I kept my part of the bargain as a matter of urgency with a phone call to the deputy mayor. Prodis gave me less than ten seconds before fiercely interrupting.
— Inspector, I couldn’t care less about your four hundred thank you cards! It’s neither here nor there … We thought we had them after we found the plates at the municipal print shop. Well, we didn’t. The offset machine minder must have given us a list of names selected at random. And their subversive activities are getting even more out of hand. We keep hearing about people getting letters from NIIEE announcing the annulment of the Toulouse census by a decision of the Ministry of the Interior. I’ll read you the letter …
I heard what sounded like paper being unfolded.
‘Due to a large number of confidential files having found their way into the possession of a group known as NIIEE (National Intervention Into Electronic Equipment), and a lack of vigilance in the town hall’s recruitment of census personnel having allowed the infiltration of certain individuals who have taken advantage of computer loopholes, with the aim of causing damage to the system compiling individual records, and to social planning, the census is annulled throughout the Toulouse area.’
They then advise people to go to the town hall to reclaim their files! This isn’t four hundred people we have on our hands, but at the very least ten thousand from our first estimates!
I got off the line fast and left Prodis to his paranoia. I rang Bourrassol. He had patiently explored the possibility of Bernard Thiraud’s murder being a simple matter of mistaken identity with the victim being the wrong target. Having done a meticulous piece of work, Bourrassol was able to draw up an almost comprehensive list of people present in and around the Préfecture on the day of the murder between 4 pm and 6 pm.
— You know, Inspector, instead of planting our guys under cover in the hot spots, it would be better to get them jobs as receptionists in the entrance hall of the Préfecture. The list I’ve drawn up is unbelievable. A dozen big fish, people we never manage to collar, who are parading around undisturbed just outside the Prefect’s office! Joe Cortanze, for instance. If I’m right there’s a warrant out for his arrest for armed robbery?
— Yes, that’s right.
— That doesn’t stop him from being seen quite officially by the Deputy General Secretary and the Cabinet leader!
— Come on, Sergeant, you’ve been in this game long enough to know that our results depend 95 per cent of the time on what our informers tell us. You’ve just turned up lucky. You’ve got a few lookouts posted round the secondary schools to keep an eye on the dope traffic, haven’t you?
— Yes, but not on this level!
— Otherwise?
— I’ve rediscovered an old acquaintance, ex-Sergeant Potrez. He has a vague resemblance to Bernard Thiraud. The same kind of heavy-set looks. He’s about five years older, but for someone working from a photograph it could be confusing …
— I don’t remember this name … Potrez.
— He was a crack shot, the star of the second territorial brigade, until the day he opened fire on a motorcyclist without warning. He was undercover to set up a gang of car thieves, the BMW gang. A kid on a bike on his way through that part of town took fright when he saw a guy in plain clothes wandering about with a Magnum in his hands. He took off fast. A real slaughter. The police surgeon took out five bullets. They were lodged in an area no bigger than my hand … Potrez was run out of the force; he’s working now as an armed delivery man. I remember from the papers the young biker’s friends were saying they’d get Potrez … That’s often how it is in the heat of the moment; things settle down later …
— Yes, or the scores get settled. It took a few years, but Tramoni got hit for Pierre Overney’s murder. Even if there’s one chance in a thousand of it leading us to the murderer, we have to stick with it. We’ll see in the end if it pays off!
I made up my mind to get home early that evening. I went to bed straight after the eight o’clock news. I had a choice of TV programmes between It’s A Knockout, with Bécon les Bruyères at Knokke le Zoute, a magazine programme on the renaissance of Lyric Art in the Vosges, and a debate on the staggering of summer holidays. With my video in Poitiers, I had no other option. I fell back on Gutenberg and rummaged through the bookshelves looking for something new to read. I came across the unfinished monograph by Roger Thiraud that Claudine had given me. I tried it for size, had a look at the cover and decided to open it. It wasn’t strictly a book, just a mock up. It seemed meant to be reproduced as it was. Adorning the fly-leaf was the coat of arms of the town of Drancy, with above it a handwritten dedication: To Max Jacob.
