Lucie was floundering. Images continued to overlap in her head. Everything was mixed up, while the sound of female screaming rose from near the fire. Clear voices from the past blended with those of the present. Cops shouting, charging toward a house. Trembling, soaked, Lucie clearly saw herself rushing forward with the lawmen. They broke down the door and Lucie followed them in. Carnot flat on the ground . . . She ran up the stairs, met the odor of charred flesh. A door, a room. Another body, its eyes still open.
Juliette, dead, lying before her, with wide staring eyes.
Lucie rolled on her side, hands clutching at her face, and let out a long scream.
Her fingers clawed at the ground, her tears mixed with the ancestral earth, while in front of her blood-soaked hands lifted high the newborn ripped from its mother’s womb. In a final flash of lucidity, she saw Chimaux leaning over her and heard him murmur in an icy voice:
“And now, I shall inhale your soul.”
• • •
Noland spoke calmly, sponging the arch of his brow with small, precise dabs.
“Phoenix emerged from the womb of evolution and contaminated generations of Cro-Magnon, some thirty thousand years ago. I think that, in some way, it contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals through a genocide wrought by infected Cro-Magnons, but that’s another matter. Regardless, the competition between virus and humans, in the nascent Western societies, favored humans: the retrovirus became harmless over the centuries and was fossilized in our DNA. Nonetheless, it persisted in the Ururu tribe, with only slight mutations, as that isolated, quasi-prehistoric tribe slowly evolved. In Western societies, culture moves too fast; it guides genes, orients them, and gains the upper hand over nature. But not in the jungle. There, genes always stay ahead of culture.”
“How does the virus work?”
“You just need a carrier, man or woman, for the child to be infected. Phoenix hides on chromosome two, near the genes that account for hand dominance. Its presence is what accounts for making the hosts left-handed. But to awaken and begin reproducing, Phoenix needs a key. And that key is something that any male on this planet has, his Y chromosome.”
Sharko thought of Terney’s title. There was no doubt it alluded to the Phoenix virus. More sleight-of-hand.
“When I inseminated the healthy mothers, more than forty years ago, they gave birth to an infected child—generation G1—since the virus was in the Ururu sperm, and thus in the child’s genetic heritage. Let’s suppose the G1 child turns out to be a girl, as was indeed the case every time, such as with Coralie’s mother, Jeanne.”
He was talking about the girl who was supposed to be his daughter, but who had none of his paternal genes. A stranger in his eyes, simply the product of an experiment.
“So Jeanne is a carrier of the virus. Some twenty years later, when her oocyte is fertilized by the spermatozoon of a Western male, it’s up to chance to decide if the new fetus is female or male. Jeanne first has a girl, Coralie, and then a boy, Félix. Two infected children of the second generation, G2. In Coralie’s case, the Western father has transmitted his X chromosome and the virus isn’t triggered in Jeanne; the lock has remained shut—though this does not prevent Phoenix from being transmitted genetically to Coralie through chromosome two. In Félix’s case, the father donates his Y chromosome. The Y enters into the composition of the placenta, which interacts with Jeanne’s organism. At that point, the lock that is holding back the virus on Jeanne’s chromosome two snaps open. Proteins are manufactured in the mother’s body, and the virus proliferates with just one goal: ensure its own survival and its propagation in another body. The expression of the virus is characterized by a hypervascular placenta, alongside a sharp decrease in the mother’s vital functions. The virus has won it all: it kills its host and propagates itself via the fetus, thus guaranteeing its own survival . . . you know the rest. Félix grows up, becomes an adult, probably has sexual relations. He transmits the virus in turn, if there are any children. Then the same thing happens that happened to the G1 mother: the virus reproduces inside Félix and kills him, this time attacking the brain. The same pattern obtains in every scenario, whether it’s the mother or father who’s infected, a boy or girl who’s born. Phoenix has applied the same strategy as any other virus or parasite: survive, spread, kill. If it survived in the Ururu, it’s because both humans and the virus found the advantages outweighed the drawbacks. A young, strong tribe, evolving slowly, its size self-regulated, experiencing no need other than to survive and ensure its continuity. The rest—especially old age—is merely . . . superfluous.”
