Walls of a Mind

by John Brooke

The word brother was like a cue; Madeleine withdrew, back to her place in the timeless tableau, where she knelt with the dog, who licked her hand and panted.

  Paul looked momentarily wistful. ‘We finally found her, wandering, total mess, like she’d been out all night, and babbling non-stop, blaming everything on herself.’

  ‘Everything?’

  He shrugged. ‘Therapist came to the house. Took one look and called an ambulance, packed her off to a hospice in Narbonne. I was just talking to him…’ Paul Guatto held up his phone. ‘He’s arranging to have her admitted somewhere more secure.’

  Aliette jotted the number. Mulling the inevitable implications of putting Noëlli ‘somewhere more secure’ — institutional red tape, professional stonewalling — she took out her own phone, was about to enter the therapist’s number when it occurred that Magui was right. The beat-up old bluish Renault sedan — it was almost the car still parked on the place at Vieussan. But not. She closed the line. First things first here. She asked Paul Guatto, ‘Is that Noëlli’s car?’

  ‘This? No. It’s just an extra. We keep it going. Big property like this, it comes in handy.’

  ‘Was Noëlli using it lately?’

  ‘Somebody was. Bought a cell phone. Left all that stupid packaging under the seat. I assumed it was one of the crew. Foreman often sends them on runs into town for this, that and the other.’

  ‘Show me… please.’ He did. She instructed Magui, ‘We’d better put that in a bag.’

  More confirmation. And a next thought. ‘Where did you find her?’

  ‘Near la grange. An old out-building…’ gesturing vaguely westward. ‘We store old equipment. Actually, we put it there and forget it.’ He offered a sigh for the ways that never change. ‘Anyway, she was wandering home from that direction.’

  ‘Take us there. Please.’

  Madeleine Guatto and Blako the dog advanced into the sunlight to see the three-car convoy off. Madame called, ‘Don’t worry, I will fix this!’ Aliette sent back a smile. Merci, dear lady. She had two detectives, an Italian and an Austrian, on the seat beside her, an ally, if not a friend, in this abstracted woman. She wanted to call, And I will fix the thing with Noëlli! One always hoped to bring a happy, harm-free resolution to mothers’ hopes for their untraceable daughters. There were many, the ones within hugging distance often the hardest to pin down. But such a declaration would be rash.

  For lying, crying Noëlli, it was not looking very good.

  · 38 ·

  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

  Avi Roig stopped at a place above the valley. He had been out since 7:00 am and done about a hundred clicks. The exercise helped him sweat out the wine. But not the stress.

  From this God-like height you could see all the way to the sea. When he wanted, his voice was strong, stentorian — it was something else left over from his previous life. Avi bellowed her name, ‘Stephanie!’ As if commanding her to step forward.

  The order disappeared without an echo.

  He reached into his pannier and grabbed his phone. Inserted the alternate SIM card. NO NEW MESSAGES. NO UNHEARD MESSAGES. He disengaged the system.

  Still nothing since Saturday. What now? The boy’s messages were not especially useful, not as such. If he had a plan, it was buried deep inside an insipid, melodramatic code. But they served to confirm that Stephanie was still nearby. Listening. Saturday’s oddly interrupted call was worrisome. Perhaps the sharp noise that interrupted Saturday’s message was a signal of the end. They could have caught the boy, even killed him. Good. The dangerous catalyst eliminated.

  How had Stephanie reacted to that sharp noise, the boy’s spontaneous cry of alarm?

  Or maybe the pressure of Roland Bousquet was just too much and the boy had abandoned his quixotic quest and run. Out of the area. Out of range. NO MESSAGES.

  Maybe the surveillance had spotted Avi’s phone. Easy to push a button, cut him out of the loop. NO MESSAGES.

  Or maybe the boy and the girl had met up. They’d found each other — and were gone. No more need for furtive calls. NO MESSAGES.

  It suggested Stephanie loved that boy after all.

  Avi couldn’t face the thought. He stashed the phone back in the pannier and rode, quickly putting distance between that place and himself. At the hamlet of Escagnès he made a sharp right onto the work road that led down through the vines to the village of Ceps at the foot of the valley. He kept a hand on the brake, his eyes moving, scanning the forest’s edge at the far end of the rows. Calling, ‘Stephanie! …Stephanie! …Stephanie! For the love of God…!’

