Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  He looked at Fanny.

  "I want to dive into the ice, Fanny. I want to go down into those ancient waters. Because the killer murdered his victim there. Or else transported him there. I don't know. And I need a scientist capable of finding the crevasses which lead to this buried ice.”

  One knee on the ground, Fanny was now staring at the drawing in the grass. The light was gray, stony, riddled with reflections. The young woman's eyes were sparkling like snowdrops. It was impossible to read her thoughts. She murmured:

  "What if it's a trap? What if the killer only picked up those crystals in order to attract you onto the summit? The strata you're talking about are at an altitude of over ten thousand feet. This is going to be no picnic. Up there, you'll be vulnerable and…"

  "That did occur to me," Niémans admitted. "Which would mean that this is a message. That the murderer wants us to go up there. And go up there we will. Do you know of any crevasses in the amphitheater of Vallernes through which we could reach the older ice?"

  Fanny nodded curtly.

  "How many of them are there?" Niémans asked.

  "On this glacier, I'm thinking of one extremely deep crevasse in particular?”

  "Perfect. What are our chances of being able to go down inside it?"

  The whirring of a helicopter suddenly filled the sky. As its blades approached, the grass turned into billowing waves and, a few yards from them, the surface of the stream rippled.

  "Do we have a chance, Fanny?"

  She glanced across at the deafening machine and ran a hand through her curls. As she bent down, her profile sent shivers through Niémans's spine.

  She smiled:

  "You'll have to hang on tight, officer?”

  CHAPTER 23

  Seen from above, the earth, rocks and trees shared out the territory in a succession of peaks and depressions, of light and shade. As the helicopter flew over this landscape, a marveling Niémans observed these changes for the first time. He admired the lakes of dark conifers, the shipwrecked moraines, the stony heights. Crossing these lonely horizons, he felt as if he had grasped a hidden truth about our planet. A violent, incorruptible truth that had abruptly been exposed, which would always resist the will of mankind.

  The helicopter made its precise way through the labyrinth of reliefs, following the course of the river, as all of its effluents now converged into one single sparkling flow. Beside the pilot, Fanny stared down at these waters, which, now and then, sent back fleeting glints. She was the person who was now in charge.

  The green of the forests fell away. The trees retreated, fading into their own shadows, as though abandoning the chase. Then came the black earth – a sterile surface, which must have been frozen for much of the year. Dark mosses, gloomy lichens, stagnant marshes, which gave off an intense feeling of desolation. Soon, large gray ridges appeared. Rocky crests which had surged up as though propelled by the earth's sighing. Then more shadowlands, like the black moat of some forbidden fortress. The mountain was there. It extended, stretched and exposed its abyssal spurs.

  Finally, their eyes were dazzled. Immaculate whiteness. Snow-covered domes. Icy fissures, the lips of which had begun to close up with early fall. Niémans saw streams which became petrified as they flowed. Despite the grayness of the sky, the surface of this snake of light was brilliant, as though white-hot. He pulled down his polycarbonate goggles, buttoned down their protective shells and looked at the scarred river. On its immaculate bed could be seen flashes of blue, like imprisoned memories of the sky. The din of the blades was now being swallowed up by the snow.

  In front, Fanny did not take her eyes off her GPS, a receptor with a quartz dial, which allowed her to position herself in relation to a satellite's signals. She grabbed the microphone that was connected to her helmet and spoke to the pilot:

  "Over there, to the north-east. That's the amphitheater?”

  The pilot nodded and the chopper swerved off, with all the lightness of a toy, toward a large nine-hundred-feet-long crater, shaped like a boomerang, which seemed to be wallowing on the top slope of the peak. Inside this basin lay a massive tongue of ice, casting brilliant reflections into the heights and darker glimmers down the slopes, where the ice was building up, becoming compressed before splintering into frozen shards. Fanny shouted at the pilot:

  "Here. Just down there. The big crevasse."

