Sebag was walking rapidly through the streets of Perpignan, gulping down a sandwich. Serrano ham, peppers, lettuce: delicious. He had come back from Canet too late to get the daily special at the Carlit and had had Rafel make this entrepa11 to order. He took advantage of his lunch break to get a little exercise, because he knew that it would be a long afternoon and that it wouldn’t be possible for him to engage in his traditional evening run. Informed of André Roman’s murder, Castello had redeployed his teams and called another emergency meeting for the end of the day.
Sebag stopped on Cassanyes Square to drink mint tea in a little Moroccan bouiboui.12 Located between the North African and Gypsy quarters, Cassanyes Square had a colorful outdoor market every morning. But today, in the early afternoon, there was not much left to testify to that, only empty crates and rotting vegetables left lying on the asphalt. The air was still warm, despite the humidity that oozed from the walls and rose from the ground. Sebag quietly sipped his hot, sugary tea on the terrace. A street-sweeping machine was noisily going about its work, surrounded by a horde of little men in green who picked up the bulkier waste.
Around 3 P.M., he set out at a quick pace toward police headquarters. He had brought five cartons full of documents to his office. The Romans didn’t have a computer, and Mathilde had let him take everything he wanted from her husband’s office, while Lieutenant Cornet agreed to turn a blind eye to what Sebag was doing. The judiciary and administrative procedures being what they were, the gendarmes had not yet relinquished the case, and in theory Sebag didn’t have the right to investigate this second murder.
The first thing he took out of the cartons was the family list of telephone numbers. He went through it quickly without finding anything noteworthy. He would have preferred to be able to examine the victim’s cell phone, but Cornet hadn’t been willing to let him take that major piece of evidence. Procedure would have to be respected. The head of the investigative unit at the Perpignan gendarmerie had promised to act as quickly as possible and keep him informed.
In the victim’s appointment book, Sebag had found three dates, three meetings with “Bernard.” February 15, May 23, and July 20. In each case a different restaurant’s name was written next to “Bernard.” At first glance, there was nothing mysterious about these meetings, just two old men who must have shared, as they ate good meal, their memories of war and infamy.
Sebag set aside for the time being a few files he’d brought along on principle but which he did not think had priority: insurance, tax returns, bank statements, etc. Instead, he took out an old photo album. He had left Mathilde the family albums and had taken the one from André’s childhood in Algeria and Tunisia.
He opened it with great care.
The black-and-white snapshots had the stiff and formal charm of rare photos celebrating the great events in a person’s life. André as a baby, nestled in the arms of a young couple standing in front of two older couples. André, still a baby, in a church for his baptism, and then another, taken twelve years later, during a communion. Between the two, André at six posing, probably with a brother, in front of an artificial backdrop of a snowy mountain; then André and the same boy smiling before a Christmas tree. As the children grew, the photos began to show more intimate scenes in their daily life: a soccer match in a vacant lot, swimming in the sea, a family meal.
Only the last pages interested Sebag. Two photos in particular. Roman as a young adult, leaning proudly on a white Dauphine with a friend in the driver’s seat. Then Roman and three other young men, including the same friend, surrounding a soldier about forty years old with a long, solemn face. The young men were smiling broadly, but the soldier was staring at the camera with all the gravity that went with his rank. The photo had been taken in a small room without much distance.
Sebag carefully removed them from the album before also taking out a tract and an article clipped from a newspaper. The article was about an armed commando’s murder of a French policeman in 1961, and the tract proclaimed, in bloodred letters, that the OAS would strike where and when it wanted. Taking along all these documents, Sebag went immediately upstairs and entered the office of Castello’s secretary.
Jeanne greeted him warmly, a pleasant smile on her full lips. Gilles showed her his hands full of documents, and explained:
“I need to make a few photocopies and scan these documents . . . ”
“Go ahead, Monsieur Sebag. Do you know how to use the machine?”
“Uh . . . yes, at least for the photocopies.”
