Syndrome E Read online

  Syndrome E

  Syndrome E

  Franck Thilliez

  Translated by Mark Polizzotti

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Copyright © Editions Fleuve Noir, Department d’Univers Poche, 2010

  Translation copyright © Mark Polizzotti, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in French under the title Le Syndrome E

  by Editions Fleuve Noir, Department d’Univers Poche, Paris.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Thilliez, Franck.

  [Syndrome E. English]

  Syndrome E / Franck Thilliez ; translated by Mark Polizzotti.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60117-4

  1. Detectives—France—Fiction. 2. Evil in motion pictures—Fiction.

  3. Subliminal perception—Fiction. 4. Violence—Fiction.

  5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Polizzotti, Mark. II. Title.

  PQ2720.H58S9613 2012

  843’.92—dc23

  2012004718

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Minion Pro

  Designed by Francesca Belanger

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic

  form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted

  materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To my family

  Table of Contents

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  Epilogue

  1

  Be the first one there.

  No sooner had he seen the classified ad than Ludovic Sénéchal hit the road at the crack of dawn, covering the 120 miles between suburban Lille and Liège in record time.

  For sale: old films, 16 mm, 35 mm, silent and sound. All genres, short and full length, 1930s and after. 800+ reels, including 500 spy thrillers. Make offer on site.

  This sort of notice was pretty rare on a general-interest Web site. Usually, owners of such things sold them at trade fairs or put them up on eBay. This ad sounded more like someone trying to dump an old fridge. It boded well.

  In the center of the Belgian municipality, Ludovic parked after some effort, verified the number on the building, then introduced himself to its occupant: Luc Szpilman. Around twenty-five, Converse All-Stars, surfer shades, Bulls T-shirt, scattered body piercings.

  “Oh, right, you’re here for the movies. Come this way—they’re in the attic.”

  “Am I the first?”

  “There should be others soon. I’ve already had a few calls. I didn’t think they’d go this fast.”

  Ludovic followed close behind. The house was typical Flemish: bland colors and dark brick. The rooms were all arranged around the stairwell, a kind of main area lit by a well of brightness.

  “Can I ask why you’re getting rid of these old films?”

  Ludovic had chosen his words carefully: getting rid, old…The bargaining had already started.

  “My father died the other day. He never told anybody what he wanted done with them.”

  Ludovic couldn’t believe his ears: not even cold in the ground, and already the patriarch was being stripped clean. On top of which, his idiot son didn’t see the point of hanging on to full-length movies that weighed a good fifty pounds each when you could store a thousand times more at a thousand times less weight. Poor sacrificed generation…

  The staircase was so steep you could break your neck. Once up in the attic, Szpilman switched on a dim bulb. Ludovic smiled and his collector’s heart skipped a beat. There they sat, completely protected from natural light. Variously colored canisters stacked in turrets of twenty. There was that wonderful celluloid smell, and the air barely circulated between the storage racks. A ladder on wheels provided access to the highest shelves. Ludovic moved closer. On one side were the 35 mm, a hefty stock of them, and on the other the 16 mm, which were his particular interest. The circular canisters were all labeled and arranged perfectly. Silent classics, feature films from the golden age of French cinema, and especially spy thrillers, easily filling more than half the shelves. Ludovic took one in his hands. The Chairman, a film by John Lee Thompson about the CIA and Communist China. A complete, intact print, preserved from humidity and light like a bottle of vintage wine. There were even pH strips in the canisters to monitor acidity. Ludovic struggled to hide his emotion. This treasure alone would have fetched five hundred euros on the open market, easy.

  “I take it your father was a fan of spy films?”

  “And how—you should see his library. Conspiracy theories, the whole nine yards. It was like an obsession.”

  “How much do you want for these?”

  “I poked around on the Web. It’s a hundred euros a reel, give or take. Mainly I want to clear all this out as quick as possible, ’cause I need the space. So the price is negotiable.”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  Ludo
vic kept rummaging.

  “Your father must have had a private screening room?”

  “Yeah, we’re about to redo it. Getting rid of the old stuff and putting in all new equipment. LCD screen and the latest home system. Here’s where I’m going to set up a practice space for my band.”

