“Bruno, I want to thank you for that good work on Jacqueline’s movements,” he said. “It turns out that those Dutchmen she was with are well known up there. Drugs, porn, stolen cars, you name it, they’re into it. From what I see of their convictions, in France we’d have locked them up and thrown away the key, but you know how the Dutch are on prisons. To get to the point, we showed Jacqueline the evidence you collected and she cracked last night. We have a full confession on the drugs, but she’s still saying nothing on the murder.”
“That’s great, as far as it goes, J-J. What about Richard? Was he involved in the drugs?”
“She says not, so I don’t think we can still hold him. We can’t shake his story, and now that she’s come clean on the drugs I’m inclined to believe her on the killing. If it were up to me, Richard would be out today, but that decision is up to Tavernier. By the way, what did you guys do to him yesterday? He came back steaming and spent hours on the phone to Paris.”
“I think our mayor gave him a talking-to, as an old friend of his father’s. You know Tavernier got the gendarmes to arrest Karim, the grandson who found Hamid’s body. Arrested for assault, after Karim charged into those Front National jerks in the riot.”
“Tavernier must be out of his mind. Half of France saw the riot and they all think the men of St. Denis are heroes.”
“Not Tavernier. Anyway, the mayor made him see sense. We got Karim out.”
“Tavernier’s a menace. Still, I’m glad you worked it out. Anything else?” said J-J.
“We seem to be making some progress on that photo of the soccer team. I’ll keep you posted.”
“It’s a bit of a subplot, Bruno, but keep at it. We’re still looking for a killer, and we don’t have any other leads.”
As he hung up, Bruno heard Mireille’s voice in the corridor greeting Momu. He should have been at school at this hour. He waved and Momu came over to shake his hand.
“I can’t stop,” he said. “I just came up in the morning break to sign these papers closing down my father’s social security account.”
“Give me ten seconds, Momu. I have a picture to show you.” He got the fax from his desk, with little expectation that Momu might recognize anyone in it, but since he happened to be here …
“Where did you get this?” Momu asked. “That’s my father as a young man, or his identical twin.” He pulled out his reading glasses to read the caption. “Hussein Boudiaf, Massili Barakine and Giulio Villanova. The Boudiafs are our cousins, so I suppose it’s a family likeness, but that’s an extraordinary resemblance. And Barakine? I recall that name from somewhere. Villanova is the coach my father talked about. But that Boudiaf—I’d almost swear it was my father as a young man.”
Consumed though he was by the murder investigation, Bruno had to keep abreast of routine matters, too. He sighed as he opened his mail and read three anonymous denunciations of neighbors. It was the least pleasant aspect of the citizens of St. Denis, and of every other commune in France, that they were so ready to settle scores new and old by denouncing one another to the authorities. Usually the letters went to the tax office, but Bruno got his share. The first was a regular letter from an elderly lady who liked to report half the young women of the town for “immorality.” He knew the old woman well, a former housekeeper for Father Sentout who was probably torn between religious mania and acute sexual jealousy. The second letter was a complaint that a neighbor was putting a new window into an old barn without planning permission, and in such a way that it would overlook other houses in the village.
The third letter was more serious. It concerned Léon, an alcoholic who had been fired from the amusement park for placing Marie Antoinette on the guillotine in such a way that it cut her in half rather than just decapitating her, much to the horror of the watching tourists. They were even more appalled when he fell drunkenly on top of her. Now Léon was reported to be working noir for one of the English families that had bought an old ruin and had been persuaded that Léon could restore it for them. The anonymous letter claimed he had demanded payment in cash to evade taxes.
He sighed. He wasn’t sure whether to warn Léon that somebody was probably reporting him to the tax office, or to warn the English family that they were wasting their money. Still, Léon had a family to support, so Bruno had better get him onto the right side of the tax authorities. He checked the address where he was supposedly working, out in the tiny hamlet of St. Félix, where he had also had a report of cheeses being stolen from a farmer’s barn.
