The First Fingerprint (36 page)

“WHAT?”

“You heard me: Caillol.”

“Have you got anything else?”

“Yes. I went to a Catholic institute for convalescents. He stayed there after leaving the Edouard Toulouse. Until 1988.”

“1988!”

“That's right … Anyway, I'll explain it all tomorrow. But tell me, was it the Luccioni girl who gave you this lead?”

“Yes.”

“I must admit, you've got incredible intuition.”

“It was just luck, Anne.”

“It's odd we didn't think of it earlier!”

“That's probably my fault … What can I say? There are only three of us on the case … Anyway, it would have come out sooner or later. Now we have to find him. They didn't tell you anything else at the Edouard Toulouse or at the institute?”

“Yes, they did. But the rest is less important. I'll tell you tomorrow.”

“Nice work, Anne. I'm lucky to have you with me.”

“Keep your compliments to yourself, Michel.”

He hung up.

When he got to the tower at Fort Saint-Jean, he could hear Sylvie calling to him from the quayside. He turned and saw her on the deck of the
L'Archéonaute
, a thirty-footer used for marine exploration.

“Do you want a guided tour?”

She smiled at him broadly and he stammered something incomprehensible.

“Come on board.”

When he was on deck, Sylvie held out her hand and looked at him shyly. A man came out of the boat's bridge.

“May I introduce Lieutenant Laffitte?”

The man looked at him and gave a nod before disappearing back into the bridge.

“This is the boat we used when we investigated Le Guen's Cave in 1992. I remember how choppy the sea was; it was awful staying on board all day. We'd set up a video link which meant we could follow the work in the cave as it happened.”

The lieutenant was sitting in front of a radar screen in the bridge, turning knobs this way and that. He didn't bother to look up when they came in, so they continued on down to the mess.

“This is one of the areas we use as a laboratory and meeting room when we're out on a mission. We keep all our equipment here: microscopes, measuring instruments, and so on … everything we need.”

“Do you often go out on missions?”

“For me it's quite rare, because I'm a prehistorian. You don't find something like Le Guen's Cave every day! But the boat's used a lot for Greco-Roman archaeology.”

They could hear Laffitte calling from the bridge.

“Sylvie, it's time to go.”

“O.K., Sylvain … it's a shame you didn't get here earlier. You could have seen the whole boat. Maybe some other time!”

“If you want.”

Laffitte's voice grew more insistent.

“Sylvie, I'm locking up!”

It was busy on the quay: there were pensioners soaking up the last rays of the sun, and executives walking home briskly having taken the ferry across the water. A group of tourists were photographing one another in front of
La Bonne Mère
, and kids on bikes were chasing each other, weaving between the passers-by.

They strolled toward the town hall in silence. As they passed the Fishermen's Association, de Palma lingered in front of a stripped-down Marseille fishing boat on blocks. A man was busy sanding the hull.

“I'd like one just like that, if they weren't so expensive!”

“They're lovely boats,” Sylvie said.

“They're the loveliest.”

They walked on for another twenty meters, with Sylvie glancing at him timidly, like a teenager. He just managed to avoid a kid on rollerskates who was wiggling his hips and swerving between the walkers. When they got to the old riggers by the town hall, de Palma went over to a forty-ton schooner.

“This one's my favorite,
Le Caprice des Vents
.”

“What a nice name for a boat.”

De Palma touched the hull of
Le Marseillois
, a three-master, then stepped back as though estimating its tonnage. The rigging and yards stood out against the hill of Notre-Dame de la Garde.

He gazed at Sylvie, and she looked back at him tenderly. After a long silence, he said:

“You know, I've just found out that Christine had a brother.”

“How odd.”

“Why is that odd?”

“She never mentioned him. I always supposed that she was an only child. She was so temperamental and bossy, it seemed obvious.”

The day was coming to an end. Headlights and restaurant signs shimmered blue and red on the gentle lapping of the heavy waters of Lacydon. A dark and humid night was settling in across Marseille.

Sylvie lived at 35, esplanade de la Tourette, on the eleventh and top floors. As de Palma came through the door, she hastened to raise the shutter in the living room. The balcony overlooked the entire port of Marseille. In the foreground was the ferry terminal, then the seawall and, beyond that, the Frioul archipelago.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Whatever you're having, Sylvie. I'm easy.”

“Whisky, then. I don't have any pastis.”

“A whisky would be fine.”

While she was in the kitchen, de Palma took the opportunity to go out on to the balcony.

In the distance to his right, the cranes and scaffolding down in the port glittered in the night, like motionless, steel sentinels bent over the cargo boats. From Arenc to L'Estaque via the Bassins National, Pinède and Président Wilson, the huge port was sending out its fireworks.

Sylvie came and stood so close to him that they were almost touching, and gave him his whisky.

“It's so beautiful,” she said.

“It's magnificent. It's the Marseille I love. My father worked down there, and his father and grandfather before him. They were all sailors. Except me—I became a lousy policeman instead.”

“But that's also a wonderful profession!”

“Don't talk nonsense, Sylvie …”

A horn sounded and the
El Djézaïr
sailed into Grande Joliette dock, heading for Sainte-Marie strait and the open sea, with a pilot ship in its wake. The cargo ship with its Algerian flag slowly cruised past the ruins of huge hangars on the Joliette quayside. These temples
of Marseille's fortune, were marked with a capital J followed by a number. J1, J2 and J3 were no more, now reduced to dust, bulldozed into the depths of the dry docks.

There had been plans for a new harbor, with marinas and the renovation of the Le Panier neighborhood, in the hope that this would rid the “boulevard of crime” of its tawdry inhabitants, thus finishing the work begun by the Germans when they razed the city center in 1943. Bombed and wrecked, could eternal Marseille now rise again, like the demi-gods of Greece who bit the dust but never wanted to die? The Greece of the Republic, the
demos
, poets and brilliant thinkers; Phocaea and her daughter Marseille, the swarthy-skinned rebel who talked with her hands and enveloped herself in nonsense when she got the blues.

