Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

“To my knowledge, no one has ever filmed an epidemic of measles as violent and deadly as this. In the early sixties, it was impossible to find societies, even primitive ones, in which the adults were so lacking in antibodies that it could cause such a holocaust. So there’s only one conclusion: before the time this film was made, this civilization had never met a modern man, since the measles, even from thousands of years earlier, had never reached it. It’s probable that the person who shot this documentary was the first outsider that tribe had ever seen, going back centuries. This was an extremely isolated community.”

  Finally, the medical examiner stood up, prompting the two detectives to do the same. He turned off his screen.

  “For now, that’s all I can tell you about it.”

  “That’s a lot. Tell me, do you know Jean-Paul Lemoine, the molecular biologist at the crime lab?”

  “Pretty well, yes—he and his team handle most of the biological analyses we send out. And they’ll be the ones studying Lambert’s brain. How come?”

  Sharko opened his shoulder bag and handed over the three sheets of data that Daniel had written.

  “Can you ask him to give this a once-over as soon as possible?”

  “A DNA sequence? What’s it from?”

  “That’s the big question.”

  The doctor heaved a sigh.

  “You are aware you’re taking advantage, at least?”

  Sharko held out his hand with a smile.

  “Thanks again. And don’t forget . . .”

  “I know—you were never here.”

  39

  Once back outside, the detectives took a deep breath, as if resurfacing after an underwater plunge. Never had the sound of a car zipping by been so reassuring. Everything, even the air itself, seemed to weigh on their shoulders. Sharko walked to the edge of the Seine and, hands in his pockets, watched the amber-colored glints winking at him. Around them, Paris nestled into its heavy blanket of lights. Deep down, he loved this city as much as he hated it.

  Lucie came up quietly beside him and asked, “What are you thinking about?”

  “A ton of things. But especially all this business about evolution and survival. About those genes that will do anything to propagate, even if it means killing their host.”

  “Like praying mantises?”

  “Praying mantises, bumblebees, salmon. Even parasites and viruses follow that logic; they colonize us to preserve their existence, and are very smart about it. You know, I was thinking about the notion of an arms race. It reminds me of a passage in Through the Looking-Glass. Did you ever read Lewis Carroll?”

  “Never did. I’m afraid my tastes in literature tended to be a bit darker.”

  Lucie moved closer. Their shoulders were almost touching. Sharko stared at the horizon with dilated pupils. His voice was gentle, limpid, belying the violence that pressed down on them harder with each passing minute.

  “At a certain point, Alice and the Red Queen are in this race, and Alice suddenly realizes that no matter how fast they run, the scenery never changes. And the Queen says, ‘It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’”

  He let the silence drift for a moment, then looked Lucie deep in the eyes.

  “We’re like any other species, any other organism. We do whatever we have to to survive. You and I, the antelope in the savannah, the fish in the sea, the poor man, the rich man, black, white . . . we all keep running to survive, and we have been since day one. Whatever tragedies knock us down, we always get up again, and we run harder and harder. If we can’t manage it, if our brain doesn’t come up with the defenses to keep us going, the arms race is over and we die, eliminated by natural selection. It’s as simple as that.”

  His voice vibrated with such emotion that Lucie felt tears welling in her eyes. Without second-guessing herself this time, she finally squeezed against him.

  “We’ve been through the same suffering, Franck, and we’ve both kept running, each on our own. But today we’re running together. That’s the most important thing.”

  She moved slightly away. Sharko gathered on his fingertip the tear she couldn’t help shedding and looked carefully at that little diamond of water and salt. He took a deep breath, then blurted out simply:

  “I know what Eva was looking for in Brazil, Lucie . . . I understood the moment I saw that film.”

  Lucie stared at him in surprise.

  “But why didn’t you . . . ?”

  “Because I’m afraid! I’m afraid of what’s waiting for us at the end of this road, do you understand?”

  He turned away from her and walked as close as he could to the edge of the embankment, as if he were about to jump in. He stared at the opposite side for a long time, in silence. Then, with a painful breath, he said:

  “And yet . . . out there is where your spirit is pushing you. So that you’ll finally know.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. At the other end, someone picked up. Sharko cleared his throat before talking:

  “Clémentine Jaspar? Inspector Franck Sharko here. I know it’s late, but you said I could call at any time, and I need to talk to you.”

  40

  Sharko hadn’t said a word in the car. Lucie watched him drive, saw the muscles in his neck and jaws tense beneath the skin. She knew what he was thinking about: the answers he expected to get from the primatologist. The words that would send the two of them off on the trail of Eva Louts, so very far from here. To a place that Sharko dreaded.

  Clémentine Jaspar lived only a few miles from the primate research center, in a house on the outskirts of Meudon-la-Forêt. While the house itself didn’t look like much, the tree-lined property around it stretched for thousands of square yards. All around, small lamps spent the solar energy collected during the day, forming pleasant blue-tinted oases amid the trees. Clémentine Jaspar had apparently wanted to create an environment for herself that reminded her of a distant land.

