Authors: Pierre Lemaitre
Just opposite the nurses’ station, they step into a small treatment room used for outpatients.
“Take a seat . . .” As she looks around for her instruments, the nurse is gently insistent. “Please, take a seat.”
Standing outside in the corridor, the
gendarme
discreetly looks away as though the two women were in the toilets.
“Shhhh . . .”
Anne flinched, though the young nurse’s fingertips have barely grazed the wound.
“Is it painful?” She sounds concerned. “That’s a little unusual. What if I press here? And here? I think it might be best to wait before removing the stitches, consult the doctor, he might want to get another X-ray. Are you running a temperature?”
She presses a hand to Anne’s forehead.
“No headache?”
Anne realises that she is now precisely where the nurse wanted her to be: sitting meekly in a treatment room, ready to be taken back to her room. And so she bridles.
“No, no doctors, no X-rays, I’m leaving,” she says, getting to her feet.
The
gendarme
outside reaches for his police radio; however this plays out, he needs to call in to ask for instructions. If the killer suddenly appeared at the far end of the hallway, armed to the teeth, he would do the same thing.
“That really wouldn’t be wise,” the nurse is saying, sounding concerned. “If there’s an infection . . .”
Anne does not know what to think, whether there genuinely is a problem or whether the nurse is simply saying this to alarm her.
“Oh, that reminds me . . . [The nurse abruptly changes the subject.] We never did get your admission form filled in, did we? You asked someone to bring in your medical papers? I’ll make sure a doctor sees you right now, and that the X-ray is done immediately so you can leave as soon as possible.”
Her tone is honest, conciliatory, what she is proposing sounds like the best, the most reasonable solution.
Anne, by now exhausted, agrees and slowly trudges back towards her room, feeling as though she is about to faint, she tires so quickly. But she is thinking about something else, something she has just remembered. She stops, turns.
“You’re the nurse who saw the man with the gun?”
“I saw a man,” the girl snaps back, “not a gun.”
She has been expecting this question. The answer is a formality. From the moment negotiations began, she could tell that the patient was scared witless. She is not trying to leave, she is trying to escape.
“If I’d seen a gun, I would have said so. And if I had, I’m guessing you wouldn’t be here, right?”
Though young, she is extremely professional. Anne does not believe a word.
“No,” she says, staring intently at the nurse as though she can read her mind, “you’re just not sure what you saw, that’s all.”
Even so, she goes back to her room, her head is spinning, she overestimated her strength, she is completely drained, she needs to lie down. To sleep.
The nurse closes the door. Pensive. What could it have been, that long, bulky thing the guy had under his coat?
*
2.45 p.m.
Commissaire Michard spends most of her time in meetings. Camille has consulted her diary, an uninterrupted series of appointments back-to-back: it is the perfect opportunity. In the space of an hour, he leaves seven messages on her voicemail. Important. Serious. Urgent. Critical. In the messages, he all but exhausts the glossary of emergency-related clichés, piles on as much pressure as he can, when she calls back he is expecting her to be belligerent. Instead, the
commissaire
’s tone is patient and considered. She is even more shrewd than she appears. On the telephone, she whispers, she has clearly stepped into a hallway for a moment. “And the magistrate has signed off on this police round-up?”
“Absolutely,” Camille insists, “precisely because it’s not a ‘round-up’ in the strictest sense, we’re look—”
“Precisely how many targets
are
you looking at,
commandant
?”
“Three. But you know how it is, one target can lead to another. Strike while the iron is hot and so forth.”
When Camille resorts to a proverb, it means he has run out of arguments.
“Ah yes, the ‘iron’ . . .” the
commissaire
says wistfully.
“I’m going to need a few bodies.”
In the end, everything comes down to resources. Michard lets out a long sigh. What is most frequently requested is always what is not available.
“Not for long, three, four hours, max.”
“To bring in three targets?”
“No, to . . .”
“Yeah, to strike the proverbial iron, I get it,
commandant
. But aren’t you worried about the effects of going in mob-handed?”
