“Your husband was a car dealer before he retired, right?” Lieutenant Cornet asked.
“Yes.”
“In Perpignan?”
“In Perpignan, and the regions of Pyrénées-Orientales and Aude. He had several dealerships.”
“Did sell everything when he retired?”
“No, only part of it. He still owned certain dealerships even though he had stopped managing them.”
Seeing that Sebag was not following him in this direction, Cornet suddenly fell silent and made a face excusing himself. The inspector responded with a broad smile signifying that he was not bothered by this interruption.
Collaboration between the police department and the gendarmerie was working well in this investigation, for the moment, but it was better not to rub anybody the wrong way.
Sebag resumed the questioning:
“Do you know what actions your husband carried out in the name of the OAS?”
“No. I never asked him. As I told you, I considered him a hero as soon as we met, and yet I never wanted to hear about it. It was as if I had already sensed that horrible things had happened.”
“André had committed horrible acts?”
“That war was terrible, and each side did horrible things.”
“So horrible that they might lead someone to take vengeance for them so long afterward?”
Mathilde Roman shrugged her shoulders.
“Except for a few persons like me, the Pieds-Noirs have never wanted to forget about that time. On the contrary, they love to scratch their painful wounds. They remember everything and everyone.”
“Had your husband maintained contacts with other former members of the OAS?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
She wiped her nose with her tissue.
“But if he did, he wouldn’t have told me about it.”
Sebag looked intensely at her for a moment. Something in the widow’s attitude put him on alert. For the first time, he had the impression that she was not telling him the whole truth.
“Did you know Bernard Martinez?” he asked.
“No.”
She had replied a quarter of a second too fast. When you don’t recognize a name, you take a moment to think before you answer.
“Are you sure, Madame?”
She wiped her nose and looked up at him.
“I didn’t really know him . . . ”
“What does that mean, ‘not really’?”
She put her tissue on the coffee table next to the first one and took a third from the package.
“I happened to see that name in my husband’s appointment book.”
“So did they see each other from time to time?”
“I suppose so.”
“And he never talked to you about him?”
“No, never.”
“So you imagined that he was connected with this past of your husband’s that you don’t want to hear any more about?”
She nodded.
“And that’s why you don’t want to talk to us about it?”
She gave him an embarrassed smile to thank him for understanding.
“Yes, excuse me, it’s stupid. But I’ve been avoiding this subject for such a long time . . . ”
“Bernard Martinez was murdered a week ago in his apartment in Perpignan.”
Sebag had deliberately told her this without warning. He felt that Roman’s wife was holding back part of the truth and he wanted to blow hot and cold. Mathilde, stupefied, opened wide her eyes reddened by weeping.
“Did your husband know about Martinez’s death?” Gilles asked.
“I don’t know. No, certainly not.”
“Would he have been saddened by it?”
“Probably.”
“They were that close?”
“I think so.”
“Would that death have worried him?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you think so?”
She looked at him, disoriented by this sudden burst of questions. Lieutenant Cornet also seemed surprised. But Sebag hadn’t finished.
“Bernard Martinez used to belong to the OAS. Was he in the same group as your husband?”
“I don’t know.”
“You no longer want to remember it, Mme. Roman, but you know. What did your husband write in his appointment book when he was supposed to see Martinez? ‘Meeting with Bernard’?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Just ‘Bernard’?”
“Yes.”
“Not ‘Martinez’?”
“No.”
“But you knew that it referred to Bernard Martinez?”
“Uh . . . ”
“In any case, when I asked you if you knew Bernard Martinez, you didn’t imagine for a moment that it might be another Bernard.”
Mathilde Roman collapsed. She put her head on her knees and burst into tears. Long sobs. Cornet put his hand on the widow’s shoulders and gently massaged them as he gave a questioning look to Sebag, who was also beginning to wonder if he hadn’t gone at her a little too hard.
To find out, he had to go on a little further.
“André and Bernard were part of the same OAS group, weren’t they?”
She made a brief movement of her shoulders that he interpreted as a confirmation.
“What exactly did they do to defend French Algeria? You know. You have to tell us. It will help us arrest your husband’s murderer.”
Mathilde went on sobbing for a long time before she slowly sat up and showed them a face ravaged by tears. Then Sebag understood the intensity of her suffering. In this painful time she would have liked so much liked to remember only an affectionate husband and a thoughtful grandfather.
“Yes, André and Bernard Martinez were active members of the OAS,” she said in a monotone voice. “They killed. They set bombs and machine-gunned people. FLN combatants but also defenseless Arabs. Also a French police officer. Women and children too, I suppose. I don’t want to know anything about it. It was horrible. The whole time was horrible. How could they go so far as that? The Arabs were our friends . . . ”
She interrupted herself to blow her nose.
“The only good and brave thing they did was to combat the barbouzes.”10
The barbouzes. For Sebag, this term aroused mainly memories of a film made by Georges Lautner in the 1960s. With Lino Ventura, Bernard Blier, and Francis Blanche, if he remembered correctly. A spy film, it had nothing to do with Algeria. He had to get to the bottom of this right away.
“Who else belonged to their group?”
Mathilde’s reddened, swollen eyes looked into those of the inspector.
“I don’t know, sir, truly I don’t know. They alone could have told you. Bernard Martinez was the only person from his past with whom André had kept in contact. He didn’t see anyone else.”
“Do you know how many of them there were?”
“No, really not, I’m sorry.”
Sebag didn’t persist. He was ashamed of having gone so far, but it was his job. He had to do it. He got up, and Lieutenant Cornet immediately did the same.
“You shouldn’t be alone, Mme. Roman . . . ” the gendarme said gently.
“My daughter should arrive soon from Toulouse.”
She glanced at a clock attached to the living room wall.
“She should be here any minute.”
“You sent Antoine to be with a neighbor, you said?”
She sniffed a barely audible “yes.”
“We’ll take you to her house,” Cornet said.
Without giving her a chance to protest, he took her arm and forced her to get up. Then he led her to the door. Before he followed them, Sebag picked up the package of tissues that had remained on the coffee table.
Mathilde Roman would still need them.
CHAPTER 20
Sebag was walking rapidly through the streets of Perpignan, gulping down a sandwich. Serrano ham, peppers, lettuce: delicious. He had come back from Canet too late to get the daily special at the Carlit and had had Rafel make this entrepa11 to order. He took advantage of his lunch break to get a little exercise, because he knew that it would be a long afternoon and that it wouldn’t be possible for him to engage in his traditional evening run. Informed of André Roman’s murder, Castello had redeployed his teams and called another emergency meeting for the end of the day.
Sebag stopped on Cassanyes Square to drink mint tea in a little Moroccan bouiboui.12 Located between the North African and Gypsy quarters, Cassanyes Square had a colorful outdoor market every morning. But today, in the early afternoon, there was not much left to testify to that, only empty crates and rotting vegetables left lying on the asphalt. The air was still warm, despite the humidity that oozed from the walls and rose from the ground. Sebag quietly sipped his hot, sugary tea on the terrace. A street-sweeping machine was noisily going about its work, surrounded by a horde of little men in green who picked up the bulkier waste.
Around 3 P.M., he set out at a quick pace toward police headquarters. He had brought five cartons full of documents to his office. The Romans didn’t have a computer, and Mathilde had let him take everything he wanted from her husband’s office, while Lieutenant Cornet agreed to turn a blind eye to what Sebag was doing. The judiciary and administrative procedures being what they were, the gendarmes had not yet relinquished the case, and in theory Sebag didn’t have the right to investigate this second murder.
The first thing he took out of the cartons was the family list of telephone numbers. He went through it quickly without finding anything noteworthy. He would have preferred to be able to examine the victim’s cell phone, but Cornet hadn’t been willing to let him take that major piece of evidence. Procedure would have to be respected. The head of the investigative unit at the Perpignan gendarmerie had promised to act as quickly as possible and keep him informed.
In the victim’s appointment book, Sebag had found three dates, three meetings with “Bernard.” February 15, May 23, and July 20. In each case a different restaurant’s name was written next to “Bernard.” At first glance, there was nothing mysterious about these meetings, just two old men who must have shared, as they ate good meal, their memories of war and infamy.
Sebag set aside for the time being a few files he’d brought along on principle but which he did not think had priority: insurance, tax returns, bank statements, etc. Instead, he took out an old photo album. He had left Mathilde the family albums and had taken the one from André’s childhood in Algeria and Tunisia.
He opened it with great care.
The black-and-white snapshots had the stiff and formal charm of rare photos celebrating the great events in a person’s life. André as a baby, nestled in the arms of a young couple standing in front of two older couples. André, still a baby, in a church for his baptism, and then another, taken twelve years later, during a communion. Between the two, André at six posing, probably with a brother, in front of an artificial backdrop of a snowy mountain; then André and the same boy smiling before a Christmas tree. As the children grew, the photos began to show more intimate scenes in their daily life: a soccer match in a vacant lot, swimming in the sea, a family meal.
Only the last pages interested Sebag. Two photos in particular. Roman as a young adult, leaning proudly on a white Dauphine with a friend in the driver’s seat. Then Roman and three other young men, including the same friend, surrounding a soldier about forty years old with a long, solemn face. The young men were smiling broadly, but the soldier was staring at the camera with all the gravity that went with his rank. The photo had been taken in a small room without much distance.
Sebag carefully removed them from the album before also taking out a tract and an article clipped from a newspaper. The article was about an armed commando’s murder of a French policeman in 1961, and the tract proclaimed, in bloodred letters, that the OAS would strike where and when it wanted. Taking along all these documents, Sebag went immediately upstairs and entered the office of Castello’s secretary.
Jeanne greeted him warmly, a pleasant smile on her full lips. Gilles showed her his hands full of documents, and explained:
“I need to make a few photocopies and scan these documents . . . ”
“Go ahead, Monsieur Sebag. Do you know how to use the machine?”
