But someone there is, they said.
They were sending Platon in, and they wanted a trap set for him.
On the night I got this message, it had grown quite cold, as if the end of summer—it was the first of September—were a steep drop-off, a ledge from which we had fallen.
There was wood in a box by the hearth and so I built a fire with the help of Paris Match pages crushed into loose balls and tucked between logs. I thought I had opened the chimney flue, but instead it seemed that I’d closed it. Smoke exited the fireplace like a devil’s breath, curling over the mantel and up the wall, leaving a soot stain in its path.
I aired out the room and figured out how to operate the flue. It had an iron lever, which thunked open when slid to the right.
With no updraft, the paper I’d stuffed between logs had burned up but the wood had not caught. I needed more kindling and decided on the Céline biography, having finished it. Or having read enough I felt I was “done.” I lit the pages. Céline’s face on that garish cover curled and shrank as he was immolated.
My fire strong, I stood over the hearth, letting the heat baste the front of my jeans, considering this job and its risks. In certain ways it had been easier to work for federal agencies. Going private meant a rogue world where you didn’t have backup. You didn’t even know who you were working for.
I let the heat absorb into my legs as I thought over the question of who, among these people, could be convinced to attack subminister Platon.
The logs sizzled. An occasional air bubble in the wood combusted, making a loud crack. My jeans were starting to burn my legs, so I closed the flue. The flames went low. When I thunked the flue back open, they stretched upward.
First, for elimination, I reviewed the inner circle.
None of the library boys.
And not René, who, I had come to understand, was Pascal’s most faithful warrior, a company man, a commune man to the core. (What we did together was separate, in its own silo.)
Florence: no. In love with Pascal, or why would she allow him to treat her so poorly.
I needed someone with a grudge, comfortable with the idea of a mutinous plan, one that Pascal had not sanctioned.
Pascal could be so rude, as he’d been to that couple, and to Nadia. I had initially hoped Nadia’s salt could be mined, but the qualities Pascal disliked in her, her will and obduracy and depth of experience, were the same ones that made her difficult to manipulate.
Burdmoore was a possibility. The record was promising. But it wasn’t clear if Pascal’s treatment of him was friendly hazing, an understanding between them, or something more like abuse.
I clunked the flue open and closed as I ruminated on this, and then the flue clunked open and stayed open.
It was jammed, the lever stuck.
When I got up the next morning, wind was swirling down the chimney, blowing ashes from the cold fire into the living room. I heard thunder that sounded like metal dumpsters sent tumbling. It started to rain, and heavily. Water streamed down the inside walls of the chimney, making a porridge of the ashes in the belly of the hearth.
AURÉLIE WAS CORRECT that everyone would know. Over the next few days, Le Moulin was converted to a hubbub of excitement, people having split into committees, to coordinate and to spread the word in the greater Guyenne of a blockade of the fair, in protest of the government’s plan to steal their water and give it to corporate farmers, their plan to ruin this valley.
If there was a secret cadre who would escalate the protest into a battle with police (and surely there was), those details were not shared with me.
This was fine. I would be patient. It is better to let people come to you than to go to them, and this is as true of the people you are surveilling as it might be of someone you want to seduce. Like Bruno’s childhood technique of fishing, you keep your hand in the water and you wait.
My contacts informed me that Platon would be without a substantial security presence at the agricultural fair, and that the local gendarmerie would not be aware of his visit.
I had twice been to these sorts of fairs, once in the US and once in Europe.
In Nebraska I followed anti-Monsanto activists to a “Beef Days” festival that had a hay-bale-throwing contest, six-pound steaks that were free for anyone who could finish eating one, and a band that performed Lynyrd Skynyrd covers. In Switzerland, I attended an ag fair with a group that was there to protest John Deere’s contracts with the Israeli government. The Swiss agricultural fair had a tractor pull sponsored by John Deere, which was also my own covert sponsor.
I had believed that Swiss people were reserved, moderate, moderately wealthy, and discreet. Mild about everything but their excessive environmental regulations. But the Swiss agricultural fair was on the level of a Las Vegas–style monster truck rally, or above that.
Men and boys in full-face helmets wheelied giant tractors as an announcer yelled over a PA in a hickish-sounding dialect of Swiss German. (This was in Schaffhausen, on the upper Rhine, John Deere’s international headquarters.) Each tractor pulled a metal sled that contained weights. As the tractor pulled the sled, a winch cranked the weights on the sled forward, increasing resistance so that the tractor’s motor was strained, and progress became more and more difficult. To keep pulling the weighted sled through the mud, each driver downshifted and goosed his accelerator, coal rolling the arena audience with thick and dirty smoke that flumed from the exhaust pipe on the hood of his tractor. One guy’s exhaust pipe sent up thirty-foot flames, as a special trick.
These people made Nebraskan Beef Days look like an Amish prayer circle.
The activist group I was infiltrating had come to Schaffhausen in hopes of sabotaging John Deere equipment, to express their anger that Israel was using the company’s machines to illegally bulldoze Palestinian lands and homes and sometimes people. They were self-serious city folk from Zurich, consumed by a situation far away from here, from this tractor pull whose contestants seemed so much happier than the activists glumly pretending to spectate.
Some of them peeled off while prizes were given and winners were announced. (The grand champions were a team of two mulleted brothers with wide-set eyes.) They planned to damage a set of gleaming yellow John Deere prototypes while the crowd was focused on the awards ceremony.
Originally, these activists had thought to put sugar in the gas tanks of the prototypes. That’s an urban legend, I told them. “If you want to ruin a tractor,” I’d instructed, “use bleach. Glug a gallon of it into the tank with a funnel.”
They were arrested while attempting this. I myself was in the crowd, clapping for the brothers, who stood on a podium, the sun flashing from their broad foreheads, shiny with sweat.
A French politician appearing at an ag fair was a typical publicity stunt. Platon had recently made an appearance at a fair in the Camargue. The photos had telegraphed his conviction that he could connect with bull breeders, despite his artificial hair and his mantle of arrogance.
He would come to the Guyenne to shake hands with farmers, pat their prize Prim’Holsteins, pose for photos.
A heavy security apparatus at such an event was inappropriate for the building of trust with country people, whose support was needed for the ministry’s plan to wreck the ancient way of farming in the greater Guyenne. This was the reason Platon would be traveling to Vantôme with only his driver (not yet confirmed to be Georges, but very likely Georges) and a single bodyguard (very likely the Serb, who irritated Platon, but so many of the other state security employees were not white, and for connecting with farmers, a North African would not do).
A friend would accompany him, I was informed.
I assumed friend meant mistress: the woman from Vincennes.
Identity of friend? I asked my contacts.
Michel Thomas, they replied.
Not the mistress. Michel Thomas was a famous French novelist, perhaps the only one who was a genuine celebrity. Even French people who never read novels, or books at all, would know who he was. He had a flair for staying in the public eye by associating with controversial sorts, and giving inflammatory statements to the media, and so it made a certain odd sense he’d team up with a reviled figure like Paul Platon.
