The Awkward Squad Read online

  “A chandelier?”

  Capestan felt the stirrings of a whirlwind.

  “As you wish . . . ,” Capestan said, knowing full well she was about to unleash a war machine.

  17

  One hour later, a gilt-bronze mirror and a crystal chandelier had appeared in the main room. Capestan and Rosière were celebrating the arrival in the deck chairs on the terrace, each sipping a cup of steaming tea. It was a mild autumn, perfect for the twin pleasures of the log fire and the terrace. The hurly-burly of the Parisians teeming around the fountain rose up toward the rooftops: laughter, piercing voices, ringing cell phones, the bells of bicycles, and the beating wings of the pigeons. A pair of djembe drums could be heard pounding in the distance, their soft rhythm setting the perfect tempo for the midmorning dawdlers. Lebreton came out and propped his elbow on the stone edge of the terrace as he lit a cigarette. The lull seemed to go on forever in the warmth, staving off the threat of the ringing telephone. Eventually it came, shattering the silence, and Capestan, ever the good soldier, stood up to answer it. Time for Buron’s verdict.

  She took a breath and picked up. It was indeed the chief, and his tone was far from friendly:

  “Your officers are over at Riverni’s, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct. Unlike your own highly qualified, utterly perfect son, Monsieur le Directeur, young Riverni is peddling some pretty low-grade coke—”

  “Capestan, what exactly are you trying to do? I forbid you to arrest or even question him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not one single juge d’instruction will take on the case. Just like last time, and that was with proper police officers,” Buron said. “We’ve tried it all before. Don’t bother wearing yourself out.”

  “I don’t feel worn out. In fact I feel in great shape.”

  “Capestan, please, this is not a laughing matter. Do you want to know how limited your options are? Let me spell it out for you: none of the investigating judges even know your squad exists. You simply don’t have the weight for this sort of case.”

  That final sentence really riled Capestan. She listened first to the silence, then to the tone at the other end of the line before resignedly hanging up. There was no point fighting if the public prosecutor’s doors were closed.

  However much she had seen this coming, a flush of annoyance rose to her face. She was really angry. Fine, Buron had laid out the rules from the start, but to be gagged so quickly was hard to take. Her squad deserved better than that; they would do better than that.

  The adrenaline was coursing through her veins. Capestan took a deep breath to try and dismiss the dark clouds overwhelming her, to think of a way around the barriers the chief had erected. Standing in the middle of the room, she screamed at no one in particular, hoping she’d be heard from the terrace through to the back offices:

  “Does anyone here know Divisionnaire Fomenko?”

  Her question was met with silence, and she was about to rephrase it when Rosière, mug in hand, rippled into the living room.

  “I know the dragon well,” she said in a husky voice, her grin heavy with innuendo.

  Capestan was not at all sure she wanted to hear the details, but it was good news nonetheless.

  “Listen, Buron’s refusing to let us nab Riverni. Our team is being forced to back down, officially at least. But surely the drug squad will have more to say on the matter. Fomenko is still tight with his old team: he might persuade them to check out the boy or, failing that, at least lend us a hand. But first we need to get him on our side. Might that be doable?”

  “Sure, why not,” Rosière said casually. “But should we really be so bothered about this dealer?”

  “Absolutely. If we give in this easily, it will discredit all our future actions. We’ll look like a bunch of clowns.”

  “And we are not a bunch of clowns . . .”

  “Precisely.”

  With her left thumb, Capestan traced the path of the scar running down her other index finger, a delicate reminder of a tumble she took while roller-skating, the first of many lessons in prudence she had failed to learn from.

  “Let’s be smart about this, though,” she said, lowering her voice but keeping all her determination. “Our future depends on our ability to indict the Riverni boy. If this kid goes before a judge, we’re back in the game.”

  “Very good, then. Very good,” Rosière said, her fingers lingering on the medallions around her neck. She was glad to discover that there was still another chance at a lucky break.

