Camille (17 page)

On the screen, Krysztofiak brings up another mugshot, a bearded guy with bushy eyebrows and dark eyes.

“Madame Forestier hesitated a little on this one. It’s understandable, after a while these people all look the same. She looked through several photographs and came back to this one, asked to see some others, but kept coming back to this one. I’d classify it as a strong possibility. Name’s Dušan Ravic. He’s a Serb.”

Camille looks up. They crowd around Louis’ laptop as he keys the search into the police database.

“Moved to France in 1997.” He quickly scrolls through the document. “A clever guy.” He reads at the speed of sound and still manages to synthesise the data. “Arrested twice and released, the charges didn’t stick. It’s not impossible to imagine him working with Hafner. There are lots of thugs out there, but real professionals are rare and it’s a small world.”

“So where is this guy?”

Louis makes a vague gesture. There have been no sightings since January, he has completely disappeared, he is facing a felony murder charge for his part in the quadruple robbery and he has the means and the motive to hide out for a long time. It’s astonishing that the same gang should show up again so soon. They already have one murder charge on file and they’re upping the ante. It’s bizarre.

They come back to the subject of Anne.

“How reliable is her testimony?” Louis asks.

“As always, it’s a sliding scale. The first hit I’d say is extremely reliable, the second is fairly reliable, if there’d been a third, it would probably have ranked lower still.”

Camille can hardly stand still. Louis is deliberately dragging out the conversation, hoping that his boss will regain his composure, but when the forensics officer finally leaves, he realises it was a waste of time.

“I have to find these guys,” Camille says, calmly placing his hands flat on the table. “I have to find them now.”

It is an emotional reflex. Louis nods automatically, but he wonders what is fuelling the blind rage.

Camille stares at the two mugshots.

“This guy” – he nods to the picture of Hafner – “we need to track him down first. He’s the real danger. I’ll take care of it.”

He says these words with such single-mindedness that Louis, who knows him all too well, can sense the looming catastrophe.

“Listen . . .” he begins.

“You,” Camille cuts him off, “you take care of the Serb. I’ll go and see Michard and get the warrants. In the meantime, round up every officer on duty. Put a call in to Jourdan, tell him I’d like him to second the men in his unit. Talk to Hanol too, talk to everyone, I’m going to need a lot of bodies.”

Faced with an avalanche of decisions, each more nebulous than the last, Louis pushes back his fringe with his left hand. Camille notices the gesture.

“Just do what I tell you,” he says in a low voice. “If there’s any flak, I’ll take it. You don’t have to worry about getti—”

“I’m not worried. It’s just that it’s easier to carry out orders when you understand them.”

“You understand exactly what I’m saying, Louis. What else do you want to know?”

Camille’s voice has dropped so low that Louis has to strain to hear. He lays a warm hand on that of his assistant. “I can’t fuck this up . . . do you understand?” He is upset, but remains composed. “So we need to shake the tree.”

Louis gives a nod that means: O.K., I’m not sure I completely understand, but I’ll do what you’ve asked.

“The informers, the pimps, the whores, everyone – but I want you to start with the illegals.”

The “illegals” refers to the undocumented workers on file to whom the police turn a blind eye because they are the best possible source of information about anything and everything. Talk or take a plane home is a particularly productive threat. If the Serb still has any ties to the community – and he would not last long without them – then tracking him down will take a matter of hours, not days. He was involved in a spectacular raid less than forty-eight hours ago . . . If he did not leave France with a murder charge and four robberies hanging over him, he must have very good reasons to be here.

Louis pushes back his fringe – right hand.

“I need you to get the team sorted as a matter of urgency,” Camille says. “As soon as I get the green light, I’ll call. I’ll join you as soon as I can, but in the meantime, you can get me on my mobile.”

*

2.00 p.m.

Camille is sitting in front of his computer screen.

Police file: Vincent Hafner.

