"How often do you cut your nails?" the biologist asked.
"I don't know… about every three weeks."
"Do you have the impression that they grow quickly?"
Anna yawned in answer.
Veynerdi went back to his bench, murmuring. "How could I have missed that?" He picked up a tiny pair of scissors and a transparent box, then returned to cut off the piece of Anna's fingernail that seemed to interest him so.
"If they grow normally" he said softly, "these extremities date back to the period before your accident. This stain is part of your past life."
He switched the machines back on. While their motors purred again, he diluted the sample in a tube containing a solvent. "That was a close call," he said, and smiled. "In another few days, you would have cut your nails and we would have lost this precious remnant."
He placed the sterile tube in the centrifuge and turned it on.
“If it's nicotine," Mathilde commented, "I don't see what you can…"
Veynerdi placed the liquid in a spectrometer. "I may be able to work out which brand of cigarettes she smoked before her accident."
Mathilde did not understand why he was so enthusiastic. Such information would not reveal anything important. On the screen of the machine. Veynerdi observed the luminous diagrams. Minutes passed by. "Professor." Mathilde was losing patience. "I don't understand. This is nothing to get worked up about. I "
"It's extraordinary."
The light of the monitor was illuminating a fixed look of wonder on the scientist's face.
"It isn't nicotine."
Mathilde went over to the spectrometer. Anna sat up on the metal table.
Veynerdi turned on his seat toward the two women. "It's henna." A wave of silence smothered them.
The researcher tore off the square-ruled paper that the machine had just printed out, then he typed the data on his computer keyboard. It at once flashed up a list of chemical components.
"According to my catalogue of substances, this stain comes from a specific vegetal composition. A very rare sort of henna, cultivated on the plains of Anatolia." Alain Veynerdi stared triumphantly at Anna. He seemed to have waited all his life for this moment.
"Madam, in your previous existence, you were Turkish."
PART VI
33
One hell of a night.
Paul Nerteaux had dreamed of a stone monster, a malignant titan prowling through the tenth arrondissement. A Moloch who dominated the Turkish quarter, demanding human sacrifices.
In his dream, the monster wore a half-human. half-bestial mask, of Greek and Persian style. Its mineral lips were white-hot, its penis stuck with blades. Every one of its steps made the earth quake, dust rise and buildings crack.
He had finally woken up at 3:00, covered in sweat. Shivering in his little three-room apartment, he had made some coffee, then examined the fresh batch of archaeological documents that the boys from the Brigade Criminelle had left in front of his door the previous evening.
Until dawn, he browsed through the museum catalogues, tourist brochures and scientific studies, observing and scrutinizing each sculpture, comparing it with the autopsy photos-and unconsciously with the mask in his dreams. Sarcophagi from Antalya. Frescoes from Cilicia. Bas-reliefs from Karatepe. Busts from Ephesus…
He had crossed over ages and civilizations without obtaining the slightest clue.
Paul Nerteaux then went to the Trois Obus café by Porte de Saint-Cloud. He confronted the smell of coffee and tobacco, forcing himself to ignore his senses and pushing down his nausea. His lousy mood was not just because of his nightmares. It was Wednesday and, like every Wednesday, he had had to call Reyna at daybreak to tell her that he could not look after Céline.
He spotted Jean-Louis Schiffer standing at the end of the bar. Closely shaven, wrapped up in a Burberry raincoat, he was looking decidedly better as he dunked his croissant in his coffee.
When he saw Paul, he grinned broadly. "Slept well?"
"Great."
Schiffer stared at his rumpled appearance but made no comment on it. "Coffee?"
Paul nodded. A black concentrate rimmed with brown foam immediately appeared on the bar.
The Cipher picked up the cup and nodded toward a free table beside the window "Let's sit down. You're not looking too good."
At the table, he handed Paul the basket of croissants.
Paul refused. The very idea of swallowing something brought acid up to his nostrils. But he had to admit that Schiffer was playing at being buddies that morning. He asked, "And you, did you sleep well?"
"Like a log."
Paul pictured once more the sliced fingers and bloody guillotine. After the carnage, he had accompanied the Cipher to Porte de Saint-Cloud, where he had an apartment on Rue Gudin. Ever since then, a question had been bugging him.
"If you've got this apartment," he said, and pointed through the window at the gray square, "what the hell were you doing at Longères?"
"The herding instinct. The desire to be around cops. I was bored to death all on my own."
The explanation rang false. Paul remembered that Schiffer was registered at the home under a pseudonym, his mother's maiden name. Someone in the Special Branch had tipped him off. Another mystery. Was he hiding? If so, who from?
"Show me the files," the Cipher said.
Paul opened the folder and placed the documents on the table. They were not the originals. He had dropped into his office early that morning to make photocopies. Clutching a Turkish dictionary, he had studied each file and had managed to work out each victim's name and personal details.
The first one was called Zeynep Tütengil. She used to be employed in a workshop beside La Porte Bleue Turkish Baths, which belonged to a certain Talat Gurdilek. She was twenty-seven, childless and married to Burba Tütengil. They lived at 34 Rue de la Fidelité. She came from some village with an unpronounceable name near the town of Gaziantep, in southeast Turkey, and had been living in Paris since September 2001.
The second's name was Ruya Berkes, and she was twenty-six and single. She worked from home, at 8 Rue d'Enghien, for a certain Gozar Halman a name Paul had already seen on several police reports-a sweatshop owner who specialized in leather and furs. Ruya came from Adana, a city in south Turkey. She had been in Paris for just eight months.
The third was Rouyike Tanyol. She was thirty, single and a seamstress for a company called Sürelik, based in Passage de l'Industrie. She had been living incognito in a woman's home at 22 Rue des Petites-Ecuries. Like the first victim, she was born in the province of Gaziantep.
This information provided no common points. There was not the slightest indication, for example, of how the murderer spotted them or approached them. But above all, it did not give these women the slightest presence or sensation of reality. Their Turkish names even increased their inscrutability. To convince himself that they were flesh and blood. Paul had had to turn back to the Polaroid shots. The women's broad, rather smooth features suggested generously rounded bodies. He had read somewhere that the ideal of Turkish beauty corresponded to just such a physique, with moonlike faces…
Schiffer was still studying the data, his glasses on the tip of his nose. Still feeling nauseated, Paul hesitated before drinking his coffee. The din of voices and the chinking of glass and metal were getting on his nerves. Above all, the drunken conversations at the bar needled him. He just could not stand such wastrels, killing themselves with one arm on the counter and the other constantly raised… How many times had he gone to fetch one or both of his parents from a zinc bar? How many times had he picked them up from the sawdust and cigarette butts while he was struggling against the desire to puke over them?
The Cipher removed his glasses and concluded: "We'll start with the third workshop. The most recent victim. While memories are still fresh. Then we'll work back to the first one. After that, we'll go to their homes, their neighbors, and retrace their journeys to work. He must have jumped them somewhere, and no one's invisible."