Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  "I've come from Paris, Madame. I was called in by the investigating magistrate to help in the enquiries into your husband's sad demise. I…"

  "Do you have a lead?"

  The superintendent stared at her, then suddenly felt like breaking something, a window, anything. This woman was full of grief, but her hatred of the police was even stronger.

  "No, we don't. Not for the moment," he admitted. "But I'm optimistic that investigations will soon…"

  "Ask your questions."

  Niémans sat down on the sofa-bed, opposite the woman who had chosen a small chair in order to keep her distance from him. To save face, he seized a cushion and fiddled with it for a few seconds.

  "I've read your statement," he began. "And I would just like to get a little additional information. Lots of people go hiking in this region I suppose?"

  "What else do you think there is to do in Guernon? Everybody goes walking, or climbing."

  "Did other hikers know the routes Rémy took?"

  "No. He never talked about that. He used to go off on ways known only to him."

  "Did he just go walking, or climbing as well?"

  "It depended. On Saturday, Rémy set off on foot, at an altitude of less than six thousand feet. He didn't take any equipment with him." Niémans paused for a moment before getting to the heart of the matter.

  "Did your husband have any enemies?"

  "No."

  The ambiguous tone of the answer led him to ask another question, which took even him by surprise:

  "Did he have any friends?"

  "No. Rémy was a loner."

  "How did he get on with the students who used the library?"

  "The only contact he had with them was to give them library tickets."

  "Anything strange happen recently?"

  The woman did not answer. Niémans pressed the point: "Your husband wasn't particularly nervy or tense?"

  "No."

  "Tell me about his father's death."

  Sophie Caillois raised her eyes. Her pupils were dull, but her eyelashes and eyebrows were magnificent. She gave a slight shrug of the shoulders. "He died in an avalanche in 1993. We weren't married at the time. I don't know anything much about all that. What are you trying to get at?"

  The police officer remained silent and looked round the little room, with its immaculately arranged furniture. He knew this sort of place off by heart. He realised that he was not alone with Sophie Caillois. Memories of the dead man lingered there, as though his soul were packing its bags somewhere, in the next room. The superintendent pointed at the pictures on the walls.

  "Your husband didn't keep any books here?"

  "Why would he have done that? He worked all day in the library."

  "Is that where he worked on his thesis?"

  The woman nodded curtly. Niémans could not take his eyes off that beautiful, hard face. He was surprised at meeting two such attractive women in less than one hour.

  "What was his thesis about?"

  "The Olympic games."

  "Hardly an intellectual subject."

  An expression of scorn crossed Sophie Caillois's face.

  "His thesis was about the relationship between the sporting event and the sacred. Between the body and the mind. He was studying the myth of the athlon; the first man who made the earth fertile by his own strength, by transcending the limits of his own body."

  "I'm sorry," Niémans huffed. "I don't know much about philosophy…Does that have something to do with the photographs in the corridor?"

  "Yes and no. They're stills taken from a film by Leni Riefenstahl about the 1936 Berlin Olympic games."

  "They're striking images."

  "Rémy said that those Games had revived the profound nature of the Games of Olympus, which were based on the marriage of mind and body, of physical effort and philosophical expression."

  "And in this case, of Nazi ideology, isn't that so?"

  "The nature of the thought being expressed didn't matter to my husband. All he was interested in was that fusion of an idea and a force, of thought and action."

  This sort of clap-trap meant nothing to Niémans. The woman leant forward then suddenly spat out:

  "Why did they send you here? Why someone like you?"

  He ignored the aggressive tone. When questioning, he always used the same cold, inhuman approach, based on intimidation. It is pointless for a policeman – and particularly for a policeman with his mug – to play at being understanding or at amateur psychology. In a commanding voice, he asked:

  "In your opinion, was there any reason for anyone to have it in for your husband?"