The title was laid out in letraset:
DRANCY from its origins to our time
by Roger Thiraud
Member of staff, Lycée Lamartine.
I leafed through the book quickly. A large number of pages consisted of blank squares pencilled in with notes. Roger Thiraud had allowed for the precise placing of illustrations, photos, maps and diagrams. For each of them he gave the source and bibliographical reference. The opening chapter devoted several paragraphs to the history of the Earth in the Mesozoic period.
The Commissaire hadn’t gone this far back. He’d stopped at the siege of Alésia! I skimmed the page, following the gist of the text. ‘… The sea covered the Paris region. Clay and chalk deposits were left on the site where, thousands of years later, Drancy would rise up.’
I jumped forward several millennia to chapter three. I learned that the name of the town came ‘from a Roman coloniser, TERANTIACUM, transformed into DERANTIACUM, DERENTI, then DRANCY’.
I amused myself tracing shifts in my own family name, backwards. I arrived at a satisfying CARADINATIACUM.
In the year 800, the township had no school and a population of only two hundred.
I skipped eight centuries of sowing and harvests, to make acquaintance with the first local celebrity: ‘Crette de Paluel, a pioneer of agricultural mechanisation’, was the alluring title of this chapter. Roger Thiraud allowed a whole page for the reproduction of a bust of this eminent sage. He noted: ‘Get photo from Print Room, National Library’. I immersed myself in the brief biography of Crette de Paluel, ‘born at Drancy in 1741, he invented the circular saw, the root-slicer, the chaff-cutter, and the ridge-plough for potatoes. A great friend of Parmentier, he was his equal in promoting the potato.’
In the quaint but serviceable lyricism of these paragraphs, Roger Thiraud was trying to end an injustice, taking pains to establish the reputation of his great man.
The Revolution had left no deep marks in the furrows of Drancy, but the fall and explosion, on 16 October 1870, of an airship pumped up at the gasometer of la Villette took up a great deal of space.
The contemporary period made up the second part of the work. It opened with a quotation from Les Misérables:
Paris’s centre, its ring of close suburbs, this was the earth’s compass to these children. Never do they venture beyond it. For them, everything stops just outside the city’s gates. Ivry, Gentilly, Aubervilliers, Drancy; that is where the world ends.
I closed my eyes for a moment; these words brought back the few hours spent with Claudine on the remains of the fortifications.
Roger Thiraud rapidly passed over national political events insofar as they didn’t impinge on his native town. He dwelled at greater length on the varying political affiliations of the municipal representatives and the building of the first modern facilities. In the final chapters he shed light on the innovations of the pre-war mayors and their town planning projects. This was the construction of a vast garden city made up of several thousand individual and collective dwellings. A kind of ideal metropolis, a twentieth-century phalanstery in which all inhabitants would have at their disposal a whole range of collective services: schools, stadia, a hospital, crèches, shops …
Work began on the garden city in 1932; the town doubled its population, to nearly 40,000.
In 1934 an even bolder programme was launched: Drancy would house the first French skyscrapers! Five towers each fourteen floors high, a series of buildings laid out on a grid, and an imposing four-storey horseshoe-shaped block, added up to several hundred dwellings reached by some thirty stairways. The whole thing was christened The Seagull, after a nearby locality.
Alas, the hopes for community life which moved the spirits of the avant-garde architects were strangely fated.
The limitations of the techniques then used in construction became apparent and numerous faults appeared even before the apartments were let. While there were takers for the detached houses, the first French skyscrapers failed to meet with the success their promoters expected. Whole floors stayed empty despite the low rents.
It had to be acknowledged, the rabbits weren’t ready for their cages! The whole development was sold off to the Ministry of Defence which garrisoned a regiment of Mobile Guards there.
I got up briefly to have a beer and take a break. Then I immersed myself once more in the story of Drancy Garden City. Roger Thiraud had a passion for his subject; there was no shortage of details.