  Vignerons working in the rows probably assumed a lost dog.

  ·

  It was almost noon when Avi rolled up to the shed behind the bistro and propped his bike against the wall. It was Monday, a day of freedom. He’d have a rest and go back out again later. He was gathering his things when a voice inquired, ‘Good ride?’

  She was standing there, briefcase in hand, dressed for a day at the office. He let the phone fall back into the pannier.

  ‘Where did you come from?’

  ‘Walked down...’ gesturing at the stairs up to the village. ‘Been setting up a command centre in our friend’s kitchen. Eye of the storm, quoi?..Looks like today’s the day, monsieur.’

  It had to mean the boy had not been taken. He hadn’t run. He was coming. Against all odds, that boy would dare to come. Avi felt his stomach start to boil.

  Patting her briefcase, she suggested, ‘We should probably do this inside.’

  He tried to breathe. He towelled sweat, hating her. ‘You ask for too much!’

  ‘B’eh, I ask for what I need.’ A friendly warning. A quiet sigh. ‘Do we need to go through this again?’ DST Agent Margot Tessier could and would bring much trouble to his life.

  With a morose shake of his damp curls, Avi led her inside. ‘I have to clean myself.’

  ‘Take your time. I’m waiting for my team.’

  He went up to his apartment, stripped, showered, stood naked at his open window gazing at his trees. Listening. The olive grove was Avi’s avatar, personal proof that life was stronger than messianic history, a gift from life to God. Day or night, the shifting evanescence of a billion leaves interacting with the wind was a blanket round the anger that he carried every day. Had the olive trees forsaken him now too? All Avi Roig could hear was spiteful God laughing at the cornered man.

  When he came down fifteen minutes later, a black 4X4 had arrived out front. Agent Tessier was sitting at the bar. He went behind it, pulled a bottle of chilled red from the cooler, poured himself a full glass. Drank deep… Prayed. He felt her leaning closer.

  ‘We know you and Stephanie McLeod were involved at a certain point.’

  He looked up. ‘It’s not a crime.’

  ‘There is something else you can help me with.’

  He waited.

  ‘Was there a place where you used to go?’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘To make love.’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘It may be. It may be a matter of life and death — which is my business.’

  The apologetic tone was veneer. Margot Tessier was on a mission. They both knew it.

  ‘Upstairs.’ Where he lived.

  ‘Forgive me, but was your relationship consummated there?’

  ‘Forgive you?... How can this be any of your business?’

  ‘Please, monsieur...Roig? It’s not personal, I assure you.’ She waited, impervious.

  ‘Yes.’ One bleak night, the spring before she left for Paris. Her hapless father had been taken to hospital, never to return, her mother was smoking herself to death and making her daughter cry. After work. She was willing — pushing it, really. They’d gone up to his bed. Not exactly joyful, but yes, a consummation of something that had been building since his first weeks in Vie
ussan seven years before. An almost twenty-year age difference couldn’t hide it.

  ‘Thank you. Anywhere else?’

  ‘Her place sometimes.’ When her mother stayed at the hospital. ‘Why does this matter?’

  He knew she’d never answer that — and she didn’t. ‘I mean somewhere special. Somewhere she liked to, you know…steal away to?’ She tried a smile. An ingenuous smile. She was not salacious. She only wanted information.

  ‘There were places by the river.’

  ‘Will you show me?’

  Did he have a choice?

  Four clichés in suits and shades were waiting outside. They fell in behind in their boss.

  Avi Roig led the French Secret Service along the riverbank, bleakly pointing to tiny coves where the sun would dally, the sand was soft. Passion spots, she’d called them. The memory of the sun warm on their bodies was corrupted. He was feeling like a traitor.