  Wearing an ample, brightly colored tunic, the primatologist greeted them on a large, dimly lit deck with teakwood furniture. As she sat down, Lucie was surprised to see a chimpanzee open the picture window and come up to her.

  “Good lord!”

  With her large, agile hands, Shery picked up a glass full of iced tea and noisily sucked down the liquid through a straw. Jaspar shot an embarrassed look at Sharko, who watched the scene in childlike amazement.

  “I thought I’d closed the door, but . . . Listen, I’m counting on you not to tell anyone about Shery being here, in this house. I know it’s against the rules, but ever since what happened, I don’t feel comfortable leaving her alone in the center.”

  “Nothing to worry about. We’re also counting on you not to mention our presence here. Let’s call this an unofficial visit. The official investigation is headed off in one direction, but the two of us are convinced the answers lie elsewhere.”

  The scientist nodded with a knowing look. After emptying her glass in record time, Shery slowly loped toward the garden, near a solar lamp, and settled in, sitting like a meditating Buddha. She stared at the guests with a well of wisdom in her eyes.

  “It’s going to rain tomorrow,” observed Jaspar. “Shery always does that the night before it rains. She’s the best barometer there is.”

  “My daughter would love her,” Lucie confided, amused.

  “Shery adores children. Come over sometime with your daughter and they can spend the day together, just the two of them.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jaspar offered her guests some iced tea. Lucie watched her move around, picked up on the complicit glances she and the chimpanzee exchanged. She thought to herself that no one on this planet was meant to live alone; people always had to attach themselves to something, whether a friend, a dog, a monkey, or toy trains . . . She sipped her drink in silence,
thinking of her little daughter, who must have been asking for her. Lucie tried to remember if she’d spoken to her even once on the phone since the day she’d left their apartment in Lille. She hated herself so much for that.

  The temperature outside was still mild; the late summer breeze soothed their heavy eyelids. The primatologist asked how the investigation was coming along and Sharko hastened to answer.

  “The vise is closing. But we’re going to need some more of your help, or your expertise. And I didn’t want to ask over the phone.”

  He leaned forward a bit, his hands flat on the table in front of him.

  “Here it is: we now know that Eva Louts was tracking down violence throughout the world and throughout history. She went to one of the most dangerous cities on the planet to look through criminal records and met with left-handed killers who had committed especially gruesome murders. She studied all those extreme cases with a single goal: to verify the correlation between hand dominance and violence.”

  Jaspar nodded, intrigued. Sharko continued, surprised at how fluently he could speak of evolutionary biology, something he’d known nothing about only a few days before.

  “You told me at the botanical gardens that, these days, there was no more advantage for violent individuals, or individuals who had come from violent backgrounds, to be left-handed, given the modern development of our weapons.”

  “That was the explanation Eva had advanced, yes.”

  “And you also said it was a great disappointment for her when she realized this in Mexico.”

  “I suppose it was. Like any researcher, she must have wanted to confirm her findings by observing a high proportion of left-handers with her own eyes. To see the living proof of her theory, so that she could then reveal it to the world. Unfortunately, the Mexican criminals were no more left-handed than you or I.”

  “But Eva never gave up. She struck out in Mexico, so she went looking somewhere else. In the virgin lands of the Amazon . . .”

  He allowed a silence to sink in. The two women stared at him intently. Sharko turned toward Lucie:

  “The minute I saw that film, I knew what she’d gone to find in the jungle was violence in its purest state. A violence cut off from any civilization, any human influence. An ancestral violence that had been perpetuated in the heart of a primitive tribe. Would she finally find her left-handers this time?”

  Lucie raised a hand to her mouth, as if the obviousness of it had suddenly struck her in the face. Jaspar drank her tea thoughtfully, then nodded with conviction. Her eyes were shining.

  “What you’re saying makes sense, even though I don’t care much for the term ‘primitive tribe,’ since they’re just as evolved as we are. The aboriginal tribes have not been contaminated by the modern world, with its factories, wars, and technology. Any ethnologist will tell you: studying these tribes is like a time machine, because the genomes evolved differently—they’re closer to the first Homo sapiens than they are to us. They’ve probably preserved prehistoric genes and haven’t acquired others.”

  Lucie and Sharko looked at each other: the elements fell together logically in their minds. The investigation rested on three pillars: first, the Cro-Magnon; second, Carnot and Lambert. And between them, as an obvious link, the lost tribes, the true connection between prehistory and the modern world.

  Unhesitatingly, the inspector took out the DVD and put it on the table.

  “This is precisely what we’re looking for: an Amazon tribe that was discovered in the 1960s. Some of the population was wiped out by an epidemic of measles. This is a tribe that almost certainly fights, or fought, its neighbors by hand or with knives to survive and conquer territory. A tribe that, in the past and maybe still today, was reputed to be the most violent, the most bloodthirsty in the Amazon, or even in the world. They’re the ones Eva Louts went to find in Latin America, looking for her left-handers.”

