Autumn, All the Cats Return

by Philippe Georget

  “Yes, I learned that recently.”

  Sebag turned a page in his notebook.

  “Now that your identity has been established, I inform you that you are officially placed in police custody. We plan to question you regarding the murders of Bernard Martinez, André Roman, and Georges Lloret . . . ”

  “I protest, Inspector,” Servant interrupted, a malicious gleam in his eye. “In Lloret’s case, I am going to claim legitimate self-defense. He fired first.” He put his swollen hand on his wounded shoulder.

  “He was faster but he didn’t aim well enough. What do you expect, Inspector, even John Wayne had bad eyesight at the end of his life.”

  A silent laugh shook Sigma’s old carcass under the bedsheets. This interrogation was amusing him enormously.

  “Please, Monsieur Servant,” Castello broke in, pretending to be indignant. “This is no laughing matter. We’re talking about the death of three persons . . . ”

  “Traitors. They deserved to die! They got a long reprieve, that’s already good enough. You mustn’t include them in your statistics for the year, they should be put down to the account of the events in Algeria. Several hundred thousand dead: three more won’t make any difference!”

  Sebag took the opportunity to put the interrogation back on track.

  “In what way were Roman, Martinez, and Lloret traitors?”

  Servant looked hard at him for a few seconds. He suspected that the policeman already knew part of the truth. Should he tell him everything? He decided he should and started in.

  He spoke only to Sebag. He never looked at Castello; the superintendent no longer existed for him. He plunged himself back into the last weeks of the war, he told about the OAS, its commitment, its battles, the ones he was proud of and the ones that had left a bitter taste in his mouth. He explained that the first robberies were a way of financing the organization, while the motivations for the later ones were murkier. Then he came to June 12, 1962, the day that the army surrounded the Le Populo cafe in the wee hours of the morning.

  “I’d always known that someone denounced me to the authorities, but I never imagined that it was my own friends. Even if I had reservations about some of our operations, I never questioned the necessity of our combat, and I would have given my life to protect my companions in arms. They betrayed me, but they also betrayed the cause, and that is above all why they had to be punished. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “Fifty years later, that’s no longer meaningful,” Castello objected.

  Servant glanced furtively at the superintendent, but replied to the inspector.

  “I’ve known about that betrayal for only the last six months.”

  “How did you learn about it?” Sebag asked.

  “The internet is amazing, isn’t it?” He raised his deformed hands and contemplated them for a moment.

  “However, it’s not easy to use a keyboard with mitts like these, but I had someone to help me. My granddaughter Gabriella . . . ”

  He fell silent. The old killer’s eyes misted over.

  “When my wife died, I suddenly had a desire to look into my past,” he went on. “Strange, isn’t it? I thought I’d closed the door on all that when I moved to Latin America. I felt as though I had two successive lives: one Algerian, one Argentine, the second having erased the first. But after my wife died, everything got mixed up. It was as if Maria’s death had closed the parenthesis of this second life, and Algeria had come back on me. Pitilessly. I began reading lots of books on the subject, works by historians and autobiographical accounts, and I remembered so many things that I thought I’d forgotten forever . . . In fact, I hadn’t lost anything; it had all remained inside me, but was completely buried.”

  Servant tried to reach a carafe of water on the table next to his bed but the effort gave him acute pain. Sebag poured him a glass and handed it to him. Servant took a long drink and kept the glass in his hand.

  “The hatreds and passions were also intact. I had some hard nights arguing with old phantoms. It could all have stopped there, but as I already told you, my granddaughter showed me how to use the internet. I made contacts, participated in Pied-Noir forums, and especially amused myself by looking up people’s names. And I found interesting information about what had happened to my old pals. I found out that Lloret and Roman had gotten rich by investing money as soon as they got back from Algeria, and I saw that Martinez, even if he was less lucky, had also had a considerable nest egg when he arrived in Roussillon. Obviously, from that I deduced that they must have kept for themselves part—and probably even a large part—of the money we had obtained during the robberies. That already made me angry, and then, one thing leading to another, I understood that it was probably they who had denounced me to the cops. I was in their way. I’d never have let them leave Algeria with all that cash in their valises. The valise or the coffin, we were told at the time . . . They left Algeria with valises full of money. I have returned from the past to bring them the coffin they deserved.”

  He ran the tip of his tongue over his dry lips.

  “So many Pieds-Noirs needed money; I would have forced them to hand out all that dough. Besides, I believe I remember that on several occasions I’d already mentioned that idea.”

  He stopped to drink another sip of water. The sun was beating on the window. The little hospital room was beginning to feel like a sauna.

  “I repeat my question,” Castello said. “Do these murders really have any meaning fifty years afterward?”

  Servant replied looking at Sebag.

  “Honor has always had a meaning for me. It’s not a question of how long it has been.”

  “I’ve learned to distrust grandiloquent formulas,” Gilles replied. “In politics and in the police.”

  Servant’s eyes grew darker and the timbre of his voice grew duller.

