The Grave Gourmet (14 page)

Once inside, she hit the light switch, found the stairwell, and beckoned David to follow her. They inched down a short flight of stairs and Capucine eased the door open with her foot while she and David took cover at either side, Sigs drawn and held rigidly in the air.

Momo and Isabelle were standing rooted, facing the garage door, their guns anchored in both fists, aiming at a dark car, packed with passengers, which sped up the ramp, its tires squealing and smoking. Inexplicably, they did not fire.

Martin Fleuret lay collapsed on the cement floor, his limbs akimbo and his neck twisted so impossibly far back it looked broken. Blood dripped from his slack mouth and made a small puddle on the floor. The representation of agony was so vivid it looked fake, like a death scene in a particularly lurid B movie. Fleuret jerked in a convulsive spasm. Capucine wondered if he hadn't just died for real.

M
omo's and Isabelle's story didn't even fill the wait for the ambulance. They had opened the garage door with the postal service key, driven down the ramp hoping to look like regular tenants arriving to park their car, and found a gang with Asian features vigorously kicking a supine Fleuret. Momo had been impressed with the professionalism of their endeavor. The two brigadiers had jumped out of their car, badges in one hand and guns in another, and approached the group, who had turned tail, run to their car, and driven off at speed. Unsure of who was whom, neither brigadier had fired at the car. It was at that point that Capucine and David had appeared.

When the ambulance arrived the paramedics had been utterly indifferent to Capucine's Police Judiciare card and even less moved by her insistence that the victim was key to an important murder case. They shouldered her aside roughly to examine Fleuret, and it had been all she could do to jump aboard the ambulance as it drove off with its earsplitting
pam-pom-PAM
. Capucine was relegated to a far corner while the paramedics, with the studied calm of great emergency, clapped an oxygen mask on Fleuret's face, inserted an IV drip in the back of his hand, and glued a seemingly infinite number of electrocardiogram sensors to his chest and legs. The ambulance lurched off, rolling from side to side sickeningly as the driver wove sharply through traffic. One of the paramedics held a running dialogue on the VHF radio, to all evidence with a doctor somewhere, and gave crisp directions to his partner, who injected a series of drugs into a rubber stopper connected to the IV, consulted the electrocardiograph with furrowed brow, consulted his colleague, and continued giving injections. Capucine's repeated questions as to how Fleuret was doing fell on disdainfully deaf ears, but it was clear things were touch and go. Eventually the ambulance backed into the loading bay of an emergency room. Capucine had no idea where.

Inside, Capucine continued to be ignored. Fleuret was placed on a gurney and, surrounded by a team in scrubs covered with transparent yellow plastic aprons, rolled at speed down a corridor. As he was pushed into an operating room the smallest of the group, a very short and very round woman, wheeled and peremptorily insisted Capucine go to the waiting room if she was family or leave the hospital if she was not. Intimidated in spite of herself, she dutifully went off to the waiting room wondering what Rivière would have done and, biting her lip, announced to the duty nurse that she was Fleuret's wife.

After an hour a very young doctor in blood-spotted green scrubs, a face mask pushed down around his neck, came up to her smiling in the carefully constructed grand-fatherly way he had been erroneously taught is reassuring to patients' families.

“Madame Fleuret?”

“Not exactly,” Capucine answered with a smile, brandishing her card. “Police Judiciare. Your patient is a suspect in a murder case and this attack may well have something to do with it. How is he?”

“He'll be fine. He probably owes his life to the ambulance crew. In addition to three fractured ribs, he has a ruptured spleen, a number of very nasty contusions, and a deep cut in the tongue. When they picked him up, his B.P. was seventy over ten and his heart was at one eighty and very thready.”

Responding to Capucine's blank look, he explained. “A blood pressure reading that low with a very high and weak pulse rate meant he was very close to death. But his vitals are now back within normal range. There's no doubt he'll recover.”

“Don't you have to operate for a ruptured spleen?”

