The Gray Sisters…Just the name gave Lucie gooseflesh. She imagined stony faces, eyes like dull mercury.
“Would it be possible to get the list of the sisters who are still living there?”
Lucie was thinking of Sister Marie du Calvaire. Richaud knit her brow.
“That should be feasible, yes.”
“And can you also tell me what this dark period of your country is about? I’d like to know what happened, exactly.”
The employee remained frozen for a few seconds. She set down a heavy ring of keys on the table and swept her gaze over the piles of papers.
“It all has to do with those thousands of children, miss. An entire generation of little ones sacrificed and tortured. The only trace of it is what remains here, in this room. They called them the Duplessis Orphans.”
She headed for the door.
“I’ll be back with your list.”
45
One o’clock in the morning, French time. Earlier that evening, Sharko had received in his in-box the list of attendees at the SIGN conference in 1994.
The inspector had printed out the document and gone back to his kitchen table, discreetly lit by a small lamp. From the outside, it had to look like he was asleep.
According to the information supplied by the ministry of health, the conference had lasted from March 7 to 14. The select participants had arrived and returned on an airplane specially chartered by the Egyptian government. It wasn’t exactly the VIP tour, but it wasn’t far off.
By a disturbing coincidence, the murders had all taken place between March 10 and 12, in the midst of the conference. According to the profile drawn up early in the investigation, one of the killers had a knowledge of medicine. The use of ketamine, the slicing of the skulls, the enucleation…The problem with this list was that the 217 French men and women in Egypt at that moment—not counting those from the humanitarian aid organizations, a whole other story—all had some notion of medicine, and the term “notion” was putting it mildly. Neurosurgeons, professors of psychiatry, medical students, researchers and department heads, biologists, most of whom had lived at the time in Paris or its environs. The cream of the French research community, individuals who seemed above reproach.
Two hundred seventeen lives—one hundred sixteen men and one hundred and one women—that he had to dissect in detail, on the basis of fifteen-year-old suppositions.
From the moment he held the sheets in his hand, Sharko felt increasingly certain that one of these individuals, aware of the phenomenon of mass hysteria that had afflicted Egypt in 1993, had made the trip a year later, using the conference as a pretext, with the sole aim of slaughtering three innocent girls in order to steal their brains and eyes.
The name of the killer or killers must have been hiding in these papers.
The questions that tormented him, the late hour, Eugenie’s constant visits, and the palpable tension in the apartment prevented him from really concentrating on the list. His head was full of shadows.
Sharko sighed. He finished his mint tea, staring into space. The military, medicine, filmmaking, this business about Syndrome E…The cop knew he was involved in a case that went far beyond the standard manhunt. Something monstrous, the likes of which he’d never seen. And yet he’d confronted his share of monstrosities, more than he could count on both hands.
In the dead of night, his keen senses suddenly focused on the entry door.
An infinitesimal sound of metal pierced the silence in the hallway.
Immediately, Sharko turned off the light and grabbed up his Sig.
Here they were.
Beneath his door, he saw, very briefly, the beam of a flashlight, before everything went black again.
His jaw set, he slowly got up from his chair and crept toward the living room.
On the other side, the linoleum floor creaked slightly. Sharko felt the edge of his sofa and crouched down, his gun aimed blindly in front of him. He could have attacked from the front, by surprise, but he didn’t know how many there were. One thing was for sure: they rarely went out alone.
The creaking in the hall stopped. The cop’s palms were moist on the grip of his gun. He suddenly thought of the photos of the film restorer’s body: hanging from the ceiling, disemboweled and stuffed with film. Not an enviable fate.
The door handle turned, very slowly, before returning to its initial position. In the following seconds, Sharko expected them to go for the lock, then burst in armed with knives or silencers.
Time stretched out forever.
Suddenly he heard a rustle under the door.
The creaking started up again, then decreased in a regular rhythm.
Sharko rushed to the door and gave the dead bolt a precise twist. The next second, he was in the hallway, barrel pointed forward. With his fist, he banged on the light switch and flew into the stairwell. Downstairs, the main door slammed shut. Sharko took the stairs two at a time, almost unable to breathe. The foyer, then the street. A long line of pallid streetlamps ran down the asphalt. Left, right—not a soul. Just the murmur of a slight breeze and the slow breath of night.
Behind him, the building’s entry door flapped shut but didn’t close completely. Sharko noted a small square of cardboard taped to the plate, preventing the bolt from going in. Whoever it was must have put it there earlier in the evening after a resident had gone through, and could therefore come back at any time without having to buzz in. Basic, but smart.
The detective ran back upstairs to his apartment. He switched on the lights, turned the locks, and, with his foot, pushed the white envelope that had been slid under the door into his living room. He did not pick it up until he’d put on a pair of latex gloves, which he kept in boxes of one hundred under the sink—can’t be too careful.
The envelope looked elegant, lightweight, the kind used for correspondence. With a tightness in his throat, Sharko looked it over completely, then opened it with a knife blade.
He had a very bad intuition.
Inside, he found only a photo.
It showed Lucie Henebelle and himself coming out of his apartment. The morning after the night they’d spent here.
