Walls of a Mind

by John Brooke

She disagreed. ‘No. A Frenchman who happens to be Jewish.’

  He looked away, tired of it, something that could never be explained to the likes of her.

  She sipped cold beer. ‘Are you saying you’re a deserter?’

  ‘I’m saying I left. I stayed far beyond the obligatory time. I believed in it, until… Don’t worry, they got their money’s worth. And they can come get me if they want. But they don’t want to hear from me as much as I don’t want to hear from them.’

  Aliette let it sit. Whether he was a deserter or just another obsessive malcontent, it was none of her affair. Nor did it matter if Stephanie McLeod had revolution in her blood — she was still a key element in a murder case. The inspector chewed her sandwich. Avi Roig pointed to the side of her mouth. She dabbed mustard. Merci. Weird man. So gloomy, his own issues roiling inside his trim gut. Yet very homey… ‘No girlfriend, Avi?’

  No.

  ‘Just Stephanie.’

  ‘She is my waitress, Inspector. That’s it.’ He stared past her. ‘I had a girlfriend once. She was a cop, actually — a uniform, as you say. Settlers were angry about another rule meant to keep them to reasonable limits. She was sent out with a team to keep order. They lost control of it, she was beaten to a pulp by a swarm of idealistic adolescents who know all about God but nothing about life. Her face, which I loved, was destroyed. She had a breakdown. All she wants to do is hide. Went back to Los Angeles.’

  ‘And you came here. Life starts over.’

  ‘It has to.’

  Well, she could identify with that.

  Another impasse. Another twinge of impatience. Where was Stephanie?

  The inspector’s phone began to emit its tone. ‘Excuse me… Yes?’

  It was Mathilde relaying a message. Call your judge. Immediately. Big emergency relating to your case. She moved to the other side of the room and did.

  Sergio Regarri was at the Poussan-le-Bas rond-point, by the new prison. There was frenetic noise in the background, horns blaring, much shouting. She waited till he removed himself to a quieter spot. The news was stunning. She cut the call. ‘Thank you, Avi, I have to run.’

  ‘She is not a criminal!’ Roig called as she went hustling out.

  · 17 ·

  CEBENNA’S TRIBE

  When Stephanie McLeod saw the silver-blue cabriolet parked at Avi’s, she doubled back to the river and took the path along the bank. It had been a long morning after the longest night of her life; there was no way she could deal with another cop. And she could not risk going to the house — she needed to see what and who was against her now. She made a wide circle to the west of the village, up the hill, around the cemetery, and into the forest, finally emerging on the rocky ridge above. She hurried along the thin path, across fifty metres of open space, and sat against the base of the old tower. From this vantage she could see straight down past Avi’s olive grove to the bistro and D14. Looking over the rooftops, she had a view of the road up to the place. She was protected from the wind, the afternoon sun was warm. But her nerves were raw, she was fearful.

  Stephanie saw the inspector, tiny from this height, go racing away in her toy-sized car.

  She waited. She saw Avi Roig cross the road, watched him watering his rows in the village garden. There was the usual impulse to run to Avi for shelter. She resisted. Three years before, Papa dead, Maman fast disappearing into debilitating cancer, Stephanie had gone down to Avi. If she went to him with this, she’d be tied to him for life. She didn’t want to be. She did not know why — it was just a feeling, deeply bred — but she knew Avi was living the same life as her mother and father. He was another one hiding from the world. A stubborn, resourceful man, always too wary, somehow scared of his shadow. Stephanie resisted running back to that.

  Twenty minutes later, Avi coiled and hung the garden hose. He returned to the bistro. Two minutes later, she saw him heading off on his bicycle, north. She knew his routines.

  It was past four. If she was going down to get some things, it had better be now.

  ·

  She traded greetings as walked down through the village, waving a clump of fresh rosemary in passing. From her patch in the garden by the boules pitch. They smiled, hoped everything was fine, horrible the way they’d dragged her away yesterday, like something on the télé! Stephanie knew smiles on the street were one thing, words whispered in private were another.

