Bred to Kill

by Franck Thilliez

  “I’ll give you ten seconds to call Brazil and cancel the contract on Lucie Henebelle.”

  Georges Noland shook his head.

  “I don’t know what you’re . . .”

  Sharko yanked him onto his side and stuck the barrel into his mouth, practically down his throat.

  “Five, four, three . . .”

  Noland gagged and started nodding rapidly. He spat several times. The cop shoved him violently toward the phone, his entire body tense and trembling. Noland dialed the number; they waited . . . Then words in Portuguese. Sharko didn’t understand the language, but he could make out that they were talking numbers, money. Finally, Noland hung up and let himself fall heavily into a desk chair on wheels.

  “They went down the river at dawn. Alvaro Andrades, the officer who guards the river, will let them pass freely when they head back.”

  Sharko felt a surge of relief. Lucie was still alive, somewhere. He walked up to Noland and grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat, before propelling him and his chair into a corner.

  “I’m going to kill you. I swear I’ll do it. But first, tell me about the retrovirus that looks like a man-of-war, the genetic profiles, about those mothers who die in childbirth. Tell me about your relations with Chimaux and Terney. I want all of it. Now.”

  • • •

  Napoléon Chimaux nodded toward the expectant mother, whom other women, young and old, came to caress on the brow, in a long procession. At his side, Lucie was wavering, her head lolling forward, then backward. His words echoed, deep and deformed:

  “All magic, all mystery, the entire secret of the Ururu is there before you. The most fantastic model of evolution that an anthropologist could ever hope to encounter. Look how serene that pregnant woman is. And yet, she knows she is about to die. In such moments, they are all in perfect communion. Do you see any special violence in this population?”

  Thick veins bulged on his neck.

  “The Ururu know exactly what sex the child will be. The mother eats more if it’s a boy, her belly becomes enormous, and she grows very fatigued in the final months of pregnancy. The male fetus sucks up all her energy. He wants to come into the world, to survive at any cost. The placenta becomes hypervascular to bring him more oxygen and nourishment. The child will be big, strong, and perfectly healthy . . .”

  Chant succeeded chant, the rhythm of pounding feet accelerated, faces spun around her. Lucie let the perspiration drip into her burning eyes. Apart from hazy silhouettes, she couldn’t make anything out. She remembered vaguely . . . the boat, the jungle . . . She saw herself lying on leaves, Chimaux’s face up close to hers. She heard herself talking, weeping, telling him things . . . What had he done to her? When had this happened?

  Suddenly, a man burst from the crowd armed with a sharpened stone, its cutting edge fine as a scalpel. He knelt before the pregnant woman.

  • • •

  In silence, Noland mopped the blood dripping down his temples. Then his thin, evil lips suddenly curled.

  “Science has always demanded sacrifices. But you couldn’t possibly understand such a concept.”

  “I’ve already run across lunatics like you, the ‘enlightened’ ones who think the rules don’t apply to them. Don’t you worry about what I do or don’t understand. I want the whole truth.”

  The geneticist’s dark eyes stared directly into the cop’s, who read only disdain in them.

  “I’ll give you your truth. I’ll shove it right in your face. But how certain are you that you want to hear it?”

  “I’m ready to hear anything you have to say. Start at the beginning. The sixties . . .”

  A silence. Two pairs of eyes ready to devour each other. Noland finally capitulated.

  “Right after he came across the Ururu, Chimaux approached my laboratory about analyzing some blood samples from the tribe. At first it was just to gauge the state of their health. There wasn’t any malevolent intent; it was routine whenever a new population was discovered. This was 1965, around the time when he’d just written his book and was doing his lecture tour. I alone had the privilege of working with him, because he valued my work on genetics and shared my ideas.”

  “What sort of ideas?”

