Bred to Kill (38 page)

L
ucie was floating outside of time. She was finding it hard to raise her lids over her bloodshot eyes. A large fire was burning before her, its flames dancing so high they set the shadows ablaze. She was sitting on the ground, cross-legged, unable to stand, as if her limbs were no longer hers. Behind her, around her, a sound rumbled, voices from men's throats beat time in unison, bare feet pounded the ground in a slow drumming rhythm. Hands and arms waved in the dark, describing incomprehensible figures. Lucie felt herself wavering and her eyes rolled in their sockets, assaulted by sharp flashes. Where was she? She couldn't marshal her thoughts. Everything blended in her head, as if a tunnel had opened into the void where her memories flowed. Faces . . . her father, her mother, Sharko. They spun around, mixed together, stretched out, swallowed by a throat of ink. In the deep recesses of her skull, she heard the laughter of little girls, saw the white sand spurt before her eyes in slow motion. At first hazy, the faces of Clara and Juliette slowly came into focus. Lucie put out her hand to touch them, but they evaporated in the night. Smiles, then tears. Lucie faltered, her head fell back, while the tears bathed her face. She felt her body falling, then a caress on the back of her neck. Seeds and mushroom powder fell on the incandescent coal set between her legs. There was a backwash of burning smoke that enveloped her face. Lucie swooned, then came to in a trance. The smoke, the smell of plants and roots enveloped her, toyed with her senses.

Suddenly the crowd parted and a roar went up, accompanied by brandished hatchets. Four men carried a woman who was lying on a carpet of leaves and branches. She was completely naked and covered in painted figures. They set her down near the fire. Designs snaked around her swollen belly.

Chimaux sat next to Lucie and breathed in a brownish powder.

“These plants we're inhaling have unimaginable powers, especially the power to heal ailing bodies and minds. Breathe them in, breathe deeply, and let yourself be carried away . . .”

He shut his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, they were burning like braziers.

 • • • 

Sharko screeched to a halt in front of a
NO
PARKING
sign and burst from his car, the Smith & Wesson shoved in his belt. He ran past the huge Gustave-Roussy cancer institute toward a tall glass-and-steel building, with streamlined contours and wide automatic doors, above which red and black letters spelled out the word “GENOMICS.” He walked up quickly to the reception desk, flashed his fake police ID, and asked to see Georges Noland immediately. The receptionist reached for the phone to call her boss, but Sharko intercepted her.

“No. Take me to him.”

“He's working in a ‘clean room' on Sub One. It's where we store our tissue samples. I don't have access and . . .”

Sharko pointed to the elevator.

“Can you get there on that?”

“Only with a badge—there's no other way to get down.”

“In that case, call him, but don't say it's the police. Tell him his grand-daughter is here to see him.”

She made the call.

“He'll be here momentarily.”

Sharko went to the elevator and waited. When the doors opened, he flew inside and slammed Noland against the back wall, jamming the gun into his stomach.

“We're going back down, you and I.”

The elevator door opened onto a hallway. In front of them, protected by thick glass partitions, stretched a large room on the cutting edge of technology. Men and women in surgical masks and sterile coveralls were working at monitors, pressing buttons that controlled huge cryogenic pressure equipment. Sharko forced Noland into the first office they came to, locking the door behind them. He pushed the geneticist against the wall and cracked the butt of his gun on the man's head. The other bent in two, hands on his forehead. The cop pressed the barrel into his cheek.

“I'll give you ten seconds to call Brazil and cancel the contract on Lucie Henebelle.”

Georges Noland shook his head.

“I don't know what you're . . .”

Sharko yanked him onto his side and stuck the barrel into his mouth, practically down his throat.

“Five, four, three . . .”

Noland gagged and started nodding rapidly. He spat several times. The cop shoved him violently toward the phone, his entire body tense and trembling. Noland dialed the number; they waited . . . Then words in Portuguese. Sharko didn't understand the language, but he could make out that they were talking numbers, money. Finally, Noland hung up and let himself fall heavily into a desk chair on wheels.

“They went down the river at dawn. Alvaro Andrades, the officer who guards the river, will let them pass freely when they head back.”

Sharko felt a surge of relief. Lucie was still alive, somewhere. He walked up to Noland and grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat, before propelling him and his chair into a corner.

“I'm going to kill you. I swear I'll do it. But first, tell me about the retrovirus that looks like a man-of-war, the genetic profiles, about those mothers who die in childbirth. Tell me about your relations with Chimaux and Terney. I want all of it. Now.”

 • • • 

Napoléon Chimaux nodded toward the expectant mother, whom other women, young and old, came to caress on the brow, in a long procession. At his side, Lucie was wavering, her head lolling forward, then backward. His words echoed, deep and deformed:

“All magic, all mystery, the entire secret of the Ururu is there before you. The most fantastic model of evolution that an anthropologist could ever hope to encounter. Look how serene that pregnant woman is. And yet, she knows she is about to die. In such moments, they are all in perfect communion. Do
you
see any special violence in this population?”

Thick veins bulged on his neck.

“The Ururu know exactly what sex the child will be. The mother eats more if it's a boy, her belly becomes enormous, and she grows very fatigued in the final months of pregnancy. The male fetus sucks up all her energy. He wants to come into the world, to survive at any cost. The placenta becomes hypervascular to bring him more oxygen and nourishment. The child will be big, strong, and perfectly healthy . . .”

Chant succeeded chant, the rhythm of pounding feet accelerated, faces spun around her. Lucie let the perspiration drip into her burning eyes. Apart from hazy silhouettes, she couldn't make anything out. She remembered vaguely . . . the boat, the jungle . . . She saw herself lying on leaves, Chimaux's face up close to hers. She heard herself talking, weeping, telling him things . . . What had he done to her? When had this happened?

