The Grave Gourmet (17 page)

T
his time imagining herself into Rivière's persona was no help at all. Capucine had already felt highly guilty about assigning her brigadiers to pointless make-work duty just so she could have a day off to go shopping and now she was going to put them on something even more crushingly boring.

Once they had shuffled in and coiled into the Police Judiciare's ubiquitous bent metal chairs, she announced with the forced cheerfulness of a Club Med host, “It's time we changed tactics. We're going to do a round-the-clock tail of Guyon's and Delage's secretaries. We'll have some backup but we're going to have to do most of the tailing ourselves. I know it's a huge pain in the ass, but I think it's going to give us our first really solid lead.”

Capucine cringed internally, bracing for the outburst. Astonishingly, all three brigadiers erupted into joyous smiles and high-fived each other with raucous, “
Eh bien,
voilàs,” and “
Enfins
!” How unlike the fiscal brigade this all was. It was really true, in La Crim they were only happy if they were out on the street.

When the buzz died down she assigned David and Isabelle to Thérèse Garnier, Guyon's secretary. “You'll have backup from the pool but I want you to stay on the subject when she goes to work in the morning, when she goes home, and for at least two hours after her normal bedtime. That's going to be a long day but we can't afford to delegate the important hours. Momo and I are going to tail Clotilde Lancrey-Javal. I want to review the setup with you back here tomorrow night at midnight when you hand over to the pool guys but after tomorrow you can go straight home and report in by phone.”

At the meeting the next day David and Isabelle were like bouncy puppies. Unbelievably, the day's tedium had actually invigorated them. It turned out that Thérèse Garnier lived in Fontenay-sous-Bois, a low-income suburb to the east of Paris, with her husband and two small children. She had risen at six, fed her family, taken the RER rapid transit train to the Châtelet station, had been herded for fifteen minutes through a tightly packed tunnel to another RER train, and had been spewed out at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where she had caught a Renault shuttle bus. The trip took an hour and a half and she entered the building at eight forty-five, fifteen minutes before her boss. In the evening she had left at six thirty, reversed the process, reached home a little after eight, fed her family, watched an hour of TV, and had been in bed by ten.

“I tell you, Lieutenant, every time I want to bitch about the job, all I have to do is think about the way women like that live. I'd rather be a nun,” Isabelle said.

“But just think about all the great sex you'd be missing out on,” David said. Seemingly playfully, Isabelle punched him in the arm, but he recoiled sharply and pursed his lips, obviously in pain.

Thérèse's routine was repeated every day that week. When Saturday arrived Isabelle was proved wrong. The outing, which did in fact include the entire family, was only to the Monoprix at the end of the street. The Garniers didn't own a car. The level-three wiretap that Madame d'Agremont had authorized revealed nothing more interesting than a Friday-night call from Guyon ordering his secretary to be at work at seven thirty Monday morning to type up a presentation he was going to write over the weekend. Thérèse's comments to her husband had not been recorded but Capucine had no trouble imagining them.

 

Capucine had not tailed anyone since the police academy, and even then it had been far from her favorite subject. Becoming invisible just went too much against her grain. Fortunately, Momo revealed a talent for gently prodding her into the thick of the crowd or behind a corner just in the nick of time and the shadowing of Clotilde Lancrey-Javal passed without mishap.

With her increased workload as administrator of the bureaucracy of the office of the president, Clotilde didn't leave the office until seven thirty at the earliest. In compensation, her transit time was considerably less than her colleague's. She took the same RER train but changed to the metro at the Odéon in the Latin Quarter for a short ride virtually to her door. The trip rarely took more than half an hour. Of course, the last fifteen minutes on the metro could occasionally be tense. She lived on a small, twisted street that snaked down the side of Montmartre toward the boulevard de Rochechouart, in the heart of Paris's notorious North African quarter, an area where even the police in uniform were often uneasy.

 

On the second day of the surveillance, once Clotilde was safely ensconced in her office, Capucine went back to Clotilde's neighborhood to get a feel for the environment.

“Lieutenant,” Momo had said. “Let's be careful here. This ain't one of your vacations in Marrakech.”

