Affairs of State

by Dominique Manotti

  There’s a dim light controlled by a timer switch and one of the lock-ups is open, two rows further back. Katryn drives out a red Mini, stops the car and gets out to close the door behind her. Fernandez moves closer. She might recognise me. He places his hand on her arm. Katryn over-reacts violently. She screams and punches him in the face with all her strength, hitting out wildly. Fernandez, caught unawares, protects himself as best he can.

  ‘Stop … I want to talk to you …’ Crushing her arm: ‘Talk to you, do you hear, shit …’

  She’s not listening, but carries on lashing out blindly, screaming. He pushes her into the lock-up, a hand over her mouth.

  ‘Shut the fuck up.’

  She bites him and draws blood. He releases her and she makes a dive for the open door of the car. A whore … That’s why she’s making trouble … He takes out his revolver with his right hand, to keep her quiet, grabs her again with his left hand and yanks her away from the car which she’s clinging on to. She’s hurt her hands. He pins her to the wall again, waves the revolver in front of her face, yelling:

  ‘Calm down!’

  Feeling the gun barrel at her throat, her whole body convulses, she shoots both her legs out at waist level, he doubles over and a shot is fired. Killed outright, Katryn slides along the wall.

  The shot resonates for a long time. The sound mingles with the smell of gunpowder and burning petrol. Winded, Fernandez stares aghast, his heart thumping wildly.

  The light timer cuts out and the only sound is the Mini’s engine ticking over. He leans against the wall. This killing means curtains for me. Unacceptable. A left-wing cop, the security branch, all the fun and games, my meeting with Bornand, the Élysée, a ten-year battle. He catches his breath. I’m not giving all that up. I need a few hours. Got to get going.

  He switches the light back on, gets behind the wheel of the car and drives it back into the lock-up. He closes the door. It’s not the ideal shelter, there’s another car, but even so it’s better than leaving it wide open. The body lies crumpled on the ground right there in front of him. There’s a streak of blood down the wall and a dark red pool is gradually spreading over the floor. This is a total fuck-up. I can’t leave her here, someone might find her any minute and identify her straight away, and I’m in the front line. I’ll play for time and try and pin it on Chardon.

  He opens the car door and dumps the body on the passenger seat, turning it to one side as if the girl were asleep. He covers her with her long raincoat, rummages in her bag and finds the remote control for the garage. He takes a deep breath and drives the Mini out of the garage. Blood on his clothes and in the car. It’s starting to snow. That’s probably good news, there’ll be fewer nosey people about, but it’s not possible to drive too far, too risky in this weather.

  Nearby in the 19th arrondissement there’s a place that’s deserted at this hour and in this weather – the La Villette automated parking lot. He heads in that direction, driving cautiously. He reaches the esplanade with its asphalt avenues divided by pavements fringed with bare trees. The street lamps are out. The snow’s falling thick and fast and settling on the tarmac and on the branches of the trees. A glow comes from the ring road above the parking lot, and there are a few lights shining on the vast La Villette construction site a hundred metres away. Fernandez and his corpse are surrounded by a fuzzy black void. He pulls up alongside the row of shrubs and pines bordering the parking lot exit ramp, walks around the car, opens the passenger door, heaves the body onto the ground, nudges it under the bushes with his foot and covers it with the cream-coloured raincoat. Immediately the snow begins to obliterate the corpse. He glances around him, still nobody. In ten minutes, everything will be covered with snow. He gets back into the car, pays at the machine, and turns onto avenue Jean-Jaurès. He pauses to adjust the seat and the driving mirror, then stops by a telephone booth, rings directory inquiries for Chardon’s number and calls him. Oh God of all cops, please let him be home. He’s home.

  ‘I’m a friend of Katryn’s. She wants you to come and take some photos.’

  ‘Don’t say anything over the phone.’

  ‘I’ll come and pick you up outside your place in fifteen minutes. I’ve got Katryn’s car.’

  ‘OK.’

  He buys a roll of kitchen paper, cleans up the most visible bloodstains in the car and puts Katryn’s handbag in the boot. He places his revolver on the back seat concealed under his leather jacket and sets off.

