The Grave Gourmet (23 page)

“H
ey, Lieutenant, ever seen one of these?” Momoasked, brandishing a short-barreled automatic pistol. “It's a Daewoo DP-51. I just looked it up. It's what the South Korean Army gets. Nine millimeter Parabellum. It's got a weird feature. You push the hammer back down once it's cocked. See.” He demonstrated. The gun gave a little tick. “And then when you pull the trigger the hammer pops back up and fires. Like this.” The empty gun clicked sharply. “That's what must have saved our butts. He must have shot involuntarily. Dumbass Daewoo shoulda stuck to stereos.”

Capucine, sitting at her desk signing forms, did not react. “So what are we going to do with the guy?” Momo pouted, not altogether unlike an insistent toddler.

“He's carrying a South Korean diplomatic passport. We're supposed to check him out and if he's a bona fide diplomat drop him off politely at his embassy. But the juge d'instruction's signed off his garde à vue. She's even classified him as a potential terrorist so we can keep him for the full seventy-two hours. Apparently, she doesn't think diplomats should be able to shoot at flics on the street with impunity.”

“How bad's he hit? He was bleeding like a stuck pig in the van.”

“Just a flesh wound. In one side, out the other. Missed the femur and the femoral artery. Nothing to worry about. I've got to get back to the clinic. He should be ready to tell his little story. Here.” She handed a thin sheaf of papers to Momo. “Can you walk these around to Records? It's the paperwork for the GAV.”

 

Capucine had a
crise de conscience
over the Clinique Bayol, the existence of which was unknown in the fiscal brigade. It embodied the sleazy elasticity of French law. Even its charade as a prissy overdecorated private surgery emporium was offensive, probably because it was so well done. Still, she had to admit to herself that the damn place was essential. Under the circumstances her South Korean could hardly have been put in a public hospital where the press would have nosed him out in no time at all.

When Capucine arrived at her detainee's room, an over-fit officer clad in a black field dress and hobnailed combat boots sprang to attention and buzzed the clear Plexiglas door open for her. Inside, the Korean lay naked on a hospital bed, his arms handcuffed to the bed frame, a twisted bedsheet covering only one leg and his genitals, his tormented body as ingenuously exposed as a rococo sculpture. The visible leg was swathed in a thick bandage through which blood had seeped and was just beginning to turn brown. He was as thickly muscled as an Olympic weight lifter, his trapezius so well developed that his head seemed to fuse directly into his shoulders. Beside him a tall metal stand held a large, flaccid bag of clear plasma that trickled down a cannula, through a boxy, beeping, blinking flow-control device, and finally into a hole jabbed into the crook of his elbow. A smaller bag, containing morphine in a dextrose solution, dangled next to the bigger bag like an impish tag-along little sister ready to caper and make silly jokes. But the little sister's cannula had been choked off with a blue plastic crimp.

Two detectives sat side by side on chairs facing the bed, smoking, tipping the ashes into an empty glass, chatting in a whisper. One was the affable detective with a limp, the other Capucine had never seen.

Both stood up when she walked in. The amiable one smiled at her with his warm, confidence-inspiring smile, looking for all the world as if he was selling life insurance on TV. “He hasn't said a word. He's conscious all right, but I'm beginning to wonder if he speaks French.”

“I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. Why don't you two go grab lunch. Let me see what I can do with him.”

The two men shrugged with Gallic indifference, dropped their cigarettes in the glass, and waited at the door until the policeman at the desk buzzed it open. After they left the door closed on a hydraulic mechanism with a rich, oily click that somehow conveyed a note of utter finality.

The Korean continued to lie glassy-eyed, staring at the ceiling sightlessly like a fish on a slab. Capucine stood in front of him motionless, mesmerized by the gleaming drops of solution falling into the drip chamber one by one with the inexorable monotony of a metronome. His breaths rasped in the dyspnea of deep pain.

Capucine shook herself out of her reverie. “Remember me? I'm the flic you were shooting at.”

No reply. He continued to stare emptily at the ceiling. Gradually consciousness seeped into his eyes. Then, suddenly, his pupils contracted and his irises darkened in anger. Still, no words. Then, with the anger intact, his lips twisted into the ghost of an imperious sneer.

“You do not know who I am,” he said finally, in heavily accented French. “I am accredited diplomat. You are acting illegally.”

