Sebag had finished shaving and was looking at his face in the mirror. He gently ran his finger over the vertical wrinkle that had been developing between his eyebrows for several years. He got that from his father.
He didn’t like it.
He detested everything that came to him from that man who had betrayed them, left them, him and his mother.
“What are you thinking about?”
Claire had pressed herself up to his naked back. He hadn’t heard her coming.
“Nothing.”
“Liar . . . ”
She pinched his cheek.
“Do I know her?” Gilles couldn’t keep from pouting. Claire, who was watching him in the mirror, noticed it. Gilles turned around and took his wife in his arms.
“We’ve been together for almost twenty years and there has never been anyone but you,” he said, looking deep into her eyes.
“And . . . you’re beginning to find that a long time?” Claire said evasively, smiling.
“When you’re in love, you’re always twenty.”
“That’s nice . . . ”
“What about you? Does it seem a long time to you?”
She put her lips on his. Their mouths opened and their tongues caressed each other. A few seconds of eternity. Despite the taste of peppermint toothpaste that they exchanged.
“Did you like my response?”
“It was nice, too.”
It was hard for them to part from each other.
“I’m going to be late,” she said.
Gilles watched her put on her makeup. Here nascent wrinkles didn’t come from anyone. Or maybe from her joyous heart and her good nature. He admired his wife and especially he envied her. He loved her steady temper, her easygoing ways, and her joie de vivre. She knew how to take things as they came without letting herself be invaded by pointless fears and useless worries. In contrast, he was often melancholic and uneasy. It had always been like that. But it had become even more pronounced since he’d started down the other side of forty. And even more since he’d started being suspicious last summer.
In the kitchen, Gilles allowed himself a second cup of coffee. The children had given him a professional espresso machine for his birthday, the kind that made coffee that turned an Italian green with jealousy. He opted for a mocha that he stirred with his eyes closed.
Claire’s purse started to vibrate. She had set it open on a corner of the table. Gilles approached it as if he were dealing with a wild animal. He spotted the telephone stuck between the card holder and the coin purse. The temptation was strong. These days, cell phones were the best confidants but they were also the worst traitors. In the call list, the text messages, and the e-mails, secrets were often hidden, the little and intimate ones, the serious and more painful ones. He was in a position to know that people showed no prudence with this new accomplice, which was as featherbrained as it was indifferent. How many cases had been solved just because the criminal hadn’t been careful enough in cleaning out an electronic memory? And how many adulterous affairs had been revealed by a simple indiscreet manipulation?
It would be so easy. Just tap a key and consult her phone.
If Claire had had a lover, she probably wouldn’t have erased all the text messages. She would have kept at least one, for the ecstatic pleasure of remembering. If Claire had had a lover, she would never have thought to erase the repository of all the calls. If Claire had had a lover, she would surely have mentioned him somewhere in her messages to her girlfriends.
The telephone finally fell silent. The temptation remained.
All the questions he’d been constantly asking himself for weeks had their answers in the circuits of this damned telephone! He just had to make a move. A simple move.
He quickly retreated before this ferocious beast that was taunting him.
Outside, the sky was continuing to weep hot tears. Its sorrow had known only short pauses during the night, and the earth could no longer soak up all that sadness.
Lost in his thoughts, Sebag was no longer paying attention to where he was going and he set his foot in a mud puddle as he was getting into the car.
“Shit!”
He used the bottom of the car’s body to scrape as much of the mud as possible off the sole of his shoe and especially around it. Then, fairly annoyed, he started the car.
The radio helped him calm down. He’d turned it to a continuous news station. Always the same tone, often the same rhythm, sometimes the same words. Similar voices with identical intonations. He was no longer listening. Whatever the subject, the journalistic logorrhea lulled him better than the sweetest of melodies.
The Arago bridge leading to the center of Perpignan was already almost bumper to bumper. Why was it that the more the speed of the water passing under a bridge grew, the more that of the cars passing over it slowed? He tried to concentrate on the investigation, but only partially succeeded.
Parts of the case passed through his mind without really sticking there. He’d just turned right after crossing the bridge when his cell phone rang.
“It’s Castello. Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to headquarters. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“No point in going any further. I need you to go to the Haut-Vernet cemetery right away. Our guys are waiting for you there.”
