He felt strong. Ready to accept everything, to put up with anything. Bastien and Véronique’s story might have turned tragic, but in a few weeks or a few months it might have a happy ending. Jealousy didn’t necessarily lead to the worst.
When he opened the front door, Claire, Léo, and Séverine gave him a standing ovation. They’d heard about his exploits on the radio and the regional TV news.
“You were even on TV,” Léo said, his eyes full of pride. “Just for a second, but we had time to see you as you came out of the house. The undershirt was great. But if you want my advice, you need to stop running and start lifting weights.”
Gilles savored this moment. His fifteen minutes of fame shone in his son’s eyes. Not every father could boast of having seen such a spark illuminate the usually dull eyes of a pimply, silent adolescent. Although Leo limited himself to a manly slap of the hands with his father, Séverine coiled up against him for a tender caress. For a long time, he ran his hand through the mane of brown hair she’d inherited from her mother.
Then it was Claire’s turn. Their bodies melted together and their lips met. Léo and Séverine modestly moved away. They had the charming idea of setting the table while their parents kissed.
“I’m proud to be your wife,” Claire told him when she had recovered the use of her tongue.
Dinner was excellent. Filets of sole with rice and mushrooms. Gilles had not had time to eat anything since morning, and he was hungry as a bear. As he ate, he told them about his adventure. He avoided certain details of his conversation with Bastien Gali but could not omit the general theme.
“It’s crazy to be that jealous,” Séverine commented.
“She did cheat on him, though,” Léo replied with the brutal certainty of a sixteen-year-old macho. “That’s not cool.”
“Yeah, but to want to burn down a whole neighborhood . . . The neighbors weren’t to blame!”
“That’s true.”
The parents exchanged looks as neutral as possible and abstained from any participation in this exchange. After dinner, they cleared the table together. Léo went back to hole up with his computer, while Séverine sat down on the couch.
Claire insisted that the three of them watch a film on TV, Embrassez qui vous voudrez.15 A comedy by Michel Blanc, with trenchant dialogue and marvelous acting by a bunch of French movie stars. Gilles sat between his two women. Claire pressed her thigh against his and took his hand.
He didn’t much care for the film. All about couples and sentimental mix-ups with the inevitable lies and sexual encounters they entailed. So that was all that was left in the world these days . . . He thought again about what Gali had said to him a few hours earlier, and when he saw women in love he too now saw only Claire, and in the men they were embracing only an unknown silhouette. But the day’s satisfaction, and also the alcohol to some extent, made a kind of armor for him. Exhausted by all the excitement, he kept dozing off. He lost the thread of the story. It didn’t matter: he’d understood the general meaning.
An obvious point woke him up. He needed sleep. For a long time, he hadn’t been sleeping enough, and he was exhausted. Under such conditions it was impossible to struggle against his demons. When he felt strong, as he did tonight, he was able to keep them at a distance. He had to recover his energy. Sleep, and then physical activity. He saw no other way of getting out of this.
15“Kiss whomever you want,” English title Summer Things (2002).
CHAPTER 22
On Monday, everyone was back at Perpignan police headquarters. Around the coffee machine, the policemen wished each other a happy new year. Most of them were talking about holidays, gifts, feasts, and drinking bouts. However, some preferred to talk about the USAP’s next match.16 Only Agent Ripoll and Lieutenant Llach were talking about police matters, but solely regarding their labor union.
“I could lose a hundred euros a month off my pension if they do away with the ‘one-fifth’ bonus,” André Ripoll moaned.
Joan Llach, the local union representative, tried to reassure him.
“But we’re not going to let that happen, trust me. We’re going to fight. That is a concession we won in 1957, just think of that—1957! The government can’t just take that away from us . . .” The reform of their particular retirement plan was arousing discontent among the police. It was in fact proposed to simply eliminate a bonus based on the number of years in service. The subject didn’t much interest Sebag. He had just had his coffee at the Carlit, which had fortunately reopened, and he was finishing his first cigarette of the day. Smoking was prohibited in the cafeteria but the policemen had granted themselves a little dispensation: through the open window, they smoked outside, and when the tramontane wasn’t blowing too hard, it was bearable for everyone.
Sebag put out his cigarette butt in the ashtray attached to the outside wall under the window, then went back to his office. He was tired. The day before, he’d gone to run on the heights above Saint-Estève. Getting back into running had proven difficult.
Molina had not yet arrived, and Gilles was tempted to allow himself a swallow of whiskey. He always had a bottle within easy reach. That was stupid and dangerous, and probably cowardly to boot, but he couldn’t seem to regain control over it. Despite Claire’s love and affection. Mornings were especially difficult. He woke early, always with dark thoughts and new questions. They matured during the night and wrenched him out of his sleep. Each morning, he had to reinvent his life. A few stretches, a good liter of black coffee, kisses for his kids, and a kiss for his wife. And a good slug of whiskey when he got to work! Too often, that drink was not the last. The slope was slippery, he knew. There was no lack of examples of that in his line of work. He’d seen too many cops, even good cops, go off the rails this way.
He was aware that this was an unhealthy game. A kind of Russian roulette. But he found alcohol less dangerous than drugs. He reached for the handle of his desk drawer.
“Happy New Year, hero!”
Behind his back, the door flew open and Molina, smiling, came and stood in front of him. As he did once a year, he gave him a big kiss.
“And health above all!”
Gilles felt it necessary to ask for news.
“So, did it go well with your sons?”
Jacques’s elder son had turned eighteen a few weeks earlier, and the younger was the same age as Léo.
“Mm . . . yes. What a gift to celebrate Christmas Eve on New Year’s Eve! We were at my parents’ house and we’d hardly finished off the bûche de Noël before the boys left to party at their friends’ house. I ended up sitting there like a dope, tête-à-tête with my folks. Great! At midnight we kissed and I went to bed.”
“You went to bed at midnight on New Year’s Eve? What about your English girl?”
“She went home for a few days. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Maybe I missed that . . .”
“By the way, you don’t look any better than when I left. You didn’t like the gasoline fumes?”
“I loved them. I sniff my car’s gas tank every morning now.”
“Otherwise, what’s new here, apart from the drama on Rue Viollet-le-Duc?”
“Well, as people say, nothing but old news, nothing to report. Except for this business in Clos Banet, a pair of burglaries in Vernet, and a conjugal argument over by Saint-Martin that ended with a suicide.”
“Marvelous. Happy New Year, good health, right? Was it the guy who offed himself?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“As you said: he offed himself. Jumped off a sixth-story balcony.”
“Was he badly hurt?”
Sebag told Molina about the fall onto the car, which absorbed part of the impact, and Valls’s death the following night, despite the efforts made to save him.
“What was the argument about? His wife wanted to run off
with somebody else, is that it?”
“You’re a soothsayer . . .”
“Go ahead, make fun of me. OK, so in short it wasn’t a big deal. I hope the crooks are going to wake up a little.”
He jerked his head toward the floor above.
“Otherwise, the Old Man is going to want to put us on cases involving marijuana and cigarette smuggling again.”
Tobacco was sold at half the price in Spain, and trafficking in cigarettes had greatly increased in recent years. In this department where the unemployment rate was among the highest in the country, a lot of people were engaging in that sort of thing. A few months earlier, the police and customs agents had broken up a Mafia-style smuggling network, but trafficking continued in a more ad hoc way: a few cartons bought by individuals in Perthus and La Jonquera were sold illicitly on the streets of Perpignan or in bars whose customers were not very scrupulous. So far as marijuana was concerned, it was the local cultivation of the plant that took off. Seeds could easily be bought on the other side of the Pyrenees, and private plots were becoming more numerous. These neo-farmers often began with two or three pots on a balcony, for their own use, and then expanded their production and started selling it, thus giving themselves a valuable complement to their wages or compensation. Some of them, it seems, even increased their production during the holidays to help pay for their children’s Christmas gifts.
“I admit that I’d prefer a little holdup,” Molina added. “Something that wasn’t too awful, but that would get us out a bit.”
“And preferably between 10 A.M. and 5 P.M. . . .”
“Obviously!”
The small conference room on the third floor was almost full for the traditional Monday morning meeting. The first meeting of the new year. When Gilles and Jacques came into the room, Julie Sadet, François Ménard, Joan Llach, and Thierry Lambert were already there. Lambert, the youngest lieutenant, was tanned from having spent two weeks on vacation in the Antilles. He was sitting at the end of the table, each of his colleagues having taken care to keep their distance. The young cop had developed a phobia that had become a genuine vicious cycle: fearing that he had BO, he was constantly spraying himself with a cheap toilet water that his co-workers found unbearable. Thus it was his perfume rather than his odor that they were trying to avoid. Not knowing the real reason for this ostracism, Lambert doused himself even more often with perfume.
After opening a window, Molina sat down next to Sebag and murmured to him: “When Thierry’s around, I think about the locker rooms of my youth. Ah . . . the intoxicating aroma of camphor, the acrid fragrance of manly sweat, the bitter effluvia of dirty underpants and damp socks . . . What a delight!”
The superintendent’s face wore the somber expression it had on bad days. His right hand rested on a stack of files. He opened one of them and spread out the sheets of paper in front of him. Then he scratched his nose but didn’t chew on his lips. “A category 3 storm on a scale of 5,” Sebag thought.
“I’ve received new instructions from the Ministry of the Interior,” Castello began, looking at each of the policemen in turn. “Our stats are not good, we’re being strongly urged to improve our performance.“
The lieutenants immediately translated the message. For the time being, they were going to have to give up substantive work and long-term investigations in order to make their stats look better. A few quick, easy arrests would do the trick, even if they were hasty and made mainly for the media.
