With Louts’s thesis, the dates they’d established, and the conclusions they could draw, Sharko and Levallois had spent the afternoon trying to retrace the student’s itinerary in the month before her death and had laid out their findings for Bellanger’s team in a cramped office at number 36.
In the summer of 2009, under the direction of her thesis adviser, Olivier Solers, Eva Louts begins a project expected to last several years. One of her aims is to study hand dominance in major primates, especially man. The first year seems to pass without incident.
Then, around June 2010, Louts’s relations with her thesis adviser deteriorate. The student withholds information, becomes protective of her discoveries. Striking off on her own, she decides to push her research further and heads for the most violent city in Mexico, Ciudad Juárez. Do violent populations still contain a greater number of left-handers than the average, as they did tens of thousands of years ago? To her dismay, she discovers this is no longer the case. But instead of giving up, she decides to go to Brazil, for reasons that remain obscure but are important enough to keep her there for a week. On her return to France, she doesn’t write anything about Brazil in her notebooks. Instead, she requests authorization to meet with violent criminals, all of them left-handed. On August 13, she meets her first prisoner; and on the 27th, she comes face-to-face with Grégory Carnot. On the 28th, the Alps. Less than a week later, she books another flight to Manaus . . .
• • •
Now, as he walked with Levallois down Avenue Montaigne, Sharko felt certain of one thing: something had triggered all this. The trip to Brazil had led to Louts’s sudden interest in French killers, which had led to Carnot. What had clicked in Louts’s head? What had she found in Brazil that had then taken her to the mountaintops?
In front of him, Avenue Montaigne glittered in all its excess. Mercedes lined up in front of luxury boutiques: Cartier, Prada, Gucci, Valentino. To the right was the Seine, and in the background the Eiffel Tower. A postcard view for the rich.
The inspector straightened his caramel-colored tie and tugged on the sleeves of his jacket. He glanced at a shop window, which sent back his reflection. His new haircut, the crew cut he’d always worn, made him happy and gave him back his true cop’s face. All he needed now was his former build for the old Sharko to be reborn completely from the ashes.
They walked into number 15, a venerable building as white as a palace. The Drouot auction house was the oldest such establishment in the world. A magical, ephemeral museum, where one could acquire anything the human mind or nature had managed to dream up. Usually, the exhibitions of objects, which related to a theme, a period, or a country, lasted for several days. Each year, eight hundred thousand pieces changed hands in three thousand sales. A business even the economic crisis couldn’t affect.
Sharko and Levallois asked to speak to the auctioneer, Ferdinand Ferraud. While waiting, they headed toward the auction rooms, taking the opportunity to peek into that evening’s exhibit, “The Story of Time.” Muffled atmosphere, low lighting, churchlike calm. Couples silently wandered arm in arm among the 450 meticulously numbered artworks, which claimed to trace the human epic from its origins to the conquest of space. Levallois walked to a corner labeled “Meteorites,” the center of which was occupied by a fragment weighing one and a half tons. He pondered it with a puzzled eye, just like the other, more elegant visitors who’d come for a final viewing of these objects before possibly acquiring them.
“Honestly, can you imagine having a meteorite in the middle of your living room?”
“Wouldn’t get through the door. On the other hand, nothing like it for cracking somebody’s skull open.”
“You got anyone in particular in mind?”
Hands behind his back, Sharko didn’t answer and instead headed toward the minerals. Stalactiform malachite, chalcedony geode, spherules of mesolite . . . In the next room, said a poster, stood skeletons of “wooly rhinoceros,” cave bears from the Urals, and especially one, in its entirety, of an adult mammoth. Perfectly staged and lit, with one of its feet resting on a pedestal, the heap of bones was an impressive sight.
“It comes from Russia,” said a voice behind him. “They said you wanted to see me.”
Sharko turned around to find a man in a snug-fitting dark suit, with a red tie and a giraffe’s neck. He had been expecting some decrepit old codger, but the auctioneer was young and seemingly in good shape. The cop looked around and pointed to the others in the room.
“You could have gone up to anyone here. Do I look that much like a cop?”
“The receptionist described you as thin with a crew cut and a jacket that’s too large for you.”
Sharko showed his ID and introduced Levallois, who had just walked up.
“We’re here about a sale that took place last Thursday. It was for mammal skeletons from the . . .”—he took out a flyer he’d gotten at the reception—“from ten thousand B.C. to the present.”
“‘Noah’s Ark.’ The show, and the sale, were hugely successful. The Darwin anniversary helped a lot. There’s been a resurgence of interest in primitive arts and the return to nature. The fossil market has become so lucrative that it’s spawned all kinds of counterfeit traffic, especially from China and Russia.”
“We’d like to see the sales records for that day.”
The auctioneer glanced at his watch and answered without hesitation.
“Fine. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time to spare, as this evening’s sale is about to begin.”
Ferraud asked them to follow. For once they were dealing with someone who wasn’t trying to obstruct their inquiry, who seemed perfectly willing to help. Sharko reflected that he must have been used to visits from the Cultural Property Office or Customs. The traffic in art objects was a booming business.
They took a stairway that afforded them a plunging view of the auction room and provided access to a row of offices. Ferraud entered one of them, opened a locked drawer, and took out a folder. He wet his fingertips.
“What exactly are you looking for?”
Levallois, tired of taking a backseat, gave the answer.
“The name of the person or persons who bought chimpanzee fossils, roughly two thousand years old.”
The other man riffled through the lists with impressive speed. His eyes suddenly focused into a stare. With a half smile, he looked up at the two policemen.
“We’ve got exactly one piece from that period—you’re in luck.”
“Was it bought?”
“Yes.”
The two cops exchanged a rapid glance.
“And I remember the buyer. An avid collector. He left us a check for twelve thousand euros. He bought an example of every great ape we had. Four skeletons of excellent quality, with over twenty percent of their original bones.”
Sharko knit his brow. The auctioneer explained:
“You should know that these fossils aren’t really fossils. That mammoth on auction downstairs, for instance, doesn’t even have five percent of its original bones. No one would be interested in it in its actual state—it was too mangled and unaesthetic. The rest of its bone structure is synthetic, made by a company in Russia.”
Ferraud circled a name on the sales sheet and handed it to the cops.
“Delivered to his home on Friday morning by our forwarding agents. That really is his address. Is there anything else I can do for you?”