Sixty years old. Almost fourteen years behind bars on various charges. As a young man, he dabbles in all sorts of things (burglary, extortion, pimping), but in 1972, at the age of twenty-five, he finds his true vocation. An armed raid on an armoured van in Puteaux. The raid gets a little messy, the police show up, one man is wounded. He is sentenced to eight years, he serves five, and learns from his experience: he has found a profession he really likes. His only mistake was carelessness, he is determined not to be caught again. Things do not quite work out as planned, he is arrested on a number of occasions, but the sentences are minor, two years here, three years there. Overall, a pretty successful career.

Since 1985, there have been no arrests. In his mature years, Hafner is at the peak of his powers. He is a suspect in eleven separate hold-ups, but is never arrested, never even questioned, there is no evidence, in every single case he has a cast-iron alibi and reliable witnesses. An artist.

Hafner is a major crime boss, and as his record confirms, he is not to be trifled with. He is intelligent and informed, his jobs are meticulously planned, but when his team go in, they go in hard. Bystanders are assaulted, beaten, battered, often with lasting consequences. No deaths, but no shortage of walking wounded. Hafner leaves a trail of victims hobbling, shambling, limping, to say nothing of scarred faces and years of physiotherapy. It is a simple technique: you earn respect by beating the shit out of the first person on the scene, the others get the message and after that everything runs like clockwork.

The first person on the scene yesterday was Anne Forestier.

The Galerie Monier raid fits neatly with Hafner’s profile. Camille doodles the man’s face in the margin of his notebook as he scrolls through the interviews from previous offences.

For several years, Hafner drew his accomplices from a small pool of about a dozen men, choosing on the basis of their talents and their availability. Camille quickly calculates that at any given point, on average three of them will be in jail, on remand or on parole. Hafner, for his part, manages to emerge unscathed. Crime is like any business: reliable, proficient workers are difficult to come by. But turnover is even higher in the armed robbery business since these are skilled craftsmen. In the space of a few years, at least six former members of Hafner’s gang are put out of commission. Two get life sentences for murder, two are shot dead (twins, they stuck with each other to the end), the fifth is in a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident and the sixth is reported missing after a Cessna goes down off the Corsican coast. It is a serious blow for Hafner. For some time afterwards, he is implicated in no new cases. People begin to draw the logical conclusion: Hafner, who must surely have put a lot of money aside, has finally retired and the staff and customers of jeweller’s all over France can light a candle to their patron saint.

Consequently, the quadruple raid in January came as a shock. Especially since, in Hafner’s career, the size and scale of those raids were an anomaly. Armed robbers rarely indulge in assembly-line work. The physical force and nervous energy required for even a single raid is difficult to imagine, especially given the brutal, strong-arm methods employed by Hafner. Every last detail is planned to allow for all eventualities, so in order to rob four jeweller’s in a single day one would have to be certain that each target was primed, that the distances between them were feasible, that . . . So many things needed to go without a hitch that it is hardly surprising that it went as badly wrong as it did.

Camille scrolls through the photographs of the victims.

First, the woman at the second raid in January. The assistant at the jeweller’s on the rue de Rennes is a girl of about twenty-five. Her face after her encounter with these consummate professionals is so badly disfigured that . . . Next to her, Anne looks like a blushing bride. The girl spent four days in a coma.

The man injured during the third robbery. A customer. Though it hardly seems so from the photograph. He looks more like a victim of trench warfare than a customer of the Louvre des Antiquaires. His medical file indicates “critical condition”. Anyone seeing his mutilated face (like Anne, he was beaten with a rifle butt) would be forced to agree: his condition is critical.

The last victim. He is lying in a pool of blood on the floor of the jeweller’s on the rue de Sèvres. Neater, in a way: two bullets in the chest.

This is another anomaly in Hafner’s career. Up until now, not one of his victims had died. The difference this time is that he cannot rely on his old gang, he has to put together a team from whoever is available. He went with the Serbs. Not an inspired choice. Serbs are fearless, but they’re volatile.

Camille looks down at his notepad. In the middle, Vincent Hafner, a portrait drawn from one of his mugshots and around it, deft sketches of the victims. The most striking is the sketch, drawn from memory, of Anne’s face as he saw it when he first came into her hospital room.

