When she saw her boss raise an eyebrow she realized that her spontaneous response was close to insolent.
“Excuse me, Superintendent, but I thought we could probably find important information about this Lloret person on the internet, and I began to search for it on my iPhone.”
Castello’s face immediately relaxed.
“Very good, very good. And?”
“Well, I found several Georges Llorets. In the Gard and in the Marseille region, but their profiles don’t fit: they’re too young. Ah, here, I’ve got another one . . . I don’t have his age, but he lives in Spain!”
She had fixed her eyes on her cell phone again and was skillfully slipping her finger over the tactile screen.
“He’s involved in subdivision projects. It seems that he’s a real estate developer. He has an agency in Roses, and another one in Figueras . . . ”
“Figueres,” Llach corrected.
“And still another in Cadaqués. Hmm . . . apparently this is an article in a newspaper, El Punt, does that mean anything to you?”
“It’s a Catalan newspaper,” Llach explained.
“I’m opening it . . . There, it’s obviously in Catalan, but there’s a photo. Just a minute, the connection isn’t great . . . Ah, there we are! This could be our man: he’s no longer young but he still looks pretty good.”
Julie handed her iPhone to her colleagues. The device made a rapid tour around the table.
“A real computer in this meeting room wouldn’t be a luxury,” Castello remarked. “Remind me to have one installed.”
The telephone came around to Sebag. Georges Lloret did in fact have a certain presence. He was wearing an elegant black suit with a red silk kerchief in the breast pocket, and he stood as ramrod straight and proud as a soldier at attention on July 14. His white, wavy hair stood out against the blue sky.
“We’ll have to read the article,” Gilles said, handing the cell phone back to its owner.
“No problem, I can enlarge the text a bit and Joan will translate it for us.”
“We could all go to my office, it would be easier to read on a PC,” Llach suggested.
Castello stood up, giving the signal, and all the policemen walked downstairs to Llach’s office. Sebag stopped at his own office to get his file. When he arrived at Llach’s office, he found him seated in front of the computer. Castello had taken another chair and was sitting alongside him. All the other inspectors were crowded behind him.
Sebag compared the article’s photo with the one in the file found among André Roman’s affairs. The photo in which the four men of the commando posed alongside Lieutenant Degueldre.
“The same figure, the same hairdo, the same ideas of elegance. That could be our man. Babelo. He has just shaved off his mustache since the Algerian War.”
Llach had started to scan the article in silence.
“It’s him. No doubt about it.”
With the mouse, he moved to the end of the article. Then he went back to the beginning.
“In fact, the article is the third one in a series on the great fortunes of South Catalonia. I’ll sum up the gist of it for you. Georges Lloret is a self-made man who got rich in the 1970s by promoting developments for tourists on the Costa Brava. He opened his first real estate agency in Cadaqués, and then very quickly opened others all along the Catalan coast.”
Llach was following the lines of the article with his finger. He was translating and summing up at the same time.
“But it’s mainly as a developer that Lloret made his money. He invested large sums in the construction of big tourist complexes in most of the resorts along the coast: Rosas, L’Escala, Palafrugell, Palamos, and others, some of the most famous and especially the ugliest. He is, it seems, a very discreet, even secretive man who does not give any interviews. The author of the article was not authorized to meet him, and he says that he had a great deal of trouble confirming rumors that circulate regarding Lloret.”
Llach stopped to catch his breath. His index finger was still following the article as it moved down the screen.
“This is where it gets interesting . . . Lloret was born in Algiers in 1933, where his grandfather had emigrated in 1898. Georges is supposed to have fought for French Algeria—on that point, the article gives no details, too bad for us—before taking up residence in Spain after Algeria became independent. He formed close friendships with members of Franco’s party and with a few other wheeler-dealers who had good contacts in the government. Which probably explains in part his business success.”
“Sounds like a really nice guy,” Julie commented.
“He’s also just barely scraping along,” Molina remarked. “Another one! Poor French of Algeria. They never stop whining about their fate but there are a lot of them who have rebounded very well after leaving their native country. Roman was also rich.”
“On the other hand, Martinez ended up living on welfare.”
“Because he was probably less talented—or less fortunate—than his former buddies. Nonetheless, when he returned to France he had enough to invest in a vineyard . . . ”
Castello raised his hand to put a stop to these digressions. He addressed Llach.
“Doesn’t the article say anything else?”
“Yes, it does. Politically, after Franco’s death Lloret got involved in the center-right again. In particular, he is supposed to have financed the CDC, the Convergencia Democratica de Catalunya, one of the parties that has governed Catalonia since 1980. Otherwise, the journalist also mentions a few things about his private life. Notably his remarriage, some fifteen years ago, to a young actress, which led to a break with his daughters, who no longer speak to him.”
Llach let go of the mouse and sat back in his chair.
“That’s all there is.”
“Well done,” Castello congratulated him. “We’re still going to need you: we have to contact this Lloret as soon as possible.”