Standing in front of the machine, Sebag quickly realized that he’d been presumptuous. He put the two photos on the sheet of glass and tried to understand the machine’s control panel. It would probably have been easier to take off in an Airbus than to force this photocopier to carry out the elementary task for which it had been designed. Sebag tapped at random on a few illuminated buttons, but nothing happened.
He turned around to ask Jeanne’s help, but saw that she was already standing behind him. She was wearing a belted black dress that harmoniously emphasized her figure.
“We’ve just received this new model, but I’m the only one who knows how to make it work. Normal or reduced size?”
“Enlarged, if possible.”
“Mmm . . . with pleasure.”
She tapped three buttons in succession. The long, white-lace sleeves of her dress enhanced the velvety quality of her arms.
“There we go.”
The photocopier actually started up and spat out its first sheet. Sebag handed Jeanne the newspaper article and the tract.
“Normal size will be fine for these.”
“Normal size? Good. After all, normal size is the best . . . ”
Sebag couldn’t help blushing at the double entendre. Jeanne liked to tease the men at headquarters, but she never went any further.
“Will that be all for you, Monsieur Sebag?”
“Would it be going too far to ask you to scan them, too?”
“Go too far, Monsieur. Sebag, go too far. It’s a pleasure to serve you.”
He couldn’t help admiring the lines of her dress when the secretary went back to her desk. The fabric stopped at her mid-thigh and her white, transparent stockings echoed the motif of the lace.
“I’ll scan them on my session and send them to you by e-mail. Will that be all right?”
“You are perfect, truly perfect.”
Jeanne clicked several keys.
“There, they’re underway. As soon as they’re done, I’ll send them to you. You can take back your documents.”
“Thanks, Jeanne. What would we do without you?”
“I don’t dare even think about it,” she said, still bantering.
Back in his office, Sebag took time to examine the photos in detail. The old snapshots were a little fuzzy but he would have bet that one of Roman’s companions was none other than Martinez. From there to thinking that he had in front of his eyes all the members of a single action group, it was only a small step.
His cell phone rang. It was Lieutenant Cornet.
“The fingerprint analysis is categorical. It is in fact the same killer. I’ve just talked with the prosecutor: the two cases are going to be joined. Obviously, they will be assigned to you.”
“Sorry about that.”
“So am I, but that’s how it is. Before the end of the day, I’ll send you all our reports and initial analyses. At least I know that the investigation is in good hands.”
“I thank you for your confidence.”
“You’re welcome, really.”
“I’ll keep you informed.”
“That would be very nice of you.”
There was a brief silence. Sebag smiled.
“Aren’t we laying it on a little thick here?” he asked his interlocutor.
“Maybe,” Cornet replied.
Then the lieutenant from the gendarmerie broke into a sincere and merry laugh.
“Gentlemen, I have to tell you: this is a grave hour. If we don’t want to be the laughingstock of all France, the overseas departments and territories, and the whole Mediterranean basin, we’re going to have to seriously raise the level of our performance.”
Although the tone was intended to be Churchillian, the vocabulary was more like that of a minor-league Raymond Domenach.13 But that wasn’t the point: to galvanize the troops, the music is sometimes more important than the words.
In the meeting room at police headquarters, no one said a word. Everybody was present, including Raynaud and Moreno. There was even a little new recruit. Sebag recognized the young woman he’d passed in the hallway that same day, the female cop with eyes the color of the Mediterranean.
Castello introduced her:
“We have Julie Sadet with us. She comes to us from the capital. She is preparing to take her examination to become a lieutenant. She’s going to help us in our investigation.”
“Hello,” the aforementioned Julie said in a firm and level voice.
The policemen responded to her greeting, both happy and intimidated to have a woman in their ranks for the first time.
Castello continued his introductory speech:
“So now we have a second corpse to deal with. A single killer, a single weapon, and probably a single motive connected with the victims’ involvement in the OAS. Gilles has put before you the first evidence produced by the gendarmes’ investigation. I’ve just had a look at it, and it’s good work, but incomplete, of course, and it will be up to us to finish it. Gilles is going to outline it for you.”
