Located one floor up, Chénaix’s office looked like your typical doctor’s examining room. A skeleton mounted on metal wire hung in a corner, while two bookshelves buckled under specialized tomes and articles about pathology, forensic anthropology, and general medicine. Old posters showing the human body papered the walls. The only thing missing was the examination table. For a human touch, the ME had hung photos of his family here and there: a wife and two daughters under the age of ten. It was his reminder that life consisted of more than just death.
Giving off a smell of stale tobacco smoke mixed with the more rancid odor of corpses, the ME sat at his computer and slid the DVD into the drive. Lucie and Sharko had sat down facing him, in silence. No one felt like talking. They were still haunted by the image of that ravaged brain, which had driven its owner to commit the most heinous acts imaginable. Lucie was also thinking about the implications of these findings: the possibility that Grégory Carnot had been merely an unfortunate guinea pig, and that the people truly responsible for her daughter’s death were still at large. They, too, would have to answer for their crimes.
The doctor watched the ten-minute film attentively. Like any normal human being, he recoiled at the scene in the hut; but overall, his face registered no particular disgust or emotion, and the two cops were unable to gauge what he was feeling. Death in all its forms was his trade; he had learned how to tame it, and he looked upon it the way a mason looks at a half-built wall.
It was only after the viewing that he showed a clear interest.
“This is an exceptional document. Do you know where it comes from?”
Sharko shook his head.
“No, it’s just a copy. We know it was shot in the Amazon.”
“The Amazon . . . Your tribe was decimated by an epidemic of measles.”
Lucie knit her brow. She had been expecting something a hundred times worse, on a par with the horrors she had discovered up until then. Some hideous plague, like Ebola or cholera. Or even—why not?—the same thing that had affected Lambert. For her, the measles was just one of those illnesses you got as a kid, like rubella or the mumps . . .
“Only measles? Are you sure?”
“Don’t say ‘only measles.’ It’s a very aggressive virus that used to ravage populations and, when it’s fatal, it can cause incredible pain and suffering. As for whether I’m sure . . . I’d say about ninety-five percent, yes. The symptoms are textbook. There’s the obvious presence of Koplik spots, even though the eruptions on the skin aren’t that pronounced, plus weepy eyes, which are very dark because they’re probably red. But one characteristic of the illness is that in the most severe cases it results in internal hemorrhaging, which causes the patient to ooze blood through the nose, mouth, and anus. Like here. And given the incredible virulence of the disease, I can guarantee that this population had never experienced it before this. Their immune system was totally unprepared for the virus—it simply didn’t recognize it.”
He gave Sharko a somber look that, in conjunction with his dark eyes, seemed baleful.
“Remember what I said about cows and milk drinkers. It’s the same thing here, and it’s still the same principle. Viruses like measles, smallpox, mumps, or diphtheria first incubated in domestic animals. Then they mutated and acquired the ability to infect humans. This ability proved to be very advantageous for them, so it was favored by natural selection. High population densities in both the Old and New Worlds sustained them and helped them spread, and at the same time humans developed immune defenses so that they wouldn’t be wiped out completely. Viruses and humans cohabitated in another arms race. I’d even be tempted to say they nourished each other, and they went through the centuries hand in hand.”
“So the virus that decimated that village came from a ‘civilized’ individual, if I can use the word?”
“No doubt about it. Today, man is the only possible carrier of measles. The virus was in this fellow, in his organism, as it might be in yours at this very moment. Except you don’t know it, because your immune system and the vaccines you got as a kid have made it harmless.”
Chénaix slid the DVD out of the computer and handed it back to the inspector.
“To my knowledge, no one has ever filmed an epidemic of measles as violent and deadly as this. In the early sixties, it was impossible to find societies, even primitive ones, in which the adults were so lacking in antibodies that it could cause such a holocaust. So there’s only one conclusion: before the time this film was made, this civilization had never met a modern man, since the measles, even from thousands of years earlier, had never reached it. It’s probable that the person who shot this documentary was the first outsider that tribe had ever seen, going back centuries. This was an extremely isolated community.”
Finally, the medical examiner stood up, prompting the two detectives to do the same. He turned off his screen.
“For now, that’s all I can tell you about it.”
“That’s a lot. Tell me, do you know Jean-Paul Lemoine, the molecular biologist at the crime lab?”
“Pretty well, yes—he and his team handle most of the biological analyses we send out. And they’ll be the ones studying Lambert’s brain. How come?”
Sharko opened his shoulder bag and handed over the three sheets of data that Daniel had written.
“Can you ask him to give this a once-over as soon as possible?”
“A DNA sequence? What’s it from?”
“That’s the big question.”
The doctor heaved a sigh.
“You are aware you’re taking advantage, at least?”
Sharko held out his hand with a smile.
“Thanks again. And don’t forget . . .”
“I know—you were never here.”