He sighed, eyes toward the ceiling. Sharko felt like disemboweling him.
“I’ve written all this down, apart from a few details. The analyzed sequences of Phoenix in both its mutated state and the nonmutated version from thirty thousand years ago. You can’t possibly imagine the impact the discovery of the Cro-Magnon had, a year ago in that cave. An isolated individual who had massacred Neanderthals . . . the upside-down drawing . . . I had there an expression of the original form of a virus that only three people in the world even knew existed, and on which we’d been laboring for years. Stéphane Terney made arrangements to steal the mummy and its genome.”
“Why not just steal the computer documents? What good was the mummy?”
“We didn’t want to leave it in the scientists’ hands. They would just have established its genome again and combed over it. Ultimately, they would have spotted the genetic differences between the ancestral genome and ours, and would have ended up discovering and understanding my retrovirus.”
He clicked his tongue.
“Terney wanted so much to keep the Cro-Magnon in his museum, and I had to twist his arm a bit so that we could get rid of it. Then we exploited the genome. Our work was moving at a fast clip, thanks especially to an explosion of knowledge in the field of genetics. And then Terney called me in a panic at the beginning of the month to tell me about a student who was sticking her nose into left-handers and violence. Eva Louts. So I checked her out, and I discovered she’d been to the Amazon. Clearly Napoléon Chimaux was somehow involved. So I decided to do some housecleaning—things were becoming much too dangerous. Terney’s paranoia was putting him in a serious panic. I killed them both, and I burned the tapes that recorded the Ururu rituals, the samples we’d taken, and the inseminations. I erased every trace. My biggest mistake was letting Terney photograph the Cro-Magnon and not removing those three pictures from his wall. But I never thought you’d make the connection.”
He squeezed his fists.
“I wanted . . . to give life to the true Phoenix, see what it could do vis-à-vis its Ururu cousin, but I didn’t have the chance. You have no idea how hard I’ve worked, the sacrifices I’ve made. You, you common street cop, you’ve ruined everything. You don’t understand that evolution is the exception, and that extinction is the rule. We’re all fated to die out. You first of all.”
Sharko leaned close to him and shoved his gun under the man’s nose.
“Your granddaughter would have died right before your eyes, and you knew it.”
“She wouldn’t have died. She would have played the part nature reserved for her. It’s nature that should decide, not us.”
“You’re an irredeemable fanatic. For that alone, I should pull the trigger.”
Noland found the strength to stretch his lips into a cold smile.
“Go ahead. Shoot. And you’ll never know the names of the four remaining profiles. Or at the very least, you risk finding them too late, when the worst has already happened. And believe me, Inspector, you will know what that worst is.”
Sharko gritted his teeth, struggling with his darkest demons, but finally removed his finger from the trigger. He lowered his weapon.
“The woman I love had better come back alive, you piece of filth. Because even in the depths of the prison where you’ll be rotting for the res
t of your days, mixing with the lowest refuse of your goddamned evolution, I swear I will know how to find you.”
• • •
Lucie’s eyes snapped open. The landscape was pitching and tossing, as if set on air cushions. The rumbling of an engine . . . silt in their wake . . . vibrations in the floor . . . She sat up, a hand on her head, and took a few seconds to realize she was back on the Maria Nazare. The boat was now moving with the current.
She was going home.
Pale, she dragged herself to the railing and vomited. She vomited because, like a sordid truth, she saw, as clearly as she could see the surrounding landscape, the toys still in their packaging in the twins’ room . . . Then herself, alone at the school fence that first day, with no one to bring . . . The cell phone lying unused in a corner . . . Her walks through the Citadelle, alone with Klark. Her mother’s searching looks, her allusions and her sighs . . . Alone, alone, always alone, talking to the dog, to a wall, to nothing.
Lucie’s stomach heaved once more. The jungle, the drugs she’d been given, had made her see that both her little girls were dead. That for the past year she’d been living with a ghost, a hallucination, a little creature of smoke who had come to give her support, see her through the tragedy.
Staggering, Lucie raised her cloudy eyes toward Pedro, who was leaning on the prow, chewing some tobacco. In front of them rose the FUNAI outpost. No one tried even to stop them; the man with the scars signaled for them to keep moving. He stared at Lucie without moving, his eyes glacial, then quickly returned inside the hut.
The guide came up to Lucie with a smile.
“You’re back among us.”
Lucie breathed in painfully, then wiped away her tears with her fingers. She felt as if she were returning from beyond the grave.
“What happened? I remember walking . . . smoke . . . then it’s like a black hole. Just images in my head. Such intimate, personal images . . . But . . . where’s Chimaux? Why are we heading away? I want to go back there, I . . .”
Pedro laid a hand on her shoulder.
“You saw Chimaux and the savages. They brought you back to the boat after three days.”
“Three days? But . . .”
“Chimaux made it very clear: he doesn’t want anyone to go back there. Ever. Not you and not me. But he had a message for you. Something he asked me to convey.”
Lucie ran both hands over her face. Three days. What had they done to her head? How had they managed to open her mind so wide?
“Tell me,” she murmured sadly.
“He said, ‘The dead can always be alive. You just have to believe in them, and they return.’”
With those words, he went into the wheelhouse, sounded a proud blast of the foghorn, and gunned the engines.
Several hours later, the boat reached the small port of São Gabriel. Amid the crowd of locals stood a European, beautiful gray shirt half open, sunglasses over his eyes.
Sunglasses with one stem glued back on.
Lucie felt her heart flip and her eyes fogged up once again. With a sigh, she stared silently at the black, tenebrous waves, beneath which thousands of species abounded. From the depths of her sorrow, she told herself that the greatest darkness could also bring hope and life.
Epilogue
The northern sky laid its silvery hues on the graves. Lucie made a sign of the cross before her children’s burial vault, raised the collar of her jacket, and slid her arm under Franck Sharko’s. A chill wind, down from the north, ripped the final leaves from the poplars, promising a harsh November. Word was, the coming winter would be rough. For Lucie and Sharko, it wouldn’t be nearly as rough as summer had been.
Alone in the wide alleys, the couple finally left the cemetery and returned to the center of Lille on foot. That midafternoon, the huge shopping centers remained full, the homeless begged for change or warmed themselves over subway grates, buses and trolleys shuffled their daily allotment of workers, students, and strollers: each one following his or her own path, unwitting participants in the great laboratory of evolution.
Franck and Lucie had planned to go to Café de la Grand-Place to talk, but on an impulse the inspector took his companion by the hand and led her to Rue des Solitaires, on the outskirts of Old Lille. They walked into a small, unassuming bar called the Nemo; the sign was new, the place having recently been bought by a retired trucker. The minute he walked through the door, Sharko felt his heart contract. He breathed in the good smells of old brick and porous cement. They sat down under a small, dimly lit archway. Sharko looked around with shining eyes.
“This is where I first met Suzanne. I was in the army. I haven’t been back here in so long.”
He took Lucie’s hands in his. His fingers had regained their thickness, his wrists their solidity.
“This place means so much to me—I wanted it to be here that I tell you I love you, Lucie.”
They looked at each other without a word, as they often did, then ordered two hot chocolates that were quickly served. Sharko ran his finger around the edge of his burning cup.
“Yesterday I heard you went to see your old captain and asked about coming to work at Quai des Orfèvres. Paris Homicide. Kashmareck likes you a lot. He seems to be going all out for you, and it’s a good bet your application will sail through. Why are you doing this?”
Lucie shrugged.
