Syndrome E

by Franck Thilliez

  “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.”

  38

  Asnières-sur-Seine. A tidy little town in the outskirts of Paris, with a pretty center and pleasant shops. All around them and to the north, things weren’t so nice. Blacktop replaced nature, the sky was crisscrossed by fat ivory-colored birds taking off from Charles de Gaulle, interminable bars of mouse-gray buildings closed off the horizon. The banlieue in all its splendor. And through the middle of it ran a river.

  Sharko and Lucie got off at the Gabriel Péri subway stop and quickly walked westward. Akim Abane, the brother of one of the five corpses from Gravenchon, had no criminal record and worked as a night watchman in a large department store. An upstanding guy, apparently, who lived on the fourth floor of a dark, uninviting apartment complex. At the bottom of the high-rise, Lucie was treated to a few relatively inoffensive whistles from some teenagers perched on a square of grass.

  The man who opened up for them had the sharp, dry features of a Mediterranean. A flinty face on a vigorous, muscular body. Someone familiar with weightlifting and bench presses. Sharko made the first move:

  “Akim Abane?”

  “Who are you?”

  To Sharko’s relief, Péresse’s men hadn’t arrived yet. He congratulated himself on his speed and showed his ID. Abane was lounging at home in shorts and a white T-shirt, which bore the legend FONTENAY MARATHON.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about your brother, Mohamed.”

  The Arab didn’t budge from the doorway.

  “What’s he done now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Akim Abane hesitated a moment before balling up his fist and punching the door frame.

  “How?”

  Sharko kept it brief, sparing him the worst.

  “Apparently killed by a gunshot. They found his body buried near a construction site in Seine-Maritime. Can we come in?”

  Abane moved aside.

  “Seine-Maritime…What the hell was he doing there?”

  The man didn’t shed a tear, but the news had shaken him, so much so that he had to sit down on the sofa. The cops invited themselves inside.

  “I knew it would end like this someday…Who could have done such a thing?”

  “We don’t know yet. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I don’t know. He had so many enemies. Here in the housing development, and outside.”

  Lucie cast a quick glance around the room. Flat-screen TV, gaming console, running shoes everywhere: too much stuff in too little space. She noticed some photos in a frame. She moved closer, her brows knit.

  “Were you twins?”

  “No, Mohamed was a year younger than me, and an inch or two taller. But we were just like each other. I mean physically. Otherwise I was nothing like him. Mohamed had a screw loose.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  Akim Abane stared at the floor, eyes vacant.

  “Two or three months after he got out, around New Year’s. Mohamed had come crying to me saying he wanted to change his life, make up for what he’d done. I never believed him. It wasn’t possible.”

  New Year’s…So that brought the dating of the skeletons to less than seven months. Sharko already knew the answer to his next question, but he let the brother give it:

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because guys like him never stop. They showed me photos of that girl he’d burned between the legs, ages ago. The image is stuck here, in my brain. It wasn’t human…” He sighed. “Mohamed stayed with me a week or so. Let’s see—it must have been around mid-January when he left with just some personal stuff in a bag.”

  He fell silent for a few moments.

  “I never believed for an instant that he’d do it…and I was right.”

  “Do what?”

  With a sigh, Akim Abane stood up, opened a drawer, and riffled through some papers. He handed Sharko a slightly crumpled brochure.

  The inspector’s heart leaped.

  In that fraction of a second, everything became clear.

  The brochure vaunted the merits of the Foreign Legion.

  He raised his eyes to Lucie, who was also taken aback.

  Akim took his seat again, hands joined between his powerful legs.

  “One day, Mohamed found that in a magazine, in jail. To hear him tell it, you’d have thought it was a revelation. The military—that’s what he wanted to join. Wipe the slate clean. Change his identity, start from scratch. Yeah, sure…”

  He picked up the framed picture, showing him standing next to his brother, and stared at it a long time.

  “You stupid shit, what’d you have to go die for?”

  Deep inside, Sharko was rejoicing. The Foreign Legion…It fit so perfectly with what they’d discovered in the past few days. Lucie picked up the questioning.

  “Do you have any proof that he joined the Legion? Letters, phone calls, anything? Had he bought a train ticket for…the south?”

  “Aubagne?” Sharko specified.

