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| Calm, cool, and objective. Like a cucumber. |
Louis Shalako
Such raids were not lightly undertaken. The real problem with manpower, was what came later.
They could only hold onto the property for so long. Police would have to give it back, barring some great criminal conspiracy and a long list of charges laid, and arrests made, in which case all of the materials would have to be identified, catalogued, copied, photographed, and shared in the legal discoveries process.
The subjects would be squawking their damned heads off, of course.
There was the chain of custody of evidence, always to be considered.
It was all about due process, and so they had long lines of tables, all set up in rows, in what was the biggest room available. A good score of junior officers, all of them briefed, opening boxes, identifying contents, running them through the machine, which sputtered, steamed and stank, taking an interminable time on each pale sheet of the mimeographic process…one officer was opening boxes, opening boxes, opening boxes. That was all he did. That would be one very junior officer…putting in a day’s work and at least earning his paycheque. That was the hell of it all—one always had the taxpayers lurking there in the back of the mind. One wondered what they might make of it.
The room hummed with the activity, yet certain notable points had already been raised. A membership list, subscription lists, rotary desk files, with names and addresses and in most cases, phone numbers. Bills and receipts from the accounting department, which turned out to be basically one hoary old woman with the saltiest tongue of the whole bunch. Unfortunately, this material did not include dates of birth, and in some cases, it wasn’t even clear if the subject was male or female, as some of the addresses were a simple set of initials and a surname. Back issues of any number of periodicals, not all of them friendly or sympathetic to the cause. They apparently studied their enemy as well. One had to know what the other guys were saying…in order to contradict them, he supposed.
All kinds of stuff, including the contents of their very wastebaskets and the bins out behind the building.
Maintenon, Langeron, and Tailler stood, surveying the room, quietly bustling with a dozen people going through their allotted stacks.
“God, Gilles, this is next to useless.”
“Oh, I don’t know. We have to be seen to be doing something.”
Langeron snorted. He was about ready to go.
One of the young police women had stopped what she was doing. Clutching a binder, she was staring right at them—
“Yes, my dear.” Maintenon gave a little wave.
Bobbing her head a bit nervously, she came around the end of the long tables and approached.
“Sir. Sirs—”
“You have a question?”
“Well. Ah. It’s just that it’s interesting…”
“Okay, then.” Maintenon nodded. “What do we have?”
Langeron stood looking on as the officer opened up the binder.
“This is the membership list. As you can imagine, they add in names, alphabetically, and one must assume, they take them out as well. Every so often, they would have to type up a whole fresh sheet, which accounts for the colour variations of the papers. That’s why it’s in a ringed binder, after all. People drop out for all kinds of reasons, sometimes they can’t or just don’t want to pay the dues anymore, for whatever reason.” There was a series of binders, one not being enough for A to Z.
Maintenon listened.
“Very well.”
“Well, sir. It just looks to me as if there are three or four pages missing.”
Langeron’s mouth opened.
They exchanged a glance.
“Go on.”
This one's a keeper...
She had her finger in there and she opened it up, moving over, and laying it out flat on the nearest clear spot. Stepping aside, she gave them a little room…
They bent over and took a look.
“There appears to be a gap here…the Cs beginning with A.” Fingertips searching, she found where she had marked a page with a paper clip. “Here’s one in the Ls. And then there’s another in the S section…possibly one or two others.” Cariveau…Lalonde…Saulnier.
…possibly one or two others…
“Well, well, well, Gilles.” Langeron’s eyes gleamed, with Tailler just sort of observing, and happy enough that they were at least getting something.
The Intelligence unit was looking pretty good right about now, something one could not ignore.
He was a junior officer, but—
Politics.
Langeron nodded, thoughtfully. And they were only just getting started.
The girl, painfully blushing, aware of being a hit, took a quick gulp of air and surprised them again.
“There’s something else. Sirs. The young man—the one in charge of the mailing and membership lists. He’s on the phone, he’s sending out letters, he’s the one typing up the news-letter, minutes of their meetings and so forth. He’s soliciting donations. A born organizer, at least for someone else’s organization.”
She thought for a moment.
“Not that inspired on his own, maybe, but useful.”
She had it written down for them. “Victor. Victor Baille.”
With a mild air of astonishment, Langeron reached for the slip of paper.
There was more, somehow, something in the body language. Maintenon saw it first.
“Yes?”
“Well. I mean. I mean, he does sort of fit the description. He’s the right age. Unmarried, no ring as I recall. And, if you look at his mailing address, you will see that it’s a woman. Different last name—” But. “More or less in the right neighbourhood. He was well-dressed, although not unusually so, er, for the typical office setting.”
They stood, staring. It was Tailler’s turn to rub a stubbled jaw.
“Much of this—” She gestured at their rows and rows, their stacks and stacks of material. “Much of this is his work.”
