The First Fingerprint (2 page)

Christine had always had a problem meeting Sylvie's classiness eye to eye. She shuddered when her hand brushed against her enemy's hand, or when she was taken in by her delicate voice and felt a luxurious sweetness dissolve into her stomach, like the essence of a rare opiate; her scalp tingled, she crossed her legs quickly, in a game of attraction and repulsion around this sensual beauty that dominated her.

So Christine Autran had been late and had had to speed along the northern motorway so as to reach Marseille before the evening rush hour.

In the stairwell of her building, she made as little noise as possible, so as not to let the old lady on the first floor know that her second-floor tenant had come home at the usual time. This old woman owned the building and was forever on the lookout, like an eel in its lair, watching the comings and goings of her tenants through her spyhole. On her way out Christine took the precaution of going downstairs in her stockinged feet. She had then leaped on to the first tram and traveled as far as Vieux-Port métro station. One anonymous person among all the other anonymous people on the move at the close of the afternoon.

In the town center, beside the Bourse shopping mall, she took the number 21 bus and nobody had so much as glanced at her. Not even the driver, a fat, bald lump with an enormous mustache who, at each stop, started clicking his gold signet ring against the black plastic steering wheel in time to a Johnny Hallyday song, which played on a loop throughout the entire journey. At the back of the bus, some architecture students on their way back to their halls of residence in Luminy were chatting noisily about their final degree projects without
paying any attention to this eccentric woman in a dusty, sweat-stained rain-hat.

And taking an excursion to the creeks at the end of November at 5:00 in the afternoon was indeed eccentric.

She had gone back thus far over her day, when the east wind got up. From where she stood, she could just make out the presence of the islands of Riou, Plane and Jarre; to her right, but out of sight, lay Maire island and, in front of Marseille, Frioul archipelago; to her left were the wildlife sanctuaries of Port Crau and Porquerolles. She pictured this fantastic landscape during the Magdalenian era, 20,000
B.C.E
., when the sea level was twenty meters lower and a vast valley ran down to these islands.

She often told her students that the coastline at the time looked rather like Norway's does now. A fossil beach had been discovered there, at a depth of forty meters, with shellfish otherwise found only in northern Scandinavia. The universe of the Provençal Cro-Magnons was a steppe covered with vegetation and colonized by angel's hair, grasses and juniper bushes. A few Austrian pines, Scots pines and alders scraped an existence in the shelter of the limestone rock-faces, beside streams and little lakes where men and beasts came to drink. The sea temperature barely exceeded six or seven degrees. Pack ice probably covered a large part of the
mare nostrum
.

For thousands of years, the first men had lived there, hunting, fishing and gathering as described in children's books. It was a primitive life spent tracking bison, aurochs, Irish elk and Mediterranean monk seals. Everything they needed was there, at arm's reach: the sea, big and small game, as well as dozens of caves for shelter when night fell.

Christine liked to imagine Cro-Magnons in the evening, dressed in their clumsily stitched furs, with their long, filthy hair, going back to the dark caves which the sea had now submerged. Sheltered by the depths of the earth, around a fire which had been cunningly kept burning for days on end, they would grant themselves a moment's rest, away from the women who had gathered life's essentials during the day: fruit, roots and fungi. The men would think about the next day's hunt, one of them sharpening flints in staccato blows, turning the hard stone into pedunculate tips, scrapers, saw-edges and
rudimentary knives—the equipment of the great hunters and fishers of the Paleolithic era.

Like Professor Autran that evening, the first men must have looked up at the self-same monochromatic, pale light coming down from the sky. They must have questioned the moon, invented answers to the grand mysteries of existence and peered into the future. Beliefs were born in the world of spirits, which had then been painted, sculpted or engraved in the gloomy living spaces of their prehistoric caves. An art of shadows and rock was born: the first men had wanted it to be different from their crude daily existences and had conceived the fantastic bestiary of their wall paintings.