  The Arab shook his head.

>   “No, I’m telling you, he never joined. I knew him—he wasn’t capable. Too unstable, and he had a real problem with authority. Can you imagine him over there? I came home from work one day and he’d cleared out. Hadn’t even taken his brochure. Not a good-bye, nothing…I knew someday the cops would come knocking on my door.”

  The inspector tightened his jaws, eyes staring at the illustrated ad of a soldier in white kepi, posing proudly with all his medals. It was clear to him that Mohamed Abane had joined the Legion after all, but there wasn’t any direct proof. Even his brother didn’t believe it.

  “Do you have any family, a relative or friend your brother might have gone to stay with after he left here?”

  “Apart from some real creeps, I can’t think of anyone.”

  Sharko continued to think. While everything seemed to be falling in place, there was still a huge piece that didn’t fit: why sever the hands, pull the teeth, and scrape off the tattoos of someone who could simply be identified through DNA? In the Legion, they must have known that Mohamed Abane had a long rap sheet. They might erase the past of their recruits, but they were scrupulous about verifying it first. They clearly would have known the Arab was registered on the national DNA database and would be well aware of the extent of his crimes.

  Unless…

  Sharko raised his dark eyes toward the photo of the two brothers.

  “I have a question that might seem strange…Your identity card didn’t go missing around that time, did it?”

  Akim nodded.

  “Actually, it did. I must have lost it at work or in the street. How did you guess?”

  Sharko didn’t respond. Lucie was just as confused as the bodybuilder. The cop had all the answers he needed, and his conviction had been reinforced. He held his hand out to the Arab and Lucie did the same.

  “Some cops from Rouen will be here very soon. They’ll ask a lot of questions and take notes. Don’t be alarmed—it’s just routine.”

  Before leaving, with Lucie ahead of him, Sharko turned back toward Akim, who hadn’t moved from his sofa.

  “By the way…your brother had a tiny particle of plastic sheathing under his skin, near his neck. Do you know if he’d had an operation?”

  “No, no…”

  “Any stays in the hospital?”

  “I don’t think so. But the truth is, I have no idea.”

  “Thank you. I promise that you’ll have answers. The people responsible for this are going to pay. I’m going to see to it personally.”

  And he gently closed the door behind him.

  39

  Lucie and Sharko were sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment in L’Haÿ-les-Roses. They had bought some pastries on the way. She was biting into a croissant, while he had gone for a pain au chocolat, which he dunked meticulously in his coffee. For the first time in several days, clouds of a perfect white fluffed in the sky outside the window. Sharko spoke between two mouthfuls:

  “It all fits. Bodies no one can identify—probably foreigners who came to France by whatever means available. That’s often how it works with the Legion.”

  Lucie picked up the thread: “The professional way they went about hiding the corpses and removing any identifying marks. The description we got from Luc Szpilman, the combat boots…Soldiers…”

  “Not to mention the hair analysis, showing that three of them had quit taking drugs in the weeks before death. It fits perfectly with guys who want to start their lives over, guys you take charge of with an iron hand. Young legionnaires in training. Cadets.”

  Sharko shoved in a mouthful of pastry. He seemed in good spirits, almost happy.

  “What was that business about the missing ID card?” asked Lucie.

  “Simple logic. Mohamed Abane was the classic deviant personality. With a background like his, he could never have gotten into the Legion. Recruiters in Aubagne will overlook practically any crime, except the really serious ones—murder, rape, sex crimes…Abane faked his identity so he could join.”

  “By stealing his brother’s card?”

  “Sure. All you need to show at the Foreign Legion recruiting station is a valid ID. That’s all. It’s the only link between your past and your future. Mohamed Abane just showed them his brother’s card. The two men looked a lot alike, so the recruiters were fooled and thought they were dealing with a clean record.”

  Sharko was beaming. Lucie suddenly saw him as sure of himself, overflowing with vitality. A man who was regaining a taste for the hunt and the field. He drank his coffee, lost in thought.

  “It almost all fits…”

  “Almost?”

