The First Fingerprint (9 page)

“He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. He must have been about one meter eighty tall. With broad shoulders. And blue eyes. He seemed very calm … I dunno! He spoke with a strong accent.”

“I'll be straight with you, Bérengère. There's no official investigation into your brother's death. The state prosecutor refused to take up the case. Franck was no angel—you saw him in prison often enough to know that! And you know too that he drowned in a diving accident. The forensic surgeon was sure of this. I realize that this is very hard for you, but that's the way it is. You have to trust us on that score.”

Bérengère looked down. She probably knew far more about her
brother than she was letting on, but she was not going to give anything away. Not there, in any case. Maybe later. Time would tell …

She was a gangland girl, and hard too, despite her appearances. She was the sort of person whose character has been forged in prison visiting rooms. De Palma knew her father well. He had arrested him twenty years earlier, when he was with the drug squad. It had taken them a very long time to nail him in his laboratory just outside a tiny village in the Alps. It had been a painstaking investigation, with years of effort and plenty of patience following Luccioni in his little white Renault 4 along the twisting roads of the Alpine valleys, against the backdrop of a Bavarian picture postcard.

Jo Luccioni came and went with no apparent purpose. He drove at a pensioner's speed, half in a dream, but with his eyes darting in all directions, while his two hounds (the only weapons he ever possessed) sat dribbling on the back seat of his old banger. If all was well, he would be off to stock up on chemicals, the carbonate and various acids required for the transformation of morphine. Those who needed the white powder had made a special trip from Marseille to deposit the goods in some hotel on a hill which no-one now remembers.

Little Bérengère had been taking skiing lessons on the day the big man was arrested. When she came back to the chalet, walking awkwardly in her ski boots, she came across a brigade of gendarmes armed to the teeth. The Brigadier had looked at her rather sadly. There stood her father, in his scruffy clothes with his hands behind his back, his acid-marked face turned to the ground. In a grave voice, he had asked the young Inspecteur de Palma to release him for a moment, so that he could embrace his little girl for the last time. De Palma had accepted. The Brigadier had written it up in his report.

Luccioni got off lightly in the end: twelve years behind bars for having concocted the best heroin in the world. Meanwhile, his little girl grew up as best she could, waiting for visiting times, trying to understand the value of secrecy and the burden of a such a marginal life, and inventing a presentable father for the sake of her friends at school.

Her brother Franck had taken a rockier road, full of shady deals. Instead of working as a baker, he wanted to be like his absent father.
But he was a pale imitation. A series of burglaries of the middle-class houses on rue de Paradis had earned him enough dosh to set himself up as a small-time drug wholesaler. A few trips to the police station and inevitably to prison had calmed the young hood's ardor for a while. But when he got out, he started all over again. Now Big Jo's son had died a miserable death among rainbow wrasses and voracious conger eels, the victim of his one passion: diving. Police frogmen had found him under a rock several meters down, gently rolling in an invisible current, as underwater scavengers feasted on his corpse.

That was on July 30. At the time, they had presumed it was a diving accident, and they hadn't investigated any further. As far as the police were concerned, that was one less crook. Case closed. Old Luccioni had never got over it, and on bad days the quality of his cream buns suffered.

The old hood must have sent along his daughter to act as an intermediary with the only policeman he had ever respected. The Baron sensed that he should be on his guard. If he did identify Franck's killer, then Luccioni Snr. would take it upon himself to extract justice.

“Thank you, Bérengère,” said de Palma as amicably as possible. “I'll come by and see you. We'll have a chat with your father.”

“Thanks, Monsieur le Divisionnaire.”

“No, not Divisionnaire. We say Commandant now. It's stupid, but that's the way it is. I'll show you out.”

In the headquarters' courtyard, the mistral was spinning furiously, like a typhoon in the Roaring Forties. An anemometer would no doubt have been able to measure its vertiginous speeds. No-one, not even the building's architects and certainly not the police, had been able to explain this phenomenon.

