The minister steps further into the room, but remains standing, a clear sign that he does not intend to be here long. With a nod, he gives the floor to the head of the General Directorate for Internal Security, who confirms what everyone has been thinking ever since news of the explosion broke: there were no Islamist terrorists involved. It may not last, but for now at least, things are calm on that score. Over the past months, steady progress has been made in top-secret talks with key cells and Islamist groups: though hotly denying it, the government is about to make a huge payment for the return of two hostages, so it would not be in the interest of the fundamentalists to cut the pipeline allowing them to hoover wads of cash from the Treasury. Besides which, nothing about the attack corresponds to their usual M.O. and choice of target, there has been no reports of suspicious behaviour either from informants or undercover agents, nothing, absolutely nothing . . .
“So, we’re ruling out religious motives for the attack.”
This leaves political motives. A much more complicated terrain. The intelligence services have had no new information in recent months, but the constellation of political factions and guerrilla groups is so vast . . . Such groups are born and die every day; they are unstable, constantly in transition, it is impossible to rule out a lone wolf attack.
“Right now, it’s all hands on deck.”
As for the death toll, initial estimates should come through in about an hour. Two hours, max.
The minister nods. He turns to the press secretary.
“As far as the media are concerned, investigations are ongoing. Nothing more.”
He calmly surveys those present.
“And I don’t want anyone doing anything until I give the word. Let me make myself absolutely clear: there is to be no precipitate action, no suspicious commotion in the ranks.”
An unambiguous communiqué to the media: the government is not panicking.
Message received loud and clear.
A car is waiting downstairs, the minister is going to visit the site of the attack, to demonstrate his compassion, to reassure the public that “intelligence services and law enforcement are committed to tracking down those responsible blah blah blah”.
Tragedy is part of the job.
5.55 p.m.
The nannies and child-minders gathered in the square Dupeyroux shift their chairs closer together to chat; near the adventure playground, a few fretful mothers watch their darlings’ daring feats. Jean usually sits in the middle of the square. He has his own bench, after a fashion.
Brash but benevolent in his park keeper’s uniform, Marcel reigns as lord and master here, though ever-ready with his whistle, in a career spanning twenty-four years he has never had to deal with an breach of the bylaws. Acquainted with the regulars, he nods to Jean as he passes. He is a little like an attentive barman, his job security depends on his devotion to his clientele.
Jean is seated as he always is, back straight, knees together, clasped hands pressed between his thighs. As the keeper passes, he moves his lips almost imperceptibly, this is how he greets people. No-one has ever seen him with a newspaper or a mobile phone; he gazes at the square, engrossed in his thoughts. This afternoon, he sits in his usual spot, he is blinking nervously, his heart is still hammering, but on the surface, it is impossible to imagine that this boy has just detonated a bomb in the neighbouring arrondissement. Even from here, it is still possible to hear the wail of sirens and ambulances hurtling down the boulevard heading for the rue Joseph-Merlin.
The park keeper moves on, quick glance to left and right, Jean gets to his feet, ducks around the bench and dives into the bushes. On his hands and knees, hidden by the dense foliage, he uses the tool he fashioned to lift the steel hatch. The metal screeches, it is a tricky procedure, though the most difficult part, once he has slipped inside, is lowering the cover back into place without making any noise. A few days ago, when he transported the bomb and all his equipment here, it was a nightmare.
He is now hunkered inside a narrow concrete cubicle. This is the entrance to a “telecoms exchange”. The impressive tangle of pipes and power lines and fibre optic cables that services the local neighbourhood snakes through here. Most of these substations are located under roads, beneath cast iron manhole covers. There are hundreds of them in Paris, as there are in all the major cities throughout France. Jean stumbled on this one almost by accident while recovering a lost ball for a kid too scared to go into the thicket.
It takes a minute for him to calm himself, then he takes a torch from his jacket pocket and checks that the coast is clear, that no-one has been down here since his last visit.
The flashlight illuminates a low-ceilinged corridor some fifteen metres long, where he has to crouch slightly in order to get through. At the far end, there is a large room where he can once again stand upright. The walls are lined with meters and junction boxes and two electrical control cabinets on which terse signs in red and black warn that the imprudent visitor will be summarily electrocuted. Signs that would make Jean laugh, if he were so disposed.
He takes off his jacket, folds it neatly, sets it on the floor and, sitting cross-legged, one by one he takes the tools from the backpack he leaves here between visits. Though this time he will take it away with him since he has no need to come back again. He turns off the torch, flicks on the headlamp he uses for precision tasks and sets to work.
He is at the very centre of the square Dupeyroux.
Above his head and a few metres to his right is the toddlers’ playground with its slides and swings and spring riders, and a hill of cubes that serves as a climbing frame.
The kids love it.
6.03 p.m.
As soon as he gets home and opens the door, Camille apologises to his tabby cat, Doudouche – a piece of work, just like her master – for abandoning her for three whole days. He throws open the windows and, while the cat perches on the table pretending to ignore him (she’s a drama queen), he peels off his jacket, replenishes the kibble in her bowl and, for a treat, pours a little cold milk into a saucer and sets it on the floor.
