First Blood

by S. Cedric

  “Modern pop philosophy,” he grumbles. “Ancient indigenous people didn’t have our westernized ways of seeing life and death. On the contrary, they encouraged patricide and infanticide for clan survival.”

  Madeleine is used to this kind of reaction to Mr. Parme’s assertions. She feels tension in the air. This has happened several times before. She has the strange feeling that she can visualize people’s emotions as if they bubble up and slough off. At that moment, she is seeing the emotion beneath the dark skin of her friend.

  She blinks, and the illusion stops.

  On the stage, the professor continues his amplified monologue. The giant screen shows a dark and terrifying painting of a monster holding a child’s body. The monster is closing its mouth over the body to devour the child. Its eyes are crazed, devilish, and yet filled with distress.

  “Saturn devouring his son,” Ismael whispers. “I love this painting.”

  “As we will see, infanticide has always been the privilege of the gods in their blood struggles,” Mr. Parme goes on. “Every system has divinities that committed this sin. The painting you see is by Francisco de Goya. You will note that it is not beautiful. In fact, it is violent and powerfully ugly. It’s like a vision of hell.”

  Ismael grumbles. “What bullshit.”

  Madeleine chuckles.

  “It represents the Greek God Cronus, called Saturn by the Romans, eating his child. You should know that Cronus attacked his own father, cut off his testicles, and took his place. His father had sworn that one of his own sons would dethrone him. To keep the curse from coming true, Cronus ate his own offspring.”

  “Now, that is true,” Ismael says.

  Madeleine glances at him. He is half smiling.

  She looks back at the screen, where another picture appears.

  It is an ancient Greek banquet. Men and women in armor are seated around a table. They are sharing meat set out on multicolored plates.

  “And here is Tantalus,” the professor says. “He is seen at the right in this painting, which is from the Delphic temple. You are probably familiar with his eternal punishment in the underworld. Does someone remember what it was?”

  High up in the tiers, a boy in a hoodie raises his hand and hesitantly says, “To suffer eternal thirst and hunger?”

  “Exactly, Guillaume. Tantalus was sentenced to eternal thirst and hunger. He was chained to a tree in a pool of water, with branches of fruit hanging just beyond his reach and the water would retreat every time he leaned over to quench his thirst. Why was he punished in this way?”

  This time, Ismael’s voice rises from the first row, “Because he killed his son. He served him up for the gods to eat.”

  Students murmur in the tiers. A girl groans in disgust. Ismael puts on a carnivorous smile. This is one of his favorite legends.

  Mr. Parme nods. “That’s correct, Ismael. It is a terrible story. Tantalus brought together the gods and served them his own son. He thought he would please them. But the opposite was true.”

  “Not exactly,” Ismael responds.

  Madeleine tries to pinch his leg. She feels another confrontation coming on. They had already occurred far too often. She doesn’t want to be thrown out of the class another time.

  The professor continues as if he hasn’t heard anything. “The price to pay for having killed his child was being condemned to the underworld with an exemplary punishment.”

  Ismael waves his hand.

  “Excuse me, but that is not at all what happened. For Tantalus, infanticide was a way to become immortal. He came up with that evening with the gods for just that purpose. It was designed to be a ritual of passage. It didn’t work the way he planned it because he was betrayed.”

  The professor clears his throat.

  “My dear Ismael, I see that you once again have a very interesting theory.”

  “These are not theories,” the young man says. “There are numerous studies that discuss Tantalus in terms of infanticide leading to divinity, like Medea, who organized every detail of her children’s sacrifice to become divine. And...”

  Madeleine shakes his arm. He sighs. Around him, students exchange amused looks. They are all used to this kind of fuss. Constantin is putting on his show. The teacher doesn’t find it funny. He returns to his lecture without further consideration of his student.

  “It’s true,” Ismael says.

  Madeleine smiles. She hates to admit it, but she finds her friend’s way of fighting the entire world with his unbelievable ideas—true or not—to be terribly attractive.

  There is a half hour of class left. Ismael dives back into his book.

  He does, however, look up when the professor starts in on Judeo-Christian mythology. While the other students take notes without thinking, Ismael listens and dissects. He has no interest in accumulating knowledge just to pass an exam. He wants to understand. He is looking to find the thread of meaning in myths.

  “There is another very interesting case in the Bible,” Mr. Parme explains. “God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son by fire. It was a way of testing his faith. At the last minute, when Abraham had gone to the mountain to sacrifice his son, God stopped him.”

  Ismael can’t keep quiet any longer.

  “That is the official version of the story. But nobody knows exactly what happened.”

  “What are you talking about, Ismael?”

  “Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask what could have happened—or perhaps what really did happen—had Abraham gone through with the sacrifice?”

  The professor looks at him, already on the defensive.

  “God stopped him. It was nothing but a test of faith.”

  “Exactly. Why would God have done that? He didn’t hesitate to kill his children in the flood, did he? Couldn’t it be possible that Abraham was looking to imitate him and that he did actually kill his child on the mountain? The text talks about a holocaust, a sacred immolation before God. At the time, the practice was very common.”