Michard knows how these things work, the bigger the operation the greater the chance the target will get wind of it and do a runner, the longer the search goes on, the more the chances of apprehending the suspect diminish.
“That’s why I need more men.”
The exchange could go on for hours. In fact, the
commissaire
doesn’t give a damn if Verhœven wants to stage a round-up. Her strategy is simply to stand her ground long enough so that if the operation goes pear-shaped she can say “I told you so”.
“Well, if the
juge
has signed off on it . . .” she says at last. “Sort it out with your colleagues. If you can.”
*
Being an armed robber is like being an actor; you spend most of your time hanging around on set and do a day’s work in a few minutes.
So here I am, waiting. Scheming, anticipating, calling on all my experience.
If the witness is strong enough to face it, the police are bound to have her do a line-up. If not today, then tomorrow, it’s only a matter of hours. They’ll go through a raft of mugshots and if she’s a solid citizen and has even the vaguest memory, they’ll be on the warpath. Right now, their best option would be to hunt down Ravic. That’s what I would do in their shoes. Since it’s the easiest and often the most effective method, they’ll set up traps in corridors, break down a few doors. You make a lot of noise, use a little intimidation – it’s the oldest trick in the police handbook.
And the place to start would be Luka’s Bistro on the rue de Tanger, the principal stomping ground of the Serbian criminal fraternity. The goons who hang out at Luka’s are tacky, low-rent mobsters who spend their time playing cards, betting on horses, from the stifling clouds of Russian cigarette smoke you’d think a beekeeper was smoking a hive. They pride themselves on being informed. If anything serious goes down, word reaches Luka’s Bistro.
*
3.15 p.m.
Verhœven has given orders to loose the dogs. To get all hands on deck. It seems a little excessive.
Camille capitalises on the
commissaire
’s support to commandeer officers from anywhere he can. As Louis anxiously watches, he puts in calls to other units, calls in favours from colleagues, they let him borrow one man, two men, it is all a little chaotic, but gradually the team begins to swell. None of his colleagues is entirely sure what he is up to, but they don’t ask too many questions, Camille makes his case with an air of authority, and besides, this is fun, they get to put flashing lights on unmarked cars and drive through the city like boy racers, shaking down drug dealers, pickpockets, brothel-keepers, pimps – and, in the end, the opportunity to play cops and robbers was part of the reason they joined the force. Camille says the operation will only last a couple of hours. They’ll go in hard and fast, then everyone can go home.
Some of his colleagues are undecided: Camille sounds nervous, he is quick to give justifications but offers little in the way of hard evidence. More worryingly, the operation is beginning to sound rather different from how it had appeared originally. They believed they were being asked to assign officers for a series of simultaneous raids to take down three specific targets. What Camille is describing is just as violent, but on a much larger scale.
“Listen,” Camille says, “if we catch the guy we’re looking for, everybody wins, the top brass will be chuffed, they’ll hand out medals to every senior officer. And besides, it’s only a couple of hours, if we work fast, you’ll be back at your units before your bosses start wondering where you stopped off for a beer.”
This is all it takes for his friends to concede and give him the manpower. The officers pile into squad cars, with Camille leading the convoy. Louis stays behind and mans the telephone.
Operation Verhœven is not exactly a model of discretion. But this is precisely the point. An hour later, there is not a single thug in Paris from Zagreb or from Mostar who does not know about the frantic search for Ravic. He has to be hiding out somewhere. They smoke out tunnels and corridors, intimidate the prostitutes, and round up everyone in sight – especially the undocumented immigrants.
This is shock treatment.
Sirens wail, police lights strobe the buildings, a whole street in the 18th arrondissement is cordoned off, three men make a run for it and are caught. Standing by his car, Camille watches the scene as he talks on his mobile to the team ransacking a fleabag hotel in the 20th.
If he thought about it, Camille might even feel nostalgic. There was a time – back in the days of the Serious Crime Squad, of the Brigade Verhœven – when Armand would hole up in his office with case files, filling page after page with hundreds of names from related cases, and emerge two days later with the only two names that could move the investigation forward. Meanwhile, as soon as Louis’ back was turned, Maleval would be kicking the arse of anyone who moved, slapping whores and forcing them to strip, and just when you were about to put him on a disciplinary charge, he would plead exigent circumstances and hand over a crucial witness statement that saved three days’ work.