Suddenly, a man burst from the crowd armed with a sharpened stone, its cutting edge fine as a scalpel. He knelt before the pregnant woman.

 • • • 

In silence, Noland mopped the blood dripping down his temples. Then his thin, evil lips suddenly curled.

“Science has always demanded sacrifices. But you couldn't possibly understand such a concept.”

“I've already run across lunatics like you, the ‘enlightened' ones who think the rules don't apply to them. Don't you worry about what I do or don't understand. I want the whole truth.”

The geneticist's dark eyes stared directly into the cop's, who read only disdain in them.

“I'll give you your truth. I'll shove it right in your face. But how certain are you that you want to hear it?”

“I'm ready to hear anything you have to say. Start at the beginning. The sixties . . .”

A silence. Two pairs of eyes ready to devour each other. Noland finally capitulated.

“Right after he came across the Ururu, Chimaux approached my laboratory about analyzing some blood samples from the tribe. At first it was just to gauge the state of their health. There wasn't any malevolent intent; it was routine whenever a new population was discovered. This was 1965, around the time when he'd just written his book and was doing his lecture tour. I alone had the privilege of working with him, because he valued my work on genetics and shared my ideas.”

“What sort of ideas?”

“That we must oppose increases in life expectancy. The rise in the elderly population goes completely against nature's wishes. The ‘gerontocracy' is only . . . creating problems, triggering new diseases, and polluting our planet. Old age, delayed procreation, all those medicines that prolong our existence are violations of natural selection . . . We are a virus on this planet. We reproduce and forget to die.”

“Look who's talking—you're not exactly a teenager yourself. Neither were Chimaux and Terney. The pot's calling the kettle black, don't you think?”

“The difference is, we know it. A virus can't eliminate itself.
We're
trying to find the antidote.”

He spoke with disgust, emphasizing every word.

“When Chimaux realized old age didn't exist in Ururu males, just as in prehistoric times, that their society kept itself in check through deaths and fatal childbirths, he asked my scientific opinion. Did the Ururu perform their rituals because of culture, a collective memory perpetuated down through the generations, or did they perform them because genetics gave them no choice? We got to know each other, respect each other. He took me where no one else had ever been, so that I might see his great white Indians with my own eyes.”

 • • • 

Sitting cross-legged, Napoléon Chimaux calmly rested his hands on his knees. The flames were reflected in his dilated pupils. Lucie was barely able to listen to him. Rapid, devastating thoughts flew from her mind, to the rhythm of the tall flames flickering in front of her: she saw scoops of ice cream fallen onto the seawall . . . a car speeding down the highway . . . a charred body on an autopsy table . . . Lucie jerked her face away, as if slapped. She was rambling, trying to focus on Chimaux's voice among the moans and screams inside her skull. She wanted so badly to understand.

“This man you see opposite you is the father, and he is going to remove the infant before killing the mother.”

The young native, made-up from head to foot, had knelt next to his wife. He spoke to her in a soft voice, stroking her cheek. And Chimaux's voice, constant, heady, at once so distant and so near.

“The husband has reproduced. His genes have now ensured their future, because the baby will be born big and strong and will make a good hunter. The man is barely eighteen years old. Soon he will find other partners, women from the tribe. He will spread his seed again . . . Then, in a few years, at another ceremony, he will take his own life. The old women will have handed down to him the art of killing oneself properly, without needless suffering, and in accordance with their traditions. Imagine my stupefaction when I discovered the workings of the Ururu, so many years ago. They eliminated the women when they gave birth to males but let them live when they had girls. They killed men in their twenties, who had done everything nature expected of them: fight when necessary and ensure their own posterity and the continued existence of the tribe. Why did such a peculiar, such a cruel culture exist in just this one tribe? What was the role of natural selection in all this? What role had evolution played?”

He drank a dark liquid that made him grimace, then spat to the side.

“I suppose you've read my book? There was no need, it's all bullshit. The violence of the Ururu is a myth, because it never gets the chance to declare itself: the adult males sacrifice themselves at the first sign of loss of balance or inverted vision. I invented the legendary violence of this population and did my best to spread the word. The tribe had to terrify people as much as it fascinated them, do you understand? People had to be afraid to come here, to confront these huge, powerful hunters. All over the world, people took me for a lunatic, a murderer, a bloodthirsty degenerate, but that image only served my purpose. It was necessary for people to fear us. This population is mine, and I'll never abandon it.”

 • • • 

“Nature and nurture . . . culture versus genes . . . such huge debates. Has DNA forced the Ururu to adopt that culture, or has the culture of the Ururu modified their DNA? Chimaux was a great believer in the second answer, obviously. He had his own, purely Darwinist, theories about how the tribe worked: the Ururu are left-handed the better to fight their enemies, and this trait had been imprinted in their genes because it offers a huge evolutionary advantage. The males are born at the expense of their mothers, because they're stronger and sooner or later will conquer other women, whom they'll inseminate in turn. Girls don't kill their mothers in childbirth—they don't do the fighting, and this way the mother can reproduce again and perhaps have a son. The Ururu males die young because they reproduce young, like Cro-Magnon, and nature no longer needs them. The women die later because they have to take care of the offspring . . . For Chimaux, Ururu culture really modified their genes and had created this magnificent evolutionary model. But I was convinced it was all primarily genetic, that their genes had determined a culture based on human sacrifice. The Ururu never had a choice: they had to kill the women who gave birth to boys or else watch them bleed to death in horrible agony. And the incomprehensible violence that affected the males when they reached adulthood, which triggered their own deaths, was purely genetic, buried deep within their cell structure, and not influenced by environment or culture. All those rituals were just so much window dressing and superstition.”