“Doudouche?”
She is pointedly staring out the window.
“Well, it’s right here,” Camille says, “The rest is up to you.”
Then as a treat for himself, he pours a little whisky.
He is dissatisfied with his enforced leave. Because he chose to spend it on his own? On the answering machine, there is a message from Anne. A warm voice: “If you don’t get back too late, fancy coming round to mine for dinner?” It is strange, Camille had not wanted to take her to Montfort, yet in her absence he spent his whole time drawing her. As he sips his whisky, he leafs through the sketches. He always works from memory. Anything that strikes him in the everyday (faces, figures, expressions, quotidian details) eventually finds its way into his sketchpad.
He continues to flick through the drawings as he dials Anne’s number.
“Depends what’s for dinner,” he says straight off.
“You’re a complete boor, aren’t you . . .”
At either end of the line, they both smile.
There follows a long, tremulous silence in which they say many things to each other.
“Be there in about an hour, O.K.?”
6.05 p.m.
An hour after the explosion, all the wounded from the rue Joseph-Merlin have been evacuated by the emergency services.
Right now, the toll seems nothing short of a miracle: twenty-eight injured, no fatalities. “At least not yet,” say the pessimists, but there are no patients in a critical condition. Broken arms and legs, dislocations, contusions, bruises, fractures, burns, cracked ribs, these things will require surgery and weeks of physiotherapy, but the real damage has been to the mind, not the body. The little boy escaped with a broken arm; at school, the kids will think he is a hero, his classmates will line up to sign his cast. The young virgin found herself on her backside; her beau, for his part, was taken to A&E with a dislocated shoulder and will
have to explain to his wife how he came to be found flat on his back in a lingerie shop in a neighbourhood where he had no business being.
Of course, it is still possible that a body might be found under the rubble (under the heap of scaffolding poles, for example), but the whole area has been scanned by experts, sniffer dogs have done their work. Verdict: no bodies under the rubble.
A miracle.
The reporters are quick to pick up on the word and run with it. These are seasoned professionals, give them a non-story and they’ll turn it into a major news item. In this case, they go for the miraculous reprieve. O.K., so a few deaths would have played better, easy to manage, guaranteed results. With the living, you have to put in more effort, but it’s just a matter of experience. Experience is what marks them out as professionals. There is no shortage of police officers at the scene. At least thirty of them, primed and ready for action, some from the anti-terrorist squad. Some of them – with the approval of the paramedics - have managed to question victims with minor injuries before they were evacuated, but most of them are patrolling the neighbourhood looking for external witnesses, residents with windows overlooking the crime scene, shopkeepers, passers-by who were not directly affected by the explosion.
They are in constant contact with teams back at the station who are busy looking up the names of landlords, tenants, shop owners, checking databases, reviewing C.C.T.V. footage from two nearby cameras (though it seems likely they will have captured nothing of interest, given their position and their angle); as soon as they succeed in identifying a witness or a passer-by, they scan any and every relevant file – barely an hour after the attack took place, terabytes of data have already been scrutinized.
And, right now, the only reliable witness statement is that given by Clémence Kriszewckanszki.
Her name is so difficult to spell that people always make the effort . . . In her twenty-two years, she has seen it misspelled only twice. Physically, she is unremarkable, the sort of woman who scarcely gets a second glance. She was the young woman sitting on the café terrace a few metres from Jean. When the bomb exploded, the young man with her was thrown backwards and cracked his skull, he has been taken to hospital.
“Julien . . .” she says, her voice almost a whisper.
“Julien what?” asks the officer, pen at the ready.
She is embarrassed, there they were kissing, cuddling, but she does not know his surname. A friend of a friend . . . She puckers her lips, she is terrified of seeming like a slut. But as far as the cop is concerned she could have been on the game since the age of thirteen for all he cares, it is the least of his worries: she may have seen the bomber, that is all that matters.
There are three of them clustered around her, sitting on red plastic chairs in the back room of a restaurant whose windows were shattered by the explosion.
“Tall,” Clémence remembers. “One metre eighty or a little more. There was something awkward about him, you know what I mean? Clumsy. Dark brown hair falling over his forehead, a small liver spot under his right eye, thick lips, he was wearing a pair of beige jeans with bright stitching and a belt with a Harley Davidson buckle. He . . .”
“Hold up, hold up,” the cop interrupts, visibly overwhelmed. “You noticed his belt buckle?”
Without waiting for her to reply, the commander whispers something to the third officer who immediately gets up and leaves the room.
The cops are sceptical. Clémence looks at them, puzzled. The commander nods, carry on. She continues her statement, detailing the clothes worn by the young man, the make of his mobile phone, the bag he set down next to him, his shoes, even his gestures, and especially the way he balanced his phone on the table in front of him, training the camera at the building . . . A young plain-clothes officer bursts in, looking harried, puts a piece of paper on the table, mutters something and goes out again. The three men stare silently at Clémence.
She stares at each of them in turn, she does not understand what is going on.
“The officer who just came in,” says the commander, “could you describe him?”
It is a classic ploy, but what else could they do?
“About thirty, I’d say.” Clémence speaks as though she is stating the obvious, repeating something everyone already knows. “Blue trousers, flared at the ankles, a Jacquard-style jumper with a blue chevron design, a gold medal on a chain around his neck . . .”
The three officers exchange half-smiles; the judge is going to love this witness.
They go back to the description of the bomber. They summon an artist from Identité judiciaire to do an Identikit. A hyper-realistic portrait, even the kids who knew him in kindergarten would recognise him.
Things rarely get off to such a good start.
6.08 p.m.
Meanwhile, less than a hundred metres away, two men are about to shed a disconcerting light on the case.
The first is Basin, the head of the crime lab attached to the Préfecture. In his fifties, tall and broad shouldered, he hails from the South West where he spent his youth playing rugby, but was never quite good enough to make it as a professional, he has the hands of a lacemaker. Ill-suited to a rugby ball, but perfect for a bomb disposal expert.
He is standing in front of the crater left by the explosion.
He has seen a lot of things in his career, but this has him bewildered.
“Ah, shit,” grumbles a voice nearby.
It is Forestier, a colleague, one of the old school, he lost a finger in Kosovo and has never been the same since. Under normal circumstances, losing a finger would not seem like the end of the world, but when you believe you’re immortal, it is devastating. He is also staring into the hole. It is only partly visible through the pile of scaffolding poles, but for guys like these, a small part of the crater, a glimpse of the rim, is enough for them to reconstruct the whole crime scene.
And, when the scene has finally been cleared, this particular crater will measure three to four metres in circumference with a depth of more than a metre.
“Fucking hell,” says Forestier.
Both men are flabbergasted.
They nod and exchange a wary smile, but this should not be seen as cynicism, it is purely professional.
Though it is true that it has been a long time since anyone saw a 140 mm mortar shell in the centre of Paris.
7.00 p.m.
“Jesus! A mortar shell?”
“Yes, Monsieur le ministre,” says the expert from Securité civile. “Probably dating back to the First World War.”
“And these things are still functional?”
“Not always, Monsieur le ministre, most of them are defective. But obviously the one on the rue Joseph-Merlin was in working order.”
The minister turns to the officer from the D.G.S.I. and gives him a quizzical look. The civil servant pulls a face intended to convey his embarrassment.
“We are not dealing with classic scenario here. If this is an isolated attack, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. We have to hope that some organisation will claim responsibility. And ideally demand a ransom. That way we’ll have something to get our teeth into. In the meantime, we need to focus on gun collectors, freaks obsessed with the First World War, the handful of factions we consider capable of violence, comb through any recent threats that were overlooked. Scrape together whatever information we can. Blindly.”
The minister is a man of action. He hates it when there is nothing to do but to wait.
He gets to his feet, he has to go and report to the President’s office. This prospect is one he finds reassuring. A minister’s job is to deal with one clusterfuck a minute. The president has to deal with three.
7.15 p.m.
But for the traffic jams, Camille would have arrived at Anne’s place on time. As a rule, he is punctual. But as though the constant stream of news flashes were not enough (“. . . the ministre de l’Intérieur is visiting the scene of the blast . . .”), his route took him within an arrondissement o
f the rue Joseph-Merlin, a guaranteed catastrophe. As soon as he found himself in the middle of a gridlock, he realised he was screwed. He was not far from his destination in terms of distance, but in terms of time . . . In such circumstances, most of his colleagues would slap the siren on the roof and barrel through the traffic, all lights blazing. If he were being honest, Camille would have to admit that he too has given in to temptation. But only rarely. And not this time. He turns on the G.P.S. to look for an alternative route, fumbles his glasses and drops them on the floor of the car; it takes an acrobatic feat to reach them and, naturally, it is at precisely this moment that his phone rings.
“Where are you?” Anne asks.
Camille releases the accelerator, the car shudders and stalls, he grabs for his glasses, wedges the phone against this shoulder and, now panting for breath, he gasps:
“Not far, not far . . .”
“Are you driving or sprinting,” Anne is amused.
Suddenly, the road ahead is clear. He clambers back onto the driver’s seat as horns honk impatiently behind him, tugs at his seat belt, keys the ignition, jerks the throttle, shifts into third gear, his mobile phone still wedged under his chin. The car judders.
“I’ll be right there,” he says, “five minutes . . .”
But he instantly drops the phone which clatters onto his knees and, of course, immediately rings again.
Traffic is moving smoothly now, a diversion has been opened up. Camille passes a frantic traffic cop whirling his baton and blowing his whistle like a madman. Camille is concentrating, careful not to lose his way. In fact, he is closer than he realised, just a few streets from Anne’s apartment.
The screen on his phone flashes, indicating a call from Louis, his deputy. He cannot help but wonder what Louis is doing on the force. The guy is rich as Croesus, he could spend his whole life dozing by a swimming pool without ever having to worry about money. And he’s an intellectual to boot, a walking encyclopaedia, no-one catches him out . . . But in spite of everything, he decided to work at the Brigade Criminelle. Deep down, the guy’s a romantic.
Rosy and John Page 2
