The Record

The fan on the filing cabinet had been replaced. It was the first thing he noticed. The old one, which had turned its head from side to side all summer like an animal that had given up hoping, was gone, and in its place stood a new one, white, silent, turning its head with a smooth mechanical indifference, and the air in the room on the fourth floor was exactly as hot as it had been in June.

He had been in Montpellier for nine days.

They had taken him off the dike that night in the back of an unmarked car, before the herd was off the track, before he had been able to stand up from the reeds. Two of Granier's people, one on each side, not unkindly, the way you take a man away from a road accident. He had not seen Gaëtan go. He had not seen Magali. The last he had seen of any of them was over his shoulder through the rear window of the car as it reversed down the track between the lights: a horse, standing riderless at the edge of the lagoon, white in the glare, its reins trailing. He had not been able to tell which horse it was. He had thought about it every night since.

They had put him in a hotel by the station. He had not been home. Granier had said it would be better not to be home for a while, and Yassine had not asked why, because he knew why. He had slept in a room with a window onto an air shaft and a print of the Place de la Comédie over the bed, and in the mornings he had walked to the fourth floor and sat in a borrowed office with no window at all and written.

He had written for nine days.

• • •

The others were finished long before he was.

Bruno's real name was Bruno, which seemed to Yassine for some reason the saddest thing he heard that whole week. Bruno Marchetti, forty-four, of Marseille, with a record that went back to his fifteenth birthday. The gun he had dropped on the dike, a nine-millimetre automatic with its serial number filed off, had been sent to the laboratory in Marseille on the Tuesday, and by the Friday the laboratory had matched it to the two bullets taken from Manolo Segura at the gate of his bull school, and to the two taken from a nineteen-year-old from Lunel found in a drainage canal near Aigues-Mortes in June. Bruno had said nothing for ninety-six hours. Then, on the morning the laboratory report came back, he had asked for a coffee and a cigarette and his lawyer, in that order, and had begun to talk.

The young one in the tracksuit was twenty-three and from the Third, and had a mother in a tower block in the Third and a little sister he sent money to, and had cried in the interview room on the second day, and had told them about Timéo. The fingers. The water. The old raseteur said Lyon right to the end. He had been there for that, too. He had told them that as well.

The boat crew were Spanish. The boat was impounded. The customs had taken one man off it, the rest had gone over the side and been picked up by the navy a kilometre out, half drowned and clinging to a cool box. On the beach, in the sand and the shallows and the backs of the two four-by-fours, there had been eleven hundred kilos of resin and, packed in among it in the same black plastic, three hundred and forty kilos of cocaine. The newspapers had the number by the Wednesday. Record seizure in the Petite Camargue. Marseille network dismantled. There was a photograph in Midi Libre of the beach in the daylight after, with the tyre tracks in the sand and the yellow tape and a gendarme standing beside a pile of black parcels with his hands behind his back, looking at the sea.

And Arnaud.

Arnaud had got out of the grey car when he was told to. He had stood on the dike track in the glare of the headlights with his hands in the air and his linen jacket creased, and looked past the armoured men at the bull still standing in the road ahead of him, and had said, very softly, to no one, Magnifique. Since then he had said nothing at all. Not a word, through ninety-six hours of garde à vue and two days in front of the juge. He had sat in the interview room with his hands folded on the table and his lawyer at his side, a man from Aix with silver hair, and listened politely to every question, and smiled, and said nothing. He would go to Les Baumettes to wait for his trial. It would take two years, perhaps three. His lawyer would fight every page. It did not matter. He had been on the beach. He had been in the car. He had been, as Granier said, with a kind of tired wonder, caught with his hands full, for the first time in twenty years, and nothing anybody said in any court was going to change where the car had been when the doors were opened.

None of it needed Yassine.

That was the thing he understood on the third day, sitting in the borrowed office with the reports of the laboratory and the customs and the navy spread across the desk in front of him. None of it needed him at all. The gun needed no witness. The beach needed no witness. Three hundred and forty kilos of cocaine on the sand at one in the morning with Thierry Arnaud sitting in a car at the top of the track needed no undercover officer to stand up in court and explain how it had come to be there. The case against the network had built itself, in a single night, out of what had been found where.

What was left was the other case. The one he had been sent for.

• • •

He wrote it on the seventh day.

He wrote it the way he had written his reports from the toilet with the tap running: in his head first, for days, at night in the hotel room with the air shaft and the print of the Comédie, until every sentence was finished and all he had to do was type it. It was not long. It was a page and a half.

It said that the undersigned had been introduced to the Manade Plantier in June in the course of an authorised infiltration. It said that he had observed, over the following seven weeks, that the manade and its family were subject to sustained pressure from individuals associated with T. Arnaud, including financial pressure, threats, and in the last weeks physical violence against a minor employed at the manade. It said that he had in his earlier reports described a nocturnal landing in July and attributed participation in it to members of the Plantier household. It said that on reflection, and in the light of subsequent events, the undersigned could not with certainty identify the persons present on that occasion, the conditions being of complete darkness, and that he withdrew those identifications. It said that he had seen no narcotics in the possession of any member of the Plantier family at any time. It said that on the night of the August new moon the Plantier family had been engaged in moving their herd to its customary summer grazing, as they had done in August for forty years, and that the presence of the herd on the dike track at the moment of the network's attempted evacuation had been, in the undersigned's assessment, decisive in preventing the escape of the principal suspects. It said that the undersigned would not be available to give evidence under his real identity in respect of any proceedings against members of the Plantier family.

