After a revolting lunch with her daughter—a slab of overcooked meat with no sauce and boiled potatoes—Lucie swung by her place, a small apartment surrounded by the student dorms of the Catholic university. The tree-lined boulevard overflowed with neo-Gothic buildings, including the university, which regurgitated its several thousand students through the city’s arteries. With all those young people around her, and her daughters growing up, Lucie felt a bit older every day.
She unlocked the door, went in, and dropped her bag of dirty clothes in the laundry room. Quick, crank up the washing machine to get rid of those horrid hospital odors. Then she dove under a cool shower, letting the spray beat against the back of her neck, nibble at her breasts. Those two days away from home, eating mush, taking bird baths, and sleeping folded in half, showed her just how much she loved her little existence, with her girls, her habits, the movies she watched every evening, cozy in the rabbit slippers that her twins—and her mother—had given her for her birthday. It’s when you veer away from the simplest things that you realize they aren’t so bad after all.
Once dried, she chose a light, supple blue silk tunic that she let fall naturally over her hips, over calf-length pedal pushers. She liked the curve of her legs, toned by the jogging she did twice a week around the Citadelle. Since her daughters started going to school and eating in the cafeteria, she’d managed to regain some measure of balance between work, leisure, and family time. She had once again become, as her mother said, a woman.
She stopped at her computer to check her online dating account. Her failure with Ludovic hadn’t soured her on that kind of relationship. In fact, she couldn’t quite do without these virtual, neatly wrapped interchanges. It was worse than a drug, and more than anything it saved time—which, as with everyone else, she found in short supply.
Seven new messages had accumulated on her profile. She looked them over quickly, rejected five off the bat, and put the other two aside: dark-haired men of forty-three and forty-four. The self-confidence a man gave off at around forty was what she was seeking first and foremost. A strong, dependable presence, who wouldn’t drop her for the first airhead that came along.
She went out, the back of her neck nicely refreshed. It was then that she noticed the slight grating of her key in the lock. Something seemed to catch when she gave the second turn. Lucie leaned down, looked closely at the metal, tried again. Although she managed to lock the door, the trouble persisted. Annoyed, she opened up again, ran her eyes over her living room, checked in the other rooms. She explored the closets where she kept her DVDs and novels. Apparently, nothing had been touched. She immediately thought of the phantom presence at Ludovic’s. Whoever had rifled through there could easily have noted her license number when he left and gone to her house. Anyone else would have thought the lock was just getting old, that it was time for a drop of oil. Lucie shrugged her shoulders with a smile and finally headed out again. She really had to stop worrying over nothing. Which didn’t keep her from staring at length into her rearview mirror after driving off, and reassuring herself that the film, that weird-ass film, was perfectly safe at Claude Poignet’s.
Getting to Liège in an old rattletrap with no air-conditioning, along the bone-jarring highways of Belgium, was no mean feat, but she managed it nonstop. Luc Szpilman opened up for her. An off-putting safety pin ran through his lower lip.
“Are you the one who called on the phone?”
Lucie nodded and showed him her official card. She had justified the visit with a version of the truth: the police were interested in one of the films Ludovic Sénéchal had made off with, owing to the violent nature of its imagery.
“That’s me,” she said. “Can I come in?”
He looked her over with a beady, porcine eye. His hair looked as if it had exploded on his head, like the guy from Tokyo Hotel.
“Come on in. But don’t try telling me that my father was mixed up in some kind of trafficking.”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
They sat in the spacious living room, reached by a series of steps that plunged the area below ground level. A glass roof opened onto a limpid, deep blue sky. It reminded Lucie of a kind of giant vivarium. Luc Szpilman uncapped a beer; his interlocutor opted for water. Somewhere in the house someone was playing a musical instrument. The notes danced, light and mesmerizing.
“The clarinet. It’s my girlfriend.”
Surprising. Lucie figured him for someone whose partner played electric guitar or drums. She decided not to waste any time and cut to the chase.
“Were you still living with your father?”
“Sometimes. We didn’t really have much to say to each other, but he never had the guts to throw me out. So yeah, I alternated between here and my girlfriend’s place. Now that he’s not here anymore, I think the choice is made.”
He downed half the bottle—a Chimay red with double the alcohol content—and set it on the glass tabletop, next to an ashtray holding the remains of a few joints. The detective tried to size him up: rebellious kid, probably spoiled as a child. His father’s recent passing didn’t seem to have left much of an impression.
“Tell me about the circumstances of his death.”
“I already told the police everything, and—”
“If you don’t mind.”
He sighed.
