Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [62]
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13. Small World
In Paris, though it might have been a world away, Rene´ Mathis was glancing through Le Figaro as he finished lunch in a cafe´ near the offices of the Deuxie`me. A new Vickers VC-10 airliner, he read, flying from Britain to be commissioned by Gulf Air in Bahrain, had vanished somewhere over the Iran–Iraq border. It had simply disappeared from the radar screens.
Mathis shrugged. These things happened. The British Comet had been particularly crash-prone, he seemed to remember. He had had a typical working lunch: steak tartare with frites and a small pitcher of Coˆtes du Rhoˆne, then a double cafe´ express. It was a quiet day in Paris, and on such days Mathis often had his best ideas.
The police investigation into the murder of Yusuf
Hashim had been inconclusive. There were areas of Paris that the police couldn’t really penetrate, either because it was too dangerous for the officers or because the denizens of the high-rises, even if they spoke French, would not co-operate. La Courneuve, a district of St Denis with its infamous Cite´ des 4000, was one. Sarcelles was another: a ghetto with its own violent rules of dog-eat-dog that had little or nothing to do with the laws of the Republic. These places were viewed by most people as the price that France had been made to pay for her imperial misadventures. The French abandonment of Indo-China had been humiliating, but had had few repercussions at home beyond the appearance of a vast number of indistinguishable Vietnamese restaurants. The Algerian war, on the other hand, had saddled the large cities of France, and Paris in particular, with thousands of disgruntled Muslim immigrants. While they were effectively fenced out of the city centres into the high-rise suburbs, Mathis viewed such places as a breeding ground for crime and subversion that would sooner or later explode.
Yusuf Hashim had been one of many runners in a long supply chain of heroin. The police had found the narcotic on the estate and it was notable for both quality and quantity. This was not the fashionable
dabbling of the cocktail set at Le Boeuf sur le Toit and other nightclubs of Mathis’s youth. This was death-by-drugs, peddled on a national scale, and the supply line was expertly run with so many cut-outs that it was impossible to find the source.
Colleagues in Marseille, working with American detectives, had had some success in closing down shipments to America through what the FBI called the French Connection. What they had further discovered was that, although France was buying more heroin than ever before, the bulk of what came in was being shipped on to London.
It was almost, the French police told him, as though someone with limitless resources was waging a crusade against Britain.
Mathis looked at his watch. He had a few minutes to spare so he ordered another coffee and a small cognac. For several days something had been nagging at the edge of his memory, begging to be let in. And now, as he looked through the glass enclosure of his pavement cafe´ beneath its scarlet awning, it finally came to him.
The tongue removed with pliers . . . He had heard of this punishment before, and now he remembered where. His brother, an infantry major, had fought with the French forces in Indo-China and had told
him of a particular Viet Minh war criminal they had tried to capture and bring to justice. He had supervised the torture of captured French troops, but had also been an enforcer of Communist doctrine against Catholic missionary schools. His speciality had been the punishment – or torture – of children, many of whom had ended up maimed for life after his attentions.
When Mathis returned to his office, he asked his secretary to search the files for photographs relating to war criminals from the Indo-China war.
After he had seen Bond at lunch, Mathis had commissioned one of his subordinates to find Julius Gorner’s Paris factory and