Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “We haven’t seen them in their entirety,” Sharko replied. “Just still images, hidden. Subliminal images.”

  The old woman swallowed hard.

  “More of his tricks.”

  The inspector leaned forward.

  “Tell us about the other scenes. You lying nude in the field, as if you were dead.”

  Judith stiffened.

  “That was the second half of the shoot: I had to lie there, naked and motionless, in a field near the factories. It was barely forty degrees out. Two of the men who’d had sex with me painted my stomach like a disgusting wound. But when I was lying in the grass, I was shivering. It was cold and my teeth were chattering. Jacques was furious that I couldn’t keep still enough. He took a syringe from his pocket and told me to hold out my arm. He—” She brought a hand to her mouth. “He told me it would keep me from feeling the cold and from moving too much…And also that it would dilate my pupils, like a real corpse.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Yes. I wanted the rest of the fee; I’d come all that way. And I wanted to make Jacques happy. We had lived together! I thought I knew him. When he gave me the shot, I started to feel disconnected from the world. I wasn’t cold anymore but I was practically unable to move. They laid me back down in the grass.”

  “Do you know what he injected you with?”

  “I think it was LSD. Strangely, those three letters, which didn’t mean anything to me at the time, came into my head whenever I thought about that scene later on. He must have said them while I was drugged.”

  The cops’ eyes met. LSD—the experimental drug used during the Artichoke program, the subject of one of the books stolen from Szpilman’s.

  “Jacques always liked realism; he was a perfectionist. The makeup wasn’t good enough for him, so…”

  Judith stood up and lifted the hem of her dress, unveiling her nudity without shame. Her tanned stomach was covered with white scars, which looked like little bloodsuckers beneath her skin. Sharko fell back in his chair ever so slightly, while Lucie remained frozen, her mouth tense. There was something sinister about seeing this body, so worn down and steeped in past sufferings, under the cheery sunlight of Marseille.

  Judith let go of the fabric, which fell back to her knees.

  “I didn’t feel any pain while he was cutting me…I couldn’t even understand what was happening. It was like I was having hallucinations. Jacques continued to film for hours on end, constantly making more cuts. They were only skin deep and didn’t draw much blood, so he accentuated them with makeup. There was something terrifying in his eyes while he was slashing me. And at that moment, I realized…”

  The two police kept silent, encouraging her to continue.

  “I realized that he had actually killed that Colombian actress. He had gone all the way—it was obvious.”

  Sharko and Lucie looked briefly at each other. Judith was on the verge of tears.

  “I don’t know how he got it past the French authorities. He must have shown them the poor woman’s twin and they were taken in by it. But with me, he didn’t lie. And he was true to his word about the fee.”

  Lucie squeezed her pencil harder. Apparently Jacques Lacombe was well off, since he’d paid Judith good money. If he’d managed to get his films known in the States, make a name for himself, what was he doing in some moth-eaten warehouse in Quebec shooting those scenes from hell?

  “When I got back to France, I was disfigured, but I had enough to live on decently and keep my head above water. I was lucky enough after that to meet a good man, who had seen my films and loved me regardless.”

  Lucie spoke in a gentle voice. The woman, despite all her wealth, filled her with pity.

  “And you never reported any of this to the police? You never brought charges?”

  “What was the point? My body was ruined, and I wouldn’t even have gotten the second half of the money. I would have lost everything.”

  The inspector looked Judith straight in the eye.

  “Do you know why he shot those scenes, Madame Sagnol?”

  “No. I told you, I didn’t know what the content of—”

  “I’m not talking about the content of the film. I’m talking about Jacques Lacombe. Jacques Lacombe, who called you—you specifically—after several years of total silence. Who leaned in close to mutilate you. Who filmed you in the most provocative postures…Why make a film with scenes like that? What was the point, do you think?”

  She thought for a moment. Her fingers squeezed the large sapphire on her ring finger.

  “To feed perverse minds, Inspector.”

  She sank into a long silence before continuing.

  “To offer them power, sex, and death through film. Jacques didn’t want to just provoke or shock with images. He wanted the image to alter human behavior. That was the point of his entire body of work. It’s probably why he was so interested in pornography. When a man watches a porno film, what does he do?”

  She made an unambiguous hand gesture.

  “The image acts directly on his impulses, his libido; the image penetrates him and dictates his actions. That, ultimately, is what Jacques was looking for. Over there, he kept mentioning this weird thing when he talked about the power of the image.”

  “What weird thing?”

  “Syndrome E. Yes, that’s right—Syndrome E.”

  Sharko felt his chest tighten. It was the second time the expression had come up, and always in sinister circumstances.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. He kept repeating it. Syndrome E, Syndrome E, as if it were an obsession. An unattainable quest.”

  Lucie jotted down the phrase and circled it, before asking Judith:

  “Did it seem that Lacombe was working with a partner? A doctor, maybe, or a scientist?”

  She nodded.

  “A man also came to see me, a doctor—there’s no doubt about it. He supplied the shots of LSD. The two of them clearly knew each other well; they were complicit.”