  Madame Fortuno came out her door. ‘There was a bomb.’

  Madame gestured her inside the fusty house. The television was on. Two bombs, in fact.

  Stephanie expressed her shock at the violent act. Madame said the police had come around. Twice. One for each bomb? Backing away from Madame’s too-curious eyes, Stephanie gestured at herself: It wasn’t me. She had been swimming.

  The house was a shambles. Why did they always have to make a mess? How did that help? Fascist goons... She stuffed some things into a knapsack. Some bread and cheese and biscuits from the fridge. After checking for spiders nesting in the toes, she laced on the hiking boots she hadn’t worn since before going to school in Paris, and stepped back into the street. With a calm wave for Madame Fortuno, Stephanie headed for the place. The car was one thing she didn’t need. She bid good evening to various villagers and continued along the path to the cemetery. The bus would be passing at five — her neighbours would assume she was on her way down to the road to catch it. First she paused to spend a moment with her parents. She did not apologize. Or curse. She merely felt them, the life they had lived, the life they’d passed along to her. Then she walked out the far side of the cemetery and into the forest. Skirting round to the north side of the ridge, far from all eyes, she climbed to the top for the second time that day.

  ·

  Safe in the woods south of the tower, Stephanie McLeod paused and looked north. Directly across the open sky lay the section of mountains called La Femme Allongée. The Reposing Woman. A formation distinctly etched by the winds of untold years to resemble a gigantic figure resting on her side, hair fallen loose, forever alone. As legend had it, Cebenna, daughter of Hercules who’d fought with the defeated Titans, was spared by Zeus but banished from the shores of the Mediterranean. The giantess had wandered north, where she lay down in isolated sorrow. Seen from thousands of vantage points across the valley, the anthropomorphic illusion was uncanny: mournful profile, longing eyes gazing up, the luxuriant fall of foresty tresses tumbling down the mountain side.

  As a village girl, Stephanie had grown up with Cebenna. Today the giantess’s lonely image resonated in her fugitive heart, alive in the gloomy sentiment the myth conveyed. ‘Au revoir,’ Stephanie whispered, then walked away, along a deserted EDF service road.

  An hour later she stopped, took the phone from her bag, reinserted the SIM card and reviewed her calls. They had taken her personal cell. She was on the work phone. Of course there was Avi, a long list — she could hear his frantic pleas; and several unknown people probably wanting to reserve a table. She deleted all. Listened to the only call that mattered now.

  Hey, Steph. Where are you, darlin’? I hope they haven’t grabbed you already. If they have, we have complete faith in your ability to withstand torture for the greater good. If not, I recommend lying low till we can connect. I can see a wonderful future awaiting the two of us, Steph. Talk to you soon. Love ya, and you know it. Ta.

  She wanted to lie down right there and die. But she refused.

  A night in a room with a nameless secret service agent made it all too clear. If they could record his other calls they could surely record that one. And he knew it. The bastard.

  Against all better judgment (judgment?…the notion was a joke), she dialled —

  He answered immediately. ‘Yes? ‘

  Stephanie found the right voice and told him, ‘I love you. But can’t there be more than this? There has to be… I’ll be in touch.’ She cut the call and removed t
he SIM card from her phone.

  And kept going. From where she walked there were views of Departmental Road 14 some three hundred metres below. Within ten minutes of her call to Prince, she noted two SUVs, both black, both with the sinister windows, come speeding around a bend, zooming along the flats toward Vieussan. If nothing else, her instinct as to their powers of surveillance had been right.

  The fugitive thing. The only instinct that was working right.

  Yes, well, I was born to it…

  Stephanie McLeod continued south, into the waning afternoon. The hour was golden. She was angry, but clearheaded now, and not too worried the police could follow.

  She would settle with Prince on her own terms, in her own good time.

  PART 2

  Will ye no come back again…

  — Lament for Charles Stuart,

  aka Bonnie Prince Charlie

  The attacks led off the regional TV news and even found a place on the national.