  The helicopter flew toward the confines of the glacier, where the translucent ledges piled up into a staircase, before opening out into a long fault – a monster from hell whose snowy face seemed to be grinning. The chopper touched down in a whirlwind of powdery flakes, its blades plowing out large furrows in the drifts.

  "Two hours!" the pilot bellowed. "I'll be back in two hours. Just before nightfall?”

  Adjusting her GPS, Fanny handed it to the man and indicated the point where she wanted him to pick them up. The man nodded. Niémans and Fanny leapt down onto the ground, each holding a large waterproof bag.

  The helicopter took off again at once, as though drawn up by the heavens, leaving those two figures alone amid the eternal snows.

  They took stock for a moment. Niémans raised his eyes and examined the precipice of ice just by where they were standing, like two human particles in a white desert. The policeman was dazzled, his every sense alert. In contrast with the hugeness of the landscape, he seemed to be able to hear the slightest murmuring of the snow as its flakes crunched together into snugly hidden crystals.

  He glanced at the young woman. Her body tense, shoulders stretched, she was breathing in deeply, as though gorging herself on that cold purity. The mountain seemed to have put her back into a good mood. He supposed that she was happy only among those glinting reflections, that headier atmosphere. She made him think of an oread. A creature of the mountains. He pointed at the crevasse and asked:

  "Why this one, rather than another?"

  "Because it's the only one deep enough to reach the strata that you're interested in. It goes down to a depth of three hundred feet." Niémans went over to her.

  "Three hundred feet? But we only have to descend a few feet to reach the layers dating to the 1960s. According to my calculations, at an average of eight inches per year, we…"

  Fanny smiled.

  "That's fine in theory. But this glacier doesn't obey the averages. The ice in its basin becomes crushed and oblique. In other words, it widens out and lengthens. In fact, one year in this gulf produces a layer of about three feet. So count again, officer. To go back thirty-five years, we're going to have to descend…"

  "…at least a hundred feet."

  The young woman nodded. Somewhere, in a blue-tinted niche, a stream could be heard flowing. The slight laughter of trickling water. Fanny pointed at the gulf behind them.

  "There's also another reason why I chose this fault. The last stop of the cable car is just eight hundred yards away. If you're right, and the killer really did lure his victim up to a crevasse, then the chances are it was to this one. It's the easiest one to get to on foot."

  Fanny bent down and opened her bag. She produced two pairs of laminated steel crampons and tossed one to Niémans.

  "Fix these on your boots."

  Niémans did so. He covered both soles with the metallic points, adjusting them to meet the edges of his boots. He then buckled up the neoprene straps as though they were spurs. It reminded him of putting on roller-skates when he was a kid.

  Fanny had already removed from her bag some hollow threaded rods, which ended in oblong loops.

  "Ice spits," she commented laconically.

  Her breath froze into a shining mist. She then took out a piton hammer with a broad handle, its nickel-plated parts apparently removable, then she handed a helmet to Niémans, who was looking at all these objects with mounting curiosity. These tools looked highly sophisticated and, at the same time, perfectly simple. They seemed to be made of unknown, revolutionary materials, and were as brightly colored as sugar drops.

  "Come here."
>
  Fanny put a cushioned harness around his waist and thighs, which looked like a maze of straps and buckles. But she had it done up in a matter of seconds. She stood back, as though she were a dress designer sizing up a model.

  "You'll do," she smiled.

  Next, she picked up a strange lamp, with thin metal strips, an electronic system plus a stubby wick in front of a reflector. Niémans caught a glance of himself in this mirror: in a balaclava, helmet, harness and steel points, he looked like a futuristic Yeti. Fanny screwed the lamp into his helmet, then dangled a pipe behind his shoulder. She tied the reservoir at its end onto Niémans's belt and murmured:

  "It's an acetylene lamp, fueled by vapor. I'll show you how it works, when the moment comes."

  Then she lifted her eyes and addressed Niémans in a serious tone of voice:

  "Ice is a world apart, superintendent," she began. "Forget your reflexes, your habits, and ways of thinking. Trust nothing: not its reflections, not its hardness, nor the appearance of its walls." She pointed to the gulf while doing up her own harness. "Down there, in that gulch, everything will become extraordinary, stupefying. But there are traps everywhere. You've never encountered ice like this before. It's ultra-compressed, harder than concrete, but half an inch of it can also conceal a pit. You will have to follow my instructions to the letter?”

