Children of War

by Martin Walker

  ‘Albert was in just now, told us about the murder,’ said Fauquet, leaning over the bar with the conspiratorial air he liked to assume when pumping Bruno for information. ‘Terrible sight, he said it was. Legs all burned away. Do you know who it was?’

  ‘There’ll be a statement later today from the Police Nationale in Périgueux,’ Bruno told him. ‘They’re in charge now. I just went to secure the scene until they arrived.’

  ‘Philippe was here when Albert came in. He’s gone up there now, said he’d be taking photos of the police at work,’ Fauquet went on, handing Bruno his espresso. ‘He was asking if you’d been in.’

  As he bit into his croissant and took his first sip of coffee, relishing the way the two tastes seemed made for one another, Bruno resigned himself to being pestered by Philippe Delaron. A cheerful young man, Philippe ran the town’s camera shop, with a lucrative sideline in taking photos for Sud Ouest, the regional newspaper. A huge family of siblings and cousins gave him contacts in every walk of the town’s life. Philippe often knew as much about local developments as Bruno, but tended to see them in a far more sensational light. Bruno helped Philippe when he could and told him frankly when he couldn’t. They had few qualms about using each other for their own ends, which made for a reasonable if somewhat wary relationship.

  ‘And Father Sentout wanted to know if there might be a burial,’ Fauquet added. Bruno shrugged but remained silent, knowing that if he said the dead man was probably a Muslim it would be all over town and on Radio Périgord by lunchtime.

  Bruno put a two-euro coin on the counter and reached for the café’s copy of Sud Ouest. He began glancing at headlines as he chewed his croissant, a signal that he wanted no more questions. Fauquet shuffled along the bar to talk to a bunch of regular customers, doubtless hinting that he’d learned far more from Bruno than he could ever reveal. Gossip was as much his stock in trade as coffee and croissants.

  The front page carried the latest depressing news about rising unemployment in France and more violence in the Middle East. The inside pages, by contrast, were filled with happy scenes of grapes being picked in the vineyards, photos of the new schoolteachers and of couples celebrating fifty years of marriage. The sports pages covered in great detail all the doings of the local rugby, tennis and hunting clubs. That was why people bought Sud Ouest, he thought, for the chance of seeing local news and pictures of people they knew. He closed the paper, made his farewells and left for his office.

  A stack of mail awaited his attention on his desk inside the Mairie. He turned on his computer and leafed through the envelopes while it booted up. The ding of an incoming email drew him to the screen. The email address of the sender tugged at his memory; ZigiPara, a name he had not heard for a decade and more. Zigi was a shortened form of Tzigane, or gypsy, which was what the army called anyone of Roma origins. His real name was Jacques Sadna and he came from the Camargue, the vast wetlands at the delta of the River Rhône where gypsies had settled for centuries and raised their famous horses. Zigi had been a corporal, like Bruno, when they first served together in the Ivory Coast and each had been promoted sergeant during some covert operations on the border between Chad and Libya. Zigi was with the paratroops and Bruno with the combat engineers. He recalled hearing that Zigi had since become an officer.

  ‘Hi Bruno, a heads-up from an old mate, even though you are a Pékin,’ he read. ‘I’m at Nijrab, adjudant-chef, and a muj has showed up claiming to be French from St Denis. Calls himself Sami Belloumi, says he knows you and has a dad named Momu. Seems simple-minded, scars on his back from whippings. Toubib says badly traumatized. He wants to go home but no documents. Photo attached. You know him? Let me know before this gets into official channels. Zigi.’

  Bruno smiled as the old army slang came back to him. A Pékin meant a civilian. Nijrab was the French army base in the Kapisa region of Afghanistan. Bruno couldn’t remember whether they were still doing combat patrols or if the mission had been changed to training the Afghan army. A muj was a mujahedin. A toubib was a doctor. Bruno’s grin turned solemn as he read on. He knew Sami Belloumi, a young man who had left St Denis three, maybe four years earlier, supposedly to go to a special school for autistic youths run by a mosque in Toulouse. Sami was the nephew of Momu, the maths teacher at the local collège, and now adopted as his son. Momu was also the father of Karim, who ran the Café des Sports and was a star of the town rugby team.

