“All the more reason . . . if it’s not her fault.”
Garnier frowns. Camille patiently explains.
“If you think that there are mitigating circumstances, why wouldn’t you let her go to trial? You testify in her defence, the psychiatrists explain that it was a moment of madness, that she is not legally responsible . . .”
“And they throw her in a mental asylum, thanks but no thanks.”
Camille moves his chair closer.
“Listen, Jean. Your first bomb caused only minor injuries, but you’re not always going to be so lucky.” (He feels like adding: “and neither are we”, but he does not). “Right now, the authorities are assessing the situation. You wanted to talk to me, and for the time being, they’re O.K. with that, but unless I get results pretty quickly, and by that I mean right now, they’re going to kick things up a gear . . . And I can tell you right now, the guys they’re going to hand you over to are no jokers.”
He comes closer still, Jean leans his head forward, as though to hear a secret.
“I’m telling you, Jean, these guys are vicious bastards . . .”
He moves back. Garnier is pale. His lower lip is trembling slightly.
“There’s no point in persisting, Jean. No-one is ever going to give in to your demands.”
Garnier swallows hard.
“We’ll see,” he says simply, “you’ll see . . .”
10.05 p.m.
The juge was prompt. Rosie Garnier, forty-six, postal delivery worker, incarcerated in Fleury-Mérogis, was extricated double-quick.
They sat her on a chair in an empty office. There is not another stick of furniture in the room, anyone wanting to sit opposite her would have to bring another chair. And this is what Camille did. They are metal chairs, heavy as a dead donkey; he did not so much carry it as drag it behind him, the shriek of metal on concrete made Rosie’s eyes narrow. Then he climbed onto it, like a character in a David Lynch film.
Camille opens the file in his lap. He looks at the photograph of Rosie taken a year earlier, just after she was sentenced. Today, she is twenty kilos lighter, but looks at least ten years older, her face is gaunt, haggard, she has bags under her eyes like bruises, she is clearly not sleeping or eating much. Only a man could fantasise about women’s prisons. Her badly cut hair is white and grey, she looks as though she is wearing a dusty wig.
Rosie.
The case file explains it. It was her father who gave her the name in 1964, the year when his idol, Gilbert Bécaud, released the single “Rosy and John”. Moved by this gesture, Rosie carried on the tradition and named her son John.
“He never liked it . . .” she told the juge. “But it’s a lovely song.”
Camille does not mince words.
“Your son claims he’s planted seven bombs,” he says, “The first obliterated half a street in the eighteenth arrondissement and there are six more. He’s promising there will be a bloodbath.”
Camille is not sure that she understands what he is saying. He settles on the most expedient method: close off every possible avenue.
“He says he’ll tell us where the bombs are if we agree to release you, you and him. And it is impossible to set you free. Absolutely impossible.”
Rosie has some difficulty digesting this information: the bombs, her son, being released, impossible. Camille drives home the last nail.
“The only thing Jean will get is life without parole.”
He leans back in his chair as though he is finished, as though the rest is none of his business.
Rosie shakes her head. She is talking to herself.
“He’s not a bad lad, my Jean . . .”
She cannot imagine her son doing such a thing. Still, Camille does not move. It takes almost a minute before the penny drops, the blood drains from her face, and her lips part with a pained, almost inaudible “oh”. Time for Camille to take the reins again.
“If you help us, the judge will take that into account at his trial, and at yours. But it’s him I’m thinking about mostly. Knocking a girl off a moped, even deliberately, is one thing; planting bombs around Paris is a very different matter. You could well be released in a couple of years, but if another one of those bombs goes off, Jean will never get out. Never. He is twenty-seven, and he’s facing fifty years in prison.”
Rosie is listening carefully, she understands.
Camille read her psychiatrist’s assessment. Not exactly Einstein. Very little education, limited ability, poor judgement, inclined to make impulsive decisions, chaotic affective responses, emotions entirely channelled into her relationship with her son . . . He studies her and finds his initial reaction confirmed. She is a stupid woman. It is always a difficult judgement to pass, you feel a niggling compassion, almost a sense of shame.
Camille has a momentary doubt.
“These bombs. Did you know about them?”
“He never tells me anything, my Jean!”
She formulates it as a general complaint, as though talking about some domestic problem.
“Madame Garnier, do you fully understand what is going on here?”
“Can I talk to him?”
This is the big question. The juge thinks they should meet soon as possible. Camille is not so sure.
“Can I see Jean?” she persists. “Talk to him . . .”
Technically, the juge is right, it is obvious that the two of them should be allowed to talk. His mother is the only leverage they have with Jean, probably the only person in the world who can convince him.
And yet Camille cannot decide. There is something odd in Rosie’s voice. Something not quite right, and until he has managed to worked out what it is . . .
“We’ll see,” he says. “We’ll see.”
He tells the juge he believes a meeting might be counterproductive.
“The mother is in a bad way, she’s been badly damaged by her time in prison. This must be one of the things he’s worried about because he went to visit her when she was first on remand, but he never went back . . . He writes to her every week, but that’s their only contact. If he sees her in this state, there’s a serious risk it will simply reinforce his demand to get her out of there . . .”
