Crime Fraiche (19 page)

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Authors: Alexander Campion

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CHAPTER 34
E
ven after a week at the commissariat, Capucine felt she had made only an insignificant dent in the paperwork on her desk. Important things were not getting done because they were still buried six inches deep in the pile. The imperative of getting to the bottom of the stack announced itself with the urgency of a genuine catastrophe. As she worked, the phone rang. She made no effort to pick it up and continued her review of one of her lieutenants’ reports on a claimed wife beating, a particularly brutal one, requiring several stitches. The case was challenging. The woman in question was promiscuous enough to be termed an “amateur prostitute.” The oxymoron irritated Capucine, but she couldn’t think of a better way to put it. The woman had explained that her husband beat her every time he learned of one of her trysts. She’d pointed out that he wasn’t all that quick on the uptake or she would be beaten daily. The lieutenant believed one of the woman’s many lovers was responsible for the assault, not her husband, who had never inflicted serious damage in the past. Still, unless an investigation unearthed evidence to the contrary, it was highly likely a judge would put him behind bars for a few months and he would emerge to the administrative difficulties of a convicted felon. The lieutenant wanted a wiretap installed.
Capucine uncapped a dented gold Waterman, a present from her grandfather when she had passed her
bac
at the age of seventeen, which ever since her university days had been kept filled with Waterman
Bleu Floride
ink in the unshakable belief that it had been the invariable choice of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. She made the occasional tick mark against the telling points that emerged from the cesspool of sordidness of the report and at the bottom noted that she would seek the approval of the
juge d’instruction
for the wiretap, which seemed entirely warranted.
The phone had stopped ringing but began again immediately. Capucine muttered an irritated “
Oh, là là
” and picked it up.
“I knew you were there, Commissaire,” the brigadier at the front desk said, his smile as fulsome as if he had been in the room. “There’s a woman here—a lady,” he quickly corrected himself, “who wants to see you but doesn’t have an appointment. Should I send her away?”
“What’s her name?”
“Madame Vienneau.”
“Tell her I’ll be right out to get her.”
Despite herself, Capucine felt awkward seeing Marie-Christine in the commissariat. She had never had a social visitor in her office, not even Alexandre, and she found it difficult to throw off her professional mantle. Her first reflex was to invite Marie-Christine down to the café around the corner for a coffee, which was what she would have done if one of her staff had come to her with a personal problem, but under the circumstances that wouldn’t do at all. Nor could she take her into one of the interrogation rooms for a flimsy cup of vending machine espresso, de rigueur for entertaining informants and other “friends” of the police. Capucine decided there was nothing else for it but to hear out Marie-Christine across her desk.
Marie-Christine seemed just as ill at ease as Capucine. “I feel terrible about barging in here like this. I know your time is hugely valuable, but I felt awkward asking you to lunch.” She paused and giggled girlishly. “Actually, I wanted to see you running a real police station, wearing your big gun.”
Obligingly, Capucine stood up and performed a little pirouette, showing off the Sig Sauer in its speed holster in the small of her back and the pair of handcuffs looped over the waistband of her skirt next to it. Capucine said, “I told you when we were driving to Honfleur, it has an appealing S and M look, but it’s pure torture when you have to sit in a car.” They both laughed and the awkward moment was gone.
“The real reason I wanted to see you was to explain why I did what I did,” Marie-Christine said. “I’m sure all those people down in Saint-Nicolas think I’m a hysterical harpy with her hormones out of control. I don’t care about them. But I
do
care what you think.”
Capucine reached across the desk and patted Marie-Christine’s hand. The commissariat was definitely not the place for feminine confidences.
“You know, lunch wasn’t such a bad idea. I’m actually a bit peckish.”
“Do you really have the time?”
Capucine nodded and smiled. She was already on the phone to the front desk.
“Brigadier, would you call Benoît’s and see if they can squeeze two more in?”
The real story, as Capucine knew, was going to wait until lunch was winding down.
The restaurant was one of those mythical Paris places that are wrongly believed not to exist any longer, a true neighborhood bistro with cubbyholes for the patrons’ napkins—changed once a week—and only a small handful of items on the blackboard menu on the wall, where all the customers, with no exceptions, were well known to the owner. There was only one waitress, a corpulent woman whose apron strings disappeared into the folds of her waist, a far bigger bully than anyone’s mother had ever been. As far as the waitress was concerned, there weren’t a handful of items on the menu; there were only two: for men
saucisses de Morteau,
thick, smoked sausages with little twigs holding the ends shut, on a creamy bed of
lentilles du Puy,
and for women a fillet of “
flétan
”—the Parisian generic for any flatfish. No discussion would be brooked. Capucine would very much have enjoyed the
saucisses
but knew enough Freud to recognize vicarious dieting when she saw it and accepted the inevitable.
