The Convert's Song (15 page)

R
aymond’s ex-handler was known in Sète, his hometown, as the Commandant.

Bruno Esposito had been a police commandant, a midlevel supervisor. His former rank had become his fighting name. The announcer proclaimed it over the sound system, rolling out the syllables: “Bru-no Es-po-si-to:
Le Commandant
!”

Cheers went up from the bleachers, echoing across the sun-splashed canal.

“That’s our guy, right?” Pescatore asked. “In the red boat?”

Fatima Belhaj removed her sunglasses. “Yes. The one in the blue boat is called Hercules.”

“No wonder. Look at that bruiser. He must weigh three hundred pounds. He’s like a whale with arms and legs.”

Sète was Pescatore’s first real taste of France. It won him over right away. The port city of forty thousand spread around canals and lagoons beneath Mont St. Clair. He and Belhaj had flown to Montpellier and made a short drive to the coast. They sat in a sidewalk café on the downtown waterway lined with palm trees and temporary bleachers. Following Belhaj’s lead, Pescatore was drinking a yellow anise-based beverage called pastis.

The liquor and the jet lag accentuated the disoriented fascination with which Pescatore discovered a sporting spectacle he had never heard of: boat jousting. Known as
les joutes,
the aquatic ritual reminded him of bullfighting and sumo wrestling as well as medieval jousting. There was a tournament in full swing on the canal, and the Commandant was participating.

The Commandant glided into view from the right. He went about six two and two fifty, bulky in the shoulders and back and gut, a skull of Easter Island dimensions. He wore the nautical jouster uniform of white pants and a white shirt over a long-sleeved blue-and-white-striped jersey. His left hand held a wooden shield; his right hand raised a wooden spear to salute the spectators. He stood atop a platform at the end of a ramp jutting from the stern of a boat propelled by ten oarsmen. The red-and-white vessel also carried a drummer and an oboist.

The rival boat approached from the left with the opponent and a similar coterie. The musicians played a fanfare. The crowd murmured.

The Commandant planted a trunklike leg and hunched behind his shield, a statue silhouetted against the sun. The boats converged. The spears slammed into the shields with the force of slow trucks colliding. Hercules roared; the Commandant stayed silent. Crouching low, muscles bunching behind his spear, he slowly and inexorably lifted Hercules sideways off his turret, the bigger man’s face filling with disbelief. The Commandant finished him with a jab that knocked his shield into his mouth. Hercules grunted, toppled fifteen feet, and splashed prodigiously into the canal. He swam toward a rowboat sent to retrieve him, shaking his head and spitting.

“Damn,” Pescatore said amid cheers. “Blood in the water. The Commandant can joust!”

Belhaj rolled her eyes. She didn’t have to wait much longer. The ex-cop was eliminated in his next match by a bronzed behemoth known as the Anti-Parisian. Before Esposito hit the water, Belhaj was on her feet stubbing out her cigarette.

“Come on,” she said.

Heads turned when she went by: her mane streaming in the breeze, her bare shoulders in the sleeveless top, her straight-backed stride in leggings and ankle-high sandal boots that made her taller. She carried her gun in a purse on a short strap. Minutes later, she and Pescatore found their man in an outdoor restaurant in a small shaded plaza. The tables were filled with jousters: white-clad knights of the waterfront proletariat shoveling down calories, their girth the product of physical labor, hearty food, strong wine. Pescatore saw bruised brows, mashed noses, mangled ears, damaged eyelids.

The Commandant had a scar on his jaw. The ex-cop sat alone at a table positioned, no doubt for their meeting, at a distance from the others. He had changed into a blue jersey of the French national soccer team. He wore a towel around his fireplug neck and sunglasses in his hair, which was wet and thinning. His smile showed slablike teeth and lines around the eyes and mouth. His voice was softer and subtler than his physique.

“Before we talk, we eat,” he said. “I have to stay at fighting weight.”

