Affairs of State (21 page)

‘No.’ After a pause: ‘Bornand always talks about France’s interests in Iran, and never about his own.’

‘And you truly believe he’s capable of distinguishing between the two? This is hardly new.’

Macquart stops and looks at Fernandez who doesn’t need to pretend he’s at a loss. He allows him a breather and continues:

‘Obviously, a presidential advisor who speculates privately on clandestine arms trafficking with Iran, and who pockets such huge sums is bound to make waves.’ Macquart adopts an aggressive tone: ‘You thought you were being clever, but you were nothing but a minnow in a sea of sharks. You were their stooge.’ A pause. ‘I’ll continue. Cecchi was intending to blackmail Bornand. He met the journalist from the
Tribune de Lille
and dug up the Chardon dossier last Monday, by way of a warning shot. And he had an appointment with Bornand at the Perroquet Bleu to offer him a deal. What deal?’

‘Maybe the re-opening of the Bois de Boulogne gambling club. He was set on it, and Bornand didn’t want to touch it.’

‘Cecchi got hold of the Chardon dossier from
Combat Présent
. It was Tardivel who gave it to him.’ In his mind’s eye, Fernandez sees Tardivel’s head lolling backwards, his glasses flying off, his vision blurred. It must have been even worse with Cecchi. ‘It remains to be seen how he obtained the information he was carrying on his person when he was shot. None of it seemed to appear in the Chardon dossier. Do you have any suggestions?’

‘No.’
Way out of my depth, and have been from the start, running in all directions without ever grasping what was going on
. ‘I had no idea of any of this.’

‘There are two men who know the entire set-up. Flandin, who had no interest in a scandal erupting, and who’s dead, and Bornand’s head of security, Beauchamp. Beauchamp, a business associate of Chardon’s − they were in Africa together in the seventies and every so often since then they’ve smuggled in a bit of Lebanese heroin. It was Beauchamp who met Cecchi at Mado’s last weekend. And who was still with him when they met Bornand at the Perroquet Bleu. For the time being, that’s all we know, but we’re still digging. The papers found on Cecchi have been sent off for analysis. Beauchamp has been arrested. He’s the lynchpin in the whole thing, that’s certain. Who was he working for? A rival arms dealer? The Americans? The RPR which wanted to prevent the release of the hostages before the elections at all costs? All of the above? We may find out eventually. On the other hand, we can’t count on an autopsy for Flandin. But that scarcely matters now.’

Fernandez’s head’s spinning. Macquart is triumphant.

‘The fact that all that went over your head doesn’t bother me. But the fact that you didn’t talk to me about Chardon, that is serious. You were seen picking him up in Katryn’s car the day of her murder. Fernandez, this memory lapse is one ruse too many. I warned you. You don’t get a second chance.’

Fernandez is gutted. Macquart looks at his watch, 17.00 hours, time for the news. He switches on the transistor. Newsflash on France Info.

‘The Élysée press office has just informed us of the death of François Bornand, one of the President’s closest friends and advisors. He was the victim of a hunting accident, at the home of his wife in the Saumur region. He was cleaning his shotgun without having checked whether it was loaded, when it went off, killing him outright. The President immediately sent his
condolences to his widow. The funeral will take place tomorrow, in Saumur, in the strictest privacy.’

Macquart switches off the radio.

‘You made the right choice in coming to see me, pity you didn’t see things through to the end.’

Then with a wan and wholly ambiguous smile on his lips:

‘The rule of law prevails. More or less.’

In France, the 1980s were commonly referred to as the ‘years of easy money’, because during this decade money came to represent, for an entire political class and regardless of whether they were in power or in opposition, an end and a value in itself, at a time when entrepreneurs and financiers became the new heroes of modern times. The Socialists, who came to power with Mitterrand when he became President of the Republic in 1981 – having been sidelined over a period of decades – assumed and practised their new religion with the zeal of neophytes. Some among them exploited the situation to enrich themselves shamelessly. Making money, for these male politicians, took various forms as they sought to exercise influence in a number of different ways. One possible outlet was via the arms trade and there were serious pickings to be made, since after the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab countries in 1967, the Middle East has been in a state of constant upheaval.

