Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘That’s become the trademark, taking the heart as the souvenir,’ said Burrows. ‘It was dismissed by everyone except me as a kookie threat at first. Everyone was far too busy showing how the professional mind-doctors had fucked up. Then there was some hype about my going to San Francisco on a case. Two days after I’d left a dispatcher at the local Bureau office was murdered. Her heart was cut out and two rings taken from her fingers. The rings came with the next threat note. It happened again a month later in Salt Lake City, that time only a day after I’d finished. I knew the agent-in-charge there: had a wife and a disabled kid. I got sent his fraternity ring. The note promised he’d get me next time.’

  Claudine’s mind was working on several levels. She was listening and analysing as best she could what Burrows was telling her while separately realizing the effort it must have cost such an outwardly macho man to come to her and talk like this - to admit fear. Remembering how she’d behaved at their seminars, she felt humbled. ‘So your coming here wasn’t a simple exchange between two bureaux?’

  ‘There was a lot of diplomatic shit, between Brussels and Washington. Visiting adviser seemed a good idea to the seventh floor. Put your guys here in debt for a favour to the Bureau in the future and conveniently got me quietly out of the way until they got a jacket back on Pickering. I still thought then it was over the top but Miriam was worried to hell so I went with it.’

  Claudine picked out the reservation. ‘What’s happened since?’

  ‘Last case in the bundle.’

  The photographs of the Baltimore massacre were uppermost, the bodies obviously decomposing. The cuttings from the American newspapers and from Newsweek were next, with Burrows’ name scrawled in the margin on every one.

  ‘Now I understand the aversion to personal publicity,’ she said.

  ‘It was a hell of a job for the Director to keep them from publishing my name,’ said Burrows. ‘In the end it wasn’t worth the trouble.’

  ‘You think he’ll come here?’

  ‘Do you think he’ll come here?’

  He must be around sixty, she guessed, although neglect had aged him. ‘You can’t expect me to give a definite answer on other people’s files and assessment. But I’ll try, of course. Think about it, Scott. We’re on the other side of the world. As far as he’s aware, from what he’s read, you could be anywhere in one of half a dozen countries. He’d need money. A passport …’

  ‘I told you the family’s loaded. Money he’s got. Probably passports, too. He’s travelled all over and he’s cleverer than a monkey on a sharp stick. Bastard’s got a 160 IQ.’

  ‘Let me read the file.’

  ‘Washington say I can go where I like. But I don’t want to run. I don’t want to die but I don’t want to run. I just want to go home.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’

  ‘I never contradicted any of your profiles,’ declared the American suddenly. ‘Sanglier ran them by me, maybe expecting me to, but I never did because I never had to. I talked with him, sure. But I never went against you.’

  The devious French bastard! Although it offended her Claudine could understand - although only just - Sanglier’s using Burrows as a monitor, considering the American’s reputation. But why should Sanglier have expected Burrows to dispute her assessments? It was as if the American was telling her Sanglier had wanted him to challenge the profiles. She accepted the revelation as another warning. She smiled at Burrows and said: ‘You think I was a smartass at the seminars?’

  ‘All the time. So did everyone else.’

  ‘Seems I owe you an apology. Lots of apologies.’

  Burrows made a movement towards the FBI material. ‘This’ll call it quits.’

  ‘You think he’ll try to find you here, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Claudine refused Rosetti’s invitation to lunch and spent the next three hours alone in her office, deeply immersed in the FBI dossier and re-reading Burrows’ chapter on Lance Pickering as well as studying three treatises on fixation syndrome in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

  Claudine made sure of returning to the incident room while Rosetti would still be there, hoping he’d suggest dinner to make up for the refused lunch, which he did. Volker was at his computers, upon which material was scrolling up in an apparently uninterrupted stream. Aware of Claudine’s approach he said: ‘You know what I think? I think Sanglier is having everything copied here because he imagines I’ll be buried by the stuff.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course not. They’re doing all the work in Amsterdam. When they transmit it to me I simply put it automatically on to a back-up disk.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing now?’