For a long time it had been known that Provençal prehistory had sunk beneath the waters. This hypothesis had been verified by a large number of finds, such as the underwater caves of Le Figuier and La Triperie near Morgiou creek. Then, in 1991, a diver from Marseille discovered a decorated cave, like a Provençal Lascaux sleeping beneath a roof of stone. Its entry lay at a depth of thirty-seven meters, at the foot of the colossal slopes of Sugiton creek. It had a narrow entrance that led to a tunnel measuring a hundred and fifty meters, at the end of which lay the now famous frescoes of silence: negative and positive hands, horses, bison, penguins … The cave had been named after its discoverer, Charles Le Guen, and its entrance had been sealed by a heavy iron gate and blocks of stone. Beside the opening, there was a notice which looked strange at such a depth:

A whistling noise woke Christine Autran from her meditations. She stood up, ran her fingers through her hair and looked at her watch: 9:00 p.m. She set off once more, going from rock to rock, silently reproaching herself for giving in to such reflections. It was something she rarely did, and never in these circumstances. She had no time to lose.

She reached the last rock, and from there she could just make out the tiny beach of smooth pebbles she was looking for. She leaped from her perch and at once found herself surrounded by the massive
limestone rocks she had just crossed, with the threatening sea to her right and in front of her the huge cliff-face that rose up toward the infinity of the sky. Only a skilled climber could have gone any further than the mousetrap in which Professor Autran now stood.

She could scarcely see. The moonlight was feeble in this little creek. She advanced a few more paces, as far as the cliff, her feet sinking slightly into the damp stones. Blindly, she felt around for a dry place on which to put her bag.

The noise of the sea was ever more present, like the breathing of a savage beast on the move only a few meters from her. Further out, Christine could see the lights of a cargo ship which must have left Marseille at nightfall and was now going full steam ahead for Corsica or North Africa.

Without wasting any more time, she removed her torch and a notebook from the right-hand pocket of her bag. She laid them beside her, then plunged her hand into the main section of the rucksack to take out a small, folding spade. She picked up the torch and aimed its beam at the foot of the cliff, where the limestone met the pebble beach. She examined the rock inch by inch, then stopped when she located a barely perceptible bulge. The whistling noise could be heard once more. Christine shivered. It came from somewhere close by. Just a few meters away. Her whole body trembled. She played her torch across the rocks.

Nothing.

She tried to reassure herself by telling herself that her imagination must be working even faster than her concentrated senses. It was an illusion.

Several times, she swallowed back the saliva which was sticking in her throat, then she let the adrenaline dissolve into the most distant extremities of her body and started to dig. Methodically.

Her spade made a sharp, rhythmic sound. She scarcely heard the heavy footsteps on the gravel just behind her.

“Già nella notte densa

s'estingue ogni clamor…”

Commandant Michel de Palma was humming out of sheer boredom: Verdi's “Otello”—
mezza voce
—the Moor's shades mingled with the discreet symphony of police headquarters.

“Gia il mio cor fremebondo

s'ammansa in quest'amplesso e si rinsensa.”

De Palma was sitting at his desk, on the second floor, to the left out of the lift, last door on the right, beyond the photocopier and the coffee machine. The murder squad.

“Tuoni la Guerra e s'inabissi il mondo

se dopo l'ira immensa

vien quest'immenso amor!”

Slumped in his chair, his muscular legs stretched full length beneath his desk, he was killing his last hour on station duty by flicking again and again through his bumper school exercise book, in which he noted down everything, from the smallest to the most significant details of the investigations he was conducting.

One exercise book a year. An old-school policeman's habit which he had inherited from a grumpy old commissaire when he had started out on the force.

“Mio superbo guerrier! Quanti tormenti
,

quanti mesti sospiri et quanta speme

ci condusse ai soavi abbracciamenti!

Oh! Come è dolce il mormorare insieme: te ne rammenti?”

Before the end of November, the book had been filled by a case which had been obsessing him for months. A murder: Samir, aged seven, raped, then his throat slit with an industrial cutter. In cold blood. And no-one had heard a thing, of course. He had been found at the end of August, in the rubbish chute of a ten-story block of flats in the La Castellane housing estate, far off in the northern suburbs of Marseille.

