Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “Such as?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Show me what you’ve got, Lieutenant Henebelle.”

  Lucie accepted the challenge with a look. She raised her bottle in front of her and waved her arm at the door.

  “The first thing that’s interesting is their location. They’re on full display in your living room, turned toward the entrance. Why not the bedroom, or somewhere more private?”

  She nodded toward a garbage can in the kitchen, where two boxes and the remains of a pizza were in plain sight.

  “When a deliveryman or a stranger comes to the door, you open slightly, with exact change in hand. You never let them past the threshold; there’s no rug for wiping your feet, outside or inside. The photos are in their line of sight; a visitor can see them without seeing the rest. You, your family, the impression of happiness and normalcy. Do you turn on your toy trains to make it seem a child is playing in the other room?”

  Sharko’s eyes narrowed.

  “You’ve got my interest. Keep going…”

  “Your past is something you don’t like to talk about outside of your apartment. But when someone is here, on this chair, those photos shout out loud that something tragic happened to your family. There are no new photos of your wife or child. You’re several years younger on the most recent ones, and you look a lot happier. At the time your daughter was five or six. It’s the age of the first big change, the first separation. School, playdates, kids going off in the morning and not coming back till evening. So we try to compensate, take pictures—lots of pictures—to slow their departure, to keep them at home and make up for their absence by artificial means. But you— No more memories, as if…life had suddenly stopped dead. Theirs, and then yours. That’s why you quit working the streets and took a desk job. The streets stole your family from you.”

  Sharko now looked like he was elsewhere. His eyes were glued to the floor and he was leaning forward, hands hanging between his thighs.

  “Keep going, Henebelle, keep going. Go on, let it all out.”

  “I’m thinking maybe a case that went bad, that involved your family, put them face-to-face with the things you’d always tried to protect them from. What? A case that encroached on your personal life? A suspect who went after them?”

  A wounding silence. Sharko encouraged Lucie to continue.

  “With those photos, you expose your inner self to the outer world. Here, in your apartment, you manage to open up, to be the man you used to be, the father and husband, but the moment you cross that threshold, the moment you close your door, you lock yourself up. Two dead bolts on the door…Isn’t that just another way of armoring yourself still further? I suspect very few people enter in here, Inspector, and the ones who spend the night are fewer still. Earlier, you could very easily have pointed me toward a hotel and taken off, the way you did the first time, when we met at Gare du Nord. So here’s my question: what the hell am I doing here?”

  Sharko raised dull eyes toward her. He stood up, poured himself a tumbler of whiskey, and retook his seat.

  “I can talk about my past, despite what you seem to think. If I never do, it’s because I have no one to tell it to.”

  “I’m here.”

  He smiled at his glass.

  “You, the little lady cop from up north who I’ve known for a few days at most?”

  “People tell their life stories to a shrink who they know even less.”

  Sharko knit his brow, then got up to put away his bottle of whiskey. He took the opportunity to make sure there weren’t any medications lying around. How had she guessed about the shrink? He sat back down, trying to keep his cool.

  “Well, why shouldn’t I tell you, after all? You seem to need it.”

  “Is that what you learned from my personnel file?”

  She gave Sharko a defiant look. The cop accepted the challenge.

  “The photos speak for themselves. It was more than five years ago. We were driving on the highway, me, Suzanne, and Eloise…And one of my tires blew out on a curve.”

  He stared lengthily at the floor, swirling the liquor in his glass.

  “I could tell you the date, the exact time, and what the sky looked like that day. It’s etched in here, for the rest of my life…The three of us were coming back from a weekend away in the north. It had been a long time since we’d just gotten away like that, far from this stinking city. But right after the blowout, I got distracted for a moment. I forgot to lock the car doors. And while I was checking the tire, my wife went running across the road like a madwoman, with my daughter. A car came speeding around the bend…”

  His fingers clenched.