Capucine bit off her acid retort and strode purposefully at Momo's elbow. The streets were jammed with North African men, bored, loitering, strolling, lolling, smoking, jeering at passersby, the detritus of a neighborhood where unemployment for those with papers topped thirty percent and the majority of inhabitants were unemployable illegals. What little French was spoken on the street was drowned in the macaronic singsong of Arab argot. As a couple Momo and Capucine sparked a good deal of interest. Momo was bombarded with comments. The few words that Capucine could understand seemed to indicate a consensus that his choice of a woman not from the bled must result in a very tame time in bed and even worse food. Most of the time Momo just laughed. Once or twice he turned in anger, causing his mocker to vanish in deference to Momo's bulk.

Clotilde's building was a nondescript dark, narrow four-story structure built in the late nineteenth century on a plot undoubtedly previously occupied by a small town house. Surprisingly for the neighborhood, a concierge was on her knees scrubbing the tiny tiled foyer with a stiff brush and a green plastic bucket of bleach water. She wore a shapeless housedress, a well-worn lemon-and-white striped apron and ancient carpet slippers. Her face was decorated with faded harquus tattoos on her chin and under her eyes.

Momo whispered in Capucine's ear. “Boss, let me deal with this woman. She'll give us a look at the apartment. No problem. Just step away a little and let me handle it.”

He walked over to the kneeling concierge and bent over her threateningly. “Woman, you've been bad,” he said in a strong Maghrebian accent. “I'm going to take you in and put you in GAV and keep you under arrest until you talk. You be there long time. Do you understand?!”

The woman was terrified. “No, no. I no do anything. Why you say that? Don't take me down. I have to feed my little ones.”

“You have bad person living here. You bad, too. A
blanc
called Lancrey-Javal. You tell me about her.”

“
L'Ancre Naval!
She lives under the roof. Go see if you want. I have keys. She not from the bled.”

Momo turned to Capucine. “We're in. She calls her the Naval Anchor because the name is too complicated for her. Just don't smile at the woman. She'll only cooperate if she's terrified and thinks we're going to let her rot in GAV for weeks on end, which happens often enough to these people.” Capucine was surprised to see that he hadn't bothered to show his police ID.

They followed the woman as she shuffled up three flights of shabby but spotless stairs and stopped at a final set so steep it was almost a ladder. Normally this would have led to the dormers, the floor that had been built to contain tiny cubicles for servants, devoid of plumbing except for a single cold-water tap and a hole-in-the-floor “Turkish” toilet in a closet at the end of the hall. But the top of the stairs was blocked by a wooden door painted in brilliant lilac.

“It's here that she lives, the Ancre Naval.” The concierge extracted a trousseau of keys from her apron, singled one out, and handed the bunch to Momo. “You go look. I stay here. Say nothing.”

The apartment could well have been featured in
Madame Figaro
. The partitions of the cubicles had been knocked down and the area transformed into a single long loft brightly lit by six windows. The ceiling had been knocked out and the roof beams exposed, stained, and waxed, creating a pleasing feeling of an antique barn. A large double bed covered in pillows was at the far end. The middle consisted of a living room of beige leather furniture clustered around an onyx fireplace. Several large portraits trimmed in ornate gilt frames stretched from floor to ceiling. The area closest to the door was occupied by a brushed stainless steel kitchen area equipped with the latest in German appliances.

“Wow!” Momo said.

“I told you she wasn't from the bled,” the concierge shouted happily from the bottom of the stairs.

 

Later that night Capucine and Momo returned to the Quai des Orfèvres after examining the contents of the apartment. Other than the neighborhood, they found nothing that was not consistent with the dwelling of a relatively well-to-do single woman. Capucine, interest piqued, went straight to her office and turned on her computer. In less than an hour she strode into the bridadiers' office, her eyes alight with the joy of discovery.

“That Naval Anchor apartment gets stranger and stranger.”

“She won it in a lottery?”

“Not even close. There are four separate apartments listed on that floor of that building. One of them is in her name and three others in the names of Jean, Bertrand, and Lisette Moreau. All four have post office mortgages. The values listed are ridiculously low, even for Barbès. What do you make of that?”

“Beats me, Lieutenant. I'm just here for the heavy lifting.”

