Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers

CHAPTER 54

The basement contained a veritable sea of paper. A tidal wave of bulging files tied up in bundles was splashed crazily all over the walls. On the floor, heaps of cardboard boxes blocked most of the aisles. Further on, the neon lighting revealed more shelves weighed down with documents, fading away into the distance.

Niémans clambered over the stacks and headed down the first corridor. The endless files were being held in place by long pieces of netting, of the sort used to stop cliffs from crumbling. As he wandered past these registers, he could not help thinking about Fanny, and the dream-like hour he had just spent with her. The young woman's smiling face in the half-light. Her wounded hand putting out the lamp. The contact of dark skin. Two tiny bluish flames gleaming in the shadows – Fanny's eyes. It had been an intimate, discreet tableau, with soft motion, gestures and murmurs, instants and eternities.

How long had he spent in her arms? Niémans had no idea. But, on his lips, on his bruised flesh, he still felt a sort of mark, a lingering presence that astonished him. Fanny had rearoused forgotten passions in him, ancient secrets whose reawakening he now found disturbing. Had he, in the midst of all that horror, at the end of his enquiries, sipped from a loving cup, been caressed by a flame?

He tried to concentrate. He knew where the pile of rediscovered papers had been placed – he had contacted the records clerk who, despite being half asleep, had given him a set of extremely precise directions. Niémans walked on, turned, and walked on again. At last, he came across a closed box, caged off behind some chicken wire and protected by a solid padlock. The hospital porter had given him the key. If these papers were really "so unimportant" why were they being so carefully looked after?

Niémans went inside the alcove and sat down on some old bundles which were lying on the floor. He opened the box, grabbed a handful of papers and started to read them. Names. Dates. Nurses' reports concerning new-born babies. The records contained the surname, weight, height and blood group of each child. The number of feeds and the names of what sounded like medicines, perhaps vitamins or something of that sort.

He flicked through the sheets – there were several hundred of them, covering more than fifty years. Not one name that meant anything to him. Not one date that seemed promising.

Niémans got to his feet and decided to compare these papers with the original files of newly-born babies, which had to be somewhere among the archives. He examined the shelves and picked out about fifty files. His face was dripping with sweat. He felt the heat from his arctic jacket radiate onto his flesh. Laying the files down on a metal table, he spread them out so as to be able to see the surnames on the covers. He started to open each file and compare the first page with the other sheets. They were fakes.

From a rapid examination it was obvious that the sheets contained in the official files had been falsified. Etienne Caillois had imitated the nurses' handwriting fairly convincingly, but not well enough to stand up against a direct comparison with the originals.

Why?

The policeman laid the two pages side by side. He compared each column and each line, but found nothing. They were identical copies. He tried other pages. Still he found no difference. He readjusted his glasses, wiped the rivulets of sweat off the lenses, then examined a few more with greater attention.

Then, at last, he saw what he was looking for.

One tiny detail differentiated the genuine papers from the fakes. THE DIFFERENCE. Niémans did not yet know what it meant, but he sensed that he had unearthed another key. His face was burning like a cauldron and yet – at the same time – an icy sensation ran through him. He checked others to see if they, too, were different in the same way, then stuffed all the documents, the official files plus the sheets Caillois had stolen, into a cardboard box.

He made off with his prize and left the records office.

He dumped the box into the boot of his new car – a gendarme's blue Peugeot – then went back inside the hospital, this time to the maternity clinic.

It was six in the morning and, despite the bright neons which glittered down onto the floor, the place seemed heavy with sleep and silence. He went down to the delivery rooms, passing by nurses and midwives, all dressed in pale coats, hats and little paper overshoes. Some of them tried to stop him, as he was not wearing the standard surgical outfit. But his tricolor card and fraught expression were a highly effective deterrent.

He finally managed to find an obstetrician, who was just emerging from an operating theater. His face seemed weighed down with all the fatigue of the world. Niémans rapidly introduced himself and asked his sole and unique question:

"Doctor, is there any logical reason why a newly-born baby should change weight during its first night of existence?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do babies commonly lose or gain several hundred grams shortly after being born?"

Staring at the policeman's balaclava and the clothes that were too short for him, the doctor replied:

"No. If a child loses a lot of weight, then we have to undertake detailed tests immediately, because there is obviously some problem and…"

"And what if he puts some on? What if he suddenly gains weight during the first night?"

