Authors: Franck Thilliez
Sharko rubbed his chin. The setup was worthy of a horror film and told him they were after a killer who was precise, cunning, and perverse.
“That's why Shery kept talking about a âmonster,'” he deduced. “A terrifying monkey skull, which gradually became covered with Eva Louts's blood.”
Levallois nodded.
“No doubt. The killer tried to disguise his crime by making us think it was an ape attack, and that might be where he slipped up. He probably had access, probably even owned, jaws, a skull, or perhaps even an entire fossil of a chimpanzee. He didn't leave any fingerprints, but that scrap of tooth enamel gave him away. So we're dealing with someone who has access to the world of paleontology. Maybe a conservator, collector, a scientist, or a museum employee. There can't be that many places around here where someone can get information about this type of thing. You don't find two-thousand-year-old skeletons on every street corner.”
“The natural history museum . . .”
“Precisely, in the Botanical Gardens. I was planning to go when it opens, right after I finish my java. I've arranged to meet Clémentine Jaspar. After the live monkeys at the primate center, it's on to the fossilized mammoths at the museum.”
Sharko was beginning to develop a liking for this young fellow he barely knew. He downed his coffee in one gulp, then nodded toward the scooter.
“Finally, something solid. You've got an extra helmet, I hope?”
F
rom way up high, the Alps were even more dazzling than usual. They looked like sheets of aluminum thrown together, crumpled by the rough contact. Aggressive gneiss, jutting schist, sparse vegetation clinging to sheer drops.
The helicopter that ferried her, a red-and-yellow EC145 belonging to the Civil Defense authorities, was also carrying thick rolls of special film from a winch. To get herself on board, Lucie had relied on a fair amount of nerve buttressed by huge dollops of procedural jargon, and the trick had worked: broadly speaking, as part of a criminal investigation conducted by the DA's office in Paris, she had to question Marc Castel as soon as possible. To protect herself, she'd kept her fake identity, Amélie Courtois. No one had dared ask to see her ID, and no one would be checking out her story. They'd flown her up with the supplies, period.
Jordan, the pretty face with the green eyes, had gone with her to a sporting goods store run by a friend of his, who'd lent her a fur-lined jacket, ski pants, and hiking boots, along with gloves and protective goggles, and had thrown in some cocoa butter for her lips. From pure city girl, Lucie suddenly looked every inch the athlete. The change in physical appearance wrested her from her dull routine and did her a world of good.
The Gebroulaz glacier surged abruptly at a bend in the cliff. A gigantic tongue of frost, trapped in a granite bed. It was as if time itself had frozen, as if a volcano had spewed up cold lava, captured in all its climactic fury. Colorful silhouettes moved about on its virgin flanks, stretching tarpaulins and lugging equipment. Farther on and lower down, they could see Val Thorens, an absurd blip of cement surrounded by a lake of vegetation.
The twin turbine veered west and then hovered about twenty yards above a relatively flat area. Below, firm hands gripped the roll and unfastened the spring hooks. Masses of film crashed into the snow, sending up silky clouds. Once the ropes had been pulled back up, the copilot spoke into his walkie-talkie, then solidly harnessed Lucie into the winch. After giving her a few technical instructions, he fitted her shoes with steel crampons. Finally, he handed her a black wool cap, which she put on.
“Good luck! See you later!”
He had to shout. The propeller thrummed, the air howled in their ears. Lucie gave a thumbs-up and the descent began. Slowly, her small body, insignificant in such an outsized space, rolled in the void. Dizzy with vertigo, Lucie felt drunk, overcome by a futile sense of freedom. The altitude weighed on her muscles, her breathing, her organs, and the dry air burned her lungs, but she felt immersed in an incredible state of well-being.
The contact with the ice crust was hardâa shock to her knees and anklesâlike landing in a parachute. Hands took hold of her, pulled her back and forth; in an instant, the spring hooks flew up before her eyes and the helicopter instantly rose into the sky. The roar of the propeller blades faded into nothing.
“I hear you're looking for me.”
A tanned face was staring straight at her. A dry, leathery face, lips white with sunblock, eyes hidden behind round, opaque lenses. Lucie went to remove her own sunshades: in a fraction of a second, she felt her retinas burning and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Don't take your goggles off! Haven't you ever walked in snow? You heard of solar reflection?”
“Where I come from, the snow looks more like charcoal.”
Her pupils took a while to adjust to the light again. Colors and shapes gradually reappeared.
