The Awkward Squad Page 7

  It meant a blow for Évrard’s sense of smell, but it came down to simple arithmetic. The young lieutenant shrugged resignedly. She knew all about the tyranny of numbers.

  Key West Island, South Florida

  January 19, 1991

  Reaching through the gaps in the bulletproof glass, Alexandre picked up the gold ingot. It was both heavier and softer than he had previously imagined it would be. This was the museum’s big attraction, its main marketing hook. As you came in you had to hand over your ticket in exchange for a little oval sticker that was patted authoritatively onto your chest, with black lettering on a gold background that read I LIFTED A GOLD BAR. Never let anyone say that a trip here is futile.

  Alexandre felt the delicate touch of Rosa’s palm on the bare skin of his forearm.

  “I don’t feel so well . . . ,” she whispered, the same way she did when she wanted breakfast in bed.

  “If it’s because you want me to steal that emerald for you, then my answer is no,” Alexandre joked. “There are cameras all over the place.”

  “No. No. It’s my water, I think . . . ,” she said, gripping his arm more tightly.

  Gasping for breath, she took hold of Alexandre’s hand and slid to the floor, where she lay down. Water. What water?

  “Are you going to give birth here? Now?”

  “Yes, I think so, yes.”

  “We’re in a museum, you can’t give birth here . . .”

  Sweat was forming on his wife’s dark forehead and she smiled. She wasn’t going to give in: she was absolutely serious that this was to be the place, right in the middle of the display cases of the Mel Fisher Museum, where she would bring her son into the world.

  13

  Outside, a thin mist was obscuring the stars in the gray night. Only the blue neon sign on the hotel opposite illuminated the room. Sitting on his sofa, his bare feet on the drab parquet floor, Louis-Baptiste Lebreton was smoking with all the lights off. He could have stayed like that for hours, with the red standby signal on his television as his only witness, a static contrast to the flickering ember of his Dunhill. His bass guitar, a Rickenbacker 4001, was hanging on the wall so as not to wake the neighbors. The glass-fronted poster for Bowie’s Hammersmith Odeon show cast the occasional reflection, which Lebreton would follow for an hour, sometimes two, before going to sleep. He woke up, then he smoked. Most of the time, he waited until 6:00 a.m.—that was when normal people got up. Add in a shower and a coffee, and soon it would be 7:00 a.m. That was an acceptable time to set about the day. Lebreton never left a single task unattended: life had dealt him more time than tasks. He stubbed out his cigarette and sat back on the sofa to wait.

  In three hours, he would pay Maëlle Guénan a visit. He was not that interested in the inquiry, and certainly not in the godforsaken squad, but this was the way of the world, so on he would go, if only to stay in the frame. At least Rosière was funny. As for Capestan, he was not expecting anything there.

  Seven o’clock. In the chest of drawers, Vincent’s T-shirts were still stacked in an immaculate pile. Lebreton had ironed the ones that were drying on the rack before the accident, then folded them up in the drawer. Maëlle Guénan’s husband had been dead for twenty years. After all that time, surely the pain was enveloped beneath several thick layers of film. One layer per year, maybe. Or maybe not. Lebreton did not know; he only hoped.

  As for him, eight months later and he still had the impression that he was sleeping under a shroud, that he was showering in a mausoleum. Each room, each item of furniture, each creak of the floor evoked the exact same feeling as a year before, when he looked forward to opening the door and everything in the apartment seemed useful. Nowadays, its contents were just souvenirs; Lebreton could neither bear to stay nor leave. In this place, every action carried a subtitle. He wandered into the kitchen to have breakfast, which he ate standing up to avoid sitting at the table alone.

