Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

He thought for a moment while staring at his troubled image. Then had to admit to himself that this rage had just one sole source. Everything had started with Reyna.

MARCH 25, 1994

Paul had started out in narcotics. He was getting good results in the field. Leading an ordered existence, studying for the examination to become commissioner and was even noticing that the lacerated leatherette seating was sinking into the depths of his consciousness. His cop casing was acting as a solid defense against his old panic attacks.

That evening, he was transferring a North African dealer, whom he had questioned for over six hours in his office in Nanterre, to the Paris Prefecture. A routine procedure. But when he arrived at headquarters. He discovered total chaos. Police vans were arriving in droves, containing hordes of screaming and gesticulating youths. Riot police were running around in all directions along the riverbank, while sirens constantly blared as ambulances surged into the courtyard of Hotel-Dieu.

Paul asked around. A demonstration against a job reinstatement plan-a proposed minimum wage for young people-had degenerated. On Place de la Nation, there were apparently over a hundred police officers wounded, plus several dozen demonstrators and millions of francs' worth of damage to property.

Paul grabbed his suspect and legged it down to the basement. If he could not find any room downstairs, then he could always go to the Prison de la Santé, or even farther afield, with his prisoner handcuffed to his wrist.

The detention center greeted him with its usual din, but this time multiplied a thousand fold. There were insults, screams, spitting. Demonstrators were hanging off the bars, yelling out curses, to which the police replied with their truncheons. He managed to off-load his dealer and headed off at once, fleeing the racket and spittle.

He was about to leave when he spotted her.

She was sitting on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, apparently disdainful of the surrounding chaos. He went over to her. She had prickly black hair, an androgynous form, a sort of Joy Division look straight from the 1980s. She even had a blue-checked head scarf, like the ones only Yasser Arafat still dares to wear.

Beneath her punkish hair, her face was of a startling regularity: as even as an Egyptian figurine cut in white marble. Paul thought of the sculptures he had seen in a magazine. Naturally polished shapes, both heavy and soft, ready to slip into the palm of your hand or stand up on a finger in perfect balance. Magical stones, signed by an artist called Brancusi.

He talked with the jailers, checked that the girl's name had not yet been put in the daybook, then took her to the narcotics squad offices on the third floor. While climbing the stairs, he mentally went through his good and bad points.

In terms of strengths. He was a reasonably good-looking. That was at least what he heard from the prostitutes who whistled at him and called to him when he went through the red-light districts looking for dealers. He had the smooth black hair of an Indian. His features were regular, his eyes brown. A dry yet vibrant figure, not very tall, but posed on thick-soled Paraboots. As he looked so cute, he had adopted a harsh stare, which he worked on in front of his mirror, and a three-day growth that concealed his boyish looks.

In terms of weaknesses, there was just one. A huge one. He was a cop.

When he checked the girl's records, he realized that this obstacle was likely to be a major one. Reyna Brendosa, age twenty-four, living at 32 Rue Gabriel-Péri in Sarcelles, was an active member of the extreme wing of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. She had links with the Tutte Bianche, or "White Overalls," an Italian antiglobalization group that practiced civil disobedience. She had been arrested several times for vandalism, disturbing the peace and assault and battery. A real hell-raiser.

Paul turned from his computer and looked once more at the vision staring back at him from the other side of his desk. Just her dark irises, emphasized by eyeliner, knocked him out more thoroughly than the two Zairian dealers who had given him a beating at Chateau Rouge, on one evening of inattention.

He toyed with her identity card, as all cops do, and asked her: "So you like smashing things, do you?"

No answer.

"Isn't there a better way to demonstrate your ideas?"

No answer.

"You get off on violence, do you?"

No answer. Then, suddenly, a slow deep voice: "Private property is the only real violence. The robbing of the masses. The alienation of minds. And worst of all, written down and authorized by law."

"Those ideas are a bit past it. Hasn't anyone told you?"

"Nothing and nobody will prevent the fall of capitalism."

"In the meantime, you're in for three months behind bars."

Reyna Brendosa smiled. "You're playing at soldiers, but you're only a pawn. If I blow, you'll vanish."

Paul smiled back. Never had he felt such a mixture of irritation and fascination for a woman; such a violent desire, mingled with fear.

After their first night, he asked to see her again. She called him a "fucking pig." A month later, she was sleeping at his place every night, so he asked her to move in with him. She told him to go fuck himself Even later, he mentioned marriage. She burst out laughing.

They got married in Portugal, near Porto, in her native village. First at the Communist town hall, then in a little church. A syncretism of socialism and sun. It was one of Paul's best memories.

The following months were the happiest in his life. He was constantly amazed. Reyna seemed ethereal, immaterial, then a moment later a gesture or expression gave her an unbelievable presence and an almost animalistic sensuality. She could spend hours talking about her political ideas, her utopian dreams, quoting philosophers he had never heard of. Then, with just one kiss, she could remind him that she was a full-blooded, organic, vibrant being.

Her breath smelled of blood-she kept biting her lips. Wherever she went, she seemed to capture the spirit of the world, to move with nature's fundamental mechanics. She had a sort of internal perception of the universe: something hidden, an underground stream that linked her to the vibrations of the earth and the instincts of the living.

He loved her slowness, which gave her the gravity of a death knell. He loved her suffering when faced with injustice, misery, the desperation of humanity. He loved the martyr's life she had chosen and that raised their daily existence to the level of a tragedy. Living with his wife was like asceticism before an oracle. A transcendently religious path of discipline.

Reyna, and a life of fasting… This feeling was a hint of the future. At the end of the summer of 1994, she told him she was pregnant. He felt betrayed. His dream had vanished. His ideal had now slumped down into the banality of bodies and family life. Deep down, he sensed that he was going to lose her. At first physically, then emotionally. Reyna's vocation was obviously going to change. Utopia for her was going to reincarnate itself in her internal transformation…

And that was exactly what happened. From one day to the next, she turned over in bed and refused his touch. She reacted only vaguely to his presence. She became a kind of Forbidden City, closed around her one idol-her child. Paul might have been able to follow this shift, but he then sensed a deeper lie that he had been blind to before.

After the birth, in April 1995, their relationship froze forever. They both stood there on either side of their daughter like strangers. Despite the presence of their newborn baby, the morbid atmosphere of a funeral parlor hung around them. Paul realized that he had now become totally repulsive to Reyna.