Gendarmes

"A boy," he had said, in the end, in the cold of the white Renault with the lamps of the car park coming on one after another outside. "Seventeen. He carries. He's a kid who wants to be a raseteur and thinks the son of the house hung the moon. That's all he is."

Granier had looked at him for a long time.

"Then he'll go in the file," he had said, "when the file needs him. Not before." He had closed the folder. "But you don't decide that, Yassine. Not you. You understand? The day you start deciding who goes in and who stays out, you're not my officer any more. You're theirs."

He had said yes, he understood. He had got out of the car into the heat and walked back to the Peugeot with the shopping in the boot and driven back across the dark flat land to the mas with the windows down and the frogs shouting in the ditches, and he had thought about what Granier had said all the way, and he had not been able to decide whether it was a warning or a description.

• • •

The course on the Saturday was at a village up towards the garrigue, an hour north, a small arena under pines with a view of the hills going blue in the heat. Two of the Plantier bulls were on the bill, young ones, not Fangas. Fredo did not go. Fredo had not gone anywhere since the funeral except the far field, where he sat on the fence in the evenings and watched the bulls and smoked and did not come in until it was dark.

So Magali drove the truck, and Yassine went with her, because somebody had to load and unload and she had looked at him across the breakfast table and said, "You," and that had been that.

They did not talk much on the way up. They had not talked much since the cemetery. She had let go of his hand at last when the gravediggers came, and walked away to her horse without looking at him, and since then she had been exactly as she had been before, short and practical and sharp, the broom on the ceiling at five, you've left the gate open, the trough's dry, do it again. Except that she was not exactly as she had been before. He could feel the difference the way you feel weather coming. She did not look at him, and he was aware every minute of her not looking.

The course went well. The young bulls ran hard and the crowd liked them. Afterwards, while he was loading them back up the ramp in the long gold light under the pines, Gaëtan arrived in his battered pickup and took his sister aside behind the arena, and they talked there for a few minutes, low, and Gaëtan gave her something, a parcel wrapped in a supermarket carrier bag, the size of a couple of bricks, and kissed her on both cheeks and got back into his pickup and drove away the way he had come, without a word to Yassine.

Magali came back to the truck with the carrier bag under her arm. She opened the passenger door and lifted the lid of the bench seat, which he had not known was a lid, and put the bag in the space underneath among the tools and the rope and a sack of bull nuts, and closed it, and sat on it.

"Drive," she said, and threw him the keys.

He did not ask what was in the bag. He did not need to. He had seen the size of it and the way she held it, and he thought about Fredo on the rail of the far field saying we don't touch the money until it's money, and understood that this was what money looked like, out here, when it had finished being something else.

He drove.

• • •

The checkpoint was at the roundabout on the edge of Vauvert.

He saw the lights from a long way off. It was nearly dark by then, the last of the sun gone behind them and the sky ahead going violet over the flat land, and the road came down off the low hills in a long straight run towards the town, and at the bottom of it, where the roundabout was, there was a cluster of blue lights turning slowly, and the white flare of a portable floodlamp, and a line of cars stopped and waiting with their brake lights on.

"Shit," said Magali, very quietly.

He did not slow down. Slowing down was what you did when you had something to hide. He kept the truck at the same steady fifty, the two young bulls shifting in the box behind them, and watched the lights come up, and counted. Two vans. A car. Six gendarmes, eight. A tape across one lane, cones, a gendarme in a fluorescent vest waving each car into a lay-by on the right where two more were waiting with torches. They were stopping everyone. They were stopping every single car.

"It's because of Manolo," Magali said. Her voice had gone flat. "Because of the boy in the canal. They've been doing it all week. Gaëtan said. Every night, a different road."

"Have they stopped you before?"

"Once. On Tuesday. They looked at my licence and let me go." She was sitting very straight on the lid of the bench seat. "I had nothing on Tuesday."