The waitress served plates piled with pasta. The dish was a
macaronade,
macaroni with a dark meat sauce. Fatima had said there was history of Italian, Spanish and Maltese immigrants in this region, many of them
pieds-noirs
from Algerian colonial days. Esposito was probably a Neapolitan name, Pescatore thought as he dug in.

The encounter between Belhaj and the Commandant resembled a joust on dry land. They addressed each other with the formal
vous.
Her attitude was politely stern. Esposito made a comment about one of her cases, indicating that he was familiar with her hotshot reputation. But his wary slouch, reminiscent of a sea lion, set the tone.

The Commandant had been based in Montpellier with the national police division known as Renseignements Généraux, General Intelligence. The RG, as it was called, had its roots in the Napoleonic political police. It had monitored just about everything.

“Labor unions, political parties, students, journalists, casinos,” he told Pescatore. “But our most important mission was the threat in the slums: Islamists and criminals. We knew the terrain better than anyone.”

In 2008, the RG was fused with Belhaj’s agency, which did national security. The result was a new superagency called the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI), the Central Directorate of Domestic Intelligence. Esposito felt that the new arrangement had left him and other former RG officers in a position of inferiority.

“A shotgun marriage,” he said wryly. Pescatore thought of the bad blood lingering from the merger of the immigration and customs services in the United States.

About two years after the fusion, the Commandant had recruited a promising informant named Alberto Francisco: an Argentine Muslim convert in a clique of hard-core extremists who worshipped at a mosque in a former automotive plant on the outskirts of Montpellier.

“We had been aware of them for years. Their discourse was radical. They had links to a network that had moved fighters to Algeria and Iraq after the American invasion. This Alberto, or Raymond, as one now calls him, pops up. Out of nowhere. Charismatic. He made an impression at the mosque as a muezzin, chanting the call to prayer. They said he had a voice like the angels.”

The Commandant glanced skyward to illustrate the point.

“I don’t know,” he said. Pescatore noticed he had a habit of using that phrase before showing that he knew quite a bit. “It was strange, a South American in this milieu. But he had Lebanese origins and references from Islamist drug traffickers in Spain. He took over a splinter group that held private prayer sessions. Many were converts. They tend to be the angriest and most volatile of all. They want to prove themselves. The ones you really have to watch so they don’t do some big stupidity.”

Belhaj nodded knowingly. Esposito said his unit learned that Raymond was stirring things up. He organized travel to terrorist training camps and combat zones. The Moroccan wife of one of his recruits caught his eye. The recruit soon died in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

“The wife was a fire-breathing ideologue. Educated, very tough. The husband was young and not bright. Raymond manipulated him and sent him to his doom to clear a path to the wife’s bed. Then he married her.”

“Is that the mother of his boys?” Pescatore asked.

“Souraya. Yes. You know the dossier, sir.”

Pescatore rested his head on his hand. He remembered Raymond glowing when he talked about his family during the conversation in Argentina. Pescatore wasn’t surprised to find out that the seed was ugly.

“The wife’s immigration status was problematic,” Esposito said. “She was on the blacklist of the Moroccan services because of her radicalism. I pulled in Alberto, I mean Raymond, and had a muscular conversation with him. A cool customer, but the threat of deporting the wife shook him up. We reached an arrangement. Voilà: We were inside the network. Inside the routes to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali, Syria. All the theaters. His information helped us and other services. We intercepted jihadis on their way to fight or coming back. We identified foreign training compounds. One camp in Pakistan, perhaps coincidentally, I don’t know, got a wake-up call from a Hellfire missile. Everyone was content.”

Declining sugar for his coffee, the Commandant asked the waitress for artificial sweetener. He said, “I’m on a diet, dear.”

Raymond soon developed a friendly relationship with his handlers. “Very engaging. Always finding an advantage, a vulnerability. He was full of little gestures. Once, we were in my car with the music playing. I am a fan of the blues. Raymond knew a lot about the blues. He brought me a classic live recording of B.B. King in Chicago: ‘How Blue Can You Get?’”

