When he reached the end of the corridor, he was almost suffocating, breathing in short gasps. He seemed to be advancing through a giant inhaler. Knowing that this was not far from the truth, he entered the throne room.
It was an empty, rather shallow swimming pool, surrounded by thin white columns, which stood out against the hazy background of steam. Prussian blue tiles marked the sides, like in old Parisian metro stations. Wooden screens covered the far wall, decked with Ottoman ornamentation: moons, crosses and stars.
In the center of the pool, a man was sitting on a ceramic slab.
Heavy and burly, he had knotted a white towel around his waist. His face was drowned in shadows.
In the stifling fumigation, his laughter pealed out.
The laughter of Talat Gurdilek, the mint-man, the man with the scorched voice.
43
Everyone in the Turkish quarter knew his story.
He arrived in Europe in 1961, taking the classic route, beneath the false bottom of a tanker truck. In Anatolia, he and his companions had been closed in behind a sheet of iron, which had then been bolted into place. The illegal immigrants thus had to lie there, without light or fresh air, during the forty-eight-hour journey. The heat and lack of air were oppressive. Then, when crossing the mountain passes of Bulgaria, the cold had seeped in through the metal and pierced them to the core. But the real torture started when they were approaching Yugoslavia, when the tanker, which contained cadmium acid, began to leak.
Slowly, the coffin of metal filled with toxic gases. The Turks yelled, shook and banged at the plate that was weighing down on them. but the tanker continued on its way. Talat realized that no one was going to free them before their arrival point, and screaming or moving would only worsen the effects of the acid.
He remained still, breathing as little as possible.
At the Italian frontier, the travelers joined hands and prayed. At the German border, most of them were dead. At Nancy. where the first drop-off had been planned. the driver discovered a row of thirty corpses, covered with urine and excrement, mouths open in their last gasps.
Only one teenager had survived. But his respiratory system had been destroyed. His trachea, larynx and nasal fossae had been permanently burned-his sense of smell was lost. His vocal cords had been eroded-his voice would now be nothing but the rubbing of sandpaper. As for his breathing. chronic inflammations would mean that he regularly had to inhale steamy fumigations.
At the hospital, the doctor had called in an interpreter to give the young immigrant this devastating diagnosis and inform him that he would be sent back to Istanbul by plane in ten days' time. Three days later, Talat Gurdilek escaped, his face bandaged like a mummy, and walked to Paris.
Schiffer had always known him with his inhaler. When he was still just a young sweatshop manager, he always had it with him and spoke between two blasts. Later, he adopted a translucent mask that imprisoned his hoarse voice. Then his problems worsened, but his financial means had increased. At the end of the 1980s, Gurdilek purchased La Porte Bleue Turkish Baths on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis and took over a room for his own personal use. It was a sort of huge lung, a tiled refuge full of steam laden with mentholated Balsofumine.
"Salaam aleikum, Talat. I'm sorry to disturb you at bath time."
Wrapped in a cloud of steam, the man laughed again. "Aleikum salaam, Schiffer. So you're back from the dead."
The Turk's voice was like the crackling of flaming branches. "It's more the dead that have brought me back."
"I've been expecting you."
Schiffer took off his coat-he was soaked to the bone-then went down the steps into the pool. "Apparently everyone's been expecting me. So what can you tell me about the murders?"
The Turk sighed deeply with a scraping of metal. “When I left my country, my mother poured water after my steps. She traced out a path of chance, which was supposed to make me return. I never went back, my brother. I stayed in Paris and watched the situation deteriorate. Things have never been worse."
The cop was now just two yards from the boss, but he still could not make out the man's face.
"Exile is a hard labor, as the poet said. And I would say that it's getting even harder. In the past, they used to treat us like dogs. They exploited us, robbed us, arrested us. Now they're killing our women. Where will it all end?"
Schiffer was in no mood for such cracker-barrel philosophy "You're the one who sets the limits," he replied. Now three working girls have been killed on your territory, one of them from your own workshop. That's rather a lot."
Gurdelik agreed with an idle gesture. His shadowy shoulders were like a scorched mountain. "We're on French territory here. It's up to your police to protect us."
"Don't make me laugh. The Wolves are here, and you know it. What do they want?"
"I don't know."
"You don't want to know."
There was a silence. The Turk breathed deeply. “I’m the master of this quarter," he said at last. "But not of my country. This business started in Turkey "
"Who sent them?" Schiffer asked more loudly. "The clans of Istanbul? The families of Antep? The Lazes? Who?"
"I swear to you I don't know, Schiffer."
The cop stepped forward. At once, a rustling broke through the fog beside the pool. His bodyguards. He stopped immediately, trying to make out Gurdelik's appearance. But all he could see were fragments of shoulders, hands and torso. A dark, matte skin. wrinkled by water like crepe paper.
"So you're just going to let the massacre go on?"
"It will stop when they have sorted their business out, when they have found the girl."
"Or when I've found her."
The dark shoulders quaked. "Now it's my turn to laugh. You're no match for them."
"Who can help me find her?"
"Nobody. If anyone knew anything, they would have talked already.
And not to you to them. All that our people want is peace."
Schiffer thought for a moment. It was true what Gurdelik said. It was one of the aspects of the mystery that baffled him. How could this woman have survived so long with an entire community ready to betray her? And why were the Wolves still looking for her in the same neighborhood? Why were they so sure that she was still there?
He changed tack: "What happened exactly in your workshop?”
“I was in Munich at the time and I-"
"Cut the crap, Talat. I want all the details."
The Turk sighed in resignation. "They burst into the workshop on the night of November 13."
"What time?"
"At two AM."
"How many of them were there?"
"Four."
"Did anyone see their faces?"
"They were wearing hoods. According to the girls, they were armed to the teeth. Rifles, handguns. The works."
The Adidas jacket had described the same scene. Warriors in commando getup, at work in the middle of Paris. In his forty years on the force, he had never heard of such a thing. What had this woman done to deserve such treatment?
"And then?" he murmured.
"They grabbed the girl and left. That's all. It was over in three minutes.”
“How did they identify her in the workshop?"
"They had a photo."
Schiffer took a step back and recited: "She was called Zeynep Tütengil. She was twenty-seven. Married to Burba Meng. No children. She lived at 34 Rue de la Fidelité. Originally from the Gaziantep area. Here since September 2001."
"You've done your homework, my brother. But this time, it won't get you anywhere."