  They had lived together for twelve years. Throughout those twelve years, Vincent had sliced his bread over the sink to avoid making a mess, and each morning Louis-Baptiste had come through and run the tap to chase away the soaked crumbs. Even now, whenever Lebreton approached the sink, he did so hunched up and overcome with nausea. In the fridge door was the last in a long series of empty jars of cornichons, which Vincent insisted on keeping until Providence intervened to throw them out. Lebreton had never touched anything, and the jar had stayed put, full of vinegar, its green plastic contraption still hanging in the middle. Louis-Baptiste, who never ate cookies, kept three packages of Saint-Michel galettes in his cupboard, one of which was half-empty. On the bookcase in the living room, the first volume of The Farseer Trilogy had been shelved the wrong way up. Volume two was sitting on Vincent’s bedside table, dog eared. The table actually belonged to Louis-Baptiste, who had been given it by his family, but he liked to call it “Vincent’s bedside table.” It was on Vincent’s side of the bed. Lebreton hadn’t changed the sheets for eight months. And Friday night drinks were now every night drinks. At thirty-nine years of age, he was already “the ghostly, the widowed, the disconsolate”—all he was good for was quoting this single line from Nerval.

  Lebreton put on his black jacket and zipped up his boots, giving the former a brush and the latter a buff. His body, crippled by loss, had become a straitjacket. He wanted to rip it off and run, the way people flee the capital for the countryside. He wanted to leave this all behind, just for a weekend. As he closed the door behind him, he wondered how long it had taken for Guénan to remake her bed.

  It was bucketing down. At the café on the corner, Lebreton found Rosière and her dog sheltering beneath the awning of the terrace. The rain was making a racket on the canvas. Rosière seemed to be coming off second best as she tried to open her paper packet of sugar. Pilou leapt up on seeing Lebreton, causing the table to lurch to one side, spilling half the coffee and making Rosière drop both sugar and paper into her cup.

  “Shitty fucking table . . . ,” she said before looking up at the commandant.

  Maëlle Guénan lived on rue Mazagran not far from here, and they had agreed to meet here before heading on together. Lebreton sat down next to Rosière, stroked the dog’s head, and signaled to the waiter for a coffee.

  “Morning, Eva. Are you planning on bringing Pilote, too?”

  “No, I’ll leave him in the Lexus. He should be fine for half an hour with the window open a crack. Might even help us avoid the car getting swiped.”

  The rain hammered into the awning as the pedestrians hurried along the pavement, while some of them huddled in the doorway opposite the bar, staring at the sky to make sure they didn’t miss a clear spell. A gale was picking up, flipping umbrellas and blowing flyers down the street. The water in the puddles was rippling and a rumble of thunder announced the next downpour.

  “Savage day,” Rosière said, trying to reassure the dog cowering between her ankles.

  “That’s a funny expression—where does it come from?” Lebreton asked.

  “It’s a Loire thing, I’m from Saint-Étienne. What about you, you’re not a Parisian, I hope?”

  “No, I’m from outside Dijon.”

  Lebreton’s parents lived in the sticks, in that lowland expanse that rushes past on the train, and that you run away from as a teenager in favor of the hustle and bustle of Le Marais. The commandant drank his espresso in one shot, then placed enough change in the saucer to cover both of them. The rain had calmed, as if gathering its strength for the next bombardment; a window of opportunity in the storm that they could not afford to miss.

  “Shall we?”

  The dog seemed to think the invitation was directed at him, and he jumped to his feet and started wagging his tail frantically.

  “Do you remember the Key Line Express shipwreck?” Maëlle Guénan asked as an opener.

  Rosière was struggling to concentrate, knowing that Pilou was all by himself in the car. Poor little thing. What with the storm, too, he must be overcome with distress and worry on
those honey-colored leather seats. On top of that, she always found these preliminary interviews tiresome—nothing useful ever came out of them. Rosière usually saw them as an opportunity to establish a picture of the witness, nothing more. She was always on the lookout for the moment when the emotions started to come through. Only at that point would you get any leads worthy of the name. Shit, the nice lady had just asked her a question—what was it again? Oh yes . . .

  “No, before our investigation I had never heard of it.”

  Maëlle Guénan nodded sadly. At almost forty-four years of age, she was wearing jeans with various colors of butterfly sewn onto them, and her baggy mauve cotton sweater was starting to fray at the elbows. She smiled, pushed back her hair with her chewed fingers, and moved her feet together. A silver, star-shaped badge twinkled on the laces of her sneakers.

  “Same with me, I have to admit,” Lebreton added from his magisterial height.

