The Empire Of The Wolves Read online

  He looked at the first one and asked: "What is it?"

  "A face."

  He turned to the next pictures.

  Paul added, "The nose was sliced off with a box cutter. Or a razor. The lacerations and tears on the cheeks were made using the same instrument. The lips were cut off with scissors."

  Without a word, Schiffer turned back to the first photo.

  "Before that," Paul went on, "there was a beating. According to the forensic scientist, the mutilations were done postmortem."

  "Who was she?"

  "We don't know. Her fingerprints aren't on record."

  "How old was she?"

  "About twenty-five."

  "What was the actual cause of death?"

  "You've got a choice. Blows. Wounds. Burns. The rest of the body's in the same state as the face. Apparently she underwent more than twenty-four hours of torture. I'm expecting more details. The autopsy's being carried out now."

  The old man raised his eyes. "Why are you showing me this?"

  "The body was found at dawn yesterday, by Saint-Lazare Hospital.”

  “So what?"

  "So, that was your territory. You spent over twenty years in the sector."

  "But that doesn't make me an expert on faces."

  "I think the victim is a Turkish working girl."

  "Why Turkish?"

  "First because of the area. Then there are her teeth. They have traces of gold fillings that are now used only in the Near East." He then added: "Do you want the names of the alloys?"

  Schiffer moved his plate back in front of him and started eating again. "Why an immigrant worker?" he asked after a long chew.

  "Because of her fingers," Paul replied. "The tips are crisscrossed with scars typical of certain types of sewing work. I've checked."

  "Does her description match anyone reported missing?"

  The old man was pretending not to understand.

  "No reported disappearance," Paul muttered patiently "No one came asking after her. She's an illegal alien. Schiffer. Someone with no official status in France. A woman no one will come to the police about. The ideal victim."

  The Cipher slowly and calmly finished his steak. Then he dropped his knife and fork to pick up the photos again. This time, he put on his glasses. He observed each image for a few seconds, attentively examining the wounds.

  Paul could not help looking down at the pictures. He saw, upside-down, the dark sliced opening of the nose, the lacerations in the face, a purple, horrific harelip.

  Schiffer laid down the packet and grabbed a yogurt. He carefully raised the top before plunging in his spoon.

  Paul sensed that his reserves of calm were quickly running out.

  "I've been doing the rounds," he went on. "The sweatshops, the homes, the bars. Nothing doing. No one's gone missing. Which is normal, because no one really exists. They're illegal aliens. How can you identify a victim in an invisible community?"

  Schiffer silently scooped up his yogurt.

  Paul pressed on. "None of the Turks have seen anything. Or else they won't tell me. In fact, no one's been able to tell me anything. Because none of them speaks French."

  The Cipher continued toying with his spoon. Finally, he deigned to add, "And so, someone mentioned me…"

  "Everyone mentioned you. Beauvanier, Monestier, the inspectors, the boys on the beat. If they're to be believed, you're the only person who can make this damned case advance."

  Silence again. Schiffer wiped his lips with a napkin, then grabbed his little plastic pot. "That's all a long time ago. I'm retired, and I've got other things on my mind." He pointed to the betting slips. “I now devote myself to my new responsibilities."

  Paul grabbed the edge of the table and leaned over it. "Listen, Schiffer. He smashed her feet to pulp. The X-rays show over seventy shards of bone sticking in her flesh. He sliced off her breasts so that you can now count her ribs through her skin. He rammed a bar covered with razor blades into her vagina.-He banged the table. "He's got to be stopped!"

  The old cop raised an eyebrow. " 'Got to be stopped'?"

  Paul wiggled on his seat, then clumsily removed the file that was rolled up inside pocked of his parka. Reluctantly, he added, "We've got three of them."

  "Three?"

  "The first one was found last November. Then a second in January. And now this one. Every time, in the Turkish quarter. And always tortured and disfigured in the same way"

  Schiffer stared at him in silence, spoon in midair.

