Jean-Christophe Grangé - The Empire Of The Wolves

Mathilde returned to the point. "What did he say when you told him that her face had been altered?"

"Nothing, because I didn't tell him. I kept this crazy secret to myself."

He looked at Anna. "Even last Saturday, when you came to Becquerel, I switched the X-rays. The marks appear on all of the images."

Anna dried her tears. "Why did you do that?"

"I wanted to finish the experiment. It was such a golden opportunity… Your psychic state was ideal. All that mattered was the research…"

Anna and Mathilde remained speechless.

When the little Cleopatra spoke again, her voice was as dry as a leaf of incense. "If I'm not Anna Heymes and I'm not Sema Gokalp, then who am I?"

"I don't have the slightest idea. An intellectual, maybe, a political refugee. Or a terrorist… I…"

The neon lights went out once more. Mathilde stuck out her hand. The darkness seemed to be deepening, like a flood of tar.

For a moment, he thought to himself, I was wrong. They are going to kill me. But then Anna's voice echoed through the shadows: "There's only one way to find out."

No one turned the lights back on. Eric Ackermann guessed what she was going to say.

Just beside him, Anna murmured, "You're going to give me back what you stole. My memory"

He had gotten rid of the kid, which alone was something.

After the chase at the station and the revelations, Jean-Louis Schiffer had taken Paul Nerteaux to a bar called La Strasbourgeoise, just in front of Gare de l'Est. He had then analyzed once more what was really at stake in this investigation, how it was now a "woman hunt." For the moment, that was all that mattered. Forget the other victims and the killers. They just had to unmask the Grey Wolves' target, the girl they had been looking for in the Turkish quarter for the past five months and had so far failed to find.

Finally, after an hour's heated conversation, Paul Nerteaux had admitted defeat and decided to do a U-turn. His intelligence and ability to adapt never ceased to amaze Schiffer. The kid had then defined their new strategy himself.

First point: have an Identikit portrait of the target done, based on photographs of the three corpses, then distribute it in the Turkish quarter.

Second point: reinforce their patrols, increase the identity controls and searches throughout Little Turkey. Such a tactic might seem derisory, but Nerteaux reckoned that they stood a chance of finding her by sheer good fortune. Things like that happened: after twenty-five years on the run, Toto Riina, the godfather of Cosa Nostra, had been arrested in central Palermo during a routine inspection of ID cards.

Third point: go back to see Marius, the head of the Iskele, and study his files to see if other working girls matched the description. Schiffer liked this idea, but he could hardly return there in person after what he had done to that slave driver.

So he kept the fourth point for himself: go and see Talat Gurdilek, for whom the first victim had worked. They had to finish questioning the murdered women's employers, and he was up for the job.

The fifth and final point was the only one aimed at the killers themselves: launch an investigation in Immigration and Visas to see if any Turkish residents known for their links with the extreme right wing or the mafia had arrived in France since November 2001. This meant sifting through all of the arrivals from Anatolia over the past five months, comparing them with Interpol records and also applying to the Turkish pol ice.

Schiffer did not see the point of such an approach. He knew too well the close relationship that existed between his Turkish colleagues and the Grey Wolves, but he had let the enthusiastic youngster rattle on.

In reality, he did not see the point in a single one of these methods. But he had been patient, because another idea had occurred to him…

While they were on their way to Ile de la Cité, where Nerteaux intended to explain his new plan to Bomarzo, the investigating magistrate, he decided to risk it all. He explained that the best way to advance now would be for them to split up. While Paul was distributing copies of the Identikit portrait and briefing the men in the commissariats of the tenth arrondissement, he would drop round to see Gurdilek..

The young captain had kept his answer to himself until he had seen the magistrate. He had kept him waiting in a bar over the road from the Palais de Justice for two hours, and had even set an orderly to watch over him. Then he reappeared from his appointment as pleased as pie. Bomarzo was giving him free hand to carry out his plan. Apparently, this thrilled him so much that he now agreed to all of Schiffer's requests.

Paul had dropped him off at 6:00 PM on Boulevard de Magenta, near Gare de l'Est, and had arranged to meet up at 8:00 PM at Café Sancak, on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, in order to report.

Schiffer was now walking along Rue de Paradis. Alone at last! Free at last… to breathe the acidic air of the neighborhood, to feel the magnetic force of "his" turf. The end of the day was like a pale, drowsy fever. On each windowpane, the sun placed its particles of light, a sort of gilded talc, which had the macabre grace of embalmer's makeup.

He strode along, psyching himself up for his confrontation with Talat Gurdilek, one of the major mafia bosses of the quarter. He had arrived in Paris during the 1960s, seventeen, penniless and unqualified, and now he owned twenty sweatshops and factories in France and Germany, as well as a good dozen dry cleaners and launderettes. He was a godfather who ruled over every level of the Turkish quarter, official or unofficial, legal or illegal. When Gurdilek sneezed, the entire ghetto caught a cold.

At number 58, Schiffer pushed open a gateway. He entered a dark cul-de-sac, crossed by a central gutter, with noisy workshops and printers' studios on either side. At the end of the alley, there was a rectangular courtyard, with rhomboid paving stones. On the right, a tiny staircase led down into a long ditch, overhung with small, half-deserted gardens.

He loved this hidden place, which was unknown even to most of the inhabitants of the building. A heart within the heart, a trench that disturbed all of the usual vertical or horizontal reference points. An iron door barred the way. He touched the handle. It was warm.

He smiled and knocked vigorously.

After some time, a man opened it, liberating a cloud of steam. Schiffer muttered a few words of explanation in Turkish. The doorman stood to one side to let him in. The cop noticed that he was barefoot. Another smile. Nothing had changed. He dived into the suffocating heat.

The white light revealed a familiar scene: the tiled corridor, the large heating pipes hanging from the ceiling, wrapped in pale green surgical cloth: the dropping of "tears" onto the floor tiles; the warped metal doors that punctuated each section and that looked like the sides of boilers, whitened with quicklime.

They walked on like this for some minutes. Schiffer felt his shoes slapping in the puddles. His body was already damp with sweat. They turned down another row of white tiles wreathed in mist. To the right, an opening revealed a workshop that sounded like a giant breathing.

Schiffer paused to contemplate the scene.

Beneath the ceiling of pipes and ducts, splashed with light, about thirty women with bare feet and white masks were slaving away over tubs and ironing boards. Jets of steam were shooting up at a regular rhythm. The smell of detergent and alcohol saturated the atmosphere. Schiffer knew that the pumping station of the Turkish Baths was nearby, under their feet, drawing water from a depth of two hundred and fifty feet, circulating through the ducts, its iron removed, chlorine added, heated, then directed either toward the Turkish Baths themselves, or toward this underground laundry. Gurdilek had had the idea of placing them together to exploit a single system of canalization for two distinct activities. It was an economical strategy: not a drop of water was wasted.