Franck Thilliez: Syndrome E

The film began.

Ludovic fell heavily as he ran upstairs.

He couldn’t see a thing, not even with the lights on.

He was completely blind.

The shrill ring tone yanked Lucie Henebelle from a deep sleep. She jerked up in her chair and groped around for her cell.

“Hello…?”

Pasty voice. Lucie glanced at the clock in the room: 4:28 a.m. Opposite her, her daughter Juliette, a glucose drip in her right arm, was fast asleep.

The voice on the other end of the line was shaky:

“Hello? Who is this?”

Lucie brushed her long blond hair off her face, her nerves on edge. She had finally managed to doze off. It was very definitely not the time for practical jokes.

“Who am I? Who the hell are you ? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Ludovic—it’s Ludovic Sénéchal… Is this… is this Lucie?”

Lucie Henebelle quietly left the room and found herself in a neon-lit hallway. She yawned and tugged at her shirttails, trying to look halfway decent. Distant babies’ wails ran along the walls. In Pediatrics, silence was a pipe dream.

It took her a few seconds to place the caller. Ludovic Sénéchal. An e-dating fling, following several weeks of intense messaging, that had ended seven months later in a café in Lille, for reasons of “incompatibility.”

“Ludovic? What’s going on?”

In the receiver Lucie heard the sound of a crash, like a glass falling to the floor.

“Someone has to come get me. Someone has to…”

He couldn’t speak, seemingly overcome by panic. Lucie urged him to calm down, talk slowly.

“I don’t know what happened. I was in my cinema. Listen, Lucie—I can’t see a thing. I turned all the lights on and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I think… I think I’ve gone blind. I called a number at random and…”

That was just like him to be watching movies at four in the morning. A hand on her lower spine, Lucie walked back and forth past a huge window that looked out on the various hospitals of the Lille medical center. That crummy armchair had given her a stiff back. At thirty-seven, your body doesn’t shrug things off so easily.

“Hold on. I’m sending an ambulance.”

Ludovic might have bumped his head on something. A scalp wound or head trauma might provoke this kind of symptom and could prove fatal.

“Make sure you’re not bleeding by feeling your head and licking your fingers. Skull, nose, and temples. If you are, cover it with ice cubes and press with a towel. The EMTs will bring you to the hospital right next door to here and I’ll come check in on you. Whatever you do, don’t lie down. You still live at the same address?”

“Yes. Please hurry!”

She hung up and ran to the emergency desk, from where she had them dispatch an ambulance. No doubt about it, her summer vacation was getting off to a rousing start. Her eight-year-old had just been admitted for viral gastroenteritis. Nobody ever had such crappy luck in the middle of summer! The illness had blasted through like a hurricane, dehydrating the poor girl in a mere twenty hours. Juliette couldn’t swallow a thing, not even water. The doctors were predicting a stay of several days, with lots of rest and a special diet after she got out. The poor kid hadn’t been able to go to her first summer camp with her sister, Clara. Being apart was hard on the twins.

Lucie leaned on the window. Watching the revolving light of an ambulance as it sped out, she reflected that in the police station or out in the world, on vacation or at work, life always seemed to land her in the shit.

Several hours later, 125 miles from Lille, Martin Leclerc, head of the Violent Crimes unit, pondered a three-dimensional representation of a human head on the screen of a Mac. You could clearly see the brain and several salient parts of the face: tip of the nose, outer surface of the right eye, left tragus… Then he pointed to a green area, located in the left superior temporal gyrus.

“So that lights up every time I say something?”

Half reclining on a hydraulic chair, head squeezed under a hood containing 128 electrodes, Chief Inspector Franck Sharko stared at the ceiling without moving a muscle.

“It’s called Wernicke’s area, linked to hearing speech. For you and me both, blood rushes there the moment you hear a voice. Hence the coloration.”

“Impressive.”

“Not half as much as seeing you here.” Sharko spoke softly beneath the bonnet. “I don’t know if you recall, Martin, but the invitation was for a drink at my place. The only thing you’ll get here is watery coffee.”

“Your shrink didn’t have any problems with me sitting in on a session. And you’d suggested it yourself—or am I not the only one having memory lapses?”

Sharko flattened his large hands on the armrests; his wedding ring clanked against the metal. He’d been attending these “maintenance” sessions for weeks and still hadn’t learned to relax.

“So what’s up?”

The head of Violent Crimes massaged his temples, his face weary. In the twenty years they’d worked together, the two men had often seen each other in the darkest possible light: horrific crime scenes, family tragedies, health problems…

“It happened two days ago. Some dump between Le Havre and Rouen. Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon—how’s that for a name? Bodies unearthed on the banks of the Seine—you must have heard about it on the tube.”

“That thing at the construction site, where they’re laying a pipeline?”

“Right. The media was all over it. They were already there because the site itself is such a hot-button issue. They discovered five stiffs with their skulls sawed off. Criminal Investigations in Rouen is on the scene, working with the local cops. Their DA was about to send in the CSI boys, but in the end we caught it. I can’t say I’m too thrilled—in this weather, it’s disgusting.”

“What about Devoise?”

“He’s on a sensitive case. I can’t pull him off. And Bertholet is away on vacation.”

“What about my vacation?”

Leclerc straightened his narrow striped tie. A solid fifty years old, black rayon suit, shiny pumps, drawn, arid face: a top cop in all his splendor. Droplets of sweat pearled on his forehead and he mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

“You’re the only one we have left around here. And they’ve got wives and kids… Shit, Franck, you know how it is.”

The silence weighed on them like lead. A wife, children. Beach balls on the sand, laughter lost in the waves. All that was so hazy and far away now. Sharko turned his face toward the real-time animation of the activity in his brain, a fifty-something-year-old organ full of shadows. He jerked his chin, inviting Leclerc to follow the movement of his eyes. Despite the absence of speech, the green area on the upper part of the gyrus was glowing.

“If it’s lighting up, it means she’s talking to me at this very moment.”

“Eugenie?”

Sharko grunted. Leclerc felt a chill. To see his chief inspector’s meninges react to speech like this, when you couldn’t even hear a fly buzzing, made him feel like there was a ghost in the room.

“What’s she saying?”

“She wants me to buy a pint of cocktail sauce and some candied chestnuts next time I go shopping. She loves those miserable chestnuts. Excuse me a second…”

Sharko closed his eyes, lips pressed tight. Eugenie was someone he might see and hear at any moment. On the passenger seat of his old Renault. At night when he went to bed. Sitting cross-legged, watching the mini-gauge trains run around the tracks. Two years earlier, Eugenie had often shown up with a black man, Willy, a huge smoker of Camels and pot. A real mean son of a bitch, much worse than the little girl because he talked loud and tended to gesticulate wildly. Thanks to the treatment, the Rasta had disappeared for good, but the other one, the girl, came and went as she pleased, resistant as a virus.