“What’s going on over there, Superintendent?”
“You’ll understand when you get there. I don’t have time to tell you more. I’m in Paris and I’m going into a meeting. And hang up quick—you’re not supposed to be on the phone when you’re driving, it’s dangerous!”
Surprised by the facetious tone his boss had adopted just as he was about to go into an important meeting in the course of which he was supposed to be reprimanded, Sebag made a U-turn in front of police headquarters and drove back over the Arago bridge.
He noted with pleasure that it was easier to go upstream in traffic than in a rising river. “Hmm, I’m becoming facetious myself,” he mumbled to himself, astonished by his change in mood in the course of a few minutes at most. He recalled a famous quotation whose author he didn’t know: “Humor is the politeness of despair.” He turned the sentence over and over in his head before finally deciding to reject it. It couldn’t be suitable for his reality, it was too exaggerated. And then his marital situation was in no way desperate. It was just dreadfully banal.
As for his humor . . .
He was at that point in his reflections when he arrived at the entrance to the Haut-Vernet cemetery. A young police officer in uniform was waiting for him under the entry porch. He came up to the driver’s-side window. With his index finger, Sebag lowered the glass.
“You can drive your car in,” the policeman suggested. “With this weather, that will be more convenient. My colleagues are already there. You can’t miss them.”
He turned around to point the way:
“You see that fork there? Take the right-hand lane, and afterward it’s straight ahead.”
Sebag thanked him, closed the window, and went ahead. He drove slowly about a hundred meters to reach a large traffic circle where a police car was already parked. He grabbed the raincoat on the passenger seat and put it on before going out into the downpour.
The door of the other car opened at the same time as his. An umbrella came out first, then a stocky silhouette. Next Sebag saw coming towards him a face that looked like a stunted grape. Officer André Ripoll. His whipping boy. The only one. His favorite!
Ripoll greeted him rapidly and came to stand next to him in the praiseworthy intention of letting him share his umbrella. Sebag’s nostrils immediately took in an acrid odor of gamy meat. Instinctively, he took a step backward. He found himself back in the rain and took out an old running cap. With his free hand, Ripoll pointed to a dark gray marble stele.
“That’s the monument to the memory of the men who were shot,” he explained, taking a step forward to put his superior back under the protection of his ridiculous bit of fabric. “It’s called the OAS monument.”
Followed by Ripoll’s umbrella, Sebag went up to the damaged monument. The vandals had attacked the man’s face, which had completely disappeared, probably under the blows of a hammer. Despite other damage here and there, the rest of the design was recognizable: it represented a man with his hands tied behind a post. The names of the former combatants for French Algeria must have been inscribed on the base, but the furious hammering had made them illegible. On both sides of the monument, the vandals had broken flower pots.
“You didn’t cordon off the area,” Sebag remarked.
“We stayed here, it really wasn’t necessary,” Ripoll said. “And then no one has come into the cemetery since we’ve been here—who would want to come here with this weather?”
“All the same, it would be better,” Sebag insisted.
The stunted grape grew red. Ripoll had trouble controlling his annoyance. He puffed noisily before yielding to authority:
“Whatever you say.”
As he was returning to his car, Sebag called Elsa Moulin on her cell phone.
“Castello already informed me, I’m on my way,” she said. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“See you in a moment. I hope you’ve brought along an oilskin.”
“Oilskin, boots, and hood. I spent my last vacation in Brittany, and I’m fully equipped.”
He hung up and then put his cell phone in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing under the raincoat. Water was running down the headstones and Sebag said to himself that this year even the least well-maintained of them would be shiny for All Saints’ Day. The monument, on the other hand, was ruined, and this act of vandalism was in danger of setting the whole city on fire.
The monument had always aroused a lot of opposition. Ever since it was erected in 2003, every June 7th an extremist association of Pieds-Noirs tried to organize a ceremony in honor of the OAS’s former combatants, invariably provoking a call for a counterdemonstration. To avoid any incident, on each occasion the prefect issued an order forbidding both the ceremony and the demonstration. Sebag thought he also remembered that the monument had already been the object of vandalism. But at the time that act had not been preceded by a man’s murder.
