Syndrome E

37

The films of a madman…

Lucie had spent a good part of the night rummaging around on the Internet, and this was the only impression it left her of the work of Jacques Lacombe, a man with a steely gaze and a mouth as thin and straight as a razor blade. The digitized photo, posted on a fanatic’s blog, dated from 1950. It was taken at a party the last time the director had been seen in public. Squeezed into a shiny dinner jacket, wineglass in hand and hair slicked back, Lacombe stared at the camera so intensely that it gave Lucie chills. She couldn’t look directly at his eyes.

Certain amateurs had tried to draw up a biography of the filmmaker, but they always dead-ended at the same place: in 1951, after the turbulent shoot in Colombia and his run-in with the law, Lacombe had simply disappeared. Only a part of his work—they estimated that a good 50 percent of his films had been lost—continued to circulate among a small circle of devotees. All that remained of this dark character were a handful of short features, most of them running less than ten minutes, which film buffs called the “crash films.”

Crash films… shot between 1948 and 1950, before Colombia. As the Web authors explained, this was a series of nineteen films whose sole aim was to display things never before attempted in the medium, a kind of artistic exploit on celluloid. Lacombe didn’t care about the point of a film, only about the public’s reactions: its passivity toward images, its relationship to plot and story line, its voyeuristic tendencies, its fascination with intimacy, and also its tolerance for conceptual cinema. He challenged people’s watching habits and turned filmmaking conventions on their heads. Always a need to innovate, disturb, shock…

And then there was that small white circle in the upper right, on each of his nineteen mini-films. Lucie understood that this was probably Lacombe’s maker’s mark, his signature. Digging further, she found a description of some of his techniques, his experimentations with masks, mirrors, and multiple exposures. Some people advanced a hypothesis about the presence of the white circle at the top of each film. They called it the “blind spot,” which from a psychological viewpoint corresponded to a small part of the retina that was lacking photoreceptors. Some of the sites even suggested an exercise:

If you closed your left eye and looked only at the square from a distance of about six inches, the circle disappeared from sight. Lucie was amazed by this flaw in human optics. Ultimately, wasn’t Jacques Lacombe trying to say, with his signature, that the eye was an imperfect instrument that could be fooled by any number of means? Wasn’t he clearly stating that these flaws were the engine driving his films? At bottom, these short features surely hid the first burblings of a sick and perverse mind. A mind obsessed by the impact of images on human beings—their veracity, their strength, and also their destructive power. He was a visionary ahead of his time.

Stretched out on the couch, her eyes half shut, Lucie understood better why Lacombe had never made it. His “crash films” turned out to be weird and boring beyond belief. Who would go see an hour-long movie called The Sleeper, which simply showed a man sleeping? Or the movement of an eyelid opening and shutting in slow motion, at a thousand frames a second, projected for more than three minutes? There was also crash film number 12: counting and showing each second of the twelve minutes the film lasted, which, by induced effect, was reduced to a simple display of numbers… These films were as distant and inscrutable as the mind of their maker.

When the alarm on her watch sounded, Lucie was lying with her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Six fifty-five. She had barely slept an hour or two. A cop’s night. She got up, head full of cotton wadding, and felt her way to the bathroom. A wide, silent yawn: this wouldn’t be an easy day.

In the bath, everything was incredibly orderly: a new toothbrush in a glass, blue towels hanging from the rack, their folded edges perfectly symmetrical, a razor with gleaming blade, a clean bathtub with a shower head above it. There was also a medicine cabinet—the kind of small furnishing that says more about someone’s life than lengthy explanations. Lucie looked at her reflection in the cabinet mirror. She could open it, have a look at the medications, rummage even deeper into Sharko’s privacy… What was there to find behind that door? Antidepressants? Stimulants? Anxiolytics? Or just vitamins and aspirin tablets?

She took a breath and turned on the taps in the shower. The water splashed against the tiles in a cold, intense downpour. Lucie had understood Sharko’s request: he wanted, in those first moments when dreams still have hold over the senses, to relive his wife’s presence. To believe in it just once more, if only for a fraction of a second.

Lucie returned silently to the living room, leaving the water running. A few moments later, she heard a door close… the water stop… the little trains start up, for the twenty minutes that followed.

Later, Sharko appeared, elegantly dressed. White shirt with thin blue stripes, tie, gray twill slacks. As he moved toward the kitchen, he left in his wake a scent of cologne that Lucie identified as Fahrenheit. The man gave off an aura of reassuring strength, a presence that Lucie had been missing for a long time. She rubbed her hands over her face and yawned discreetly.

Sharko turned on the radio. A lively tune filled the room. Dire Straits. Things were starting to move.

“I won’t ask if you slept well. Coffee?”

“Please—black, no sugar.”

He gave her a sidelong glance as he placed a packet in the coffee machine and turned it on. When their eyes met, he turned away toward the cabinet and took out a teaspoon.

“Nothing that remarkable about Lacombe, I suppose? Otherwise you wouldn’t have hesitated to wake me up in the middle of the night.”

Lucie came closer with a smile.

“Not much beyond what Judith Sagnol already told us. The enigmatic type, vanished into the woodwork in 1951, never heard from again. I also searched around for Syndrome E, including on medical and scientific sites—nothing, no matches found. If the Internet doesn’t know about it, it must be pretty secret.”

Sharko handed her her coffee and went to water his plants, near the kitchen window.

“You should go freshen up a bit. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a woman first thing in the morning, but you definitely look like you got up on the wrong side of the bed.”

“I’ve been up all night thinking.”

“Naturally.”

“We have to go to Canada, Inspector.”

