‘So, handsome, you drinking on your own?’
Daquin ruffled his hair, kissed him on the forehead. Another day perhaps. Then he got up. Rushed down to the basement, into the toilets. A route he knew and had already taken. A door marked PRIVATE, a dark corridor, several closed doors and at the end, another door, a staircase, a yard, then another yard. And finally a street, parallel to that of the bar.
It was daylight. Always a bit of a shock to find it light after a night spent drinking in the dark. He couldn’t allow his drunken state to set in. He walked quickly, as far as Les Halles, very nearby. He called the boss from a phonebox. It was a respectable hour to call. Seven o’clock.
‘Come right away.’
He took a taxi to the plush building on boulevard Malesherbes, a gloomy area. A large apartment on the second floor, all in silence. The family must be asleep. The Chief led him into the kitchen and a big surprise: a solid breakfast lay prepared on the table. Coffee, rolls, butter and jam, orange juice, yoghurt. Just what he needed to sponge up the night’s drinking. Daquin talked. The tail — followed at least twice — and yesterday, his house visited. Was it our people or traffickers?
The Chief pulled a face. The smell of stale tobacco, a real old woman’s tale. Who was he going to make swallow that? But he couldn’t take risks, mustn’t allow anything to happen, whatever it might be, to one of his most brilliant superintendents.
‘I’ll take personal charge of this business. Leave me your keys. And let’s meet this evening in my office.’
If Daquin hadn’t gone mad, if he were truly being followed, who was it pulling the strings? Impossible to be certain.
10 a.m. Passage du Désir
Daquin smiled at Attali and Romero. He felt less and less drunk.
‘Who’s going to start? Attali?’
‘VL didn’t turn up at the station this morning.’
‘Good. Attali, to work. A notification of a missing person to all police. And find everything out about this girl, her family, her friends, her clients.’
Daquin turned to Romero, who told him about his evening and his night. He could feel Daquin’s interest and amusement and became scintillating. Attali envied him.
‘Martens sells his correspondents blank documents, but they’re authentic — at 2,000 francs apiece. The illegal immigrants are going to pay 5,000 to 7,000 francs with their name on them. It’s lucrative. But I don’t think he’s directly implicated in drug trafficking. His clients are a very mixed collection of people.’
‘Does Martens have any way of finding you again?’
‘A way of meeting me again, of course. But of finding me, no. He knows absolutely nothing about me, not even my name.’
‘He’s going to find out pretty soon that his desk’s been rifled.’
‘Not necessarily. I took the files out one by one and put all the pages back in their exact order. I took a great deal of care. I only took one original.’
And Romero placed on the table a piece of paper covered in figures and dates. Every month, ten blank residence permits and work permits. Unit cost: 2,000 francs. Dates of deliveries and payments. Destination: Pierre Meillant. Daquin made no attempt to hide his surprise and excitement.
‘Romero, you really have the luck it takes to make a good cop. Not a word to Thomas and Santoni, obviously, they’re close to Meillant. And on the Turkish side, what does that give us?’
‘Martens’ correspondent at the embassy, the one who buys papers regularly, is someone called Turgut Sener. That’s all I know. The real papers for the Turks who put us on to Martens and Moreira’s trail don’t seem to be have been bought. At least, I didn’t find any trace of them. It could be a trade-off of processed vouchers.’
‘We must look into what could connect this Sener to the Sentier and drugs. If my memory serves me well, you’ve already established a contact at the embassy?’
‘Yes, commissaire.’
‘Good, well, just the right time to activate it, as our Secret Service boffins would say.’
Romero felt somewhat miffed. But there was nothing he could say. Two months ago, when he’d come to work with Daquin, a cousin had phoned him — a distant cousin (‘She’s the granddaughter of the sister of one of our great-grandmother’s …’ ‘Stop, I can’t take any more!’) who’d just arrived in France as a secretary at the Turkish embassy (‘Well, that sounds really interesting.’). She wanted to meet some French people, go out a bit. (‘To be honest with you, I got the impression she’d really wanted to marry a Frenchman and leave Turkey — she never wanted to go back there, she said.’) Romero immediately imagined a sour-tempered, desiccated prune. Since then he’d telephoned the distant relative twice — professional conscience obliged — without ever meeting her. It was a teaser: how could he strengthen the telephone link, yet avoid a clinging relationship? He’d get there in the end.
*
New meetings with the Club Simon members. The first admitted his participation without any reticence — the pseudonym he used was Minos (which would have been very suitable for a child killer) and came up with a more or less similar version to Lestiboudois. His particular interest was in petroleum by-products. His Arab clients loved the evenings at the Club Simon. Afterwards they’d take everyone, girls and boys, to finish off the night in the most expensive nightclubs in Paris, and when they were happy with their performance, would show the videos they’d just recorded quite openly.
‘Were you there?’
‘Me? Oh, no. Never. People would tell me about it.’
‘What about Thai girls?’
He’d never tried them: they weren’t ‘Parisian’ enough. He didn’t know Virginie Lamouroux.
The second was more interesting. A man called Lamergie, who worked in food-processing. His pseudonym was Theseus (oh, really!) and he acknowledged that he’d always taken part in the evenings his company offered to foreign clients. And on several occasions he’d used the services of Thai girls. When Daquin spelled out to him that these girls were between the ages of ten and fourteen, were slaves, bought, sold and locked up with no clothes in their studios so that they couldn’t escape, he didn’t seem too shocked and said simply that he hadn’t known. He knew Virginie Lamouroux well and he’d used her on numerous occasions.
And what had he been doing on the evening of Friday 29 February? He took out his diary. Yes, he was at the club with two clients, with girls provided by Virginie Lamouroux.
What were the girls’ names? Estelle, Maud and Véronique. He knew nothing further about them, but could recognize them.
Had he noticed anything that evening? No, it finished quite early, about midnight, difficult to be more precise. He’d passed Virginie Lamouroux in the small lobby in the basement, coming out of one of the projection cabins.
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Absolutely.’ He flipped through his diary. ‘It was the last time I visited the club. I said hallo to Virginie, she seemed to be on very good form. I suggested she join us for dinner, but she turned me down.’
‘Was she on her own?’
‘Yes.’
‘And can you recall which projection cabin she came out of?’
Lamergie pictured the scene.
‘I was coming from the studio at the back.’ Daquin rapidly checked on the page of notes in front of him. ‘Virginie was coming out of the cabin immediately to the left, at the foot of the stairs.’
Daquin glanced at his plan again, but he already knew the answer. It was the studio hired by Icarus, the one where, in all probability, the murder had taken place.
When Lamergie had gone, Daquin swore aloud two or three times and thumped the partition, the table and the chairs in quick succession. How could I have let this girl go, he thought. Lamouroux’s now involved in the Thai girl’s murder … I’ve behaved like an imbecilic misogynist. I always underestimate women.
*
This was a good time to phone New York on a Sunday morning. It must have been ten or eleven there, people were already up and about and still at home. Daquin went into an empty office, called New York and on the first ring found Frank Steiger at home. He was a very good friend, in the FBI. They’d worked together for a year on a very delicate case and the American owed him one.