In his paver hat, the obstetrician looked bewildered. `But that never happens. I don't understand."

Niémans smiled.

"Thank you, doctor."

He left, closing his eyes as he walked. Under his seething eyelids, he now at last glimpsed the motive for the Guernon murders. The incredible machination of the blood-red rivers.

There was just one more detail he had to check.

In the university library.

CHAPTER 55

"Out! Everybody out!"

The library reading-room was brightly lit. The police officers lifted their noses from their books. Six of them were still going through works more or less closely associated with evil and purity. Others were examining the lists of students who had used the library during the summer or early fall. They looked like forgotten soldiers, fighting a war that had, unbeknown to them, shifted onto a different front.

"Out!" Niémans repeated. "It's all over here!"

The policemen glanced warily at one another. They had presumably been told that Superintendent Niémans was no longer in charge of the case. They were certainly also surprised to see the famous detective with his head stuck in some sort of a sock, and with a damp brown cardboard box under his arm. But who could stand up to Niémans? Especially when he had that expression on his face.

They stood up and slipped on their jackets.

One of them, passing by the superintendent on his way to the door, called softly to him. The superintendent recognised the broad-backed lieutenant who had been studying Rémy Caillois's thesis.

"I've got to the end of the thing, superintendent. And, maybe it doesn't mean anything, but…how can I put it? Caillois's conclusion is really weird. You remember the athlon, the ancient man who brought together strength and intelligence, the mind and the body? Well, Caillois talks of some kind of project to achieve exactly that. A totally crazy idea. The point isn't to set up a new program of education at school or university. Nor is it to retrain the teachers, or anything like that. The solution he had in mind was…"

"Genetic."

"So you've read it, too, have you? It's crazy. He seemed to think that intelligence is a biological fact. A genetic trait which must be associated with other genes, which control physical strength, and so recover the perfection of the athlon…"

His words whirled round Niémans's mind. He now knew the nature of the blood-red rivers conspiracy. And he did not need this half-witted cop's explanation. He wanted the horror to remain latent, implicit, unspoken. Written on his soul in letters of fire.

"Off with you now," he grunted.

But the officer was now flying:

"In the last pages, Caillois talks of selected births and rationally chosen couples. A sort of totalitarian system. A load of gibberish, superintendent, like in science fiction books of the sixties. Jesus, if the guy hadn't died the way he did, the whole thing would be a real scream!"

"Get lost."

The stocky lieutenant stared at Niémans, hesitated, then went his way. The superintendent crossed the totally deserted reading-room. He felt his fever mounting again, like roots of fire, encircling his skull as though with burning electrodes. He reached the office on the central rostrum. The office belonging to Rémy Caillois, the university's chief librarian. He tapped on the keyboard of the computer. The screen lit up at once. Suddenly, he changed his mind: the information he was looking for dated back to the 1970s, so it was not to be found on the data bank. Niémans frantically rummaged through the desk drawers in search of the registers containing the lists he wanted to consult.

Not the lists of books.

Nor the lists of students.

Just the list of boxed-in carrels, which had been occupied by thousands of readers over the last few years.

Strangely enough, it was in the inner logic of those compartments, which Etienne then Rémy Caillois had so carefully organised, that Niémans hoped to unearth a link with what he had discovered at the maternity clinic.

At last, he found the registers of seating arrangements. He opened his box and once more laid out the files dealing with new-born babies. He calculated the years when these children had become students, spending their evenings in the library, then he looked for their names among the lists of carrels which the two chief librarians had kept so accurately.

Before long, he found some plans of the compartments, with the names of the students written into each space. He could not have imagined a system that was more logical, more rigorous, more suited to the conspiracy he suspected. All of the children named on the original sheets had, when studying twenty years later, not only been placed in the library in the same carrel, day in day out, year in year out, but also facing the same student of the opposite sex.

Niémans was now certain that he was right.

He went through the same procedure for a few other students, intentionally picking them out over a time span of several decades. Each time, he found that they had been seated facing the same person of the same age, but opposite sex, during their daily work in Guernon University Library.