Esposito pronounced the English hesitantly. He stirred his coffee. “I don’t know. Perhaps he was too slick for his own good. I told my men: ‘Boys, keep an eye on this one. He’s not the typical exalted stooge.’ Sure enough, we began to see things we didn’t like.”

The Commandant discovered that Raymond and his gang had rackets on the side. They dealt in hashish and cocaine with Moroccan traffickers in Barcelona, Gypsies in Perpignan, Italians in Nice. They were involved in robberies and shootings.

“Informants double-deal all the time. We didn’t do anything about it. But the scale, the audacity, concerned me. He was a full-fledged gangster. At first he wore a long beard, the whole getup, but soon he shaved it. He dressed well, chased women. He told his followers his lifestyle was
taqiyya,
dissimulation to fool the infidels. I got a feeling that he was playing…Pardon me, I must pay my respects to the victor.”

The Anti-Parisian, the tanned young jouster who had defeated the Commandant, walked up to greet him. The backslaps sounded like someone hitting an elephant with a baseball bat. Belhaj directed an exasperated look at Pescatore. Esposito sat down when the other man left.

“What a warrior,” Esposito told them. “I was a champion in my youth, but I am out of practice. No matter how hard I train, I don’t know if I’ll ever beat the Anti-Parisian.”

“Why do they call him that?” Pescatore asked, breaking his personal rule about keeping his mouth shut when in doubt.

“The reality is that many of us in these parts are not enamored of Paris.” The Commandant gulped down his coffee. “I worked there as a young officer in the CRS, the riot squad. I speak from personal experience. Paris is bizarre. Paris is a museum surrounded by a jungle.”

Belhaj scowled. She snapped something that Pescatore didn’t understand. The Commandant retorted. They yammered at each other, fast and furious. Pescatore caught words:
Franchement, écoutez, épouvantable.
She said Esposito might as well have called her an ape. He responded that it was ridiculous to think his statement was directed at her.

Pescatore realized that he had tossed a hand grenade onto the table. Fatima saw the Commandant as a racist, sexist dinosaur from the provinces who had just insulted the area where she grew up and the power center she represented. The Commandant regarded her as a pushy ethnic female climber sent by chicken-shit bosses. Pretty ironic, Pescatore thought, because Esposito was no doubt the son or grandson of immigrants himself. Maybe that made him resent her even more.

Taking advantage of a diminuendo in the argument, Pescatore intervened. He spoke in the most formal French he could muster.

“It is all my fault,” he said, addressing them both. “I should have never asked the question. My most sincere apologies.”

His words had a pacifying effect on Esposito.

“Listen, I admit I am bitter,” he said to Pescatore, sighing. “I did my duty and I was ignored. I know you are investigating the attacks in Argentina. I deduce that Raymond was involved. This fulfills my worst fears.”

In a stony voice, Fatima Belhaj said, “You were saying that he was manipulating intelligence.”

“It was worse than that. I suspect him of espionage. And at least one act of political violence on French soil. My analysis is not popular in the intelligence community.”

The Commandant bent to his left and reached into a gym bag. “When I was advised you were coming, I retrieved a report I wrote back then. I would like you to read it, to absorb the information without emotion or bias.”

He followed her disapproving gaze from the papers in his hand to his gym bag.

“What? Are you concerned about my carrying a sensitive document in public?” He grinned. “Jousters don’t steal. And no one steals from a jouster. Please read it, take your time. Then we can continue.”

Giving them no opportunity for objections, he left and went to visit at a table across the plaza. His high-shouldered, prow-chested walk recalled Robert Mitchum or John Wayne.

“I begin to lose patience with the Com-man-dant,” Fatima muttered to Pescatore. She pronounced the title with derision.

Unable to think of a safe response, Pescatore pulled his chair closer. She said she would translate the parts he didn’t understand. Dated fifteen months earlier and stamped with warnings about confidentiality, the report referred to Raymond as Alberto Francisco. After a preamble, it said: