“Lebrun cc’d Josselin. This whole business is going to blow up in your face.”
Sharko shrugged.
“The big boss has had it in for me since the beginning. One more fuckup won’t make a difference.”
“Yes, that’s the point—one more fuckup will make all the difference! You’re handing him the ammunition he’s been waiting for. Do you see what a spot you’ve put me in? As if I didn’t have enough shit to deal with right now.”
His cell phone rang. When he looked at the display, his face fell. He answered and moved away.
“Kathia…”
Sharko watched him pace back and forth. His boss and friend didn’t seem to be his usual self. Too nervous, too removed from the case. His thoughts were interrupted by Lucie and Kashmareck, who had just entered the room. Martin Leclerc quickly hung up, his lips pinched. The four cops shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. Lucie gave the inspector a tight smile, while Kashmareck and Leclerc went off to confer over coffee.
“Egypt doesn’t seem to have agreed with you,” she said quietly. “Your nose… What happened?”
“A really big mosquito. Happy to be here among us?”
Lucie looked around her, eyes sparkling.
“The heart of the French criminal police. The place that all the major cases pass through. Just a few years ago, I knew it only through the novels I read between typing reports for my bosses.”
“Nanterre is okay, but back in the days of Number 36…”
“Oh, Number 36—that’s legendary!”
“One day, I left the north to come work at Criminal Division HQ, the famous 36 Quai des Orfèvres. Imagine my pride, the first time I walked up those creaking old stairs, just like Inspector Maigret. I had access to the darkest, most twisted, most intriguing cases. I was happy as a clam. Except that I’d lost everything around me. Hometown, quality of life, human relations with my neighbors, friends… Number 36 stinks of murder and sweat in crappy offices—if you really want to know.”
Lucie sighed.
“Is it just me, or do you have a special gift for being a wet blanket?”
A few minutes later, they sat down at a round table, everyone taking out sheets of paper and pens. Péresse arrived late, waylaid by the Paris traffic.
Leclerc gave a brief summary: the purpose here was to set out all their findings and pull together the threads of the investigation, so that everyone would be on the same page. To get everyone in the swing, he played the 1955 film in the original and hidden versions. Once again, all faces wrinkled with curiosity and disgust.
Péresse, the chief inspector from Rouen, then got things rolling with several pieces of bad news. Inquiries at hospitals, detox centers, and prisons in Normandy had yielded zip about the five unearthed bodies. Since the missing persons reports had turned up nothing either, the trail of illegal immigrants or undocumented aliens in France remained the most promising avenue, especially since there’d been an Asian in the batch. For now, the Rouen criminal police were collaborating with the other branches of law enforcement to try to infiltrate human trafficking networks. It might be a dead end, admitted Péresse, but given how few leads his teams had to work with, for the moment he couldn’t see any other possibilities. He hoped something would come of the DNA lifted from the bodies, for which they would have the results in the next day or two.
Kashmareck had more to offer, describing in detail the vicious killings of Claude Poignet, Luc Szpilman, and the girlfriend. Initial findings suggested they were the work of the same killers and that they’d occurred the same night. An individual of about thirty, solidly built, wearing combat boots, and another who remained completely invisible. Two coldhearted, organized, sadistic murderers, one of whom knew about film and the other about medicine. Executioners who would stop at nothing to shut down any and all leads to the deadly reel.
The captain from Lille then detailed what Belgian investigators had unearthed about Vlad Szpilman’s past:
“We got some very interesting information yesterday about the old man and where the film came from. The Belgians confirmed that Szpilman borrowed the reel from the International Federation of Film Archives in Brussels—and by ‘borrowed,’ I mean swiped. Szpilman was a bit of a kleptomaniac. FIAF said that about two years ago, some guy showed up to see the film, which was supposed to be on their shelves, at which point the curator discovered it was missing. Naturally, he had no idea Szpilman was the one who had it.”
“Two years? So the killers were already looking for the reel?”
“So it seems. Whether he intended to or not, Szpilman pulled the rug out from under them.”
“And where did the film come from, exactly? Before ending up at FIAF.”
“It was in a batch of short features acquired from the National Film Board of Canada when it unloaded part of its archives. According to the old Canadian files, the film arrived there in 1956 as an anonymous gift.”
Sharko leaned back in his chair.
“An anonymous gift,” he repeated. “Barely made, and already someone ships it off to the archives. How did the guy looking for the reel find out it had ended up at FIAF?”
Kashmareck leafed through his notes, wetting his index finger.
“That’s in here… here it is. Most of the films are referenced by title and year, as well as country of origin, serial number of the film stock, and place of manufacture. It’s all in a central database that can be accessed from the FIAF Web site. You can find out what films have gone to which archive. Then you just have to filter with the available data—year, manufacture, country—to refine your search. You can even receive alerts when a film moves to another archive. That’s evidently what happened in this case.”
“Can we trace the users who logged on to the FIAF site?” asked Henebelle.
“Unfortunately not—the requests aren’t stored.”
Sharko looked at Henebelle out of the corner of his eye, just to his left. The light struck her face in a peculiar way, as if it darkened on contact with her skin. The cop could see her doggedness, her concentration, the dangerous flames burning in the depths of her blue irises. He knew that look only too well.
Leclerc took note of Kashmareck’s findings and continued:
“And Vlad Szpilman? Who was he, apart from a collector and occasional klepto?”
“The Belgians had something to say about that too. According to friends, Vlad Szpilman seemed to be pursuing his own investigation, also during the past two years. He had begun stealing, or in any case acquiring, every film and documentary he could lay his hands on concerning the American, English, and even French secret services. CIA, MI5, documentaries on the Cold War, the arms race, and that’s not the half of it.”
“These last two years,” repeated Sharko. “And by coincidence, the Canadian informant said on the phone that he’d been looking into this matter for two years as well. Everything seems to have started the moment Szpilman got hold of the film.”
“That’s also around the time when Szpilman went to the neuromarketing center to have the film analyzed,” Lucie completed.
Kashmareck nodded in agreement. “But that’s not all. Szpilman also spent a good deal of time at the public library in Liège. One time, he left a document in the photocopier that the librarian kept meaning to give back. According to her, Szpilman spent all his time in the twentieth-century history section.”
He took a sheet from his leather shoulder bag and passed it around. Lucie grabbed it up first. It was a black-and-white photo that appeared to have been copied from a book. In the middle of a field, German soldiers pointed their rifles at women and the children they held tightly against them. The caption read GERMAN SOLDIERS EXECUTING JEWISH MOTHERS AND THEIR CHILDREN FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER, DURING THE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS AT IVANGOROD, UKRAINE, 1942. Lucie stared at the look on the face of the German soldier in the foreground, with his rifle raised. The glazed expression in his eyes, the twist of his lip were unspeakably evil. How could someone kill for the benefit of the camera? How could someone ignore a presence that immortalized on film a face confronting death?