The Paris Botanical Gardens, at the edge of the fifth arrondissement, afford a magical spectacle on September mornings. Reddish light, the kind that spells the end of summer, falls obliquely on the foliage of thick, venerable cedars and drips onto the leaves. Joggers disappear down paths still damp with the previous evening’s rain, while gardeners begin trimming shrubs in preparation for the harsher seasons. Everything is conducive to calm and relaxation. At that time of year, school groups haven’t yet taken over the park and its museums.
Sharko and Levallois entered the foyer of the Hall of Evolution, a massive building straight out of another era. Above them, the huge glass roof filtered an orangey light, which spread across the three levels organized around a central nave. Without even penetrating into the center of the museum, one could discern strange skeletons, stuffed giraffe heads, hundreds of display cases harboring animal species. Here in particular, life was laying itself bare.
Clémentine Jaspar was waiting at the reception desk, a thick folder in her hands. In her brown pleated trousers and a khaki shirt with large pockets, the primatologist could easily have been mistaken for a guide or some hiker lost in the middle of the capital.
The cops greeted her. Sharko gave her a sincere smile.
“How’s Shery?”
“She’s still having trouble expressing herself. It will take her a while to fully recover, at her age. And there aren’t any shrinks for chimpanzees.”
She quickly changed the subject.
“And how’s your investigation coming?”
“Not bad for the moment. We’re gathering up as much information as we can before drawing any conclusions.”
The inspector nodded toward the folder.
“I’m especially counting on what you can tell me about this thesis.”
Jacques Levallois, who had remained a few steps back, gave his colleague a light tap on the shoulder.
“I’m going to go find the director or someone who can clue me in about the fossil. See you in a bit.”
Jaspar watched him walk away, then headed toward the turnstiles.
“Let’s go into a gallery, if that’s okay. I can’t think of a better place to explain all this to you.”
As Sharko reached for his wallet to buy a ticket, she handed him one.
“I’ve got a few privileges here. It’s a bit like my second home.”
The inspector thanked her. He had lived in the area for more than thirty years and yet he’d never set foot in the museum, or in most Paris museums, for that matter. His habits ran more toward prisons, courtrooms, psychiatric wards. A macabre round of institutions that had punctuated his life.
They went through the turnstile and entered the nave. They wandered among life-size reproductions of sharks, elephant seals, giant rays. Most impressive was the hanging, outsized whale skeleton, which clearly exhibited the mysteries of nature. By what magic secret had those giant ribs been formed, until each was almost as big and heavy as a man?
Jaspar climbed a flight of steps to the first level, devoted to land species. In the middle, scores of jungle animals seemed to be fleeing an imaginary fire. Buffalo, lions, hyenas, antelopes, all frozen in flight. The primatologist skirted several cases, then stopped in front of the one containing Lepidoptera. Hundreds of flying insects, pinned to cork, numbered and precisely identified: phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. She sat on a bench, inviting Sharko to join her, then opened the fat green folder.
“Here’s the copy of Eva’s thesis back. You’ll find my notes in the margins.”
She spoke with gravity, her features drawn and tired.
Sharko focused his attention on his interlocutor.
“Tell me what Louts discovered.”
Jaspar thought for a moment. She seemed to be seeking the best way to broach a complex subject.
“She found a relation between hand dominance and violence.”
Violence.
The word burst like a firecracker in the inspector’s head. Immediately, the image of Grégory Carnot appeared to him. He also thought about Ciudad Juárez, a city of fire and blood, where terror showed itself at its crudest. Violence, everywhere, in every form, that clung to him like a tick.
The primatologist brought him back to earth.
“So that you can fully grasp the essence of her work, I first have to tell you some of the more notable principles of evolution. Listen very carefully.”
“I’ll do my best.”
With a circular movement of her arm, Clémentine Jaspar indicated the species that inhabited the magnificent gallery. Fish, beetles, crustaceans, mammals.
“If these species populate our planet today, if this little dragonfly exists, even though it appears so fragile, it’s because it is much more adapted to survive than a dinosaur. Look at these animals, the shape of their shells and tails, their color. These are clear examples of adaptation to the environment, which all have but one function: attack, defense, camouflage . . .”
She pointed toward one particular display case.
“Those two specimens in front of you are birch moths. Look carefully. Do you notice anything?”
