The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

Chapter LXI

The French prison system was, by general consent, a mess: a collection of overcrowded, underfunded institutions, with a significant Muslim population that was ripe for radicalization. Baba Diop had spent time behind bars in his native Senegal, most notably at the notorious Rebeuss Prison in Dakar, but even by those standards Fleury-Mérogis, Europe’s largest penal institution, was a grim environment in which to be incarcerated. If Diop was seeking straws at which to clutch, he had at least avoided La Santé. A cousin of his had spent three years there before emerging convinced that the place was both cursed and haunted, a consequence, he believed, of having provided a home for the guillotine until the 1970s.

Diop had passed the days since his capture at Gare de Lyon in a series of French police interview rooms. This had not been a happy experience, not least because he had proven unable to provide his interrogators with the intelligence they required, namely any deep insight into the channels through which Islamic terrorists were making their way into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. All Baba Diop could tell the French was that he had been hired by Aleksej Marković to escort two Syrians – whose names he had never learned – from Port-Vendres to Paris. He had done similar work for Marković in the past, although on those occasions he had been shepherding human cargo from the Serbian border to Paris.

As Diop understood it, most of these individuals were respectable middle-class citizens – doctors, businessmen, accountants – seeking to escape the turmoil of war and persecution in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, even Pakistan, by buying themselves a new life in Europe. Sometimes they brought their families with them, although only the wealthiest could afford to do so since the Serbians charged $50,000 per head to move illegal immigrants through Serbia and on to France, and did not offer discounts for bulk. Another arm of the operation worked with poorer cargo, the kind that was transported like cattle in the backs of trucks, there to live or die according to the vagaries of heat and cold, and the relative availability of essentials such as food, water, and oxygen. Baba Diop preferred not to involve himself in that kind of haulage. He found it depressing, and incompatible with his Christianity.

As for the two men killed at Gare de Lyon, Diop informed the police that he had been ignorant of their terrorist backgrounds. His policy had always been to ask as few questions as possible. He trusted Marković to share with him all the necessary facets of an operation; anything more, Baba Diop was better off not knowing. Yes, he was aware of the Vuksans, but only peripherally through Marković, because he had never met the brothers himself. He thought that Fouad Belkacem, his colleague who had also been present at Gare de Lyon on that fateful afternoon, might have had some dealings with the Vuksans directly, but he could not be sure. He and Fouad did not talk very much, Diop told the police solemnly. They had little in common, Fouad being a Muslim, a drinker, a smoker, and a fornicator, while Baba Diop was none of these things.

Oh, and Fouad was also apparently a traitor. He had betrayed Baba Diop, Aleksej Marković, and the two Syrians, which meant that Baba, the police stressed, should feel under no obligation to withhold information in order to protect him. Fouad was one of their assets, and had already told them a great deal. Baba Diop’s testimony was required only to corroborate certain details, they said, but he should be careful not to lie because, thanks to Fouad, they would know if he was dissembling, and would punish him accordingly.

But Baba Diop did not believe all of this. He had served for a number of years with the Senegalese National Gendarmerie before his arrest for gross corruption – the reason for that involuntary three-year stay at Rebeuss – and had participated in his share of interrogations. He suspected that whatever information the French might have got out of Fouad Belkacem, it had not been enough to satisfy their curiosity.

And so the questioning had continued until, having deprived Diop of sleep, restricted his access to food and water, and beaten him a little, his interrogators decided that he had told them all he could, and it was time for him to languish in a cell until the courts got around to trying him as an accessory to terrorism. Only as he was being taken to Fleury-Mérogis did Diop learn of Fouad Belkacem’s murder. He already knew that Marković had been shot and killed. The police had appeared curious to learn who might have been responsible, which surprised Diop since he had assumed that the police had themselves killed Marković. Now, it seemed, Fouad was also dead. Baba Diop found this troubling because he recognized that, depending on the culprits, he might be next in line.

All of which explained how Baba had come to be confined in Fleury-Mérogis. After being brought before an investigating judge, he was remanded to a supposedly secure unit of the prison’s maison d’arrêt des hommes, where he was likely to remain for the foreseeable future. Following his eventual trial, the end result of which Diop could gloomily predict, he would most likely end up back at Fleury-Mérogis, or even be given the opportunity to find out for himself whether La Santé was, in fact, cursed, or if its refurbishment had succeeded in banishing the hex. This was how Diop saw the next decade or so of his life unfolding. It made him sad. He was not a wicked man. He had tried not to hurt people unless absolutely necessary, but it had been his misfortune to fall into bad company on many occasions, and in at least four different countries.

Diop was not unalarmed at the prospect of incarceration in Fleury-Mérogis. He was aware of its large Muslim contingent and its reputation as a font of radicalism. Amedy Coulibaly, the Malian who murdered a policewoman and four Jews in Paris in 2015, and Chérif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who shot twelve dead at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, had both been radicalized by their time at the prison. Diop, one of his fellow detainees warned him as they were placed in the van, would be entering an environment that was unsympathetic at best to non-Muslims, and policed by unarmed guards who preferred not to risk their lives by stepping into the exercise yard when the prisoners were at liberty there.

Baba Diop spent the final thirty-six hours of his life at Fleury-Mérogis. At 11 a.m. on the second day, he was stabbed in the throat with a sharpened comb while being led under escort to the governor’s office. His murderer was a young French-Algerian named Ahmed Beghal, who declared that he had taken Diop’s life as revenge for his part in the deaths of the ‘martyrs’ at Gare de Lyon. Beghal, with no previous history of violence, and not yet on the watch list of firebrand inmates, declined to say whether he might have been ordered by another party to kill Diop. He also refused to share with police or prison staff the source of his information about Diop, whose identity had been kept secret in order to protect him against just such an act of retaliation.

And in Vienna, the Vuksans felt the noose tighten another inch.