Syndrome E Page 9

  Lucie showed Szpilman the screen.

  “He called abroad just a few minutes before he died. Does this number or the area code mean anything to you?”

  “Maybe the States? He called there sometimes, when he was doing research.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  Lucie took out her own phone and punched in a number, an intuition in the back of her head. She couldn’t swear to it, but…

  A voice on the other end of the line interrupted her musings. Information. Lucie made her request.

  “I’d like to know which country the phone number 514-555-8724 corresponds to.”

  “One moment, please.”

  Silence. The phone cradled between ear and shoulder, Lucie asked Luc for a pen and paper. Then she quickly jotted down the number. The voice returned in her ear.

  “Ma’am? It’s the area code for the province of Quebec. Montreal, to be precise.”

  Lucie hung up. A word crumbled on the tip of her tongue, while she stared intently at Luc.

  “Canada.”

  “Canada? Why would he have called Canada? We don’t know anybody there.”

  Lucie gave herself time to absorb that information. For some reason or other, Vlad Szpilman had suddenly called a person living in the country where the film had been manufactured. She scrolled through the earlier calls as far back as a week before. No other trace of that number.

  “Did your father keep notes about films or his contacts? Index cards, notebooks?”

  “I never saw any. These past few years, my father’s life consisted of a few square yards, between here, his screening room, and his office.”

  “Can I have a look at his office?”

  Luc hesitated and finished his beer.

  “Okay. But you’ll really have to tell me what’s going on. He was my father—I have a right to know.”

  Lucie nodded. Luc led her into a clean, well-organized room, with a computer, magazines, newspapers, and a library. The cop glanced into the papers, the drawers. Just normal office material, a PC, nothing unusual. The library in the back housed a lot of history books, about the wars, massacres, genocides. Armenians, Jews, Rwandans. There was also a section on the history of espionage. CIA, MI5, conspiracy theory. And a bunch of books in English, with titles that suggested nothing special to Lucie: Bluebird, MK-Ultra, Artichoke. Vlad Szpilman seemed preoccupied with the dark underside of the world from the last century. Lucie turned to Luc, pointing at the books.

  “Do you think your father was hiding some important secret from you?”

  The young man shrugged.

  “My father had a bit of a paranoid streak. Wouldn’t have been like him to talk to me about that stuff. It was his secret garden.”

  After a spin around the room, Lucie let herself be accompanied to the exit door, thanked Luc Szpilman, and handed him her business card, on the back of which she jotted her personal cell number in case. In the car, she took out her phone and dialed the number in Canada. Four nerve-racking rings before someone finally picked up. Not a sound, not a hello. So it was up to Lucie.

  “Hello?”

  Long pause. Lucie repeated, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  “Who is this?”

  Male voice, pronounced Quebec accent.

  “Lucie Henebelle. I’m calling from—”

  Abrupt click. He’d hung up. Lucie imagined a nervous type, on his guard, distrustful. Dazed by the brevity of the exchange, she burst from her car and went back to knock on Szpilman’s door.

  “You again?”

  “I’ll need your father’s phone.”

  13

  Refine her strategy. Take him unaware before he can hang up.

  Lucie let a good fifteen minutes go by, then redialed the number with Vlad Szpilman’s partially recharged cell. With a little luck, her interlocutor would recognize the contact and not hang up. Not immediately, in any case.

  She paced anxiously in front of the Belgian’s house. Even though he’d been fairly easygoing and cooperative, she didn’t want Luc to hear the conversation—assuming there was one.

  The phone was picked up after two rings.

  “Vlad?” went the voice with the Quebec accent.

  “Vlad is dead. This is Lucie Henebelle, a lieutenant in the French police. Criminal division.”

  She’d blurted it all out at once. This was the decisive moment. An interminable silence followed, but he didn’t hang up.

  “Dead how?”

  Lucie squeezed her fist: the fish was hooked. She just had to reel it in gently now, without any sudden jerks.

  “I’ll tell you. But first tell me who you are.”

  “Dead how?”

  “A stupid accident. He fell from a ladder and cracked his skull.”