 

“Lieutenant, I may have fucked up. Badly,” Momo said, his voice clear enough on the cell phone to be audible to the others in the room. By mid-week the surveillance of Clotilde had revealed nothing of interest. Impatient, Tallon had convoked Capucine to review the case at the end of the day. Capucine had followed Clotilde home on the metro, handed her over to Momo when she went upstairs, and had then come back to the Quai des Orfèvres for the meeting. Half an hour into the session Capucine's cell phone had vibrated in its irritating way.

“What happened?”

“Well, about an hour after you left the subject comes down with a newspaper under her arm. You know, the
Monde
, the small one, folded in half, like.”

“Momo, I know the
Monde
. Go on.”

“So she hangs around, like she doesn't know where to go. That looked odd. Then she walks down the street and starts poking around the stuff this store has out on the sidewalk. You know, pots and pans, suitcases, djellabas hanging on the wall, all that stuff.”

“I remember the store.”

“Anyway, this Asian guy comes up. Suit. With a
Monde
under his arm. He starts looking at this junk, too. At one point he brushes up against the subject and apologizes. They don't talk after that and he just walks off. Looked odd to me. Who in hell reads the
Monde
in Barbès? I think they switched papers. After the fact it struck me that the
Mondes
were fatter than they shoulda been.”

“Then what happened?”

“The subject just goes back upstairs. I know I fucked up. I should have tailed the Asian guy, but I didn't want to leave the subject without orders.”

“You did the right thing, Momo. I should have been with you. It sounds like a drop, all right. Stay with the subject. I'll be back there in half an hour.”

Capucine looked at Tallon pointedly. “Seems like Clotilde Lancrey-Javal just passed something to someone on the street. Momo couldn't follow him because I wasn't there to back him up.”

Tallon beamed. “Don't worry about that. Put more people on her surveillance. Upgrade the priority level on her wiretaps. Get going. Things are looking up.”

C
apucine let Rolland sulk in his cell until late in the afternoon of the next day before bringing him up to her office. Despite his wrinkled suit in which he had obviously slept for two nights, it was the same affable Rolland who still gave every indication of being on a social call.

“Monsieur Rolland, pleasant as our conversation was the other day, we really didn't spend as much time talking about the restaurant as I would have liked. I gather that there's no love lost between you and the kitchen staff but, nevertheless, Diapason is your place of business. A man has been found dead, people come and go in the middle of the night dragging heavy bags: obviously there must be a good deal of discussion about these things.”

“If there is, it isn't with me. I've already told you, Président Delage was not a devotee of wine. He possessed the rudiments, of course, but preferred ordering safe, solid, costly but dull wines of no particular interest. There was no pleasure in conferring with him. I'm sure his death was a tragedy, but not for me.”

“And the mysterious visit in the middle of the night?”

“I know even less about that. Who can say? Some sort of produce delivery, no doubt. As I'm sure you've been told, Jean-Basile Labrousse is famous, or shall I say infamous, for ordering his produce in minute quantities from small farms all over France. There are deliveries all the time. Obviously, avoiding the wholesale distributors is a good thing. I myself mistrust the large
marchands de vin
and buy a good deal of my wine locally direct from the châteaux. But there are limits. Apparently the kitchen is continually in fear of having to withdraw a dish from the menu in the middle of the service, which would just not do in a three-star restaurant, particularly if the wine I had chosen for that dish had already been uncorked.”

“But there is the question of the key. Would a farmer, if that's who it was, be given a key?”

Rolland laughed. “Madame, I couldn't care less who has keys or who makes deliveries. My wine cellar has a steel door as solid as a safe's. It has to meet the insurance company specifications. As long as they can't get into it—and they certainly can't—I don't give a damn who traipses around the restaurant, day or night.”

Capucine looked at him sharply. “Who has keys to the cellar?”

“Just Labrousse and myself.” Rolland paused and stared at the floor. “But I don't allow anyone in there without my being present.” He raised his head and his eyes traversed the room slowly like the twin barrels of a shotgun until they stared hard into Capucine's. “You can't imagine how painful it is for me to think of my
aide sommelier
pawing my bottles without my supervision.”

“Oh, I'm quite sure he's been perfectly trained by you and is a credit to the restaurant.”

“Lieutenant, how long is this going to go on for? Are you going to allow me to work tonight?”

“Not tonight, no. Let's hope we can make more progress tomorrow.” Capucine stood up as Momo arrived and turned her back on Rolland. Without a word Momo escorted him from the room.

