of the train.
In the long curve that the train was following at that moment, the powerful locomotive could be seen moving toward the east, fleeing the night, as if frightened by the thick black smoke it spewed. Monotone hatching against the gray sky, firs and birches alternated with the hypnotic effect of a stroboscope.
Behind her, several travelers, mostly women, were making use of the amenities available to the passengers. Perfectly integrated into the luxurious setting of this paneled boudoir, several reading spinets produced a continuous humming sound, in harmony with the rhythm of the wheels on the rails. Seeing a place free up, Clawdia sat down at one of these machines; she settled into a still-warm chair in front of the glass triptych set in an old gold frame. Her feet worked the two pedals in a continuous motion, engaging the wheel and then the dynamo, which soon produced enough electricity to light the screen. Gloomily, she tapped out on the ivory keyboard an “adventure” code that soon produced a list of possible options. From among the suggested titles, she chose Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, and activated the boxwood pull-tabs to confirm her choice. The device got right to the point: on the middle screen she could see the text of the last chapter, in which readers finally witness the hunt for the accursed whale, while one of the two panels that framed it displayed quavering but coordinated excerpts from the John Huston film with Gregory Peck, and the other showed the wrongs done to these poor creatures by the fishing industry. Caught up in the images, more than the text, Clawdia let herself be swept away by the scene, in which the whalers pursued the wounded monster.
“Heave, heave, me hearties!” yelled Stubb, with his bonny Irish face that looked like it had been carved with an ax, as the chalky mass of the sperm whale made its way through the gray swell.
When Queequeg jabbed in his harpoon, then Daggoo, then Tashtego, she thought she could feel the blades plunge into her as they went into the beast’s flank, the feeling was so strong that she had to hold back a whimper; caught up in trying to contain herself, she nonetheless heard a scream rise up in the library.
It was the wagon’s babushka, her eyes full of horror, who was pointing at Clawdia, gesturing at something behind her back. Clawdia turned around and could not stifle her own cry: hung by its feet outside the car, a woman’s naked body was swinging outside the window, her face and dangling arms smearing the glass with wide, bloody streaks.
Informed of the incident, two conductors climbed onto the roof to untie the poor woman and bring her body back inside the train. Holmes and Grimod, drawn by the noise that all this commotion was making, appeared at just the right moment to lend a hand; it was not hard for them to help move the body to a service compartment, far from the eyes of the passengers. As they laid the dead woman out on a bench, they were sorry to recognize Yva, the pretty waitress, whose charms Holmes stopped contemplating from that moment forward. The young woman’s ears had been cut off, her breasts and stomach slashed with a razor along the contours of her tattoo; her throat was slit open. A harrowing detail—Yva’s pubic hair had been torn out with such violence that it had left bruises, as if she had been skinned by an inept butcher.
At this last finding, Holmes and Grimod exchanged a quick look; in a less tragic situation, one would have glimpsed in this exchange, in spite of everything, the depth of their terror.
“Thank you, Messieurs,” said one of the conductors, pulling a cover over the body. “We’ll take it from here.”
The two men joined Lady MacRae and, refusing to respond to the other passengers’ questions, hurried to Canterel’s cabin. After waking him from his slumber, Holmes began to tell him of the drama that had just taken place. When he reached the most intimate of the abuses suffered by the young woman, Canterel cursed.
“Great Scott!” he said, knitting his brows. “The Noh Straddler!”
“Yes,” Grimod confirmed. “It’s his mark.”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Clawdia.
“The most sinister of assassins,” said Holmes in a low voice. “No one has ever seen his face, but there is not a heinous crime, not a bankruptcy, not a famous con that does not involve his name being spoken at one point or another.”
“Or rather his nickname,” said Canterel, “since no one knows his true identity. On the rare occasions that anyone has glimpsed him, he has been seen straddling his victim, standing still over of her in an affected pose, like an actor in Noh theater, then grabbing at her crotch to yank out her pubic hair. He decorates the places he visits with these awful trophies. In the only cache that he didn’t have time to remove before disappearing, the police also found masks fashioned from human faces . . .”
“And, God forgive me,” continued Holmes, “a copy of The Tarot as Guide to the World bound in the skin of human breasts!”
“What a monster!” said Clawdia, shivering.
“Yes,” Holmes said pensively. “At least now we know who our adversary is.”
“Martial,” Grimod interrupted, “could someone have noticed that you talked privately with Yva, maybe even imagining that she could have given you some kind of information?”
Canterel gathered his thoughts, then remembered the man in the blue glasses: he was the only person who had seen him come out of the bathroom where the young waitress was finishing getting dressed.
“Then we must begin with him. Here’s what I propose . . .”
Fabrice is a tall young man, thin, his shoulders a little round, with greasy hair under his sailor hat. This is a black woolen cloth cap that he wears a little back on his head and that makes him look a bit like a tramp. He found it at a flea market. The hat of a boatswain from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, with the letters CGT embroidered in silver thread on the crown. He only takes it off inside the factory.
Same with his orange flip-flops. The rest he couldn’t care less about. In any case, his overcoat covers everything else when he leaves his house. He’s a nolife, spending all his time in virtual universes. He has given all of his free time to them. Blizzard games—Warcraft and others—hold no secrets for him. He is still passionately devoted to them, but for several months now he has been venturing into more sensitive territory: hacking. Not because he is attracted by the danger or is in it for the rush, but in rebellion and out of a sense of commitment. Returning to his first love, viruses, he programs bugs to train himself, and tests them, dreaming all the while of working out an algorithm that would prevent the digitization of a given text. He knows strange things, like the name of the French village that is farthest from a McDonald’s. Occasionally, to relax, he goes on YouTube and watches a Congolese rocket fall: Troposphère V, he never gets tired of it. This Saturday, at the moment when we take an interest in his character, he is still in front of his screen after a whole night of battle. Along with thousands of nameless zombies, he relayed a new cyber-attack against Scroogle. A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) expertly orchestrated by Anonymous, which managed to block the site for nine hours. Sweet victory, but it was just a warning. The bastards who run that site said for years that they were digitizing the planet’s libraries so they could put their contents online for free. And then overnight, they had introduced a fee to access millions of books. It was disgraceful. Disgraceful and despotic. Fabrice is a member of the Resistance; the operations he leads are legitimate acts of sabotage.
