Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  Niémans smiled.

  "Thank you, doctor."

  He left, closing his eyes as he walked. Under his seething eyelids, he now at last glimpsed the motive for the Guernon murders. The incredible machination of the blood-red rivers.

  There was just one more detail he had to check.

  In the university library.

  CHAPTER 55

  "Out! Everybody out!"

  The library reading-room was brightly lit. The police officers lifted their noses from their books. Six of them were still going through works more or less closely associated with evil and purity. Others were examining the lists of students who had used the library during the summer or early fall. They looked like forgotten soldiers, fighting a war that had, unbeknown to them, shifted onto a different front.

  "Out!" Niémans repeated. "It's all over here!"

  The policemen glanced warily at one another. They had presumably been told that Superintendent Niémans was no longer in charge of the case. They were certainly also surprised to see the famous detective with his head stuck in some sort of a sock, and with a damp brown cardboard box under his arm. But who could stand up to Niémans? Especially when he had that expression on his face.

  They stood up and slipped on their jackets.

  One of them, passing by the superintendent on his way to the door, called softly to him. The superintendent recognised the broad-backed lieutenant who had been studying Rémy Caillois's thesis.

  "I've got to the end of the thing, superintendent. And, maybe it doesn't mean anything, but…how can I put it? Caillois's conclusion is really weird. You remember the athlon, the ancient man who brought together strength and intelligence, the mind and the body? Well, Caillois talks of some kind of project to achieve exactly that. A totally crazy idea. The point isn't to set up a new program of education at school or university. Nor is it to retrain the teachers, or anything like that. The solution he had in mind was…"

  "Genetic."

  "So you've read it, too, have you? It's crazy. He seemed to think that intelligence is a biological fact. A genetic trait which must be associated with other genes, which control physical strength, and so recover the perfection of the athlon…"

  His words whirled round Niémans's mind. He now knew the nature of the blood-red rivers conspiracy. And he did not need this half-witted cop's explanation. He wanted the horror to remain latent, implicit, unspoken. Written on his soul in letters of fire.

  "Off with you now," he grunted.

  But the officer was now flying:

  "In the last pages, Caillois talks of selected births and rationally chosen couples. A sort of totalitarian system. A load of gibberish, superintendent, like in science fiction books of the sixties. Jesus, if the guy hadn't died the way he did, the whole thing would be a real scream!"

  "Get lost."

  The stocky lieutenant stared at Niémans, hesitated, then went his way. The superintendent crossed the totally deserted reading-room. He felt his fever mounting again, like roots of fire, encircling his skull as though with burning electrodes. He reached the office on the central rostrum. The office belonging to Rémy Caillois, the university's chief librarian. He tapped on the keyboard of the computer. The screen lit up at once. Suddenly, he changed his mind: the information he was looking for dated back to the 1970s, so it was not to be found on the data bank. Niémans frantically rummaged through the desk drawers in search of the registers containing the lists he wanted to consult.

  Not the lists of books.

  Nor the lists of students.

  Just the list of boxed-in carrels, which had been occupied by thousands of readers over the last few years.

  Strangely enough, it was in the inner logic of those compartments, which Etienne then Rémy Caillois had so carefully organised, that Niémans hoped to unearth a link with what he had discovered at the maternity clinic.

  At last, he found the registers of seating arrangements. He opened his box and once more laid out the files dealing with new-born babies. He calculated the years when these children had become students, spending their evenings in the library, then he looked for their names among the lists of carrels which the two chief librarians had kept so accurately.

  Before long, he found some plans of the compartments, with the names of the students written into each space. He could not have imagined a system that was more logical, more rigorous, more suited to the conspiracy he suspected. All of the children named on the original sheets had, when studying twenty years later, not only been placed in the library in the same carrel, day in day out, year in year out, but also facing the same student of the opposite sex.

  Niémans was now certain that he was right.

  He went through the same procedure for a few other students, intentionally picking them out over a time span of several decades. Each time, he found that they had been seated facing the same person of the same age, but opposite sex, during their daily work in Guernon University Library.

  His hands shaking, the superintendent switched off the computer. The huge reading-room was resonant with stuffy silence. Still sitting at Caillois's desk, he turned on his phone and called the night watchman at the Guernon town hall. He had quite a job persuading him to go down at once into the archives in order to consult the registry books of marriages in Guernon. The night watchman finally agreed and Niémans was able, via his mobile, to direct the investigations he wanted him to carry out. He dictated the names, and the watchman checked them. What he wanted to know was if the names he read out belonged to people who had married each other. He was right seventy per cent of the time.

  "Is this a bet, or what?" the watchman grumbled.

  When they had been through about twenty examples, the superintendent stopped and hung up.

  He tied his papers together and rushed off.

  Niémans trudged across the campus. Despite himself, he kept looking for Fanny's window, but failed to locate it. On the steps outside one of the buildings, a group of journalists seemed to be waiting expectantly. Everywhere else, uniformed policemen and gendarmes patrolled the lawns and entrances to the buildings.

