Текст книги "Bruno, Chief Of Police"

Автор книги: Martin Walker

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that I could find, but we have certainly tracked your Villanova and that new

name you gave me, Hussein Boudiaf. It’s dynamite, Bruno.’

‘What do you mean, dynamite?’

‘Have you ever heard of a military unit called the Force Mobile?’

‘No.’

‘Look, Bruno, you’re not going to believe it unless you come and see this stuff

for yourself. Your men Villanova and Boudiaf were war criminals.’

‘War criminals? Where? How do you mean?’

‘It’s too complicated to explain on the phone. There’s so much background. What

I suggest is that you go to Pamela’s house and ask her to give you a couple of

my books that she’ll find on the desk in my room. Have you a pen? I’ll give you

the titles. Look up the Force Mobile in the indexes. The first one is Histoire

de la Résistance en Périgord by Guy Penaud, and the other one is 1944 en

Dordogne by Jacques Lagrange. I’ll call Pamela and get her to look them out for

you, but you have to read the bits about the Force Mobile and call me back. I—

Dammit, my phone’s running out of juice. I’ll recharge it and wait for your

call. And my hotel in Bordeaux is the Hotel d’Angleterre, easy to remember.

Believe me, you have to come here.’

CHAPTER

24

In Pamela’s large sitting room, where the walls were glowing gold in the

sunlight and her grandmother’s portrait stared serenely down at him, Bruno

plunged back nearly sixty years into the horror of war and occupation in this

valley of the Vézčre. The smell of burning and cordite seemed to rise from the

austere pages of Christine’s books, and the history of times long before he was

born suddenly seemed intimately, terribly close.

The Force Mobile, he read, was a special unit formed by the Milice, the

much-feared police of the Vichy regime that administered France under the German

Occupation after 1940. Under German orders, transmitted and endorsed by French

officials of the Vichy government, the Milice rounded up Jews for the death

camps and young Frenchmen who were conscripted into forced labour in German

factories. As the tide of war turned against Germany after 1942, the Resistance

grew, and its ranks were swollen by tens of thousands of young Frenchmen fleeing

to the hills to escape the

STO

, the Service de Travail Obligatoire. They hid out

in the countryside, where they were recruited by the Resistance and took the

name Maquis, from the word for the impenetrable brush of the hills of Corsica.

To this raw material, the Maquis, came the parachute drops of arms and radio

operators, medical supplies, spies and military instructors from Britain. Some

came from the Free French led by de Gaulle, some from Britain’s Special

Operations Executive and others from British Intelligence, MI6. The British

wanted the Maquis to disrupt the German Occupation, or, in the words of Winston

Churchill’s order establishing the

SOE

, ‘to set Europe ablaze’. But as the

invasion neared, the prime British objective was to disrupt military

communications in France, and to force German troops away from defending the

beaches against an Allied invasion, and drive them into operations against the

Maquis deep inside France. The Gaullists wanted to arm the Maquis and to build

the Resistance into a force that could claim to have liberated France, thus

saving France’s honour after the humiliation of defeat and Occupation. But the

Gaullists also wanted to mould the Resistance into a political movement that

would be able to govern France after the war and prevent a seizure of power by

their rivals, the Communist Party. On occasion, Gaullists and Communists fought

it out with guns, usually in disputes over parachute drops.

The Milice and their German masters crafted a new strategy to crush the

Resistance in key areas. Specialist German troops, anti-partisan units, were

shipped in from the Russian front, and from Yugoslavia where they had become

experienced at battling similar guerrilla forces. But the real key to the new

strategy was to starve out the Resistance by terrorising the farmers and rural

people on whom the Maquis depended for their food. Rural families whose sons had

disappeared were raided, beaten, sometimes killed and the women raped. Crops and

livestock were confiscated, farms and barns were burned. This reign of terror in

the countryside was carried out by a unit specially recruited for the task, the

Force Mobile. In the Périgord, it was based in Périgueux.

Sitting in Pamela’s peaceful home, Bruno read on, rapt and appalled. He knew

that the Occupation had been rough, that many in the Resistance were killed, and

that the Vichy regime became engaged in a civil war of Frenchmen killing

Frenchmen. He knew about atrocities like Oradour-sur-Glane, the village to the

north where German troops, in reprisal for the death of a German officer, had

locked hundreds of women and children into the church and set it on fire,

machine-gunning any who tried to escape the flames. He knew of the small

memorials dotted around his region: a plaque to a handful of young Frenchmen who

died defending a bridge to delay German troop movements; a small obelisk with

the names of those shot pour la Patrie. But he had never known about the Force

Mobile, or the wave of deliberate brutality inflicted on this countryside he

thought he knew so well.

