The First Fingerprint

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  Inside, it was dark; only a glimmer of daylight filtered through the shutters. He did not turn on the light and stood for some time in the corridor, until his eyes had become used to the gloom.

  The house oozed comfort and smelled of dust, wax and wood-smoke. Beams on the ceiling gave it that old fragrance of rustic charm.

  Walking up the corridor to the salon door, he filled his lungs with this scent which reminded him of his childhood.

  The mistral rising in the mighty branches of the plane trees carries the children’s cries far away. All day, the sun beats down. The night is heavy and dense.

  In the salon, Papa reads his paper, as he does every evening; he goes to sit next to him on the leather sofa and gently lays his cheek on his lap. In front of him is the small leather easy chair, reserved for his mother, and the Persian rug with its geometric patterns and complex arabesques—he imagines high-speed circuits for his toy cars. But he is not allowed to play in the salon.

  He looks up, glances at the knickknacks on the sideboard before lingering over the painting he likes best: a landscape of the port of Marseille in the ’30s. He imagines being a naval officer like his grandfather and his great-grandfather, like most of the men in his father’s family.

  A naval officer with a spotless uniform and beautiful, gold-stitched stripes.

  Sometimes, his grandfather takes him on cargo ships. Shyly he looks at the old sailors and shakes their gnarled hands, scared by their little laughing eyes, by the huge wrinkles surrounding them—indelible marks of long watches spent on the decks of ships, with only the dazzling gleam of the sea for scenery.

  He would have liked to have known the port of Marseille in the ’30s. To have seen the steam from the ships on their way to Indochina, the Sainte-Marie strait with its massive, black, fat-bellied tugs, strenuously pulling along the mail ships from Asia, the Far East or America; the dark coal-smoke which swathed La Major cathedral; the sailors’ sons coming to wave home a father who had been away all these long months. Marseille back then must have smelled of camphor, cinnamon and precious wood, of coke and the heavy fruits of Black Africa.

  He screamed, closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift back into place. Methodically. As always. A few minutes later, he opened his eyes: his childhood had disappeared. He was calm, but his body was now completely drained of energy.

  It was time for the hunt. After the long hours, the bird was coming. It was there, a few meters away, behind the tall grasses. It had come to drink from the only pool on the entire, vast plain. The lance with its flint tip had been placed in its stick of hooks. The bird approached. He looked up.

  A good hunter must not miss his first shot.

  The bird was a few paces away, dipping its beak in the water, then stretching its neck. Once, twice.

  In a flash, he launched the lance. The bird took wing…

  A great hunter must not miss his first shot.

  Beside the front door, the answering machine was flashing in the half-light. It showed the number eleven, in red batons. Eleven messages. All from patients canceling their appointments between Christmas and the New Year. The eleventh was a woman’s voice:

  “Excuse me, Doctor, this is Hélène Weill speaking. I’m sorry to disturb you at home, but you never answer your mobile. Anyway, I’d like to cancel my appointment on Thursday 28. And I was wondering if you were available today.”

  The night augured well.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed. Hélène told him that she really needed him. Christmas was making her feel terribly anxious. She could come now, or any time he wanted, even late that evening. But she simply had to see him, at any price. He suggested taking her to a restaurant, a lovely little place which he knew well. It would be nicer than the psychiatrist’s couch.

  “I’ll pick you up from your house before 8:00. We’ll go to Cadenet. I have a friend there who’s just opened a little bistro. You’ll see, it’s a bit of a drive, but it’s just perfect.”

  It was 6:00 p.m. He glanced at the cast-iron hooks above the telephone: the keys to the doctor’s Mercedes were there.

  But first of all he had to perform the ritual.

  He went up to the first floor, to the psychiatrist’s vast study, placed his rucksack on a Chippendale chair, and took out a small bottle of mineral water and a plastic box containing some red powder.