  “Then let’s forget the big words. My father joined the Free French Forces in 1943 and was killed in Cyrenaica the following year. My mother died in 1947 when she was hit by a truck on a street in Algiers. It was my grandmother who brought me up. We lived in a little two-room apartment in Bab-El-Oued. She was a seamstress and worked every day until her eyes burned so that I would lack for nothing. After the explosion at Le Populo, I had to leave Algeria in a hurry and I wasn’t able to take care of her. I didn’t even say goodbye to her. I left her a ticket for the ship to Marseille but she never left. She was one of a few hundred French of Algeria who disappeared after the cease-fire. I never found out what happened to her. Killed by the Arabs, probably. Or else she died of sorrow and was buried in the potter’s field.”

  Sebag filled Servant’s plastic glass with water. He would have liked to drink some, too.

  “You’re right: It’s not only a matter of honor,” Servant went on. “Because of those three bastards, I wasn’t able to protect my grandmother. I blame them especially for that.”

  Sebag hesitated before this murderous grandfather talking about his own grandmother with tears in his voice: did he find him moving or simply ridiculous? He replied in order not to have to make up his mind:

  “How could you be certain that your old friends betrayed you? That was only a supposition . . . ”

  “My doubts were sufficiently strong to make me decide to cross the Atlantic. I wanted to know exactly what happened. It’s no accident that I looked up Martinez first. I knew that he was the weak link in the trio: he confessed it all. I’d let him think I wouldn’t kill him if he told me everything.”

  “Your sense of honor, no doubt,” Castello broke in. He’d made up his mind: he didn’t find this bloodthirsty old man moving.

  “I didn’t promise him anything,” Servant retorted, “he was the one who wanted to believe it. I didn’t disabuse him.”

  “Sure, that must be it.”

  “They were three assholes who didn’t deserve my pity.”

&nbs
p; “Because you’re capable of pity?”

  Sebag turned around toward his boss and frowned. There was no point in irritating the old man. They were cops, not judges. Their job was to clarify the case and if that required their being indulgent with the murderer, they had to do it. Castello seemed to get the message. He stepped back, leaned against the wall, and kept quiet. Sebag resumed the conversation.

  “So you wanted to avenge your grandmother, is that it?”

  Servant gave him a skeptical look.

  “My grandmother, to be sure, but all the others, too. There were too many deaths in that war. Too many French, too many Arabs, too many children and old men. French Algeria was a magnificent country that was well worth dying for. But only for it. In the end, it was hatred that won out, and that was why people went on killing. It was probably inevitable. Fate—mektoub, as the Arabs say. But killing for money, that was truly ignoble. For me, it’s a war crime, a crime against humanity. I thought international justice didn’t have a statute of limitations on that kind of monstrosity . . . ”

  “That’s a very personal conception,” Gilles said.

  “No doubt. It’s mine.”

  “It wasn’t for you to judge and inflict the punishment.”

  “Yes it was. Without realizing it, I helped those bastards betray our cause. I found no other way to repair that mistake.”

  Then Sebag had him talk about the three murders, one after the other. Servant gave precise answers to all the inspector’s questions. Then it was time to mention the destruction of the monument to the OAS.

  “I read about that act of vandalism in the newspaper,” Servant said, “but I had nothing to do with it.”

  Sebag felt Superintendent Castello quiver alongside him.

  “We found one of your hairs on the site,” Sebag said. “The DNA analysis leaves no doubt.”

  Servant shrugged.

  “That’s possible. I did in fact go there to pay my respects.” He wiped his damp forehead with the sleeve of his hospital gown. It was steadily getting warmer in the room.

  “I also went to the Wall of the Disappeared. It’s magnificent. I found there the name of my grandmother, can you imagine that? I’d thought everyone had forgotten her . . . Would it astonish you to learn that I was moved to tears?”

  Sebag stopped taking notes and lifted his pen.

  “You categorically deny any act of vandalism against the so-called ‘OAS monument’?”

  “Why would I have damaged it?” Servant said with astonishment. “I was so happy to learn that our dead could finally have their own monuments in France. It was about time, wasn’t it? For me, it was a great occasion to see it.”

  “What day was that?”

  Servant thought for a few seconds.

  “Last week. I’d say Tuesday. Yes, that’s right, Tuesday.”

  The monument had been destroyed during the night between Wednesday and Thursday. Sebag thought it was strange that the hair had remained there for days among the pebbles but he didn’t see why Servant would lie about it. As he had supposed long before the murderer had been identified, the act of vandalism didn’t fit with the murders. Any more than the attacks on Pieds-Noirs. Sebag nonetheless asked all the questions he had to ask.

  “Do you know Guy Albouker?”

  Servant searched his memory before responding.

  “No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”

  “What about Jean-Pierre Mercier?”

  “Never heard of him, either. Am I supposed to have killed them, too?”

  Sebag smiled and explained the other case that preoccupied him.

  “Sorry, Inspector,” Servant replied. “You’ll have to find someone else to be responsible for all that. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You have enough evidence, I think, to put me behind bars for the rest of my life, don’t you? No point in piling on.”

