Prunier was barking out orders for police units to converge on St. Cyprien and start door-to-door inquiries with the photographs while J-J was telling his forensics team to head for the gendarmerie at St. Cyprien and call him when they were about to arrive. And now we wait, thought Bruno, to learn the fate of the men we are sending into danger.
“Right,” said the brigadier. “Time for me to talk to Paris, so I’ll be grateful if you’d let me have the room for a few minutes. Carry on, everybody, and remember we want to get these men alive.”
J-J went out to the gendarmerie steps to smoke a cigarette. Yveline reloaded the coffee machine in the squad room, and Isabelle asked for the ladies’ room. Yveline gave her a key.
“Use my apartment. It’s on the ground floor, to the right.” She pointed the way across the yard to the small apartment block, known inevitably as la caserne, the barracks where the gendarmes lived. “The budget didn’t provide a second bathroom for women in the gendarmerie. So we use my place.”
Prunier took Bruno’s arm and said, “Tell me about these networks of yours. How do they work, exactly?”
Bruno explained how he’d organized the first list as a way for far-flung members of the police municipale to keep in regular contact, then how he’d added the tourist offices, hotels and restaurants and recently the hunting clubs.
“The credit should go to this young woman from the justice ministry who’s following me around to do a report on the future of the police municipale. Apparently her minister likes the idea of beefing up what she calls the police de proximité, closer to the public. She’s a brilliant researcher, and she realized I hadn’t taken advantage of the Internet to bring together all my local contacts. It was she who had the idea of adding the tabacs. I’d never have thought of it, and she set up the listserv system so I can reach all of them with one e-mail. She’s been extraordinary, using social media to identify Leah and then researching her background. We’d never have picked up on this Testament of Iftikhar without her.”
“What else do you know about her?”
“She’s a rising star in the Socialist Party, on the executive board of their youth wing, sits on their international committees and plans to go into politics. It’s a shame. She’d be a brilliant detective, or in intelligence.”
“What did she study?”
Bruno explained what he knew, adding as Yveline joined them with a pot of fresh coffee that Amélie had also graduated from magistrates’ school.
“I had dinner with her at Bruno’s place,” Yveline said. “She’s very smart, I liked her, and she sings like an angel.”
Bruno wondered whether he should mention Amélie’s concern about her cousin’s daughter, but J-J returned, still talking on his phone. Isabelle came in through the rear door, and Prunier’s phone then rang, followed instantly by Yveline’s.
“They’ve got him? Brilliant,” Yveline said and gave Bruno a thumbs-up as she replied to whoever was on the other end of her phone. Then her face fell as she put the phone down.
“Merde, he’s been shot, but not by us. The brigadier’s on the phone with the minister in Paris. I’d better go in and tell him. A gendarme van found al-Husayni. Apparently he was shot on the street while walking out of town, but he’s alive,” she told Bruno, her hand knocking on the door of her own office. Before she slipped inside to tell the brigadier, she added, “The gendarmes said they would bring him straight here to the clinic in St. Denis.”
“Which direction was he walking?” Bruno asked her, looking at the map.
“The gendarmes’ van had come through Les Eyzies and Meyrals,” Yveline replied before disappearing.
“That’s the direction of the Dutchman’s house,” said Isabelle, wearing a single headphone and sitting by the main radio set. “The GIGN helicopter is on the way.”
“It’s no more than twenty minutes since I called that house,” Bruno said. “If they decided to flee at that point and abandon al-Husayni, they won’t have gone far.”
“The roadblocks are still in place. We should have them.”
The brigadier came out of Yveline’s office. “One down, three to go. Do we have a holding charge we can use to arrest this al-Husayni? I’d rather not use the antiterror legislation at this stage. We’d never keep that from the media.”
“Leaving the scene of an accident, Leah’s fall,” said Bruno. “Suspicion of being an accomplice to her murder and maybe breaking into the de Villiers’ house, if that’s where he was coming from.”
The brigadier turned to Isabelle. “Any word from the GIGN team?”
“Just that they’re on the way, they have the new coordinates,” she said, the headphone pressed tightly to her ear.
“Right, no point in sitting around waiting for news,” the brigadier said. “Who’s going to interrogate al-Husayni when he gets here?”
“I’ll do it with Bruno,” said J-J.
“Do we need an Arabic translator?”
“No,” said Bruno. “Dumesnil met him with Leah and told me that al-Husayni speaks good French. We might want to begin on the assumption that he may not be a hostile witness.”
The brigadier gave Bruno a skeptical glance, and then Yveline interrupted.
“The GIGN team has landed, taking positions and watching, as ordered, sir. They report no signs of life at the house, and the front door is open.”
“Send them in,” said the brigadier. “And make sure all the roadblocks are on top alert.”
Chapter 22
Saïd al-Husayni was a bespectacled man in his forties, looking pale and exhausted in the hospital bed in the St. Denis clinic. His left arm and shoulder were swathed in bandages, and his face was bruised and scraped. An intravenous drip was taped into his other arm.
“He’s a lucky man,” said Fabiola as Bruno and J-J came into the room. “One bullet through the upper arm and another just below the shoulder that then glanced off a rib. He won’t lose the arm, but he won’t have much use of it for a while. We don’t have an anesthetist here, so I had to use a local anesthetic. You can have ten minutes, but if I tell you to stop the interview, you stop. Is that clear? He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Thank you for letting us see him,” said J-J. Like Bruno, he was now wearing one of the brigadier’s identifying badges. “We’ll do as you say.”
J-J greeted al-Husayni politely by name, preceding it with “Monsieur,” introduced himself and Bruno and asked if he would like some water or anything else.
“Might I have some coffee, please,” came the reply. Al-Husayni looked bemused by the courtesy of his reception. “And could I have a cigarette? They took my bag from me.”
J-J took out a pack of his own Royale filters, but Fabiola shook her head. “You can have water, but we’re out of coffee, and we don’t allow cigarettes in this clinic.”
“How were you shot?” J-J asked.
“They all wanted cigarettes, so I was told to go and buy some, but they didn’t trust me alone so I was driven to the town by Sadiq, given money and told to buy two cartons. When I came out of the shop and walked back to the car, Sadiq had turned the car around. He had the phone to his ear, and when I opened the passenger door he shot me in cold blood, snap-snap, just like that.”
“Did he use a silencer?”
“I don’t know, it was a very long barrel. Not very noisy, but I heard it clearly.”
“Were you with Mustaf of your own free will?” J-J asked in an affable way. He had taken a chair beside al-Husayni’s bed. Bruno was in his shirtsleeves and leaning casually against the wall by the window after putting a tape recorder on the bedside cabinet and turning it on.
“The last time I was a free man was when I was studying in Spain,” said al-Husayni, taking a deep breath as if he were sucking on a cigarette. “I have family in Ramallah, and Mustaf told me they would be killed if I didn’t do what he ordered. You don’t know what these men are capable of.”
“We know what they did to Dumesnil,” said Bruno.
&n
bsp; “They are animals. They made me question him, a kindly, harmless man like that. It made me ill. Have you arrested them all?”
“Let’s begin at the beginning,” said J-J. “Were you there at Commarque when Leah died?”
“Died? She was killed.” Al-Husayni almost spat the world. “Mustaf hated her. He despised women, and she was a Jew. He only tolerated her as long as he did because of me. He wanted me to tell him of the history of the caliphate and the time of Arab rule in Spain. That was what he dreamed of, that such times would come again. He made me tell it again and again, that Arabs had once ruled here in this part of France.”
“How was Leah killed?”
“Mustaf cut her rope and pushed her off the wall when she insisted on painting her slogan. I was waiting below with the Belgian and saw her fall.”
Who might the Belgian be? Bruno wondered, exchanging glances with J-J.
