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Authors: Alexander Campion

BOOK: Crime Fraiche
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CHAPTER 36
I
f anyone had attempted to describe the lunch as a success, it could only have been because of the food. The Vienneaus’ cook—Loïc’s cook, now that one thought about it—seemed to have blossomed when released from the yoke of Marie-Christine’s hausfrau authority. Despite Vienneau’s instructions not to deviate a single iota from the traditional norms of a classic Sunday lunch, she had nonetheless managed to produce the sublime.
The pièce de résistance was a
rosbif
that was the quintessence of all
rosbifs
. It had been presented whole at the table for Vienneau to slice, a darkly charred, lustrous brown cylinder elegantly tied with well-scorched sprigs of thyme trapped under the string. Once carved, the roast revealed its palette, a luminous bronze tan just underneath the crisp, almost black exterior, dissolving into a joyous pink and then into an erotic, moist, almost pulsing vermilion at the core.
Chewing seemed entirely superfluous. At one point Capucine cut out a portion of the carmine heart and held it in her mouth to see if it really would melt. She might even have hummed to herself as she did so, but if she did, it was so quietly that no one could possibly have heard. She was astonished when Alexandre rebuked her silently with pursed lips and crinkled brow. As she fought down an attack of the giggles, she realized that Alexandre was having another of his food epiphanies. It was the potatoes. When the dish arrived, it had looked like yet another Sunday gratin, a pulpy mass of tasteless Gruyère and limp spuds. But this gratin had turned off the marshy road to flaccidity and had taken the straight and narrow toward being a feast for the gods. Transparently thin slices of potatoes had been interspersed with shavings of truffles and parchments of parmesan and delicately covered with a lightly seasoned topping of tart
crème fleurette
—sour cream—before being baked to perfection. No wonder Alexandre wasn’t in a mood for levity.
No, the food was hardly the problem. It was the conversation. Topics fizzled like soggy fireworks. No matter how enthusiastically they were launched, they failed to burst into a cascade of interest and fell back to earth with a damp thud. Even though no mention was made of Marie-Christine, her specter dominated the room. If someone brought up politics, the conversation turned to a minister who had been caught in a compromising situation with his mistress; celebrity gossip inevitably brought up the latest mega-actor divorce; even the weather drew the ill-phrased observation that it was time to start thinking about the Caribbean, where everyone at the table knew full well that Marie-Christine was spending the week with her current lover.
Vienneau was frustrated to the point of rudeness. When Bellanger attempted to jump into the breach by commenting that the CAC 40 stock market index had closed nearly one whole percent up on Friday, Vienneau quashed him with an unkind “Henri, there are other things in life than the goddamn stock market.”
There was a collective sigh when it was over and Vienneau proposed a walk around the élevage to aid their digestion. Cigars were lit. Deep breaths were taken. Laughter was heard. The mood was that of a class of schoolchildren let out for recess after an interminable lecture.
But the good cheer was short-lived. It wasn’t just Vienneau’s luncheon table; the entire élevage smacked of depression. The freshly painted white luster of the place seemed to have dimmed. Everywhere one looked, something seemed to need fixing. The workers seemed listless; the steers, morose. Had something changed, or was it just that the day was leadenly overcast?
The group reached a fence enclosing a small herd of chalky white steers, who, in the way of steers, ambled over lackadaisically to investigate. There was much rubbing of rubbery noses and the sort of encouraging commentary one makes to farm animals and toddlers. A worker came up.
“Monsieur Vienneau. I’m glad you’re here. There’s a problem with this fence. The railings are rotten under the paint.” To demonstrate, he yanked the rail they were all leaning against and the end came away from the post. “Last night some steers leaned against the next section and both rails came completely off. I hammered them back in this morning and tied them up with twine, but the field is so close to the road, I’m worried there’s going to be an accident if they get loose at night.”
Vienneau seemed put out. He made a cursory show of examining the fence and ignored the worker.
“Excuse me for speaking to you personally, monsieur, but this could be a serious problem.”
“Yes, yes.” Vienneau looked around nervously, visibly attempting to escape. “Thank you for calling this to my attention. I’ll bring it up with Monsieur Martel.”
“But, mons—”
Vienneau walked away, leading his guests. The worker stared after them, looking frustrated and annoyed.
They continued their walk. Alexandre, Jacques, and Oncle Aymerie fell behind, chatting in conspiratorial whispers, examining Alexandre’s cane. Capucine had second thoughts about her gift.
