“Nobody moves, and nobody gets hurt,” Tanguy tells the three secretaries sitting at their desks, while Caceres, without saying a word, pulls out the lines of the telephone switchboard. Babelo, Bizerte, and Sigma go down a long hallway. They have prepared their mission well, and they know where they’re going. They stop in front of a door behind which a meeting of the inspectors of the social services and education sector is being held. They throw open the door.
“Stand up, hands in the air, against the wall,” the leader of the commando orders in a firm but cordial voice.
There are about twenty inspectors. They obey. Sigma makes sure none of them is carrying a weapon. Babelo looks at them one by one and then, smiling, says:
“Don’t be afraid: we aren’t going to hurt you. We just want to make a recording.”
The inspectors think that they are simply going to be forced to take part in a clandestine radio broadcast as part of one of the many takeovers made by the OAS. As planned, the atmosphere immediately becomes more relaxed. Babelo brushes a bit of dust off his jacket before taking a sheet of paper out of his inside pocket. He begins to read a list of names:
“Mouloud Feraoun. Max Marchand. Marcel Basset . . . ”
Seven names in all, six of them are present. Only one is not there.
“We’re waiting for him,” one of the inspectors says, “He’s late.”
“No problem,” Babelo says. “You’re going to follow me, please.”
One of the six men raises his hand as if he were in school.
“Can I take my glasses?”
“Of course,” Babelo says courteously.
The inspector, an Arab about fifty years old, grabs a pair of glasses lying on the conference table. He puts them in the vest pocket of his jacket. Then the six men follow the commando out into the courtyard.
Antoine Hernandez has set up two machine guns on their stands at opposite ends of the courtyard. Perfect for a crossfire. When the inspectors understand what awaits them, it’s too late. They can no longer escape. Babelo, Sigma, and Bizerte drive their prisoners forward. Tanguy and Caceres have joined them. They take their places behind the machine guns.
Babelo orders the inspectors to stand with their backs against the wall. The six doomed men obey.
And the firing begins. It is long and intense. The furious staccato of the machine guns covers the cries and pleas of the inspectors.
Tanguy and Caceres deliberately aim low. They hit the legs first, and when the bodies collapse, they strike the abdomens, then the hearts. Mouloud Feraoun is the last to fall. The Algeria that has not yet been born in Évian has just lost one of its greatest writers.
When the firing finally stops, Babelo holds out his hand to Sigma. The young man hands him his pistol. The leader of the commando approaches the bodies. Calmly, he gives each of the victims a superfluous coup de grâce. Then he gives the smoking gun back to Sigma.
The police, arriving long after the commando has calmly departed, pick up more than a hundred 9 mm cartridges in the courtyard of the Château-Royal, about twenty bullets per man killed. As they roughly haul off the body of the Arab inspector they hear a faint cracking coming from a pocket in his jacket. The policemen have just broken a pair of glasses that has somehow miraculously survived the gunfire.
CHAPTER 27
Two hundred and fifty Pieds-Noirs were loudly expressing their anger and their concern on the Place de la Victoire in Perpignan. The brick walls of the Castillet, the ancient medieval gate to the city, resounded with their slogans, giving body and magnitude to their eternal demands:
“Justice for the repatriates!”
“No to the distortion of History!”
“Compensation!”
“Have pity on our cemeteries, our tombs, and our monuments!”
Happy and proud to feel their strength, the former French of Algeria seemed ready to shout their lungs out until they died.
Standing at a certain distance, Sebag observed the scene from a small stone bridge that looked down on the River Basse. From that vantage point, he saw nothing but white hair or bald heads floating and shining under improvised banners. He thought again of what Albouker had said during the couscous dinner: “In ten to twenty years we’ll all be dead and that will be the end of our community.”
Sitting at a table on the terrace of a café, a few young adults were watching the demonstration with unconcealed curiosity. In the shade of a bus shelter, several North African boys were looking on scornfully. Sebag saw an inspector from the RG discreetly approaching to keep an eye on them. A single spark would suffice to reignite the ancestral hatred.
