The Night Lords by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agora Books

TWENTY NINE

MORPHOLOGY OF THE PJ

A city like Castang’s, some three hundred thousand souls within city limits and a third as much beyond, has elaborate and heavy police structures as complicated and rigidly hierarchised as all the other branches of European administration. The municipal police has a large substructure in the ‘urban security’ brigade which handles most of the crime, even that called ‘blood crime’. Blows-and-wounds and even homicides are not a reserved hunting-ground for the Police Judiciaire.

The PJ is a totally separate office,and its provincial ‘antennae’ in most major cities are attached to the central service in Paris, the well-known ‘Thirty-six’ of the Quai des Orfèvres which holds the archives, the telecommunications system, and the computer. The PJ is a club, or a caste: a péjiste is not just a flic. An élite naturally, of officers with law degrees and a high level of specialisation: a club-of-queer-trades, and a department-of-dead-ends too (VRs or ‘vaines recherches’ they are called) but the jargon acronyms are less romantic.

While still madly centralised it is less rigid than most European and especially Latin administrations, and less of a bureaucracy. The chiefs of the territorial brigades, divisional commissaires like Richard, have a fairly free hand in organising their services, and some like Richard, who dislike ‘organigrammes’ and rigidly-structured pyramids, have surrounded themselves with officers in the varying grades to suit their own methods. Only efficiency counts; there isn’t any other choice. The structure of the PJ is nowadays more morphological than purely anatomical…

Richard thus had his BRI and VP squads, his financial expert ‘Massip-the-Fiddler’, and the usual ‘mondaine’ or morals group specialised in whores and narcotics, as well as oddities like le-père-Bianchi, but they were not kept in little watertight compartments, and Castang while officially a homicide-principal-inspector could find himself doing the anti-gang treadmill with Cantoni, or anything but the specialised fraud or vice enquiries, as people went on holiday, took overdue leave, or – occasionally – got shot.

One did one’s best not to get shot, but there was no way of not getting wet (only Massip the accountant never got wet, and of course the Treasurer-paymaster). So that Vera was unsurprised, and more sympathetic than cross when he got home very late, having sent the sodden handbag to the ‘identité judiciaire’ lab and left a note for Richard, with soggy socks and trousers. Hot shower, boiling-hot tisane with lemon and honey: aspirin: bed: not so much chat. Mucking about in ponds in the middle of the night, cutting one’s fingers, getting soaked, having to send one’s trousers to the cleaners (and the treasurer wouldn’t accept that as an expense) – these were all habitual péjiste activities. Leaving aside getting shot, much worse happened.

The morphology of the Administration is like all organigrammes, a vast pile of cubes connected with right-angled lines. One can say too that it is an immense mass of gas, custard or ectoplasm: since it hasn’t any shape how can it have any bloody morphology? But the PJ is highly elastic. Don’t catch rheumatism.

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