AM: Very well. Mr Garros, your lack of cooperation will be duly noted.
(His lawyer, André Saidi, nods in resigned silence. The officer continues with the scheduled questions.)
AM: How many years were you active?
JG: Twelve.
AM: Can you provide a list of your clients over those years?
JG: No.
AM: You can’t, or you won’t?
JG: What difference does it make?
AM: Mr Garros, we have access to some of the Counterfeiter’s falsifications attributed to you in recent years. Your capture was possible due to the connections made between some of them. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this. We could continue pulling the thread and reveal, one by one, who you’ve worked for. Tell me, what do you gain by protecting your clients?
(The accused remains silent.)
AM: Mr Garros?
JG: The honour of loyalty.
AM: Oh, really! Loyalty. A rather antiquated concept for a man like you, Mr. Garros. If you give us some useful information, we can reach an agreement.
JG: Oh, I see. I help you, and in return, you help me.
AM: That’s right.
JG: You see, madam. The difference is that I never asked for your help.
(Officer Morrison places a file on the table.)
AM: We already know you worked with the multinational Belinadiknos, with a couple of local municipalities, with at least a dozen private associations, and with the head of KawtAirlines. It’s only a matter of weeks, maybe days, before we know who else hired your services. They’ve committed fraud just like you, Garros. Your clients will fall, whether you want them to or not.
(Silence.)
AM: Mr Garros?
JG: They’ll fall, but it won’t be me who gives them the final push into the abyss.
Chapter 5
I managed to twist that walk to the prison with André to my advantage. Who else was stuck in that hellhole whom I needed to see? Ding, ding, ding! The infamous Julian Garros himself. That’s right, I got the prison pass I’d filled out for Friday switched over to today. Okay, it wasn’t valid, but the beefy guard who escorted me to the meeting room didn’t seem to care. We were old… acquaintances.
I waited inside for Julian to show up.
Unlike Timotheo Larousse, Julian had a face made for television. A criminal like him tried to avoid the camerasas much as possible, but the reporters had pounced on him. And when I say pounced, I mean they had infested the prison entrance with cameras on the day of his arrival, scoured the internet for images of him and for the best snapshots some photographer had taken of him during his capture (where he had a “serious look” but, in the words of a BBC presenter, “captivating”) had flooded magazine covers for months. I think someone even wrote an erotic fanfic about him.
The first time I saw Julian Garros, my skin crawled. Not because he was handsome, but because I could recognise a calculating look when I saw one. I didn’t have much to do there: André had already chewed through the case as much as possible and handed it over to me to carve out the details while he took care of the Larousse case. Julian had shared only so much with him, and no one could break his walls down. Or so I thought.
I was wrong. Julian didn’t spill secrets with his words, no. Instead, his silences did all the talking, silences that screamed louder than anything he could have said.
That Thursday, when I came face-to-face with him, I kept my greeting to myself. Julian smiled.
“I thought we were meeting on Friday,” he said, his voice calm, measured.
“No, there’s been a change of plans.”