In Lebanon, a massive influx of Palestinian refugees fighting for their national independence, primarily organised from within the heart of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) succeeded in destabilising the already extremely fragile political and religious equilibrium of the country, torn apart by the civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1989. There were constant and confused armed conflicts between the Palestinians and the Lebanese militias, including the Shia (to whom Amal belonged); the Phalangists (right-wing Christians); and the
Druze (within the Progressive Socialist Party, or the PSP). Along with these internal conflicts in Lebanon, throughout the 1980s there hovered the permanent shadow of their more powerful neighbours. The shadow cast by Israel, seeking to eliminate all Palestinian resistance, and which invaded Lebanon twice over, bombing and laying siege to Beirut, occupied southern Lebanon for four years, that cast by Syria, with its dreams of annexation, which installed its army across a whole swathe of the country, and that of Iran, a Shia theocracy from 1979 onwards, manipulating religious influence as if it were a form of politics in order to emerge from isolation in an Islamic-Arab world heavily dominated by the Sunni.

At the other end of the Middle East, Shia Iran, where the Shah had been forced into exile by the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and Sunni Iraq (which supported the Palestinians in Lebanon), dedicated themselves to a conventional war which lasted from 1980–1988, a war of exceptional length and bloodshed, in which millions died. All these power games were in play during this decade, at the mercy of shifting allegiances, of terrorist acts of numerous kinds, involving the seizure of aeroplanes (even a cruise liner was boarded at sea), bombs and car bombs, mass murder, targeted assassinations, and – the latest change – suicide bombings, leaving thousands dead. Not to mention the taking of civilian hostages, to be used as negotiating tools.

France was deeply implicated in all these conflicts, and in more ways than one. Firstly, as is the way of French traditional politics in dealing with the Arab world, because it offered its support to Iraq by supplying it massively with arms, despite the official embargo. Then again, because of its wholesale adoption of a nuclear policy. The Shah of Iran was closely involved,
ever since 1974, in the
Eurodif
uranium enrichment project. From 1979 onwards, France refused to honour the contractual accords made with Iran under the Ayatollahs. It therefore became the target of numerous attacks, instigated behind the scenes by Iran and involving the repeated seizure of – primarily – French and Lebanese hostages, of which the longest sequestration was that of Carton, Fontaine, Kauffman and Seurat, taken in March and May 1985, and which ended with three of them being released in May 1988, Seurat having died in captivity. The negotiations to obtain their release are central to this novel.

For the USA, this period was similarly extremely unsettled. The Iranians took the entire staff of the US Embassy in Tehran hostage, shortly after the fall of the Shah. Lengthy negotiations ensued, closely linked to Ronald Regan’s victory at the presidential elections. Then a number of particularly bloody attacks led to the Americans’ departure from Lebanon. Ultimately, Reagan became involved in the operation which came to be known as ‘Irangate’, and consisted of secretly selling arms to Iran (at that time under an official embargo) in order to release vast sums of black market money, then used to finance – outside any controls exercised by the US Congress – the ‘Contras’, ultra right-wing terrorist forces operating inside Nicaragua, in an attempt to destabilise the progressive regime then in power following the holding of the first ever democratic elections there.

It was a hugely eventful period offering almost unlimited opportunities and scope for wheeling and dealing. However, readers do not need to be familiar with every twist and turn to follow the plot, or at least that is my intention. Above all this novel is the story of men greedy for power and money. The sort
of men one encounters, today as in bygone times, in Europe, the Middle East and the world over.

Dominique Manotti

November 2009

Dominique Manotti was born in Paris in 1942, and was a political and union activist from the end of the Algerian War in 1962 until 1968. She is a professor of 19
^th
-century economic history in Paris, and author of many novels, including
Rough Trade
,
Dead Horsemeat
(short-listed for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Award),
Lorraine Connection
(which won the International Dagger Award and was nominated for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards), and
Affairs of State
(all published by Arcadia Books). Her gritty,
Euro noir
novels tell the story of France’s modern social evolution, for better and worse, and Dominique is one of France’s bestselling crime novelists, translated into 12 languages and selling over 200,000 copies worldwide.

Amanda Hopkinson is Professor of Literary Translation at City University, London. She translates from Spanish (including Elena Poniatowska and Juan Villoro), Portuguese (Paulo Coelho and Jose Saramago) and French (Dominique Manotti). She also publishes on Latin American culture, particularly literature (Isabel Allende) and photography (most recently a history of photography in Mexico).

Ros Schwartz has translated over 60 titles from French. Her translation of Saint-Exupéry’s
The Little Prince
was shortlisted for the Marsh Award for children’s literature in translation in 2012. She was made a
Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
in 2009.