Lucie’s head was circled in red marker.
Sharko leaped onto his cell phone and punched in the woman’s number.
Still no ring, as if the number simply didn’t exist.
It was them. Sharko was certain of it. Somehow or other, they had neutralized the SIM card of her cell phone.
The next moment, with trembling fingers, he dialed the number of the Delta Montreal. The hotel staff informed him that there was no one in Mme. Henebelle’s room; the key was still at reception. Sharko told the operator that he had an urgent message for Lucie Henebelle, that she absolutely had to call him the moment she returned.
He’d thought he was putting her out of harm’s way by sending her across the ocean.
But he had completely isolated her.
Thrown her into the lion’s den.
Half an hour later, not knowing what else to do, he knocked at Martin Leclerc’s door in the twelfth arrondissement, near the Bastille.
It was not quite two in the morning.
46
At a little after six in the evening, Lucie was sitting across from the archivist, in the alcove that smelled of old papers and distant history. Patricia Richaud nervously fingered her pendant of the Virgin Mary, while Lucie skimmed down the list of nuns still present at La Charité Hospital. A peculiar atmosphere reigned in that forgotten lair, at once heavy and tense.
Lucie stabbed her finger at the list.
“She’s still there. Sister Marie du Calvaire. Eighty-five years old. She’s still alive.”
She sat back in her chair with a sigh of relief. This aged woman had lived with Alice Tonquin. She must know at least part of the truth.
Satisfied, Lucie focused her attention. Patricia had begun speaking.
“In the years you’re asking about, they did not forgive a woman for giving birth out
of wedlock. Mothers who did not observe that norm were treated as pariahs, sinners. Their own parents rejected them. Because of this, pregnant young women tried every means to hide their sin, often leaving their home for several months so they could give birth in secret behind the walls of the convent.”
Lucie unconsciously circled the name “Alice Tonquin” in her small memo book. She couldn’t get the little girl’s face out of her mind; she knew that the old film she’d watched that first day, in her ex-boyfriend Ludovic’s private cinema, would continue to haunt her for a long time.
“They abandoned their children there,” she murmured.
Richaud nodded.
“Yes, the baby was then taken in by the nuns. The idea was that the orphan would later be raised by a good family, that it would have every chance in life. But starting with the economic crash of the thirties, the adoption rate plunged. Most of those children grew up and remained in the institutions. So they had to build more day cares, convents, orphanages, and hospitals. The Church began to carry more and more weight in the government. Gradually, it increased its influence over institutions such as health services, education, public welfare…The Church was everywhere.”
Lucie had barely seen any of Montreal, but she’d noticed the countless religious monuments next to the offices of IBM and major financial corporations. A city marked by a weighty Catholic past, which neither modernism nor capitalism managed to obscure.
“When Maurice Duplessis came to power in 1944, it was the start of a critical period in Quebec’s political history. People would later call that period the ‘Great Darkness.’ The Duplessis administration was first and foremost about anticommunism, the use of strong-arm tactics against trade unions, and an invincible political machine. His party often enjoyed the very active support of the Roman Catholic Church in electoral campaigns. And you know how powerful the Church is, miss…”
Lucie pushed Alice’s photo toward the librarian.
“And what does this have to do with these orphans? How is this little eight-year-old girl involved in all this?”
“I’m getting to that. Between 1940 and 1950, the children placed in orphanages came, for the most part, from broken families that couldn’t afford to keep them. The families paid fees to the orphanages to raise their progeny, fees that were much higher than the state allocations. Up to that point, the system worked reasonably well; the Church took in the money and used it to develop its charitable activities. But the mass arrival of illegitimate orphans posed a serious problem: first of all, they filled the institutions beyond capacity, but worse than that, no one was paying for them, other than the federal government, which offered an absurd daily allowance of seventy cents per child. Understand that these illegitimate children had to be housed, fed, and given the education that every human being has a right to. With such limited financial resources, and despite everything, the nuns still tried to raise and educate these orphans in hardship and poverty. Whatever eventually happened, no one can blame them for their courage. They weren’t responsible…”
She paused a moment, her eyes staring into space, before resuming her explanation.
“Alongside that, in 1950, the Church built Mont Providence Hospital, a school that specialized in the education of orphans with slight intellectual deficiencies. The aim of the institution was to educate those children and help foster their integration into society. But in 1953, the hospital was on the verge of bankruptcy. The religious communities had gone more than six million dollars into debt to the federal government, and the government was demanding repayment. The nuns found themselves at an impasse, so they called on the provincial government. And it was at that point that everything changed, that the hell began, and Quebec would know what is certainly the darkest period in its history.”
Lucie listened carefully. Once again they were smack in the period of her search, the early fifties. Despite the dampness of her skin, she couldn’t repress a shiver. Patricia Richaud was now talking in a cold, almost didactic voice.
“Maurice Duplessis authorized a maneuver allowing that hospital, which was only for the slightly retarded, to be turned into an actual insane asylum. Why? Because in an asylum, the daily allowance paid by the federal government goes from zero to two dollars and twenty-five cents per person. Because in an asylum, there’s no obligation to hold classes, and so they could do away with spending money on education. Because having the status of psychiatric hospital allowed them to use those children as free labor, without regard for human rights. The healthy children took care of the sick ones, bathed them, cooked their meals, assisted the nuns, nurses, and doctors. And so, overnight, the boarders at the special school of Mont Providence suddenly became inmates in a hospital for the insane.”
