by John Brooke
Turning back to the unfriendly neighbour. ‘Your name, madame?’
‘Fortuno.’ Given as gracefully as if she were handing over her firstborn child.
If you were her firstborn child, you would probably bless the day.
Aliette made a small show of noting Madame Fortuno’s name, then left, vexed — with herself, mainly. Stephanie McLeod had run. She had deceived her. Sort of. Then she had scared her — most certainly. Then she’d let her walk away.
And the girl had run...
Shoddy police work, Inspector. Really low-grade.
· 6 ·
SEE YOU LATER, ULRIKE MEINHOF
Stephanie McLeod drove out of the valley and on toward the sea. Angry panic gradually gave way to a brooding sulk. Another stupid move… Her anger made her stupid. Everything at ENA was geared to refining rationality. A semester back at home learning the reality of politics had left rationality saturated with angry emotion. She blamed her mother. Which was stupid too.
She smacked the radio in the dashboard of the rattling old Renault but all she got was static. ‘Why, why, why am I so dumb?’ There was no answer forthcoming. Only empty shock. This horrible sense of being a catalyst to tragedy.
To: Just Friends. I am so tired of bullshit. What sort of Action do you advise?
Send… It was the sort of thing one forgot about within the hour. The message, not the anger.
The message she sent into the electronic ether was an emotional reaction to spineless Joël Guatto, himself a reaction to greedy, slimy Roland Bousquet. Joël refused to confront Roland. Joël was a gormless man, trapped in sentimental codswallop, as Stephanie’s Scots papa used to say. At ENA they offered her the world, but the world was run by a system and six months in the office of Roland Bousquet made it plain the system’s gears were greased with the crudest human excrement. Such was the difference between theory and truth. But Joël Guatto’s gutless heart was worse. She had believed he might actually do something good. Her reaction to his capitulation was really an irrational response to a spiritual dare: The ENA girl felt her mother looking at her from beyond the grave, telling her, Now you know what it is, chère, what are you going to do? Left, right, traditional, transnational… Stephanie McLeod went looking for a rationale on the far side of the system’s obsolete lines. Her anger brought her to the virtual door of a compound somewhere in the Tarn. It was well-hidden, but she was good at bringing these things out of the fog of seemingly innocent code. Two weeks later, mid-April, there was a reply from Just Friends:
We will send a friend. Receive him kindly. Call him Prince.
A joke?
He’d showed up three weeks before the vote, sitting there at Avi’s bar in his leathers, head shaved and shining, studs in his ears, a bobby pin hanging from his eyelid, perusing the menu, ordering soup and a plate of cheese. She chatted — as naïve and ingenuous as chatting with a sly cop. By the time he’d finished his coffee and a serving of Avi’s flan, the punky man had sussed her sufficiently enough to casually let her know he had come down from the Tarn to find a friend.
She was thrilled. He looked at pathetic Joël with eyes she immediately understood.
Prince began hitching up from wherever he was staying — near the city, he never said exactly where and she knew enough not to ask too quickly. They invented a mutual friend in Scotland, the land of her late pa. Armed with that, Prince calmly dodged through Avi’s questions. He knew all about her — ENA, Roland, Joël, and everything about her parents. From one little message, they knew who she was. That impressed her. She thought it would please her mother, if not her eternally skeptical dad. Prince could talk to the issues, framing it in terms Stephanie could feel in her gut. She had fallen into another sort of love. Dumb, dumb girl… What’s the point of trying to please a ghost? Stephanie McLeod longed to be away from here, back in Paris, in school with people just like her. In her very rational mind, she knew it was probably too late.