  Bruno clicked to open the photo and it was Sami sure enough. Bruno remembered him being as tall as Karim, but now he looked so thin he was almost skeletal, with prominent cheekbones that emphasized his bulging eyes. He had a long beard and his head had been shaved. The photograph brought back memories of Sami at the tennis club, serving ace after ace, always placing the ball precisely in the corner. Bruno had been able to get back perhaps one serve in three. But Sami had no interest in anything but serving. He never returned a ball, never played a forehand or backhand. He would stay on court alone for hours with a basket full of tennis balls beside him, practising his perfect serves. It was the same with basketball. He could sink the ball from anywhere on the court, but that was all he wanted to do. He wouldn’t pass the ball, wouldn’t dribble or run. And like his tennis serve, he practised sinking the ball for hours.

  Momu said it was something to do with the way his brain worked. Sami seemed able to repair anything electrical or mechanical, from toasters to computers. He could do mathematical puzzles, but if he’d learned to read or write, they were skills he never used. While he was polite and friendly, always shaking hands whenever he saw Bruno, the boy hardly ever spoke. Old Dr Gelletreau at the medical centre had said he was autistic and there was nothing to be done. Momu had tried to get him into a special school, but the lack of them was one of the scandals of the French education system. It was sad, Bruno thought, that Fabiola had arrived in town too late to treat him. It wasn’t that the other doctors of St Denis weren’t good but that Fabiola was special, a gifted healer with an intuitive way of dealing with her patients and establishing trust. Perhaps she might have been able to draw Sami out. Perhaps she could do so now once they had him back home.

  He made a routine call to the passport office to see when Sami had applied for one and to establish its number. What had Sami been doing in Afghanistan, he wondered. Zigi had called him a muj, and in the drab brown garment that was all Bruno could see on the photo Sami was the very image of a Taliban. But most Afghans in the countryside probably looked similar.

  There was one obvious reason why a French citizen, a Muslim of Arab origin, would make his way to Afghanistan. Had Sami somehow been radicalized? Bruno doubted whether the boy he had known had much sense of politics or religion, and he had been brought up in Momu’s secular home. Momu had little time for religion and Bruno had never known him to visit a mosque, except to enrol Sami in the special school. Perhaps Sami had become a devout Muslim and then been persuaded or dragooned to go to Afghanistan. Could he have volunteered for jihad? Zigi’s account of the whipping scars made that sound unlikely. Bruno knew he was speculating with too few facts to go on. What mattered was that Sami was a son of St Denis and he wanted to come back to his family.

  The passport clerk finally replied. Sami Belloumi had never applied for a passport.

  ‘Hi Zigi,’ Bruno tapped out in reply to his old comrade. ‘If they made you adj-chef, the army is in more trouble than I thought. Good to hear from you and thanks for message. That photo is our Sami, French citizen and member of respected local family but last heard of at special school for autistic kids in mosque in Toulouse. Can we bring him home? Bruno.’

  *

  The Mayor looked old and tired when he returned from a meeting of the Conseil-Général, the governing body for the Département, with its endless arguments over budgets in times of austerity. Usually Gérard Mangin used the stairs, bounding up them with the energy of a man half his age. This time he emerged from the lift with shoulders bowed. He spotted Bruno helping himself to coffee from the
communal pot and gestured for Bruno to join him in the mayoral office. Bruno took a seat on the straight-backed and uncomfortable wooden chair the Mayor offered visitors to dissuade them from staying too long.

  ‘You must be in worse shape than you look if you’re reduced to drinking that dreadful stuff,’ the Mayor said, nodding at the mug in Bruno’s hand. He buzzed his intercom twice, a signal to Claire to make some proper coffee from his private store.