The gendarme in the fluorescent vest swung his torch towards them and pointed it at the lay-by.

Yassine pulled in. He stopped where he was told to stop, behind a white van with Belgian plates whose driver was standing on the verge with his hands in his pockets looking aggrieved. He turned off the engine. In the sudden quiet he heard the bulls stamp in the box behind them, and the tick of the engine cooling, and the crackle of a radio on someone's shoulder, and his own heart.

A torch came up to the driver's window. Behind it, a young gendarme, very young, his cap pushed back and sweat on his upper lip.

"Evening. Licence, registration, the animal transport papers."

Yassine gave them. The licence was in his own name. The papers were the manade's. The gendarme took them and held them in the beam of his torch and read them slowly, moving his lips a little, the way someone reads who has been told to read carefully.

"Plantier," he said.

"Manade Plantier. Coming back from the course at—" Yassine named the village.

"Two animals?"

"Two."

"You're the owner?"

"I work for them. Madame Plantier's the owner's daughter." He nodded at Magali. "She's in charge."

The torch went past him to Magali. She looked into it without blinking. The young gendarme looked at her, and then down at the papers again, and then over his shoulder, and called out to someone behind him in the glare, and Yassine heard footsteps on the gravel coming towards the truck, slow and heavy and unhurried, and knew before he could see anything who it was.

The captain from Vauvert came into the light of the torch.

He had his cap off and his shirt open at the neck and he looked older than he had looked at the canal, older and very tired, the face of a man who had not slept properly in a week and did not expect to. He took the papers from the young gendarme without looking at them. He looked instead at the truck, at the name on its side, PLANTIER, in its faded red. Then he walked slowly round to the back of it and stood there looking at the ramp and the bolts and the two young bulls stamping and blowing in the box. Then he walked back, along the passenger side, past Magali's window, and stopped at Yassine's.

He did not shine the torch in his face. He did not need to. The floodlamp in the lay-by was enough.

"Out of the cab, please," he said. "Both of you. We'll have a look in the back."

Yassine opened the door. He got down onto the gravel. He kept his face turned slightly away, towards the truck, towards the road, as if he were simply looking at the traffic, and he could feel the captain's eyes on the side of his head like heat from a fire.

"Have we met?" the captain said.

"I don't think so."

"No?" The captain looked at him a moment longer. "I've a good memory for faces. It's my one talent. Lyon, this says." He tapped the licence. "You're a long way from Lyon."

You're a long way from home. The same voice, the same weary politeness, the same morning by the canal with the mosquitoes going up off the reeds. Yassine felt it go through him like cold water, and kept his face exactly where it was, and said:

"I've been away a long time. I'm from round here, before."

"Are you." It was not a question. The captain turned his head and called to the young gendarme. "The cab. Seats, glove box, the lot. And get the dog out of the van."

The dog.

Magali was standing on the other side of the bonnet in the glare with her arms folded. She did not look at Yassine. She did not look at anything. Her face in the white light had gone the colour of paper.

The young gendarme climbed up into the cab on the driver's side and began to go through it with his torch. The glove box. The door pockets. The floor. Behind the truck, at the second van, someone was opening the back doors, and Yassine heard a whine and the scrabble of claws, and the low eager panting of a dog that knew it was about to work.

He had his hand in his pocket. The cheap phone was there.

He did not take it out. He could not take it out with the captain standing a metre away. He turned instead, slowly, as if to look at the bulls, and walked two steps towards the back of the truck so that the bulk of it was between him and the floodlamp, between him and the captain, and in the shadow there he slid the phone out of his pocket and held it down against his thigh, and without looking at it, by feel, the way he had learned to do in a course he had actually attended, opened the one conversation it held and typed with his thumb.

Checkpoint Vauvert rbt now. Plantier truck. Cannot be searched. Dog.

