After the telephone call in the train station, Lucie expected to find Sharko’s wife when they entered the apartment. The entire way there, she had tried to imagine what kind of woman could stick to a man of his breadth. Did she have the bearing and disposition of a lion tamer staring down a wild beast, or on the contrary was she docile and sweet, prepared every evening to take the full brunt of the tensions cops built up over the course of their endless days?
As soon as the inspector opened the door, Lucie realized that there was no one to greet them. Not a soul. Sharko removed his shoes before going in, an oddly dignified gesture. Lucie started to do the same.
“No, no, keep your shoes on. It’s just a habit of mine. I have a lot of habits I can’t manage to break, which is sort of a pain in the ass, but what can you do?”
He closed the door and turned all the locks. At a glance, Lucie noted that it wasn’t really the apartment of a single man. Several feminine touches—thick plants all around, a pair of rather retro high heels in a corner. But there was only one place setting on the table in the dining area, already set for a meal, facing the wall. She thought of Luc Besson’s film The Professional. In some ways, Sharko gave off the same sadness as Léon, the contract killer, but also an incomprehensible sympathy that made you want to learn more about him.
Photos of a beautiful woman, old yellowing pictures stuck in frames, confirmed that the cop was probably a widower. What divorced man would keep wearing his wedding band? Farther back in the living room, other photos hung on the wall: dozens of glossy paper rectangles arranged haphazardly, showing a little girl from infancy to the age of five or six. In some pictures, there were three of them: him, the woman, the kid. The mother was smiling, but Lucie—she couldn’t explain why—sensed a kind of absence in her gaze. Everywhere, Sharko seemed to be squeezing his two loved ones against him, so strongly that their cheeks were pressed tightly together. Lucie felt a shiver as the truth suddenly dawned on her: something must have happened to Sharko’s family. A horrible, unspeakable tragedy.
“Please, have a seat,” said the inspector. “I’m dying of thirst…How does a nice cold beer sound?”
He was talking from the kitchen. A bit troubled, Lucie set her bag down on the carpet and walked into the room. A large living room, almost too spacious. She noticed cocktail sauce and candied chestnuts on a low coffee table, then the computer in a corner.
“Anything cold is fine for me, thank you…Hey, can I use your Internet? I’d like to do a search for Jacques Lacombe and Syndrome E.”
Sharko returned with two bottles and handed her one. He put his down on the coffee table, then shot an odd glance off to the side.
“Excuse me a moment.”
He disappeared down the hallway. Ten seconds later, Lucie heard whistling, then a rattling sound, just like what she’d been hearing in the express for three and a half hours. Miniature trains—she could have sworn it…
Sharko returned and sat in a chair, Lucie following suit. He emptied half his beer in one gulp, as if it were nothing.
“It’s after midnight. My boss has already got someone working on Syndrome E. You can do your search tomorrow.”
“Why waste time?”
“You’re not wasting time. On the contrary, you’re saving it. You’re giving yourself time to sleep, think of your loved ones, and remember that there’s more to life than work. Seems so simple, doesn’t it? But by the time you realize it, all you have left are old photos.”
Lucie was silent a moment.
“I take a lot of photos too, trying to preserve traces of time…We keep coming back to images, no matter what. Images, as a way of conveying emotion, penetrating everyone’s most intimate thoughts.” She tipped her chin toward the haphazard arrangement. “I understand you better now. I think I get why you’re like this.”
Sharko was already finishing his beer. He wanted to let himself go, float on a cloud and forget the hardships of the past several days. The charred face of Atef Abd el-Aal, the slums of Cairo, the abominable eye-shaped scars on Judith Sagnol’s wrinkled flesh…Too many shadows—way too many.
“What do you mean, ‘like this’?”
“Cold. Distant at first. The kind of guy people think they should avoid. It’s only when you dig a little deeper that you realize there’s a heart beneath the tough outer shell.”
Sharko squeezed the empty beer bottle.
“And those photos—what do they tell you?”
“A lot.”
“Such as?”
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Show me what you’ve got, Lieutenant Henebelle.”
Lucie accepted the challenge with a look. She raised her bottle in front of her and waved her arm at the door.
“The first thing that’s interesting is their location. They’re on full display in your living room, turned toward the entrance. Why not the bedroom, or somewhere more private?”
She nodded toward a garbage can in the kitchen, where two boxes and the remains of a pizza were in plain sight.
“When a deliveryman or a stranger comes to the door, you open slightly, with exact change in hand. You never let them past the threshold; there’s no rug for wiping your feet, outside or inside. The photos are in their line of sight; a visitor can see them without seeing the rest. You, your family, the impression of happiness and normalcy. Do you turn on your toy trains to make it seem a child is playing in the other room?”
Sharko’s eyes narrowed.
“You’ve got my interest. Keep going…”
“Your past is something you don’t like to talk about outside of your apartment. But when someone is here, on this chair, those photos shout out loud that something tragic happened to your family. There are no new photos of your wife or child. You’re several years younger on the most recent ones, and you look a lot happier. At the time your daughter was five or six. It’s the age of the first big change, the first separation. School, playdates, kids going off in the morning and not coming back till evening. So we try to compensate, take pictures—lots of pictures—to slow their departure, to keep them at home and make up for their absence by artificial means. But you— No more memories, as if…life had suddenly stopped dead. Theirs, and then yours. That’s why you quit working the streets and took a desk job. The streets stole your family from you.”
