The psychoanalyst was Professor Amira Chadoub, a plump and motherly-looking woman in her early fifties. She came from a family of Moroccan immigrants and had been raised as a Muslim. There was no sign of her Moroccan heritage in her clothing; she was wearing a blue linen dress, high-heeled shoes, a pearl necklace with matching earrings, and her grey hair was pulled back into a neat bun. Usually such a tribunal was assisted by a secretary from the Justice Ministry, a role that in this case had been assigned for security reasons to the Brigadier.
Once his two colleagues had unpacked, Deutz introduced them to the Brigadier, who made brief welcoming remarks and offered them coffee or drinks. Nancy had made herself scarce. Bruno was described vaguely as the local policeman who had known Sami since he was a boy and was invited to join them. The Brigadier evidently wanted to set some ground rules.
There were two essential issues, he began. The first was whether Sami was able to distinguish right from wrong and be responsible for his actions. The second, equally important, was whether he was fit to stand trial, to be aware of the nature of judicial proceedings against him and able to be responsible for his own defence.
‘If we judge the answer to either of those questions to be No, then he will not stand trial and will remain under medical supervision. Am I right?’ asked Professor Weill. The Brigadier nodded.
‘Just one thing,’ Deutz said. ‘I’ve heard that the signs of whipping on this man’s body are being taken to mean he was under duress. That might not be right; self-flagellation is common among some Islamic sects.’
‘How much time do we have to spend with this young man before we decide?’ Chadoub asked, ignoring Deutz’s remark.
‘I’d like to say as much time as you need,’ the Brigadier replied. ‘In practical terms we are under some time pressure. Bruno, when we have finished our coffee perhaps you could find Sami and bring him to the main salon.’
Bruno set off to find Sami in the family rooms. He found Dillah, reading a magazine, who told him that Momu and Sami had decided to explore the château. He’d probably find them in the tower, she said. He climbed up the endless stone stairs but eventually found them by the austere battlements that ran from the tower the full length of the main building.
The view from this height was spectacular. He could see across the outer wall and down into the valley with a clear view of one of the long, slow bends of the river. Just beyond the stretch of water, glinting in the sunshine, were the pale grey cliffs of limestone that defined the region and had sheltered its human inhabitants for tens of thousands of years. When Bruno had first arrived in St Denis a decade earlier, he’d been told that humans had lived there for forty thousand years. Now the archaeologists said it was at least eighty thousand years, and some thought it was far longer, citing the flint tools found at Tayac near Les Eyzies that dated back over two hundred thousand years.
A map of the local area was spread out on the stone in the gap between the battlements before the two figures. Momu was pointing to the rounded hills that enfolded St Denis as Bruno approached. Sami had Balzac clutched to his chest as his eyes followed Momu’s pointing finger until Balzac’s puny bark alerted him to Bruno’s arrival. Sami put Balzac down and let him scamper to his master.
Sami grinned as he pointed out familiar places to Bruno and then located them on the map. Momu had been showing him the scale printed on the corner of the map and Sami was using the length of his finger to work out how far away each place was from where he stood. At one point, as Sami leaned over the battlement, Momu gently pulled him back to safety, warning him of the dangers of the drop.
Sami was still wearing the army tracksuit in which he had been jogging that morning. He looked happy and very young. Just a few days of good food and medical care had done him good. The contrast was striking with the image of the fanatical and calculating professional bomb-maker presented in the media.
‘The tribunal is here, and they want to get started,’ Bruno told Momu, who sighed and began to fold the map. Looking disappointed that the map game was over, Sami shrugged and followed them down the stairs to the salon.
‘I think we only need Sami for this meeting,’ Deutz said firmly when Bruno showed Sami and Momu into the large room, well lit by four tall windows that opened onto the park.
‘Monsieur Mohammed Belloumi is Sami’s adoptive father and has been appointed his guardian by the courts,’ Bruno said. ‘There are no legal grounds to exclude him.’
