Several hours later, 125 miles from Lille, Martin Leclerc, head of the Violent Crimes unit, pondered a three-dimensional representation of a human head on the screen of a Mac. You could clearly see the brain and several salient parts of the face: tip of the nose, outer surface of the right eye, left tragus…Then he pointed to a green area, located in the left superior temporal gyrus.
“So that lights up every time I say something?”
Half reclining on a hydraulic chair, head squeezed under a hood containing 128 electrodes, Chief Inspector Franck Sharko stared at the ceiling without moving a muscle.
“It’s called Wernicke’s area, linked to hearing speech. For you and me both, blood rushes there the moment you hear a voice. Hence the coloration.”
“Impressive.”
“Not half as much as seeing you here.” Sharko spoke softly beneath the bonnet. “I don’t know if you recall, Martin, but the invitation was for a drink at my place. The only thing you’ll get here is watery coffee.”
“Your shrink didn’t have any problems with me sitting in on a session. And you’d suggested it yourself—or am I not the only one having memory lapses?”
Sharko flattened his large hands on the armrests; his wedding ring clanked against the metal. He’d been attending these “maintenance” sessions for weeks and still hadn’t learned to relax.
“So what’s up?”
The head of Violent Crimes massaged his temples, his face weary. In the twenty years they’d worked together, the two men had often seen each other in the darkest possible light: horrific crime scenes, family tragedies, health problems…
“It happened two days ago. Some dump between Le Havre and Rouen. Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon—how’s that for a name? Bodies unearthed on the banks of the Seine—you must have heard about it on the tube.”
“That thing at the construction site, where they’re laying a pipeline?”
“Right. The media was all over it. They were already there because the site itself is such a hot-button issue. They discovered five stiffs with their skulls sawed off. Criminal Investigations in Rouen is on the scene, working with the local cops. Their DA was about to send in the CSI boys, but in the end we caught it. I can’t say I’m too thrilled—in this weather, it’s disgusting.”
“What about Devoise?”
“He’s on a sensitive case. I can’t pull him off. And Bertholet is away on vacation.”
“What about my vacation?”
Leclerc straightened his narrow striped tie. A solid fifty years old, black rayon suit, shiny pumps, drawn, arid face: a top cop in all his splendor. Droplets of sweat pearled on his forehead and he mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
“You’re the only one we have left around here. And they’ve got wives and kids…Shit, Franck, you know how it is.”
The silence weighed on them like lead. A wife, children. Beach balls on the sand, laughter lost in the waves. All that was so hazy and far away now. Sharko turned his face toward the real-time animation of the activity in his brain, a fifty-something-year-old organ full of shadows. He jerked his chin, inviting Leclerc to follow the movement of his eyes. Despite the absence of speech, the green area on the upper part of the gyrus was glowing.
“If it’s lighting up, it means she’s talking to me at this very moment.”
“Eugenie?”
Sharko grunted. Leclerc felt a chill. To see his chief inspector’s meninges react to speech like this, when you couldn’t even hear a fly buzzing, made him feel like there was a ghost in the room.
“What’s she saying?”
“She wants me to buy a pint of cocktail sauce and some candied chestnuts next time I go shopping. She loves those miserable chestnuts. Excuse me a second…”
Sharko closed his eyes, lips pressed tight. Eugenie was someone he might see and hear at any moment. On the passenger seat of his old Renault. At night when he went to bed. Sitting cross-legged, watching the mini-gauge trains run around the tracks. Two years earlier, Eugenie had often shown up with a black man, Willy, a huge smoker of Camels and pot. A real mean son of a bitch, much worse than the little girl because he talked loud and tended to gesticulate wildly. Thanks to the treatment, the Rasta had disappeared for good, but the other one, the girl, came and went as she pleased, resistant as a virus.
On the Mac screen, the green area continued to pulsate for several seconds, then gradually faded. Sharko opened his eyes. He stared at his boss with a weary smile.
“You’re going to have to get rid of your chief inspector someday, seeing him talk such crap.”
“You’re dealing with your problems and they haven’t kept you from doing your job. I’d even say you’re sometimes better at it.”
“Yeah, try telling that to Josselin. The guy never lets up busting my chops. I think he’s got it in for me.”
“That’s always how it is with a new boss. All they care about is cleaning house.”