That was all.

He did not mention Timéo by name. He did not mention the summer grass, or the gap in the dune fence the exact width of a pack horse, or the carrier bag under the lid of the bench seat, or the rifle in its blanket in the wardrobe. He did not mention nine years. He did not mention the kitchen table and the faded lemons and an old man saying then that's what we'll do. He read it over, once, sitting in the borrowed office with no window, and it was very short and very clean and very nearly true, and it was the first report he had written since June in which he had not left anything out, because this time he had left out everything.

He printed it. He signed it. He carried it down the corridor and knocked on Granier's door.

• • •

Granier read it standing up.

He read it by the window, with the new fan turning its head beside him and the light of the August afternoon coming in through the glass that had been designed to keep the heat out. He read it slowly. Yassine watched him read the first page, and turn it, and read the half page that came after, and stop, and go back to the top, and read it again.

Then he put it down on the desk, squared to the edge, and sat down in his chair and folded his hands on his stomach, the way he always did, and looked at Yassine across the desk for a long time.

"Four riders," he said.

Yassine said nothing.

"In July. Four riders, five pack animals. I drew a circle round it in green ink. And now there are no riders at all." Granier tapped the page with one finger. "Complete darkness. You withdraw the identifications. You saw the boat, you saw the cargo, you saw a truck with a dented cab and two bulls loaded on top of the straw, you wrote it all down in more detail than any report I've read in thirty years, and now you can't say who was there."

"It was very dark."

"I'm sure it was." Granier did not smile. "And you won't give evidence under your own name."

"No."

"You know what that means. The law. No conviction can rest solely on what you've written unless you stand up in court as yourself and say it." He looked at the page. "You've just taken the only thing we had against those people and put it in a drawer and locked it. Without you, there's no case. With this—" he touched the page again, "—there's less than no case. There's a police officer saying he was wrong."

"I was wrong."

"Were you."

It was not a question. Yassine did not answer it.

Granier sat back. He looked out of the window for a while, at the roofs and the trams and the blue haze over the hills, and Yassine waited, and the new fan turned its head from side to side without a sound.

"I said I wouldn't lie for you," Granier said at last. "In Aigues-Mortes. I meant it."

"I know."

"I'm not going to lie for you now." He turned his head back. "If the juge asks me, I'll tell him you were there. I'll tell him you wrote your reports in July, and then you rewrote them in August, and that in my opinion as your coordinating officer, the second version is less reliable than the first. I'll tell him you were close to the family. I'll tell him you stopped a search of their truck and I signed the order. I'll tell him all of it, if he asks." He paused. "He won't ask. He's got three hundred and forty kilos of cocaine and a ballistics report and Thierry Arnaud in a cell. He's going to be in the newspapers for a month. He's not going to spend his August chasing an old man who sells bull meat to tourists, on the word of an officer who's retracted it." Granier looked at him. "And if he did, there's nothing to chase. You've seen to that."

"Then it's finished."

"For them." Granier unfolded his hands. He reached into the drawer of his desk and took out a single sheet of paper, and laid it on the desk on top of the report, squared to its edges, and turned it so that it faced Yassine. "For you, there's this."

• • •

It was very short. It was shorter than the report. It was a single paragraph, typed, with the heading of the ministry at the top and a space at the bottom, and Yassine did not need to read it to know what it was, but he read it anyway, because he had read every paragraph he had ever been asked to sign.

"The IGPN," Granier said, while he read. "If you stay. They'll open it within a month, they've already rung me twice. An infiltration where the agent retracts his own reports. A search stopped at a checkpoint on the agent's request. An unlicensed firearm in a house the agent was living in. Contact with the subject after the operation was formally ended. Disobeying a direct order on the salt road. They'll take you apart, and they'll be right to, and to do it they'll go through that family one by one. They'll have the old man in an interview room. The daughter. The boy, with his hand. They'll go through nine years of that farm looking for the reason you lied, and they'll find it, because it's there." He paused. "If you go, there's nobody to inquire into. A man who's left the service can't be disciplined. I'll file your retraction. The juge will close the line on the Plantiers for want of evidence. And that'll be the end of it. For them."

"And for me?"

Granier looked at him across the desk. His face in the afternoon light was very tired and quite calm and not unkind at all.

"For you," he said, "it'll be the end of it too."

Yassine looked down at the paper. At the heading. At the paragraph. At the space at the bottom, a line with nothing on it, left for him.

He thought about a morning in June, in this room, with the old fan turning its head and two sheets of paper stapled at the corner laid on this desk in exactly this way, squared to the edge, and a line on the second page with nothing on it, left for him kindly, the way you leave a man the last chair at a table you have already laid. He had written his name on that line. He had written it without hesitating. He had initialled every page in the little box in the corner, in case the state was worried he might later say he had not seen them.

He thought about the boy in the canal. He thought about the white plastic chair. He thought about a riderless horse at the edge of a lagoon in the glare of the headlights, and not knowing which one it was.

Granier held out a pen.

Yassine took it. He uncapped it. He leaned forward over the desk and wrote his name on the line, the whole of it, Yassine Belkadi, in the same hand he had used in June, a little smaller perhaps, a little more careful, and put the date beside it, and capped the pen, and laid it down on the desk beside the paper, squared to the edge, and sat back.