  18

  Évrard and Merlot had stayed put in Riverni’s neighborhood, waiting for the telephone calls to go up and down the hierarchical hill before making a decision. After her talk with Buron, Capestan had called them on-site and instructed them to wait for eventual reinforcements. Évrard told her that there was a small enclosure in the center of the Villa and that they had seen the boy hide his stash beneath a flagstone in a metal box. So they knew where to search if and when they got permission. The officers had rung the bell anyway to ask a few routine questions, taking care not to give their game away. This had not gone down well with the little braggart, and it looked as if things were about to take a turn. Merlot had intervened with great authority, confronting the young man without a grain of hesitation, despite being a foot shorter and thirty years older. Within seconds, the young lion had run off to kick up a fuss with Papa.

  Évrard had been greatly impressed by this sudden show of strength from Merlot, whom she had written off as a fully certified buffoon. She felt a fresh wave of confidence in her partner, and along with wanting to nab their irritating dealer, that made two solid reasons to wait for Fomenko’s cavalry.

  Unfortunately, Rosière came back empty handed in the late afternoon. Fomenko had seemed to give it some thought before saying that he “couldn’t be bothered with that kind of bullshit”: the boy was so small-fry that that there simply wasn’t any point bringing him into custody. The divisionnaire was damned if he was going to fill out endless piles of paperwork for a little brat who (flicker of a smile) would walk free in fifteen minutes. Not to mention the boy’s father, who would block any attempt to advance the case for the next ten years. “If we were talking Escobar at the height of his powers, then maybe, but this dumb prick? We’re better off dropping it,” Fomenko had said. Rosière had been happy to see an old friend—and even happier to swipe a bag of Moroccan weed on her way out—but she was also deeply sorry that her diplomatic mission had failed. She hated to be the bearer of bad news.

  “Okay,” Capestan said. “Thanks for trying anyway, capitaine.”

  Ultimately, today had been quite a lesson. Fomenko had turned down her appeal outright, a little more courteously than Valincourt had, but just as firmly. In summary, Buron was blocking any official action and the gods of number 36 were refusing active collaboration. The squad was on its own. Completely alone. She could either hang around on the sidelines or she could force the issue. After all, she still had one secret weapon.

  Capestan set off down the corridor and knocked on the first door on the right. The walls of the office were already adorned with posters from the most prestigious productions at the Opéra de Paris. A gentle aroma of mandarin was emanating from an essential oil diffuser, and the soft trill of France Musique played over the radio. On a tall smoked-glass table sat a large stack of law books, including an ancient Dalloz. Capitaine Orsini was scribbling away in a notebook. Orsini: the velvet-gloved snitch; the police judiciaire’s very own lie detector. Capestan’s trump card. He looked up at her, all ears.

  “Capitaine Orsini? May I ask you to lend a hand with an investigation? We have a team in position at Villa Scheffer in the sixteenth. They’ll bring you up to speed.”

  Sitting on a chair beside his daughters’ bunk bed, his feet tucked in to his polka-dot slippers, Torrez was reading Clementine Does Hip-Hop in his fine baritone. His daughters, deep in concentration, were each twisting a strand of black hair, one of them
staring at the ceiling, the other at the bottom of her sister’s mattress.

  After a knowing pause designed to build the tension, Torrez turned the page. The simple drawing depicted a dance studio with a television and a DVD player.

  The DVD player. It was still in Marie Sauzelle’s living room. Burglars wouldn’t bother with that sort of thing anymore, but back in 2005 . . . The murderer had trashed the place in a hurry. Was this an oversight, or were they on the hunt for a burglar without a swag bag?

  19

  Gabriel was in his bedroom gazing at the photograph of his mother. This picture in its old black-plastic frame was the only one left of her in the whole apartment. One by one, the others had deserted the walls and then the shelves. Not that there had ever been an awful lot: they simply didn’t have that many.

