“Famous?”
“OK, perhaps not famous. But well known.” Rouvier crushed the plastic cup in his hand and chucked it in a trash can from a distance; he smiled at the accuracy of his aim. Then he sobered and turned. “I knew Ghislaine Quoinelles. He was, perhaps, a little haunted by his surname.”
“How?”
“His grandfather was a famous scientist.” Another moue of a shrug. Rouvier was looking ready to leave. “I do not know much more. But I often wondered why he came south, to little Lozère. In France a famous surname can be a wonderful advantage. We are meant to be a meritocracy, the great republic! But énarques descend from énarques. The sons of small Hungarians in the Élysée get to run La Défense at the age of twenty-three. Quoinelles was rich and clever and descended from famous men, politicians, scientists — yet he came here to tiny Mende, where literally nobody lives! For a Parisian, Lozère is like Siberia. Maybe he tried to escape the shadow of his surname.”
Julia absorbed the sudden information. It attained a sort of logic. A hint of a pattern. Perhaps.
“Oedipal. Yes. But what has that got to do with the murder?”
Rouvier smiled in a valedictory way. “Hélas. Nothing. Probably nothing. But we have no clues and no witnesses and no suspects, so I will try anything. Perhaps you can help us?” He warmed to his own theme. “Ask Madame Annika, maybe, she may know more, you are her friend. She is a difficult woman to pry open, like an oyster. Find the pearl. And now I am talking rubbish, is it not so?” He laughed, quite cheerily, and reached in the pocket of his smartly dark uniform. Then he produced a card with a debonair flourish. “Call me, telephone me. Anytime. But now it is late, I go, I must drive a long way home. You live in Mende? You need me to drive you? Let me drive you—” His hand reached for her arm.
She flinched. She couldn’t help it.
“No!”
Her voice was way too sharp — punchy and aggressive.
Rouvier gazed back, perplexed and confused, and Julia winced at what she had said. But she couldn’t help it. The words had ignited the memory. A car, a dark winter night, crossing the border to Ontario, to drink underage. “Hey, babe, let me drive you…” Her resolve never to let that happen again.
“No. Sorry. Please. I…”
His frown was sincerely tinged with hurt.
“I was merely offering to assist. Miss Kerrigan?”
“I know. I know. It’s just that… You know. My apartment is quite near.”
“D’accord.” He gazed her way again, puzzled still. But then his frown subsided and he glanced up at the weeping sky. “And now it is raining. Il pleure dans mon coeur / Comme il pleut sur la ville.”
Julia nodded, keen to move on, to forget. “‘It rains in my heart like it rains on the city’? I know that line. Rimbaud, right?”
“Ah, no. It is in Verlaine, in the works of Verlaine.”
His smile was renewed, but it was sad, and it was distracted; it was obvious he really wanted to leave. Julia focused on the present. She still had questions: she had so many questions, but there was one she needed to ask now; she felt it was important, but didn’t know why.
“Monsieur Rouvier—”
He was actually walking away; but he turned.
“Oui?”
“You said Ghislaine’s grandfather was a famous scientist. What was he famous for?”
The officer stood beneath a streetlight; rain tinseled in the glow as he pondered the question. Then he smiled faintly, his face illuminated by an answer.
“I might be wrong, but I think it was breeding. Yes, something audacious. Like that? Yes — I believe it was crossbreeding.”
“Crossbreeding — between what? What species? What animals?”
His smile faded to nothing. “Men.”
“Sorry?”
“Men and animals. He tried to crossbreed men with animals, or so I believe.” The smile returned. “Au revoir, Miss Kerrigan. Au revoir.”
11
Rising from the bed, Jake slowly approached the door. Hanging from the hook was a terrible thing.
What was it? A tiny dead monkey? A dried fruit bat? What the fuck was this? A brown leathery mammalian corpse just hanging here? Surely it couldn’t be worse, surely it couldn’t be what he most of all feared?
His revulsion mixed with his furious curiosity. He walked closer. And then his stomach surged with the bile of confirmed disgust.
This was no monkey. This was unmistakably not animal.
It was a human embryo.
A human fetus, somehow dried or mummified, was hanging by its own umbilical cord from the coat hook on the door.
The fetus stared at him. Its blank open eyes were milky white.
He heard a scream.
He stared.
The scream didn’t register; it was like a distant car alarm, not really meant for him. He was so transfixed by the sight of those eyes, dead eyes rolled back, like his sister. No, don’t think this way. But he couldn’t help it. Slowly he pulled on his jeans and a shirt, and all the time he kept staring at the baby, the dead fetus, the possessed, horrifyingly white eyes, like his sister’s, lying in the road; until he realized it was Chemda. Screaming.
Chemda!
He kicked open his door and the scream was still loud in his ears — her room was next to his. Shunting through her door, he found her, sitting on her bed, panting and gasping, her face wrought with fear. She was pointing at something, wordless and terrorized.
He didn’t have to guess. Hanging by its umbilical cord, from the rafters of the timbered room, was another fetus.
“Chemda. Come on—”
She was naked, wrapped in sheets. She didn’t move.
“Chemda. Please. Now!”
He walked over to her, took her damp hand; her gaze yearned beyond him, through him, at some fearful horizon. Then a lucidity reappeared; she nodded, dumbly, and he turned away as she hurriedly put on a dress. Before they could open the door a maid was in the room; the maid also screamed. And her scream was unbearable, existentiaclass="underline" like she sensed her own approaching death. The maid’s rubber-gloved hand was weakly pointing at the limply hanging fetus; her mop had fallen to the floor. Then she screamed again. A wild klaxon. Shrieking and shuddering.
Jake didn’t know what to do: rescue Chemda, or calm the near-hysterical maid. He grabbed Chemda’s hand once more, and they fled into the garden.
He was agitated for an hour; it took Chemda two hours to calm down. Madame Marconnet brought tea and a blanket and the maid hovered nearby, distraught, her small, dusty hands trembling and shaking as she smoothed down her dirty apron, over and over. Sitting next to Jake, Chemda stared fearfully at the river and the boats and the algae nets and the singing fishermen, and for a hundred minutes she said nothing. And then, finally, she spoke.
“Talismans.” The voice from the back of her throat. “They are talismans.”
“What?”
“In Khmer—koh krohen… or kun krak.”
Once more she fell silent.
They were alone again in the secluded riverside garden of the Gauguin. Madame Marconnet had withdrawn, the maids had finally gone back to work — to clean the rooms, to take away those horrible things.
The garden, he now noticed, was beautiful. In front of them the milk-chocolate waters of the Mekong communed with the dark-chocolate waters of the Nam Khan. But all Jake could think about was those cold and dead and horrible milky eyes. Above them the leaves of the tamarinds tinkled and whispered, yet Chemda was still shivering with fright.