Julie still had her cell phone in her hand.
“I’m going to give you the phone numbers of his real estate agencies; I think the main one is in Rosas.”
Llach and Sebag each began writing down the numbers as Julie dictated them. Castello got up and put his hand on Gilles’s shoulder.
“I’m going back up to the meeting room with the others, but you and Joan stay here to get in touch with this Lloret. That’s the top priority.”
Sebag sat down in the chair freed up by his boss, who left the office followed by Julie Sadet, Molina, and Lambert. Llach picked up his landline phone and dialed the first number. Several minutes of tedious, long-winded conversations followed: Joan was speaking in brief bursts separated by silences. His successive interlocutors apparently weren’t impressed. Sebag quickly stopped listening. He had learned a few rudiments of Catalan during his first months in Perpignan, but this conversation was going much too fast for him.
After twice knocking softly on the door, Jeanne opened it a little and showed her pretty face.
“Monsieur Sebag, the superintendent wants to see you right away in the third-floor meeting room.”
The request surprised the inspector. He left Llach to his telephoning and followed Castello’s secretary. He walked behind her, his eyes fixed on her high leather boots and her jeans tightly molding her little round butt. Jeanne ignored the elevator and took the stairs. She climbed the first few steps and then stopped. She put both hands on her buttocks and explained:
“Apparently it’s good for your figure.”
“You’re the living proof of that,” Sebag choked out.
He left the secretary in front of her office and continued down the hall to the meeting room. An embarrassed silence prevailed. Castello, without a word, handed him the DNA analysis of the hairs. Sebag had to start over several times before he understood what he was reading. The words and the figures danced before his eyes and every time the
y stood still, Sebag read the same thing: the white hair found in Martinez’s apartment belonged to the same person as the one discovered in front of the OAS monument in the Haut-Vernet cemetery.
CHAPTER 29
He was walking leisurely through the streets in downtown La Jonquera. He’d taken a liking to walking. Even if his illness made every step painful. In any case, on his bad days everything made him hurt anyway. Opening a door, holding a pencil, drinking a glass of wine, eating. On bad days, he couldn’t do anything. Just breathe and watch television. On the condition that he not use the remote too much.
His doctor had advised him to be active. Whatever he did. Walking, swimming, cycling. He mustn’t allow the illness to deposit its calcium on his bones. But he’d never liked water—except the clear, warm water of his Mediterranean—and cycling scared him since he had felt his sense of balance growing weaker.
So he walked every time he could. And as he walked he had the feeling that he was leaving his arthritis behind him.
He arrived at the edge of the commercial zone. One of the ugliest, most hideous, most shameful he’d ever seen. The luminous signs and the enticing advertisements flayed the retina of his poor old eyes. Here began the country of discounts and debauchery.
La Jonquera had developed in the 1970s around the autoroute, but it had really taken off when Spain joined the European Economic Community, the village having easily profited from the flaws in the structure of the EEC. The difference in taxation between France and its neighbor made life in Spain cheap. La Jonquera was now three hundred shops, about twenty supermarkets and service stations, a hundred bars, a large number of them frequented by prostitutes. Since 2010, the commune could even boast that it had the largest brothel in Europe. Open every day from 5 P.M. to 4 A.M., the Paradise offered without blushing its “Lesbian shows,” its 120 prostitutes, and its 80 rooms.
The French flocked in droves to La Jonquera, as many as twenty-five thousand of them a day, in couples or in families, in order to fill up shopping carts that jingled through the aisles of the supermercatos. Others came at night, alone or in groups, to have sex with girls from Eastern Europe or Latin America.
Jean turned back toward his hotel. His cardiac rhythm accelerated as he passed in front of the Guardia Civil building. However, he knew that he had nothing to fear. His false papers were in order, and on the other side of the Le Perthus pass, the police were not on his trail. He’d been following their investigation step by step by regularly reading the French newspapers and listening to a local radio station in Roussillon that he could get in his room: he knew that the investigators were on the wrong track. He’d tricked them without doing it on purpose. By signing his crimes, he’d led them astray.
His last target probably didn’t suspect anything, either. He’d established contact with him. It hadn’t been easy. The last of the three bastards had become an important person. Somebody who couldn’t be approached that easily.
But he’d succeeded in doing it.
They had a rendezvous.
Soon the old accounts would be settled once and for all, and he could go home. To his adopted country. With great relief, he’d see his Gabriella’s gracious smile again. It had been three days since he’d called her. He missed his little girl terribly.
He entered his small hotel, an inconspicuous establishment in the center of La Jonquera, where the village still resembled other villages in the rest of Spain. Miguel, the owner, welcomed him with a broad smile.
“Hi, how’s my Argentinian?” he asked in Castilian.
“Tired, but no more than usual. At my age, you’re always tired.”
“And your pain?”
“Also the usual. The day I don’t have pain will be the day I’m dead.”