  “That we must oppose increases in life expectancy. The rise in the elderly population goes completely against nature’s wishes. The ‘gerontocracy’ is only . . . creating problems, triggering new diseases, and polluting our planet. Old age, delayed procreation, all those medicines that prolong our existence are violations of natural selection . . . We are a virus on this planet. We reproduce and forget to die.”

  “Look who’s talking—you’re not exactly a teenager yourself. Neither were Chimaux and Terney. The pot’s calling the kettle black, don’t you think?”

  “The difference is, we know it. A virus can’t eliminate itself. We’re trying to find the antidote.”

  He spoke with disgust, emphasizing every word.

  “When Chimaux realized old age didn’t exist in Ururu males, just as in prehistoric times, that their society kept itself in check through deaths and fatal childbirths, he asked my scientific opinion. Did the Ururu perform their rituals because of culture, a collective memory perpetuated down through the generations, or did they perform them because genetics gave them no choice? We got to know each other, respect each other. He took me where no one else had ever been, so that I might see his great white Indians with my own eyes.”

  • • •

  Sitting cross-legged, Napoléon Chimaux calmly rested his hands on his knees. The flames were reflected in his dilated pupils. Lucie was barely able to listen to him. Rapid, devastating thoughts flew from her mind, to the rhythm of the tall flames flickering in front of her: she saw scoops of ice cream fallen onto the seawall . . . a car speeding down the highway . . . a charred body on an autopsy table . . . Lucie jerked her face away, as if slapped. She was rambling, trying to focus on Chimaux’s voice among the moans and screams inside her skull. She wanted so badly to understand.

  “This man you see opposite you is the father, and he is going to remove the infant before killing the mother.”

  The young native, made-up from head to foot, had knelt next to his wife. He spoke to her in a soft voice, stroking her cheek. And Chimaux’s voice, constant, heady, at once so distant and so near.

  “The husband has reproduced. His genes have now ensured their future, because the baby will be born big and strong and will make a good hunter. The man is barely eighteen years old. Soon he will find other partners, women from the tribe. He will spread his seed again . . . Then, in a few years, at another ceremony, he will take his own life. The old women will have handed down to him the art of killing oneself properly, without needless suffering, and in accordance with their traditions. Imagine my stupefaction when I discovered the workings of the Ururu, so many years ago. They eliminated the women when they gave birth to males but let them live when they had girls. They killed men in their twenties, who had done everything nature expected of them: fight when necessary and ensure their own posterity and the continued existence of the tribe. Why did such a peculiar, such a cruel culture exist in just this one tribe? What was the role of natural selection in all this? What role had evolution played?”

  He drank a dark liquid that made him grimace, then spat to the side.

  “I suppose you’ve read my book? There was no need, it’s all bullshit. The violence of the Ururu is a myth, because it never gets the chance to declare itself: the adult males sacrifice themselves at the first sign of loss of balance or inverted vision. I invented the legendary violence of this population and did my best to spread the word. The tribe had to terrify people as much as it fascinated them, do you understand? People had to be afraid to come here, to confront these huge, powerful hunters. All over the world, people took me for a lunatic, a murderer, a bloodthirsty degenerate, but that image only served my pu
rpose. It was necessary for people to fear us. This population is mine, and I’ll never abandon it.”

  • • •

  “Nature and nurture . . . culture versus genes . . . such huge debates. Has DNA forced the Ururu to adopt that culture, or has the culture of the Ururu modified their DNA? Chimaux was a great believer in the second answer, obviously. He had his own, purely Darwinist, theories about how the tribe worked: the Ururu are left-handed the better to fight their enemies, and this trait had been imprinted in their genes because it offers a huge evolutionary advantage. The males are born at the expense of their mothers, because they’re stronger and sooner or later will conquer other women, whom they’ll inseminate in turn. Girls don’t kill their mothers in childbirth—they don’t do the fighting, and this way the mother can reproduce again and perhaps have a son. The Ururu males die young because they reproduce young, like Cro-Magnon, and nature no longer needs them. The women die later because they have to take care of the offspring . . . For Chimaux, Ururu culture really modified their genes and had created this magnificent evolutionary model. But I was convinced it was all primarily genetic, that their genes had determined a culture based on human sacrifice. The Ururu never had a choice: they had to kill the women who gave birth to boys or else watch them bleed to death in horrible agony. And the incomprehensible violence that affected the males when they reached adulthood, which triggered their own deaths, was purely genetic, buried deep within their cell structure, and not influenced by environment or culture. All those rituals were just so much window dressing and superstition.”