  ‘I need some of that after this morning’s meeting,’ he went on. ‘They’re trying to raid the little pot of money I’ve been saving for the new sewers to pay for road repairs in those communes who were too idle to do proper maintenance. They’re coming up with all sorts of threats to make me give way but I won’t have it.’

  ‘I’d have thought they knew you well enough by now,’ Bruno said, with a slow smile. ‘You always guard the commune’s money as if it were your own.’

  ‘More carefully, Bruno. I’ve seen mayors go to prison because they were too free and easy with town funds.’

  ‘What are they threatening?’

  ‘They want me to sell off the collège apartments, agree a three-year hiring freeze at the Mairie and sell off part of our town park for development.’

  Bruno winced. He’d spent his spare time the previous winter in repainting and restoring one of those apartments, offered at a subsidized rent to attract teachers to work at rural schools. Florence the new science teacher lived there with her infant twins. And the town park was sacrosanct, Bruno thought, or it ought to be.

  ‘So what was decided?’

  ‘Nothing, which is usually the case with committees. I said we couldn’t even consider the matter of the apartments until we had a legal opinion on the status of the teachers’ tenancies and they would have to pay for that. I had no objection to a hiring freeze so long as it included all the other communes, not just ours, but I made a counter-proposal that we organize a census of all public employees in all the mairies. They didn’t like that.’

  ‘And on the park?’

  ‘None of their business. I simply pointed out that it belongs to the citizens of St Denis and so nothing will happen without a referendum. And I added that of course any member of the Conseil would be welcome to come to St Denis and campaign for a sale of the park but I wouldn’t guarantee their safety if they did. Anyway, they’re not having our money and that’s that.’

  Bruno nodded, pleased to see that the Mayor was himself again, invigorated as he refought his committee battles.

  ‘Now tell me about this mysterious murder they were talking about on the car radio as I drove back.’

  As Bruno related what he knew about Rafiq’s death, the Mayor skimmed through his inbox and pulled out the faxed letter of request for Bruno to be seconded to the Interior Ministry under the Brigadier’s command. He took his fountain pen from his desk drawer, scribbled an approval on the letter and handed it to Bruno. The door opened and Claire brought in two cups of espresso from the machine the council had bought to mark the Mayor’s twentieth anniversary in office.

  ‘Something else has come up, in Afghanistan of all places,’ Bruno began when Claire had left. Halfway into Bruno’s explanation of the reappearance of Momu’s nephew, the Mayor rose, crossed to his shelves and plucked out a manila file bound in white tape. Back at his desk, he opened it and pushed across to Bruno copies of Momu’s original application for his nephew to obtain French citizenship, along with a copy of the formal naturalization and of Sami’s carte d’identité.

  ‘I remember it well. I did most of the paperwork myself. Did we have any idea this young man was no longer at that special school in Toulouse?’

  ‘No,’ Bruno said. ‘And the passport authorities have no record of his ever being issued with a passport. Heaven knows how Sami got out to Afghanistan. As soon as the school breaks for lunch I’ll go and see what Momu has to say. I can’t imagine he didn’t know that Sami had left Toulouse.’

  ‘You may be right, but if Sami decided to become a jihadi I’m not surprised Momu kept it quiet,’ the Mayor said. ‘Still, the sooner you let him know that Sami is alive and well the better.’

  Bruno explained that Sami’s appearance at the French army base had not yet reached official channels. So far, this was a private tip-off from an old army chum who seemed ready to keep the whole affair informal. There were regular French military flights back and forth to Afghanistan, and with luck Sami’s return need never become an official matter. In Bruno’s experience, armies were usually content to let sergeants resolve tricky problems in their own way with a minimum of paperwork and a maximum of discretion and dispatch.

  ‘I presume that copy of the ID card will be sufficient for your old army friend,’ the Mayor replied. ‘If not, I can probably pull some strings in Paris. I seem to recall some regulation about the repatriation of distressed French citizens from danger zones. If we need to give some guarantee of paying an air fare we can find the money somewhere. Sami’s one of ours, so let’s do what we can to get him back. In the meantime, what’s an undercover agent with an Arab name doing getting himself killed in St Denis?’

