LIGHT SURVEILLANCE
Much like a lightly-boiled egg. As light as you choose: exactly how light that is you will see when you come to eat it. When the police speak of holding so-and-so under observation the impression you receive depends pretty well on how many spy stories you have been reading recently.
A few hints are conveyed by the word ‘light’. Not around twenty-four hours: that’s ‘intense’ and needs three separate shifts; and all police forces are parsimoniously administered, and chronically short of manpower. It is indeed possible to recall off-duty staff and wring out a lot of largely unpaid overtime. Reasonably, the police has small stomach for this, and no officer in his right senses will order it more often than he has to. The fuzz in question will be cross, sleepy and not at its brightest. When you come to think of it most people (outside spy stories) have work to do, and most of their activities can be encompassed between eight in the morning and midnight. That is quite enough for two shifts, thanks, especially when you think of rotating them, and Sundays, and days off. Spy stories don’t bother about that detail, but secretaries of police departments had jolly well better.
Light means not leaning on people: the surveilled aren’t supposed to notice. There exist plenty of ploys like the ‘open tail’ where Dingus is supposed to notice, and get all uneasy about it, but they depend on the controlling officer’s discretion, and the beginnings of discretion, as Richard would say, begin with being discreet.
It will probably mean a tap on the phone, but not a bug planted: microphones and transmitters and stuff mean breaking-and-entering, and all sorts of procedures illegal unless ordered by an instructing magistrate, and he’d be a bit uncomfortable at its coming out in court unless he can talk loudly and emphatically about the Safety of the Realm.
In principle it calls for one agent at a time, with a flexibility about relaying and replacing same, and see note about My Free Sunday. This agent is there to observe, and log what he observes: she and he are supposed to use their common sense about meals and going for a pee.
It can be lifted off a subject who has plainly settled to a humdrum occupation, and moved to another. It is not, in fact, enormously ambitious. The essential aim is that of all police work: to establish a pattern, after which variations in that pattern attract a certain interest. Most people vary little in their patterns: hence the observation that life in Paris, that thrilling city, boils down to Metro – Boulot – Dodo; in London – Bore, Snore, and Stanmore. Or as the diarist put it: Got Up, Washed, Went to Bed; with the note on the third day ‘Did not Wash’.
Lastly, light surveillance takes some time; a fortnight at least. This was achieved by Commissaire Richard explaining at some length to the Mayor that the enquiry was like the Bakerloo Tube: it had to go underground before popping out in daylight. To the Press, that printing anything further in attempts to whet public greed for sensation was contrary to the interests of justice. To the examining magistrate, Madame Delavigne, not only explaining that this was a good idea, but persuading her that she’d thought of it herself.
Light surveillance to Castang meant in fact not more than two or three days, which was not enough to show up anything at all interesting. After that, Vera was released from her clinic and came home proudly with the baby dumped in her lap, trembling a bit because this was rather a responsibility (there’d always been some nurse or another frigging about with it, annoying her considerably, holding it upside-down, shoving safetypins into its defenceless flesh, and so on; treating it in general with the utmost callousness and brutality, as professional nurses always do).
Castang pressed with the greatest resolution for his days off; got them with no trouble. There didn’t seem to be anything much happening anyhow. He’d set up his scheme, and it was working smoothly.
With Liliane he had no problem. Since she came from Lille (her real name was Agnes) they drank lots of cups of coffee together. She was suspected too of going round her highly-polished flat with felt soles on (known in France as skates) but this might have been an exaggeration. Certainly the flat was full to the brim with potted plants climbing and writhing everywhere; you can see them through the lace curtains, said Maryvonne (‘I swear it’). She was a good deal liberated, but so, Vera-trained, was he. Cantoni was an unliberated oaf, but what did you expect of the Intervention brigade? Lasserre is a phallocrat pig. Massip dips his dick in the inkwell to write with. But being Polish she was a believer in hard work and Christian charity, and Castang found her good to work with.
Maryvonne he’d got keen on; conscientious, observant and patient, a good cop. And brief readable well-written paperwork. Having two women – however liberated they were they understood what it meant having a baby was a great help when it came to being missing.
The three men he knew of course well, and could appreciate their various talents. Davignon both quietly spoken and taciturn; nearly his age, and ambitious. Had susceptibilities you had to know about. Studious. Sleepy in the mornings, at his best in the evening. Experienced, and reliable; would be getting his step soon.