  Lebreton: Such a waste, Rosière thought to herself. There had even been a twinkle in Guénan’s distant eye when she saw the stud.

  “It’s crazy,” Maëlle said. “Twenty years and no one remembers it anymore. People remember the Concordia, the Estonia. . . , but the Key Line? Nothing. Too far away. Or maybe not enough deaths. Although there were forty-three. Forty-three deaths, you realize. Maybe it’s because there weren’t enough French people among the victims.”

  A laminated floral-pattern tablecloth covered the kitchen table, where Maëlle had invited them to sit down. They could feel the nonslip padded protector underneath. The corners had worn through with use, revealing the dark wood below. The straw chairs were threatening to collapse—Rosière and Lebreton kept still and watchful as a precaution. Along the wall were three fake brass portholes, under which was a series of gold-framed photographs showing a boy growing into a fine-looking young man: Cédric, their son, no doubt. On a side table, a bizarre instrument with a grille, also brass, drew Rosière’s attention. A compass, she figured.

  “Can I offer you a cider?” Maëlle said, her voice so soft they had to lean forward to hear her.

  Cider! So that was her poison, Rosière thought. Cider? Goodness gracious, old girl . . . Well, reputations don’t come out of thin air. Rosière was about to pick up the compass-thingy to have a look, but Lebreton’s glare stopped her just in time.

  “Two ciders would be lovely, thank you,” he said, with his half-silky, half-shattered tone.

  Maëlle appeared to live an austere life. She looked like the sort of person who dreads opening the mailbox. Next to a white playpen in the corner of the room, a see-through plastic box was overflowing with teddy bears, colorful bricks, and scuffed toys. Her childcare toolkit. Once Maëlle had come back with an already open bottle of cider and three glasses, Lebreton picked up the thread:

  “Your husband was on board when the ship sank, is that right?”

  “He was never the same after that,” she said, sitting forward in her chair. Her eyes stayed glued to the glass in her hands. “It was all he thought about. He’d wake up sweating in the middle of the night. He spoke about it all the time: the panic on board, the people screaming and stampeding over each other. Some people take their traumas to the grave in silence, but with him it was the opposite. I think he told me the story of every person on that ferry. For weeks he spoke of nothing else. He wouldn’t even listen to our little boy when he came home from school. In the evening, he’d sometimes go off on a tangent halfway through a film, telling us about the girl he’d seen punching a granddad in the face. He’d wake me up in the night to share some episode that had come back to him. Like the man who jumped overboard shouting ‘My glasses, my glasses!,’ his hands pressing against his face to make sure he didn’t lose them, while his wife tried to cling on to a rubber life ring. Women trampling over teenagers, people yelling in different languages, and so many other horrors. It was terrifying to hear. Of course Yann saw some heroic behavior, or just some good, altruistic acts. But those didn’t stay with him; he spoke less about them. He did love the story of a Frenchwoman whose husband had yelled at her, ‘Save what you can.’ And in her panic, she’d grabbed the first thing that came to hand: a plastic salt shaker! Yann went to see them again after the shipwreck. The woman had kept the salt shaker in a glass cabinet. ‘I’d take this over my jewelry box any day: it’s precious to me,’ she had said. Yann liked that couple.”

  “Did anyone have any cause for complaint regarding your husband’s conduct during the accident?” Lebreton said, leaning forward.

  “No, no one. And after hearing the survivors’ condolences at his funeral, I can be absolutely sure of that: Yann behaved like a true sailor.”

  Rosière was admiring the living room’s ochre wallpaper. Really gives a room some oomph, wallpaper: more crisp, more refined.

  “Could anyone have wanted to harm him?” Lebreton asked softly.

  “Are you joking?”

  The abruptness of her tone yanked Rosière from her decorative reverie. They were getting to the heart of the matter, when the accusations would start flying thick and fast. Maëlle Guénan simply could not believe she was being asked this again:

  “Jallateau! It’s all his fault—Jallateau, the shipbuilder. There’s no doubt he was behind the murder. When it came to foreign clients, he skimped on safety checks and materials. The bow doors were too weak: they gave way and the ramp flooded. After taking on water, the ferry keeled over in less than an hour. On top of that, the public address system on board was defective, so the passengers didn’t know which deck to go to. Yann wanted to sue the crook. He built a case and contacted as many passengers as possible—Americans, Cubans—to get them to testify. He visited the French passengers one by one—it took him weeks. He prepared a document this thick,” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “Then he went to Saint-Nazaire to see Jallateau. And three days later, he was dead. No illness, no accident. A bullet.”