For 1940 he gave the exact number of German soldiers taken prisoner at the front and interned in The Seagull development. This was a revelation; the French army had managed to take prisoners during the phoney war.
But the Germans were soon in residence at Drancy. In a change of role; from captives they became captors. From the summer of ’40 they imprisoned the tatters of the French and British armies along with Yugoslav and Greek civilians arrested in Paris. On 20 August 1940 The Seagull development officially became a concentration camp for French Jews in transit for deportation to Germany and occupied Poland.
Roger Thiraud quoted the figure of 76,000 people rounded up over three years within a few kilometres of the Place de la Concorde, and then deported to Auschwitz. He put the number of those who escaped this at less than 2,000.
Every week 3,000 people passed through Drancy, which was guarded by four German soldiers, assisted in their task by several dozen French auxiliaries. Roger Thiraud underlined the figure four.
He re-created the life of the camp with the help of press cuttings and interviews with survivors. I had to force myself to read certain passages.
When we talked about Drancy in front of the children, we invented a name so as not to frighten them. A jolly sort of name: Pitchipoi, Drancy was Pitchipoi.
The next page had a pencil line across it and an explanatory note: Reproduce the facsimile of the letter from the Commandant of Drancy to Eichmann announcing the departure of the first transport of children under two years old. (Transport D901/14 of 14.8.1942.)
Some of these documents had been kept together as an appendix in a brown paper envelope. I took out a note from the Food Office, dated 15 April 1943.
In reply to your note of the 9th instant, we are honoured to communicate the following information:
| 1. Children under nine months: | 347 |
| 2. Children aged nine months to three years: | 882 |
| 3. Children aged three to six years: | 1,245 |
| 4. Children aged six to thirteen years: | 4,134 |
| 5. Quantity of milk consumed (monthly): | 3223.50 litres |
Because of an extremely volatile complement, the above figures only give an approximate notion and the number of children can vary from day to day plus or minus 50 units.
Another pile of papers bore the label, ‘Figures to be Compiled’, in Roger Thiraud’s handwriting. Long columns of figures spread out under headings whose starkness multiplied the tragedy: departure date, transport, order number, destination camp, gassed on arrival, H group, F group, survivors in ’45.
The total tally of deportees was 78,853, the survivors 2,190.
The last table set out, region by region, the geographical provenance of those interned at Drancy; it included some categorisation by age groups.
The Paris region came first, followed by South-Pyrenees, well ahead of the North or Central regions, whose Jewish population seemed to have escaped the stranglehold of the Gestapo. The Paris region came top everywhere in this sinister hit parade, except for the first age group, that of children less than three years old. While the vast majority of regions had between 5 and 8 per cent, Paris reached 11 per cent and South-Pyrenees was over 12 per cent.
I closed Roger Thiraud’s unfinished book feeling deeply upset. It took me a long time before I ventured to turn out the light. Sleep wouldn’t come. I got up to watch the last TV news. I fell asleep as morning came and the street was already filling with the first sounds of the day’s work.
Commissaire Matabiau was first on the scene, strangely dressed in a voluminous black cape, and wearing a hood. I knew it was him even without seeing his face. He was walking slowly, down the length of a corridor whose beginning melted into infinity. His mask caught the bluish neon reflections. Matabiau moved forward, his head drooping on his left shoulder. To a large crowd of wretched poor he was handing out little squares of green card adorned with Prodis’s photo. I found myself in his path, naked. He drew my attention to the indecent state I was in, giving me a paper. Under the deputy’s photograph I recognised the official stamp of the police station, but the words blurred as soon as I tried to decipher them.
I then turned to look at the other participants in this disturbing ceremony and had no trouble recognising a good half of those around me.
The mourning families mingled with the ex-strikers of the cemetery service, while a unit of Mobile Guards tried to extract a large gold nugget from the yellowish entrails of a laughing hippopotamus. Suddenly there was a deafening sound; high-pitched screechings and explosions that curdled the blood of everyone there. Matabiau vaporised into the flashing reflections of the floor tiles.