  Disgusted by such a lack of respect, Ludovic turned to his right, rearranged some piles of films, immersed himself in the celluloid aroma. He discovered features by Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, then, farther on, classics like Hamlet and Captain Fracasse. He wished he could take them all, but his functionary’s salary at Social Security and his various monthly subscriptions—online dating, Internet, cable, satellite—didn’t leave him much wiggle room. So he’d have to make choices.

  He walked toward the sliding ladder. Luc Szpilman cautioned him:

  “Careful on that. That’s where my father fell and fractured his skull. I mean, really, climbing up there at eighty-two…”

  Ludovic paused an instant, then rushed forward. He thought of the old man, so passionate about his films that he’d died for them. He climbed as high as he could and continued shopping. Behind The Kremlin Letter, on a hidden shelf, he discovered a black canister with no label. Balancing on the ladder, Ludovic picked it up. Inside was what looked like a short, since the film took up only part of the reel. Ten or twenty minutes’ projection time, tops. Probably a lost film, a unique specimen that the owner had never managed to identify. Ludovic grabbed it up, climbed down, and added it to the stack of nine cult films he’d already chosen. Anonymous reels like this always added spice to the screenings.

  He turned around, playing it cool, but his pulse was pounding.

  “I’m afraid most of your movies aren’t worth a whole lot. Pretty standard stuff. And besides, can you smell that odor?”

  “What odor?”

  “Vinegar. The films have been affected by vinegar syndrome. They’ll be worthless before long.”

  The young man leaned forward and sniffed.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Absolutely. I’m willing to take these ten off your hands. Shall we say thirty-five euros apiece?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Forty.”

  “All right…”

  Ludovic wrote out a check for four hundred euros. As he was pulling away from the curb, he noticed a car with French plates looking for a parking spot.

  No doubt another collector—already.

  Ludovic emerged from his home projection booth and sat down, alone with a can of beer, in one of the twelve fifties-style leatherette seats that he’d scavenged when they closed the Rex: his own private movie theater. He’d created an authentic auditorium for himself in the basement of his house, which he called his “mini-cinema.” Fold-up seats, stage, pearlescent screen, Heurtier Tri-Film projector: he had it all. At the age of forty-two, the only thing he was missing was a partner, someone to squeeze close while watching Gone with the Wind in the original English. But for the moment, those lousy dating sites had yielded only one-night stands or washouts.

  It was nearly three in the morning. Saturated with images of war and espionage, he decided to round out his marathon screening with the unidentified, and incredibly well-preserved, short feature. It must have been a copy. These unlabeled films sometimes turned out to be veritable treasures or, if the gods were really smiling, lost works by famous filmmakers like Méliès, Welles, or Chaplin. The collector in him loved to fantasize about such things. When Ludovic unspooled the leader to wind the film into the projector, he saw that the strip was marked 50 FRAMES PER SECOND. That was unusual: normally it was twenty-four per second, more than sufficient to give the illusion of movement. Still, he adjusted the shutter speed to the recommended setting. No point watching it in slow motion.

  Within seconds, the whiteness of the screen yielded to a dark, clouded image, with no title or credits. A white circle appeared in the upper right corner. Ludovic wondered at first if it was a flaw in the print, as often happened with those old reels.

  The film began.

  Ludovic fell heavily as he ran upstairs.

  He couldn’t see a thing, not even with the lights on.

  He was completely blind.

  2

  The shrill ring tone yanked Lucie Henebelle from a deep sleep. She jerked up in her chair and groped around for her cell.

  “Hello…?”

  Pasty voice. Lucie glanced at the clock in the room: 4:28 a.m. Opposite her, her daughter Juliette, a glucose drip in her right arm, was fast asleep.

  The voice on the other end of the line was shaky:

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  Lucie brushed her long blond hair off her face, her nerves on edge. She had finally managed to doze off. It was very definitely not the time for practical jokes.

  “Who am I? Who the hell are you? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Ludovic—it’s Ludovic Sénéchal…Is this…is this Lucie?”

  Lucie Henebelle quietly left the room and found herself in a neon-lit hallway. She yawned and tugged at her shirttails, trying to look halfway decent. Distant babies’ wails ran along the walls. In Pediatrics, silence was a pipe dream.

  It took her a few seconds to place the caller. Ludovic Sénéchal. An e-dating fling, following several weeks of intense messaging, that had ended seven months later in a café in Lille, for reasons of “incompatibility.”