  Paul started yelling, drowning out the cries from the racecourse. "Jesus Christ, Schiffer, don't you understand? There's a serial killer in the Turkish quarter. Someone who attacks only asylum seekers. Women who don't exist, in an area that isn't part of France anymore!"

  At last, Jean-Louis Schiffer put down his yogurt and took the file from Paul's hands. "You should have come to see me before."

  9

  Outside, the sun had come out. Silvery puddles enlivened the large gravel courtyard. Paul was pacing up and down in front of the main entrance, waiting for Jean-Louis Schiffer to finish packing.

  There was no other solution. He had realized that right from the start. The Cipher could not help from a distance. He could not advise him from his retirement home, nor help him out over the phone when Paul had run out of ideas. No. It was necessary for the former officer to question the Turks alongside him and exploit his contacts by returning to the neighborhood he knew better than anyone else.

  Paul shivered at the possible consequences of what he was doing. No one had been informed, neither the magistrate nor his superiors. And it wasn't good practice just to let loose such a bastard, known for his violent, unrestrained methods. He was going to have to keep him on a very short leash.

  He kicked a pebble into a puddle, thus disturbing his own reflection. He was still trying to convince himself that he had had the right idea. How had he come to this? Why was he so obsessed by this case? Why, since the first murder, had it seemed that his entire existence depended on the outcome?

  He thought for a moment while staring at his troubled image. Then had to admit to himself that this rage had just one sole source. Everything had started with Reyna.

  MARCH 25, 1994

  Paul had started out in narcotics. He was getting good results in the field. Leading an ordered existence, studying for the examination to become commissioner and was even noticing that the lacerated leatherette seating was sinking into the depths of his consciousness. His cop casing was acting as a solid defense against his old panic attacks.

  That evening, he was transferring a North African dealer, whom he had questioned for over six hours in his office in Nanterre, to the Paris Prefecture. A routine procedure. But when he arrived at headquarters. He discovered total chaos. Police vans were arriving in droves, containing hordes of screaming and gesticulating youths. Riot police were running around in all directions along the riverbank, while sirens constantly blared as ambulances surged into the courtyard of Hotel-Dieu.

  Paul asked around. A demonstration against a job reinstatement plan-a proposed minimum wage for young people-had degenerated. On Place de la Nation, there were apparently over a hundred police officers wounded, plus several dozen demonstrators and millions of francs' worth of damage to property.

  Paul grabbed his suspect and legged it down to the basement. If he could not find any room downstairs, then he could always go to the Prison de la Santé, or even farther afield, with his prisoner handcuffed to his wrist.

  The detention center greeted him with its usual din, but this time multiplied a thousand fold. There were insults, screams, spitting. Demonstrators were hanging off the bars, yelling out curses, to which the police replied with their truncheons. He managed to off-load his dealer and headed off at once, fleeing the racket and spittle.

  He was about to leave when he spotted her.

  She was sitting on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, apparently disdainful of the surrounding chaos. He went over to h
er. She had prickly black hair, an androgynous form, a sort of Joy Division look straight from the 1980s. She even had a blue-checked head scarf, like the ones only Yasser Arafat still dares to wear.

  Beneath her punkish hair, her face was of a startling regularity: as even as an Egyptian figurine cut in white marble. Paul thought of the sculptures he had seen in a magazine. Naturally polished shapes, both heavy and soft, ready to slip into the palm of your hand or stand up on a finger in perfect balance. Magical stones, signed by an artist called Brancusi.

  He talked with the jailers, checked that the girl's name had not yet been put in the daybook, then took her to the narcotics squad offices on the third floor. While climbing the stairs, he mentally went through his good and bad points.

  In terms of strengths. He was a reasonably good-looking. That was at least what he heard from the prostitutes who whistled at him and called to him when he went through the red-light districts looking for dealers. He had the smooth black hair of an Indian. His features were regular, his eyes brown. A dry yet vibrant figure, not very tall, but posed on thick-soled Paraboots. As he looked so cute, he had adopted a harsh stare, which he worked on in front of his mirror, and a three-day growth that concealed his boyish looks.

  In terms of weaknesses, there was just one. A huge one. He was a cop.

  When he checked the girl's records, he realized that this obstacle was likely to be a major one. Reyna Brendosa, age twenty-four, living at 32 Rue Gabriel-Péri in Sarcelles, was an active member of the extreme wing of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire. She had links with the Tutte Bianche, or "White Overalls," an Italian antiglobalization group that practiced civil disobedience. She had been arrested several times for vandalism, disturbing the peace and assault and battery. A real hell-raiser.

  Paul turned from his computer and looked once more at the vision staring back at him from the other side of his desk. Just her dark irises, emphasized by eyeliner, knocked him out more thoroughly than the two Zairian dealers who had given him a beating at Chateau Rouge, on one evening of inattention.

  He toyed with her identity card, as all cops do, and asked her: "So you like smashing things, do you?"

  No answer.

  "Isn't there a better way to demonstrate your ideas?"

  No answer.

  "You get off on violence, do you?"

  No answer. Then, suddenly, a slow deep voice: "Private property is the only real violence. The robbing of the masses. The alienation of minds. And worst of all, written down and authorized by law."

  "Those ideas are a bit past it. Hasn't anyone told you?"

  "Nothing and nobody will prevent the fall of capitalism."

  "In the meantime, you're in for three months behind bars."

  Reyna Brendosa smiled. "You're playing at soldiers, but you're only a pawn. If I blow, you'll vanish."

  Paul smiled back. Never had he felt such a mixture of irritation and fascination for a woman; such a violent desire, mingled with fear.

  After their first night, he asked to see her again. She called him a "fucking pig." A month later, she was sleeping at his place every night, so he asked her to move in with him. She told him to go fuck himself Even later, he mentioned marriage. She burst out laughing.

  They got married in Portugal, near Porto, in her native village. First at the Communist town hall, then in a little church. A syncretism of socialism and sun. It was one of Paul's best memories.

  The following months were the happiest in his life. He was constantly amazed. Reyna seemed ethereal, immaterial, then a moment later a gesture or expression gave her an unbelievable presence and an almost animalistic sensuality. She could spend hours talking about her political ideas, her utopian dreams, quoting philosophers he had never heard of. Then, with just one kiss, she could remind him that she was a full-blooded, organic, vibrant being.

  Her breath smelled of blood-she kept biting her lips. Wherever she went, she seemed to capture the spirit of the world, to move with nature's fundamental mechanics. She had a sort of internal perception of the universe: something hidden, an underground stream that linked her to the vibrations of the earth and the instincts of the living.

  He loved her slowness, which gave her the gravity of a death knell. He loved her suffering when faced with injustice, misery, the desperation of humanity. He loved the martyr's life she had chosen and that raised their daily existence to the level of a tragedy. Living with his wife was like asceticism before an oracle. A transcendently religious path of discipline.

  Reyna, and a life of fasting… This feeling was a hint of the future. At the end of the summer of 1994, she told him she was pregnant. He felt betrayed. His dream had vanished. His ideal had now slumped down into the banality of bodies and family life. Deep down, he sensed that he was going to lose her. At first physically, then emotionally. Reyna's vocation was obviously going to change. Utopia for her was going to reincarnate itself in her internal transformation…

  And that was exactly what happened. From one day to the next, she turned over in bed and refused his touch. She reacted only vaguely to his presence. She became a kind of Forbidden City, closed around her one idol-her child. Paul might have been able to follow this shift, but he then sensed a deeper lie that he had been blind to before.

  After the birth, in April 1995, their relationship froze forever. They both stood there on either side of their daughter like strangers. Despite the presence of their newborn baby, the morbid atmosphere of a funeral parlor hung around them. Paul realized that he had now become totally repulsive to Reyna.

