Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  In the heavy, stifling air of the office, the inspector labored to link the MO to the one used in France. Here, despite everything, there was a ritual, organization, and no particular effort to hide the bodies. In addition, the killer had opened his victims’ skulls while they were alive. But in France, most of them had died of gunshot wounds, fired randomly, judging from the different impact sites of the projectiles. And they’d taken pains to render the corpses anonymous: hands severed, teeth extracted.

  Was there really a link between them? What if he’d been mistaken all along? What if chance was finally having its say in all this? Sixteen years…sixteen long years…

  And yet, Sharko still felt an impalpable connection, the same diabolical will to attain and harvest two of the human body’s most precious organs: the brain and the eyes.

  Why these three girls in Egypt?

  Why the five men in France, including one Asian?

  The cop guzzled down the glasses of water that Nahed regularly brought him and sank still deeper into the shadows, while Ra’s emanations tortured his back. He was dripping with sweat. Outside was an inferno of sand, dust, and mosquitoes, and he already longed to be in his air-conditioned room, huddled under the netting.

  Unfortunately, the rest of the paperwork was just fluff. None of it had been handled very thoroughly. A few scattered sheets, handwritten, stamped by the prosecutor, bearing the depositions of relatives or neighbors. Two of the girls were returning from work, and the third from a place where she often went to swap cloth for goat’s milk. There was also the long list of seals—useless. In this country, they seemed to expedite murder cases the way they would the theft of a car radio in France.

  And that was precisely what didn’t ring true.

  Sharko looked at Nahed.

  “Tell me, have you seen the name Mahmoud Abd el-Aal anywhere in these reports? Have you noticed any notes signed by him, other than these few pages?”

  Nahed quickly glanced through the handwritten pages and shook her head.

  “No. But don’t be too shocked by the flimsiness of these files. Here, they go for action over paperwork. Repression over reflection. Everything’s biased, tainted by corruption. You can’t imagine.”

  Sharko took out the copy of the Interpol telegram.

  “See here, Interpol received this telegram more than three months after the bodies were discovered. Only a persistent and committed cop would have sent it. A cop with integrity, values, who wanted to see this thing through to the end.”

  Sharko picked up the pages and let them fall in front of him.

  “And they want me to believe there’s no more than this? Just formalities? Not a single personal note? Not even a copy of the telegram? Where did the rest go? Inquiries at pharmacies or hospitals about the ketamine, for instance?”

  Nahed contented herself with shrugging her shoulders. Her face was serious. Sharko shook his head, one hand on his brow.

  “And you know what’s most disturbing of all? It’s that, strangely enough, Mahmoud Abd el-Aal is dead.”

  The young woman turned away and walked toward the glass door. She glanced into the hall. The guard hadn’t moved.

  “I’m not sure what to tell you, Inspector. I’m here simply to translate, and—”

  “I’ve noticed how much Noureddine was harassing you, and you were trying to avoid him every way possible without succeeding. What is it? An exchange of services? Or is it a custom in your country that you have to agree to whatever that tub of lard says?”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “I saw you trembling several times when looking at those photos, or at the descriptions of the case. You were once the same age as those girls when they died. You were in school, just like them.”

  Nahed pursed her lips. Her hands squeezed each other tightly. With an evasive gaze, she glanced at her watch.

  “It’s nearly time for our meeting with Michael Lebrun, and—”

  “And I’m not going. I can drink French wine any day of the week back in France.”

  “You might offend him.”

  He picked up a photo of one of the smiling girls and pushed it toward Nahed.

  “I couldn’t care less about diplomacy and canapés. You don’t think these girls deserve our attention?”

  A weighty silence. Nahed was supremely beautiful, and Sharko knew enough not to trust a woman solely because she was beautiful. But beyond this he sensed a hurt, an open wound that sometimes clouded her jade-colored eyes.

  “Very well. What can I do for you, Inspector?”

  Sharko approached the blinds in turn and lowered his voice.

