part0046

Her breathing sped up at those three words. The voice on the video! She waved over to Thierry. “You’re the voice on the video. I thought you were dead.”

“You thought I was dead?” He laughed into the phone. “Hardly. You’re confused, Professor Gaie. That bump on the head has you disoriented.”

She touched her forehead then. “How did you know about my head? No, I’m not. I saw you. Dead.”

“I need you, so I needed to know you were safe. You saw Gaston Carpentier dead. I killed him.”

Her eyes grew wide. She had thought the male voice on the video was Gaston Carpentier. She was now very confused. Further, Havilah had no idea why the man said he needed her. She saw Thierry speaking in Italian to the police. He signaled for her to continue to talk to the man on the telephone.

“Why?” She bit down on her lip, trying to place the voice.

“He asked me to.”

“A man like Carpentier didn’t seem the type to have a death wish. He had a lot live for and a lot of minds to lead astray.”

“You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, Professor Gaie.”

“Well, you killed him by your own admission. I didn’t.”

“With his consent. Though he actually asked me to wound him. But let’s not split hairs.”

Havilah almost dropped the telephone. She repeated what he’d said for Thierry and the police. “That doesn’t make much sense,” she followed up.

“It does if you want to turn the media narrative away from the video that aired of you rousing the rabble with your racist invectives. It does if you want to save your political campaign by eliciting sympathy. I wouldn’t give him that. He deserved no less than death. You should not cry for him.”

“Why not?”

“He asked me to kill you. But you are far more important to me alive than he was.”

“Well I won’t cry for him then. But who is this?”

“You still don’t know? I’m the man that saved your life.”

“What are you talking about?” She sat down now.

“I killed Gerard Louis. He had come to kill you as well. In fact, I’ve saved your life three times in one day. I need you, Professor Gaie. You will do what Didier wanted you to do or all of this would have been in vain, vous comprenez . You understand.”

Okay now we’re getting somewhere. “Réda Halimi? You’re supposed to be dead.”

“He is. Another reason I had to kill Gerard Louis. Guess again.”

She stood up. They were now in front of the hotel. More police had begun to gather around the boat, waiting for her to leave so they could begin questioning her all over again. She knew she had to keep talking and thinking.

“Gerard Louis killed Réda Halimi? So you killed the agent because he killed him and tried to kill me and you need me. That’s it?”

“Exactly.”

“Voilà !” He breathed hard into the receiver as if he were in hurry to get somewhere.

She put her hand to her forehead and immediately flinched. She tried to compose herself so she could find out why this insane man believed he needed her.

“So you killed Carpentier because…”

“He was never going to honor the agreement he had made with Didier. Carpentier was a fraud. He had wired money to our accounts. A trifling show of good faith. $300,000 euros to buy our silence. We needed the money. We were desperate and he knew that. He made all sorts of promises and guarantees, all depending on his election to the presidency. He was a politician. They lie. I’m a soldier. Didier and Réda were inclined to believe him because they all had attended ENA together. Gaston Carpentier was from one of the impoverished areas in northern France. He was older than they were when he started at ENA. They saw a kindred spirit in him even after he founded the OFS. They believed it was a political gimmick for him. That he would say anything to get elected. But it was not who he really was. It was a hustle, as you say in America. Non ?”

Havilah could hear Rachid sneering. “He was using us as a bogeyman to legitimize himself. He thought we were fools whom he could easily manipulate. And it really was a fool’s bargain. We are already pariahs. Lemieux’s death made things more difficult. But by the time Didier came to his senses, Didier then went in a more reckless direction after he saw you on television. He thought he could “flip the script” with your help and change the image of FBB. It was another political miscalculation on his part,” he said pointedly, and paused for effect.

“I knew that wounding Gaston Carpentier would have helped him,” he said now reflecting on the dead politico. “And killing you, an American professor, la belle Américaine , would have made us even more social and politcal pariahs with the added nuisance of having the American government involved. Carpentier would have betrayed us to the authorities, just as soon as he could. He would have blamed everything on us. So I killed him instead.”

Havilah’s heart was pounding loudly in her chest. She fought back her panic only because she knew she had to keep him talking. Thierry handed her a note. Location?

“Didier clearly didn’t believe he could totally trust Carpentier or he wouldn’t have made that video; and he wouldn’t have been surveilling OFS regularly,” she countered. She nodded her head to Thierry to let him know she was listening for clues.

“You are right. He did understand that we needed to take precautions. But then you came along. You and your ‘there is always another way besides violence and fear’ schtick appealed to his desire for recognition as a son of France. I always knew Didier was too much of a fool idealist. There was a schism in our organization between the older generation and the younger foot soldiers. I recruited the young ones. We have a different way. Didier had convinced Réda to go along with his grand scheme. But once Didier was murdered and Réda saw how quickly the media, the government, and the good citizens of the Republic condemned us for a crime we did not commit, he too understood that our way was the better way. Didier really wanted to belong, to be French. The younger ones of us don’t care about the French or France. My parents came here from Tunisia. Things have never, ever been easy. Didier believed he could change things. He was never quite one of us. He had fucked us with all of this nonsense. And the worst was that he was not a believer.”

“A believer?” Havilah shook her head. “He was one of the founders of Frères Beurs-Blacks. What are you talking about, not one of you?”

“He did not seek truth and enlightenment in the Arab world. He did not walk the roads of Damascus. He was Catholic. He didn’t have true understanding.”

She could tell he nearly spit that last part. Havilah remembered the eager-to-please younger man with Réda Halimi. He was definitely smart but she had no idea he was lethal. And none of this made sense. He seemed to care about Réda but cared not a wit about Didier, and poor Eva was just a casualty of their culture wars.

“You are using religion to camouflage a power grab. Islam has nothing to do with this,” she huffed into the receiver.

“Perhaps. But you will make me a hero or a warrior martyr all same by saying my name over and over again in the media.”

Havilah noticed that he seemed more amused than annoyed at her suggestion. “If you killed Carpentier because he was untrustworthy and wanted me dead, and you killed his henchman Louis because he was about to kill me, then exactly who killed Lemieux?” She was waving to Thierry. She scribbled on the piece of paper, No location yet.

“Carpentier. Or rather Louis. Louis had begun following him because he’d mysteriously disappear for hours. He and some other agent were assigned to protect him. Louis discovered he was Jewish and told Carpentier that he had been sneaking off to the synagogue. He used those sex clubs as a cover for being in that part of the Marais district. The OFS are anti-Semitic. Lemieux was not a Frenchman of the soil of France. He was not Français de souche . Carpentier thought Lemieux’s not revealing his origins was a supreme betrayal. And Gerard Louis was so enraged that he put the sign on him: Liar. Truth. Immigrant. He was not supposed to do that. He got a little too creative. He was supposed to overdose him with the drugs and toss him into the Seine to make it look like an accidental suicide. Louis’s improvisation led Carpentier to strike a deal with us.”

She heard an announcement. She couldn’t make out the language. “What about Didier and Eva? Why did Louis kill them? Loose ends? The video?”

“Yes. I need to go. Make sure you tell my story, belle Américaine. I intend to offer you some assistance, in case you decide that you simply can’t comply.”

“Wait! Wait!” The line went dead.