The Grave Gourmet (16 page)

K
arine Bergeron sat demurely in the ground-floor interview room wearing a maroon cashmere twin set with a single strand of pearls as she stirred the inevitable flaccid plastic thimble of machine espresso that passed for hospitality at the Quai des Orfèvres. She was radiant.

“Lieutenant, it's very kind of you to receive me at such short notice. You were so nice the other day I feel I can treat you like a friend. I've made a few decisions and I wanted you to hear them from me directly.”

“Good things, I hope.”

“Oh, yes! I told you I had been thinking about accepting Martin's proposal, and I have. We're going to be married the week after next in the church of his village in Brittany. We decided while he was in the hospital. He seemed so weak and defenseless and he wanted me so much, I just couldn't say no.”

“That seems quite sudden.”

“Yes, it is. And there's even more! He's going to change his life for me. I was very moved.”

“What do you mean?”

“Martin is an avid sailor. He keeps a big boat in Brittany and sails all the time in the summer. We've decided to take a year off and go around the world in it. That was one of the reasons he wanted to get married right away. The weather is still warm enough for us to leave France and the trade winds are perfect right now. We're going to go to Guadeloupe and then figure out the rest of our route when we're there.”

“But what about his practice? He's going to walk away from that?”

“Well, you know about his specialty, this arms business. Almost all of his clients came to him because of Jean-Louis's position. His most important clients have already dropped him and he's convinced the others will as well.”

“That's a shame. It must have been a lucrative practice for him.”

“Oh, it was. But he was also traveling constantly and dealing with some absolutely horrible people. A lot were even worse than those you saw. He sold weapons of all types. Sometimes even small things like pistols and hand grenades and whatever. Often those were sold to the shadiest possible people. It was awful. Very unlike Martin. I'm so relieved that part of his life is over. Right now we're going to go around the world and just think about ourselves. And when we come back he can just build up a whole new practice, but a nice, normal one.”

“I'm happy for you. I'll certainly authorize the trip to Brittany for the wedding but there's absolutely no question of Maître Fleuret leaving the French territory.”

“Why ever not?”

“Maître Fleuret may well come to trial for the murder of Président Delage.”

“Good God.” There were tears in Karine's eyes. She took a paper tissue from her bag and patted her lower lids, careful not to smudge her makeup. “That would destroy Martin. How can you suspect him?”

“He had a motive. It could be argued that Président Delage was the main obstacle to his marriage to you. His desire to leave the country reinforces that logic.”

Karine's tears cascaded. There was no saving her makeup now.

“B…but he left right after the dinner. He…he came to see me. I told you that.”

“Yes, let's do talk about that particular visit.”

Karine sobbed quietly, making gentle hiccoughing sounds. “He came to try to persuade me to marry him.”

“After a long night out on the town? He has a curious sense of gallantry. What time did he arrive?”

“Oh, quite late. A few minutes after eleven. I was watching a film and it had just ended. It was a movie about a woman detective in the Police Judiciaire. She was completely unlike you. Very punk and tough. In love with a drug addict whom she had to arrest at the end.” Karine laughed through her tears.

“I've seen it. My husband teases me about it all the time. But you're quite sure he was no later than eleven? He must have come straight from the restaurant. It would have taken a good twenty minutes to drive from there to your apartment.”

“Absolutely sure. The eleven o'clock news was just starting and I asked him if he wanted to watch it. He didn't. He wanted me to take his ring, which I was too stupid to do right then. I had to wait until he was all broken to see how much he really loved me.”

“Karine, I really am happy for you, but I must warn you to be careful. Make no attempt to leave the country. The consequences could be quite serious for you both. It's important you use your influence to prevent Maître Fleuret from doing anything foolish.”

Later, Capucine gazed at Karine as she walked across the courtyard to the porte cochere and wondered about Fleuret. It would hardly be a dilemma, choosing between your livelihood and the love of your life. Not a difficult choice at all.

T
aken by surprise Capucine suddenly found herself hard in the grips of a deep depression. She tried telling herself that she had every reason to feel pleased with the way the case was going. The pot was boiling away cheerfully, brimming with enough ingredients to promise a rich and fulfilling denouement. She insisted to herself that La Crim was turning out to be exactly what she had hoped for: cases with countless convoluted threads intertwining through real people, requiring unraveling with infinite care and finesse. So very different from that pointless white-collar work where the suspect was identified from the onset and the challenge was simply to produce a file thick enough to send to court.

But the forced logic had no effect on either the stale brown taste in her mouth or the sinking certainty in her gut that none of the threads in hand would ever lead anywhere, much less to a solution. The whole thing seemed an exercise in futility. She was doomed. The case was unsolvable. She hated the whole business and rued her decision to try and make her way in the Brigade Criminelle. What a childish fool she had been. The more she thought about it the worse it got.

Of course, it was far from the first time she had felt this way about her life. Once, she remembered with painful clarity, at Sciences Po she had quit a class on literary theory in the middle of the semester while in exactly the same mood of despair. It was a decision she still bitterly regretted. At the time, once she had calmed down, she realized that it was nothing more than intellectual overload. It had been a demanding course and she had overinvested herself in it. The solution would have been simplicity itself: cut the class for a few days and wait for her enthusiasm to return, which would have happened quickly enough. Everyone burns out every now and then. It was perfectly normal. Wasn't it?

The more she tried to reason with herself the more her little homilies rang hollow. She knew she was on dangerous ground, an inch away from storming into Tallon's office and plunking her badge and gun down on his desk—or was it just in American movies that one did that?

She reached her three brigadiers on the phone—she was so close to tears she didn't have the courage to face them personally—and assigned them to a further round of computer background checks she knew perfectly well was useless. But at least they wouldn't pester her for a while. She then decided to devote the day to the most frivolous and futile pursuit she could come up with—keenly aware that the frivolity itself was the essential reagent—and wound up spending the day wandering through the fashionable boutiques of Saint-Germain fingering expensive clothes. She even went so far as to leave her Sig behind, something she had never done since the day she was inducted into the force. She felt even more denuded than if she had forgotten her wedding ring on the side of the bathroom sink.

The afternoon turned out to be a sweet and sour dish of pleasure and angst. The chic Latin Quarter boutiques, with their astronomic prices and rarefied ranges of clothes, turned out to be an effective opiate. She was far away from the police, embraced by a life that would have been hers by default if she had not made it a full-time job to resist it. Ironically her sense of relief brought home how easy it would be to quit. And that realization brought with it the shock of catastrophe and the terror of an empty life. By late afternoon she had only a pair of backless Italian mules to show for her efforts and was exhausted enough to call it quits. She squeezed into a seat on a café terrace facing the church of Saint-Sulpice. As the sun went down releasing the crisp odor of fall she nursed
kirs
and navigated the labyrinthine editorials of the final edition of the
Monde
.

By her third kir there was hardly enough daylight to even pretend to read and she was numb enough from the cold and the wine to feel that the whole world was safely at arm's length. No solutions had presented themselves, but she had the feeling that somehow she had tipped over to the other side of some sort of some unnamed water-shed. It was time to go home and let Alexandre tease her about how useful her purchase would be on duty. The thought made her very happy.

I
n the morning Capucine awoke to find her calm and sense of purpose intact. At the Quai, ever mindful of her mother's injunctions, she waited patiently until just after ten
A.M
. and dialed Grégoire Rolland's home number. He was clearly taken aback. In the high-pitched tone of a socialite she invited him to come down to the Quai, entirely at his convenience, to “brainstorm” with her. She complained she was making no headway in understanding the workings of the restaurant and he was the only member of the staff “really on her wavelength.” The sense of Rolland preening himself oozed through the receiver. She reiterated that the visit must not inconvenience him in any way and that he must tell her with perfect honesty when he had free time. Together they decided that two days hence at three thirty, after the luncheon service was over, would be just perfect. As she hung up she imagined Rivière's mocking sneer if he had been privy to her approach and laughed, the first time in days.

Rolland arrived in an open shirt and decidedly un-French, close-fitting suit that, while expensive-looking, still smacked of the marked-down rack, perhaps an Armani on closeout sale from one of the
grands magasins
. He was more at ease than she had ever seen him, neither obsequious as during the staff meal nor inscrutable as during his restaurant service. Capucine wondered if this finally was his true persona. His attitude was of someone on a purely social visit. He could almost have come with a box of chocolates in hand.

Rolland spoke first. “So, Lieutenant, tell me how I can be of service to you.”

“Oh,” Capucine said, “it's really quite simple. It would be helpful to know more about the restaurant and I have no one else to turn to. As you can imagine, I can hardly speak freely to Chef Labrousse.”