Only when coffee had been reached—cheese was not even offered, and the reluctantly proposed dessert to be shared had been declined—did Marie-Christine unburden her soul.
“I really adore Loïc,” Marie-Christine said earnestly. “I love him with all my heart. Our two lives have grown into one. You won’t believe it, but we met at Castel. I never thought true romance could be found in a discotheque. He was with someone he didn’t like, and I was with a girlfriend because I had just been dumped and was trying to get drunk to forget about it. Somehow we just found ourselves dancing together. When I woke up with him the next morning, I realized how lucky I was. He was older than the boys I had been going out with and was strong and gave direction and purpose to my life, which had gone completely adrift.
“He had just inherited the élevage and it was in a complete mess. His father had been senile and had been interested only in his crazy breeding theories. Sales had fallen way off, and the élevage was losing money hand over fist. It was a nightmare for Loïc. He was working so hard, he needed to spend his weekends in Paris, getting away and blowing off steam.
“Of course, we fell in love right away and developed a routine. He would come to Paris every weekend and stay at my apartment. I couldn’t go to Saint-Nicolas, because there’s no hotel and it would have been completely out of the question for me to sleep at his house. Can you imagine !” Marie-Christine giggled.
“But I would drive down for the day pretty often and came to know the ins and outs of the élevage. Loïc quickly got bored with coming to Paris. His heart was really in the country. He proposed to me and I accepted in a flash.”
She stopped and took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way. Remember I told you that I inherited a good bit of money when my father died several years before and I had invested it in the élevage? What that meant was that I bullied my trust officers into investing, but I guess that amounts to the same thing,” she said with a giggle.
“It’s important you understand that when we started going out, Loïc had no idea I had any money. I really do think he fell in love with me that first night at Castel. Anyway, it all worked out for the best. The élevage took off again. It was really spectacular. I don’t know how Loïc did it. He invested in some new bulls—his father’s experiments had seriously weakened the herd—expanded some of the buildings, came up with an advertising campaign, and the next thing we knew, we were heralded as one of the leaders of the new generation of French agriculturists and were making buckets of money. . . .” Marie-Christine’s voice trailed off.
“So what happened?” Capucine asked. The restaurant was almost empty, and the kitchen staff was setting the tables for the evening service, but she knew they would not be disturbed.
Marie-Christine snapped herself back into the conversation. “I’ll tell you about that in a minute, but I want to tell you about the money part first. It’s because of that that I’m in the mess I’m in now.
“Lazard Frères has always managed my trust, and they’re very strict about it. When we got married, their lawyer insisted that the marriage contract be under the provision for separation of assets, so each partner’s property would remain his and only the property acquired after the marriage would be considered joint. Do you know how that works?”
Capucine laughed. “When I started out in the police, I worked in fiscal fraud. I know a whole lot more about that stuff than I’d like to.”
“Well, the Lazard man told me that the money I was lending the élevage was probably more than the place was worth. Remember, it was nearly bankrupt at that point. He said that if we ever divorced, I could wind up as the majority owner even if Loïc had paid my trust fund back later. It annoyed me to think they were preparing for my eventual divorce, but I guess that’s part of their job.
“That’s my problem. I can’t control what Lazard does. If I ever divorced Loïc, I’m afraid he would lose the élevage. Is that right? You know all about these things.”
“I haven’t seen the numbers, but it’s certainly possible.”
“That would be like cutting his right arm off. You just can’t do that to a man. Can you understand that?”
“So you
do
want a divorce.”
“I don’t know what I want. Loïc is wonderful, kind and understanding, just like the father I always wanted, and I love him. Well, I don’t have to tell you. Alexandre is so much older than you are. Being with Loïc is not like having a real husband. The bed part is such a chore.” She leaned over, put her hand on top of Capucine’s, and said in a rush, “He never wants to do it and then after three or four months he panics because we haven’t and then he takes one of those awful blue pills and we have to sit around for an hour trying to think of something to say waiting for it to kick in. Sometimes it winds up working, and sometimes it doesn’t. And all the trying, my God. It’s just so horrible. Poor you, I’m sure you have to go through the same thing.”