His hands shaking, the superintendent switched off the computer. The huge reading-room was resonant with stuffy silence. Still sitting at Caillois's desk, he turned on his phone and called the night watchman at the Guernon town hall. He had quite a job persuading him to go down at once into the archives in order to consult the registry books of marriages in Guernon. The night watchman finally agreed and Niémans was able, via his mobile, to direct the investigations he wanted him to carry out. He dictated the names, and the watchman checked them. What he wanted to know was if the names he read out belonged to people who had married each other. He was right seventy per cent of the time.

"Is this a bet, or what?" the watchman grumbled.

When they had been through about twenty examples, the superintendent stopped and hung up.

He tied his papers together and rushed off.

Niémans trudged across the campus. Despite himself, he kept looking for Fanny's window, but failed to locate it. On the steps outside one of the buildings, a group of journalists seemed to be waiting expectantly. Everywhere else, uniformed policemen and gendarmes patrolled the lawns and entrances to the buildings.

Faced with a choice between cops and hacks, the superintendent opted for his own people. Flashing his card, he crossed several road-blocks. None of the faces meant anything to him. They were presumably the reinforcements from Grenoble.

He entered the administrative building and found himself in the large over-lit hall, where a group of pale-faced people, old for the most part, was idling around. Probably the professors, doctors and academics. Everybody was on the alert. Niémans strode straight past them, ignoring their questioning stares.

He went up to the first floor and headed for the office of Vincent Luyse, the university vice-chancellor. The superintendent crossed the antechamber and tore some of the photographs of students sporting blues off the walls. He opened the door without knocking.

"What the…?"

The vice-chancellor calmed down as soon as he saw that it was Niémans. With a curt nod of his head, he gave his other visitors their leave, then said to the superintendent:

"I hope you have a lead! We are all…"

The policeman laid the pictures down onto the desk, then produced the files and the register. Luyse looked uneasy.

"Really, I…"

"Wait."

Niémans finished laying out the photos and the papers in front of the vice-chancellor. Then he leant over the desk and asked:

"Compare these records with the names of your champions, are they from the same families?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Niémans pushed the papers nearer to him.

"The men and the women in these files got married. I suppose they belong to your famous university elite. They must be professors, researchers, intellectuals…Look at their names and tell me, one by one, if they also happen to be the parents and grandparents of this new generation of supermen who win all the sports prizes."

Luyse grabbed his glasses and lowered his eyes.

"Um, yes, that is correct. I know most of these names."

"And you would agree that the children of these couples are extraordinarily gifted, both intellectually and physically?"

Despite himself, Luyse's tense face relaxed into a broad smile. A smarmy grin of satisfaction that Niémans would have liked to ram down his throat.

"Yes…yes, of course. This new generation is very brilliant. Believe me, these children are going to live up fully to their promise…And, as a matter of fact, we already had a few such fine specimens in the previous generation. For our university, such performances are particularly…"

Niémans suddenly realised that he did not so much distrust intellectuals as detest them. He hated them to his very marrow. He loathed their distant, pretentious ways, their ability to describe, to analyse and gauge reality, in whatever form it presented itself. These poor jerks lived as though they were attending some sort of show, and always left more or less disappointed, more or less blasé. And yet he recognised that what happened to them, unbeknown to themselves, was not something he would wish even on his worst enemy. Luyse went on:

"Yes, this new generation is going to strengthen our university's reputation and…"

Niémans interrupted. He put his files and registers back into the box, and then spat out:

"Then you should be over the moon. Because these people are going to make your university a household name."

The vice-chancellor looked at him quizzically. Niémans opened his mouth, but he suddenly froze. There was a look of terror on the vice-chancellor's face as he murmured:

"But what's wrong? You're…you're bleeding!"

Niémans looked down and saw a dark puddle gleaming on the surface of the desk. The fever that had been burning his skull was in fact the blood from the wound, which had reopened. He staggered, stared at his own face in the shiny, flat mirror and suddenly wondered if he was not looking at the reflection of the last murder in the series.

He did not have time to answer. One second later, he was kneeling unconscious on the floor, his face pressed against the desk, down in the sticky looking-glass of his own blood.

CHAPTER 56

Light. Humming. Warmth.