He looked again at the letter about the offending window. That was St. Félix as well; mon Dieu, he thought, a crime wave in a hamlet of twenty-four people. He sighed, grabbed his hat, phone and notebook, plus a leaflet on the legal employment of part-time workers, and went off to spend the rest of the day in the routine work of a country policeman. Halfway down the stairs he remembered that he would need his camera to photograph the window. Fully burdened, he went out to his van, thinking glumly that Isabelle would not be very impressed if she knew how he usually spent his days.
Three hours later he was back. The English family spoke almost no French, and his English was limited, but he impressed upon them the importance of paying Léon legally. He would leave it to them to discover the man’s limitations. The owner of the allegedly offending window had not been at home, but Bruno took his photographs and made his notes for a routine report to the planning office. The affair of the stolen cheeses had taken most of his time, because the old farmer insisted that somebody was destroying his livelihood. Bruno had to explain repeatedly that since the cheeses were homemade in the farmhouse, which fell well short of the standards required by the European Union, they could not be legally sold, and thus they had to be listed as cheeses for domestic consumption in his formal complaint of a crime. Then he had to explain it all over again to the farmer’s wife. She finally understood when he pointed out that the insurance company would seize the chance to refuse to pay for the theft of illegal cheeses.
The phone was ringing as he got back to his office. He lunged and caught it just in time. It was the sous-officier from the military archives.
“This name Boudiaf,” the caller said. “The name you gave me was Hussein, and we have no trace. But we do have a Mohammed Boudiaf in the Commandos d’Afrique. He was a corporal, enlisted in the city of Constantine in 1941, joining the Tirailleurs. He then volunteered for the Commando unit in ’43, and on the recommendation of his commanding officer he was accepted. He took part in the Liberation, and was killed in action at Besançon in October 1944. No spouse or children listed, but a pension was paid to his widowed mother in Oran until her death, in 1953. That’s all we have, I’m afraid. Does that help?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Bruno automatically. “Does the file list any siblings or other relatives?”
“No, only the mother. But I think we can assume that Corporal Mohammed Boudiaf was a relative of your Hussein Boudiaf. I know it’s Hamid al-Bakr you are interested in, but there is a coincidence here. Al-Bakr joins the unit in August ’44 in an irregular way, a unit where his acceptance would have been made a lot easier if he knew Corporal Mohammed. Is there a possibility of a name change here? It’s just speculation, but in cases like this we often find that the new recruit had some good reason to want to change his name when he enlisted. They do it all the time in the Legion, of course, but it’s not uncommon in other branches of the service. If your al-Bakr was originally called Boudiaf and wanted to change his name, there would be no easier way to do that than to join a unit where his brother or his cousin was already well installed.”
“Thank you, that’s a great help. If we need copies of this for the judicial proceedings, may I contact you again?”
“Of course. I looked up your own file and read the citation for that Croix de Guerre you won in Sarajevo. I’m honored to give you any help I can. Now, did you receive my fax of the pay-book photo?” Bruno checked the fax machine. It was there, the first two pages of an Army pay book
, featuring a passport-size photo of a young man known to the French Army as Hamid al-Bakr. Beneath it were two thumbprints, an Army stamp and on the previous page the details of name, address, date and place of birth. The address was listed as Rue des Poissonniers, in the Vieux Port of Marseilles, and the date of birth was given as 14 July 1923.
“Yes, it’s here. Thank you.”
“Good. Feel free to call on me anytime, Sergeant Courrèges. Good-bye.”
Bruno focused on the notepad in front of him and the two photos. Hamid al-Bakr of the French Army was the spitting image of Hussein Boudiaf, the soccer player. Could they be the same person? Momu’s reaction had been real. If Hamid had changed his name, the question was why. What was he so intent on covering up that he hid his real name from his own son? And could this secret of the past explain Hamid’s murder, more than sixty years after the young soccer player decided to join the Army and change his name?