·
The five Just Friends were lolling around the cheaply furnished salon when she arrived at the rental condo at the beach. Prince was reading by the window, bullet-clean skull framed by the open sea. The others were sipping tea at the cluttered table. Nasty Liz, another punkified Brit. Chris, the woolly Canadian. Jules and Suzi, two French from the base farm somewhere in the Tarn. The conversation level dipped noticeably when the new recruit walked in. Sleeping with Prince did not mean she was accepted. Extending acceptance was the only power they had. Prince looked up from his book — a Scots detective with a drinking problem reminded him of home. Stephanie signalled that they needed to talk and headed for the bedroom. Only when he’d finished his chapter did he join her. Prince was their leader. He would not be rushed.
Stephanie did her best to keep it together as she related the cop’s visit, but ended up weeping on his shoulder. He took her in his arms. ‘Not your most brilliant move, luv. The police are not our friends. But if they’re right in front of you, you have to pretend they are. See? Besides, what’s to be panicked about? On the contrary — opens a big window. An opportunity, like.’
Advising her to wash her face, Prince returned to the sunny salon.
He was at the table, expanding on the notion of leveraging the politician’s murder, when Stephanie rejoined them. Joël Guatto’s violent death was the perfect cover. Let’s move now. The logic of that made sense, yes? As usual, no one disagreed with Prince. They discussed the target, tactics and logistics in low, desultory musings, French to English, English to French.
Stephanie, isolated in probationary limbo, sat on the sofa and held her peace. She only dared complain when they were alone, preferably at Vieussan, in the safety of her bed. How long would this go on, being ignored so coldly when not being stared at like some rock from outer space?
Prince kept telling her to be patient. Trust was the door and it took a while.
Right. And trust is a two-way street.
Stephanie stared out the window at the beach and the crowds enjoying its simple warmth, groping through her muddled instincts, needing clarity on exactly where she was. Joël was a gormless man, but a bullet was surely out of proportion. Prince’s heartless disregard was chilling.
An ultralight plane went buzzing across the cloudless blue a hundred metres above the crowd, trailing a banner telling everyone not to miss the bullfight at Beziers that weekend. When it had passed, there was nothing but the sea. And her problem: Do something that matters, chère. With those final, belaboured words, her mother’s anger had passed into the core of herself. It was making her make mistakes. She was ashamed of her panicked response to a cop’s cheap ploy. A blonde cop with a deceptively friendly manner. It begged the essential question: Did she belong here with these revolutionary Friends if she couldn’t field a little trick like that?
‘What do you think, Steph?’
She turned, no idea what he was talking about. Prince smiled. The others watched her. It struck her again — how white they were, and how completely oblivious to the sun and the sea on the other side of a pane of glass. And the beach. Yes, a condo on the beach was a clever ruse: Five more tourists from the north. Shouldn’t they play the role just a little — get out there and walk or go for a swim? Apparently not. It was one more thing that made her wonder.
They were vague, colourless, more virtual than real. Who were they? She had been sleeping with Prince for two months now — since Joël Guatto’s disastrous election night — and still did not know his real name. She had tried to bond with Suzy and Liz, to no avail. Suzy was a French granola child in sandals, sarong, dreadlocks — could be an actual country girl or from the most bourgeois street in Paris. Stephanie sensed the latter: Suzy chatted as if trained in the social graces, but she would not give away the slightest clue. Stephanie sensed Liz, Goth white, Goth sullen, had a prior claim to Prince’s love — if love was the right word. The Just Friends manifesto banished sexual jealousy to the de
pths of bourgeois hell. Whatever, Liz was a nasty piece of work. The two other boys, Chris from Canada, and Jules — they were not interesting at all.
Stephanie heard herself ask, ‘Did you kill Joël Guatto?’
Prince was solemn, eyes locked on hers. ‘Guns are old technology, Steph.’
‘And we don’t hit people,’ added Chris. Only infrastructure. This was an a priori rule.
Stephanie challenged with the obvious. ‘He came here.’
Where else could he have been going that day?
One by one the Friends met her gaze. No comment, no comment, no comment…
Nope, no trust at all. Stephanie headed for the door. ‘Sorry, I need to think.’