However, did that mean that this new defacement was necessarily connected with Martinez’s murder? Sebag thought again about Albouker’s recent statements. The president of the Pied-Noir Circle had wondered whether the community of former French of Algeria wasn’t the real target of this murder. Gilles had immediately rejected that notion. Perhaps a little too quickly, he now said to himself.
Officer André Ripoll, his hands full of stakes, stood at attention in front of him:
“Where should we put them?”
“Cordon off a space of thirty square meters around the monument and that will be fine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ripoll said, scratching his skull under his cap.
Sebag added in an ironic tone:
“Let’s say, a space about six meters by five.”
Ripoll went away mumbling a few words, half in French, half in Catalan. Sebag had annoyed him, he was well aware of that and fully satisfied by it. God alone knew why, the old officer irritated him and he took a malicious pleasure in needling him every time they met. These were the only times in his life when he abused his hierarchical position that way, but it always relieved him.
With the help of another policeman, Ripoll quickly set up a few stakes and then attached the traditional yellow tape to them, making use of a few nearby tombs as well. He came back toward Sebag.
“What I especially wanted to tell you a little while ago is that this cordon of yours isn’t going to be of much use. With all the rain that fell tonight and is still falling, the forensic guys are not likely to find many clues here.”
“That’s possible, but it’s our job. Now you can go back and stay dry in your car.”
Ripoll looked at his soaked uniform and then murmured:
“Stay dry, stay dry, it’s a little late for that . . . ”
Another car came down the lane and parked near the others. Despite the mist on the windows, Sebag recognized Elsa Moulin’s cheerful face.
The young woman got out of the car dressed in a banana-yellow oilskin zipped up to her chin and strawberry-red plastic boots. As soon as she emerged, she put her curly hair under an apple-green cloche. She looked like a mischievous little girl.
“Hi!” she cried out joyously.
He thought Elsa looked splendid, and told her so.
“I thought I wasn’t going to see the sun today.”
Elsa seemed surprised. Sebag was usually very reserved with women. She smiled and her eyes lingered on him for a few moments. Then she walked over to the monument.
“You’re not wearing your usual outfit?”
She replied as she looked at the monument.
“It would be better but I’m not sure it’s waterproof.”
“By the way, is Pagès still on leave?”
“Until the end of the week, yes.”
She returned to her vehicle and opened the trunk. First she took out an umbrella that she opened and balanced on her shoulder. Then she hung her camera around her neck.
“First a few pictures . . . ” she said when she came back to Sebag. “Could you hold my umbrella for me, please? It’s mainly to keep the camera dry.”
He obeyed with pleasure. Together they began by backing up to take general views of the traffic circle. Then they approached the monument little by little. Medium-range views and then close-ups. Elsa even went so far as to almost glue herself to the monument to photograph the impact of the hammer blows in detail. Sebag conscientiously held the umbrella over the young woman and the camera. Water was running off the plasticized fabric and onto his soaked cap. A few drops occasionally ran down his neck.
When Elsa had finished taking her pictures, they returned to the car. Sheltered by the umbrella and by the open trunk lid, the young woman carefully put away her equipment in a bag. Then she took out a heavy case.
“Could you help, me, please? It’s what I’m doing that has to be protected. My sweet little face doesn’t matter.”
He went with her to do the tedious work of collecting evidence. His thoughts very quickly turned elsewhere. If Castello had sent them here so rapidly, it was because he didn’t want to think it was a coincidence. But how could this act of pure vandalism be connected with a cold-blooded murder? For Sebag, that didn’t make sense. At the same time, the proximity of the two events couldn’t be completely random.
Elsa’s work took a good hour. At one point, she held her tweezers before his eyes. She’d just found a white hair on the gravel. They grimaced simultaneously.
“This isn’t yours, is it?” Elsa joked.
“Not yet.”
She put the hair in a plastic bag that she labeled in the shelter of the umbrella. Despite his raincoat, Sebag felt soaked to the skin. His shoes had long since ceased to be waterproof and every step he took was accompanied by a ridiculous sucking sound. After Elsa left, he went back to the police car. As he approached, Ripoll rolled down the window, revealing his shriveled, anxious face.
“I think you can go now,” Sebag told him. “Leave the area cordoned off at least until tomorrow and keep a man at the entrance to the cemetery to watch for any suspicious movement.”