“Actually, I fully well know who you are, and I'm afraid you're in a bit of a tight spot,” Capucine said airily. “You're not going to leave this room until we hear your story. No matter how long that takes.”

No reply.

“Suit yourself. I'm sure you know your wound will get quite painful. Painful enough to make you think what you're feeling now is no more than an itch. I'm going to give orders that you are to talk to no one but me. Then I'm going home. My shift is over and tomorrow is my day off. Enjoy.” She turned to leave.

“Wait,” the man said. “I am truly a diplomat. A member of the consular service of the Republic of South Korea. When I not return to my embassy they register a formal complaint. You detain me illegally. This is serious international crime. I demand release.”

Capucine snorted a disgusted laugh. “If you really believe that, you're an incurable innocent. And you also know nothing about French law. You are being held in garde à vue, under the terms of Articles 63 and 77, which allow me to keep you for three days, during which time you do not exist. You will have just disappeared. No embassy, no lawyer, no nothing; just here, you, me, and the pain.”

The Asian looked stonily at Capucine and swallowed.

“In fact, I can keep you as long as I want. You were apprehended in
flagrant délit.
”

The Korean had raised a questioning eyebrow.

“That means you were caught red-handed committing a crime. Under French law that puts everything in a whole different context. Normally, I'd have you taken straight to a court that would certainly convict you on the spot for the most serious of crimes, the attempted homicide of a police officer. You'd go directly from the court to Fresnes Prison to start serving your sentence. However, since you're wounded, I can legally hold off sending you to court until you're healed and I'm the one who decides if you're healed or not.”

The Korean stared at her, visibly concentrating on keeping his face expressionless.

“It is true that your embassy would eventually seek to obtain your release, but you have no idea how slowly we can make our bureaucracy move. Do you have any idea of how cop shooters are treated in prison? Think about these things. I'm going off duty. Do you want the lights left on or off?”

“Wait, wait, madame. Don't go. Please. I remember these abusive French laws from school. I will talk to you. But send me the doctor. I will talk more if he makes pain better.”

“We'll see about the doctor. Let's see what you have to say for yourself first.” Capucine went to the door, waited for it to be buzzed open, and spoke quietly to the guard. In a few minutes a uniformed officer arrived with a stenotype machine on a small stand, which he set up in a corner opposite the bed.

“The officer will note everything you say. The machine will then be plugged into a computer and the text will be printed out. I will ask you to sign each page. Is that clear?”

The man nodded.

“All right, let's get going. Name, date and place of birth, current address, profession?”

“Kim Park; July 15, 1974; Seoul, Republic of South Korea; Korean Embassy, 125 rue de Grenelle; I am a third secretary in the commercial section.” In the corner the officer silently typed at his tiny keyboard, pressing multiple keys at the same time in the unfathomable way of steno-typists.

Capucine waved the envelope that Clotilde had passed him inside the
Monde
. “Tell me about this.”

“I did not open it. I think it contains technical informations about Renault cars.” He fell silent.

“Kim, let's not play games, here. I want to hear what this is about, and quickly.”

“Yes. Yes. One of my assignments is to obtain technical informations on certain Renault manufacturing processes.”

“How do you do that?”

“I have an assistant. Inside Renault. In the research and development department. He obtains the informations and gives to a woman, a secretary, who gives to me. She was the woman who passed me the envelope.”

“What is the name of your plant, your assistant, in Renault?”

“Nguyen Chapellier.”

Capucine went to the door, walked out when it was opened, and returned in less than a minute.

“All right. Back to you. How did you manage to place Nguyen Chapellier in Renault?”

“Very easy. I found engineers who would do such work. I have studied as engineer and I went to many trade conferences. I met many people who would be happy to take the money I offered. I chose the three best and told them to make application to Renault. Two were chosen. One was put in a division that was not serviceable. Nguyen was put in the correct research group. If he had not been chosen for right place I would have begun again.

“That is easy part. Placing assistant. It always is. Much harder to get informations. Renault e-mail is checked so it cannot be used. The informations must go out on paper. Renault checks all documents that leave building. But my assistant Nguyen told me that the top boss-mans' secretaries not checked and that the president's secretary is juicy girl. So I meet her and take her to dinner and she happy to bring me informations from Nguyen. Very efficient.”

The door opened with its loud buzz and a uniformed policeman entered and spoke softly in Capucine's ear. “They've found him. They're on the way to pick him up and bring him to the Quai.”