“Of course. But I'm afraid I don't know all that much about what happens outside of my own area.”

“Well, why don't we start with that, then. Tell me, how does one become a sommelier?”

Rolland was delighted to talk about himself. He launched into the sort of rambling self-description that reminded Capucine of French talk shows: irrelevant, self-serving anecdotes stitched together with pointless digressions. He had grown up in Montargis, fathered by a postman, and had no fond memories of either. He had detested grade school, and had escaped to a vocational lycée in Paris to train for the restaurant and hotel industries. Even though the lycée had liberated him from the provinces, the victory proved Pyrrhic since the hot kitchen of the school turned out to be even more loathsome than grade school and he was allowed so little free time that Paris remained just as remote. It was only in his last year that his extraordinary nose was noticed. An instructor with the mission of teaching spontaneous recipe creation had presented a table full of raw produce—beef, artichoke, orange, asparagus, eggs, and chicken, each in a separate bowl—to the blindfolded class. As usually happened, none of the students could identify more than half of them. Except for Rolland, who sniffed them all out unerringly. It had been Rolland's big break. The instructor assigned him to the advanced wine class that same afternoon, a course he had been previously denied because of his mediocre grades. He quickly became a school phenomenon and secured a spot as apprentice sommelier at the Troisgros restaurant in Roanne that summer.

He explained happily that the rest was history. He began to collect awards. Best Young Sommelier in France three years out of the lycée, then Best Sommelier in France, and finally, the crowning honor, Best Sommelier in the World before he was thirty. But he insisted these awards were meaningless. What mattered most was his reputation within the community of sommeliers and there it was known he had no equal.

He had no desire for a family. In his view women and children were incompatible with the hours of the restaurant business. He was really only interested in associating with initiates of the world of enology. The bit between his teeth, Rolland had become transfixed. He had the distant look of a visionary or a dinner-party bore. Capucine felt that if a video were being made it could easily be dubbed over with the voice of a man describing his life's work of constructing a ten-foot-high model of the Tour Eiffel with matches.

In an attempt to drive the conversation back to Diapason, Capucine feinted with, “Isn't there an element of pride in being on the team of one of the most illustrious restaurants in the world?”

“I hardly think of myself on anyone's team. Labrousse does his job and I do mine. I don't doubt that he's an admirable cook. It's just that…how can I explain it to you?…the food is merely a support for the wine.” He paused with wrinkled brow. “It's a poor comparison but think of it this way. It's like the cheese on the bread. The bread must be good, of course, but the important thing is the Reblochon. When I serve, say, an Haut-Brion '78 I am happy to have one of Labrousse's little dishes as a backdrop, but of course it's the wine that triumphs. It's obvious, no?”

“And do you think Chef Labrousse sees it that way?”

Rolland laughed raucously. “Who knows what these cooks think? Personally, I think their brains must be addled by all that heat and sweat.”

Like a drover coaxing a recalcitrant cow back into the herd Capucine tried repeatedly to prod Rolland into talking about life at Diapason, but he was not to be moved. Only “his” wine mattered. The sole merit of the restaurant was its ability to attract a worthy clientele. The less he knew about the steamy mechanics of food preparation, the happier he was.

After another half an hour of monologue about himself, largely focused on the theme of his current desire to spend six months in Australia to develop a “visceral understanding” of a
vignoble
that was increasingly becoming worthy of his attention, he suddenly jerked a look at his watch. “Good Lord! Look what time it is. I have to rush back to the restaurant. I'm going to be late. I hope this has been of some use to you. It's certainly been extremely enjoyable for me.” Rolland, ever the well-mannered guest, beamed and stood up, offering his hand.

Capucine pushed a button under her desk and the door opened quietly as Momo entered wordlessly. “I'm sorry, Monsieur Rolland, but you're going to be spending the night with us. I'm placing you on
garde à vue
. You'll be here at least until tomorrow, possibly longer. Momo, take Monsieur Rolland down to the detention cells.”

“You can't do this! I have to get dressed for the dinner service. How will the restaurant funct…”

Capucine jutted her chin sharply and Momo placed a meaty hand under his armpit and squeezed just hard enough to shut him up and start him toward the door.

“Don't worry, I'll give Chef Labrousse a call and let him make arrangements for the dinner service. Good night, Monsieur Rolland.”