Lucie wrinkled her features. They saw clawlike fingers gripping skulls on a table. Spiders filmed close up, mummifying insects in their gossamer threads. A fat black cloud in a perfectly clear sky. A large dark clot in a pool of blood. Horrors, aberrations—all the things Jacques Lacombe prized.
Sharko rubbed his temples, shaken.
“They must have shown it to the patients in a continuous loop. Combined with the sounds from the loudspeakers, it would have been a veritable brainwashing machine. That Lacombe was as crazy as Sanders.”
“That’s probably the image he had of mental illness: scenes of capture and imprisonment, the invasion of the body by foreign organisms. All that to create a shock to the brain. Just like Sanders, he wanted to eradicate illness by tapping directly into the unconscious. Bombard it, the way they bombard cancer cells with radiation today.”
Sharko let go of his mouse and ran a hand through his hair.
“Barbarians… We’re back in the days of the Cold War, the battle between East and West, when people were prepared to make any sacrifice to reach their goals.”
Lucie sighed and looked the inspector in the eye.
“When I think it was these horrors that brought us together, you and I… Without these monstrosities, we would never have met.”
“Only a relationship born in suffering could bring together two cops like us. Don’t you think?”
Lucie pinched her lips. The harshness and madness of the world saddened her more than anything.
“Where’s the rhyme and reason in all this?”
“There is none. There never was.”
She nodded her chin toward the screen.
“The other folder. We should get onto Szpilman’s findings—hopefully to find out his secrets and be done with this once and for all.”
Sharko nodded gravely. Around them, the atmosphere in the room had become thick and viscous. The cop clicked on the “Szpilman’s Discoveries” folder. Inside was a single PowerPoint file, labeled “Mental_contamination.ppt.” Lucie’s throat tightened.
“Wait a minute. Just before they shot him, Rotenberg was telling me about mental contamination. With everything that happened afterward, it had slipped my mind. Open the file.”
“A batch of photos, it looks like.”
The slide show began, delivering its pixelated poison. They saw the pictures of the German soldier aiming at the Jewish women, which the police had already seen at the meeting in Nanterre. The eyes of the soldier in the foreground had been circled in marker.
“His eyes… That’s what Szpilman wanted to call attention to.”
The following series of photos: mass graves.
The bodies of Africans in heaps, tangled together, gathered up by the army. The inhuman expression of a vile massacre.
“Rwanda,” the inspector murmured with difficulty. “Nineteen ninety-four. The genocide.”
A particularly horrible image showed the Hutus in action, armed with their machetes. The faces of the aggressors were contorted in hatred, their lips frothing with saliva, the veins on their necks and arms bulging beneath the skin.
Once again, the killers’ eyes were circled. Lucie moved her face closer to the screen.
“Always the same look in the eye, always… The German, the Hutu, the little girl with the rabbits. It’s like… a common feature of madness, transcending cultures and time periods.”
“Different forms of mass hysteria. We’re in the thick of it.”
The war correspondent had then ventured among the bodies, lingering over the corpses, not shying away from the most horrific close-ups.
The following image froze Lucie and Sharko in complete stupor.
It showed a Tutsi, his eyes missing, his skull cut in half.
The photo bore the caption BEYOND MASSACRE: AN EXPRESSION OF HUTU MADNESS.
Lucie burrowed into her seat, a hand on her forehead. The photographer had thought this was a barbaric act by the Hutus themselves, but the truth lay elsewhere.
“I can’t believe it…”
Sharko pulled on the flesh of his cheeks until his eyes slanted.
“He was there too. The sicko who steals the brains. Egypt, Rwanda, Gravenchon—and how many other places besides?”
Other documents followed: archival photos, scans of articles, or pages from history books.
Each concerned a genocide or a massacre. Burma, 1988. Sudan, 1989. Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992. Horrible photos, taken in the frenzy of the moment. The very worst that history had to offer was on display before them. And always, eyes circled. Sharko looked for sliced skulls among the mountains of corpses, without finding any more. But they were surely there, somewhere among the dead. They simply hadn’t been photographed.
The cop firmly hit PAUSE.
“Enough!”
He stood up, put his hands to his head, and paced the room. Lucie still couldn’t get over it.
“Mental contamination,” she kept repeating mechanically.
She filed through the last images; then the slide show ended.
Quiet in the room. Discreet rumble of the air conditioner. Lucie rushed to the window and threw it open.
Air. She needed some air.
57
Sharko squeezed his skull between his hands.
“The killer must have been there… present after every massacre, to steal the brains.”
Pale, Lucie had come back to sit on the bed. She stared blankly at the screen.
“Szpilman didn’t care about the political, ethnic, or existential reasons for the genocides. He was tracking something in those massacres, in which perfectly normal fathers and children suddenly went into a killing frenzy. Just before he died, Philip Rotenberg had talked to me about research that led the Belgian to that business of mental contamination. He’d said there might exist a phenomenon so violent that it could modify the structure of the brain.”
“Like a virus, you mean?”
“Yes, except that there isn’t anything really physical or organic. Just… something that passes through the eye and directly modifies human behavior, that liberates the impulse toward violence.”
“A kind of criminal mass hysteria.”
“In a way. Ever since I saw the film with the girls in the white room, I’ve had an image in mind: they’re like a squadron of warplanes. The lead plane, the one that guides the rest, veers downward, and the other planes follow in formation, one by one, as if they were held together by an invisible thread. What if that’s what this Syndrome E is all about? One highly violent individual sets things off, acts as a catalyst; then the mental contamination of violence spreads almost immediately from person to person? What if that was the goal of the experiments hidden in Lacombe’s film? Trying to re-create the phenomenon for the camera? Establish concrete proof of its existence?”
Sharko walked almost mechanically around the room. Nothing existed around him. The case had absorbed him, and what Henebelle was saying struck him as at once far-fetched and frighteningly on target. Szpilman, through his own research and persistence, had stumbled onto the truth. He had spent years rummaging through books, contacting war zone photographers, collecting images, tracking down a horrifying discovery. Ultimately, the film that had no doubt come to him by arranged accident had been the cornerstone of his research, the missing piece that allowed him to grasp the very essence of his quest.
“There are people on this planet,” he said, “who are trying to understand, medically—I would almost say surgically—the workings of this phenomenon, which Jacques Lacombe recorded more than fifty years ago for the purposes of secret experiments. Violent mental contamination starting from a catalyst. That’s what Syndrome E is.”