Capucine was sorely tempted to tell her that that was not at all the way it happened with Alexandre, quite the contrary in fact. But, diplomatically, she merely nodded encouragingly.
“What are you going to do?” Capucine asked.
“Who knows,” she sighed. “I told you all about Philippe when we were in Honfleur. I used to think it was just him. But I’ve discovered my physical needs are much more important than I ever imagined.” She paused and gave Capucine an appraising look, deciding if she could embark on the next stage of confidences.
“I’ve found someone else, an old school friend. It’s platonic—I mean, we’re not in love or anything like that—but we spend a lot of time in bed. I feel so much better in my skin. I feel like a woman again and not a daughter. I love all the things he makes me do in bed. He’s even more adventuresome than Philippe—”
“What about Loïc?” Capucine asked. She had nothing against sexual confidences but was not about to take time off from her commissariat to listen to them.
“What am I supposed to do? Go back to Loïc and have affairs on the side? I couldn’t stand that. Divorce him? I couldn’t stand that, either. I thought you’d point me in the right direction.” She burst into uncontrollable sobs.
The waitress stared at them unconcernedly. If it had been she crying her eyes out, Capucine hoped the woman would have had the sense to bring a plate heaped with sausages and lentils.
CHAPTER 35
F
riday evening found a reluctant Capucine back at Maulévrier. Even though she was in the same village as Momo, abandoning her desk at the commissariat paradoxically felt like a dereliction of her duty to him.
Oncle Aymerie’s ebullience aggravated her sense of guilt. He bubbled over with the news of a prodigious ferret shoot planned for the next morning. Ferreting was a pursuit—she couldn’t bring herself to consider it a sport—particularly distasteful to Capucine, a highly cruel and unfair manifestation of the paysan’s endless, imaginary war against the harmless, endearing rabbit.
The logistics of the thing were simple enough. Ferrets were sent down into a large rabbit warren, and the terrified little bunnies dashed out of the profusion of holes either to find themselves trapped in purse nets or shot in the back by hunters with shotguns. The main virtue of the exercise appeared to be to affirm the reality of social symbiosis in country life. Keeping ferrets was the purview of the laboring classes, while wielding shotguns was presumed to be the domain of the leisured. The partnership was further cemented by the perceived gain to the farmers, who saw a measurable decrease in the ranks of their enemy, while the “nobs” always enjoyed any excuse for a day out with their guns to kill something or other. Both sides of the equation received dividends of burlap bags stuffed with rabbit carcasses, which were duly transformed into endless varieties of stews and pâtés.
This was to be the annual incursion into a particularly infamous warren at the base of a venerable tree known, no one knew why, as
le Chêne de l’Evêque
—the Bishop’s Oak. The warren in question was viewed as the Roland Garros of ferreting, as extensive as the Vietcong’s tunnels, snaking out in all directions, harboring uncountable legions of furry, legumicidal rodents.
Capucine was dismayed that Alexandre had been infected by Oncle Aymerie’s exuberance and the two of them had succeeded in exciting Jacques’s normally soaring high spirits to even greater altitudes.
Early the next morning Capucine was awakened by Alexandre, looking for all the world like a Gallic version of a P. G. Wodehouse character in his father’s baggy plus fours.
“I brought you your coffee. We have to be there at nine sharp. The little bunnies will have returned from their morning’s nefarious sorties but will still be scuttling around their tunnels before they dig in for their daytime naps. Timing is all in ferreting.”
“You seem very knowledgeable,” Capucine said, sleepily sipping a café au lait from a kitchen bowl.
“Wild rabbit is the forgotten mainstay of French cuisine. The diabolic Disney stole them from us. It’s probably the only dish you don’t dare serve in Paris today—people look at you as if you were some sort of heartless ogre—and yet it’s the king of the white meats. When we get back, Jacques and I are going to spend the afternoon making a selection of pâtés and a
lapin à la moutarde
for dinner. You really need to get moving. I don’t want to be a minute late.” Capucine asked herself why on earth she had been in such a rush to get back.
An hour later Capucine and Alexandre walked up to
le Chêne de l’Evêque,
their guns crooked on their arms. Alexandre might have been about to pose for a 1920s advertisement for an expensive brand of Scotch, peering about with a luminescent grin as if he were expecting a gaggle of paparazzi to erupt from the wood. Capucine wondered if he realized he had affected the most irritating of Jacques’s mannerisms.