A little farther on they rounded a corner and came across Pierre Martel haranguing two North African workers. The two men hung their heads, utterly cowed. It was another awkward moment. Vienneau was trapped. He couldn’t very well turn the group around and force them to retreat, nor could he lead them into an embarrassing scene.
Vienneau advanced as slowly as he decently could. As they approached Martel, his angry words became clearer. “I’m not putting up with this fucking shit anymore.” He grabbed one of the men by the shirt and shook him, raising his other hand threateningly. “All right, you two, get out of my sight. Get back to work before I get really mad.” Hangdog, the two workers shuffled off, staring at the ground.
Martel walked up to Vienneau, shaking his head in an exaggerated show of dismay. The two shook hands with the quick pump of business associates. “I tell you, monsieur, getting these shiftless
beurs
to do a day’s work is more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Of course it is. Of course it is. But you’re doing an excellent job,” Vienneau said, smiling stiffly. Capucine could easily read his mind as he told himself that staying at home after lunch, sipping Calvados around the fire, would have been a far better idea.
“Monsieur, I was just coming to your house to give you these,” Martel said, handing Vienneau a thin sheaf of computer printouts.
Vienneau looked a little bewildered.
“It’s the week’s production statistics.”
With obvious lack of interest, Vienneau riffled though the pages and prepared to put the stack under his arm.
“
Pardon,
monsieur, but did you see this?” Martel pointed to a line at the bottom of the first page. Capucine peered over his shoulder, unnoticed.
“Yes, yes, I see. The average weight of the steers slaughtered this week is down a little bit.” Vienneau shrugged his shoulders. “It’s seasonal. Happens every year. They know winter is coming. When you’ve been in the business longer, you’ll understand these things. I’ll bring the shortfall to the attention of Accounting on Monday. Voilà!” he said in clear dismissal of Martel, whose face flattened in anger as he turned and stamped off.
Jacques, Alexandre, and Oncle Aymerie, who had snuck off without anyone noticing, loped up cheerfully. They had clearly put Alexandre’s cane to its intended use.
“We just had a very fulfilling little walk,” Jacques said. “We saw the prize bull. Alexandre poked him you know where with his stick, and we were told we couldn’t do that.” The three chuckled happily.
“And then you discovered what else you could do with that stick, I’m sure,” Capucine said.
Just as Alexandre was about to remonstrate, he saw Momo in the distance, walking with two other North Africans. All three seemed dispirited, kicking pebbles on the path, killing time. Alexandre had met Momo on several occasions and was a great fan of his in the way that oil and vinegar have a profound attraction for each other.
Alexandre brightened and inhaled deeply, ready to shout out a greeting. “Say!” he started to articulate before the anomaly of the situation struck him. All he got out was the “S—”
Capucine rejoiced in her reprieve, but her heart went out to Momo. He looked drained and spiritless.
Oncle Aymerie had obviously scored the lion’s share of the bounty of Alexandre’s walking stick and evidenced a bonhomie exaggerated enough to have qualified him as a stand-in for Maurice Chevalier.
“Come along, you three,” he said to Capucine, Alexandre, and Jacques. “Time to go home for tea.” He paused and said to Alexandre, “Don’t worry.
Tea
is just a synecdoche,” struggling valiantly with the final word but getting it right in the end. In a stage aside to Jacques he said, “You have to use words like that with literary types if you want them to understand.” The three men laughed uproariously.
Capucine’s stupefaction at Alexandre’s growing intimacy with her family did not erase her anxiety at the upcoming explanation to him of exactly how it was that Momo just happened to be strolling along the grounds of the élevage. An explanation that would be all the more tricky when she got to the part about not yet having obtained the examining magistrate’s approval for such an unorthodox move.
CHAPTER 37
I
t was probably due to some subliminal childhood memory ; Capucine had always loathed the façade of Rouen’s cathedral—France’s other Notre Dame. Monet had gotten it right: a prodigiously amorphous pile oozing with formless baubles, as meaningless a shape as one of his haystacks, whose only usefulness had been to reflect the changing colors of the day’s light. The monolith loomed oppressively, casting a chilly shadow over the empty café terrace in the middle of the place de la Calende. Capucine shivered and felt ridiculous.
Momo and Capucine had agreed to meet at the Brasserie La Flèche at the corner of the square just in front of the cathedral at two thirty in the afternoon. Momo was to take the bus right after lunch on his day off. Both of them had worried that some of his fellow workers might also be on the bus and prove unshakable. Arriving half an hour early and sitting out in the open, she would see him coming and be able to come up with a Plan B if need be. But she hadn’t bargained on the cold and gloom.
