haunting junk shops and combing through want ads for years, in secret hopes of getting his hands on the lost film?

  Lucie grill
ed Szpilman further. The visitor had come in a classic car, a black Fiat, as he recalled. French plates, whose number the young Belgian couldn’t recall.

  They went back to the living room. Lucie gazed at the giant flat screen set into the wall. Szpilman had said his father was watching the news just before his death.

  “Do you have any idea what might have caused your father to suddenly run up to the attic?”

  “No.”

  “What channel was he watching?”

  “Your national station, TF1. It was his favorite.”

  Lucie made a mental note to watch a tape of the news from that evening, just in case.

  “Had anyone come here before he went upstairs? Perhaps in the morning or afternoon?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  She cast a glance around the room. Not a phone jack in sight.

  “Did your father have a cell phone?”

  Luc Szpilman nodded. Lucie poured herself another glass of water from the pitcher, playing it cool. Inside, she was churning.

  “Was he carrying it on him when he died?”

  The kid suddenly seemed to get it. He stabbed his index finger onto the low table.

  “It was here. I picked it up this morning and put it on the shelf, out there. The police didn’t even ask about it. You think that—?”

  “Can you show me?”

  He went to get it. Battery dead, of course. He connected it to a charger plugged into a nearby outlet and handed it to Lucie. The phone was in crummy shape, but she was able to check the call history, with date and time. She first looked at the incoming calls. The last one was from Sunday afternoon, the day before his death. A certain Delphine de Hoos. Luc explained that she was the nurse who came periodically for his blood tests. The other calls were farther back in time, and according to his son were all normal. Just a few old friends or colleagues from FIAF, with whom his father shared the occasional vodka.

  Lucie then tried the list of outgoing calls. Her heart skipped a beat.

  “Well, well…”

  The last one was dated from the famous Monday, at 8:09 p.m. About fifteen minutes before the fall from the ladder. But much more interesting than the date was the phone number itself—curious, to say the least: 514-555-8724.