Children of War (11 page)

‘When can I go back to teaching?’

‘It’s the same answer, Momu. They know where you teach and where to find you. If you aren’t at the
collège
, that means less danger for the schoolchildren and your colleagues. This is not an address they know, and if they find you, you’re guarded. And that reminds me, I have to ask for your mobile phones. We don’t want them tracking you through them.’

‘Can Karim and his family come to visit us here?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll go to see Karim and make the arrangements, pick them up myself and bring them here.’

‘Presumably they know who you are,’ said Dillah. ‘These men could be tracking you as easily as us.’

‘I have a special phone. It’s as secure as we can make them.’

‘I’m worried about Karim and the babies,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t they be here with us? There’s plenty of room.’

‘That’s up to you and Karim, if he feels he can afford to close the café and forgo the income,’ Bruno said. ‘I don’t think it’s wise for him to commute back and forth to work from here. We simply don’t know if these thugs are aware of Karim. His name wasn’t in their notebook we found. And if he disappears along with his family, they might alert somebody. We don’t know if they have any sympathizers around here …’ Bruno saw Momu’s face darken.

‘At the mosque, they know about Karim,’ Momu said. ‘When they agreed to take Sami into their special school, they wanted to know everything, names, relatives, how much I make, did I own my house, did I have a mortgage or a loan to buy my car? That was how they worked out how much we should pay.’

Bruno had not been aware that Momu had been paying the mosque. ‘How much did you pay them?’

‘Rather more than I could afford,’ he said. ‘And they were
furious when I stopped paying when Sami disappeared. They said their religious court had ruled against me and I still owed money. I told them I’d see them only in a French court and they climbed down. I understand now why they were so nervous at the idea. It would have meant questions about where Sami had gone.’

‘I’d better take some food out to those two nice young men,’ said Dillah. ‘I can’t stand the idea of them living on frozen pizza, not here in the Périgord.’

The next morning Bruno drove into St Cyprien to buy more clothes for Sami, dog biscuits and a pay-as-you-go phone. If he wasn’t allowed to use his own mobile, he still needed to communicate with people. And he wanted to continue his search for any trace of the Halévy children. He picked up some croissants and then drove back by a roundabout route to call at Karim’s Café des Sports. He parked around the corner by the rugby stadium and looked at the cars parked outside the café. They all carried the number 24 on the licence plate, which meant they were local. Even so, he knocked on the back door and Rashida opened it, an infant crawling at her feet and her new baby in her arms.

‘Karim called the Mayor to find out where they are but he won’t tell us,’ she said when he’d slipped inside and closed the door. Automatically, she began making coffee.

‘I’ll take you there tonight if you like, after the café closes, but you must only go when I take you. It could be dangerous,’ Bruno explained. ‘Don’t say anything about this to Karim unless you’re alone.’

‘Should I bring some food, maybe some clothes?’

‘That’s all taken care of. Dillah is feeding us. And you might want to bring your swimsuits. There’s a pool.’

She grinned. ‘Karim thought you’d have them all in some police barracks or on an army base. It sounds more luxurious than that. But how long is this going to last?’

‘I wish I knew,’ he said, and was about to take his leave when Karim came in from the door that led to the café, his height and bulk instantly filling the room. As soon as he saw Bruno his eyes blazed.

‘What the hell is going on, Bruno? Where are my mum and dad?’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ he replied calmly, and thanked Rashida as she handed him a cup of coffee. ‘They’re still in danger, along with Sami, but I’m hoping to arrange for you to see them this evening.’

Karim took the baby from his wife’s arms and said, ‘I came in for some more sugar. We’re almost out. Could you see to the bar, please? And I was making two double espressos for Julien and Manuel. They’ll also want some of their usual lottery cards.’

As Rashida left, saying that little Pierre had yet to be fed, Karim sat heavily at the kitchen table, scooped up his toddler with his free hand and tried clumsily to seat the little boy in his high chair. Bruno put down his coffee and took the baby and Karim settled his son and began to feed him some yogurt. Bruno bent down to sniff the baby’s head, a scent that always enchanted him.