  “None of the cops in this station will talk to me. Lebrun’s hands are tied by the embassy. Find me Abd el-Aal’s address. He must have a widow, maybe children or brothers. I want to talk to them.”

  After a long silence, Nahed gave in.

  “I’ll try, but especially—”

  “Mum’s the word, you can count on me. When I get my phone back, I’ll call Lebrun and tell him I’m very sorry but I’m not feeling well. The heat, jet lag…I’ll tell him I’m coming back here tomorrow, just to wrap things up. Your job is to meet me at the hotel at eight, hopefully with the address.”

  She hesitated.

  “No, not at the hotel. Take a taxi and”—she jotted a few words onto a slip of paper and handed it to him—“give him this paper. He’ll know where to take you.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In front of the Church of Saint Barbara.”

  “Saint Barbara? That’s not a very Muslim name.”

  “The church is in the Coptic district of Old Cairo, in the southern part of the city. The name belonged to a young girl who was martyred for attempting to convert her father to Christianity.”

  19

  Freyrat, in the heart of the Lille medical area, late afternoon. The crucible of psychiatry. A two-story concrete monster, the meeting place of every mental deviance: schizophrenia, paranoia, trauma, psychosis. Lucie entered the austere structure, asking at the reception for Ludovic Sénéchal’s room. She wanted to be the one to tell him about the death of his old friend Claude Poignet. She was directed to the Denecker Wing on the second floor.

  The diminutive room would have depressed a clown. The out-of-reach television was on. Ludovic was stretched out on his mattress, hands behind his head. He slowly turned his face toward his visitor and smiled.

  “Lucie…”

  Surprised, she came forward.

  “You can see?”

  “I can make out shapes and colors. People not wearing lab coats are most likely visitors. What other woman would come visit me?”

  “I’m happy it’s getting better.”

  “Dr. Martin says my sight will return gradually. At this point it’s just a matter of two or three days.”

  “How did they do that?”

  “Hypnosis. They understood what wasn’t working. Or more to the point, they understood without understanding.”

  Lucie felt ill at ease. She hated playing the painful role of death’s messenger. Meeting the eyes of a victim’s loved ones was probably the hardest part of her job. She did everything she could to put off the announcement. Ludovic was a sensitive soul and not in the best shape right now.

  “Tell me about it.”

  The man sat up. His pupils had regained a reassuring mobility.

  “The psychiatrist explained it all to me. He put me under hypnosis, then asked me to tell him what had happened in the hours and minutes before I went blind. So I related how my day had been spent. What I bought from the old collector in Liège, the anonymous reel discovered in the attic. Being alone in my mini-cinema, watching movies all night long. Then the images from the anonymous short, as they appear. The slit eye, the shots of the little girl on the swing. And it was there, strangely, that I started telling him about my father, just out of the blue. The women he’d bring back to the house when I was a kid, a few years after my mother’s death.”

  �
�You never breathed a word of this to me.”

  A small, dry laugh floated across the room.

  “Look who’s talking! We spent weeks chatting online, seven months flirting, and I know practically nothing about your private life. Sure, I know you’re a cop and that you have two daughters who I got along with, but other than that, what is there?”

  “That’s not what we’re talking about.”

  He sighed, looking sad.

  “With you, it’s never what we’re talking about. Well, anyway…It came up suddenly, under hypnosis. The naked women I’d sometimes see coming out of my father’s room. All that…breathing I’d hear through the walls. I wasn’t even ten yet. The shrink understood that the block might have come from there. Something, probably some image, had brought those memories back up and triggered my hysterical blindness.”

  Lucie suspected it was related to the subliminal images. Without the censorship of the conscious mind, they had slammed against the deepest recesses of Ludovic’s psyche and kicked up a mess.

