She had ventured into the shadows on her own, without an explanation.
That idea alone drove him insane.
The two shitheads came back into the room, cigarettes dangling from their lips. They walked back and forth, slowly, without saying a word, just to show they were working his case. This time, Manien had a thick file under his arm. He put a CD on the desk and asked bluntly:
“Did you ever talk with Frédéric Hurault at Salpêtrière?”
“Talking with somebody doesn’t make you a murderer.”
“Just answer the question.”
“It happened now and again.”
Manien left the room again, whispering to his colleague. They were going to toy with him, take advantage of their allotted twenty-four hours to make him sweat. Many people trapped in these offices confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. The trick was to deprive an addict of his heroin, an alcoholic of his bottle, a mother of her child. They threatened, intimidated, pushed you to the limit. Every human being has a psychological breaking point that can be reached through intimidation and humiliation.
Alone once more, Sharko stared at the CD on the desk. What was on it? Why were they asking about Salpêtrière Hospital? Why had the DA authorized his arrest? A good hour later, the two men returned with more questions, then left yet again.
Then another salvo. This time, Manien sat down opposite Sharko, across the desk, while Leblond stood near the closed door with folded arms. The moron was fiddling with a rubber band.
Manien turned on a digital recorder and tipped his chin toward the CD.
“We’ve got proof you killed Frédéric Hurault.”
Sharko didn’t flinch. Any cop or shrink could tell you: to survive an interrogation, you had to deny and keep denying, weighing your words carefully. And never ask, What proof?
“I didn’t kill him.”
Manien opened his thick folder, making sure Sharko couldn’t see what it contained. The inspector nodded toward the manila cover.
“What’s in there, a ream of white paper?”
Manien took out a photo and slid it toward the inspector.
“It’s white enough, but it’s not paper. Have a look.”
Sharko hesitated. He could refuse to cooperate, stand his ground, but he did as told. Since the moment he’d been taken into custody, Manien had been sparring with him. They both knew how it worked; they both knew that at the end of twenty-four hours, there’d be only one winner.
When he saw what was in the photo, he was overcome by violent anxiety, and his face contorted. He felt like screaming. He couldn’t repress a shudder.
“I see this one got a rise out of you,” said his interrogator.
Sharko clenched his fists behind his back.
“It’s a picture of two little girls drowned in a bathtub, for fuck’s sake!”
Manien blew out a cloud of smoke, as if to make himself look devilish.
“Do you remember the first time we talked about Frédéric Hurault, in my office? It was last Monday.”
“I know it was last Monday.”
“Why didn’t you mention that his daughters were twins?”
Sharko remembered all too clearly the apocalyptic sight from that long-ago Sunday morning in 2001. Small bodies, absolutely identical, their heads shoved under the water. He tried to remain calm, even though it felt like his nerves could shatter at any moment. Manien had found his weak spot, the bad kneecap he’d keep pressing on until it tore the ligaments. Sharko told himself that from this point on, he’d have to hold out. Just hold out.
“Why should I? Was it important? Do you really think that’ll help you track down his killer? I can’t believe you’re still hitting a brick wall on this case.”
Manien turned the photo around and put it right in front of Sharko, giving the knife a further twist.
“Look at them. Pretty little blond twins, barely ten years old. Their father shoved their heads into a bathtub full of water, both of them at the same time. Just imagine the scene . . . Doesn’t it remind you of anything?”
Sharko felt the storm rumbling in his head, but he kept silent. Words and phrases echoed. We’ve got proof you killed Frédéric Hurault.
Manien strung out his conclusions:
“Let’s go back a year. August 2009. You flirt with a colleague from Lille, Lucie Henebelle, pretty little thing, nice-looking piece of ass. My compliments.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“She’s the mother of two eight-year-olds. Twin girls. And they get themselves kidnapped right on the beach while you’re sitting there having a cozy little chat with the lady.”
He intercut his sentences with long silences, watching for the slightest inflection on his suspect’s face.
“They find the first body five days later in the woods, burned beyond recognition . . . Even her mother doesn’t know her. And the second, found seven days after that, has suffered the same fate in the perp’s house. So eight years after Hurault, here you are again, faced with the murder of twins. Except this time, it’s personal. It’s as personal as it can get. Crazy how fate can keep dishing it out.”
Sharko had removed himself mentally. His body remained made of stone, but inside he was boiling. How had Manien got hold of all those details? How far had he gone in violating his privacy?
“So from that point on, it’s all downhill for you. No more cushy desk in Nanterre. You come back to Homicide, in my squad. You’re a real wreck. You can’t get over what happened, so you scrape shit from the street, because that’s all you’ve got left. Henebelle would just as soon slit your throat as look at you. As far as she’s concerned, you took away her children. And there’s no way you can give them back . . .”
Sharko didn’t answer. What could he say? What could he do? He contented himself with giving Manien a disgusted stare. Manien blew another cloud of smoke at him. His face was gray, emotionless.
“Sometimes, to give somebody something, you have to take from somebody else. That’s what you did—you took a life. A life that deserved to rot in hell. A life that looked a lot like Grégory Carnot’s. Eye for an eye, and all that.”