Prince did not try to stop her. He waved. ‘Thinking never solved anything, Steph. Let Ulrike be your inspiration, darlin’…à plus tard.’ See you later, Ulrike Meinhof.
Ulrike was an unfair way into her angry heart. Now it was a hook in her troubled soul.
Those first chats as she’d served him beer and soup, he had dropped it in so casually and with a certain kind of smile. She looked a lot like the German revolutionary who had died for her cause. Lost in his cool flirtation, she coyly conceded that she and Ulrike had the same hair, more or less. It was just a serendipitous twist of fate.
But she had contemplated that infamous face for hours and hours as a child.
Did Prince know that too? From the moment he’d appeared he knew so much.
‘Aye, same special cloth as Ulrike,’ Prince had declared. Later, in her bed.
·
Stephanie McLeod turned west at the edge of the beach town, drove three short clicks to the turn at the campground and stopped in the public parking lot. Of course she had read and watched all the reports on Joël’s murder. She had to understand her responsibility in this tragic thing.
A gentle wind sifted through the grasses on the crest of a dune. Stephanie slipped off her shoes and walked across warm sand, down to the water. With a river at the bottom of the hill, there was never any need to go all the way to the sea. She had forgotten the simple beauty of it.
And the sea was much warmer than the river. Shoes in hand, she moved though the edges of the puddling surf, looking for signs of the murder scene. She was tempted to ask a reposing stranger if she happened to know the exact spot. She immediately chided herself, Don’t be ghoulish. Don’t be weird. And don’t stare! Stephanie McLeod realized she was being less than subtle studying the bodies stretched out along the strand. It had been a while…
Swimming at the river was an exercise in cultivating privacy. You staked out a place behind a boulder around a bend, on the far side of a dipping willow. Though no one owned the riverbank, there was an unwritten code. Here at the beach, the idea of being alone, body and mind, was something else again. No privacy at all means total privacy. A different code.
Stephanie turned her face toward Algeria and a slow parade of sails across the distance. Two military jets streaked low, leaving a sonic boom behind them in the five-o’clock sky. Another ultralight toddled by, this one crimson-winged, trailing a message cut in single letters tied together like alphabet soup advertising great food and dancing at a club in Valras.
Stephanie watched the rudimentary flying machine beating into the wind. She felt her heart lift with the surprise of revelation. She was amazed at how she loved it! Avi was always berating her for railing at the fallen world and willfully ignoring the perfect simple things right in front of her eyes. At that moment, for thirty wondrous seconds, Stephanie McLeod knew she would forget ENA, its promise of an important life among the so-called elite, the absurdity of trusting men’s supposed better instincts.
She would become an ultralight pilot, earning her daily bread towing messages through the sky above the beach. That could be the key to joy.
She turned. Two women seemed to be aware of her. You can always feel eyes.
Not bathers. Two women in their nine-to-five clothes, interlopers amongst the almost naked, like herself. They watched her, surprised. Were they enjoying her enchantment?
Stephanie’s childish smile froze. One of them was Joël’s wife…
Ex-wife. Make that widow. A widow on the beach…
It was one too many emotional jolts in a single day.
Stephanie felt her mind seize tight, her feet begin to run in sliding sand.
· 7 ·
GUILTY GIRL
Inspector Magui Barthès tried to colour in the emotional nuance a written report was bound to lack. ‘I mean she seemed utterly flabbergasted! No idea how to react, what to say. She seemed to be trying to control something inside her…down in her gut. She kept shaking her head, looking down at herself, then back at us. Then she just hurried away.’
‘Across the sand.’
‘To the gap in the dune, back to the parking lot.’
‘You assume.’
‘I wasn’t going to go racing after. Seeing Stephanie McLeod come walking out of the blue like that reduced my assignment to tears. I stayed with her.’
‘And you were there because?’
Because Sophie Guatto had requested they go to the scene of the tragedy.
