Murder in Belleville (28 page)

“The question is do we enlist help or do it ourselves?” she said.

Rene rolled his eyes. “I’m too short for those commando outfits. Besides, my plumbing source moved to Valence. We’d need dynamite.”

“Gaston’s a military man, aren’t you?” she said, turning to Gaston. “And you’re handy with a plunger.”

“Apprenticed with the Army Corps of Engineers,” he said. “Before I chose intelligence.”

“Perfect,” she said.

“Bombs make you nervous, Aimee,” Rene said, concern in his voice. “Let the big guys get us in. Then we’ll have a better chance.”

Before she could reply, they heard a gunshot in the distance.

“You might have a point, Rene.” She grabbed the wet raincoat and opened the cafe door.

Two blocks later she ran into a solemn crowd of women by the barricaded square. One of the anxious mothers, her face mirroring the fear of a silent group around her, had collared a riot-geared policeman.

“What’s happening?” she asked. “Tell us what’s going on.”

“
Tiens
,” he said. “We’ll have them out soon.” He led her and the others further back. “Three more just came out!”

Loud shouts of “Take the right perimeter!” came from the school courtyard direction.

“My boy’s asthmatic,” the woman begged. “He needs his inhaler.”

“Give me his name, Madame,” the uniformed CRS man said, not unkindly. He copied it down, then repeated the name into his collar-clipped microphone.

Aimee overheard an official pleading to offer himself as a hostage in exchange for the children. Middle-aged and well dressed, he kept insisting to be taken.

A small group of people, who she figured were child pyschiatrists, stood at alert next to him. She looked up, examining the mansarded roof bordering the theater, when shots ricocheted off the square’s metal guard rail. Everyone hit the cobblestones. Except Aimee. She’d seen a face in the fourth-floor attic window. A flash of blond hair, and then it disappeared. Was it Anais?

“E
NCORE
!”
Bernard’s mouth widened in surprise as the young teacher, wearing a paint-spattered smock, her face flushed, wound the music box, which tinkled a nursery rhyme. Children giggled as they paraded around a line of small chairs. When the music halted abruptly, all made a mad scramble. The lone child without a seat gave up, laughing, and joined the clapping throng circling the remaining chairs as the teacher again cranked up the music.

A small wooden sword was thrust in Bernard’s lap.

“En
garde,
Monsieur!” said a serious-faced boy, his button eyes shining, with a black-and-scarlet cape tied under his chin.

“Michel, perhaps the monsieur is tired. Slaying dragons and wolves all day can be exhausting,” said a calm voice behind him.

Bernard turned to see a brunette woman in a denim smock, entering the class room with a tray of biscuits and pitchers of juice, escorted by a man in a black ski mask.

“A
table, mes enfants,”
she said. “After that we take our nap, as usual.”

The first masked man, wired to a pile of dynamite sticks on a basket of wooden blocks, motioned for Bernard to rejoin him. Bernard saw the man’s hands move and realized the explosive device must be a command-detonation type.

“Are you helping the hunter?” asked the caped young boy.

“Alors, Michel, it’s a big job to catch the wolf,” the teacher nodded to Bernard. “Our hunter needs some help!”

Bernard nodded as if he slew wolves and dragons daily. So the teachers made everything a game, he thought. Smart. And a good way to avoid panic and ensure cooperation.

A redhaired girl, freckles splashed over her face, wore a feather boa twined around her shoulders. She emerged from the dress-up corner and stumbled pigeon-toed in oversize ruby-red high heels.

“Gigi’s hungry,” she said, a large tortoise in her arms. The tortoise’s mouth snapped.

Bernard saw wires trailing from the dynamite. Afraid she’d trip over them, he yelled, “Stop!”

The teacher looked up. “Lise, don’t forget you get three points for your team every time you jump over those wires!”

Lise nodded, set Gigi down, and calmly jumped over them. Bernard’s heart hammered, and he knew he was hyperventilating again.

He’d conveyed Rachid’s demands to Guittard, who reiterated that he must remember his “goal”: Get them by a window. However, neither of these men went far from the dynamite. Guittard had agreed to Rachid’s demands for the immigrants’ release and implied that Bernard should play for time.

“Monsieur Rachid, Minister Guittard agrees to your demands,” Bernard said, parroting Guittard’s commands. “We’re recalling the planes, which stand by on the runway.”

“Three hours,” he said. “Every hour after that I shoot a teacher.”

Bernard flinched but kept his countenance firm. “Monsieur Rachid, we’re complying with your demands—”

“And you lose a limb,” he interrupted.

“Monsieur Rachid …” Bernard stumbled; he tried to go on.

“Do you like the sun?” Rachid interrupted. “Because when we leave we might bring you with us.”

Bernard’s hope sank. He’d been doomed from the start.

“R
ENE, COULD
we disengage the security by a remote source?” Aimee asked, standing at the Cafe Tlemcen window.

He shrugged.

“But you’re right, Rene,” Aimee said. “It’s time to work with the big boys on this.”

They had no other choice.

“Commissaire Sardou, I can help you,” Aimee said into her cell phone.

“You again?” Sardou snapped.

“Let me talk with Minister Guittard,” she said. “We can disable the
ecole matemelle
security system.”

“Don’t mess things up. We’re meeting the hostage takers’demands,” Sardou snorted. “You’re not needed.”

“I suggest we simulate the computer connection,” Aimee said, “fool the system, and enter the security-blocking code.”

Guittard got on the line.

“Talk to me, Mademoiselle Leduc,” he said.

“No fuss, if my partner and I work with your engineers. The children will walk out alive.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

She outlined her plan, sketching in the details after he’d paused and told her to go on. “But the computer must be up to do this.”

Guittard sounded worried, she thought.

“
Un moment,”
Guittard said, putting her on hold.

“Rachid gave them three hours,” Rene said. He looked at his watch, shaking his head. “Two hours left.”

“Forget it. The tactics team run this operation,” Guittard said, coming back on the line. “Their men coordinate this. The terrorists booby-trapped the computer against a simulation like that. There’s no way to defuse the bomb via the security system.”

Frustrated, she kicked the floor tiles. If their information was true, there was no way around it.

She’d never been on friendly terms with the gendarmerie’s specialized computer services. This unit, a quietly kept secret of the Defense Ministry, had a large budget. Paradoxically, the government’s red tape never allowed the branch to keep pace with private sector developments; Rene was always several computer years ahead of them. Every dealing she’d ever had with them had been fraught with resentment and roadblocks.

“So we wait,” Guittard said. “For every ten
sans’papiers
they release one child.”

Frustrated, she wanted to scream at him that terrorists didn’t play by the rules. Instead she said good-bye and paced Gaston’s cafe.

“Bernard Berge was a top graduate of ENA,” Gaston said, sipping mineral water. “Have some confidence in him.”

Creme de la creme,
Aimee knew. No other country had an equivalent. The only close comparison had been from a friend of her father’s who’d likened it to Princeton, Harvard, and Yale all rolled into one, only more exclusive.

Graduates, referred to as
enarques,
stepped right into ministry posts. Aimee remembered a newspaper comment referring to the government not as
socialiste
but as
enarquiste.

“Bernard followed the
enarque
path true to form,” Gaston continued. He took another sip, then set down the glass, careful to place it on the coaster. “Appointed first to the Ministry of Finance, he worked on the budget, then moved to law. He was a judge for a long time.”

“So
enarques
move around the government?” she asked, surprised.

“Bien sur,”
he said. “They’re all friends, like to keep the jobs inside the family, so to say. Keep them exclusive. They all live near one another, fancy flats in the Seventh Arrondissement so they can walk together to the ministry.”

