The Empire Of The Wolves

by Jean-Christophe Grangé

  After three hours of tests, the scientist had almost admitted defeat. He had found nothing. or nearly. The portrait he could offer of the previous Anna was insignificant. A woman who smoked, otherwise leading a very healthy life: who probably suffered from insomnia, to judge from the irregular levels of melatonin; who had eaten olive oil since her childhood-he had found greasy traces of it in her eyes. The final point was that she dyed her hair black. In reality she had lighter hair, which was almost red.

  Alain Veynerdi took off his gloves and washed his hands in the sink cut into the bench. Tiny beads of sweat were glistening on his forehead. He looked exhausted and disappointed. One last time. he went over to Anna. who had gone back to sleep. He walked around her, apparently still searching, seeking for a sign, a hint that would allow him to decipher that diaphanous body.

  Suddenly he bent down over her hands. He took hold of her fingers and looked at them attentively. He then woke her up. As soon as she opened her eyes, he asked her with barely contained excitement: "I can see a brown stain on your fingernail. Do you know where it came from?"

  Anna stared at her surroundings in confusion. Then she looked at her hand and raised her eyebrows. "I don't know," she mumbled. "It's a nicotine stain, isn't it?"

  Mathilde joined them. She, too, could now see a tiny ochre mark on the tip of the nail.

  "How often do you cut your nails?" the biologist asked.

  "I don't know… about every three weeks."

  "Do you have the impression that they grow quickly?"

  Anna yawned in answer.

  Veynerdi went back to his bench, murmuring. "How could I have missed that?" He picked up a tiny pair of scissors and a transparent box, then returned to cut off the piece of Anna's fingernail that seemed to interest him so.

  "If they grow normally" he said softly, "these extremities date back to the period before your accident. This stain is part of your past life."

  He switched the machines back on. While their motors purred again, he diluted the sample in a tube containing a solvent. "That was a close call," he said, and smiled. "In another few days, you would have cut your nails and we would have lost this precious remnant."

  He placed the sterile tube in the centrifuge and turned it on.

  “If it's nicotine," Mathilde commented, "I don't see what you can…"

  Veynerdi placed the liquid in a spectrometer. "I may be able to work out which brand of cigarettes she smoked before her accident."

  Mathilde did not understand why he was so enthusiastic. Such information would not reveal anything important. On the screen of the machine. Veynerdi observed the luminous diagrams. Minutes passed by. "Professor." Mathilde was losing patience. "I don't understand. This is nothing to get worked up about. I "

  "It's extraordinary."

  The light of the monitor was illuminating a fixed look of wonder on the scientist's face.

  "It isn't nicotine."

  Mathilde went over to the spectrometer. Anna sat up on the metal table.

  Veynerdi turned on his seat toward the two women. "It's henna." A wave of silence smothered them.

  The researcher tore off the square-ruled paper that the machine had just printed out, then he typed the data on his computer keyboard. It at once flashed up a list of chemical components.

  "According to my catalogue of substances, this stain comes from a specific vegetal composition. A very rare sort of henna, cultivated on the plains of Anatolia." Alain Veynerdi stared triumphantly at Anna. He seemed to have waited all his life for this moment.

  "Madam, in your previous existence, you were Turkish."

  PART VI

  33

  One hell of a night.

  Paul Nerteaux had dreamed of a stone monster, a malignant titan prowling through the tenth arrondissement. A Moloch who dominated the Turkish quarter, demanding human sacrifices.

  In his dream, the monster wore a half-human. half-bestial mask, of Greek and Persian style. Its mineral lips were white-hot, its penis stuck with blades. Every one of its steps made the earth quake, dust rise and buildings crack.

  He had finally woken up at 3:00, covered in sweat. Shivering in his little three-room apartment, he had made some coffee, then examined the fresh batch of archaeological documents that the boys from the Brigade Criminelle had left in front of his door the previous evening.