Outside the criminal records office, a group of thugs, one of about fifty and two younger men, were waiting to sign in. They loitered there with dripping noses, pretending not to recognize one another as they stoically put up with the fury of the Provençal wind.

Perched on her platforms, Bérengère Luccioni almost fell over under the force of the gusts, just managing to right herself by grabbing hold of the wing mirror of a heap of rust belonging to the city police. She shrieked, and de Palma gripped her by the shoulder to help her.

At that moment, he had a clear memory of the five-year-old girl he had seen in that chalet hidden in the Alps. She had stared at him with eyes as green as mint leaves, without really understanding why this young policeman, this Prince Charming, had put stainless-steel handcuffs on her papa. In her infant mind, those cuffs had looked like silver.

He watched her leave, this woman with her life of baguettes and pastries, her skimpy skirt, her audible Lycra, and make-up which was too excessive to seduce the old commandant he had become.

Tomorrow, or another day, he would go and see her father.

From his height of one meter seventy, Tête watched his stream of urine land in rapid spurts in the toilet bowl of Le Bar des Sportifs in Endoume. He looked up at filthy, yellow, badly joined tiles which covered the urinal's walls. It was then that he heard a conversation start up on the other side of the partition.

“Gopher will be in La Madrague around noon. You take the two parcels he gives you, then come and drop them off here, like I told you. Don't drive too fast. Especially not on the Corniche—there are police speed controls there all the time. O.K.?”

“No problem.”

Tête went on pissing. With all the beers he had got through that evening, there was no end to it. But now the stream was beginning to peter out.

“And you, Richard, you leave the bar around 2:00. You know where to go?”

“You've told me at least four times.”

Tête recognized the voice of Laurent, a.k.a. “Lolo,” the owner of Le Bar des Sportifs. He knew the other voice too, but couldn't put a name to it. His brain was in a spin, as though the mistral had just blown up and was now whistling through the empty corridors of his poor little neurons. It sounded like Féli, but it couldn't be him—he should have been in his pizzeria, filling his redbrick oven with oak logs.

Lolo was a great guy, a big man in the mob. After twenty years behind bars for various crimes, he had finally seen the error of his ways and taken over a small café in Endoume, right by Anse de la Fausse-Monnaie. Recently he had been calling up his childhood friend, Gérard
Mourain, a.k.a. “Tête,” to offer him odd jobs. Sometimes Tête had to be on the lookout for police, at other times he had to tail someone. Lolo never explained to Tête what was going on, he just gave him a precise task and then paid him handsomely, cash up front. Mourain could not have asked for more.

“Is Tête in this evening?”

“Yeah, I called him up and he arrived about 8:00. Since then he's been knocking back beer after beer. If he goes on like that, he's gonna be completely pissed. You want to see him?”

“No, just see if he can do the job. As usual … Just get it sorted!”

“Shit, now I've pissed myself,” Tête said out loud. All this thinking meant that he had lost control of his stream of urine and had now wet his trousers; a dark line stretched from his crotch to his left knee.

“Fuck it … shit and fuck it!” he yelled.

The conversation on the other side of the wall came to a halt.

When Tête emerged, Lolo was back behind the bar as though nothing had happened. He walked sideways to get to his seat, pretending to look at the pétanque championship trophies lined up along the far wall so that no-one would see the piss mark on his leg.

“Hey, Gérard, come here.”

Tête stood up awkwardly and walked over to the bar as quickly as he could. Lolo didn't notice a thing. And there was no-one else in the bar.

“Tell me, Gérard, are you free next Wednesday, around midday?”

“Um, sure …”

“O.K., good. You know that restaurant in La Madrague overlooking the harbor? I can never remember its name. Anyway, it's the only one.”

“Yeah, I know it. What about it?”

