Sharko hadn’t said a word in the car. Lucie watched him drive, saw the muscles in his neck and jaws tense beneath the skin. She knew what he was thinking about: the answers he expected to get from the primatologist. The words that would send the two of them off on the trail of Eva Louts, so very far from here. To a place that Sharko dreaded.
Clémentine Jaspar lived only a few miles from the primate research center, in a house on the outskirts of Meudon-la-Forêt. While the house itself didn’t look like much, the tree-lined property around it stretched for thousands of square yards. All around, small lamps spent the solar energy collected during the day, forming pleasant blue-tinted oases amid the trees. Clémentine Jaspar had apparently wanted to create an environment for herself that reminded her of a distant land.
Wearing an ample, brightly colored tunic, the primatologist greeted them on a large, dimly lit deck with teakwood furniture. As she sat down, Lucie was surprised to see a chimpanzee open the picture window and come up to her.
“Good lord!”
With her large, agile hands, Shery picked up a glass full of iced tea and noisily sucked down the liquid through a straw. Jaspar shot an embarrassed look at Sharko, who watched the scene in childlike amazement.
“I thought I’d closed the door, but . . . Listen, I’m counting on you not to tell anyone about Shery being here, in this house. I know it’s against the rules, but ever since what happened, I don’t feel comfortable leaving her alone in the center.”
“Nothing to worry about. We’re also counting on you not to mention our presence here. Let’s call this an unofficial visit. The official investigation is headed off in one direction, but the two of us are convinced the answers lie elsewhere.”
The scientist nodded with a knowing look. After emptying her glass in record time, Shery slowly loped toward the garden, near a solar lamp, and settled in, sitting like a meditating Buddha. She stared at the guests with a well of wisdom in her eyes.
“It’s going to rain tomorrow,” observed Jaspar. “Shery always does that the night before it rains. She’s the best barometer there is.”
“My daughter would love her,” Lucie confided, amused.
“Shery adores children. Come over sometime with your daughter and they can spend the day together, just the two of them.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Jaspar offered her guests some iced tea. Lucie watched her move around, picked up on the complicit glances she and the chimpanzee exchanged. She thought to herself that no one on this planet was meant to live alone; people always had to attach themselves to something, whether a friend, a dog, a monkey, or toy trains . . . She sipped her drink in silence, thinking of her little daughter, who must have been asking for her. Lucie tried to remember if she’d spoken to her even once on the phone since the day she’d left their apartment in Lille. She hated herself so much for that.
The temperature outside was still mild; the late summer breeze soothed their heavy eyelids. The primatologist asked how the investigation was coming along and Sharko hastened to answer.
“The vise is closing. But we’re going to need some more of your help, or your expertise. And I didn’t want to ask over the phone.”
He leaned forward a bit, his hands flat on the table in front of him.
“Here it is: we now know that Eva Louts was tracking down violence throughout the world and throughout history. She went to one of the most dangerous cities on the planet to look through criminal records and met with left-handed killers who had committed especially gruesome murders. She studied all those extreme cases with a single goal: to verify the correlation between hand dominance and violence.”
Jaspar nodded, intrigued. Sharko continued, surprised at how fluently he could speak of evolutionary biology, something he’d known nothing about only a few days before.
“You told me at the botanical gardens that, these days, there was no more advantage for violent individuals, or individuals who had come from violent backgrounds, to be left-handed, given the modern development of our weapons.”
“That was the explanation Eva had advanced, yes.”
“And you also said it was a great disappointment for her when she realized this in Mexico.”
“I suppose it was. Like any researcher, she must have wanted to confirm her findings by observing a high proportion of left-handers with her own eyes. To see the living proof of her theory, so that she could then reveal it to the world. Unfortunately, the Mexican criminals were no more left-handed than you or I.”
“But Eva never gave up. She struck out in Mexico, so she went looking somewhere else. In the virgin lands of the Amazon . . .”
He allowed a silence to sink in. The two women stared at him intently. Sharko turned toward Lucie:
“The minute I saw that film, I knew what she’d gone to find in the jungle was violence in its purest state. A violence cut off from any civilization, any human influence. An ancestral violence that had been perpetuated in the heart of a primitive tribe. Would she finally find her left-handers this time?”
Lucie raised a hand to her mouth, as if the obviousness of it had suddenly struck her in the face. Jaspar drank her tea thoughtfully, then nodded with conviction. Her eyes were shining.
“What you’re saying makes sense, even though I don’t care much for the term ‘primitive tribe,’ since they’re just as evolved as we are. The aboriginal tribes have not been contaminated by the modern world, with its factories, wars, and technology. Any ethnologist will tell you: studying these tribes is like a time machine, because the genomes evolved differently—they’re closer to the first Homo sapiens than they are to us. They’ve probably preserved prehistoric genes and haven’t acquired others.”
Lucie and Sharko looked at each other: the elements fell together logically in their minds. The investigation rested on three pillars: first, the Cro-Magnon; second, Carnot and Lambert. And between them, as an obvious link, the lost tribes, the true connection between prehistory and the modern world.
Unhesitatingly, the inspector took out the DVD and put it on the table.
“This is precisely what we’re looking for: an Amazon tribe that was discovered in the 1960s. Some of the population was wiped out by an epidemic of measles. This is a tribe that almost certainly fights, or fought, its neighbors by hand or with knives to survive and conquer territory. A tribe that, in the past and maybe still today, was reputed to be the most violent, the most bloodthirsty in the Amazon, or even in the world. They’re the ones Eva Louts went to find in Latin America, looking for her left-handers.”
He handed Jaspar the DVD and described its sordid content, before concluding:
“Louts knew about the existence of this community, she knew where to find them. So there has to be a record of this population somewhere. Can you help us find their name, as fast as possible?”
The scientist got up to fetch a sheet of paper and wrote down the information the inspector had given her.
“This isn’t really my field and I wouldn’t know where to begin, but I have a friend who’s an anthropologist. I’ll call him first thing in the morning and get this disc to him. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found out anything.”
“Perfect.”
The two ex-detectives finished their drinks, talking briefly about the case and about what Eva Louts might have become in a world without crime.
But that world wasn’t exactly around the corner.
As they left the garden, Lucie took a long look at the great ape, who was staring at the stars as if looking for traces of her kin. Lucie thought to herself that humans were unique, in that we possessed positive characteristics that no other creature, not even that chimpanzee, could boast; but also in that we were capable of behaviors such as genocide, torture, and the extermination of other species. Could the good we were capable of make up for all that evil?
Before they got to the car, she laid her hand on Sharko’s shoulder.
“Thank you for everything you’re doing.”
He turned to face her and gave her a smile that faded all too quickly.
“I didn’t want to come here. I didn’t want to let you in on what I’d discovered. Now the Pandora’s box is open. I know that your body and your mind are going to drive you to go there, no matter what. But if you have to go, then I want to go with you. I’ll come with you to Brazil. I’ll come with you to the ends of the earth.”
She hugged him.
He closed his eyes when she kissed him on the lips.
Their shadows stretched along the trees. The shadows of two doomed lovers.