Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  In his interrogation, the Arab had mentioned a Syndrome E. “How much do you know about Syndrome E?” What was lurking behind that chilling term? And what discovery was making the men behind this business so afraid?

  With a sigh, Sharko felt his arms and cheeks. He was here, alive. Maybe his brain was on the tilt, but his carcass still had some gas in its tank. And despite the small rolls of flesh that had comfortably settled onto his midriff, his bones that often screamed in pain, he was proud of this body that had never let him down.

  Today, he had once again become a street cop.

  An outlaw.

  27

  Claude Poignet’s killers hadn’t escaped the Locard exchange principle, which states: “One cannot go to and return from a place, or enter and leave a room, without bringing in or leaving behind something of oneself, and without taking away something that was previously in the place or room.” No one is infallible or invisible, not even the most thoroughgoing bastard. In the darkroom, the forensic technicians had found a minuscule blond eyebrow hair, as well as traces of sweat around the eyecup of one of the 16 mm cameras used to film the murder. Though evaporated, the sweat had left enough dried skin cells, picked up by the CrimeScope, to allow for DNA analysis. Not much chance of the killer’s name popping up in the fingerprint database, but at least they’d now have a genetic profile, which they could use for comparison in a subsequent arrest.

  The thing now was to make an arrest.

  Criminal Investigations Division, Lille. Eyelids heavy, Lucie finished her third coffee of the morning, black, no sugar, sitting at a table with the main investigators involved in the case, which internally had been given the sober label “Deadly Reel.” The film had just been shown in its two versions: first the “official” one, then the variant with the children and rabbits. Following this was a presentation of stills depicting the more evident subliminal images: the nude woman, then the same woman mutilated, fat black eye on her stomach.

  The jokey atmosphere that normally characterized task forces, especially in the summer months, had quickly soured. Sighs, whispers, closed faces. Everyone gauged the complexity of the case, measured the killers’ perversity, and provided his own commentary. Captain Kashmareck restored order:

  “We have a digitized copy of the film, which is something the killers don’t know. I am therefore requesting you not let that information get out. These people killed to get hold of this film, which means that its hidden content must lead somewhere. Any ideas about what you’ve just seen?”

  A hullabaloo broke out. Among all the remarks offered, from the very constructive “It’s disgusting!” to “Those children are completely nuts,” there wasn’t really anything worth the climax of a Columbo episode. Kashmareck cut short the chatter.

  “Two things to note here. First, we’re in touch with a historian specializing in films from the fifties, someone Claude Poignet had contacted. The man had set the old restorer’s request aside, but when he learned of his death he immediately got back to work trying to identify the actress. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. On our side, we’re going to make prints of the actress, who I still want us to think of as an actress, and spread it around the film societies and revival houses—you never know. Second, in a minute I’m going to bring in a former expert in psychomorphology, who today specializes in lip-reading. She knows how to read silent films and will help us get down every last word that comes from the girl’s mouth. Madelin, did you check with Kodak and the lab that manufactured the film stock?”

  The young go-getter opened his notepad with a sigh.

  “It no longer exists—these days it’s a McDonald’s. I was able to trace the former owners, but they’re dead.”

  “Fine. Morel, you get hold of young Szpilman and issue a warrant to come here and try to establish a composite portrait of the fellow in combat boots. Crombez, you get on forensics to keep them moving with the DNA and the rest. We’ve got the warrant from the international court for a search of Szpilman’s place with the Belgians at two o’clock. We need someone there. Henebelle, you on it?”

  “Sure. Belgium seems to be my thing these days. Have they questioned the film archive to find out which donor had given them the deadly reel?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  Lucie spoke to Madelin: “And what about the phone numbers of our Canadian caller?”

  “Once again, I reached out to Quebec Sûreté to get the info. For the two numbers you provided, the first one came from a phone booth in the center of town, and the other, the mobile, ended up at a fictitious name and address.”

  Lucie nodded. The informant had displayed exemplary distrust. The captain, who was nervously twiddling a cigarette, took the floor again:

  “I’ve got a meeting in Paris with the top brass tomorrow morning. Péresse from Rouen, Leclerc from Violent Crimes, and Sharko, a behavioral analyst.”

  Sharko…Lucie squeezed her lips shut. He hadn’t even bothered to call her back.

  “Anything new from Egypt?” she asked.

  “Not for the moment—this Sharko probably didn’t get anything from his trip over there. In any case, I want to have something to tell them tomorrow. After we hear from Caroline Caffey, our lip-reading specialist, everyone gets to work.”

  Kashmareck went out, returning a few moments later with a woman who set all the men’s eyes ablaze. About forty, she had long legs, blond hair, and the face of a Russian doll. She quickly scanned the group, settled into a chair that seemed to be reaching out for her, and opened a memo pad. With her firm, decisive movements, she must have been used to subduing the troops. She explained briefly, in discursive tones, that she worked for the military, customs, and the police, especially in antiterrorism and hostage negotiations. A heavyweight in her field. Lucie had never felt such attention around her. The testosterone level was rising. At least this bombshell had the power to capture their minds.