“I was in the garage. Since the old man didn’t have a car anymore, that’s where we set up our instruments. I was working on a piece with a bud and the GF. It was probably around 8:25 when I heard this huge crash from upstairs. First I ran in here, because when the news is on, you can’t budge my old man from his chair. Then I went upstairs and I saw the attic door was open. That was weird.”
“Why’s that?”
“My dad was over eighty. He still got around pretty well, sometimes he even went for a walk in town to go to the library or something, but he never went up there anymore—the steps were way too steep. When he wanted to stare at one of his movies, he always asked me.”
Lucie knew she was on the right track. Something sudden and unexpected had triggered a reaction in the old man, pushing him to go up without asking his son for help.
“And after that, in the attic?”
“That’s where I discovered his body, at the foot of the ladder.”
Luc stared at the floor, pupils dilated, then got hold of himself in a fraction of a second.
“His head was in a pool of blood. He was dead. It felt weird seeing him like that, motionless, eyes staring. I immediately called emergency.”
He grabbed up his beer with a firm hand, letting nothing show. Somewhere in all this was a late-born son who’d seen his father as just some clumsy geezer, a guy who could never play football with him. Lucie nodded toward the painting of an elderly gentleman, firm gaze and black eyes. A mug as severe as the Great Wall of China.
“Is that him?”
Luc nodded, both hands around his beer.
“Papa, in all his glory. I wasn’t even born yet when he had that painted. He was already fifty. Can you imagine?”
“What was his occupation?”
“Curator at FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives, and he went there regularly to poke around. FIAF’s mission is to ‘preserve the international cinematic heritage.’ My father spent his life in films. It was his great passion, along with history and geopolitics of the past hundred years. The major conflicts, Cold War, espionage, counterespionage…He knew all about that stuff.”
He raised his eyes.
“You said on the phone there was a problem with one of the films from the attic?”
“Yes, probably the one he was trying to get to that evening. A short from 1955, which opens with a scene of a woman getting her eye slashed. Does that ring any bells?”
He took a moment to think.
“No, not a thing. I never watched his movies. Those old spy chestnuts didn’t interest me. And my father always watched them in his private screening room. He was nuts about cinema, a real fanatic, able to watch the same film twenty or thirty times over.”
He gave out a nervous laugh.
“Dad…I think he pinched a lot of those reels from FIAF.”
“Pinched?”
“Yeah, pinched. It was one of his little quirks as a collector. He couldn’t help himself. Call it an obsessive tic. I knew he made deals with a fair number of his colleagues who did the same thing. Because, theoretically, those films never left the building. But Dad didn’t want those reels to rot in some soulless corridor. He was the type who’d pet film cans the way you’d pet an old cat.”
Lucie listened, then told him about the little girl on the swing, the scene with the bull. Luc continued to deny and seemed sincere. Then she asked him to show her the attic.
In the staircase, she understood why Szpilman Senior had stopped going up: the steps were practically a sheer vertical. Once at the top, Luc went to the ladder and slid it to the far corner.
“The ladder was exactly here when I found the body.”
Lucie gave the place a good once-over. A fanatic’s inner sanctum.
“Why was it moved?”
“A ton of people have been by here, and others will probably still come. Since yesterday morning, the movies have been selling like hotcakes.”
Lucie suddenly felt a connection forming.
“Did all the visitors buy something?”
“Uh…no, not all of them.”
“Tell me.”
“There was this one guy who came just after your friend. He seemed kind of strange.”
He walked one step at a time, not as sharp as before. The beer, apparently.
“Tell me more.”
“He had really short hair. Blond, buzz cut. Under thirty. Solid guy, wearing combat boots, or something like that. He poked through everything in the attic. It was like he was looking for something specific among the cans. In the end, he didn’t buy anything, but he asked if anyone had already been here or had removed any of the films. So I told him about your Ludovic Sénéchal. When I mentioned that film he’d taken, the unmarked one, the guy said he’d like to make a deal with this Sénéchal. So I let him have the address.”
“You knew it?”
“It was on the check.”
So it all started here. Like Ludovic, the mysterious individual must have come across the ad and rushed over. He’d come just a bit too late, and Ludovic, who lived close to the border, had made away with the prize. Did this mean the other guy had been haunting junk shops and combing through want ads for years, in secret hopes of getting his hands on the lost film?
Lucie grilled Szpilman further. The visitor had come in a classic car, a black Fiat, as he recalled. French plates, whose number the young Belgian couldn’t recall.
They went back to the living room. Lucie gazed at the giant flat screen set into the wall. Szpilman had said his father was watching the news just before his death.
