Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) (26 page)

“
Instructed
is the right word. That’s why the position is called a juge d’instruction.” She smiled at her joke. “Sometimes I am instructed by the police, and sometimes by others.” She continued to trace patterns on the desk.

“Capucine, you’re being silly because you’re angry. You’re trying to go up against something you can’t go up against. It’s as foolish as throwing rocks at a herd of elephants. They won’t even notice, but in the unlikely event they do, the consequences could be catastrophic.”

“Elephants?”

“The denizens of the core of the power structure. They’re as powerful and indestructible as elephants. And they take notice of little animals like you and me only when we can be of use.”

“But you’ve devoted your life to bringing down these rogue elephants.”

“Hardly. I only go after small game. I want results.” She drummed the desk again, then smiled. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m a hypocrite. But you’re wrong. Sometimes the elephants actually help you.”

“How were you helped?”

“Let’s not waste time on something you’ll read about in tomorrow’s paper. Suffice it to say, I obtained a full dossier on Tottinguer. More than enough to prepare an unbeatable court case.”

“From Bufo?”

“Good Lord, no. How naïve you can be, Capucine. I received it with the good graces of the senior partner of our largest law firm, who happens to be the biggest and possibly most powerful elephant of the herd.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Nothing at all, really. I merely promised not to throw rocks. I promised not to be as foolish as you seem to want to be. You see, it really was a very good deal, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure I understand. I learned that Nathalie was an occasional operative for the DST. It turns out that Dominique is an outlier in Bufo’s family. I assumed that this was all a plot to put you out of the way and have me blamed for it.”

“You’re absolutely right about that. And that’s the way it would have happened if I didn’t have a benefactor. A benefactor who acted in his own interest, not mine, but a benefactor nonetheless.”

Capucine looked at her blankly, lost.

“Capucine, I have two words for you. Jade pendant. Does that answer your question?” Inès stood up. “I have an interview coming up. One I’ve been waiting a long time for. And one last thing before you go. Let me be perfectly clear. You have no case whatsoever against Dominique. No procureur in Paris would even look at the thing.”

C
apucine stormed out of Inès’s office, punched the elevator button incessantly until the elevator cab arrived, then accelerated her car in bursts, screeching to a stop when she was held up by traffic. At one point, after a stop so violent she skidded sideways, the driver of the car in front, a middle-aged man with a comb-over, shook his fist at her. Irate, Capucine clapped the blue police beacon on her dash and flipped on the siren, smirking as traffic scurried out of her way.

Back at her brigade, she ordered a perplexed Capitaine Bourlon to release Dominique, then stormed into her office and slammed the door. For fifteen minutes she drafted a terse resignation from the Police Judiciaire using a dented gold Waterman pen her grandfather had given her when she received her
bac.
The exercise calmed her. Her breathing returned to normal. She realized that the clerks in personnel would be oblivious to the nuances of her resignation letter. She tore it into minute pieces, scooped them into the palm of her hand, dropped the pieces into the wastebasket.

She extracted her phone and tapped Alexandre’s speed-dial icon.

“Let’s go out for dinner. I need cheering up. Where are you?”

“I’m at home, finishing up a piece. What a happy coincidence. I’ve booked at Le Grand Véfour. And your favorite cousin is coming along.”

Capucine’s breathing rate rose again. She felt like kicking the desk. It was always like this. Le Grand Véfour had lost its third star a few years before. With Alexandre on the premises, the staff would be all over him, lusting after the slightest scrap of high-powered praise they could get. She would be on show. Jacques would milk the situation for its comic potential. She should let the two of them go out, while she sat at home, in front of the TV, eating a frozen couscous meal from Carrefour. Capucine made an effort to control her breathing.
One. Two. Three. Four.

“Why don’t we go to Juvéniles instead?” Capucine said.

“The wine bar? It’s a wonderful place, of course, but wouldn’t you rather have something a bit more exalted?”

“No. I’ve had my fill of the high and mighty. I want good, honest food and good, honest wine, prepared by people who understand both.”

“You’re on. That’s an irresistible combination. Le Grand Véfour won’t be happy with a canceled reservation, but into every life a little rain must fall.”

They found Jacques already seated at a corner table, chatting with the owner of the restaurant, a voluble, portly, eternally baby-faced Scot, who had come to Paris twenty-five years earlier to write an article about wine and had wound up staying permanently.

One wall of the restaurant was lined with bottles stacked on their sides on dark-wood shelves. Unopened wooden wine crates were piled in front of the shelves. The feeling was that of a cheerfully discombobulated wineshop. A chalkboard listed thirty or forty wines in a meticulous hand, but everyone knew these were only suggestions from among the hundreds of bottles available.

Over the years, the owner of the restaurant had become accepted as a genuine cognoscente in the French wine world. He categorically refused to serve Bordeaux, on the grounds that the entire region was priced far beyond its value and that the only viable buys were from the lesser known regions.

While Capucine was greeted by Jacques and the owner, Alexandre lingered, rooting through the current selection.

