She sighed. “He has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, so this doesn't surprise me. Are you going to back off? I assume that's what he wants.”
“It is. And no, I'm not. Does he know you looked into this for me?”
“No, I don't usually talk about my work with him. He's happy when he sees my name in the paper, but that's usually all he knows about what I do.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then the waiter swung past with a small bowl of olives. “So, tell me about your work. This new department or division you were trying to get a story about, how's that going?”
“Good, actually.” She nodded thoughtfully. “They don't usually encourage journalists to get involved, or know too much, but I've been around for a while and I think they trust me. Plus, the fight against drugs usually involves a public relations campaign so I'm sure they plan to use me, too. In fact, I told a couple of people that I'd met an American cop, and they may even be needing your help at some point.”
“Oh?”
“Oui,” she said, “in an advisory capacity. In the last year or so we've seen a flood of drugs into Paris, two in particular: crack cocaine and meth.”
“Drugs for the user on a lower budget,” Hugo said.
“Yes. And no offense, but we think of them as American drugs.”
He smiled. “Thank heavens for Hollywood.”
“Right. The police know, or suspect, that the meth is being manufactured here. The crack, too, in that it comes into Paris as cocaine and then gets altered here. All of the shipments that they've intercepted so far, and there have been quite a few, have been pure cocaine. Too high in quality to go out on the streets.”
“So what is this new task force supposed to do?”
“Well, in the past they've not had much luck stopping the stuff getting into the city. There are just too many access points. Roads, rail, even the river. For them to monitor or control all of those would bring commerce and tourism to a standstill, it's just not possible.” Claudia sipped her wine. “Plus, they figure that if the bad guys are smart enough to get it across the borders, they can get it into Paris.”
“And if it's getting manufactured here, closing down routes into the city wouldn't help anyway.”
“Exactly.” She nodded.
“So the cops are concentrating on finding out where the stuff is being made?”
“Indirectly, yes,” she said. “The plan is to target drug distribution within the city.”
“I don't know if that's a good idea.” Hugo shook his head. “I'm guessing they'll just end up with a bunch of junkies and maybe some low-level dealers. We tried that approach in the United States, I worked on a few task forces myself, and all it did was fill up the jails. The big fish kept swimming.”
“That's because it's all you did. And they're going to do things a little differently.”
“How so?”
“They don't plan to take the users and small-time dealers off the street, they plan to use them to follow the flow of drugs upstream.”
“I've been arguing for that approach for years,” Hugo said. “It takes a lot of manpower and money though.”
“I imagine that's where I come in. If the public cares enough, the police will have their money. For a while, anyway.”
“Makes sense. And the other thing for this to work: the cops will have to make sure those street dealers are more scared of them than they are of the people they buy from.”
“Now that could be a problem.”
Hugo read something in her face. “What do you mean?”
“Have you heard of Anton Dobrescu? Is that name familiar?”
Hugo thought. “Maybe from the news, but I don't remember…”
“Romanian,” she said. “Looked like Rasputin, all hair and wild eyes. He was one of the most dangerous drug dealers in Bucharest and Timisoara, where he made a fortune before moving his operation to France once the borders opened up. He set up in Paris and was the head of an especially violent organized crime group.”
“He's running the drugs?”
“No, he's dead. Killed quite nastily by the other organized crime group in Paris, the North Africans. Algerians, mostly, they call themselves Les Pieds-Noirs.”
“The Black Feet? Never heard of them.”
“I'm not surprised, they're generally pretty quiet. The name refers to the French and other Europeans who settled in Algeria, I guess they all wore black shoes. Anyway, they were happy enough to divide up Paris and share the proceeds for a while, but Dobrescu got greedy. He started putting his dealers in the French mob's territory. And he killed people he shouldn't have.”
“North African mobsters?”
“No, cops. Like I said, his people had a kind of alliance with Les Pieds-Noirs, and mob violence was down for a while. But when he started encroaching on their turf and killing cops,” she shook her head. “Everyone knows you don't do that. Ever. Except Dobrescu, who either didn't know or didn't care. Anyway, I think that once he started down that path, Les Pieds-Noirs figured he was threatening their entire way of life and they decided to hit him once, and hard.”
“There was a fire, right?” He remembered the headlines now. “The papers never really said what happened. Not in any detail.”
“Right, that's because the police and media weren't sure ourselves, not at first. We had to piece it all together afterwards, and that wasn't easy after a fire like that. Plus the authorities were pretty tight-lipped.”
“So what do you think happened?” he asked.
“As best we could tell, Les Pieds-Noirs took a handful of Dobrescu's men hostage and somehow got Dobrescu himself. From the positions of the bodies, and their condition, it looked like the North Africans cut up the Romanians. Possibly while Dobrescu was made to watch, but we can't be sure about that. There were reports of a gun fight before the house went up in flames, and there were several Romanians who were shot and not cut up, so we think his men figured out where they were being held and launched a rescue mission.”
“You keep saying cut up, do you mean…?”
“Literally, chopped up. Years before, a member of Les Pieds-Noirs, an informer, turned up in a barrel floating down the Seine. Arms, hands, legs, and feet, all chopped off. We, and the police, wondered then whether it was a play on the name ‘Pieds-Noirs.’ Anyway, generally they were not violent, not on a day-to-day basis.”
“Just don't piss them off, I guess.” Hugo took a sip of his scotch. “You were saying, the rescue mission,” he prompted.
“Yes. Big gunfight and someone started a fire. By the time the cops sorted through the evidence the place was a charnel house, bodies and bits of bodies scattered everywhere, almost all burnt beyond recognition.”
“But the cops identified Dobrescu?”
“They did. They identified him and several of his top lieutenants through DNA and dental records, no doubt about it. Anyway, the Romanians disappeared entirely, which I'm sure was the point of that little exhibition.”
“And with Dobrescu gone, no one to lead a comeback.”
“Right. So, the bottom line is that the police have a good handle on who's running things in Paris now, but proving it is the problem. After that little massacre, and the previous instance of chopping hands and feet, people are afraid to cross them.”
“I'm sure,” said Hugo. “And if the cops have no rival gangsters to use, they will have to start from the bottom and build a case upwards, man by man. And you want to be in on the story from the beginning.”
“Exactement,” Claudia said. She picked up a menu. “But enough about drugs and murder. I'm hungry. Share a pizza with me?”
“Is that your way of saying you want to stay a while and talk about us?”
“It's my way of saying I want to stay a while and eat.”