The next day Capucine again waited until after lunch to send for him. Even though Rolland was now haggard and his suit frankly scruffy, smelling faintly of urine and industrial disinfectant, he still hung on valiantly to the shreds of his affable tone. Capucine continued their discussion, hardly an interrogation, into the late afternoon. Rolland reiterated his utter lack of interest in pastimes that didn't involve enology and his disdain for the pedestrian domain of food preparation. At precisely four o'clock Capucine stopped the conversation short and conspicuously pushed the button that summoned Momo.

“Your forty-eight hours of garde à vue are up. I'm going to have you driven home. You're in no condition to be on the streets.”

When Momo arrived she beckoned him to the window and whispered almost inaudibly in his ear. “Use my car. Drive him home. Take him up to his apartment. Make sure he steps over the threshold. Then arrest him immediately and bring him back. I'm not through with him.”

Momo did a double take but walked Rolland out the door without comment.

Within an hour Rolland was back in his old cell, untouched since his departure. Capucine had no difficulty imagining his dismay at the evening meal, which would probably consist of a glutinous heap of tasteless, unsalted white beans with a few unidentifiable shreds of meat serving as a backdrop for a glass of tap water drawn from the cold-water sink in his cell.

Capucine again left him to his own devices until the next afternoon, when she had him brought, not to her office, but an interrogation room on the second floor of the Quai. In a Chanel suit and the extravagant mules she had acquired during her antidepression spree Capucine looked jarringly out of place in the depressingly drab room with its cheap felt carpeting, sound-deadening foam wall tiles, and gray Formica table with four—inevitably—bent metal chairs. Even more out of place was the bottle of wine on a small table next to the door.

When Capucine had asked Alexandre to name the wine that would be most likely to attract the attention of a sommelier he had hiked his eyebrows and intoned a bored litany as if it were a Gregorian chant, “lafitelatourmoutonhautbrionmargauxyquempétrus-romanéeeeeaycontiiiieeiieeii.”

“No, no silly, not the obvious ones. I know all of those. I want something outstanding but relatively unknown. And if it works, I might even give you the bottle.”

“Ah. That changes everything.” He thought for a moment. “How about a bottle of La Mouline? It's a Côte Rôtie. Superb, little known, and almost impossible to get. They only make three hundred cases a year. I saw a bottle of the 1991 the other day for a little under a thousand euros.”

“Perfect. That exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.”

“What sort of up-market mouse do you expect to catch with such a luxurious cheese?”

“It's not going to be used as cheese. It's what they called a ‘stressor' at the academy interrogation classes. If it works I'll tell you all about it tomorrow while we're drinking the damn thing.”

As a uniformed policeman led Rolland into the interrogation room he held back for an instant to stare at the bottle lying in an open wooden box like a dead body at a viewing. Capucine placed him at the table half-facing the bottle, at which he darted frequent nervous glances.

This time around Rolland seemed unable to muster his cocktail-party persona. He breathed audibly through his mouth. The ammoniac jail-cell acridness was more pronounced and was now enhanced by a musky smell of body odor. He was as gray and gaunt as if he had moldered in the depths of a dungeon for decades. Sitting on the corner of his chair he shifted nervously, mute while Capucine drummed her fingers inaudibly on the table. The eternity of a minute passed as Capucine's little smile ebbed like a parting tide. “Well?” she asked finally.

Rolland paused, twisted on the corner of his chair, gulped, stared at her, then at the bottle, then back at her, and finally, in a small voice that needed to be primed by a cough, said, “Okay, okay, it was me. I confess.”

“Of course you do. Everyone loves catharsis. But to what exactly do you confess? Be specific.”

“It was me bringing the bag into the kitchen. The other man was a, well, an associate.”

“Grégoire,” Capucine said, falling into the first-name and familiar “
tu
” the police invariably use with the criminal classes. “Why don't you just get on with it and tell the story instead of being coy. We'll both get where we're going much faster that way.”

“Lieutenant, believe me, it's nothing. It was foolish of me not to tell you from the beginning. But once I had fibbed I had to stick to it. You'll laugh when I tell you.”

“Out with it, Grégoire.”