The Force Mobile in Périgord was commanded by a former professional footballer

from Marseilles called Villanova. Oh, sweet Jesus, Bruno thought as he read the

name he’d so recently come to know. Villanova brought a new refinement to the

rural terror. He believed that the French peasants would be even more

effectively intimidated if the reprisals and rapes and farm burnings were

carried out by North Africans, specially recruited for the job with promises of

extra pay and rations, and all the women and loot they could take from the farms

they raided. Villanova found his recruits in the immigrant slums of Marseilles

and Toulon, where unemployment and poverty had provoked desperation, and where

he had many acquaintances in the local football teams that included young Arab

immigrants.

Bruno shivered as he realised where this was leading. He would have to pursue

the hypothesis that his murder victim, Hamid al-Bakr, war hero of France, had

also been Hussein Boudiaf, war criminal and terroriser of Frenchmen. Christine

was right. He would have to go to Bordeaux in the morning, and gather the

evidence about the Force Mobile, Villanova, Boudiaf, and other members. This

theory, which had seemed as obvious to Christine as it now did to him, was

indeed dynamite. The evidence for it would have to be complete and unassailable.

They would also have to research the names of the victims of the Force Mobile in

order to identify the families who had suffered – and who had every reason to

want vengeance against any of Villanova’s North African troops still living.

They would certainly have the motive to kill an old Arab whom they recognised

from those dark days of the war.

And what of Momu? What would it do to Momu, to Karim and Rashida, if they were

to learn that their beloved father and grandfather had been a war criminal, a

terrorist in the employ of the puppet Vichy state, acting under Nazi orders?

What kind of shock would it be to learn that the man you respected as a war

hero, as the brave immigrant who established his family as Frenchmen with

education and prospects and family pride, had in reality been a beast who spent

the rest of his life living a lie? How could the family stay in St Denis with

that knowledge hanging over them? How would the rest of the little North African

community in St Denis react to this revelation?

Bruno could scarcely bring himself to think about the French public reaction to

the North Africans once all this became known, or to imagine by how many hundred

votes the Front National vote would swell. He bent forwards in his chair, his

head in his hands, biting his lip as he tried to cudgel his brain into rational

thought. He had to make some plans, talk to the Mayor, brief

J-J

and Isabelle,

and arrange to go to Bordeaux in the morning. He must talk to Christine, get

some advice on how on earth he could prepare his town for a bombshell such as

this.

‘Are you all right, Bruno?’ Pamela had come in to the room. ‘Christine said you

would have some pretty grim news and you would need a very stiff drink, but you

look quite devastated. You’re as white as a sheet. Here, have some whisky – it’s

not that Lagavullin you tried the other night. It’s plain Scotch, so take a big

gulp.’

‘Thanks, Pamela.’ He took a hefty gulp, and almost gagged on the fire of it, but

it made him feel better. ‘Thanks for the drink, and for being normal. I’m afraid

I have been in something of a nightmare, reading about these horrors of the

Occupation. It’s a relief to come back to the present day and to life in a

pleasant home.’

‘Christine said she thought it was somehow related to Hamid’s murder, but she

didn’t give any details. It’s funny how the past never quite goes away.’

‘You’re right. The past doesn’t die. Maybe it even keeps the power to kill.

Look, I have what I need now. I’ll take these books and leave you in peace. I

have to get back to my office and get to work.’

‘Are you sure, Bruno? Don’t you need some food?’

He shook his head, picked up Christine’s books and took his leave. As he drove

away he looked with new eyes at this placid countryside that had known such

events, and known them within living memory. He thought of smoke in the sky from

burning farms, blood on the ground from slaughtered fathers; he imagined French

policemen giving the orders that deployed military convoys on the country roads

– convoys packed with Arab mercenaries in black uniforms, with licence to rape,

loot and pillage. He thought of half-starved young Frenchmen, hiding in the

hills with only a handful of weapons, helplessly watching the reprisals

unleashed against their families and their homes. Poor France, he thought. Poor

Périgord. Poor Momu.

