Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  But he had not cut all ties with his origins. He regularly went back to Nanterre to hear the news. One disaster after another. Victor had been found on the roof of an eighteen-storey building, as crumpled as a witchdoctor's doll, a syringe sticking into his scrotum. OD. Hassan, a massive blond Berber drummer had blown his brains out with a shotgun. The "brother" bank robbers were doing time in Fleury-Mérogis. And Marcel had become a hopeless junkie.

  Karim watched his friends drowning and, with horror, saw the final tidal wave break. AIDS was now hastening the process of destruction. The hospitals, once full of worn-out workmen and bedridden oldsters, were now filling up with dying kids with black gums, mottled skin and withered bodies. He saw most of his friends go that way. He saw the disease gain in power and size, then ally itself with Hepatitis C and mow down the ranks of his generation. Karim retreated, with fear in his guts.

  His town was dying.

  In June 1992, he got his badge. And was congratulated by the panel – a load of fat bastards with signet rings who filled him full of pity and loathing. But it did call for a celebration. He bought some champagne and headed for Les Fontanelles, Marcel's estate. Still today, he could remember every detail of that late afternoon. He rang the door-bell. Nobody. He asked the kids downstairs, then wandered through the halls of the building, the football fields, the waste tips heaped with old papers…Nobody. He kept on looking until evening. In vain. At ten o'clock, Karim went to Nanterre Hospital's AIDS unit – Marcel had been HIV positive for the last two years. He walked through the fumes of ether, past the faces of the sick, and questioned the doctors. He saw death at work. He contemplated the terrible progress of the epidemic.

  But he did not find Marcel.

  Five days later, he heard that the body of his friend had been found in a cellar, his hands fried, his face sliced into ribbons, his nails bored by an electric drill. Marcel had been tortured almost to death, then finished off with a shotgun blast to his throat. The news did not surprise Karim. His friend had been doing too much and watering down the doses he sold. It had only been a question of time. By coincidence, that very day, he received his bright new tricolor inspector's card. That coincidence was, for him, a sign. He retreated into the shadows, thought of Marcel's killers, and grinned. The little fuckers would never have imagined that one of Marcel's pals was a cop. Nor would they have imagined that this cop would make no bones about killing them, both for old times' sake, and from a personal conviction that life just should not be that fucking awful.

  Karim started investigating.

  Within a few days, he had got the killers' names. They had been seen with Marcel just before the presumed time of the murder. Thierry Kalder, Eric Masuro and Antonio Donato. He felt disappointed. They were three small-time junkies who probably wanted to get Marcel to reveal where he stashed his gear. Karim collected more detailed information: neither Kalder nor Masuro could have tortured Marcel. Not warped enough. Donato was the guilty party. Extorting money with menaces from little kids. Pimping for under-age girls on building sites. Junked out of his mind.

  Karim decided that his death alone would assuage his vengeance.

  But he had to work quickly. The Nanterre cops who had given him this information were also after the fuckers. Karim plunged into the streets. He was from Nanterre, he knew the estates, he spoke the kids' language. It took him just one day to find the three junkies. They were holed up in a ruined building, close to one of the auto route bridges by Nanterre University. A place waiting to be demolished while vibrating from the din of cars shooting past, a few yards from the windows.

  He arrived at the wrecked building at noon, ignoring the noise of the traffic and the hot June sun. Children were playing in the dust. They stared at the big guy, with his rasta looks, as he entered the ruins. Karim crossed the hall, full of ripped-open letter boxes, leapt up the stairs four at a time and, through the growling of the cars, distinctly made out the give-away sound of rap. He smilingly recognised A Tribe Called Quest, an album he had been listening to for the last few months. He kicked open the door and said simply: "Police." A wave of adrenaline burst into his veins. It was the first time he had played at being the fearless cop.

  The three men were frozen with astonishment. The flat was full of rubble, the walls had been torn down, pipes stuck out everywhere, a TV sat on a gutted mattress. A brand-new Sony, obviously stolen the previous night. On the screen, the pale flesh of a porno film. The hi-fi rumbled away in a corner, shaking down dust from the plaster.

