The Children Return

by Martin Walker

  “Can you fix this?” Bruno asked, handing Sami a dead laptop from the sports bag he’d brought. It was a cheap Taiwan-made model that looked very like the one Bruno had bought at the supermarket for four hundred euros.

  Sami opened it and found it dead when he tried to turn it on. He rummaged in Bruno’s bag until he found a connecting cord that fitted and looked around for an electrical socket. His eyes scanned the garden and saw a small stone outbuilding, its door open and what looked like a lawnmower inside. Sami trotted to it, looked inside and came out with an extension cord wrapped around a wheel. He plugged the power cable into the back of the computer and waited briefly. Then he turned it over and neatly removed the battery and the power plug and pressed the On button for about thirty seconds. He replaced the battery, pressed the On button and was rewarded with a momentary flare of tiny green and orange lights above the keyboard before they faded and died.

  “It’s okay, only needs new battery,” he said casually, and looked hopefully at Bruno. “You have more? And tools?”

  In order for Gilles to interview Nancy there were to be no photos, and he had to agree to refer to her simply as an American diplomat. Freddy was told to put his cameras back in his bag. Fabiola had left quickly after Sami had gone back with Momu for another session with the tribunal. Bruno had passed on to the brigadier Sami’s sketches and his revelation about the Mozart playlists. Nancy was relaying the information to Washington. Gilles kept checking his watch.

  Nancy finally emerged, having changed into a blue linen skirt, a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and flat-heeled leather boots. Bruno thought he detected a touch of eye makeup, and she was wearing a soft red lipstick and silver stud earrings. Again he had the sense of having seen that face somewhere before, but still could not place it. As she sat, Bruno was aware of a subtle hint of perfume. No longer needing to look comfortably rumpled for Sami, she seemed more at ease in this relatively formal dress. She gave a polite smile with the aplomb of a woman who had handled or chaired many such meetings.

  No one asked Bruno to leave, so he listened to Gilles’s questions and was interested to note the careful courtesy with which Nancy treated them, although she answered either briefly or with diplomatic caution. Her remarks disappointed Bruno. So far she’d given the verbal equivalent of the brigadier’s summary, and Bruno wondered what Gilles could do with it.

  “You seem very comfortable with Sami,” Gilles said suddenly. “Have you come to like him?”

  “I think anyone would sympathize with what he’s been through, and it must have taken guts and initiative to escape from the terrorists,” she said, with a smile that added something human and convincing to the words.

  “So you believe his story?”

  “We’ll have to see what the medical tribunal says, but so far everything he says checks out and he is being very helpful.” Again, her body language and facial expression added emphasis. Bruno was aware that she was deliberately setting out to charm Gilles, even while a transcript of her words would read blandly on a page. He decided to intervene.

  “I’m not sure Nancy has been briefed yet on the traumatic events of Sami’s childhood,” Bruno said. “They help explain his problems today.”

  Briefly, he outlined Sami’s experience in the Algerian civil war, watching the rape and slaughter of his family and staring for two days at their severed heads.

  Nancy’s eyes went wide in horror, and she brought her hand to her mouth. For a moment Bruno thought she was going to be sick.

  “That’s incredible,” she said, her voice hoarse, as if her throat was dry. “I’d better make sure Washington knows; it’s important context for everything else about Sami.” She shook her head and stared at Bruno. “Kind of hard to see him as just another ruthless terrorist after learning that. How old was he?”

  “About five, I believe. You might want to ask Momu about it.”

  “Was that on the record?” Gilles asked. “Hard to see him as a terrorist once you know that?”

  Nancy looked at him in silence, considering, and then said, “I can’t imagine how anyone wouldn’t be shattered by it. And with that memory of his …” Her voice trailed off as she pondered a moment. “Maybe I should rephrase it. You can quote me as saying that any assessment of Sami’s role and his psychological condition has to take account of the savage trauma he suffered as a child at the hands of Islamic extremists.”

