The brigadier had taken over the commandant’s office in the gendarmerie, and he and J-J were each talking on separate cell phones when Bruno was shown in by Yveline Gerlache. Her supposedly temporary appointment as commandant of the small squad of gendarmes in St. Denis had been extended so often it seemed like it was becoming permanent. After a nervous start earlier in the year, which Bruno put down to this being Yveline’s first time in command, she had settled in well. She gave him a warm smile and a firm handshake when she came out to greet him.
Yveline had been a star athlete at the officer training school in Melun and almost made the French Olympic field-hockey team. She’d already won the women’s singles trophy in the annual tournament of the town tennis club. Once she had learned that Bruno was training a girls’ team to play rugby as well as the usual boys, she’d volunteered to help. The trips to away matches had given them time to talk and get to know each other a little better. Fabiola had arranged a dinner for Yveline to meet some of the other women in town and had asked Bruno to help with the cooking. He’d been delighted to do so and had made a joke of it, dressing as a waiter and serving the food and wine before leaving them to their desserts and coffee. They had gone on until well after midnight, Fabiola later told him.
“Glad to see you looking all right,” said the brigadier, closing his phone. As always, he looked as if his hair had just been cut. Like many soldiers he seemed to transfer the neatness of parade uniforms to his civilian clothes. He wore a starched white shirt with a tightly knotted silk tie and an anonymous but well-cut suit of navy blue. Despite the trip by helicopter, his trousers looked newly pressed. His shoes were black lace-ups, and his sole idiosyncrasy was to keep a white silk handkerchief in his sleeve.
“My doctor said to warn you I might pass out and I’m supposed to go straight to bed once this meeting’s over,” Bruno said.
“In that case you’d better take my chair,” said Yveline, rising to perch on the window ledge.
The brigadier waited until they were settled in and said, “I’ve just been talking to Paris. They’ve accepted my recommendation that we keep watching the Toulouse mosque but take no further action at this time. It’s more important to know what’s going on than to go in bullheaded and provoke all sorts of Muslim complaints about police discrimination. I know you won’t like it, but that’s the plan. It’s what we’ve been doing for twenty years, infiltrating the bastards and turning them rather than just arresting them. I think that’s why Paris hasn’t been through the kind of hell they’ve seen in New York, London and Madrid.”
“I thought we were looking for two murder suspects,” Bruno said. “And we have to stop a second killing. I don’t think they were carrying that sniper’s rifle for fun.”
“That’s not the priority,” the brigadier replied, his voice as crisp and official as his appearance. “The priority is to establish just how far this mosque is tied up with Afghans and jihadis and to find out who is behind it. The chief imam is on the government’s advisory board on Islamic assimilation, so if he’s involved it would be very embarrassing. You probably know that glib deputy of his from the TV talk shows, Ghlamallah, the one who speaks oh so reasonably about a new Islam that’s being reformed to integrate with European democracy. You may have seen an op-ed piece he wrote about it for Le Monde the other day.”
The brigadier made no effort to keep the sneer out of his voice, and J-J snorted from his perch on a corner of the desk. Bruno noted that Yveline kept her face impassive. He suspected that, like him, she didn’t agree with the brigadier’s mockery. Bruno had heard Tayeb Ghlamallah speak on the radio and thought he’d made a lot of sense. There were six million Muslims in France, nearly a tenth of the population, and an even greater proportion among those under the age of twenty. Without assimilation and a more tolerant, less defensive Islam, France faced a difficult future.
Bruno, aware that he was feeling light-headed, made an effort of will to keep his voice reasonable. “If they mean what they say, then the imams should be eager to help us track down a couple of murderers, all the more so since Rafiq was one of their own. I presume he was a Muslim.”
“Rafiq may have been born into a Muslim family, but he never went to mosque until we asked him to start doing so,” the brigadier said. “We inserted him into that new prison at Seysses, and he managed to get himself recruited. He’s been in that mosque in Toulouse for three months; a nice little operation until he got himself killed. But we don’t know how much these thugs got out of him first.”