  “I can still hear the screech of brakes. Over and over…Only the sound of trains on their tracks can make it stop. That incessant rattling sound you hear as we speak—it’s with me day and night…”

  A bitter swallow of whiskey. Lucie retreated into herself—what else could she do at such a moment? The man sitting near her was far more damaged than she could have imagined. Sharko continued:

  “You worked a case involving child kidnappings. You tracked down a man who carried within himself the purest expression of perversion. It was the same for me, Henebelle. My wife, my own wife, had been kidnapped by the same type of killer, six months before she gave birth to Eloise. I hunted him down day and night; nothing else existed. During that investigation, I lost my friends, I saw people I loved disappear before my eyes, carried away by the madness of a single individual.”

  He nodded toward a wall of his apartment.

  “My neighbor, an old Guianese woman, was killed because of me. When I finally found Suzanne, tied up on a table, I could barely recognize her. She had been subjected to things that even you couldn’t imagine. Things…that no human being should ever suffer.”

  Lucie could feel him on the tightrope, ready to fall at any moment. But he hung in there. He was made of a different fiber, a material that no projectile could penetrate.

  “She was never the same after that, and the birth of our daughter couldn’t change it. Her eyes remained empty most of the time, even if, once in a while, between two doses of medicine, the sparkle returned.”

  A leaden silence. Lucie could not imagine the pain this man carried inside him. The solitude, the gaping fracture of his soul, the tragic open wound that bled nonstop. For perhaps the first time in all those years, Lucie told herself, he didn’t want to feel alone anymore, if only for a single night. And despite the blackness of the world around her, she was glad to be sharing this moment with him.

  Sharko downed his glass in one swallow and stood up.

  “I’m the walking caricature of the worst a cop can withstand. I’m bloated with pills and torment, I’ve killed and been wounded as much as one person can, but I’m still standing. Here, on my own two feet, in front of you.”

  “I…I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’ve had it up to here with sorry.”

  Lucie gave him a limp smile.

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  “Okay. I think it’s time for bed now. We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”

  “Yes, it’s time…”

  Sharko made as if to leave the room, then came back toward his colleague.

  “I have a favor to ask you, Henebelle. Something I could only ask a woman.”

  “And after that, I have one final question. But tell me.”

  “Tomorrow morning, at seven sharp, could you turn on the shower in the bathroom? You don’t have to take one—or, of course you can if you want, but what I mean is, I just need to hear the sound of the shower running.”

  Lucie hesitated for a moment before she understood. Her gaze drifted toward a photo of Suzanne, and she nodded.

  “I’ll do that.”

  Sharko gave her a thin smile.

  “Your turn. Ask your question.”

  “Who did you call earlier, in the train station? Who did you suppo
sedly ‘negotiate’ with so that I could sleep in your apartment?”

  Sharko took a few seconds before answering:

  “The computer, over there…You can use it for your search. You just have to push the ON button. No password required. Why would I need one?”

  37

  The films of a madman…

  Lucie had spent a good part of the night rummaging around on the Internet, and this was the only impression it left her of the work of Jacques Lacombe, a man with a steely gaze and a mouth as thin and straight as a razor blade. The digitized photo, posted on a fanatic’s blog, dated from 1950. It was taken at a party the last time the director had been seen in public. Squeezed into a shiny dinner jacket, wineglass in hand and hair slicked back, Lacombe stared at the camera so intensely that it gave Lucie chills. She couldn’t look directly at his eyes.

  Certain amateurs had tried to draw up a biography of the filmmaker, but they always dead-ended at the same place: in 1951, after the turbulent shoot in Colombia and his run-in with the law, Lacombe had simply disappeared. Only a part of his work—they estimated that a good 50 percent of his films had been lost—continued to circulate among a small circle of devotees. All that remained of this dark character were a handful of short features, most of them running less than ten minutes, which film buffs called the “crash films.”

