The Awkward Squad Read online

  “No! No, not at all,” Capestan said, backpedaling furiously. “It’s superstition, that’s all it is—you’ve just proved that.”

  Capestan sat down and filled him in on the developments before explaining the plan of action: a couple of officers staking out the bicycle; some of the others busily looking into the Squirrel and the boat; and the last few doing tag teams to keep an eye on Buron (who, incidentally, had dropped a strong hint about a certain siren for Lieutenant Torrez).

  “At last!” he exclaimed, as if collecting a long-overdue distinction.

  They chatted for a bit longer about life at the Commissariat des Innocents. The wallpaper was up, they had hung some curtains to make the living room feel cozier and had brought in a few cooking utensils. Évrard was insisting they needed to wrap the shrubs against the winter, Dax had torn up the parquet floor after catching his foot on a nail, and Merlot had broken the photocopier by sitting on it. Lewitz was putting the finishing touches on their new-look kitchen, which protruded a bit into the bay window but was otherwise fine. That morning, Orsini had made a joke. The team was so stunned they forgot to laugh. He was a good sport about it, acknowledging that it wasn’t the first time he had had that effect.

  Torrez gave a running commentary, including a promise to donate a dessert set they no longer needed in their kitchen at home. The conversation gradually petered out and a peaceful silence fell on the room. Like police officers at a stakeout, the two of them let their thoughts drift around the room, neither of them wanting to disturb the other. Then Torrez cleared his throat and Capestan knew he was about to ask the question he had not dared to ask until now.

  “The guy you . . . What happened?”

  Capestan sank back in her chair. She was not really in the mood for discussing that episode from her past.

  “As stories go, it’s not a barrel of laughs. Are you sure?”

  Torrez looked down, not wanting to push her. The commissaire could tell that he now considered her a proper partner, and that he wouldn’t mind keeping it hazy if need be. He could handle the uncertainty. But the man had just body-checked a bus for her—they were beyond hiding from their pasts. She sighed, folded her arms, and prepared to answer the lieutenant’s questions.

  “Three years ago, I was with the BRB.”

  “The antigang squad?” Torrez said in amazement.

  This squad was legendary, the high point of any career. Yet now she had been relegated. The lieutenant tried to fathom such a fall from grace.

  “Yup, antigang,” Capestan replied with a hint of nostalgia. “I was doing well there. Then one day I was reassigned to the brigade de protection de mineurs at quai des Gesvres. Big pay raise—I couldn’t say no.”

  “But you should have?”

  “Yes,” she said, unfolding her arms.

  Children, kidnappings, distressed families, abuse . . . Always the most poignant and tragic events. And it was relentless. Every evening, Capestan was confronted by her own powerlessness, by the feeling that she was buried in the battlefield. She barely lasted a year before having to admit to herself that she was not up to it. She had never been calm by instinct; she could not keep her emotions at arm’s length. On her previous postings, she could always recover between one ghastly case and the next. Not there; not once. Her ability to detach vanished in the space of a few months. She had drained her reserves of cool-headedness; now it was only hot, ready to boil over for the smallest reason. She put in a transfer request. Buron refused, saying she had to do another year. So she stayed.

  “A brother and a sister, aged twelve and eight, had disappeared,” Capestan started. “We prayed they had run away, but obviously we feared it was a nutjob. The search wasn’t going anywhere—we were floundering. Weeks went by, then months.”

  Months. The thought devastated her all over again.

  “They had been kidnapped. Eventually we found a lead and tracked the guy down to some godforsaken place near Melun. While my colleagues searched the house, I went to check the hut around the back. I smashed the padlock. The two children were in there, emaciated and black with grime. At first I stood there in the doorway, knocked senseless. They stayed there holding each other on a straw mattress on the ground. Next to them was an old man, also showing signs of malnourishment. But he was dead, had been for a day, maybe more. When I arrived, the kids didn’t make a sound—silent as the grave. Eventually I tried to reassure them, then I heard a sound behind me. The man was standing there in the doorway. The sun was behind him, so I could make out his profile perfectly, but I couldn’t discern his facial features or what he had in his hands. There was a pad of paper in one of them, for sure, but in the other I couldn’t tell if it was a pen or a knife. When he saw me he didn’t try to flee. Quite the opposite—he asked me what I was doing on his property. I saw the little girl’s hand grasp the earth next to me. I stood up and positioned myself between the man and the children so they wouldn’t see. And then I shot him.”

