Pascal had used his inheritance to purchase a sizable tract of land just beyond Vantôme. (The land was not expensive, given that the village population had dwindled, as populations had all over the region.)
Young people, kids in their twenties, followed him down from Paris. They lived communally and planted carrots and had babies. Through Jean Violaine, the Moulinards were able to begin building connections to the local peasant culture. They reopened the village bar, raising their stature with the old-timers. They corresponded with Bruno Lacombe, but only, or so it seemed, by email.
In the second year after Pascal and his group settled in the region, the power cable of a TGV that crossed through the eastern edge of the Guyenne had been severed, causing huge delays and backups to an entire southwestern network of French trains.
Later, an electrical substation in that same area caught fire. The state was confident the cause was arson but had no leads on who had committed it.
Prior to the sabotage of earth-moving equipment in Tayssac, a new megabasin in the Limousin, a couple of hours northwest of Le Moulin, suffered a catastrophic pump failure, which led to the release, all at once, of that reservoir’s water stores. Its pumps had been destroyed by an invasive shellfish, the zebra mussel. Pascal Balmy was known to have visited that part of the Limousin some months prior to this pump failure. Balmy was interviewed by police investigators, and a transcript of that interview was included in my dossier.
“Are you or have you ever been aware of the destructive properties of the zebra mussel?”
“Yes,” Balmy replied. “It was described in the newspaper, after the pump failure.”
He told the investigator that the Moulinards had made great efforts to propagate native plants on their own land and felt proud of the role they were playing to restore ecological balance, whose damage, historically, was the result of government interference.
Balmy told the investigator he was happy to finger the scofflaws responsible for dumping an invasive species in the water supply. “I will name for you who did this,” he said. The perpetrators he named were trade, industrial farming, highways, tourists, commercial air travel, trucking, and shipping.
“Sir, we hoe a row,” he told the police. “We plant potatoes. We don’t use pesticides. We nurture pollinators. But here is how the state does things: They have a deer population that’s getting out of control, so what do they do? They bring in lynx. When farmers get upset about the lynx, the government reintroduces wolves. The wolves kill livestock, so the state makes it legal to shoot them. Hunting accidents increase, so they build a new clinic, whose medical staff creates a housing shortage, necessitating new developments. The expanding population attracts rodents, and so they introduce snakes. And so far, no one knows what to do about the snakes.”
WHEN FEDERAL AGENTS burst into Nancy’s warehouse in West Oakland, Nancy and the boy with the chin-line beard were both thrown to the floor, their hands behind their heads.
Nancy understood. From her prone position, she saw me step back next to the invaders in tactical gear, and she glared. The boy, stunned, wept. Nancy did not cry and did not look stunned. She was reserved and dignified despite her too-short kimono, her undignified legs splayed out on the warehouse floor. No one dresses up for a surprise bust by an army of Feds with long guns, and only later did I understand that Nancy had dressed up for the boy.
These people stab each other in the back. They turn state’s evidence. They give a self-serving account when interrogated.
I had assumed the boy would choose to become a witness for the state, which was mostly interested in Nancy, in exchange for a lighter sentence. He refused the state’s deal. His case went to trial, with Nancy as his coconspirator.
My testimony in that trial was made under an assumed identity, as a federal informant. They had weak evidence against Nancy. Their evidence against the boy, while strong, mostly depended on me. If convicted, he’d get twenty years in federal prison. The boy’s lawyer attempted to argue that he had been entrapped. By that point, this boy no longer believed he loved me, as it might be reasonable to expect, given that I’d set him up. He loved Nancy. They’d been through something together. They’d been screwed over by me, and this seemed to have bonded them.
Sure, I pressured him to purchase the fertilizer. Indeed, I lured him with promises of a romantic relationship. Yes, the money he used to buy it came from the FBI. But entrapment is a tough defense, difficult to prove. Recordings of my conversations with the boy, our text exchanges and emails, were not presented to the jury or turned over in discovery. I was confident he’d go to prison. I even felt a twinge of guilt about this. Twenty years is a long time! But after 9/11, the justice department was not merciful when it came to domestic terrorism charges.