The corridor had grown wider; the walls, putty-like, throbbed to the rhythm of a heartbeat. The horizon darkened as a massive black Renault bore straight down on us, its wheels running on shining rails that seemed to spring from its movement.
A ghastly face, distorted by the shape of the windscreen, grimaced behind the wheel. I suddenly made out the features of Pierre Cazes. I was rooted to the spot and I closed my eyes so as to avoid my death. In vain. I saw straight through the screen of my eyelids. The CRS man was now in some kind of mad frenzy; he leapt up and down screaming. His mouth, his eye sockets, his nose were filled with thousands of black ants with phosphorescent legs. He pulled them out in thousands and threw them against the car’s windows. In its crazy wake the car dragged an interminable line of wagons. Old wooden goods wagons whose contents shifted about with the violent jolting of traction. The end of the transport was made up of roofless containers that flew into the air and fell heavily on to the rails, spraying the air with the smell of dust. With each of these jolts, thousands of skulls white as chalk rattled out of the containers and burst on to the bottom of the corridor.
Claudine Chenet appeared at the edge of a wood to my left. With her was the archivist with the club foot from the Toulouse Préfecture. They managed to halt the headlong progress of the huge convoy, opening the sealed doors one by one. Hundreds of bleeding Algerians got out of the wagons. They formed long wretched lines for as far as the eye could see. A transport worker uncoupled the car and released an old woman from the box that imprisoned her. I could make out the first smile of Madame Thiraud when the train got under way. The wheels began screeching in unison, creating an unbearable wailing sound. Two monstrous hands were placed either side of the Renault’s bonnet; the thumbs blocked the car’s headlights. I felt myself being sucked away, down into my bed. With vertiginous speed the whole scene melted into a tiny red dot at infinity. Fleetingly, I glimpsed a silhouette whose outlines were reminiscent of Sergeant Lardenne bent over the screen of a car-shaped pocket video game. Piercing music covered up the din of the train, echoing its staccato motion. Thousands of children’s voices took up the rhythm as the convoy moved away: ‘Pitchipoi, Pitchipoi, Pitchipoi, Pitchipoi …’
I woke with a start, covered in cold sweat. For a while I lay distraught, trying to cheat fear and forget these visions of death. I tried to will up other images, the walk on the ramparts, the meal at Dalbois’s. It was futile. Claudine’s face vanished, imperceptibly replaced by Bernard Thiraud’s. Dalbois took on the features of Pierre Cazes. I got round my terror by taking up Roger Thiraud’s book again.
He ended the story of The Seagull development in less than a page. Liberated in August 1944, from September the camp housed several thousand French people accused of collaboration with the enemy. Roger Thiraud named the best known personalities, from Tino Rossi to Sacha Guitry, who stayed a short time at Drancy in these circumstances. In 1948 work was begun to restore the buildings to their original use. In the appendix the author gave the title of a film, L’Enfer des anges, filmed in the project in 1936 with Mouloudji as its star.
Bernard Thiraud’s contribution amounted to no more than a sketch of how his father’s work might be completed for the period 1948–1982.
Sunlight flooded the room. I went over to the window; heavy black clouds rose on the horizon, heralding a storm. I stretched out on top of the bedspread, with my hands behind my head, and stayed like that, thoroughly dispirited, until eight o’clock. I swallowed an instant coffee then made up my mind to go to the station.
When I got there I found Sergeant Lardenne balanced shakily on top of a piece of metal furniture. He was taking down the huge roadmap of France, 1971 edition, that covered nearly the entire wall of the entrance.
— What are you doing, Lardenne, you’re going to come to grief! He turned and mumbled a reply. I couldn’t catch a single word.
— Speak up, I can’t make out a thing you’re saying …
He lifted a hand to his mouth and spat out half a dozen pins.
— The Departmental Supplies Branch has sent us this year’s map. All the new roads are on it, even the outline of the motorways planned up to ’85. I’m chucking out this antique.
I stopped momentarily to admire the sergeant’s skills as a handyman. He unfolded the new map and put it up on the wall, pinning it at every twenty centimetres. Once the job was done he got down off the filing cabinet and came over beside me to stand back and survey his handiwork.