Since that morning, Sebag had been constantly thinking about the meeting that was to take place at the prefecture in the late afternoon. He had been regularly calling his teams, but no progress seemed to have been made in the course of the day. Julie and Joan had contacted all the car rental agencies in Narbonne, Béziers, and Carcasonne. Without result. They were continuing to follow the rail lines, one toward Toulouse, the other toward Montpellier. However, their energy and conviction were diminishing as they moved farther and farther away from Catalonia.
Molina’s talk with Charles Mercader had not been successful, either. The witness was proving to be unhelpful. Jacques had shown him a dozen photos of elderly men, and after hesitating for a long time he’d finally pulled the portrait of Maurice Garcin out of the pile. But the hope had been short-lived. “It’s possible,” “I can’t exclude the possibility,” “This is the one that comes closest,” he’d said, before concluding with a disappointing: “I don’t know anymore.” Then Molina had tried to have him work up an Identikit image, but his memories were too fragile and allowed him at most to come up with a square face with a short, powerful nose and brown eyebrows, despite the white hair. Police rigor alone would have prevented them from calling this vague sketch an Identikit portrait. But that was nonetheless how Sebag was preparing to present it to the prefect.
The setting sun was lighting only the top of the Castillet, its crenellated terrace, its little tower, and its Catalan flag. There were now almost three hundred Pieds-Noirs there, and they were beginning to organize themselves. They put the largest of the banners at their head. On a white cloth attached to two broom handles, the words “Honneur et Justice” were written in red and black paint. Prepared with enthusiasm and haste, the second “n” in “honneur” had been crossed out. Behind the banner rose a dozen posters, some of them carrying the demonstration’s main slogans, others proudly displaying the ancient coats of arms of the cities of French Algeria.
The demonstrators started to move down Boulevard Clémenceau. It had been agreed that the procession would make a small loop around the Place de Catalogne and then return to the prefecture. It was at that point that a delegation would be received by the prefect.
Sebag recognized Jean-Pierre Mercier at the head of the procession, flanked by René from Oran and Roger from Algiers, the sparring partners from the couscous dinner. All three of them had somber faces and a grave manner. They gave the lieutenant only a solemn nod; the mood was no longer one of feasts, polite remarks, and culinary disputes. The cortège moved with slow and heavy steps in front of the amused smiles of curious onlookers. More accustomed to demonstrations by government workers and farmers, the people of Perpignan watched the procession pass with derisive indifference, as if it were a quaint, old-fashioned event.
For the tenth time that day, Sebag tried to reach Jean Pagès, both at headquarters and on his cell phone. In vain. He was tempted to call Elsa Moulin, but he knew she was off duty, and he didn’t want to bother her.
The demonstration turned in front of the Dames de France. This tall, prestigious, modern building, constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century on the site of former ramparts, had been the home of prosperous stores and employed as many as three hundred people before it had to close its doors in the 1
980s. The entrances had remained blocked for more than ten years. Then the building was bought by the city and renovated with private funds. Since 2003, a magnificent glass dome lighting the interior had sheltered many fashionable stores, including a large FNAC.
After they passed the Place de Catalogne, the demonstrators relaxed a little. Slogans ran out of steam and were replaced by friendly conversations and even a few bursts of laughter here and there. The pleasure the repatriates took in being together, in feeling their numbers and strength, made them forget for a few moments the reasons for their anger.
The relaxed mood changed abruptly as they approached the prefecture. Then the demonstrators remembered their demands and started chanting them again in loud voices. A slight cold wind was blowing as night began to fall on the Quai Sadi Carnot. A car with its headlights on stopped near the crowd. A demonstrator left the group to open the trunk. He took out old saucepans and big spoons, which he began distributing. An infernal metallic concert immediately broke out in front of the austere prefecture building. Like Algiers in the old days, Perpignan began to resound with anger.