“I just want to be near you. I want us to be together, all the time. For us to be on the same team.”
“Lucie . . .”
“Manien’s squad has been cleaned out, thanks to your revelations. There are empty spots to fill. I’ve got no reason to stay here in Lille . . . too many memories.”
She sighed sadly and added:
“So as long as you haven’t resigned from the force, I’ll go where you are.”
“I can’t resign. Not now. Someone killed Frédéric Hurault, and made sure it was near enough to number thirty-six for me to catch the case. They found my DNA on his clothes, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the one who left it there. Hurault was the father of twin girls. I’m convinced this someone knew about Clara and Juliette. The murder was for my benefit. Now that I’m thinking more clearly, I’m convinced someone was using the body to send me a message.”
Lucie shook her head.
“You’re thinking too clearly. You know the power of coincidence as well as I do. And that’s all it is, a coincidence, nothing more. Nobody’s got it in for you. That murder is just one more lousy back-page item.”
“Maybe. But now that they’ve reinstated me, I can’t leave again without solving this one last crime.”
Lucie poured sugar into her chocolate and stirred it.
“Then I’ll do the same. And you’re the one I want to work with. If they’ll let us.”
Sharko ended up smiling.
“Jesus, two months ago, we both swore to give all this up!”
They fell silent as they drank their chocolate, each staring into the void. The memories of their last case were still so close to the bone . . . Georges Noland had finally given up the names corresponding to the remaining genetic profiles in Terney’s book. One man and three women, all young, who at that very moment were undergoing tests, ultrasounds, MRIs, unable to understand what was happening to them. Of course, Noland had talked, but who could be sure he hadn’t conducted other experiments, other inseminations, that weren’t recorded anywhere? And what if he’d had accomplices? How far had he gone in his lunacy? Had he told the police the whole truth, or was he still concealing a portion of it in his diseased brain?
As for Napoléon Chimaux, he was still out there somewhere, hidden in the jungle. Dislodging him and making him admit his share of responsibility would not be easy.
Coralie Lambert could not be saved. By the time she was hospitalized, millions of tiny men-of-war had already invaded her body; the retrovirus had multiplied as of
the first months of pregnancy, initiating a process of inescapable death. Her baby had been born in perfect health but harboring within him a sleeping monster. They could only hope that the geneticists, biologists, and virologists would find a way to annihilate the virus before this innocent infant would someday turn into another Grégory Carnot or Félix Lambert.
Assailed by memories, Sharko pursed his lips. Evolution built marvelous creations, but it could also be extremely cruel. The cop often repeated to himself what Noland had told him during their last face-to-face: Evolution is the exception. Extinction is the rule. He was right. Nature was constantly trying things out, testing out millions, billions of combinations, of which only a small handful would endure through the millennia. In that alchemy, there were necessarily some monstrosities: AIDS, cancer, GATACA, the great plagues, serial killers . . . Nature didn’t distinguish between good and evil, it merely tried to solve an exceedingly complex equation. One thing was certain: it had taken an awful risk by creating mankind.
A couple entered, two kids holding hands who went to sit at a small round table. They looked at each other shyly, and Lucie could read the gentle glow of a nascent relationship. One day, perhaps, their chromosomes would embrace, their genes mix together. His blue eyes, her blond hair . . . the curve of a nose, the oval of a cheekbone, the little hollow of a dimple. Chance would decide who, between father and mother, would transmit which physical or mental particularity to the child. Their love would engender a thinking, intelligent being, capable of accomplishing beautiful things, who would prove that we were not merely survival machines.
Lost in her reverie, Lucie gazed absently at Franck Sharko and caught herself wondering, for the first time since they’d known each other, what the fruit of their union might be like. There would certainly be a bit of Clara and Juliette somewhere in that future being.
Yes, Clara and Juliette were inside of her, deep within her DNA, and not out there, six feet underground. It would take only a small spark to bring a part of her two treasures back to life.
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