  Chardon lives in a house in a little dead-end street at the top of a hill. The snow makes driving really difficult. No cars, no pedestrians, everyone shut up indoors. Only some kids ducking behind parked cars are having a huge snowball fight, shrieking and yelling. Chardon is waiting for him by his front door, sheltering under the porch. He slithers his way over to the car and gets in beside Fernandez, more intrigued than suspicious.

  ‘Katryn is in Aubervilliers where we’d planned to meet up. Completely by chance, she spotted the CEO of a major company with some young – very young – local kids, that’s all she told me. She stayed there and sent me to fetch you.’ A long silence.

  ‘Have you got your camera?’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Silence. Unease. Be quick.

  ‘You’ll see, we won’t be long.’

  The road surface is slippery. They weave acrobatically in and out of the cars moving at a crawl. As long as Chardon keeps his eyes on the road, as long as he’s afraid, he won’t inspect either the car’s interior or my trousers too closely. The window’s open, letting in icy draughts to dispel the smell of blood.

  Porte d’Aubervilliers. Fernandez takes the road running alongside the Saint-Denis canal, pressing harder and harder on the accelerator. He crosses the canal via the Pont du Landy, then, without slowing down, turns sharply onto a barely tarmacked path. Chardon turns to him with a questioning look. Fernandez, driving in the ruts with his left hand on the wheel, grabs his revolver from under his jacket on the back seat with his right hand, raises the gun to Chardon’s head and fires. The body slumps forward onto the dashboard and the passenger window shatters. Without stopping, still using his right hand, Fernandez thrusts the body down between the dashboard and the passenger seat then covers it with his jacket. It’s only a rough sort of camouflage, but we’re not going far, and the people around here tend to keep themselves to themselves. He drives over a muddy waste ground bordering the canal and lands back on tarmac, zigzags through some sordid side streets, drives under the motorway and the railway line and into a breaker’s yard. He stops the Mini fifty metres from a Portakabin and honks the horn. A skinny young man in blue overalls stands in the doorway waiting for him. They shake hands.

  ‘A car for the crusher. And no looking inside.’

  ‘Have you informed the boss?’

  ‘Didn’t have time. It’s an emergency.’

  The young man points to the telephone, inside the cabin.

  ‘You have to. I don’t take the decisions here.’

  Fernandez calls. The boss is there. The young man turns on the loudspeaker.

  ‘I need to dispose of a car, and it’s urgent.’

  ‘Full?’

  ‘Partly, yes.’

  ‘You know it’ll cost you?’

  ‘I’ve always paid, and always returned the favour.’

  ‘OK.’

  The young man heads over to the crusher, at the far end of the yard. Fernandez goes back to the Mini, removes Chardon’s keys from his pockets and Katryn’s key and diary from her handbag. Reluctantly he leaves his own soft leather jacket lined with sealskin on the front seat, but he can’t afford to make any mistakes, then drives the car over to the crusher. He gets out and watches it being crunched. When a small car is flattened, it becomes like a pancake, a giant pancake, dripping with petrol, oil and blood, thrown into a tipper truck with other crushed vehicles. Fernandez feels relieved of a burden. I’ve never heard of any corpse coming back from here.

  Time: five thirty. It’s pitch d
ark. The yard’s about to close. And my day’s not over. Metro, rush hour, keep a low profile. Back home, he removes his clothes and stuffs them into a plastic bag. Throw everything away. He has a quick shower and dresses in similar style clothes – jeans and a leather jacket. Then he jumps into his car and races over to Chardon’s place.

  He parks at the bottom of the hill and walks up. It’s still snowing but the kids have all gone home. He walks slowly, carrying out a recce. Railings and a half-open iron gate. He enters a small garden overgrown with ivy and shrubs covered with a blanket of snow which shield him from prying eyes. A two-storey brick house. The curtains haven’t been drawn and no lights are on: the place looks empty. The key turns easily in the lock. But what if there’s an alarm … the door opens, not a sound. He slips inside, closes the door behind him and begins to explore. The rooms are bathed in a faint orange glow from the street lights, striped by the curtain of steadily falling snow. Take care to stay away from the windows.

  On the ground floor there’s a junk room, a garage with a freezer, washing machine and workbench, and a locked door. It takes him a few moments to find the right key. He switches on the light to discover a windowless room that turns out to be a well-equipped photographer’s darkroom. Everything is neat and tidy. Two photos are hanging from a line, drying, presumably taken by Chardon just before he went off for a drive. Two porn scenes, with people Fernandez recognises. He pockets them. They’ll enjoy these at the Élysée. He switches off the light and goes upstairs.

  The entire floor is taken up by one big, sparsely decorated room with windows on two sides, a Moroccan wool rug on the floor, and designer furniture: sofas, armchairs, a solid wood table – opulent comfort. Against one of the walls is a half-empty wall unit with a television, video recorder, hi-fi, records and cassettes. There’s a state-of-the-art open-plan kitchen. A coffee pot on the hob, a dirty cup in the sink. Otherwise, the place is immaculately tidy. Nothing for me here, don’t waste time.

  On the second floor is a bedroom, office and bathroom. Try the office first, makes sense. An antique writing desk standing against one wall has been left open. Two piles of coloured folders. Fernandez flicks through the files quickly. The left-hand pile is all income tax, payslips, social security. Move on. The right-hand pile contains a few handwritten sheets, names, addresses, dates, memos probably, hardly of any interest. Chardon’s archives must be stored somewhere else, at his bank perhaps, which would explain why there’s so little protection. In the middle of the pile, there’s a thicker folder. The first sheet of paper is a photocopy of the flight plan for a Boeing 747, Brussels-Zavantem-Valetta-Tehran, Thursday, 28 November 1985. Bingo. Easy. For a blackmailer, this guy’s got no sense of security. Fernandez grabs the whole thing, fast. He places Katryn’s diary and keys in one of the desk drawers, having wiped them carefully, aware that it’s not very convincing. But he’s improvising as he goes along, and he can’t hang around for ever. Back in the hall, he waits a few moments, still not a sound in the street – the compelling silence of a snow-covered city. He leaves the house, slamming the door behind him, and walks off, turning up his jacket collar.

  Bornand’s afternoon continues to be busy. At some point, Customs may decide to poke their noses into the business about the plane. So it’s vital to talk to the Finance Minister. But relations between the two men are complicated, fraught with stumbling blocks. He must prepare the ground. Timsit is the man of the moment. A graduate from the elite École Nationale d’Administration from which civil servants are drawn, his culture is very different from Bornand’s and he has a great deal of influence on the government. They’d met several times on hunts organised by the Parillaud bank and talked at length about collectors’ guns, and Bornand had offered him some magnificent specimens from Lebanon.

  ‘I wanted to make a point of informing you before talking to the Minister about it. An arms deal with Iran. Nothing to do with big bucks, it’s to do with secret negotiations over the release of the hostages. I’ve just come out of the President’s office. He wants this business to be hushed up at all costs.’

  Message received.

  So at last to Flandin, the boss of the SEA, the applied electronics company that covered the deal. The tone is not the same as it was last night. Bornand finds him jittery, anxious to protect his company at all costs. There’s the rub, most likely.

  ‘I warn you, no way will I carry the can. Do what you need to do to stifle this thing, otherwise I’ll spill the beans on all the lousy payoffs from the Iran deals, yours for starters. And I’m not picking up the tab on my own.’

  Bornand reclines in his armchair and stretches out his legs. If things get more complicated, this guy will soon become a problem. The minute I chose to work with a novice on this type of deal, I was taking a risk and I knew it. I’ll give Beauchamp a call and tell him it’s time to shut him up. After all, that’s what I brought him into the SEA security service for. A half smile. To win you have to be one step ahead of the game.

