“Not this late in the season when we’ve almost finished picking. And this wind is drying off the grapes. This time of year it’s not the rain but the possibility of hail that worries me. I’ve seen whole vineyards flattened.”
Bruno nodded. In the storms that came around the equinox, in March and September, he’d seen hailstones the size of golf balls, big enough to break roof tiles and demolish greenhouses, coming down so thickly they lay ankle-deep on the roads. He declined Julien’s offer of a glass of wine but accepted a cup of freshly pressed grape juice, warm and sticky. He rinsed his hands and left for the mairie. Schools had reopened after the summer, and the rush of tourists had gone. But there were still British families and older Dutch and German couples enjoying the September sun as they breakfasted on Fauquet’s terrace and watched the river flow beneath the old stone bridge. Yogurt and honey were a fine mixture but not what Bruno thought of as breakfast, so he stopped at Fauquet’s for coffee and a croissant.
“Albert just left. He told us about the murder,” said Fauquet, leaning over the bar with the conspiratorial air he liked to assume when pumping Bruno for information. “He said it was a terrible sight, legs all burned away. Do you know who it was?”
“There’ll be a statement later today from the Police Nationale in Périgueux,” Bruno said. “They’re in charge now. I just went to secure the scene until they arrived.”
“Philippe was here when Albert came in. He’s gone up there now, said he’d be taking photos for the paper of the police at work,” Fauquet went on, handing Bruno his espresso. “He was asking if you’d been in.”
As Bruno bit into his croissant and took his first sip of coffee, relishing the way the two tastes seemed made for each other, he resigned himself to being pestered by Philippe Delaron. A cheerful young man, Philippe ran the town’s camera shop, with a lucrative sideline in taking photos for Sud Ouest, the regional newspaper. A huge family of siblings and cousins gave him contacts in every walk of the town’s life. Philippe often knew as much about local developments as Bruno but tended to see them in a far more sensational light. Bruno helped Philippe when he could and told him frankly when he couldn’t. They had few qualms about using each other for their own ends, which made for a reasonable if somewhat wary relationship.
“And Father Sentout wanted to know if there might be a burial,” Fauquet added. Bruno shrugged but remained silent, knowing that if he said the dead man was probably a Muslim it would be all over town and on Radio Périgord by lunchtime.
Bruno put a two-euro coin on the counter and reached for the café’s copy of Sud Ouest. He glanced at headlines as he chewed his croissant, a signal that he wanted no more questions. Fauquet shuffled along the bar to talk to a bunch of regular customers, doubtless hinting that he’d learned far more from Bruno than he could ever reveal. Gossip was as much his stock-in-trade as coffee and croissants.
The front page carried the latest depressing news about rising unemployment in France and more violence in the Middle East. The inside pages, by contrast, were filled with happy scenes of grapes being picked in the vineyards, photos of the new schoolteachers and of couples celebrating fifty years of marriage. The sports pages covered in great detail all the doings of the local rugby, tennis and soccer teams. That was why people bought Sud Ouest, he thought, for local news and seeing pictures of people they knew. He closed the paper, made his farewells and left for his office.
A stack of mail awaited his attention on his desk inside the mairie. He turned on his computer and leafed through the envelopes while it booted up. The ding of an incoming e-mail drew him to the screen. The e-mail address of the sender tugged at his memory, ZigiPara, a name he had not heard or seen for a decade or so. “Zigi” was a shortened form of “Tzigane,” or “Gypsy,” which was what the army called anyone of Roma origins. His real name was Jacques Sadna, and he came from the Camargue, the vast wetlands at the delta of the River Rhône where Gypsies had settled for centuries and raised their famous horses. Zigi had been a corporal, like Bruno, when they first served together in the Ivory Coast, and each had been promoted to sergeant during some covert operations on the border between Chad and Libya. Zigi was with the paratroopers and Bruno with the combat engineers. He recalled hearing that Zigi had since become an officer.