  Several seconds passed. A host of questions burned Lucie’s lips, but she was afraid he’d cut the connection. It was he who finally broke the ice.

  “Why are you calling?”

  Lucie played it straight. She sensed that the other man was under great pressure, and that he’d sniff out a lie in two seconds flat.

  “After he called you on Monday, Vlad Szpilman immediately went up to his attic to get a film. An anonymous film from 1955, made in Canada, that I now have in my possession. I’d like to know why.”

  Apparently she’d hit a nerve. She heard his breathing become more labored.

  “You’re not with the police. You’re lying.”

  “Call my headquarters. Lille police department, Criminal Investigations unit. Tell them that—”

  “Tell me about the case.”

  Lucie flipped through her recall at top speed. What was he talking about?

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “You’re not with the police.”

  “Of course I am! Lieutenant in Lille, for God’s sake!”

  “In that case, tell me about the five bodies, the ones discovered near the factories. How far have you got with the investigation? Give me the technical details.”

  Lucie understood: the bodies at the pipeline. So that was what had triggered Vlad Szpilman’s phone call. They were reporting it on the news.

  “I’m sorry. We work by jurisdiction, and mine is the north. We’re not the ones handling that case. You’d have to check with—”

  “I don’t give a damn. Get to know the people handling it. If you’re really with the police, you’ll get hold of the information. And in case you try to trace me, my phone is a cell registered under a false name and address. Because of you, I’ll now have to destroy it.”

  He was about to hang up. Lucie decided to bet all her chips.

  “Is there a link between that case and the film?”

  “You know there is. Good-b—”

  “Wait! How can I reach you?”

  “Your number came up when you called. I’ll reach you.” A moment’s pause. “I’ll call you back at 8:00 p.m., French time. Have the info, or you’ll never hear from me again.”

  Call ended. Silence. Lucie stood there, mouth agape. That had certainly been the densest and most intriguing phone call of her entire life.

  After thanking Luc for the use of the phone, she settled deeply into the front seat of her car, hands on her forehead. She thought about that voice separated from hers by some thirty-five hundred miles. Clearly, her interlocutor was scared stiff of being identified; he hid behind stolen phone numbers and abbreviated any form of exchange. Why was he hiding? And from whom? How had he got in touch with Vlad Szpilman? But the question that nagged at her the most was to find out what invisible connection could possibly exist between the anonymous film and the bodies unearthed in Normandy.

  That evil reel might have been the tree that hid the forest.

  Caught up, Lucie knew at that moment that she had no choice. Her conscience forbade her to call it quits or drop the bone. It was always like that, in a snap, that she decided to pursue her cases to the end. That same relentlessness that had pushed her to wear the badge. And sometimes, to go too far.

>   As of now, time was of the essence. She had until eight o’clock to find the right contact in Paris and ferret out the info demanded of her.

  14

  A schizophrenic’s apartment tends to be messy. The internal personality disorder—the mental fracture—often manifests in an external disorder, to the point where some schizophrenics engage the services of a housekeeper. On the other hand, the apartment of a behavioral analyst demands a certain rigor, mirroring a rectilinear mind accustomed to compartmentalizing pieces of information the way you’d arrange shoes in a storage cubby. As such, Sharko’s apartment pulled in two different directions. While the coffee cups piled up in the sink and the wrinkled suits and ties amassed in a corner of the bathroom, various other rooms, all very neat and tidy, made it look like the residence of a peaceful family. A lot of photos in frames, a small plant, a child’s room with old stuffed toys, the yellow wallpaper with its frieze of dolphins.

  On the floor of this latter room, a magnificent railway sprawled out its vintage tracks and locomotives, bordered by landscapes made of foam, cork, or resin. Restoring life to this miniature world, which had once required hundreds—thousands—of hours of assembly, painting, and gluing, was the first thing Sharko had done on his return from Rouen two hours earlier. The locomotives sent joyous whistles into the air and emitted their good, steamy smell, mixed with his wife Suzanne’s perfume, which he’d added to the water tank. As always, Eugenie sat amid the tracks, smiling; at moments like these, the cop was glad to have her around.