And, Bruno wondered, whatever can we do with the Frenchmen who took their

long-delayed revenge against one of their tormentors? At least now he knew why a

swastika had been carved into Hamid’s chest. It signified not the politics of

the killers, but the real identity of the corpse.

Once back in St Denis, Bruno drove immediately to the Mayor’s house by the river

on the outskirts of town, showed him Christine’s books and the photograph of

young Boudiaf with Villanova, and explained why he now believed their dead Arab

war hero had been in the Force Mobile. The Mayor was swiftly convinced, but

agreed the chain of evidence had to be made solid. They sat down and, from

memory, composed a partial list of all the families they knew in St Denis or the

surrounding region who had been part of the Resistance. They could flesh out the

list the next day from the records of the Compagnons de la Résistance in Paris.

‘So the police are now going to start investigating half the families of St

Denis to see which of them might have known that Hamid had been in the Force

Mobile. How the hell do we stop this getting out of hand, Bruno?’

‘I don’t know, Sir. I’m trying to think this through. They’ll question the old

ones first, those who might have recognised Hamid. It could take weeks, a lot of

detectives, and then the media and the politicians get involved. We could have a

national scandal on our hands. We may need all your political connections to get

the people in Paris to realise there can be no winners in this, nothing but a

political nightmare when the right-wingers make hay about French families being

burned out and terrorised by Arabs in German pay. Speaking personally, I’m so

outraged by it I can hardly think straight, Sir.’

‘Stop calling me Sir, Bruno. We’ve been through too much for that and I don’t

know what to do any more than you do. In fact, I trust your instincts on this

better than my own. I’m too much the politician.’

‘Politics may be what we need to get through this. But I have to go and brief

the investigation team.’

‘You haven’t told them yet? So they don’t know anything about the Force Mobile?’

the Mayor demanded, and then paused before continuing thoughtfully, ‘So we have

some time to think how much to tell them.’

‘No time at all, Sir,’ Bruno said briskly. Determined to squash whatever

thoughts might be stirring in the Mayor’s mind, he went on, ‘They know I’m

working on this and Isabelle, the Inspector, has already been delving in the

military archives about Hamid’s mysterious war record. They are close on that

trail, and I have to go.’

Bruno left the Mayor sitting hunched and looking slightly shrunken in the rather

over-decorated sitting room that was his wife’s great pride, and walked out to

his van to call Isabelle. They met in his office at the Mairie where he laid out

the evidence for her. Together they rang

J-J

and agreed to meet in Bordeaux the

next morning. He phoned Christine at her Bordeaux hotel, got from her the mobile

number of the curator of the Jean Moulin archives, and arranged for the next

morning’s visit. He decided it was not his job to alert Tavernier.

J-J

could do

that.

More depressed than he had ever felt, Bruno could not think of food, but

Isabelle took him off to the local pizza restaurant where he ate mechanically

and drank too much wine. Careless of the town’s gossips, she drove him home and

put him to bed. She fed his chickens, undressed and climbed into bed beside him.

He awoke in the early hours, and she pushed him into the shower and put on a pot

of coffee. Then she joined him under the steaming water and they made urgent

love amid the soap suds, ending up passionately on the bathroom floor.

Later she brought the coffee and they went back to bed. There, they turned more

gently to one another and were still engrossed in each other’s bodies when the

cockerel crowed to signal the dawn – which made them both laugh and Bruno

realised he felt human once more. They showered again, and Bruno watered his

garden and fed Gigi, then made fresh coffee while Isabelle went back to her

hotel to dress. She returned with a bag of fresh croissants from Fauquet’s and

they took her car to Périgueux. Bruno kept his hand resting lightly on her thigh

for the entire journey.

‘You’re a very remarkable woman,’ he told her as they reached the new motorway

at Niversac. ‘That makes twice you’ve rescued me. And this time you did it even

after you saw me drunk.’

‘You’re worth it,’ she said, taking his hand, putting it between her thighs and

squeezing it. ‘And there’s another bad moment ahead, when you have to help us

make the arrest. You’d better prepare yourself for that. Whatever Hamid was or

whatever he did, he was unlawfully murdered.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But if it had been your family, your farm, your mother, you

would have killed him yourself. That’s justice.’

‘It may be justice, but it’s not the law,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

Indeed he did know it, and it saddened him. Yet his sadness was of a different

order to the despair that had gripped him the previous evening. That at least

had lifted.