“Uh . . . yes, at least for the photocopies.”
Standing in front of the machine, Sebag quickly realized that he’d been presumptuous. He put the two photos on the sheet of glass and tried to understand the machine’s control panel. It would probably have been easier to take off in an Airbus than to force this photocopier to carry out the elementary task for which it had been designed. Sebag tapped at random on a few illuminated buttons, but nothing happened.
He turned around to ask Jeanne’s help, but saw that she was already standing behind him. She was wearing a belted black dress that harmoniously emphasized her figure.
“We’ve just received this new model, but I’m the only one who knows how to make it work. Normal or reduced size?”
“Enlarged, if possible.”
“Mmm . . . with pleasure.”
She tapped three buttons in succession. The long, white-lace sleeves of her dress enhanced the velvety quality of her arms.
“There we go.”
The photocopier actually started up and spat out its first sheet. Sebag handed Jeanne the newspaper article and the tract.
“Normal size will be fine for these.”
“Normal size? Good. After all, normal size is the best . . . ”
Sebag couldn’t help blushing at the double entendre. Jeanne liked to tease the men at headquarters, but she never went any further.
“Will that be all for you, Monsieur Sebag?”
“Would it be going too far to ask you to scan them, too?”
“Go too far, Monsieur. Sebag, go too far. It’s a pleasure to serve you.”
He couldn’t help admiring the lines of her dress when the secretary went back to her desk. The fabric stopped at her mid-thigh and her white, transparent stockings echoed the motif of the lace.
“I’ll scan them on my session and send them to you by e-mail. Will that be all right?”
“You are perfect, truly perfect.”
Jeanne clicked several keys.
“There, they’re underway. As soon as they’re done, I’ll send them to you. You can take back your documents.”
“Thanks, Jeanne. What would we do without you?”
“I don’t dare even think about it,” she said, still bantering.
Back in his office, Sebag took time to examine the photos in detail. The old snapshots were a little fuzzy but he would have bet that one of Roman’s companions was none other than Martinez. From there to thinking that he had in front of his eyes all the members of a single action group, it was only a small step.
His cell phone rang. It was Lieutenant Cornet.
“The fingerprint analysis is categorical. It is in fact the same killer. I’ve just talked with the prosecutor: the two cases are going to be joined. Obviously, they will be assigned to you.”
“Sorry about that.”
“So am I, but that’s how it is. Before the end of the day, I’ll send you all our reports and initial analyses. At least I know that the investigation is in good hands.”
“I thank you for your confidence.”
“You’re welcome, really.”
“I’ll keep you informed.”
“That would be very nice of you.”
There was a brief silence. Sebag smiled.
“Aren’t we laying it on a little thick here?” he asked his interlocutor.
/> “Maybe,” Cornet replied.
Then the lieutenant from the gendarmerie broke into a sincere and merry laugh.
“Gentlemen, I have to tell you: this is a grave hour. If we don’t want to be the laughingstock of all France, the overseas departments and territories, and the whole Mediterranean basin, we’re going to have to seriously raise the level of our performance.”
Although the tone was intended to be Churchillian, the vocabulary was more like that of a minor-league Raymond Domenach.13 But that wasn’t the point: to galvanize the troops, the music is sometimes more important than the words.
In the meeting room at police headquarters, no one said a word. Everybody was present, including Raynaud and Moreno. There was even a little new recruit. Sebag recognized the young woman he’d passed in the hallway that same day, the female cop with eyes the color of the Mediterranean.
Castello introduced her:
“We have Julie Sadet with us. She comes to us from the capital. She is preparing to take her examination to become a lieutenant. She’s going to help us in our investigation.”
“Hello,” the aforementioned Julie said in a firm and level voice.
The policemen responded to her greeting, both happy and intimidated to have a woman in their ranks for the first time.
Castello continued his introductory speech:
“So now we have a second corpse to deal with. A single killer, a single weapon, and probably a single motive connected with the victims’ involvement in the OAS. Gilles has put before you the first evidence produced by the gendarmes’ investigation. I’ve just had a look at it, and it’s good work, but incomplete, of course, and it will be up to us to finish it. Gilles is going to outline it for you.”
Sebag briefly summed up what he had learned that morning and what Lieutenant Cornet had communicated to him via e-mail in the late afternoon.
“Pending the autopsy and the ballistics analysis, we can say with a high degree of probability that André Roman was killed yesterday, around the middle of the day, hit in the heart by a 9 mm bullet. There were numerous fingerprints in and on the car, but the freshest ones correspond to those we found at Martinez’s apartment. The tire tracks found nearby come from a Kleber model usually put on small cars such as a Renault Clio, a Peugeot 206, or a SEAT Ibiza. The neighborhood canvass made this morning around the Romans’ villa in Canet has not yielded any results as yet, but many of the neighbors were not there today. Concerning the car in which the crime was committed and that of the killer, we do not currently have any witnesses, unfortunately. You all know that road . . . ”
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