“Do you have any idea what might have caused your father to suddenly run up to the attic?”
“No.”
“What channel was he watching?”
“Your national station, TF1. It was his favorite.”
Lucie made a mental note to watch a tape of the news from that evening, just in case.
“Had anyone come here before he went upstairs? Perhaps in the morning or afternoon?”
“Not that I know of.”
She cast a glance around the room. Not a phone jack in sight.
“Did your father have a cell phone?”
Luc Szpilman nodded. Lucie poured herself another glass of water from the pitcher, playing it cool. Inside, she was churning.
“Was he carrying it on him when he died?”
The kid suddenly seemed to get it. He stabbed his index finger onto the low table.
“It was here. I picked it up this morning and put it on the shelf, out there. The police didn’t even ask about it. You think that—?”
“Can you show me?”
He went to get it. Battery dead, of course. He connected it to a charger plugged into a nearby outlet and handed it to Lucie. The phone was in crummy shape, but she was able to check the call history, with date and time. She first looked at the incoming calls. The last one was from Sunday afternoon, the day before his death. A certain Delphine de Hoos. Luc explained that she was the nurse who came periodically for his blood tests. The other calls were farther back in time, and according to his son were all normal. Just a few old friends or colleagues from FIAF, with whom his father shared the occasional vodka.
Lucie then tried the list of outgoing calls. Her heart skipped a beat.
“Well, well…”
The last one was dated from the famous Monday, at 8:09 p.m. About fifteen minutes before the fall from the ladder. But much more interesting than the date was the phone number itself—curious, to say the least: 514-555-8724.
Lucie showed Szpilman the screen.
“He called abroad just a few minutes before he died. Does this number or the area code mean anything to you?”
“Maybe the States? He called there sometimes, when he was doing research.”
“I don’t think so, no.”
Lucie took out her own phone and punched in a number, an intuition in the back of her head. She couldn’t swear to it, but…
A voice on the other end of the line interrupted her musings. Information. Lucie made her request.
“I’d like to know which country the phone number 514-555-8724 corresponds to.”
“One moment, please.”
Silence. The phone cradled between ear and shoulder, Lucie asked Luc for a pen and paper. Then she quickly jotted down the number. The voice returned in her ear.
“Ma’am? It’s the area code for the province of Quebec. Montreal, to be precise.”
Lucie hung up. A word crumbled on the tip of her tongue, while she stared intently at Luc.
“Canada.”
“Canada? Why would he have called Canada? We don’t know anybody there.”
Lucie gave herself time to absorb that information. For some reason or other, Vlad Szpilman had suddenly called a person living in the country where the film had been manufactured. She scrolled through the earlier calls as far back as a week before. No other trace of that number.
“Did your father keep notes about films or his contacts? Index cards, notebooks?”
“I never saw any. These past few years, my father’s life consisted of a few square yards, between here, his screening room, and his office.”
“Can I have a look at his office?”
Luc hesitated and finished his beer.
“Okay. But you’ll really have to tell me what’s going on. He was my father—I have a right to know.”
Lucie nodded. Luc led her into a clean, well-organized room, with a computer, magazines, newspapers, and a library. The cop glanced into the papers, the drawers. Just normal office material, a PC, nothing unusual. The library in the back housed a lot of history books, about the wars, massacres, genocides. Armenians, Jews, Rwandans. There was also a section on the history of espionage. CIA, MI5, conspiracy theory. And a bunch of books in English, with titles that suggested nothing special to Lucie: Bluebird, MK-Ultra, Artichoke. Vlad Szpilman seemed preoccupied with the dark underside of the world from the last century. Lucie turned to Luc, pointing at the books.
“Do you think your father was hiding some important secret from you?”
The young man shrugged.
“My father had a bit of a paranoid streak. Wouldn’t have been like him to talk to me about that stuff. It was his secret garden.”
After a spin around the room, Lucie let herself be accompanied to the exit door, thanked Luc Szpilman, and handed him her business card, on the back of which she jotted her personal cell number in case. In the car, she took out her phone and dialed the number in Canada. Four nerve-racking rings before someone finally picked up. Not a sound, not a hello. So it was up to Lucie.
“Hello?”
Long pause. Lucie repeated, “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“Who is this?”
Male voice, pronounced Quebec accent.
“Lucie Henebelle. I’m calling from—”
Abrupt click. He’d hung up. Lucie imagined a nervous type, on his guard, distrustful. Dazed by the brevity of the exchange, she burst from her car and went back to knock on Szpilman’s door.
“You again?”
“I’ll need your father’s phone.”