  Until dawn, he browsed through the museum catalogues, tourist brochures and scientific studies, observing and scrutinizing each sculpture, comparing it with the autopsy photos-and unconsciously with the mask in his dreams. Sarcophagi from Antalya. Frescoes from Cilicia. Bas-reliefs from Karatepe. Busts from Ephesus…

  He had crossed over ages and civilizations without obtaining the slightest clue.

  Paul Nerteaux then went to the Trois Obus café by Porte de Saint-Cloud. He confronted the smell of coffee and tobacco, forcing himself to ignore his senses and pushing down his nausea. His lousy mood was not just because of his nightmares. It was Wednesday and, like every Wednesday, he had had to call Reyna at daybreak to tell her that he could not look after Céline.

  He spotted Jean-Louis Schiffer standing at the end of the bar. Closely shaven, wrapped up in a Burberry raincoat, he was looking decidedly better as he dunked his croissant in his coffee.

  When he saw Paul, he grinned broadly. "Slept well?"

  "Great."

  Schiffer stared at his rumpled appearance but made no comment on it. "Coffee?"

  Paul nodded. A black concentrate rimmed with brown foam immediately appeared on the bar.

  The Cipher picked up the cup and nodded toward a free table beside the window "Let's sit down. You're not looking too good."

  At the table, he handed Paul the basket of croissants.

  Paul refused. The very idea of swallowing something brought acid up to his nostrils. But he had to admit that Schiffer was playing at being buddies that morning. He asked, "And you, did you sleep well?"

  "Like a log."

  Paul pictured once more the sliced fingers and bloody guillotine. After the carnage, he had accompanied the Cipher to Porte de Saint-Cloud, where he had an apartment on Rue Gudin. Ever since then, a question had been bugging him.

  "If you've got this apartment," he said, and pointed through the window at the gray square, "what the hell were you doing at Longères?"

  "The herding instinct. The desire to be around cops. I was bored to death all on my own."

  The explanation rang false. Paul remembered that Schiffer was registered at the home under a pseudonym, his mother's maiden name. Someone in the Special Branch had tipped him off. Another mystery. Was he hiding? If so, who from?

  "Show me the files," the Cipher said.

  Paul opened the folder and placed the documents on the table. They were not the originals. He had dropped into his office early that morning to make photocopies. Clutching a Turkish dictionary, he had studied each file and had managed to work out each victim's name and personal details.

  The first one was called Zeynep Tütengil. She used to be employed in a workshop beside La Porte Bleue Turkish Baths, which belonged to a certain Talat Gurdilek. She was twenty-seven, childless and married to Burba Tütengil. They lived at 34 Rue de la Fidelité. She came from some village with an unpronounceable name near the town of Gaziantep, in southeast Turkey, and had been living in Paris since September 2001.

  The second's name was Ruya Berkes, and she was twenty-six and single. She worked from home, at 8 Rue d'Enghien, for a certain Gozar Halman a name Paul had already seen on several police reports-a sweatshop owner who specialized in leather and furs. Ruya came from Adana, a city in south Turkey. She had been in Paris for just eight months.

  The third was Rouyike Tanyol. She was thirty, single and a seamstress for a company called Sürelik, based in Passage de l'Industrie. She had been living incognito in a woman's home at 22 Rue des Petites-Ecuries. Like the first victim, she was born in the province of Gaziantep.

  This information provided no common points. There was
not the slightest indication, for example, of how the murderer spotted them or approached them. But above all, it did not give these women the slightest presence or sensation of reality. Their Turkish names even increased their inscrutability. To convince himself that they were flesh and blood. Paul had had to turn back to the Polaroid shots. The women's broad, rather smooth features suggested generously rounded bodies. He had read somewhere that the ideal of Turkish beauty corresponded to just such a physique, with moonlike faces…

  Schiffer was still studying the data, his glasses on the tip of his nose. Still feeling nauseated, Paul hesitated before drinking his coffee. The din of voices and the chinking of glass and metal were getting on his nerves. Above all, the drunken conversations at the bar needled him. He just could not stand such wastrels, killing themselves with one arm on the counter and the other constantly raised… How many times had he gone to fetch one or both of his parents from a zinc bar? How many times had he picked them up from the sawdust and cigarette butts while he was struggling against the desire to puke over them?