  One night, he could no longer stop himself from asking. You don't want me anymore?"

  "No."

  "You never will again?"

  "No."

  He hesitated, then asked the fatal question: "And you never have?”

  “No, never."

  His policeman's flair had deserted him on that score… Their meeting, life together. Marriage had been a pure fraud, an illusion.

  A setup with the sole aim of having a child.

  The divorce took only a few months. In front of the judge, Paul felt as if he was hovering. He heard a raucous voice being raised in the office, and it was his. He felt sandpaper biting into his face, and it was his own beard. He was gliding through the room like a ghost, a phantom in a comedy. He said yes to everything, to the alimony and custody: he did not put up the slightest fight. He did not give a damn, and instead dwelled on how much he had been taken in. He had been the victim of a rare form of collectivization: Reyna the Marxist had taken over his sperm. She had practiced a Communist-inspired in vitro fertilization.

  The funniest thing of all was that he could not bring himself to hate her. On the contrary, he admired her as an intellectual, free from desire. He was sure that she would never again have a sexual relationship. Neither with a man nor with a woman. And the idea of this idealist who wanted quite simply to give life, without the slightest physical pleasure or desire, left him drained, without any idea about what she was doing.

  It was then that he started to drift, like wastewater looking for its sea of sludge. At work, he began to wander. He never showed up at his office in Nanterre. He spent all his time in the roughest neighborhoods, hanging around with the lowest of the low, smoking endless joints with pushers and druggies, sinking into the dregs of humanity.

  Then, in the spring of 1998, he agreed to see her.

  She was called Céline and she was three. The first weekends were terrible: parks, rides, cotton candy, terminal boredom. Then, bit by bit, he discovered an unsuspected presence. Something transparent in the child's movements, face, expressions, with their supple bounding whimsical shifts, whose turns and turns-about he observed.

  A tightly clenched fist to emphasize what was obvious, the way she leaned forward then rounded off the movement with an impudent grin, her husky voice with its own special charm that made him tingle as though touched by some material or bark. A woman was already lurking there within the child. It was not her mother-abso
lutely not-but another unique, sparkling being.

  There was something new under the sun: Celine was there.

  Paul changed completely, and now started to relish the time they spent together. Those days spent with his daughter brought him back to life. He struggled to regain his self-respect. He dreamed of himself as a hero, an untouchable supercop, washed clean of any stain.

  A man whose gaze would make his morning mirror glisten.

  For this recovery, he chose the sole territory that he knew: crime. He forgot about taking the exam to become a commissioner and instead applied for a job in Paris 's Brigade Criminelle. Despite his bout of depression, he became captain in 1999. He then turned into a determined, inspired investigator. And started to hope for a case that would take him to the top-the sort of inquiry that all motivated officers long for: the pursuit of a beast, a face-to-face duel with an enemy who was up to his expectations.

  It was then that he heard about the first body.

  A redhead who had been tortured and disfigured then dumped in a doorway off Boulevard de Strasbourg on November 15. 2001. No suspects. No motive, and an almost nonexistent victim… The body did not match any person who had been reported missing. The fingerprints were not on record. The squad had already closed the case. Just another bust-up between some whore and her pimp. The red lights of Rue Saint-Denis were not even two hundred yards away. But Paul instinctively sensed that there was something else. He read the file -the witness who had found the body, the forensic report, photos of the stiff. At Christmas, while his colleagues were with their families, and Céline had gone to see her grandparents in Portugal, he studied the file in detail. He immediately saw that this had been no usual murder. Neither the diversity of the torture methods nor the mutilations to the face fitted with the idea that it had been a pimp. What was more, if the girl had really been in the game, then her fingerprints would have been identified-all the whores of the tenth arrondissement were on record.

  He decided to keep an eye on events in the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis area. He did not have to wait long. On January 10, 2002, a second body was found in the courtyard of a Turkish sweatshop on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. The same type of victim a redhead who had not been reported missing. The same marks of torture. The same lacerations to the face.