Ripoll nodded, reassured. He was the leader of their group and he had already decided to delegate the work to the youngest member while he went to dry out his uniform in front of the radiators at headquarters.
“I’d like the man who remains here to be experienced,” Sebag added treacherously. “I want you to do it, Ripoll.”
The old policeman’s face shriveled up again. His mouth and nose came closer as if they were going to fold inward, and his eyes half closed. Ripoll gave a military salute laden with cold hostility. Sebag walked away, a smile on his lips. He really didn’t understand the sick pleasure he took in tormenting this poor cop. But he didn’t care. He felt no remorse. He felt good. Relaxed. And he didn’t even feel annoyed when he once again stepped in a hole full of icy water as he was getting into his car.
He started the car and turned the fan on maximum to clear the fogged windows. He drove slowly as far as the gate to the cemetery but stopped there to talk to the caretaker. The man had fallen sound asleep, lulled by the beating of the rain on the roof of his lodge. He’d discovered the damage early in the morning, when he’d taken advantage of a brief letup in the rain to make his daily rounds through the tombs. Sebag saw that he wouldn’t learn anything from the man, and didn’t linger.
Before starting down the avenue to the hospital, he took out his cell phone and punched in a number. His day was going to be entirely occupied by this new event, and he had to cancel the appointment he’d made for the afternoon in connection with his investigation of Mathieu’s accident. Too bad. Sévérine would just have to wait a little longer. He left a message on the cell phone of the witness with whom he was supposed to meet and suggested that they postpone the interview until the following morning.
On his way to headquarters, he made a detour to stop at his home. He changed clothes, but the only footwear he found was running shoes. With slacks and a raincoat, it wasn’t the look he would have chosen. Considering himself in the mirror, he thought he looked almost ridiculous. Oh, well, just once won’t matter, he told himself philosophically.
Pascal Lucas, the driver of the van, called him on his cell phone while he was alone in his office, writing a report on the destruction of the monument.
“Hello, Inspector. I’ve just remembered something important. The car, the Clio, had Spanish license plates!”
The driver’s voice was vibrating with excitement, but his slurred voice left little doubt that he had been drinking.
“That could be an interesting detail,” Sebag said coolly. “Assuming that I can really count on it. Tell me the truth, Mr. Lucas, have you drunk quite a bit today?”
“No more than usual,” the driver said sullenly.
“But no less, either.”
On the other end of the line, Pascal Lucas replied, almost inaudibly, “No.”
“And how did you come to have this . . . revelation?”
“I was watching a series on TV and there was a car with a Spanish license plate, and that was what made me think of it.”
“Fine, fine, I’ve noted that down, Mr. Lucas. I’ll see what I can do with it.”
Sebag hung up, puzzled. Could alcohol have the same effect on memory as hypnosis? Could it also make thoughts we assumed had been erased reemerge from the black abyss of our brains? He remained skeptical, but he had hardly any choice but to pretend to believe it.
He realized that his witness hadn’t yet called back. He dialed his number again, and this time immediately got him. The guy could talk with him the following morning, and they agreed to meet at the site of the accident.
“But watch out, Lieutenant,” the man warned him amiably, “if you have to cancel this time it will be several days before I can talk to you. I have to go to Spain for my work.”
Sebag crossed his fingers as he hung up. He hoped that there wouldn’t be another unexpected impediment. Too many days had already passed since the tragedy, and the longer it was, the more memories were likely to fade.
He thought again of Lieutenant Cardona’s rage and glimpsed for a moment the malicious pleasure his colleague would take if he failed to find a new lead. And above all, he imagined Sévérine’s disappointment. Gilles could handle anything but that.
That white Clio had to exist.
He had to prove it.
He had to identify the driver.
“Well, gentlemen, we really didn’t need that.”
Castello’s tone was not in any way facetious. He’d abruptly left his summit meeting of superintendents in Paris to catch the first afternoon plane.
“Since the ministry is already not very happy with us, I can tell you they’ll be keeping a close eye on us. Moreover, I expect the arrival of the director of the prefect’s cabinet any minute now.”
In the meeting room, Sebag, Molina, Llach, and Lambert were physically present, while Ménard was participating via conference call from Marseille.
“Where are Raynaud and Moreno?” Castello said with concern.