“Drive up there for lunch at about 11:30. Order whatever you want, but take a seat near the window, where you've got a good view. If you notice anyone dodgy, call this number from your mobile and let it ring three times. If the guy then leaves, call back and let it ring twice. Got that? Fine. Take a good look around, even below the rocks to the left of the port. You can stop at around one o'clock.”

“And then?”

“And then you quietly finish your lunch and go home. I'll call you. Want a drink?”

“Sure, a beer.”

Tête and Lolo raked over a few childhood memories. They talked about the Endoume football club, in which Lolo had been goalkeeper and Mourain the left winger.

“You know, they're having a really good year. If things go on like this, they'll end up replacing l'Olympique!”

“Be serious, Lolo, people have been saying that for the past thirty years. With O.M. it's different. Can you imagine the Endoume players with their broken legs on the pitch at the Vélodrome? You know damn well they wouldn't last ten minutes.”

“Don't talk shit, Gérard. This year, they're playing really well. I reckon they'll get promoted to the second division. You'll see.”

“You can always hope. But if the Endoume players are that good, why don't they go and play for O.M.? It's because a whole bunch of them are called but only a few are chosen. And O.M. are professionals, not a load of shitty amateurs like we've got here.”

“Come on, Gérard, we're not going to fight about it, are we? Do you want to make a bet?”

“No, I never bet.”

“'Cos you're shitting yourself?”

“Nope, it's just a principle.”

The last time Tête had betted on anything, he had ended the evening at police headquarters before spending two years in Les Baumettes. The bet was as follows:

“I'll bet you're too much of a chicken to get your piece out and make some music.”

“You wanna bet?” Tête had replied.

He had got out of the car, crossed the road, opened the door of a jeweler's, drawn his gun and pointed it at the manager. Unfortunately, a hysterical customer had started screaming. As the jeweler's was only ten meters from the local station, the police had shown up within a minute. That was the bet: to hold up a jewelry store ten meters away from a commissariat. Only Tête had been daft enough to do anything like that. Age had taught him that he was no genius and now he had
settled for being a lookout for the big boys. Sometimes he did a bit of grassing too, to keep himself out of Les Baumettes for as long as possible.

He ordered a final beer and picked up
La Provence
to see what had been going on. On the local news page, he saw a photograph of a woman.

… according to police sources, Christine Autran was hanged then thrown into the water. The investigation has been entrusted to the murder squad under the direction of Commissaire Paulin …

Tête peered more closely at the black-and-white photograph.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. He looked up at Lolo, whose wife was yelling at him down the phone. The landlord was not looking in his direction.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he repeated, then closed the paper.

He had just recognized the woman he had tailed for days on boulevard Chave.

De Palma passed the night of Saturday to Sunday in the murky depths of Le Valparaiso, a nightclub by the port—thongs and salsa guaranteed—which had been opened recently by an old friend from the drug squad. He'd been thrown out of the squad after some dodgy business about broken seals on the doors of a heroin lab in Martigues.

At 6:00 a.m., his head full of moritos, congas and the loud laughter of lewd women, he'd had enough of ogling the young waitress. He went out into the emerging dawn and drove home slowly, trying to get his head together. Soon he was driving along the smarter side of boulevard Michelet.

De Palma recognized her from a distance. For a good twenty years she had been delighting night owls at the foot of La Maison du Fada, Le Corbusier's dazzling construction—now a desirable residence for snobs. All the old guard of the city's police knew this exotic bird of the streets of Marseille. De Palma slowed down to get a look at Solange's face, for that's what she called herself. She had not changed; she seemed immune to time, this woman who was as hard as the pavement she pricked with her shiny high heels. He stopped alongside her and wound down his window.

Solange welcomed him with a false smile.

“A hundred francs for a blow job, and two hundred for love. With a condom.”

“Don't you recognize me, Solange?”

“My God, is it you Inspecteur?”

“Commandant, Solange.”

“Same difference. With all these new words for the ranks, I'm completely lost.”