It was almost two in the morning when she walked up to the receptionist, a sixty-year-old in a sweat suit, with a mountain-man beard, graying hair, and black eyes. He was watching a nature show on Rai Uno, though “watching” might be pushing it.
“Evening. Have you got a room?”
He gauged the woman with a dull eye, then turned toward a board still containing more than three quarters of its keys.
“Sì, signora. Number eight. Your name?”
An Italian, with an accent you could cut with a fork and r’s you could roll uphill. Lucie improvised:
“Amélie Courtois.”
He wrote the name in the register.
“For how many nights?”
“One or two. It depends.”
“Tourist?”
Lucie slid the photo of Eva Louts across the desk.
“This woman might have come here about ten days ago. Saturday, August 28, to be precise. Do you recognize her?”
He looked at the picture, then at Lucie, with an anxious face. She saw a dull light in his eyes: a workaday type who didn’t want any trouble.
“Are you with the police?”
“No, Eva is my half sister. She went abroad without leaving me her address and I need to find her. I know she probably stayed in a hotel. Is this the only one around here?”
“Yes.”
Dubious, he put on a pair of glasses and looked more carefully at the picture. Then he opened the register, turned a page, and pressed his finger onto a line written in spidery scrawl.
“That’s it. Eva Louts, right.”
Lucie’s fists clenched: that was one obstacle passed. The man kept silent, as if digging into his memory. Another glance at the photo. Then he pointed to a phone number written on the register, just underneath the young woman’s name.
“Is that Eva’s phone?” asked Lucie.
He took a cell phone from his pocket, scratching his head.
“Pazienza, pazienza. I think this number . . . is in my contacts list. Curioso . . .”
For a brief moment, Lucie forgot all about her fatigue and her troubles, or that she had set off on the trail of a girl she’d never met.
“Here we are. It’s him. It’s his cell number.”
He showed her the screen of his phone, with a name and number: Marc Castel. Lucie felt her throat tighten.
“Who’s that?”
“He’s a kind of guide for the upper mountains. I often recommend him for tourists who want to do some climbing or hike up top. I must have jotted down his number here so she could copy it—something like that, I don’t really remember.”
Lucie knit her brow.
“What did Eva need a guide for? Where was she going?”
“I have no idea. All I can tell you is that she stayed here two nights, then left early Monday morning. The best thing would be to ask Marc. He lives in Val Thorens. I’ll tell you how to get there.”
“Terrific.”
“Be sure to get to his place early. I’d say seven at the latest. After that, Marc heads up to the summit and you won’t see him again until after dark.”
He scratched out an approximate map with an address and handed it to Lucie, who thanked him and gave him back the room key.
“Could you give me number six instead? According to the register, that was Eva’s room.”
Room 6 was pleasant enough but awfully small. A bathtub that could crack your spine, narrow single bed, miniature television. The one window looked out on something dark and infinite, probably a mountainside. Beneath the wan luster of a nightlight, Lucie sat on the mattress and removed her shoes with an ahhh of relief. She massaged her feet slowly, pensive.
Delicately, she pulled a small, transparent medal from the pocket of her jeans and slid it under her comforter. It was a plastic oval, with a small loop for hanging on a chain, that contained the last photo she’d ever taken of the twins together. The living one on the left, the dead one on the right. She’d had medals of this type made by the dozens, and had put them everywhere. In her car, her house, her clothes. Her children were always with her, no matter where she went.
Lucie spent ten minutes composing a text to her daughter. Juliette would find it tomorrow morning at breakfast, when she put the phone inside her schoolbag.
Once she had washed, undressed, and set her cell phone on “alarm,” she sat on the bed, handling her Mann pistol. She ran a finger over the grip, brushed the trigger with a sigh. Through this object, she recalled the smells of the squad room, of black coffee, ink on freshly printed reports, the cigarettes some of her colleagues smoked.
After setting the pistol on the nightstand, she lay back on the mattress, hands behind her head, eyes to the ceiling. Lucie could hear the mountain breathing. A lugubrious lung with granite alveoli, which seemed to be pumping all the air out of her. She turned onto her side, shut off the light, and curled up like a child. Sleep enfolded her in its thick, warm blanket.
• • •
Lucie was dazzled by the beauty of the countryside closely surrounding her. At the foot of Marc Castel’s chalet, set into the heights of Val Thorens, she enjoyed a panoramic view of Vanoise National Park. Snowy peaks as far as the eye could see. Powerful, hieratic crests assaulting a crystal sky. Closer in, so near it almost seemed you could touch them, were smaller mountains of red, green, and yellow that were already playing with the tints of morning light. In this early dawn, nature offered up its freshest and most gorgeous spectacle: wrapped tightly in her thin jacket and black woolen gloves at an altitude of more than sixty-five hundred feet, Lucie was shivering.
Beautiful as it was, the landscape had nothing on the man who opened the door. Eyes of a troubling green, short brown hair, a compact, angelic face that made him look like Indiana Jones. He was a head taller than Lucie and, beneath his tight-fitting undershirt, showed a climber’s fine physique. Apparently the woman from the North was catching him fresh from bed.
