Mind/Reader Page 24

  That only emerged after Marcel Temoine was identified as Sanglier - the name he legally adopted like other French resistance heroes - from the genuine Interpol records he’d risked his life to maintain alongside the fabricated version the Nazis created in the last year of the war to obscure and deny their atrocities.

  Those genuine files provided a graphic narrative of a man using the Berlin-based Interpol communication system, under the noses of SS men hunting him, to re-route and redirect ordered deportations and even misdirect execution instructions to save the lives of dozens of French and English prisoners and nationals.

  Henri could remember now as vividly as he had felt it in those early, reunited years the adulation, almost reverence, in which the renamed Sanglier family was held. And he enjoyed it now as much as he had enjoyed it then; had grown up knowing no other attitude from virtually everyone with whom he came into contact.

  It was only much later, when he’d embarked upon his own name-enhanced police career, that he had fully realized that the French adoration of their resistance heroes was a counter-reaction to the deeply rooted national embarrassment at wartime collaboration and the Vichy government.

  He could recall just as easily his father’s self-effacing modesty and determined refusal to consider himself a hero, the reluctance for several years to cooperate with the most esteemed historians, and the outright dismissal of film-writers and biographers as parasites, trying to make money from the lives of those he’d failed to save.

  Which the old man had himself steadfastly refused to do, throughout his lifetime. He’d accepted the National Assembly-voted lifetime pension. And the medals, France’s Légion d’Honneur and Britain’s George Cross. But he’d rejected the company-offered sinecures and the invitations to assured political office and most fiercely of all the huge advances offered by publishers for his own account of those years.

  And he had refused to tell the story to his own son, even when the events that linked him to the Carter family had made it necessary and despite Henri’s insistence that he didn’t intend writing a book for general publication but simply wanted to re-establish lost facts and mislaid material. That adamant, totally inexplicable rebuff had shocked - offended - Henri. Remaining dispassionately objective he supposed it had been an over-reaction at the time, hardly sufficient to justify the uncertainty that followed. But it had been difficult for him to understand because it was the first thing - and the most important - his father had ever refused him.

  Enough has been written; it’s over, in the past. As clearly as he could remember everything else Henri recalled the precise words of his father’s rejection. As he could call to mind the other remarks. The truth is not what it seems. And There are many ways to be brave, some which aren’t brave at all, so similar to another remark To be brave is not to be stupid.

  None, by themselves or even together, anything more than what, as a trained policeman, he would consider circumstantial. Scarcely even that. Which was all, he conceded, other remarks by another dead man could be regarded as.

  But the internal Interpol inquiry into the affair of William Carter shouldn’t have been circumstantial, although that’s how it had largely turned out. Any more than it should have been internal in the first place. It should have been a public inquiry into the crass incompetence of William Carter, Interpol’s English archivist entrusted - honoured - with assembling and annotating all the uncollated material about the organization’s most famous officer.

  Both reasons put forward for the secret inquiry - the national embarrassment a public hearing would create, either at Interpol’s inefficiency or at the reminder of the wartime French ignominy - were ludicrous. As the inconclusive verdict - ‘a regrettable administrative error’ - was ludicrous, as ludicrous as the punishment of William Carter, enforced premature retirement on a reduced pension.

  But most inexplicable of all had been his father’s reaction to it all, even making allowances for the illness from which the old man died six months later. It’s unimportant, he’d said: only the details about me have been lost. The Nazi efforts to escape their guilt are still there. And then he had uttered the most incomprehensible remark of all. Better this way: all gone. Ended at last. Made even more incomprehensible by the abject refusal - tight-lipped, head-shaking, won’t-speak refusal - to explain what he’d meant by that or any other enigmatic statement.

  The only way the entire episode, the entire story, made any sense was if there was a basis - still-hidden facts that could yet emerge - for Henri Sanglier’s doubt about the complete truth of his father’s acclaimed heroism. If there were - and the hidden information became public - it would not only expose and disgrace a dead man whom he’d adored and respected whose reputation he would do anything to protect, it would make impossible the career Sanglier intended to pursue after Europol. Which couldn’t - wouldn’t - be allowed to happen, whatever he had to do to prevent it.

  Sanglier had genuinely had no intention of trying to write a book, despite his father’s dismissal as exaggerated nonsense - another remark on Henri’s circumstantial list - everything that had been published about his exploits, which had surely justified a definitive, correcting biography. Henri had quite simply wanted to complete the gaps which William Carter’s blundering — I can only think I destroyed material before ensuring it was properly copied … maybe files were taken and not returned … the record system was chaotic — had created: simply wanted to know. He’d read, several times, all the books and every article and seen, several times again, the two films based upon his father’s life. And always ended with a trained investigator’s dissatisfaction at what was never properly explained, even before the Interpol loss.

  Which, after his father’s death, he’d set out to correct. It had not been an act of disobedience against his father’s wishes but a gesture of love, to ensure his father’s reputation endured.