‘This is a medical examination, not a legal proceeding,’ Deutz replied, turning to the Brigadier for confirmation.
‘I have no objection to the father staying,’ interjected Weill, and Amira agreed. Bruno drew up a chair for Momu and then left the room, pausing to give Sami’s shoulder a comforting squeeze as he passed. Nancy was hovering at the corner of the corridor and asked him to describe the other two members of the tribunal.
‘It’s smart to have a Muslim on the tribunal, even if she’s no longer religious,’ she said when he’d described them. ‘Washington had a query about the other boys who went jihad from the Toulouse mosque with Sami. Do we know who they were, what happened to them?’
‘Momu is in with Sami. Let’s ask Dillah.’ Bruno led the way to the family rooms, but they were empty. Finally they found her in the grounds, sitting on a wooden bench that faced the château, some knitting on her lap that looked as if it would become a baby’s jacket. But her hands were still and her eyes blank, almost as if she were dozing. She jerked upright when Bruno called her name and then explained why he needed her help.
‘I’ve been thinking about those other poor boys,’ she said, and Bruno scribbled down the names she gave him. ‘Momu and I tried to get their parents to come with us when we complained to the mosque. But the first one, Kader, had a French mother, a convert to Islam. They’re always the worst. She said she was proud her son had gone jihad. The others were frightened of making a fuss. I think their immigration status was in trouble, or maybe it was asylum. Their son had already been in trouble with the police, so they put him in the madrassa.’
‘Tell me about this school attached to the mosque,’ said Nancy. ‘Was it specially for autistic boys?’
They had first heard of it from the social welfare office in Sarlat, Dillah explained, when they were told there were no schools in the Département suitable for Sami. They had said this mosque school looked after troubled boys of various kinds with specialist teachers and doctors for boys like Sami. The Imam was a respected figure and his deputy who ran the school was often on TV, speaking what she and Momu thought was sense about the need for a European Islam, adapted to a modern democracy.
‘You mean Ghlamallah,’ Bruno said. Dillah nodded. ‘Was it Ghlamallah you saw at the mosque?’
‘Ghlamallah came in to tell us the boys had gone. He insisted they’d planned it themselves and there was nothing the mosque could do. He was sorry and he refunded us the fees for that term.’ Her mouth tightened. ‘He seemed to think it was the money we cared about.’
Nancy said they needed to see Olivier, the one going through the videotapes to make a chronology of Sami’s journeys, to give him the names of the other boys from the mosque. Nancy also wanted to see the file on Ghlamallah.
There was a fat file on him, but none of it damaging. Even with Rafiq’s reports, all they had were suspicions. The precise organization of the mosque was far from clear. The elderly and deeply devout Imam was nominally in charge, and he was highly visible, sitting on the board of France’s national Muslim council, a delegate to the global ecumenical council and to the European inter-faith assembly.
‘He seems to be a figurehead,’ Olivier said. ‘Everybody’s favourite Muslim, but apart from chairing the weekly board meeting it doesn’t look as though he actually runs the place.’
‘So Ghlamallah is the one in charge?’ Nancy asked.
Olivier shrugged. ‘He’s more like the public spokesman, spends a lot of time giving speeches and writing his books and articles. His phone
calls and emails seem pretty innocent. We’re running a clean-up program on some of the audiotapes on calls that we think were using a vocal modifier to disguise the speakers’ identities. Maybe that will tell us more.’
‘In his emails, does he send a lot of photos?’ Nancy asked.
‘Funny you should ask, but it’s like he keeps a photo diary of everything he does, photos of audiences at his meetings, of him being interviewed, events he attends. He sends hundreds of them.’
‘Have you run them through a pixel scanner?’ she asked.
‘What’s that?’ Bruno asked.
The National Security Agency at Fort Meade in the U.S. had found microscopic messages embedded in individual pixels in a photograph that could contain hundreds of thousands of them. The NSA had developed an automatic scanning system to look for such odd pixels, blow them back up to normal size and then run the message through the decryption programs.