  "Are you crazy, or what?" she yelled. "Haven't you seen the body? Don't you realise that it was a maniac who killed my husband? That Rémy was picked up by a nut? A headcase who laid into him, beat him, mutilated him, tortured him to death?"

  The policeman took a deep breath. He was thinking of that quiet, unworldly librarian, and his aggressive wife. A chilling couple. He asked:

  "How was your home life?"

  "Mind your own, fucking business."

  "Answer the question, please."

  "Am I a suspect?"

  "You know damn well you're not. So just answer my question." The young woman looked daggers at him.

  "You want to know how many times a week we fucked?" Goose-pimples rose over the nape of Niéman's neck.

  "Would you co-operate, Madame? I'm only doing my job."

  "Get lost, you fucking pig."

  Her teeth were far from white, but the contours of her lips were ravishingly moving. Niémans stared at that mouth, her pointed cheek bones, her eyebrows, which shed rays across the pallor of her face. What did the tint of her skin, of her eyes matter? All those illusive plays of light and tone? Beauty lay in the lines. The shape. An incorruptible purity. The policeman stayed put.

  "Fuck off!" the woman screamed.

  "One last question. Rémy had always lived at the university. When did he do his military service?"

  Sophie Caillois froze, taken aback by this unexpected question. She wrapped her arms around her chest, as though suddenly chilled from the inside.

  "He didn't."

  "He was declared unfit?"

  The woman's eyes fixed themselves once more on the superintendent.

  "What are you after?"

  "For what reasons?"

  "Psychiatric, I think."

  "He had mental problems?"

  "Are you off the last banana boat, or what? Everybody gets dismissed for psychiatric reasons. It doesn't mean a thing. You play up, come out with' a load of gibberish, then get dismissed."

  Niémans did not utter a word, but his entire bearing must have expressed deep disapproval. The woman suddenly took in his crew cut, his rigid elegance and his lips arching in a grimace of disgust.

  "Jesus Christ, just drop it!"

  He got up and murmured:

  "So, I'll be going then. But I'd just like you to remember one thing."

  "What's that?" she spat.

  "Whether you like it or not, it's people like me who catch murderers. It's people like me who will avenge your husband." The woman's features turned to stone for a couple of seconds, then her chin trembled. She collapsed in tears. Niémans turned on his heel. "I'll get him," he said.

  In the doorway, he punched the wall and called back over his shoulder:

  "By Christ, I swear it. I'll get the little flicker who killed your husband"

  Outside, a silvery flash burst in front of his face. Black spots danced beneath his eyelids. Niémans swayed for a few seconds. Then he forced himself to walk calmly to his car, while the dark halos gradually turned into women's faces. Fanny Ferreira, the brunette. And Sophie Caillois, the blonde. Two strong, intelligent, aggressive women. The sort of women this policeman would probably never hold in his arms.

  He aimed a violent kick at an ancient metal bin, riveted to a pylon, then instinctively looked at his pager.

  The screen was flashing. The foren
sic pathologist had just finished the autopsy.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 7

  At dawn that same day, at a distance of two hundred and thirty miles due west, Police Lieutenant Karim Abdouf had just finished reading a criminology thesis about the use of genetic sampling in cases of rape and murder. The six-hundred-page door-stopper had kept him up practically all night. He now looked at the figures on his quartz alarm clock as it rang: 07.00.

  Karim sighed, flung the thesis across the floor, then went into the kitchen to make some black tea. He returned to his living-room – which was also his dining-room and bedroom – and stared out at the shadows through the bay window. Forehead pressed against the pane, he evaluated his chances of being able to conduct a genetic enquiry in the one-horse town to which he had been transferred. They were zero.

  The young second-generation Arab looked at the street-lights, which were still nailing down the dark wings of the night. Bitterness knotted his throat. Even when up to his ears in crime, he had always managed to avoid prison. And now, here he was, twenty-nine years old, a cop, and banged up in the lousiest prison of them all: a small provincial town, as boring as shit, in the midst of a rocky plain. A prison with neither walls nor bars. A psychological prison which was gnawing away at his soul.