‘Who are these bastards?’ Karim asked, keeping his voice mild to avoid upsetting his son.

‘Jihadis, Salafists, the same kind of zealots who wiped out Sami’s family in Algeria, and now they’re here in France,’ Bruno replied. ‘They want to kill Sami because he’s the living
proof that they’ve been funnelling French Muslims from the mosque to fight in Afghanistan. If they have to kill your parents or your children to get to Sami, they’ll do it.’

‘You saw them at the
collège
, you know who they are. Why haven’t you arrested them?’

‘If we do that, the people who are behind this will send somebody else. It makes more sense to watch them, monitor their phone calls and their movements and build up a picture of the whole organization, not just these two thugs. They’re just pawns.’

‘You make it sound like my parents are pawns, too,’ Karim said, but Bruno felt there was no malice in his words, simply a sense of frustration that there was so little he could do for his family.

‘We don’t see them as pawns,’ Bruno said, knowing his words were pompous but they needed to be said. ‘We’re doing all we can to protect them, renting a discreet location, installing round-the-clock security guards.’

Karim nodded. ‘What about Rashida and the kids?’

‘We found a notebook in their van. It had your dad’s name and address but not yours. Still, Momu says he listed the entire family when Sami went to the mosque, so they may know about you. If you want to join your parents, we can do that.’

‘I can’t afford to leave the café.’

‘Rashida and the kids could go, but it might be risky for you to stay on alone. These people are armed and ruthless.’

‘
Putain
, why not round up the whole mosque? Close the bastards down.’

‘Because this is France. We have laws. I have to go, Karim. We can discuss all these issues later. I’ll pick you up this
evening after you close the café. Go to the tennis club and I’ll take you out the back way, just in case someone is trying to follow you.’

Bruno kissed the baby, handed it back to Karim and strolled up the quiet side street that led to the empty rugby stadium. He used his key to enter the clubhouse and used the office phone to make the calls he had planned. He started with the Mayor, then Florence to learn if the computer club had approved his appeal for their help in the search for any records of the Halévy children. They’d already begun, he was told. Finally he called Pamela.

‘Fabiola came back last night and we ate here. She told me all about it, made it sound very cloak-and-dagger,’ she said. He could almost hear the smile in her voice. ‘I suppose you’ll have to arrest me now I know the secret of where you’ve taken them.’

‘They should be safe there.’

‘Did Fabiola say anything about that problem with Gilles? And have you called him?’

‘No, she said nothing, and no, this isn’t something I could ask him about on the phone.’

‘What’s this number you’re dialling from?’ she asked. ‘I don’t recognize it.’

‘I’m not using my usual phone for security reasons.’

‘Take care of yourself. Should I call this number if I need you?’

‘No, there’s another number, a disposable phone I bought.’ He gave the number. ‘So long as you’re not calling to tell me to interrogate Gilles about Fabiola.’

She laughed, a sound he loved to hear, and it made him hope things were better between them again.

His calls to the Jewish Scouts and to the Shoah Foundation brought no new details, but gave him the names of some of Halévy’s friends in Paris to whom he might have confided something. He got voicemails, secretaries, but finally Halévy’s sometime partner in a medical practice came on the line, happy to talk about his old friend.

‘You’ll never guess what he told me once,’ Bruno heard. ‘He said that he was never healthier than in the war. He never ate too much, no sugar, only water and milk to drink, and everything fresh from the garden and the farm.’

‘So he lived on a farm? Not in a town.’

‘He was briefly in a town, in an attic belonging to an old lady who brought them bread and hot milk for breakfast. But mostly he was on a farm, with a couple, and he always called the man Monsieur. He called the wife Tante Sylvie. Apparently they were very devout Christians, and the man wore a porcelain mask. David spoke of it when that musical was popular, the one about the phantom living under the Paris Opera. He said the Monsieur had been like that, a
gueule cassée
.’