Sebag briefly summed up what he had learned that morning and what Lieutenant Cornet had communicated to him via e-mail in the late afternoon.
“Pending the autopsy and the ballistics analysis, we can say with a high degree of probability that André Roman was killed yesterday, around the middle of the day, hit in the heart by a 9 mm bullet. There were numerous fingerprints in and on the car, but the freshest ones correspond to those we found at Martinez’s apartment. The tire tracks found nearby come from a Kleber model usually put on small cars such as a Renault Clio, a Peugeot 206, or a SEAT Ibiza. The neighborhood canvass made this morning around the Romans’ villa in Canet has not yielded any results as yet, but many of the neighbors were not there today. Concerning the car in which the crime was committed and that of the killer, we do not currently have any witnesses, unfortunately. You all know that road . . . ”
He stopped and smiled his excuse to their new colleague.
“Almost all of you know that road along the coast; for several kilometers there are no houses except a few old fishermen’s shacks near the lake. The gendarmes were planning to put out a call for witnesses, but obviously the ball is in our court now.”
“I’ve talked with the prosecutor, and he has okayed that,” the superintendent added. “The appeal will be put out tomorrow in the newspapers and on the radio. For once the journalists will be useful to us, and we’ve got to take advantage of that. A few words about the victim, Gilles?”
“André Roman was born in Algiers in 1939. His father worked for the post office and his mother was a housewife. André began work at the age of sixteen, as a mechanic in a garage. When he arrived in France in 1962, he took over a car dealership in Perpignan. He sold Simcas, a brand that later became Talbot, and was then absorbed by Peugeot-Citroën. His business did well, and when he retired in 2005, he owned a dozen garages in Perpignan, Prades, Leucate, and Narbonne.”
“He managed better than Martinez did,” Llach commented.
“You could say that, yes. André Roman had, in addition to his fine villa, a twenty-one–meter boat moored in the port at Canet, an apartment in Font-Romeu, and a small house in Tunisia. He inherited the latter . . . ”
Castello was getting impatient.
“Is there anything else, Gilles? You have photos, I think.”
“Yes. These.” He circulated copies.
“I’ve e-mailed them to you,” he explained.
“What are they?” the superintendent asked.
“In the first photo, I think the two men are André Roman and Bernard Martinez, but the second one is the more interesting. There we see four young men—including Roman and Martinez, grouped around a soldier.”
He turned to Ménard, who had returned from Marseille over the weekend.
“François sent them to his historian, who had no difficulty identifying the central figure . . . ”
Ménard put two handwritten pages on the table. He looked at the first.
“It is in fact the notorious Lieutenant Degueldre,” he confirmed. “Born in 1925 in the north of France, he was a young resistance fighter under the German occupation, then a hero of the war in Indo-China, decorated with the military medal for bravery. Having become a lieutenant in the first foreign regiment of paratroopers, he participated in the Algerian conflict before going underground and operating within the OAS to lead the redoubtable Delta commandos. He was arrested in 1962, sentenced to death, and shot by firing squad.”
“The name Degueldre was inscribed on the monument that was destroyed at the cemetery,” Sebag added.
“Four men around this Degueldre,” Joan Llach said. “Were Martinez and Roman thus part of a single group that is supposed to have included two other members?”
“At least two other members, in any case.”
“Then we’ve got to find these two guys quick,” the Catalan policeman concluded.
“That is in fact our priority,” the superintendent reminded them. “This second murder tells us that our killer is not striking blindly just any Pied-Noir, or even just any former member of the OAS: he has an account to settle with a precise group that included at least four men. With Roman, we were unlucky. If it had happened twenty-four hours later, Gilles would have gotten in contact with him before the killer did. We have to get there first the next time.”
“Except that the killer probably already knows his targets,” Molina interrupted. “That’s a major advantage.”