  When she decided to leave, Sharko stood up and retrieved a dusty old suitcase from the top of a closet. The smells of the past poured out as he opened it, laden with nostalgia. Sharko’s heavy heart felt a pang.

  His departure for Cairo was scheduled for the next morning, on Egyptair out of Orly. Economy class, the bastards. By prearrangement, the police inspector attached to the French embassy would be waiting for him. Sharko had checked online for the local temperature: celestial fires torched the country, a veritable sauna, which wouldn’t help matters. He packed his suitcase with plain short-sleeved shirts, two bathing suits—you never know—two pairs of twill trousers, and Bermuda shorts. He didn’t forget his tape recorder, cocktail sauce, candied chestnuts, or O-gauge Ova Hornby locomotive, with its black car for wood and charcoal.

  His phone rang the moment he shut the valise, left half empty to make room for presents. It was Leclerc; Sharko picked up with a smile.

  “Some cartons of cigarettes, Egyptian whiskey whose name I already don’t remember, perfume burner for Kathia…So what else do you want now, a cardboard pyramid?”

  “Have you got time to swing over to Gare du Nord?”

  Sharko glanced at his watch: 6:30. Normally he’d be having dinner in a half hour, reading the paper or doing the crosswords, and he hated disrupting his routine.

  “Depends.”

  “A colleague from Lille CID wants to meet you. She’s already on the TGV.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “Supposedly it has some bearing on our case.”

  A pause.

  “What kind of bearing?”

  “A rather strange and unexpected kind. She called me, on my direct line, if you can believe the nerve of this one. Go find out if it’s just a load of crap. You’ve already got something in common: you’re both supposed to be on vacation.”

  “Some coincidence.”

  “Her train gets in at 7:31. She’s blond, thirty-seven. She’ll be wearing a blue tunic and tan pedal pushers. Anyway, she’ll recognize you—she saw you on TV. You’ve become something of a star.”

  Sharko rubbed his temples.

  “Thanks for nothing. Tell me about her.”

  “I’m sending you some background. Print it out and get moving.”

  Sharko had his electronic plane tickets in front of him.

  “Aye, aye, Chief. At your service, Chief. By the way, two measly days in Cairo is a bit short, don’t you think?”

  “The locals don’t want us there any longer than that. We have to follow protocol.”

  “Why are you sending me? Protocol isn’t exactly my thing. And besides, what if I backslide? You remember that little green light in my brain?”

  “It’s when that little green light goes on that you’re at your best. Your illness does some funny things to your head, a kind of stew that lets you grasp things nobody else can sense.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind saying that to the big boss, he might treat me a little better.”

  “The less we tell him, the better off you are. By the way: Auld Stag.”

  “What?”

  “The Egyptian whiskey—it’s called Auld Stag. Write it down, for goodness’ sake. For Kathia, find the most expensive perfume burner you can. I want to give her something nice.”

  “How’s she doing? It’s been a while since I’ve been to see her. I hope she doesn’t hold it against me too much and that—”

  “And don’t forget the bug spray, or you’ll really be sorry.”

  He hung up sharply, as if to cut the conversation short.

  Fifteen minutes later, Sharko settled into the commuter train at Bourg-la-Reine, printed sheets on his knees. He pored over the brief report his boss had sent. Lucie Henebelle…Single, two daughters, father died from lung cancer when she was ten, mother a homemaker. Police sergeant in Dunkirk in the early 2000s. Assigned a desk job, she’d found herself caught up in a sordid case, the “death chamber,” which had shaken the northern part of the country. Sharko was all too familiar with the hierarchic barriers back then between the rank of sergeant and that of detective. How had a simple paper-pusher managed to become the lead on such an investigation, which involved psychopaths and rituals? What inner forces had driven this mother of two to the other side?