  “But that’s not what drove me blind, because I could still describe what happened next in the film. Talk about the little girl. When she ate, or slept. When she brushed the camera away with her hand, as if she was annoyed. Then, suddenly, the psychiatrist told me I had screamed under hypnosis and he’d had to wake me. He managed to calm me down and asked what had happened. So then I started telling him about the episode with the rabbit.”

  Lucie immediately straightened up. The strange Quebecer, on the phone, had also mentioned rabbits. He had revealed that the whole thing started with children and rabbits.

  “What rabbit?”

  Ludovic tensed and pulled his knees against his chest.

  “I must have been eight or nine. One day, my father brought me into his workshop, where he kept all his tools. There was a rabbit that had taken shelter in the back of an old U-bend conduit. A large wild rabbit. I was small enough to crawl through the conduit and catch it, but not my father. So he ordered me to do it. And I did. I crawled on all fours and forced the animal to leave its hiding place. My father grabbed it by the ears. The rabbit was bleeding from its hind paws—it was struggling to get free. I cried out for him to let it go, but my father was beside himself. He took an ax and…”

  His two hands flew to his face, as if he’d just received a spurt of blood.

  “That scene…Until the hypnosis, I’d forgotten it, Lucie. It had completely gone out of my mind.”

  “More like it had been buried way deep. So deep that nothing had been able to bring it back to the surface. In the anonymous film, did you see any rabbits?”

  “No, no…”

  The cop still didn’t understand. Poignet had pored through every frame without noticing anything. So then what?

  Clumsily, Ludovic picked up his bottle of water and took a few swallows.

  “You saw the film. Tell me what you found. Were you able to show it to my friend the restorer?”

  Lucie looked him in the eyes and blurted out, “Claude Poignet is dead.”

  Ludovic’s fists clenched on the sheets. A long silence.

  “How?”

  “He was murdered. The ones who did it came looking for the film.”

  Ludovic straightened up and brushed his hair back, heavily. He was on the verge of tears.

  “Not him. Not Claude. He was just an old man who didn’t bother anybody.”

  Feeling his way, Ludovic walked toward the Plexiglas window, his eyes vacant. Lucie could see from the reflection that he was crying.

  She needed to keep herself from pity, from feeling. “I promise you we’ll find the people who did this. We’re going to find out what happened.”

  She stayed with him for some time, explaining the early stages of their investigation. She even told him about the unknown person who had rifled through his film collection. Ludovic should know the whole truth.

  “I feel so alone, Lucie…”

  “The psychiatrists are here to help you.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the psychiatrists.”

  He sighed.

  “Why didn’t it work out with us?”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It’s never really worked out with anyone for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because sooner or later, the person always starts asking me why.”

  She felt uneasy; the heat was getting on her nerves. And that chemical stench…

  “The man I spend the rest of my life with will have to take me as I am, here and now. And not keep trying to bring up the past. Questioning me about this or that. I’m a cop because I’m a cop—that’s the way it is, you just have to deal. The past is dead and buried, okay?”

  Ludovic shrugged.

  “Listen, I should let you go. I’m sure you’ve got things to do.”

  “I’ll visit again.”

  “Sure, you’ll visit again.”

  He leaned his forehead against the window. Sadly, Lucie went out and sucked in a large breath of fresh air. She was mad at herself for having been so short with him, with men in general. But those were the stigmata of her past sufferings. The first man she had truly loved had abandoned her all too abruptly, her and her girls.

  In the parking lot, watching visitors come and go, she thought it might not be a bad idea to put a watch on Ludovic’s room—and maybe Juliette’s as well. She’d talk to her boss about it.

  She returned to Criminal Investigations headquarters late that afternoon, on Boulevard de la Liberté, a hundred yards or so from the center of Lille. Up there, information was being exchanged at a healthy clip between the Violent Crimes unit in Paris, CID in Rouen, and the Lille teams. For the moment, they were using e-mail and phones. The various data would soon be integrated into computer files that all the officers could access. Cross-references would be noted; the info would circulate at its best. It seemed that every chance was on the side of the law.