He sent it. He did not hear it go. He put the phone back in his pocket and stood looking at the bulls, and one of them, the young black one with the white splash on its belly that had come out of the toril at the fête like something fired from a gun, put its nose to the slats and blew at him, hot and wet, and he stood there and let it.

In the cab, the young gendarme had got to the passenger side. Yassine heard his boots on the floor. He heard him open the glove box on that side and close it. He heard him pause.

"Captain," the young gendarme said. "There's a lid on this seat."

The dog was coming along the side of the truck now on a short lead, a black Malinois with its nose down and its tail going, its handler behind it murmuring to it the way Gaëtan had murmured to the herd in the dark. Cherche. Cherche. Good girl.

The captain walked round the front of the truck to the passenger door. He looked up into the cab, at the young gendarme crouching on the floor with his torch on the bench seat.

"Open it," he said.

And the radio on his shoulder spoke.

It was not loud. It was a woman's voice, a dispatcher's voice, flat and clipped and bored, the way dispatchers' voices always were, and it said the captain's call sign, and then it said something else that Yassine could not catch over the noise of the road and the dog and the blood in his own ears. The captain lifted his hand to the radio and pressed the button on its side and said, "Repeat," and the voice repeated it.

He stood quite still.

Then he said, into the radio, "Who authorised that?" and listened, and his face changed. Not much. A tightening round the mouth, as if he had bitten down on something. He said, "Understood," in a voice like a door closing. He let go of the radio. He stood for a moment longer at the passenger door of the truck, looking up at the lid of the bench seat, which the young gendarme had his hand on, which the young gendarme was waiting to be told to lift.

"Leave it," the captain said.

"Captain?"

"Leave it. Get down." He turned. He looked at the dog handler, who had stopped with the Malinois straining at the lead by the rear wheel. "Put her back in the van."

"She hasn't—"

"Put her back in the van." The captain had not raised his voice. He came back round the front of the truck to Yassine, holding out the licence and the papers. He held them out at arm's length, as though they were something he would prefer not to touch, and when Yassine took them he did not let go at once. He held on, and looked at Yassine across the papers in the white glare of the floodlamp, a long look, steady and very tired and so angry that it seemed to come off him like heat off a road.

"You can go," he said.

He let go of the papers. He turned and walked away towards the vans without looking back, and the young gendarme climbed down out of the cab looking bewildered, and the dog handler dragged the whining Malinois back to its cage, and the gendarme in the fluorescent vest was already waving his torch at the next car in the queue.

• • •

Neither of them spoke until the lights of the checkpoint were gone behind them and the road had gone dark again, the headlights cutting a white tunnel through the night between the ditches and the reeds, and the frogs shouting on either side.

He drove. Magali sat on the lid of the bench seat with her hands flat on her knees and looked straight ahead through the windscreen. He could feel her looking. Her not looking at him was a pressure he could feel against the side of his face. Five kilometres. Ten. The turning for the marsh road came up out of the dark and he took it, and the tarmac went rough under the wheels, and the bulls shifted in the box behind them, and still she did not say anything.

Then, quietly, without turning her head:

"They were going to open it."

"Yes."

"The dog. Ten more seconds and the dog would have been on the seat."

"Yes."

"And then they got a call." She was still looking straight ahead. "And he let us go. Just like that. He didn't want to. You saw his face. He wanted to open it more than anything in the world, and someone on the radio told him not to, and he let us go."

Yassine said nothing. He kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, on the white tunnel the headlights made, and felt the silence in the cab go tight and tighter like a rope taking weight.

"You weren't frightened," Magali said.

"I was frightened."

"No. You were. At the start. When we saw the lights. I could see your hands." She turned her head then, at last, and looked at him, and in the faint green glow of the dashboard her face was not angry. It was something worse than angry. It was careful. "Then you went round the back of the truck, by the bulls. And when you came back, you weren't frightened any more. You were standing there by the wheel, waiting. Like you knew."

He did not look at her. He could not.

"You knew they'd let us go," she said. "How?"