  Volker gave one of his conspiratorial smiles. ‘That and a little bit more. It would bury us if we tried to read it all. So I’ve made up this trigger word program. Everything from Amsterdam is filtered through it. The computer automatically recognizes key words or symbols, like Triad and all the Triad society titles and the names, in every variation, of the Chinese Amsterdam have already identified from the photographs. The Polish girls and their ponce are included, too.’

  Having spent so much time with the man Claudine thought she knew the answer to her next question but asked it anyway. ‘So we aren’t bothered by the dross but learn everything at the same time as they do in Amsterdam?’

  ‘It’s important for us to keep up to date, here in our lonely backwater.’ The smile widened. ‘Sanglier has had a master database created. You’ll never guess the password he chose?’

  ‘Sanglier,’ said Claudine at once. ‘You inside it?’

  The German’s face creased in disappointment. He pointed to two hard-copy dossiers beside him. ‘Sanglier’s is the one to the right. The other is all the Triad stuff, with the photographs.’

  Yvette called from the other end of the room, holding out the telephone. Claudine listened, asked two quick questions and then turned back into the room.

  ‘There’s been a response in Paris to the amnesty appeal. It could be the father of our first victim. Celeste herself.’

  ‘You want me to send Sanglier a message?’ asked Volker. ‘The line’s open.’

  ‘I think the commissioner is far too busy in Amsterdam,’ decided Claudine. ‘I’ll go. You never know what I might learn.’

  She was later to remember the remark and decide it was probably the most prophetic thing she’d ever said in her life.

  ‘We’re ready to go then?’ said John Walker. Now that the moment had arrived the Serious Fraud Office superintendent was nervous.

  ‘I can’t think of anything we haven’t covered.’

  ‘And you’re going officially to inform the British commissioner?’

  ‘It’s got to be done by the book. We already decided that,’ insisted Toomey.

  ‘I’m looking forward to a trip abroad.’

  ‘So am I. I’m told Dutch food is very good. They do a lot of things with mussels.’

  ‘I can’t stand mussels.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  At the height of the Raj, when Britain guarded its empire with an enormous army, soldiers rarely told their easily abandoned conquests their real names, to avoid the inconvenience of identifiable parenthood. It became an unwritten custom to call themselves by the jobs they did, creating incongruous lineages of Engineer and Sergeant and Clerk: occasionally, even, Officer.

  The cowed and nervous man who shuffled to his feet, hands clasped subserviently in front of him and head bowed against eye contact, was named Shankar Sergeant and Claudine’s first thought upon entering the holding cell of Paris’s Neuilly district police station was that he was descended from a long line of the much abused and always cheated. He wore a collarless Indian shirt, no longer white, beneath a stained and creased striped Western jacket that didn’t match the bagged and grease-shone black trousers that stopped inches above shoes cracked across both insteps. He was extremely thin and his chest sounded hollow whe
n he coughed, which he did frequently. He was shaking.

  Instead of replying when she said who she was the man lifted his hands in front of himself in the Hindu greeting of peace and Claudine was momentarily disconcerted at the identical representation of how the hands - his daughter’s hands - had been wired together. He did not sit when she told him, looking apprehensively sideways to the station commander and his deputy who had insisted upon accompanying her, hoping for their moment of glory from involvement in a national sensation.

  Claudine repeated it, in English, sitting down herself. Hesitantly he followed on the opposite side of the table, tensed to stop at the first correction. He perched on the very edge of his chair, hands between his knees, head remaining lowered. He still shook, twitching slightly at the grate of their chairs when the two policemen sat.

  Claudine pointed to the tape machine and said: ‘We are going to make a record of what you say. You understand?’

  He nodded, without speaking. Claudine poured water from the carafe intended for her and pushed the glass across towards the man, who looked confused at the kindness. Gently she said: ‘Tell me about your daughter.’