“Forgive me for intruding, but . . . the owner of the Ten Marmots suggested I come find you here before you headed up the mountain.”
He looked her over from top to bottom, as if she had disembarked from another planet.
“Do you know what time it is? It’s not even seven! Who the hell are you?”
Lucie again pulled out the ID photo, holding it out in front of her, and adopted an authoritative tone. Given how rude the guy was being, enough with the politeness.
“Amélie Courtois, Paris police. I need to know what this woman was doing here.”
He accepted the photo mechanically, without taking his eyes off Lucie.
“Come inside a minute. I’m freezing my balls off.”
Lucie entered the wooden lodging and shut the door behind her. She loved the ambiance of these large mountain chalets: the honeyed tones, the softness of the wood floors, the brute force of the exposed beams. In the living room, a large bay window offered a picture postcard view. It must have been so nice to wake up here every morning, head in the clouds, far away from the blackness of the big cities, the pollution and honking horns.
The man stared at her questioningly.
“The police? So what do you want with Marc?”
“Wait—you’re not Marc?”
“No, just a friend.”
Lucie clenched her teeth. Couldn’t the idiot have said so sooner?
“I just want to ask him some questions about one of his customers. Where is he?”
The man nodded toward the summit, through the bay window.
“Up there. Didn’t you see the helicopters as you were coming up?”
“Sure. They seem to be making round trips from the top, carrying large rolls of something.”
“They’ve been at it since six thirty. Marc was in one of them. For the last few days he’s been helping cover the most vulnerable parts of the Gebroulaz gla
cier with tarps, in preparation for next summer. The choppers regularly bring men and materials up there.”
“They wrap up glaciers these days?”
“Just a small part. With climate warming these past years, all the glaciers on the planet are starting to sweat, especially in the Alps. In the last century, some of them have lost eighty percent of their volume. This year, they’re trying to see if they can slow down Gebroulaz’s melt rate, the way they did last year at Andermatt. Sixty-five thousand square feet to wrap in two layers of film barely an eighth of an inch thick, to protect them from UV rays, the heat, and the rain.”
“So, this girl?”
“I’m not the one you should ask—I’ve only been here a few days.”
“And when will Marc be back?”
“Not before evening. He spends all day up on the glacier. Sorry.”
Lucie pocketed the photo and thought a moment. There were only two solutions she could see: wait patiently for his return or . . .
“Take me to the helicopters.”
14
In the elevator of his building, Sharko turned the key in the lock and pushed Sub 1, a restricted floor that gave residents access to the underground parking lot. He hadn’t slept a wink, having spent the entire night thinking of Lucie. He’d been so worried about her that he hadn’t been able to resist sending her a text at 3:10 a.m.: “Is everything all right?” To which she’d answered simply, at around 6, “All ok.”
Heading down, he looked at himself in the elevator mirror. For the first time in ages, he’d put a little gel in his long salt-and-pepper hair, brushing it back off his forehead. He hadn’t used the stuff in so long that it had practically hardened in the tube. On an impulse that morning, he had also donned his old charcoal-gray suit, one of the ones he’d worn for his big criminal cases. Every cop has a fetish object—a pipe, good luck bullet, or medal. For him, it was these clothes, and he couldn’t have said why. To keep his pants from falling, he’d had to pierce another hole in his black belt, using a fruit pitter because he didn’t have a screwdriver. He floated in the jacket, its shoulders drooping. It was as if Hardy had lent Laurel his outfit, but no matter: in the well-tailored suit, he felt better and looked better.
He jumped when he reached the parking spot for his Renault R21. A shadow emerged from a recess in the garage stacked with piles of junk.
“Shit, you gave me a start!”
The shadow was Bertrand Manien. Harsh face, molelike black eyes. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and flicked his lighter. The click echoed in the concrete cavity, and a yellowish glow haloed his flinty face. Of all the captains in Homicide, Manien had the darkest, murkiest past. He had been around every squad, from Vice to Narc, and knew the underbelly of Paris like the back of his hand. Secret brothels, S&M clubs, shady joints where he’d sometimes been seen off-duty. Not to mention his long stint in the human trafficking detail. A squad that no one came out of unscathed: the vicious way people treated one another—especially minors—defied the imagination.
No one, except Bertrand Manien, who often boasted of his service record.
“Nice suit. And I see you got a haircut. There been a change in your life, Sharko? Maybe a girlfriend, after all this time?”
“What do you want?”
“I was just at Frédéric Hurault’s place. The poor guy lived not two miles from here. You two were practically neighbors, fancy that. So I figured I’d drop by.”
How long had he been waiting? How had he got in? Why had he come alone? And why the allusion to a girlfriend? Sharko tried to open his car door, but Manien flattened his palm over it.
“Two seconds. Why are you always in such a rush?”
The inspector felt his throat tighten. If Manien had camped out here, someone else could easily have followed him yesterday to Vivonne Penitentiary, or even broken into his apartment to look around. There was nothing more rotten or twisted than one cop pursuing another.
“What do you want?”
“You’ve scored a prime parking spot for this rust heap. I didn’t know you could still get an R21. Why don’t you keep it outside?”