Sharko paused a moment before setting down his watering can. His jaw tightened.

“Listen, I can’t get those children’s faces out of my head either. I saw their fear, then that frenzy in their eyes, their movements. I know that the people hiding behind that camera must have done monstrous things. But our job is in the present, Lucie, the present. It’s already shitty enough as it is. And besides, for the moment, we don’t have anything concrete to help us learn what happened to those kids.”

“Yes, we do. I did some research on the Web. In the 1950s, Montreal was heavily Catholic and had loads of orphanages run by nuns. Every child who passed through those institutions has a file that can be consulted at the city’s national archives. They have a Web site, which says you can come in without an appointment and examine the files on site. Everything is classified, organized, listed…”

“But none of that means we should be looking in Montreal.”

“The film comes from Montreal. So does the informant’s call. So does the little girl, according to the lip-reader. And don’t forget what Judith Sagnol told us about the old Montreal warehouses where she spent her stay. In the archives, it would be best to have an actual name, but a search year will do. The files contain photos. We could—”

“All we have is the date of an old film and a few prints of the kid taken from screen shots, in black and white and of poor quality.”

“And a first name she said in the film: Lydia… One of her playmates, I assume. Maybe a roommate? A year, one name, and a photo might be enough.”

“Yeah, maybe…”

“We’re moving forward inch by inch, but we are moving forward. We can print photos of some of the other girls from the film. In some shots, you can see the refectory, the swing set, bits of the yard, which might help us identify the institution. It’s not a lot, but it’s something. If we can find out who the girl was, or the other girls, we might have a chance of understanding all this.”

Sharko picked up his coffee cup and brought it to his lips. He took a large swallow.

“Canada is far away and we’ve got a lot to do here… I’ll have to think about it.”

The inspector’s telephone rang. It was Leclerc. His tone was smooth and direct.

“I’ve got good news and bad news.”

Sharko put his phone on speaker.

“I’m with Lieutenant Henebelle right now.”

“What? At your place?”

“She spent the night at a hotel, and now she’s here listening. Go ahead—what’s the bad news?”

Lucie preferred not to call Sharko on his lie: it was fair enough. The voice boomed in the speaker, serious:

“Good morning, Lieutenant Henebelle.”

“Sir.”

Leclerc cleared his throat.

“I got an answer from the Sûreté in Quebec about Jacques Lacombe. He died in 1956. His charred body was found at his home. It was ruled a household accident. He lived in Montreal.”

Sharko pressed his lips together.

“A household accident… What had he been doing before?”

“The Canadians filled me in on that too. He moved to Washington in 1951, where he worked as a projectionist at a little neighborhood movie theater for two years. In 1953, he went to live in Montreal, where he again worked as a projectionist.”

Sharko thought for a moment.

“None of that jibes with his sudden departure from France, his will to succeed as a filmmaker, or his genius… Especially since in 1955 he made that awful film with the children. There’s more to this. I don’t believe his death was accidental. Nineteen fifty-six was just after he’d shot that film—that’s too much of a coincidence. Who can dig deeper into his past? Who can find out about the circumstances surrounding the fire?”

“Nobody. Who’d want to handle it? The Americans? The Canadians? Us? We’d have to open a new case about something that took place more than fifty years ago, and for there to be an investigation, it’d have to be ruled a homicide. Not to mention all the administrative clearances. No, nothing we can do there.”

Sharko sighed, leaning on the table.

“Fine… so what’s the good news?”

“We just got back the DNA results, and we’ve identified one of the five bodies. The one who was shot in the shoulder and tore his skin off.”

Lucie noticed how brightly the inspector’s eyes shone.

“Who was it?”

“Mohamed Abane, twenty-six. Rap sheet as long as my arm. A real model childhood, with brawls, drugs, theft, racketeering. Finally did ten years for aggravated rape and mutilation.”

“More.”

“His victim, a twenty-year-old woman, almost didn’t make it out alive. His way of thanking her was to cauterize her genitals. Abane was barely sixteen at the time.”

“A real charmer.”

“He was given time off for good behavior. Released from Fresnes eleven months ago.”

Sharko’s fist tightened on the phone. For the first time since the case had begun, they finally had a concrete lead.

“Last known address?”

“He was staying with his brother Akim, in Asnières.”

“Give me the exact address.”

“Péresse already has a team on the way—they’ll be there any minute. Did you think they were going to wait for you? It’s their job, not yours. Get yourself here to the office—I’ve got the beginnings of a list for you: humanitarian organizations present in Cairo in 1994, at the time the girls were murdered.”

“That can wait.”

Sharko hung up. Lucie paced back and forth, hand under her chin.

“What are you churning over, Henebelle?”

“Lacombe died in a fire, one year after making the film. That same year, a copy arrives at the Canadian archives as an anonymous gift. What if Lacombe sensed his life was in danger? What if he’d made several copies of the film and sent them to various archives to preserve his secret, but also to make it go viral? We’ve seen how quickly the film went from hand to hand, collection to collection.”

Sharko nodded. The woman had the knack.

“In his way, Lacombe knew how to safeguard his treasure. By sending it off, simply making sure it existed and could one day be deciphered and understood. Yes, that could be.”

Lucie agreed. One by one, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, even if they couldn’t yet make out the final design. Sharko quickly dialed another number.

“Who are you calling?”

“A former colleague at Number 36 for Abane’s address. Don’t be long in the bathroom. I’ll drop you at the subway in ten minutes and you can get back home.”

Lucie smoothed out her wrinkled sweatshirt.

“The hell you will. I’m coming with you.”