  Karim felt as if his body had doubled in size and was floating in space. Out of the corner of his eye he saw car radios carelessly heaped up at the far end of the room. He saw torn-open packets of powder on an upturned cardboard box. He saw a pump-action shotgun amid some boxes of cartridges. He immediately picked out Donato, thanks to the photofit portrait he had in his pocket. A pale face with light-blue eyes, protruding bones and scars. Then the other two, hunched up in their efforts to extract themselves from their chemical dreams. Karim still had not drawn his gun.

  "Kalder, Masuro, scram!"

  The two of them jumped at hearing their names. They dithered, glanced at each other with dilated pupils, then headed for the door. Which left Donato, who was shaking like an insect's wing. He made a rush for the gun. Just as he was about to grab it, Karim crushed his hand and kicked him in the face – he was wearing steel-tipped shoes – without taking his other foot off the trapped hand. The joints in the arm cracked. Donato screamed hoarsely. The cop seized the man and dragged him over to the ancient mattress. The heavy rhythm of A Tribe Called Quest pounded on.

  Karim took out his automatic, which he wore in a velcro holster on his left side, and wrapped up his carrying hand in a transparent plastic bag – made of a special uninflammable polymer – which he had brought with him. He tightened his hold on the diamond patterned grip. The man looked up at him. "What…what the fucking hell are you doing?"

  Karim loaded a bullet into the cylinder and smiled.

  "Cartridge cases, buddy. Ain't you ever seen that on the TV?

  Never leave cartridge cases lying round…"

  "What you after? You a cop? You sure you're a cop?"

  Karim nodded to each question, then said: "I'm here for Marcel."

  "Who?"

  The cop saw the incomprehension in the man's eyes. And he realised that this wop couldn't even remember the person he had tortured to death. He realised that, in this junkie's memory, Marcel did not exist, had never existed.

  "Tell him you're sorry."

  "Wh…What?"

  The sunlight spilled in over Donato's gleaming face. Karim lifted his gun in its plastic envelope.

  "Ask Marcel to forgive you!" he panted.

  The man understood that he was going to die and roared: "Sorry! Sorry, Marcel! Fucking Jesus! I'm really really sorry, Marcel! I…"

  Karim shot him twice in the face.

  He got the bullets back out of the burnt fibers of the mattress, stuffed the burning-hot cases into his pocket then left without looking back. He figured that the other two would soon be back with reinforcements. In the entrance hall, he waited for a few minutes then saw Kalder and Masuro sprinting his way, accompanied by three other zombies. They rushed into the building through the wobbling doors. Before they had had time to react, Karim was in front of them and flattening Kalder against the letter boxes.

  He brandished his gun and yelled:

  "One word and you're dead. Come looking for me, and you're dead. Top me, you go down for life. I'm a fucking cop, you dick-heads. A cop, get it?"

  He threw the man down onto the ground and went out into the sunlight, crushing shards of glass under his feet.

  So did Karim bid farewell to Nanterre, the town that had taught him everything.

  A few weeks later, he phoned the police station on Place de la Boule to ask about their enquiries. He was told what he already knew. Donato had been killed, apparently by two 9mm caliber bullets from an automatic, but they had found neit
her the bullets nor their cases. As for his two accomplices, they had vanished. As far as the cops were concerned, the case was closed. As far as Karim was concerned, too.

  The Arab asked to join the BRI, Quai des Orfèvres, a unit specialising in tailing, on-the-spot arrests and "jumping" known criminals. But his results played against him. They suggested the Sixth Division – the anti-terrorist brigade – so that he could infiltrate the Islamic fundamentalists in suburban hot spots. Immigrant cops were too rare a commodity to miss out on this chance. He refused. No way was he going to act as a grass, even if it did come to fanatical assassins. Karim wanted to roam through the kingdom of the night, go after killers and face them on their own turf, wander off into that parallel world which was also his own. His refusal was not well received. A few months later, Karim Abdouf, top of his class in the Cannes-Ecluse police academy, and unsuspected killer of a psychopathic junkie, was transferred to Sarzac, in the département of the Lot.