Enough was enough. She had left her Barbour open, as police procedure dictated, giving her free access to her Sig. She zipped it up tightly, snapped the collar shut around her neck, and took another turn with her brightly striped scarf. She was still cold. And just as bored.
A man arrived with a large, slow-moving basset hound on a leash and sat down three tables away. A waiter came up, a bottle of beer already on a tray, poured two-thirds of it into a glass and the rest into a bowl, which he placed in front of the basset, who lapped it up enthusiastically. It was obviously a daily ritual.
When there was no beer left, the dog looked up at Capucine, two foaming streams spilling from its jowls. His lower lids fell away from his eyes, incongruously making him appear all knowing and infinitely sad. Capucine was convinced the dog fully understood her predicament. The man stood up, sprinkled a few euro coins on the table, and said, “
Salut,
Jean,” more or less in the direction of the waiter, who waved lethargically as they walked off.
Capucine snorted and shook her head. She was overreacting again. It was her need to cover all her bets. The thing that went most against her grain was putting all her chips on a single number. But that was exactly what she’d done. If Momo came up dry, she’d have no case. After all the sound and fury she’d be a laughingstock in her family as well as on the force. And on top of it all, she knew she’d asked too much of Momo. She cringed at the thought of their meeting.
She followed the man and his dog with her eyes. Just as they were about to reach a cute shop that was both tea salon and secondhand bookstore, preciously called the “Thé Majuscule”—Capital Tea—she saw Momo, who bent down to pet the dog, using the gesture to look around the square. He was in the clear. Now she could get out of this goddamn cold.
Capucine stood up, folded a five-euro note under a saucer to pay for her tea, and followed Momo into the brasserie. By the time she arrived at their table, Momo already had a double Scotch in front of him. He downed half of it, the single ice cube tinkling in the tall tumbler. She had seen him look happier.
“Not enjoying country life?” she asked.
“Sure I am. Tending your smoke- and booze-free garden is definitely the way to go. The hell with sitting in a café, puffing on a
clope,
sipping a
ballon
of red, and checking out the waitress’s legs. Oh,
pardon,
Commissaire. Don’t take that the wrong way, but, jeez, this is some assignment you gave me. I get to share a room with some asshole Arab fundamentalist, so I can’t even think about having a drink or a smoke, and then I get to spend nine hours at hard labor with nothing more in my belly than lamb tagine.” He shook his head in disgust.
“What kind of work do they have you doing?” Capucine asked.
“I got a great job. I’m on the kill floor. It’s fun stuff. What do I do? I torture cows. Remember how you used to get all pissed off about the way they do interrogations at the Quai? Well, you’d really love this.” He beckoned the waiter over and pointed at his empty glass to ask for another. Once Capucine had given her order and the waiter had left, Momo resumed his litany of complaints.
“What happens is that the steers are pushed down this chute, see? And then some guy with this pneumatic gizmo pops them on the head so they’re knocked out. I did that for a week. That part’s okay. But then I tried too hard and got promoted. I even got a raise.” Momo snorted. “After they’re so-called knocked out, they’re chained upside down to this rail that slides them into the next room, where someone slits their throats and skins them. That guy would be me.”
“Oh, Momo, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for the fucking steers.” He signaled the waiter for a third Scotch.
“So these un-knocked-out steers really jerk around on the chain when you start to skin them. Some of them even start howling.” He paused and smiled slightly. By the third Scotch the alcohol was finally beginning to take effect. “What I do is, when no one is looking, I give the dumbass steer a good hard right hook to the back of the head. If you do it just right, you can hear the neck snap. What’s for lunch?” He burst into ironic laughter.
“No steak?” Capucine asked with a smile.
“No, and anything that looks like a tagine or contains lamb is even worse. And if you even say ‘mint tea,’ I’m outta here.”
Capucine picked up the menu. “There’s
canard à la Rouennaise.
It’s the specialty in Rouen. I’m not sure Alexandre would tell us this is the best place to have it, but—”
“Duck? Great. Go for it.”
“Your cover is secure, right?”
“Yeah, bulletproof. But it wasn’t easy. I don’t know shit about farmwork, so I had to come on even dumber than usual. That worked out pretty well. They figured out I was a retard but real good at using my muscles. Just like at the police.” Momo laughed and then looked around to make sure he hadn’t been overheard. “At first they’d kid me because I didn’t have calloused palms and I was the only guy wearing work gloves. But I don’t have that problem anymore.” He lifted both his hands and held them out palm first in the classic gesture of surrender. “See?” he said, proudly showing off his brand-new orange calluses. “Of course, I still don’t know shit about cattle.”