  Beside her the two Frenchmen shifted and she guessed neither had adequate English, which she’d also guessed and chosen to be Shankar Sergeant’s most comfortable language.

  ‘Indira,’ he said, his voice little above a whisper, quieter than the persistent cough. There was a long pause. ‘After Mrs Gandhi. A wonderful woman.’

  Nothing was going to come unprompted, Claudine decided. ‘How long have you been in France?’

  ‘A year.’

  ‘Indira came with you? The whole family?’

  The man shook his head. ‘By myself at first.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘To begin with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Calcutta.’

  ‘But there was somewhere else?’

  There was another head movement, a nod. ‘Bahrain.’

  ‘Was your family with you there?’

  Beside her the station chief, whose name she knew to be Leclerc but whose rank she couldn’t identify from his uniform, said impatiently: ‘I’m finding this difficult to follow. I would like it in French.’

  ‘There’s a recording,’ said Claudine, curtly and in French. ‘English is better for him. I’ll explain what you don’t understand later.’

  Ignoring their increased shifts of irritation - irritated herself at the interruption - she smiled hopefully back at Shankar Sergeant and repeated her question.

  ‘No. I was by myself again,’ he replied.

  ‘Why did you go to Bahrain?’

  ‘To work in the oilfields.’

  ‘Did you?’

  Another nod. ‘As a cleaner.’

  ‘That wasn’t what you expected?’

  ‘In Calcutta there were stories of a lot of money, working on rigs. I didn’t know until I got there that these are not jobs given to people like me.’

  ‘So there was no money?’

  ‘Not what I had been told. I had to send money home, to keep my family. Live myself.’

  ‘How did you get to Bahrain?’

  ‘Ship.’

  Claudine wished she didn’t have to drag the pitiful story from the man, sure that she already knew it: knew it all. ‘I meant who paid?’

  ‘I saved, for five years. Borrowed the last fifty pounds from a money-lender.’ He looked down at himself, holding out his arms slightly in despair. ‘I am a tailor. I have a certificate.’

  ‘An Indian money-lender?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whom you had to repay, as well as sending money to your family and living yourself in Bahrain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you do it?’

  ‘I tried to gamble. It’s illegal but all the migrant workers do it. Sometimes they win but not very often. I came very close. Once I won the whole fifty pounds but then I lost it, before the game ended. Mah-jong. Do you know mah-jong?’

  Claudine nodded. ‘Chinese run the gambling?’

  For the first time the man looked at her properly, not speaking for several moments. ‘I lost. Couldn’t pay.’

  ‘What did they offer?’ persisted Claudine. Much abused and always cheated, she thought.

  ‘A way out,’ said the man, coughing in short spasms. His head had sunk down on his shoulders again but he was suddenly animated, not needing any urging. ‘Everything solved. A man came to me, the day after I lost. I was frightened. Told him everything and he said he could help me. He said Bahrain was a lie: I shouldn’t have believed what I’d heard in Calcutta. Europe was where a lot of money could be earned: more than I’d ever thought possible, actually working in the job I was trained for. There would be enough to have my family with me …’

  ‘He’d even fix the permits?’

  ‘After I got here. It was the way the system worked. I would be with friends, all the time. I was to do as they said: I had to give them my passport and they would get me in. Within a month I would get it back, with the legal work visa.’

  His account of the story was probably true. He wouldn’t totally have believed the visa part of it but Claudine didn’t feel like challenging the man. ‘You had to sign papers?’

  ‘Of course. It was a very big loan but I could have paid it off. There were ten of us on the boat. We had to take our own food but they gave us water. It was a very old boat, a freighter. There were big boxes on deck, as well as in the hold. I never knew what was inside. My food ran out two days before we got here but one of the other men, from Calcutta like me, shared what he had left. We got off at night, I don’t know where but someone said later near Marseille. We had to climb down rope ladders, over the side of the ship, into small boats. We were split up then—’

  ‘Did you come straight to Paris?’ broke in Claudine quickly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In a lorry.’

  ‘What sort of lorry?’

