They were following him. Even here. What did that mean?
And what if he’d just been dreaming? What if that silhouette had only been a vision, like Eugenie?
Sharko turned back. The air here seemed frozen. This silence, this darkness, the blackness of the building facades. He quickened his pace and finally rejoined the hubbub of the main street. Somewhere else, the buzzing was getting louder; the inimitable chants of the women filled the air, to the rhythm of clacking castanets and tabla drums. Sharko was in Egypt; he was discovering people so open that they drank from the same glass at the table, that they lived outside and cooked their bread on the sidewalk.
But in the midst of that jubilant crowd, a monster had struck.
A bloodthirsty ghoul, who had leapt from neighborhood to neighborhood to spread darkness.
That was more than fifteen years ago.
Alone in room 16, which overlooked Mohamed Farid Street, wrapped like an Egyptian in his sheets to ward off mosquitoes, Sharko crushed his hands against his ears. Eugenie was flinging cocktail sauce all over the walls and yelling at him. She didn’t want any more corpses or horrors; she cried and pulled at her hair with shrill screams. And the moment Sharko dozed off, dying from exhaustion, she clapped her hands sharply and he jerked awake again.
“All those people are watching you. They’re spying on us, dear Franck, through the window, through the keyhole. They’re following us, sniffing out our scent. We have to go back home before they do us harm. You want them to torture me like Eloise and Suzanne? Remember Suzanne, naked, her rounded belly, tied up on a wooden table? Her screams? She was begging you, Franck. She was begging you. Why weren’t you there to save her? Why, dear Franck?”
The Wernicke’s area in Sharko’s brain was throbbing. He got up and glanced into the street. He saw the tops of people’s heads, white robes swaying in the thick air. Not a trace of the arrogant fat cop. Then he double-checked that the door and shutters were locked tight. The paranoia remained, swarming beneath his flesh, and Eugenie still refused to leave. At the end of his rope, the schizophrenic policeman rushed toward the small refrigerator, gathered up all the ice cubes, and threw them into the bathtub. Shut in the bathroom, he ran the cold water and sank below the surface, breath taken away, body freezing. The tall enameled edges threw up familiar ramparts, reassuring him. The world seemed to shrink onto his body and mash up everything around it.
He ended up falling asleep in the empty tub, curled up and trembling like an old dog, alone, so far from home, with his inner phantoms. Against his chest he held the little locomotive, O-gauge Ova Hornby, with its black car for wood and coal.
He never realized he was crying.
23
The chronically jammed Brussels ring road was dumping its last batch of workers into the city’s outskirts. After the strong heat of the previous days, a yellowish haze tarnished the sky, despite various antipollution initiatives. Armed with a GPS, Lucie and her boss easily found their way to the University of Saint-Luc health services, located in a suburb of the Belgian capital. With their tree-lined surroundings and meticulous, linear architecture, the buildings gave off a sense of peace and strength. From what Kashmareck understood, the clinic, in addition to its role as a hospital, also performed specialized research, supported by an up-to-the-minute technological infrastructure. Among other things, it was involved in neuromarketing, the main point of which was to gain a better understanding of consumer behavior by identifying how the brain worked at the time of purchase.
Georges Beckers was waiting for the detectives in the medical imaging department, located on the basement level of the university hospital. Short and stout, the man wore a jovial face, with puffy jowls and a collar of white beard. There was nothing to suggest that he was at the forefront of neuroimaging research, assuming it was possible to have an archetypal researcher. He briefly explained that, between medical consults, his department leased out the scanners for advertising purposes—something that was strictly prohibited in France.
As they walked down the hallway, the police captain steered the conversation toward their case.
“When did you first meet Claude Poignet?”
Beckers answered in a thick Belgian accent:
“It was about ten years ago, at a conference in Brussels on the evolution of imagery since the Age of Enlightenment. Claude was very interested in the way images traveled from generation to generation. In illustrated books, films, photographs, and even collective memory. I’d gone there for science, and he for film. We hit it off immediately. It’s really tragic, what happened to him.”
“Did you get together often?”
“I’d say two or three times a year. But we were in constant touch by e-mail or telephone. He followed my work on the brain closely and he taught me a great deal about how movies work.”
At the end of the corridor, they halted before some wide windows. On the other side lay a cylinder, located in the middle of a white room. Before the scanner stood a kind of table on tracks, fitted with a kind of hoop used to hold the head in place.
“This scanner is one of the most cutting-edge machines in existence. Three teslas of magnetic field, a picture of the brain every demi-second, powerful statistical analysis system… I hope you’re not claustrophobic, Captain?”
“No, why?”
“In that case, you’re the one who’ll go in the scanner, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Kashmareck’s face darkened.
“We came to see about the film. On the phone, it sounded like you’d discovered something.”
“Indeed I did. But explanation works best with demonstration. The machine is free this evening, so we might as well take advantage of it. An MRI in a machine that costs millions of euros is not an opportunity that comes along every day.”
The man was apparently obsessed with science and aching to use his little toys. Like it or not, Kashmareck was going to serve as guinea pig and no doubt feed the statistics that researchers delighted in. Lucie patted her boss’s shoulder and gave him a smile.
“He’s right. Nothing like a good shower of X-rays.”
The captain grunted and gave in. Beckers provided the explanations:
“Have you seen the film?”
“Haven’t had time yet—we’ve just downloaded it onto our servers. But my colleague here described it to me in the car.”
“Perfect. This will give you a chance to see it. But you’re going to do it from inside the scanner. My assistant is waiting. Do you have any dental fillings or body piercings?”
“Uh… yes…”
He looked at Lucie, hesitant.
“Here, on my navel…”
Lucie brought her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing. She turned around and pretended to be inspecting the machines, while the scientist pursued his explanations.
“Take it out. We’ll get you settled and give you glasses that are actually two pixelated screens. During the viewing of the film, the apparatus will record your brain activity. Please…”
Kashmareck sighed. “Jesus, if my wife could only see this!”
The cop moved away and joined a man in a lab coat in the room below. Lucie and the scientist headed to a kind of control room loaded with screens, computers, and colored buttons. It looked like the main deck of the starship Enterprise. While they were settling Kashmareck in, Lucie voiced the question she’d been dying to ask: