Franck Thilliez - Syndrome E

“Had anyone come here before he went upstairs? Perhaps in the morning or afternoon?”

“Not that I know of.”

She cast a glance around the room. Not a phone jack in sight.

“Did your father have a cell phone?”

Luc Szpilman nodded. Lucie poured herself another glass of water from the pitcher, playing it cool. Inside, she was churning.

“Was he carrying it on him when he died?”

The kid suddenly seemed to get it. He stabbed his index finger onto the low table.

“It was here. I picked it up this morning and put it on the shelf, out there. The police didn’t even ask about it. You think that—?”

“Can you show me?”

He went to get it. Battery dead, of course. He connected it to a charger plugged into a nearby outlet and handed it to Lucie. The phone was in crummy shape, but she was able to check the call history, with date and time. She first looked at the incoming calls. The last one was from Sunday afternoon, the day before his death. A certain Delphine de Hoos. Luc explained that she was the nurse who came periodically for his blood tests. The other calls were farther back in time, and according to his son were all normal. Just a few old friends or colleagues from FIAF, with whom his father shared the occasional vodka.

Lucie then tried the list of outgoing calls. Her heart skipped a beat.

“Well, well…”

The last one was dated from the famous Monday, at 8:09 p.m. About fifteen minutes before the fall from the ladder. But much more interesting than the date was the phone number itself—curious, to say the least: 514-555-8724.

Lucie showed Szpilman the screen.

“He called abroad just a few minutes before he died. Does this number or the area code mean anything to you?”

“Maybe the States? He called there sometimes, when he was doing research.”

“I don’t think so, no.”

Lucie took out her own phone and punched in a number, an intuition in the back of her head. She couldn’t swear to it, but…

A voice on the other end of the line interrupted her musings. Information. Lucie made her request.

“I’d like to know which country the phone number 514-555-8724 corresponds to.”

“One moment, please.”

Silence. The phone cradled between ear and shoulder, Lucie asked Luc for a pen and paper. Then she quickly jotted down the number. The voice returned in her ear.

“Ma’am? It’s the area code for the province of Quebec. Montreal, to be precise.”

Lucie hung up. A word crumbled on the tip of her tongue, while she stared intently at Luc.

“Canada.”

“Canada? Why would he have called Canada? We don’t know anybody there.”

Lucie gave herself time to absorb that information. For some reason or other, Vlad Szpilman had suddenly called a person living in the country where the film had been manufactured. She scrolled through the earlier calls as far back as a week before. No other trace of that number.

“Did your father keep notes about films or his contacts? Index cards, notebooks?”

“I never saw any. These past few years, my father’s life consisted of a few square yards, between here, his screening room, and his office.”

“Can I have a look at his office?”

Luc hesitated and finished his beer.

“Okay. But you’ll really have to tell me what’s going on. He was my father—I have a right to know.”

Lucie nodded. Luc led her into a clean, well-organized room, with a computer, magazines, newspapers, and a library. The cop glanced into the papers, the drawers. Just normal office material, a PC, nothing unusual. The library in the back housed a lot of history books, about the wars, massacres, genocides. Armenians, Jews, Rwandans. There was also a section on the history of espionage. CIA, MI5, conspiracy theory. And a bunch of books in English, with titles that suggested nothing special to Lucie: Bluebird, MK-Ultra, Artichoke. Vlad Szpilman seemed preoccupied with the dark underside of the world from the last century. Lucie turned to Luc, pointing at the books.

“Do you think your father was hiding some important secret from you?”

The young man shrugged.

“My father had a bit of a paranoid streak. Wouldn’t have been like him to talk to me about that stuff. It was his secret garden.”

After a spin around the room, Lucie let herself be accompanied to the exit door, thanked Luc Szpilman, and handed him her business card, on the back of which she jotted her personal cell number in case. In the car, she took out her phone and dialed the number in Canada. Four nerve-racking rings before someone finally picked up. Not a sound, not a hello. So it was up to Lucie.

“Hello?”

Long pause. Lucie repeated, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Who is this?”

Male voice, pronounced Quebec accent.

“Lucie Henebelle. I’m calling from—”

Abrupt click. He’d hung up. Lucie imagined a nervous type, on his guard, distrustful. Dazed by the brevity of the exchange, she burst from her car and went back to knock on Szpilman’s door.

“You again?”

“I’ll need your father’s phone.”

Refine her strategy. Take him unaware before he can hang up.

Lucie let a good fifteen minutes go by, then redialed the number with Vlad Szpilman’s partially recharged cell. With a little luck, her interlocutor would recognize the contact and not hang up. Not immediately, in any case.

She paced anxiously in front of the Belgian’s house. Even though he’d been fairly easygoing and cooperative, she didn’t want Luc to hear the conversation—assuming there was one.

The phone was picked up after two rings.

“Vlad?” went the voice with the Quebec accent.

“Vlad is dead. This is Lucie Henebelle, a lieutenant in the French police. Criminal division.”

She’d blurted it all out at once. This was the decisive moment. An interminable silence followed, but he didn’t hang up.

“Dead how?”

Lucie squeezed her fist: the fish was hooked. She just had to reel it in gently now, without any sudden jerks.

“I’ll tell you. But first tell me who you are.”

“Dead how?”

“A stupid accident. He fell from a ladder and cracked his skull.”

Several seconds passed. A host of questions burned Lucie’s lips, but she was afraid he’d cut the connection. It was he who finally broke the ice.

“Why are you calling?”

Lucie played it straight. She sensed that the other man was under great pressure, and that he’d sniff out a lie in two seconds flat.

“After he called you on Monday, Vlad Szpilman immediately went up to his attic to get a film. An anonymous film from 1955, made in Canada, that I now have in my possession. I’d like to know why.”

Apparently she’d hit a nerve. She heard his breathing become more labored.

“You’re not with the police. You’re lying.”

“Call my headquarters. Lille police department, Criminal Investigations unit. Tell them that—”

“Tell me about the case.”

Lucie flipped through her recall at top speed. What was he talking about?

“I’m sorry, I—”

“You’re not with the police.”

“Of course I am! Lieutenant in Lille, for God’s sake!”

“In that case, tell me about the five bodies, the ones discovered near the factories. How far have you got with the investigation? Give me the technical details.”

Lucie understood: the bodies at the pipeline. So that was what had triggered Vlad Szpilman’s phone call. They were reporting it on the news.

“I’m sorry. We work by jurisdiction, and mine is the north. We’re not the ones handling that case. You’d have to check with—”

“I don’t give a damn. Get to know the people handling it. If you’re really with the police, you’ll get hold of the information. And in case you try to trace me, my phone is a cell registered under a false name and address. Because of you, I’ll now have to destroy it.”