“Am I speaking to Marc Castel this time?”
“That's me.”
Lucie turned around. Ice crystals crunched under her feet. The glacier breathed, palpitated, like a living artery.
“I'd rather have met you under less dangerous circumstances. In the North, the terrain is a bit flatter than here.”
“The North? On the radio, they told me you were from Paris. Amélie Courtois, from Paris.”
Lucie improvised.
“I work in Paris, but I live in the North. I came to ask you about . . .”
She bit onto a glove, pulled it off with her teeth, and dug into her pocket.
“Eva Louts,” Castel finished the sentence.
Lucie didn't bother pulling out the photo, and quickly pulled her neoprene protection back on.
“What crime can she have committed for you to come all the way up here?” asked Castel.
“She was murdered.”
The guide absorbed the news. His blond eyebrows lifted slightly. After a long moment of immobility, he pulled out a bottle of water and took several gulps. Behind him, men had begun unrolling the thick film and cutting it with large shears.
“How? Why?”
“For how, let's just say in circumstances that I'd rather not go into. As for why, that's the reason I'm here. Tell me about her.”
The guide began climbing higher. He was tall and well built.
“Come with me. There aren't any crevasses up there. Dig your crampons firmly into the ice. You wouldn't think so, but it can play real tricks on your eyes, and it's a steep climb.”
Lucie did as told. Her boots seemed to weigh a ton. She breathed hard, while Marc Castel talked with irritating ease. The guy must have been carved from stone and raised on pure oxygen.
“The girl was full of pep. Small, high-strung, independent, and cute as hell. She'd come to my chalet on Mario's recommendation.”
“The manager at the Ten Marmots . . .”
“Right. She had all the right gear: hiking boots, fancy backpack, and even the photo equipment around her neckâa Canon EOS 500, nice camera. She told me she was a scientist doing research into Neanderthal man.”
“Research into . . . Neanderthals? That's what . . . she told you?”
He walked with large, surefooted strides. Lucie struggled to keep up, and she was panting hard. At higher than nine thousand feet, the air was getting thinner, and every step felt like lifting weights.
“That's right. She was trying to understand why that race of men died out thirty thousand years ago and why
Homo sapiens
continued to live and evolve. She seemed to know a hell of a lot about it.”
Lucie might not have got all of it right, but hadn't Sharko talked about research into left- and right-handedness? What did Neanderthals have to do with any of this? Castel nodded toward the endless twisting path rising ahead of them.
“The entire reason for her visit was for me to bring her up there, near the Col du Soufre, on the glacier's accumulation zone. There's a place there, a cave, discovered about six months ago. A grotto that the melting ice revealed, because of . . .”
“Global . . . warming . . . I know . . .”
Behind his dark glasses, he looked at her with a smile that showed dazzling white teeth. The only thing missing was the little sparkle they use in toothpaste ads.
“We went up fast. The girl was in terrific shape and she climbed like a gazelle.”
“Let's just say . . . that's not me.”
“I can sense you've got a fair amount of pep yourself, somewhere in there. We've got about an hour of climbing, with a difficult passage over ladders across a wide crevasse.”
After Marc Castel notified his colleagues and picked up some equipment, he roped himself to Lucie, giving her the basic instructions for attacking the glacier. He explained with an ease mixed with firmness. This was his territory here, his oxygen, his rock face.
The climb began. Ice ax in hand, a coil of ropes and spring hooks around her waist, Lucie pulled on her calves, pushing her dormant muscles. The ice snapped and cracked. The sun's rays danced, and translucent blues ricocheted beneath her shoes. After they'd passed the tarpaulin-covered areas, the walls of gneiss stretched out, the dimensions around them expanded, extending beyond measure.
Finally a kind of natural crater appeared, level with the ice. A horizontal half-moon sunken into the mountainside. While Lucie gulped down water from her bottle, Marc pulled two flashlights from his backpack.
“This is it.”
Lucie caught her breath, hands on her knees. From that spot, she felt as if she were overlooking the world and its verticality.
“How could Eva . . . have known about . . . the existence of this . . . this cave?”
“It was written up in the scientific journals when they discovered it.”
The guide stood at the edge of the grotto. Floes of ice spilled inside and disappeared in the shadows. Marc pointed to a dark spot on the rock, above the cave entrance whose lower portion was still obstructed by the glacier.