  “The very idea is ridiculous,” the exasperated professor says. “Ismael, we have already discussed this, and I do not think that your wild imaginings really interest any of your classmates. Mythology is not a game of supposition. You are here to learn the curriculum.”

  Ismael shakes his head and looks bitter.

  “Of course. As soon as there’s an idea that doesn’t fit into your conception of things, it’s ridiculous. Is your course so sacred? It’s true that you learned it by heart without understanding it, and you would like all your students to do the same, also without understanding it. Isn’t that right?”

  “I order you to be quiet,” the professor shouts, his face matching his jacket. “You don’t know anything. You’re just a freshman.”

  “This class isn’t what I thought it was going to be.”

  Murmurs that sound like a multitude of insect wings rise in the lecture hall. All eyes are on the young man with braided hair.

  “Enough. If that’s what you think, please leave immediately. I’ve had enough of you disturbing my class.”

  “You can’t do that. I’m a student like the others,” Ismael says.

  “Get out,” the professor shouts, his voice amplified by the microphone.

  In the tiers, other students start shouting their own opinions.

  “Ismael, he’s right,” one student yells. “You’re being a pain in the ass.”

  “We have an exam in a month.”

  The contagion spreads. The students are getting worked up.

  “Leave if you think you’re smarter than the teacher,” a girl shouts.

  Mr. Parme stands on the stage, his hands on his hips, smiling at the girl like a conqueror.

  Ismael Constantin stands up, his braids swirling around his neck like snakes poised for an attack.

  “You’re right. I have no reason to be in this ridiculous farce. Thank you for opening my eyes to that.”

  “My pleasure,” says the professor. “Now get out of here and leave
me to finish my class.”

  Madeleine gets up with her friend while the man, who is trembling slightly, goes back to his lecture. The other students dive back into their notes.

  16

  “This child was frozen about fifteen years ago,” the medical examiner said.

  Eva crossed her arms. Stay detached. She had fended off dizziness since the beginning of the autopsy—the scientific desecration of this little body. She was fighting to continue standing, to ignore the sparkling colors dancing in the corners of her eyes. She was weak from lack of sleep. She had not eaten anything since the night before. Her blood sugar was low.

  “The external examination of the wounds indicates that he had his throat cut. The subject died from blood loss.” Chadoutaud pointed out the wounds, allowing her assistant to take pictures. “I can distinguish three deep lesions that were caused by a sharp instrument, undoubtedly a knife. I see residual metal in the wounds. I will remove it for analysis. The cut was made by someone who was left-handed and very strong.”

  Constantin was left-handed, Eva thought. She was repeating what she had thought from the first instant. He had to be the murderer. But why was he keeping the child like that? For fifteen years in a freezer? And why would he put the freezer in a room behind an armored door? What kind of morbid fetish was that?

  “Vertebra growth indicates that the child was between three and four months old.”

  Leroy paced, nodding and shaking nervously. He was not looking at the body. The baby. Eva was having trouble swallowing. As hard as she tried to concentrate, she was losing her grip. The medical examiner listed her observations, most of little importance to the investigation, in a soft, melodious voice. As in the previous autopsy, the electric saw attacked the skull first. Then the scalpel cut into the child’s belly, progressively taking him apart. Eva watched as the ribs were sawed open, and the heart--no larger than a strawberry--and the stomach, liver, spleen, and lungs were removed, washed, weighed, examined, and commented upon. She realized that her jaw was hurting because she was clenching it so hard. The scissors continued to dig into the flesh, to separate the muscles. She desperately fought the nausea.

  There was a knock at the door.

  A respite. Eva finally breathed in.

  Attention turned to the bald security guard who had bags under his eyes and a paunch spilling over the top of his front-pleated pants. He was waving a large envelope.

  “Sorry to interrupt like this, but the lab sent this over. They said it was urgent.”

  The assistant, Christophe, set down his instruments of torture.

  “Thank you.”

  Those were the first words Eva had heard him say. The young man opened the envelope and removed some printouts.

  “These are the test results you asked for, Pauline.”

  “Right on time. I’ll read them now.”

  Pauline Chadoutaud moved away from the autopsy table and took off her gloves. She ran her eyes over the papers.

  “What tests?” Leroy asked.

  “I didn’t want to waste any time, so I took samples last night, when the two victims came in. I took them to the lab myself for a DNA comparison.”

  “And? Are they related?” Eva asked.

  The medical examiner nodded. She lowered her mask, revealing a sad smile.

  “Yes. The frozen child is Constantin’s son. The DNA matches.”

  “As we suspected,” Eva muttered.

  They had all expected this. Now that it was official, they were not any further ahead. They were still missing the key pieces in the Constantin puzzle.

  “How can we find the mother?”

  The medical examiner’s face held no answer. She looked powerless. “We have no way of determining her identity. Her DNA is not on file anywhere. I also asked for a records search after the child’s father was determined. There is no record of a child fathered by Constantin being born fifteen years ago in any hospital in this region.”

  Eva nodded.

