by Pirate Irwin
They were a mix of Guillemot’s BMA, his and Broglie’s Police Judiciaire and the odious Brigades Spéciales, the latter being split into two sections, one to hunt down Jews and the second one to chase communists.
What made them effective and was repugnant to Lafarge was that all of them had volunteered for the service, which guaranteed no compassion wherever a Jew or communist was concerned.
Lafarge had had cause to come across the two leaders of the sections in Paris, David and Henocques, both of them highly effective but devoid of any human feeling towards their quarry. Needless to say brutality was never far from the surface. For them, torture rather than reason produced the results to please their commander Bousquet.
They finally arrived at the end of the corridor and Broglie indicated to Lafarge to enter. He walked into a largish office populated by around 10 plainclothes officers, all of them busy at their desks, either on the phone or typing away.
Lafarge wondered where on earth he was going to find space to work from until Broglie took him by the arm and ushered him to the end of the room and into an office where there were two desks, shutting the door behind them which thankfully crowded out the noise.
“This is my desk, which you can see needs tending to like my roses in my garden. A good pruning is required!” grinned Broglie gesturing at the mass of files on his desk.
The only other items adorning it were an overflowing ashtray, a half bottle of cheap looking red wine, a standard green–topped reading lamp – obviously not over–used given the amount of unread dossiers, thought Lafarge – and a framed photograph whose subject Lafarge could not see as its back was turned to him.
“This then I take to be my desk. Nice and clean for the moment, Inspector,” smiled Lafarge gesturing towards one that was bare of any such detritus.
“Yes it is. We will soon remedy that problem. You have a phone, a typewriter and a lamp which should be all that you require,” replied Broglie.
“Good. Well I might as well get started then. Our chief is extremely keen that this matter is resolved as soon as possible as it is of great personal interest to him,” said Lafarge.
Broglie laughed and took out two empty glasses and filled them with the wine left over in the bottle, offering one to a reluctant Lafarge.
“Ah Inspector Lafarge, first we shall drink our pre aperitif and then us being a little different in our habits to the ever busy lot in Paris, because they have the Germans looking over their shoulders the whole time, we shall treat you to hospitality Free Zone style!” chortled Broglie, downing his well filled glass in one gulp.
Lafarge took a deep breath and did the same, deciding that although he wished to fulfill Bousquet’s orders, he would accept their invitation on this occasion as it was best not to antagonize his hosts from the outset.
Besides, he needed their insight if there was any into the possible whereabouts of de Chastelain, he was tired after the long journey, and a relaxed dinner with them would be a nice way to end the day and allow him to be fresh for the chase in the morning.
*
Lafarge awoke early the next morning after sleeping soundly, having consumed an inordinate amount of wine and alcohol and eaten lavishly at no doubt great expense to the state.
It had proved to be not as painful as he had feared, a gathering of policemen never having been his preferred choice of social companions, and Broglie despite his earlier joke and rotten teeth a very pleasant host.
Guillemot too, whom they had picked up from his office, was sharp, witty and intelligent, making Lafarge wonder why he had opted for Limoges and not Paris, while several of the others also were amiable company.
Alas, in terms of information there was little to be had, although pleasantly that was more because Broglie imposed a rule that talking shop was largely off limits at such occasions.
Guillemot told him to drop by his office in the morning and they would talk the matter over, which pleased Lafarge and absolved him from chatting about work for the remainder of the evening.
The mood only darkened when a group of about five members of the Brigades Spéciales walked into the brasserie, and dallied by their table for a few minutes.
It appeared to Lafarge that they all liked to dress in the manner of Chicago organized crime figures, sharp double breasted chalk grey pinstriped suits, plain shirts and striped ties, while to a man they had their hair slicked back.
All very presentable, the sort of look that would win over any local girl’s parents if their daughter was to invite them over for Sunday lunch, but that was till they opened their mouths.
All seemed determined to outdo each other in uttering profanities, squalid jokes of a sexual nature and often relating back to the powerless suspects they had tortured or raped that day, for nothing was beyond them in the search for what to them was the truth.
Mind you, Lafarge thought, truth was not something that came easily to these creatures.
At least Bonny and Lafont’s gang barely pretended to be something they weren’t, although they reveled in the title of the French Gestapo, but their avarice and criminal activities were carried out in the open.
The Brigades Speciales were sullying the reputation forever of the French police, although Lafarge had to admit even without them, the regular police services were doing a good job of that themselves.
The headquarters was less frenetic than the previous day and Lafarge wondered what had happened to those lost souls that he had seen crowded on the benches.
Best not to think about that, he reflected as he knocked and entered Guillemot’s office. Guillemot pulled up a chair for his colleague and poured him a coffee, which tasted like a real one for once, not the muck that they drank in Quai des Orfèvres.
The BMA had accrued a good reputation, but unlike the Brigade Spéciales, they didn’t resort to outright brutality but more on creating good relations with the populace and then prying for information, the majority of it undercover.