The magistrate agrees. They will wait and see.
10.15 p.m.
“Six more shells? One explosion a day? That’s what you’re telling me?”
The information is having trouble percolating.
“And he wants his mother?”
“That’s correct, Monsieur le premier ministre. His mother.”
“He thinks we’ll pack him off to Australia and wait for a postcard with the location of the bombs. Is he thick or what?”
So it is decided: a media blackout. No-one knows whether this is a good decision, but at the moment it seems the only choice is between various bad decisions.
“Come up with an official explanation for the explosion,” says the prime minister. “Something everyone can understand. Put together a draft communiqué, I don’t care how you go about it. We have to play for time, and in the meantime you . . .” (he turns to the counterterrorism officer), “uh . . . do whatever you have to do.”
As he is about to leave the room, he turns back.
“Just put an end to this bullshit!”
Once he is gone, the principal private secretary offers a free translation.
“Put Jean Garnier’s balls in a vice. And turn the screws.”
The counterterrorism agent gets up and leaves without a word.
Silence. Everyone can tell all hell is about to break loose.
Yet no-one can say why. Perhaps it is the suddenness and the severity of the situation, perhaps the speed at which events are unfolding means one tends to envisage disastrous outcomes which, in politics, are usually the most likely to ensue.
The authorities have a whole panoply of crisis response plans and disaster recovery strategies detailing how emergency services should respond in the event of major incidents. While they wait to see
whether or not Garnier will come clean, they need to act. It may be necessary to trigger the O.R.S.E.C. civil emergencies plan; they need to begin a detailed survey and analysis of the potential risks posed by the series of explosions and establish operational and mobilisation conditions . . .
10.40 p.m.
Witness statements continue to come in, but Louis has not been able to reconstruct the movements of Jean Garnier over the past weeks.
“He barely sees anyone,” Louis tells Camille, “His only friends are the guys he plays football with, and none of them have seen him for weeks. According to the neighbours, ever since his mother’s arrest, he has been in and out of the apartment, they have bumped into him shopping for groceries, but no-one has noticed anything unusual. I sent teams to interview staff at every place he made a purchase, at the agency where he hired the car . . . But Jean is the sort of customer nobody notices and no-one remembers.”
Ever since Clémence formally identified Jean Garnier, everyone on the team is agreed: they need to circulate his photograph, call for witnesses. But there is a media blackout. Orders from the ministry. The authorities are categorical. A photograph of the bomber in the morning newspapers would create panic.
“On the one hand you’ve got panic, and the other you’ve got carnage,” Camille says. “I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of whoever’s making the decisions.”
“Pretty soon the relief team will get here and he’ll be undergoing enhanced interrogation techniques, not many people can withstand that kind of grilling.”
“It won’t make any difference, he’ll hold out to the bitter end,” Camille says to Louis as they go to the coffee machine. “His plan is simple, it’s black and white. His logic is implacable because it’s simplistic, it’s impervious to nuance. As far as he’s concerned it’s yes or no. The specialist interrogators will get nowhere, I’d put money on it.”
As they wait for the relief team, Camille checks his watch more and more frequently, eager to be out of this mess.
Four men burst through the doors without even knocking.
The counterterrorism brigade is taking over.
They are all built like brick outhouses. Everything about them inspires fear: their manner, their determination, the preciseness of their movements. Jean Garnier stares at them, petrified. He has anticipated much of what would happen, and thus far everything has gone according to plan, but now the script has changed. Within seconds, he is hauled to his feet, arms twisted behind his back, handcuffed, hooded, shackled, restrained. Surrounded by the four men, he seems to have shrunk ten centimetres.
The message is clear: this is a serious gear change.
Camille does not smile, but he is relieved. Less than thirty seconds after they burst into his office, the specialists disappear with Garnier in tow.
Camille calls to the senior officer, Commandant Pelletier, a tall, square-jawed man with a salt-and-pepper moustache that dates from a previous century.
“Have fun . . .”
Pelletier remains focussed. He is clearly in his element. He is the last to leave. He has not uttered a single word.
11.15 p.m.
Camille gets in his car and sets off for Anne’s apartment, but half-way there, feeling uneasy, he stops and takes out his mobile phone.
This thing is dragging on – he texts her – Sorry . . . Maybe later tonight . . . O.K.?
He does not think before he sends it. It is not that he does not want to be with her, on the contrary, he would like to lie next to her, caress her body, smell her perfume . . . but he is puzzled, preoccupied. There is something amiss, something he cannot put his finger on. His thoughts flicker back to the counterterrorist unit; in a case such as this he does not like to think what they might be capable of. They will know what to do.
And yet . . .
Doesn’t matter how late – Anne texts back – just come.
Camille hesitates a moment; no, he will keep up his lie to Anne. He will go home.
Predictably, Doudouche is sulking. Camille is attentive, but to no avail, it is always like this when he comes home late, she pretends he does not exist.