  “Sexual abuse?”

  “Not sexual, no. He was a megalomaniac. He’d been studying the Great Famine from the time of the Ancien Régime. The bastard wanted to get to the truth. He was carrying out a clinical study of the effects of hunger on the most vulnerable segments of society: children and the elderly. Not on thirty-year-old rugby players, of course. In his view, science justified making sacrifices, like doctors who run tests on monkeys.”

  Capestan couldn’t help thinking that, in her current state, she would not be averse to putting a bullet in those doctors, either. Torrez smoothed out his sheet with his hand. The father in him approved of the shot; the policeman wanted her arrested. He scratched the remote control distractedly.

  “Do you regret it?” he said after a while.

  That old question. Three lives ruined versus one dead son of a bitch? Capestan was too respectful of math to have any regrets. But she also knew that made her seem like a sociopath.

  “I’m undecided,” she lied.

  Torrez appeared to take it as a yes.

  “Was it a knife?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Was he holding a knife?”

  “It was a pen.”

  “And did your colleagues cover for you?”

  “Even better,” she replied. “My boss did. Buron was first on the scene. His version of events was categorical: self-defense. If Buron said so . . .”

  If it had not been for him, she would not only have been dismissed—she would have ended up in jail. His word had saved her, and his invoice had just arrived.

  Was that what this was? Was he making her pay? Had he set up the squad with Capestan, his debtor, in charge so that she would find him a nice scapegoat? She could feel the threat lurking beneath the surface: Buron was expecting her to protect him; otherwise their pact was off. Was she supposed to rig the investigations, hide the evidence, and ultimately betray the victims? This was out of the question.

  But betraying Buron was not something she could do lightly.

  Capestan’s mind was in disarray from the chief’s machinations. Could her mentor really do something so cynical? Capestan refused to believe it. She refused with such certainty, in fact, that she obliterated the thought entirely. She needed to analyze the facts, to recover her ability to examine each aspect with complete objectivity.

  As for Torrez, he was still caught up with the commissaire’s debt:

  “If Buron got you off the hook, I don’t see why he would have assigned you to this squad. You made a big mistake, but it was isolated.”

  Isolated. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In the months leading up to the incident, she had already let off a few stray bullets into the kneecaps of certain thugs. She had been involved in a couple of questionable hit-and-runs, which would never have fooled Buron at police HQ, let alone Lebreton at the IGS. The truth was, the shot she fired in that hut had brought her dark spiral to a close. Capestan had earned her dismissal twenty times over.

  The sound of heels clicking down t
he corridor was followed by a knock on Torrez’s door. He told whoever it was to come in, and after a few seconds of hesitation, Rosière poked her head around the door, then flung it wide open. Lebreton followed her into the room. They greeted Torrez with outstretched palms, displaying a blend of caution and camaraderie. Lebreton then tugged at his shirt cuff before slinking off to lean against the wall opposite the bed. Rosière stayed by his side, furiously fiddling with her saint medallions.

  “How are things going with the passenger list?” Capestan wanted to know, still by the bedside of the semi-mummified lieutenant.

  “So far, so good. The company’s based in Miami. They’re sending it to Évrard so we should have it in two or three days.”

  “Perfect. How about the tailing?”

  “That’s been a bit more problematic,” Lebreton admitted, shifting his weight to the other leg.

  “In what way?”

  “Buron’s a canny policeman. It’s hard to follow him without being spotted, especially because he knows most of us. At a distance, out in the street, we can stay undercover—”

  “The old boy’s not a fucking gazelle,” Rosière cut in with a chuckle. “He’s not going to leave us in the dust.”

