Rough Trade

24

6.30 a.m. Villa des Artistes

Soleiman opened his eyes. He was emerging from a very deep sleep. Heard Daquin downstairs, making coffee. Rapid check, he ached all over, but everything seemed to function, more or less. Sat up in bed. Groaned: had forgotten his broken ribs. Got up somehow, went as far as the bathroom. The big mirror: face almost unrecognizable, one hand bandaged, a dressing on his knee, bruises all over his body. Urine normal. I’ve got off lightly.

Daquin, in his dressing-gown, brought the breakfast up: scrambled eggs, fromage blanc, coffee. Soleiman got back into bed and began to eat. Had to be very careful about his jaw: cracking sounds, stabs of pain. Daquin still hadn’t asked any questions.

‘Do you already know what happened to me?’

‘No, I don’t know anything.’

‘I was beaten up by some cops, your buddies.’

Soleiman seemed so shocked that Daquin laughed.

‘You should have told them you belonged to me, and they needed my permission to touch you.’

Soleiman went silent. Daquin leant over towards him and kissed him on the neck.

‘Sorry, I couldn’t resist the temptation, you were funny when you said that. Go on, I’m listening.’

Soleiman gave a sober account of the whole incident.

‘The superintendent knew me already,’ he went on, ‘he’d seen me on Monday at the demonstration in passage du Désir. I got the impression he hated me.’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘No.’

‘Describe him to me.’

‘Over fifty. Not tall. Thickset. Average upmarket Frenchman.’

‘In the 10th arrondissement, highly possible it was Meillant.’

A long silence, both of them thoughtful. Soleiman, who was lying on his back in the bed, moved slightly closer to Daquin, rested his head on his thigh.

‘Listen, Daquin. This wasn’t the first beating up I’ve had. Each time I just tried to survive. I hid in a hole, and I came out when I hadn’t any more marks on my body. Today it’s different. For the first time I’m starting to exist in the eyes of others, I’ve got a past, I’m a man. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’ Daquin indicated that he did. ‘And it’s all being destroyed by that bastard. He humiliated me in front of my own people. I’ve no choice. Either I disappear again or I kill him.’ Despair in the blue eyes.

Silence for a long moment. Daquin stroked Soleiman’s left breast with its dark, hard nipple. I love this body. It suits me very well.

‘Neither solution will get you out of it, my boy, and you know that already. Look at it differently. He humiliated you, do the same to him, in front of the same public. He roughed you up because he’s a cop. Force him to resign from the police. Can you imagine the prestige you’ll get out of that?’

‘It’s beyond my reach, you know that very well.’

‘It’s not certain. We’ll operate together, you and I, to break Meillant.’

Soleiman sat up, pulled a face. His ribs were painful.

‘Why would you do that?’

‘I need to do it for my own purposes. And I can just see a way of doing it, with you. Are you game? I warn you, it’ll be risky and difficult.’

‘I’ll do anything to get out of this.’

‘We’ll talk about it again tonight.’

Daquin got up, went into the bathroom, shaved and dressed.

‘Stay here, in bed, today. You need to. But telephone the Committee, explain what happened and the way you look. A serious protest to the ministers, Interior and Labour, could be very helpful. Also, let the Turks at LVT know you’re alive, that you’ll need them, and that they must manage to stay with LVT until Monday evening. As for me, I’m going to look round the Bouffes du Nord area to see what can be done.’ A kiss on the lips, a smile, another kiss. ‘There’s something to eat in the fridge. I’m entrusting the house to you. Be good.’

10 a.m. Turkish Embassy

The ambassador, a middle-aged man, very much the Quai d’Orsay type, stood up to welcome the two inspectors from the Fraud Squad responsible for the enquiry, accompanied by Romero. But his manner of receiving them at once established a dividing line: they belonged to a lower order. Romero tensed up.

‘An extremely regrettable incident. Our staff will obviously collaborate with the French police. For us, the situation is clear: Monsieur Sener fell beneath the bullets of the same Armenian terrorists who struck down our ambassador to the Vatican in 1977, or our ambassador in Berne on 6 February last.’

He observed a moment’s silence, then turned towards Romero: ‘My staff have told me that you and one of your colleagues were present on the spot at the time of the murder. Might the French police be taking an interest in the activities of one of our diplomats without informing us? I’m not contemplating that hypothesis, which would be laden with future complications. I believe that your presence on the spot was accidental and I’m glad of it, for it will certainly allow the enquiry to lead very quickly to the arrest of the guilty parties.’

Romero acknowledged this with a slight bow from the waist.