  “Ludovic? What’s going on?”

  In the receiver Lucie heard the sound of a crash, like a glass falling to the floor.

  “Someone has to come get me. Someone has to…”

  He couldn’t speak, seemingly overcome by panic. Lucie urged him to calm down, talk slowly.

  “I don’t know what happened. I was in my cinema. Listen, Lucie—I can’t see a thing. I turned all the lights on and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I think…I think I’ve gone blind. I called a number at random and…”

  That was just like him to be watching movies at four in the morning. A hand on her lower spine, Lucie walked back and forth past a huge window that looked out on the various hospitals of the Lille medical center. That crummy armchair had given her a stiff back. At thirty-seven, your body doesn’t shrug things off so easily.

  “Hold on. I’m sending an ambulance.”

  Ludovic might have bumped his head on something. A scalp wound or head trauma might provoke this kind of symptom and could prove fatal.

  “Make sure you’re not bleeding by feeling your head and licking your fingers. Skull, nose, and temples. If you are, cover it with ice cubes and press with a towel. The EMTs will bring you to the hospital right next door to here and I’ll come check in on you. Whatever you do, don’t lie down. You still live at the same address?”

  “Yes. Please hurry!”

  She hung up and ran to the emergency desk, from where she had them dispatch an ambulance. No doubt about it, her summer vacation was getting off to a rousing start. Her eight-year-old had just been admitted for viral gastroenteritis. Nobody ever had such crappy luck in the middle of summer! The illness had blasted through like a hurricane, dehydrating the poor girl in a mere twenty hours. Juliette couldn’t swallow a thing, not even water. The doctors were predicting a stay of several days, with lots of rest and a special diet after she got out. The poor kid hadn’t been able to go to her first summer camp with her sister, Clara. Being apart was hard on the twins.

  Lucie leaned on the window. Watching the revolving light of an ambulance as it sped out, she reflected that in the police station or out in the world, on vacation or at work, life always seemed to land her in the shit.

  3

  Several hours later, 125 miles from Lille, Martin Leclerc, head of the Violent Crimes unit, pondered a three-dimensional representation of a human head on the screen of a Mac. You could clearly see the brain and several salient parts of the face: tip of the nose, outer surface of the right eye, left tragus…Then he pointed to a green area, located in the left superior temporal gyrus.


  “So that lights up every time I say something?”

  Half reclining on a hydraulic chair, head squeezed under a hood containing 128 electrodes, Chief Inspector Franck Sharko stared at the ceiling without moving a muscle.

  “It’s called Wernicke’s area, linked to hearing speech. For you and me both, blood rushes there the moment you hear a voice. Hence the coloration.”

  “Impressive.”

  “Not half as much as seeing you here.” Sharko spoke softly beneath the bonnet. “I don’t know if you recall, Martin, but the invitation was for a drink at my place. The only thing you’ll get here is watery coffee.”

  “Your shrink didn’t have any problems with me sitting in on a session. And you’d suggested it yourself—or am I not the only one having memory lapses?”

  Sharko flattened his large hands on the armrests; his wedding ring clanked against the metal. He’d been attending these “maintenance” sessions for weeks and still hadn’t learned to relax.

  “So what’s up?”

  The head of Violent Crimes massaged his temples, his face weary. In the twenty years they’d worked together, the two men had often seen each other in the darkest possible light: horrific crime scenes, family tragedies, health problems…

  “It happened two days ago. Some dump between Le Havre and Rouen. Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon—how’s that for a name? Bodies unearthed on the banks of the Seine—you must have heard about it on the tube.”

  “That thing at the construction site, where they’re laying a pipeline?”

  “Right. The media was all over it. They were already there because the site itself is such a hot-button issue. They discovered five stiffs with their skulls sawed off. Criminal Investigations in Rouen is on the scene, working with the local cops. Their DA was about to send in the CSI boys, but in the end we caught it. I can’t say I’m too thrilled—in this weather, it’s disgusting.”

  “What about Devoise?”

  “He’s on a sensitive case. I can’t pull him off. And Bertholet is away on vacation.”

  “What about my vacation?”

  Leclerc straightened his narrow striped tie. A solid fifty years old, black rayon suit, shiny pumps, drawn, arid face: a top cop in all his splendor. Droplets of sweat pearled on his forehead and he mopped his brow with a handkerchief.