He could talk this through with Isabelle that evening, he thought, smiling at the prospect, then admitting to himself that there probably wouldn’t be a lot of time spent talking about crime and theories—or talking about anything. He remembered the way she had kissed him in the cave, just a millisecond before he was going to kiss her … The phone broke into his reverie.
“Bruno? It’s Christine, calling from Bordeaux. I’m at the Moulin archive and I think you had better get down here yourself. There’s nothing about Hamid al-Bakr that I could find, but we have certainly tracked your Villanova and that new name you gave me, Hussein Boudiaf. It’s dynamite, Bruno.”
“What do you mean, dynamite?”
“Have you ever heard of a military unit called the Force Mobile?”
“No.”
“Look, Bruno, you’re not going to believe it unless you come and see this stuff for yourself. Your men Villanova and Boudiaf were war criminals.”
“War criminals? How do you mean?”
“It’s too complicated to explain on the phone. There’s so much background. Go to Pamela’s house. Ask her to let you see two of my books that she’ll find on the desk in my room. The books you need are Histoire de la Résistance en Périgord by Guy Penaud, and 1944 en Dordogne by Jacques Lagrange. Look up Force Mobile in the indexes and read all you can about it. I’ll call Pamela and get her to put them out for you, but you have to read the bits about the Force Mobile and call me back. I— Dammit, my phone’s running down. I’ll recharge it and wait for your call. And my hotel in Bordeaux is the Hôtel d’Angleterre in case there’s a problem. Believe me, you have to get here as soon as you can.”
24
In Pamela’s large living room, where the walls were glowing gold in the sunlight and her grandmother’s portrait stared serenely down at him, Bruno plunged back nearly sixty years into the horror of war and occupation in this valley of the Vézère.
The Force Mobile, he read in the books Christine had identified, was a special unit formed by the Milice, the muchfeared police of the Vichy regime that administered France under the German occupation after 1940. Under German orders, transmitted and endorsed by French officials of the Vichy government, the Milice rounded up Jews for the death camps. As the tide of war turned against Germany after 1942, the Resistance grew, and its ranks were swollen by tens of thousands of young Frenchmen fleeing to the hills to escape the STO, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which rounded them up for forced labor in the factories of Germany. They hid out in the countryside, where they were recruited by the Resistance and took the name Maquis, from the word for the impenetrable brush of the hills of Corsica.
To them came the parachute drops of arms and radio operators, medical supplies, spies and military instructors from Britain. Some came from the Free French led by de Gaulle, some from Britain’s Special Operations Executive, or SOE, and others from British Intelligence, MI6. The British wanted the Maquis to disrupt the German occupation, or, in the words of Winston Churchill’s order establishing the SOE, “to set Europe ablaze.” But as the invasion neared, the prime British objective was to disrupt military communications in France, and to force German troops away from defending the beaches against an Allied invasion, driving them into operations against the Maquis deep inside France. The Gaullists wanted to arm the Maquis and build the Resistance into a force that could claim to have liberated France, thus saving the country’s honor after the humiliation of defeat and occupation. They also wanted to mold the Resistance into a political movement that would be able to govern France after the war and prevent a seizure of power by their rivals, the Communist Party. On occasion, Gaullists and communists fought it out with guns, usually in disputes over parachute drops.
The Milice and their German masters crafted a new strategy to crush the Resistance in key areas. Specialist German troops, anti-partisan units, were shipped in from the Russian front and from Yugoslavia, where they had become experienced at battling similar guerrilla forces. But the real key to the new strategy was to starve out the Resistance by terrorizing the farmers and rural people on whom the Maquis depended for their food. Rural families whose sons had disappeared were raided, beaten and sometimes killed, and the women raped. Crops and livestock were confiscated, farms and barns were burned. This reign of terror in the countryside was carried out by a unit specially recruited for the task, the Force Mobile. In the Périgord, it was based in Périgueux.
