The Leak

The message came on the Sunday, before he had written his own.

He was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with the tap running and the green light coming through the frosted glass, the cheap phone in both hands, trying to decide what to say about a week in which a boy's fingers had been broken and an old man had handed him a rifle and a woman had kissed him on a bale of hay at one in the morning, and none of which, he had begun to understand, could be put into a report in any form that would not destroy someone. He had typed Assault on minor, T.N., Thursday night and deleted it. He had typed Household now on armed watch and deleted that too. He was sitting looking at the empty screen when it lit up in his hands.

Tonight. 23:00. The salt road below the walls, the lay-by by the pans. Come alone. Do not be late.

No good. No keep going. Granier had never once in seven weeks written to him first.

He turned off the tap. He sat for a moment in the silence with the phone dark again in his hands and listened to his own heart, and to the house beyond the door, Fredo's voice in the kitchen saying something short to Gaëtan, a chair scraping, the dogs barking at nothing in the yard. Then he flushed the toilet he had not used, and went out.

• • •

He told Fredo it was his mother.

He had not planned to. He had planned to say a friend in Montpellier, or the bank, about my account, or anything at all that was small and dull and could be checked by nobody. He stood in the kitchen doorway at nine in the evening with the car keys in his hand and the old man looking up at him from the table with the rifle lying in its blanket at his elbow, and what came out of his mouth was:

"My mother. In Montpellier. She's not well. A neighbour rang. I need to see her."

Fredo looked at him for a long moment.

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. I'll be back before it's light. Before the watch changes."

"You have a mother," the old man said. It was not quite a question. Yassine understood that in seven weeks he had never once mentioned her, and that Fredo had noticed this, the way Magali had noticed that he never talked about Lyon, the way everyone out here noticed everything and said nothing until they chose to.

"I have a mother."

Fredo nodded slowly. "Go," he said. "Go and see your mother." He looked down at the rifle at his elbow, and then up again. "Take care on the road. They watch the roads now."

"I know."

"And Yassine." The old man said his name in the same flat voice he used for everything, but he held it a moment, as if weighing it. "If she's very ill, stay. We'll manage. A man should be with his mother."

Yassine stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the keys cutting into his palm and could not, for a second, say anything at all. Then he said, "Thank you," and turned, and went out into the dark of the yard, and did not look back at the window where he knew Magali was standing, because he had felt her there the whole time.

• • •

The salt road ran along the south side of Aigues-Mortes between the walls and the pans, a strip of tarmac on a causeway with water on both sides. At night the ramparts were lit from below, every tower and every crenellation picked out in gold against the black sky, so that the whole town looked like something cut out of brass and set down on the flats as an ornament. On the other side of the road the salt pans lay in the dark, invisible except where the light from the walls caught the edge of the water and turned it the faint dull pink of old wine.

The lay-by was a widening of the causeway where tourists stopped in the day to photograph the flamingos. The white Renault was already there, nose to the pans, lights off.

He parked behind it and walked up and got in.

There was no air-conditioning this time. The engine was off. The windows were down, and the night came in through them, warm and heavy and smelling of salt and mud and the sweet rot of the marsh, and the mosquitoes came in with it. Granier did not seem to notice them. He was sitting very still in the driver's seat with his hands folded in his lap, not on his stomach the way he folded them in the office, but low, in his lap, like a man in a waiting room.

He did not say you've lost weight. For a while the only sound in the car was the mosquitoes.

"It's leaked," he said.

Yassine heard it. He heard it the way you hear the first sound of a bull's hooves on sand behind you, before you have turned, before you know which way it is coming, when all you know is that it is coming.

"What has?"

"The file. Some of it. Enough." Granier did not look at him. He was looking out through the windscreen at the dark pans. "On Wednesday the stups in Marseille took a flat in the Third. Nothing to do with us. Something of theirs, a cannabis point, three kids and a nourrice and a bathtub full of resin. They took the phones. One of the phones belonged to a man who has been, from time to time, a driver for one of the refrigerated lorry companies I told you about." He paused. "On the phone there was a photograph."

Yassine waited.

"Of a document," Granier said. "One page. Photographed on a desk somewhere, in bad light, at an angle, the way you'd photograph something you weren't supposed to have and wanted to have quickly. The first page of the juge's authorisation." He turned his head at last. His face in the gold light from the walls was very tired and very still. "The heading. The juge's name. The case reference. The target. Manade Plantier, commune of Le Cailar. And the dates."

