Crime Fraiche (13 page)

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Authors: Alexander Campion

BOOK: Crime Fraiche
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“
Bonjour,
monsieur. This is Commissaire Le Tellier of the Police Judiciaire. I’m calling about your niece.”
The faint voice blossomed into a smile, obvious even through the tiny speaker of the earpiece. “Wonderful! Have you found her?”
“Not quite yet, but it won’t be long, Monsieur Lafontaine. Actually, some more details would speed up our search. Would it inconvenience you if we came by tomorrow ?”
“Of course it wouldn’t. Anything to bring my poor niece back more quickly. Anything at all.”
CHAPTER 19
L
afontaine lived in the quiet half of the Ile Saint-Louis, the part that still remained Aragon’s island heart of the town, embraced by the languid arms of the Seine, where all was eternally tranquil—a world apart from the tourist-trap side, crammed with overpriced ice cream shops, cheap kicky clothing boutiques, and foreigners in shorts screaming at their bawling children. His apartment on the serene quai d’Anjou was in a perfectly proportioned
hôtel particulier
overlooking the gently flowing river.
Capucine tapped the brass fist-shaped knocker on the shiny green door of the flat with some trepidation. Lafontaine was far more than a mere celebrity; he really would still be known in five hundred years.
The man who opened the door was immediately recognizable as the celebrated composer, even across the chasm of the thirty years since the pictures on his CDs had been taken. But after the first rush of realization, the larger-than-life being collapsed into the frail frame of a mortal body, ancient and blinking.
Capucine smiled as reassuringly as she could. “We spoke on the telephone yesterday. We’ve come to help you find your niece. Do you remember?”
Like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, his face cleared. “Yes, of course!” he said in a trembling voice. “Do you have any news?”
“We’d like to ask you some questions so our search will be more effective. May we come in?” Capucine asked.
The apartment was a treasure trove. An enormous Steinway, topped with silver-framed photographs as dense and ordered as a field of corn, dominated the room. Out of the corner of her eye Capucine recognized three presidents, two popes, Sartre, Mahatma Gandhi, and a charming snap of Jacqueline Onassis bending down and kissing a seated Lafontaine on the forehead. Beyond the piano, every flat surface supported memorabilia, each item more remarkable than the other.
Forcing herself not to ogle, Capucine tuned in as Isabelle was saying, as usual in a slightly bellicose tone, “So you thought you ran across your niece at the market after she had been gone for thirty-five years. Is that correct?”
“Good Lord! It hasn’t been thirty-five years. Only four days.” Lafontaine smiled tolerantly.
“But your concierge told one of our officers your niece had died in nineteen sixty-nine.”
“Poor Yvette. I’m afraid she’s getting on in years. You know”—Lafontaine paused as if explaining to a small child—“a little gaga. She’s confused. She’s only kept on because the residents of the building have become attached to her. All the actual cleaning work is done by an outside service. It’s a little extra cost, of course, but we don’t mind. It’s such a pleasure to have Yvette deliver the mail in the morning and gossip about what’s going on in the building.” He paused, looking puzzled. “What was it you were asking me, young lady?”
“I was saying that the concierge in the building seemed to think that your niece had died thirty-five years ago.”
“That poor woman.” It was not clear of whom he spoke. “My sister did die thirty-five years ago, and that’s why her daughter has been living with me ever since.”
David decided it was up to him to sow some order in the interview. “And how old is your niece, then?”
“Why, the same age she’s always been, of course, twenty-one.” Lafontaine spoke to David as if he were dim-witted.
Capucine, who had been a great fan of the literature of pataphysics while at university, left them to it, finding the banter a perfect backdrop to her perusal of Lafontaine’s memorabilia. She was sorely tempted to let it go on, but she finally found what she was looking for and meanness was not among her vices.
“Excuse me, Monsieur Lafontaine. This is absolutely remarkable. Tell me about it,” she said, pointing to an odd-looking picture frame over the fireplace, deep enough to hold a book, elaborately gilded, but completely empty.