Sitting in Pamela’s peaceful home, Bruno read on, rapt and appalled. He knew that the Occupation had been rough, that many in the Resistance had been killed and that the Vichy regime had become engaged in a civil war of Frenchmen killing Frenchmen. He knew about atrocities like the one at Oradour-sur-Glane, a village to the north where German troops, in reprisal for the death of a German officer, had locked hundreds of women and children in the church and set it on fire, machine-gunning any who tried to escape the flames. He knew of the small memorials dotted around his region: a plaque to a handful of young Frenchmen who died defending a bridge to delay German troop movements; a small obelisk with the names of those shot pour la Patrie. But he had never known about the Force Mobile, or the wave of deliberate brutality inflicted on this countryside he thought he knew so well.
The Force Mobile in Périgord was commanded by a former professional soccer player from Marseilles named Villanova, Bruno read. The name leaped out at him. Villanova, it seemed, brought a new refinement to the rural terror. He believed that the French peasants would be even more effectively intimidated if the reprisals and rapes and farm burnings were carried out by North Africans, specially recruited for the job with promises of extra pay and rations, and all the women and loot they could take from the farms they raided. Villanova found his recruits in the immigrant slums of Marseilles and Toulon, Bruno read, where unemployment and poverty had provoked desperation, and where he had many acquaintances on the local soccer teams, including young Arab immigrants.
Bruno shivered as he realized where this was leading. It looked likely that Hamid al-Bakr, war hero of France, had also been Hussein Boudiaf, war criminal and terrorizer of Frenchmen. Christine was absolutely right. He would have to go to Bordeaux in the morning, and gather the evidence about Villanova, Boudiaf and other members of the Force Mobile. This theory was indeed dynamite. The evidence for it would have to be complete and unassailable. The names of the victims of the Force Mobile would also have to be found. They would have every reason to want vengeance against any of Villanova’s North African troops still living. They would certainly have the motive to kill an old Arab whom they recognized from those dark days of the war.
He couldn’t help thinking of Momu. What would it do to him, to Karim and Rashida, if they were to learn that their beloved father and grandfather had been a war criminal, a terrorist in the employ of Vichy, acting under Nazi orders? What kind of shock would it be to learn that the man you respected as a war hero, as a brave immigrant who had established his family as French citizens with education and prospects and family pride, had in reality been a villain who had spent most of his life livin
g a lie? How could the family stay in St. Denis with that knowledge hanging over them? How would the rest of the little North African community in St. Denis react to this revelation? And how would everyone else react?
Bruno could scarcely bring himself to think about the reaction of the French public, or to imagine how the Front National vote would swell. He bent forward in his chair, his head in his hands. He had to make some plans, talk to the mayor, brief J-J and Isabelle, and arrange to go to Bordeaux in the morning. How on earth could he prepare his town for a bombshell such as this?
“Are you all right, Bruno?” Pamela had come into the room. “Christine said you would have some pretty grim news and would probably need a stiff drink, but you look quite devastated. You’re as white as a sheet.”
“Not right now, but thanks.”
“Christine said she thought what you were going to read related to Hamid’s murder. It’s funny how the past never quite goes away.”
“You’re right. The past doesn’t die. It even keeps the power to kill. Look, I have what I need now. I’ll take these books and leave you in peace. I have to get back to my office.”
As he drove away he looked with new eyes at this placid countryside that had known such events, and known them within living memory. He thought of smoke in the sky from burning farms, blood on the ground from slaughtered fathers; he imagined French policemen giving the orders that deployed military convoys on the country roads—convoys packed with Arab mercenaries in black uniforms, with license to rape, loot and pillage. He thought of half-starved young Frenchmen, hiding in the hills with only a handful of weapons, helplessly watching the reprisals unleashed against their families and their homes.
And, Bruno wondered, whatever can we do with the Frenchmen who took their long-delayed revenge against one of their tormentors? At least now he knew why a swastika had been carved into Hamid’s chest. It signified not the politics of the killers, but the real identity of the corpse.
Bruno, Chief of Police Page 20