“Why would the Americans do this?”
“Kissinger made it quite clear that the purpose was to ensure that the French were dependent on American technology and stressed that ‘the real quid pro quo is the basic orientation of French policy.’ That’s another quote. Once de Gaulle was out of power, Kissinger thought he could use the nuclear bait to turn the French into reliable allies again, on the American leash just like the British. And if the Americans withdrew their cooperation, the French would fall far behind in nuclear matters. And you know how important that is to Paris.”
Bruno nodded and took a deep breath. Nuclear weapons were France’s last claim on great power status. “Are these documents still in your files here? Or have they gone?”
“It doesn’t matter. I photocopied them, scanned them into pdf files and have them all stored in the cloud. Get me a computer and a printer, and I’ll print them out for you.”
“Have you told the mayor all this?”
“Not in such detail, no. I told him the funny stuff. He was the one who said my book would make quite a stir. But I’ve given seminars on this material at the National Defense University and at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. I have a couple of graduate students who’ll get their doctorates out of this.”
“Is your book finished?”
“The text is finished, and I’m just about done with the footnotes. I expect to send it to Yale University Press by the end of the month. My editor there has already seen most of it.”
“This is the English version you’re talking about. What about the French edition, when will that be ready?”
“I’ll translate it myself, and I’m aiming to have it done by the end of the summer, which would mean publishing it sometime next year.”
Bruno was thinking how this would play in French public opinion if extracts from the book or even a summary of its highlights turned up on the front page of Le Monde a week or so before the election. Nuclear independence had been one of the cardinal principles of French governments for the last half century, and to learn that it was all a sham would come as a national shock. The opposition would have a field day. He could envisage a row in the Assemblée Nationale, public inquiries, denunciations and even fistfights on TV talk shows.
“Tell me about the politics of this,” Bruno said. “Were both parties involved?”
“Pompidou and Giscard were conservatives, so the Socialists could claim it was their fault. I don’t have any documents about Mitterrand’s time, when Reagan was in the White House.”
“I can see why a conservative government would want this kept quiet,” he said, wondering if Jacqueline had her own political motives.
“But it’s our history, Bruno, yours and mine and that of every other French voter and taxpayer. Why shouldn’t they know about it?”
Why not indeed? he thought. But the timing would be important, the timing and the way the information was released. Was it unreasonable for the brigadier and his political masters to delay the information for a few weeks until the election was over? Would it not even be a huge distortion of the political process to have the final days of the election campaign dominated by an angry public debate over France’s nuclear status?
Bruno shook his head, suddenly angry at himself. He was thinking like the brigadier or like a politician. These were not decisions to be taken by agents of the state, thinking of the French electorate as so many children to be protected from monsters in the dark. This was a free country, and such an issue was for the French voters to decide.
“You look like a man who’s just made his mind up about something,” said Jacqueline. “Are you going to tell me about it?”
“First, you’re invited to dinner tonight with me and some friends in Sarlat, and if you agree I’d like to share this with them,” he replied. In the distance, he could hear the familiar sound of a police siren. The gendarmes were on their way. “One’s a magistrate and another is a journalist with Paris Match. I trust them, and I’m confident that you can, and giving them this information may be the only way that you can control how this story is released and presented.”
“Rather than suppressed by the kinds of people who burgled my house and bugged my home,” she said. “That’s fine with me. I wonder, can the mayor come too? I was going to make dinner for him, but I think he’d want to be a part of this.”
17
His shoes polished and his uniform jacket and cap brushed, Bruno presented himself at the gendarmerie at one minute before five, shook hands with Sergeant Jules and was shown into the commandant’s office. The brigadier was standing beside the desk, studying a series of framed photographs on the wall of Yveline playing hockey. On top of her computer sat a small stuffed toy in red cloth. As Bruno came to attention before the desk he could see it was a monkey, and was surprised that the brigadier had not tossed it into a wastepaper basket. He braced himself for an encounter of the kind he had learned in the army was best handled by saying “Yes, sir,” and as little else as possible.
“How are you, Bruno? Sit down, take your hat off and have a seat.” The brigadier sat down at Yveline’s desk, pulled a bottle of Balvenie scotch from his briefcase, poured generous slugs into two water glasses and added a couple of splashes of Evian. He pushed one glass across the desk to Bruno, who stared at it suspiciously.
“Well done on the burglary. Crimson is delighted and so am I.”
“Thank you, sir,” he replied, trying to keep the surprise from his face.
“You’re no fool, so you’ll have worked out why I was curt with you at Crimson’s house.”
“Yes, sir.” It could only be because the brigadier wanted to mislead Crimson. He had no idea why.
“I won’t enjoy my drink until you enjoy yours, so please take a sip and stop playing the old soldier.”
Bruno obeyed but hardly tasted the whisky as he watched the brigadier pull a slim file from his briefcase.