  Fernandez is back. Bornand pours two whiskies and leafs through the dossier he’s given him. The entire operation is set out. Well, not quite. The particulars of last February’s decision by the armaments division of the Defence Ministry: the air force’s Matra Magic 550 missiles are to be replaced by a more efficient model. In May, there’s the contract between the armaments division and a company specialising in electronic equipment, the SEA, which purchases the missiles for the sum of five million francs and pledges to disable them and recycle the onboard equipment in the civil aviation sector. The missiles are delivered to the SEA’s hangars in September. In October, the SEA sells electronic equipment to SAPA, a financial company registered in the Bahamas, for the sum of 30 million francs. The same day, SAPA sells the same equipment on to SICI, a Malta-based company, for the sum of 40 million francs. The equipment is loaded at Brussels International (Zavantem) Airport, destined for SICI, in Malta. The flight plan of the Boeing 747 carrying the equipment clearly shows that the plane never landed in Malta but diverted to Tehran. A separate sheet also shows that two weeks ago, Camoc, a Lebanese company specialising in recycling and adapting French, American and Israeli weapons, opened a branch in Tehran. In short, the entire chain is there, all ready to be spoon-fed to the press, it’ll be all too easy for them to check it out.

  Bornand looks up at Fernandez:

  ‘Terrific work, young man. I daren’t ask you how you got hold of this …’

  He smiles.

  ‘Chardon and Katryn left the restaurant together, quite late, around three, after a game of snooker, and from what I was able to overhear, they were off to a meeting together with someone in Paris. It’s perfectly simple, I took advantage to go and check out Chardon’s place. I took the dossier, because I thought it might make him stop and think twice.’

  Bornand raises his glass to him and nods. Fernandez continues:

  ‘Among Chardon’s files, I also found some photos. Jean-Pierre Tardivel, an influential journalist at Combat Présent, the far-right weekly, having a bit of fun with two exceedingly young boys …’

  He nudges the photo towards Bornand who leans forward attentively:

  ‘That’s extremely interesting. I’ll keep it. I’m sure it’ll come in useful.’

  ‘… and the fabulous Delia Paxton being fucked by two drag queens, in a setting that looks like a porn shoot.’

  Bornand takes the photo and slides it into an envelope.

  ‘For the President. He’s a fan of Delia Paxton, he goes to see all her films incognito, on the biggest screens possible. At least now he’ll know what to talk about when he meets her at a dinner party. Or in his speech when he awards her the Legion of Honour.’

  After Fernandez has left, Bornand pours himself another whisky. Silence in the night. Just a disk of coloured light on the desktop. He needs time to mull things over.

  Whoever built up this dossier has sources at every level of the operation, within the ministerial department, at the SEA, but also inside Camoc in Beirut,
whose involvement is largely unknown back here. The only two people in Paris who are aware of its involvement are the boss of the SEA and myself. It would probably be easier to track them in Beirut than here. Beirut … Moricet.

  Flashback: Moricet tall, built like a fighter, a seducer’s smile on the face of a pirate, and a quirky taste in clothes with a penchant for elegant linen suits. Both high on cocaine in a hazily remembered Beirut brothel with fluid outlines, a luxury apartment gutted by the war, and a stupid competition: which of them could fuck the most girls in two hours? And Moricet had won with nine to his six. Age had certainly been against Bornand, but in any case, he put up a respectable performance.

  Another flashback: Moricet and himself, totally hammered, in Beirut, in an unknown car, hemmed in by two groups of armed men. Sobering up in a flash, Moricet had pushed him to the floor of the car, then speeding forward, shooting with a gun that had appeared from nowhere, bullets ricocheting off the bodywork, had got them out of there. Then Moricet drove him back to the Christian quarter. The memory of being scared shitless, the kind of fear that makes you feel you’re really living, and a friend he knew he could rely on.

  ‘Attempted kidnapping plus a demand for ransom,’ Moricet had commented dryly. ‘The most profitable industry in this country since the war started.’

  ‘More profitable than the bank, I fear.’

  And he had confided some of his concerns over the International Bank of Lebanon, the IBL, which was well established in the Christian community but since the start of the war had been losing its customers among the other Lebanese religious communities, the Syrians, and the rest of the Middle East.

  ‘Negotiate with the Syrians.’

  ‘We’d like to, but it’s not easy. They’re more than a little wary of us.’