“That was in the old days. Now we just keep the patient in the hospital and let the spleen heal itself. If all goes well he'll be on his feet and out of here in a week or ten days at the most.”

That was the good news. The bad news was that he had been heavily sedated on top of a healthy dose of morphine. Fleuret wasn't going to say anything that made any sense until the next day at the earliest.

Purely out of a desire to take some kind of action, Capucine stationed a uniformed gendarme outside Fleuret's door and beat a retreat to the Quai.

At six the next morning Capucine arrived with Fleuret's breakfast tray. His eyes had sunk deeply into dark hollows in his paper-white face. He seemed to be in pain despite the drugs. He looked up and frowned at Capucine.

“What are you doing here?” he growled hoarsely.

“Maître, I think your guardian angel would like you to show a little appreciation that my people were following you and divined you were coming to no good in that garage. If they hadn't driven in you'd be in a whole lot worse shape right now, wouldn't you agree? From what I hear, your little playmates were just getting warmed up. So, what exactly was going on?”

“This doesn't concern you since I'm not going to press charges.”

“Actually, it does concern me. You're a possible suspect in a murder case and everything unusual you engage in is very definitely the subject of police scrutiny.”

Fleuret's lips puffed a protracted “Pfffff!” of derision and he twisted painfully, reaching for the nurse's call button.

“I wouldn't be too quick to do that if I were you. You can easily be transferred to a police hospital where I doubt you'd find conditions as comfortable.” Capucine prayed Fleuret wouldn't know the most she could do was what she'd done already: post a gendarme at his door. “I'm going to insist you make a deposition.”

“All right, all right, anything to get you out of here. That was a meeting with the client of a client of mine.” Fleuret smiled ironically. “Or I should say ex-client of an ex-client of mine since when I declined to advise my client regarding the transaction in question I was fired and as a result he abandoned the transaction. I imparted that fact to the ex-client of the ex-client and, as you saw, he was somewhat less than pleased. Voilà
.
If you type that up I'll be happy to sign it.”

“Maître, impressed as I am by your heroic sense of humor, I'm sure you can understand that the Police Judiciare does not appreciate levity. Let's hear your story.” Capucine sat on the edge of the bed.

Fleuret poured himself a cup of coffee and dropped a paper packet of sugar into the cup as he tried to open it.

“Here. Let me do it. Do you want milk as well?” Capucine fished the packet out with the spoon, poured in the contents of a fresh one along with soy milk from a little plastic container.

The epidermis of Fleuret's antipathy softened slightly as Capucine stirred.

“You're right, I doubt I have any choice. It's all a matter of record anyway. As it happens, in addition to my high-net-worth clients I also represent a number of French manufacturers of tactical assets and handle the legal side of the commercialization of their products to foreign nations.”

“By ‘tactical assets' I'm guessing you mean ‘arms,' right? Exactly what are we talking about? Airplanes, missiles, assault weapons?”

“Okay, ‘arms,' if you prefer. France exports a full range of weaponry: sidearms, airplanes, and everything in between. The bigger the asset, the more complex the contractual agreement. My specialty is missiles, which usually involve elaborate maintenance service contracts, but I've done pretty much a full range of deals. The transaction in this case was a sale of missiles to an Asian nation. Upon reflection, I decided that this particular sale was unethical and informed my client that I would not be able to assist them. As a consequence they felt they had no choice but to abandon the transaction and asked me to inform the purchaser. That's really all there is to it. Obviously, the purchaser was less than thrilled with the news and chose to take it out on the messenger.”

“I see. Now, who is the ex-client and who was the purchaser?”

“Lieutenant, that's irrelevant history. Just before the meeting I received a call from my client informing me that I was no longer on their roster of lawyers and that they had the intention of blackballing me with the other arms distributors. So that's all a closed chapter of my career.”

“Maître, I wasn't asking you about your career, but I do need the names of the seller and the buyer, here.”