  “So you and Chimaux decided to test out your competing theories by inseminating women here in this country.”

  Noland’s jaws tightened.

  “Chimaux had an outsized ego. He always thought he was right, but he was pathetically indecisive. The whole thing was my idea. I was the one who made the hard choices. It’s my name people should remember, not his.”

  “Oh, people will remember it, all right.”

  The scientist pressed his lips together.

  “The only thing Chimaux had to do was gain control of the Ururu. That’s where the measles came in—my idea. I was the one who filmed those wasted bodies, not him. I was the one who did the dirty work so that he could take over the tribe.”

  Small bubbles of spittle had formed on his lips. Sharko knew he was facing one of the most perverse expressions of human folly: men who wasted their superior intelligence solely to do evil. The fabled figure of the mad scientist was right there before him.

  “Then . . . Well, yes, I inseminated women without their knowledge. Cryogenics has existed since the 1930s; the frozen Ururu sperm traveled thousands of miles to get here. Good French couples came to see me because they couldn’t conceive. Some of the women wanted to be inseminated with their husbands’ seed. It was so easy for me to substitute the sperm of an Ururu. It was undetectable—the Indians were white-skinned and their features were Caucasian; the babies would all be born as Europeans. Only the lactose intolerance could give it away. And of course, the fact that the child didn’t look like the father. But even then, the families always found resemblances . . .”

  Sharko’s hand tightened on the grip of his gun. Never had he had such a desire to pull the trigger.

  “You even inseminated your own wife.”

  “Don’t be so quick to judge. For your information, I never loved my wife. You know nothing about me or my life. You have no idea what the words ‘obsession’ or ‘ambition’ can mean.”

  “How many innocent women did you inseminate?”

  “I tried to inseminate several dozen, but the failure rate was huge. It didn’t work all that well—the technique was still in its infancy. It’s also possible the sperm samples didn’t hold up well in transit. Ultimately it only worked on three women.”

  “Your wife . . . the grandmother of Grégory Carnot, and one other, is that right?”

  “Yes. Those three women each had a child, but they were all girls.”

  “So one of those girls was Amanda Potier, Grégory Carnot’s mother, and the other was your daughter Jeanne, who produced Coralie and Félix . . .”

  He nodded.

  “Three girls with Ururu genes, who carried the virus, and who in turn gave birth to seven children among them—three boys and four girls.”

  The generation of children whose genetic fingerprints were inscribed in Terney’s book, thought Sharko.

  “As far as I was concerned, that was the generation that told the tale. Félix Lambert, Grégory Carnot, and five others. Seven grandchildren with Ururu genes, born into good families, who were raised with love and who, nonetheless, reproduced the tribal pattern. Their mothers died if they gave birth to sons, or lived if they didn’t. The male children turned violent when they reached maturity. It started just about a year ago. Grégory Carnot was the first to demonstrate what I’d been waiting to see for so long. Carnot, age twenty-four . . . Lambert, age twenty-two . . . It seems the virus takes effect a few years quicker in our society, closer to twenty than to thirty. No doubt the mix with Western genes slightly modified its behavior.”

  He sighed.

  “I was right all along: culture had nothing to do with it. It was purely a matter of genetics. Even more than genetics, because I later learned it was actually a retrovirus with an incredibly effective strategy, that had managed to find the ideal host in that quasi-prehistoric tribe.”