  Fanny stopped, allowing her words to sink in. The condensation formed a magical halo around her face. She pulled her hair back into a bun and put on her balaclava.

  "We're going to enter the pothole this way," she went on. "The level drops here, so it will be easier. I'll go in first and position the spits. The imprisoned gases which I shall release when breaking into the ice will form a huge crack covering several yards. This fault could run vertically, or horizontally. So you must stand away from the wall. It'll make one hell of a din, which is nothing in itself, but it could loosen some blocks of ice or stalactites. Keep your eyes peeled, superintendent. Stay constantly on your guard and don't touch anything."

  Niémans drank in the young woman's instructions. It was certainly the first time that he had ever been under the orders of a curly-haired girl. Fanny seemed to notice this quiver of pride. She continued in a tone of voice that mixed amusement and authority:

  "We're going to lose all notion of time and space. Our only point of reference is the rope. I have several bags each containing one hundred yards of rope, and I alone will be able to measure the distance we've covered. You will follow in my steps and obey my orders. No personal initiative. No spontaneous actions. Clear?"

  "OK;" Niémans sighed. "Is that all?"

  "No."

  Fanny examined the cloud-laden sky.

  "I only agreed to this expedition because of the storm. If the sun comes out again, then we'll have to come back up at once.

  “Why?”

  "Because the ice will melt. The streams will reawaken and pour down on top of us, along the walls. The temperature of the water will be less than two degrees. Now, the physical effort will have made our bodies baking hot. That will be the first shock, which may well give us both heart attacks. If we survive that, then our limbs will start to go limp, we'll slow down and gradually lose consciousness…Get the picture? Within a few minutes, we'll be frozen solid, like statues, on the end of our rope. So, whatever happens, and whatever we discover, at the first sign of sunshine, we come back up.”

  Niémans thought this new phenomenon over.

  "Doesn't that mean that the killer also needed a storm to be able to go down inside the fault?"

  "A storm. Or nightfall."

  The superintendent remembered that, when he had been following the cloud hypothesis, he had found out that the sun had shone all Saturday in that area. If the killer had really gone down into the ice with his victim, then he must have waited for it to be night. Why had he made things so difficult for himself? And why then bring the corpse back down into the valley?

  Unused to the crampons, Niémans staggered clumsily over to the edge of the fault. He risked a glance down. The canyon did not seem vertiginous. After fifteen feet, the walls swelled out until they were almost touching each other. The gulf was then but a narrow slit, like the opening of an infinitely deep shell.

  Fanny joined him and, while attaching a large number of snap-hooks and spits onto her belt, observed:

  "The stream slides into the crevasse then widens a few feet lower down. Which explains why the gulf is far wider after this initial fault. Beneath it, the water splashes against the walls and erodes them. We'll have to slip between its jaws to get inside.”

  Niémans looked' at the two icy edges, which seemed to open up reluctantly over the pit.

  "If we went down even deeper into the glacier, would we find water from past centuries?"

  "Absolutely. In the Arctic, it's possible to descend as far as extremely distant eras. At a depth of over ten thousand feet lie, still intact, the rainwaters which pushed Noah into constructing his Ark. And the air he breathed, too."

  "The air?"

  "Bubbles of oxygen, imprisoned in the ice."

  Niémans was astonished. Fanny put on her rucksack and knelt down by the edge of the crevasse. She screwed in her first spit, attached a snaphook, then played the rope through it. She looked up at the storm clouds, then playfully declared:

  "Welcome to the time machine, superintendent."

  CHAPTER 24

  They roped down.

  The policeman was suspended on the rope, which slid through a self-locking grip. To go down, all he had to do was press the handle, which then slowly played it out. As soon as he released the pressure, it became blocked. Sitting in his harness, he was now dangling in the void.