*

An office was placed at the disposal of the inspectors for them to interview the two men who had accompanied Sener along the Champs-Elysées, Tahir Bodrum and Dogan Carim. They were both built on the same model: tall, heavy, thickset, moustachioed. They looked like henchman. Grey suits. Very well cut, essential for concealing their revolvers, white shirts, dark ties. Their function at the embassy: cultural attachés. Odd-looking lot, the Turkish intellectuals. They had both arrived at the embassy in 1979. Since then they had become very friendly with Sener. Yesterday they had gone out for a walk with no particular purpose. Taking advantage of the good weather in the most beautiful avenue in the world. Sener was no more preoccupied than usual. They heard a kind of ‘plop’, like the subdued sound of a balloon bursting, and Sener collapsed. They hadn’t understood what was happening, they bent down over him. He was dead. Astonishment. As they stood up they saw Romero and Marinoni running towards them.

‘How was it that the dead man had no diary on him, not even his keys, only his wallet and his identity papers?’

‘We weren’t on our way to a professional appointment. Perhaps he had left everything in his office?’

‘Your addresses, gentlemen?’

‘The embassy, naturally, inspector.’

Noon. Boulevard Haussmann

Systematic search of Sener’s office in the presence of an embassy man. Nothing. Nothing to an astonishing degree. It was an office without files, without correspondence, without a diary, without an address book. The inspectors talked to the secretaries who had worked with Sener, and to the colleagues closest to him: he was irreproachable, meticulous and calm.

‘Did he have a diary, any files?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘Where are they?’

Wide-eyed looks of surprise, a pretence at goodwill that remained helpless.

‘Didn’t his secretary keep his appointments book?’

‘No, Monsieur Sener worked in a highly personal way.’

Noon. Passage du Désir

Daquin arrived at his office whistling. A lengthy examination of the building at the Bouffes du Nord: he was full of ideas. Attali was completing a report on the two days he had just spent on the surveillance of Kashguri. He was in a foul mood.

‘Do you want to know what’s happening in the office? The custody of Paulette and her husband is over. They’ve both been charged. Can you imagine what it was like when they met again? Thomas is resigning from the police and Santoni has asked for leave. Lavorel is following up the Paulette Dupin case. So there are only the three of us left to work on a massive case, and we’re swamped. What’s more, here in the office, nobody says good-morning to us any more.’

‘What’s making you so pessimistic today?’

Attali was considering the best reply to this apparently simple question when the telephone rang. At a sign from Daquin he picked it up.

‘Superintendent Daquin’s office, Inspector Attali speaking.’

Gradually his face brightened. He took a sheet of paper and a pencil.

‘Noted. I’m informing the Super at once.’ He hung up and turned to Daquin. ‘The cops at Mantes have fished up a corpse from the river, it could be that of VL. They’re expecting us at the morgue for the identification.’

2p.m. Square Nicolay

After Sener’s office, his apartment. And always the inevitable observer from the embassy. Attractive apartment, on the fifth floor of a nineteenth-century building looking onto a private square, green and quiet. Air, silence, space. A small entrance hall, a large room alongside the outside wall, two bedrooms. Old-style kitchen and bathroom. The furniture was modern, comfortable and unostentatious. The concierge for the building did Sener’s housework. At the inspectors’ request she went up with them. Everything was impeccably tidy.

‘When did you come here last?’

‘Yesterday morning.’

One of the two bedrooms served as an office. Not a single paper on the table, nothing.

‘Was it usually like this?’

‘No. Here, by the telephone, there was a kind of black notebook, with a list of telephone numbers, and a pad of paper for writing down notes.’

The inspectors burrowed everywhere. A large collection of clothes. Few books. No papers.

‘Any files? No, he didn’t have many here. Sometimes he brought one or two back in the evening but he took them away again the next morning.’

*

As soon as the search was over, the seals put in place, and the embassy man gone, the concierge invited the three inspectors to have coffee in her lodge.

‘Tell us something about this Monsieur Sener. How did he live?’

‘He was a good tenant. He’d been here just over a year. Never late with the rent. I collect it. If only all the tenants were like that… He paid me regularly too. There was work to do in his place but it was never totally filthy. If you knew what some places are like …’

‘Women?’

‘One. Much older than him. Not all that beautiful. More the businesswoman type. She spent the night there two or three times a week.’

Paulette. Whenever images of Paulette or Thomas cropped up again Romero felt uneasy.

‘No others?’

‘What can I tell you? No other regulars, that’s all.’

‘And on the other evenings?’

‘Either he came back very late or he entertained friends. Practically all of them men. Turks, no doubt. Many with moustaches. They had dinner, they talked, they drank, they smoked like chimneys. And they gambled heavily.’

‘At what?’

‘I’ve no idea. Dice, cards…’

‘For money?’

‘Yes, I think so, lots of it. But that’s only an impression.’

3p.m. Mantes

The Crime Squad inspectors were waiting for Daquin and Attali outside the hospital in Mantes.

‘A rather alarming corpse, as you’ll see.’

