by Brian Moore
No warning. Not a hint that he’d already sent someone down to do the job. Sent him to Salon where this old paper-shuffler shot him dead. How much are they paying Monsieur l’Inspecteur, these Jews? How much is he charging them for me?
It was eight-thirty when he arrived at Orly. He went to a phone booth. Janine answered.
‘Where are you? I thought we were going to meet at the Pergola?’
‘I’m at the Gare Montparnasse,’ he said. He hadn’t even thought what he was going to tell her: a lie came more quickly than the truth. It was normal: everyone lied in the milieu. ‘It’s my father,’ he told her. ‘He’s had a heart attack. He’s in hospital in Bayeux. Maman rang me this afternoon.’
‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I’ve had this bad feeling all day. I’ve just read your horoscope. I’m sorry about your papa. When will you be back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shit! Next Tuesday is your fête. I’m not supposed to tell you but we were planning a surprise party. What do you think? Should I cancel it?’
‘What’s this about a horoscope?’ he said. Horoscopes were no joke.
‘It’s just a horoscope in Elle. It’s silly. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I don’t remember exactly.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Oh, it was something like, “You have to make a sudden trip and lose out on pleasures.” I thought that meant the party. It sounds like it, doesn’t it?’
‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Get it and read it to me. Hurry. I’ve got to go.’
He waited. There was something bad in the horoscope. He knew it.
‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘Virgo. With a seventh house, Saturn, in your solar return chart being echoed by a full moon in Pisces, this is a dangerous time for you. You will have to make a sudden trip and lose out on previously planned pleasures. Beware of strangers on your journey. As Mars moves to Leo on the 9th you will be forced into an action that could do you great harm. If possible you should not agree to a proposal that others have made to you. This is no time to play the hero.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Yes. It’s funny, isn’t it, about the sudden trip. I hope everything goes all right with your papa. And listen. Phone me on Sunday. I won’t cancel the party until I hear from you. Take care.’
‘I will.’
On the plane he took out the sheet of ruled paper and looked at what was written on it: Prieuré St Christophe. Avenue Henri Martin 6, Aix-En-Provence. Telephone: 42 96 17 36.
Underneath this address someone had written in a tiny tight handwriting:
Cistercian residence, adjoins Cistercian boys’ school. Prior, Dom André Vergnes. Sixty-five. [In touch with Chevaliers.] B should arrive there August 10. He is expected to stay circa fourteen days, then plans move to Villefranche, then Nice. Drives white Peugeot, 1977. In Aix, the Café La Mascotte, Place des Tanneurs, is where he goes most afternoons. Uses this café’s address as a poste restante.
He took his bag from under the plane seat and opened it to the folder. There were two photographs. The first, a black-and-white head-and-shoulders of the subject, showed a young man in a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, pointed ears close to his head like an angry dog, frizzy blond hair, light-coloured eyes. Underneath, pasted on the border of the print, a hand-lettered notation: BROSSARD. 1946. He stared at the face. French. Pure blood. Not like me. He looked at the second photograph. The slip of paper with it said it was seven years old. There were two men, an old priest and another old fart, white-haired, in a cardigan. He studied the old fart’s face. The same close-set ears, the same stupid stare. Now he’s supposed to be seventy, he should be dead, he’s part of history. The milice. Those days are old movies, that’s all, Nazi uniforms, propeller bombers, Casablanca with Ingrid Bergman, and chez nous, Rommel in the desert with his tanks, and the Americans landing at Algiers. Papa was a little kid in the Arab quarter in Oran, he saw Rommel’s tanks on the run, then the winners, Americans, French, British, parading through the streets, he loved that, he loved uniforms, Papa, he wanted to be a soldier, a French soldier, not the ones in France, not Vichy, not the ones this guy fought for, but de Gaulle’s. Not that it mattered. No matter which French side you fight for, the French will fuck you, like they did Papa, who couldn’t wait to grow up and join the French army, yes, in ’55, signing on in Algiers, he was twenty years old, and they filled him full of lies, he was to be a Harkis, part of an elite commando, auxiliary troops, riding camels, encamped beside the French, Papa was in the top commando, the Georges, Muslims under French officers, fighting for Salan and the junta against the FLN, our own brothers. I wonder if that rich Jew officer tonight knew I’m the son of a Harkis. No, he wouldn’t know that. I’m not dark, like Papa. I can always pass for French.