  The Lot. A region where the trains did not stop any more. A region where ghost villages sprang up around roads, like stone flowers. A land of caves, where even tourism attracted only troglodytes: gorges, pits, cave paintings…This region was an insult to Karim's personality. He was a second-generation Arab, off the streets, nothing could be stranger to him than this two-bit provincial town.

  A dreary daily routine began. Karim had to go through days of tedium, punctuated by menial tasks: writing reports of car accidents, arresting an illicit vendor in a shopping center, nicking gatecrashers in tourist venues…

  So the young Arab started living in his daydreams. He got hold of biographies of great policemen. Whenever he could, he went to the libraries at Figeac or Cahors to pick out newspaper articles dealing with police enquiries, crimes and misdemeanors, anything and everything which reminded him of his true vocation. He also bought old bestsellers, the memoirs of gangsters…He subscribed to the police force's professional press, to magazines specialising in guns, ballistics, new technologies. A sea of paper, into which Karim was slowly sinking.

  He lived alone, slept alone, worked alone. At the police station, which must have been one of the smallest in France, he was simultaneously feared and hated. His fellow cops called him "Cleopatra" because of his locks. Since he did not drink, they thought he was a fundamentalist. And, because he always declined the obligatory stopover chez Sylvie during their nightly rounds, they imagined he was gay.

  Immured in his solitude, Karim ticked off the days, the hours, the seconds. He sometimes spent an entire weekend without saying a word.

  That Monday morning, he re-emerged from one of his spates of silence, spent almost entirely in his bed-sitter, apart from a training session in the forest, where he relentlessly practised the murderous gestures of té, before emptying a few magazines into some century-old trees.

  His door-bell rang. Instinctively, Karim looked at his watch. 07.45. He opened the latch.

  It was Sélier, one of the late-duty officers. He looked wretched. A mixture of worry and fatigue. Karim did not offer him any tea. Nor even a seat. He just said:

  "Well?"

  The man opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Under his cap, his hair was gluey with greasy sweat. At last, he stammered: "It's…it's the school. The primary school."

  "What is?"

  "Jean-Jaurès School. It was broken into…during the night."

  Karim smiled. The week was getting off to a fine flying start. Some loafers from a nearby estate must have decided to smash up a school, just for the fun of it.

  "Much damage?" Karim asked, while getting dressed.

  The uniformed officer grimaced as he saw the clothes Karim was putting on. A sweatshirt, jeans, hooded tracksuit top, then a light-brown leather jacket – a garbage collector's model from the 1950s. He stammered:

  "No. That's just it. It was a professional job…"

  Karim was doing up his boots.

  "A professional job? What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It wasn't kids mucking about…They got into the place with skeleton keys. Took loads of precautions. It was just the headmistress who noticed something weird. Otherwise…"

  The Arab got to his feet.

  "What did they steal?"

  Sélier panted and slipped his index finger under his collar. "That's what's even weirder. They didn't steal anything."

  "Really?"

  "Really. They just got into a room, then…pfft!…Seem to have left just like that."

  Karim took a brief look at his reflection in the window panes. His locks tumbled down obliquely on either side of his temples, his narrow face was sharpened by his goatee. He adjusted his woolly hat of Jamaican colors and smiled at his image. A devil. A devil sprung out of the Caribbean. He turned toward Sélier:

  "So why did you come running after me?"

  "Crozier isn't back from his weekend yet. So Dussard and me…We reckoned that you…That you ought to come and see…Karim, I…"

  "All right, all right. Let's go."

  CHAPTER 8

  The sun was rising over Sarzac. An October sun, lukewarm and pallid, like a bad convalescence. In his old five-door Peugeot, Karim followed the police van. They crossed the dead town which, at that hour, still had a ghostly gleam about it, like will-o'-the-wisps.

  Sarzac was neither an ancient village nor a modern town. It was spread out over a long plain, with its middle-aged houses and blocks of flats lacking any distinguishing signs. Only the town center had a slight difference: a little tramline ran from one end to the other, alongside the streets of cobblestones. Each time he went by, Karim thought of Switzerland or of Italy, without knowing why. He had not been to either of these countries.

  Jean-Jaurès School lay due east, in the poor part of town, near the industrial area. Karim reached a set of incredibly ugly blue and brown buildings, which reminded him of the estates of his childhood. The school stood at the end of a concrete ramp, above a cracked asphalt road.

  A woman, wrapped up in a cardigan, was waiting for them on the steps. The headmistress. Karim greeted her and introduced himself. She welcomed him with a frank smile, which took him aback. Generally speaking, he provoked a wave of mistrust. Karim mentally thanked this woman for her spontaneousness and observed her for a few seconds. Her face was as flat as a lake, with big green eyes set in it, like a pair of water lilies.

  Without another word, the headmistress asked him to follow her. The pseudo-modern building looked as if it had never been finished. Or else, as if it was constantly being revamped. The corridors and the extremely low ceiling were made of polystyrene tiles, many of which were out of place. Most of them were covered with children's drawings, pinned there, or else painted directly onto the walls. Little coat pegs were ranged at kids' height. Everything was off kilter. Karim felt as though he was walking in a shoebox that had been crushed under someone's feet.

  The headmistress stopped in front of a half-open door. She whispered, in a voice full of mystery:

  "This is the only room they visited."

  Gingerly, she pushed open the door. They entered an office which had the feel of a waiting-room. Glass-panelled shelving contained numerous registers and school books. A coffee-maker stood on a small fridge. A desk of imitation oak was swamped with green plants standing in saucers full of water. The whole room smelt of moist earth.

  "You see," the woman said, pointing at one of the glass panels. "They opened this cupboard. It contains our archives. But it doesn't look as if they stole anything. Or even touched anything."

  Karim knelt down and examined the lock on the panel. Ten years of break-ins and car thefts had given him a solid education in burglary. No doubt about it, the intruder who had dealt with this lock knew a trick or two. Karim was astonished: why should a cracksman bother to burgle a primary school in Sarzac? He picked out one of the registers and flicked through it. Lists of names, teachers' comments, administrative notes…One volume for each year. The lieutenant stood up again.

  "And nobody heard anything?"r />
  The woman answered:

  "You know, the school isn't heavily guarded. There is a caretaker, but…"

  Karim stared hard at that glass-panelled cupboard, which had been ever so gently forced open.

  "Do you think the break-in occurred on the night of Saturday, or of Sunday?"

  "Either. Or even during the day. As I just said, during the weekend our little school is hardly Fort Knox. There's nothing worth stealing."

  "OK," he concluded. "You'll now have to go down to the police station and make a statement."

  "You're undercover, aren't you?"

  "Sorry?"

  The headmistress was eyeing up Karim attentively. She had another go:

  "I mean, the way you're dressed, your appearance. You infiltrate gangs on the estate, and…"

  Karim burst out laughing.

  "We don't have much in the way of gangs round here."

  The headmistress ignored this remark and proceeded, in a knowing voice:

  "I know all about it. I saw a documentary on TV. Characters like you wear double-sided jackets marked with police badges and…"

  "Really, Madame," Karim butted in. "You're overestimating your little town."

  He turned on his heels and headed off toward the door. "You're not going to look for clues? Take fingerprints?" Karim replied:

  "Given the seriousness of the crime, I think we'll just make do with your statement and ask one or two questions round the neighborhood."

  The woman looked disappointed. She stared attentively at Karim once again:

  "You're not from these parts, are you?"

  "No."

  "So why did they send you here?"

  "It's a long story. One of these days, I might drop by and tell you it."

  Outside, Karim rejoined the uniformed officers, who were smoking, holding their cigarettes in their closed fists and wearing the hunted expressions of schoolboys. Sélier leapt out of the van. "Lieutenant, Jesus! There's more!"