The First Fingerprint (24 page)

“Really?”

“Yes, I went to see his sister, and she told me.”

“But how did you make the connection?”

“It would take too long to explain now … It was silly, in fact. I just remembered that Luccioni used to live in Mazargues when he was young.”

“So, that means more work for us.”

“Indeed it does! And tomorrow we're going to have to start questioning staff at the archaeology lab. So take it easy, you're going to be up to your neck.”

“O.K., Michel.”

“See you tomorrow, kid.”

Three messages were waiting for him on his mobile.

The first was from Maistre:

“Hi there, old fellow. I'll be in your chic neighborhood to get my car fixed. I'll call by to see you around 7:00 p.m. End of message.”

The second was from his mother, who was worried about his silence. He realized that he had not contacted her for days. The third was from Sylvie Maurel, whose voice trembled slightly. She sounded out of breath.

“Michel, I didn't go to work today. I don't know why, but I didn't feel up to it. This morning, when I went out, I didn't feel good. So I went back to bed. I'm in town now. If you're free this evening, I'd like to see you. I've got something to tell you. It's 5:00 p.m. I'll call you back in an hour.”

De Palma looked at his watch. It was 5:30. He thought for a moment. He had trouble admitting to himself that he really wanted to see Sylvie. It was a compulsion he could not chase away. He called Maistre and invented an appointment to put him off for the evening. Then he phoned Sylvie and arranged to meet her at 8:00 p.m. in a café on cours d' Estienne d'Orves. That would give him enough time to go home first.

As he entered his flat, he realized that everything about the décor reminded him of his wife: the colors, the odd, dusty knickknack. She had certainly not left his life yet.

Did he really want her to?

*

Marie has come to his flat for the first time. She immediately notices his collection of books on criminology. Out of curiosity, she goes over to them, reading out the titles:
The Criminal Personality, Clinical Criminology, A Criminology Handbook, Crime and Criminals …

He simply says: “It's a trade, Marie. Each to his own field of studies, and mine's crime. I'm on the murder squad. And reading is as important as fieldwork. I know everything about murder.”

She picks up a door stopper entitled:
The Scene of the Crime: the First Elements in an Investigation.
It is illustrated, and de Palma has left a sheaf of notes inside it. In the central section, Marie comes across a series of photographs
.

Horror
.

“What's this? It's awful, it looks like …”

“A naked nine-year-old child who has been beaten to death, raped, and tied up with electric cable. The case has never been solved. Don't look at it. The human mind couldn't dream up anything more horrific.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“All the time. It's my job.”

Marie closes the book and stares at de Palma, distressed
.

“Do all policemen read books?”

“No, far from it. Let's just say that I'm a specialist. I try to understand killers.”

“And do you?”

“I think so.”

Marie puts down the book and gazes around the room. On the sideboard, she notices a chrome frame with a black-and-white photograph which has turned sepia over the years
.

“You were a very handsome young man!”

“It's not me. It's my brother,” he replies in a somber voice
.

“He looks so much like you!”

“We're twins.”

“Really, I didn't know you had a twin brother!”

“He died, in an accident … I don't want to talk about it.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't realize …”

She casts her eyes around the room, trying to escape the horrific expression on his face
.

“I'll be back,” Marie had said. It had been months now. For de Palma, they had flown by … He had not heard from her at all for the past fortnight. He did not want to know the reason why. He would phone her parents that weekend, to try to find out more.

Sylvie was waiting for him on the terrace of Le Pythéas. When she saw him coming, she stood up and waved.

“You look tired.”

“This job is wearing me out.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“I'll have a beer.”

Sylvie peered at him. She was more beautiful than ever. He did his best to hide the fact that, just then, he was the least relaxed man in Marseille.

His beer arrived, and he knocked back half of it in one.

“I got some bad news this morning,” she announced all of a sudden.

“Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Nothing personal. But I read in
La Provence
that you'd arrested François Caillol.”

“We didn't arrest him. It was the gendarmes. And why is that bad news?”

“I know him.”

“Personally?”

“No, not really. He's a psychiatrist specialized in neuropsychology … And he's interested in prehistory. I've seen him on several occasions at conferences. Apart from his consulting work, he studies hallucinatory phenomena. Christine knew him better than I do. They worked together on shamanism.”

“So?” de Palma murmured, pretending not to be falling from another planet.

“They were studying shamanistic practices in various tribes in an attempt to understand certain prehistoric rituals. It's a bit complicated, and to be honest I'm not sure that work of this kind is valid. Anyway, people like that are all half crazy!”

“But not because he's a psychiatrist! The enigma of violence is associated with the uncertainty of our human condition: the greater the uncertainty, the greater the violence. That's what my old
criminology teacher used to say, and then he'd add: ‘Crime is natural, what's artificial is virtue. It's taken thousands of years, plus a whole bunch of gods and prophets, for humanity to learn this truth.'”

“How true. So do you think Caillol's a murderer?”

“Who knows? A psychiatrist is generally speaking sane. They have fewer doubts about the human condition than we do. But, in the end, you never know …”

De Palma stared down at the foam on the amber surface of his beer. He would have preferred Sylvie to talk to him about something other than Christine Autran, even though she had just advanced his investigation significantly.

“Michel …”

“I'm the best, Sylvie. I always get my man. Sooner or later, I get them all. I've got the gift!”

“And you're modest with it!”

“I, too, am a great hunter.”

“You're off the rails, Michel. He's been arrested.”

“I know I'm off the rails. If I wasn't, then you wouldn't be here right now. I can't explain it all to you. This investigation is hard enough as it is. But I have this crazy idea that our psychiatrist isn't the murderer. That's what I think. If you'd seen everything I've seen in my life, you wouldn't even trust yourself.”