  The filmmaker and the doctor. It corresponded to the profile of the Cairo murders, to the killing of Claude Poignet as well. Luc Szpilman had mentioned a man in his early thirties: that couldn’t possibly be Lacombe, who would have been too old by now. So who, then? Someone obsessed with his work? An heir to his insanity?

  “But all that was a long time ago, too long for me to tell you anymore. Half a century ago, and whatever happened over there is just vague fragments in my head. Now that we know what harm that horrible LSD has caused, I suppose I’m lucky to be alive.”

  Sharko emptied his flute and stood up.

  “We’d still like you to watch the entire film, in case certain details come back to you.”

  She nodded limply. The cops could tell she was overcome with emotion.

  “What did Jacques do for you to be so interested in him after fifty years?”

  “We’re not sure yet, unfortunately, but there’s an ongoing investigation that has to do with this film.”

  Once the viewing was over, Judith sighed deeply. She lit a long cigarette at the end of a holder and blew out a curlicue of smoke.

  “That’s just like him, that way of filming—the obsession with the senses, his use of masks, the lighting, and that viscous atmosphere. Try to see his short films, the ‘crash movies,’ and you’ll understand.”

  “We will. The film doesn’t remind you of anything else? The settings, the faces of those children?”

  “No, sorry.”

  She seemed sincere. Sharko took a blank calling card from his wallet, on which he wrote his name and number.

  “In case you think of anything else.”

  Lucie also handed her a card.

  “Please don’t hesitate.”

  “Is Jacques still alive?”

  Sharko answered without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Finding that out and locating him are our top priorities.”

  35

  Leaping from the taxi,
they sprinted for the train station. The traffic and the heat were as infernal as ever. Lucie ran ahead; Sharko followed behind, his steps heavier but keeping up all the same. No hot pursuit of a killer, no criminal to arrest or bomb to defuse, just the 7:32 express to catch.

  They dashed onto the train at 7:31. Ten seconds later, the conductor blew his whistle. The air-conditioning in the cars finally gave the two detectives some oxygen. Panting, they headed for the bar car and ordered cold drinks while mopping their faces with paper napkins. Sharko could barely catch his breath.

  “One week…with you, Henebelle, and I’ll…lose ten pounds…”

  Lucie downed her orange juice with noisy swallows. She finally took a minute to breathe, running a hand over her soaked neck.

  “Especially if…you come running with me at…the Citadelle in Lille…Six miles, Tuesdays and Fridays…”

  “I used to run too, back when. And I guarantee you…that I would have kept up…”

  “You didn’t do so bad this evening…”

  Their hearts resumed their normal rhythms. Sharko clanked his empty Coke can on the bar.

  “Let’s go sit down.”

  They found their seats. After a few minutes, Lucie made a brief recap, eyes glued to her notes. In her mind, the sea and sun of Marseille were already far behind.

  “So this one expression kept coming up: Syndrome E. You have no idea what that could mean?”

  “None.”

  “In any case, we now have a name, an important one: Jacques Lacombe.”

  “A doctor, a filmmaker…Science and art…”

  “The eye and the brain…The film, Syndrome E.”

  Sharko rubbed his chin for a long time, lost in thought.

  “We should get in touch with the Sûreté in Quebec. We need to know who this Jacques Lacombe really was, what he went over there to do, in the States and Montreal. We need to trace this back to those children. They’re the key to this, and my sense is they should still be alive. There have to be traces of them somewhere. People who can tell us. Help us understand…understand…”

  The words were like a dark warning in the back of his throat. His fingers scratched at the seat in front of him. He stopped when he noticed Lucie looking at him curiously.

  “This stuff really seems to have a hold on you,” she said.

  Sharko clenched his jaws, then turned his face toward the center aisle. Lucie sensed that he didn’t want to look back on his life, so she fell silent and thought about the case. Judith Sagnol’s hoarse voice echoed in her head. Jacques Lacombe had made this film to feed perverse minds, she’d confided. A way for the director to express and immortalize his madness. What kind of monster had Lacombe been? What sort of animal had he become in the jungles of Colombia? What had he carried along in his wake, so that even today people were willing to kill to get their hands on his “oeuvre”? Had he really killed and decapitated people in the Amazon just to make a movie? How deep had he gone into horror and insanity?

  The landscape sped by, mountainous when the train left the Alpine foothills to its right, then flat and unvarying once past Lyon. Lucie was half dozing off, lulled by the slow rocking of the steel mastodon slicing through the countryside. Several times, coming out of her daze, she noticed Sharko staring at the empty seats in the other row and muttering things she couldn’t understand. He was sweating excessively. He got up at least five or six times during the trip, heading for the toilets or the bar car, to come back about ten minutes later looking either angry or appeased, mopping his forehead and neck with a paper napkin. Lucie pretended to be asleep.