— No comparison, Inspector; it brightens up the office a bit, don’t you think?
I couldn’t take my eyes off the lines of motorways crisscrossing France. The designer was into colour; the main roads were picked out in yellow with a double border of bright orange lines.
— Take a good look at this map, Lardenne. Do you notice anything about the motorways?
He looked plainly nonplussed.
— No, there’s a good lot of them … Do you think they’ve made a mistake?
— Look closely. You can’t miss it! Start the investigation again from scratch! Right now.
— What investigation, Inspector?
— How many are there, Lardenne! I’m talking about the Bernard Thiraud murder case. Go and question the motorway police between Paris and Toulouse and the service stations, the restaurants. In both directions. You’ve got your work cut out.
— But Inspector, they’ll give me the same answers they did a fortnight ago. And that’s not counting the ones with blank memories or the ones who’ll tell me to get lost!
I stood under the map. I traced one of the orange lines with a ruler.
— Who’s talking about questioning the same people? We were barking up the wrong tree the last time. Maybe he took the A6 instead of the A10 …
— That’s absurd, it’s 300 kilometres longer!
— It’s worth a try, Lardenne. I want a phoned report this evening for the Toulouse-Paris run. Miss nothing out; make it a clean sweep! Call me any time you need to, either here or on my home number. Get Bourrassol to sign your orders. And good luck.
Lardenne left. I headed for the Toulouse Préfecture. I gave Lécussan’s name to the receptionist blocking the way to the stairs; she let me through. When he saw me the head archivist gave me a friendly wave. Then, limping badly, he came over to meet me. With each step he made the effort to lift his club foot even though he could just have slid his shoe along the floor, saving himself the exertion, and avoided the painful effect disabled people’s movements make on their onlookers.
— Inspector, I’m glad to see you again. Our old relics have their charm, don’t they?
I waited until he was right beside me before replying.
— Yes, I’d never have thought so! I’d like to take another look at the documents from the other day, the ones that poor boy went through.
— Are you making progress? If the question isn’t indiscreet …
— Oh, just checking. By the way, I believe you keep a record of people’s applications to look things up?
Of course. It’s procedure in all French record libraries. Why do you ask, Inspector?
I made up a plausible explanation on the spot.
— It’s something that occurred to Commissaire Matabiau. We’re trying to get hold of a retired policeman who knew Bernard Thiraud’s family. I’d like to see if his name crops up on one of your forms.
Lécussan was very helpful.
— I can take care of that; it’s straightforward for me. That’ll let you get on with the other files.
— No, there’s no need. Thank you anyway. Show me where these records are kept.
— Behind you in the deputy archivist’s office. Each reader’s form is numbered, then filed in chronological order.
— No alphabetical file?
— No, that wouldn’t be of any help to us. Anyway, it’s a mechanical job; these records never have any function, but we’re obliged by law to keep them.
The deputy archivist, a young woman whose face was hidden behind large tortoiseshell spectacles, gave me the forms for the current year. I had no trouble finding the card Bernard Thiraud had filled in with his name, the reason for his research and the references of the files he wished to consult: everything listed under DE.
I leafed through the forms for a while without finding anything resembling Pierre Cazes’s name.
I gave the file drawer back to the archivist. A sudden inspiration made me ask for the 1961 run. In great excitement I opened the file at October. The shock of it took my breath away when I came across a form for 13 October 1961 filled out in Roger Thiraud’s name.
I closed my eyes. I re-read it, calmly, so as to be sure I wasn’t making a mistake.
| Toulouse Préfecture |
| Record Library Date: 13.10.1961 |
| Name of applicant: Roger Thiraud |
| Resident: Paris 2e |
| Reason for search: Personal |
| Documents consulted: Everything listed under DE |
I returned the file to the young woman.
— Have you found what you were looking for, sir?
— Yes, I think so. Thank you.
The chief was waiting for me in the bay, a box of files under his arm.
— That’s the DE listing. They’re exactly the same papers from your last visit. Maybe you’ll have more luck. And did you find any sign of this retired policeman?