“But if they've arrested Caillol, they must have evidence!”

“Oh, they always have evidence. So much so that they don't need a confession! An intelligent man, a pervert, and a psychiatrist to boot, who kills then leaves behind a trail of clues that gets him arrested straight away. I mean, really …”

De Palma stood up and called to the waiter.

“If this psychiatrist has also studied prehistory, and therefore cave painting, he wouldn't leave a reproduction behind so that he could be identified at once, especially given that the victim was one of his patients. See what I mean?”

“Yes, I suppose so … Are you going?” she exclaimed.

“Yes, I … I mustn't see you like this! Goodbye, Sylvie.”

*

When he got home, he wanted to empty his mind. He went to his CD player, put on the last act of “Tristan” and scanned to the end—the death of Isolde. Birgit Nilsson's sublime voice, smooth and deep, mingled with the obscure depths of the orchestral performance.

“How soft and gentle is his smile

how sweetly his eyes open, my friends, can you see?”

On his balcony, his eyes focused on the dark mass of the Saint-Loup hills, piercing the black sky. He let his memories gently envelop him: long winter walks to the conservatory on place Carli, hand in hand with his twin, his other half; Wednesday visits to the mother superior of the convent of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, who was a distant cousin; the nun's marshmallows, the obligatory prayer in the chapel, bathed in the soft light filtering through the yellow and lazulite stained-glass windows.

“These sweet voices which surround me

are they the waves of soft breezes?”

With his brother, he would kneel before the altar of white marble, which was always decked with freshly cut flowers. A few meters away to the left lay the mummified body of the order's founder, a semi-saint who had lived in the nineteenth century. As he mumbled a ‘Hail Mary,' Michel would glance at her embalmed corpse. He was so fascinated by her death mask that, one day, he could no longer resist pressing his face against the glass. He had taken a long look at those features, their severity smoothed by death. Her mouth was still crimson, her eyes looked as though they might open again at any moment, and her aquiline nose rose up above her white cowl with her hands crossed on her stomach and a rosary in her fingers, the founder of the order of Saint Joseph of the Apparition seemed to be fast asleep; perhaps she was dreaming of the African savannahs, the ochre stretches of the Sahara, or the deep jungles of Vietnam which she had tried to evangelize during her life as a missionary.

“Are they billows of delicious perfumes?

How they swell, how heady they are
,

Shall I breathe, shall I look?”

Death had always fascinated Commandant de Palma. Even though he had lost his faith, it remained the big mystery.

He was fascinated by the death of others, and by his own killer instinct, which surprised him from time to time when he felt unbalanced. He would have flashes of fury, and over-exposed sequences spun in his mind, with images of cold blades cutting into soft flesh, bodies pushed into the void, crushed skulls.

The great darkness.

The big sleep, as they say.

“In the mass of waves, in the thunder of noise
,

in the breath of the world, the universe
,

I shall drown, be engulfed
,

lose consciousness—supreme rapture!”

In the dark corridor on the third floor of the Marseille high court, secretaries were going in and out of the magistrates' offices carrying huge folders. De Palma was waiting beside a plastic fig tree, his bum aching on the hard, varnished bench. He was trying to think of an operatic air to pass the time, but his brain was still half asleep.

That morning, Commissaire Paulin had informed him that the public prosecutor had taken away the investigation into the killing in Saint-Julien from the murder squad. De Palma was there to see his deputy, to try to make him change his mind.

He did not like the high court on Monday mornings. Having failed to find a tune to hum, he had only one solution: to kill time by admiring the legs of the petite brunette, as dry as a stick, who was doing the most toing and froing perched on the high heels of her blue shoes.

The door of office number 4 opened. Christophe Barbieri, deputy public prosecutor, poked out his round head and motioned to the Baron to come in.

One wall of the magistrate's office was taken up by a huge poster for the film
La Femme du Boulanger
and above the desk was the Declaration of Human Rights. Barbieri sat down straight away with an exasperated look on his face.

“So, Michel, where are you at with the Autran case?”

“I'm making slow progress, but I am progressing. Why?”

“As Paulin will have told you, I've spoken to the gendarmerie. They take a very dim view of your insinuations about their work.”

Barbieri was all but bald. He was wearing a mauve shirt, from which hung an ageless tie decorated with horses. At times his eyes took on an expression of infinite sadness; at others they were lit by a strange
fire. He always worked listening to music, except during hearings, and his favorite composers were Mozart and Debussy. There was a huge laserdisc player on the rickety shelf behind him, between the legal books and his magistrate's hat.

“What did the gendarmes tell you?”

“They found out that your colleague … what's his name?”

“Vidal.”

“Yes, Vidal; they found out that Vidal paid a little visit to the priest of Saint-Julien.”

“So what?”

“And they don't like it.”

“I couldn't care less, Christophe.”

“You might not, but I do. The gendarmerie has made far more progress than you. So I'm taking the Saint-Julien murder away from you. I don't want to see you meddle again. Is that clear?”

De Palma did not reply. He was afraid of losing his temper, which would not help matters. Barbieri was a tough, but straight, magistrate; everyone respected him, even the roughest villains. He was a hard worker, capable of spending entire days looking for the tiniest details which would scupper even the finest barristers. He did not tolerate police officers who presumed to criticize his working methods. De Palma was one of his few friends on the force; a friendship which had formed around their shared passion for opera.

“I can't drop it now,” he said softly.

“Why is that?”

“Because of Christine Autran.”

“Why, because of Christine Autran?”