Giorgio Faletti - I Kill

Frank closed the car door. He was thirty-eight years old with the eyes of an old man who had been denied life’s wisdom. He had a Latino face, darkened further by the shadow of his eyes and hair and the suggestion of a beard. A strong, athletic man. A man who had killed other men, protected by a badge and the justification of being on the right side. Perhaps there was no cure, no antidote for evil. But there were men like Frank, touched by and immunized against evil itself.

The war never ended.

As Hulot locked his car, they saw Inspector Froben of Homicide, who was taking part in the investigation, coming out of the building in front of them and heading in their direction. He flashed Hulot a wide grin, showing off large, regular teeth that illuminated his face and his rugged features. He had a massive body that filled the jacket of his cheap suit, and the broken nose of someone who’d often climbed through the ropes of a boxing ring. Frank saw confirmation in the tiny scars around his eyebrows.

‘Hi, Nicolas,’ Froben said, shaking Hulot’s hand. His smile grew wider and his grey eyes narrowed, the scars meshing with a web of tiny wrinkles. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘You tell me. In this sea of shit with a storm threatening, I need all the help I can get. This is Frank Ottobre, FBI special agent,’ said Hulot as Froben’s gaze moved to Frank. ‘Very special. His office sent him to join the investigation.’

Froben said nothing, but his eyes showed he was impressed by Frank’s title. He extended his boxer’s hand with its large, strong fingers and grinned again. ‘Christophe Froben, humble inspector of Homicide.’

As he returned Froben’s powerful handshake, Frank felt that the other man could have broken his fingers if he’d wanted to. He liked him immediately. He embodied both strength and grace at the same time. Frank could imagine him with his children after work, making model ships and handling the fragile parts with surprising delicacy.

‘Any news on the tape?’ Hulot asked, coming straight to the point.

‘I handed it over to Clavert, our best technician. A magician, actually. When I left, he was working on it with his gadgets. Come on, follow me.’

Froben went first and they filed in through the same door he had come out of earlier. He led them down a short hallway flooded with diffused light from a window behind them. Hulot and Frank followed Froben’s broad back that seemed to fill the corridor. He stopped in front of a staircase that led down to the left. Froben gestured a generous sweep of his big mitt.

‘After you.’

They went down two flights of stairs and found themselves in a huge room full of electronic equipment. It was lit by cold neon tubes that supplemented the inadequate light from the basement’s street-level skylights.

A thin young man with a shaved head was sitting at a workbench. He was wearing a white lab coat over a pair of jeans and an untucked plaid shirt. A pair of round glasses with yellow lenses was perched on his nose. The three men stopped behind the swivel chair where he was sitting, handling a potentiometer. He turned to look at them. Hulot wondered whether or not the man risked going blind when he went out into the sun wearing those glasses.

Froben didn’t introduce the newcomers, but the man didn’t seem to mind. Probably, to his way of thinking, if two strangers were there, it was because they were supposed to be.

‘Well, Clavert? What have you got to tell us about the tape?’

‘Not much, inspector,’ the technician said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘No good news. I analysed the recording with everything I’ve got. Nothing. The voice is artificial and there is no way to identify it.’

‘Which means?’

Realizing that not everyone present had his technical knowledge, Clavert backtracked.

‘Every human voice travels along certain frequencies that are part of one’s personal identity. Voices can be identified like fingerprints and the retina. They have a certain number of high, low and medium tones that don’t vary, even if you try to alter your voice, by talking in falsetto, for example. We can visualize these frequencies with special equipment and then reproduce them in a diagram. This is fairly standard kit. They use it in recording studios, for example, to distribute frequencies and keep a song from having too many high or low tones.’

Clavert went over to a Mac computer and moved the mouse. He clicked some icons and a white screen appeared, with parallel lines crossing it horizontally. There were two other jagged lines, one green and one purple, wandering between them.

‘This is the voice of Jean-Loup Verdier, the Radio Monte Carlo deejay,’ the technician said, moving the mouse to point to the green line. ‘I’ve analysed it and this is the phonic pattern.’ He clicked again and the screen turned into a graph highlighting a yellow line that zigzagged over a dark background, caught between parallel blue lines. Clavert pointed at the screen. ‘The blue lines are the frequency. The yellow line is the analysed voice. If you take Verdier’s voice from different points of the recording and overlap them, they match perfectly.’ He looked round to see if his audience were keeping up.

‘This is the other voice.’ Clavert returned to the previous screen, clicking the purple line. The graph appeared again, but this time the yellow line was broken and the field was much smaller. ‘In this case, the caller passed his voice through filters to distort and compress the sound, mixing vocal frequencies and making it unrecognizable. All you have to do is change just one of the filters slightly to get a different graph each time.’

‘Can we analyse the recording to find out the model of the equipment he used?’ Hulot asked. ‘Maybe we could find out who sold it.’

‘I don’t think so,’ the technician said doubtfully. ‘You can buy these machines just about anywhere. There are several brands. Performance varies according to the specification and the brand but they all do basically the same thing. And electronics change all the time so there’s a big second-hand market. All this stuff generally ends up in the hands of home-recording enthusiasts, and almost always without receipts. I really don’t think it’s feasible.’

‘We’ll see what we can do,’ Froben joined in, without seconding Clavert’s pessimism. ‘We’ve got so little solid information that we can’t overlook anything.’

Hulot noticed Frank looking around, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts, as if he already knew all this. Still, the inspector was sure that he had heard every word and was filing it all away. He turned back to Clavert.

‘And what can you tell us about the fact that the phone call didn’t go through the switchboard?’

‘Well, I can’t actually advance a theory about that. I can think of two basic possibilities. All switchboards have numbers that let you through. If you know them, you can avoid the switchboard operators. Radio Monte Carlo certainly isn’t NASA as far as secrecy is concerned, so it wouldn’t be hard for someone to get his hands on the numbers. The second hypothesis is a little more complicated, but it’s not science fiction. Actually, I think it sounds more likely.’

‘And that is?’

‘I made some enquiries,’ Clavert said, leaning back in his chair. ‘The Radio Monte Carlo switchboard, like most stations that run phone-ins, has a computer program with a function that displays the caller’s number, for obvious reasons.’ Again he looked around at the three detectives. ‘When the call came, no number appeared on the display, which means that the person calling had attached an electronic device to the phone that neutralized the switchboard function.’

Hulot shook his head. ‘Is that hard to do?’