Crash films… shot between 1948 and 1950, before Colombia. As the Web authors explained, this was a series of nineteen films whose sole aim was to display things never before attempted in the medium, a kind of artistic exploit on celluloid. Lacombe didn’t care about the point of a film, only about the public’s reactions: its passivity toward images, its relationship to plot and story line, its voyeuristic tendencies, its fascination with intimacy, and also its tolerance for conceptual cinema. He challenged people’s watching habits and turned filmmaking conventions on their heads. Always a need to innovate, disturb, shock…
And then there was that small white circle in the upper right, on each of his nineteen mini-films. Lucie understood that this was probably Lacombe’s maker’s mark, his signature. Digging further, she found a description of some of his techniques, his experimentations with masks, mirrors, and multiple exposures. Some people advanced a hypothesis about the presence of the white circle at the top of each film. They called it the “blind spot,” which from a psychological viewpoint corresponded to a small part of the retina that was lacking photoreceptors. Some of the sites even suggested an exercise:
If you closed your left eye and looked only at the square from a distance of about six inches, the circle disappeared from sight. Lucie was amazed by this flaw in human optics. Ultimately, wasn’t Jacques Lacombe trying to say, with his signature, that the eye was an imperfect instrument that could be fooled by any number of means? Wasn’t he clearly stating that these flaws were the engine driving his films? At bottom, these short features surely hid the first burblings of a sick and perverse mind. A mind obsessed by the impact of images on human beings—their veracity, their strength, and also their destructive power. He was a visionary ahead of his time.
Stretched out on the couch, her eyes half shut, Lucie understood better why Lacombe had never made it. His “crash films” turned out to be weird and boring beyond belief. Who would go see an hour-long movie called The Sleeper, which simply showed a man sleeping? Or the movement of an eyelid opening and shutting in slow motion, at a thousand frames a second, projected for more than three minutes? There was also crash film number 12: counting and showing each second of the twelve minutes the film lasted, which, by induced effect, was reduced to a simple display of numbers… These films were as distant and inscrutable as the mind of their maker.
When the alarm on her watch sounded, Lucie was lying with her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Six fifty-five. She had barely slept an hour or two. A cop’s night. She got up, head full of cotton wadding, and felt her way to the bathroom. A wide, silent yawn: this wouldn’t be an easy day.
In the bath, everything was incredibly orderly: a new toothbrush in a glass, blue towels hanging from the rack, their folded edges perfectly symmetrical, a razor with gleaming blade, a clean bathtub with a shower head above it. There was also a medicine cabinet—the kind of small furnishing that says more about someone’s life than lengthy explanations. Lucie looked at her reflection in the cabinet mirror. She could open it, have a look at the medications, rummage even deeper into Sharko’s privacy… What was there to find behind that door? Antidepressants? Stimulants? Anxiolytics? Or just vitamins and aspirin tablets?
She took a breath and turned on the taps in the shower. The water splashed against the tiles in a cold, intense downpour. Lucie had understood Sharko’s request: he wanted, in those first moments when dreams still have hold over the senses, to relive his wife’s presence. To believe in it just once more, if only for a fraction of a second.
Lucie returned silently to the living room, leaving the water running. A few moments later, she heard a door close… the water stop… the little trains start up, for the twenty minutes that followed.
Later, Sharko appeared, elegantly dressed. White shirt with thin blue stripes, tie, gray twill slacks. As he moved toward the kitchen, he left in his wake a scent of cologne that Lucie identified as Fahrenheit. The man gave off an aura of reassuring strength, a presence that Lucie had been missing for a long time. She rubbed her hands over her face and yawned discreetly.
Sharko turned on the radio. A lively tune filled the room. Dire Straits. Things were starting to move.
“I won’t ask if you slept well. Coffee?”
“Please—black, no sugar.”
He gave her a sidelong glance as he placed a packet in the coffee machine and turned it on. When their eyes met, he turned away toward the cabinet and took out a teaspoon.
“Nothing that remarkable about Lacombe, I suppose? Otherwise you wouldn’t have hesitated to wake me up in the middle of the night.”
Lucie came closer with a smile.
“Not much beyond what Judith Sagnol already told us. The enigmatic type, vanished into the woodwork in 1951, never heard from again. I also searched around for Syndrome E, including on medical and scientific sites—nothing, no matches found. If the Internet doesn’t know about it, it must be pretty secret.”
Sharko handed her her coffee and went to water his plants, near the kitchen window.
“You should go freshen up a bit. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a woman first thing in the morning, but you definitely look like you got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
“I’ve been up all night thinking.”
“Naturally.”
“We have to go to Canada, Inspector.”
Sharko paused a moment before setting down his watering can. His jaw tightened.
“Listen, I can’t get those children’s faces out of my head either. I saw their fear, then that frenzy in their eyes, their movements. I know that the people hiding behind that camera must have done monstrous things. But our job is in the present, Lucie, the present. It’s already shitty enough as it is. And besides, for the moment, we don’t have anything concrete to help us learn what happened to those kids.”
“Yes, we do. I did some research on the Web. In the 1950s, Montreal was heavily Catholic and had loads of orphanages run by nuns. Every child who passed through those institutions has a file that can be consulted at the city’s national archives. They have a Web site, which says you can come in without an appointment and examine the files on site. Everything is classified, organized, listed…”
“But none of that means we should be looking in Montreal.”
“The film comes from Montreal. So does the informant’s call. So does the little girl, according to the lip-reader. And don’t forget what Judith Sagnol told us about the old Montreal warehouses where she spent her stay. In the archives, it would be best to have an actual name, but a search year will do. The files contain photos. We could—”
“All we have is the date of an old film and a few prints of the kid taken from screen shots, in black and white and of poor quality.”
“And a first name she said in the film: Lydia… One of her playmates, I assume. Maybe a roommate? A year, one name, and a photo might be enough.”
“Yeah, maybe…”
“We’re moving forward inch by inch, but we are moving forward. We can print photos of some of the other girls from the film. In some shots, you can see the refectory, the swing set, bits of the yard, which might help us identify the institution. It’s not a lot, but it’s something. If we can find out who the girl was, or the other girls, we might have a chance of understanding all this.”
Sharko picked up his coffee cup and brought it to his lips. He took a large swallow.