“You see this line? It's how high the glacier used to be. Glaciologists estimate that it goes back less than half a century. Fifty years ago, the cave we're about to enter was covered over by ice and completely inaccessible.”
“That's amazing.”
“I'd say instead that it's catastrophic. Glaciers are the thermometers of our planet. And our planet has a fever.”
Marc removed the rope tying them together and rolled it in his bag. Lucie cast a prudent eye toward the peak. In front of her were countless striations, clouds you could practically touch with your hand, the blue of the sky competing with the blinding white of the reliefs. The young man called to her.
“A small jump a yard down will get us below the level of the glacier. Then a few steps on the ice, and then we'll reach a flat surface made of rock. I have to warn you, it's extremely cold in there. And it was worse when the whole thing was blocked up and not a drop of sun got in. In a word, this cave hasn't seen daylight in thirty thousand years.”
“Thirty thousand? That's fantastic!”
“Very soon, access will be strictly regulated, or even prohibited, so let's take advantage while the local politicians are still squabbling over who gets jurisdiction.”
He headed in first. Sitting on a step of ice, he let himself slide toward the fearsome maw. Standing a level below the young woman, he reached his hand up.
“Come on.”
In turn, Lucie jumped into the time machine. Behind her, bluish strata, accumulated and compressed for centuries, overlapped like layers of phyllo dough. The cold immediately pressed against her face, neck, on the smallest bit of unprotected skin. The fog that her body and mouth exhaled traced swirls in a swath of harsh light. Marc had removed his glasses. His eyes were pure blue, even lighter than Lucie's. In the intimacy of this place removed from history, their gazes met for the first time.
“I always imagined policewomen to be . . . fairly unattractive and built like tanks.”
“And I always imagined guides having blue eyes. You don't go against the stereotype.”
“Fortunately, you do. Why would someone so pretty become a cop?”
“So she can get a guide's services for free and go where no one else gets to go.”
He gave her a frank smile.
“Okay, back to business. So this place is a sanctuary that appeared even before the birth of the glacier. A place where modern man had never set foot.”
Despite her layers of clothing, Lucie couldn't help shivering. The skin of her face felt hard as stone.
“And yet, here we are,” she said. “Nothing escapes the conquest of our world.”
Marc nodded, then pointed his beam toward the dark entrance.
“The cave is fairly large, about thirty yards deep. It's in there, all the way in back, that some Italian mountain climbers found the ice men.”
Lucie narrowed her eyes. Had she heard right?
“Ice men? How many?”
“Four. Remarkably well mummified and preserved by the subzero temperatures. From what I've been told, it was as if they'd been in a freezer for thirty thousand years.”
“That all?”
“That's a drop in the bucket on the evolutionary scale.”
“Still . . .”
He took a slug from his water bottle.
“With the dry air, all the water had evaporated from their bodies, their eyes were gone, but the muscles had barely receded, just become black and desiccated. The near absence of oxygen prevented decaying. They still had their hair, remains of furs, some hand tools nearby. It was as if they'd dried out . . . like raisins.”
They moved forward, bending down to enter a low passageway.
“If I recall my history right, these would have been Cro-Magnons?”
“It's more complicated than that. I'm not an expert and I wasn't there when they were discovered, but the paleoanthropologists who came here almost certainly identified one Cro-Magnon male and a family of Neanderthals: a man, woman, and child. Unfortunately I can't tell you much more than that. The scientists acted fast, doing their best to preserve the area so as not to damage the mummies. All I know is that the mummies, the remains of clothing, and the tools gathered here were carefully wrapped up and airlifted out under strict hygiene and temperature conditions. Then they were brought for analysis to the paleontology lab at the college in Lyon.”
“Lyon isn't exactly next door. Why not Chambéry or Grenoble?”
“I think Lyon's the only facility in France that handles this kind of situation and has equipment advanced enough for this type of study. The scientists took photos of the site at the time, which you can see if you go there.”
His words echoed strangely against the cave walls. Lucie felt as if she were intruding upon a narrow crypt, violating some ancestral secret, one buried in layers of ice in the heart of the mountains.
“I didn't remember, or actually, I hadn't known that Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals had coexisted.”
“They did for several thousand years. The Neanderthals died out while
Homo sapiens
continued to evolve. We're not sure exactly what the reasons were for the Neanderthals' extinction, though there are theories. Mainly having to do with his inability to adapt to the cold. But Eva Louts had her own belief. She was convinced the Neanderthals had been exterminated by the Cro-Magnons.”