Olivier shrugged. ‘Not that I’ve heard. We don’t do the analysis ourselves.’
‘Maybe it would be a good idea to check,’ said Nancy. ‘On an operation like this, where we’re working closely together, I’m sure the NSA would be glad to help.’
Olivier raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure they would,’ he said, in a voice loaded with sarcasm. ‘I’ll put it to the Brigadier.’
‘Don’t bother, I’ll do it myself,’ she said. ‘But who else seems to be running the mosque?’
Olivier went through the list. There was the kayim, or caretaker, who seemed to do most of the administration; a khalib, who led Friday prayers, and a nazir, the treasurer. He controlled the money, at least that part of it that could be traced through the banking networks. Then there were various departments: the madrassa or school; the social service that ran charities and welfare; the sports association and medical centre; the publishing company; the job training office and the women’s organization.
‘It’s huge,’ Olivier said. ‘Twenty thousand worshippers, so many they spill over into the streets, and about two hundred people seem to be employed full-time. The annual budget is around twenty million euros, at least that bit of it we can see.’
‘So which section are those guys in that attacked me at the collège?’ Bruno asked.
‘We call it the security section. They call themselves the monitors, the guys who keep order at Friday prayers,’ Olivier explained. ‘The man Rafiq was interested in before he was killed is the Niqab, the captain, second-in-command. We know this man was in the paras, invalided out after two years when he had a training accident when his chute didn’t open properly. He’s a bit of a mystery, French-born with an Algerian background but no next-of-kin ever listed, never seems to send emails, never makes phone calls, never leaves the mosque. The smaller of the two guys who attacked you is his chief aide, Ali, known as the Caïd.’
Olivier paused, looking at his computer screen. ‘Well, look who’s turned up.’
He hit a couple of keys and what had been a small window on one corner of the screen expanded and Bruno saw it was a live feed from France 24, and a familiar face was being interviewed: Ghlamallah.
‘Whoever this so-called Engineer might be, there can be no question of handing him over to the Americans,’ Ghlamallah was saying. ‘We know from Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal how the Americans treat their prisoners, even when they don’t fry them in the electric chair or inject them with lethal chemicals. Many French people, not just Muslims, have severe doubts about the American operations in Afghanistan, the countless deaths of innocent civilians in drone attacks. If this Engineer is in French hands, he must be dealt with under French law.’
‘But France has also been part of the NATO effort in Afghanistan, in support of the elected government and against the Taliban,’ the interviewer objected.
‘Some of us question that policy, which seems neither to have produced stability nor a decent government in Afghanistan and certainly has not defeated the Taliban,’ Ghlamallah said, sounding very reasonable. ‘We think it’s time to put down the guns and start negotiating.’
‘Glib son-of-a-bitch, isn’t he?’ said Nancy, her arms folded as she watched the screen. ‘Just made for prime time.’
Ghlamallah was wearing Western dress, a dark suit with open-necked white shirt. His short beard was carefully trimmed and his teeth, which he displayed often as he smiled when making his points, had that too-perfect white symmetry that suggested expensive dentistry. His dark hair was trimmed short and neatly parted. Bruno saw Nancy’s point; the man was a highly skilled TV performer.
‘The sooner we get that pixel-scanning operation running, the happier I’ll be,’ she said, and turned to Bruno. ‘So how is Monsieur prime-time there going to spin it when Paris Match breaks the news that the Engineer came from his mosque?’
‘I imagine he’ll say exactly what he said to Momu and Dillah,’ Bruno replied. ‘He’ll say the three young men left of their own accord, choosing the path of jihad in the service, perhaps mistaken, of what they saw as their victimized Islamic brethren. Nobody could be more sorry than him about Sami’s eventual fate, but the fault lies with the Americans and tragically mistaken policies by successive French governments. Was it his fault if there were too few special schools in France for autistic children, particularly if they were Muslim? The mosque did their best to help, but they were not running a prison camp. The students were given considerable freedom and they chose jihad.’