“See, I actually do have a little pastime. I like to gamble. It gives me a big thrill that relieves the tension. You wouldn't think there's a lot of tension in my job. But there is. Anyway, you know how it is with gambling. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” He stopped, uncertain how to continue.

“When you say you gamble, what do you mean? You buy lottery tickets at the café?”

Rolland sneered. A bit of his bravado had returned. “Hardly. Sometimes I go to casinos for the weekend, sometimes I gamble in Paris. I'm sure the police know that there are a number of private clubs that cater to gambling even if it stretches the law a little. For the gambling to be a thrill the sums have to be important and the atmosphere has to be correct.”

“And what does your innocent little pastime have to do with carting bags around in the middle of the night?”

“I see that, like most women, you disapprove of gambling. But over the years I've won more than I've lost. How many people have a pastime that costs nothing and actually brings money in? Of course, every now and then your short-term losses are more than you expect. It's the way it works. But I always get it back. Always. Well, anyway, a while ago it happened that I owed a certain man—I most definitely won't tell you his name—a bit over fifty thousand euros. Unfortunately, I didn't have the money in the bank, so I did the honorable thing. I sold some of my wine to a marchand to pay him. Not much at all. Just two cases, actually.”

He paused and looked at Capucine, as if for approval. She stared back, expressionless.

“A week later I won big, as of course I knew I would. So I went to an auction at Drouot and bought two cases of the same wines I had sold. In fact, I got lucky and bought them for quite a bit less than I had received from the marchand. Since I certainly wasn't about to make a profit out of the transaction I also bought a case of a Forts de Latour that we were nearly out of at the restaurant. I gave the wine delivery man from Drouot a huge tip to make a delivery in the middle of the night. Those guys will do anything for a few euros. Voilà! Everyone was a winner. Even my cellar, which got an extra case of a wine for free. Wasn't it foolish of me not to tell you from the beginning?” Rolland seemed relieved and confident he was restored to Capucine's good graces.

“Simply put, you're telling me that in order to finance your gambling losses you steal wine from the cellar at Diapason? Is that it?”

“Hardly stealing!” Rolland looked shocked. “Yes, I sent some of my wine to a dealer but I knew I would replace it in a matter of days. I was careful to select the standard classics that are always on the market. There was no risk. I always recoup my losses quickly. I would never take any chances with my wine.” He gave a comfortable little chuckle of complicity.

“Do you realize, Grégoire, that a theft of this value is considered grand larceny? You could go to prison for over fifteen years. Worse, you've betrayed Chef Labrousse's trust. Hell, you've betrayed your profession. You're a discredit to the restaurant industry. It makes me happy to think of the years you'll have in jail to think it all over.”

“Lieutenant, now it's you being childish. I stole nothing. The wine is happily back in my cellar sleeping soundly. If anything has changed it's that I added a case. That's hardly a crime.”

For a second it was as if Capucine was back in the financial brigade. Rolland had the same self-satisfied, supercilious smirk plastered on his face that had never failed to enrage Capucine in her former role. It was clear Rolland felt he was fully entitled to his actions. For him it was Capucine, with her Little-Goodie-Two-Shoes morality, who was at fault and had to be handled carefully.

“Lieutenant, seriously, what sort of case do you have? There's no evidence. The Drouot commis will say he was home in bed. There's nothing missing from the cellar. There's just an extra case that I carelessly failed to note down when I bought it. Big deal.” He persisted with his maddening smirk.

Capucine clenched her teeth, her lips compressed into the beginning of a pucker for a long moment as she contemplated letting him rot in the cells downstairs for the rest of the month. She could probably get away with it, too. It was just the sort of thing Tallon liked to do. Finally, she sighed and shook her head in disgust.

“All right. You were lucky this time. But it's not going to be that easy for you. I'm going to give you a choice: either you quit Diapason and leave Paris or I'll have a chat with Chef Labrousse and make damn sure that he drums you out of the business and destroys your reputation. If you're a good boy and leave Paris by the end of the week I won't say a word to Chef Labrousse. He's suffered enough as it is. But God help you if I ever see you in this town again.”

“Lieutenant, you're the most charming policeman I've ever met, but I really do think you've seen too many Westerns.” Rolland walked out of the room as jauntily as when he had first come in four days before. Capucine had a hard time restraining herself from throwing one of the bent chairs at him.