  · 39 ·

  DEEPLY INVOLVED

  Dr. Xavier Crevier, a ‘very busy’ therapist in Narbonne, impatiently corroborated Paul Guatto’s claim. He sounded confused, if not insulted by her query. ‘Yes, I assure you, it is very real.’ His patient had suffered a crisis, another in a string accruing from family-related stresses — her papa’s deteriorating state of mind, her fractious relationship with her mother, Joël’s death, her own large sense of self-disappointment. This latest collapse was undoubtedly related to Friday’s horrific events. ‘Her father’s longtime friend, Inspector. She sees his world disintegrating. Her own evaporated when she returned to serve the family business. She has much invested in her father. She had much invested in her brother. It is a very precarious moment.’ He insisted Noëlli not be subjected to any questioning till the ‘coast is clear.’ Noëlli was at ‘a cure we sometimes use.’ He refused to reveal the location. He was negotiating a room at Centre Hospitalier in Beziers and hoped she would be moved before the end of the day, but, ‘No…no visits!’

  He was unmoved by her threat of a perquisition order. ‘I know the law. I’m not worried.’

  She repeated, ‘I just want to talk.’

  A sniff at the end of the line. ‘You people inflict more damage than is necessary.’

  ‘Not all of us, monsieur. When?’

  Perhaps at week’s end. ‘I will insist on being present.’

  Aliette did not look forward to that. She got back to police procedure.

  The grange, as Paul Guatto called it, was a low-slung building, long neglected. Large patches of crumbling plaster had fallen away from the cinder-block structure, broken roof tiles, a muddy colony of swallows’ nests in the eaves further besmirching the walls, the rotting wooden doors opening to a dim, musty space stocked with a depressing hodge-podge of abandoned equipment — rusted machines, conveyance parts, antiquated tools, rotted leather tack.

  The loft was lined with forgotten barrels, stacked three high and two deep to the wall. ‘Wormwood,’ Paul muttered when she expressed the popular belief that the older the barrel the better. They found the makeshift redoubt in a room at the front, directly over the entrance. The mustiness of the discarded mattress was partially blocked by fresh linen. A crippled but still serviceable rocking chair beside the wide-open loft loading door suggested an occupant passing the time. The row of spent bottles, dregs still damp, implied recent days and nights. The wicker basket lined with a clean tea towel was further proof. And a small pile of that week’s Midi-Libre.

  Paul Guatto was honestly surprised. And then not so much. He was under the impression that this ‘hideout’ in the grange was his sister’s — a place to retreat from the family madness and her own unhappiness. ‘Maybe she has a boyfriend.’

  Aliette doubted that. The boy who’d camped here was devoted to Stephanie McLeod.

  Magui made a call, requesting a forensics unit to collect human traces and compare the tire tracks in the long grass out front with the tread on the old Renault. There would be lots to bring to a next meeting with Noëlli, all of it more substantial than the recollection of a wistfully hummed tune. Noëlli Guatto was deeply involved. It was galling to think of the woman’s druggy whining, her tragic fainting spell, the way she played Inspector Henri Dardé.

  ‘And this?’ Magui pointed to a note, fallen from the folds of the gingham tea towel.

  The two cops puzzled over a square of paper. Papa used this at Montredon. N.

  ‘Montredon? Isn’t that the place where they had the war with police over Italian plonk?’

  Paul was waiting downstairs. They called him up and showed him the note. He confirmed his sister’s hand.

  ‘So what is she talking about here?’

  Paul scratched behind his ear. ‘I don’t know…His gun? That’s what it was. A gun fight. Papa’s big moment. A pistol… Like some holy artifact when we were young. The twins would take turns holding it.’ He smiled, but it was not a happy memory. ‘I haven’t looked at it in years.’

  It appeared Noëlli had given it to the boy called Prince.

  For Aliette, it added another level of worry, a more pressing need to be on her way.

  Aliette instructed Magui Barthès, ‘Go back to her house, go through her desk and computer. Everything. Align it with Joël’s back-and-forth with Stephanie McLeod. Look for a phone. If she was so out of it Saturday, there’s a fair chance they packed her off without her phone. That could be a help. When the IJ’s arrive, bring them here, get them going, but please don’t sit around and watch. We need to know what Noëlli knew. That’s in her house. I’ll be at Vieussan.’

