Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

One night, he could no longer stop himself from asking. You don't want me anymore?"

"No."

"You never will again?"

"No."

He hesitated, then asked the fatal question: "And you never have?”

“No, never."

His policeman's flair had deserted him on that score… Their meeting, life together. Marriage had been a pure fraud, an illusion.

A setup with the sole aim of having a child.

The divorce took only a few months. In front of the judge, Paul felt as if he was hovering. He heard a raucous voice being raised in the office, and it was his. He felt sandpaper biting into his face, and it was his own beard. He was gliding through the room like a ghost, a phantom in a comedy. He said yes to everything, to the alimony and custody: he did not put up the slightest fight. He did not give a damn, and instead dwelled on how much he had been taken in. He had been the victim of a rare form of collectivization: Reyna the Marxist had taken over his sperm. She had practiced a Communist-inspired in vitro fertilization.

The funniest thing of all was that he could not bring himself to hate her. On the contrary, he admired her as an intellectual, free from desire. He was sure that she would never again have a sexual relationship. Neither with a man nor with a woman. And the idea of this idealist who wanted quite simply to give life, without the slightest physical pleasure or desire, left him drained, without any idea about what she was doing.

It was then that he started to drift, like wastewater looking for its sea of sludge. At work, he began to wander. He never showed up at his office in Nanterre. He spent all his time in the roughest neighborhoods, hanging around with the lowest of the low, smoking endless joints with pushers and druggies, sinking into the dregs of humanity.

Then, in the spring of 1998, he agreed to see her.

She was called Céline and she was three. The first weekends were terrible: parks, rides, cotton candy, terminal boredom. Then, bit by bit, he discovered an unsuspected presence. Something transparent in the child's movements, face, expressions, with their supple bounding whimsical shifts, whose turns and turns-about he observed.

A tightly clenched fist to emphasize what was obvious, the way she leaned forward then rounded off the movement with an impudent grin, her husky voice with its own special charm that made him tingle as though touched by some material or bark. A woman was already lurking there within the child. It was not her mother-absolutely not-but another unique, sparkling being.

There was something new under the sun: Celine was there.

Paul changed completely, and now started to relish the time they spent together. Those days spent with his daughter brought him back to life. He struggled to regain his self-respect. He dreamed of himself as a hero, an untouchable supercop, washed clean of any stain.

A man whose gaze would make his morning mirror glisten.

For this recovery, he chose the sole territory that he knew: crime. He forgot about taking the exam to become a commissioner and instead applied for a job in Paris 's Brigade Criminelle. Despite his bout of depression, he became captain in 1999. He then turned into a determined, inspired investigator. And started to hope for a case that would take him to the top-the sort of inquiry that all motivated officers long for: the pursuit of a beast, a face-to-face duel with an enemy who was up to his expectations.

It was then that he heard about the first body.

A redhead who had been tortured and disfigured then dumped in a doorway off Boulevard de Strasbourg on November 15. 2001. No suspects. No motive, and an almost nonexistent victim… The body did not match any person who had been reported missing. The fingerprints were not on record. The squad had already closed the case. Just another bust-up between some whore and her pimp. The red lights of Rue Saint-Denis were not even two hundred yards away. But Paul instinctively sensed that there was something else. He read the file -the witness who had found the body, the forensic report, photos of the stiff. At Christmas, while his colleagues were with their families, and Céline had gone to see her grandparents in Portugal, he studied the file in detail. He immediately saw that this had been no usual murder. Neither the diversity of the torture methods nor the mutilations to the face fitted with the idea that it had been a pimp. What was more, if the girl had really been in the game, then her fingerprints would have been identified-all the whores of the tenth arrondissement were on record.

He decided to keep an eye on events in the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis area. He did not have to wait long. On January 10, 2002, a second body was found in the courtyard of a Turkish sweatshop on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. The same type of victim a redhead who had not been reported missing. The same marks of torture. The same lacerations to the face.

Paul forced himself to stay calm, but he was sure that he now had his serial killer. He rushed to see Thierry Bomarzo, the investigating magistrate, and was put in charge of the case. Unfortunately the leads were already cold. The local cops had made a mess of the scene of the crime, and forensics had found nothing.

Deep down, Paul sensed that he should track the killer on his own turf, by infiltrating the Turkish community. He got himself transferred to the local police station on Rue de Nancy and demoted to the rank of plain sergeant in the Service d’Accueil de Recherche d'Investigation Judiciaire (the SARIJ). He rediscovered the routine of a lowly cop, dealing with robbed widows, shoplifting in grocery stores and neighbors from hell.

The month of February passed by. Paul was champing at the bit. He was both fearing and hoping for another corpse. His life alternated between moments of excitement and days of utter gloom. When things could not get any worse, he visited the anonymous tombs of the two victims in the paupers' cemetery in Thiais, Val-de-Marne.

While staring at the stone slabs with just a number on them, he swore that he would avenge the victims and find the madman who had massacred them. Then, in the back of his mind, he also made a promise to Céline. Yes, he would catch the killer. For her. For himself. So that everyone would see what a great cop he was.

On the dawn of March 16, 2002 another body was found.

The boys on night duty called him up at five in the morning. The garbage collectors had phoned in: they had come across a corpse in a ditch by Saint-Lazare Hospital, a disused brick building off Boulevard Magenta. Paul ordered that no one should go there for another hour. He grabbed his coat and headed for the scene of the crime. He discovered a deserted zone, without a single officer or flashing light to disturb his concentration.

It was a miracle.

He was going to be able to sniff out the trace of the killer, to enter into contact with his scent, his presence, his craziness… Once again, he was disappointed. He had been hoping for some material clues, a particular disposition that would reveal a modus operandi. But all he had was a corpse in a concrete trench. A livid, mutilated body topped by a disfigured face beneath a ginger mane.

Paul realized that he was caught between the silence of the dead and the silence of the quarter.

He went back home in desperation, even before the police van arrived. He wandered down Rue Saint-Denis and watched Little Turkey wake up. The shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers running to their sweatshops, the thousand and one Turks going about their business… He felt sure that this immigrant neighborhood was the forest in which the killer was concealed, a dense jungle where he had fled to seek refuge and security.