It was his job after all.
But. The word hung in the air as Maintenon nodded, engaging her eyes as well as she could bring herself to do that—finally she sort of locked on and held on. She seemed to exhale, settling a bit in the shoulders and the stance. Straighten up, chin up…sort of drifting to look between them now.
He resisted the urge to pat her on the back or anything stupid like that.
“All right. Thank you for this. And keep going—there’s no telling what else might be in those files.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
She turned and went back, leaving their exhibit on the table. She had a good walk, as someone had once said.
“That one’s got a real brain in her head, Gilles.”
“Yes, Roger.” He grinned, eyes in some far-off place, if only momentarily. “That one’s a keeper.”
***
“Okay, Victor. You’re not in trouble, and you don’t have to answer questions if you don’t want to.”
“Monsieur.”
Monsieur Belloque was an attorney, and a very good one as evidenced by the fine leather briefcase and what may well have been a genuine gold pen. Leather-bound notebook. The suit, fine white pinstripes on a deep blue wool knit, must have set him back a thousand francs. Another few hundred for shoes, socks, and underwear. Maintenon assumed that the Party was paying for this little consultation—they’d already interviewed Monsieur Prideaux, to the tune of not much joy. The man had barely even acknowledged his own existence, at least as far as the record was concerned.
Cold eyes impaled Maintenon from across the table. And that was just Belloque.
“I’m not saying anything…I don’t have to.”
“That is quite correct, young man. Something we can all agree on.”
“Then why am I here?”
“Quite frankly, I would very much like to send you home again. You are very much not under arrest and I thank you for coming in. Quite frankly, Victor, we appreciate your time, good citizenship and all of that. The thing is, I have a problem. I was hoping that you could help me with it.”
“Go to hell.”
Belloque. My client has rights...etc. Etc.
Monsieur Belloque put his hand on the fellow’s forearm, and the fellow subsided, biting his tongue, at least in the figurative sense.
“Yes. Well. Naturally, I understand.” Mainenon sighed. “Yes. We raided your office, and it all feels very personal. It’s not much comfort, knowing that we have raided several other parties, and all of this is very disruptive to your activities. Which, I admit, you have every right to engage in—”
“Oh, really—bullshit.”
There might be another tack. There was a whole dossier on him, provided ostensibly by Tailler, but Maintenon thought from somewhere else as well—it was almost too thorough. This one came right from the top, for whatever that was worth these days.
“This might seem like a stupid question.”
“And?”
“Why did you feel you need a lawyer? Just for my own interest, so to speak.”
“Because I don’t have a clue, what it is that you want from me, Inspector.”
“Perhaps it really is that simple. What are we really after, eh?” He grinned sourly. “Are you guys really all that paranoid?”
The young man flushed a bit.
“I see you were in Spain?”
Subject and lawyer exchanged a glance. Monsieur Belloque’s eyes came back to Maintenon.
“What is this about, Inspector?”
“It is just that I am concerned for your client’s safety. Anyways, I was just curious. I’m not a big fan of the Fascists, young man. And neither are you, Monsieur Belloque.”
They had a dossier on him as well. He’d read it with great interest.
Baille was about twenty-seven, twenty eight years old.
“For one so young, to go off and fight in another man’s war—well. I sort of understand the emotional impulse, the need to live one’s values. Quite frankly, one wonders where you found the courage—the guts, the, ah, thrassos, as the Greeks say. I was in the Great War. There are some things we don’t forget, yet I could hardly describe, just exactly why I signed up in the first place—to avoid being inducted, as much as anything. I thought I had a better chance, odd as it seems. To form up with a good unit, and maybe have my pick…of sergeants.” Victor Baille stared—just stared. “Of course, I didn’t much like the Kaiser, as one can imagine. How things were back then.”
“And how do we feel about the Communists, Inspector.” The cold eyes, as opposed to Victor’s hot and almost shameful eyes, humiliated eyes as it seemed. “What about us—what about the Socialists?”
The terms were capitalized, as many such isms were these days—you could hear it in the lawyer’s voice, the inflections. A socialist lawyer—well, they probably needed legal advice, just like anyone else.
“Well, I don’t, really. I prefer not to care at all. I do vote—hopefully you will forgive me if I don’t mention the party. I feel impartial and objective, insofar as that is humanly possible. Politics is not my job. I can hardly tell our beautiful young people, certainly not these days, what or how to think, nor do I wish to do so. Crime is my job, and my specialty is in homicide. Knowing for a fact that your client in no way resembles my suspect, ah, well.” He let them think for a second, glancing down at his notes.
He flipped a page, nodding at what he saw.
There was an imperceptible shrug from Victor.
He looked up.
“…I mean, it really was a shambles, wasn’t it?”
