The Investigation (6 page)

“That spot?” he asked. “A profile of some kind? No, I can’t make it out … wait a minute…”

Intrigued by the shape, Gregory studied it more and more carefully, his eyes squinting. The more he studied it the more anxious he became. Although he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was looking at, his anxiety began to increase.

“It looks as if it’s alive…” he said involuntarily in a low voice. “Is it a burned-out window in a gutted house?”

Sheppard moved closer to the wall and blocked the area with his body. The irregular spot of light now shined on his chest.

“You can’t figure it out because all you can see is a tiny part of the whole,” he said, “right?”

“So that’s it! You think these disappearing body incidents are only a part—let’s say the beginning—of something bigger.”

“That’s it exactly.”

Sheppard was pacing again. Gregory returned his gaze to the spot on the wall.

“It may even be the beginning of something with criminal and political implications that go beyond the boundaries of this country. What comes next, of course, will depend on what has already taken place, and naturally it could all work out differently. Maybe everything that’s happened so far is only a diversion, or camouflage for some other operation…”

Deeply engrossed in the dark, nerve-wracking shape, Gregory hardly heard him.

“Excuse me, Chief Inspector,” he interrupted. “What is that thing?”

“What? Oh, that.”

Sheppard switched on the ceiling light and the room was filled with brightness. A second or so later he switched it off again, but during the few instants of light Gregory finally managed to catch a glimpse of what he had been staring at so fruitlessly: it was a woman’s head thrown backward at an angle, the whites of her eyes staring straight ahead, her neck scarred by the mark of a noose. There wasn’t enough time for him to see all the details, but even so, with a peculiar kind of delayed action, the expression of horror in the dead face got to him, and he turned to Sheppard, who was still pacing back and forth.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Gregory, blinking his eyes, “but I don’t know if that’s the most important thing about it. Do you really believe that a man alone in a darkened mortuary in the middle of the night would tear apart a cloth curtain with his teeth?”

“Don’t you?” Sheppard interrupted.

“Yes, of course, if he did it because he was nervous or afraid, or if there weren’t any other tools available … but you know as well as I do why he did it. That damned ironclad consistency that we’ve seen throughout this whole series. After all, he did everything to make it look like the bodies had come back to life. He planned everything to achieve that effect, even studied the weather reports. But how could he possibly predict that the police would be ready to believe in miracles? And that’s exactly what makes the whole thing so insane!”

“The kind of criminal you’re talking about doesn’t exist and couldn’t possibly exist,” Sheppard observed indifferently. He pushed the drapes to the side and looked out a dark window.

After a long interval Gregory asked, “Why did you bring up the Lapeyrot case?”

“Because it began childishly, with buttons arranged in patterns. But that isn’t the only reason. Tell me something: exactly what is contrary to human nature?”

“I don’t understand…” Gregory mumbled. He was beginning to get a splitting headache.

“A person manifests his individuality by his actions,” the Chief Inspector explained quietly. “Naturally this holds true for criminal acts also. But the pattern that emerges from our series of incidents is impersonal. Impersonal, like a natural law of some kind. Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so,” said Gregory. His voice was hoarse. He leaned over to one side, very slowly, until he was completely out of the blinding glare of the desk lamp. Thanks to this movement his eyes were soon able to see better in the darkness. There were several other pictures hanging next to the photograph of the woman, all showing the faces of dead people. Meanwhile, Sheppard had resumed his pacing across the room, moving back and forth against a background of nightmarish faces as if he were in the middle of some kind of weird stage setting; no … more as if he were among very ordinary, familiar things. He paused opposite the desk.

“The mathematical perfection of this series suggests that there is no culprit. That may astound you, Gregory, but it’s true…”

“What … what are you…” the lieutenant gasped in a barely audible voice, recoiling involuntarily.

Sheppard stood absolutely still, his face unseen. Suddenly Gregory heard a short, quavering sound. The Chief Inspector was laughing.

“Did I shock you?” the Chief Inspector asked in a more serious tone. “Do you think I’m talking nonsense?