  By the time Sanglier had made that decision he’d been a gendarmerie commissioner in Paris, able to use all his authority - both official and that inherited with his adopted name - to access the incomplete Gestapo documentation and obtain every transcript of the Interpol inquiry to supplement what remained of the Interpol material, after William Carter’s losses, which was now preserved in the vaults commemorating the heroes of France.

  And created for himself far more gaps than he succeeded in closing. The Gestapo annals were genuine, captured by advancing American forces and actually produced as court evidence in the Nuremberg war crime trials. At those same trials were also produced - and proved accurate by comparison with other surviving, independent documentary evidence - the secret Interpol files his father risked torture and death to maintain.

  The only facts uncorroborated by independent documents or by a surviving resistance worker had been those establishing his father’s legend. In most cases there were photographs of the Allied agents with whom his father worked. Street addresses and family details: messages intercepted, between one and another. But never Sanglier, the boar. His father had even drawn attention to it himself, in the account he’d begrudgingly given the official war historian preparing his national archive entry, one of the few occasions he’d cooperated fully to expand the acknowledged facts.

  The old man had confided that he’d trusted no one, relaxed with no one, never allowed his whereabouts or even his real name to be known by those to whom he was secretly passing information. Nor had he needed to. For four enforced years he had been at the hub of a communication machine, not just Interpol but units of the Gestapo and the Abwehr: that had been how, using their unchallengeable authority, he had been able to re-route the deportation trains and intercept the execution orders in the chaos of the collapsing Reich. It was from one of those intercepted arrest warrants that he’d been able to pass on his Ruhr targets to the cell subsequently executed. He had always passed on his Ruhr targets by mail, using Berlin’s central post office, never once making any personal contact: the routine had been for him to provide the German production loc
ations for the established cell to confirm before alerting London.

  The totally unexpected and official approach from London - to him as a private individual, not a police commissioner - had moved Sanglier’s half-formed, amorphous doubts into positive fear. It had come from the Scotland Yard unit investigating war criminal residency in Britain after London’s highly publicized legal extension of the statute of limitations.

  On the face of it, the inquiry was a further acknowledgement of his father’s wartime bravery. A Nazi transportation major responsible for sending British prisoners of war to the two labour camps from which the incomplete records showed his father had diverted trains was suspected of living, now in his late seventies, in Wales. Was there any unpublished, family-retained material about the train diversions - the cited heroism for his father’s George Medal - that Sanglier could make available in evidence of the major’s activities?

  It had not, of course, been necessary for Sanglier to go to London but he had, not to offer the requested additional information - there wasn’t any - but to learn as much as possible of the British investigation. There was no British doubt about his father’s activities in Berlin in the last two years of the war: indeed Sanglier had been received in London with practically the same respect to which he was accustomed in France. The inconsistencies were attributed to the confusion of the war’s end and the Nazi success in covering their tracks. And although the British shared his frustration at the totally inadequate Interpol inquiry, they didn’t question its being held in camera or suggest there might have been some official connivance in the disappearance to disguise the fact that his father might not have done all - or even part - of what seemed to be irrefutably confirmed by what official documentation remained. But Sanglier was made very aware of the war crime unit’s determination, spurred by the personal loss of the father and the elder brother in German captivity of the Jewish-born superintendent who headed it.

  ‘I’m in this job until the end of my career,’ the man had claimed. ‘And at the end of that career there won’t be one of the bastards I haven’t tracked down or a fact about any of them I haven’t uncovered. And I don’t care what I’ve got to do to achieve that.’

  It had been two long, worrying years, up until just a few months before his Europol appointment, before Sanglier was freed of his fears that the British would uncover something that might expose his father. Throughout all that time he kept in touch with London on the pretext of offering a few unimportant scraps he knew, from having studied it in the beginning, to be missing from their file. And then, just before the Europol approach, the determined superintendent had told him their Welsh suspect had died and their investigation with him.

  ‘But there’ll be others,’ the man had said. ‘Maybe you and I will be in touch again.’

  Which, until Claudine Carter’s arrival at The Hague, Sanglier had dismissed as a casual remark from someone he’d come to know well, albeit at a distance.

  Now he wasn’t sure any more: wasn’t sure about anything any more. But had to be. Unless he learned why Claudine Carter had been assigned by Britain to Europol, if indeed there was anything to learn, he’d be back living, as he had been living since her arrival, in those apprehensive months of regular London telephone calls. Except that now there was no one to call.

  So what, objectively and dispassionately, did he know about Claudine Carter?

  That she was the daughter of the barely disgraced William Carter and a Lyon restaurateur and, according to the much-studied personnel curriculum vitae, had excelled as a criminal and forensic psychologist in London as she was unquestionably excelling at Europol. That she’d suffered a personal tragedy in the death of her husband after just fifteen months of marriage. And that according to the British commissioner, René Poulard and Scott Burrows she showed no interest - a definite rejection, he knew, from witnessing her cocktail party humiliation of René Poulard - in making friends within the organization. Not even, Sanglier reflected, in making a professional effort with him.