Sebag didn’t hear his cell phone but he felt it vibrate in his pocket. Julie Sadet’s name appeared on the screen. The racket made by the saucepans drowned out her voice and prevented Sebag from understanding what she was telling him. He was able to pick out just one word. A word full of hope and promise. A key word that was waited for in every police investigation.
“We’ve got something new,” Julie repeated after Sebag had moved some fifty meters away from the demonstration. “After Narbonne, Béziers, Sète, and Carcasonne, we finally have a lead in Montpellier. On Sunday evening, at a rental agency near the train station, a man named Manuel Esteban turned in the vehicle—a white SEAT—he had rented in Figueres the preceding evening.”
Sunday . . . the day Roman was murdered.
“Since it was Sunday,” Julie went on, “the agency in Montpellier picked up the vehicle the next morning. No one was able to see the customer and they had no details on him. So Joan contacted the agency in Figueres. He just did it, without worrying about the rules. The Catalans didn’t make a fuss about it: they told him what they knew. That Manuel Esteban was born on April 25, 1942, and that he had presented a driver’s license issued in Madrid in 1962.”
“Where was this Esteban born?”
“Also in Madrid.”
“So he’s a Spanish citizen?”
“Absolutely. Is that a problem?”
Gilles didn’t reply immediately. He felt a slight disappointment. He wasn’t expecting that. He’d imagined that the suspect would be a French citizen and that he would have an obvious connection with colonial Algeria. What if they’d been on the wrong track? Maybe Julie’s idea wasn’t so good after all. But a white SEAT . . . rented the day of the murder. It couldn’t be just a coincidence.
Julie had followed the drift of his questions
“Since this morning, we’ve contacted sixty-five car rental agencies. Only three of them had received a car rented in Spain. But neither the model nor the date corresponded.”
“Had Manuel Esteban rented other cars from the agency? A white Clio, for instance?”
“No. If he’s really our man, he must have changed agencies, as Jacques suggested this morning. Now that we have his name, it shouldn’t be too hard to find the other agency.”
“Unless he gave them false papers!”
“Even if he did . . . that won’t necessarily prevent us from following the lead. He probably doesn’t have dozens of different identities. He might have rented a Clio with the same false papers.”
Julie Sadet was a go-getter and didn’t allow a few questions to paralyze her. Sebag liked this quality in her; he often thought himself too hesitant.
“You’re right. It’s a real lead. The first one. In a few minutes, I’m going to report on the investigation at the prefecture. This comes at the right time, we’ll have no trouble getting the prefect’s help in accelerating things with Spain.”
“It also comes at the right time for you.”
“It’s good for everyone if the prefect is happy. But the most important thing is that we finally have a hope of wrapping up this case. We’ve got to find this Manuel Esteban. The ball will also be in the Spanish police’s court.”
“The Spanish police and the South Catalonia police. The Mossos d’Esquadra!”
“That’s right, you learn fast.”
“I spent the day with Joan, that’s like taking an accelerated training course,” she explained. “Speaking of Joan, he took the initiative and he’s on the phone with his pal in the Mossos. The investigation of Manuel Esteban is supposed to begin unofficially tonight on the other side of the Pyrenees.”
“That’s great. You guys are champs!”
“Thanks, boss,” Julie replied with a touch of irony.
Before putting down his phone, Sebag put it on mute. He didn’t want it to ring at the wrong time during the next few minutes. He said to himself that Jacques might ultimately not have been wrong to insist on his changing his ringtone. Sévérine’s voice crying “Papa, you’ve got an SMS” in the middle of a meeting at the prefecture would hardly encourage people to take his report seriously.
About thirty Pieds-Noirs were still on the Quai Sadi Carnot, waiting for their delegation to come out. Gilles Sebag heaved a great sigh of relief as he left the wood-paneled halls of the Prefecture of Pyrénées-Orientales. He thought he’d done pretty well.