  Caroline Caffey took control of the laptop, its contents displayed on a wide screen via a rear projector.

  “Doing a lip-reading analysis of this film was not easy. In Canada as in France, there are various dialects, from street slang to formal discourse. The little girl is probably part of the country’s French-speaking community, as she speaks Quebec French, or more precisely Joual, an urban working-class sociolect from the Montreal area. It’s a way of speaking very similar to what you hear in the north of Bordeaux. Lots of long vowels, for instance.”

  Straight as a ruler in her Chanel suit, she used the mouse to advance the film to the adult actress from the beginning. It was just before she had her eye slit with a scalpel. Her lips began to move. Caffey let it run and translated simultaneously:

  “She’s speaking to the cameraman and saying, ‘Open the door of secrets to me.’ ”

  “Is that in French French or Quebec French?” asked Lucie.

  Caffey accorded her a look heavy with indifference.

  “Miss?”

  “Henebelle. Lucie Henebelle.”

  She’d called her Miss. Damned observant.

  “Hard to say, Miss Henebelle. Those are her only words. But I think French French. Especially because of the word ‘secrets,’ which she would have pronounced with her mouth open wider in Canadian French.”

  Lucie jotted in her Moleskin: “Adult actress: French” and “Little girl on swing: Montreal.” Caffey forwarded the film a bit and came to the girl on the swing set. Explosion of joy on the child’s face. Camera focused in tightly enough so that you couldn’t see the surroundings. The filmmaker didn’t want anyone to recognize the place. As soon as the little girl started talking, Caroline imitated her:

  “Can we play on the swings again tomorrow?…Will you come see me again soon?…Lydia wants to play on the swings too…Why can’t she go outside?”

  The girl rose toward the sky, filled with joy. The camera lingered on her face and eyes, played with different shots, establishing a dynamic. There was an evident closeness between the cameraman and the little gi
rl; they knew each other well. The more she watched these images, the more Lucie felt herself gripped in the gut by that innocent kid. An incomprehensible bond, a kind of maternal affection. She did her best to push away this kind of dangerous sentiment.

  Next relevant scene. Close-up on the child’s lips as she ate potatoes and ham at a long wooden table. Caffey began decoding:

  “…I heard them talking. A lot of people are saying mean things about you and the doctor…I know they’re lying—they’re just saying that to hurt us. I don’t like them. I’ll never like them.”

  Caroline Caffey’s sentences rang out in the silence. The words and the tone she used gave the images a baleful character. You could feel the unease growing, the storm about to break. Lucie jotted down and circled the word “doctor.”

  Scene of the little girl and the kittens in the grass. She smiled widely, affectionately petting the two animals. Lucie thought of the other film, the hidden film, which at that very moment was nesting in the frames and had lodged in her brain.

  “…I’d like to keep them…Oh, too bad…Will you bring them back again?…Sister Marie du Calvaire hated kitties…I love them…Yes, bunnies too. I love bunnies…Hurt them? Why did you say that?…No, never.”

  Lucie took notes, picking up on the irony of the statements. Never hurt rabbits, when at that very moment, buried within those very images, she was slaughtering them with eleven other little girls. What could have precipitated such a drastic change? She underscored “Sister Marie du Calvaire” with three red lines. Was the girl in a convent in Montreal? A Catholic school? A place where medicine and religion might coexist?

  Next scene, strange: the camera moves closer and farther from the little girl, taunting her. The girl is angry. Her eyes have changed.

  “…Leave me alone, I don’t feel like it…I’m sad about Lydia, everybody is sad, and you think it’s funny.” She pushes the camera aside. “Go away!”

  “What happened to Lydia?” Lucie noted, drawing a box around the name. The camera turned around the girl to create a dizzying effect. Cut. Following scene: the field.

  Caroline Caffey stopped the projection. She swallowed before continuing:

  “Nothing more after this, other than screams in the scene with the rabbits. There’s one more thing that might interest you: if you look closely at certain sequences, there are details that I noticed on the little girl’s face. It has changed. In some images she’s missing a front tooth. And even if it doesn’t show very clearly, she acquires red blotches on her skin. Her hair remains the same length. They must have cut it regularly.”

  “So she got older between the beginning of the film and the end,” deduced Kashmareck.

  “Indeed. This film was not made in a week, but certainly over a period of several months. As it progresses, you feel a growing tension in the girl’s mouth, a tension that seems to correspond to her words. It’s too short and probably too abbreviated to draw valid conclusions, but I get the feeling that her psychological state is deteriorating. No more smiles; her face becomes dull, angry. In certain scenes, even though they’re in bright light, her pupils are dilated.”

  Lucie twirled her pen between her fingers. She remembered the absolute fury of the children in the room with the rabbits.

  “Drugs…or some kind of medication?”

  Caroline nodded.

  “Quite likely.”

  She shut her memo pad and stood up.

  “That’s all I can tell you. I’ll send you a document with my analysis as soon as I can type it up. Gentlemen, miss…”

  An exchange of glances with Kashmareck, indicating that she’d wait for him outside. Not a single question about the ongoing case, not the slightest emotion regarding what she’d just seen. A pro. After she left the room, the captain clapped his hands together.