  Faced with a choice between cops and hacks, the superintendent opted for his own people. Flashing his card, he crossed several road-blocks. None of the faces meant anything to him. They were presumably the reinforcements from Grenoble.

  He entered the administrative building and found himself in the large over-lit hall, where a group of pale-faced people, old for the most part, was idling around. Probably the professors, doctors and academics. Everybody was on the alert. Niémans strode straight past them, ignoring their questioning stares.

  He went up to the first floor and headed for the office of Vincent Luyse, the university vice-chancellor. The superintendent crossed the antechamber and tore some of the photographs of students sporting blues off the walls. He opened the door without knocking.

  "What the…?"

  The vice-chancellor calmed down as soon as he saw that it was Niémans. With a curt nod of his head, he gave his other visitors their leave, then said to the superintendent:

  "I hope you have a lead! We are all…"

  The policeman laid the pictures down onto the desk, then produced the files and the register. Luyse looked uneasy.

  "Really, I…"

  "Wait."

  Niémans finished laying out the photos and the papers in front of the vice-chancellor. Then he leant over the desk and asked:

  "Compare these records with the names of your champions, are they from the same families?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Niémans pushed the papers nearer to him.

  "The men and the women in these files got married. I suppose they belong to your famous university elite. They must be professors, researchers, intellectuals…Look at their names and tell me, one by one, if they also happen to be the parents and grandparents of this new generation of supermen who win all the sports prizes."

  Luyse grabbed his glasses and lowered his eyes.

>   "Um, yes, that is correct. I know most of these names."

  "And you would agree that the children of these couples are extraordinarily gifted, both intellectually and physically?"

  Despite himself, Luyse's tense face relaxed into a broad smile. A smarmy grin of satisfaction that Niémans would have liked to ram down his throat.

  "Yes…yes, of course. This new generation is very brilliant. Believe me, these children are going to live up fully to their promise…And, as a matter of fact, we already had a few such fine specimens in the previous generation. For our university, such performances are particularly…"

  Niémans suddenly realised that he did not so much distrust intellectuals as detest them. He hated them to his very marrow. He loathed their distant, pretentious ways, their ability to describe, to analyse and gauge reality, in whatever form it presented itself. These poor jerks lived as though they were attending some sort of show, and always left more or less disappointed, more or less blasé. And yet he recognised that what happened to them, unbeknown to themselves, was not something he would wish even on his worst enemy. Luyse went on:

  "Yes, this new generation is going to strengthen our university's reputation and…"

  Niémans interrupted. He put his files and registers back into the box, and then spat out:

  "Then you should be over the moon. Because these people are going to make your university a household name."

  The vice-chancellor looked at him quizzically. Niémans opened his mouth, but he suddenly froze. There was a look of terror on the vice-chancellor's face as he murmured:

  "But what's wrong? You're…you're bleeding!"

  Niémans looked down and saw a dark puddle gleaming on the surface of the desk. The fever that had been burning his skull was in fact the blood from the wound, which had reopened. He staggered, stared at his own face in the shiny, flat mirror and suddenly wondered if he was not looking at the reflection of the last murder in the series.

  He did not have time to answer. One second later, he was kneeling unconscious on the floor, his face pressed against the desk, down in the sticky looking-glass of his own blood.

  CHAPTER 56

  Light. Humming. Warmth.

  Pierre Niémans did not immediately realise where he was. Then he made out a paper hat. A white coat. Strip lights. The hospital. How long had he been there, unconscious? And why did his body feel so weak, as though his limbs, muscles and bones had been replaced by some liquid substance? He tried to speak, but the attempt died in his throat. His fatigue was pinning him down onto the rustling plastic cover of his bed.

  "He's losing a lot of blood. We'll have to perform a temporal haemostasia."

  A door opened. Wheels squeaked. White lights passed above his eyes. A blinding explosion. A burst of energy that dilated his pupils. Another voice resonated:

  "Begin the transfusion."

  The superintendent heard a clicking sound and felt something cold move across his body. He turned his head and saw some tubes connected to a fat suspended pouch, that seemed to be breathing, as it moved in and out, prompted by an automatic air-pressurised system.

  Was he going to stay there, wandering through unconsciousness, in that antiseptic stench? Fade away in that light when he knew the motive of the murders? When he at last understood the secret that lay behind that series of slaughters? His face twisted up into a sardonic grin. Suddenly, a voice said:

  "Inject the Diprivan."

  Niémans grasped what was meant and sat up. He seized the doctor's wrist, which was already clutching an electronic lancet, and panted:

  "I don't want an anesthetic!"

  The doctor looked was taken aback.

  "No anesthetic? But…you've been cut almost in half, my friend. I'm going to have to stitch you back up."

  Niémans found the strength to mumble:

  "A local one…Give me a local anesthetic…"

  The man sighed, shifted his chair back in a shriek of castors and said to the anesthetist:

  "All right. Then give him some Xylocaine. The maximum dose. A full two hundred milligrams."

  Niémans relaxed. They moved him under the multi-faceted lamps. The nape of his neck was propped on a head-rest, so that his skull was raised as high as possible toward the light. They turned his face, and then his view became obstructed by a curtain of paper.