“The preliminary autopsy says he was still alive when they set his feet on fire,” said J-J. “But they’d tortured him first, jamming that cattle prod up his backside.”
“I had a taste of that cattle prod, and I’d have told them anything they wanted to know,” said Bruno. “But there’s another part of this which may be connected. A young Muslim from St. Denis has just turned up at our army base in Afghanistan, wanting to come home. He was supposed to be at the special school they have attached to that mosque in Toulouse. His name is Sami.”
“Special school? You mean he’s retarded?” J-J asked.
“No, and we no longer use that word; he’s smarter than you or me in math. He’s just different, autistic. He hardly ever speaks.”
“What was he doing over there?” the brigadier asked.
“I don’t know, but he’s coming back here as a distressed citizen in a danger zone. The mayor looked up the regulation. Here’s a copy of his file.”
“Sami Belloumi, born in Algeria, arrived in France as a child fifteen years ago and adopted by his aunt and uncle, Momu al-Bakr of St. Denis, naturalized as a French citizen the following year,” the brigadier read aloud. He looked up and asked Yveline, “When we’ve finished could you scan this thumbprint on his ID card and e-mail a copy to my office. Let’s see if that tells us any more about him.”
The brigadier put the file on the desk before him and considered the possibilities. “This could be just what we want to smoke out the jihadis. They think Sami is here, or on his way, and presumably they’ll want to stop him from talking. That means they’ll be coming here again, and this time we’ll be waiting for them.”
“But they’ll know he’s autistic and doesn’t speak much, and anything he says isn’t the kind of evidence that is likely to convince a court,” said Bruno. He hated the idea of Sami being used as live bait, let alone turning his town into a killing ground. “Why would they take that risk?”
“Thanks to Rafiq, we know quite a lot about that mosque already,” said the brigadier. “We’ve been monitoring their phones and computers for months.”
“Did Rafiq explain what he was doing before he got killed?” asked J-J.
“Just that two men he called the action team were up to something and he’d follow, observe and report. We know their names and we can pick them up whenever we want, but right now I’d rather just watch them. It’s not the foot soldiers we want, it’s the guys who are pulling the strings.”
“Did Rafiq have a family?” asked Bruno.
The brigadier shook his head. “Divorced, no kids. We don’t use family men for undercover work.”
“I’m sure there’ll be friends from his regiment who’d want to know,” said Bruno.
The brigadier shook his head. “We’ll keep this quiet. An unidentified man has been found dead by a burned-out car. Police are trying to identify him. That’s all we say to the media.”
“The killers left him handcuffed to a tree,” said Bruno. “It seems to me they knew he was undercover and they’re sending you a message.”
“Of course they are,” the brigadier replied. “But that’s no reason for us to respond. If pressed, J-J can leak to a friendly journalist that it looks like a gangland killing. Not a word about mosques or anything else. I’ll bring down a team to babysit Momu and his wife, and Sami when he gets here. Any idea when that will be, Bruno?”
“He should be on the next military flight from Dushanbe, but you’ll probably
know before I do. I assume the flights come into Creil.” It was the main airfield for France’s military transports, a big base outside Paris that Bruno had used several times in his army days.
“That’s right, but there might be media there. We’ll arrange for this one to land at Évreux instead,” the brigadier said. Not for the first time, Bruno was struck by the wide authority the brigadier seemed to have in the French military as well as its police and intelligence services.
“I’ll make sure it all goes smoothly at that end, and I’ll get them to fly him on to the Mérignac air base outside Bordeaux so you can pick him up there. In the meantime,” the brigadier went on, “there’s a shrink we use, deputy head of the prison psychiatric service, name of Deutz, a very smart guy with lots of diplomas.” Deutz, he explained, had noticed and then studied the way jihadis were recruiting in prisons. He had drafted profiles of the kinds of prisoners they recruited and proposed strategies to counter them.
