And then that inexplicable frenzy.
Lucie and the police remained frozen in place, keeping their own thoughts. The youngest of them, a trainee barely twenty-five years old, excused himself to go outside, his face white. He worked for the local police, not the feds, and wasn’t used to this kind of case. You come to search a house, easy peasy, and find yourself looking at two corpses riddled with stab wounds and already covered in flies.
Thinking quickly, Debroeck moved to protect the crime scene from contamination: the Belgian police force trains its officers well. Lucie, for her part, tried to look past the corpses and made a mental grid of the surroundings. Open drawers, furniture tipped over. She noted the presence of a smashed wall safe. The frame of the painting that had hidden it lay shattered on the floor.
“First, they keep Luc Szpilman from helping with the composite sketch, and second, they make off with anything that can compromise them.”
“What could have compromised them?”
“The discoveries his father had surely made about the anonymous film. The documents he might have exchanged with the Canadian informant. They came to do some housecleaning. God dammit!”
Lucie turned around and went out, needing to breathe in some fresh air.
It was them. Claude Poignet’s murderers had continued mopping things up. No ritual or theatrical display this time.
Just a senseless act committed by wild animals.
30
Leaning against Kashmareck’s car, Lucie gave her boss the rundown. He had joined her at Szpilman’s, shortly after the arrival of the CSI teams and two medical examiners. For several hours, people in uniform had been going in and out of the house.
Lucie nodded toward the open door.
“The MEs gave an estimated time of death. It happened the same night as Claude Poignet’s murder. The killers knew the restorer’s death and the theft of the film would send us running back here. So they eliminated the only person who could identify them. As for the girlfriend…she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They weren’t being too particular.”
She sighed.
“The computer’s hard drive and all the books in his library have disappeared. There were volumes on history, espionage, genocide. Maybe Szpilman had written notes in the margins? Perhaps there was one book in particular that might have pointed us toward something? Damn, if I’d only known the first time I came here!”
“The thefts are what interest me. Old Szpilman was just a collector.”
“He was more than that. He did serious research into this film, studied it inside and out, made contact with a guy in Canada who knows what he’s talking about. Somehow or other, the killers found out.”
Kashmareck pulled two small bottles of water from his climate-controlled glove compartment and tossed one to Lucie.
“You okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“It’s all right to say no.”
“I’m fine.”
“And your daughter, how’s she doing?”
Another sigh. “Better. Big breakfast this morning, and she wolfed down her lunch. They’ve removed her IV. Now we’re waiting for the famous verdict of the bowel movement. Just life.”
Kashmareck flashed her a smile that lately had become a rare sight on his face.
“We all go through it. Kids exist to remind us that our priorities aren’t always the ones we think. Even if it’s hard sometimes, they put order in our lives.”
“How many kids do you have?”
“More than I should.” He looked at his watch. “Okay, I’m off to see the locals about getting real-time access to info from Lille. You head back. Go spend a few hours with your daughter while they wrap up here. You’re not looking too hot, and the next few days threaten to be even worse.”
“Got it.”
She pressed her lips together, without moving.
“You know, Captain, there’s something about this latest crime.”
“What’s that?”
“On site, the MEs counted thirty-seven stab wounds for the girl and forty-one for the kid…They had them all over their bodies, including the genitals. Deep wounds, several inches down. Sometimes the knife went to the hilt—they could see the marks the metal left around the slits. Given the characteristics, the similarities in the stabbing patterns, they think it’s the work of a single attacker.”
The commanding officer answered with silence. There was nothing to say. Lucie stared at him intently.
“There’s pure madness in this, Captain. In their movements, their way of operating. Something not right in the way they’ve been proceeding. The same kind of irrationality we saw in those kids in the film, more than fifty years ago.”
31
Eugenie was tickled pink to be leaving. She jumped up and down and squealed with delight in front of the hotel. Sharko, meanwhile, carried his suitcase to the taxi that was waiting for him at the foot of the building. No embassy Mercedes to bring him back this time. As agreed, he had returned the photos to Lebrun at the police station, at 2:00 p.m. on the dot. The embassy’s inspector had come alone, and their brief conversation had not gone entirely well, especially when Lebrun had noticed the bruise near Sharko’s nose. Sharko had said something about slipping in the bathtub. No further comment.
Alone on the sidewalk, the cop looked around him in the vain hope of seeing Nahed, telling her good-bye, wishing her good luck. She hadn’t answered any of his calls, no doubt on embassy say-so. His throat tight, he got into the taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport.
Eugenie sat next to him for a while, then vanished during the trip. Sharko could finally enjoy the landscape without the shouting in his head. His only real moment of respite since arriving in Egypt.
Earlier that day, Taha Abou Zeid, the Nubian doctor at the Salaam Center, had called him to confirm his suppositions: the two other victims had also suffered the effects of the mass hysteria, in its most aggressive form. And according to the recollections of several doctors, who of course had not kept any records, the girls had remained symptomatic until their cruel deaths.
That was the point in common.
The collective hysteria.