He looked again at the photographs on his lap. The old man could have changed a bit in seven years. But his ears will be the same. When I see him, I may only have a minute to make up my mind. So I have to be sure.
He looked again at the photograph of the young man, the milicien. Look at the ears, the nose, the mouth. Remember them. Remember them.
But the photograph face stared out at him, as if defying him to remember, the young man’s eyes calculating and guarded as though the camera were in a police station. He looked at that face. When you think of it, this guy is like Papa. They both picked the wrong side and paid for it. Papa, who fought his guts out for the French, had to leave his own country because his people saw him as a traitor. If he’d stayed, people like him, the FLN buried them in sand and put honey on their faces for the ants to eat. Or cut their ears, lips and balls off, dressed them as women and lit them with a match and a jerrycan of petrol. And the French did nothing. They sailed home. Like the Nazis. The Nazis dumped this guy who fought for them against his own people. Papa was lucky, he didn’t stay behind, he thought he was French, he thought he could live here, so he took the lousy French offer to leave with the army and sail to a country he never knew. In school they told him Algeria was part of France, stupid cunt, he wasn’t French he was Harkis, native troops, an embarrassment, the French government stuck them into camps and farmed them out as casual labour and promised proper jobs, proper housing, all that shit. But did nothing.
And here I am tonight, going south, to Aix, not so far from where I was born in the Harkis camp at Sète, where Papa was paid slave wages to pick grapes. Is it any wonder he did what he did? Is it any wonder I do what I do?
But that’s it. People who back the wrong side lose the war. And go on losing. Like Papa, picking up the gun again, after eight years’ hard labour in Harkis camps. And two years after that, shot dead in the street by French flics. And look at this guy, this French Nazi, condemned to death in absentia twice over, a traitor, forty years on the run. Even now, when he’s an old man, it’s not finished for him, I’m on this plane, I’m going to kill him. And he, he’s waiting for me. He killed whoever came before me.
My horoscope. What date is today? The 6th. ‘On the 9th you will be forced into an action that could do you great harm. This is no time to play the hero.’
3
How old was she? It was the first question Colonel Roux asked himself when he received the summons to meet her. As an examining magistrate she must be a woman of a certain age. But there was always this curiosity if one was to work with a woman. Madame Annemarie Livi. An Italian name. He had not been able to ask anyone about her. Until this news became official, it was something he was not able to discuss, even with his fellow officers. General de Bernonville himself had called Roux into his office and warned him that politics were involved. Politics at the highest level. The Commissariat of Police did not yet know that they were being dismissed from the investigation. There were sure to be repercussions. Political repercussions.
Last evening he and Claire had dined together in a little restaurant just off Rue du Four. Claire’s sister, Anne-Laure, had agreed to babysit. He had waited
until then to tell Claire his news. And, of course, the first thing Claire seized on was that he was going to work with a woman.
‘How old is she?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been wondering. She must be getting on, if she’s a juge d’instruction.’
‘Livi,’ Claire said. ‘Wasn’t that Yves Montand’s real name?’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’s his sister.’
‘I hope so,’ Claire said. ‘In that case she’ll be too old for you.’
Now, in the sunshine of a May morning, waiting in a corridor outside one of those anonymous offices near the Galeries d’Instruction in the Palais de Justice, he saw, sitting at her desk, a tall woman, elegantly dressed in a dark-green tailleur and a white silk blouse. In her late forties, he supposed. Her dark hair spilled over her shoulders as she bent to untie the tapes of the mass of documents that the clerk spread out on her desk. The clerk turned and signalled Roux to enter. Judge Livi stood up, smiling, her hand extended in greeting. The clerk closed the door, leaving them alone.