“You won’t be surprised to learn that Crimson is someone we keep a friendly eye on, but we’re also interested in Jacqueline Morgan and how they know one another. Just over a year ago she was invited to give a faculty seminar at the Wilson Center in Washington on her research into European-American relations during the Cold War. Crimson was her guest, invited along to give a commentary from the British point of view. Since the seminar covered some very sensitive aspects of French nuclear policy, we were fortunate that a visiting French academic was in the seminar room and spoke to us afterward.”
He fixed Bruno with a piercing look and asked: “Why did you not tell Isabelle that you’d been to a party at Crimson’s house last year with the pair of them?”
“I told Isabelle I’d been to parties at his house, but I didn’t know her. In fact I didn’t meet Jacqueline Morgan until the day before I met Isabelle at Crimson’s house, and I called on her as a historian who knew a lot about Resistance finance. She was in work clothes; no makeup, her hair a mess. Having previously only seen her dressed up for a cocktail party I wouldn’t have recognized her.”
“How well do you know Crimson? He seemed very fond of you this morning.” The brigadier refilled their glasses.
Bruno recounted the tennis games, the drinks at the club bar, the garden party and the dinner. “Until Isabelle told me his background, I’d assumed he was just another retired civil servant.”
“You understand that it’s him we’re really concerned with rather than her. He’s always been very close to the Americans, and it was interesting that after meeting him she got those documents declassified. I doubt whether the Americans give a shit who is the next president of France. But the British certainly do.”
“I’d have thought they’d be happier with the devil they know.”
“You could be right; I wouldn’t know. But even if the Brits don’t want to interfere in our elections, they may think it useful for us to know that they could upset our applecart if they chose to. There are lots of items on the European agenda where London will need help from us—prot
ecting their precious financiers in the City, concessions on European affairs. A little leverage is always good.”
“This is all way above my head,” Bruno said. The refilled glass was looking very attractive, but he restrained himself.
“In that case let’s talk about Jacqueline.”
“She strikes me as an interesting woman,” said Bruno.
“You are known to have a soft spot for women, Bruno, a sentiment that in general I applaud. But it can lead to misapprehension.”
He pulled out another file from his briefcase and began reading phrases at random. “Arrested in Paris, May 1968, at a barricade on the rue St. Jacques while a student at the Sorbonne…arrested August 1968 at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, received a broken jaw from a police baton…September of that year she takes up an exchange scholarship at University of California, Berkeley…December 1969, a delegate to the final convention of Students for a Democratic Society in Flint, Michigan, voted to wind up the SDS and reform into the Worker-Student Alliance, a group closely associated with the violent extremists known as the Weathermen…arrested in May 1971 during a march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War.”
The brigadier paused in his reading, looked up and took a sip of his drink. “Quite the little activist, this Jacqueline Morgan. A member of Redstockings, a radical women’s collective, and a contributor to a collective book titled Our Bodies, Ourselves. And she never gave up. Arrested again in 1985, this time in Britain, when she was staying at the women’s camp protesting against American missiles at the Greenham Common airbase. She was arrested again that year during a demonstration over the miners’ strike but was released without being charged. She was supposedly a visiting professor at the University of London at the time. I suspect that was the moment she came up on Crimson’s radar screen. Most recently she attended our Green Party’s summer university last year, where she spoke as a member of the advisory board of Greenpeace in the United States. I have to hand it to her, she never stops.”
He tossed the file onto his desk. “And now the radical Professor Morgan is connected to a British spymaster. If this were the Cold War, I’d suspect a honey trap and start looking for a Moscow connection. These days, who the hell knows?”
“You know she was burgled today?” Bruno asked. “Her laptop and documents were taken, along with some silver and jewelry to make it look genuine.”
“It wasn’t us, but I hope you’ll understand that I can’t answer for all the less public arms of the French state, however much I may disapprove of what they do in the name of national security.”
Bruno sipped at his drink, wondering what the brigadier’s real agenda might be but mainly thinking of the epic of Jacqueline’s life. She’d plunged into the history of her time and also made a distinguished career by writing some of that history. He did not feel surprise but rather admiration.
“Why not say what you want to do?” Bruno asked. “Are you trying to suppress her work, or do you just hope to delay it until after the election?”
“Why on earth would I want to do that? This is our history. The French public is entitled to know it.”
Bruno sat back in his chair, completely baffled. He reached for his scotch, took a long sip and then looked thoughtfully at the photograph of the president of the Republic that hung on the wall by the door.
“You want him to lose the election,” he said. The brigadier shrugged, poured himself another drink and waved the bottle toward Bruno, who put his hand over his glass.
“I couldn’t care less who wins the election, they’re all pretty much the same,” the brigadier replied. “But there’s something rotten in the entrails of the state, some of it in my own ministry. You know what I’m talking about because I’m told you said much the same thing to Isabelle. Tapping the phones of journalists and opposition leaders, burglaries, suitcases full of secret campaign funds, crooked deals, planted evidence, enemies lists and worse. That’s what I’m sick of. To save France from that requires a change of government.”
“No, it doesn’t. It means we need a free press and a fair election.” Bruno pushed the half-full glass of scotch back across the table, picked up his hat and walked out.