  · 40 ·

  IN AID OF A LOVERS’ REUNION

  The inspector pulled up between the shiny German 4X4 and Nabi Zidane’s bashed-up Audi wagon. Margot Tessier and Nabi were sharing a bench in the shade of a mulberry. Two elderly gentlemen occupied another. Otherwise the place was quiet in the waning afternoon. It would fill as people began arriving home. Aliette wondered if the villagers were starting to resent the police taking all the parking spots. In lieu of a bonjour, Margot said, ‘You didn’t bring any people?’

  ‘You didn’t mention that I should.’

  Margot received this with a dry nod. She’d brought four agents. Nabi had volunteered six of his inspectors. ‘So we’re a dozen, and me at my command post. It will have to do,’ she declared.

  ‘In aid of what, Margot? You didn’t mention that either.’

  ‘A lovers’ reunion.’ This came with another one of those disquieting smiles that seemed to say, I know you hate me but I don’t hate you. And a question. ‘When you talked to her — when she was confiding? — did she happen to mention her first beautiful night with her Prince?’

  She being Stephanie McLeod.

  So Aliette understood Margot’s reading of Stephanie’s short message. She signalled no, they had not discussed that detail. She gazed out over the valley, a vast amorphous area. With just twelve pairs of eyes, it could only be a game of chance. ‘No gendarmes?’

  ‘No gendarmes. Overkill.’ Margot wanted the subject to believe there might be a chance of sneaking through and hooking up. She wanted him to try.

  ‘And what if he makes it? To her.’

  ‘Perfect. Exactly what we’re hoping for. She’s reeling him in. We just have to be there.’

  ‘But Margot…’ Aliette saw a young man whose face she still hadn’t seen, overwrought, too nervous. She knew Margot’s agents were trained to react. Nabi’s guys were not as trained — they’d be nervous too. She saw Stephanie McLeod in the middle of these factors. ‘Look, Margot, we’ve had a big day. We found the car. It’s not that one…’ indicating Stephanie McLeod’s old heap parked next to the public phone. ‘We found out who’s been hiding him and where. We’re pretty sure he has a gun now. You’ve heard him building up to this. He’s too desperate. I can’t imagine what Stephanie is thinking, but if there’s a gun, it’s just too — ’

  �
�I know what Stephanie is thinking,’ Margot interjected in her peremptory way.

  An impasse. Aliette looked to Nabi. Nabi didn’t blink.

  Margot added, ‘We know he’s armed. Yesterday he held a gun to an old woman’s face and stole her lunch.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone communicate with me?’ That was disingenuous; dozing contentedly in the afterglow of sex and Sergio, she hadn’t wanted to communicate.

  Maybe Margot knew that too. In any event, she ignored it. ‘We’re professionals, Inspector. It will depend on how he presents. How he reacts.’

  ‘If he reacts wrong?’

  ‘We respond accordingly.’

  Aliette persisted. ‘They’re children, Margot. You’ve been saying this yourself. He is nothing more than a strange boy who has revealed himself to be desperately in love. He’ll do something desperately stupid. That is the context here.’

  Agent Tesssier reiterated flatly, ‘Apart from private property he so wantonly obliterated, I believe this boy has assassinated a representative of the state in the most brazen manner.’

  Aliette’s patience burst. ‘But she is not a threat!’

  The two geezers murmuring on the next bench looked without pretending. Hard to mind your business when the police start screaming.

  Margot was unmoved. ‘Can’t you be a little less fraught and join the team?’

  Fraught? …Am I really so transparent? Aliette’s heart sank. What was the point?

  Now Nabi Zidane offered the tiniest shrug. Don’t kill yourself with this.

  After more strained silence under the mulberry, Margot asked, ‘So, who was it?’ Prince’s local helper.

  ‘Noëlli Guatto. Her car. Her safe house. Her gun. I’m betting her access to information as to the Clorres shipments… Her little masquerade as a hitch-hiker with a bomb in her pocket.’

  ‘And did Noëlli Guatto give a bomb to Roland Bousquet?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet.’

  Margot Tessier considered it — but only briefly. She got to her feet. ‘But we do know it was Stephanie McLeod on the phone last night. Yes?... Bon. Time to get to work.’