“Because this spot exists and it’s mine.”
Manien played with silences, looks. He walked around the vehicle, as if he were about to strip it to nothing.
“Can you tell me where you were last Friday night?”
Sharko greeted a neighbor with a nod of his chin and let him move away. He lowered his voice:
“You keep coming after me. You’re here alone, at my house, at not even eight in the morning. This is becoming personal with you. Why aren’t you out questioning the whores and pimps who were in that neck of the woods? Why don’t you just do your job?”
“On the contrary, I am doing my job. So, I suppose you were in your apartment on Friday night, around midnight?”
“Nothing gets by you, that’s for sure.”
“And no one to vouch for you?”
“I’ll say it again, nothing gets by you.”
With a malicious smile, Manien pulled out a small notepad.
“You know what’s in here?”
“Search me—the address of your last pickup? Who was it this time, some Romanian teenager?”
“Don’t be obnoxious. You know, I’ve gotten hooked on quite a little game since you intentionally fucked up my crime scene. I said to myself, ‘Well, now, what if I tried to find out exactly who this Chief Inspector is, with his dark, mysterious past?’ The Hurault case was the perfect opportunity for me to look into you.”
“If you’ve got nothing better to do, I feel sorry for you.”
“Not at all. I’ve rather enjoyed it. So I chatted a bit with your building superintendent, and he told me something really interesting.”
He let linger an unwholesome silence, hoping to rouse Sharko’s curiosity and reveal a sign of weakness. But the inspector didn’t flinch. It was like the silent combat of two cobras gauging each other before the final attack. After a while, the detective went on with his story.
“Since he’s known you, the good super has almost always seen you use the outside parking lot, in front of the building, just a few yards from your entrance. If you had a BMW, I’d have understood why you’d suddenly want to stick it underground, safe from delinquents and rainstorms. But a clunker like this . . .”
Manien squatted down, touched the brushed concrete floor with the back of his hand.
“This concrete is like new. The guy in the next spot assured me the space had always been empty, so he parked on a diagonal because it was so narrow. But you went to see him last week and told him from now on you’d be taking the spot, and he had to keep off.”
Voices echoed in the underground lot. In the distance, a squeal of tires, a hiss of rubber. People were going to work. Sharko could again feel the tension mount.
“And?” he replied. “Would you like the results of my last physical? Given my condition, I have to avoid carrying anything heavy, and packs of milk or water are heavy. Look behind you, the elevator is right there, and it lets me out just opposite my door. If I park outside, I have to walk at least two hundred yards and climb a bunch of stairs to reach the building. I confess I’m having a hard time seeing what you’re getting at. It’s like you’re trying to drag me down, no matter what I do.”
Manien let out a huge puff of smoke, despite the detectors just a few feet away. The guy was dangerous, even crazy; Sharko had seen him bust suspects with hard kicks to the shins.
“The super was positive: your car didn’t budge from its spot on the night of the murder.”
“Not surprising, since I was at home.”
“You created the perfect alibi for yourself. Even days later, you continue to park here. You’re a genius, a real genius. To change your habits so thoroughly. Open the garage with the remote, wait, cruise around these narrow aisles in this boat that bar
ely has power steering. When were you planning to drop the charade and start parking out in the fresh air again?”
Sharko finally opened his door. He kept his voice calm, assured.
“You didn’t hear what I just said, but no matter. It’s possible I’m mistaken, that I still don’t understand how cops work, but since when does having an airtight alibi make you guilty?”
Manien didn’t let go. Worse than a starving dog let loose on a bone.
“It’s a long way to the Vincennes woods. Since you left your heap here the night of the murder, you must have taken a cab or bus, or better still, the subway. There are surveillance cams in the subway.”
“That’s right. Go look through every camera in town. It’ll give you something to do.”
Puffing on his cigarette, Manien stepped back until he was in the middle of the aisle. Then he flicked away the butt, just under the Renault’s rear tire.
“Don’t bother seeing me to the door. Anyway, we’ll catch up at number thirty-six. And don’t worry, this whole business is just between you and me. I reassigned Leblond—he should be helping out with your investigation in just a few days. I certainly wouldn’t want my little conjectures to sully your . . . troubled reputation.”
His steps echoed in the silence, then faded away for good.
Sharko remained still for a long time, feeling as if he’d received a sock on the jaw.
As every Wednesday, he went by the cemetery, where he meditated for a while at his family’s grave. He couldn’t keep from thinking about what had just gone down with Manien.
A half hour later, he met Jacques Levallois at a café on the corner of Boulevard du Palais and Quai du Marché-Neuf. The place was hopping at that time of day. Pedestrians, cars, hordes of scooters rushing to work. The young lieutenant was a regular of the establishment, which he frequented just before going on duty. He was seated at a sidewalk table, in his thin tan cotton windbreaker, dipping a sugar cube into his espresso while watching the barges drift by along the Seine. His large scooter, a 250-cc with two front wheels, was parked at the curb. Sharko ordered a juice for himself and took a seat across from his partner, who gave him a quizzical look.
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