Sharko got up and leaned closer to the glass, intrigued.
“Two identical moths, one with white wings and the other with black wings.”
“Well, now, you see, in the nineteenth century, in England, the pale form was ultra-dominant. During the day, the pale moths could hide on the trunks of birch trees, which ensured their survival. That’s why they were more plentiful: predators didn’t see them. You might object that, on the other hand, black moths wouldn’t be seen at night, but neither were the white ones, since it was too dark.”
“Okay, logical enough. So it was better to be a light moth than a dark one.”
“Correct. If nothing had changed, the dark moths would eventually have become extinct, because they were less adapted to their environment, more vulnerable, genetically less efficient, and thus eliminated by natural selection.”
“My famous lame ducks . . .”
“Absolutely. But today, we’ve noticed that the light-colored variety is becoming increasingly rare, while the dark variety is flourishing. In a hundred years, the ratio has completely inverted.”
She came up and stood next to Sharko. Her eyes shone in the reflection of the glass.
“What effect of natural selection could have changed the distribution to that extent?”
“You tell me.”
“The man-made kind, Inspector. With the advent of the Industrial Age, England experienced a serious problem of air pollution. This pollution caused the color of birch trees to turn from pale gray to dark gray. And so it became increasingly difficult for the pale variety of the butterfly to survive, because its camouflage was no longer effective. You have here a typical example of natural selection influenced by human agency: the better-adapted species, the dark-colored variety, began to increase in number, while the light-colored variety was being eaten by predators. All because of humans.”
“So man and industrialization are able to influence nature’s choices—or even to change them.”
Jaspar pointed toward a graph that charted population growth over time. In the space of several centuries, it went from thousands of individuals to several billion. A veritable human virus seemed to be spreading over the planet. Sharko felt a chill in his spine.
“The second point to keep in mind is, every human being alive today is a pure product of evolution. You are incredibly well adapted to your environment, as am I.”
“I really didn’t think I was all that well adapted.”
“But you are, I guarantee it. If you’re alive today, it’s because none of your ancestors died before reproducing, and this has been so since the dawn of time. More than twenty thousand generations, Inspector, who sowed their seed all the way down to you.”
Sharko pondered the profusion of shapes, sizes, and colors. Bound by the intrinsic power of Mother Nature, one couldn’t help feeling humble. Little by little, the cop grasped the stakes that biologists grappled with, and could get an inkling of their obsessions: to understand the how and why of life, just as he tried to get inside the minds of his killers.
Comfortably in her element, Jaspar spoke with increasing ardor:
“Your forebears went through wars, famines, natural catastrophes, plagues, the great scourges but still brought babies into the world, who grew up and themselves propagated those extraordinary genes, all the way to you. Do you realize what a hidden combat our ancestors waged, just so you and I could be talking about this today? And it’s the same story for each of the seven billion men and women who populate our planet. Incredibly well-adapted individuals . . .”
Her words echoed particularly loudly in that spot. The cop felt perturbed, touched. He thought of his little daughter, of Eloise, who had been struck by a car and killed. Her blood, her genes, the thousands of years of effort by his ancestors, just to hit a dead end in his lineage. He would die leaving no one behind, without furthering his own flow of life. Was he a failure, ill adapted, the result of exhaustion, which nature, chance, or coincidence had deemed fit only for the trash dump?
Listlessly, he tried to latch on to the primatologist’s words, to his investigation. Only the taste of blood and the smell of the manhunt could still calm him and make him forget everything else.
“Where are you going with this?”
“To Louts’s thesis. If left-handers exist, there is a reason, like the light or dark moths have reasons to exist.”
The inspector thought of the framed picture they’d found in the student’s room. Two armed panthers, challenging each other with thrusts of the foil. Both left-handed . . . Jaspar had begun walking again, toward the Arctic exhibits. Animals with white fur that allowed them to move about unnoticed and be protected from the cold; mammals endowed with a thick layer of blubber . . . more examples of environmental adaptation.
“Eva Louts drew up some very precise statistics. References, sources of information, and the dates when portions were written were all inscribed in her thesis: in highly interactive sports, in which close contact is an intrinsic part of the combat, the frequency of left-handers reaches nearly fifty percent. No matter if it’s boxing, fencing, or judo. The farther apart the adversaries stand from each other, the more this ratio diminishes. It remains high in Ping-Pong, for instance, but falls back into the normal range for tennis and group sports in which there’s less one-on-one contact.”