Bruno and Isabelle met

J-J

and a liaison officer from the Bordeaux police on the

steps of the Centre Jean Moulin at nine a.m. Christine was already inside with

the elderly French historian who ran the archives. The Centre was named after

one of the most famous of France’s Resistance leaders, who had sought to unify

Communists, Gaullists and patriots into a common command and had been betrayed

to the Gestapo. It stood in the centre of the city, an elegant neo-classical

building of white stone that hid the dark history within. Best known to the

public as a museum of the Resistance, it contained showcases of domestic

objects: wooden shoes, wedding dresses made of flour sacks, ration cards and

other realities of daily wartime life. Also on show were bicycle-driven dynamos

that produced electricity for clandestine radios, and cars with giant bags on

the roof that contained carbon gas made from charcoal, to use in the absence of

petrol. There were displays of the different contents of the weapons containers

– Sten guns and bazookas, grenades and sticky bombs – dropped by British

aircraft for use by the Resistance. Underground newspapers were laid out to

read. And playing in the background was a discreet but continuous soundtrack of

the songs they sang, from the love songs of Charles Aznavour to the defiant

heroics of the Resistance anthem, Le Chant des Partisans.

But Bruno discovered that the real heart of the Centre Jean Moulin was to be

found on its upper floors, which contained the written and oral archives and the

research staff who worked there, keeping alive the memory of this tortured

period of French history.

Christine and

J-J

sifted through the fragmentary records of the Force Mobile,

and established that Hussein Boudiaf and Massili Barakine had been recruited to

a special unit of the Milice in Marseilles in December 1942. After two months of

basic training, they were assigned to the Force Mobile, a unit of a hundred and

twenty men commanded by a Captain Villanova, which specialised in what were

described as ‘counter-terrorist operations’ in the Marseilles region. In October

of 1943, after the British and Americans had invaded Italy and knocked Hitler’s

ally Mussolini out of the war, the Germans had spread the Occupation into the

previous ‘autonomous’ zone run by the Vichy government, and the Force Mobile

came under Gestapo rule. The outfit was expanded, and Villanova’s unit was

assigned to Périgueux in February 1944, charged with taking ‘punitive measures

against terrorist supporters’.

They found pay slips with Boudiaf’s name, movement orders for Villanova’s unit,

payroll listings that included Boudiaf and Barakine, and requisitions for

special equipment that included explosives and extra fuel to destroy ‘terrorist

support bases’. The curator, cross-checking with the records of the Force

Mobile’s pay office, found a record of Boudiaf’s promotion to squad leader in

May, after one of Villanova’s trucks was destroyed in a Resistance ambush. The

promotion listing included a new Milice pay book and identity card, complete

with photograph, that had never been collected by Boudiaf. The Milice records

stopped in June 1944, with the Allied invasion of Normandy and the complete

collapse of the Vichy regime.

Bruno and Isabelle went through the Force Mobile mission reports, the punitive

sweeps – staged from the Périgueux base – north into the Limousin region, west

to the wine country of St Emilion and Pomerol, east toward Brive and south into

the valleys of the Vézčre and the Dordogne. They hit the region around St Denis

in late March of 1944, raiding farms where the sons had failed to appear for

forced labour service. They hit again in early May, based on intelligence from

interrogations of Resistance prisoners after a Wehrmacht anti-partisan force,

the Bohmer division, had surprised and destroyed a Maquis base in the hills

above Sarlat. Bruno noted the names of the interrogated prisoners, who had all

been shot; the names of the families listed as having sons who failed to appear

for the

STO

, and the names of the towns and hamlets where the Force Mobile had

been deployed. St Denis was not among them, but the surrounding hamlets of St

Félix, Bastignac, Melissou, Ponsac, St Chamassy and Tillier had all been raided.

They spread out the photographs on the curator’s desk and compared them. There

was no doubt that Hussein Boudiaf the footballer was also Hussein Boudiaf the

newly promoted squad leader of the Force Mobile. And if he was not also Hamid

al-Bakr then it was his double. But all bureaucracies tend to operate in the

same way. The French Army pay book contained two thumb prints of al-Bakr, and

the Milice pay book had been designed in precisely the same format and contained

two thumb prints of Boudiaf. They were identical. The dates and place of birth

were also identical, 14 July 1923, in Oran, Algeria. Only the addresses were

different. Boudiaf’s address was given as the police barracks in Périgueux, not

as Marseilles.