“You have a Coteaux du Languedoc that I’ve never come across before. How is it?” Alexandre asked when he arrived at the table.

Rather than reply, the owner held up his index finger authoritatively and then disappeared behind the bar, to return almost instantly with four glasses in one hand and a bottle in the other. With the legerdemain of a magician performing a card trick, he extracted the cork, put an inch of wine in his glass, took an explorative sip, nodded, and filled the other three. “Tell me what you think.”

Capucine took a sip. It was smooth, mellow, unaggressive.

“Extraordinarily subtle and delicate,” Alexandre said. “You’re a genius. How do you find these treasures?”

“It’s hard graft, but someone has to do it,” the owner said with a laugh and a trace of Scots in his French. “Shall I bring a bottle?”

“Not just a bottle,” Alexandre said. “I want a whole case. The car is parked right out in front.”

The restaurant filled quickly, and the owner wandered off to greet newcomers. The noise level rose steadily. Capucine, Alexandre, and Jacques breathed in the crowd, chatted desultorily, read the menu, then ordered from a pretty young Irish waitress. Goose foie gras with fig chutney for Alexandre and Jacques, and
jambon basque Ibaiona
—air-dried ham from Spain—and ripe cantaloupe melon for Capucine, to be followed by duck
gésier
confit salad for Capucine, a chicken tikka curry with cucumbers for Jacques, and haggis and mash for Alexandre.

The owner came up, poured the last of the Coteaux de Languedoc into their glasses, and asked if they wanted a second bottle.

A man sitting at the next table, imposing with his waxed handlebar mustache and flowing silver locks, butted in.

“I highly recommend the two thousand nine Domaine du Vissoux Fleurie Les Garants. It’s powerful enough to balance with your dinners.” He raised his glass to them.

Capucine breathed a sigh of relief. Table-to-table conversation was the norm at Juvéniles. There was going to be no discussion of cases tonight.

But she was wrong. They chatted about nothing, drank a bottle of Les Garants with their dinner, then a second, then tasted two different Armagnacs. Despite the new French law, Juvéniles cast an unseeing eye on cigars, as long as they were Havana. Alexandre produced one from a leather case, lit it, offered the case to Jacques, who declined. Slowly the room emptied by half. The diners at either side of them were gone. They seemed to be enveloped in their own zone of privacy.

Jacques took Capucine’s hand, kissed the tips of her fingers in a very un-cousinly gesture, and then raised his glass of Armagnac in salute. “So, cousine, you pulled off another one. You were very diligent in reading the signs from the sidelines.”

Alexandre glowered at Jacques’s kissing his wife’s fingers. “What I’ve never really understood,” Alexandre said, “is what was behind all this. We were taking a cruise with friends. How did so many of them turn into spies and murderers and criminals? It’s like that Agatha Christie story on the Orient Express, where everyone turns out to be guilty.”

“Cousin, I will take you up on your offer of a cigar,” Jacques said.

He went through the irritating ritual of lighting up, puffing cautiously, scrutinizing the tip to make sure the nascent ash was even. After an interminable wait, Jacques spoke. “I can give you the background because my service is keeping its beady little eye on the situation,” Jacques said.

He took another puff of the cigar and spent a long moment scrutinizing the ash. The owner of the restaurant headed over to chat but sensed the tension at the table and adjusted his path a few degrees to starboard, toward the bar, where he noisily prized open a wooden case of wine and began removing the bottles.

“It revolves around EADS, this Franco-German corporation created to merge French and German aviation and missile production and expand across the globe to become an aeronautical powerhouse.”

Jacques took a deep puff on his cigar and eased into his tale.

“The plan was cooked up by consultants who are clever enough little elves but who are incapable of imagining that the people implementing their strategies don’t behave like computer models. The seniors in the eleven companies that were merged, naturally enough, launched a cataclysmic battle for power. A battle, by the way, that is still far from resolved.”

“So why is your agency so interested in this?” Alexandre asked.

“It’s not rocket science,” Jacques answered with the Cheshire cat grin. “Well, actually it is.” He brayed an attenuated version of his earsplitting donkey laugh.

“Everyone knows about
le scandale
two summers ago, when large amounts of EADS stock was shorted only weeks before the announcement that the fabled double-decker transatlantic jet was going to miss its delivery date by over six months. Fortunes were made on the short sales. Our Inès was appointed to investigate but was unable to punch through the screen of anonymity. In short order everyone forgot about it all. Except terrier Inès, who has been barking away at the case ever since.”

“Let me guess,” Capucine said. “Conseiller Bufo was in charge of the police side of the inquiry.”

“ ‘In charge’ are big words to be used in this context. Let’s just say ‘involved.’ But Bufo definitely deserves credit for his role in preventing any of the prime movers in the scandal from being named.”