“Ah, that. It’s my most prized possession. They’re Berlioz’s drafts for his famous letters to Harriet Smithson. I’m sure that you know the story. Berlioz was madly in love with the Irish actress for years.” He picked up a silver frame from a table and handed it to Capucine. “This is a copy of her portrait. Lovely, don’t you think?”
Isabelle and David trotted over to see the image, which featured a young woman whose prissy features seemed undersized on her curiously pear-shaped head. Her hard, round breasts strove valiantly to burst out of a low-cut velvet gown. Her hair had been pulled back tightly and coiffed into elaborate curly cascades at her temples and her nape. It was not the sort of beauty that would break hearts in the present age.
“Berlioz wooed her for years. He tirelessly wrote her letter after letter declaring his love, but she wanted nothing to do with him. His passion for her grew and grew until it finally found its outlet in the fervor and violence of the
Symphonie Fantastique.
It was only then that the gods smiled at him and, quite by accident, Harriet found herself at the premiere and somehow divined that the symphony had been written for her. She relented and later they were married.”
“What a lovely story,” David said.
“In his will Berlioz ordered that the drafts of his letters to Harriet be destroyed, but his family couldn’t bring themselves to do it. A few years ago they were given to me. I was very moved.”
Capucine peered intently at the empty frame. “Monsieur, please come help me. Here Berlioz says, ‘Without you my life is nothing but an empty . . .’ and a whole series of words have been crossed out. Then there is a scribble that I can’t quite decipher. What does it say?”
Lafontaine examined the frame, David and Isabelle staring over his shoulder. Lafontaine squinted, shot Capucine a shrewd glance, then craned his neck to look more closely. “Madame, the word is
rêve
—dream. It explains much about the
Symphonie Fantastique.
” He looked levelly at Capucine, perfectly lucid. “Do you really think you’ll be able to find my niece?”
Very gently Capucine put her hand on his arm. “I’m confident, monsieur, you will be reunited with her soon.”
As Lafontaine walked them to the door, he turned to David. “Yes, it is a lovely story. But you know, some historians claim that it wasn’t the
Symphonie Fantastique
at all that changed Smithson’s mind. When she went to that premiere, her acting career was failing, she was beginning to get fat, she had run out of money, and Berlioz had become famous and quite well-to-do. But why should that make a difference? As Liszt said, once she had inspired that monumental work, Smithson’s duty was fulfilled.”
In the Clio going back to the commissariat, Isabelle smoldered in a silent white rage. After a while she could contain herself no longer. “Damn it, Commissaire, you should have let me grill that old fool. At the very least I would have gotten a decent description of the girl, and I probably could have talked him into filing a complaint. It really pisses me off that this theft is not going to make it onto La Belle’s charge sheet.” She glared at Capucine.
“Isabelle, he made it as clear as he could that he had gladly given up his letters for the few unexpected days he had with his niece. Even in the Police Judiciaire you’re not expected to be cruel enough to take that away from him.”
CHAPTER 20
“A
lexandre absolutely loathes this place,” Capucine said with a happy smile. “When it opened, his review said they served fluorescent fluff, not food.”
“I picked it because I was sure you wouldn’t want to sit next to a bunch of grumpy old Cognac-marinated buffers who won’t eat anything that isn’t excrementally brown and flaccid from being soaked in wine for a week. You get far too much of that with your corpulent consort,” Jacques said, bleating his loud cackle.
“And just when I thought you were getting to like him,” Capucine said with an exaggerated moue.
The restaurant was very definitely not part of Alexandre’s econiche. The white enameled room was filled with organically formless white composite marble tables, each dotted with a glaring bottom-lit plastic bauble in a brilliant primary color. Thumping techno-rock throbbed through an overly efficient sound system. It might be the perfect setting for its fauna—willowy and emaciated golden young things posing self-consciously, large eyes nervously darting, seeing and desperately hoping to be seen—but it was certainly suboptimal for what Capucine had in mind.