  The Cipher removed his glasses and concluded: "We'll start with the third workshop. The most recent victim. While memories are still fresh. Then we'll work back to the first one. After that, we'll go to their homes, their neighbors, and retrace their journeys to work. He must have jumped them somewhere, and no one's invisible."

  Paul downed his coffee in one gulp. Over his burning bile, he said, "Don't forget, Schiffer, the slightest fuckup and…"

  "You arrest me. I haven't forgotten. Anyway, this morning we're changing tactics." He waggled his fingers as though manipulating a puppet. "We're now playing it softly, softly"

  They left the café and headed out to the Golf.

  With the police light flashing, they took the bypass. The grayness of the Seine, added to the granite of the sky and the riverbanks, made for a smoothly monotonous world. Paul liked this crushingly dull and depressing weather. It made for another hurdle for this energetically willful officer to cross.

  On the way, he listened to the messages on his cell phone. Bomarzo the magistrate wanted an update. His voice was tense. Paul now had just two days before he was going to put more officers from the Brigade Criminelle onto the case. Naubrel and Matkowska were pursuing their investigations. They had spent the previous day with the "moles," workmen who dig into the depths of Paris and decompress every evening in specially built chambers. They had questioned the managers of eight different companies and drawn a blank. They had also paid a call on the main manufacturer of these chambers, in Arcueil. According to the boss, the idea that a decompression chamber had been used by someone who was not a qualified engineer was absolutely ridiculous. Did this mean that the killer had such knowledge. or was it a false lead? The officers were now continuing their investigations in other sectors of industry.

  When they reached Place du Chatelet, Paul spotted a patrol car turning up Boulevard de Strasbourg. He caught up with it by Rue des Lombards, and motioned to the driver to stop.

  "Just a second," he told Schiffer.

  From the glove compartment, he took the Kinder Surprises and chewy sweets he had bought an hour before. In his hurry, the bag tore and its contents fell onto the floor. Blushing with embarrassment, Paul picked them up and got out of the car.

  The uniformed officers had stopped and were waiting beside their car, thumbs hooked over their belts. Paul rapidly explained what he wanted them to do, then spun around.

  When he sat back down behind the wheel, the Cipher waved a sweet in the air. "Wednesday-no school for the kids."

  Paul pulled off without responding.

  "I used to use patrol cars as messengers, too. To take my girlfriends presents-"

  "Your employees, you mean."

  "That's right, kid, that's right…" Schiffer unwrapped the bar of caramel and folded it into his mouth. "How many kids have you got?”

  “One daughter."

  "How old is she?"

  "Seven."

  "What's her name?"

  "Céline."

  "A bit fancy for a cop's kid."

  Paul thought so, too. He had never understood why Reyna, the Marxist idealist, had given their child such a precious name.

  Schiffer was chewing away. And the mother?

  "Divorced."

  Paul drove through a red light and past Rue Réaumur. The fiasco of his marriage was the last thing he wanted to discuss with Schiffer. With relief, he spotted the red-and-yellow McDonald's sign that stood at the beginning of Boulevard de Strasbourg.

  He sped up, not giving his partner the chance to ask any more questions.

  Their hunting ground was in sight.

  34

  At 10:00, Boulevard de Strasbourg looked like a battlefield in full fury. The sidewalks and roads themselves dissolved into a single frenetic mass of passersby, slipping in between a maze of trapped, hooting vehicles.

  Above them, the sky was colorless, as taut as a tarpaulin full of water, about to split at any moment.

  Paul decided to park at the corner of Rue des Petites-Ecuries and follow Schiffer, who was already making his way through the cardboard boxes being carried on men's backs, their arms hung with clothing and the loads wobbling on the trolleys. They turned down Passage de Industrie and found themselves beneath an arch of stone, leading to an alleyway.

  Sürelik's workshop was in a brick building, propped up by a framework of riveted metal. The façade was gabled. with a Gothic arch, glazed tympanums and sculpted terra-cotta friezes. The bright red edifice oozed a sort of enthusiasm, a cheerful faith in the future of industry, as though someone inside had just invented sliced bread.