  ‘Tortured as well as killed, as vicious as anything I ever saw,’ Bruno replied. ‘So he was probably being questioned before being put to death in a very professional way, a stiletto under the chin and into the brain. I only know what I told you, which is what I heard from the Brigadier. Rafiq sounds Arab, if that’s his real name, and Fabiola said she thought the dead man had North African origins. It seems quite a coincidence that he gets killed just as Sami resurfaces.’

  The Mayor looked thoughtful. ‘Indeed it does, suspiciously so, particularly when our shadowy Brigadier is involved. It usually spells trouble when he turns up, and trouble with our traditional blend of politics, intrigue and diplomacy.’

  Bruno grinned. ‘You left out the sex.’

  ‘This is France, Bruno. We take that for granted.’

  3

  Back in his office, Bruno scanned the documents about Sami that the Mayor had given him and emailed them to Zigi with a note saying these should suffice to establish Sami’s identity. The ID card and naturalization papers each carried a thumb-print. Then he called the collège secretary to check the teachers’ timetables. Momu was still teaching but would be free in the last period before lunch and he’d probably find him in the staffroom.

  Bruno put on his cap and strode the short distance across the bridge to the school that educated the young teenagers of St Denis and the other nearby communes. It was a standard building of the 1960s, an unimaginative array of oblongs in concrete and glass around a playground and small sports field. The pupils had dubbed it ‘the shoebox’. The rooms were baking in summer and none too warm in winter and the temperamental boiler was one of the Mayor’s priorities for replacement in his battles over the budget.

  Bruno squeezed past an unfamiliar white van that was blocking the entrance. He thought it might be some workman doing maintenance but there was no company sign on its side. He put his head round the door of the secretary’s office to say hello and ask about the van. She shrugged and said she knew nothing about it. Puzzled, Bruno took a note of the number, recognizing from the figure 31 that it was a Toulouse registration.

  Glancing through a side window, he saw on the passenger seat a print, an enlargement of the kind of photo taken for a passport or ID card. To his surprise he recognized the features of a much younger Sami Belloumi, the youth who was supposed to be in Afghanistan.

  Bruno tried the van doors. All locked, and the windows on the rear door had been covered with paper on the inside. He looked at the width between the tyres and at their treads and pulled out his notebook to check the dimensions he’d recorded earlier. It wasn’t conclusive but the width could fit. Bruno opened the engine cover, removed the distributor head and detached the cables from the battery. He told the secretary to refer the driver to him, took out his phone and called the Gendarmerie. Sergeant Jules answered and Bruno called for urgent back-up and asked him
to get someone to check on the registration number of the van from Toulouse.

  He climbed the stairs to the upper level where the science labs and Momu’s mathematics classroom were located along with the teachers’ staffroom. The final teaching period of the morning had not yet begun, and instead of the noisy anarchy of break-time, the place was quiet, disturbed only by the faint sounds of teachers’ voices.

  But the corridors were not empty. Ahead of him two men in jeans and leather jackets were going from one classroom to the next, bending to peer through the single pane of clear glass in each door, evidently looking for somebody. One of the two men turned at the sound of Bruno’s footsteps and nudged his colleague. They exchanged glances at the sight of his police uniform.

  ‘Bonjour, messieurs,’ Bruno said politely. ‘Can I be of assistance? You appear to be looking for someone.’

  They looked like North Africans. One was tall and heavy-set with the build of a rugby player, dark skin and tightly curled hair cut short. He was clean-shaven and held his arms away from his sides as if readying for action. The shorter man had a small, neat beard and was carrying some kind of baton against his thigh. A box, the size of a thick dictionary, hung from a strap over his shoulder. They moved as if they were used to working as a team. The big man walked directly towards Bruno, his face impassive, while his partner with the beard moved to one side, ready to come in against Bruno’s flank. He smiled and tried to distract Bruno by saying they were looking for a friend.