Pierre Niémans did not immediately realise where he was. Then he made out a paper hat. A white coat. Strip lights. The hospital. How long had he been there, unconscious? And why did his body feel so weak, as though his limbs, muscles and bones had been replaced by some liquid substance? He tried to speak, but the attempt died in his throat. His fatigue was pinning him down onto the rustling plastic cover of his bed.

"He's losing a lot of blood. We'll have to perform a temporal haemostasia."

A door opened. Wheels squeaked. White lights passed above his eyes. A blinding explosion. A burst of energy that dilated his pupils. Another voice resonated:

"Begin the transfusion."

The superintendent heard a clicking sound and felt something cold move across his body. He turned his head and saw some tubes connected to a fat suspended pouch, that seemed to be breathing, as it moved in and out, prompted by an automatic air-pressurised system.

Was he going to stay there, wandering through unconsciousness, in that antiseptic stench? Fade away in that light when he knew the motive of the murders? When he at last understood the secret that lay behind that series of slaughters? His face twisted up into a sardonic grin. Suddenly, a voice said:

"Inject the Diprivan."

Niémans grasped what was meant and sat up. He seized the doctor's wrist, which was already clutching an electronic lancet, and panted:

"I don't want an anesthetic!"

The doctor looked was taken aback.

"No anesthetic? But…you've been cut almost in half, my friend. I'm going to have to stitch you back up."

Niémans found the strength to mumble:

"A local one…Give me a local anesthetic…"

The man sighed, shifted his chair back in a shriek of castors and said to the anesthetist:

"All right. Then give him some Xylocaine. The maximum dose. A full two hundred milligrams."

Niémans relaxed. They moved him under the multi-faceted lamps. The nape of his neck was propped on a head-rest, so that his skull was raised as high as possible toward the light. They turned his face, and then his view became obstructed by a curtain of paper.

The superintendent closed his eyes. As the doctor and nurses started to busy themselves on his temple, his mind began to drift off. His heartbeat slowed, his head no longer tormented him. A delicious feeling seemed about to engulf him.

The secret…Caillois's secret…Sertys's secret. Even that was becoming vague, strange and distant…Fanny's face occupied his every thought…Her body that was so dark, muscular and curvaceous, as soft as volcanic rock that had been bronzed in a furnace, by the waters and the wind…Fanny…The visions filling his skull were like murmurs, the rustling of cloth, the whispering of elves.

"Stop!"

The order echoed across the operating theater. Everything came to a halt. A hand tore away the curtain and, in the wave of light, Niémans saw a devil with long locks, waving a tricolor police card under the noses of the astonished doctor and nurses.

Karim Abdouf.

Niémans glanced round to his right: the tubes were already gushing into his skin, into his veins. The elixir of life. The sap of arteries. The doctor was brandishing his scissors.

"Hands off the superintendent," Karim panted.

The medic froze once again. Abdouf approached and examined Niémans's wound, now sewn up like an oven-ready roast. The doctor shrugged.

"I'm going to have to cut the thread."

Karim peered distrustfully around.

"How is he?"

"Solid. He's lost a lot of blood, but we've given him a hefty transfusion. We've stitched up his wound. The operation is not quite over yet and…"

"Have you given him any junk?"

"Any junk?"

"To knock him out."

"Just a local anesthetic and…"

"Get me some speed. Some stimulants. I need him back on his feet." Karim's eyes were fixed on Niémans, but his words were meant for the doctor. He added:

"It's a matter of life and death."

The doctor stood up and searched through a chest of narrow drawers for a blister pack of tablets. Karim grinned fleetingly at Niémans.

"Here," said the doctor. "With this, he'll be up and about in half an hour's time, but…"

"Good. Now, move along."

The Arab yelled at the little group of white coats:

"Fuck off, the lot of you! I need to talk to the superintendent." The doctor and nurses vanished.

Niémans felt the needles from the drip being pulled out of his arm and heard the paper sheeting being pulled away. Then Karim was handing him his blood-stained coat. In the other hand he was weighing the batch of little colored tablets.

"Your speed, superintendent." A grin. "Just for this special occasion."

But Niémans was in no laughing mood. He grabbed Karim's leather jacket and, his face ashen, murmured:

"Karim…I've…I've worked out the conspiracy."

"What conspiracy?"

"The conspiracy of Sertys, Caillois and Chernecé. The conspiracy of the blood-red rivers."

"WHAT?"

"They…they were swapping babies."