“That, Lieutenant, is client confidential, very definitely so. A few of my transactions are a matter of record and I'm sure you could easily have divined the nature of that side of my practice, which is why I've given you the information you already have. But to think I'm going to violate client confidentiality is naive, to say the least. Now, I'm going to have to ask you to leave me to my breakfast or I really will call the nurse.”

 

That afternoon she received a call from Fleuret. “I've just had your juge d'instruction on the phone, a very irate and unpleasant woman, but a very well-informed one nonetheless. She spent some time quoting to me from legal texts. She's very knowledgeable about the niceties of the attorney-client privilege, and she succeeded in convincing me that if I don't make a fully detailed deposition I face a risk of immediate incarceration. I know it's an imposition, but I wonder if I could ask you to come back to the hospital. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid it's impossible for me to get to you.”

Madame d'Agremont's stock rose significantly in Capucine's books.

Fleuret's story was straightforward. Matra, the automobile, communication, and weapons conglomerate, had negotiated with the Taiwanese government for the sale of a large number of multihead missiles to be used with their 47 French Mirage 2000 fighter jets. Everything had been arranged, even the tricky negotiation of the extension of the existing missile maintenance agreement to the new weapons. All that had been left to resolve was the relatively simple agreement on the price of the missiles themselves. The meeting in the garage had been with the secretary to the Taiwanese minister of defense and, of course, the inevitable bodyguards. The secretary had not wanted to be seen in public, hence the underground venue. Fleuret knew the Taiwanese would be greatly disappointed at the loss of the deal—after all, a Mirage 2000 loaded with French-made multihead missiles would be a big step up from the Russian Su27, which was the top of the current Chinese fleet—but he had hardly expected the violence of their reaction.

“But why did you change your mind so close to the end of the transaction?”

“That's a bit complicated. I think, when all is said and done, it was to honor the memory of Jean-Louis Delage. You see, it was my idea to have dinner that night, but generous soul that he was, he insisted on paying. I wanted Jean-Louis to approve my participating in the deal. Most of my weapons practice had come from his contacts and I wanted to make sure he would not object. It was a sort of moral obligation, if you can understand that.”

“Why wouldn't he approve if he had encouraged you to do this sort of work in the first place?”

“Oh, you just don't understand Jean-Louis. He was first and foremost a statesman, not an industrialist. He saw the success of Renault, and France itself for that matter, as coming from skillfully concocted international alliances. As you probably know, Matra manufactures a good number of components for Renault and the links between the two companies are well known abroad. Over dinner he told me he was certain that this transaction would put Renault on the Chinese blacklist along with Matra. He thought it was a criminally stupid thing to do just as China's industrial star was rising. In fact, he was almost irrationally hostile to the whole thing. So hostile that I was sure he was thinking of negotiating some form of alliance with the Chinese the way he already had with the Japanese.”

“So it was during dinner you agreed you'd drop the deal? I understand it ended quite amicably.”

“This is the part where I blush. I'm afraid I did give Jean-Louis my word at the table. I really had no choice. You don't know how single-minded he was when he got going with his international agreements. Besides, he would have gone over my head and bullied the bigwigs at Matra if I didn't agree. But after the dinner was over, I changed my mind. My fees would have been enormous. I also doubt that the Chinese will be able to maintain their silly attitude toward Taiwan for very much longer. So in spite of my promise to Jean-Louis I kept on with the transaction. But after he was no longer with us, going against Jean-Louis's wishes seemed an insult to his memory. Something I just couldn't do. Does that make sense?”

Just as Capucine was launching into a second round of questions, ones she knew would just be gilding the lily, Karine Bergeron arrived, clucking like a chic mother hen, encumbered with bags and packages, all presumably intended to make Fleuret's stay in the hospital more bearable. Karine glared at Capucine, obviously unhappy that he was being disturbed in any way. A polite but painfully self-conscious conversation ensued. Capucine felt excluded, somehow at the mercy of her suspects, not the reverse. On her way down in the elevator she ground her teeth and wondered for the hundredth time what Rivière would have done.