“So they torture the steers. That’s it?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Commissaire. It turns out that’s the way steers are always killed. In fact, it seems these guys are better than most. And before they get to my area, the goddamn things are treated like those white, fluffy dogs in the Sixteenth Arrondissement.”
The two plates of duck arrived along with a bottle of Volnay that Capucine had selected. Automatically, the waiter poured an inch into Momo’s glass for him to taste. Irritated, he pushed the glass toward Capucine and told the waiter to bring him a fourth Scotch. Capucine had never seen Momo in such a bad mood.
“Did you find out anything else?”
“Nothing major. The joint’s sagging, but it’s not in free fall or anything like that,” Momo said, poking his duck aggressively with his fork.
“Sagging?”
“For one, they can treat those cows like they were living in some Passy apartment all they want, but the fuckers aren’t growing the way they used to. For two, nobody’s really driving the bus anymore.” Momo decided the duck was edible and attacked it with gusto.
Capucine let him chew noisily until she could stand it no more.
“Come on, Momo, out with it!”
“All right,” he said, his mouth full. “That guy that died, Philippe Gerlier, he was so good, they call him Saint Philippe. According to everyone, he was the one running the place. Your pal Vienneau just did a walk around every now and then, like he did with you guys the other day, but he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.
“Apparently this Gerlier really
was
a saint. He worked his ass off day in and day out, except when he was visiting his poor mama, who is dying of Alzheimer’s in some clinic in the Midwest of the United States. The guy was half American, but he was brought up in France by his French father after his American wife left him.”
“I thought Vienneau took over the management after Gerlier died.”
“Not that I can see. The guy trying to run the place is this Pierre Martel, one of the foremen. The problem is that he doesn’t really know what to do, either. All he does is yell and bully the hands.”
Capucine looked at Momo, waiting for more.
He took a mammoth bite of the duck and swallowed a third of his whiskey. “The big problem is that the cattle aren’t growing fast enough. They post the weekly stats in the abattoir, and you can see that they are killing more and more head to make the weekly weight.”
“Does anyone know why?”
“Sure. It’s because Saint Philippe isn’t there to bless the steers anymore.” Momo laughed and downed the Scotch, signaling the waiter for another one with his free hand.
“No one has a clue. The place is like a Chinese fire drill. Martel makes everyone run around in circles doing this and doing that. One day they change the feed mix. The next day they dump a new vitamin supplement into the feed. The day after that they change the antibiotics. Then they stop it all and run all the cattle down the chute to get injected with a new kind of vitamin. Nothing works. They gotta find another saint.” Momo laughed happily. The Scotch had finally done its work.
“That roast you had that Sunday—”
“How do you know about that?” Capucine asked in amazement.
“Man, we know everything that goes on in the big house, right down to the last fart. Anyway, that particular hunk of meat was from the last batch before cattle started to pine away for their saint. The last of the good stuff.”
The duck reduced to a skeleton, Momo leaned back in his chair with his latest drink. “So what do you want me to do now, Commissaire?”
“You need to get into wherever it is they keep the records. Is there some sort of accounting office?”
“There’s an accounting department with three employees. Most of the guys have found an excuse to go in at one point or another. One of the accountants is pretty hot. They lock the office doors at night, but it’s not a dead bolt or anything, so a plastic shim will get you in with no trouble. What am I looking for?”
“Anything out of the ordinary. If you find something interesting, let me know and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
Momo nodded.
“Listen. You’re being careful about your cover, right?”
“Yeah, Commissaire, I’m just a big dumb guy who don’t know from nuttin’. Speakin’ of which, I should be getting back. Some of the guys are going into town for dinner tonight. There’s a crappy Maghrebian café they go to, and I wouldn’t want to miss out on some more couscous. Also, I gotta buy some hooch to take back.”
“Momo, you left your police card at home like I told you? You’re sure about that?”
“Calm down, Commissaire. I’m not some kid just out of the academy. It’s my fucking neck on the line. I know what I’m doing.” Capucine noticed Momo tightening slightly, which she took as a sign of irritation. If she had been a bit more observant, she might have seen that he was squeezing his heels together to reassure himself that the Smith and Wesson was still tightly strapped to his left ankle.

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