  The superintendent closed his eyes. As the doctor and nurses started to busy themselves on his temple, his mind began to drift off. His heartbeat slowed, his head no longer tormented him. A delicious feeling seemed about to engulf him.

  The secret…Caillois's secret…Sertys's secret. Even that was becoming vague, strange and distant…Fanny's face occupied his every thought…Her body that was so dark, muscular and curvaceous, as soft as volcanic rock that had been bronzed in a furnace, by the waters and the wind…Fanny…The visions filling his skull were like murmurs, the rustling of cloth, the whispering of elves.

  "Stop!"

  The order echoed across the operating theater. Everything came to a halt. A hand tore away the curtain and, in the wave of light, Niémans saw a devil with long locks, waving a tricolor police card under the noses of the astonished doctor and nurses.

  Karim Abdouf.

  Niémans glanced round to his right: the tubes were already gushing into his skin, into his veins. The elixir of life. The sap of arteries. The doctor was brandishing his scissors.

  "Hands off the superintendent," Karim panted.

  The medic froze once again. Abdouf approached and examined Niémans's wound, now sewn up like an oven-ready roast. The doctor shrugged.

  "I'm going to have to cut the thread."

  Karim peered distrustfully around.

  "How is he?"

  "Solid. He's lost a lot of blood, but we've given him a hefty transfusion. We've stitched up his wound. The operation is not quite over yet and…"

  "Have you given him any junk?"

  "Any junk?"

  "To knock him out."

  "Just a local anesthetic and…"

  "Get me some speed. Some stimulants. I need him back on his feet." Karim's eyes were fixed on Niémans, but his words were meant for the doctor. He added:

  "It's a matter of life and death."

  The doctor stood up and searched through a chest of narrow drawers for a blister pack of tablets. Karim grinned fleetingly at Niémans.

  "Here," said the doctor. "With this, he'll be up and about in half an hour's time, but…"

  "Good. Now, move along."

  The Arab yelled at the little group of white coats:

  "Fuck off, the lot of you! I need to talk to the superintendent." The doctor and nurses vanished.

  Niémans felt the needles from the drip being pulled out of his arm and heard the paper sheeting being pulled away. Then Karim was handing him his blood-stained coat. In the other hand he was weighing the batch of little colored tablets.

  "Your speed, superintendent." A grin. "Just for this special occasion."

  But Niémans was in no laughing mood. He grabbed Karim's leather jacket and, his face ashen, murmured:

  "Karim…I've…I've worked out the conspiracy."

  "What conspiracy?"

  "The conspiracy of Sertys, Caillois and Chernecé. The conspiracy of the blood-red rivers."

  "WHAT?"

  "They…they were swapping babies."

  PART XII

  CHAPTER 57

  Eight o'clock in the morning. The landscape was black, shifting, unreal. The rain had started to pour down again, as though to give the mountain a final polish before daybreak. Translucent shafts broke through the shadows like funnels of glass.

  Under the boughs of a huge conifer, Karim Abdouf and Pierre Niémans were standing face to face, one leaning on his Audi, the other against the tree. They were stock still, concentrated, as taut as wires. The Arab cop observed the superintendent, who was slowly recovering his strength, or rather his nerves, thanks to the effect of the amphetamine. He had just described the murderous at
tack of the Range Rover. But Abdouf was pressing him to tell the whole tale.

  Through the din of the downpour, Pierre Niémans began: "Yesterday evening, I went to the home for the blind."

  "On the trail of Eric Joisneau. Yes, I know. And what did you find out?"

  "The director, Champelaz, told me that he looked after children who had contracted hereditary diseases. And that they always came from the same families, those of the university elite. Champelaz explained the phenomenon this way: it's an academic community which, through its isolation, has worn thin its blood and become genetically poor. The children born today are destined to be extremely brilliant and highly cultivated, but physically weak and impoverished. From one generation to the next, the blood of the university has become corrupted."

  "But what's that got to do with the case?"

  "At first sight, nothing. Joisneau had paid a call over there to find out about eye problems, which might have some link with the mutilation of the bodies. But that wasn't the point. Not at all. Champelaz also told me that this inbred community had also been producing extremely vigorous offspring over the last twenty years or so. Intelligent kids, who were also capable of walking off with all the sports prizes. Now, this fact doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the scenario. How can the same community produce a line of runts and also a batch of absolute supermen? Champelaz had looked into the origins of these remarkable kids. He consulted their medical records at the maternity clinic. He examined their backgrounds in the hospital archives. He even had a look at the birth papers of their parents and grandparents in the hope of finding some indication, some genetic clue. But he found nothing. Absolutely nothing."

  "And then?"

  "Then, last summer, something strange happened. In July, a routine investigation in the hospital archives turned up some old papers, which had been forgotten in the basement of the old library. What were they? The birth papers of those very parents and grandparents of our supermen."

  "Which means?"

  "That there were two copies of these sheets. Or, to be more precise, that the records Champelaz had looked at in the official files were forgeries, and that the genuine papers were the ones that had just been discovered in some boxes belonging to the university's chief librarian: Etienne Caillois, Rémy's father."