  They arrived at Gare de Lyon at 11:03. Night had fallen, faces were sallow with fatigue, and sticky air flowed into the station, carrying the effluvia of the city. The first train to Lille departed the next morning at 6:58. Eight hours is a long time when you have nothing to do and nowhere to go. Lucie’s thoughts drifted. No way she was going to wander around Paris at night. On the other hand, she felt funny about going to a hotel, with her ridiculous backpack and no change of clothes. Still, some cheap hotel was certainly the best solution. She turned to Sharko to say good-bye, but he was no longer there. He had stopped about ten yards behind and his hands were spread in front of him; his brow was furrowed and he was looking toward the ground, throwing glances Lucie’s way, making her feel like the topic of a heated argument. Finally he smiled, brushing the air with his fingers as if he were high-fiving someone. Lucie went toward him.

  “Whatever are you doing?”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “I was negotiating…” His face beamed. “Listen, you don’t have anywhere to go. I can put you up for the night. I have a big couch, which is certainly more comfortable than an Egyptian bed.”

  “I don’t know anything about Egyptian beds, and I wouldn’t want—”

  “It’s no bother at all. Yes or no.”

  “In that case, yes.”

  “Great. Now let’s try to catch the commuter rail before it stops running.”

  And he started walking toward the turnstiles. Before heading after him, Lucie turned one last time toward the place where he’d been standing alone several seconds earlier. Sharko, noting this, took his hands from his pockets and showed her his cell phone with a smile.

  “What, you didn’t think I was talking to myself, did you?”

  36

  After the telephone call in the train station, Lucie expected to find Sharko’s wife when they entered the apartment. The entire way there, she had tried to imagine what kind of woman could stick to a man of his breadth. Did she have the bearing and disposition of a lion tamer staring down a wild beast, or on the contrary was she docile and sweet, prepared every evening to take the full brunt of the tensions cops built up over the course of their endless days?

  As soon as the inspector opened the door, Lucie realized that there was no one to greet them. Not a soul. Sharko removed his shoes before going in, an oddly dignified gesture. Lucie started to do the same.

  “No, no, keep your shoes on. It’s just a habit of mine. I have a lot of habits I can’t manage to break, which is sort of a pain in the ass, but what can you do?”

  He closed the door and turned all the locks. At a glance, Lucie noted that it wasn’t really the apartment of a single man. Several feminine touches—thick plants all around, a pair of rather retro high heels in a corner. But there was only one place setting on the table in the dining area, already set for a meal, facing the wall. She thought of Luc Besson’s film The Professional. In some ways, Sharko gave off the same sadness as Léon, the contract killer, but also an incomprehensible sympathy that made you want to learn more about him.

  Photos of a beautiful woman, old yellowing pictures stuck in frames, confirmed that the cop was probably a widower. What divorced man would keep wearing his wedding band? Farther back in the living room, other photos hung on the wall: dozens of glossy paper rectangles arranged haphazardly, showing a little girl from infancy to the age of five or six. In some pictures, there were three of them: him, the woman, the kid. The mother was smiling, but Lucie—she couldn’t explain why—sensed a kind of absence in her gaze. Everywhere, Sharko seemed to be squeezing his two loved ones against him, so strongly that their cheeks were pressed tightly together. Lucie felt a shiver as the truth suddenly dawned on her: something must have happened to Sharko’s family. A horrible, unspeakable tragedy.

  “Please, have a seat,” said the inspector. “I’m dying of thirst…How does a nice cold beer sound?”

  He was talking from the kitchen. A bit troubled, Lucie set her bag down on the carpet and walked into the room. A large living room, almost too spacious. She noticed cocktail sauce and candied chestnuts on a low coffee table, then the computer in a corner.

  “Anything cold is fine for me, thank you…Hey, can I use your Internet? I’d like to do a search for Jacques Lacombe and Syndrome E.”

  Sharko returned with two bottles and handed her one. He put his down on the coffee table, then shot
an odd glance off to the side.

  “Excuse me a moment.”

  He disappeared down the hallway. Ten seconds later, Lucie heard whistling, then a rattling sound, just like what she’d been hearing in the express for three and a half hours. Miniature trains—she could have sworn it…

  Sharko returned and sat in a chair, Lucie following suit. He emptied half his beer in one gulp, as if it were nothing.

  “It’s after midnight. My boss has already got someone working on Syndrome E. You can do your search tomorrow.”

  “Why waste time?”

  “You’re not wasting time. On the contrary, you’re saving it. You’re giving yourself time to sleep, think of your loved ones, and remember that there’s more to life than work. Seems so simple, doesn’t it? But by the time you realize it, all you have left are old photos.”

  Lucie was silent a moment.

  “I take a lot of photos too, trying to preserve traces of time…We keep coming back to images, no matter what. Images, as a way of conveying emotion, penetrating everyone’s most intimate thoughts.” She tipped her chin toward the haphazard arrangement. “I understand you better now. I think I get why you’re like this.”

  Sharko was already finishing his beer. He wanted to let himself go, float on a cloud and forget the hardships of the past several days. The charred face of Atef Abd el-Aal, the slums of Cairo, the abominable eye-shaped scars on Judith Sagnol’s wrinkled flesh…Too many shadows—way too many.

  “What do you mean, ‘like this’?”

  “Cold. Distant at first. The kind of guy people think they should avoid. It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you realize there’s a heart beneath the tough outer shell.”

  Sharko squeezed the empty beer bottle.

  “And those photos—what do they tell you?”

  “A lot.”