"And the agent?"

"The line where your name goes is on the second page." Granier's voice did not change. "The photograph is of the first page only. Either they didn't have the second, or they had the sense not to photograph it, or they photographed it on another phone we haven't got." He looked back at the pans. "So they know there's an operation. They know its target. They know it was authorised in June and runs to October. They don't necessarily know who. But they know there's somebody. And I'd imagine it isn't very difficult, if you know there's somebody, to look round the Manade Plantier and ask yourself who's new."

The mosquitoes whined in the dark of the car. Out on the pans a bird called once, a long falling note, and was silent.

"Where did it come from?"

"I don't know." It was the first time Yassine had ever heard Granier say those words, and he said them as if they cost him something. "Marseille. The palais, the juge's office, a clerk, a typist, a cleaner. The détachement there, which has had its troubles, as you know. Or Montpellier." He paused. "My own floor. I don't know. The reform put four services in one building and a hundred new people with access to the same server, and the Senate wrote a very long report last year saying it would happen, and it has happened, and I don't know." He unfolded his hands and looked at them. "I've opened an inquiry. The juge has opened an inquiry. Marseille have opened an inquiry. By the time anyone finds anything you'll be an old man."

"When was it taken? The photograph?"

Granier glanced at him. "The phone's metadata is a mess. They're working on it. Sometime in the summer." He looked away again. "Does it matter?"

Yassine did not answer. Something had moved at the back of his mind, very far back, the way a fish moves under the surface of a pond, a shadow and a ripple and gone, and he could not see what it was and he did not want to look for it. He looked at the walls instead. At the gold towers against the black.

"So," Granier said. "You're out."

• • •

"Tonight," Granier said. "Now. You don't go back. You drive to Montpellier behind me and you sleep in your own bed, and tomorrow morning at nine you come to the fourth floor and we write it all up, everything, and on Tuesday I go to the juge and he signs the warrants for the Plantiers, and on Wednesday at five in the morning we go in. The father, the son, the daughter. The boy from Vauvert if he's there." He said it without emphasis. "It's finished, Yassine. The operation is ended as of tonight. The law gives you four months to maintain your cover to get yourself out safely. I'd suggest you use about four minutes of it."

"No."

Granier did not seem surprised. He nodded slowly, as if Yassine had said something about the weather.

"If I disappear tonight," Yassine said, "and on Wednesday you go in at five with the BRI, what do they think? Arnaud's people? They know there's somebody. Then the new one vanishes on a Sunday night and three days later the Plantiers are in a van to Marseille. They'll think the Plantiers gave them up. They'll think Fredo did a deal. You put him in a cell in Les Baumettes and you know what happens to him. Or to Magali in the women's wing. Or to the boy."

"That isn't your—"

"It is my problem. You sent me. It's exactly my problem." He made himself breathe. "And Arnaud. What happens to Arnaud? You take the Plantiers on Wednesday, and Arnaud's moon is five days after that, and he's got a boat coming with whatever's on it, and nowhere to land it, and a week to find somewhere else. He'll find somewhere else. Or he'll come up the track to the mas with Bruno and the boy in the tracksuit, and he won't find anybody there but the dogs." He turned in his seat. "You told me you wanted a night and a beach and Arnaud's people on the sand with the stuff in their hands. That's what's coming. In eight days. And you want to throw it away to put an old man in prison for carrying resin."

"I want my officer alive."

"Your officer's fine."

"My officer," said Granier, very quietly, "is sitting in my car at eleven o'clock at night telling me he won't follow an order, with mosquito bites all over his face and his hands shaking. And a week ago he left a seventeen-year-old out of a report, and three days ago, if the gendarmerie dispatcher at Vauvert is to be believed, he stopped a search of a cattle truck that would have found, I imagine, quite a lot of money, and I signed the order because I trusted him. And he hasn't written to me today. And he's not telling me something now. He's been not telling me something for weeks." He looked at Yassine. "Am I wrong?"

Yassine did not answer.

"You've stopped being mine," Granier said. "I told you in the car park. The day you start deciding who goes in and who stays out." He shook his head, slowly. "I don't blame you. I want to be clear. I've done it. Thirty years ago, in Marseille, for eight months, I lived with people I was sent to watch, and by the end of it I'd have walked into the sea for them. I know what it is. It's like being in love. It's worse than being in love, because you can't tell anyone." He looked back at the walls. "That's why I'm pulling you. Not because you've done anything wrong. Because you're going to."

