The streets of Perpignan were empty, and in five minutes he was at the headquarters. As he turned into the parking lot he almost hit a patrol car that was coming out at high speed. Alerted by the flashing light, he hit the brakes at the last minute. The car was responding to a call. Not too urgent: the officers hadn’t yet turned on their siren. A memo issued last year drastically limited the use of horns and sirens at night. Citizens needed their sleep. At the risk of causing an accident. Who would be considered responsible in such a case? The memo didn’t say.
Repeating his excuses, Ripoll handed Sebag the envelope with his greasy hands. Sebag refused to take it.
“Don’t you have any gloves?”
The guard understood too late that he should have been more careful himself. He opened a drawer in his desk and handed Sebag a pair of plastic gloves.
“I had no way of knowing . . . ” he stammered.
“No, of course not. An anonymous envelope sent to an inspector in the middle of the night, there’s nothing more ordinary than that, right? I get them every night.”
He put on the gloves and took the envelope. It was in fact just like millions of others that circulated everyday in France. It was addressed rather pompously to “Inspector Gilles Sebag, Perpignan Police Headquarters.” The address had been typed in a font that made it look like handwriting. In the upper right corner, the word “urgent” was written in red and underlined by hand. On the back, in place of a return address there was a stylized image of a swallow that resembled Ingrid Raven’s tattoo.
“Are the surveillance cameras outside still not working?” Sebag asked.
“They were supposed to be repaired last week, but it didn’t happen. I don’t know why. I’m on night duty this week, and I wasn’t told anything.”
“Didn’t anyone notice the person who put the envelope in the box? A patrol that was coming back just at that time?”
“Not so far as I know, but I’ll ask the night teams.”
“Was the telephone call recorded at least?”
“Probably, yes. Like all calls.”
“You haven’t checked.”
“Uh . . . no. Not yet.”
Ripoll was uneasy. Maybe he’d fallen asleep or had been drinking coffee in the cafeteria when the phone rang. He probably thought he’d spend a nice quiet night on duty. In the middle of the week, that was often how it was.
“You’ll get the cassette and bring it to me in my office. I want it within five minutes.”
He heard Ripoll grumble a few words in Catalan. He went to his office, reproaching himself for taking out his bad mood on poor Ripoll. It wasn’t his way to lay into subordinates, but everyone had moments of weakness. Especially when they’d had only a few minutes to get over their first binge in twenty years.
He put the mysterious letter on his desk and sat down. The room was plunged in darkness and silence. He turned on the little desk lamp. He knew that it was preferable to hand the document over to his colleagues in the technical division, but he didn’t have the patience to wait until the next day.
After all, the letter was addressed to him. And it was already the next day.
Still wearing gloves, he took a letter-opener out of his drawer and carefully slit the envelope. Inside, he found a letter written on dark recycled paper. He unfolded it. There were only three lines, written on a computer. The message was clear and direct:
We demand 150 million euros for the liberation of the young Dutch woman. Other instructions will follow.
It was signed:
Moluccan Resistance Front
A hundred and fifty million! The amount surprised him at first. Who would have that kind of money? The CEOs of multinational corporations, football players and rock stars. Maybe also a winner of the Euro Millions lottery. But certainly not Ingrid Raven‘s parents.
Next his eyes fell on the signature. Moluccan Resistance Front . . . Black and white images came back to him. A train. A train stopped in open country. He recalled hooded heads captured by the telephoto lens of a camera from behind the windows of a train compartment. He remembered a door that slowly opened and a body that fell heavily onto the tracks. A Moluccan—maybe even South Moluccan—commando had seized a train in Holland. That was in the 1970s, if he recalled correctly. He’d seen it on TV. People had died.
“What does this all this crap mean?”
“Excuse me? Did I screw up again?”
He hadn’t heard Ripoll come in. The sergeant remained on the threshold. His broad silhouette stood out against the light in the hall.
“No, excuse me, I was talking to myself.”
Ripoll approached. He set a cassette on the desk.
“I wound it back to the message that interests you.”
Handing him a small tape recorder, he added: ‘
“It’ll work better with this.”
“That might be very helpful, in fact,” Sebag replied, giving him his friendliest smile. “Were you able to contact all the teams?”
“Yes. But no one saw the suspect at all.”
“Too bad! But thanks for your quick work.”
Ripoll turned around to go, but Sebag stopped him before he crossed the threshold.
“What was your impression of the guy who phoned?”
“What do you mean, my impression? I don’t know. You’re going to be able to listen to him yourself.”
“I will, in fact, but I won’t be in the same state of mind you were. I’m going to listen to it already knowing something. I’d like to know what you felt. For example, how did you know right away that it wasn’t a joke?”
Ripoll took the time to reflect before answering. Sebag couldn’t see his face, which was back-lit, but he could sense that Ripoll was flattered by the question.
“He had a hollow, rather distance voice, but his tone was dry. He hadn’t said more than a dozen words before he’d already hung up. People don’t do that when they’re joking.”
