The Tenth Chamber

THREE

General André Gatinois was taking a brisk stroll through the Père Lachaise Cemetery, his habitual lunch-time routine on fair days. Keeping lean into his fifties was proving nettlesome and he found it increasingly necessary to skip lunch and walk a few kilometrers instead.

The cemetery, the largest in Paris, was the most visited and arguably the most famous in the world, the resting place for the likes of Proust, Chopin, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Molière. Much to Gatinois’s irritation, it was also home to Jim Morrison, and he personally complained to the cemetery administrator whenever he noticed another addled Doors fan had spray-painted a TO J IM sign complete with arrow on a piece of masonry.

The cemetery was only a kilometre or so from his office on Boulevard Mortier in the 20 th arrondissement, but to maximise the amount of time in greenery, he had his driver take him to the main cemetery gate and wait there until he was done with his constitutional. The number plates on his official black Peugeot 607 guaranteed the police wouldn’t bother the idling chauffeur.

The cemetery was huge, some fifty hectares, and Gatinois could vary his route endlessly. On a sunny late-summer day, the masses of leaves overhead were just starting to turn and were rustling pleasantly in the breeze. He walked amidst a throng of visitors, although his fine blue suit, military-style hair and stiff posture set him apart from the jeans and sweatshirts of the scruffy majority.

Lost in thought, he found himself somewhat deeper than usual in the grounds so he picked up his pace to make sure he’d be back in time for his weekly staff meeting. A particularly large ornate tomb on a knoll made him slow and stop for a moment. It was open-walled, Byzantine, housing side-by-side sarcophagi adorned by a medieval man and a woman in marble repose. The tomb of Héloïse and Abélard. The twelfth-century star-crossed lovers who so defined the notion of true love that, for the sake of national homage, their bones were sent to Paris in the nineteenth century from their original resting place in Ferreux-Quincey.

Gatinois blew his nose into his handkerchief. Eternal love, he scoffed. Propaganda. Mythology. He thought of his own loveless marriage and made a mental note to buy a small gift for his mistress. He was tired of her too, but in his position, he was obligated to subject each dalliance to a full security check. Although his colleagues were discreet, he felt somewhat constrained: he couldn’t chop and change too frequently and still maintain his dignity.

His driver passed through the security cordon and let Gatinois off in an internal courtyard where he entered the building through a huge oak door as venerable and solid as the Ministry of Defence itself.

La piscine.

That’s what the DGSE complex was nicknamed. The swimming pool. Although the name referred to the nearby Piscine des Tourelles of the French Swimming Federation, the notion of swimming laps, working your tail off but remaining in the same place, often seemed apt to him.

Gatinois was somewhat of an anomaly within the organisation. No one inside the Directorate-General for External Security held a higher rank, but his unit was the smallest and in an agency where opacity was a way of life, Unit 70 was the most opaque.

Whereas his departmental peers within the Directorates of Strategy and Intelligence commanded vast budgets and manpower, stood toe-to-toe with their counterparts in the CIA and other intelligence agencies worldwide and held star status within their ranks, his unit paled in comparison. It had a comparatively small budget, only thirty employees and Gatinois worked in relative obscurity. Not that he ever lacked for resources – it was just that the amount of funding he required was dwarfed by the Action Division, for example, with their global network of spies and operatives. No, Gatinois achieved what he required on a fraction of what other groups needed. In truth, much of his unit’s work was accomplished by contractors in government and academic labs who had no idea what they were actually working on.

Gatinois had to be content with the knowledge, reliably passed to him by his superior, the DGSE director, that the Minister of Defence, and indeed the President of France himself, were often more interested in updates about Unit 70 than any other matter of state intelligence.

Unit 70 had its suite of rooms in a nineteenth-century block within the complex. Gatinois favoured it over the other modern cookie-cutter buildings and always resisted relocation. He preferred the high ceilings, intricate mouldings and wainscoting of the quarters even though the toilets were bulkier than their modern equivalents.

His conference room had grand proportions and a brilliant crystal chandelier. Following a brief visit to his personal bathroom to adjust his grooming, he swept in, nodded to his staff and took his place at the head of the table where his briefing papers awaited.

One of his rituals of self-importance was to keep his people waiting in silence while he scanned their weekly status report. Each department head would deliver a verbal summary in turn, but Gatinois liked to know what was coming. His principal aide, Colonel Jean-Claude Marolles, a short, haughty man with a careful little moustache, sat to his right, rolling the barrel of his pen back and forth between thumb and forefinger in his typical skittish fashion, waiting for Gatinois to find something to criticise.

He didn’t have long to wait.

‘Why wasn’t I told about this?’ Gatinois asked, peeling off his reading glasses as if he intended to fling them.

‘About what, General?’ Marolles replied with a touch of weariness that set Gatinois off into a rage.

‘About the fire! What do you mean, “about what?”’

‘It was only a small fire at the abbey. Nothing at all happened in the village. It doesn’t appear to have any significance.’

Gatinois was not satisfied. He let his unblinking eyes settle on each of the men around the table in turn until he found Chabon, the one in charge of running Dr Pelay. ‘But, Chabon, you write here Pelay told you that Bonnet himself attended the fire and mentioned that an old book was found inside a wall. Is that your report?’

Chabon replied that it was.

‘And what was this book?’ he asked icily.

‘We don’t know,’ Chabon replied meekly. ‘I didn’t think it had relevance to our work.’

Gatinois welcomed the opportunity for histrionics. He took his inspiration from the chandelier, which reminded him of a burst of fireworks. Often, their work had the quality of watching paint dry. It was easy for them to get complacent. It was easy for him to get complacent. It had been a solid six months since the last noteworthy breakthrough and his frustration at the torpid pace of his assignment and his long overdue advancement to a larger ministry job was ready to boil over.

He started softly, seething, and let his voice rise in a smooth crescendo until he was bellowing loud enough to be heard down the corridor. ‘Our job is Ruac. Everything about Ruac. Nothing about Ruac is unimportant until I say it’s unimportant. If a kid gets chicken pox I want to know about it! If there’s a power cut in the café I want to know about it! If a goddamn dog shits on the street I want to know about it! An old book is found in the wall of Ruac Abbey and the first reaction of my staff is that it’s not important? Don’t be idiotic! We can’t afford to be complacent!’

His people looked down, absorbing the pounding like good soldiers.

Gatinois stood up, trying to decide whether he ought to stamp out and leave them sitting there contemplating their fates. He leaned over and slammed his fist onto the polished wood. ‘For God’s sake, people, this is Ruac! Pull your fingers out and get to work!’