• • •

They sat for a long time in silence after that.

The walls burned gold in the dark. A car went by on the causeway behind them, slowly, its headlights sweeping across the inside of the Renault and away, and Granier watched it go in the mirror until its tail lights were gone round the corner of the ramparts. The mosquitoes whined. Somewhere a long way off across the pans a dog was barking, on and on, at nothing.

"Eight days," Granier said at last.

Yassine turned his head.

"The moon." Granier was still looking at the walls. "I can't stop you going back. I could. I could arrest you here for something, I'd think of something, and I don't want to. So I'm not going to stop you. But I want you to hear what it means." He held up one hand and counted on it, finger by finger, slowly, the way you would count for a child. "The operation is ended. As of tonight. I'm writing that down and I'm sending it to the juge in the morning. Whatever you do out there from now on, you do as a private individual with an expired authorisation and no protection of any kind. If you carry anything for anyone, you're a trafficker. If you pick up that old man's rifle, which I imagine you have, you're a man with an unlicensed firearm. If anyone dies, you're a witness, or worse. I can't cover you. I won't lie for you. I'm the coordinating officer, I'm the only one who can stand up in court and say what you did and why, and if I'm asked, I'll tell the truth."

"I know."

"And the night." Granier lowered his hand. "If you give me the night and the beach, before the moon, I'll be there. With whatever Marseille and the customs and the navy will give me. And on that night, on that beach, I'll take everybody I find standing on it with anything in their hands. Everybody." He looked at Yassine. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"

He understood. He understood exactly. He saw it laid out in front of him in the dark of the car like the pens at the mas in the first grey light: the gates and the passages, the way the cattle went left or right, the only way through.

"I understand."

"Good." Granier reached forward and started the engine. "Then go and see your mother."

It took Yassine a moment.

"I rang her," Granier said, looking at the dashboard. "On Friday. Since you didn't. I told her the course was going well and you'd be home in the autumn, and that you were eating, and that you'd asked me to tell her you were sorry you hadn't called." He put the car into gear. "She knew I was lying. She thanked me anyway. Go and see her, Yassine. It's on your way. If you're going to do this, you should at least have done one true thing tonight."

• • •

He did not go to Montpellier.

He sat in the Peugeot in the lay-by on the salt road for a long time after the Renault had gone, with the windows down and the gold walls in front of him and the dark pans at his back, and the mosquitoes eating him alive, and he did not move.

He thought about the photograph on the driver's phone. The heading. The juge's name. Manade Plantier, commune of Le Cailar. Somewhere in the summer. He thought about the fish that had moved at the back of his mind and gone, and did not look for it.

He thought about the beach. A long pale beach in the dark, and a hull without lights standing off in the swell, and men wading in with their bundles held above their heads. And Granier on the dunes with the BRI and the customs and the navy, taking everybody he found standing there with anything in their hands. Everybody. Gaëtan in the shallows with Tambour's rein loose in his fingers. Magali swinging bundles up into the panniers two to a side and checking the straps twice. Timéo, with his splinted hand, grinning. Fredo by the truck.

And then he thought about the same beach, the same night, the same boat. And a different set of people standing on it.

It came to him slowly, the way the shape of the land came to him on the night they took the cows, not all at once but piece by piece out of the dark: a dike, a ditch, a line of tamarisk, a gate. He sat in the car below the burning walls and let it come. A beach with Arnaud's people on it and no Plantiers. A boat that came in on the moon because Arnaud had been told it could. A track across the marsh that a car could not cross in the dark and a herd could. A river that closed at night like a shop. A night that gave Granier everything he had asked for, the boat and the beach and the men with the stuff in their hands, and gave the Plantiers nothing at all except the one thing they had never had in nine years, which was the end of it.

It would need Gaëtan. It would need the cheap phone in Gaëtan's shirt pocket with its single number. It would need Fredo, who had said finished. It would need the horses and the dark and the herd, and it would need him to lie to everyone, to Granier and to the Plantiers both, more completely than he had ever lied in his life, and to go on lying right up until the moment when it stopped mattering.

He did not know if it could be done. He did not know if he could do it.

He started the engine. He turned the car round on the narrow causeway, slowly, in three movements, and drove back along the salt road past the gold walls and onto the dark road north towards the marsh and the mas, with the radio off and the windows down and the frogs shouting in the ditches on either side, and in his head, piece by piece, like a man laying planks across a canal in the dark, he began to build it.