“He probably knows more about French jihadis than anyone else, but he’s also a top-notch psychologist. Or is it ‘psychiatrist’? I never know the difference. Anyway, he’s got all the necessary security clearances, and I’d like him to talk with Sami and see how much we can learn. He could be an intelligence gold mine, and this fellow Deutz is just the man to get it out of him. Here, take a look at this analysis he wrote.” The brigadier pulled a slim, photocopied report from his briefcase and pushed it across to Bruno.
“We might have trouble persuading Momu to cooperate,” Bruno said, glancing at the report. It came with a Ministry of Justice heading above the title “Challenges and Opportunities of Jihadists in the Penal System.”
“That’s your problem, Bruno. Just tell Momu that this is the price he has to pay to get Sami back into France without trouble. If he doesn’t like it we can whip Sami straight into jail as a terrorist suspect. There’s a facility for psycho prisoners at Fleury-Mérogis just outside Paris, and it would be easier for Deutz to see him there. But I want Sami down here where the Toulouse jihadis know where to find him.”
“So Deutz would stay here in St. Denis?”
“We’ll probably put him up at the écouteurs’ school up the valley; cheaper that way.”
Bruno knew the place, an old château converted into a training academy for the translators who worked with French intelligence, monitoring phone and Internet traffic.
“Be nice to Deutz, Bruno, he’s very well thought of. The Brits and the Americans both invited him over to talk about jihadi recruitment in prisons. He’s an athletic type, alpinist, a bit of a ladies’ man, I hear. You and he should get along well,” the brigadier said with the suspicion of a wink.
“Sir,” said Bruno crisply. He had learned in the army that this monosyllabic answer sufficed for most occasions, particularly when he had no idea what to say. Once again, Yveline’s face was impassive. New as she was to the gendarmes, she must have become accustomed to the macho banter that had characterized police and military establishments throughout Bruno’s career and doubtless long before. Some policewomen tried to join in, which never worked. Some made waspish comments, which made matters worse. Most ignored it and developed the kind of blank, distant stare that Yveline had mastered.
“Just to clarify, sir,” said Yveline, addressing the brigadier. “We have the murder of an employee of the French state on our turf. We know of two suspects, armed with a sniper’s rifle and a cattle prod, who also stole a car and got away from a pursuit by gendarmes. We have witnesses who can identify these two suspects, who also committed an assault on the chief of police here. We know they are based at this mosque in Toulouse, but we are not to attempt to arrest them. Is that right?”
“Absolutely,” said the brigadier, raising his eyebrows and studying Yveline as if for the first time.
“And you agree with this, sir?” she asked J-J.
“The ministers of justice and of the interior have put the brigadier in charge of this matter, so, yes, I agree,” said J-J, looking amused. He knew the form, as did Bruno. Yveline was about to be introduced to the way that French law worked once the intelligence agencies were involved and the crime in question carried political overtones.
“I’ll need that order in writing, sir, otherwise I’d feel it my duty to tear that mosque apart to find these killers.”
She spoke with a flat, unemotional politeness that impressed Bruno. Once, he might have made the same objection, even used the same phrase. But he was older now, more experienced in some of these informal aspects of law enforcement. Above all, he saw the sense in the brigadier’s strategy. Bruno’s job would be to ensure none of this damaged St. Denis or its citizens, including Momu and Sami.
The brigadier studied Yveline for a long moment and then picked up his cell phone, looked up a number and called it. “Ah, my dear general,” he began when it was answered. “Brigadier Lannes here from the minister’s office. Did you receive my note about this nasty murder just outside St. Denis this morning? You did? Excellent. Perhaps you would confirm to your estimable commandant in St. Denis that she comes under my orders until further notice. Thank you.”
He passed the phone to Yveline, who listened briefly, said, “Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” and handed the phone back.
“Any more questions, comments, suggestions?” the brigadier asked.
He paused, glancing from Bruno to Yveline and back again before speaking.