A large crowd had already gathered around the old oak tree, which, like everything else at Maulévrier, was steeped in Capucine’s memories. Jacques appeared out of nowhere and, without a word of greeting, said, “Ah, this gnarled old oak. Do you remember the time we climbed up in its welcoming branches and hid from everyone all afternoon and—”
Mercifully, the two paysans who had been standing importantly by the tree, nursing wooden boxes with large holes drilled in the covers, came up to Capucine with broad tooth-gapped smiles.
“
Mam’selle, Monsieur le Comte
told us to show you our ferrets before we started,” one said, reaching into the box slung from his shoulder and proudly producing a white and brown ferret with a long, slim, almost snakelike body. At first blush it was as cuddly and innocuous as one of Alexandre’s detested Disney cartoon characters. “He hasn’t eaten since the day before yesterday, and he’s dying to get down there,” the man said with a broad, ruthless smile, displaying all ten of his teeth. The animal looked dispassionately at her with eyes so black they seemed pupil-less and yawned sensuously, revealing its long, needlelike canines.
Not to be outdone, the second paysan opened his box and proudly showed the six ferrets nestled in partitions inside. One of them shyly poked its head out of the box, blinking myopically, hooking strong claws on the side of the partition—the engaging eager to pursue the defenseless.
Oncle Aymerie—with Emilien as his second in command—began to marshal the crowd. In addition to Vienneau, and his apparently inseparable acolyte Bellanger, there were a dozen of the usual shooting guests and a further dozen paysans. Vienneau looked bleary-eyed and disoriented, as if he had been up all night embracing a bottle. Adrift in the fumes of his hangover, he completely ignored Bellanger.
Oncle Aymerie noisily cleared his throat to attract the collective attention. “All right, everybody. The purse nets are in place,” he said loudly. Looking around, Capucine saw that at least forty green nets had been positioned on short stakes over the visible openings to the warren. The outermost nets were at least a hundred and fifty feet from the tree. The perimeter of the warren was a lot bigger than when she had been a child. The rabbits had been industrious. “Now, as we all know,” Oncle Aymerie boomed, “the guns have to be particularly vigilant and concentrate on their sectors. The nets will get the rabbits coming out of the holes we know about, but most of them will come out of small holes we haven’t discovered. That’s why the guns are so important. Emilien is going to place you, and when the ferrets go down, I want you to face away from the tree and look into your sector and nowhere else. Otherwise, you’re not going to hit anything. Is that perfectly clear?”
Emilien placed his “guns,” about twenty in all, including the handful of paysans who had turned up with rudimentary shotguns, in a circle about fifty feet out from the oak. The two paysans put their ferrets down holes close to the tree with muttered exhortative incantations. The air of expectation and excitement was palpable. The guns peered intently into their sectors with fierce concentration. Absolutely nothing happened. And continued to not happen for several long minutes.
The bubble of excitement floated away. It became obvious to everyone that there was no reason for silence, but they were placed too far apart for conversation. One by one they abandoned their forward-leaning crouches with shotguns at the ready and began to slouch. Long, boring moments passed. Capucine fell into a reverie, imagining the ferrets creeping through the long tunnels as the rabbits stole away in controlled panic, soundlessly ducking into side tunnels and trying whatever tricks there were that rabbits used. Still nothing happened.
Jacques, who was stationed next to Capucine, walked over to her. “I know what you’re thinking, you little vixen. You’re thinking of those long, thick ferrets squeezing through those tight tunnels, panting to sink their teeth into those furry bunnies’ behinds. I’m relieved that it isn’t just men who are titillated by the phallic nature of the sport.” He giggled his Amadean laugh, but quietly enough so it wasn’t heard.
“Jacques, get back to your post. The rabbits are going to come out any second now!” Capucine hissed.
A single shot boomed. Out of the corner of her eye Capucine saw the animal lifted in the air by the impact and then roll when it hit the ground. Bellanger had shot a rabbit two sectors away from his and was lowering his gun with a self-satisfied smirk. He had apparently decided that the gun assigned to the sector was asleep at his post and so the rabbit was his by rights. It had been a brilliant shot, but Capucine could feel the collective waves of hatred seeking Bellanger out like science fiction death rays.
The firing erupted with the brio of a war movie, every gun firing out rounds as fast as he could. An army of rabbits scuttled back and forth in desperation at the perimeter’s edge, crossing each other’s paths, veering suddenly, and crossing again. Then, as if a conductor had lowered his baton, the firing ceased all at once. Oncle Aymerie called out loudly, “Congratulations. At least a hundred shot and over fifty in the nets. Well done indeed!”