  Gabriel had drawn dozens of portraits of her from this photograph. Most of his attempts—charcoals, watercolors, even cartoons—had stemmed from this picture. He had made prints of sixteen of them, all the same size, which were now pinned above his chest of drawers in four rows of four. Each one had a very slight variation in her features, making it look as if his mother was aging.

  He heard a knock, and suddenly his father’s silhouette filled the door frame. In the days since Gabriel had announced his engagement, his father’s face had occasionally twitched into a smile, but it was clear his heart hadn’t been in it. Gabriel had wanted to reassure him, to tell him that he might be young, but that he wasn’t going far, that he would come over on Sundays, Saturdays, midweek—all three if necessary. But his father was not the sort of man you could speak to like that. He was not the sort who needs his hand held.

  He was still standing in the doorway, wearing his same old blue woolen cardigan that was bagging at the elbows, and clutching a hammer and a screw. He seemed to be there purely by accident, and Gabriel decided to tease him:

  “I’m not sure what odd jobs you’re planning on doing, but I can’t help thinking you’d be better off with a nail. Or a screwdriver.”

  His father smiled and pretended to only just notice it was a hammer.

  “I was starting to wonder myself. This wall’s not being very cooperative . . .”

  As always, Gabriel felt a tinge of embarrassment at being caught with the photograph frame. He tried to find an excuse at the same time as fishing for some paternal approval.

  “I’m sure she would have loved Manon,” he said, pointing his thumb casually at the portrait. “She fits the perfect daughter-in-law profile, don’t you think? She would be proud, wouldn’t she?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Gabriel tried hard not to hope for a follow-up. He turned to rummage for a nail in his pot of stationery, pushing aside the Marvel figurines littering his desk.

  “How old was she when you met?” he said, then held out a nail he had salvaged from a pile of paperclips, screws, and elastic bands.

  “Thank you,” his father said, slipping both nail and screw into his pocket. “She was twenty-six, I’ve told you before.”

  “She looks older in this picture.”

  His father flinched, as if about to turn the frame over, but he checked himself in time, thrusting his hand back in the pocket of his gray trousers, embarrassed by his sudden gesture. Gabriel shifted his gaze to the window and looked out at the cars lining up on boulevard Beaumarchais. They were in all colors next to the gray of the exhaust fumes, revving their engines at the red lights as they waited for them to change. Even before the lights turned green, the drivers were in first gear, nudging forward four measly inches.

  “And Manon’s parents are pleased?” his father asked, his voice a little louder. “We must have them over for dinner. I’ll let you fix a date.”

  Gabriel could hardly believe his ears. Dinner? People at their apartment? This was progress . . . To hide his happiness—no, his total elation—he carried on facing the window, closing the blind on the traffic, not that it did much to block out the sound of the cars. Once he had managed to tone down his smile, he dug his cell phone out of the side pocket of his Bermuda shorts: his lucky beige ones, which he thought made his calves look good. Before Manon, it would never have occurred to him that calves could even look good. But now he wore them constantly, no matter how cold it was.

  “I’ll call Manon straightaway and ask her.”

  The moment of awkwardness surrounding the photograph had passed.

  “And the family record book . . . Have you managed to have a think?” Gabriel asked, unlocking his cell phone.

  “Yes, yes, I’m taking care of it. But there’s a chance it may take a while. You understand, don’t you, Gabriel?”

  “Yes, of course, Papa.”

  But actually, no, Gabriel was not sure he did understand. Come the spring, he would officially be taking the step into adulthood. Manon might see this as just an adolescent thought, but she also knew that he’d already taken this step a long time ago.

  She was his passion, his refuge, and he was going to marry her. The reality still had not fully dawned on him, and each time he thought about it a little puff of warmth would take him by surprise. His chest was tight with a joy so palpable that it overwhelmed his grief, turning it instantaneously into something else, something like nostalgia.