The evening was off to a bad start. Jacques launched into his banter, screeching his innuendo-laden gibes over the background noise. He had donned his Paris plumage: a pale gray Prince of Wales check suit over a light purple silk shirt, as crisp and perfectly ironed as if he had just put it on—a trick Capucine would love to learn—a pale yellow Hermès tie, and tan suede Weston loafers. Even though Jacques’s sartorial excesses didn’t seem to present the slightest detriment to his career, in the family it was often wondered if he might not be, well, just a little fey.
Jacques arched an eyebrow at a passing waiter, who stopped short as if he’d been harpooned—another trick Capucine would love to learn. After a whispered instruction, the waiter returned promptly with martini glasses filled with noxiously green cocktails that tasted mildly of mint and madly of alcohol.
“Tell me, my nubile cousin, to what do I owe the pleasure of this delightfully sudden assignation?” Jacques asked with a cartoon leer.
Capucine was spared the need to answer by the waiter, who returned with the menus. She smiled enigmatically and studied hers closely. In keeping with the birdlike eating habits of its clientele, the restaurant offered mainly appetizers and desserts with only a small handful of decidedly bizarre main dishes.
“Try the
poulet au Coca,
” Jacques suggested. “It’s actually quite good. Even your tubby hubby will tell you that Coke syrup isn’t all that different from balsamic vinegar.”
The mandatory restaurant antiphony dragged on for long minutes, slowed by Jacques’s salacious teasing of the lithe waiter. In the end Capucine wound up with a salmon tortilla and Jacques with the chicken braised in Coca-Cola.
During the interminable dialogue with the waiter, Capucine had become increasingly despondent, realizing that the dinner was a vast mistake. Jacques, acutely sensitive as usual, picked up her mood shift, instantly becoming the concerned cousin.
“You’re worried about something, aren’t you?”
“Well—”
“It’s the family, isn’t it?”
“Actually—”
“I know, I know. I remember all that brouhaha when you announced you were joining the police and how upset you were.” He gave her hand a fraternal squeeze.
“No—”
“Look, you’re worrying about nothing. Trust me. Of course they were all up in arms at the time, but they’re over it. It’s forgotten. And, hard as it is to believe, they all love Alexandre.”
“Jacques—”
“No, no, listen to me. Look how they were all deferring to you last weekend about those deaths. You’re the official family sleuth now. Even Father seemed to be trying to get you to investigate.” Jacques hee-hawed loudly.
“Jacques, that’s not it at
all.
” Capucine paused for breath. “The DCPJ declined my request to be allowed to investigate the incidents in Saint-Nicolas.”
“Excellent! The last thing anyone needs is you plodding around the village with your big flat feet, digging up people’s secrets. Besides, you have your career to think of. Face it, Jane Marple wouldn’t have made it in the PJ even if she’d had your boobs.”
“Jacques, stop. You absolutely
have
to help me. I need you to pull one of your many strings. The last two deaths were clearly murders. The local gendarmerie doesn’t give a damn. Somebody’s got to do something about it.” Capucine’s lips had rounded into a pucker and her eyebrows had contracted into an angry V.
“Of course they were murders. But that’s not the point.”
“So what
is
the fucking point, then?”
“
Ma cousine,
the hardest thing for me to accept in my job is that it’s all about compromise. Let’s say I were to pull one of my moldy little strings and get the DCPJ to see things a little more your way. Do you realize how antagonistic the Normandy gendarmerie would become toward the Police Judiciaire? Do you have any idea of how many criminals would slip through the cracks because of that rancor? Not to mention that there would be a big ugly blot on your pristine little copybook that might well bar you from promotion to the senior echelons.”
Her back to the wall, Capucine pulled an ace from her boot and slapped it on the table. “What about your father ? It was Oncle Aymerie who got me started. He’s dead set on getting to the bottom of these deaths.”