  Next morning, Midi-Libre put it on the front page.

  Wine Terror in Southwest

  Two separate bombings targeting a winemaker near Beziers yesterday threaten to escalate the already tense situation with regulators, local wine and grape producers, and a growing sector engaged in trans-national operations — the so-called Euro-plonk dealers.

  A tanker truck carrying Spanish product en route for processing at Domaine Clorres, west of Beziers, was blown to bits where it was stopped at the side of the road during the midday period. Several motorists on the nearby rond-point suffered minor injuries and shock, mainly from flying glass and the effects of a domino-like series of minor collisions at the busy wine-flooded intersection.

  Fifteen people were taken to hospital for treatment.

  Felipe Alejo, driver of the targeted tanker, had stepped away from his rig at the time of the explosion and was uninjured.

  Twenty minutes after the tanker truck exploded, a second blast levelled a wine production facility at the Clorres property, fifteen kilometres directly south. Miraculously, the site was quiet during the siesta and no one was injured. An elderly family member was in shock.

  There have been no claims of responsibility as yet, but investigators have already linked the two bombings to a same source. ‘We have solid information as to how and when they were planted,’ said Police Judiciaire spokesperson Suzanne Montigny. ‘In both instances, we believe the detonation was activated via a remote signal, as opposed to a timer,’ she said.

  Total damage is in the range of €3 million.

  Reaction in the wine-producing sector ranged from shock and anger on the part of major producers to grim satisfaction expressed by some small growers. At issue is a simmering debate on how to deal with the rapid transformation of wine markets across France in the face of new borderless European trade regimes. All industry spokespeople agree the situation has become dire for certain growers. While the blasts were not blamed outright on renegade cells of small growers feeling increasingly disenfranchised by the new economics, and known to be escalating from symbolic displays to actual violence in attempts to shock government bodies into helping them, regional industry officials uniformly denounced the rising incidence of wine terrorism.

  ‘Actions such as this do not help in resolving the matter,’ said Francis Granger, secretary of the regional growers’ association. ‘These people criminalize and further marginalize their position. The only government teams working on their files will be the police.’

  Granger admitted the entire French industry is suffering a variety of ills, from unchecked overproduction to cheap imports and the rising cost of fuel. ‘We continue to work with industry and political leaders at all levels to build a reasonable solution.’ Etc.

  ·

  There was a sidebar on under-regulated, over-producing Spanish wine growers.

  Another on the self-styled ‘resistance’ group called CRAV.

  But not a word about the pan-Euro anarchist network known as Just Friends.

  · 18 ·

  TOO MUCH CIRCUMSTANTIAL

  The inspector sat at a desk in a spare office at Hôtel de Police, police central in the heart of downtown Beziers, listening to the trucker.

  Felipe Alejo’s contract with the wine broker in Mentrida had been steady for over a year and he’d fallen into a routine. He left the outskirts of Madrid at four in the morning and hit the Beziers West exit in time for lunch and a siesta. He rolled north for five minutes, to the roundabout by the prison, circled and parked off the road, an easy ten-minute ride to his destination — Domaine Clorres. He got out and stretched, opened his cab on both sides to give it a good airing. He carefully tidied the small bed. Maryse was not fussy, but he was proud. They had a rendezvous at 14:15 hours, as always, and Felipe always made sure the cab was clean and fresh. Then he grabbed his cooler pack and returned to his place behind the wheel. Spreading that morning’s Diario AS on his console, he donned his reading glasses, unfolded his serviette, unwrapped his sandwich, uncorked his white wine, and tucked in. He was engrossed in a report on another impending transfer, a midfielder from Hamburg, when he became aware of movement outside.

  A glance in the side mirror at his elbow revealed a woman, walking — walking backward, looking for a ride. Felipe Alejo had watched the denim-clad figure backing along the side of the road, tight to his trailer, thumb out in a desultory fashion. As she passed by his cab he heard her humming a tune. She glanced his way, nodded bonjour. Alejo returned the greeting. A hint of a wry smile from under the shaded peak of her sun bonnet said she was not having much luck at this hour when people were headed home to eat. Felipe guessed she was headed for the autoroute. He thought she should take off her hat and change to a skirt — her trip would go much faster. If she was still waiting at the entrance to the toll station after he’d offloaded, maybe he could help her out.