  He pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, opened the box, poured a little of the powder into the palm of his right hand, lifted it to his mouth and started to chew carefully before taking a mouthful of water. He placed his hand on a sheet of white paper, bending his little and ring fingers. He then spat out the liquid over his hand, again and again, until it was covered in red. When he lifted it up, a negative image of his hand had been left on the white paper.

  He waited for it to dry, looked at the result of his labors and said aloud:

  “Spirit of the hunt

  Goddess of life

  Here is the hunter’s sign

  Take her life to fortify mine

  May her death be swift

  May I not make her suffer

  May your spirit guide me in the shadows

  May the force of her blood enter into my blood

  May her flesh fortify the first man.”

  Carefully he slipped the sheet of paper into a green plastic folder and left the mansion.

  Hélène Weill lived alone in a flat on rue Boulegon, right in the center of Aix. At 7:30 p.m., he called her from a phone box to say that he was late, and that it was impossible to park in her narrow street, so could she wait on the ringroad, just by the Ford garage.

  “Hélène, I’m a bit late,” he said. “I’ll send along a friend of mine. Another patient … He’ll pick you up in my car. You’ll see, he’s a wonderful guy. Just won-der-ful! He’ll recognize you, don’t worry, he’s already seen you around in my consulting room. Then you can come and have a drink at my house. How about that?”

  Hélène had chosen a rather strict suit. When she got into the Mercedes, he noticed that she had raised her skirt high enough so that he could see between her thighs. He paid no apparent attention and pulled away.

  It took them fifteen minutes to get out of Aix. The streets were jammed in a late rush-hour of people who had being doing last-minute Christmas shopping. He managed to win her trust by inventing a few problems for himself and an imaginary therapy. Hélène told him of her hallucinations, dwelling on an image that had recurred constantly in her nightmares since her last visit to the psychiatrist: being raped by three scouts. And the nights she spent smoking joints and masturbating. He listened to her without a word, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  They left Aix. Hélène talked about herself non-stop, into a vacuum. He was not listening any more.

  When they had passed the village of Puyricard, he slowed and turned down a forest track. He drove on for a good hundred meters, then stopped the car.

  “Get out,” he ordered firmly.

  Hélène smiled limply, her chest rose, her thighs drew apart.

  “Get out,” he ordered even more forcefully. “And wait for me there, in front of the car. I won’t be long.”

  She obeyed at once, got out of the car and took a few steps in the white light of the headlamps. He opened the boot of the Mercedes without listening to the romantic chat the woman was serving him up. He put on his latex gloves and picked up a strange object shaped like a tomahawk: a rudimentary ax, with a wooden handle measuring about fifty centimeters and, at the tip, a huge piece of biface flint, perfectly sharpened and held in place with dried gut.

  Slowly, he approached Hélène, his eyes on fire. She heard him recite out loud, in a calm voice:

  “I am the hunter

  Give me your blood

  May the spirits of the dead guide you through the night

  May your flesh fortify the first man …”

  Hélène gasped.

  “But, what do you …?”

  She stepped back, falling over a
tree trunk on the ground, her legs spread.

  He grabbed her arm, yanking her upward while repeating through gritted teeth:

  “May your flesh fortify the first man.”

  The flint ax lodged itself deep in the skull of his prey. He hit her again coolly, like a butcher. Small shards of bone and scraps of gray brain flew into the air. Then there was silence.

  He examined the prostrate body: Hélène, her face crushed, looked like a crazed puppet. Her muscles were still twitching. He dipped his finger in the blood which was foaming out of her mouth and tasted it.

  “May your flesh fortify the first man.”

  He pulled up her skirt and tore off her stockings. The nylon soughed, and an acrid smell rose up. He stood back to get a good look at the slaughtered flesh still quivering at his feet.

  It was at that moment that he started to howl like a beast, and bit into the still-warm flesh of her thigh.

  Once. Twice.

