The magistrate charged Pierre Cazes that evening, a little after seven. It was thought he wouldn’t live until the trial. A chance to bury the whole business. I went off to meet Claudine Chenet. She came to open the door. She didn’t give me time to take in the room I was entering. She pressed against me and placed her hands on the back of my neck. My palms slid down her back. I kissed her with my eyes shut while my right foot pushed back the door on to the corridor. She pulled away from me without a word and sat down on the edge of the bed. I watched her, unsure of what to do. Tears were flowing down her cheeks.
— Why are you crying? It’s all over, you have to forget …
— No, it’s not why you think. I’m ashamed to be happy after all this. You can’t know how much I’ve felt alone and abandoned since that day … I needed to have someone beside me … You most of all. It’s a hard thing to say, but I can’t get used to unhappiness, the way Bernard’s mother has.
She smiled and kissed me again.
— There, that’s it, I’ve stopped crying. Look, I’ve bought some fruit. Strawberries and peaches, do you like them?
I sat on the bedspread and took her in my arms.
— I’ve wanted the same, since we first met.
— I promise you I won’t talk about it any more, but tell me why this old guy had it in for Bernard. And his father. I need to know. Is there something secret?
— No. The journalists must be sweating over it in all the Paris newsrooms! André Veillut had nothing against the Thiraud family. He saw Bernard only once, in Toulouse. I don’t think he even knew Roger Thiraud …
— Then he was a madman …
— No, just a bureaucrat. He began his administrative career in 1938 in Toulouse. He’d just turned twenty. He set his sights for the top, armed to the teeth with diplomas. In under a year he was made Deputy General Secretary in the social section: assistance to needy families. In 1940 he was in charge of assistance to displaced persons and the reception of those French people fleeing the German advance. In 1941 his brief was extended to Refugee and Jewish Affairs.
As a zealous bureaucrat, Veillut followed the Vichy government’s instructions. He scrupulously administered the transportation of Jewish families to the transit centre at Drancy. Not out of political conviction nor anti-Semitism, but just by obeying the rules and carrying out the orders of the hierarchy. These days, dozens of obscure Section Heads decide what quantities of tomatoes or peaches will be dumped because of overproduction. As far as they’re concerned the thousands of tons of fruit that are destroyed are nothing more than a figure and a code on a printout. In 1942–1943, Veillut was doing the same thing, feeding the Nazi death machine and liquidating hundreds of human beings, instead of regulating the agricultural surplus. Lécussan was working with him as a clerical administrator. A formidable team. The region they covered tops every other region in France for deportations of Jewish children. In other Préfectures, people tried to scramble the cards, to lay false trails for the Gestapo. Not in Toulouse. Veillut was anticipating their wishes. It was efficiency he was after. There’d never have been such a massacre if the Nazis hadn’t benefited from the complicity of so many French people. They even got their hands on kids under two, despite them being spared by Pétain’s decrees …
— But Bernard’s father was a child then, he couldn’t have been involved in any of that.
— Roger Thiraud was born in Drancy, there’s the connection. It’s all it took! In his free time he was writing a short monograph on his home town, you know the little book you gave me. Apart from Crette de Paluel, Drancy was of no interest. Until the concentration camp that made it sadly famous. Bernard’s father devoted a long chapter to it, as well as the initial architectural project of building a futurist new town. He checked hundreds of documents: architecture, statistics, lists of names. And then one day he noticed the disproportionate number of children deported from the Toulouse region. As a historian, he became determined to understand the reason for this imbalance. Maybe there had been a very big Jewish community, or a centre where Jews from different regions were assembled … Roger Thiraud went to Toulouse, first to the municipal archives in the Capitole, then to those in the Préfecture. After a detailed study of the documents classified under DE, he soon realised that the responsibility for the inflated numbers of children fell on a high-placed Toulouse bureaucrat in charge of Jewish Affairs, identified only by the initials AV. He left for Paris again apparently intent on discovering the identity of this unknown person. Unluckily for him, the head archivist, Lécussan, was aware of his visit and the reason for his research. He immediately alerted Veillut that a historian was getting too closely interested in explosive documents.
Claudine interrupted me.
— But wasn’t there an investigation to establish who’d been responsible for what, after the Liberation?
— Yes, of course. Veillut and Lécussan aren’t fools. They proved it by staying above suspicion for more than forty years. At the start of ’44 they sensed that the heyday of collaboration was nearing its end, that they’d soon have to account for themselves. They distanced themselves from Vichy and put their efforts into helping the Resistance networks. In the most showy way. When the Liberation came Veillut was decorated for valour! Nobody would venture to cast doubt on a man with a hero’s rosette on his lapel. Since then, Veillut has never stopped climbing the ladder: General Secretary of the Bordeaux Préfecture in 1947, Head of the Prefect’s office in Paris in 1958. In 1960 he was entrusted with a secret mission: to set up a team with the job of liquidating the most troublesome FLN leaders. Its activities were extended to the OAS in 1961.
I took an apricot from the fruit bowl and went on.
— When in 1961 Lécussan warned him about the research being undertaken by Roger Thiraud, Bernard’s father, Veillut quite naturally drew on the skills of one of his men, Pierre Cazes. Of course he neglected to reveal the real reason for Roger Thiraud’s execution. Just a week ago this cop was still convinced he’d terminated a dangerous terrorist. Like a good professional, Pierre Cazes took advantage of the disturbances on 17 October 1961, the Algerian demonstration, to carry out his contract. Wanting to finish his father’s book, Bernard reached the same conclusions about the children’s deportation. He wanted to check the sources. With the result that he met the same end. But this time by Veillut’s own hand. Twenty years after his father …
— Do you think this whole story will be published in the newspapers?
I couldn’t answer that; I’d already been told to soft pedal it. At the Ministry they were drawing up a version more in keeping with the idea that the citizenry had of the guardians of public order.
— Maybe not everything, but they’ll have to release a good piece of it.
Claudine leaned down and snuggled up to my chest. I stopped talking. I caressed her hair, gently, rocking her backwards and forwards, cradling her, to make her feel safe. I fell asleep a lot later, wrapped in the scent of her skin.