Dr. Bertowski, of the psychiatric department at La Salpêtrière Hospital, finally arrived, flanked by his neuroanatomist.
“Shall we get started, Mr. Sharko?”
“Mr. Sharko”—it rang funny, since “Sharko” sounded like the name of an advanced form of muscular atrophy: Charcot’s disease. As if all the world’s illnesses were his doing.
“Let’s.”
Bertowski leafed through his ever-present file.
“The episodes of paranoid persecution have become pretty scarce, from what I see here. Just a few lingering traces of distrust—that’s very good. And your visions?”
“They’ve come back full force, maybe because I’ve been cooped up in my apartment. Not a day goes by without a visit from Eugenie. Most of the time she just sits around for two or three minutes, but she’s kind of a pill. I can’t tell you how many pounds of candied chestnuts she’s made me buy since our last session.”
Leclerc withdrew to the back of the room while they removed Sharko’s hood.
“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?” the doctor asked.
“The heat, mostly.”
“Your job doesn’t help matters. We’re going to shorten the time between sessions. Every three weeks seems a good compromise.”
After immobilizing his head with two white straps, the neuroanatomist moved a figure eight–shaped instrument toward the crest of his skull—a coil that delivered magnetic impulses to a very precise area of the encephalon, so that the targeted neurons, like micromagnets, would react and rearrange themselves. Transcranial magnetic stimulation allowed them to attenuate, even eradicate, the hallucinations related to schizophrenia. The main difficulty was, of course, to target the right spot, as the area in question measured only a few centimeters, and being off by even a millimeter could make the patient start meowing or reciting the alphabet backward for the rest of his life.
Sharko lay there, a blindfold over his eyes, with just one order: don’t move a hair. The only sound was the crackle of small magnetic pulses emitted at the frequency of one hertz. He didn’t feel any pain, not the slightest discomfort, just the profound anxiety of knowing that, ten years earlier, they would have been treating him with electroshocks.
The session ended without incident. Twelve hundred pulses—or about twenty minutes—later, Sharko stood up, his muscles feeling a bit numb. He readjusted his spotless shirt and ran a hand through his brush-cut black hair. He was sweating. The sweltering heat of the hospital and the slight pudginess caused by Zyprexa didn’t help. At the beginning of July, even the air-conditioning had trouble overcoming the hellish temperature outside.
Sharko jotted down his next appointment, thanked his psychiatrist, and left the room.
He joined Leclerc at the coffee machine at the end of the hallway. The Violent Crimes chief felt like having a cigarette; those few minutes of observation had worn him out.
“That really gave me the willies, seeing them play with your head like that.”
“Just routine. It’s like sitting under the dryer at the hairdresser’s for a perm.”
Sharko smiled and raised the plastic cup to his lips.
“So go on. Tell me about the case.”
The two men walked slowly.
“Five bodies, buried about six feet underground. Not a pretty sight. From what we know so far, four of them badly worm-eaten, the fifth in relatively good shape. All five missing the tops of their skulls, as if they’d been sawed off.”
“What do the local cops make of it?”
“What do you think? They’re in this provincial little town where the biggest crime up to now is not sorting your trash. The bodies must go back weeks, if not months. They’re in it up to their necks, and the investigation is likely to get complicated. They could probably use a psychological leg up. Do what you usually do, no more, no less. You gather info, talk to who you gotta talk to, and after that we’ll handle it in Nanterre. Two, three days, tops. Then you can get back to your miniature trains and go about your business. And I’ll do the same. I don’t want this to drag on. I need to go away pretty soon.”
“Are you and Kathia going on holiday?”
Leclerc’s lips made a thin line.
“I don’t know yet. It depends.”
“On what?”
“On a bunch of things that aren’t anyone’s business.”
Sharko didn’t push it. When they exited the hospital doors, a wave of heat crashed over them. His hands in the pockets of his linen trousers, the chief inspector looked back at the long, white stone building, its dome sparkling in the implacable sun. The establishment had become his second home these past few years, after the squad room.
“I’m a bit nervous about going out there again. All that seems so far away.”
“You’ll get used to it pretty fast.”
Sharko remained silent for a moment, apparently weighing the pros and cons, then shrugged.
“Fuck it. Why not? I’m starting to look like a chair from spending so much time on my ass. Tell them I’ll be there midafternoon.”