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?”
37
The films of a madman…
Lucie had spent a good part of the night rummaging around on the Internet, and this was the only impression it left her of the work of Jacques Lacombe, a man with a steely gaze and a mouth as thin and straight as a razor blade. The digitized photo, posted on a fanatic’s blog, dated from 1950. It was taken at a party the last time the director had been seen in public. Squeezed into a shiny dinner jacket, wineglass in hand and hair slicked back, Lacombe stared at the camera so intensely that it gave Lucie chills. She couldn’t look directly at his eyes.
Certain amateurs had tried to draw up a biography of the filmmaker, but they always dead-ended at the same place: in 1951, after the turbulent shoot in Colombia and his run-in with the law, Lacombe had simply disappeared. Only a part of his work—they estimated that a good 50 percent of his films had been lost—continued to circulate among a small circle of devotees. All that remained of this dark character were a handful of short features, most of them running less than ten minutes, which film buffs called the “crash films.”