“I see. What do they do, in your opinion?”
Ripoll ran his hand through his thinning hair.
“I don’t know. I think, uh . . . I think they wait a few seconds, at least long enough to see how the other person reacts. If you’re making a joke, that’s why you do it, isn’t it?”
“Very perceptive. What else?”
“Well . . . nothing.”
“Thanks very much. I’ll call you if I need something else explained.”
“Any time. I’ll be there until seven o’clock.
He listened to Ripoll‘s heavy footsteps moving down the empty corridor. He took a deep breath and put the cassette in the player. After a little static, a man’s voice could be heard. More of a whisper.
“There’s a letter for Inspector Sebag in the mailbox at police headquarters. It’s urgent, very urgent.”
The dial tone that followed these two short sentences split his eardrums. The caller’s tone was self-assured, strong, “dry,” as Ripoll had put it, almost authoritarian. The message was sober, like the letter. But it was hard to gain an idea of the voice because the caller was whispering. Sebag rewound the tape and listened to it again, taking care, however, to stop as soon as the last word had been spoken. There was not the slightest hesitation in the rapid utterance of the two sentences. No trace of an accent, either. All that didn’t sound like a joke, in fact.
He got up to open the window. The air was cooler, but the temperature wouldn’t go down any more now.
If only they’d been able to locate the place where the call was made! For the past two years they’d been waiting for a promised new telephone switchboard, but the delivery had been repeatedly delayed. The funds were lacking, and there were always other priorities. A patrol car parked carefully in the lot. The car that he’d almost hit as he came in. Sebag saw two officers get out. They had a young woman with them.
The out
side air did him good. His headache had gone away. Claire’s image tried to impose itself on him, but he refused to allow it any room. There was no point brooding on it. There was only one question he had to ask himself, and only one answer to give. Did he want to know?
He spent the rest of the night on the Internet, reading up on the Molucca Islands and their subversive movements. He took breaks in the cafeteria and reluctantly swallowed several cups of bad coffee. The grimaces he couldn’t repress as he drank it helped keep him awake as much as the coffee did.
Toward five o’clock, coming back from one of his trips to the cafeteria, he met the two officers and the young woman on the stairs. A pretty blonde. Rather tall. She smelled like sweat and fear. She was crying. The end of the night must have been difficult for her. Sebag noticed that she held a tissue against her throat.
“Bon dia,” said Rafel Puig, the owner of Carlit. “Com vas? Did you fall out of bed this morning? You look beat. Don’t tell me you went running before you came in?”
“No. He treballat tot la nit” (“I worked all night”). Sebag had been taking evening classes at the Generalitat de Catalunya, a sort of unofficial embassy of South Catalonia in Perpignan. He understood Catalan and could repeat a few simple phrases.
“Tota la nit? Carall, you must not do that very often.”
Sebag shrugged.
“You can’t always avoid it.”
Rafel automatically wiped his impeccable zinc bar top with a rag. The proprietor of the Carlit always mixed Catalan and French in what he said. It was his way of propagating his country’s language, a didactic and open way that Sebag liked.
“Una tassa de cafè, com de costum?” (“A cup of coffee, as usual?”)
“A triple shot in a big cup, please. With two eggs fried hard. The night was short, and today is going to be long.”
“Go on, sit down. I’ll bring it all to you in five minutes.”
At six o’clock, Sebag had decided to allow himself a real break. Passing by the reception desk, he’d asked Ripoll to wake up Castello and tell him what had happened during the night. Then he’d crossed the avenue and gone into the Carlit.
He picked up the morning newspaper and sat down in a corner. Their exploits the day before were on the front page of the local daily. On the inside pages, there was a big photo showing the prefect in front of a split-open box out of which Spanish cigarettes were spilling. The boxes had been spread out on the ground and presented so that the haul seemed impressive. The article referred to the seizure of more than three thousand cartons worth a total of a hundred and fifty thousand euros. The final calculation had thus been made in terms of the official sales price in France and not in terms of the black market price. That made no sense, but it did make it possible to arrive at an considerable sum. A hundred and fifty thousand euros was something. Converted into francs—a simple mathematical operation that many readers would automatically make—the total was nearly a million, a figure symbolically suitable to strike people’s minds.
He did a rapid calculation: it would take a thousand confiscations like this one to arrive at the amount demanded by Ingrid Raven’s kidnappers. This ransom was crazy!
A second article reported the police raids on a dozen bars in Perpignan and the arrest of three managers. In one photo, two policemen stood on either side of a man hidden in a jacket, his hands cuffed behind his back. The three managers arrested had been taken into custody. The newspaper suggested that they would probably spend the night at police headquarters. Sebag knew they’d already been released. In a box at the bottom of the page, a lawyer denounced this disproportionate operation. He wasn’t wrong: the forceful arrests would probably result only in simple fines imposed by the criminal court.
Rafel set his breakfast on the table.