“Hi Bruno, a heads-up from an old pal, even though you are a pékin,” he read. “I’m at Nijrab, adjudant-chef, and a muj has showed up claiming to be French from St. Denis. Calls himself Sami Belloumi, says he knows you and has dad named Momu. Seems simpleminded, scars on his back from whippings. Toubib says badly traumatized. He wants to go home but no documents. Photo attached. You know him? Let me know before this gets into official channels. Zigi.”
Bruno smiled as the old army slang came back to him. A pékin is a civilian. Nijrab is the French army base in the Kapisa region of Afghanistan. Bruno couldn’t remember whether they were still doing combat patrols or if the mission had been changed to training the Afghan army. A “muj” is a mujahideen. A toubib is a doctor. Bruno’s grin turned solemn as he read on. He knew Sami Belloumi, a young man who had left St. Denis four, maybe five, years earlier, supposedly to go to a special school for autistic youths run by a mosque in Toulouse. Sami was the nephew of Momu, the math teacher at the local collège. Momu was also the father of Karim, who ran the Café des Sports and was a star of the town rugby team.
Bruno clicked to open the photo, and sure enough it was Sami. He looked so thin he was almost skeletal, with prominent cheekbones that emphasized his bulging eyes. He had a long beard, and his head had been shaved. The sight of him brought back memories of Sami at the tennis club, serving ace after ace, always placing the ball precisely in the corner. Bruno had been able to get back perhaps one serve in three. But Sami had no interest in anything but serving. He never returned a ball, never played a forehand or backhand. He would stay on the court alone for hours with a basket full of tennis balls beside him, practicing his perfect serves. It was the same with basketball. He could sink shots from anywhere on the court, but that was all he wanted to do. He wouldn’t pass the ball, wouldn’t dribble or run. And just as he endlessly repeated his tennis serve, he practiced shooting the ball for hours.
Momu said these habits had something to do with the way Sami’s brain worked. He seemed able to repair anything electrical or mechanical—toasters, computers, whatever. He would do mathematical puzzles but otherwise would not read or write. While he was polite and friendly, shaking hands with Bruno whenever they met, the boy hardly ever spoke. Dr. Gelletreau at the medical center had said he was autistic and there was nothing to be done. Momu had tried to get him into a special school, but the lack of such institutions was one of the scandals of the French education system. It was sad, Bruno thought, that Fabiola had arrived in town too late to treat him. It wasn’t that the other doctors of St. Denis weren’t good but that Fabiola was special, a gifted healer with an intuitive way of dealing with her patients and establishing trust. Perhaps she might have been able to draw Sami out. Perhaps she could do so now, once they had him back home.
He made a routine call to the passport office to see when Sami had applied for one and to establish its number. He was put on hold. What had Sami been doing in Afghanistan? he wondered. Zigi had called him a muj, and in the drab brown garment Sami had been wearing in the photo he was the very image of a Taliban, though most Afghans in the countryside probably looked similar.
There was one obvious reason that a French citizen, a Muslim of Arab origin, would make his way to Afghanistan. Had Sami somehow been radicalized? Bruno doubted whether the boy he had known had much sense of politics or religion, and he had been brought up in Momu’s secular home. Momu had little time for religion, and Bruno had never known him to visit a mosque, except to enroll Sami in the special school. Perhaps Sami had become a devout Muslim and then been persuaded or dragooned to go to Afghanistan. Could he have volunteered for jihad? Zigi’s account of the whipping scars made that seem unlikely. Bruno knew he w
as speculating with too few facts to go on. What mattered was that Sami was a son of St. Denis and he wanted to come back to his family.
The passport clerk finally replied. Sami Belloumi had never applied for a passport.
“Hi Zigi,” Bruno tapped out in reply to his old comrade. “If they made you adj-chef, the army is in more trouble than I thought. Good to hear from you and thanks for message. That photo is our Sami, French citizen and member of respected local family but last heard of at special school for autistic kids in mosque in Toulouse. Can we bring him home? Bruno.”
The mayor looked old and tired when he returned from a meeting of the conseil général, the governing body for the département, with its endless arguments over budgets in times of austerity. Usually Gérard Mangin used the stairs, bounding up them with the energy of a man half his age. This time he emerged from the elevator with shoulders bowed. He spotted Bruno helping himself to coffee from the communal pot and gestured for Bruno to join him in the mayoral office. Bruno took a seat on the straight-backed and uncomfortable wooden chair the mayor offered visitors to dissuade them from staying too long.
“You must be in worse shape than you look if you’re reduced to drinking that dreadful stuff,” the mayor said, nodding at the mug in Bruno’s hand. He buzzed his intercom twice, a signal to Claire, his assistant, to make some proper coffee from his private store.
“I need some of that after this morning’s meeting,” he went on. “They’re trying to raid the little pot of money I’ve been saving for the new sewers we’re planning to put in place. They want the money to pay for road repairs in those communes that were too lazy to do proper maintenance. They’re threatening me in all sorts of ways, but I won’t give in.”
“I’d have thought they knew you well enough by now,” Bruno said, with a slow smile. “You always guard the commune’s money as if it were your own.”
“I guard it more carefully, Bruno. I’ve seen mayors go to prison because they were too free and easy with town funds.”
“What are they threatening?”
“They want me to sell off the collège apartments, agree to a three-year hiring freeze at the mairie and sell off part of our town park for development.”
Bruno winced. He’d spent his spare time the previous winter in repainting and restoring one of those apartments, offered at a subsidized rent to attract teachers to work at rural schools. Florence, the science teacher, lived there with her two young children. And the town park was sacrosanct, Bruno thought, or it ought to be.
“So what was decided?”
“Nothing, which is usually the case with committees. I said we couldn’t even consider the matter of the apartments until we had a legal opinion on the status of the teachers’ tenancies and the conseil would have to pay for that. I had no objection to a hiring freeze so long as it included all the other communes, not just ours, but I made a counterproposal that we organize a census of all public employees in all the mairies. They didn’t like that.”
“And on the park?”
“None of their business. I simply pointed out that it belongs to the citizens of St. Denis and so nothing will happen without a referendum. And I added that of course any member of the conseil would be welcome to come here and campaign for selling the park, but I wouldn’t guarantee their safety if they did. Anyway, they’re not getting our money, and that’s that.”
Bruno nodded, pleased to see that the mayor was himself again, invigorated as he refought his committee battles.
“Now tell me about this murder they were talking about on the radio as I drove back.”
As Bruno related what he knew about Rafiq’s death, the mayor skimmed through his in-box and pulled out a faxed letter requesting Bruno be seconded to the interior ministry under the brigadier’s command. He took his fountain pen from his desk drawer, scribbled an approval on the letter and handed it to Bruno. The door opened, and Claire brought in two cups of espresso from the machine the council had bought to mark the mayor’s twentieth anniversary in office.
“Something else has come up, in Afghanistan of all places,” Bruno said when Claire had left. Halfway into Bruno’s explanation of the reappearance of Momu’s nephew, the mayor rose, crossed to his shelves and plucked out a manila file bound in white cord. Back at his desk, he opened it and pushed across to Bruno copies of Momu’s original application for his nephew to obtain French citizenship, along with a copy of the formal naturalization and of Sami’s carte d’identité.
“I remember it well. I did most of the paperwork myself. Did we have any idea that Sami was no longer at that special school in Toulouse?”
“No,” Bruno said. “And the passport authorities have no record of his ever being issued a passport. Heaven knows how Sami got to Afghanistan. As soon as school breaks for lunch, I’ll go and see what Momu has to say. I can’t imagine he didn’t know that Sami had left Toulouse.”
“You may be right, but if Sami decided to become a jihadi, I’m not surprised Momu kept it quiet,” the mayor said. “Still, the sooner you let him know that Sami is alive and well the better.”
Bruno explained that Sami’s appearance at the French army base had not yet reached official channels. So far, this was a private tip-off from an old army buddy who seemed ready to keep the whole matter informal. There were regular French military flights back and forth to Afghanistan. With luck, Sami’s return need never become official. In Bruno’s experience, armies were usually content to let sergeants resolve tricky problems in their own way with a minimum of paperwork and a maximum of discretion and dispatch.