They entered the small room where the forensic surgeon worked, with its white tiling, metal trolleys, phials, scalpels and the mingled smells of decomposition and disinfectant.

The doctor straightened up. Daquin and Attali came close. Attali exclaimed with shock. It was certainly her, but she was unrecognizable. The beautiful face was not only white and swollen, decomposed through its time in the water, it was also frozen in a near-unbearable grimace of suffering, the eyes rolled back, the mouth wide open, the features deformed, the neck twisted in a desperate attempt to escape. From what? A glance at the body. The flesh was lacerated, split open, rotting, from the chest to the knees. The breasts had gone, there was only a yawning white wound.

Attali went out, swaying dizzily.

Daquin turned to the doctor, who threw a sheet over the body.

‘Would you be able to give me some information about her death now, or must I wait for the report?’

‘I can tell you two or three things. Death took place about two weeks ago, difficult to be more precise for the moment. The victim died before being thrown into the water, perhaps even much earlier. Death was caused by the lacerations you’ve seen, possibly whip strokes. She was tied down by the wrists and ankles, whipped to death, raped by two different men while she was still alive. Then the body was placed in a wickerwork trunk immediately after death and thrown into the water later. There are pleasanter ways of dying.’

‘Thank you, doctor.’

Daquin rejoined the Crime Squad inspectors and Attali who were walking up and down outside the hospital.

‘It’s her, there’s no doubt about that.’

‘The face seemed to match the missing person notice. According to the doctor her age and the date of disappearance apparently matched too, so we called you. Do we transfer the papers to you?’

*

Police station in Mantes. Small office. The two inspectors gave Daquin and Attali the report on the discovery of the body. A bargee who was tying up at a factory quay in Mantes saw that he’d left a rope trailing in the water. He pulled it up and found a large wickerwork trunk, in a rather damaged state, attached to it. He hauled it up on deck, forced it open and found the body. He fainted and his wife telephoned the police station. The bargee’s name, his statement, how to contact him, the description of the body in the trunk, everything was there. Let’s go and see the trunk.

In the police station basement, Daquin suddenly came to a halt. I know that trunk. The pattern of the wickerwork, the leather corners, the brass clasp, even though half torn off. It was the trunk that had been in Anna Beric’s bedroom … Administrative formalities, then Daquin and Attali loaded the trunk into the boot of their car and returned to Paris. Attali, who was driving, didn’t utter a word.

‘What’s got into you?’

‘I think I was beginning to understand that girl. She wanted to get away from her family, who were stifling her, and from bastards like Sobesky and Romero who only thought of stroking her bottom. She wanted to be someone different, somewhere else. And I wasn’t good enough. That tortured face, what a horrible sight! It’ll haunt me for a long time.’

‘Find the killer, that’ll help you forget.’

Attali literally exploded.

‘Commissaire, what a lousy thing to say! I’ve tried to do that by all methods, with all my conviction. I’ve questioned people, I’ve listened. I don’t think I’ve neglected anything. And no result, nothing, nothing, nothing. I can’t do anything.’

‘Calm down, Attali, I think I’ve got an idea.’

Attali gave him a sceptical look and put his foot down hard on the accelerator. They were going at nearly 180 kilometres an hour.

‘Slow down. I’m scared in cars, and I’m expected home this evening. Does my idea interest you or not?’

‘Of course it does.’

Daquin settled back into his seat and tried not to look at the speedometer.

‘All the statements we’ve got from the mannequins and the Thai girls, all say the same thing. Kashguri’s a voyeur. I know from one of the mannequins through a private conversation, that he organized rather unusual sessions in his apartment. The girls were tied down by their ankles and wrists, flagellated then fucked or raped — I don’t know what term the law might prefer — by his menservants, while he masturbated close by. The girls were not killed: they were taken back to their homes with a load of money and so far none of them have made a complaint. That seems to be rather like what happened to VL. But she died from it. Two possibly hypotheses. VL took part in one of the special soirées, it went wrong. Kashguri got rid of the corpse. Or else Kashguri had good reasons for liquidating VL. Perhaps she tried to blackmail him with the video cassette from the Club Simon, or else she represented a danger for the network because the police were closing in on it. Or other reasons that we don’t even suspect. The fact remains that he had her killed while providing himself with a little sexual pleasure on the way. There’s no hard evidence to support all that, I agree. But perhaps you could see the people again who met VL on the morning of her disappearance and try to see if we can’t find a trace of Kashguri somewhere close to her. Sometimes it’s easier to locate two people rather than one.’

‘Chief,’ said Attali, a few kilometres farther on, ‘Mantes is on the way to Rouen.’

‘That’s certainly true.’

‘In the Seine, in a barge, the same sort of thing.’

‘But she didn’t die from a bullet through the heart.’

4p.m. Crime Squad Headquarters

The Superintendent in charge of the case heard the report by his two inspectors without a word. Then he passed over to them a despatch from Agence France Presse. They read it in silence and then gave it to Romero.

