"And then?"
"Then, last summer, something strange happened. In July, a routine investigation in the hospital archives turned up some old papers, which had been forgotten in the basement of the old library. What were they? The birth papers of those very parents and grandparents of our supermen."
"Which means?"
"That there were two copies of these sheets. Or, to be more precise, that the records Champelaz had looked at in the official files were forgeries, and that the genuine papers were the ones that had just been discovered in some boxes belonging to the university's chief librarian: Etienne Caillois, Rémy's father."
"Shit."
"Quite. Logically speaking, Champelaz should then have compared the records he'd already examined with the ones that had just turned up. But he didn't. He didn't have time. Or couldn't be bothered. Or, more like, was scared. Of finding out the horrible truth about the Guernon community. So, I compared them."
"And what did you find?"
"That the official records had been forged. Etienne Caillois had imitated the handwriting and, each time, changed one detail in comparison with the originals."
"Which was?"
"Always the same one – the baby's weight at birth. So that the figure would match the data in the rest of the file, when the nurses weighed the baby again during the next few days."
"I don't get it."
Niémans leant forward. His voice was expressionless.
"Listen to me carefully, Karim. Etienne Caillois forged the first pages in the file to conceal something inexplicable: in these records, the weight of the baby was never the same the next day. The infants lost or gained several hundred grams in one night. I went to the maternity clinic and asked an obstetrician. He told me that such rapid changes are impossible. So, I took the only explanation left: it wasn't the weight which had changed in one night, but the baby. That was the terrible truth which old man Caillois had been trying to conceal. He, or more likely, old man Sertys, a night auxiliary at the Guernon University Hospital, swapped over babies in the delivery room."
"But…why?"
Niémans grinned horribly. The rain, blown in on the wind, was slapping at his face like a flail. His voice was wearing thin on the rock of his conviction.
"To regenerate a worn-out community, to pump new, vigorous, healthy blood into the intellectual community. Caillois's and Sertys's technique was simple: they replaced certain babies born to university families with children from the mountain stock, who'd been selected according to their parents' physical profile. In that way, strapping, powerful bodies suddenly became part of Guernon's academic circle. New blood percolated into the old in the only place where the inaccessible university elite crossed the path of humble farmers – the maternity clinic. A clinic which handled all of the children of the region and which made these exchanges possible. I then guessed that Caillois and Sertys shared a common goal. Not only did they want to regenerate the professors' precious blood, they also wanted to engineer a breed of perfect beings. Supermen. People as beautiful as those in the photographs of the Berlin Olympics, which I'd noticed in Caillois's flat. And people as brilliant as Guernon's most distinguished academics. That's when I realised that those lunatics wanted to bring together the gray matter of Guernon and the bodily vigor of the outlying villages, to fuse together the academics' brain power and the natives' physical prowess. If I have understood correctly, they perfected their system to such an extent that they not only programed the births, but also the couples, by setting up marriages between selected youngsters"
Karim swallowed down these pieces of information one by one. He seemed to be silently, intently digesting them. Meanwhile, Niémans's feverish monologue went on:
"So how to make the right people meet? How to organise the marriages? I thought about the jobs Caillois and Sertys did, and the limited responsibilities they held. I was sure that it was precisely thanks to their obscure, humble positions that they had been able to carry out their scheme. You remember what was written in that exercise book? `We are the masters, we are the slaves. We are everywhere, we are nowhere.' This seemed to imply that despite their lowly jobs, or rather because of them, they were able to control the destinies of the inhabitants of an entire region. They were lackeys, but they were also in charge. Sertys was a mere auxiliary nurse, but he changed the fates of the area's babies by swapping them over in their cots. As for the Caillois family, they set about organising the next part of the program – the arranged marriages. But how? How did they go about it? I then remembered Caillois's personal files in the library. We had checked which books had been consulted. We had also gone through the names of the kids who had read them. There was just one thing we hadn't looked at: where the readers sat, those little carrels where the students work. So I hurried back to the library and compared the lists of seating positions with the falsified birth papers. They went back over thirty, forty, even fifty years, but the whole thing matched, down to the last name. The kids who had been swapped over were always placed in the reading-room facing the same members of the opposite sex – who were offspring coming from the most brilliant families on the campus. I then did some checking at the registry office. Things didn't fit precisely, but most of those couples who had met in the library, through the glass panels of their carrels, had subsequently got married. Which means I was right. The `masters' had first changed the kids' identities, then arranged who they would meet. They placed the swap-overs – mountain dwellers' children – in front of bright sparks who were the real offspring of the academic community. And so they gave birth to a superior cross-breed, bringing together the `body' blood and the `brain' blood. And it worked, Karim. Our university champions are none other than the children of those programed couples."
Abdouf remained silent. His thoughts were crystallising, as sharp and daggered as the needles from the larches as they mingled with the raindrops.
Niémans continued:
"I put the pieces together and, little by little, completed the jigsaw. I then realised that I was following the same path that the killer had taken, that the story about those old papers turning up in the library, which had been mentioned in the press, had tipped the murderer off. He must have compared the two sets of documents as well. I suppose he must already have had his doubts about the origins of Guernon's `champions' and is almost certainly one of the champions himself. One of those lunatics' creatures. He then worked out how the conspiracy functioned. He followed Rémy Caillois, the son of the man who'd stolen the birth papers, and discovered his secret relationship with Sertys and Chernecé…Who, I reckon, was only an extranumerary. A nutty doctor who had, while treating blind kids, stumbled on the truth and decided to join the genetic engineers rather than turn them in. So, our killer unearthed the three of them and went about wiping them out. He tortured the first victim, Rémy Caillois, in order to get the whole story.
He then simply mutilated and killed the other two."
Karim stiffened. His entire frame was trembling under his leather jacket.
"Just because they did a bit of baby swapping? And got couples together?"
"There's something you don't know. The villagers in the surrounding mountains suffer from an extremely high infant mortality rate. This fact is inexplicable, particularly as they are strong and healthy. But we can now guess the reason. Not only did the Sertys family swap babies over, but they also smothered the kids who were supposed to have been born to the villagers – but who were really the academics' runts. By depriving the mountain folk of their offspring, they were certain that they would try again and so provide even more fresh blood to be poured into the valley's academic families. They were fanatics, Karim. Madmen and murderers from father to son, ready to do anything in order to create their superior race"