The Code

He slept until ten, which nobody had let him do in three weeks, and when he came down the yard was empty and white with heat and the trucks were both back under the plane tree, the dented one with its ramp still faintly wet where someone had hosed it.

Nobody had banged on the ceiling. Nobody came to find him. In the kitchen there was coffee on the stove gone thick and bitter, and bread under a cloth, and the shutters were closed, and the table at the window end had been cleared of its heap of paper so completely that the oilcloth showed its pattern of faded lemons for the first time since he had arrived. He stood looking at the lemons for a moment. Then he poured the coffee and drank it standing up, and went out to find work, because work was the only thing he could think of that would not require him to think.

He found Magali in the stables, rubbing down the pack horses. She looked up when his shadow fell across the doorway and looked down again.

"Papa wants you," she said. "At six. In the far field. Take Grisette."

"Not Mistrau?"

"Papa wants to talk to you, not watch you fight." She went on working the brush in long strokes down the grey flank of the horse, which leaned into it with its eyes half shut. "Until then, do the troughs. And the hay in the second barn. And sleep, if you can. You look like something the dogs brought in."

He did the troughs. He did the hay. He did not sleep.

• • •

At six the light had gone long and the far field lay gold and green under it, the glasswort going rust at the edges, the water in the ditches the colour of tea. The bulls were grazing there, the ones that had stayed when the cows went south: twenty or so, scattered across the pasture in ones and twos, black on the gold, egrets stepping white among them. Fangas stood a little apart from the others near the far fence, as he always did, his head down, the scarred horn catching the light.

Fredo was sitting on the fence. Not leaning on it; sitting on the top rail with his boots hooked under the one below, the way a boy would sit, his hat pushed back and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, watching the bulls. Yassine tied Grisette to a post and walked the last fifty metres. The old man did not turn his head.

"Sit," he said.

Yassine climbed up and sat on the rail beside him. The wood was hot through his jeans. For a long time neither of them said anything. Fredo smoked. The bulls grazed. A heron came down into the ditch below them with its legs dangling and stood there, affronted, as if it had expected the field to be empty.

"My father," Fredo said at last, "brought cigarettes across this marsh. After the war. American cigarettes from the ships at Marseille and Port-de-Bouc, in boxes, on horses, at night, the same way you went last night, more or less. And Spanish brandy, before that, from the boats that came up from Catalonia. He did it for twenty years. The customs men knew. Everybody knew. Half the cigarettes in Nîmes came across this field on the back of a white horse, and the customs men smoked them." He tapped his ash onto the rail. "His father, before him, salt. Salt from the pans, out the back gate, past the gabelle. And before that, I don't know. Probably they were stealing the Pope's sheep."

"And you?"

"Me." Fredo took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it. "I did nothing. Thirty years I did nothing. We had the street runs and the courses and the meat and the grants from Brussels, and in a good year the bulls paid for the bulls, and I thought, my father was a smuggler and I am a manadier, and that is progress." He put the cigarette back. "Then the grants went down. Then the bank. Then my wife was ill for two years, and there is no grant from Brussels for that. And then a man came to see me."

He did not say which man. Yassine did not ask.

"Nine years," Fredo said. "Nine years we have done it. Four times a year, five, never more. Never two in a month. When the moon is gone."

"Why are you telling me?"

The old man turned his head and looked at him for the first time. It was the look from the doorstep, the night Manolo had brought him: the long slow look that went from the horns to the hocks and back.

"Because you were in the water," he said. "A man who has been in the water knows. You can't un-know it. So now you'll know properly, so you don't go round imagining things. Imagining is worse." He looked back at the bulls. "And because Manolo answers for you. You understand what that means?"

"I understand."

"I don't think you do. I think you're from Montpellier and you think it's a manner of speaking." Fredo's voice did not change. It stayed low and flat and patient, a man explaining the weather. "It means if you open your mouth, it isn't you I go to. It's him. He knows that. He knew it when he brought you. That's what I answer for him means, out here. It means, if he's wrong about you, it's on me."

Yassine looked at Fangas, standing by the far fence with his head down. He found that he could not look at anything else.

"So," Fredo said. "Now you'll listen."

• • •

He told it the way he had sorted the bulls that first morning: one thing at a time, without hurry, each thing put where it belonged.

"Hashish. Only hashish. Resin from Morocco, by Spain. The Spanish bring it to the beach, we bring it across the marsh, the trucks take it north. That's all we are. Mules. Horses, I should say." He almost smiled. "We don't buy it. We don't sell it. We don't touch the money until it's money. Nothing of it stays on this land longer than one night, and nothing of it goes to anyone in this village or any village I know. It goes to the city and the city does what the city does."

"The city."

"Marseille. Nîmes. Your Montpellier, probably. I don't ask." He drew on the cigarette. "Second. No guns. Not on this land, not on my horses, not in my trucks. The Spanish have guns, on the boat. That's the boat. When they step off the boat, into the water, nothing in their hands but the parcels. That was the first thing I said, nine years ago, and if they ever come off that boat with a gun in their hand, I turn my horses round and go home and they can carry their own parcels across the marsh, and drown in it, the whole marsh, there's places out there that'll take a man to his neck."