  “That’s okay. We’ll go over Constantin’s life. In the end, we’ll figure out who could have had this baby.”

  Chadoutaud put her mask back on and slid on a fresh pair of latex gloves.

  “I’m going to finish the post-mortem.”

  Colored dots returned to Eva’s eyes, despite the glasses. She felt herself sway.

  “Inspector?” the medical examiner said. “Is everything all right?”

  Eva looked at her, at Leroy, and then at the assistant, and for the first time in a long time, she felt the strength drain out of her. She couldn’t pretend any longer.

  “No,” she said in a subdued voice. “I need to get some air. Finish without me, okay?”

  Out of decency, nobody said anything as the trembling inspector left the room.

  Her car was in the morgue’s tiny parking lot, which was squeezed between the faded red-brick building and the dense traffic that ran along the Seine. Eva slammed the door. Above her, the metro roared by, sending out sparks.

  Wrapped in her thick leather jacket, which still had the faint odor of smoke from the previous night’s blaze, Eva turned on the car to crank up the heat. Then she opened a can of soda and slipped in a straw, hoping the sweet drink would boost her blood sugar.

  But her hands continued to shake.

  She watched the snowflakes land on the windshield.

  There was no way around it. This case was reviving the dark ghosts of her childhood. She had thought she could withstand the shock, but the baby’s autopsy was bringing back memories of her mother and her twin sister, Justyna. She remembered swinging with Justyna on a tire hanging under a purple autumn sky. Then they were fleeing from one city to another, one apartment to another. There were endless new rooms, new schools, new friends. They never understood exactly why they were running, why their mother was convinced that some day the bad guy would come for them. Now Eva knew that her mother had always been right. Bad guys were always looking for vulnerable children. As in the fairy tales, there were always ogres.

  Another train went by, making a deafening noise. Leroy came out of the building. She put on her glasses so he would not see the fever in her eyes.

  “It’s done,” he said, sliding behind the wheel. “You didn’t miss anything important. Now the lab needs to finish the tests. So?”

  Eva swirled the soda remaining in the can.

  “So? To sum up, there is a dead three- to four-month-old baby,” she said in a monotone. “Someone cut his throat and froze him. It was probably his own father.”

  He looked at her, clearly worried.

  “That’s not what I was asking, Eva. I want to know if you are okay. I’m worried.”

  “And I want you to mind your own business, for once. You were the one who was ready to move heaven and earth for the Constantin case, weren’t you?”

  “That’s true, but...”

  “So, okay, I’ll follow along. We’ll solve this double murder.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Leroy scratched his week-old beard. He knew he should not push Eva when she was in this kind of mood.

  “Good. So let’s say Constantin killed his son and kept him as a trophy. What do we do with Larusso’s theory?”

  “You mean, the one about it being an ordinary crime of gang retribution?”

  Leroy nodded.

  “Yes, Constantin deposed the other gang leaders when he set himself up. That must have created some jealousy, to say the least. Some crazy hoodlum could have gotten it in his head to take Constantin’s place. You have to admit that the staging, with the fire and all, was pretty spectacular.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Not really,” Leroy said. “The fire would fit, but the sewn-up mouth, the cut-out tongue, and the missing heart are a lot for a turf war. Even the medical examiner thought it looked like some kind of sacrificial rite. I don’t mean to say that this kind of staging never happens, but it’s not really very common among mobsters. There was some cold determination beh
ind what that man experienced.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  “So, what now? Even though the child was murdered fifteen years ago, do you think the assassination could have been a revenge killing?”

  “That is a theory, based on the information we have. In any case, that is what the mutilation makes me think of. An eye for an eye. In this case, it would be a heart for a heart.”

  “And do you think the baby’s mother could have done it?”

  “Yes, that is what I think.”

  “I wouldn’t like to cross paths with a woman like that,” Leroy said.

  He continued to scratch his beard and look into the distance.

  “That would explain the ripped-out heart. But why cut out his tongue and sew his lips together?”

  “Maybe it’s a message,” Eva said. “To frighten someone? In any case, you’d need to have some guts to do that to someone. Sewing the mouth closed must have taken a long time.”

  “Do you really think the whole building knew, but nobody did anything?”

  “I’m certain of it, just like I’m sure that none of the tenants will tell us anything. The rule of silence applies here.”

  She took another sip of her soda, watching the clock on the dashboard.

  “Let’s not get too carried away with conjecture. Let’s get back to the chronology, point by point. Ismael Constantin has a child, a child who is carefully hidden. He doesn’t show up on any records, which means that it was a home birth. Who could be aware of the child’s existence?”

  “We keep coming back to the same person,” Leroy said, “The kid’s mother.”

  “The mother,” Eva repeated, “whose identity we don’t know.”

  “We need to find her. Guilty or not, she’ll have answers.”

  “I agree.”

  Leroy massaged his temples.

  “Wait, Eva.”

  “Yes?”

  “Aren’t we jumping to conclusions? Even if Constantin killed his kid, nothing proves that he’s the one who decided to keep the baby in the freezer. Are you following me? It’s generally women who do that kind of thing.”