  “Do you think Sami should be sent back to the United States to face justice?”

  “We and French officials are still trying to establish exactly what happened to him in Afghanistan, before we start considering judicial issues.” She rose. “Okay, I think we’re done here. You have a deadline and I guess you’ll want to see Momu as well, to get some details about that terrible incident in Sami’s childhood.”

  She shook Gilles’s hand, nodded to Bruno and said, “We need to talk.” She led the way out of the walled garden in silence and into the park where they usually went for their jogs. Bruno restrained his curiosity and waited for her to begin.

  “I gather you’ve seen Deutz’s report on jihadists in prison,” she began once they were in the fringe of the trees. “What did you think?”

  “Impressive but unsettling,” he said. Parts of the report had sickened him. “Heaven knows what a human rights lawyer would do with it.”

  Deutz had used a wing at the top-security prison where the cells had been wired for sound and video. In the first phase, he had simply monitored the recruiting techniques deployed on the new arrivals. But then he had started using standard prison-management tools, inserting stool pigeons and sending in hardened trusties to challenge the jihadists’ power. One of them ended up dead in the showers, hanging from a pipe. It was listed as a suicide, with a note that the video had not been functioning that day. Deutz tried using tame imams, but the prisoners simply refused to talk to them. His best results had come from inserting homosexual prisoners into the wing and using the resulting photographs to blackmail the jihadists into cooperating with threats to send still photos of the encounters to their families. Once that first moment of cooperation was on film, Deutz could threaten to expose the man to his fellow jihadists as an informer.

  “It’s not something we’d get away with in Guantánamo,” Nancy said drily. “Not after those photos came out from Abu Ghraib.”

  “I didn’t think we could get away with it in France,” Bruno replied. “And I’m not sure what Deutz means when he talks of success. Getting them to inform on one another is one thing, but they’re still jihadists and they’ll hate us all the more.”

  “That’s what I think. I’m sick of us being seen as the bad guys.”

  “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked.

  “In a way, but there’s also Deutz’s claim that the scars might not have been punishment. He could be right. Maybe Sami was not whipped into obedience.”

  “Sometimes I wonder about that,” Bruno replied. “There are occasional flashes in Sami’s eyes; I don’t know whether it’s intelligence or if he’s slyly observing us to see how we react to him. Maybe it’s a survival mechanism he developed in Afghanistan, watching to see what he has to do to win approval. I think Sami knows his bombs killed people; you remember how he reacted to that card he thought looked like a bomb?”

  Nancy swept her hand through her hair impatiently. “You mean he did what he had to do to stay alive?”

  “Yes, but he’s still an autistic kid. I don’t know what goes on in his head. That’s what the tribunal is for.”

  “Deutz sees himself playing devil’s advocate, I guess,” said Nancy. “But it’s not just that, it’s the methods he describes using in that paper. They worry the hell out of me. Do you think they might backfire on us if there’s a leak of that paper he wrote? We could pay for it down the road when details start to come out.”

  “I thought you Americans were his big supporters.”

  “Some are; those who want quick results an
d big headlines. There’s a growing number of us who think this could be a much longer kind of war, and we need to be a lot more subtle in the way we wage it. What about you?”

  He shrugged; why would a high-flying diplomat want the views of a village policeman? “There’s always a problem with balancing short-term results and long-term concerns. Break a man today, and his sons may make you pay for it later.”

  “Not many politicians look that far ahead,” she said.

  “I’ve noticed.” They had reached the edge of the parkland, where the scattered trees began to thicken into the woods that climbed all the way up the slope—oaks, chestnut and walnut trees mainly, good country for wild boar. Bruno led Nancy to the side, away from the wild woodland.

  “Thanks for steering Deutz away when Gilles turned up,” he said.

  “The brigadier took care of it, but I don’t think it was Gilles that set Deutz off. It was Fabiola. He kept asking who brought her here.”