  Karim started daydreaming. He saw himself nicking serial killers, thanks to analyses of DNA and specialised software, just like in American movies. He imagined himself leading a team of scientists who were studying the genetic map of the criminal type. After much research and statistical analysis, the specialists isolated a sort of rupture, a flaw somewhere in the spiral of chromosomes, and identified this split as the key to the criminal mentality. Some time ago, there had already been mention of a double Y chromosome which was supposed to be characteristic of murderers. But this had turned out to be a false lead. Nevertheless, in Karim's daydream, another "spelling mistake" was located in the set of letters which made up the genetic code. And this discovery had been made thanks to Karim and his relentless arrests. A shudder suddenly ran through him. He knew that if such a "flaw" existed, then it was also coursing round his veins.

  The word "orphan" had never meant much to Karim. You could miss only what you had experienced and he had never had anything which could even remotely be described as a family. His earliest memories were of a patch of lino and a black-and-white TV in the Rue Maurice-Thorez children's home in Nanterre. Karim had grown up in the midst of a colorless, graceless neighborhood. Detached houses rubbed shoulders with the tower blocks, patches of wasteland gradually turned into housing estates. And he could still remember those games of hide-and-seek with the building sites that were little by little gobbling up the wild nature of his childhood.

  Karim was a lost child. Or a foundling. It all depended on which way round you looked at it. Whichever, he had never known his parents and nothing in the education that he subsequently received had served to remind him of his origins. He could not speak Arabic very well and had only the vaguest knowledge of Islam. The adolescent had rapidly rejected his guardians – the careers in the home, whose simplicity and general niceness made him want to puke – and had given himself over to the streets.

  He had then discovered Nanterre, a limitless territory crisscrossed by broad avenues, dotted with massive housing estates, factories and local government offices, and populated by a sheepish crowd dressed in rumpled old clothes and who expected no tomorrows. But degradation shocks only the rich. Karim did not even notice the poverty that characterised the town from the tiniest brick to people's deeply wrinkled faces.

  His adolescent memories were happy ones. The time of punk rock, of "No Future". Thirteen years old. His first pals. And first dates. Oddly enough, in the loneliness and torments of adolescence, Karim stumbled across a reason to love and to share. After his orphaned childhood, his difficult teenage years gave him a second chance to find himself, open up to others and to the outside world. Even today, Karim could still remember those times with a total clarity. The long hours spent in bars, pushing and shoving over a pinball machine, laughing with his buddies. The endless daydreams, throat in a knot, thinking about a girl he had spotted on the steps at school.

  But the suburbs were hiding their true nature. Abdouf had always known that Nanterre was a sad dead-end place. He now discovered that the streets were violent, even lethal.

  One Friday evening, a gang burst into the café of the swimming pool, which was open late. Without a word, they kicked the manager's face in, then bottled him. An old story of refused entry, or a beer not paid for, no one knew any more. And no one had lifted a finger. But the stifled cries of the man beneath the counter became resonant echoes in Karim's nerves. That night, things were explained to him. Names, places, rumors. He got a glimpse of another world, the existence of which he had not even suspected. A world peopled by ultra-violent beings, inaccessible estates, bloodstained cellars. On another occasion, just before a concert on Rue de l'Ancienne Mairie, a fight had turned into a slaughter. The tribes were out once again. Karim had seen kids rolling on the asphalt, their faces split open, and girls hiding under cars, their hair sticky with blood.

  As he got older, he no longer recognised his town. A tidal wave was swamping it. Everyone spoke in admiration of Victor, a boy from the Cameroons who jacked up on the roofs of the estate. Of Marcel, a nasty piece of work, with a pock-marked face and a blue beauty spot tattooed on his forehead, like an Indian, who had been put away several times for beating up cops. Of Jamel and Said who had held up the Caisse d'Epargne. On his way out of school, Karim would sometimes notice these youths. He was struck by their haughty nobility. They were not vulgar, uneducated or coarse. No, they were aristocratic, elegant, with ardent eyes and studied gestures.