My guilt over what I’d done to this boy evaporated when the jury read their verdict. The entrapment defense had worked. This boy was not predisposed to commit the crimes of which he was charged, or so the jury believed. In other words, he had been innocent until I came along. They did not convict on the most serious charges, only a couple of minor ones, which resulted in one year of prison followed by five years of probation. Nancy walked free for time already served, and also got probation. I lost my job. I had cost the Feds two convictions. The agency who had hired me more or less touched a button: their tinted windows went up, and that was it.
I started working in Europe, in the private sector, taking advantage of the fact I speak French, Italian, Spanish, and German. I’m fluent in all those languages, although I speak them with a strong American accent. (People think fluency is about having a good accent. It isn’t. Fluency is about how well you understand the language, and how well you are able to speak it. Having a good accent is nothing. It’s a consolation prize for people who aren’t fluent.)
But why had Nancy and that boy entered my thoughts just then?
I could not remember. But then I did remember: on account of Priest Valley, my Heineken-bottle-green fatherland, my made-up fodderland, which I’d passed through with the boy, before he made trouble for me.
Priest Valley, where no one lives but I say I am from.
A valley with a sign on the side of a highway. Paradisical and empty. Soft with wild grasses. Grand with valley oaks. Its tall priest-like poplars, planted long ago, in hopes of colonizing this otherwise untouched place where a couple of outbuildings linger, their unpainted lumber collapsing back into nature.
PRIEST VALLEY
ELEVATION: 2,200 FEET
POPULATION: ZERO
A MONTH INTO LIVING TOGETHER in his apartment, Lucien and I traveled from Paris to Marseille, where he would be shooting a film based on a pulp novel about Marseille’s criminal underworld.
I planned to stay for a week, as part of the contract of our romance, in exchange for which I would secure access to his family’s estate, rent a car, and drive up to the Guyenne to establish trust with Pascal Balmy and his inner circle.
Lucien and I took the TGV from Gare de Lyon to Marseille, riding backward in a swaying first-class train car, a canister of modern French technology tearing through French countryside at three hundred kilometers an hour, farms and rolling hills and little medieval villages being pulled backward as if a monster vacuum cleaner was sucking the landscape into its unseen mouth.
The two of us riding faced in the “wrong” direction, Lucien began to feel queasy. The train car was full, so we could not move from our assigned seats. I watched as his complexion blanched. His forehead shone with sweat. I could see that he was suppressing the urge to vomit, as I read the newspaper and feigned concern.
I said I would get him some bubbly water, and I headed for the café car.
The core of my assignment and duties had been to infiltrate and to monitor Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards for proof they had committed sabotage and were planning more of it. But even before I’d pulled off the neat trick of sidling up to Balmy’s oldest friend, my contacts had me tracking, in addition to Balmy, a French bureaucrat, an obscure deputy minister. I had been encouraged to study this man’s activities and habits in Paris and elsewhere.
A message had come in, regarding him.
I read the message while standing at the bar of the empty café car, sent a short reply, ordered a glass of white wine, drank it, bought a sparkling water for Lucien, a package of mints, put a mint in my mouth, and made my way back to our seats.
Lucien looked greenish as I handed him the water.
I sat. He sipped the water and put his head in my lap. He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around my waist.
I looked down at this head in my lap, Lucien’s, foreign and heavy and warm, and then I looked out the window.
The trick of riding backward is to understand that this orientation of travel is time-honored and classical. It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward, while watching scenes of the past recede.
A high-speed train was approaching from the opposite direction. As it whooshed past our own, the effect of wind between the two trains stopped my heart.
I know perfectly well that each train has its own track. I know they won’t collide.
THIS DEPUTY MINISTER’S NAME was Paul Platon. He worked in the Ministry of Rural Coherence, which was concerned with energy, ecology, and this ambiguous goal of so-called coherence. His area was security as I understood it, inside this ministry.