‘Not bad,’ said Nancy, nodding her head in approval as she glanced at him. ‘Needs a little polish, but if he sticks to his guns he could just get away with that. Maybe you have a future in politics.’
Her tone was light and joking, but suddenly Bruno was aware that Nancy’s eyes were still on him, as if reappraising what she saw. He felt a sudden spark flash between the two of them that went beyond the professional relationship they had established. But with the stir of attraction he felt for her came an automatic caution. It was partly a sense that duty came first, but he knew it came also from his uncertainty at navigating delicate terrain. Almost automatically he responded as a policeman.
‘That’s why I want those bastards who killed Rafiq and hit me with that cattle prod,’ he said, and saw the spark fade from Nancy’s eyes. ‘If we have them facing murder charges we can go in and turn that mosque upside down.’
‘Not with twenty thousand devout worshippers standing solidly as a human chain to protect their mosque, you can’t,’ Olivier interrupted.
‘Are you telling me that mosques are off limits?’ Nancy asked, dragging her gaze from Bruno.
‘Usually yes, with a mosque this big and this well connected,’ Olivier replied. ‘But there is one way in. They run a small orphanage that operates as a kind of extortion racket. A gang of kids go into a shop, start breaking and stealing stuff, and of course they’re too young to be arrested. Then the Caïd comes along to apologize and explains how underfunded the mosque is in trying to deal with those poor fatherless boys. The shopkeepers get the message and fork out to the welfare fund and the kids move on to the next store. That’s the lever we’ll use when the time comes.’
17
The sun was still warm in mid-afternoon and Bruno was in his garden wearing a polo shirt and shorts when he heard a car lumbering up the lane. Gilles had called to say he was on his way. Balzac darted off down the drive to investigate the new arrival. Bruno had been weeding his vegetable patch and filling a wicker basket with tomatoes that he would turn into a compote for freezing. Some olive oil, garlic, chopped onion and balsamic vinegar and he’d have more than enough to keep him through the winter. And there’d still be plenty of tomatoes left over for the tarte he planned to make for dinner.
He stood, stretching his back, put the basket by the kitchen door and went in to take some beers from the fridge and glasses from the freezer. Gilles had taught him that trick, and Bruno was looking forward to seeing him, although not to fulfilling Pamela’s request to probe him about the stalled affair with Fabiola. Once the Briga
dier had told him to leave the château for the rest of the day and concentrate on Gilles, Bruno had called Pamela and Fabiola and invited them to supper.
‘You’ve lost weight. You’re even thinner than you were in Sarajevo,’ Bruno laughed, welcoming his friend with a hug. He shook the hand of the photographer who accompanied Gilles, an unshaven young man in jeans who looked too frail for the big camera case he carried. He was introduced as Freddy, and his eyes darted inquisitively around Bruno’s property, the restored old cottage, the line of truffle oaks, the chicken coop and potager.
‘I don’t think Freddy is quite used to the countryside. More of an urban guy,’ said Gilles, fondling Balzac’s long ears, which always made the puppy roll onto his back to have his tummy scratched. ‘He’s going to leave us to talk, and if you can show him the château on the map he’ll take some exterior shots if that’s OK.’
‘We might be able to do better than that,’ said Bruno, handing each of them a cold beer. ‘We can arrange for you to have an exclusive: photos of Sami and his family, the scars on his back and as much of an interview as you’re likely to get from an autistic young man who’s been through hell.’
‘You’re kidding.’ Gilles looked amazed.
‘No, we thought it was time to tell Sami’s full story, including the way he was let down by one of France’s biggest mosques, run by two of France’s most respected Imams. But you and I need to talk anyway and the full photo shoot can’t be till tomorrow, so let Freddy go and take his exterior shots and maybe he’d like to join us for dinner.’
Children of War Page 16