As Bruno approached the mayor’s house, he saw that the mayor had returned from the hospital and was engaged in that most restful of chores, watering his garden. The mayor turned at the sound of Bruno’s footsteps, offered him a friendly nod and then raised his eyebrows.
“You look cross,” he said, over the patter of spray on leaves. “Jacqueline called to tell me about the burglary. She also told me about dinner with your friends in Sarlat. I could use a respite from going to the hospital. She’ll be here shortly. We can have a drink before we head over there.”
Bruno took a deep breath and asked, “How’s Cécile?”
“Asleep in a morphine dream. Her hand twitched when I held it. We grew these plants from seedlings, and now she won’t live to eat them. I’ve accepted that. What’s the matter with you?”
Bruno recounted his conversation with the brigadier.
“I wish I could identify for you one election when nobody in the state apparatus tried to put his thumb on the scales,” the mayor said. “It’s what they do, part of the price we have to pay for the existence of an intelligence service. We expect them to keep us safe from terrorists, but we’ve never been very good at defining the lines they should not cross.”
The mayor walked to the tap on the side of the house, turned it off and wound the hose into neat loops. “You know what I mean, Bruno. You cross a few lines yourself from time to time, and so do I,” he said. “It’s an imperfect world, so it comes down to personal judgment. I let you get away with a few things because on the whole I trust your instincts and your motives. It’s for you to decide how far you trust the brigadier.”
“I’m not sure there’s anything I can do,” Bruno said. “I thought I was doing the right thing in advising Jacqueline to release a summary of her work, so at least she keeps control of it, and it doesn’t get suppressed. But now it turns out that’s what the brigadier wanted all along.”
“Not quite. The brigadier wants it released. So do you and so does Jacqueline. But if you think that the brigadier wants a wave of heated headlines to emerge like a bombshell in the final days of the campaign, you don’t have to let him get away with that. Ah, there she is now.”
The white BMW pulled into the drive, and Jacqueline stepped out. She was wearing high heels again and a silk dress in pale green. Its sleeves came down just below her elbows, and somehow she made the plain black plastic watch on her wrist look like the height of fashion. She kissed the mayor on the lips and hugged him briefly before turning to Bruno and offering her cheek.
“I took your advice,” she said to Bruno, and pulled two folded pages of typescript from her bag. “Here’s a first draft of an article I’m thinking of sending to Le Monde.”
Bruno read out loud. “‘Recently declassified documents from American archives suggest that U.S.-European nuclear cooperation went further than has been hitherto believed and that, like Britain, France’s development of missiles and nuclear weapons benefited from the discreet sharing of U.S. technology…’
“It reads like Le Monde,” he said, handing it to the mayor, who skimmed the whole draft quickly.
“Those who know will understand the significance of this, and those who don’t will probably not get past the first paragraph,” the mayor said. “Perfect—it’s all there but not sensationalized.” He gestured to the table on the terrace where a bowl of olives and another of nuts awaited and invited his guests to sit before he went into the kitchen and returned with a tray bearing three champagne flutes and a half bottle of champagne.
“Just enough to wet our lips before we head for Sarlat,” he said, and turned to Bruno as he opened the bottle. “I hope you’re not planning to go in uniform.”
“I’ve got a jacket in the van. I’ll look like a boringly dressed civilian.”
�
��Talking of wetting our lips,” said Jacqueline, “I was thinking about Bruno’s friend at Paris Match. It might be a good idea to have him run a small item first, a teaser to whet Le Monde’s appetite. In my limited experience of the media, they seem all the more interested when they know a rival publication is sniffing after the same story. Would your friend be amenable to that?”
“I don’t know, but it’s worth asking,” Bruno said. “You may have to succumb to the Paris Match treatment, a flattering photo and an interview with the glamorous historian who straddles two continents.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“That’s not all. You can expect quite a lot about your past to come out, May ’68, Vietnam protests, SDS, radical feminist, Greenham Common.”
The mayor raised his eyebrows, and Jacqueline gave Bruno a sharp look. “You’ve been doing your homework.”
“Not at all,” he replied. “It was just read out to me from an interior ministry file on you that’s currently sitting in the gendarmerie.”
18
They were climbing into Jacqueline’s car for the journey to Sarlat when Bruno’s phone rang, and J-J’s gruff voice told him that new evidence had emerged. Yves Valentoux would be arrested that evening for questioning.
“It looks bad.” J-J went on, “Yveline has evidence that he wasn’t at home in Paris all evening, contrary to what he said. She went through all his credit card statements and then through the individual bills and found that he bought a disposable phone about six weeks ago which we’ve tracked moving down here from Paris on the day that Fullerton was killed.”
“How do we know it was Valentoux’s phone?”
“It’s on his credit card. He bought it at a Leclerc. At the same time he put twenty euros onto it prepaid, so we were able to identify the SIM card.”
“What does he say?”
“I haven’t spoken to him yet. I’m on my way to Sarlat to arrest him. I cleared it with the magistrate. Ardouin will join me at the police station. I thought you might want to be there.”
The Resistance Man Page 15