Insanity…madness…The wave of children who suddenly started massacring animals, their eyes filled with incomprehensible hatred. Lucie felt her muscles stiffen.
“At that point, a whole monstrous system was set in place. The government promoted the construction of new psychiatric hospitals or transformed existing establishments into asylums. Saint-Charles-de-Joliette, Saint-Jean-de-Dieu in Montreal, Saint-Michel-Archange in Quebec, Sainte-Anne in Baie-Saint-Paul, Saint-Julien in Saint-Ferdinand d’Halifax…and that’s not all of them. Those illegitimate orphans, whom no one knew what to do with, became the unfortunate victims of the Duplessis government. The nuns in those places were powerless. They had no choice but to bow to the regulations dictated by their mothers superior.”
She sighed again. Her words grew heavier and heavier. Lucie noted and circled “Saint-Julien, Saint-Ferdinand d’Halifax,” where Lydia had died. Was it possible that Lydia had never left that institution since childhood? Had the rabbit slaughter taken place there, years earlier?
“From the 1940s to the ’60s, under government auspices, Quebec doctors employed by the religious communities falsified the medical records of the illegitimate orphans. They pronounced them ‘mentally unfit’ and ‘mentally retarded.’ In the blink of an eye, thousands of perfectly healthy children found themselves interned in asylums, mixed in with actual mental patients, for years on end. Simply because they had had the misfortune of being born illegitimate. Those children are now adults, and they’re still known as the Duplessis Orphans.”
What Lucie was hearing surpassed all understanding. A mass derangement, with the aid of bogus medical records and money under the table.
“You mean these Duplessis Orphans have been identified? They’re still alive?”
“Some are, yes, of course, even though many of them have since passed away or eventually developed mental conditions for real, because of the treatments, the punishments, and the beatings they suffered during all those years. A hundred or so individuals have formed an association. For years they’ve been asking for restitution from the state and the Church. But it’s a long, long struggle.”
Lucie felt nauseated. She thought of the images from the film, of what Judith Sagnol had told them, of that antiseptic white room where the massacre had taken place, of the mysterious doctor who had been there beside the filmmaker…There was no doubt that Alice Tonquin and Lydia Hocquart had been Duplessis Orphans. Perfectly normal little girls declared insane by the system.
Lucie looked the librarian in the eyes.
“And…have you heard about the experiments in those asylums? Does the term ‘Syndrome E’ mean anything to you?”
Patricia pressed her lips tightly. She had discreetly slipped her pendant and its chain under her blouse.
“I’ve never heard of a Syndrome E. But there are two more things you should know. Since we have delved into these shadows, we might as well go all the way. At the beginning of the 1940s, and up until the 1960s, a law adopted by the legislative assembly of Quebec allowed the Roman Catholic Church to sell the remains of orphans who had died within their walls to the medical schools.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Money encourages the worst monstrosities. But that’s not all. You asked about
experiments, miss, so I’ll tell you. Adult patients—living patients—were sacrificed for experimental purposes in the depths of these insane asylums. I’m talking about the involvement of the American government in Quebec’s dark period.”
Lucie swallowed hard, her eyes glued to Alice’s photo. She thought of Clara and Juliette, felt a sudden, overpowering urge to hear their voices, to touch them, hug them tight against her breast. She nervously fingered her useless cell phone.
“What sort of experiments? Medical things like…like what the Nazis did to deportees?”
A bell rang briefly in the room. Lucie jumped. It was almost seven o’clock, and the archives were about to close.
Patricia Richaud stood up, picked up her key ring, and looked Lucie in the eyes.
“The CIA, miss. We’re talking about the CIA.”
47
Reeling from these revelations, Lucie sat on a bench in a tree-lined park across from the archives. In the early evening, the place was empty, and it exuded an Olympian calm despite the big city surrounding it. She rested her backpack on her knees and massaged her face.
The Central Intelligence Agency, involved in this business. What could that mean? What did the American government have to do with patients interned in Canadian hospitals?
Through his own research, Vlad Szpilman had stumbled onto something—Lucie was sure of it.
She tried to draw the connection with her investigation, to add pieces to the puzzle. Naturally, she thought of the filmmaker Jacques Lacombe, who went to Washington in 1951 under peculiar circumstances. The starlet Judith Sagnol had mentioned a contact abroad, someone who’d wanted to work with Lacombe. Who? Then Jacques Lacombe arrives in Montreal in 1954.
And what if Lacombe were involved with the CIA? What if his modest job as a projectionist had only been a cover?
So many questions, turning over and over and over in her head…
Impatient, Lucie looked at her watch: 7:10. Patricia Richaud was supposed to meet her there in the park in twenty minutes, once she’d closed the office and seen to some routine duties. She was going to give her at least the start of an explanation of her claims about the involvement of American intelligence in experiments on human beings.
Syndrome E Page 30