Jaspar opened the thesis. She turned a few pages, to photos of handprints painted on a cave wall.
“With these data, Eva attempted to trace hand dominance throughout the ages. She discovered that most cave paintings dating from the Paleolithic or Neolithic Era had been done by left-handers. The handprints, made from pigments blown from the mouth, are of left hands in 179 cases, against 201 cases of right hands, or around forty percent. Which suggests that, long ago, in the time of the first humans, there were many more left-handers than today, and that over the course of the centuries, evolution tended to weed them out, just as it did with the dark moths.”
She continued to leaf through the thesis. More photos appeared.
“After that, Eva went into museums and archives, copying down ancient documents concerning the reigns of the Goths, Vikings, and Mongols. In other words, peoples that have gone down in history as particularly violent . . . Look at these photos of their tools from back then, their weapons. Louts concentrated on their configuration, the rotational direction of drill bits in the materials, the signs of wear from teeth on wooden spoons, which are different depending on whether you bring the spoon to your mouth with your left or right hand.”
She pointed to the characteristic traces.
“By studying these collections, she was able to gauge the proportion of left-handers in these violent populations, and realized that it was much higher than in other populations during the same period. The student accomplished a major piece of work. No one else had noticed such a thing or delved into it like that. I can understand why she broke off relations with her thesis adviser. She was on to something huge, a major discovery for evolutionary biology.”
Sharko held out his hand, and Jaspar gave him several photocopies. He looked through the graphs, figures, and photos. As he turned the pages, Jaspar commented:
“Here’s another long section, just as interesting, which takes Eva’s research all the way up to contemporary society. This time, she based her conclusions on murder rates over the past fifty years in a city that’s considered one of the most violent in the world, Juárez, Mexico. I’m not sure how she obtained this information, but it seems to have come straight from the files of the Mexican police.”
Sharko ran his hand over his mouth. A piece of the mystery was becoming clear; no doubt this was the reason for her trip to Mexico.
“She went there barely a week before coming to your center, in mid-July,” he confided. “We found her plane reservations.”
Jaspar paused in surprise for a few seconds.
“To go so far just to get that information. She truly was remarkable.”
“What was she looking for in those records? More left-handers?”
“Exactly. She wanted to know the proportion of left-handers among extremely violent criminals living in very violent surroundings. Were there as many as in the time of the barbarians? Would you get statistics that showed, globally, in contemporary civilization, one left-hander for every ten right-handers?”
Sharko looked through pages and pages of documents with a questioning eye, and spoke before she could continue.
“So tell me—how does violence figure into all this?”
“Eva discovered that in violent societies, where combat is the dominant factor, being left-handed offers a huge advantage for survival.”
Jaspar paused to let Sharko digest that information, then went on.
“According to what she wrote, if left-handers exist, it’s because they’re better fighters. They enjoy a strategic advantage in combat, which is the effect of surprise. When two individuals confront each other, the left-hander has the advantage because he’s used to fighting right-handers, whereas the right-hander is disoriented by someone who favors using his left hand or foot. He doesn’t see the blows coming. And therefore, it’s because they are less numerous, less common, that left-handers have an advantage.”
“In DNA, you mean?”
“Yes. That might seem simplistic, but it’s really the way nature works: everything favorable to the propagation of genes is selected and transmitted, while the rest is eliminated. Obviously, this doesn’t take place over just a few years, it often takes centuries for this information to be inscribed in our DNA.”
Sharko tried to summarize.
“So, from what you’re saying, the more violent the community, the higher the proportion of left-handers?”
“That was the evolutionary phenomenon Eva highlighted. The ‘left-handed’ trait is spread via DNA in violent societies, while in other societies it gradually fades out, leaving more room for right-handers.”
“I know a number of lefties. They’re not particularly athletic or violent. So if nature tends to eliminate anything that isn’t useful, why aren’t they right-handers like everyone else?”
“Because of genetic memory. Our modern culture will end up eliminating it, as it will end up eliminating white moths.”
She nodded toward the thesis.
