"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…"