  “Almost, yes. I was thinking about the five murdered cadets. There’s nothing worse than the selection process, and especially the ten weeks of drills that come after. Hell on earth. They put you through every kind of physical and psychological torture, until you’re ready to off yourself. It’s easy to imagine one or several recruits fighting back or popping a cork. If we push it a bit further, let’s suppose they run into a serious hitch. An instructor who has no choice but to shoot, because they’ve given these guys real guns. But then, why would they have removed the brains and eyes before burying them?”

  He was moving so fast that Lucie had to think for a few moments before answering:

  “Because they’re trying to hide much more than just a hitch? Because, behind all this, there’s that diabolical film and those children locked in a room, slaughtering animals?”

  “And the girls who were brutally murdered in Africa. Egypt, France, Canada. It’s all related without being related. The real problem is that the Foreign Legion hasn’t set foot in Egypt for more than fifty years. Apart from a similarity in MO, apart from that hysterical phenomenon we suspect, we don’t have any link between the two series of crimes. As for the film, we’re still not sure what it has to do with all this.”

  Lucie ran a hand over her face. Nervous exhaustion was weighing more and more heavily on her. Sharko continued to think aloud.

  “They really are good. Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon—there’s nothing there. Not even a military training camp. We should make sure, but I’m convinced the Legion has never set foot there. Maybe if we’d found the bodies around Aubagne, but there…they completely covered themselves.”

  “So what are you saying, that we have no way of getting at the Legion?”

  “Accusations are serious business, and you know how it works. Even if our reasoning holds water, we need actual proof. Witnesses, paperwork, traces of some kind. But all we’ve got is our conviction. Neither my department nor Criminal will launch an investigation based on simple deductions. Stolen ID or no, Mohamed Abane’s past works against us. The Legion will deny categorically that they’d ever recruit someone like that. No violent crimes with them—that’s a golden rule.”

  A silence. Lucie wiped her hands on a napkin.

  “And if someone decided to bring charges against the Legion even so, what would that be like?”

  Sharko let his arm fall in front of him, in a sign of despair.

  “We’d have to present our findings to the minister of defense. On the off chance it worked, we’d need a court order and a mountain of paperwork just to be allowed to question a few handpicked individuals. The whole thing would eat up a lot of time and come to the attention of the Legion top brass, who could easily spin it however they wished. Assuming it still went forward, we’d still run up against the Military Secrets Act. We’d certainly have to deal with some bigwig, a colonel or general, probably with top secret clearance or higher. I’ve run up against that kind of joker before, a few years back. You might as well be talking to an anchor at the bottom of the sea. The Legion is body, the Legion is mind. Even if some of them saw things, and even assuming they’re still on French soil, they won’t say a word.”

  Lucie slowly slid her finger around her coffee cup.

  “And what if we got around procedure?”

  Sharko looked at her coolly.

  “Out of the question.
”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it.”

  Sharko shrugged.

  “You’re too young to go off the rails. You want some friendly advice? Stop inviting trouble. Your kids will never forgive you.”

  “Can it with the sermons. We go in aboveboard. We show up and ask to talk to the commanding officer about a suspect we’re looking for, for instance. If he agrees to see us, we guide him toward our case nice and easy. If he’s really involved, he’s almost sure to react.”

  “React how? You think he’s going to shout the truth from the rooftops?”

  “No, but maybe he’ll get nervous, or make some phone calls. We can trace his line…or stake out his place. I don’t know…long-range mics, maybe?”

  Sharko let out an unpleasant snicker.

  “You’ve been watching too much Mission: Impossible. His house must be stuffed to the gills with high-frequency detectors. Little army toys, capable of picking up any wave emission for dozens of yards around. And you can bet his phone is on a dedicated encrypted line. Most of those guys are total paranoiacs—that’s why they get chosen for the job. What say we get real?”

  “So just like that, we let them get away with it and keep our traps shut?”

  Sharko didn’t answer; he stared at his open hands on the table. Lucie squeezed her napkin between her fingers.

  “Well, I’m not going to keep my mouth shut. If you don’t feel like coming, I’ll go alone. When you step in it, you have to see it through to the bitter end.”

  She disappeared quickly into the bathroom. Sharko sighed. She was capable of doing it—a real hothead. After thinking it over a while, he got up, walked down the hall, and stopped in front of the locked bathroom door.

  “Do you need a visa or something like that to go to Canada?” he called in a loud voice.