  “Professional rivalry?”

  She shrugged. They walked on in a silence for a while. Bruno broke it by asking her whether she’d ever worked in the Arab world.

  “A few liaison visits to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, one tour in Iraq, that’s all. I don’t speak Arabic. Why do you ask?”

  “You seemed surprised about what happened to Sami in the Algerian civil war.”

  “It’s like when you read about the Taliban shooting girls who’re learning to read and burning their schools. Unless it’s one girl you can see and identify with, it doesn’t stick, unlike those wretched photos of prisoners in Abu Ghraib that went around the world. They defined us.”

  “And you’re worried that Deutz could define us all over again?”

  “Yes, I’m wondering if we really know what we’re doing. There’s a line of poetry about ignorant armies that clash by night. That seems to sum us up.”

  Bruno glanced at her, surprised by her frankness as much as her views. He’d assumed she’d follow the Washington conventional wisdom. But he understood her snatch of poetry. He’d been a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia with an ill-defined mission and no coherent chain of command. But he’d also been in good units with good leaders, clear goals.

  “Isabelle told me you were in that secret war in Chad, fighting the Libyans.”

  Startled that she knew of it, and wondering again how much else Isabelle had told her, Bruno was reassured to note that she was watching him with polite interest rather than with an inquisitor’s gleam in her eye. With some distant memory of stern lectures on security before the Chad operation, he tried to brush the topic aside. “Nothing very secret about it, mainly a training mission. We were teaching the Chad troops to use modern weapons while they taught us how to move in the desert.”

  Nancy looked at her watch, and said, “Sorry, just checking when I can reach somebody in Washington.”

  “I presume they’re pressing you to deliver Sami,” Bruno said.

  “I think we’re getting more out of him here. It’s a matter of persuading people of that despite the politicians and the talk shows.”

  “So you’re on our side,” he joked, wondering if she’d smile. He was also wondering why she’d brought up Isabelle’s name. Nancy did not strike him as the sort of woman who did anything by chance.

  “Just temporarily on your side,” she said, and her smile looked genuine enough, coming with a twinkle in her eyes and an impish look that suited her. “So don’t count on it lasting.” She took his arm companionably, and they strolled in silence for a few paces.

  “I hear you met Deutz before?” he said.

  “Yes, when I arranged his visit to Quantico, where our psychological people are based. They didn’t like him. Apparently he was rather too confident of his French charm. One woman nearly brought a sexual harassment case. It took a lot of phone calls to get him into Guantánamo.”

  “I thought our government didn’t approve of Guantánamo.”

  “It doesn’t, officially. Did you read all of that report Deutz wrote?”

  “Yes, there was nothing about Guantánamo in there.”

  “No, but it was clear that he knew our smooth-talking imam, Ghlamallah.”

  “I must have missed that,” Bruno said.

  “First rule of academic papers: always read the footnotes and the acknowledgments,” she said. “Ghlamallah is thanked for his cooperation and insight. Reading between the lines, it sounds as though Deutz saw Ghlamallah as one of his tame imams. You know Ghlamallah was in Saudi Arabia, working with the Saudis on their detox program?”

  “What do you mean by ‘detox’?”

  “Detoxification, using Islam to persuade jihadists of the error of their ways.”

  “Does it work?”

  “In some cases, but it’s slow,” she said. “We’re groping. We’ll try anything.”

  “I don’t think we’re groping with Sami. I mean, he’s doing his best to help.”

  “That’s why it’s so frustrating to sit around this place while the tribunal gives him Rorschach tests or whatever they do. I’ve had a whole lot more mug shots sent over that I can’t wait to show him, see if he recognizes anybody. As it is, I’m going stir-crazy here.”

  She stopped, let go of his arm and turned to face him. “You know this area. Where should we go for dinner? Your favorite place, my treat, or at least Uncle Sam’s treat.” Her face had that impish look again.