  A few yards from the door, Paul grabbed Schiffer by the lapels of his coat and pushed him under the porch. He then searched him thoroughly to check that he was not armed.

  The old cop tutted reprovingly. "You're wasting your time, kid. Softly, softly, like I said."

  Paul turned around without a word and headed toward the workshop.

  Together, they pushed open the metal door and entered a large square space with white walls and a painted cement floor. Everything was spick-and-span. The light green metal structures, bulging with rivets, reinforced the overall sensation of solidity. Large windows let in oblique rays of light, while galleries ran along each wall, like the bridges of an oceangoing liner.

  Paul had been expecting a pit; what he found was an artist's studio. About forty workers, all of them men, were neatly spaced out and laboring behind their sewing machines, surrounded by cloth and open boxes. In their overalls, they looked like special agents stitching up coded messages during the war. A cassette recorder was playing some Turkish music. A coffeepot was sizzling on a gas hot plate. A craftsman's paradise.

  Schiffer stamped on the floor with his heel. "What you were imagining is downstairs. In the cellars. Hundreds of female workers crammed together like sardines. Illegal immigrants, the lot of them. We're inside now, but this is only the respectable front."

  He pulled Paul toward the machines, walking between the workers, who forced themselves not to look up. "Lovely, aren't they? Model workers, my boy. Industrious, obedient, disciplined."

  "Why be so sarcastic?"

  "The Turks aren't hardworking at all. They're spongers. They aren't obedient. They're indifferent. They aren't disciplined. They follow their own rules. They're a load of fucking vampires. Pillagers who can't even be bothered to learn our language… What's the point? They're just here to earn as much as they can, then piss off back home. Their motto is `Take it all, leave nothing.' " Schiffer grabbed Paul by the arm. "They're a plague, my boy"

  Paul pushed him away violently.

  "Never call me that again."

  He looked up as if Paul had just threatened him with a gun. He stared at him quizzically. Paul wanted to tear that expression off his face, but then a voice sounded behind them.

  "What can I do for you, gentlemen?" A squat man, dressed in spotless blue overalls, was coming toward them, an oily smile g
lued under his mustache. "Ah, Inspector!" he said in astonishment. "It's been so long since I've had the pleasure of seeing you!"

  Schiffer burst out laughing. The music had stopped. The activity of the machines had ceased. A deathly silence reigned.

  "Aren't we on first-name terms anymore?"

  Instead of replying, the workshop's boss looked over distrustfully at Paul.

  "This is Paul Nerteaux," the cop continued. "He's a police captain.

  And my immediate boss. But he's above all a pal." He slapped Paul on the back and grinned. "You can trust him like you can trust me."

  Then he went over to the Turk and put his arm around the man's shoulders. The ballet was choreographed down to the slightest movement. "Let me introduce you to Ahmid Zoltanoi," he said to Paul. "The best workshop manager in all of Little Turkey. As starchy as his overalls, but with a heart of gold, deep down. People round here call him Tanoi."

  The Turk bowed slightly. Beneath his coal black eyebrows, he seemed to be sizing up this newcomer. Friend or foe? He turned back to Schiffer, his voice oily: "I heard you had retired."

  "Force of circumstances. When there's an emergency, who do they call up? Uncle Schiffer, that's who."

  "What emergency are you talking about, Inspector?"

  The Cipher swept the pieces of cloth off a table and placed the picture of Rouyike Tanyol on it.

  "Recognize her?"

  The man bent down, hands in his pockets, thumbs out like gun triggers. He seemed to be balancing on the starchy folds of his overalls. "Never seen her before."

  Schiffer turned over the snapshot. On the white edge, written in indelible marker, could distinctly be seen the victim's name and the address of the Sürelik workshop.

  "Marius has coughed up. And the rest of you will follow. Believe me." The Turk's face fell. He gingerly picked up the photo, put on his glasses and stared at it. "Yes, her face does ring a bell."