“Who makes day and night?” he continued. There was derision in his voice.

Suddenly Gregory stood up, pushing his chair backward.

“I understand,” he said. “Of course. The series has something to do with the creation of a new myth. An imitation of one of the laws of nature. A synthetic, impersonal, invisible, obviously all-powerful criminal. Oh, it’s perfect! An imitation of infinity…”

Gregory laughed, but not very happily. Then, breathing deeply, he became quiet.

“Why are you laughing?” the Chief Inspector asked gravely, perhaps even a bit sadly. “Isn’t it because you were already thinking along the same lines but rejected the idea? Imitation? Of course. But a perfect imitation, Gregory, so perfect that you’ll come back to me with your hands empty.”

“Maybe,” Gregory said coldly. “And in that case I’ll be replaced by someone else. If necessary I could manage to explain every detail right now. Even the dissecting laboratory. The window can be opened from the outside with the aid of a nylon thread looped around the lock beforehand. I tried it, and it works. But to think that the creator of a new religion of some kind, an imitator of miracles, had to begin this way…”

Gregory shrugged his shoulders.

“No, it can’t be that simple,” the Chief Inspector said. “You keep repeating the word ‘imitation.’ A wax doll is an imitation of a human being, isn’t it? What if someone made a doll that could walk and talk, wouldn’t that be an excellent imitation? And if he made a doll that could bleed? A doll that could experience unhappiness and death, what then?”

“And what does any of this have to … after all, even the most perfect imitation—even the doll you were just talking about—has to have a creator, and the creator can be held responsible!” Gregory shouted, overcome with anger, “He’s only playing with me” suddenly flashed through his mind, and he said, “Chief Inspector, please answer one question for me.”

Sheppard looked at him.

“You don’t really think this case can be solved, do you?”

“Certainly not. I don’t want to hear that kind of talk anymore. Of course there is a possibility that the solution—” The Chief Inspector broke off in mid-sentence.

“Please, sir, tell me everything.”

“I don’t know if I have the right,” Sheppard said dryly, as if displeased by Gregory’s insistence. “You might not like the solution.”

“Why? Please, explain it to me a little more clearly,”

Sheppard shook his head.

“I can’t.”

He walked over to the desk, opened the drawer, and removed a small package.

“Let’s work on the part that pertains to us,” he said, handing it to Gregory.

The package contained photographs of three men and one woman. Commonplace, banal faces, indifferent to everything, stared at Gregory from the shiny little cardboards.

“That’s them,” he said, recognizing two of the photos.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have any pictures taken after death?”

“I managed to get two.” Sheppard reached into the drawer. They had been taken at the hospital at the request of the families.

Both photographs were pictures of men. And it was a strange thing: death seemed to give a new dignity to their rather ordinary features, bestowing a kind of motionless gravity upon them. Dead they looked more expressive than they had while living, as if they finally had something to hide!

Gregory looked up at Sheppard, To his surprise, the Chief Inspector was hunched over, suddenly looking much older than before. He was clenching his lips as if in pain.

“Chief Inspector?” he said softly, with unexpected timidity.

“I would prefer not to give this case to you … but I have no one else,” said Sheppard in a quiet voice. He placed his hand on Gregory’s shoulder. “Please keep in touch with me. I’d like to help you, although I have no idea whether my experience will have much value in a case like this.”

Gregory drew back and the Chief Inspector’s hand dropped. Both men were now standing outside the circle of light made by the lamp, and in the darkness the faces on the wall stared down at them. The lieutenant felt more drunk than he had all evening.

“Please sir…” he said, “you know more than you’re willing to tell me, don’t you?” He was a bit breathless, as if he’d been exerting himself strenuously.

“Sir … are you unwilling to tell me, or unable?” Gregory asked. He wasn’t even shocked at his own audacity.

Sheppard shook his head in denial, watching Gregory with a look of immeasurable patience. Or was it irony?

