Death on the Rive Nord

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Champs-Elysees in central Paris, even at night, was not the kind of place Rocco would have imagined as an ideal meeting place unless it were in a spy film. Wide open and busy, it was somewhere he’d have thought was anathema to a former undercover cop suffering anxiety attacks. A quiet cafe in a dark backstreet would have been more fitting, with discreet shadows and several avenues of escape if required.

Rocco checked his watch. It was just on nine o’clock. He left his car and walked slowly along the southern side of the avenue as directed, heading towards the distant Place de la Concorde. The Clemenceau metro was in front of him, and behind him loomed the always-impressive bulk of the Arc de Triomphe. Even at this hour there were a number of tourists gawking at the shop windows and drinking in the sights of a city famous the world over.

He had to give Casparon time to see him, to check his back-trail, so he stopped and peered in one of the shopfronts, a minimalist display of fine silks draped over an arrangement of driftwood and pale pebbles. It had probably cost more than he earned in a month, but he had to admit it looked good. More art than fashion. Or maybe he was missing the point.

A lone man appeared walking towards him along the inside of the pavement, and Rocco felt a tug of surprise. It was as if he’d dropped from a nearby rooftop. It was a reminder that he had been away from the city just long enough to have lost his street ‘edge’ — that instinctive feel for your surroundings which alerts you to a change in the atmosphere long before anyone else would notice.

The man moved under the flood of light from the window Rocco had been studying and nodded a greeting.

He was gaunt and dark-skinned, the colour of stained oak. In the shop light, his eyes were an unusual amber with tiny irises, and he wore a wisp of beard and moustache with a scrub of short, black hair. He looked wiry and tense, and might have been a former footballer or athlete. Except, reflected Rocco, footballers and athletes don’t carry an air of tension like an electrical charge which seems to envelope them and the atmosphere around them.

He put Caspar’s age at forty plus, but he might have been younger. Working too long undercover did that to you; it put years on your face and in your head, and wore you down like a stint of hard labour.

‘Rocco?’ The man lifted his chin in query, but it was clear he knew Rocco by sight, probably thanks to Michel Santer.

‘Caspar. Can I call you that?’

‘Sure. Everyone does. You prefer Rocco, right?’ It was a ritual between policemen, establishing common ground when working together. For Caspar it was probably a habit he couldn’t break, but Rocco was happy to go along with it.

He led the way to a large cafe with empty tables spilling onto the pavement. There were few customers around. ‘Inside OK for you?’

Caspar nodded. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ The tone was defensive, and Rocco noted a trace of bravado in the man’s eyes. Even so, he wasn’t going to pretend all was well when it so obviously wasn’t. That would be patronising.

Instead he said, ‘Because it’s too open outside and I don’t like sitting in a goldfish bowl.’

Caspar accepted the explanation with good grace. ‘Yeah, I hear you’ve banged a few heads in your time. No sense in taking chances.’ He stepped past Rocco and walked inside, heading for a table at the rear. He sat down facing the front and called for two coffees and cognacs from a waiter in a white apron, then watched as Rocco joined him. ‘Any of the old stuff ever come back on you?’

‘Not really.’ Rocco had received his fair share of threats over the years, the way cops do, much of it in the heat of the moment following arrest or conviction, and usually aimed at family members and colleagues. But most crims knew that going after a cop or his family was a ticket to suicide; tackle one and you had the whole force on your back. If you came out after serving a sentence and wanted to stay out, you left all that revenge talk behind you and took the punishment as part of the job. ‘You?’

Caspar sniffed, eyes flicking constantly towards the door. ‘They’ve tried, once or twice. Killed my dog a year ago; left messages, little packages, that sort of stuff.’

‘Packages?’

‘Mementoes. Sick stuff.’ He didn’t elaborate and Rocco let it go. He could imagine what they were. Criminals by and large were not given to great subtlety.

While they waited for the drinks to arrive, he studied the man across from him. Up close and in the light, he was younger than he seemed, Rocco concluded. He had smooth skin, but it carried the unhealthy sheen of someone not in the best physical health. A lock of greasy hair hung down across his forehead like the blade of a scythe, the tip nestling in a deep crease in the skin.