  Then he went back to the car to fetch a long, narrow piece of flint, as sharp as a kitchen knife, kneeled down between Hélène’s thighs and began to slice her up. When he reached the femur, he struck it with the ax with one swift movement, as precise as a horse butcher.

  Five minutes later, he was holding Hélène’s left leg at arm’s length, swinging it to and fro in a broad arc to empty it of what was left of its blood. He then paused for breath before wrapping the mass of wobbly flesh in several bin-liners and putting it in the boot of the Mercedes.

  He returned to the body, placed the sheet of paper with its negative hand under Hélène’s right arm, then disappeared into the night.

  He was in no hurry.

  4.

  At around noon on January 4, de Palma and Jean-Louis Maistre walked into Le Zanzi, the squad’s local bar on rue de l’Evêché. Dédé the landlord yelled thunderously as he served up the rounds of pastis and J&B:

  “Watch out, here come the real men!”

  Dédé was the only person who found this funny. De Palma and Maistre let him get on with it. Two Ricards arrived almost at once, along with the landlord’s big, fat, sweaty hand, which they had to shake.

  Dédé had been running Le Zanzi for the past four years. He served on average fifty meals a day and hundreds of drinks, and could get the parking tickets of his friends and family written off in return.

  “O.K., boys?”

  “As ever.”

  “You’re looking off-color, Baron. Like you’re miles away.”

  “No, I’m fine … I just had a bad night’s sleep. And I don’t like pastis.”

  “So why do you drink it?”

  “To be like everyone else …”

  Dédé had not yet cleaned the Christmas decorations off the window of Le Zanzi, even though the illustrations were no better than last year’s. With “genuine snow” spray, he had tried to sketch out a tree, then squirted out a Santa and added stars here and there, like jewels. Large, back to front, joined-up writing read:

  “Saturday December 20, Grand Lottery at Le Zanzi, big prizes, Xmas hampers, a DVD player to be won …”

  De Palma spotted Maxime Vidal staring absently at his glass of mint syrup at the corner of the bar. He walked over to him.

  “Did you hear about that business at Cadenet, Michel?”

  “What, the woman they found?”

  “Yes.”

  Maistre stuck his nose between the two of them, spinning the ice in his empty glass.

  “Baron, a drought is setting in!”

  “We’re talking about that Cadenet business.”

  “He must have been a complete maniac. They haven’t found all the bits!”

  The previous day, de Palma had received a call from the Cadenet gendarmerie, who were looking for possible information about a murder in the countryside around Aix. They were still trying to come to terms with the case; they had never seen anything like it before.

  “A hunter found her,” he was told. “It’s atrocious, absolutely fucking atrocious. How could a human being do something like that?”

  The state prosecutor had allocated this investigation to the gendarmerie. So de Palma could do nothing. Yet, he sensed that this murder was just the beginning of a series of murders, or else a repetition of a similar case which had happened in Aubagne a year ago. They hadn’t found all the pieces then either, but what interested him most was the gendarmerie’s mention of an image of a negative hand. It showed that the killer was a maniac, a cold, precise individual who liked signing and staging his murders. Then there was the lack of material evidence: the gendarmes had not found a single, usable clue on the scene of the crime apart from the traces of tires belonging to a large car, probably a Mercedes. It was something they still had to check out.

  Capitaine Anne Moracchini burst into Le Zanzi. She was rubbing her hands to warm them up.

  “Michel, did you hear about what happened at Cadenet?” she asked with a tremor.

  “Don’t talk to me about it! It’s been given to the gendarmerie.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it! They’re talking about cannibalism … I thought things like that only happened in America, or in darkest Africa!”

  “What have you got against Africans? The world never changes, my lovely, there have always been loonies like that, and there always will be. The only problem is that there seem to be more and more of them! We’ve put two of them up for trial in the last year. Not counting the ones we never catch!”

  “What’s all this about a picture of a hand found beside the body?”

  “I’ve got an idea or two about that. I’ll tell you later.”