Miguel broke into a cheerful laugh and patted him softly on the shoulder.
“It’s great to be an optimist, huh, Argentinian?”
The old man laughed in turn. But not for the same reasons. His Spanish fooled everybody. It was in that language that he thought and expressed himself most easily. And if there were traces of an accent in his Spanish, they came from the South American inflections he’d acquired, not from his French origins. He now found it difficult to operate in his native language. He often had to search for his words, and didn’t always find them. In this small hotel where he had settled in, no one had been able to guess that he’d been born on French territory seventy-two years earlier.
His cover was definitely perfect.
He returned to his little hotel room and took off his overcoat. He opened the armoire, took out a hanger, and hung up his coat. He ran his big hand over the collar to brush off a few white hairs. Lately he’d begun to lose his hair. That dismayed him: he already had so many reasons to feel that he was getting old.
CHAPTER 30
Llach slammed down the receiver.
“They just don’t want to understand. Even though I explain that I’m a cop and that it’s a question of life and death, they just keep saying that they have strict instructions and can’t give me their boss’s cell phone number. And then they tell me that they’re going to convey the message with my telephone number and that Lloret will call back if he thinks it necessary. By the way, I gave them your number.”
“That was the right thing to do,” Sebag replied distractedly.
“Lloret must speak French, you won’t need an interpreter.”
Sebag smiled at him. He hadn’t heard what Llach said.
“I called the office in Rosas and the one in Cadaqués. Shall I try the others?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“You’re right. It’s worth a try. You never know . . . ”
Llach picked up his telephone and repeated his requests to new interlocutors. Gilles couldn’t seem to concentrate and was lost in the contemplation of a map hanging on the wall behind Joan.
It was a map of southern Europe. A green line ran from the north of the department of Pyrénées-Orientales to the southern extremity of the province of Valencia in Spain and marked off the zone where Catalan was spoken. There were also the Balearic Islands and a little area on the northwest coast of Sardinia, around the city of Alguer. Sebag remembered having read that the king of Aragon had installed several families from Barcelona there. That must have been in the sixteenth century.
Llach hung up with the same angry gesture.
“I didn’t get any more out of them in Figueres. They promise to leave a message but don’t even assure me that their boss will call us back. This Lloret seems to be a pretty shady character!”
“Sure looks that way.”
Llach stared at him.
“You look like there’s something wrong with you. What was that quick trip upstairs about?”
Sebag told him what he had just learned.
“Son of a bitch!” Llach said, banging his fist on the desk.
“My feelings exactly.”
“That means that the murderer of Martinez and Roman also destroyed the OAS monument.”
“Looks like it . . . ”
“That’s not at all what we thought!”
“What I thought.”
“Why just you? We’d all excluded that possibility.”
“But I’m the one who said yesterday at the prefecture that it couldn’t be the same person.”
“True, that might come back and bite your ass.”
Sebag shrugged.
“Too bad. That’s not necessarily the worst part. What’s really unfortunate is that at this point we’re on the wrong track.”
“But what difference does it make, in the end? It’s almost logical, when you think about it! The guy is so pissed at the OAS that he demolishes anything connected with it.”
“We thought he was taking personal revenge on three specific people, not on the OAS in general. We were mistaken about his psychology and maybe also a
bout his true motives.”
“Mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You’re the one who likes proverbs, you can trust that one. Our murderer is out to get Martinez, Roman, and Lloret, and while he’s at it he also messes up a monument in honor of an organization he detests more than anything. I don’t find that completely incoherent.”
“Except . . . ”
“Except what?”
“Except that you’re forgetting the attack on Albouker!”
“Shit, that’s right.”
Llach thought for a few seconds, and then he banged his fist on his desk again.
“In my opinion, that still doesn’t change anything! We thought that certain malicious persons had taken advantage of the double murder to piss off the Pieds-Noirs. That hypothesis remains valid, maybe not for the monument, but for the attack on Albouker. Not too bad an argument, no?”
Sebag had to agree: the idea wasn’t stupid. But he needed time to reflect on it. He sometimes had flashes of intuition, but it generally took him a while to think them through.
“Let’s go back for a moment to Georges Lloret. What else can we do to get in touch with him?”
“Apart from going through the Catalan police, I don’t know . . . And there, my wife’s cousin can’t do anything. This Lloret guy is a pain in the neck and he won’t respond to an unofficial request.”
“Speaking of your cousin, do you have any news from him? Has he started calling the car rental agencies?”
“He promised me yesterday that he would try this morning. Do you think it’s going to take very long to get our colleagues to collaborate in the regular way?”
“I thought you were the expert on cross-border collaboration.”
“Not in the least: I’m only the expert on cross-border improvisation.”
Sebag laughed heartily. He hadn’t often had occasion to work with Joan and was pleased to find that he was an efficient colleague.
“O.K., what do we do now?” Llach asked.
“We wait for the phone to ring. Lloret may call back someday.”
Autumn, All the Cats Return Page 27