“Okay. We were young. We were idealistic. We were inexperienced and completely untrained. We had no idea of what we were getting into. The road to hell is so very often paved with good intentions, Inspector.” An educated young man, a bunch of other educated young men—and women.
All of them with very definite ideas, ideas of what meant right, and what meant wrong.
And women—
He let that drop.
Gilles nodded.
“Go on. Please.”
The man reddened a bit, sitting up a little straighter and leaning in over the table.
“Our weapons were shit. Our three days of training didn’t do much. We had no transportation, a few mules. No supplies—very little ammunition.” The voice was low but intense. “Hardly any food or water, no idea of whom to trust or where the next attack or ambush might lie. We had virtually no artillery. No one who knew how to use it anyways…” He’d been there a year and a half. “Most of us really didn’t speak the language, which meant we were always dependent on our sources…our interpreters, some of whom weren’t very good.”
There was all too much to tell.
This was all fact, Gilles had no doubt of that.
“And somehow, you got away.” Right at the end, right when it was all over.
Right up until the very last minute, when there were no further doubts that the cause was lost.
“Yes. At some point, you just throw the weapons. Get rid of anything that might identify you. Try to find a big gaggle of refugees. Get right in the middle of them, be just as dirty, just as sweaty, just as scared as the next person. Try and carry something—something stupid, like a monkey or a potted plant. A fucking cello, if you can find one! Try to look humble. Try to blend in—and pray that no one really sick catches up with you. They shot a hell of a lot of innocent people, Inspector. Mostly for no reason at all. They were unlucky. I was lucky.”
He’d sort of adopted an old woman—she was lost, alone, carrying what she could. Hustled along by the panic, in a crowd of strangers. He’d fed her some stolen sausage…
She hadn’t hardly left her own house, let alone her village, in years…
He’d managed to get her name, and she had remembered his just when it was important. Half dotty in the head, as Victor put it. By the time they had become all jammed up at the border crossing, she’d been half-convinced he was her nephew…her late sister’s boy. He’d done some fast talking that day, and perhaps the men with the guns just didn’t care anymore. Not enough to shoot the whole fucking lot of them—they had won, after all, and the border was right there.
“There was this smell in the air…sweat and piss and shit, and no one knew what was going to happen next…” The smell of fear.
People on the other side were watching…newspaper correspondents and assholes with movie cameras. Guys with microphones, poking them in your face—
“So. You got back into France without a passport…that seems fair enough.”
Victor let out a big breath.
“You know, Inspector. You are one real son of a bitch.”
“Yes, Victor. And I’ve been there—I’ve been there, too.”
The electric light buzzed overhead, or whatever. Smoke hung in the room…Monsieur Belloque held his breath.
“So. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon…who, or what sort of party would he vote for?”
“The floor is yours, Victor.”
“Yes. Yes! I have it. The Democratic, Socialist, Catholic People’s Party.”
A quick little noise escaped, one of repressed laughter and derision.
Gilles studied his fingernails momentarily.
“So. What’s your point?”
The mouth opened.
Admittedly, the tone had been a little cold. They were wasting time.
“All right, Inspector. Maintenon—Gilles. I haven’t really told anyone too much about that before…I’m almost grateful.” It was like he was blinking back tears. “Now. What is this shit about guys like you being all fucking concerned for my safety?”
He sat back and slumped there, arms folded, that glare, not leaving Maintenon’s face.
It would appear the young man was ready to listen. Reaching up, he wiped his eyes a bit with the corner of his cuff. He sighed, a deep, shuddering breath.
Everything about him said, ‘fuck you’ and yet here he was, stripped bare. Right down to the very soul. Right down to his very essentials.
The lawyer sat there, watching.
Fuck you, Maintenon.
Always watching…
“It’s just that three, at least three, of your most promising members, bright young people in the sunshine of life, have been killed in about the last week and a half. Well—I mean. It’s just that we are a little bit concerned—in our abstract and rather unfortunately, ever so objective way…”
All those beautiful young people—dead, as it were. Nothing too serious, but dead, after all—
And Monsieur Baille might even be next, fitting the bill so neatly. As anyone could see.
“Inspector?”
“Yes, Monsieur Belloque?”
“Perhaps we might chat for a bit…as old friends. Completely off the record, you understand.”
Gilles nodded.
“Of course we can. I had hoped for nothing better.” He looked into Victor’s eyes. “You know, I was wounded, eh?”
Just a flesh wound, but a wound nevertheless. Through the flesh, just above the knee. It ached like hell in the cold weather. The cuffs of his pants were a bit tight, or he would have rolled it up and showed him.
The sort of thing you can never really forget.
Belloque eyed him.
“So. Can you gentlemen think of anyone, anyone at all, who might have wished harm, ah, to Monsieur…Saulnier, Cariveau, or Lalonde.”
END
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Images. Louis steals them off the #internet(s)
Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.
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