  None of which, persisting with his objectively dispassionate examination, was in any way sinister. What was, then? Her apparent dismissal of her father, when he’d made an admittedly clumsy effort to initiate a conversation about him, was intriguing, not sinister. And he had not the slightest evidence to imbue her assignment to The Hague with any hidden, personal implications. Yet try as he had, in the failed effort at reassurance, he found it impossible to conceive it as an astonishing coincidence. Just as he found it impossible to believe that Carter had not been able to remember - as he claimed before the Interpol tribunal - some details of the lost documents.

  Which was the focus of his every fear: that something - at least what Carter might have told his daughter, at worst an actual surviving document - remained literally to destroy his life.

  And that focus led inevitably to the mystery visit of Peter Toomey, the reason for which had been withheld from the British commissioner. And her flight, within a month, to London, which he knew about from Europol’s travel division.

  It was an effort for Sanglier to remain objective in his conclusion and not build shapes out of shadows. But he did, just. Everything remained, as it always had, circumstantial. But, thinking like a policeman, sufficient for suspicion.

  He’d made a lot of mistakes already — panicked, even - but now he’d thought things through, as he should have done in the beginning, he wouldn’t make any more.

  Perhaps the biggest mistake was betraying any irritation or hostility towards Claudine Carter, which he might have done when she presented her profile to him and Sobell. What he should have done was to appear to make her a friend. And there was still every opportunity for that.

  Françoise was emerging as a matching - maybe even greater

  - immediate problem. Neither had pretended to the other that there’d ever been any love involved in their union, although at first she’d fooled him into believing she was only marginally bisexual. He’d wanted the attribute of a glittering model - in whose circles she still moved to make her conquests - and Françoise, realistically accepting her own career was on the descent, had wanted to exchange it for one of the most famous names in France. He hadn’t guessed the strength of her determination any more successfully than he’d gauged her sexuality. It was going to be far more difficult to rid himself of her than he’d imagined.

  Claudine was glad to return to The Hague, although Sanglier had assured her there had been no major developments in their larger investigation. There was no contact from London waiting on her apartment answering machine or channelled through Europol, either, the possibility of which had been another reason for her eagerness to get back.

  Police forces in all five countries concerned had accepted the idea of publishing victim photographs in an identification appeal, three of them preferring Kurt Volker’s digitalized versions to the actual death mask photographs. Instead of being flattered, Volker protested what he called the illogical limitations the moment Claudine walked into the incident room.

  ‘This is Western Europe. And apart from the Amsterdam and Brussels killings all the victims were Asian. They’re far more likely to be known and recognized in the East than anywhere here.’

  Claudine regarded the rumpled German quizzically. ‘How can we reach Asia, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘By opening our own Web site on the Internet,’ announced Volker simply. ‘And publishing not just the pictures but a physical description of each victim and the basic details of how they were murdered.’

  ‘It’s been difficult enough getting country-by-country police cooperation here,’ reminded Claudine, liking the thought but wanting to anticipate the drawbacks. ‘And I’m still not totally convinced we’re getting it now. How could we begin to organize the authorities in Asia?’

  ‘I don’t think we could, not effectively,’ conceded Volker. ‘But we wouldn’t be doing it at street level. It would be on the Net, only accessible to people connected to it. And it would be our Web site ad
dress. The home page would be right here in this room.’

  ‘Home page?’

  Volker gave a slight shift of impatience. ‘Where every Internet message would come to.’

  ‘We couldn’t go over the heads of national or local forces,’ argued Claudine, ever conscious of political sensitivity.

  ‘I’m not proposing that we do,’ persisted the German. ‘Every country in Asia belongs to Interpol. All we’ve got to do is advise Lyon and they can disseminate the information as a matter of courtesy. That’s their job, international police liaison.’

  Interpol, Claudine knew, had been - and still was - one of their strongest opponents. Particularly since Europol had gained its operational function. ‘It would cause a hell of a lot of friction.’

  ‘Not our problem,’ insisted Volker, smiling his perfect smile. ‘Our problem’s finding how to solve crimes: helping local forces to solve their crimes. Politics is for our lofty commissioners.’

  ‘What about the volume of traffic it might generate? For every genuine response - even if there is one - there could be hundreds of false alarms. It could - and probably would - be used to try to find every missing person in Asia. And I don’t think all your computers combined could calculate how many that could be.’

  Volker shook his head at the exaggeration. ‘I could handle what there would be.’

  ‘It’s worth putting forward,’ Claudine accepted finally. Which she did, that same morning, in a memorandum to Henri Sanglier in which she tried to counter all the objections that would inevitably be raised.

  Claudine was immediately concerned at the obvious drawback in Sanglier’s attempt to delay for as long as possible the moment when the mass checks on food delivery lorries became public knowledge. The French commissioner had recommended - insisted in France - that road blocks be diversified as widely as possible throughout the road systems instead of being concentrated in a few bottle-necking locations. In Claudine’s opinion what that gained in arguably delaying public - and therefore the murderers’ - awareness was more than endangered by the vast amount of gossiping police manpower it was necessary to employ. She immediately sent her second memorandum of the day to Sanglier, suggesting an amendment.