“Bon profit!” (“Bon appétit!”).
He sat down across from the inspector and jerked his chin toward the newspaper.
“I’m lucky, after all, to be right next to the police headquarters. If half my customers weren’t cops, I’d probably be selling Spanish smokes myself. I hope it wasn’t because of this stupid business that you were up all night.”
“No, don’t worry. I’m working on a big case. With international implications. But I can’t tell you anything about it for the moment.”
Rafel understood that he was making fun of him and didn’t persist. Sebag was able to finish his breakfast in peace. The coffee was strong, the eggs fried the way he liked them. The other stories in the paper were of no interest, however.
When he was done, he took his plate and cup to the bar. Then he went back to headquarters. Ripoll had finished his shift, but he was hanging around hitting on Martine, the cute little police auxiliary who was on the reception desk during the day. Behind the randy old guard’s back, Sebag made a sign of compassion to the young woman cop, who replied with a friendly smile. Ripoll turned around to tell him that the boss had just come in and was waiting for him. Sebag stopped by his office to get the letter and its envelope out of his desk drawer. He picked them up with a pair of tweezers and climbed to the fourth floor.
Castello and Lefèvre were standing in front of the window, talking. They interrupted their conversation when Sebag arrived. The inspector put his precious items on the boss’s desk and sat down. Castello and Lefèvre examined them carefully. Then they sat down in turn.
“What do you think?” the superintendent asked Sebag. “Is it serious or not?”
The inspector had thought about that question half the night.
“It’s serious. Yes and no!”
Both Castello and Lefèvre started.
“Some parts of it are serious and others are less serious,” Sebag began to explain. “I think the sender of the letter is in fact involved in Ingrid’s disappearance. The drawing on the envelope resembles her tattoo; it’s a signature we have to take seriously. I have rejected the hypothesis that it’s a joker who is taking advantage of the situation: we haven’t yet made any statement about this case; no one knows about it. Besides, I’ve just read the local press, and so far nothing has gotten out.”
Castello approved his reasoning. Lefèvre remained non-committal.
“What doesn’t seem credible to me is the signature. ‘The Moluccan Resistance Front . . . ‘ I did a little research last night. The Moluccas now belong to Indonesia, and used to be a Dutch colony. The majority of the population is Muslim, but in the 1960s there was a South Moluccan independence movement that recruited members among the island’s Christian minority. This movement organized terrorist actions on Dutch soil, but seems to have completely disappeared today.”
“Islamist terrorist movements are active everywhere in the world,” Lefèvre interjected. “Why should they be set aside from the outset?”
“I think we aren’t understanding each other: I don’t need to set aside what doesn’t exist. As I was saying a moment ago, the only terrorist movements that the Moluccas have experienced were more connected with the Christian community. So far as I know, there has been no Islamist movement in that region.”
Sebag had felt Lefèvre stiffening during his long-winded speech.
“Al-Qaeda has branches throughout the Muslim world,” the Parisian superintendent retorted. “You may not be aware of all of them.”
“Probably not,” conceded. “But re-read the text of the demand. I think it goes in the direction of what I’m suggesting. We are being asked for money, period. Usually the demands made by Islamist movements are drowned in important religious and geo-political considerations. And although some cases of kidnapping have been settled by paying ransoms, for the most part that was done on the quiet.”
Lefèvre could not repress a sardonic smile.
“Do you have special training regarding matters of terrorism or did you become an expert on geo-politics by surfing the Net?”
Sebag was getting annoyed, but he refus
ed to rush into the stupid and vain battle between the provincial cop and his Parisian colleague.
“Let’s say that there is in fact a Moluccan Resistance Front, and that for their own reasons its activists want to attack Dutch interests; why would they kidnap a young female student, and why here, in Perpignan, in this remote corner of the country?”
He’d emphasized the last words.
“Anyway, and here I’m sure that you’ll agree with me, if this international terrorist movement exists and is capable of carrying out an operation like a kidnapping so far from its bases and networks, it’s hard to understand why it would send a letter demanding ransom from me, a little hick cop in the provinces.”
Castello raised an eyebrow; he didn’t like the terms his inspector was using. Lefèvre slowly nodded and then smiled ironically:
“I find particularly interesting the last question you raised, and I’d like to know your hypotheses about it. Why you? What do you have to do with this case?”
The question was direct. Castello reframed it in an attempt to attenuate its harshness.
“Do you have an idea, Gilles? The answer could probably guide us.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. I thought about that too at length, and I have no explanation.”
“In the course of your career, you’ve never been at odds with extremist movements of any kind?” Lefèvre asked. “Or . . . with megalomaniac and mischievous criminals?”
“Not so far as I recall.”
“How long have you been in Perpignan?”
“Seven years.”
“And before that, where were you?”
“In Chartres. The capital of the department of Eure-et-Loir.”
“I know that, thanks. For how long?”
“Is this an official interrogation?”
Summertime All the Cats Are Bored Page 14