Sharko sighed, then stood up. He walked around a bit, cracked his neck joints. He stopped in front of the silent reptile and looked him in the eyes.
“Since we’re probably going to be here for some time, couldn’t you remove these cuffs?”
“Go ahead,” Manien ordered his subordinate. “He knows the rules.”
Leblond undid the cuffs. Sharko forced himself to smile.
“Thanks, that’s very kind of you. And while you’re at it, would you mind fetching me a cup of coffee and some water?”
“Don’t push it,” were Leblond’s only words before he finally left the room. Manien had also stood up. He walked to the barred window and, hands behind his back, stared out at the rooftops before resuming.
“You know, this business with the eyelash and the DNA on Hurault’s clothes really had me going. A cop like you, if you committed a murder, you wouldn’t leave a hair at a crime scene like that. You’d have put on a mask or a ski cap, taken all sorts of precautions.”
“So you know all you need to know. You must be looking for somebody else.”
“Unless you did it on purpose.”
He turned around suddenly, staring deep into Sharko’s eyes.
“You killed someone, but you’re a cop, so something way down inside you, something unconscious, told you you’d have to pay your debt. Leaving proof of your presence there was like . . . like a way of absolving yourself of the crime. You could tell yourself that if we didn’t catch you, then it wasn’t really your fault. But you didn’t want to make it too easy. That’s why you contaminated the scene the day we found the body. Given where the crime took place, you knew thirty-six would catch the case, and you wanted to stir things up a bit. Comp
licate our job by leaving that ambiguity about the DNA. Did you leave it there when you committed the crime, or when we found the body?”
“It’s an interesting theory, but I’m not that masochistic. Why would I want to spend the rest of my life in prison?”
Manien smiled. He went over to the desk drawer and pulled out Sharko’s Smith & Wesson, bagged and unloaded, which he waved in front of him.
“Hence the gun, with just one bullet in the chamber.”
Sharko felt like ramming his head into the other man’s nose. Manien kept at it:
“You bought it last March in a gun shop in the sixth, according to your bank statement. You do Hurault, and if the law catches up with you, you off yourself. Because deep down, you want to die; it’s just that you don’t have the balls to do it on your own. You’d have to be cornered like a wild beast. There’d have to be no other way out.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Except, Henebelle has now come back into your life. And that’s changed everything, because now you don’t want to die anymore. Now you’ve got just one thing on your mind: to figure a way out of this mess.”
Sharko shrugged.
“For the Smith and Wesson, I was planning on joining a firing range. You can check it out. The bullet in the chamber came from a box of cartridges that you must also have found in my closet. So I didn’t take it out—so what? People forget things sometimes, don’t they? Your explanation’s a real corker, but it’ll never stand up in court. You’ve got nothing against me, no material proof, no witnesses. You’ve hit a dead end, and that’s why you’re making such a hash of this. You play at intimidation, even if it means screwing up procedures and your career along with them. It’s so delicate going after a cop from thirty-six . . .”
Sharko sat back down on his chair.
“It’s either you or me—the DA must have told you that, right?”
“None of your business what the DA said.”
“If you’re still empty-handed tomorrow morning at six, I’ll be in a position to fuck you both.”
Manien’s jaws clenched.
“Yeah, you’ll be in a position.”
The squad leader ripped the cups from Leblond, who had just returned, and slammed them on the desk. Half the water spilled on the inspector’s knees. Manien snatched up his folder and headed straight for the door.
“Except you’ll never be in that position. Because the proof we’ve got is on that CD right there in front of you. And to show we’re not panicking and we’re confident of our case, we won’t come back to see you until late tonight, for the kill. So until then, you can just stew in your own lousy juice.”
48
Manaus, or perpetual sweat. A city of crushing humidity and equatorial heat. The mercury never dropped, not even at night. The moment she passed through the sliding doors, Lucie wasn’t just perspiring, she was dripping. The jungle breathed, the waters of Rio Negro saturated the air and went for the lungs. The Amazon rain forest, though invisible, announced the local color.
After changing currency, Lucie and the group guided by Maxime rode in a minibus to the small local Eduardinho Airport. One and a half miles of road. Concrete high-rises in the distance, multilane highways, industry. Advertising billboards in Portuguese between the palm trees and the mangroves.
Maxime gave them bottles of water and snacks, with big helpings of tourist information that Lucie couldn’t have cared less about. Manaus, former rubber capital . . . Colonial mansions built with French materials, etc., etc. Her cell phone had automatically switched over to the Brazilian network Claro and she tried desperately to reach Sharko. It must have been around 10:00 p.m. in France. Still no message, no news.
Only one airline, Rico Linhas Aéreas, flew into São Gabriel da Cachoeira. At 6:32 p.m., the group took off on board a small-model Embraer EMB. The landscape was breathtaking, its opulence arrogantly expressed. Lucie saw before her the formation of the Amazon River, resulting from the confluence of the black waters of Rio Negro and the yellow waters of the Solimões. At certain points, its breadth reached nearly twenty-five miles. A few scattered villages marked the last vestiges of civilization. Slowly, the sun set over the emerald horizon, slit by liquid clefts, dark mires, secret swamps. Brown wounds opened, as mountains broke through the vegetation. Lucie imagined the mysterious life teeming below, those millions of species of plants and animals that struggled to survive, reproduce, perpetuate their genes in the tropical swelter. The Ururu were one of those species. Predators of the shadows that had come down through the centuries, carrying with them a prehistoric violence.