  “Well, there is one thing I was hoping to do this evening, if the brigadier lets me out,” said Bruno, smiling. “It might make it easier if I’m taking you. But it will be very noisy, very French, a lot of people, many of them good friends, and a lot of wine. It’s the vendange supper at the local vineyard, to celebrate the end of the harvest. And I should warn you that Gilles will probably be there, if he finishes writing in time. Have you ever eaten fresh-roasted wild boar?”

  19

  The smell of roasting meat grew stronger as Bruno and Nancy walked down the long avenue, already lined with parked cars, that led to the Domaine. Bruno had little choice but to leave his Land Rover by the entrance gate, a long stroll from the winery where the vendange party was being held. It gave him time to explain to Nancy how the vineyard had been saved from financial trouble by the mayor’s plan to raise cash by selling shares to the citizens of St. Denis.

  “The party’s late this year, so the grapes will already have been pressed,” he explained. “They had to rush the picking because of the weather. So you won’t be able to taste the fresh grape juice.”

  “And is the wine you make here good?” she asked, turning her head to look at him as they talked, and sounding genuinely interested.

  She was looking splendid, with that easy style that comes from deep self-confidence. Nancy was wearing a red turtleneck sweater, a leather jacket and jeans tucked into knee-high brown boots. Her dark hair fell in natural curls, flattering her square jaw with its slightly prominent chin. Except for her generous lips and eyes that were lively with intelligence, Bruno would have thought it a face too strong for beauty. But there was something special about her, perhaps the proud way she carried her head or the way she took part so easily in the male world of politics and security. Whatever it was, he knew he’d remember this woman.

  “Tell me when you’ve tasted it,” he answered her. “It will be last year’s wine. Julien, who runs the vineyard, usually does better with his whites, but it’s all very drinkable. It may not compare, though, with the fine wines you drink on the diplomatic circuit in Paris.”

  “Some of the embassies, you’d be surprised,” she said, grinning. “And if you knew what we used to drink in college, you’d be appalled.”

  “Do you know Bergerac wines?” He raised his voice over the growing sounds of revelry as they approached the winery.

  “You bet,” she said. “Isabelle made a point of serving them at her place. That was the first time I had foie gras with Monbazillac. And there was another, a red that she said was one of your favorites, named after some baron who was al
ways drawing his glove to challenge people to duels.”

  “Château de Tiregand,” Bruno said, smiling, and privately touched to think of Isabelle shopping around the wine caves of Paris to find wines to which he’d introduced her.

  They rounded the corner to see the golden stone of the inner courtyard turned into a rosy pink by the glow from the giant fire pit on which the boars were roasting. When the twilight gave way to darkness, Bruno knew the whole scene would turn a rich red as the ashes smoldered. He felt the strange sensation stealing over him of time slipping, of the modern France of high-speed trains and computers giving way to a scene that was almost medieval or perhaps even older. The setting of stone and fire and meat roasting over open flames could have taken place in this valley in days when men carried swords and wore chain mail and kept guard against English raiders, or millennia ago when they wore furs and painted prehistoric beasts on the walls of caves.

  “Wow, we could be back with the Knights of the Round Table,” said Nancy, squeezing his arm. “This is great. You ought to sell tickets.”

  He shook his head. “This is just for us locals. It’s all done by volunteers. For this to work, people need to know each other.”

  “Then I’m honored,” she replied. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  The courtyard was half filled by four long rows of tables, lit by ranks of hurricane lamps and candles in glass jars. Places were set for thirty or forty people at each one, and a large crowd was milling around a makeshift bar where large jugs were being filled from barrels of wine. Another cluster of people was standing back from the heat at the great fire as men with wet towels around their hands wrestled to lift one of the long metal spits. The weight of the wild boar bowed it slightly as they carried it to another set of tables where two men in white aprons were already carving the first boar.

  “Where have you been, Bruno?” called Stéphane jovially, waving one of the big carving knives.