“Good,” Capucine replied. “Could you ask the doctor to come in and start the morphine drip in his IV. Oh, and give him some ice chips. That'll give him something to chew on while I'm gone.”

She looked at Park. “Enjoy your lunch. I'll be back in a little while.”

N
guyen Chapellier stood rigidly in front of Capucine in abject terror, his eyes round with fear.

“So,” said Isabelle, “we pick this asshole up in his cubicle at Renault and make as little fuss as possible, just like you told us, Lieutenant. Hell, we didn't even cuff him. And so what does the little jerk do? He comes on to me in the elevator. Can you believe it? What a fucking sicko.”

“Still, Isabelle, you went overboard,” David chimed in. “Lieutenant, Isabelle decides to cuff him but instead of normal steel cuffs, she gets him in those nylon jobs and pulls them tight so they really hurt. And while she's doing it she clips him a few times in the kidneys pretty hard just so he doesn't miss the message.”

“Well, asshole, it wasn't me that punched him out, was it? Lieutenant, when we dump him in the backseat of the car, he starts screaming; I guess because his poor sweet little wrists hurt. Anyway, in the middle of all this he wets himself, and pretty-boy David here goes bananas because he's peed on the car seat and hauls off and whacks him a good one in the mouth. When the little asshole comes around David starts yelling at him and keeps it up all the way down here. All in all, it was a totally fun ride,” Isabelle said with heavy sarcasm.

Capucine held her hand up for silence and addressed Nguyen. “We're holding your little friend, Kim Park. He's already told us his story. Let's hear your side of it.”

“I don't know anyone called Kim Park,” Nguyen muttered sullenly, exploring the inside of his mouth with his tongue while darting terrified glances at David.

Capucine looked at David with eyebrows raised in exasperation and jerked her head at the door. He eased out of the room with his ballet dancer's fluidity. Capucine turned to Isabelle. “Brigadier,” she said formally, “do you think you could get us some coffee?”

With the two brigadiers out of the room, Nguyen relaxed visibly and his shoulders dropped a good two inches. Capucine smiled her protective big-sister smile. “You probably don't know him by that name. Beefy Asian guy. No neck. Pays you to stuff things into paper towel dispensers. Ring any bells?”

His eyes morphed from saucers of fear to saucers of astonishment. Capucine was amazed the difference was so obvious.

“Oh, gosh.
That's
what you arrested me for. Dac Kim—that's what he told me his name was—told me it wasn't criminal. The worst that could happen would be a civil suit and even then they would settle out of court.”

“Look around and tell me how civil you find it here.” Capucine looked at him stonily. “Let's hear it.”

“Gee, there's not all that much to tell. Renault has this project that will make internal combustion engines totally more fuel efficient. Dac Kim—I guess he's some sort of secret agent or spy or something like that—hired me to apply for a job at Renault to get as much data on the project as I could. I got lucky and they put me in the right department. So I'd Xerox stuff and get it out through the president's secretary. She was never checked by the security people. It wasn't any more than that. Really. Just Xeroxing some stuff every now and then.”

“How much did you get paid?”

“Twice as much as my salary. It was great. I was making more than three times as much as my last job and all I had to do was make a few copies every now and then. Took me no more than a couple of hours a month and I'd get a big fat envelope stuffed with five hundred euro notes hidden in the paper towel rack in the ladies' room of the executive floor. How smart was that?”

“Selling corporate secrets worth multimillions and risking a long jail sentence for a few thousand a month is smart?”

Nguyen looked crestfallen. “Actually,” he said like a scolded schoolboy, “I had it all set up so I was going to get the big bucks.”

“What do you mean?”

“After a couple of months of rooting around the department, it became obvious that the key part was this thing they called the ‘nozzle.' It's supposed to inject the catalyst into the engine. The invention was going to be a complete dud without it. So anyway, the problem was that the nozzle group had its own security system that I had no access to. But I solved it, let me tell you. I was good to go. And I convinced Dac Kim that I was going to need a big lump-sum payment if I produced the goods on the nozzle. A whole year's pay, that's what I was going to get!”

“And how were you going to get the info on the nozzle?”