Gregory glanced down at his hands and noticed that he was still holding the photographs, the ones of the live subjects in his left hands, the dead ones in his right. And again he was inspired by the same mysterious compulsion that had made him direct such an odd question to the Chief Inspector. It was as if an invisible hand was touching him.

“Which of these are … more important?” he asked in a barely audible voice. It was only possible to hear him because the room was absolutely still.

A tight-lipped expression on his face, Sheppard made a discouraging gesture and went over to the light switch. The room was flooded with brightness, everything became ordinary and natural. Gregory slowly hid the photographs in his pocket.

The visit was obviously coming to an end. During the remainder of their conversation, which concentrated on such concrete matters as the number and posting of the constables guarding the mortuaries, the organization of a cordon around the areas mentioned by Sciss, and the details of the lieutenant’s actual powers, there remained the shadow of something left unsaid.

Again and again the Chief Inspector would fall silent and look at Gregory anxiously, as if uncertain whether to leave these businesslike considerations and resume the previous conversation. But he left well enough alone and didn’t say anything.

Gregory was halfway down the stairs when the lights went out. He managed to feel his way to the door. Suddenly he heard his name.

“Good luck!” the Chief Inspector shouted after him.

The lieutenant walked out into the wind and closed the door.

It was terribly cold. The puddles had all solidified; frozen mud crunched underfoot; in the onrushing wind the drizzling rain was being changed into a blizzard of icy needles that pricked Gregory’s face painfully and made a sharp, paperlike rustle as they bounced off the stiff fabric of his coat.

Gregory tried to review the details of the evening, but he might just as well have tried to classify the invisible clouds that the wind was driving around over his head. Remembered snatches of this and that struggled in his mind, spilling over into images unconnected with anything except a poignant feeling of depression and being lost. The walls of the room had been covered with posthumous photographs, the desk with open books, and he vehemently regretted now that he hadn’t taken a good look at any of them, or at the papers spread out next to the books. It never even occurred to him that such actions would have been indiscreet. Gregory began to feel that he was standing on the boundary between the definite and the indefinite. Each of his thoughts seemed about to reveal one of many possible meanings, then vanished, melting away with every desperate effort he made to grasp it fully. And he, pursuing understanding, seemed about to plunge into a sea of ambiguous details in which he would drown, comprehending nothing even at the end.

Whom was he supposed to catch for Sheppard—the creator of some new religion? Although able to function smoothly and efficiently in routine cases, the machinery of investigation was now beginning to turn against itself. The more meticulously the facts were measured, photographed, recorded, and assembled, the more the whole structure seemed to be nonsensical.

If he’d been asked to track down a completely obscure and unknown murderer, Gregory wouldn’t have felt so helpless. What, he wondered, was that confused anxiety he had seen in the eyes of the old Chief Inspector, who wanted to help him but couldn’t?

Furthermore, why had the Chief, who seemed to think the case was unsolvable, picked him, a beginner, to take it over? And was that really the reason Sheppard had invited him to his house in the middle of the night?

With his fists clenched in his pockets, Gregory walked along the deserted street, not seeing anything in the darkness, not feeling the raindrops trickling down his face, not remembering where he was headed for. He gulped in some of the cold, damp air and again saw Sheppard’s face before him, the little shadows at the corner of his mouth twitching.

How long was it since he had left the Europa? He began to calculate. It was now 10:30, so nearly three hours had gone by. “I’m not drunk anymore,” he said to himself. Stopping in the circle of light around a lamp post, he read the street sign to get his bearings, figured out the location of the nearest subway station, and headed toward it.

The streets became more crowded, brightened now by neon signs and by blinking red and green traffic signals. Once inside the revolving doors at the subway entrance, Gregory was met by a blast of warm, dry air from the heating ducts. He rode downward on the escalator, slowly sinking into the noisy rumbling below.

It was even warmer on the station platform than it had been upstairs. Gregory let the Islington train pass, watching the triangular red light on the last car until it disappeared in the distance. Circling around a newsstand, he leaned against an iron support beam and lit a cigarette.