Bruno almost jumped from his chair. This was a vital clue. A
gueule cassée
, literally ‘broken face’, was one of the many who had suffered severe facial injuries from the Great War, usually a victim of artillery fire. Some were so disfigured that they were given ceramic masks, along with a small pension, which meant there should be an official record somewhere of all those in the region with these facial mutilations. Where might the records be kept? He called the Préfecture in Périgueux and was put through to the archives, only to be told the relevant records had been lost or perhaps destroyed. He tried the military archives at Les Invalides in Paris, and
was transferred to the archives of the
anciens combattants
in Caen.

He reached a woman who tried to be helpful when he explained his search. The archives were filed by name, and he had no name, and only a rough idea of the region. But there were more than a hundred thousand
gueules cassées
, he was told. Did they all have porcelain masks? No, only about a third of them. Would it be possible to track down those fitted with such masks in the Dordogne? That’s not how the archives are organized, he was told. And there was no centre for fitting the masks in the
département
of the Dordogne.

Bruno then called Jo, his predecessor as the town policeman, and asked him for any memories of a
gueule cassée
in the region during the Occupation. Jo could recall two: one, named Barrachon, had lived in St Denis and worked in an insurance office; the other had been an
Inspecteur de Tabac
in Ste Alvère. Bruno took their names, but neither one was a farmer. Jo promised to ask around.

Bruno knew someone in the town with the name of Barrachon, who would probably be a relative. He called the house and an elderly woman answered. It was her son that Bruno knew, also an insurance agent. He explained his search and asked if an ancestor had been a
gueule cassée
and found he was on the right track. The woman’s grandfather had been fitted with a mask in Limoges, and had been secretary of the local branch of the
Anciens Combattants
. She still had his papers up in the attic. Would Bruno like to come and look through them?

Two dusty hours later, Bruno had a long list of names of the local
mutilés de guerre
, organized by the nature of their wounds. It sobered him. He knew from the town war memorial that
almost two hundred sons of St Denis had fallen in the Great War, around one in eight of the commune’s male population in 1914. And there were two hundred and seventy names of the
mutilés
. There were the blind, those who had lost one or both legs, those missing one or both arms, as well as the victims of poison gas.

Bruno had known intellectually of the appalling toll of that war, and as a veteran soldier he could guess that for each one who died in action, two or three would be wounded. He understood from his own experience how that simple word ‘wounded’ could not begin to describe the pain and frustrations of hospital and operations, the endless tedium and discomforts of convalescence.

His own recovery had been complete. Yet now he felt weighed down by the presence of hundreds of thousands of men whose lives had been permanently transformed and diminished by wounds and disfigurements that lasted for the rest of their days. Blinded, legless, deafened, barely able to breathe for the gas that had scoured their lungs, the costs of war endured for whole lifetimes, condemning the victims and their wives and families to but a fraction of the lives they had expected. And it was not only Frenchmen, but Germans, Russians, British, Austrians, Americans, Turks, Italians, a polyglot host of smashed bodies and broken minds that spread around the globe. What a gross and terrible madness that war had been.

On the list in his hands were fourteen
gueules cassées
. Five of them were listed as receiving pensions for being one hundred per cent disabled, so he presumed they would not be able to continue working their farms. Of the remainder, five were
farmers. Three of them were in the commune of St Denis, one was in St Chamassy and one in Audrix.

Bruno noted the names and addresses, and went to the
Mairie
to find exactly where the farmers from St Denis had lived and the names of the current owners of the farms. The
cadastre
, the vast map of the commune on which every lot of land was marked, was cross-referenced to the taxation records. Two of the names he crossed off his list, since the men had died before 1942. He called the other
mairies
and found that the
gueule cassée
in St Chamassy had died in 1941. That left him two names. The farmer in St Denis had land adjoining the road to Les Eyzies, which did not seem sufficiently remote a secret shelter.

So he drove to the tiny
mairie
of Audrix and asked the Mayor if he could consult the
cadastre
. He found that the farm had been abandoned and had paid no taxes since 1944. The farmer’s name was Michel Desbordes and his wife was Sylvie. The Mayor rang the oldest inhabitant of the village and asked if he remembered the couple. He did, so Bruno and the Mayor walked through the small square flanked by the medieval inn on whose terrace Bruno had often dined to the modest house where the old man lived with his daughter, a widow and retired in her turn.