Exhausted, he slumps fully-clothed on the sofa but cannot get to sleep; letting Anne down, lying to her, upsets him. Especially since he didn’t need to. Or maybe he did. It would have meant he was unavailable “You’re off the case now,” he tells himself, not that it makes any difference. He sits on the sofa, Doudouche on his lap, drawing (he never stops, there are roughs and sketches everywhere, it helps him to think, it is something he has always done, he replicates what he has seen from memory, which means he only really understands them in hindsight).
In his job, there are the facts, and the effect the facts have on him. It is not that he blindly trusts his own gut feeling, in fact he is more the type to be overcome by doubt, yet he listens to his hunches, his instincts, he cannot do otherwise.
And so here he is, doodling, trying to capture Rosie’s face and, next to it, the face of John. The first portrait exudes a sort of simple-minded stubbornness, the second is more complex. There is stubbornness here too, but it is more calculating. Determination is a trait they have in common. In her, it appears as intransigence; in him, as single-mindedness. They may not look like much, but they are as dangerous as the black plague.
Looking at the portraits, Camille speculates about the relationship between them.
Rosie kills her son’s girlfriend, he plans a wave of bombings to free her . . . Put side by side, these two isolated portraits do not compute. There is a glaring disparity. “You’re off the case now.” Good for you.
Not so for Jean Garnier, right now he will be going through hell. Camille has to stop drawing, because even what little he knows of enhanced interrogation techniques makes him shudder. No-one ever talks about them, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that when someone threatens to set off bombs all over Paris, they’re bound to pull out all the stops. He thinks: waterboarding, walling, stress positions, cramped confinement, heavy metal played on continuous loop . . . Do these things really exist?
Think about something else, try a different viewpoint. This is one of Camille’s techniques. Any investigation throws a certain light on things, so Camille attempts to come at it from the opposite perspective. From memory, he recreates a photograph glimpsed in Rosie Garnier’s police file; a picture of the Carole taken after she was mowed down. He sketches her hair, an almost perfect halo that seems unbearably cruel against the pool of blood shining in the harsh forensic glare. It looks like the hair of a little girl. For some reason, a dead girl with blonde hair is more upsetting. He traces the heartrending curve of her neck.
Then, finally, he drifts into unconsciousness with Doudouche curled up on his belly.
*
When the telephone rings just before four in the morning, he realises why he did not go round to Anne’s apartment, why he did not go to bed.
His intuition did not fail him.
Doudouche refuses to budge, Camille pushes her off but she mewls in protest. His very bones ache with tiredness, but he struggles to his feet and lifts the receiver with one hand while the other fumbles with the buttons of his shirt: he needs to take a shower, and quickly.
It is the juge. Camille was expecting the call. He has to go back to work. Jean Garnier is refusing to talk to the counterterrorism agents, which comes as no surprise. He wants to talk to Verhœven, no-one else. Camille has only one question: why are they giving in to his demands?
“Because it’s urgent,” says the investigating magistrate, “Garnier is claiming that the next bomb is schedule to go off at 3 p.m., we’ve got less than twelve hours.”
As soon as he hangs up, Camille calls and wakes Louis, the indispensible Louis, who also has to get up and come back to the station.
“I don’t get it,” says Louis. “It’s not exactly news that a bomb will go off in the next twelve hours. Garnier told there would be one bomb a day.”
“I know,” Camille says. “I don’t know
exactly what our friends from counterterrorism did, and frankly I don’t want to know, but Garnier started to make a confession, then suddenly he clammed up, he won’t talk to anyone but me, he says it’s non-negotiable.”
“So did he say where it is, the second bomb?”
“Yeah, that’s why they’ve called us in. Garnier says he planted it in a school.”
Day Two
4.55 a.m.
Sitting with his arms folded, chin jutting, Pelletier, the head of the Counterterrorism Squad, treats being taken off the case as a snub. As Camille comes into the room and he gets to his feet, he all but stands on tiptoe to look down on him from an even greater height. Verhœven has been dealing with such slights for fifty years and though he still finds them irritating, it would take more than this to wind him up, and besides he is too tired to fight. Besides, he thinks the rivalry between law enforcement agencies is a bit of a cliché. Even so, he stares down Pelletier. From below, unavoidably. Counterterrorism is not a department, it’s a vocation; we are not cops, we’re highly-trained specialists; if C.T. can’t get a result, then no-one can. These are just some of the messages Pelletier is conveying with this stare.
Camille is genuinely sympathetic. After all, he himself has been taken off cases, or threatened with being taken off too many times.
But he does not have time to hang around, he still has to deal with the other. Given his importance, we will capitalise him: the Other. If Pelletier is openly hostile, the Other exudes quiet self-assurance and the muted reserve of ministerial chambers; it is 5.00 a.m. but the Other is bright as a button, depressingly young, a senior post and not yet thirty, a potent brew of family connections, raw talent, will power, hard graft, ambition and luck, the sort of cocktail that sticks in your craw. The hair, the suit, the shoes, the watch, the demeanour, even the way he clears his throat, everything is part of his personal image. Camille closes his eyes and shakes the desiccated hand. At least Commandant Pelletier’s anger and frustration makes him seem like a normal human being . . .
Rosy and John Page 5