Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  Sharko stood up from his bench with a grimace. He sighed.

  “All right…I’m going to download the film tonight. Finally see what all this is about. What time can you be in Paris tomorrow?”

  “Arrival Gare du Nord at 10:52. Departure Gare de Lyon at 11:36, to get to Marseille at 2:57. Sagnol has been contacted—she’ll be waiting for us at her hotel. I told her we were reporters doing a story on vintage porno films.”

  “Great topic. But change the time of your departure. I’m going to arrange for you to attend the morning meeting in Nanterre, with your boss. We’ll leave together from there.”

  “Fine. And now tell me what you discovered in Egypt.”

  “Three beautiful pyramids called Cheops, Khafre, and Menkaure. See you tomorrow, Henebelle.”

  Before leaving the park, he ran his fingers one last time over the eight vertical bars etched in the trunk.

  And there, alone in the dark, he gritted his teeth.

  33

  Lucie and her captain arrived together at the Criminal Investigations Division’s central headquarters in Nanterre. In preparation for the full day Lucie had opted for a rather masculine outfit: tight jeans, gray short-sleeved sweatshirt, and work boots with reinforced toes. She liked to dress like a guy, blend into the crowd. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, but the sun was already baking the asphalt. Slowly, the cloud of smog rose over the capital and its outskirts.

  The air was cooler inside the building. In the conference room, Sharko and Martin Leclerc were having a heated argument over the strongly worded letter that the head of Violent Crimes had just been faxed by the French embassy in Egypt.

  “Lebrun cc’d Josselin. This whole business is going to blow up in your face.”

  Sharko shrugged.

  “The big boss has had it in for me since the beginning. One more fuckup won’t make a difference.”

  “Yes, that’s the point—one more fuckup will make all the difference! You’re handing him the ammunition he’s been waiting for. Do you see what a spot you’ve put me in? As if I didn’t have enough shit to deal with right now.”

  His cell phone rang. When he looked at the display, his face fell. He answered and moved away.

  “Kathia…”

  Sharko watched him pace back and forth. His boss and friend didn’t seem to be his usual self. Too nervous, too removed from the case. His thoughts were interrupted by Lucie and Kashmareck, who had just entered the room. Martin Leclerc quickly hung up, his lips pinched. The four cops shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Lucie gave the inspector a tight smile, while Kashmareck and Leclerc went off to confer over coffee.

  “Egypt doesn’t seem to have agreed with you,” she said quietly. “Your nose…What happened?”

  “A really big mosquito. Happy to be here among us?”

  Lucie looked around her, eyes sparkling.

  “The heart of the French criminal police. The place that all the major cases pass through. Just a few years ago, I knew it only through the novels I read between typing reports for my bosses.”

  “Nanterre is okay, but back in the days of Number 36…”

  “Oh, Number 36—that’s legendary!”

  “One day, I left the north to come work at Criminal Division HQ, the famous 36 Quai des Orfèvres. Imagine my pride, the first time I walked up those creaking old stairs, just like Inspector Maigret. I had access to the darkest, most twisted, most intriguing cases. I was happy as a clam. Except that I’d lost everything around me. Hometown, quality of life, human relations with my neighbors, friends…Number 36 stinks of murder and sweat in crappy offices—if you really want to know.”

  Lucie sighed.

  “Is it just me, or do you have a special gift for being a wet blanket?”

  A few minutes later, they sat down at a round table, everyone taking out sheets of paper and pens. Péresse arrived late, waylaid by the Paris traffic.

  Leclerc gave a brief summary: the purpose here was to set out all their findings and pull together the threads of the investigation, so that everyone would be on the same page. To get everyone in the swing, he played the 1955 film in the original and hidden versions. Once again, all faces wrinkled with curiosity and disgust.