“What do you think?” Nguyen said, raking Capucine with frankly lascivious eyes. “I hooked up with this girl in the nozzle team. She was really ditzy and geeky but totally hot once you got her clothes off. Anyway, she was spending her weekends at my place. The plan was to ‘borrow' her badge.” Nguyen crooked the first two fingers of each hand to signify quotation marks and smiled a sly smile. “See, I was going to sneak it out of her handbag and use it to get into her work area on a Saturday. I figured she'd never notice. Worst case, she'd think she left it somewhere, she was that ditzy.”

Isabelle walked in with three flaccid plastic thimbles of espresso. Nguyen met her gaze confidently. His self-esteem seemed fully restored.

“So you got the plans?” Capucine asked.

“No way. I had really bad luck. At first it went off like a charm. I wormed the password out of Marie, that's the girl's name. I got her to play a guessing game. You know, ‘I bet I can guess this or that.' So I bet her I could guess her computer password. I got it the third time around. The name of her cat, ‘Rutabaga.' But she goes, ‘Oh, wait, you lose. I stuck a 7 right in the middle, right after the first ‘A,' to make it more secure.' She's that ditzy. She told me right off.”

“Then what?”

“Marie comes over on Friday night for the weekend and I cook up this seafood lasagna. It's my specialty. I use scallops, mussels, and a lot of clams. It's a lot of work but it's worth it. The seafood all has to be cooked separately first. You have to steam the clams over chopped onions, and—”

“We'll do the
Bon Appétit
TV show later. Stick to the story.”

“Okay. But trust me, if this gig doesn't pan out I could become a chef, I'm that good. So Dac Kim gave me some white powder and said to put just a pinch in Marie's food. Man, I really felt bad about crapping up my lasagna, but work is work, right? Anyway, she was sick as a dog the next day. I tucked her up in bed and she must have slept twenty hours. She only got up to barf. I spent all of Saturday going through her area at work but I couldn't get into her files. I had the code to Marie's terminal, all right, but I didn't have the goddamn codes for the files, so no cigar.”

“So you gave up?”

“For those kind of bucks, are you kidding? I kept going back on Saturdays to see if I could crack those files. I didn't even have to dope up Marie. She just sat around reading or whatever while I was gone and never noticed a thing. But nothing doing. And obviously I wasn't going to get the code out of Marie. I mean, what was I going to say? ‘Hey, sweetie, I just happened to notice that you have separate passwords on all your nozzle files. Can we play a guessing game about those?'” Nguyen laughed happily. He could have been at a bar chatting the two women up.

“So then what happened?” Capucine asked.

“Everything got crazy. First off, in the middle of the week it must have been, I'm talking to my boss, Lionel, and he tells me that Monsieur Guyon, he's the head of R & D, is in a state about some security leak and the président himself was going to go to the government to get the spooks or whatever to plug up the leak. You can imagine how that made me feel.”

“I'm amazed you didn't give it up right then and there,” Capucine said encouragingly.

“Hey, I'm a pro, remember. No way I was going to forgo all that cash. So, I did my super-sleuth routine. I wrote Dac Kim a little note. Stuck it inside the paper towel holder in the ladies' room. How Dac Kim dreams this crap up is beyond me. Like it's not risky to be going in and out of the ladies' crapper all the time. So he gets my note, but instead of sending me a note back like he usually does, I get a call that very night from the big man himself. ‘Meet me at thus and such café on the boulevard Saint-Michel at nine o'clock.' A first.

“So anyway, Dac Kim has a big plan. I'm supposed to e-mail the files out and not even try to open them. He says once he has them he can figure out a way to have someone crack the code. So, I'm supposed to go to Marie's area on the next Saturday and do my stuff like there was no problem. Sure, there was no problem. For him. He wasn't going to be there.”

“Did you have any luck with the file?”

“Not the slightest. Those files were wrapped up in the tightest security I've ever seen. I thought the game was over and that security would get super tight. Then on Monday they found Président Delage dead. Remember that? I always wondered if there was a connection. I guess not. I was sure that they would really clamp down on security then, but nothing changed. So I was able to go back the next two weekends. I never could do anything with those files, though.

“Then one day, out of the blue, they tell us they're moving the whole project to a military base and that everyone has to get a government security clearance. Hey. Fuck that. I quit as of next week. I'm history on that project. A buck is a buck, but I have no intention of winding up in a maximum-security prison. Renault is one thing, but a government installation is a whole other kettle of fish.”

Nguyen gave Isabelle a sly look out of the corner of his eye. Capucine guessed he was hoping she would be impressed with his story. Left to his own devices she wouldn't have put it past him to try to hit on her again.