  Various sounds were creeping into the room from the corridor: a cart rolling past, trays being cleared, and the singsong voices of the nurses doing their rounds.

  “The trouble is we can’t stake him out at number 36,” Lebreton continued. “What with the cameras and the windows that look out on the embankment, it’s impossible to go unnoticed. Cars can’t park, tourists just walk straight past. I wondered if we should forget about direct surveillance and post teams on the side roads leading up to the building, but there’s not enough of us—”

  “Or we focus on his out-of-office movements and drop number 36 completely. But then that’s hardly a tail,” said Rosière, who was wearing a dazzling white-vinyl raincoat.

  No, if they were going to keep Buron under surveillance, then they certainly were not going to skip around his work-related activity. But number 36 was hard to pin down—they needed to find a solution.

  “What about some binoculars on the opposite bank?” Capestan suggested.

  Lebreton dismissed the idea with a shake of the head.

  “Visible from the floors higher up, plus very suspect. We thought about renting an apartment . . .”

  “. . . but cheap studios with views of the Seine are hard to come by,” Rosière chimed in. “And the well-to-do aren’t really the sort to lend you a window for a couple of euros . . .”

  “We could try and requisition one . . . ,” Capestan ventured.

  “. . . but they’d complain to high heaven,” Rosière said, joining the commissaire with a sardonic grin.

  The capitaine was getting hot in her shiny raincoat, especially because Torrez had cranked up the radiators. She flapped both sides to try and get some ventilation before shrugging it off and folding it over her arm.

  “There’s construction going on at the moment, isn’t there?”

  “Affirmative,” the commandant said. “Some scaffolding up to the top floor and part of the roof. But we can’t just plunk ourselves there, not even in construction gear. We’re talking about spying on the police judiciaire, not some bunch of ruffians. The construction company would never agree to it. And I’ve checked, there isn’t room for a construction trailer at street level. Trust me, it’s impossible: there’s no way to plant someone on the sly at number 36.”

  “We’ve run dry,” Rosière agreed.

  Torrez turned the remote control over in his fingers, running his nail across the rubber buttons. The commissaire racked her memory of quai des Orfèvres and the surrounding area, picturing the massive barred windows, the entrance, the walkway above the Seine’s embankment, the horse chestnuts, the handful of parking spaces beyond the automatic barrier. Nowhere to hide. They needed to find another option. An idea was starting to form.

  “Well, if we can’t be discreet, let’s do it in full view,” Capestan declared.

  Key West Island, South Florida

  May 2, 1993

  The air was extremely humid and heavy with the scent of salt and flowers. Two emerald-green parakeets were fluttering around the banyan tree, whose roots were mangling the road surface. The colors, the warmth, the silence. Alexandre never wanted to go back to France.

  He was going to have to, though, to tend to Attila.

  Attila. The nickname spoke volumes. The little boy was exploring the bottom part of the garden under Alexandre’s watchful eye. He was wielding a spade that was normally reserved for building sand castles, slamming it into one trunk after the next. He had never used that spade to build anything. Alexandre sighed and mopped his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief.

  The young man who owned the bike rental shack waved to him as he walked down the street. His trusty, dignified pirate’s parrot was perched on his shoulder, swaying from side to side. They swaggered into Sloppy Joe’s on Duval Street. What Alexandre would have done for a nice glass of bourbon. France. No more diving; no more days draped in linen and cotton. Back to work, which meant wool and uniforms. The brief dalliance had run its course.

  A rooster appeared on the opposite roadside. There were never many cars on these broad, tree-lined streets, and if there were they went at a gentle pace. The unperturbed rooster was in no hurry itself as it made its way toward Alexandre’s open gate. He tried to scare it away with a whistle, but the fowl was stubborn as well as stupid. It was normal for the roosters there to roam wild, since the locals trained them to hunt and eat scorpions. The roosters respected their side of the bargain, and in return they expected to be left in peace. With its comb held high and its chest puffed out, the rooster came farther into the garden. Attila spotted it straightaway and tore toward it, brandishing the spade and yelling at the top of his lungs. Alexandre abruptly shot out his hand to intercept the child and clung onto him. Red-faced and furious, Attila thrashed his limbs in every direction, but soon he tired himself out and succumbed to Alexandre’s viselike grip.

