The Empire Of The Wolves

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  How could he be having such ideas at a time like this? Charlier's men must be searching the neighborhood, escorted by the local police officers, all out to get him. Battalions of armed men set on gunning him down. And that need for drugs that was mounting, along with his thirst, irritating every inch of his body…

  Anna repeated, a few notes lower: "Me.." She took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket.

  Ackermann risked asking, "I couldn't have one, could I?"

  She lit her Marlboro first, hesitated for a moment, then offered him one. At the moment she lit her lighter, darkness fell again. The flame pierced the night, making a negative print of the scene.

  Mathilde turned the headlights back on. "What then, Ackermann? We're still missing the main point. Who is Anna?"

  Her tone was still threatening but void of any anger or hatred. He now knew that these women would not kill him. No one turns into a murderer just like that. His confession was voluntary and also a relief. He waited for the taste of burning tobacco to fill his throat before answering.

  "I don't know everything. Far from it. But according to what I was told, your name is Sema Gokalp. You're an illegal Turkish immigrant. You come from the Gaziantep region, in the south of Anatolia. You used to work in the tenth arrondissement. They took you to the Henri-Becquerel Institute on November 16, 2001, after a short stay in Sainte-Anne Hospital."

  Anna remained impassive, leaning against the pillar. His words seemed to pass through her with no apparent impact, like a bombardment of invisible-but lethal-particles.

  "I was kidnapped?"

  "Found, more like. I don't know what happened exactly. A clash between Turks. The pillaging of a sweatshop around Strasbourg-Saint Denis. Some kind of racket. I'm not sure. All I know is that when the cops arrived, you were the only person left in the workshop. You were hiding in a stockroom…"

  He took a drag. Despite the nicotine, the smell of fear lingered. "Charlier heard about the case. He immediately realized that he had a perfect guinea pig for his Morpho project."

  "What do you mean, 'perfect'?"

  "No I.D. papers, no family, no friends. And, even better, in a state of shock."

  Ackermann glanced at Mathilde knowingly. Then his gaze returned to Anna.

  "I don't know what you saw that night, but it must have been something terrible. You were completely traumatized. Three days later, your limbs were still paralyzed by a cataleptic fit. You jumped at the slightest noise. But the most interesting thing is that the trauma had disturbed your memory. You seemed incapable of remembering your name, your identity, the few scraps of information in your passport. You kept muttering incoherently. This amnesia had prepared the ground for me. I was going to be able to implant new memories even more quickly. You were ideal."

  Anna yelled, "You fucking bastard!"

  He closed his eyes and nodded; then he seemed to pull himself back together, and added cynically: "What's more, you spoke perfect French. It was that fact which gave Charlier the idea."

  "What idea?"

  "To start with, all we wanted to do was to inject artificial fragments into the head of a foreigner, with a different culture. We wanted to see what would happen if we tried, for example, to alter the religious convictions of a Muslim. Or give her a reason for resentment. But you offered other possibilities. You spoke our language perfectly. Physically, you could easily pass for a European. So Charlier placed the bar even higher. Total conditioning. We would totally wipe out your personality and culture and replace them with Western ones."

  He paused. The two women remained silent, a tacit invitation to continue.

  "First, I increased your amnesia by injecting an overdose of Valium.

  Then I started working on conditioning you. Constructing a new personality. Using Oxygen-15."

  Intrigued, Mathilde asked, "How did you proceed?"

  Another drag, then he answered, incapable of taking his eyes off Anna. "Mainly by exposure to information. In every form. Words. Films. Sounds. Before each session, I injected a radioactive substance into you. The results were incredible. Each piece of information turned into a real memory in your brain. Every day, you were becoming more and more like the real Anna Heymes."

  The slender woman stood up from the pillar. "You mean she really exists?"

  The smell in the garage was stronger and stronger, as though of rotten flesh. He was starting to decay as he sat there, while the craving for amphetamine raised a slope of panic in his mind.