“Ah, yes. The Belgian,” J-J said easily and opened a manila file on his knee, leafing through to a random page as though knowing what he was looking for and finding it significant. The file looked to Bruno like Yveline’s duty roster for her gendarmes. J-J looked up from the file. “And what name was he using with you?”
“Ahmed, but he spoke bad Arabic, very crude, with an Algerian accent. His French was better, and he also spoke Dutch, or maybe it was Flemish. I think he came from Antwerp.”
J-J held up the photographs from the Gare de l’Est. “You can see we’ve had you all under surveillance since you arrived.”
“Yes, that’s Ahmed and Mustaf and me with Leah,” al-Husayni said. “And that’s Sadiq, of course.” He pointed with his good arm at the remaining man. “He’s French, a convert originally from Normandy, never told me his original name. Ahmed and Sadiq had both been fighting in Syria and were very proud that Mustaf chose them for this mission.”
“How long ago was that, when they were chosen?” Bruno asked, thinking how long it had been since Leah set up her false ID and bank account.
Al-Husayni tried to shrug, but a spasm of pain crossed his face. “They never said.”
“How about you? When did they force you to join them?”
“A month ago. I was smuggled out through Sinai, then from Cairo to Spain on a forged Spanish passport. They knew I spoke Spanish well. From Barcelona I was told to fly to Frankfurt and then go by train to Paris.”
“What about Leah? When did she leave?”
“The same time as me, but being Israeli she could fly out to Cyprus and then to Paris. They told each of us the other would be killed if we did not do as we were told.”
“Did you know Leah had earlier set up a false identity?” J-J asked.
“Yes, of course. That was our plan. She told me that she’d done that so that she and I could be together in France as we felt we could never be in Palestine, or in Israel. We were waiting for a medieval history conference in Seville. We knew I’d receive a formal invitation there. That would allow me to get a visa to leave Israel.”
“Why would you need a false identity in France?” Bruno asked.
“Because I feared these people would look for me and demand that I work for them, once I was out.”
“It is not illegal for a Palestinian to marry an Israeli and live in Israel,” J-J said.
“Oh yes it is,” said al-Husayni, bridling. “An amendment to the Nationality Act of 2003 barred a Palestinian from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel. And Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that this did not violate rights under the constitution, which they call the Basic Laws. Even if it did, the court said, this erosion of family unification was outweighed by security concerns.”
“I didn’t know that,” J-J said.
“We wanted to be married, to start a family.” He took a sip of water. “Leah was worried that time was running out for her.”
“I’m sorry to ask this, but did you know that Leah was over two months pregnant when she died?” J-J could sound very sympathetic when he chose, Bruno observed. He was more accustomed to seeing the big detective in bullying mode during interrogations.
The Palestinian rolled his head back to stare unseeing at the ceiling. J-J remained silent, waiting for him to react. The seconds stretched out and then finally came the single word, “Leah.” It was more like a sigh than a statement.
“She said she thought she might be. We hoped—we had dreamed—that she was. But once we were in France with Mustaf, it was impossible to go to a doctor to confirm it. That would simply have given Mustaf even more of a hold over us.”
“When Leah died, do you remember seeing a cow’s horn?” Bruno asked gently.
Al-Husayni nodded. “I tripped over it in the woods on our way to the castle, and when I saw Leah was dead, I left it by her side. Something about the way she lay, it reminded me of a piece of prehistoric art she loved. She had a postcard of it on the wall of our bedroom in Ramallah.”
“The Venus of Laussel,” said Bruno.
Al-Husayni smiled at him. “That’s the one.”
“Why did Mustaf want you along?” Bruno asked, hoping to steer the talk toward Mustaf’s mission. “You’re not a jihadi, not a fighting man.”
“Leah had been talking openly about this Testament of Iftikhar and the rumor that it was being verified and was about to emerge. She suspected it would be a very clever forgery and that this would have to be exposed by Western scholars whose criticisms would have far more weight than anything Arab scholars could muster. Some Islamic scholars took this very seriously and so did some influential imams. They alerted their contacts among the jihadists, and we found ourselves conscripted.”
“Why would a jihadist operation in France compromise itself by bringing along two amateurs like you?”
“My younger brother is a jihadi,” said al-Husayni. “He knew of our plans to get out of the country to live in France and knew that Leah had managed to set up an identity and bank account here. They thought that would be useful to them, and they would be able to keep a watch on us. I don’t think Mustaf had much interest in the testament. A clean bank account and French identity that he could use to rent cars and accommodations were much more important to him.”
“How did you find the second house?” Bruno asked.
“As soon as we got into the first place, Mustaf told the other two to look around for alternatives in case we had to leave in a hurry.”
“You mean Ahmed and Sadiq?”
“No, the other two, new ones, Frenchmen who joined us later. They had Arab origins but were born and raised here. I only saw them once, when they took us to this place near St. Cyprien. It’s a pretty town.”
J-J scribbled a note, passed it to Bruno and asked him to give the news to the brigadier. As he left, Bruno heard J-J ask, “Did these two Frenchmen have names?”
Bruno called the gendarmerie, but the brigadier was on his phone again, so Bruno dictated J-J’s note to Sergeant Jules and asked him to take it to the brigadier and hold it up before his eyes. Within seconds, Bruno’s phone rang.
“Two new ones, just what we need,” said the brigadier. “No names, no ID?”
“Not yet, but he’s being very cooperative. We’ll probably need an artist to do some sketches with him. What about the house?”
“The birds had flown, and now we’ve lost them again. The coffee on the table was still hot. They left in a hurry, leaving some papers, a lot of prints. We’re working on those now.”
“I’d better go back in,” said Bruno.
“Tell me about this car the other two guys were using,” J-J was saying.
Al-Husayni shrugged and then winced. “I don’t know much about cars. It was smaller than the van we had, darker in color. It had a shiny badge on the front, like the Greek letter omega. When I first saw them, the two men were very neatly dressed, jackets and ties, like businessmen. They could almost have been twins. Then last night when they came they were dressed casually, jeans and sweaters, khaki jackets like hunters.”
Fabiola called a halt
, insisting that al-Husayni should rest.
“One moment,” al-Husayni said. “Can I go and see Auguste Dumesnil? I must apologize for what was done to him.”
“You’ll be better before he is,” said Fabiola. “But now, this interview must end.”
“It was because Mustaf thought Dumesnil was the very image of a Crusader, a Christian militant,” al-Husayni went on urgently, ignoring her. “All those religious images in Dumesnil’s apartment infuriated him.”
“That’s enough,” Fabiola spoke sharply, and Bruno and J-J left reluctantly, knowing there was more to be mined from al-Husayni. Back in the squad room at the gendarmerie, the search and roadblock routine had been relaunched. Sergeant Jules was fielding calls from the media asking for a comment from J-J on the suicide of the ex-nun. Philippe Delaron, who had set up camp outside the gendarmerie, was brushed aside by J-J without a word. The place felt as if it were under siege. Bruno sensed the energy leaking away as the excitement of the chase gave way to frustration and routine.
This was a time, Bruno knew, when a team needed leadership, not the drive of a bully but something more refined, someone with the ability to change and lift a mood. He was curious to see whether the brigadier or Isabelle had such skills, running a complex operation that included police, gendarmes, elite mobile teams, traffic patrols and military units, all the while keeping the politicians happy. Bruno wondered what he would do in such circumstances to revive morale. It would need something different, a new focus for the search. Perhaps it was time to lift the search altogether, regroup and focus the armed units on a different mission, guarding the most obvious target points. It would be a risk to let the quarry run free, but they might have a better chance of catching them if they did. And they needed to focus on the new dimension, the two strangers.
No sooner had he thought the words than Yveline turned from her phone and called, “We have a match, fingerprints from the house fit an ex-con called Abd-el-Kader Demirci. He did two years in Fresnes for drug trafficking.”
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