Everyone moved out to walk the area in front of their stations to collect dead rabbits and drop them in a heap at their positions. Several of the rabbits had big chunks of flesh chewed out of their hindquarters, and many were missing hind limbs.
Naturally, the biggest pile of rabbits was in front of Bellanger. A bit surprisingly, there was only one in front of Vienneau. Even Alexandre had managed to shoot six. Capucine’s heart went out to Loïc, who seemed far too preoccupied with Marie-Christine to think about anything else.
Oncle Aymerie, the gamekeeper, and Alexandre busied themselves arranging the rabbits into orderly rows, to be counted, photographed, and distributed. Capucine was astonished at how rapidly Alexandre had melded into life at Maulévrier. She felt the slap of rejection. Just as she should have been congratulating herself on her reconciliation with her family, Alexandre seemed to be usurping her spot.
Alexandre came up to her. “Look at that. We did a total of a hundred and sixty-two of the little rascals. I accounted for six myself.” He was as delighted as a child who had successfully spelled
anticonstitutionnellement,
the longest word in the French language, and won a spelling bee.
“If you think this is sport, then I imagine you deserve congratulations,” Capucine said, fully intending to hurt. To her dismay, Alexandre was oblivious and sauntered off to continue conferring with Oncle Aymerie, no doubt about the culinary potential of the morning’s harvest.
Jacques came up. That was all she needed. “Little cousin, marriage is not easy, is it?” he said with a sneer so attenuated she almost thought he might be sincere. She put her arm through his.
“Thank God,” she said, “the Calvados has arrived. About fucking time.”
“My thoughts exactly, Commissaire Maigret,” Jacques said as he led her off to the Estafette, which had just arrived from the château with lunch for the paysans.
There was the traditional awkward moment as the necktied made every effort to make conversation with the workclothed as they used their time-blackened Opinels and Laguioles to cut into enormous loaves of country bread braced against their chests and sliced
saucisson
and
jambon de Bayonne
into robust slabs. Emilien made a great show of uncorking label-less bottles of red wine the dark color of coagulating blood—the stuff the paysans liked to call “good red wine that stains”—and lining them up next to a half dozen large bottles of Calvados. But well before the alcohol spread the paysans’ wings, they were already soaring with the joy of a job very well done.
Tranquil that the bridge across the class divide was as secure as ever, and knowing that it would take some doing to coax the ferrets out of the warren, Oncle Aymerie’s guests trooped off to the château for their own lunch, which turned out to be one of Odile’s bolder creations, roast chicken stuffed with ground pork on a bed of thinly sliced zucchini. Capucine was relieved when she saw the whole chickens but lost her appetite at the sight of the stuffing.
Lunch was a boisterous affair, the guests’ early morning elation exacerbated by healthy doses of Calvados on empty stomachs. Alexandre and Jacques rattled like excited schoolgirls about a recipe for rabbit pâté involving chunks of apple, the very idea of which made Capucine lose what little interest she had left in the chicken. The only jarring note was Bellanger, who tried repeatedly to engage Vienneau in conversation with a conspicuous lack of success. Oncle Aymerie made no pretense of listening to any of the chatter and merely beamed happily at his tribe under his tent, concerned only with ensuring that their glasses were constantly full and that their faces were rosy and smiling.
Vienneau seemed to reach a conclusion of some sort, became agitated, glanced right and left nervously, and finally banged his glass with his spoon. In the startled silence that followed, he announced, “I, well, I, um . . . I would like to invite you all to lunch tomorrow. I know it’s a bit sudden and it’s not the done thing and all, but I think I can promise you a truly exceptional
rôti de bœuf
. What do you all say?”
Even if it had been the result of too much wine, it would still have been an unforgivable gaffe. One simply did not attempt to force a captive group of people into a social commitment, particularly without reasonable notice. The common knowledge of Vienneau’s misfortune did not lessen the sense of embarrassment. There were self-conscious shuffles and averted gazes.
But Vienneau wasn’t about to give up. “I apologize for inviting you like this on such short notice,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t stand the thought of bouncing around that empty house on a Sunday. It’s too much for me. Please say you’ll all come.”
Oncle Aymerie’s perfect manners saved the situation. “What a funny coincidence,
mon cher
Loïc, that you should invite us just as I was going to suggest it myself. I haven’t seen your
élevage
in a donkey’s years. And I’ve been pining away for a Sunday roast
comme il faut.
Of course we’ll all come.”

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