“That’s what you think. It’s true he has a rosy vision of himself as the flower of French feudalism. He’s overprotective of ‘his’ village and feels the murder victims were ‘ill used’ and it’s somehow all his fault. He wants to set things to rights and sees you as his paladin. But he’s sure as hell not going to be feeling that way if you start flipping over stones and the creepy crawlies come slithering out.”
Jacques paused and delicately sliced off a piece of his chicken. “And I’ll tell you another thing. The last time I got you out of the soup, I didn’t have to pull any strings. All I did was nudge a few people in my own agency and convince them that your case was really in the national interest, which it was. I hardly think the director is going to feel that the death of a couple of ranch hands is a threat to the country’s security.”
Jacques took a bite of chicken. “It used to be that you just wanted to get a little street grime on your lily-white Sixteenth Arrondissement hands. That suited you. It went with the kohl you bought for your eyes on vacation in Marrakech. But galloping eternally after the grail of justice seems a bit OTT.”
“Jacques, it’s not about justice, not really. I don’t know what it is. It’s the principle of the thing, I guess. But I know I couldn’t sleep at night if I let a killer go loose because it was politically expedient.”
Jacques shrieked his braying laugh. “My poor cousine, what makes you so adorable is that you aren’t even slightly embarrassed saying things like that out loud. ‘Couldn’t sleep at night!’ I know what’s keeping you awake. It’s trying to get your geriatric, gastronomic hedgehog pumped up. He told me all about it,” Jacques said with an exceptionally loud bray of laughter.
With the petulance of adolescence, Capucine kicked Jacques’s shin as hard as she could. Jacques looked into her eyes and saw what only he could have seen: beneath the iron resolve of her cobalt blue eyes, she was on the edge of tears.
As if suddenly bored by the tiff, he fell into a reverie, an elbow on the table, chin cradled in his hand, index reaching up to his cheekbone, staring unseeing into the middle distance. As it happened, at the exact center of that middle distance were the gym-hardened gluteals of a lissome blonde who was leaning over her table to ensure maximum visibility while flirting with her beau of the evening. With the radar of her breed, she noticed Jacques’s stare and smiled fleetingly at him. Jacques was oblivious.
“You know, cousine, plucking you out of the ministerial bouillabaisse is going to turn into a bad habit. But I suppose someone in the family has to have exemplary ideals. There is an interministerial committee meeting in a few days that’s intended to coordinate efforts of the various intelligence services and police departments, and I happen to sit on it. I’m certainly not going to put this on the agenda, but I might see my way to make an utterance at the urinals other than my usual relieved groan.”
Capucine whooped like a schoolgirl and leaned far over the table to kiss her cousin on the forehead. The males at surrounding tables smiled admiringly.
“But, don’t think this is a done deal. Messing outside of my own ministry is poking into a can of nasty worms that often bite.”
“Jacques, thank you. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Jacques shrieked his inimitable laugh. “And to think that when you called me to have dinner on such short notice, I was sure it was all about finishing what we started that rainy afternoon in the commons—”
Jacques started as if he had been goosed. His hand darted into his jacket. Reflexively—thinking he was reaching for a gun—Capucine leaned forward, pushing her chair back, grabbing for her Sig as she searched the room for the danger. Jacques’s volcanic bray was loud enough to stop conversation at all the surrounding tables. He fished a beeper from an inside pocket, inspected it, and held it up disdainfully between thumb and index. It twitched and buzzed like a captured insect.
He stood up and hiked his eyebrows in apology. “Gotta run, luscious.”
Just as he started off, he turned back and whispered in Capucine’s ear. “I feel guilty about leaving you in the lurch. If one of the things you had on your mind was resolving that issue I was just talking about, I can recommend that little citizen at the next table.” He indicated the blonde who was following their conversation intently. “I’m sure she’d be amenable to anything you might conjure up.”

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