  Lucie walked into her captain’s office. Kashmareck was talking with Lieutenant Madelin. The young hotshot, no more than twenty-five, face like a class valedictorian, had just finished going over Claude Poignet’s autopsy. The triple fracture of the hyoid bone suggested strangulation, and the presence of lividity—an accumulation of blood on the pressure points between body and floor—on the left deltoid and hip proved that Poignet had been murdered while on his side: the killers had left him lying that way at least a half hour before hanging him.

  Kashmareck emptied his coffee cup. He ran on caffeine the way others did on water.

  “A half hour…The time it took to rewind the film and poke around a bit to stage their scene. Killers who kept their cool, didn’t panic.”

  Lucie barged into their ruminations:

  “So Poignet didn’t die by hanging but by strangulation.”

  The captain picked up a photo of the studio and pointed to the floor in one corner of the room.

  “Yes, right there. We found drops of blood. Probably a nosebleed caused by asphyxiation. What else did the autopsy show?”

  Madelin skimmed through his notes.

  “Knife to open his chest—whatever the kind of blade, it was sharp, that’s for certain. According to the ME, the removal of the eye was very…professional. I’ll read what it says: ‘Circular opening of the transparent membrane that covers the eye, slicing of the oculomotor muscles, then of the optic nerve, and finally removal of the eyeball. Much like a surgical procedure.’ ”

  The captain nodded in agreement.

  “That fits perfectly with the data I’m starting to get from Rouen. The skulls of the five bodies, sawed open with professional skill…which supports the theory that it’s the same killers. Go on.”

  “For the rest…it’s technical, but nothing very revealing. Samples were sent to toxicology, just in case. But I doubt Poignet was drugged.”

  “Fine. We’ll all get to read the report. We’re expecting the international warrant from the judge—the request has been sent to the Belgian authorities to search Szpilman’s p
lace. It won’t be our show over there—they’re in charge, we just watch, but it’s better than nothing…What else? Uh…We’re checking the Canadian phone numbers you gave us, Henebelle, just to make sure we can’t reach your anonymous tipster from Montreal.”

  He put his hands to his face and heaved a sigh, gazing at his notes in dry-erase marker on a not very white board. A labyrinth of arrows.

  “Madelin, go over the calls Poignet made or received in the twenty-four hours before his death. Henebelle, you go next door. The lab made blowups of the pieces of film the victim had instead of eyes. Bring the info back here and see what else they have to say. Fingerprints, other clues…I’m going to reach out to the guys canvassing the neighborhood to see if they’ve got anything new. Tonight we’ll throw it all into the hat and cross our fingers. For now, I need something concrete, something solid, before we have to start thinking.”

  20

  The image Sharko had formed of Cairo changed like the shimmering water on the surface of the Nile. The taxi driver, an osta bil-fitra, or “born cabbie,” who spoke a little French, had taken him via the city’s narrow roads. The Egyptian populace lived outdoors, in a state of excitement and nonchalance. Every one of life’s scenes was an excuse for communication. Butchers cut their meat on the sidewalk, women peeled vegetables in front of their houses, bread was sold in the street, right from the ground. Sharko felt like he was moving through a living tableau when, in the midst of the chaotic traffic, he was dazzled by the perfect movement of a cotton galabia, swaying to its owner’s regal gait. He felt the breath of Islam in the overheated streets; the mosques were ablaze with beauty, and in their excess they aimed an eye at their single god. There is no other god than God.

  Then Coptic Cairo appeared around him. There, young people wearing plain leather sandals asked for neither money nor pens, but offered you images of the Virgin Mary. There, the walls were redolent of ancient Rome, and the Bible seemed to peel open its parchment writings. Peaceful, ocher-colored alleyways, with only the crunch of sand brought in by the hot winds of the hamsin. In the middle of the most populous city in Africa, Sharko finally felt at peace. Alone in the world. He tapped into the city’s great ambiguity.