  "We had to fill your mind with a coherent set of memories. The best way was to choose a real person and use her life story, photos and video films. That's why we chose Anna Heymes. We had all the necessary material."

  "Who is she? Where is the real Anna Heymes?"

  He pushed his glasses up his nose, before saying, "Several feet underground. She's dead. Heymes's wife committed suicide six months ago. So the place was vacant, so to speak. All your memories are part of her story. The dead parents. The family in the southwest. The wedding in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The law degree."

  At that moment, the light went out. Mathilde lit it again. The return of her voice coincided with the return of clarity. "And you would have let such a woman loose again in the Turkish community?"

  "No, that would have been senseless. This was a trial run. An attempt at… total conditioning. To see how far we could go."

  "In the end," Anna asked, "what would you have done to me?”

  “No idea. That was out of my hands."

  Another lie. Of course he knew what was awaiting her. What was to be done with such an embarrassing guinea pig? Lobotomy or elimination, that's what. When Anna next spoke, she seemed to have understood that dark reality. Her voice was as cold as a blade.

  "Who is Laurent Heymes?"

  "Exactly who he claims to be. The research director of the Minister of the Interior."

  "Why did he participate in this farce?"

  "It's all because of his wife. She was depressive, uncontrollable. Toward the end, Laurent got a job for her. A special mission for the Ministry of Defense concerning Syria. Anna stole some documents. She wanted to sell them to the authorities in Damascus before running away somewhere or other. She was nuts. The affair leaked out. Anna panicked and committed suicide."

  Mathilde did not understand. "And this was a way of putting pressure on Laurent Heymes, even after her death?"

  "He was always afraid of a scandal. His career would have been in ruins-a top civil servant married to a spy… Charlier has a complete dossier on the subject. He has a hold over Laurent, like he does over everyone else."

  "Everyone else?"

  "Alain Lacroux. Pierre Caracilli. Jean-François Gaudemer." He turned toward Anna. "All those supposedly high-ranking officials you had dinner with."

  "Who are they?"

  "Puppets, crooks, crooked cops who Charlier has information on and who were forced to attend the carnival."

  "Why those dinners?"

  "That was my idea. I wanted to confront your mind with the outside world and observe your reactions. Everything was filmed. The conversations were recorded. You must understand that your entire existence was fake: the building on Avenue Hoche, the janitor, the neighbors… Everything was under our control."

  "A laboratory rat."

  Ackermann stood up and tried to take a few steps, but he immediately found himself stuck between the car door and the wall. He slumped back down onto his seat. "This program was a scientific revolution," he replied hoarsely. "Moral considerations were irrelevant."

  Anna offered him another cigarette over the car door. She seemed ready to forgive him, so long as he told her all.

  "What about the Maison du Chocolat?"

  When he lit the Marlboro, he noticed that he was shaking. A shock wave was on its way. The craving was soon going to start screaming beneath his skin.

  "That was one of our problems," he said through a cloud of smoke. "Your job took us by surprise. We had to tighten our surveillance. Cops were const
antly watching you. The doorman of a restaurant, I think-"

  "La Marée."

  "Yes, that's it."

  "When I was working in the Maison du Chocolat, there was a regular customer. A man I had the impression I recognized. Was he a policeman?"

  "Maybe. I don't know all the details. All I do know is that you were escaping from us."

  Again, night fell and Mathilde woke up in the strip lights.

  "The real problem was your fits," he went on. "I immediately sensed that there was a fault line, and that things were going to go from bad to worse. Your trouble with faces was just a precursor. Your real memory was beginning to resurface."

  "Why faces?"

  "No idea. This was pure experimentation."

  His hands were trembling more and more. He concentrated on what he had to say. "When Laurent caught you observing him at night, we realized that the problem was worsening. We had to section you."

  "Why did you want to conduct a biopsy?"

  "To be sure what was going on. Maybe the huge jab of Oxygen-15 had caused a lesion. I just had to understand!"