Lafarge and Guillemot chatted amiably for a few minutes, the latter revealing that Limoges appealed to him more because his family had come from the region and a few still lived in Oradour–sur–Glane and its surrounding farms. Also he admitted Paris had never attracted him overly, even after being a student there in the early 30’s.
“I’m more a Marseille man,” he said smiling.
Lafarge laughed at Guillemot's gentle joke at the expense of he the Parisian, the rivalry between the two biggest cities in France never far from the surface of any conversation.
“I’m more a Nice man myself. That is, my family live there now,” said Lafarge resignedly.
“Ah I thought you were more Vichy,” came Guillemot’s riposte.
“You’re well–informed Inspector,” said Lafarge admiringly.
“It’s my job, Gaston. I wouldn’t be much use if I didn’t do my research, would I?” said Guillemot, smiling again. “Now to business,” he added, changing the tone completely.
“We have had no firm sightings of de Chastelain for a few days now. However, before you get too dejected, I can tell you with almost complete confidence that he is still in the area,” said Guillemot, his tone supporting his statement.
“How so?” asked Lafarge.
“Instinct born of several years of intelligence work added to the little slivers of information that we have been able to piece together. I have to admit it’s not a complete picture but then I am afraid we have loads of other cases on our desk and this one came to us late,” he said apologetically.
“That’s fine. If you can furnish me with the information you already have, any people who you feel might be co–operative and talk to me that would at least get me started. I believe for instance there are two terrorist groups known to be operating in the region,” said Lafarge.
“Yes at least two of them. I think we can discount the Armenian–led largely communist group given someone like de Chastelain, despite his reputation for taking on the state in court, would not appeal to them as they are a pretty exclusi
ve bunch and rely on cultural as well as political fidelity.
“Thus we are left with the group mainly made up of confused intellectuals and lost professionals.
“There we have easier access, if you understand my drift. They can be more malleable, as while their antennae might make them naturally suspicious they are also proud people who would take kindly to us paying tribute to their pre–war reputations. Their egos react well to being caressed.
“The only thing is finding them, as there are plenty of lawyers, doctors and professors, mostly at a loose end in Limoges, god knows why they chose this dull place, and they are not all plotting against the state.
“However, we have files on most of them and it is there where you may find a link to de Chastelain. There might be an old colleague or former law professor of his.”
Lafarge thanked him and said he would await delivery of the files in his office and get cracking straight away. He turned to leave having drained another cup of the excellent coffee but Guillemot told him he hadn’t finished.
“I believe you prefer to work on your own, Gaston. Here it will not be possible, a smaller town means no information or act goes unnoticed. It would be better for all concerned that you keep all the services informed of your plans and your progress, even though I know you are answerable really to one man and he is in Paris,” said Guillemot affably but firmly.
“You never know but if you play it that way, then information will also come in your direction. We all for better or for worse are working for the same government, and I believe the same goal, so I would advise restraining your normal modus operandi and being a team player.
“Things will work out for the better for all concerned. It may mean even having to converse with the Brigades Speciales. I too loathe them but they do get results and if it helps catch your man then you should have no qualms about how they extract the information.
“Don’t worry, though, I am not going to be shadowing you, your social life when you manage to have one is your own affair. Just tread warily there for while we have strength, so do they, and traps there are aplenty.
“Lord knows you are going to have plenty of time to learn that.
“I don’t know if Bousquet has given you a deadline but I would suggest letting him know that you could be here for several months. The way these cases generally go and the hostile atmosphere out in the countryside makes me think you will be our guest for a long time,” said Guillemot with a tone that suggested to Lafarge he was happy at the thought of that, which was an encouraging sign at least.
Lafarge had reckoned as much about the duration of his stay, he just didn’t know whether Bousquet had.
Mind you, Lafarge thought as he wandered down the corridor to his office, the longer he was away from Paris, the happier Bousquet would be. He too was happy because it gave him the time to get to know his own actress acquaintance, Aimée de Florentin, much better and he would be calling on her at the earliest possible moment.
Not only because he wanted to, but also the couple that had greeted her at the station intrigued him and who they really were, for neither had for sure ever ploughed a field or milked a cow by the very nature of their appearance that day and the smoothness of their hands when he shook them.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lafarge had leafed through countless dossiers in three hours and he was already bored. None of them really revealed much of an insight into how or through whom he could start making progress into tracking down de Chastelain.
The one thing he did glean from reading the files on some of the more notable people in the town and its surroundings was that the unattractive spirit of denunciation was as virulent here as it was in Paris.
The funny thing, though, was that they were busy denouncing themselves. Thus a farmer called Benoist Bouchard had written to headquarters relating that one of his farmhands, Lionel Cretillon, was sloping off from work at odd hours during the day, usually post lunch.
Bouchard apologized that owing to his duties on the farm and providing provisions for the security forces in the area, he had not been able to follow his errant employee. About the same time, good old yeoman Cretillon, Lafarge noticed, had filed a similar report with the police regarding his employer.
“Farmer Bouchard is not the most reliable of employers, for having given us our instructions for the day if we have finished by lunch we can rarely find him to give us further work for the afternoon,” he said in his statement deposed with the gendarme.
It had transpired, when the gendarmes decided to take action, that Cretillon was screwing Bouchard’s daughter on a regular basis while the farmer, who had higher ambitions for his offspring than a lowly farmhand, had informed on him to try and have him arrested.
Cretillon, having been warned by his lover, had decided to counter attack by filing a similar complaint. The result for both was a telling off for wasting police time and ordered to carry on working together.
With so few men of working age available as so many French males had been kindly sent by Vichy to work in Germany, Bouchard had little option but to ditch his ambitions for his daughter and keep his unwanted prospective son–in–law on at the farm.
That was one of the funnier ones that Lafarge had read, there were a lot of others that were far less amusing and had ended in serious repercussions for the person that had been denounced.
Those who did the denouncing rarely got severely punished even if they were proved to be wrong, as the state did not wish to discourage the practice. Similarly, they also did not want a deluge of false information that would distract them from real leads, and there was a suspicion that some resistance cells were deploying this tactic, as it was effective and not harmful to them.
Lafarge tossed the umpteenth file onto his desk which now resembled the bazaar that was Broglie’s, even to the extent of the overflowing ashtray and the half full bottle of red wine, though, his was a better quality. The plethora of denunciations revolted him and illustrated once again that the French were no different to other human beings, that even with their culture and appreciation of the best things, whether it be art, food, women and wine, they had a very dark side.
These files and the information within them showed clearly a neighbour who had been a smiling and pleasant person to live beside in happier times became a vengeful and envious personality once things deteriorated. Sometimes it was for the tiniest of benefits, like adding a chair to their home because their neighbour had been arrested on their say so and the house had been declared open for anyone to take the accuseds’ goods and chattels.
Lafarge, like any policeman, had always had use for informants, without them it made cases almost impossible to solve, but these sort of informants revealed within the files were totally unreliable and were meriting an equal punishment to their targets.
Lafarge was contemplating strolling down to the brasserie ‘Le Chat Gris’ where he had been invited the previous night, when Broglie, who he hadn’t seen all morning, came in with a thunderous look on his round face.
He acknowledged Lafarge but headed straight for a cupboard just behind his desk and from it retrieved a bottle of red wine.
He pulled the cork and poured it into his unwashed, grimy glass before downing it in one. Lafarge kept his thoughts to himself, allowing Broglie time to gather himself and tell him what was on his mind if he so wished. It took another two full glasses before he did so.
“Sorry Gaston, it’s just I have had it with the creeps from Brigades Spéciales,” he said, spitting the words out venomously.
Lafarge raised his hands in a gesture of why now, why are you so angry with them?
“I arrested a fellow and his wife this morning, a couple we have been watching closely for some time, pretty much since they came down from Paris. We acted on information provided by a reliable source that they were involved in a cell who were printing anti–Nazi pamphlets and were planning a similar thing here, even though their co–conspirators had been arrested by the Gesta
po.
“Well, I preferred to wait until they did set up their new operation and I shared that intelligence with Guillemot, who agreed to the plan. Thus we pounced this morning... I didn’t tell you because their arrival was well before your fugitive came here, and caught them red–handed. They surrendered without any resistance and we brought them back here.
“I was in the process of presenting them to Guillemot, having registered them with the desk sergeant, but unfortunately I must have been overheard or one of my fellows blabbered something to one of the thugs.
“No sooner were we having an initially cordial discussion in Guillemot’s office than in strode de Blaeckere, the head of the Brigade Spéciale in charge of tracking down communist insurgents, and two of his sidekicks and demanded that we hand the couple over to his authority.
“Obviously, I protested in the strongest of terms as did Guillemot, but de Blaeckere would have none of it.
“He sneered at me that I was just a yokel from the country and had no say in what he, an aristocrat from Normandy and educated at the Sorbonne, decided.
“I went to take a swing at him, but fortunately, Guillemot prevented me from doing so and using his more subtle arts of diplomatic persuasion, tried to reason with the man.
“However it had no impact whatsoever and he simply ordered his men to take the couple, who had calmed down after realizing that Guillemot and myself were more interested in talking them into a confession than beating it out of them.
“In any case, having caught them with the printing press, there wasn’t much to confess. Now I hate to think what he and his men are doing to the couple in the basement cells. I don’t have much sympathy for what they were doing but at the same time, I still believe in the due process such as it is these days.
“Treason is treason and the penalty is death, but at least with me and Guillemot, they would have gone there unharmed. Those sadists are going to make them regret ever having lived,” Broglie hissed and wiped away beads of sweat that had broken out on his forehead.