  She stared at them in turn, her eyes gleaming. She was exhausted by all this injustice, drained by the delays and inaction.

  “And to this day, there hasn’t been a single arrest.”

  When Lebreton and Rosière came out onto the street, the rain was still running down the windows, though the sunshine was doing its best to break through the charcoal-gray clouds.

  “Jallateau the powerful versus Guénan the insubordinate. The lone ranger heading into battle with nothing but his pants and a pocketknife—always makes for a juicy story,” Rosière said amidst blowing her nose. “On the other hand, the shipbuilder must have known that he’d end up as suspect number one.”

  The capitaine rolled her hankie into a ball and slipped it up her sleeve, then let out a squeal of delight as she saw that both Lexus and dog were intact. Pilote bounced up and smeared the windows with saliva.

  “The original detectives didn’t find a shred of evidence against him,” Lebreton replied. “But he may well have called in a gun for hire. Or maybe someone just used their own gun: a trial would have put lots of jobs at risk. When the guys at the shipyard saw Guénan showing up with his case notes, it must have made them sweat.”

  “True. And sailors aren’t renowned for being the brightest.”

  “Unlike police officers—remarkable how quickly they managed to solve this case,” Lebreton said mockingly.

  Rosière took his point with a nod.

  “Jallateau’s company is based at Sables-d’Olonne nowadays,” he continued. “He must have gotten fed up with ferries—now he’s taking commissions for luxury catamarans. I think this calls for a day at the seaside.”

  “Couldn’t agree more,” she said. “Hey, it was pretty nice, the wallpaper in her living room, don’t you think? We could do with a bit of that at the commissariat.”

  Évrard closed the door to her teenage bedroom, with its starlit ceiling, poster of Scorsese’s Casino, and single bed. For the past six months, she had been back with her parents. She headed through to the hallway and picked her windbreaker off the polished
-wood coat stand. Before leaving, she poked her head into the kitchen to say good-bye to her mother, who responded with a “knock ’em dead.”

  Out on the pavement, Évrard absentmindedly checked the contents of her pocket through the waterproof material. Her lucky euro was there, safe and sound. Her last euro: the one she didn’t gamble away; the one she could use to rebuild her life. At times she had been tempted to throw it into the Seine, just to see what would happen. It was all a load of claptrap, anyway. Even the worst gamblers know that you can’t get your life back on track with one euro. So what did you need? That was the real question.

  14

  “Right, he’s refusing,” Capestan announced as she came into Torrez’s office.

  “Did he tell it to you in so many words?”

  The lieutenant rested his elbows on the reams of printed sheets spread across his desk. He seemed surprised that Valincourt had even agreed to take her call.

  “No, I got one of his assistants, who relayed a message from the divisionnaire: he can’t see us right now, but we shouldn’t hesitate to contact him at a later stage or to bring a précis of the investigation to his attention, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Capestan sighed. Out of all the officers connected with the Sauzelle case, the only one still in the region was Valincourt. He was already a big cheese at the time, so he had done more overseeing than actual investigating and was therefore unlikely to remember a great deal. On top of that, the divisionnaire was hardly the most available or accommodating resident of number 36.

  Torrez was frowning with the resignation of a man who had always endured refusals from his colleagues. He gave Capestan a faint smile before reverting to his standard prickly expression as he continued running through Naulin’s criminal record.

  The commissaire stood there looking vacantly at Torrez, waiting for a decision to materialize. According to his assistant, Valincourt was at the shooting range in La Chapelle. In ordinary circumstances, she could have gone along and played the chance-encounter card, but bearing in mind she had been relieved of her weapon, she was not really supposed to go there anymore. Valincourt would know that she was there to force his hand. Not that that was a big drama.