‘So that’s our murder victim,’ said

J-J

. ‘The bastard.’

‘Just one moment,’ said the curator, and went to a large bookshelf where he

removed a fat volume. He began leafing through the index, and then looked up

with satisfaction. ‘Yes, I thought I remembered that. Rue des Poissoniers was

part of the Vieux Port of Marseilles that was destroyed in the bombing before

the invasion, which makes it a useful address for someone who wanted to hide his

true identity.’

They went back to the Force Mobile mission reports, signed by Villanova. The

raids around St Denis on May the eighth had included squad leader Boudiaf’s

unit. They claimed to have destroyed fourteen ‘terrorist supply bases’, which

meant farms. May the eighth 1944, thought Bruno, the day that France celebrated

her part in the victory that came exactly a year after the Force Mobile raided

the outlying hamlets of the Commune of St Denis. He would never think of the

annual May parade at the town war memorial in quite the same way again.

Suddenly, a memory came to him in a series of distinct but clear images, almost

like the frames of a comic book or a film in slow motion. This year’s parade,

just three days before Hamid’s murder, and Hamid in the crowd with his family,

proudly watching Karim carry the flag to the war memorial. Hamid, who had been a

recluse, never seen in the town, never going to the shops or sitting in the café

to gossip or playing petanque with the other old men. Hamid, who had mixed only

with his own family and kept himself carefully out of sight. And then

Jean-Pierre from the bicycle shop and Bachelot the shoemender, the two

Resistance veterans who never spoke but who carried the flags side by side at

each May the eighth parade … In his mind’s eye, he clearly saw them at this

year’s parade, saw that moment when he noticed them staring intently at one

another in unspoken communication. He saw the Englishman’s grandson playing the

Last Post, remembered the tears it brought to his eyes, and recalled his

conclusion that Jean-Pierre and Bachelot had connected through the music and the

memory. Perhaps that was not the connection at all

Bruno played each scene back carefully in his mind, then he went to the

interrogation reports that came from the prisoners taken by the Bohmer division.

He examined the list of captured men who were to be shot. The third name was

Philippe Bachelot, aged nineteen, of St Félix. Jean-Pierre’s family name was

Courrailler, but he found no Courrailler in the list of prisoners. There was

still a branch of the Courrailler family, though, in Ponsac, where they kept a

farm, and a daughter who ran the kennels, breeding Labradors. He knew the farm,

because it was one of the few places new enough and wealthy enough to have

installed a special barn with white tiles that met European hygiene codes. Bruno

excused himself and stepped out from the Archives and down the stairs, through

the museum and into the open air of the square. There he took out his mobile

phone to call the Mayor.

‘It’s him all right, Sir,’ Bruno told Gérard Mangin. ‘Photograph and thumb

print. Hamid al-Bakr was also Hussein Boudiaf of the Force Mobile, a squad

leader who burned a lot of farms in our Commune in May of 1944. There’s no

question about it, the evidence is solid. But it gets worse. One of the farms

that was hit was that of Bachelot’s family, after they interrogated his elder

brother. Another was in Ponsac, and I think it was the Courrailler farm, but

could you get someone to check the compensation records in the Mairie archives?

I remember that the families all got some kind of compensation after the war.’

‘That’s right,’ said the Mayor. ‘There was a lawsuit in the Courailler family

about who got what after the Germans paid over a lot of money for war damages.

All I recall is that half the family still doesn’t speak to the other half

because of the lawsuit, but I’ll get hold of the full list and call you back. Is

this leading where I think it is, towards Bachelot and Jean-Pierre?’

‘It’s too soon to say, but I’m not with the police team now. I’m taking a walk

outside on my own. This part is between you and me; it’s town business. When I

go back into the Archives I assume we’ll just collate all the evidence, make

copies and get them certified by the curator. And of course we’ll collect the

names of families who were victimised by the Force Mobile. We could end up with

a long list of possible suspects and it could take some time. A lot of potential

witnesses have died and memories aren’t what they were.’

‘I understand, Bruno. You will be back in time for tomorrow’s parade?’

Tomorrow was the eighteenth of June, the anniversary of the Resistance, of de

Gaulle’s message from London in 1940 for France to fight on, for she may have

lost a battle but she had not lost the war. Bachelot and Jean-Pierre would carry

the flags, just like always.

‘I’ll be there, Sir. And everything is in order for the firework display

tomorrow night.’