  Crash films…shot between 1948 and 1950, before Colombia. As the Web authors explained, this was a series of nineteen films whose sole aim was to display things never before attempted in the medium, a kind of artistic exploit on celluloid. Lacombe didn’t care about the point of a film, only about the public’s reactions: its passivity toward images, its relationship to plot and story line, its voyeuristic tendencies, its fascination with intimacy, and also its tolerance for conceptual cinema. He challenged people’s watching habits and turned filmmaking conventions on their heads. Always a need to innovate, disturb, shock…

  And then there was that small white circle in the upper right, on each of his nineteen mini-films. Lucie understood that this was probably Lacombe’s maker’s mark, his signature. Digging further, she found a description of some of his techniques, his experimentations with masks, mirrors, and multiple exposures. Some people advanced a hypothesis about the presence of the white circle at the top of each film. They called it the “blind spot,” which from a psychological viewpoint corresponded to a small part of the retina that was lacking photoreceptors. Some of the sites even suggested an exercise:

  If you closed your left eye and looked only at the square from a distance of about six inches, the circle disappeared from sight. Lucie was amazed by this flaw in human optics. Ultimately, wasn’t Jacques Lacombe trying to say, with his signature, that the eye was an imperfect instrument that could be fooled by any number of means? Wasn’t he clearly stating that these flaws were the engine driving his films? At bottom, these short features surely hid the first burblings of a sick and perverse mind. A mind obsessed by the impact of images on human beings—their veracity, their strength, and also their destructive power. He was a visionary ahead of his time.

  Stretched out on the couch, her eyes half shut, Lucie understood better why Lacombe had never made it. His “crash films” turned out to be weird and boring beyond belief. Who would go see an hour-long movie called The Sleeper, which simply showed a man sleeping? Or the movement of an eyelid opening and shutting in slow motion, at a thousand frames a second, projected for more than three minutes? There was also crash film number 12: counting and showing each second of the twelve minutes the film lasted, which, by induced effect, was reduced to a simple display of numbers…These films were as distant and inscrutable as the mind of their maker.

  When the alarm on her watch sounded, Lucie was lying with her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Six fifty-five. She had barely slept an hour or two. A cop’s night. She got up, head full of cotton wadding, and felt her way to the bathroom. A wide, silent yawn: this wouldn’t be an easy day.

  In the bath, everything was incredibly orderly: a new toothbrush in a glass, blue towels hanging from the rack, their folded edges perfectly symmetrical, a razor with gleaming blade, a clean bathtub with a shower head above it. There was also a medicine cabinet—the kind of small furnishing that says more about someone’s life than lengthy explanations. Lucie looked at her reflection in the cabinet mirror. She could open it, have a look at the medications, rummage even deeper into Sharko’s privacy…What was there to find behind that door? Antidepressants? Stimulants? Anxiolytics? Or just vitamins and aspirin tablets?

  She took a breath and turned on the taps in the shower. The water splashed against the tiles in a cold, intense downpour. Lucie had understood Sharko’s request: he wanted, in those first moments when dreams still have hold over the senses, to relive his wife’s presence. To believe in it just once more, if only for a fraction of a second.

  Lucie returned silently to the living room, leaving the water running. A few moments later, she heard a door close…the water stop…the little trains start up, for the twenty minutes that followed.

  Later, Sharko appeared, elegantly dressed. White shirt with thin blue stripes, tie, gray twill slacks. As he moved toward the kitchen, he left in his wake a scent of cologne that Lucie identified as Fahrenheit. The man gave off an aura of reassuring strength, a presence that Lucie had been missing for a long time. She rubbed her hands over her face and yawned discreetly.

  Sharko turned on the radio. A lively tune filled the room. Dire Straits. Things were starting to move.

  “I won’t ask if you slept well. Coffee?”

  “Please—black, no sugar.”

  He gave her a sidelong glance as he placed a packet in the coffee machine and turned it on. When their eyes met, he turned away toward the cabinet and took out a teaspoon.