But to her mind Bernard hadn’t seemed to fit that crowd. Remembering his haunted look, she became lost in thought. If he’d had some balls, he would have had everything.

The fading afternoon light hit and sparkled in Gaston’s glass. He looked up again; this time his lined eyes were serious. “His father served under Soustelle in Algerie. For a
pied-noir,
Bernard Berge has attained the top.”

Maybe what she’d mistaken for Bernard’s cowardice was a conscience. How had he felt to be part of this rarefied echelon? What had it cost him to perform this mission?

“Rumors had it he’d taken a leave earlier this year to avoid a nervous breakdown,” Gaston said. “He holed up in his flat and wouldn’t come out. Until they snagged him for this job.”

B
ERNARD WATCHED
the hands edge toward the 4 on the large wall clock. Around him little snores in the nap room kept time to the Mozart tape that had lulled many to sleep. The teacher, whom he’d heard called Dominique, sat in the middle, writing down Rachid’s whispered dictation, as she rubbed a child’s back.

“In order to escape,” Rachid said, “we demand that the police announce our deaths. Once sure of our safety, we will release the last of the children.”

Dominique held up the paper, written in red crayon, for him to see. Dark circles ringed her eyes.

“Sign it ‘the Human Bomb,’” Rachid said. “Then stay with the children.”

She complied and lay down on a cot.

Rachid stuffed the note in a biscuit tin and crawled over to Bernard. “Go with him,” he said jerking his head towards the other terrorist. “Throw it out of the attic window facing the square.”

“Why not call Guittard?” Bernard asked. “You can explain your demands to the minister.”

Rachid slammed his fist on the counter. The fish tank shuddered. “When I want suggestions, bureaucrat, I’ll ask for them.”

Bernard flinched. He took the note and crept past the sleeping children. Rachid’s accomplice nudged him with the machine gun up the staircase, poking him in the ribs every time he paused.

Bernard was sweating as they reached the fourth floor. All the way up, his mind fixed on how to get the terrorist near a window. A creaking sound on the wooden stairs alerted him… a rat, another escaped school pet, or a hiding child? The terrorist paused, he’d heard it, too.

“Wait here,” the man barked.

Bernard stood on the worn steps, breathing hard. This pampered childhood world felt foreign to him.

The hungry postwar years he remembered were in rented rooms with a toilet shared by two floors. And that, his mother had considered a luxury. His real father had died in a desert skirmish with rebel
fellagha
when he was little.

His stepfather, Roman, also a
pied’tioir,
said little. But when he spoke everyone listened. Bernard had always likened Roman’s speech to the tools of his butcher’s trade—sharp and cutting.

He’d once asked his mother, before he’d learned better, why his Papi’s words cut like a knife. She’d sighed, then pulled him close, something she’d rarely had time for. She told him his Papi bottled everything inside and that some people showed their love in different ways. His Papi, she continued, showed it by working hard. They had a home now, she’d said. She’d gestured toward the room around them. Peeling plaster in two narrow, high-ceilinged rooms, the only water source a pump in the courtyard.

But when Roman spoke, he used language as a weapon. Whereas Bernard learned to use language as a shield, living in the ether of ideas.

His mother said she was sure one day he’d make his Papi proud and show him how smart he was. She’d run her hand down his cheek, smooth down his hair and the stubborn cowlick that never took orders. Her tone had been wistful when she’d asked him if he’d take care of his Papi when he got older.

But he never had. Roman died broken and tubercular seven years later. Before Bernard earned entrance to Ecole Nationale Administratif, and his brother passed the entrance exam for medical school. However, Roman’s fierce silences and cutting words were imprinted on his pysche.

These children would never know his deprivations. And for once, bypassing the envy that lived in his heart, he experienced gratitude. Gratitude that no child would know those days… but then he thought of the Balkans, the blank-eyed orphans. War never stopped, it just took different forms. And these children, weren’t they victims forged from battles of the long-lost Algerian war?