  He chose his camp. He started out by stealing car radios, then cars and so became truly financially independent. He hung out with the drugged-out Black, his "brothers" the bank robbers, and especially Marcel, a footloose, scary and brutal person, who ran wild from dawn to dusk, but who could also distance himself from the suburbs in a way which fascinated Karim. Marcel, a peroxide skinhead, wore fur-lined jackets and listened to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. He lived in squats and read Blaise Cendrars. He called Nanterre "the octopus" and, as Karim knew, invented for himself a whole set of excuses and explanations for his future, inevitable fall. Strangely enough, this suburban being revealed to Karim the existence of another life, one beyond the suburbs.

  The orphan swore that, one day, he would make it his.

  While continuing his thieving, he studied hard at school, which surprised everybody. He took Thai boxing lessons – to protect himself from others and from himself, for he was occasionally gripped by uncontrollable fits of violent rage. His destiny had now become a tightrope, along which he walked without losing his balance. Around him, the dark swamps of delinquency and debauchery were swallowing everything up. Karim was seventeen. He was alone again. Silence surrounded him when he walked across the hall of the adolescents' home, or when he had a coffee in the school café, sitting next to the pinball machines. No one dared wind him up. By that stage, he had already been selected for the regional Thai boxing championships. Everyone knew that Karim Abdouf could break your nose with a flick of his foot and with his hands still flat on the zinc counter. Other stories also went round, about hold-ups, drug deals, epic fights…

  Most of these rumors were unfounded, but they meant that Karim was pretty much left alone. He passed his exams with flying colors. He was even congratulated by the headmaster and suddenly realised that this authoritarian man was also frightened of him. The kid enrolled in Nanterre University to study law. At that time, he was stealing two cars a month. Since he knew several fences, he constantly swapped them around. He was certainly the only second-generation Arab on the estate who had never been arrested, or even bothered by the police. And he still had not used drugs, of any sort.

  At twenty-one, Karim passed his law degree. What now? Lawyers would not take on a six-feet-s
ix tall Arab, as slim as a rake, with a goatee, dreadlocks and his ears full of rings, even as a messenger boy. One way or the other, Karim was going to end up on Welfare and find himself right back at square one. Never. So carry on stealing cars? More than anything else, Karim loved those secret hours of the night, the silence of parking lots, the waves of adrenaline that ran through him as he foiled the security systems in BMWs. He realised that he was never going to be able to give up that inscrutable, heightened existence, a tissue of risk and mystery. He also realised that, sooner or later, his luck was going to run out.

  It was then that he had a revelation: he would become a cop. He would then live in that same arcane universe, but sheltered from the laws he despised, and hidden from the country he wanted to spit on. One thing he had never forgotten from his childhood was this: he had no origins, no homeland, no family. He was a law unto himself, and his country was limited to his own breathing space.

  After national service, he enrolled as a boarder in the Cannes-Ecluse police academy, near Montereau. It was the first time he had left Nanterre, his manor. His grades were excellent from the start. Karim's intellectual capacities were well above average and, above all, he knew more about delinquent behavior, gangland law and the suburban life than anybody else. He also turned into a brilliant marksman and his knowledge of unarmed combat deepened. He became a master of to – a quintessential form of close combat, bringing together the most dangerous elements of the various martial arts and sports. The other apprentice cops took an instinctive dislike to him. He was an Arab. He was proud. He knew how to fight, and he spoke better French than most of his classmates, who were generally waifs and strays who had joined the police to stay off Welfare.

  One year later, Karim completed his course by holding down a series of posts as a trainee in various Parisian police stations. Still the same no-man's-land, still the same poverty. But this time in Paris. The young trainee moved into a little bed-sitter in the Abbesses quarter. A little perplexed, he realised that he had made it.