The waiter delivered their order, and they took a sip of cognac to each other’s health, dumping the rest in the coffee as if by mutual consent. Rocco stirred in sugar while Caspar sipped his as it came, before sitting back and saying, ‘So what did you want to talk about?’ He dragged a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one, drawing in a lungful of smoke as if his life depended on it, his face intense, needy. He looked apologetic about getting to the point so abruptly. ‘Sorry. I don’t seem to be as good at the small talk as I used to be.’

‘No need to apologise. It suits me, too. Samir Farek. What can you tell me about him?’

‘Jesus, Farek?’ Caspar looked surprised and suddenly the air around him seemed to crackle with energy. ‘How the hell did you come up against him?’ He stubbed out the cigarette and immediately lit another. His fingertips, Rocco noticed, were heavily stained with nicotine.

‘His name cropped up in an investigation. I’ve got nothing on him but Santer said you might have some information. If so I’d like to hear it.’

Caspar took a hefty sip of his coffee, then sucked on his cigarette and blew out smoke, wincing. ‘It’s nothing good. Will that do you?’ He shook his head and stared down at the tabletop, marshalling his thoughts. Eventually, he said, ‘His friends call him Sami. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Cosy, genial. He looks OK, too — more French than Algerian. But he’s nothing of the sort. He’s vicious and organised and completely ruthless.’ He tapped off some ash from his cigarette. ‘He was in the French army for a few years, recruited in Algiers. Got to be a sergeant armourer, with a good record. Wasn’t long before he was a regular go-between, too, fixing meetings with the army and colons on one side and the guerrillas on the other.’

‘He could do that?’ Rocco was as familiar as any Frenchman with the long-running battle between the colons, the colonist settlers, and the Front de Liberation Nationale, the FLN, in Algeria’s struggle for independence. It had been bloody and costly in human lives on both sides, and had only come to a conclusion in 1962 with many of the colons leaving the country for good. How a lowly sergeant of Algerian birth could straddle the line between the two factions while remaining untouched had to rank as one of the smaller miracles of the whole debacle.

‘This one could. He knew the right people on both sides and had the contacts, especially among the local community and religious leaders.’ Caspar looked sour. ‘He must have been charmed; he seemed to be accepted by the colons and army high command, who found him useful on the ground, and avoided being targeted by the FLN. They didn’t usually take too kindly to locals joining the French army; saw them as traitors and executioners. Any they caught didn’t get home again. Not in one piece, anyway.’

‘So how did he manage to avoid it?’

Caspar held out a hand and rubbed his fingers together. ‘How else? Money talks.’

‘On a sergeant’s pay?’

‘Yeah, well.’ Caspar gave a dry laugh. ‘He wasn’t just a sergeant in the army, was he? Farek has two brothers and God knows how many cousins, all working together. I say brothers — one’s a half-brother; he’s reputed to be the thinker. Their father played the field a bit. The other brother is a numb-nuts who probably tears the legs off spiders for fun. Between them they used to control nearly all the contraband activities crossing the Med, north and south, and a lot of it sideways. Anyone tried to barge in, they got wiped out.’ He shrugged. ‘In Farek’s army job, he had the firepower at his fingertips. They needed a show of superior strength, he’d borrow a couple of heavy machine guns from the armoury and allow his brothers and cousins to lay down the law, then have them back on the racks in time for breakfast.’

‘You make it sound like he had a free hand.’

‘He did, but I’m not sure how. I reckon the colons were happy to turn a blind eye while he got rid of a few potential guerrillas, and the army didn’t have to worry about putting down extra smuggling activities on top of everything else they had to do. It was a win-win situation — especially for Farek.’

‘And the FLN didn’t mind?’

‘That I can’t answer. But there was a question about captured arms which went missing on a regular basis. I figure he might have been feeding them to the FLN in exchange for a whole skin. Since independence, though, he’s been a little lower profile. He left the army and popped up again in Oran, in the north-west, where he’s been building a new little empire. I heard his brothers dropped out of sight altogether. Things must have got too hot for them in Algiers once the army was no longer around to protect them, so they skipped out.’

‘Clever. What about family?’

‘He’s married. Got a kid, too. Mr Perfect, in fact — on the outside.’

‘But?’

‘It’s a cover. Word is he plays away a lot… and he’s been looking for a replacement.’

Rocco found a mental picture of Nicole slipping into his head and tried to ignore it. He definitely didn’t want to go there.

‘Why doesn’t he divorce her?’

‘It’s a society thing, although I don’t think he’s got a religious bone in his body. He’ll probably dump her when he gets an excuse. It won’t be legal, but it will be final.’