  The hand was a signature. The beginnings of a lead, but what sort of lead? Eventually it would get its author caught. But when?

  No-one could answer that question. They would have to wait. De Palma shuddered at the very idea of waiting for the next death, and the next hand. The next autopsy. Then comparing, analyzing and theorizing. The steamroller of the police force: entire days spent cogitating for nothing, waiting for a third corpse, starting all over … Until the killer slipped up. If he did.

  It bugged de Palma—it was a matter of pride—the gendarmes had already solved the two finest serial-killer cases so far. They had checkmated the police force, no doubt about it. When he had gone to bed late the previous night, completely exhausted, he had cursed the prosecutor for handing the investigation over to the gendarmerie.

  He emerged from his thoughts. Moracchini was talking with Vidal about a case of legal identity. Maistre walked over to him looking mysterious.

  “Do you know what happened to me last night, Baron?”

  De Palma shook his head and grunted, his mouth working on a particularly resistant olive.

  “We got a message …”

  Still struggling with his olive, de Palma grunted again.

  “A message from the M.L.A., do you know what that stands for, M … L … A …?”

  “No.”

  “The Marseille Liberation Army …”

  “Are you feeling O.K., Jean-Louis? You’re with friends here, having a nice quiet drink … So calm down and quit raving!”

  “I swear to you, it’s true! The message read: ‘We are the M.L.A., the Marseille Liberation Army. We demand the release of Eric Laugier, the Marseille patriot. The people of Marseille are behind us.’”

  “After the Corsicans, the Bretons and the Basques, now we have the M.L.A. … Really, Le Gros, you’re so funny. When you’ve had one too many, you wax amphigorical!”

  “What?”

  “Amphigorical. It means an intentionally obscure spoken or written style. Gibberish, in another words. It’s in the police force handbook. So who is this Laugier?”

  “He’s the guy from La Plaine who planted some bombs at the National Front’s premises two years ago. Remember? You’re getting past it too! There was a death. We were on the scene together.”

  “So what’s the connection between a spotty militant and the Marseille Liberation Army?”

  “
They’re a group of agitators. They want to liberate Marseille from French colonialism, from the domination of Paris, that kind of thing … They want to return to the days when Marseille was a republic. It all goes back to the year dot.”

  Laugier had set a large amount of explosives in the premises of the National Front on rue Sainte like a real pro. At the time, they had thought that the Corsicans were behind it. A man had been killed during the explosion, a former paratrooper who was also a member of regional counselor Francis Codaccioni’s entourage.

  A few months ago, Laugier had been tried and sentenced to ten years. Ever since, a group of militants had been campaigning for his liberation, covering the walls of La Plaine and surrounding areas with posters demanding justice, and writing regularly to the President and Prime Minister, either to ask for a pardon, or to insult them, depending on the mood of the writer. Laugier was a new-look terrorist, a shadowy fighter for an unexpected cause, and had become the off-beat martyr of Marseille’s independent fighters. The Che Guevara of La Plaine, minus the beard and the cigar.

  “I thought Laugier was a good guy,” de Palma said, swallowing a final olive, which turned out just as stubborn as the others; its flesh stuck firmly on to its stone, like a limpet resisting the knife of a starving fisherman. He turned to Dédé.

  “Where do you buy your olives?”

  “My mother-in-law makes them. It’s a time-honored recipe. Just like olives of old!”

  “Your mother-in-law isn’t a member of the M.L.A. by any chance?”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind, I’ll explain one of these days.”

  In the early afternoon, de Palma was alone in his office. He had nothing to do and intended to spend a few hours trying to discover the meaning of the negative hand found beside Hélène Weill’s body. It was the basic curiosity of a passionate investigator. A vague idea had occurred to him: he wanted to contact a specialist, someone at the university who would be able to explain the meaning of this drawing. He picked up the phone book and started to flick through it while whistling the opening of the overture of “Aida.”