MAJOR STRASSER HAS BEEN SHOT
Commissaire Richard had seen Casablanca on late-night television and thought it funny, as one can at fifty-seven years old and having had, in the consecrated phrase, ‘a good war’. Richard as a young aspirant officer in La Rochelle had climbed aboard a fishing-boat and joined The General in London.
He liked to quote bits from time to time. The most successful beyond doubt had been a moment when the mayor, much flown after a good lunch and happy to be gambling on a certainty, mayors do from time to time, clapped him jovially on the back (a thing Richard detested).
"Commissaire, I bet you – I bet you ten thousand francs…"
"Make it five: I’m only a poor corrupt police official."
The mayor, disconcerted at such bluntness, had been vexed and had to have the joke explained.
In the offices of the Police Judiciaire to say ‘Round up the usual suspects’ was a corny synonym for ‘Do nothing at all’. One had to be careful, for Richard had several ways of delivering the line: like Sloppy in Dickens he could ‘do the police in different voices’.
He put the phone down and said it in an entirely new voice, so that even Lasserre knew better than to go ho-ho.
"You push your red button," Richard said to him. Lasserre was a Commissaire too, though a more junior kind. He was the sous-chef, the Chief of Staff, the Co-ordinator. The phrase meant a general alert, to the urban police as well as the PJ: to the gendarmerie who have authority outside city limits and come under the Defence not Interior Ministry. Even the CRS, the Auxiliaries. Their uniform is dark blue but to Richard they were known naughtily as ‘The Black and Tans’. Road-blocks: check-points: machine-guns: Would-you-please-open-your-luggage-compartment.
What the hell had happened? A terrorist attack?
"Castang, get two boys, my car, wait outside. I shan’t be a minute." Lasserre was leaping for the levers of command, turning while you watched into the Foreign Legion Sergeant from Dayton, Ohio, about to snarl "Move your chicken ass."
The car was a big Citroën, the best they had. Orthez, the best driver they had, got into the front, Castang with young Lucciani in the back. Castang was a Divisional Inspector, a middle-rank officer, superior to the other two.
Richard came out tidy and unhurried. Blue and white checked shirt, dark red tie; his accustomed country-club look. "Cours La Reine," he said. "Opposite the Opera." Orthez made a spectacular U-turn. "Etienne Marcel," very deliberately, "has been shot. That is all I know at present." Well… Anybody less like Major Strasser – or come to that looking less like Conrad Veldt – was scarcely imaginable, but Castang knew what he meant. Marcel – always called Marcel, and by everyone who claimed to be friends with him, which was almost everyone called Etienne – was a municipal Councillor, an adjunct Mayor and a great deal else. All that red-button stuff was now explained. Orthez turned the Priority signal on, Pim-pam, Pim-pam, and went majestically through a red light.
It was a day in early May. Everybody had been complaining as usual about the weather, which had been unusually cold and spilling rain. It was late afternoon: the sun was out between showers, beginning now to get some warmth in it. A French city of some three hundred thousand souls. Neither truly north nor of the south. An Atlantic climate when the west wind blows, which it does a lot; central-European in easterly weather: cold winters and hot summers.
Castang liked every sort of weather. He liked this; the young growth of trees, bushes fresh and moist, the whole town for once smelling wonderful. The planes were in leaf, the chestnuts in flower, so that what he would remember first would always be the myriads of sodden blossoms under foot, the white and pink turning to pale tobacco colour; and everywhere the powerful scent of rain and springtime. He was wearing an old camel pullover, but a prudent man, he had his trench coat in the car, and one of his mildly eccentric hats.
The Cours La Reine is a creation of eighteenth-century town-planning (the reine is Marie Leczinska, Louis Quinze’s plain, patient, and pious Polish wife). Double avenue, with broad pedestrian alley down the middle: six rows in all of pruned trees and underfoot a vile gravel, muddy in wet weather, dusty the moment it was dry. Crammed with parked cars for a generation: the municipality, creakingly, moving towards banning them and planting grass and flowerbeds, thirty years late as usual.
The place was still full of cars claiming privilege: France has a terrible number of privileged persons. Regulations are for the poor. The end of the alley, with a nice formal garden in front, is the old Palace of the Dukes, now the Préfecture. Along the sides are big buildings – many beautiful, others merely pompous. The Banque de France and the Opera, the Seat of the Military Governor and museums where nobody ever goes.
Up at the other end the avenues degenerate into mere streets and here is the commercial centre of the town with banks, insurance companies and the palaces of industry.