‘We’d been sitting in her kitchen having tea. I was going slowly, getting her to talk about the victim, mostly by getting her to talk about their marriage. She suddenly says she wants to go to the beach. To the place. Said she knew exactly where it was. No, correct that. She was sure she knew the place because they’d gone there lots — not lately, of course, but when they were courting. And with their two boys. I wasn’t sure it was a great idea, but she insisted.’
‘With her boys?’
‘No, they were still at school… But she wouldn’t have. She’s not weird like her in-laws. She’s the opposite, if you ask me. Pretty solid. A single mum putting it back together. I’ve been there, I recognized it. So I thought, why not? It’s a ten-minute drive from Sérignan. We found a spot that had to be near the spot, and sat and continued our chat. I felt a bit silly, all dressed for work, everyone around us with their boobs flying free and all. But no one really gives a damn,’ Magui concluded. Then added, ‘Being there seemed to help brighten her up a little.’
‘And she has no particular notion as to why Joël Guatto was on the beach that day?’
Magui shrugged. ‘Not really. Out for a walk and a think before picking up his boys.’
‘A think about what?’
‘Whatever. His worries. His father. Politics. She said he’d been pretty broody in the last while whenever he showed up. Said her kids noticed it too.’
‘The marriage? Getting sentimental after his big mission failed?’
‘I dangled that. She did not respond. I sensed she was sad about his death but done with him as a husband. I sensed she was more sad for her sons, who’d lost a father.’
‘Does she have a new relationship?’
‘Didn’t mention anyone.’
‘Did Sophie Guatto have anything to say about Stephanie McLeod? I mean, before she appeared on the beach and made her cry?’
‘She said Stephanie McLeod was no big surprise.’
‘Did she know Stephanie was pushing Joël to go to war with Roland Bousquet?’
‘I gather she had pretty much backed away by that point. When I mentioned Stephanie’s link to Bousquet, she just said Bousquet knows how to play the game. And her husband didn’t.’
‘And no ideas as to who might shoot him dead?’
‘That part was unfathomable to Madame,’ reported Magui.
Aliette Nouvelle sat considering it: Magui and the widow on the beach. Stephanie McLeod appears out of the blue, panics, runs away. ‘Did she recognize you as police?’
‘I don’t think so… Why would she?’
So Aliette confessed her foolish mistake at the bistro. A less-than-forthright cop had scared Stephanie McLeod a
nd she’d run for cover. And that she was now worried about a police-phobic girl who would hide instead of report as ordered. They needed her.
Magui wasn’t worried. ‘I think deep down most Enarques are very obedient boys and girls.’
‘Maybe.’ When they aren’t scared silly. ‘We’ll see… We’ll give her till tomorrow.’
·
But why would she run? And why there, to the beach, the very spot? A sentimental visit to the scene like the victim’s estranged wife? Possible. It was more logical to suppose Stephanie McLeod had gone to the same place as Joël Guatto before he’d been taken down by a sniper’s bullet. So, what place? Stephanie McLeod’s serendipitous appearance on the beach made some things obvious and dangerously problematic. Stephanie was fearful. Was Stephanie at risk? How to use that odd coincidence to practical ends? If Aliette hoped for reasonable (read: helpful) instruction on her case, she had to prepare certain notions for her judge.
An hour later the inspector was puzzling out her own report, mulling possible directions, when Mathilde Lahi appeared at her office door and presented Stephanie McLeod — looking sleep-deprived, contrite and nervous. But trusting. Needing to trust. A veteran cop could see it instantly. ‘Bonjour. Come in. Merci, Mathilde.’
Left alone, Stephanie took a breath and sputtered, ‘I apologize. I…I panicked when I realized who you were. It’s not like me. It’s really not.’
‘I trust things are better with your boyfriend.’
Stephanie blushed. Then told her, grave and frank, ‘As of this morning he is ancient history.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Aliette offered a smile. ‘I confess I’m one boyfriend behind here.’