Without waiting for an answer, he picked up the telephone in front of him and asked his secretary to call the two members of the team who were late.
“Tell them that if they aren’t here in five minutes, I’ll cancel all their overtime pay for the last month.”
He hung up angrily.
“Normally, I like to begin our meetings by laying out the facts and the first evidence collected by the investigation, but just for once I would like to begin with conclusions. Before the cabinet director arrives, I want to take up right away the question that seems to me essential: Should we connect the act of vandalism against the OAS monument with Martinez’s murder? Gilles?”
Sebag had been expecting Castello to ask him to speak first. He’d thought about it all afternoon.
“The coincidence is disturbing, I have to admit, but I have a hard time imagining that the same individual is responsible for these two acts. A murder and an act of vandalism have nothing in common. And then the timing doesn’t work, either. If everything was planned by a single individual, I think the acts would be committed in ascending order. Here, we start off with a murder . . . ”
Sebag looked at his boss and then at his colleagues. His arguments hadn’t hit home. They all remained perplexed. He wasn’t surprised. He himself probably wouldn’t have been convinced. He always had trouble putting into words what he felt regarding certain investigations.
Joan Llach spoke up:
“All the same, ‘OAS’ written on a door at a crime scene and a couple of days later, the destruction of a monument erected in honor of that organization is disturbing, to say the least.”
“That’s true, but we could very easily explain that coincidence by the fact that the murder of Martinez might have aroused hostilities between the Pieds-Noirs and their opponents,” Sebag replied.
“We could . . . if we’d mentioned that ‘OAS’ was written on Martinez’s door. But I remind you that we didn’t release that information. We didn’t give it to the media.”
Sebag rejected Llach’s argument.
“Right, but we all mentioned the OAS when we talked with the people close to Martinez. And also in our interviews with the left-wing activists we met. In a little city like Perpignan, information travels fast.”
“The leftists were very tetchy yesterday,” Molina pointed out. “Besides, on that subject . . . ”
The door of the meeting room opened, interrupting Molina.
Raynaud-Moreno, the brotherly duo, made an entrance they would have liked to have been more discreet.
“Good evening,” Moreno said in his barely audible, sepulchral voice. Raynaud limited himself to making a vague sign with his hand.
“Finally!” the Superintendent said angrily. “May I ask what you were working on today that made you so late?”
The two inspectors sat down, taking care not to make their chairs squeak. They glanced at each other as they always did, and it was Moreno who spoke for both of them.
“We’re still working on the holdup at the pari-mutuel bar on Rue Foch.”
Three weeks earlier, two armed and hooded individuals had held up a bar, seriously wounding the manager. Probably the same ones who had then engaged in several other holdups in the neighboring department of Aude.
“And are you making progress?”
The two acolytes of the “laughing brigade”—that was the nickname the other inspectors sometimes gave them—exchanged glances again.
“Not much,” Moreno recognized.
“Then for the moment you’ll put that case on ice and, for once, you’ll work in the team. I mean ‘team’ in the broad sense—I’m not referring to you two.”
The two men reluctantly acquiesced. Castello turned to Sebag.
“Do you have anything else to say about what we were talking about?”
“For my part, no.”
“Does anyone else want to say something?”
A metallic voice rose in the room. All eyes converged on the flying saucer that had been set on the table. Ménard was speaking from Marseille.
“Are we completely giving up the idea that the two crimes are connected?”
“We never exclude anything, you know that very well,” the superintendent replied. “And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll have a choice this time. Everyone is going to push us in that direction. The Pied-Noir community is going to be indignant, even worried, and more than ever we’re going to be walking on eggshells. We need to make rapid progress.”
“Exactly . . . ” Molina began.
Two loud knocks on the door interrupted him. Castello got up immediately. He opened the door and stood aside to let a woman enter. She was as young as she was severe-looking. Sebag, who had already met her, knew that she was only twenty-five years old, and had just graduated from the ENA.9 The post as director of the cabinet of the prefect of Pyrénées-Orientales was her first, and if she lacked a sense of humor and flexibility, she had already shown herself to be very efficient. She smoothed out her straight skirt before sitting down.
Castello introduced her to his men more out of politeness than necessity:
“Mlle. Sabine Henri, who is representing the prefect here.”
The young woman took the time to look carefully at each of the inspectors. She wore glasses with rectangular lenses and black frames.
“Good evening, gentlemen. I won’t conceal the fact that the prefect is very concerned about the turn these events have taken. He fears that the situation will degenerate very quickly, and demands rapid results.” The inspectors silently nodded their assent. They were being respectful and docile, but none of them was fooled: they knew that a police investigation requires work, rigor, and sometimes luck, but it always requires patience. Results couldn’t be produced by a movement of her chin.
Castello took the floor again.
“Before you arrived, we were talking about the vandalism at the monument in Haut-Vernet. Lieutenant Sebag was there this morning. Lieutenant?”
Sebag circulated the photos Elsa Moulin had taken.
“The forensic team didn’t find much around the monument. No fingerprints, no footprints. It has to be said that the surfaces in the cemetery—mainly asphalt, with some gravel here and there—don’t really favor prints. The weather conditions didn’t make their task any easier, either. Despite everything, however, they did find a white hair on the gravel.”
While he was giving this last bit of information, he’d given Molina a little kick under the table to warn him not to make any inappropriate jokes. His partner got the message and limited himself to repressing a groan of pain. Sebag went on:
“The initial observations suggest that the instrument used to damage the monument was a sledgehammer of the usual size, the kind that can be found in every home improvement store in the region.”
The cabinet director was listening and observing him neutrally.
“The gate to the cemetery is closed at night, but the perimeter wall is not even two meters high,” Sebag explained. “Thus, it would be easy to get over. On the west side, it is sheltered by a row of trees that can be climbed without anyone noticing.”
Sebag stopped abruptly. He didn’t know what else to say. The young woman’s smooth, oval face came to life. Her delicate lips opened.
“In a cemetery, white hairs must not be very rare. In short, you haven’t got anything that would allow us to identify the perpetrator or perpetrators?”
The words had been uttered without aggressiveness. As a simple observation. But Sebag felt as if he had been slapped.
“We’ll have a DNA analysis of the hair made anyway, since we’ve already found one in the victim’s apartment that seems not to have been his own. Otherwise, in view of the easy access to the cemetery and the simple nature of the tools used, we can assume that an individual could have acted alone. Even a relatively elderly individual.”
“Do you really believe that we’re dealing with an elderly vandal?”
Sebag weighed his words:
“I don’t believe, I investigate. I’m looking for clues or proofs, and sometimes I’m able to find them and solve a few cases.”
Sabine Henri did not react, but Sebag saw her round chin tremble. He felt that the young woman was trying to use her coldness to compensate for her lack of experience. That it was no more than a pose adopted to impose her authority, in spite of her age and her sex, in the very masculine universe of the prefecture. The cabinet director managed to put a very discreet smile on her lips.
“I’ve heard about you, Lieutenant Sebag.”
She slowly turned toward the superintendent.
“And in the other case, the murder, have your men made progress?”
Castello coughed:
“Uh . . . I don’t know yet, we haven’t yet had time to take up the question. I sent one of my men to Marseille to consult with a historian specializing in the OAS. He’s the one who confirmed that the victim did in fact belong to the organization—Hello, Ménard, are you still there?”
The flying saucer began to emit a few broken sentences.
“Michel Sonate . . . interviewed . . . Bernard Martinez in January . . . 2011 in Perpignan for the pur . . . pose of writing a book about . . . the former members of the OAS. I was . . . able to listen to the whole inter . . . view but Martinez didn’t mention . . . his motivations. At no time . . . ”
The sentence was lost in a terrible burst of static. Castello shook the flying saucer.
“We couldn’t hear you very well, François, could you repeat the last things you said?”
“Martinez had nothing . . . to say about the actions he’d led in Algeria.”
“And your historian has no idea of what Martinez might have done at the time? Or about the identity of any of his victims?”
“For the moment . . . no. But he’s doing research and . . . correlating his data. The hardest part is that . . . members of the OAS . . . used . . . pseudonyms for each other.”
Sabine Henri seemed astonished.
“Do you mean, Superintendent, that you think the motive for the crime might go back to the last years of the Algerian War?”
“That’s one of the hypotheses, yes. I must say that it’s even the only one.”
“But that’s so far back . . . If it’s a question of revenge, why so long afterward? It’s fifty years this year!”
Sebag began to smile. Obviously to a young woman of twenty-five, the 1960s seemed almost prehistoric.
“Some hatreds recognize no statute of limitation,” Castello explained.
“But why wait so long?”
Sebag found that question pertinent. Plunging straight ahead, he hadn’t yet asked it himself. One of the keys to the mystery might lie in the answer to that question. He wrote down this idea in his notebook and didn’t hear Castello’s response. The superintendent had already moved on to another aspect of the investigation.
“Since the murder appeared to be connected with the victim’s membership in the OAS, and thus with the community of the former French of Algeria, we wondered if there hadn’t been other murders of Pieds-Noirs elsewhere in France, other settlings of accounts. I assigned Joan Llach and Thierry Lambert to look into that possibility. Gentlemen . . . ?”
Lambert held back to let his colleague take the initiative. Llach didn’t have to be asked twice.
“We searched the national data banks of the police and the gendarmerie, and up to this point we’ve found three murders of French nationals born in Algeria at the time of the French occupation: a pharmacist in Cannes, a retiree in Paris, and a restaurant owner in Nantes.”
From the tone Llach had adopted everyone had understood that no great revelations were to be expected. But since all police work requires a detailed report, he was allowed to continue:
“The pharmacist in Cannes was killed during a holdup of his dispensary a year and a half ago, the retiree was stabbed to death by his wife, and the restaurant owner in Nantes, who was probably connected with the mafia, was shot down by henchmen whom the local police have not yet been able to identify. In these three cases, no reference to the OAS was found at the scene of the crimes.”
“Do you think you’ve dealt with this question, or do you need to continue?” Castello asked.
“I lack a few bits of information, but I should be able to finish up alone tomorrow. Uh . . . I’ll no longer need Thierry.”
“Fine, fine. That’s it, I think . . . Ah no, wait, Molina . . . Usually you open your mouth to say absolutely nothing, and this time you haven’t said anything much at all. Can I hope that when you keep quiet, it’s because you have some new evidence to give us?”
“I just might . . . ”
Molina had a satisfied look on his face that intrigued Sebag.
“I made my little investigation into the activists in the Collective Contra Nostalgeria and I found a guy whose profile is particularly interesting: Émile Abbas was born fifty-four years ago in Algeria, of an Arab father and a French mother.”
To make the greatest effect, he took the time to look around his audience. Normally, Castello would have been irritated, but the presence of the cabinet director led him to show patience.
“You’re keeping us waiting, Monsieur Molina.”
“Émile Abbas’s father was murdered in Algiers in February 1962 by an OAS commando,” the inspector finally said.
“Well, well, that’s certainly interesting,” the superintendent conceded. “Have you called him in?”
“Yes, for tomorrow morning at headquarters, but I don’t know if he’ll agree to come. For the moment, he and his friends have not been very cooperative.”
“He’ll have an interest in being more flexible. He’s a simple witness now, but he could become a suspect. If he doesn’t come, Molina, go pick him up at his home or at his workplace.”
The cabinet director nodded in agreement, but added a little cautionary note.
“Be careful not to go too far. Let’s avoid handcuffs, for example. That might make us look bad if he’s not the right man.”
With that incitement to be prudent, Sabine Henri abruptly stood up.
“I beg you to excuse me, but I have to leave you. I can’t stay any longer. The whole region, as you know, is on severe storm watch because it’s supposed to rain until 10 P.M. today and I have a press conference at the prefecture’s crisis center. Let’s not make our friends the journalists wait. They haven’t yet gotten excited about this matter of the monument, and that’s so much the better.”
The young woman made a little sign with her hand and left. Castello had only to conclude the meeting, which he did by assigning everyone a task for the following day. He ended with Sebag:
“Gilles, you’ll be with Molina tomorrow to receive Abbas.”
Sebag hid a grimace. Shit! Molina had mentioned 9 A.M., and that was precisely the time he had a meeting with Clément Ollier, the witness to Mathieu’s accident. Castello’s tone was categorical, there was no way he could get out of it. Too bad! He didn’t have a choice. Once again, he would be obliged to play truant. It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Molina would understand perfectly, Sebag had no doubt of that. They’d worked together and arranged the tasks to suit them for so long that they’d lost count: it was impossible to know which of them was indebted to the other.