‘Let’s hope those are the only fireworks we get,’ said the Mayor. With a

heaviness in his step but a sense of justice in his heart, Bruno went back into

the building.

CHAPTER

25

They drove back in convoy to the police headquarters in Périgueux, Bruno riding

with

J-J

and Isabelle following behind with thick files of photocopies in the

back of her car. He would have driven with Isabelle but

J-J

held open the

passenger door of his big Renault and said, ‘Get in.’

J-J

waited until they were out of Bordeaux and on the autoroute before saying,

‘If you screw me around on this, Bruno, I’ll never forgive you.’

‘I thought you would threaten to put me in jail,’ Bruno said.

‘If I could, I damn well would,’

J-J

grunted. ‘I think you already know who

killed the bastard, and you are pretty sure that nobody else will ever find out.

That’s what you went out to tell your Mayor. You and your local knowledge. Am I

right?’

‘No, you’re wrong. I may have some suspicions, but I’m pretty sure neither you

nor I nor anybody else is going to be able to prove it. There’s no forensic

evidence. If there wasn’t enough to convict Richard and Jacqueline, I don’t see

how you’re going to be able to pin this on anybody else, not without a

confession. And some of these old Resistance types went through a Gestapo

interrogation without talking. They won’t confess to you. If this case goes

public, you can imagine the lawyers who’ll be standing in line to represent them

for free, for patriotism. It will be an honour to stand up and defend these old

heroes. Any ambitious and clever young lawyer can build a career on a case like

this. You know what, J-J? Tavernier will fight tooth and nail for the privilege

of representing them. He’ll resign from the Magistrature, resign from the

Ministry, make a big media trial and ride it all the way to the National

Assembly.’

J-J

grunted a kind of agreement and they drove on in silence.

‘Damn it to hell, Bruno,’

J-J

finally burst out. ‘Is that what you want? An

unsolved murder? Dark suspicions of racial killing? It will poison your precious

St Denis for years to come.’

‘I have thought hard about that and it’s a risk we have to take, a risk we have

to balance against the alternative,’ Bruno said. ‘And there’s something else

that worries me. We toss this phrase around about him being a war criminal, and

it was hideous what he and that Force Mobile did around here. But think about it

a bit more. He was a kid, nineteen or twenty, living in the slums of Marseilles

in the middle of a war. No job, no family, probably despised as a dirty Arab by

the people around him. The only guy who ever gave him a break was his football

coach, Villanova. Suddenly through Villanova he gets a job and a uniform, three

square meals a day and his pay. And just for once he’s somebody. He has a gun

and comrades and a barracks to sleep in, and he carries out the orders he’s

given from a man he respects and who has all the authority of the state behind

him. After the Force Mobile was wound up, he paid his dues. He fought for

France, in our uniform this time. He fought in Vietnam. He fought in Algeria. He

was in a good unit that saw a lot of combat. And he stayed on for the rest of

his life in our own French army, the only place he could think of as home. So

yes, a war criminal, but he did his best to make up for it. He raised a fine

family, made his kids get an education so that now his son has taught every kid

in St Denis how to do his sums. His grandson is a fine young man with a

great-grandson on the way. Do we want to drag all that through the shit-storm

this would become?’

‘Shit-storm is right.’

‘Anyway, this is not going to be decided by you or me,

J-J

,’ Bruno went on.

‘This is going to go all the way to the top, to Paris. They’re not going to want

a trial of some old Resistance heroes who executed an Arab war criminal sixty

years after he burned their farms, raped their mothers and killed their

brothers. Work it out. The Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Justice,

the Minister of Defence and the Prime Minister will all have to troop into the

Elysée Palace and explain to the President of the Republic how the TV news and

the headlines for the next few weeks are going to be about gangs of armed Arabs

collaborating with the Nazis to terrorise patriotic French families. And then

they evade justice by hiding out undiscovered in the French Army. And on top of

all that they fool us into making them war heroes with a Croix de Guerre. Can

you imagine how that plays out in the opinion polls, on the streets, in the next

election? Tell me, what would the Front National do with that?’

‘Those are not our decisions, Bruno. We do our work, collect the evidence, and

then it is up to the judicial authorities. It’s up to the law, not us.’

‘Come off it,

J-J

. It’s up to Tavernier, who’ll do nothing without considering

every possible political angle and checking with every minister he can reach.

When we explain all this to him, he will understand instantly that this case is