Jacques took a long puff on his cigar and watched the smoke rise to the ceiling. He leaned forward over the table. Capucine and Alexandre leaned with him. Three schoolchildren about to share a secret. “Bufo is a ministerial thug. He produces results but requires a good deal of direction. His puppeteer in the EADS case is none other than a lawyer you may have heard of, Etienne-Louis Lévêque. He’s the spider at the center of the entire web. Or if you want a more
mondain
metaphor, a Richelieu, dressed not in ostentatious red, but in discreet bespoke Lanvin.” He winked broadly at Alexandre.

“Bufo had two confederates on
Diomede,
Dominique keeping an eye on Nathalie, the sometimes DST agent, whose role presumably was to keep an eye on Inès and capitalize on any propitious situation that might arise. My surmise is that Lévêque placed his confederate on the boat, as well, to keep an eye on Bufo’s confederates. It’s a wonder we didn’t stock up on eyedrops at every port of call.”

“Jacques, how can you know these things? Dominique just confessed that this afternoon, and I tore up the procès-verbal.”

Jacques said nothing and puffed a nimbus of smoke around his head.

“
Sapristi,
Jacques, enough sibling rivalry,” Alexandre said, rapping on the table with his knuckles. “Just tell the damn story and be done with it.”

The owner of the restaurant mistook the knuckle rapping for a request for more Armagnac and appeared with three tulip-shaped glasses. Embarrassed, Alexandre thanked him profusely. Everyone sipped. Jacques and Alexandre puffed.

“Think of it as one of those Italian operas with singers making unexpected entrances to sing a little aria. First, Nathalie wraps herself around the forestay, for reasons we won’t go into in mixed company, and exits with Serge’s help. Serge’s jade amulet finds its way into the scuppers. Dominique pops out of Nathalie’s cabin and fires a shot with Capucine’s pistol, using Inès’s jacket to muffle the sound. The shell casing goes astray and finds its way into the scuppers, as well. Frustrated, Dominique fires another round and manages to hang on to the shell casing, which he squeezes into its little hidey-hole. Pleased with himself, he melds into the clutch of people now milling around the deck.”

Jacques looked up with an expectant smile, as if he were about to receive an accolade. Alexandre and Capucine stared at him expectantly.

“Well?” Alexandre asked in irritation.

“Hasn’t Capucine told you?” Jacques asked.

“How could I have told him what I don’t know? Did you find the casing all by yourself, or did someone give it to you? And what was that business with the jade amulet? What hidey-hole?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Or are you insisting I betray confidences?”

Capucine made a moue, which evolved into a pout.

“Oh, all right, cousine. Aude investigated the foredeck. She gave me the shell casing. And, of course, I gave it to my favorite cousin.”

“But what about the second shell casing, the one the Italian police found?” Alexandre asked.

“Now, that
is
interesting. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you my guess. There’s a perforated steel strip that goes round the deck. It’s there so you can clip various lines to it if the need arises. No need to explain to Tubby Hubby what a barber hauler is. The holes are small enough to catch a nine-millimeter shell, which is where I’ll bet Dominique tucked the second shell. It would have been invisible there until the Italians got going with their lights.”

Jacques puffed happily on his cigar.

“Jacques, there’s a whole part of this story you’re not telling,” Capucine said. “What about the jade amulet? Did Aude hide it? Why? You seemed awfully close to her. And what do you have to do with Lévêque, for that matter?”

Jacques took a deep puff on his cigar and let the smoke escape slowly through his sly grin.

“Me? Aude? We’re just pawns in this tale. The important thing is that you seem to have friends in high places. Friends who have the instinct to know the precise moment you need to be extracted from the choucroute before something bad happens. I really can’t say any more than that.”

“Jacques, you’re maddening.”

“Actually, I have a question,” Alexandre said. “Capucine told me that apparently Nathalie was a part-time hit man for the DST, unlikely as that may seem. Was she on the boat to rub someone out?” Alexandre crooned out the words “rub someone out” with relish.

Jacques said nothing but looked particularly enigmatic.

“Even I can guess that one,” Capucine said. “Who else but Bufo? He must have decided to solve the Inès problem in his own way.”

Jacques examined the smoke of his cigar rising to the ceiling.

“So,” said Alexandre, “Inès’s life was spared by Serge, the man she tricked into a confession so she could rob him of the last years of his youth. It’s a story worthy of Maupassant.”

“Isn’t it?” Jacques said. “Right down to Serge’s jade necklace.”

“Jacques, you’re impossible,” Capucine said.

“Why? Because I know all your secrets?” Jacques stood up. “Walk with me. I have to meet some of my, ah, colleagues in the Palais Royal.”

Alexandre went to the tiny counter to settle the bill.

“I have some news. I don’t know if it’s good or not, but it’s definitely news.” Jacques paused to see if Capucine would rise to the bait. She didn’t. “A little piece of paper flitted across my desk this afternoon. It would appear that you are about to be promoted to commissaire principal.” Jacques paused again, looking for a reaction. Again, there was none. “It won’t be instanter. There’s a bit of blather about your age, but there’s also a
coup de pouce
—a little ‘thumb nudge’—from Olympic heights. It will happen before the end of the year.”