  Servant closed his eyes. Suddenly, he seemed very tired. Sebag glanced at his boss. Since Castello had no further questions, Gilles closed his notebook, making the cover slam rather hard. Servant reopened his eyes.

  “Are you done?” the old man asked.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Have I been sufficiently cooperative?”

  The question surprised the lieutenant.

  “Yes, that’s fine.”

  “Then can I perhaps ask a favor of you?”

  “Go ahead . . . ”

  “I’ve got a granddaughter in Argentina. Her name is Gabriella. She’s an angel. Anyway . . . she’s my angel. Could you ask her mother to tell her that I died?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think it’s better to let her believe that her grandfather died, in a traffic accident, for example, than that I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison for a triple murder. Her mother will agree with me. In any case, I’ve been dead to her for a long time. Consuela hasn’t spoken to me since she discovered everything I did. In Algeria, of course, but also in the death squads in Argentina, and all that nonsense.”

  Before promising, Sebag glanced at his boss out of the corner of his eye. He wrote down the telephone number in Argentina that Servant gave him. He would have liked to continue the conversation to find out a little more about this strange murderer, but his job was done. The prosecutor would soon take over, and then an examining magistrate. In a year or two, a court would try Sigma. There was in fact very little chance that the grandfather would ever see his granddaughter again. A strange family, he said to himself, in which the strongest bonds skipped a generation each time.

  Jean Servant shook Sebag’s hand with his big, swollen paw. He warmly thanked the lieutenant and then closed his eyes. He seemed exhausted. And at peace as well.

  CHAPTER 42

  I’d like to go running with you this morning.”

  Claire’s proposal took him by surprise. His wife had always hated jogging. Her fitness classes at a gym had been amply sufficient for her.

  “Of course, you’ll have to agree to slow down by at least half.”

  Gilles searched her blue-green eyes for a twinkle of mockery. It was Sunday, eight in the morning, and they were in lingering in bed, still waking up. It could only be a joke. But no matter how much he scrutinized her eyes, he couldn’t see anything. He had to accept the obvious: Claire was serious.

  “I find I’m getting out of breath too easily. When I have to climb two flights of stairs at school, I’m tired when I get to my classroom. Age . . . ”

  Gilles ran his finger over the little wrinkles that bordered her eyes. In a few weeks, Claire would turn forty.

  “I’d be delighted to run with you,” he said.

  “I’m not sure you’ll think that for long.”

  After jogging five hundred meters, Claire was in fact already huffing and puffing. But Gilles had foreseen this and had led her to the edge of the Lake of Saint-Estève.

  “You walk the next lap and catch your breath, O.K.?”

  “And what will you be doing in the meantime?”

  “Let’s say I’ll do three or four laps.”

  In fact, Gilles had time to run the path along the edge of the lake five times, Claire having taken advantage of her rest lap to do a few stretching exercises. They continued that way for an hour: Gilles jogged with Claire on one lap, then did five alone, without forgetting to slap his wife on the butt every time he passed her by.

  It was a beautiful autumn day, without wind or clouds. The sun, already high in the sky, warmed the joggers’ naked arms and legs.

  On the way back, they walked along silently. Sebag was reflecting. Part of the case remained unsolved. Who had vandalized the OAS monument? Who had attacked Guy Albouker and Jean-Pierre Mercier? Were the same persons behind both these acts? He wasn’t sure he would ever find the answers to those questions. He and his colleagues hadn’t even the beginning of a lead. Ju
st a hypothesis, the same as at the outset, which had returned stronger than ever after Servant’s denials: a few morons had tried to take advantage of the murders to sow panic in the Pied-Noir community. And they had acted amazingly fast, hardly three days after the discovery of the first crime. Now that the murders had been solved, these individuals would not be heard from again and they would never be identified. He had to be content with this return to calm.

  Sebag stopped walking. He untied his right running shoe and removed it to take out a pebble that was bothering him. The pebble rolled into the gutter and disappeared from sight. If only one could cope with all life’s cares that way . . .

  They resumed their walk. Claire took his hand and then put her head on his shoulder. Gilles smiled. He thought again of the silly teenage promise he’d made himself two days earlier, an oath that went something like “If I fail in this case, I’ll talk to Claire.” Confronted by this semi-success, what should he do? He sighed. He’d never emerge from that dilemma. Maybe someday he should try flipping a coin.

  “Are you thinking about your work?”

  His sigh had not escaped Claire.

  “A little. I’d like to find an answer to all the questions I’m asking myself and I don’t know how to go about it.”

  “Can I help?”

  Gilles stopped to look at his wife, but he couldn’t decipher the tender smile that was crinkling her blue-green eyes. Had she understood his double entendre?

  He limited himself to saying, “Thanks, that’s nice of you.”

  They shivered at the same time. Their bodies had cooled off since their run.

  “Shall we start running again?” Gilles suggested.

  “If that’s the only way to avoid catching cold . . . ”

  They trotted down the service roads that ran alongside the broad avenues in Saint-Estève. Ten minutes later, they were entering their house. Sévérine was reading on the living room sofa and Léo was finishing his breakfast. Claire said she was exhausted.