Sharko now looked like he was elsewhere. His eyes were glued to the floor and he was leaning forward, hands hanging between his thighs.
“Keep going, Henebelle, keep going. Go on, let it all out.”
“I’m thinking maybe a case that went bad, that involved your family, put them face-to-face with the things you’d always tried to protect them from. What? A case that encroached on your personal life? A suspect who went after them?”
A wounding silence. Sharko encouraged Lucie to continue.
“With those photos, you expose your inner self to the outer world. Here, in your apartment, you manage to open up, to be the man you used to be, the father and husband, but the moment you cross that threshold, the moment you close your door, you lock yourself up. Two dead bolts on the door…Isn’t that just another way of armoring yourself still further? I suspect very few people enter in here, Inspector, and the ones who spend the night are fewer still. Earlier, you could very easily have pointed me toward a hotel and taken off, the way you did the first time, when we met at Gare du Nord. So here’s my question: what the hell am I doing here?”
Sharko raised dull eyes toward her. He stood up, poured himself a tumbler of whiskey, and retook his seat.
“I can talk about my past, despite what you seem to think. If I never do, it’s because I have no one to tell it to.”
“I’m here.”
He smiled at his glass.
“You, the little lady cop from up north who I’ve known for a few days at most?”
“People tell their life stories to a shrink who they know even less.”
Sharko knit his brow, then got up to put away his bottle of whiskey. He took the opportunity to make sure there weren’t any medications lying around. How had she guessed about the shrink? He sat back down, trying to keep his cool.
“Well, why shouldn’t I tell you, after all? You seem to need it.”
“Is that what you learned from my personnel file?”
She gave Sharko a defiant look. The cop accepted the challenge.
“The photos speak for themselves. It was more than five years ago. We were driving on the highway, me, Suzanne, and Eloise…And one of my tires blew out on a curve.”
He stared lengthily at the floor, swirling the liquor in his glass.
“I could tell you the date, the exact time, and what the sky looked like that day. It’s etched in here, for the rest of my life…The three of us were coming back from a weekend away in the north. It had been a long time since we’d just gotten away like that, far from this stinking city. But right after the blowout, I got distracted for a moment. I forgot to lock the car doors. And while I was checking the tire, my wife went running across the road like a madwoman, with my daughter. A car came speeding around the bend…”
His fingers clenched.
“I can still hear the screech of brakes. Over and over…Only the sound of trains on their tracks can make it stop. That incessant rattling sound you hear as we speak—it’s with me day and night…”
A bitter swallow of whiskey. Lucie retreated into herself—what else could she do at such a moment? The man sitting near her was far more damaged than she could have imagined. Sharko continued:
“You worked a case involving child kidnappings. You tracked down a man who carried within himself the purest expression of perversion. It was the same for me, Henebelle. My wife, my own wife, had been kidnapped by the same type of killer, six months before she gave birth to Eloise. I hunted him down day and night; nothing else existed. During that investigation, I lost my friends, I saw people I loved disappear before my eyes, carried away by the madness of a single individual.”
He nodded toward a wall of his apartment.
“My neighbor, an old Guianese woman, was killed because of me. When I finally found Suzanne, tied up on a table, I could barely recognize her. She had been subjected to things that even you couldn’t imagine. Things…that no human being should ever suffer.”
Lucie could feel him on the tightrope, ready to fall at any moment. But he hung in there. He was made of a different fiber, a material that no projectile could penetrate.
“She was never the same after that, and the birth of our daughter couldn’t change it. Her eyes remained empty most of the time, even if, once in a while, between two doses of medicine, the sparkle returned.”
A leaden silence. Lucie could not imagine the pain this man carried inside him. The solitude, the gaping fracture of his soul, the tragic open wound that bled nonstop. For perhaps the first time in all those years, Lucie told herself, he didn’t want to feel alone anymore, if only for a single night. And despite the blackness of the world around her, she was glad to be sharing this moment with him.
Sharko downed his glass in one swallow and stood up.
“I’m the walking caricature of the worst a cop can withstand. I’m bloated with pills and torment, I’ve killed and been wounded as much as one person can, but I’m still standing. Here, on my own two feet, in front of you.”
“I…I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’ve had it up to here with sorry.”
Lucie gave him a limp smile.
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“Okay. I think it’s time for bed now. We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow.”
“Yes, it’s time…”
Sharko made as if to leave the room, then came back toward his colleague.
“I have a favor to ask you, Henebelle. Something I could only ask a woman.”
“And after that, I have one final question. But tell me.”
“Tomorrow morning, at seven sharp, could you turn on the shower in the bathroom? You don’t have to take one—or, of course you can if you want, but what I mean is, I just need to hear the sound of the shower running.”
Lucie hesitated for a moment before she understood. Her gaze drifted toward a photo of Suzanne, and she nodded.
“I’ll do that.”
Sharko gave her a thin smile.
“Your turn. Ask your question.”
“Who did you call earlier, in the train station? Who did you supposedly ‘negotiate’ with so that I could sleep in your apartment?”
Sharko took a few seconds before answering:
“The computer, over there…You can use it for your search. You just have to push the ON button. No password required. Why would I need one?”