The same link that might have united the five anonymous bodies in Gravenchon.
The taxi left the city center and took the Salah-Salem expressway. The breath of Cairo was slowly absorbed into the cloud of exhaust.
His forehead flattened against the window, alone with his dark thoughts, Sharko saw a train in the distance. Outside the car, near the smokestacks, four men clung on as best they could, gaining footholds on pipes or stepladders. Whatever their religions or beliefs, they huddled close together to avoid falling. And they fled into the wind, into the sun, toward the burning dust of Cairo. These men were risking their lives to get out of paying a three-pound fare, but they were smiling and seemed happy, because their poverty reminded them, better than anyone, how much life was worth living.
Then Sharko saw the ones at the airport, who crowded at the discount windows for flights to Libya, a large canvas bag their only luggage. These people, on the contrary, were fleeing Egypt to try to wrest themselves from poverty. They were heading for a country where oil decided everyone’s fate. Someday they’d be sent back home, or perhaps they’d end up in some rickety skiff off the Italian coast.
Sharko had never seen the beauty of the great pyramids, but he did see that of a people whose only luxury was their dignity. As his plane rose into the air, he recalled the joke the Coptic taxi driver had told him while bringing him to the church of Saint Barbara, the night of his meeting with Nahed:
“Someone asks three people, a German, a Frenchman, and an Egyptian, what Adam and Eve’s nationality was. The German answers, ‘Adam and Eve exude good health and vital hygiene: they must be German!’ The Frenchman declares, ‘Adam and Eve have sublime, erotic bodies: they can only be French!’ But the Egyptian concludes, ‘Adam and Eve are naked as jaybirds, they don’t have enough to buy shoes, a
nd yet they’re convinced they live in Paradise: what else could they be but Egyptians?’ ”
After fifteen minutes in the air, Sharko started leafing through the book on mass hysteria. As Dr. Taha Abou Zeid had briefly explained, this phenomenon had cut across time periods, nationalities, and religions. The author based his thesis on photos, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with specialists. In France, for instance, witch hunts in the Middle Ages had provoked an inordinate fear of the devil and mass acts of insanity: screaming crowds hungry for blood, mothers and children who cheered to see “witches” burning alive.
The cases in the book were astounding. India, 2001: hundreds of individuals from different parts of New Delhi swear they were attacked by a fictional being, half man, half monkey, “with metal claws and red eyes.” Certain “victims” even leap from the window to flee this creature, who’d surged right out of the collective imagination. Belgium, 1990: the Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena suddenly receives several thousand sightings of UFOs. The most likely cause was held to be sociopsychological. A sudden mania for looking for flying objects, exacerbated by the media: when you want to see something, you end up seeing it. Dakar: ninety high school students go into a trance and are brought to the hospital. Some speak of a curse; there are purification rituals and sacrifices to remedy the situation.
Sharko turned the pages—it went on forever. Sects committing group suicide, panicked crowds, haunted house syndrome like the Amityville Horror, collective fainting spells at concerts…There was even a chapter on genocides, a “criminal mass hysteria,” according to the terms of certain psychiatrists: organizers who plan coldly, calculatingly, while those who execute sink into a frenzy of wholesale destruction and butchery.
At bottom, there was no real explanation for these outbreaks, which were given various names: mass psychogenic phenomenon, mass or collective hysteria, epidemic hysteria, mass syndrome of psychogenic origin…It didn’t appear in the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV, but its existence could not be denied. Scientists spoke mainly of psychological root causes, but could not explain what triggered the phenomena—the seismic epicenter—or their very real physical manifestations: vomiting, nausea, joint and muscle pain…
Shortly before landing, Sharko shut the book and gazed out the window, at nothing. A bloodthirsty, sadistic individual might be seeking something in hysterical phenomena, and mutilating, killing, and stealing eyes and brains to get at it. Why? What ends could possibly justify such barbaric means? Was there even an end?
The lights of Paris finally appeared three thousand feet below. Thousands of people, huddled in front of their computers and television screens or glued to their cell phones. In a way, this was the most modern and dangerous form of mass hysteria: a vast group of humans, their minds linked by the world of images. A modern madness from which no one could escape.
Not even Sharko.
32
Under the kiss of dusk, Sharko finally reached his building in L’Haÿles-Roses. Compared with the Egyptian capital, Paris and its outskirts, with their purified subway lines, the calm faces plunged into a book or staring out the window, had become almost reassuring. Once he’d set down his bags, the cop switched on his railroad trains and let himself be carried away by the gentle rattling of the connecting rods and wheels and the whistling of steam. The sounds, smells, and little habits that went with them brought him a measure of comfort.
But the spell of Cairo remained in the pit of his stomach.
As did the delicate prickle of the alligator clamps planted on his skin.
With a sigh, Sharko went back to his living room. He set on the table the jar of cocktail sauce, glazed chestnuts, and his presents, which he’d bought at the duty-free before departure: the bottle of whiskey and carton of Marlboros for Martin Leclerc, the perfume burner for Martin’s wife, Kathia.
Despite the late hour, fatigue, and aching joints from all the transportation, Sharko dragged himself to Roseraie Park, just opposite his building. A tradition, a habit, a need. Marc, the guard, was as usual watching one of his countless police shows. He opened the gate with the friendly smile you give to those you’re used to seeing without really knowing them.
At the far end of the park, his usual bench awaited—an old half cylinder cut from a tree trunk, languishing under the oak where he and Suzanne had carved their initials so long ago: F & S. Facing the tree, eyes vacant, he ran his fingers over his chest. Once again he saw the flame of the cigarette lighter waver before the Arab’s twisted mouth; he remembered the peculiar smoke of burning flesh. His jaws clenched, he used a penknife to carve a small vertical line in the bark, next to seven others.
Eight scumbags who would never harm anyone again.
He folded his blade, then sat on the bench, leaning forward, hands joined between his slightly parted knees. Seeing himself like this, he thought that he really had aged prematurely. Not physically, but emotionally. The warm air brushed over his neck like a child’s caress. Shadows were settling on the capital, a large sleeping cat that you saw from below. And with them, their nauseating cloud of crimes and assaults.
He stared sadly at a patch of grass. It was precisely here that he’d first met Eugenie. At the time, sitting cross-legged, she was reading The Adventures of Fantômette, his daughter’s favorite book, and she’d smiled at him. A poisoned smile, the initial signs of paranoid schizophrenia. The beginning of his torture, as if the deaths of Suzanne and Eloise hadn’t been enough.
Even in the worst moments of his illness, Sharko had always enjoyed the support of Kathia and Martin, the man who, despite administrative and personal difficulties, had managed to keep him afloat. In 2006, Leclerc had become head of a new department, the Bureau of Violent Crimes, and offered him a job as behavioral analyst—a relatively recent position in the police force that consisted of investigating unsolved violent crimes without leaving one’s desk, at least in theory. Cross-referencing information, establishing a psychological profile, and using computer and informational tools as a way of determining the killer’s motives—tools such as ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System), Interpol, or STIC (Information and Communications Technology Resource). On the strength of his degree in psychocriminology and his twenty years on the job, Sharko, a paranoid schizophrenic cop, had conducted a different sort of manhunt, outside the mainstream.
He sighed when his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. The screen read “Lucie Henebelle.” It was almost midnight. Sharko answered with a tempered smile. The woman should have been asleep like everyone else. But no, there she was, on her phone.
“It’s a bit late to be calling, Lieutenant Henebelle.”
“But never too late to answer…I knew your plane landed at Orly at 9:30. I figured you wouldn’t be asleep yet.”
“That’s quite a gift for divination. Do you also know what they served on board?”
Lucie was getting some fresh air outside the children’s hospital.
“I left you a message yesterday. You didn’t call back.”
“Sorry, but someone was serving grilled fish on my chest.”
A silence. Lucie took back the reins of the conversation.
“I have new information for you. They’ve—”
“I’m already up to speed. I called my boss when I got in. The murder of Szpilman Junior and his girlfriend, the theft of the film, and the hidden film they found inside the original. I haven’t yet downloaded it from the server. At the moment, I’m on something else.”
“On what else?”
“A bench. I’ve just covered two thousand miles, my body looks like a calculator because of the mosquitoes, and I’m trying not to think about the case for a little while, if it’s all right with you.”
Sharko lodged the phone between his ear and shoulder, then wiped off the toe of his shoes with a paper napkin. He looked under his sole and discovered that there were still grains of sand encrusted in the grooves. He dug a few out with his fingers and studied them attentively.
“Why are you calling?”
“I told you, I—”
“You what? You need to talk about corpses even at night? You want to know what I found out over there to feed your own obsessions? Is this what you run on, what keeps you moving forward day after day? I’d be curious to know what you dream about, Henebelle.”
Lucie had stopped in the middle of the ambulance lane. White and blue lights danced on the low northern sky.
“Leave my dreams out of this, Inspector, if you don’t mind, and you can also take your two-cent psychologizing and shove it. I was going to suggest a quick round-trip to Marseille regarding our case, but apparently that doesn’t turn you on. After all, I’m just a lieutenant, and you’re a chief inspector.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t turn me on. Good night, Henebelle.”
He snapped the phone shut. Lucie stared at hers for several seconds, livid. The guy was a flaming asshole. And that was the last time she’d be calling him—he could go fuck himself! Seething with rage, she bought a chocolate bar at the vending machine and downed it in two bites.
“Thanks for the extra calories, you goddamn effing shark!”
Then she headed for the stairs. A wide smile stretched across her lips when her phone started ringing and she read the name: “Sharko.” She waited until the last ring before taking the call.
“So? You want to know after all?”
“What’s in Marseille, Lieutenant Henebelle?”
Lucie waited a moment before answering.
“A specialist in fifties-era films called a little while ago. He managed to identify the actress in the short. Her name is Judith Sagnol. She’s still alive, Inspector.”
Syndrome E Page 21