  “Nothing that remarkable about Lacombe, I suppose? Otherwise you wouldn’t have hesitated to wake me up in the middle of the night.”

  Lucie came closer with a smile.

  “Not much beyond what Judith Sagnol already told us. The enigmatic type, vanished into the woodwork in 1951, never heard from again. I also searched around for Syndrome E, including on medical and scientific sites—nothing, no matches found. If the Internet doesn’t know about it, it must be pretty secret.”

  Sharko handed her her coffee and went to water his plants, near the kitchen window.

  “You should go freshen up a bit. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a woman first thing in the morning, but you definitely look like you got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

  “I’ve been up all night thinking.”

  “Naturally.”

  “We have to go to Canada, Inspector.”

  Sharko paused a moment before setting down his watering can. His jaw tightened.

  “Listen, I can’t get those children’s faces out of my head either. I saw their fear, then that frenzy in their eyes, their movements. I know that the people hiding behind that camera must have done monstrous things. But our job is in the present, Lucie, the present. It’s already shitty enough as it is. And besides, for the moment, we don’t have anything concrete to help us learn what happened to those kids.”

  “Yes, we do. I did some research on the Web. In the 1950s, Montreal was heavily Catholic and had loads of orphanages run by nuns. Every child who passed through those institutions has a file that can be consulted at the city’s national archives. They have a Web site, which says you can come in without an appointment and examine the files on site. Everything is classified, organized, listed…”

  “But none of that means we should be looking in Montreal.”

  “The film comes from Montreal. So does the informant’s call. So does the little girl, according to the lip-reader. And don’t forget what Judith Sagnol told us about the old Montreal warehouses where she spent her stay. In the archives, it would be best to have an actual name, but a search year will do. The files contain photos. We could—”

  “All we have is the date of
an old film and a few prints of the kid taken from screen shots, in black and white and of poor quality.”

  “And a first name she said in the film: Lydia…One of her playmates, I assume. Maybe a roommate? A year, one name, and a photo might be enough.”

  “Yeah, maybe…”

  “We’re moving forward inch by inch, but we are moving forward. We can print photos of some of the other girls from the film. In some shots, you can see the refectory, the swing set, bits of the yard, which might help us identify the institution. It’s not a lot, but it’s something. If we can find out who the girl was, or the other girls, we might have a chance of understanding all this.”

  Sharko picked up his coffee cup and brought it to his lips. He took a large swallow.

  “Canada is far away and we’ve got a lot to do here…I’ll have to think about it.”

  The inspector’s telephone rang. It was Leclerc. His tone was smooth and direct.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

  Sharko put his phone on speaker.

  “I’m with Lieutenant Henebelle right now.”

  “What? At your place?”

  “She spent the night at a hotel, and now she’s here listening. Go ahead—what’s the bad news?”

  Lucie preferred not to call Sharko on his lie: it was fair enough. The voice boomed in the speaker, serious:

  “Good morning, Lieutenant Henebelle.”

  “Sir.”

  Leclerc cleared his throat.

  “I got an answer from the Sûreté in Quebec about Jacques Lacombe. He died in 1956. His charred body was found at his home. It was ruled a household accident. He lived in Montreal.”

  Sharko pressed his lips together.

  “A household accident…What had he been doing before?”

  “The Canadians filled me in on that too. He moved to Washington in 1951, where he worked as a projectionist at a little neighborhood movie theater for two years. In 1953, he went to live in Montreal, where he again worked as a projectionist.”

  Sharko thought for a moment.

  “None of that jibes with his sudden departure from France, his will to succeed as a filmmaker, or his genius…Especially since in 1955 he made that awful film with the children. There’s more to this. I don’t believe his death was accidental. Nineteen fifty-six was just after he’d shot that film—that’s too much of a coincidence. Who can dig deeper into his past? Who can find out about the circumstances surrounding the fire?”