“To defend me against who?"
Silence.
"Against your dad?"
She leaned over him. Her face appeared in a ray of light. It was swollen, covered with bruises. One of her eyes, white and full of blood, was staring at him like a porthole. She repeated, "To defend me against your dad?"
He nodded. There was a moment of uncertainty, of stillness, then she hugged him in a wave of abandon. Paul pushed her back. It was not tears and pity that he wanted. All that mattered was the coming battle. The promise he had made to himself the previous evening, when his drunken father had started beating his mother until she fainted on the kitchen floor. When the monster had turned around and seen him, a little boy trembling in the doorway, and had warned him: be back. I'll be back to kill both of you!”
So Paul had armed himself and was awaiting his return, sword in hand.
But he never did come back. Not the next day, nor the day after that. By one of destiny's coincidences, Jean-Pierre Nerteaux was murdered on the very night that he had made his threat. His body was discovered two days later, in his own taxi, near the gasoline warehouses in the port of Gennevilliers.
When she learned of the murder, his wife, Françoise, reacted in a strange way. Instead of going to identify the body, she wanted to go to the place of the crime to check that his Peugeot 504 was still in one piece and that there would be no problems with the cab company.
Paul remembered the slightest details: the bus ride to Gennevilliers, the mutterings of his devastated mother, his own apprehension faced with something he did not really understand. But when they reached the warehouses, he was struck with amazement. Huge crowns of steel rose up from the wasteland. Weeds and shrubs sprouted between the concrete ruins. Steel rods were rusting like metal cactuses. It was a landscape for a Western, like the deserts in the comic books he read.
Under a sweltering sky, the mother and child crossed the storage areas. At the far end of these abandoned fields, they found the Peugeot. Half sunken into the gray dunes. Paul soaked up everything that an eight-year-old could understand. The police uniforms, the handcuffs glinting in the sunlight, the muted explanations, the black hands of the servicemen in white light as they busied themselves around the car…
It took him a while to understand that his father had been knifed at the wheel. But only a second to see the lacerations in the back of the seat, through the half-open rear door.
The killer had attacked his victim through the seat.
The child was at once struck by how coherent the event was. A day before, he wanted his father to die. He had armed himself, then revealed his criminal plans to his mother. This confession had acted like a curse:
Some mysterious force had made his wish come true. He might not have held the knife himself, but it was he who had mentally ordered the murder.
From that moment, he had no more memories. Not of the funeral, nor of this mother's complaining, nor of the financial difficulties that marked their daily lives. Paul was completely drawn in on this truth: he was the real murderer.
The true organizer of the massacre.
Much later, in 1987, he enrolled in the law department of the Sorbonne. By doing odd jobs, he had managed to save enough money to rent a room in Paris, away from his mother, who now drank all the time. As a cleaning woman in a supermarket, she was thrilled at the idea that her son was to become a lawyer. But Paul had other ideas.
When he obtained his master's degree in 1990, Paul joined the Cannes-Ecluse police academy. Two years later, he was first in his class and could have chosen one of the jobs most coveted by apprentice police officers: OCRTIS, the temple of dope chasers.
His career looked set. Four years in a central office or an elite unit, then he could take the internal examination to become a commissioner. Before he was forty Paul Nerteaux would have a top-ranking job in the Ministry of the Interior, on Place Beauvau, amid the gilded paneling of headquarters.
But Paul was not interested in such a career. His vocation as a policeman lay elsewhere, still linked to his feelings of guilt. Fifteen years after their expedition to Gennevilliers, he was still haunted by remorse. His career was guided by the sole desire to wash away his crime and recover his lost innocence.
He had had to invent personal techniques and secret methods of concentration to master his anxiety attacks. Thanks to this discipline, he had found the means to become an unbending cop. In his company he was hated, feared and sometimes admired, but never liked because no one understood that his inflexibility and desire to succeed were his defenses, a security barrier. It was the only way for him to control his demons. No one knew that in the right-hand drawer of his desk, he still kept a copper paper knife…
He tightened his grip on the wheel and concentrated on the road.
Why was he digging up that shit again now? Was it the influence of the rain-soaked landscape? Because it was Sunday, the day of death for the living?
On either side of the highway, all he could see were the dark furrows of plowed fields. The horizon itself looked like a final groove, opening out onto the nothingness of the sky. Nothing could ever happen in this region, except for a slow descent into despair.
He glanced down at the map on the passenger seat. He now had to turn off the highway and take the A road toward Amiens. After that, he had to take the D235. Ten kilometers later, he would be there.
So as to chase away his dark thoughts, he focused his mind on the man he was going to see: probably the only policeman he did not really want to meet. At the Inspection Générale des Services, he had photocopied his file and could now recite his CV by heart…
Jean-Louis Schiffer was born in 1943 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, Seine-Saint-Denis. Depending on the context, he was nicknamed either "the Cipher" or "Mr. Steel." The Cipher because of the impenetrable mysteries that surrounded the cases he dealt with: Mister Steel because of his reputation of being implacable-and also for his silvery hair, which was long and silky.
After his leaving certificate in 1959, Schiffer was called up for military service in Algeria, in the Aurès mountains. In 1960, he returned to Algiers, where he became an intelligence agent and an active member of the DOP (Détachements Operationnels de Protection).
In 1963, he returned to France, ranked sergeant. He then joined the police force, first as an ordinary officer, then a sergeant in the territory brigade in Paris 's sixth arrondissement. He rapidly became noticed for his instinctive street savvy and liking for infiltration. In May 1968, he dived into the throng and mixed with the students. At the time, he wore his hair in a ponytail, smoked dope and discreetly noted the names of the ringleaders. During the clashes on Rue Gay-Lussac, he also saved a riot police officer from under a hail of paving stones.
His first act of bravery. His first distinction.
But that was only the beginning. After being recruited by the Brigade Criminelle in 1972, he was made inspector and continued to act heroically, fearing neither fire nor combat. In 1975, he received a medal for bravery. It seemed that nothing could stop his ascent. But then, in 1977, after a short period spent in the famous "anti-gang" squad, he was suddenly transferred. Paul had found a report written at the time and signed by Commissioner Broussard in person, who had noted in the margin unmanageable.
Schiffer then found his true hunting ground in the First Division of the Police Judiciaire in Paris 's tenth arrondissement. Refusing all offers of promotion or transfer, for twenty years he dominated the west of the sector, imposing law and order in an area running from the central boulevards to the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est, including part of Sentier, the Turkish quarter, with its high immigrant population.