Dominique Manotti: Affairs of State

A mutton stew simmers in a cast-iron pot, filling the air with the aroma of tomato and spices. The kitchen is clean, with a sink, white units, a big fridge and a wooden table in the centre of the room. A hanging light gives out a warm yellow glow. The window is closed against the night and the heat is suffocating. The father, a stocky man with a furrowed face and grey hair, crashes his fist down on the table:

‘Not the theatre … Not my daughter.’

‘I’ll do as I like.’

His fist strikes her temple and he roars: ‘I forbid you …’

The girl’s head lolls backwards, a crack, a red veil in front of her eyes. She reels and clutches at the table. Her mother sobs, wails, pleads and tries to step between them. The two brothers push her into a corner. The younger children have taken refuge in another room, the TV turned up full volume so the neighbours won’t hear.

The girl leans forward, resting both hands on the table:

‘No one is ever going to forbid me from doing anything, ever again. In two months I’ll be eighteen and an adult …’ Tensely, almost spitting: ‘An adult, you hear …’

‘An adult …’

He chokes with rage, grabs a chair and brandishes it as he edges round the table bearing down on her. She feels the heat behind her, turns around, seizes the pot with both hands and throws it at his head. The sauce splashes out in all directions, splattering the walls, the floor and the furniture with streaks of orangey-red fat. She doesn’t even feel the burns on her hands, arms and legs, she doesn’t hear her mother screaming. Her father raises his hands to his head, sways, slides down and collapses in a heap on the floor amid the chunks of mutton.

The eldest brother rushes over, slaps her, twists her arm behind her back, lifts her, carries her to one of the bedrooms and locks her in. The men are arguing in the kitchen, voices loudly raised. The father doesn’t want to call a doctor. A tap’s running. Her mother sobs noisily.

They’re going to lock me in. They’re going to kill me . Her temples are throbbing. She walks over to the window and opens it. The air is cold, the housing estate ill-lit, silent, three storeys down. Don’t think. Get out. Fast, before they come back . There are two beds in the room. She grabs hold of a mattress, leans over the windowsill, concentrates, aims, lets go. Quick, the other one, repeat exactly the same movements with accuracy . It lands on top of the first. A woman’s screams in the kitchen. Quick. Don’t think, do it; don’t think. Jump.

She straddles the sill, tensing her muscles like at the gym. She gazes at the mattress, focuses on it with all her energy, takes a deep breath and jumps.

She hits the ground hard and her right ankle cracks. She struggles to her feet. She can stand on it. She runs slowly, limping, into the night, zigzagging between the apartment blocks, avoiding the well-lit areas, listening out. How long for? She stops, her heart in her mouth. She’s lost. She sits on some steps, concealed by a dustbin, clasping her knees and her head buried in her arms. Slowly she catches her breath. Her heart’s still pounding slightly. Cold, very cold. Her left eye’s closed up, there’s a sharp pain in her right ankle and the burns on her arms and legs are excruciatingly painful. No ID, no clothes, no money. One thing’s for sure: I’ll never go back home . And another: They won’t come looking for me. As far as they’re concerned, I’m dead. Dead.

Outside, it’s sunny, summer’s around the corner, but the offices of the RGPP, the Paris police intelligence service, are dark and gloomy with their beige walls, grey lino, metallic furniture and tiny north-facing windows overlooking an interior courtyard. In Macquart’s office are three comfortable armchairs upholstered in velvet, halogen lamps permanently switched on. A newspaper is spread out on a table, open at page two, the ‘Comment’ page. Three intelligence service chiefs, men in their fifties wearing dark suits, are leaning over it.

‘It’s under Guillaume Labbé’s byline. Who is this Guillaume Labbé?’

Macquart straightens up.

‘In my view, it’s Bornand’s pseudonym.’

‘The President’s personal advisor?’

‘Who’s your source?’

‘Simple deduction. Guillaume is the Abbé Dubois’s first name …’ A pause. ‘Advisor to Philippe Duke of Orleans …’1 Silence. ‘In any case, Bornand’s always felt he has a great deal in common with the statesman portrayed by the historians and memoir-writers of the eighteenth century: intelligent, depraved, a man of influence with connections … So the pseudonym Guillaume Labbé seems obvious to me. I think he’s even used it once before. I must have it on file somewhere.’

‘If you say so …’

They huddle over it and start reading.

In some sectors of the Paris press, one government scandal follows hot on the heels of the last. The wheels of business must be kept oiled.

‘If it is him, he’s got a nerve. He dictates half the editorials of the satirical weekly the Bavard Impénitent , so that’s their speciality …’

After explaining at length how, on the orders of the Defence Minister, the French secret services sank the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship campaigning against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, in a New Zealand port, killing a Portuguese journalist in the process, certain ‘investigative’ journalists are now kicking up a fuss over the so-called ‘Irish of Vincennes’ affair, accusing the men from the Élysée special unit …

‘It’s Bornand, for certain. He’s the one who set up that unit, who recruited the men working in it, who placed it under the President’s direct authority without having to be accountable to anyone. So clearly, it had better succeed. If it goes, he goes.’

‘It’s definitely Bornand. He loves macho police officers who climb over walls and shoot first, ask questions later.’

‘You’ve got to admit they’re more of a turn-on than we are.’

‘Order, gentlemen, please.’

… of having planted the weapons themselves in the homes of the Irish terrorists they arrested in August 1982, the day after the fatal bomb attack in rue des Rosiers .2

The Rainbow Warrior affair prompted impartial observers to question the workings of the French Secret Service: mind-boggling incompetence or complex anti-government and anti-Socialist machinations? And what was the source of the leaks that enabled a handful of French journalists to find out more than the New Zealand investigators, and faster? …

‘Shoot down the Foreign Intelligence Service …’

… The Irish affair is even more ambiguous. The ‘investigative’ journalists who are on the case all receive their tip-offs from the same source: a psychologically unstable individual with a dodgy personality whose testimony has been doing the rounds of the Paris editors for more than a year, without anyone taking him seriously until now. Furthermore, on his own admission — and this is common knowledge — he is in the pay of one of our major police departments working on the Secret Service’s patch.’

‘Well, well …’

‘An attack on the Directorate for Territorial Surveillance too … For the time being, the intelligence services seem to have emerged remarkably unscathed.’

‘He’s not on top form today.’

Have these ‘investigative’ journalists questioned this informer’s reliability? Have they tried to cross-check the information he has given them with other sources? Not at all.