“I presume that copy of the ID card will be sufficient for your old army friend,” the mayor replied. “If not, I can probably pull some strings in Paris. I seem to recall some regulation about the repatriation of distressed French citizens from danger zones. If we need to give a guarantee of paying the airfare we can find the money somewhere. Sami’s one of ours, so let’s do what we can to get him back. In the meantime, what’s an undercover agent doing getting himself killed in St. Denis?”
“Tortured as well as killed, as vicious as anything I ever saw,” Bruno replied. “So he was probably being questioned before being put to death in a very professional way, a stiletto under the chin and into the brain. I only know what I told you, which is what I heard from the brigadier. Rafiq is supposedly his real name, and Fabiola said she thought the dead man had North African origins. It seems quite a coincidence that he gets killed just as Sami resurfaces.”
The mayor looked thoughtful. “Indeed it does, suspiciously so, particularly when the brigadier is involved. It usually spells trouble when he turns up.”
3
Back in his office, Bruno scanned the documents about Sami that the mayor had given him and e-mailed them to Zigi with a note saying he hoped they would establish Sami’s identity. The ID card and naturalization papers each carried a thumbprint. Then he called the collège secretary to check the teachers’ timetables. Momu was still teaching but would be free in the last period before lunch and could probably be found in the staff room.
Bruno put on his cap and strode the short distance across the bridge to the school that educated the young teenagers of St. Denis and the other nearby communes. It was a standard building of the 1960s, an unimaginative array of oblongs in concrete and glass around a playground and small sports field. The pupils had dubbed it “the shoebox.” The rooms were baking in summer and none too warm in winter, and the temperamental boiler was one of the mayor’s priorities for replacement in his battles over the budget.
Bruno squeezed past an unfamiliar white van that was blocking the entrance. He thought it might belong to some workman doing maintenance, but there was no company sign on its side. He poked his head into the secretary’s office to say hello and ask about the van. She shrugged and said she knew nothing about it. Puzzled, Bruno took note of the number, which ended in 31, a Toulouse registration.
Glancing through a side window, he saw on the passenger seat an enlarge
ment of the kind of photo taken for a passport or ID card. To his surprise he recognized the features of a young Sami.
Bruno tried all the van doors, but they were locked, and the windows on the rear door had been covered with paper on the inside. He looked at the width between the tires and at their treads and pulled out his notebook to check the dimensions he’d recorded earlier. It wasn’t conclusive, but the width could fit. He opened the hood, removed the distributor cap and detached the cables from the battery.
He went back to the school office and asked the secretary to refer the driver to him if he came to her for help. Bruno then took out his phone and called the gendarmerie. Sergeant Jules answered, and Bruno called for urgent backup and asked him to get someone to check on the registration number of the van from Toulouse.
He climbed the stairs to the upper level where the science labs and Momu’s mathematics classroom were located along with the teachers’ staff room. The place was quiet, disturbed only by the faint sounds of teachers’ voices behind closed doors.
But the corridors were not empty. Ahead of him two men in jeans and leather jackets were going from one room to the next, bending to peer through the single pane of clear glass in each door, evidently looking for somebody. One of the two men turned at the sound of Bruno’s footsteps and nudged his colleague. The sight of his police uniform had captured their attention.
“Bonjour, messieurs,” Bruno said politely. “Can I be of assistance? You appear to be looking for someone.”
Their dark skin seemed to identify them as North Africans. One was tall and heavyset with the build of a rugby player, his tightly curled hair cut short. He was clean shaven and held his arms away from his sides as if readying for action. The shorter man had a small, neat beard and was carrying some kind of baton against his thigh. A box the size of a thick dictionary hung from a strap over his shoulder. They moved as if they were used to working as a team. The big man walked directly toward Bruno, his face impassive, while his partner with the beard moved to one side, ready to come in against Bruno’s flank. He smiled and tried to distract Bruno by saying they were looking for a friend.
The Children Return Page 2