  If she was headed toward Spain.

  He had read another column of football news. Real Madrid was having problems adjusting to Beckham and vice-versa. Would Beckham be able to grasp the meaning of a match with Barcelona? How could he possibly? His feet were capable of miracles but his soul was merely English… When Felipe set his paper aside, he noted that the hitcher had travelled about a kilometre. He saw a car pull over. He was pleased she’d got a ride.

  Half an hour later Felipe Alejo climbed out of his cab and went to meet Maryse. Her corner was at the end of a long curve two hundred paces up the road. (Yes, the inspector knew her, if only by sight.) Rather than pulling up in front of her chair, where the world could watch her climbing into the cab, Felipe felt it was more civilized — more romantic? — to walk to fetch her, and then walk back together. Maryse was wearing her yellow summer dress. Señor Alejo recalled that he was remarking on the joli jaune she wore when a huge blast hit his ears. He and Maryse both stumbled with the push of the spreading force. His protective instinct made him hold her. She was too stunned to emit a scream. Holding Maryse, Felipe watched as wine sprayed into the air, blending with oily smoke. He said the heat created a mirage — an exotic grapy lake spreading on the tarmac beneath a fiery sky. The chaos on the roundabout increased as more traffic continued flowing in from four directions, frantic honking, some ugly crunches as metal bashed metal. The fire spread through the oil. People left their cars and ran.

  From where he stood with Maryse, it appeared all motorists had got themselves well clear when Felipe’s diesel engine exploded. Within minutes the air was filled with sirens and flashing lights as gendarmes, fire crews, medics and media arrived. The people doomed to wait for their cars to be cleared away and the mess was cleaned could only watch. Felipe was seeing fingers pointing and hearing comments. Not at him; at the ruined tanker. The name of the Spanish wine broker on the charred and crumpled silver tank announcing another shipment of plonk headed for Domaine Clorres. Fifteen minutes later, everyone turned their eyes south in response to another explosion — muted
by the distance — and the sight of another wine-coloured cloud.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I presented myself to the police. I have nothing to hide, señora. I only drive.’

  Felipe Alejo’s French was basic. At Aliette’s insistence, he again laboured through his recollection of the moment face to face with the bomber. ‘I saw her in my side mirror… Because I heard her. She was humming… No idea. Just humming, you know, like you do? It was a fairly big pack. Like for camping, or for someone seriously on the road. I see them all the time… I don’t know what brand. No, no writing on the back. Or flags, none of that. I’m not a camper. Football. Anything to do with football, I’m your man. Well, Spanish league,’ qualified Alejo.

  She pressed.

  ‘She wore a sun hat — floppy thing, like a guy who works in the fields, her hair was mostly up inside it… I don’t know. It wasn’t black. Red T-shirt. Jeans, well-worn. Walking boots… I would not know high-end from low. No, they were boots, not trainers. Tattoos? Nothing that grabbed my attention. Her skin?… It seemed fine enough. No, not too dark, not like mine…not much sun. It was really only for a second or two. Maybe a bit of makeup around the eyes, like a black pen to show them better. Darkish eyes…darker than yours. Not too dark, not like mine.’

  She pressed.

  He slumped forward on the desk. ‘That’s it. That’s really all.’ He tapped his head. Empty.

  Aliette was sympathetic — she was the fourth official to push him through this process. ‘You remember much more than you think, monsieur. I wish more people I talk to had your powers of observation.’ This was pure flattery. Anything to coax another detail.

  Felipe Alejo resisted. ‘But it’s almost nothing.’ Meaning nothing to take him away from his football news, his wine, his sandwich. ‘She was not special in any way.’ Just another woman hitching. There were lots these days. Most were from eastern Europe.