De Palma had stood for a long time in silence in front of that child's body, wound in a bin-liner, its eyes half-closed, its throat agape. He had taken little Samir's cold hand, leaned over his puffy face, holding his breath to stop himself from vomiting, and had spoken to him tenderly, the way you speak to a child who cannot go to sleep in the dark: “I'll get whoever did it. Trust me, kid. I always get them. I'm the best. I'll make him eat his fucking mother.”

Duriez, director of the regional police department, had told Commissaire Paulin, the head of the murder squad, to put de Palma on to the case because he was an ace. Since which time the affair had grown in importance: young Arabs were crying out for justice, the Maire wanted the police to be irreproachable, and Duriez had put him under immense pressure by declaring to the press, with his hand on his heart: “I have no doubt that this case will be solved in the very near future.”

De Palma ran through the details of the Samir case for the umpteenth time. Occasionally he frowned as he examined a telephone number jotted in the margin, or a name followed by a question mark. His intense dark stare, as sharp as a facetted sapphire, darted out from his angular face, then faded again in an instant before returning to its journey through the tiny handwriting which went off in all directions, like rapacious weeds, across this great hunter's pages of memories.

“Quando narravi l'esule tua vita

e i fieri eventi e i lunghi tuoi dolor
,

ed. io t'udia coll'anima rapita

in quei spaventi e coll'estasi nel cor.”

De Palma would soon celebrate twenty-five years on the force. Five had been spent at 36 quai des Orfèvres, the holy of holies of the national police; the next twenty at the regional police department in Marseille. That made twenty-five exercise books. His retirement day was approaching slowly but surely, and with it the great emptiness of his future life.

He would not be celebrating that.

He looked up from his exercise book and peered around. The desk opposite was immaculately spick and span. Its occupant for the past six months was Lieutenant Maxime Vidal, a tall, dark lad who was as dry and thin as a capital I, and who smiled innocently in all circumstances. He had left the office at about 6:00 p.m. just like any other young officer who still had some kind of life outside of his job.

De Palma's gaze strayed over the white walls, lingered for a moment on the empty chair in front of him, then went back up to the gray metal ring hanging from the wall. He tried to remember various faces, but none came to him.

“Venga la morte! E mi colga nell'estasi

di quest'amplesso

il momento supremo!”

The décor was no longer quite what it had been since the false ceiling collapsed on to the heads of the officers in the Murder and Organized Crime Squads. It smelled of wet paint, enamel, fresh plaster and wallpaper paste. A heavy, heady, glycerophtalic smell still hung in the air.

De Palma sat up on his chair, stretching his arms to waken the network of muscles that covered his solid bones, then he cracked his resin-brown fingers. The night before, he had had bad dreams. A quarter of a century in the force had no doubt driven him somewhat
crazy, maybe semi-paranoid, and definitely insomniac. But he had gone to bed early, with the firm intention of snoring like a sawed log so as to recover from all those long nights spent looking at night-birds dressed up to the nines in the flashy bars on Carré Thairs.

Around 2:00 in the morning, fatal crime scenes burst into his mind without any warning. Always the same images of lacerated bodies, faces with eyes rolled upward, guts torn open, corpses blue under the striplights in the morgue. Women and men of all sizes, all colors, going in and out of the morgue's drawers, mechanically, like the staging of some modern play.

And then children. Many too many children. Like night-watchmen, the lifeless faces of the little dead invaded his sleep and kicked him awake pitilessly, asking again and again for impossible justice. The image of his brother, a close-up of his fine, soft eyes, had finally replaced all the others.

He had spent a couple of hours on the balcony, staring into the night, listening to the murmurs of his sleepy neighborhood. His wife, Marie, had hated this quartier more than anything. It was the ugliest part of the eastern sprawl of Marseille, and one of the poorest too, despite its lovely name which filled your mouth like a zest: La Capelette. He had always lived there.