9
The hot North African sun hammered the open docks at the ferry terminal within the protected harbor of Tripoli. It was a few minutes after noon, and several last-minute passengers for the boat to Palermo shuffled across the quay and boarded. A thick miasma hung in the windless air over the minarets and domed mosques of the surprisingly oriental Libyan capital. Within the city, the noon traffic was heavy. Although much of the population slept during the hottest part of the day, business still had to continue; the country, despite its protestations to the contrary, had been irrevocably influenced by the West.
Among the final passengers was a tall, well-built Frenchman, with thick black hair, wide, dark eyes, and a handsome face that would have been more at home on the rocky beaches of Cap d’Antibes than here in this forsaken place of dust and poverty.
He was dressed plainly in a short-sleeved safari suit and soft desert boots. He carried two pieces of soft leather luggage.
At the head of the gangway, he was greeted by the ship’s purser and deck officer, and a steward was assigned to show him to his first-class cabin for the thirty-hour trip.
“Have a pleasant voyage, Monsieur Riemé,” the purser said, touching the bill of his cap.
“Merci, I will.” He followed his steward forward to his cabin, where he ordered a bottle of good white wine and a light lunch of fish soup. He ate the soup and some bread, drank one small glass of the wine. He then poured the rest of it in his bathroom sink, careful to rinse all traces of the wine away.
He lay down and slept for one hour. When he got up, he rang his steward and ordered a bottle of bourbon and a bucket of ice. When it came he poured a small tot into a glass, sloshed a bit of it on his bed and on the carpeted deck, as if he had had an accident, and sent the remainder of the bottle after the wine down the sink.
Then he settled down to wait until nightfall, smoking Gauloise cigarettes one after another.
Henri Riemé, at twenty-nine, was young enough to have missed General de Gaulle’s terrible betrayal of the French officer corps in Algeria during the fifties and sixties, but his father and three of his uncles had been left out in the cold and hung by fanatics.
For a time afterwards (his mother called those days the horrible years), the Riemé family had sunk into obscurity, the mother, Uncle Paul, and Henri living in a small flat on the Left Bank of Paris.
In the sixties, and into the seventies, when young Henri was attending school, it seemed as if the family would never make its mark on French history beyond the footnote in the texts listing the father and uncles among those purged.
It seemed that way until the Sorbonne, where young Henri, who was studying engineering, met Robert Sossoin, a radical from Marseille. They roomed together for two years. Then Henri had to drop out of school for lack of money. But meanwhile Sossoin had filled his head with Communist doctrine.
“The Communist Party is the future of France, Henri,” Sossoin would argue endlessly.
“Look what it has done to the Soviet Union,” Riemé would counter.
“Ah, the grand experiment you speak of now. You expect that in such a short time, with such a large nation, with so many different peoples, miracles can or should occur? It is only after time and effort, only after the sweat of the worker’s brow runs hard and fast, that miracles will happen. There is no starvation in Russia. There are no homeless. They have brought themselves from a backward icebox of a nation to the most powerful country on this earth,” Sossoin said fervently. “We must align ourselves with them. We must free France from the stagnating grip of capitalism.”
Even those high-sounding words did not completely sway young Henri, however. His conversion did not come until nearly a year after he had dropped out of college, when he was working as a waiter at a touristy Left Bank café.
His uncle had died several months earlier, and his mother was ill, in need of hospital care. She was too proud to accept state care, and Henri was too poor to afford private doctors. At that propitious moment, Robert Sossoin showed up, offered money, and thus recruited Henri into the LPN — Le Poing Noir (The Black Fist). The LPN’s avowed aim was redistribution of wealth by taking it forcibly out of the hands of the rich and placing it in the pockets of the deserving worker.
For the next few whirlwind years, Henri and his newfound group robbed department stores and banks, their targets becoming larger and larger, their methods more and more sophisticated, and the price on their heads ever greater.
In 1977, their activities came to the attention of the KGB resident in Paris, who contacted the LPN leadership and arranged for reorganization and training.
Riemé was one of the men selected to go to Libya and then Moscow for terrorist schooling: hand-to-hand combat, demolitions, and weapons, as well as secret codes, radio work, and languages, primarily Russian and English.
Eventually their control officer, whose real name they never knew, pronounced them ready to return to France to do some real work.
The officer was a little man, with intense eyes and a dark complexion. Sitting now aboard the ferryboat, Riemé remembered well that last meeting after they had graduated, when the little man clapped him proudly on the shoulder.
“You will become a first-class assassin to rival Carlos himself. An assassin for freedom.”
Henri had been startled. He had thought of himself as an administrator, or perhaps a soldier, like his father and uncles. But an assassin? There was something faintly dirty about the notion.
Within two months of returning to France, however, he had been ordered to assassinate a minor political figure in Nancy, which he did with such sophistication and dispatch — and with such congratulations from his comrades afterward — that he was hooked. He had found his place. He was an assassin. An expert. His mother, who had died despite her operation, would have been proud of him, as would his father and uncles.
“For them,” he had told himself. “For France, and for my family.”
Those phrases had become his talisman, his prayer to the gods, before, during, and after each job.
And now there was a new assignment. It was the first to come directly from his little control officer. It would be a terrible blow against capitalism in France.
“The rich will tremble in fear,” the little man had told him one week ago in Tripoli. The meeting had been arranged through a complicated line of intermediaries.
“But why this one?” Riemé had asked, studying a photograph. It showed a man in his early fifties, coming out of a modern glass-and-steel building, apparently in Paris.
“His name is Gérard Louis Dreyfus,” the little man said. The name meant nothing to Riemé. “He is one of the most wealthy and most powerful of the international grain merchants. From France, he controls a huge portion of the world’s food supply.”
“I still do not see…” Riemé began, but the little man continued as if he had never been interrupted.
“I ask you, Henri, is there starvation in the world?”
Riemé nodded.
“Then it is the people who control the food to whom we must look. Men like Louis Dreyfus, who is known as the Octopus. He steals the grain of France and other nations, and then sells the food to the very rich for obscene profits. A man who does not deserve to live.”
“The assassination of one man in such a large business would do nothing to stop it,” Reimé argued.
“On the contrary, Henri. The Louis Dreyfus business is very special. It is entirely owned and operated by one family. By one man. Gérard. Eliminate him, and the business would take years to recover, if it ever would.”