  He broke off, sorry that he had shouted. It felt as if short circuits were sizzling in his skin. He threw away his cigarette and stuck his hands between his thighs. How long could he hold out?

  Mathilde Wilcrau then asked the crucial question: "Where are Charlier's men looking? How many of them are there?"

  "I don't know. I've been sidelined. Laurent, too. I'm not even in touch with him anymore… As for Charlier, the program's over. The vital thing for them now is to catch you and put you out of circulation. You read the papers. You know what they're saying in the media and how outraged public opinion is about a little bit of phone tapping. Imagine what would happen if this story got out."

  "So there's a price on my head, is there?" Anna asked.

  "More like a desperate need for treatment. You don't know what you've got in your mind. You must give yourself up to Charlier. To us. It's your only chance to recover, and save all of our skins!"

  He looked up over the curve of his glasses. The two of them now looked out of focus, and it was better that way. He added, "Jesus, you don't know Charlier! I'm sure all of this was perfectly illegal. So now he'll be sweeping up. Right now, I don't even know if Laurent is still alive. It's a total fiasco. Unless we can treat you again.." His voice was dying in his throat. What was the point of going on? Even he no longer believed in the possibility.

  Mathilde then said, in her deep voice, 'All of which does not explain why you altered her face."

  Ackermann felt a smile rise to his lips. He had been expecting this question right from the start. He stared straight into Anna's eyes. "You were like that when we found you. When I did the first scan, I discovered the scars, implants and screws. It was incredible. A complete surgical overhaul. It must have cost a fortune. Not the sort of operation an illegal immigrant worker could pay for."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean you're not a simple worker. Charlier and the others got it wrong. They thought they were kidnapping some faceless Turk. But you're much more than that. Crazy as it might seem, I reckon you were hiding out in the Turkish quarter when they discovered you."

  Anna burst into tears.

  "In a way," he went on bitterly to the end, "this fact explains the success of the treatment. I'm no magician. I could never have transformed a simple working girl from Anatolia to this extent. And definitely not in a few weeks. Only Charlier could swallow such nonsense."

  Mathilde returned to the point. "What did he say when you told him that her face had been altered?"

  "Nothing, because I didn't tell him. I kept this crazy secret to myself."

  He looked at Anna. "Even last Saturday, when you came to Becquerel, I switched the X-rays. The marks appear on all of the images."

  Anna dried her tears. "Why did you do that?"

  "I wanted to finish the experiment. It was such a golden opportunity… Your psychic state was ideal. All that mattered was the research…"

  Anna and Mathilde remained speechless.

  When the little Cleopatra spoke again, her voice was as dry as a leaf of incense. "If I'm not Anna Heymes and I'm not Sema Gokalp, then who am I?"

  "I don't have the slightest idea. An intellectual, maybe, a political refugee. Or a terrorist… I…"

  The neon lights went out once more. Mathilde stuck out her hand. The darkness seemed to be deepening, like a flood of tar.

  For a moment, he thought to himself, I was wrong. They are going to kill me. But then Anna's voice echoed through the shadows: "There's only one way to find out."

  No one turned the lights back on. Eric Ackermann guessed what she was going to say.

  Just beside him, Anna murmured, "You're going to give me back what you stole. My memory"

  PART VIII

  42

  He had gotten rid of the kid, which alone was something.

  After the chase at the station and the revelations, Jean-Louis Schiffer had taken Paul Nerteaux to a bar called La Strasbourgeoise, just in front of Gare de l'Est. He had then analyzed once more what was really at stake in this investigation, how it was now a "woman hunt." For the moment, that was all that mattered. Forget the other victims and the killers. They just had to unmask the Grey Wolves' target, the girl they had been looking for in the Turkish quarter for the past five months and had so far failed to find.

  Finally, after an hour's heated conversation, Paul Nerteaux had admitted defeat and decided to do a U-turn. His intelligence and ability to adapt never ceased to amaze Schiffer. The kid had then defined their new strategy himself.

  First point: have an Identikit portrait of the target done, based on photographs of the three corpses, then distribute it in the Turkish quarter.

  Second point: reinforce their patrols, increase the identity controls and searches throughout Little Turkey. Such a tactic might seem derisory, but Nerteaux reckoned that they stood a chance of finding her by sheer good fortune. Things like that happened: after twenty-five years on the run, Toto Riina, the godfather of Cosa Nostra, had been arrested in central Palermo during a routine inspection of ID cards.

  Third point: go back to see Marius, the head of the Iskele, and study his files to see if other working girls matched the description. Schiffer liked this idea, but he could hardly return there in person after what he had done to that slave driver.

  So he kept the fourth point for himself: go and see Talat Gurdilek, for whom the first victim had worked. They had to finish questioning the murdered women's employers, and he was up for the job.

  The fifth and final point was the only one aimed at the killers themselves: launch an investigation in Immigration and Visas to see if any Turkish residents known for their links with the extreme right wing or the mafia had arrived in France since November 2001. This meant sifting through all of the arrivals from Anatolia over the past five months, comparing them with Interpol records and also applying to the Turkish police.

  Schiffer did not see the point of such an approach. He knew too well the close relationship that existed between his Turkish colleagues and the Grey Wolves, but he had let the enthusiastic youngster rattle on.

  In reality, he did not see the point in a single one of these methods. But he had been patient, because another idea had occurred to him…

  While they were on their way to Ile de la Cité, where Nerteaux intended to explain his new plan to Bomarzo, the investigating magistrate, he decided to risk it all. He explained that the best way to advance now would be for them to split up. While Paul was distributing copies of the Identikit portrait and briefing the men in the commissariats of the tenth arrondissement, he would drop round to see Gurdilek..

  The young captain had kept his answer to himself until he had seen the magistrate. He had kept him waiting in a bar over the road from the Palais de Justice for two hours, and had even set an orderly to watch over him. Then he reappeared from his appointment as pleased as pie. Bomarzo was giving him free hand to carr
y out his plan. Apparently, this thrilled him so much that he now agreed to all of Schiffer's requests.

  Paul had dropped him off at 6:00 PM on Boulevard de Magenta, near Gare de l'Est, and had arranged to meet up at 8:00 PM at Café Sancak, on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, in order to report.

  Schiffer was now walking along Rue de Paradis. Alone at last! Free at last… to breathe the acidic air of the neighborhood, to feel the magnetic force of "his" turf. The end of the day was like a pale, drowsy fever. On each windowpane, the sun placed its particles of light, a sort of gilded talc, which had the macabre grace of embalmer's makeup.

  He strode along, psyching himself up for his confrontation with Talat Gurdilek, one of the major mafia bosses of the quarter. He had arrived in Paris during the 1960s, seventeen, penniless and unqualified, and now he owned twenty sweatshops and factories in France and Germany, as well as a good dozen dry cleaners and launderettes. He was a godfather who ruled over every level of the Turkish quarter, official or unofficial, legal or illegal. When Gurdilek sneezed, the entire ghetto caught a cold.

  At number 58, Schiffer pushed open a gateway. He entered a dark cul-de-sac, crossed by a central gutter, with noisy workshops and printers' studios on either side. At the end of the alley, there was a rectangular courtyard, with rhomboid paving stones. On the right, a tiny staircase led down into a long ditch, overhung with small, half-deserted gardens.

  He loved this hidden place, which was unknown even to most of the inhabitants of the building. A heart within the heart, a trench that disturbed all of the usual vertical or horizontal reference points. An iron door barred the way. He touched the handle. It was warm.

  He smiled and knocked vigorously.

  After some time, a man opened it, liberating a cloud of steam. Schiffer muttered a few words of explanation in Turkish. The doorman stood to one side to let him in. The cop noticed that he was barefoot. Another smile. Nothing had changed. He dived into the suffocating heat.