Orthez had to push the car slowly through a mill of sightseers arriving faster than cops did, the bush telegraph functioning as usual better than electronics. Cops, growing irritable, had stopped saying ‘Dégagez’ and ‘Circulez’ and were beginning to link arms to heave back masses of morbid flesh anxious to see more morbid flesh: there was nothing much to see. Castang was aware that he had been brought to use his eyes. Richard would have, simply, too many distractions to be able to concentrate – and yes, there came the mayor with his television face on, saying "My poor Etienne – a friend for twenty years. Shocking, quite shocking." Yes, he meant it, it was all true, it was all sincere. But professional, inevitably. The press had arrived as soon as the police, plus a gaudily painted station-wagon from regional television: already one chap was flourishing a hand-held camera, and three more with microphones. And has there been such a crowd since the last state visit? An acutely public performance for a thoroughly public figure.
The very publicness of it all had created a small but distinct area of privacy within a nervous ring of exasperated constabulary quarrelling with some half-dozen persons who had cars parked on the alley and were complaining that Time was Money. "Everything is to stay as it is" repeated the police meaninglessly. Yes.
"Lucciani, get the number plates, names and addresses. Witnesses, Orthez, try to find who saw the body first. Let’s get to this body."
The body lay between Marcel’s car, a typically flamboyant Porsche, white with black this-and-that, and a humble pale-blue car belonging to the principal eyewitness, a young woman torn between shock and voluble self-importance, at present held in check by a young urban cop who had taken his képi off to mop the sweaty brow, terrified of doing something wrong. Castang looked at the car. There’d been a right fusillade, big holes in the bodywork. Identité Judiciaire would be here any moment, but that was big artillery, Blazing-Colts stuff, forty-four or -five calibre, eleven-sixty-threes if you count in millimetres. Maybe two guns, no considered kneecap work there but bang bang bang like Frankie and Johnny. Magazine emptied. The body had been covered with somebody’s raincoat, legs sticking out. Castang peeled it off. Medical details were of no importance. Be hit at a closish range by three or four of those and it doesn’t matter what they hit or where: massive shock and haemorrhage take you out of the vale of tears while you are still falling down.
A doctor had of course been summoned and there by God he was, telling Richard at the greatest possible length what Richard already knew.
The car keys were on the floor at no great distance, jerked out of his hand by the impact. One or more gunmen had waited by the car. As he bent over to unlock it he got mashed. Had he had his back turned? – the impact might have spun him round. Had the killer known him? – Meaning did you wait by the car to identify him? Or because the unlocking it immobilised him handily for long enough? The killer hadn’t been a very good shot. Or with a gun of that calibre he hadn’t cared. Or there were two guns and when IJ got the bullets they would know.
Castang felt a presence behind him, unobtrusive but making itself felt, named the Divisional Commissaire and more of his kind. Fabre, the stout professorial Central Commissaire of the urban brigade; the mayor with a graveside look. The man’s misfortune was that in a moment of genuine emotion he would always look insincere.
Castang got up off his knee and dusted it. The damp gravel clung. A gunman might well have left a recognisable footprint, but it would be long gone beneath the tramplings of populace.
"Orthez, get this ground completely free and sweep it. The cartridge cases and whatever you can find. Things get trodden in: get one of those treasure-hunting gadgets. The angle and the distance is going to be difficult, unless this lady of yours actually saw the gunman."
"I’ve told this gentleman – "
"I’m afraid you’ll have to come back with us. You might have a lot more to tell than you realise."
"But the Banque de France… And my boss will be…"
"Monsieur Lucciani here will go with you and explain. We want that car, Orthez. Will it start? – Here are the keys."
"Get all this mob off this ground," said Richard’s voice.
"I’ve given the order."
"Well, see it’s enforced. And see that photographer doesn’t forget the angle of the sun this time – fellow to my mind had the light in his eyes."
Detail, a great deal of detail. The car wouldn’t start either. As well as Etienne Marcel, a perfectly good Porsche had got itself assassinated. The technical squad went on working till well after six. Buses, when again able to make their way down the Cours La Reirie, crawled at foot pace with everyone hanging out of the window. Till night fell a football-size crowd eddied and clung like bees swarming, changing and eventually moving, but constant in number.
The whole city wanted to see where Etienne Marcel got shot. Quite a lot of people brought flowers and cast them on the spot where all the blood in a robustly-built man had leaked out on to the gravel. The police were patient about this.
As night fell, it began spotting again with rain. Heavy clouds gathered blackly as though in civic mourning. The national television news at eight had a long section on this coldblooded and dastardly killing in our midst that must surely be the work of extremists. Whether extreme right-wing or extreme left was at present unclear but extreme, very. Castang saw small opportunity of getting home before late, and phoned to tell his wife.