  After that, she’d been transferred to Criminal Investigations in Lille, with a rank of lieutenant. Nice promotion. She’d opted for the big city, where she’d have many more opportunities to come face-to-face with the worst. Spotless record so far. A driven, punctilious woman, according to her supervisors, but with an increasing tendency to go off the rails. Rushing in without backup, frequent shouting matches with the brass, and a worrisome habit of zeroing in on violent cases, especially murders. Kashmareck, her superior officer, described her as “encyclopedic, possessed, a good psychologist in the field, but sometimes out of control.” Sharko dug deeper into the file. It was like reading his own story. In 2006, she had apparently taken a tumble: an intense manhunt to the far end of Brittany that in the end had put her on medical leave for three weeks. The official reason was “overwork.” In cop speak, that meant depression.

  Depression…And yet this woman seemed fairly solid, at least on paper. Why had she fallen so far down the hole? Depression grabs hold of you when an investigation kicks you in the teeth, when other people’s pain suddenly becomes your own. What had happened to her that was so personal? Could it have anything to do with her two girls?

  Sharko raised his eyes, a hand gripping his chin. She was only in her thirties, and the darkness already had such a hold that it was controlling her life. How old had he been when he’d started to tip over? Possibly well before that. And this was the result. Anyone watching could have guessed his situation in the blink of an eye: a guy bloated on meds who’d grow old alone, marked with the stamp of a fragmented life, encrusted along his wrinkles like a river of sorrow.

  He stepped off the train at Gare du Nord at 7:20, less sweaty than usual. In July, the commuters were replaced by tourists, better behaved and much less sticky. The pulse of Paris beat more slowly.

  Platform 9. Sharko waited among the pigeons, in a current of sullen air, arms crossed, in tan Bermudas, a yellow polo shirt, and docksiders. He hated station platforms, airports, anything that reminded him that every day people left each other. Behind him, parents were bringing their children to trains, packed for holiday camp. That kind of separation had its good side, promising the joy of reunion; but for Sharko, there would be no m
ore reunions.

  Suzanne…Eloise…

  The mass of passengers surged like a single entity from the TGV arriving from Lille. Colors, a tempest of voices, and the noise of suitcases dragging along on wheels. Sharko craned his neck among the taxi drivers holding up signs with names on them. Making the obvious connection, he immediately spotted the right party. She came up with a smile. Small, slim, hair to her shoulders, she struck him as fragile, and without her damaged smile and that fatigue you see on certain cops, he might have taken her for just some broad coming to Paris to look for seasonal work.

  “Inspector Sharko? Lucie Henebelle, Lille CID.”

  Their fingers met. Sharko noted that in their handshake, she looped her thumb on top. She wanted to control the situation or express a kind of spontaneous dominance. The inspector smiled back at her.

  “Is the Nemo still on Rue des Solitaires in Old Lille?”

  “I think it’s up for sale. Are you from the north?”

  “For sale? Damn…The best things always disappear. Yes, I come from the north, but that goes back a way. Let’s go to the Terminus Nord—not very glamorous, but it’s nearby.”

  They left the station and went to the large café, finding a sidewalk table in the shade. In front of them, the taxicabs lined up in an endless colored queue. It was as if the station were regurgitating the entire world: whites, Arabs, blacks, Asians were dispatched in an indistinguishable swarm. Lucie set down her backpack and ordered a Perrier; Sharko, a Weissbier with a slice of lemon. The young lieutenant was impressed by the fellow, especially his bearing: trim hair, eyes of an old vet, and a solid build. He gave off the ambiguity of a composite material, something indefinable. She tried to keep any of this from showing.

  “They tell me you’re an expert in criminal behavior. It must be fascinating.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Lieutenant—it’s getting late. What have you got for me?”

  The guy was direct as a boxer’s fist. Lucie didn’t know who she was dealing with, but she knew he’d never give without getting something in return. That’s how everyone worked in this profession: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. So she took her story from the top. The death of the Belgian collector, the discovery of the film, the violent, pornographic images buried in it, the fellow in the Fiat who seemed to be hunting for the same film. Sharko betrayed not a hint of emotion. He was the kind of guy who must have seen it all in his career, withdrawn behind his thick shell. Lucie didn’t forget to tell him about the mysterious phone call to Canada that afternoon. She jabbed her finger on the table as the waiter brought their drinks.