  Despite the tension, his eyes shone continuously. He was the kind of fanatic who would remain so all his life, who would believe to the bitter end, whom no prison could truly hold.

  “What was Terney’s part in all this?” asked Sharko.

  “At the time, I didn’t know the virus existed. I couldn’t understand what was killing the mothers. I thought it had something to do with the immune system, maybe some sort of exchange between the mother and the fetus during pregnancy. Terney was a fanatic, and paranoid to boot, but he was a genius. He knew DNA and the mechanics of procreation backward and forward. He helped me understand it all. He’s the one who discovered the retrovirus. Imagine how I felt the first time I saw it under the microscope . . .”

  Sharko thought of the vile Portuguese man-of-war floating in its liquid. A killer of humans.

  “We decided to call the virus by the same name as the insemination project: Phoenix. I knew Terney would take the bait, that he couldn’t refuse the chance to treat a mother who was carrying in her body a pure product of evolution. I had kept track of Amanda Potier; I knew she was pregnant. She was the living embodiment of Terney’s entire quest, all his research . . . Grégory Arthur TAnael CArnot was in a way his child . . . With his reputation and contacts, it was easy for him to obtain blood samples of the seven children after their births, so that he could give me a better understanding of Phoenix.”

  “Tell me about Phoenix. How does that filth work?”

  • • •

  The Ururu male blew a powder into his wife’s face, making her eyes immediately bulge out and turn glassy. Then he made her bite into a stick. Chimaux watched the macabre spectacle in fascination.

  “The newborn will immediately be handed over to another woman of the village, who will then raise him. And so life is perpetuated among the Ururu. It’s cruel, but this tribe has come down through the millennia with these rites. If it still exists, it’s because, somehow, a natural evolutionary balance has been established. The Ururu tribe has not experienced the same decadence as the rotting societies of the West. It has not felt this absurd need to reproduce later and later, to prolong its life span for no real purpose, to live in the familial model we know all too well. Just look at the damage this has caused in your world: illness upon illness past the age of forty. Do you think Alzheimer’s is a new disease? What if I told you it has always existed, but that it never declared itself because people died too young? It sat quietly in our cells, awaiting its moment. Today,
everyone can know his genome, his predisposition to diseases like cancer. Vile probabilities guide our future. We’re becoming insane hypochondriacs. Evolution no longer has a say in any of it.”

  “Why Louts . . .” murmured Lucie in a flash of consciousness.

  “Louts came here with a remarkable theory, which might have been my own about twenty years ago: the combative culture of a population ‘imprints’ the trait of left-handedness on their DNA, thus forcing the descendants to be left-handed as well, so that they too will be better fighters. A collective memory that modifies DNA. She shared my concept of evolution. She was just like me.”

  He lowered the waist of his fatigues to show a large wound on his groin.

  “I nearly died five years ago. Noland wanted to take this way too far. When he and Terney identified the virus and figured out how it worked, he started talking about this large-scale project. If you’d known him, you’d know what words like that can mean in his mouth. I wouldn’t go along with it, because this time it wasn’t just about a few dead, but about injecting a living virus into the genetic heritage of the entire human race. A kind of AIDS to the tenth power, that would clean everything out. So he tried to kill me. Since then, I haven’t left the jungle.”

  He readjusted his clothes and took another sip. Lucie struggled to memorize his words. A virus . . . Noland . . . She had to fight it, but the fog enveloped her, devoured her thoughts, erased her memories.

  “When Louts came to see me, I had an idea. I wanted to know if the first symptoms of the virus had struck any young adult males. If some of them had become ultraviolent, and if Terney and Noland’s theories had panned out. So I used her; I asked her to go visit the prisons, to find young, violent left-handed offenders who had complained of balance problems. All she had to do was bring me back a list of names and their photos; I knew I’d be able to recognize the Ururu grandchildren, and if so, that Noland had been right. When she didn’t come back, I knew she’d succeeded too well. Her perseverance had cost her her life. Noland had killed her.”