  “Think carefully about what she’s just told us. And I believe we can all thank Henebelle for this superb case in the middle of summer.”

  Every head turned toward her, and a few bad wisecracks blurted out. Lucie took it all in stride—what else could she do? Kashmareck restored order one last time:

  “Okay, everyone clear on what to do?”

  Silent nods.

  “Get to it, then.”

  Lucie remained behind a few moments, alone in front of the computer, facing the little girl halted on her swing. She ran her fingers over the frozen smile. It was as if the child were smiling at her, radiating innocence.

  Lost in thought, Lucie’s mind returned to Sharko. She was even getting a bit worried. Why this silence? She looked at her phone. Who was he really, that behavioral analyst she couldn’t stop thinking about? What was his past, his service record? What horrific cases had he dealt with when he was younger? She dialed up the national police administrative office. Her rank granted her access to information on any police officer in France. Past cases, ongoing ones, even superior officers’ comments…The entire CV. Once she had identified herself, she asked for the career highlights of Franck Sharko. Reason? She had to take over one of his cases. Her request would be logged, but too bad.

  A few seconds later, she was politely informed that her request could not be granted, with no further explanation. Before hanging up, she asked whether anyone had requested her own file. They answered in the affirmative. The day before yesterday, to be precise, the head of Violent Crimes had: Martin Leclerc.

  She hung up with an annoyed pout.

  So Sharko and his boss had calmly rifled through her jacket. They knew about her past. And that bastard had made sure not to reveal his.

  Go ahead, help yourself.

  With a sigh, she raised her eyes back to the little girl on the screen. Someone’s daughter. Montreal. Canada. Today, that unknown girl must have been twice her own age. And perhaps she was still alive, somewhere in the depths of that faraway country, carrying within her all the secrets of this horrendous episode.

  28

  Michael Lebrun’s voice in Sharko’s phone sounded cold and high-handed.

  “Where are you?”

  “In a taxi. I’m going to buy some Egyptian whiskey for my boss and a few presents. Tell Nahed not to bother waiting for me at the hotel. I’ll meet her at the police station early this afternoon.”

  “No, I’ll meet you there. Noureddine called me. He’s fit to be tied. You’d be well-advised to return the stolen photos to him as quickly as possible. And don’t expect him to open any more doors for you—that’s over.”

  “Not a problem. Nothing more to be gained from that file anyway.”

  “You can be certain I’ll be informing your superior about this.”

  “Please do. He gets off on this kind of thing.”

  A pause. Sharko leaned his head against the window. Far to the north, the colors of Cairo grew duller as the taxi approached the trash collectors’ quarter.

  “Head feeling better?” asked Lebrun.

  “What?”

  “You had a headache yesterday.”

  “Much better, thanks.”

  “No more slipups before your flight this evening, Inspector.”

  Sharko thought about the charred face of Atef Abd el-Aal, who was rotting pathetically in the sun.

  “There won’t be any slipups. You can trust me.”

  “Trust you? I’d sooner trust a rattlesnake.”

  Lebrun hung up sharply. Those embassy guys were a sensitive bunch to say the least, attached to their protocols like good little do-bees. No relation to Sharko’s concept of how a cop’s job should be done.

  The black taxicab halted in the middle of the road, simply because the road itself had stopped dead. No more pavement, just earth and loose rocks that only a pickup truck or tok-tok could make it through. The osta bil-fitra explained in approximate English that to get to the Salaam Center, you just had to hold your nose and walk straight ahead.

  So Sharko started walking—and discovered the unimaginable. He plunged into the beating heart of Cairo’s trash cities. Blue and black garbage bags, swoll
en with heat and rot, rose so far that they hid the sky. Flocks of kites with dirty feathers flew overhead in precise circles. Heaps of rusted tins and metal drums agglutinated into makeshift shelters. Pigs and goats roamed freely, the way cars might circulate elsewhere. His nose buried in his shirt, Sharko creased his eyes. At the top of the heap, the trash bags began shimmying.

  People. People lived in those mountains of refuse.

  As he advanced through these entrails of despair, Sharko discovered the garbage people, the ones who picked through all this trash to squeeze out the last droplets of juice, the bit of cloth or paper that might earn them the slightest piastre. How many were living in this slum alone? A thousand? Two? Sharko thought of carrion insects, which took turns on corpses during the decomposition phase. The city’s trash arrived by the cartload; people ripped open the plastic bags like wild dogs, sorted out the paper, the metal, even the cotton from disposable diapers.

  Swarms of children came running up to Sharko, clung to him, smiled at him despite everything, and made him understand, with hand gestures, that he should take their photo with his phone. They weren’t even asking for money, just a little attention. Moved, Sharko joined in the game. With every shot, the sooty urchins came over to see, then burst out laughing. A little girl, dirty as charcoal, took the inspector’s hand and stroked it gently. Even filth and poverty could not eliminate beauty. She wore clothes stitched together from old Portland cement sacks. Sharko knelt down and ran his hands through her greasy hair.