He liked her at once. She was direct.
‘Colonel, as you know, I am the third examining magistrate to be given this case. When I read through these dossiers, I became aware of the difficulties my predecessors faced. The case is baffling. We simply must take a new direction and at once. Tell me. Have you been told why I am requesting that the gendarmerie take over this investigation?’
It was a direct question. He gave General de Bernonville’s answer. ‘I’ve been told that it concerns the relations between the Commissariat of Police and the Vichy regime. It’s a matter of record that the French police were pro-Pétain and collaborated with the German occupiers in deporting Jews to German concentration camps. Moreover they often acted on their own initiative before the Germans requested such aid. The gendarmerie, on the other hand, were sympathetic to the Resistance and to the de Gaulle forces fighting outside France. As a result the gendarmerie has a clean record in the matter of collaboration with the Germans. The Commissariat of Police does not. General de Bernonville, my superior, says that because of that you have decided to transfer this investigation from the police to the army.’
‘Perfect summation, Colonel. You should have been a lawyer.’ Judge Livi leaned back, shook her head and laughed.
Definitely an attractive woman, he decided.
She then lifted in both hands a heavy sheaf of documents as though weighing them. ‘This is only a part of it,’ she said. ‘It would take a month to read it all. I’ve tried. What I find is forty years of legal obfuscation, court reports, trial delays, unsuccessful police investigations and repeated attempts by the Catholic clergy to obtain a pardon for this man. Why? Brossard is a former member of the milice, twice sentenced to death in absentia as a wartime collaborator, thief and murderer. Why?’
‘A pardon was obtained, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘In 1971. Partly through the efforts of a certain monsignor.’
‘You said “partly”, Colonel. And that’s the right word. No monsignor, or even bishop, could engineer such a pardon without some help from the Elysée Palace. That’s the angle that interests me. How could they persuade the President of the Republic to sign a pardon for a thug like Brossard? And they almost got away with it. In fact, if this new charge hadn’t been laid against him we wouldn’t be able to touch him now.’
‘You’re right, Madame. That changed things. Of course, he’d have been freed in any case, when the statute of limitations for wartime crimes ran out five years ago. The question is, why didn’t he come out of hiding then?’
‘I suspect he was afraid of reprisals, perhaps from the sons and daughters of his victims. The same people who’ve launched this new charge against him, the charge of a crime against humanity for the murder of the fourteen Dombey Jews in 1944. Thank God, there’s no statute of limitations on that.’
‘Except for his age,’ Roux said. ‘He’s seventy years old.’
‘I know. If he drops dead before we find him, the big fish will never be brought to trial.’
‘Big fish? Do you mean people in the Church?’
‘No, I don’t mean the Church, although the Church is involved, of course. Tell me, Colonel, are you a Catholic?’
Roux shrugged. ‘Statistically, yes. Practically, no.’
‘Like so many of us,’ Judge Livi said. ‘Neither believing nor practising. And yet we know that, within the Church – what’s the phrase? – within my Father’s house there are many mansions. I think that’s particularly true today. Everyone knows that the main body of the French hierarchy was pro-Vichy during the Second World War. There may be things that the Church still wishes to conceal. But we also know that this wasn’t the whole truth. There were prelates and priests who actively supported the Resistance, hid Jews and protested against the deportations.’
‘True. But I believe, Madame, the media’s charge that, over the years, monsignors, bishops, even cardinals, have been involved in efforts to secure a pardon for Brossard is nothing less than the truth. The Church is heavily compromised. And they know it. That’s why Cardinal Delavigne has appointed laymen to head his investigation. By the way, I’ve been told we may have a lead there.’
‘You don’t waste any time, do you?’ Judge Livi said. ‘What sort of lead?’
‘A member of the Cardinal’s commission.’
‘That could be helpful.’