“That’s why, among the violent criminals in that Mexican city, Eva didn’t find a higher proportion of left-handers than anywhere else. She must have been extremely disappointed by those findings, but all things considered, it’s logical: no question that, in a world where you only need press a button or pull a trigger in order to kill, being left-handed doesn’t do you any good, because we no longer have to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Consequently, the gene pool of left-handers will eventually die out. One day there will no longer be any more left-handers in any society, whatever its level of violence.”
Sharko took time to assimilate this information. It all struck him as implacably logical and extremely interesting. Culture modified the environment, which in turn affected the selection of the fittest . . . He returned to his questions.
“A week after Mexico, Louts traveled to Manaus, in Brazil. Did she make any mention of that in her thesis?”
Jaspar’s eyes widened.
“Brazil? No, no . . . nothing to explain a trip down there. No statistics, no data. Is Manaus also a violent city?”
“No more than any other, apparently. In any case, after her quasi-failure in Mexico, Eva seemed to be conducting very focused research. And does the thesis talk about her studies of French prison inmates? A certain Grégory Carnot, for instance?”
“No, nothing like that either.”
Sharko placed the sheet of paper on the others, skeptical. Nothing about her trip to Brazil, nothing about Carnot or her prison visits. After Manaus, Louts had moved squarely outside the parameters of her thesis. The inspector probed further:
“She visited prisons during the day, when she was supposed to be at your center. That’s why she wanted to start at five o’clock—she didn’t want anyone knowing about her visits to penitentiaries. She interviewed inmates and collected their photos. From what you’ve read, and from what you know, why would Eva have gone to visit prisoners who were all young, left-handed, and had committed violent murders?”
She thought for a moment.
“Hmmm . . . Her approach this time seems rather different from in Mexico. She was not looking for a left-hander behind the crime, but for a crime behind the left-hander. She might have been trying to determine if hand dominance and violence could be related in isolated cases of individuals who lived in civilized environments . . . Did these men have any points in common? Was there something that made them stand out? I’m sorry, that’s the only line of inquiry I can think of.”
Which didn’t explain much of anything, Sharko thought to himself. Lower down, he saw Levallois climbing the steps two by two. He asked the primatologist one last question:
“Is there anything else about the thesis I should know?”
“I don’t believe so, but you can read it for yourself. Apart from the graphs and some mathematical data, most of it should be fairly accessible. Eva had written an incredibly thorough and careful study, one that would certainly have caused a stir in scientific circles. And still will if her work gets published.”
The young lieutenant was catching his breath on the top step. He spotted Sharko and waved, then gazed at a large poster that explained how viruses work. The police inspector warmly thanked the primatologist.
“Naturally, I have to ask you to keep all this confidential until we’re finished with our investigation.”
“Of course. I’m going to wander around the galleries a bit more. Please keep me posted on the case. You can call whenever you like, even at night. I don’t sleep much. I’d really like to understand this and help you out as much as I can.”
“I will.”
She gave him a shy smile, shook his hand, and walked off. Sharko gazed after her a few seconds, then headed toward his partner.
“So, what about the fossil?”
“It’s not from here, for the simple reason that they don’t have any chimpanzee fossils that old in their collection.”
“So, wild goose chase.”
“Not at all, we’ve got a huge lead. The director told me that for the past week there’s been an exhibit on mineralogy and fossils at the Drouot auction house, which ends tomorrow. A sale of mammal skeletons several thousand years old was held last Thursday. No doubt there were monkeys in the batch. I’ve got the name of the auctioneer who handled it. He’ll be at Avenue Montaigne tonight at nine for another sale.”
“Can we reach him right now?”
“I called Drouot, but no luck. He doesn’t show up until about a half hour beforehand.”
Sharko headed for the stairs.
“In that case, I know where we’ll be spending our evening.”
“Mmmm . . . I had other plans.”
“You already went to the movies once this week. Mustn’t overdo it, you know.”
Levallois greeted the quip with a smile, then grew serious again.
“And what about you, anything new?”
“You might say that. I’ll fill you in at thirty-six.”
When they stepped outside, the temperature rose sharply. Sharko slapped the thesis into his partner’s hands.
“Can you put this on my desk? I want to give it a read-through.”
He veered off to the left, toward the main gardens.
“The scooter’s this way, Franck.”
Sharko turned around.
“I know, but I’m going to walk home and stop in at the barber’s. Besides, if I’ve got this evolution business right, we were given legs to walk on. If we keep taking cars and public transportation, we’ll just end up losing them.”