— No, I think Commissaire Matabiau was on the wrong track.
I spread the contents of the box on the reading table and sorted out the different folders. I put aside DEforestation, DEmarcation, DEfence, and DElousing to concentrate my attention on the dozens of items referenced DEportation.
I felt disgust in the face of the horror underlying these memoranda swapped by bureaucrats with the aim of perfecting the human disposal machine. A series of letters revealed the different stages of deportation for the Jewish children of the South-Pyrenees region. In the first instance, a letter from the ‘Secretary dealing with Jewish questions’ at the Toulouse Préfecture, signed only with the initials AV, asked Jean Bousgay, Minister for the Interior, if the German orders were to be carried out. These made provision for Jewish children whose parents had already been deported to be sent to Drancy.
The Minister answered in the affirmative. The ‘Secretary dealing with Jewish affairs’ in Toulouse gave his instructions to the local police to carry out the Nazi plan.
Such perfect functioning on the part of the local administration would allow this region to beat Paris to first place in their ghastly championship, far ahead of the rest of the country!
There was no document mentioning the name Pierre Cazes; I didn’t feel up to double-checking. I replaced all the folders in the box. I knocked on the door of Lécussan’s office without getting an answer. When I went round the shelves I couldn’t see him or hear the unmistakable sound of his awkward walk. In the end I went to his deputy.
— Isn’t the head archivist still here?
— No, M. Lécussan went out ten minutes ago. Do you want to leave him a message?
— There’s no need. Just give him my thanks for all his help. The first drops of rain took me by surprise on the steps outside the Préfecture. Gusts of wind growing stronger by the minute raised the dry dust that had accumulated on the pavement and in the gutters. I hurried to get back to the station and avoid the worst of the storm.
It hadn’t turned six yet but it was dark. Thick clouds blackened the sky. The ceiling lights had been turned on in the duty room and their livid glow tinged the room with a sinister atmosphere. Lardenne’s telephone call caught me in Matabiau’s office, looking for the Toulouse phone directory.
— Inspector, maybe you were right; I think we’ve got a lead …
— Where are you calling from?
— From Saint-Rambert d’Albon, on the A6 motorway between Lyons and Valence. I’ve done over 550 kilometres since Toulouse! It’s a pretty spot, you get a view of the Rhône. It’s not far from Mont Pilat …
— You can read me the tourist office brochures next time, Lardenne. What did you find out?
— I’ll know for sure tomorrow … I’ve just met a motorcycle team who permanently patrol the motor-way between Lyons and Avignon. One of the guys was on duty the night of Bernard Thiraud’s murder. He was working together with another cop, which is why I have to wait until tomorrow.
— Come out with it. It’s even worse than when you had a handful of drawing pins in your mouth!
— In a word, François Leconte, the cop in question, was busy checking a lorry driver’s papers near Loriol, just beyond Montélimar. At 11.57 precisely …
— He’s got a hell of a memory!
— No, he gave the guy a ticket; the time’s given on the docket stub … While he was doing that, his colleague stopped a black Renault 30TX that was doing more than a hundred and fifty an hour …
— Registered in Paris?
— I’ll find out. Anyway, the driver was acting like he was a real big shot. He showed an official service pass, at least as far as François Leconte remembers. He was in the middle of filling out the ticket …
— Question his colleague, the sooner the better!
— Precisely, that’s the problem. He’s been on holiday since the beginning of the week. I’m trying to find out where he is. It seems he’s off having a nice time in Brittany, in a caravan.
— Great! Our only witness is out in the wilds, with no telephone …
— Do you want me to take a run over there, Inspector?
— No, keep pumping the motorway cops and try to get their pal’s address out of them. It really looks like we’re getting somewhere. The crime happened at six. He did 500 kilometres by midnight, including getting out of Toulouse … We’re making progress, I can feel it. As soon as you’ve finished at Saint-Albert de Ranbon …
— Saint-Rambert d’Albon!