Sylvie touched his shoulder.

“A penny for your thoughts.”

“Nothing special. Do you like opera?”

“I've never been.”

“I'll take you, one day.”

Sylvie stroked the rim of her glass with her index finger.

“I'll put on some music. It's a kind of jazz-rock. I don't know what you like.”

De Palma immediately recognized the '70s sound of a Telecaster guitar.

“Is that Mike Stern's latest album?”

“Yes, it is. Do you know his stuff?”

“He used to be in Blood, Sweat and Tears, and he played with Miles Davis once or twice … a really good guitarist, though his style's a bit conventional.”

“I thought opera lovers only listened to opera!”

“Only fools and sectarians. Music is a whole universe. I've got all of the Stones' albums, real rarities which I bought in London in the good old days … But don't talk to me about The Beatles or Georges Brassens!”

“A bit sectarian all the same …”

A surging saxophone-and-guitar duet immersed Sylvie's flat in a soothing atmosphere. They listened to it for a while, without looking
at each other. When the second track started, she went over to the hi-fi and turned down the volume.

“I wanted to see you because there's something I forgot to tell you last time.”

“What's that?” he asked darkly, worried that she was about to break the charm of the evening.

“I was the one who first told her about Le Guen's Cave. I knew about the discovery before it was announced in the papers. In fact, I know Le Guen well. We spoke about it a few months before. I was the one who told him that he would have to reveal his discovery. And then …”

The charm had been broken. The Telecaster sounded as though it was light years away.

“Who are you talking about?”

“About Christine … And then there were those divers found dead in the tunnel. Do you remember?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Because something struck me at the time. One day, after their deaths, she was with me at the lab and she said: ‘You see, the first man has got his revenge.'”

“Anything else?”

“No, nothing.”

“It's rather a silly thing to say.”

“I'm not so sure. Anyway, it struck me. And for several days I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. Why did she say it?”

“I've no idea. But people say strange things sometimes.”

“Of course, but what struck me was the expression on her face. I can still see it, there was something lugubrious in the way she said it.”

He thought over what Sylvie had just told him. Without knowing why, he felt certain that it was important.

“I'd like you to tell me about shamans. I've been told that Le Guen's Cave was used for shamanistic rituals, is that true?”

“Nothing is a hundred percent sure in prehistory, but it is a serious hypothesis … We've long tried to understand why Paleolithic man always went into the darkest depths of his caves to paint his frescoes. A great deal of nonsense has been written on the subject, which we'll
ignore … But then ethnology came to our rescue. In Australia, the Aborigines produce wall paintings too, and then draw the same hands as those you saw in the lab and elsewhere … The same goes for South America, in places where initiation rituals are held. You see?”

Sylvie drew away from de Palma and paused for a moment.

“The significant point about our caves is what is depicted, and what is not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that there are animals, but never any representations of man's environment. No huts, or landscapes, or the sun and moon … Drawings of men are extremely rare too, which makes us think that there is magic at work in Paleolithic art. Personally I think these hands are signs for entering into contact with the spirits that lie behind the walls. Hence those ideas about shamanistic rituals. They went into the caves and invoked spirits, to treat a sick child for example, or to make the hunt as favorable as possible …”

She sipped at her whisky.

“It's a little like all religions. God is put to use to soothe the great and small ills of daily life. Shamans are mediators between the real world and the supernatural world. There are many of them still in Siberia, in Africa of course, and in America … And they all have one thing in common: they seek out trance states, hallucinations and visions. Trances allow them to see mythical beings, animals and specters which are invoked to favor the hunt, or to make it rain. We think that it was the shamans who painted the pictures in the caves. And that they also used chants and healing rituals. I saw these kinds of practices among the Bochimans in the Kalahari.”

“Have you heard of the Slain Man?”

“I see that you know more than you're letting on!” she said, adopting an elegant pose. “Slain men are quite common. But the most interesting examples are in Pech-Merle, Cougnac and Le Guen's Cave, of course. They seem to be intentionally poor drawings, just line sketches and nothing else. In Pech-Merle and Cougnac, they apparently show lines of vital energy flowing through individuals. In Le Guen's Cave, on the other hand, there can be no doubt that the Slain Man is a murder victim. Was it a ritual killing? An early form of crucifixion? Or else a
bewitchment, like sticking pins in dolls or figurines? Nobody knows. In any case, Le Guen's Slain Man is unique.”

Another connection formed in the Baron's mind.

“So you think that these prehistoric shamans might have performed ritual murders?”

Sylvie shook her long, brown hair.

“Yes, I think so. But it's just one hypothesis among others. In any case, murder is there as a possibility. Those people who think that murder only started during the Neolithic period, along with the concept of property, have got it wrong.”

“Did Christine share your opinions?”

“Completely. We didn't like each other, but we were in the same school. The Palestro school,” she added, laughing.

“Did she ever talk to you about the Slain Man?”

“The one in Le Guen's Cave? Of course she did. She thought it was a human sacrifice.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think she was wrong to be so categorical—after all it's only a drawing. It might be a sacrifice, yes, but perhaps merely a symbolic one in a carving. As you're beginning to realize, we can't be sure about anything.”

He went into the living room and took off his jacket. She noticed the gun he was wearing on his hip.

“Do you always have that on you?”

“Almost always. Except when I sleep. Though sometimes I do keep it under my pillow.”

“What a strange existence.”

“What an awful one, you mean! I live with violence and anxiety. They're my two best friends. We could have had a lovely evening together, but here we are talking about Christine Autran. Death, always death.”