  Keeping his mind on this simple gesture, Niémans listened to Fanny's instructions. Several feet beneath him, she told him when to lower himself down. When he reached the next spit, the policeman changed ropes, taking care to attach himself first by the short cord tied to his harness. With all these straps, Niémans looked like an octopus decked with sparkling Christmas decorations.

  As the descent continued, the superintendent remained above the young woman and, although he could not see her, instinctively trusted himself to her experience. As he progressed along the wall, he heard her working a few feet below him. His mind emptied. Outside his own concentration, all he felt was a mixture of strange vivid sensations. The chill breath of the wall. The support of his harness as his body hung in the air. The beauty of the ice, with its dark blue sheen, like a lump of night torn from the heavens.

  Soon, the daylight faded. They passed between the swollen edges of the fault and into the very heart of the gulf. Niémans felt as though he were diving into the crystallised belly of a huge animal. Under that bell-jar of ice, made up of one hundred per cent water, his sensations became even sharper and more intense. He quietly admired the dark, translucent walls which cast off jagged glints of light, like echoes of the day. In the darkness, each of their movements resonated deeply in the vault.

  Finally, Fanny touched down on a sort of almost horizontal gallery, which ran along the wall. Niémans followed her onto that natural landing. The two sides of the crevasse had narrowed again until they were just a few yards apart.

  "Come here," she ordered.

  He did so. Fanny pressed a button on the top of his helmet – just as if she had flicked on a lighter – a sudden bright ray gleamed out. The policeman caught another glimpse of himself in the reflector on the young woman's helmet. What he saw most clearly was the acetylene flame, a sort of inverted cone, which was shedding this strong light by refraction. Fanny cautiously turned on her lamp, too, then said:

  "If your killer came into this gulf, then this is the route he took."

  Baffled, Niémans stared at her. The yellowy gleam of her lamp shone down on her face, deforming it into a pattern of disturbing, brutal shadows.

  "We've reached the right depth," she continued, indicating the smooth surface of the wall. "Ninety feet below the dome. The crysta
llised snow from the 1960s. And then, below it…"

  Fanny opened another bag of rope then fixed a spit into the wall. After having hammered it home, she screwed it into place by sliding a snaphook into its end, and twisting its threaded point. Just as she would have done with a corkscrew. Niémans was astonished by her strength. He looked at the displaced ice, which emerged from the spit through a side opening, and thought how few men he knew would be capable of such a feat.

  They roped off again, but this time horizontally, along that glittering tunnel. Tied one to the other, they were walking above the precipice. Their reflections mingled in the wall opposite them. Every twenty yards, Fanny fractioned off the rope, digging another spit into the wall and separating off the next section. She repeated this action several times, and they progressed a hundred yards.

  "Shall we go on?" she asked.

  The policeman looked at her. Her face, hardened by the brutal light from the lamp, now seemed distinctly sinister. He nodded, pointing at the corridor of ice which led away into an infinite succession of reflections. She opened another bag and carried out her maneuver once more. Spit, rope, twenty yards, then spit, rope, twenty yards…

  They thus covered four hundred yards. Not a sign, not a trace of the killer having gone that way before them. Soon, the walls seemed to be wandering in front of Niémans's eyes. Slight clicking noises and distant sardonic laughter came to his ears. The world had become luminous, resonant, shaky. Did ice vertigo exist? He peered at Fanny, who was opening a fresh bag of rope. She did not seem to have noticed anything.

  A vague panic gripped him. Perhaps he was starting to lose his wits. His body, his brain, were perhaps so tired that they were showing signs of cracking up. Niémans began to tremble. The cold bit into his bones in waves. His hands seized the next spit. His feet shuffled on clumsily. With tears in his eyes, he tried to catch up with Fanny. He suddenly felt that he was about to fall, that his legs could no longer support him. His wits wandered even further. The bluish walls seemed to be undulating rapidly in the light of his lamp, and the distant laughter to echo around him. He was going to fall. Into the pit. Into his own madness. He managed to give a suffocated shout: