“Me? No, I didn’t see anything. Just the van and the scooter. Nothing else.”
Sebag made a disappointed face. Clément Ollier was, in fact, the only eyewitness to the accident, everyone else in the file having rushed to the spot only after the collision. That was the main weak point that he had noted in Cardona’s investigation, the only bone he had found to gnaw in the hope of finding something new. But this slender hope had just evaporated. The accident had happened near the church in front of which they were standing, right on the other side of the street, about fifteen meters further on. Thus nothing could have escaped Clément Ollier.
“Were you standing right here at the time of the accident?”
“Not far away, yes.”
Sebag recovered a little hope.
“Where?”
Ollier made a vague gesture.
“A couple of meters away.”
“Could you show me exactly?”
Followed by Sebag, Ollier walked down Foment de la Sardane Boulevard. To the policeman’s great surprise, he went past the site of the accident and then continued a good twenty additional meters.
“I believe I was here,” he cried.
He took two more steps before pounding on the pavement.
“Precisely here!”
Sebag contemplated the site from their new position. The perspective had changed radically: they were now on the left rear of the van.
“I had a ringside seat, so to speak. The kid couldn’t do anything, it all happened so fast!”
The inspector closed his eyes, trying to imagine the scene and especially to judge the angle of view. When he reopened his eyes, he was sure: at the moment of the collision, Clément Ollier was behind the van. He could very well not have seen the infamous white Clio coming toward the right front side of the van. On the other hand, he could have seen it when it continued on its way and took off.
“And then . . . after the accident, what did you do?”
“I rushed over to the kid. I was a volunteer fireman for ten years, so I wanted to make myself useful. At first, we thought all the damage was to the van, the kid was very pale but seemed not to have been hurt. If only we’d been able to guess . . . ”
Sebag was no longer listening. Hurrying to help Mathieu, Clément Ollier had stopped looking at the street. His attention must have been entirely focused on the victim. It was possible that he hadn’t seen the car. Pascal Lucas’s claim became credible.
“Of course, even if we’d guessed earlier, we couldn’t have done anything. Internal bleeding . . . Still, it was bad luck.”
Sebag was wondering what he was going to be able to do with this new information. It was a long way from the credible to actual proof, and Cardona wasn’t going to help him get there. He needed another witness. He looked up at the apartment buildings surrounding him. The white façades were adorned with loggias with wooden railings and trellises made of round tiles. After the rainy period of the last few days, it was warming up again and here and there Sebag could see people through the open windows. If that damned car existed, someone must have seen it. Must have.
“Papa, I know you have a lot of work. If you can’t deal with Mathieu’s accident, it’s O.K. I won’t be mad at you.”
Gilles had come home late the preceding evening. Sévérine had watched him out of the corner of her eye and her father’s preoccupation hadn’t escaped her. She had joined him on the terrace when he’d gone out to sip his coffee. He could drink coffee at any time of day, it had never prevented him from sleeping. Sévérine had come up quietly behind him, put her arms around his waist, and laid her head on his back.
“I’m fourteen years old, I can understand . . . ”
He hadn’t known what to say. In any case, he had a lump in his throat and couldn’t have talked. He’d savored his coffee down to the last drop before turning around to face Sévérine and take her in his arms.
Then his voice and his words came back to him.
“Thanks, sweetheart, but don’t worry: I’m going to be able to find a little time. And as I told you from the beginning, if there’s something to find, I’ll find it.”
He was now up against the wall, in both the literal and figurative senses. Across from him, two rows of apartment buildings with five stories each. He was going to have to go door-to-door. That was the part of his job that he hated the most.
He said goodbye to Clément Ollier, thanking him warmly. Then he called Molina on his cell phone.
“So, is he there?”
“One second, hang on.”
He watched his witness get into his car parked in front of the church. Clément Ollier started to drive away and waved as he passed in front of him. Molina’s voice resounded again in his ear.
“Excuse me, I was with Abbas.”
“He came after all, then?”
“Yes, he was on time. I was the one that made him wait half an hour before seeing him. Llach lent me his office.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing, for the moment. We’ve just started. We’re still getting his vital statistics.”
“Do you need me?”
“Do you think I can’t handle this by myself?”
“It’s not that. It’s just that Castello wanted us both to work on it.”
“You’ll join in later. Whatever happens, I’m not going to let this guy go anytime soon. I’m going to teach him some manners, after all! You can just come by for dessert. Are you getting anywhere?”
“I’ve got something new, yes.”
“Enough to annoy Cardona?”
“Not yet. But enough to hope I can.”
“O.K., go for it, I’m counting on you, champ! I’ve got to let you go, I’ve got a client on the grill.”