Camille tears out the page, crumples it into a ball and tosses it into the wastebasket. He jots down a single word that summarises his analysis of the situation.

“Critical.”

Because Hafner does not come out of retirement in January and cobble together a makeshift team unless there is an overwhelming motive. Aside from the need for money, it is difficult to guess what that might be.

Critical, because Hafner does not simply slip back into his old ways. To maximise his profits, he takes the risk of staging a quadruple robbery with uncertain results.

Critical, because despite a huge haul in January – his share would have amounted to €200,000–€300,000 – six months later, he is back at work. The Hafner Comeback Tour. And if the haul this time was less than he expected, he will come back for another encore. There are innocent people out there living on borrowed time. Better to catch him first.

Anybody would realise there is something fishy about this whole affair. Though he cannot put his finger on it, Camille knows there is something amiss, something not quite right. He is hardheaded enough to know that a man like Hafner will be difficult to catch and that, right now, the most sensible approach is to track down his accomplice, Ravic, in the hope that they can flip him and get a lead on Hafner.

And if Anne is to survive, they need it to be a good lead.

*

2.15 p.m.

“And you feel this is . . . relevant?” Juge Pereira’s voice on the other end of the line sounds suspicious. “It sounds to me like you want permission to conduct a mass round-up.”

“Absolutely not,
monsieur le juge
, there will be no mass round-up.”

Camille is tempted to laugh, but he stops himself: the examining magistrate is too shrewd to fall for such a ruse. But he is also too busy to question the methods of an experienced police officer who claims to have a solution.

“On the contrary,” Camille argues, “it will be a carefully targeted operation,
monsieur le juge.
We have identified three or four known associates that Ravic might have approached for help while he was on the run after the January raid, we just need permission to shake the tree, that’s all.”

“What does Commissaire Michard have to say?”

“She agrees with me,” Camille says with an air of finality.

He has not yet spoken to the
commissaire divisionnaire
, but he can predict how she will react. It is the oldest bureaucratic trick in the book: tell X that Y has already approved a course of action and vice versa. Like so many hackneyed ploys, it is very effective. In fact, when carefully executed, it is almost unassailable.

“Very well then,
commandant
, do as you see fit.”

*

2.40 p.m.

The fat
gendarme
is staring at his mobile, engrossed in his game of solitaire, when he realises the person who just walked past is the woman he is supposed to be guarding. He scrabbles to his feet and runs after her shouting “Madame!” – he has forgotten her name – “Madame!” She does not turn, but pauses as she walks past the nurses’ station.

“I’m going now.”

It sounds casual, like saying “Bye, see you tomorrow”. The big
gendarme
quickens his pace, raises his voice.

“Madame . . .!”

The young nurse with the ring through her lip is on duty. The nurse who thought she might have seen a shotgun but in the end decided that she hadn’t, but then again . . . She rushes from behind the desk, past the
gendarme
, determined to take charge. She was taught to be firm in nursing school, but six months working in a hospital and she has learned to cope with anything.

As she draws level with Anne, she gently takes her arm. Anne, who has been expecting something of the sort, turns to face her. For the nurse, it is the patient’s single-minded determination that makes this a delicate situation. For Anne, it is the young nurse’s calm persuasiveness that complicates matters. She looks at the lip ring, the shaven head, there is a gentleness, a fragility to the girl, her face is utterly ordinary, but her big puppy-dog eyes could melt the hardest heart, and she knows how to use them.

There is no direct refusal, no warning, no lecture; the nurse takes a different tack.

“If you want to discharge yourself, I need to take out your stitches.”

Anne brings her hand up to her cheek.

“No,” the nurse says, “not those, it’s too soon. I meant these two here.”

She reaches up and gently runs her fingers over the shaved patch on Anne’s head, her expression is professional, but she smiles and, assuming that this is now agreed, she leads Anne back towards her room. The
gendarme
stands aside, wondering whether or not to tell his superiors about this development, then follows the two women.