  Péresse, the chief inspector from Rouen, then got things rolling with several pieces of bad news. Inquiries at hospitals, detox centers, and prisons in Normandy had yielded zip about the five unearthed bodies. Since the missing persons reports had turned up nothing either, the trail of illegal immigrants or undocumented aliens in France remained the most promising avenue, especially since there’d been an Asian in the batch. For now, the Rouen criminal police were collaborating with the other branches of law enforcement to try to infiltrate human trafficking networks. It might be a dead end, admitted Péresse, but given how few leads his teams had to work with, for the moment he couldn’t see any other possibilities. He hoped something would come of the DNA lifted from the bodies, for which they would have the results in the next day or two.

  Kashmareck had more to offer, describing in detail the vicious killings of Claude Poignet, Luc Szpilman, and the girlfriend. Initial findings suggested they were the work of the same killers and that they’d occurred the same night. An individual of about thirty, solidly built, wearing combat boots, and another who remained completely invisible. Two coldhearted, organized, sadistic murderers, one of whom knew about film and the other about medicine. Executioners who would stop at nothing to shut down any and all leads to the deadly reel.

  The captain from Lille then detailed what Belgian investigators had unearthed about Vlad Szpilman’s past:

  “We got some very interesting information yesterday about the old man and where the film came from. The Belgians confirmed that Szpilman borrowed the reel from the International Federation of Film Archives in Brussels—and by ‘borrowed,’ I mean swiped. Szpilman was a bit of a kleptomaniac. FIAF said that about two years ago, some guy showed up to see the film, which was supposed to be on their shelves, at which point the curator discovered it was missing. Naturally, he had no idea Szpilman was the one who had it.”

  “Two years? So the killers were already looking for the reel?”

  “So it seems. Whether he intended to or not, Szpilman pulled the rug out from under them.”

  “And where did the film come from, exactly? Before ending up at FIAF.”

  “It was in a batch of short features acquired from the National Film Board of Canada when it unloaded part of its archives. According to the old Canadian files, the film arrived there in 1956 as an anonymous gift.”

  Sharko leaned back in his chair.

  “An anonymous gift,” he repeated. “Barely made, and already someone ships it off to the archives. How did the guy looking for the reel find out it had ended up at FIAF?”

  Kashmareck leafed through his notes, wetting his index finger.

  “That’s in here…here it is. Most of the films are referenced by title and year, as well as country of origin, serial number of the film stock, and place of manufacture. It’s all in a central database that can be accessed from the FIAF Web site. You can find out what films have gone to which archive. Then you just have to filter with the available data—year, manufacture, country—to refine your search. You can even receive alerts when a film moves to another archive. That’s evidently what happened in this case.”

  “Can we trace the users who logged on to the FIAF site?” asked Henebelle.

  “Unfortunately not—the requests aren’t stored.”

  Sharko looked at Henebelle out of the corner of his eye, just to his left. The light struck her face in a peculiar way, as if it darkened on contact with her skin. The cop could see her doggedness, her concentration, the dangerous flames burning in the depths of her blue irises. He knew that look only too well.

  Leclerc took note of Kashmareck’s findings and continued:

  “And Vlad Szpilman? Who was he, apart from a collector and occasional klepto?”

  “The Belgians had something
to say about that too. According to friends, Vlad Szpilman seemed to be pursuing his own investigation, also during the past two years. He had begun stealing, or in any case acquiring, every film and documentary he could lay his hands on concerning the American, English, and even French secret services. CIA, MI5, documentaries on the Cold War, the arms race, and that’s not the half of it.”

  “These last two years,” repeated Sharko. “And by coincidence, the Canadian informant said on the phone that he’d been looking into this matter for two years as well. Everything seems to have started the moment Szpilman got hold of the film.”

  “That’s also around the time when Szpilman went to the neuromarketing center to have the film analyzed,” Lucie completed.

  Kashmareck nodded in agreement. “But that’s not all. Szpilman also spent a good deal of time at the public library in Liège. One time, he left a document in the photocopier that the librarian kept meaning to give back. According to her, Szpilman spent all his time in the twentieth-century history section.”

  He took a sheet from his leather shoulder bag and passed it around. Lucie grabbed it up first. It was a black-and-white photo that appeared to have been copied from a book. In the middle of a field, German soldiers pointed their rifles at women and the children they held tightly against them. The caption read GERMAN SOLDIERS EXECUTING JEWISH MOTHERS AND THEIR CHILDREN FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER, DURING THE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS AT IVANGOROD, UKRAINE, 1942. Lucie stared at the look on the face of the German soldier in the foreground, with his rifle raised. The glazed expression in his eyes, the twist of his lip were unspeakably evil. How could someone kill for the benefit of the camera? How could someone ignore a presence that immortalized on film a face confronting death?

  Lucie passed the photo to Péresse. Kashmareck laid a book on the table.

  “Here’s the book the photo came from. It’s about the Ukrainian Holocaust. I found the image on page 47. On the next page, all the bodies of the Jewish women and their children are lying on the ground, each killed by a bullet to the head.”

  Sharko leafed through the book and studied the pictures.

  “The genocide of Jews,” he said.

  He thought of the book he’d read on the plane. A “criminal collective hysteria.” It couldn’t be a simple coincidence. Szpilman was on to something that related to the murdered Egyptian girls.

  Kashmareck nervously fingered a cigarette, which he would gladly have smoked then and there. He continued:

  “It’s clear that for some reason Vlad Szpilman started spending a lot more time at the library in the last couple of years. He never borrowed any books, so left no traces in the library’s records. The same for his Internet searches. A total ghost.”

  Lucie broke in:

  “I saw books in his private library, books that the killers made away with. They all dealt with the major historical conflicts. Wars, genocides…and a number on espionage as well. I…”

  Lucie tried to remember. She hadn’t paid special attention to the crowded bookshelves.

  “I remember names like…I think it was ‘artichoke’?”

  “Artichoke,” confirmed Leclerc. “A CIA program to study interrogation techniques. In the 1950s, there were a fair number of experiments, some of them rather unsavory, using hypnosis and various drugs, such as LSD, to induce amnesia or other altered states.”

  “The fifties,” Lucie repeated. “And the film dates from 1955. Another coincidence? I have several images from that film stuck in my head, especially the ones of the little girl’s dilated pupils, as if they’d given her drugs. And also the one of the bull stopping dead in front of her. You talked about LSD and hypnosis—could that be it? And besides…”

  She undid the elastics on her folder and took out a photo, which she pushed toward Leclerc.

  “Here’s a shot of the little girl, taken from the film, before the attack on the rabbits. Compare it with the photo of the German soldier. Look at the expression on their faces, just before they kill.”

  Leclerc put the two side by side.

  “The same cold-blooded expression.”

  “Same look, same hatred, same desire to kill. One about thirty years old, the other barely seven or eight. How could a kid that young have eyes like that?”

  Silence. Wearing a somber expression, the head of Violent Crimes passed the pictures around, then walked to the water cooler at the other end of the room to refill his glass and check his cell phone. He returned, trying to look composed, but Sharko could see that all wasn’t well. Something was going on with Kathia.

  “Anything else, Captain Kashmareck?”

  The cop from Lille shook his head.

  “Szpilman’s call record over the past months didn’t give us anything. We think he mainly communicated with the Canadian online. But for the moment, our teams have hit a dead end. The Belgian used a ton of systems that made his communications completely untraceable. And none of his e-mails have yielded anything that seems relevant to this case.”

  Leclerc gave a brief nod to thank him, then turned to his chief inspector.

  “Your turn. Egypt…”

  Sharko cleared his throat and began narrating his adventure abroad. He intentionally neglected to mention the episode with Atef Abd el-Aal in the desert, and instead claimed to have found the lead to the hospitals by questioning someone close to one of the victims. He realized that he was still an amazingly gifted liar.

  During his monologue, Lucie watched him carefully. A real mug, this guy, an old-fashioned sort of body, with hands full of little scars, ancient razor nicks around his cheeks and chin, strong temples, and a nose that must have been broken more than once. If he hadn’t been a policeman, he might have been a boxer, a middleweight. Not exactly a perfect specimen, but Lucie thought he had charm, and an inner strength that emanated from his powerful build.

  “Those girls had been afflicted with some kind of collective hysteria,” the cop concluded. “And if you look carefully at the film, it’s exactly what happened with the little girls and the rabbits.”

  “True enough,” admitted Leclerc. “And what do you make of it?”

  All eyes turned to Sharko.

  “Let’s recap. Nineteen fifty-four or fifty-five, probably near Montreal, in what looks like a hospital room. Little girls on one side, rabbits on the other. A camera to film the whole business. The phenomenon occurs. The girls start slaughtering the animals in a frenzy. Nineteen ninety-three, Cairo. An inexplicable wave of hysteria strikes all of Egypt, north to south. The information circulates in scientific communities throughout the world. One year later, a killer attacks young girls who’d been affected by the wave in its most aggressive form. Three murders, three brains removed.”

  “Not to mention their eyes,” said Lucie.

  “Not to mention their eyes…Finally, 2009, or sixteen years later. We unearth five bodies buried about six months or a year earlier. All killed or wounded by gunfire. Bullets in the chest, the head, entry wounds front and back. What does this latter scene suggest?”

  Lucie spoke up:

  “People trying to flee in all directions? Who were also afflicted with a kind of madness?”

  “Or people trying to attack, exactly like the little girls. A quick, sudden attack, with no warning. No choice but to slaughter them and hide the bodies.”

  He stood up and leaned against the table, palms perfectly flat.

  “Imagine a group of five men. In their twenties, well built, in good physical shape. Mainly former junkies, but they’ve stopped using. They were forced to by circumstance—prison, confinement, disciplinary training. These individuals do not come from easy backgrounds and they all have multiple old fractures, the kind you get in fights. Not to mention their tattoos, which indicate a need to create an identity for yourself, to look tough or like you’re part of a clan. The presence of an Asian underscores the diversity of the group, and suggests that they don’t really know each other. These men are brought together somewhere. They’re watched over by
at least two other men, armed with pistols or rifles.”

  “Why two?” Péresse interrupted.

  “Because of the bullets’ angles of entry and the disparity of the impacts. Front, back…Then there’s a glitch of some kind, something goes wrong. The young guys blow a fuse and start acting violent, out of control. Like the little girls with the rabbits. Like the young Egyptian murder victims. They fall into a collective hysteria.”

  Leclerc took a deep breath. “A kind of aggression that puts them in a blind fury. They see red, like…like a raging bull.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right, a raging bull. And yet, if we’re to believe the film, they think they’ve managed to tame the bull. But these men can’t be tamed. They shout at them to stop, but nothing works. So, at a loss, they open fire. The guards have no choice. They kill or wound them. One way or another, our killers—the movie guy, the medical guy—are immediately aware that a kind of hysteria has manifested again. So they show up and, as before, remove the eyes and brains. Then, burial six feet underground.”

  “So in your view, the same perps who killed the girls in Egypt also killed the five men here?”

  “I believe so, even though there’s a huge difference with the MO used in Egypt. There, the victims were still alive when the heinous acts were committed—there was torture and postmortem mutilation. Here, they were killed much faster.”

  Kashmareck had snapped his cigarette in half from too much fidgeting.

  “What are these killers really after?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but I think it’s linked to these outbreaks of mass hysteria. In any case, I get the sense we’re not dealing with isolated individuals working on their own. People paid Atef Abd el-Aal to kill his brother, and the bodies in Gravenchon bear the mark of a real professional.”

  Sharko looked at his boss.

  “By the way, if you could also get someone to look into the term ‘Syndrome E’…It was the doctor at the Salaam Center who mentioned it, along with the collective hysterias. Just a term he remembered, without knowing what it meant.”