‘Yes, but it could make things difficult for us. If the Church carries out a real investigation, priests who helped Brossard in the past may turn against him. And that will drive him deeper into hiding.’
‘On the other hand, Colonel, some of them may be willing to co-operate with us?’
‘I hope so. But you mentioned, earlier . . . you said something about big fish?’
‘Don’t you know the people I’m referring to?’
Roux hesitated. Don’t make a gaffe. Let her tell me. He shook his head.
‘Three other Frenchmen were accused, like Brossard, of crimes against humanity. None have been brought to trial. One of these men, Vichy’s top representative in dealings with the Nazi occupiers and the man responsible for the first big round-up of French Jews in 1942, here in Paris at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, managed like the others to have his case delayed time after time, and is still living in Paris, in comfort, a free man. As is the second man, the former Vichy Chief of Police. It’s interesting to know that this same Vichy police chief stood for election to parliament after the war and was, moreover, a close friend of the President of the Republic.’
‘I remember thinking much the same thing,’ Roux said.
‘As for the last of the three, he is possibly the greatest criminal of all. He’s living, at liberty, in Paris, in his comfortable home, surrounded by friends and relations. He’s not, like Brossard, a convicted criminal, with a long record in police dossiers. He is a Commander of the Legion of Honour, a greatly skilled technocrat, accustomed to operate at the highest level of government. He’s a former Secretary General of the Department of the Gironde, a friend to several French presidents in the post-war years and was a minister in Giscard d’Estaing’s government in the sixties. In the Vichy years he was also responsible, time and time again, for the dispatch to Germany of Jewish death trains.’
‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’ Roux said.
‘Not really. All three of these men had excellent lawyers. They didn’t hide themselves like Brossard. They didn’t need to. They came forward, maintaining a discreet silence as the charges of a crime against humanity were read out to them. They were then allowed to go free, pending a time when their cases would be tried. I believe that, unless we find Brossard and bring him to trial, none of these big fish will ever have to appear before the courts. But if Brossard is sentenced, public opinion can be mobilized to demand that they also be tried. And he must be tried! If he is, I suspect we’ll find out that over the years presidents, prime ministers, cardinals, judges and prefects of police have all been part of this co
nspiracy. And unless the whole truth is brought out into the open it will for ever be a stain on the conscience of our country.’
Judge Livi leaned back and sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Colonel. I know that sounds like a courtroom speech, but it’s what I believe.’
Roux looked at her and smiled. ‘I’m glad you do, Madame. I believe it too.’
‘So, we’re together on this?’
‘Of course. I’ve already started my investigation. This afternoon I leave for Caunes, in the Languedoc.’
‘Caunes?’
‘Monsignor Maurice Le Moyne is living there, in retirement. He was Brossard’s great champion. It was partly, if not largely, through his efforts that the famous pardon was procured.’
‘Le Moyne,’ Judge Livi said. ‘But why should he help you? Or do you have something else in mind?’
‘The charge of the crime against humanity has been laid by a Jewish group, under the direction of Serge Klarsfeld, the lawyer who found Klaus Barbie and brought him to trial. They are actively searching for Brossard. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which is, as you know, the most successful and wide-ranging Nazi-hunting group, is also intensifying its efforts to find him. These are law-abiding groups who will act in a law-abiding manner. But there seems to be another group involved. The DST, which monitors terrorist activities, has intercepted two telephone conversations which reveal that what seems to be a Jewish commando is plotting to assassinate Brossard, because they believe he will never be brought to trial. If that’s true, we’ve got to act quickly.’
‘Interesting,’ Judge Livi said. ‘Why wasn’t I told about this?’
‘The DST is a branch of the National Police. They don’t want to see the gendarmerie succeed where they’ve failed.’
‘So they didn’t inform you, either?’
‘No. But we have our sources. And if there is a Jewish commando trying to kill Brossard, I can use that information to convince his clerical friends that we are the least dangerous of his pursuers. Brossard himself may not be swayed by such an argument. But Monsignor Le Moyne? I think it’s worth a try.’