Twenty people sitting around a big square table had listened with attention for half an hour. Among those present were the officials of the repatriates’ associations, the prefect, his cabinet director, and a few government officials whom he knew by sight only. Sebag had not sweated under his shirt like that since he took his French oral for the baccalaureate degree.
But he hadn’t wasted his time. Summing up for all these people the case that had been occupying his mind for almost two weeks had allowed him to review it for himself as well: he had the feeling that he now saw things more clearly, especially since he had been obliged to eliminate from his vocabulary and his thinking the question marks, “maybes,” and “probablys” that always encumbered his arguments.
Thus, as former OAS combatants, Bernard Martinez and André Roman had been murdered for crimes committed fifty years earlier, during the tumultuous last months of French Algeria. A victim or someone close to a victim was now seeking vengeance, though the reason for its belatedness remained unknown. The murderer, a man at least seventy years old, had achieved two of his three objectives. The third and last target had not yet been identified, but it was already known that he did not reside in France. Thus there was no longer any reason to fear another murder in Perpignan. Sebag had then silently congratulated himself on having mentioned this point rather early in his presentation. A wave of relief had run through the room and on both sides of the table people’s jaws unclenched.
The murderer had established his home base in Spain and had made at least two trips to France. To get around, he’d rented a vehicle in Spain. In the case of Roman’s murder, he had rented a car from an agency in Figueres, under the name Manuel Esteban, and he had returned it in Montpellier. From there, he’d taken the train to cross over to the other side of the Pyrenees. Sebag had discussed this new lead at considerable length. “The most promising one,” he had said, not mentioning that it was also the only real one. After the meeting was over, the prefect had promised to exert all his influence on the Spanish authorities to get them to issue a wanted notice for Manuel Esteban.
Sebag had also mentioned Maurice Garcin’s name. He no longer had much faith in that lead, but its existence lent substance to their investigation. He had implied that it was not necessarily incompatible with the Esteban lead, because one could very well imagine that the former barbouze was acting under a false Spanish identity.
In the course of committ
ing his first crime, the murder of Martinez, the killer had—perhaps in the grip of panic—caused a fatal accident in the Moulin-à-Vent quarter. Sebag had not concealed all his reservations regarding this hypothesis, which still had to be verified. To do so, it would suffice to track down the place where this Manuel Esteban rented a white Clio.
The atmosphere in the room at the prefecture had grown tense again when he came to the destruction of the OAS monument and the attack on Guy Albouker.
“At the present stage of the investigation, nothing allows us to connect these deplorable events with the double murder.” As he uttered those words he’d felt a kind of pinch in his stomach: he would have liked to have the DNA analyses of the hairs before going that far out on a limb.
“If your suspect is not responsible for these other acts, then who is?” Jean-Pierre Mercier had asked, addressing himself to the prefect rather than to Sebag. And the representative of the state had just handed the question over to the lieutenant.
Sebag had recognized that the investigation of those events was not making progress, that there had been no witness to the vandalism in the Haut-Vernet cemetery, and that as for the attack on Albouker, the latter’s statements had not yet made it possible to identify the perpetrators. He declared with a rather forced assurance that in his opinion these acts were committed by individuals whose goal was to create concern in the Pied-Noir community and discord in the city. He had then slipped in an appeal for calm. The prefect had appreciated that and had seized the opportunity to take the floor to expand on that subject.
As he crossed over the Basse near the central post office, he heaved another sigh of relief. He so rarely felt satisfied with himself!
He remembered that his cell phone was still on mute. Toward the end of the meeting he’d noticed a vibration. The screen confirmed it: there was a message.
The call came from Martine, the young woman cop on the reception desk at headquarters. She asked if he could come by headquarters before going home. A lady was waiting for him. Although he was no more than five minutes’ walk away, he called Martine back.
Autumn, All the Cats Return Page 25