She drifted off, then started awake when the landing gear hit ground two hours later. A burst of applause as the engines shut off. The airport boasted all of two runways, with barbed wire around them, and a large unpainted building. No rolling walkways here; they pulled out your bags on the tarmac. It smelled like hot asphalt and especially like river water, that peculiar blend of silt and deadwood. Passport control, customs. Oppressive military police presence. Harsh, inquisitive looks. Remnants, according to Maxime, of the dark years when the mining companies hunted down and massacred the natives for the gold, lead, and tungsten to be found in the upper Rio Negro. Today, these police were men of the jungle, who traveled the river in canoes and looked for poachers in the forest: traffickers in precious woods, medicinal plants, and animals. Not to mention drugs. The borders with Colombia and Venezuela were just a hundred miles away, and the FARC not much farther. For the first time, Lucie was happy to be with the group. She didn’t know a word of Portuguese—it wasn’t the sort of language they taught in northern France—and she wanted to avoid complications.
The group was mobbed the moment they exited the airport. People offered to take their picture with a sloth in their arms, a boa around their neck, a baby caiman on their knees. Some held out pamphlets in English: boat tour up the Rio Negro, visit to Indian reservations, excursion in the jungle. Merchants and guides squeezed around them by the dozens . . .
At that point, it occurred to Lucie how she might speed up the process. In the tumult, she moved away from the tourists, pulled out a photo of Eva Louts that she’d had blown up, and let herself be submerged in the flood of locals.
“Who knows?” she asked in English. “Who knows?”
The photo circulated from hand to hand, was crumpled, sometimes disappeared, until a man of about forty, with a long black beard and a dark, gaunt face, approached her. A mix of white and Indian, Lucie thought. The man answered in English, “I know her.”
Behind her, Maxime called his charges, as best he could, to gather on the parking lot near a minibus. Lucie looked squarely at the other man and drew him aside.
“I want to go where she went. Is that possible?”
“Everything is possible. Why the Ururu?”
So he knew about the Ururu; he really had brought Louts there. His voice was somber. The man’s shirt was half open and soaked with sweat; his black chest hairs jutted out. He’s got the face of a crook, thought Lucie, but she didn’t have much choice.
“To meet Napoléon Chimaux, like she did. How much?”
The guide pretended to think about it. Lucie watched him carefully. He was tall, strongly built, and had scars everywhere. His hands were as fat as rock crabs.
“Four thousand reais. That includes the crew, the boat, equipment, and food. I take care of everything. I’ll bring you there.”
He had spoken in French—with a pronounced Latin American accent but perfectly understandable. Lucie didn’t try to bargain. The price corresponded to the amount of cash Eva Louts had withdrawn.
“Fine.”
They shook hands.
“Are you staying at the King Lodge?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The man handed back the photo.
“Tomorrow morning, five o’clock sharp. That way, we’ll get to the end of t
he river before nightfall and sleep there before setting out on foot the next day. Full payment up front. Don’t forget your authorization papers and some cash for the trip downriver.”
“Tell me what happened with Eva Louts. What was she looking for out there?”
“Tomorrow. By the way, my name is Pedro Possuelo.”
He disappeared into the crowd, as discreetly as he’d come. A shadow among shadows . . .
• • •
The trip from São Gabriel was a trek in itself. They took another minibus with mismatched doors and a grinding engine. Lucie couldn’t make out much of the town, even under a full moon, but she could sense its poverty. Half-crumbled concrete walls, tin roofs, dusty sidewalks under hanging lightbulbs. These people didn’t even have a road by which to leave the area; the jungle enclosed and strangled them.
Maxime, whose face was beginning to betray his exhaustion, still kept up his explanations, playing his role to the hilt: after the occupation by the Carmelites and until the beginning of the twentieth century, the waterfalls along the river had turned São Gabriel into a garrison town. The large freighters from Manaus couldn’t advance any farther into the jungle because of the rapids. The Indians came from the other side, in light canoes, to buy and sell commodities, making the spot into a trading post for goods and services. The current population—fewer than twenty thousand—was composed mainly of natives who had left the forest: growers, merchants, and artisans who maintained ties with their birth regions. São Gabriel wasn’t just a town in the forest, housing the headquarters of NGOs such as FUNAI and IBAMA or the National Health Foundation. It was also a town of the forest.
The travelers arrived at the King Lodge, a small hotel at the edge of the jungle, managed by whites. Bright colors, giant fans, palm trees in the lobby. Maxime gathered his troops and retrieved the FUNAI authorizations from one of his colleagues, who had arrived earlier. He handed out the documents to each traveler and explained the next day’s program: departure at ten o’clock in a motorboat to reach a campsite sixty miles upriver, night in a hammock in the middle of the jungle with a dinner of typical local fare.
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