But Camille is not thinking about this. He is focused on the job in hand.
In sleazy hotels, he takes the stairs two at a time, flanked by officers who burst into the rooms catching couples
in flagrante
, dragging sheepish husbands with their shrivelled cocks off the beds so they can question the prostitutes beneath them – Dušan Ravic, we’re looking for him, for his family, anyone, a cousin will do – but no, the name doesn’t ring a bell; they carry on barking questions while the panicked johns scrabble to pull on their trousers, hoping to get out before they’re spotted. The girls – half naked, scrawny, their breasts tiny, their hip bones jutting through their skin – have never heard of Ravic. “Dušan?” one of them says as though she has never heard the name before. But they are obviously terrified. “Take them in,” Camille says. He needs to create an atmosphere of fear and he does not have much time. A couple of hours. Three, if all goes well.
Several miles north, outside a house in the suburbs, four officers put in a call to Louis to check they have the right address, then kick the door down and go in, armed and ready, toss the place, and come up with 200 grams of cannabis. No-one here has heard of Dušan Ravic. They take the whole family into custody save for the elderly grandparents.
Riding in a screeching car piloted by a boy racer who never drops below fourth gear, Camille keeps his mobile glued to his ear, in constant contact with Louis. Backed up by a barrage of orders and the persistent pressure on the teams, Verhœven’s fury is contagious.
In the 14th, three young Kosovars are hauled into the police station. Dušan Ravic? The three boys look blank. We’ll see. Meanwhile, rough them up a little so when they’re released they can preach the Good News: the police are looking for Ravic.
Camille gets word that two pick-pockets from Požarevac are being held at the commissariat in the 15th arrondissement; he consults Louis who checks his map of Serbia. Požarevac is in the north-east, Ravic is from Elemir in the far north, but you never know. Camille gives the word: bring them in. The object is to spread fear.
Back at the
brigade criminelle
, Louis, perfectly calm, fields the calls, he has a mental map of Paris, he has categorised the neighbourhoods, prioritised those areas with residents likely to provide information.
Someone asks a question, little more than an idle suggestion, Camille thinks for a moment and says yes, and so officers round up the buskers in the
métro
stations, kick them along the platforms and drag them into the waiting police vans while they keep a tight grip on their little cloth bags jingling with change. Dušan Ravic? Blank stares, an officer grabs one of them by the sleeve. Dušan Ravic. The man shakes his head, blinking rapidly. “I want a home delivery on this guy,” says Camille who has just come up for air because there is no signal in that part of the
métro
and he needs to know what is happening. He glances anxiously at his watch but says nothing. He is wondering how long it will take before Commissaire Michard comes down on him like a ton of bricks.
*
About an hour ago, the force descended on Luka’s and carted off one guy in three – who knows on what charge, I doubt they know themselves. The point of the exercise is obviously to spread panic. And this is just the beginning. My calculations were spot on: in less than an hour the whole Serbian community will be turned inside out, and the rats will be deserting the ship.
I’d be happy to settle for one rat. Dušan Ravic.
Now that the operation is in full swing, there’s no time to lose. I’m there in the time it takes to drive across Paris.
A narrow street, almost an alleyway, between the rue Charpier and the rue Ferdinand-Conseil in the 13th. A building whose ground-floor windows have been bricked up, the original door was “salvaged” long ago, there’s no lock, no handle now, no door, only a sheet of rotting plywood that bangs with every gust of wind until someone comes down and wedges it shut, only for it to start banging again as soon as the next person arrives. There’s a steady stream of people in this place, junkies, dealers, illegals, whole families of immigrants. I’ve spent too many days (and quite a few nights) holed up here for one reason or another, I know this street like the back of my hand. I loathe this shithole, I could happily get a couple of kilos of gelignite and blow the street to kingdom come.