“But he may not have localized them all yet. We have to remain optimistic, Lieutenant Molina. Besides, at this very moment the prosecutor is giving a press conference on this case, and we have to realize that we can’t get along without the media at this point. The prosecutor is going to reveal what we know about the commando, the two victims, and the two other potential victims. The press conference won’t be attended solely by the local press; correspondents from the big national media will also be there, and the case will soon become known throughout France. Wherever the two other members of the group live, they will soon know what’s happening and we can hope that they will make themselves known.”
“They may already be dead,” Llach dared to say. “I mean, they might have died of natural causes.”
“That is also a possibility, and it would make our job easier, in a way. In that case we could still hope that their relatives would recognize them and get in contact with us anyway. However that may be, we have to move forward. And fast. We know our job and we’re going to treat this case like a normal case, without forgetting the fundamentals of the profession.”
He bent over a sheet of paper on which he had written his instructions before the meeting:
“Starting tomorrow, there will be an investigation around Canet and along the coast road. The gendarmes didn’t find anything today, we’ve got to go back there. Llach and Lambert, you will take care of that. You have new evidence, since the tire tracks lead us to look for a small car. Sebag and Molina, you will follow the call for witnesses and compare the testimonies. Ménard, you and Julie will follow up the leads connected with the past . . . ”
François Ménard raised his hand and the superintendent gave him the floor.
“On that subject, Gilles also asked me to look into the battle against the barbouzes Mathilde mentioned.”
“Oh yes, that’s right, the barbouzes . . . I think that was one of the most incredible episodes of the Algerian War,” Castello recalled.
Ménard agreed and consulted his second page of notes.
“The term barbouzes designates the agents of a secret, parallel police force sent to Algeria in late 1961 to wage a kind of antiguerrilla war on the OAS. Two to three hundred men in all, including a handful of Vietnamese karate champions who didn’t go unnoticed. Initially assigned to gather intelligence, they also blew up bars and restaurants frequented by members of the OAS. But they were soon identified and the houses they were occupying in Algiers became in their turn targets for attacks organized mainly by Lieutenant Degueldre’s Delta commandos.”
“To which our four guys belonged,” Castello added.
“Probably. The OAS won that episode of the Algerian War because almost half of the barbouzes were killed, and the survivors were brought back to France during the emergency of March, 1962.”
A profound silence followed. The inspectors remained perplexed. This plunge into a recent, violent history troubled them. How could they untangle the ties linking the past to their double murder?
“You’ve got your work cut out for you, Ménard. Among the barbouzes who survived the war, a few may still be alive and want to take revenge on former members of the OAS. That should give us loads of suspects. And we mustn’t forget, either, the French policeman who was killed. Get his name and find his descendants. There’s work to do! Also talk to Sebag, who seems to have a good contact with a former member of the OAS.”
Finally, the superintendent turned to the pair of friends who hadn’t said a word since the beginning of the meeting.
“Raynaud and Moreno, you will concentrate on the affair of the monument, which mustn’t be neglected. Personally, I still have trouble understanding what that act of destruction is doing in our double murder case. If our killer is settling a particular account with a precise group in the OAS, I don’t see him vandalizing a funeral monument at the same time. On the other hand, another element common to the two cases has been added today: Lieutenant Degueldre. There, I have to admit that I don’t know quite what to say.”
He stopped to survey his inspectors, but none of them had a hypothesis to offer. They all took care to look elsewhere.
“By the way, that makes me think again of that matter of the hairs found on the site of the first murder and near the monument: we need to accelerate the analysis of those. Pagès is back, and he’ll be glad to look into that again. Raynaud and Moreno, you talk to him about that. And then you will go back and investigate the leftist milieus hostile to the Pieds-Noirs. Just because we couldn’t prove anything against Abbas doesn’t mean that his whole group is cleared. O.K., good evening to everyone, see you tomorrow.”
The inspectors immediately stood up with a shrill concert of chairs screeching on the linoleum. The superintendent had called them by their last names rather than by their first names. That was a sign. A very bad sign.