The heron in the ditch stalked off a few paces, disgusted, and settled again.

"Third. Never the white. Never." For the first time the old man's voice had something in it, a hardness under the flatness, like a stone under mud. "Every year they ask. Every year. More money, they say, ten times, twenty times, same work, same horses, same beach. And every year I say no, and I'll say it again this year, and next year, and the year after I'm dead Gaëtan will say it, because I've told him that if he doesn't I'll come back and haunt the bulls." He took the cigarette out of his mouth. "The resin, it's like the cigarettes my father carried. Half of France smokes it. The ministers smoke it, their children smoke it, the gendarmes smoke it when they think nobody's looking. It's a vice. I carry a vice across a field. The other thing—" He shook his head slowly. "The other thing kills children. I've seen what it does. In Nîmes, in the towns. Boys of fourteen with guns. No."

"And the money?"

"The money is the lease on the summer grass. The money is the vet. The money is the bank, that wants its interest whether the bulls run or not. The money is the feed for the winter when the land is under water. The money is the insurance we can't get any more." Fredo's hand made the same small gesture his son had made in the yard after the tri, a sweep that took in everything: the field, the bulls, the egrets, the light. "The money is this. You think a herd of Camargue bulls survives on what they pay at Lunel on a Saturday? The money is so that there's still a Plantier in this field in ten years, and Fangas's grandsons running in the arena, and something left for Magali that isn't debt. That's all. That's all it's ever been."

He was quiet for a while. The sun had touched the line of the tamarisks and the whole field had gone the colour of brass.

"Timéo," Yassine said.

Fredo did not answer at once. When he did, he did not look round.

"Timéo is Gaëtan's business," he said. "I didn't want the boy. I said, he's seventeen, his mother works at the café, she thinks he's mucking out stalls. Gaëtan said he'd come anyway, he'd find out anyway, better with us than with some little gang in Vauvert. Maybe he's right." He threw the end of the cigarette down into the ditch, where it hissed. "That's the one thing I'm not proud of. You can put that in your book, if you're keeping one."

Yassine went very still on the rail.

"Everybody keeps one," Fredo said. "In their head. Manolo keeps one. My daughter keeps one so big you could stand on it to reach the shelf." He climbed down off the fence, stiffly, and stood for a moment with one hand on the post. "The boy in the canal," he said. "At Aigues-Mortes. You heard about that."

"I heard."

"That isn't us. Nothing like that is us. I want you to know it, because you'll hear things, now, and you'll wonder." He looked out at the bulls. "The people we carry for are not good people. I know what they are. But on my land they keep their manners, and the day they don't, we stop."

He went to get his horse.

• • •

On Sunday he wrote to Granier from the toilet with the tap running.

He wrote it in his head first, during the four days between, the way he always did. He wrote it at the troughs and in the hay barn and on Mistrau's back in the far pasture, and by Sunday it was finished, every sentence, and all he had to do was type it.

Night Tues-Weds. Departure 23:00 from mas, mounted, F.P. remaining with vehicle. Five riders incl. undersigned and one unidentified adult male (grey horse, joined at approx 1 km, departed before vehicle loading, description to follow). Five pack animals. Route south, cross-country, approx 1h40, to beach between Espiguette and Petit Rhône mouth, exact location unknown, to be established. Vessel approx 10-12m, no lights, crew Spanish-speaking, min. 3. Vessel stood off approx 30-40m. Crew waded. Cargo resin in plastic-wrapped blocks, est. 30-40 kg per pack animal. Transfer under 20 min. Return by alternate route to vehicle (PLANTIER truck, dented cab, plate to follow), cargo concealed under bedding with livestock loaded on top. Departed north with F.P. and G.P. Destination unknown. Subsequent conversation with F.P. confirms activity ongoing for nine years, 4-5 times per year, on moonless nights. F.P. states: resin only, no weapons on land, refusal of cocaine (repeated requests from buyers, refused annually). Buyers referred to as Marseille. F.P. denies any knowledge of or involvement in recent homicides. Credibility: high, in my assessment. Will continue.

He read it over. It was accurate. It was, again, very nearly complete.

He looked at the line that said Five riders incl. undersigned, and at the line under it, and at the space between them where, in the version he had written in his head on Mistrau's back, there had been a name. T.N., minor, 17. He had written it. He had written it in his head on Thursday and on Friday and on Saturday, and on Saturday night, lying on the horsehair mattress with the heat coming out of the roof, he had seen the boy's face in the starlight under the poplars, soaked and shivering and grinning, and he had taken it out.

Five riders. Gaëtan, Magali, the man on the grey, himself. That was four. He had counted it a dozen times. Anyone who read it carefully would count it too. Granier read everything carefully.

He sat on the closed lid of the toilet with the tap running into the cracked basin and the green light coming through the frosted glass and the cheap phone in both hands, and looked at the word Five for a long time. Then he put his thumb on it, and held it, and watched it go, letter by letter, back to nothing, and typed in its place, without letting himself stop to think about it, Four.

He sent it. The phone made its small pleased noise. Two grey ticks.

He turned off the tap.