  Gabriel sat down at the edge of his bed, facing the photograph of his mother. She had bequeathed him her olive complexion and the perfect oval of her face. For Gabriel, the notion of perfection stopped at his ears: the left lobe had been torn off when he was barely two years old. A dog, so his father said, but Gabriel didn’t remember. Same with the missing half of the little finger on his right hand: he didn’t remember a thing.

  His mother. He still had no idea what happened. When Gabriel was small, his father used to talk about her often. Then the source dried up. Each of Gabriel’s questions was gradually silenced by the tears his father desperately tried to hold back. It made for a horrific spectacle, the giant with the red eyes. Gabriel was not a torturer by nature, so in time he simply gave up, deliberately protecting himself in the thick cotton batting of the unsaid. Soon he would be a father, too, and then it would be his turn to answer. And he would have nothing to say. This was unthinkable. The time had come to search for the truth: an investigation—a serious one—was required.

  20

  “It is—it’s a very real danger,” Torrez repeated to an impassive Capestan.

  With each response, she raised her eyes to the heavens. She was standing in front of the Clio rented car, her fingers touching the handle of the passenger door. The final travelers were drifting out of the parking lot at gare de la Souterraine, relieved that it was all over. The train had arrived an hour late from a journey that ought to have taken less than three. A piece of vandalized cable had fallen onto the tracks. After traveling through miles of beautiful countryside, they had found themselves at a standstill in some lovely bit of urban sprawl, on a railway speckled with patches of yellow grass and lined with a jumble of fences, undergrowth, and cable drums. The window through which Capestan contemplated this grim industrial scene was spattered with droplets of detergent. Their train had no dining car, and the refreshments cart had been ransacked long before it reached them in standard class. After going halves with Torrez on the few remaining Ricqlès pastilles that she kept at the bottom of her bag, Capestan promised herself that next time she would be more lavish with her state budget and travel in first class.

  Worst of all, however, had been listening to Torrez apologizing for the delay for the entire journey. However much Capestan tried to persuade the lieutenant of his probable innocence in the cable affair, he had continued to grumble: “It’s because of me, it’s because of me.” He feared that this unfortunate hitch had set an ominous precedent.

  Torrez could not let go of his jinx, and Capestan began to wonder whether this feeling crept into his private life, or whether it was exclusive to his role as a police officer. Whether it was the mark of Cain or the sword of Damocles, Torrez had no shortage of bagga
ge.

  Behind the wheel of a freshly vacuumed car, gazing out on the countryside of his beloved Creuse, the lieutenant calmed down a bit. A smile was obviously a step too far, but his eyebrows had returned to something resembling a normal position. As the road wound through hills, fields, and forests, Capestan felt carefree, delighted to see the word “autumn” shift from an abstract term to a reality. The monochromatic town and the evergreen mountains were in the past, and nature was now putting on a glorious Technicolor show for them: red and orange oaks, the brown of the horse chestnuts, and yellow for the beeches. Each species paying its own tribute to October. The verdant prairies put the finishing touches on the eco-idyll they saw before them. No noise, no gray, and everywhere the primeval smell of the wild. The air was pure and fresh, cleansing every cell and flushing out the foggy heads of the city dwellers. It was enough to make Capestan giddy. Torrez picked up on it, puffing his chest as though it were a personal compliment.

  At the far end of a village, an imposing eighteenth-century house came into view. A scarlet Virginia creeper covered the facade of the two-story house, reaching up to the roof’s slate tiles. Traces of rust on the iron shutters indicated that they could do with a lick of paint. From the street, Capestan made out a note on the shabby door.

  She pushed at the garden gate, which let out a quiet squeak, and walked up the path, gravel crunching underfoot. Good, honest sounds, she thought, returning to her whimsical reverie. André Sauzelle had left them a message: I’m at the pond. The fishing hut on the little island.

  Before returning to Torrez, who was waiting with his back to the car, Capestan noticed some large balls of fat hanging in several of the trees for the birds. Strange, she thought: it wasn’t even winter yet.

  “André Sauzelle is waiting for us in his fishing hut. I feel like swinging by the churchyard before going to find him.”