— If you say so. Right, as soon as it’s done, go on to Paris. Wait for me at my hotel, I’ll join you right away.
— Take the A10, Inspector, it’s more direct! I still can’t understand, if this really is our man, why he did the Paris-Toulouse return journey on the motorway to the south instead of going the direct route via Bordeaux. I’ve worked it out, Paris-Bordeaux-Toulouse there and back, adds up to 1,600 kilometres, while Paris-Lyons-Montpellier-Toulouse there and back is more than 2,200 kilometres. He surely didn’t do an extra 600 kilometres just for the nice scenery?
— Mont Pilat doesn’t come into this business, Lardenne, I’m sure of that at least!
— Why then?
— Because he’s been the one making up the rules until now …
I had various matters to deal with urgently; I made up my mind to leave the station when the night squad came on. An oppressive heat had replaced the coolness brought by the late afternoon storm. When it hit the overheated tarmacadam the water evaporated and a thick clammy mist hung over the ground. I decided to walk home. I went round Saint-Sernin church to head down to the Garonne along rue Lautmann. The rush-hour traffic of cars and pedestrians over the Saint-Pierre Bridge had abated. I made for the Catalans quarter, along the river, cutting out the detour through allée de Brienne.
It was when I got as far as avenue Séjourné that I first became aware of a presence like a delayed echo of my own movements. I walked on another twenty metres or so to make sure I wasn’t imagining the shadow, then turned round quickly to scan the embankment. A figure was silhouetted in the light of a street lamp; the contrasting brightness behind him made it impossible for me to distinguish the features of the man who’d been following me. He was short and seemed to be leaning on his right leg. He was pointing a pistol at me, a few particles of light were caught against the darkness of the barrel. I realised there was another street lamp less than two metres behind me. I could only be made out in the same semi-darkness as my adversary. I eased my right arm on to my stomach, and, judging every little movement, unbuttoned my jacket. This provoked no response from the man who had me in his sights. It was patently obvious that he was using a gun for the first time in his life; his limbs were stiff, his spine rigid, he held the gun straight out level with my face.
At that distance the odds of hitting me were less than one in ten. He should have been bent at the knees, hunched forward with his right arm held in and aiming at my chest, while steadying himself with his free hand.
I called out to distract his attention.
— What do you want? If it’s money I’m willing to throw you my wallet …
— I’m not interested, Inspector Cadin, I have no need of money. You shouldn’t have stuck your nose in … I didn’t want …
The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite identify it. The man refreshed my memory with a forward movement of his club foot.
— You’re mad, Lécussan. You won’t get out of this alive. Drop your gun while there’s still time.
The head archivist kept moving towards me with his jerky gait, pointing the pistol.
I’d had enough time to unfasten the holster. I dropped on to my left side gripping the butt of the Heckler as I went down. Instinctively, my forefinger slid on to the breech and released the safety catch before coming to rest on the trigger.
I emptied the first bullet from the magazine stretched out on the damp cobblestones of the embankment, while gunfire sprayed out of Lécussan’s fist. The bullet whistled over my head. I pulled the trigger again and again, taking deep breaths, and not stopping to think about it. Only the fear of death made me fire. Lécussan had collapsed after his first shot. His gun had slid into a puddle. I got to my feet and went to pick it up. Turning it towards the light to lose the reflections, I made out the inscription on the barrel: Llama. Gabilondo. Y. Vitoria.
A model identical to the one used by Bernard Thiraud’s murderer.
Lécussan was no longer alive. Two of my bullets had shattered his skull, a third had got lodged in the club foot, just above the heel. I telephoned the station from a cabin on the embankment. I gave the duty officer strict orders to embargo the information for twenty-four hours.
Passers-by, intrigued by the sound of fire, had begun to gather, but none had the courage to approach me … I wonder even if courage would have been enough!
As I walked away, I heard the sound of ambulance sirens mingled with those of the emergency services police van arriving at the scene of the shooting.
At half past midnight the Paris express left Toulouse central station. I’d managed to get a couchette. I fell asleep before Montauban, rocked by the complacent snores of two commercial travellers.