During the following two hours, Sebag knocked on fifty-two doors. Thirty-seven of them opened up. More or less spontaneously. Each time, he tried to question every member of the family. In all, he obtained a total of a hundred and twelve negative opinions: seventy-five persons were out at the time of the accident, thirty-four had looked out their windows only after hearing the sound of the collision or the emergency vehicle’s sirens, and the last three, though present, had heard nothing at all.
Thus there remained fifteen apartments, fifteen closed doors that he’d have to try to get to open up another time. Luck was on his side. Mathieu’s accident had taken place less than three hundred meters from Martinez’s apartment; he could always claim to be working on one case while he was working on the other.
However, it was now time to get back to headquarters to help Molina. As he drove down the boulevards toward the city center, through a gap in the clouds he caught a glimpse of Le Canigou towering against the blue sky. For the first time this season, a fine white powder had covered the summits, but after two days of heavy rain the peak was as blotchy as cokehead’s nose.
Sebag found Molina alone in their office, playing on his computer.
“Well, how did it go with Abbas?”
“It’s happening . . . ”
Silence. Jacques didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“Well?” Sebag insisted.
“Mr. Abbas is not exactly a motormouth.”
Another silence. Molina remained absorbed in his game.
“That makes two of you, then,” Sebag commented.
Molina grimaced. He must have been in a particularly delicate phase of his game.
“Two what?”
His fingers gripped the mouse. He clicked nervously twice and then pushed it away and swore. He’d lost.
“Two what?” he asked again, this time looking up at Sebag.
“Two motormouths. Words have to be extracted from you with forceps, too.”
“The computer helps me relax, and I needed it,” Molina explained. “Abbas immediately agreed to give his identity, but t
hen nothing more! He just kept repeating that he’d talk only in the presence of his lawyer.”
“He really said nothing at all?”
“I’m exaggerating a little. He said—I’m summing up—that the OAS was nothing but a bunch of fascist, racist assholes, and that he was glad that some courageous guy had finally decided to massacre the monument.”
“What about the murder?”
“There, he was more moderate. He said that the Algerian War was very far away and he didn’t understand how anybody could want to take revenge at such a late date.”
“Did you talk to him about his father?”
“Obviously. That’s when he shut up. Fortunately, I’d gotten a few details thanks to an early morning phone call from Ménard. He’s really a hard worker, that guy. Apparently he stayed all night in his historian’s archives. Of course, he hasn’t anything else to do in Marseille.”
“And so?”
“And so Émile Abbas’s father, first name Mouloud, was a doctor at a hospital in Algiers. He worked in the emergency room and is supposed to have secretly treated several FLN activists. In any case, that’s what the OAS accused him of, but I think it was mainly the fact that he was a doctor and an Arab that really bothered those bastards. In short, a commando burst into the hospital in the middle of the day—it was in early January 1961, I think—and shot him in cold blood, a dozen bullets to the body, right in front of patients and nurses, and then calmly walked out.”
“How old was Abbas then?”
“Four.”
“And when you questioned him, did he really have nothing to say about his father’s murder?”
“No. Just something to the effect that it was just like the police to confuse victims with perpetrators.”
“And how did you react?”
“I remained very Zen. Yes, I did, I did . . . You should’ve seen me, you’d have been proud. I asked my questions, he didn’t answer. I calmly asked them again, and since he still wouldn’t answer, I left.”
“Still calmly?”
“Yes. I gently closed Joan’s office door and went down to drink a cup of espresso in the cafeteria.”
“Great!” Sebag said ironically.
“Of course, I did kick the coffee machine. Mustn’t be too Zen . . . ”
“Ah, now you’re reassuring me.”
“Were you worried?”
“Not really. No one has ever seen an old rugby fullback become as Zen as a Tibetan monk from one day to the next. And since then you’ve been letting Abbas stew?”
“Exactly.”
“How long has it been?”
Molina glanced at his watch.
“Almost an hour and a half.”
“Not bad. Then what?”
“I’m going to have to go back.”
“And say what?”
“I’ll ask my questions again. Still calmly.”
“And since he’ll continue to refuse to answer, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t have any idea,” Molina said, annoyed. “As people say, ‘that’s when it starts to get complicated . . . ’ Now, either we put him in custody or we let him go.”
Sebag noticed the sudden use of “we” at the point where an important decision had to be made. Molina was bringing him back into the game.
“I suppose he didn’t allow you to take his fingerprints?”
“Are you kidding?”
“And he didn’t say anything about what he was doing on the night the monument was damaged or on the day of the murder?”
Molina just shrugged.
“So we don’t have anything! Not against him, or for him, for that matter . . . And in that case there’s no point in hoping for a second that the prosecutor will authorize us to search his home.”
Sebag sank into his chair and turned on his computer.
“We’ve put the cart before the horse. It would have been better to investigate this guy before we called him in. Either we would have found nothing and we’d have let it drop, or we’d have something useful and we could question him more precisely. And then even if he didn’t answer, it would mean police custody and all the rest.”
“It’s a little late to see that now!”
“Yes, I know. But we couldn’t foresee that he wouldn’t give us anything at all. And then yesterday I was obsessed with the witness to the accident.”
“What happened, by the way?”
Sebag summed up what he’d discovered, the absence of real witnesses, and told him about his failure to find other witnesses.
“So you haven’t won yet, then?”
“Not yet.”
“O.K.! What about Abbas?”
“So far as Abbas is concerned, I’m going to take my turn and have a little conversation with him.”
“Good luck! And what am I going to do in the meantime?”
“Play another game?”
Molina didn’t have to be asked twice. His hand was already on the mouse, and his eyes immediately flew back to the screen. In front of the door to Joan Llach’s office, Sebag took a deep breath before entering.
“Hello.”
Émile Abbas didn’t respond to his greeting and watched impassively as he sat down in front of Llach’s computer. Sebag shook the mouse to wake up the machine. He resumed the session Molina had left open.
“So . . . Your name is Émile Abbas. You were born on November 28, 1957, in Algiers. Your father, Mouloud Abbas, was a doctor, and your mother, Geneviève Fontaine, was a nurse. In the same hospital?”
Émile Abbas sighed.
“Is that important?”
The two men looked at each other for a few seconds. Abbas had a lean, hard face with hollow cheeks. His long, pointed nose plunged toward a large, thin mouth. His delicately framed upper lip was supported on a more generous lower lip. Under his straight black eyebrows his eyes shone with a dark light.
Sebag sighed in return.
“No, it isn’t important. But we have forms we have to fill out, you know. And since you don’t want to talk about anything else, we have to do something.”
“I haven’t done anything, and so I don’t have anything to say, anything to justify.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that just because you’re such a nice guy?”
“That’s your business.”
Sebag looked at his watch.
“You could have been outside a long time ago if you’d cooperated. Especially if, as you say, you haven’t done anything.”
“I don’t even know what you’re accusing me of. Your colleague mentioned the destruction of the OAS monument and the murder of a Pied-Noir. The one you already came to see us about at the Collective, right?”
“And you really helped us out a lot that day . . . ”
“We don’t much like ‘collaborating’ with the police.”
“We’ve changed, you know, since the Second World War. The Resistance, the Gestapo, that’s over. Even kids no longer play that game during recess. The only people still playing that game are a handful of old-fashioned activists.”
“The police can’t change, it’s genetic.”
Sebag didn’t want to prolong a debate that would benefit no one. He shook his head several times while Abbas looked at him. Then he lowered his eyes and looked at the computer screen.
“You’re a teacher of technology at the Pablo Picasso Lycée. You are married to Chantal Abbas, née Vila, and you have two children, Samira and Didier. They are both grown-up and have left the family home.”
Abbas sighed again. More loudly.
“Whenever you want, we can talk about more serious matters.”
Abbas did not reply.
“We’d just like you to tell us where you were on the night the monument was destroyed and on the day of the murder. If you have
an alibi, we’ll check it out and if it holds up, we’ll let you go. It’s as simple as that.”
“And if I don’t have an alibi? I go directly to jail? And all that because my father was murdered by the OAS fifty years ago? For you, that’s enough to harass decent people and you claim that the police have changed?”
“We’re only human,” Sebag acknowledged. “We have our flaws, and first among them is a cruel lack of imagination. We work in a basic way. For a crime or misdemeanor, we look first for the motive. Here, it’s not money, it’s not a woman, it’s politics. We have reasons to think that Bernard Martinez, the victim, was killed because he used to belong to the OAS. So yes, the murder of your father and the fact that today you’re an active opponent of the former supporters of French Algeria make you . . . ”
“The ideal suspect!”
“I would say rather a person we absolutely have to question, a lead we can’t ignore. If you were a suspect, you’d be in custody, you’d be handcuffed and we’d be searching your home. And all that with the permission of the state prosecutor. We live in a state under the rule of law.”
“My father was murdered, and at the time, the police didn’t make any effort to investigate, and you call that the rule of law?”
“You just said ‘at the time.’ Today, the war is over. The Algerian War and the Second World War. And then, in case you didn’t know it, French policemen were killed by the OAS for having tried to do their jobs.”
“They were a minority!”
“I’ll grant you that, but they died all the same. They deserve your respect.”
Abbas pressed his lips together and said nothing. Sebag had the impression he had scored a point.
“You’ve never found out who killed your father?”
“It was the OAS. The men who did it don’t matter.”
“Yet you have just said that you wish there had been an investigation.”
“It’s hard enough to lose your father. But then to see that no one gives a shit is even worse.”
“I understand.”
“No, you can’t understand,” Abbas replied with scorn. He sat erect on his chair, his hands on his thighs. Sebag saw no hatred in him, nothing but rage. A furious rage capable of spoiling a life but not of killing. Especially not fifty years afterward.
Autumn, All the Cats Return Page 13