Lucciani, sleepy both in the mornings and the evenings, but given to sudden bursts of interest, energy and inventiveness at odd moments. Results irregular, said his dossier (‘en dents de scie’ which is expressive). A Southerner from Nice; intelligent, vain, sly. Talked enough to make up for Davignon; worse he was a tale-bearer, a back-biter and gossip-shop. But he had good qualities, too.
Orthez was a good cop because constantly surprising and unexpected. Looked a dolt, mostly acted like one; thick, tactless, woodenly insensitive. A gifted mechanic, and the best driver in the department. It was not a recommendation in Castang’s eye: an interest in cars is a classic sign of a sub-normal intelligence, and Orthez could both look and act maddeningly sub. He often smelt not very nice, too. How had he ever passed his examinations? – the examiners must have got the papers muddled. Learning how unsafe, facile and stupid this opinion was had been a lesson in humility for Master Castang. Orthez could sometimes be much brighter than he was. He had Vera-like characteristics too: modesty, simplicity, common sense and sound judgement. A terrific worker, with tenacity, staying power. Ausdauer as the Germans say: he came from Carcassonne and looked like a bullet-headed Bavarian, particularly in dark-blue blazers, to which he was given in the summer months.
Surveillance, if to be continued any length of time by a limited group, means a good deal of masquerading. The cops do not dress up in disguises more often than they can help, and not as much as the public imagines, but a bit of camouflage is desirable. The personage with the dirty raincoat and the large flat feet, ostentatiously reading the racing news in crowded doorways, will not do. One has thus a couple of people on the technical squad, known as the artists, who are given a small amount of money and urged not to be too tricky. It shows up first in the cars used by the department. Beside the ordinary workhorses, medium-sized, solid unimaginative things of the Peugeot-station-wagon type, there is a litter of small tatty cars fixed so that their bodywork comes easily to pieces. Known in France, charmingly, as ‘banalised’. There are one or two souped-up but most are, as the name suggests, designed not to attract any notice from anyone. If you are in a small grey mongrel Renault, with a few lengths of metallic piping on the roofrack, and a plaque on the side saying something unreadable and preferably unpronounceable, like say Chomfieh S.A.R.L. Technical Supplier, you can hang about anywhere without being asked your business. But the Artists are perpetually put to it to invent new ones, and must keep a repertory in hand, and be flexible. What will do nicely in a crowded city street would stick out like Fred Karno’s Army in the leafy residential avenue. Start mucking about with the gas mains outside the Algerian Embassy, and you will become aware of this.
Above all be simple. The Red Faction stopped Schleyer’s car by pushing a pram in front of it. Avoid complex and ingenious technicalities. That black man with the nice face, in ‘Mission Impossible’ who is never seen without a swarm of conjuror’s contraptions – he has a lot to answer for.
If Castang wanted gadgets, Lucciani, who had a childish passion for them, was handy: a great setter-up of infrared binoculars, cameras in wristwatches, and tape recorders in Gitane packets. And most technical squads contain someone with a taste for electronic doodads. Why have some cop outside the garage door all night, probably in the pouring rain, when a thing the size of a cigarette-butt will tell you all you want to know?
Castang, with no interest and small talent for gadgets, was mistrustful. He was sure that the thing, having once been dropped on the floor, would when activated have no effect whatever save to set off all the air raid sirens in the entire municipal area. But it was nice sometimes when Lucciani said, "I know a better way of doing that." His little repertory would have been bigger but that whenever he dashed in all excited with one of his catalogues the controller would make a prim mouth and say ‘Too dear’.
His own instinct was to keep the affair very light-handed indeed. Better, to his mind, to miss a few things almost certainly trivial, than jar someone’s funnybone. These are intelligent, observant, wary people. The whole of Etienne Marcel’s family has had some training in prudence, discretion, carefulness, indeed quite a considerable wiliness, he dared say. Even the pretended naivetes of such as Clothilde (‘I’m a born pigeon; walk wide-eyed into everybody’s gluepot’) were to be taken with a big discount. ‘If you want a good folklore phrase, the soup isn’t eaten as hot as it’s cooked.’ On the likes of Noelle and her children were few flies. And one could not tell – in or around these cosy set-ups there is possibly a connection with some cool and cunning types. Otherwise what’s the point of this operation? Don’t let’s forget, two people have been killed… And they know the police take a certain interest.
As for him, he had surveillance to do at home. At night too. That baby howled. Lucky the walls were thick, and as far as he knew there were no electronic ears a-listening.