Franck Thilliez - Syndrome E

“What for?”

“I’ll check further with a surgeon. But if I remember right, there are a bunch of possibilities. It might be a chemotherapy stent. But they’re also used as a central catheter, to avoid having to stick the patient several times over. The tox screen and cell analysis should tell us a lot. Like if he had a particular illness, such as cancer.”

“Anything else?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned. The rest has to do with forensic technique, not very important for you. For the next step, I’ve taken psoas samples for the DNA of each subject. Since they shaved their heads, the pubic hairs went to the guys from tox. Their turn to work now. Let’s hope this all gets us some IDs, or else this business threatens to drag on forever and get extremely complicated.”

“Don’t you think it already is?”

The medical examiner began removing his spattered scrubs. Sharko rubbed his lips, eyes to the floor.

“Even back when I practically lived in morgues, I never thought of buying shoes like yours, in rubber. You can’t imagine how many pairs of slip-ons I messed up. The odor of death seemed to be… encrusted in the leather. Where can you get that kind of shoe?”

The specialist looked at his interlocutor, then went to the back of the room to put away his final tools, a wan smile on his face.

“Go to Leroy Merlin, gardening department, you should be able to find them. And now, good luck to you, Chief Inspector. I’m going to catch some sleep.”

Once outside, Sharko sucked in a lungful of fresh air and looked at his watch. Almost eleven… Most of the reports wouldn’t come through until late afternoon. He squinted up at the cloudless sky and sniffed his clothes. Barely two hours in there and they already smelled. The Paris cop decided to go back to the hotel and change before heading over to Criminal Investigations, to see what was what and look at the computer files. He’d take advantage to smush that miserable fly that had eluded him all night long.

And then, if there was no concrete progress by two days from now, he’d pack up and deal with it back in Nanterre. He was already missing his miniature trains something fierce.

The film restorer Claude Poignet lived on Rue Léon-Gambetta, a mishmash of unrelated businesses and brightly colored shops. At one end, the street opened onto the Wazemmes covered market, with its intermingling of ethnicities, and at the other it plunged into the students’ quarter, bordering Rue de Solférino and Boulevard Vauban. In his diminutive dwelling, crushed between a Chinese restaurant and a smoke shop, the septuagenarian didn’t look like much. Bifocals in cordovan frames, ratty burgundy wool V-neck sweater, wrinkled checked shirt: was he a restorer of old films or an old film restorer?

“I’d say an old restorer of old films. I quit about twenty years ago, because of my eyes. Light doesn’t get through as well as it used to. And cinema is first and foremost about light, you know? No light, no cinema.”

Lucie penetrated farther into one of those old buildings from northern France, with living room tiles cemented in place, high walls, and visible pipes. A kettle was heating on the gas stove, giving off an acrid stink of burned coffee. When Claude filled the two cups, Lucie thought he was pouring liquid coal. Though normally she took hers without sugar, she plunked in two cubes before even tasting.

“So? Were you able to autopsy our short?”

Poignet smiled. His teeth were like the décor: one hundred percent rustic. Still, behind his wrinkles he still bore traces of a man who must have been a real charmer, like a young Redford.

“That’s a real policeman’s term, ‘autopsy.’ How did a beautiful young woman like you end up chasing down criminals?”

“Probably something to do with thrills. You get yours from looking at films, me from looking at streets. When you get down to it, we’re both trying to fix something that doesn’t work.”

She forced herself to swallow her coffee—truly vile, even revolting, even with all the sugar in the world. An Angora cat came to purr between her legs, and she petted it gently.

“Have you known Ludovic a long time?”

“His father and I were in the army together. I gave Ludovic his first projector, more than twenty years ago—a 9.5 mm from Pathé that I was getting rid of for lack of space. Already back then, he used to hold screenings on the walls of his father’s house. It’s really a shame what’s happened to him. His mother died of an illness before he was nine. He’s a good boy, you know?”

“I know, and I’m here because I want to help him. Can you tell me about the film?”

“Come with me.”

They walked up narrow, creaking stairs that clearly showed the age of the house. Portraits by the dozens hung on the walls. Not of movie stars, but of an unknown woman, whose delicately made-up face caught the light magnificently. Clearly the traces of an obsession, a love lost much too soon. Once upstairs, they walked down a dimly lit hall with worn floorboards.

“To the left is the lab where I develop. I still occasionally film with an old 16 mm, just for kicks. I’ll exit this world with a roll of film in my hands, believe you me.”

He opened the darkroom, revealing movie cameras, reels of film stock, and jugs of chemicals, and gently pushed back the door.

“We’re going in back.”

The last room opened onto a veritable laboratory devoted to the world of cinema. An editing table, viewer, loupes, the latest computer equipment, and a film scanner. There were also a number of more archaic instruments: scissors, glue, splicer, adhesive tape, rulers. Lucie had been right to use the word “autopsy.” He must have sliced up celluloid here the way they dissected bodies. There were even the delicate white gloves, which the restorer put on.

“Soon, none of this will exist anymore. Fully digital HD cameras will do away with good old 35 mm. The magic of movies is being lost, I can tell you that. Is a film that doesn’t skip still a film?”

The reel in question was mounted on a vertical rotating axis, on the left side of the viewing monitor. About three feet of film stretched from there into a central housing that served as both magnifier and screen, then exited toward a take-up reel. The only light in the room was from a neon tube.

“Let’s begin at the beginning. Come closer, dear miss. Permit me to say that you’re quite lovely.”

He wasn’t exactly tongue-tied, this one. Lucie smiled and went to stand beside him, facing the viewer.

“How should we do this?” he asked. “Simple or complicated?”

“Feel free to go into detail—I’m new at this, even though I love movies. When you were giving Ludovic the projector, I was watching my first horror film, alone in the house at eleven at night. It was The Exorcist . My best and worst memory.”

“ The Exorcist … One of the most profitable productions in cinema history. William Friedkin, who directed the first one, had subjected his actors to abominable conditions. Sudden gunshots next to their ears, freezing cold rooms to get more out of them. These days, actors have to have their creature comforts.”

Lucie looked at him affectionately. He spoke with passion, just like her father when he talked lures and fishing rods. She’d been so small then.

“So, our film…”

“Right, our film. First of all, the format: 16 mm. It was shot entirely with a shoulder camera. Probably a Bolex. Light, portable, the mythic camera of the 1950s. Oddly enough, filmed at fifty frames a second, as the loss leader indicates, when the standard was twenty-four. But the Bolex allowed for this sort of whimsy, and so could satisfy all sorts of requirements.”