  “He’s got the blood of a guerrillero,” the boy’s mother said, with a twinkle of Cuban pride in her eye.

  “Guerrilleros are only for times of revolution, Rosa” came the reply.

  His wife had just pulled up in her mud-spattered white jeep. She put the hand brake on and got out of the car, then headed around to the passenger side. She unfastened the seat belt and carefully took little Gabriel in her arms. The tears had long since dried on the child’s cheeks, and in his hand he had one of those colorful lollipops the doctor lets you have. The bandage around his little finger made it hard to hold. Alexandre felt a tightness in his chest and looked searchingly at Rosa. She waited until she was by his side before pointing to the Band-Aid on Gabriel’s ear.

  “They couldn’t sew it back: the lobe was torn off.”

  39

  “Do you think that if number 36 had been at number 38, they still would have called it 36?” Dax said.

  Évrard pretended to think it through before giving her answer:

  “No.”

  Sitting on the stone wall of the quai des Orfèvres embankment, opposite the entrance to the headquarters of the Parisian section of the police judiciaire, she was observing the windows on the third floor, which is where the management had their offices.

  “Yeah, number 38 sounds bad,” Dax went on. “Could be worse, though. Could have been number 132, flat B. Can you imagine? ‘Open up! Number 132, Flat B here.’ They’d have to find another name, I’m telling you.”

  Évrard smiled and let her gaze drift down the Seine. A boatman was steering his barge with a steady hand behind the thick glass of his wheelhouse, enjoying his morning coffee with careful, deliberate sips as the early autumn sunshine broke through the trees, bridges, and apartment buildings. Évrard envied the traveler’s freedom. She kicked her legs alternately to get some kind of rhythm and keep herself awake in the monotony of the surveillance. The grainy sto
ne scratched her through the fabric of her jeans.

  Today she had been paired up with Dax for Buron’s surveillance, and she was hoping that the saying about sticks and stones and words would ring true. On top of her windbreaker she was sporting a T-shirt that Orsini, ever the man of letters, had decorated with the slogan COMMISSARIAT ON STRIKE. Capestan’s idea. Since undercover surveillance was not an option, they were pretending to be pickets—the ideal excuse to be both stationary and conspicuous. Plus, with no equipment and even fewer rights, the commissaire reminded them that their relegated squad had plenty to complain about. Évrard had not been convinced by this strategy, objecting that Buron wouldn’t risk going anywhere if he knew they were outside. Capestan had insisted: “He’ll never suspect we’re tailing him, he’ll think it’s a genuine strike. He thinks we’re a bunch of idiots. And anyway, that’s not the point—we still don’t know what we’re looking for, but we do know there’s a link with number 36, so best we keep an eye on what happens there. Let’s see who does respond to our presence.”

  Dax, sitting on the wall next to her, had also daubed his T-shirt in fat, slightly smudged block capitals saying THE FORCE IS NOT WITH US. Helpful as ever, he and Lewitz had come up with A PIECE 4 THE POLICE; CASH, NOT TRASH; and a variety of football-related slogans. Capestan felt apprehensive about this bombardment and ended up going for the least moronic suggestion. She did, however, decide it was best to split up the two friends on this mission.

  And so Dax and Évrard had arrived at 8:00 a.m., and barely a minute into their surveillance of Buron, the duty guard at the entrance—a young, stocky guy with a pale complexion and short arms—was squinting at them curiously. He smiled mockingly and phoned up a superior to ask what was to be done with this “picket line” made up of “two very quiet people.” The answer must have been “Clear them away,” since he came up and asked if they wouldn’t mind moving along. Évrard had refused outright. The orderly went off to get some further instructions, returning with two other similarly bewildered guards.