  ‘It delivered food. We kept stopping and things kept being unloaded. I had to hide when that was done. It was easy. There were many things inside.’

  ‘Was it cold? Refrigerated?’

  ‘No.’

  Claudine refused the disappointment. ‘Was there a name on the lorry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you remember what it was?’

  ‘Short words. Chinese.’

  ‘Can you tell me what they were?’

  The man shook his head, sadly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Would you recognize them, if I showed you?’

  ‘I might.’ His shaking had stopped, but everything he said was still punctuated by coughs.

  Hurriedly Claudine picked through the photographs of the identified K-14 Chinese. There was only one showing the Wo Lim lettering, in Roman script, on the rear of a refrigerated truck. ‘Just look at the words,’ she ordered, offering the man the photograph. ‘Are those the words that were written on the lorry that brought you up to Paris?’

  The man squinted, tilting the print slightly. ‘It might be.’

  ‘I want you to be sure.’

  ‘I don’t know, not for certain.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ lied Claudine. ‘What happened when you got to Paris?’

  ‘It was just as the man had promised, in Bahrain. There was another Chinese man waiting for me. He took me to a house where he said I could live and gave me a meal and the very next day I started work in a tailor’s shop: it wasn’t really a shop. It was a warehouse where other people like me worked, doing all sort of jobs. It had been a long time since I’d done any tailoring but they said it didn’t matter: I’d soon get better. When I asked about my passport the man said there was a hold-up but that I shouldn’t worry. Everything was all right. For three months it was wonderful. I could send money home and pay off what had been agreed on the loan and keep myself. I couldn’t save, though, to bring my family over. It was Mr Cheng who began talking about it—’

  ‘Cheng?’
Claudine interrupted.

  ‘That’s what he said his name was, Mr Cheng. He said it wasn’t right for a family to be broken up, but that he could help me like I’d been helped in Bahrain. He’d lend me the money to bring my whole family to France. Living all together meant there would still be enough money to repay the extra I borrowed.’

  ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Three. My wife, Indira and Ratri.’ He began to cry, without any sound. ‘We were so happy. It was a dream. We even got an apartment, one room but our own bath, here in Neuilly.’

  ‘How long did it last?’

  Shankar Sergeant became embarrassed at his tears and scrubbed his jacketed arm across his face. ‘A month. At the warehouse they said my work wasn’t good enough and fired me. When I asked for Mr Cheng they said he wasn’t here any longer. There was another man now, Mr Tan. He shouted a lot. He said I couldn’t work there any more but that I had to go on paying back the money. He was going to keep all our passports until I did and laughed at me when I said I’d go to the police because we were all here illegally and we’d be deported back to India …’ The man’s voice trailed away, head forward again.

  ‘But he offered a way, didn’t he?’

  There was a nod but no words for several moments. ‘Indira was sixteen: they’d given her a job in the factory, too. At a loom. He said she was too beautiful to go on doing that. That men would pay, to go with her. She’d earn a lot of money doing that, enough to go on paying off the loan and to keep the family. And that there would be even more money. There was Ratri. She was just twelve. Men would pay even more for her.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘No. That I would go to the police and be sent back to Calcutta before I allowed that.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘The day I told Mr Tan that, Indira didn’t come home from the warehouse. When I went to get her she wasn’t there. People even said they didn’t know her. That she’d never worked there. But Mr Tan said he was giving me one more chance but that he had to have her and Ratri. When I still said no two other Chinese men hit me and wouldn’t let me leave. They locked me in a room. They gave me water and some meat - a sausage - and laughed when I said I couldn’t eat meat because my religion wouldn’t allow it. It was a week, I think …’ He began to cry again but louder this time, sobs shuddering from him which made him cough all the more, and when he spoke the words came in short, gasping bursts. ‘I counted five days. Then they showed me newspaper … read out to me what they’d done to Indira and Mr Tan said they had Ratri anyway and that they’d do the same to her if I made trouble. Then they let me go …’