“The local police situation has been pretty calm over the holidays—except for Gilles, perhaps. It’s high time to get busy.”
“Aha! So things were pretty cool!” Lambert exclaimed in a low voice. “Damn, if I’d known that I wouldn’t have left over the holidays.”
Unfortunately for him, the superintendent had sharp ears. He gave Lambert a lethal look.
“I would ask you to spare me that kind of reflection. I don’t need another Molina around this table.”
“Even when I keep quiet, I still get it in the neck!” Molina grumbled.
Castello preferred to ignore this remark and return to the essentials.
“We’re going to start by reviewing the ongoing cases with the people who were working last week. Gilles, Julie, who wants to begin?”
Sebag left the floor to his colleague, who talked about the series of burglaries. The perpetrators had stolen nothing but cash, jewels (including fakes), and video equipment.
“We think they’re young people, maybe even boys.”
“How many have we got?”
“Five burglaries last week and five more the week before.”
“So if you find the perps, we’ll already have ten cases resolved. Perfect.”
Superintendent Castello was the first to be annoyed by this obsession with statistics in the police over the past decade. A fixation that was becoming ridiculous because police work remained one of the kinds of work most difficult to quantify. For example, to produce good figures, it was preferable to arrest somebody who had written twenty bad checks rather than a rapist. As for certain domains, such as drug trafficking, all one had to do to make it seem that the situation was improving was to stop arresting people. Castello pointed to Julie:
“Mademoiselle Sadet, you’re going to continue to investigate these burglaries; Molina will help you. You will start from the beginning: canvass the neighborhood, collect testimony. I want a serious lead by this evening.”
Julie nodded, Jacques grimaced.
“I also have an urgent request from the city regarding merchants. It’s been a hard year for them, between a couple of spectacular burglaries and a lot of shoplifting. We have to reassure them. Llach and Lambert, today you’ll go around to all the retailers downtown. Remind them that over the past months we’ve made arrangements that allow us to respond quickly to the slightest theft. Just imagine that we caught a little gang responsible for several dozen larcenies . . . Bingo for the stats!”
“Walking the beat is a job for subordinates,” Llach objected. “Not for lieutenants.”
“When we want to be seen by the public at large, yes. But when it’s a matter of reassuring a particular category of the population, officers are better. To show that we are taking these things seriously, I want you out there in civilian clothes. And don’t hesitate to imitate Belmondo:17 leather jacket, sunglasses, weapon prominently displayed, et cetera. That will reassure people!”
Thierry Lambert turned to Molina.
“Damn, I’m going to have to buy some sunglasses. I left mine on the plane.”
“You’ve got ski goggles!”
“Are you kidding?”
“No, they’d be great! You could also put on your boots, your down jacket, and especially your mittens. A revolver with mittens, that will really reassure our shopkeepers!”
Castello scratched his nose and pursed his lips. “Category 4,” Gilles said to himself, scowling at his partner to encourage him to let up.
“Fine, Molina, I’ll change the teams. You’ll be more reassuring than Lambert. You’re going to be the one out making the tour of the merchants with Joan. I want both of you on the street in ten minutes. Get going!”
The inspectors rose in a great clamor of chairs and recriminations. Only Ménard remained seated. Although his name had not been mentioned, Sebag was starting to follow the others when the superintendent stopped him.
“Stay here, Gilles, I’d like to talk about a case with you.”
Sebag sat down again. The three men formed an equilateral triangle around the table. Castello took a file out of his pile. “Abad-Valls case” was written on it in red felt pen. Gilles recognized Ménard’s writing.
“This morning François drew my attention to an investigation that you conducted together. You’d already brought certain oddities to light. He found some more. Go ahead, François.”
After clearing his throat,
Ménard began his account. Sebag listened to his colleague attentively, not taking his eyes off him. The little bastard had acted on his own, and that wasn’t right: if he’d acted like a good comrade, he would have spoken to him about his discoveries before going to the boss. However, Sebag tried not to let his eyes show anger or disappointment, only indifference. In his state of mind, that wasn’t very hard. Ménard looked only at the superintendent as he talked.
When he had finished, Castello turned to Sebag:
“What do you think?”
“It’s disturbing, in fact,” Gilles admitted.
“Isn’t it . . .”
Castello found it difficult to conceal his pique. His favorite had failed. Part of his annoyance today might have proceeded from this disappointment. Well done, Sebag said to himself. He thought his boss counted on him too much.
“It’s only a short step to infer that the informant tried to take revenge on the two employees by telling them their wives’ dirty little secrets,” Castello went on. “I’d like you to follow this lead with François.”
Apart from the fact that he had little desire to work with Ménard after this low blow, Sebag was not very eager to plunge back into these conjugal dramas. He’d had enough of them. He gave, without knowing it, the same arguments that Ménard had used with Maxime Abad the day before, regarding the risks the mysterious informer was taking—or rather was not taking.
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