  He handed Jaspar the DVD and described its sordid content, before concluding:

  “Louts knew about the existence of this community, she knew where to find them. So there has to be a record of this population somewhere. Can you help us find their name, as fast as possible?”

  The scientist got up to fetch a sheet of paper and wrote down the information the inspector had given her.

  “This isn’t really my field and I wouldn’t know where to begin, but I have a friend who’s an anthropologist. I’ll call him first thing in the morning and get this disc to him. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found out anything.”

  “Perfect.”

  The two ex-detectives finished their drinks, talking briefly about the case and about what Eva Louts might have become in a world without crime.

  But that world wasn’t exactly around the corner.

  As they left the garden, Lucie took a long look at the great ape, who was staring at the stars as if looking for traces of her kin. Lucie thought to herself that humans were unique, in that we possessed positive characteristics that no other creature, not even that chimpanzee, could boast; but also in that we were capable of behaviors such as genocide, torture, and the extermination of other species. Could the good we were capable of make up for all that evil?

  Before they got to the car, she laid her hand on Sharko’s shoulder.

  “Thank you for everything you’re doing.”

  He turned to face her and gave her a smile that faded all too quickly.

  “I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t want to let you in on what I’d discovered. Now the Pandora’s box is open. I know that your body and your mind are going to drive you to go there, no matter what. But if you have to go, then I want to go with you. I’ll come with you to Brazil. I’ll come with you to the ends of the earth.”

  She hugged him.

  He closed his eyes when she kissed him on the lips.

  Their shadows stretched along the trees. The shadows of two doomed lovers.

  41

  They had run to keep up with the landscape.

  Because they both wanted to survive. And live.

  Live through the death that had separated them.

  Closely entwined in the bed, Lucie and Franck savored every second after their lovemaking, because soon time would speed up again. Like Alice through the looking-glass, they would have to get up and start running, run without catching their breath or looking back. Run, perhaps, so that they never had to stop.

  And so they enjoyed the tender motions, lost themselves in each other’s gaze, smiled at each other constantly, as if trying to reclaim everything they had lost.

  Finally, the first words came from Lucie’s mouth. Her breath was warm, her naked body burning.

  “I want us to stay together this time, no matter what happens. I never want us to be apart.”

  Sharko had kept his eyes glued to the numbers on the alarm clock. It was 3:06. He finally turned the appliance around so that he’d never again have to see the cursed numbers that haunted him every night. No more 3:10 a.m.

  “I want that, too. It’s what I’ve wanted more than anything in the world, but how could I have believed it possible?”

  “You’ve never stopped believing. That’s why you kept my clothes in your closet, with two little mothballs.”

  Lucie rested her ear on Sharko’s chest, at the level of his fractured heart.

  “You know, when I followed that biologist in Lyon, and I found myself facing that kid with a broken bottle, I . . . I nearly killed him because he’d snickered at my daughters’ picture. I shoved the barrel of a gun into his temple and I was this close to squeezing the trigger. This close to abandoning Juliette just so I could put a bullet in his brain.”

  Sharko didn’t move and let her speak.

  “I think I projected on him all the violence I was never able to take out on Carnot. The poor kid was like a catalyst, a lightning rod. That violence was buried in me, in th
at miserable reptilian brain the ME told us about. We all have it in us, because we were all hunters like Cro-Magnon. That episode made me understand that . . . that deep down I still harbored the remains of . . . of something ancestral, probably animal, maybe even more than other mothers.”

  “Lucie . . .”

  “I gave birth to my daughters, I raised them the best I could. But I never loved them as I should have, as human beings are supposed to. I should have been with them all the time. We’re not here just to wage war, or hate one another, or hunt down killers. We’re also here to love . . . And now I want to love Juliette. I want to take my child in my arms and think about the future, not the past.”

  Sharko gritted his teeth. He had to dominate the emotions that were threatening to drown him. Lucie saw the little bones rolling in his temples. He tried to speak, but his lips remained paralyzed. Lucie felt his unease and asked:

  “Is it what I just said that’s bothering you? Am I frightening you?”

  A long silence. Sharko finally shook his head.

  “I’d like to talk to you about something, but I can’t. Please don’t ask me any more than that. Just tell me if you can live with someone who harbors secrets. Someone who’d like to put everything he’s lived through behind him, who’d finally like to see a little ray of sunlight. I need to know. It’s important for me to know, for the future.”

  “We all have our secrets. I have no problem with that. Franck, I want to tell you, about our sudden breakup last year . . . I wasn’t in a right frame of mind. My daughters had disappeared and . . . I’m so sorry for driving you away like that.”

  “Shhh . . .”

  He kissed her on the lips. Then he rolled over on his side and turned out the light.

  When he turned the radio-alarm back the right way, the digital display read 3:19.

  He closed his eyes but, even though he felt good, calm, he couldn’t fall asleep.

  He could already feel the fetid breath of the jungle pressing down on him.