“Let us not forget that when the intelligence phase of this operation is complete, then you, Mademoiselle Commandante, and you, Bruno, will have the agreeable duty of arresting these two murderers. We’re not bringing them to justice now, but we will most certainly do so at a time that suits us.”
5
Bruno awoke the next morning feeling wonderfully refreshed but guilty when he realized how late it was. He couldn’t recall the last time he had slept past nine. He fed his chickens, went for a fast run in the woods, showered and headed directly into town, still sipping from the bottle of orange juice Pamela had brought him the previous evening, along with the bouillon Fabiola had promised.
After the meeting with the brigadier, Bruno had gotten home midafternoon. Earlier he’d identified his two attackers from a selection of surveillance shots on the brigadier’s laptop, taken at and around the mosque. The one with the cattle prod was known as Ali the Caïd and the other was known only as Zhern’ber, the Strong Man. After checking his chickens, Bruno had gone straight to sleep as soon as he lay down on his bed.
He’d been woken a few hours later by Pamela’s arrival. Darkness had fallen, and he’d been unsure of the time and surprised to find himself drenched in sweat. Visions of Rafiq’s body in the rain still churned in his head from a disturbed dream. He had a fierce headache and felt weak as a kitten. He had to take Pamela’s arm to climb from his bed and stagger into the shower. By the time he returned, she had changed the sheets, laid out one of the clean rugby shirts he used instead of pajamas, and put the hot bouillon in a mug alongside a bottle of aspirin on the bedside table.
“I didn’t mean to be angry at you,” she said when he was back in bed, sipping at the bouillon. “I was angry at me for feeling so …” Her hands groped at the air, looking for the right word. “For feeling so involved.” She seemed to have trouble forming the word.
“Apart from anything else we are to one another, I’m your friend,” he said quietly, choosing his words with care. “You’d feel just as involved if Fabiola was hurt. You weren’t conscious to see it, but she reacted pretty fiercely when you fell from your horse.”
Pamela brushed his words aside. “But it’s the ‘anything else’ that matters here, Bruno, don’t you see? Here in your bedroom, where we’ve been—I don’t need to spell it out. I’ve had that Jacques Brel song in my head all day, ‘La Chanson des Vieux Amants.’ ”
Suddenly, she’d stood up and collected her bag. “Fabiola said I wasn’t to stay too long and not to upset you. I’m sorry.”
She bent and kissed him chastely on the forehea
d. “Your fever’s gone. Sleep well and don’t worry about the horses in the morning. Unless we hear otherwise we’ll expect you in the evening.”
She left him trying to remember the words of the Brel song about two lovers, after an affair that had lasted twenty years, remembering old fights and passions. The song had stuck in his head as he sipped at his bouillon. He groped for that line about the strange skill they had acquired, to grow old without ever growing up.
He loved Pamela dearly, enjoyed being with her and could even imagine growing old with her. But she had taken the firm decision that she did not want children, and that, for Bruno, was the insuperable problem. With each year that passed, he felt more and more the need to be a father and to find the right woman to bear his children and help raise them. He sighed and sank back on the pillows, expecting a long and sleepless night of self-questioning and sadness at being childless. And then he thought of the great lottery of parenthood, never knowing how the young would turn out once they became themselves. His thoughts turned to Momu and his wife, Dillah, the grief that young Sami must have caused them and the mixture of joy and guilt and confusion they must be feeling at the prospect of his rejoining them, and the next thing he knew it was morning and he was very late for work.
The usual stack of mail was on his desk, and atop the pile lay an envelope addressed to the mayor and already opened. A yellow Post-it note was attached, which asked, in the mayor’s careful handwriting, for Bruno to deal with the contents. “This comes as news to me,” the mayor had added.
The envelope was of heavy paper, and the name and address of a Paris law firm was embossed on the flap. The address was on the Rue de la Paix, which Bruno knew to be close to the Opéra, a desirable and presumably expensive location. Bruno skimmed the opening greetings and then, increasingly fascinated, sat down in his swivel chair to read.
The Children Return Page 4