Paris, 27 March. 3.30 p.m.

Agence France Presse has just received the following communiqué,delivered by hand to their Paris office:

A Turkish diplomat has just been shot in the centre of Paris, inexactly the same way as another diplomat in Rome. We shallavenge with arms the extermination of our people, until theTurkish government acknowledges its crimes.

Commando of the Armenian Avengers

‘Now,’ the Superintendent went on, ‘we shall quietly explore the Armenian trail.’

Romero was surprised.

‘Do you think the communiqué is genuine?’

‘Perhaps it isn’t. But the embassy have locked us out, that’s obvious. This business involves only Turks who are all members of the embassy staff. And we’re not being asked to clean things up for them.’

8 p.m. Rue des Pyrenées

Romero was hovering about in the apartment that his cousin had lent him. A very small three-room place behind Père Lachaise. Lace covers over the television set, lace mats on the tables … He had a date with Yildiz. A last look round, everything was ready, the aperitifs, the dinner … The bell rang, he opened the door. Yildiz, her hair held back simply with a slide. A plain cotton dress, with long sleeves, turquoise blue. White sandals. Once again he felt a stab in the stomach. He kissed her hand. She stopped in the hall. Nervous.

‘Where is your cousin? She’d told me …’ A pause.

‘Do you really think I would make a crude pass at you?’ Sudden recollection of VL at the foot of a dark staircase … Soon gone. Be careful, a difficult evening to manage, no interference from the outside. ‘You’ve hurt me.’

‘No, of course I don’t think that.’

She still hesitated, put down her handbag, went into the sitting-room and sat down on the sofa.

‘Well then?’

‘First, what will you drink?’

‘Vodka with orange.’

Romero took a whisky, sat down in an armchair on the other side of the table, smiled at her. She drank a mouthful, still looking anxious.

‘What do you want, Romeo?’

‘To talk to you in peace. Things have been happening … And I think I may be under surveillance by the embassy. So, no public places. I don’t want to compromise you.’

‘Answer me honestly. Am I, in some way or another, responsible for Sener’s death?’ She looked anguished.

‘Certainly not.’

‘I should have told the ambassador about our conversation.’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘You were in the Champs-Elysées.’

‘I was following him.’

‘Yes.’ She was not convinced.

It was the right moment. Don’t play the scene wrong.

‘I’ll tell you what I think about Sener’s murder. I certainly owe you that. First, I’m not a member of the Fraud Squad. I belong to an anti-drug unit …’

Yildiz, her eyes lowered, finished her drink. He refilled her glass.

‘We’ve been working for nearly three months in the Paris area. And we’ve found practically nothing, apart from a few small dealers. But on the way we’ve come across the networks. I won’t mention prostitution. And in the ready-to-wear business, in the Sentier.’ At this point, described Berican, Paulette and Sener in detail. A brilliant account. Yildiz laughed, she was moved. ‘That’s where you come in, Yildiz, and you helped me to follow Sener.’

‘You still haven’t explained to me who killed him, and why.’

‘I’m not at all sure. But we think the Berican workroom isn’t an isolated case. There’s probably a much wider network in which Sener was the kingpin. His associates liquidated him before we could interview him.’

‘All over selling a few clothes?’

‘But it all adds up to a lot of money.’ Yildiz looked sceptical.

‘And I need you for something else.’

‘Why?’ She was on her guard.

‘The embassy is concealing all the leads, to prevent a possible scandal. But two people know a lot about it, and they are Dogan Carim and Tahar Bodrum, who were with Sener in the Champs-Elysées. We think they were on their way to a business appointment linked to the dealing in the Sentier. We interviewed them but got nowhere.’

‘They’re attached to the embassy.’

‘We suspected it. And that’s why I need you. Who are those two men? Where were they living until yesterday? Who are their friends and acquaintances? Only you can supply me with a starting point from where I can go forward. Without you I’m stuck, I’ve come to a halt.’

‘I feel remorse, Romeo. I feel I acted wrongly. And it came to a bad end.’

‘I beg you to believe me, you didn’t act wrongly. Sener was always on the fiddle, all for money, and he was liquidated by his own buddies. Yildiz, help me.’

Silence. Yildiz stared fixedly at her glass and twiddled it round in her fingers.

‘I’ll do what I can, Romeo. Tomorrow.’

Romero stood up. Went towards the kitchen. Came back with a bouquet of red roses, knelt at Yildiz’ feet and placed the bouquet on her knees.

‘Yildiz, will you marry me?’

She was astonished.

*

When the cousin came back at midnight, as arranged, she found all the lights on, the dinner untouched in the kitchen. Romero and Yildiz, fast asleep, in her bed. The auburn hair spread out over the pillows and Romero buried beneath it.