A Noël Killing

by M. L. Longworth

  “Bonjour, madame,” Sorba said, opening the door to his office and gesturing for her to enter.

  Marine jumped up, her short skirt lifting up even higher than it already was. Sorba’s eyes were fixed on her elegant long legs. “Bonjour,” Marine said, shaking his hand. “Thank you for seeing me at such short notice. My life is . . . crazy . . . these days.”

  “Come in,” he said. “Please take a seat and tell me about your situation.”

  Marine sat down, leaning forward slightly so that her blouse revealed a view of her chest. “I’m here because I have two children,” she began. “They are both in middle school, both boys. Very smart boys, you will see. They speak Italian and French and I want them to learn English.”

  “You’ve come to the right place, Madame . . .” Sorba cast a glance at a piece of paper on his desk. “Madame Abbona.”

  Marine smiled, hopping that Sorba didn’t pick up on the fact that Abbona was a northern name. She got it from the label of a wine bottle, one of Antoine’s favorite Barolos.

  “Do you offer scholarships?” She leaned forward a little more.

  “Rarely, I’m afraid. Except in exceptional circumstances.”

  “Those are my circumstance,” Marine replied. “Exceptional ones.”

  “Tell me about them,” Sorba said, making a not very good attempt to not stare at her cleavage.

  “Long story, as they say.” Marine let out a small laugh. “I was born in Aix, but we moved to my mother’s family villa near Naples when I was very small. Beautiful villa. Frescoes on the ceilings and walls, so many rooms, and views of the sea. But it takes so much money to keep up. The staff is so expensive these days . . .” She tried her hardest to look sad. “So I marry a wealthy man . . .”

  “M Abbona?”

  “Si. Only he’s not as wealthy as he pretends. He has some shady businesses, with a friend of his who’s a crooked accountant. And then they get caught, and both get thrown in jail.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Sorba said, leaning forward.

  “No, not sorry!” Marine replied, trying her best to play an angry Neapolitan woman. “I ask for a divorce, but I find out from our family lawyer that in this crooked business everything has been tied to me, without my knowing it. Those papers they made me sign, they told me they were investments. His businesses have so many debts, and I will lose everything, even the family villa . . .”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Si!”

  “If your sons have very good grades,” Sorba said, “we may be able to help them out a bit.”

  Marine looked at him, dabbing the corners of her eyes with a tissue. “Grazie. But it’s not enough . . .”

  “The villa.”

  “My lawyer tells me that if I can pay off one of the debts very quickly, I may be able to save the villa, at least. How do I help my poor unmarried sisters? Eva, Clara, Rosa . . .”

  Sorba’s eyes enlarged and he got up and walked around his desk. Marine got a lump in her throat, realizing she had gone a bit far with the sisters, but it just slipped out. It was as if she had become Valentina, and she really did have three unmarried sisters. Marine could even see them in her head.

  Sorba sat on the edge of his desk, beside Marine. She shifted a bit, revealing more leg. “Do you think you can help us?” she asked, almost whispering. “You would be our guest at the villa anytime. Clara is a dancer in a nightclub . . .”

  “I do have friends here who may offer you a loan,” Sorba said, smiling. “To get you out of your troubles. I’ll talk to them this afternoon. Tell me more about your villa, and your poor sisters . . .”

  Marine smiled and the stories flowed out of her. The villa and its glazed tile floors, the fountain outside with an eighteenth-century sculpture of Leda and the swan, the palm trees framing the views of the sea. The ancient roses in the garden, and the hunchbacked gardener named Giuseppe. Equally enjoyable for her were the stories she made up about her sisters: Rosa wanted to be a nun but was kicked out of the convent for being “too wild”; Eva had been a model but now just wanted to perfect her ravioli recipe . . .

  Just before leaving Marine gently stroked Alain Sorba’s cheek, thanking him. By the time she got back to Margaux’s car she was wild with excitement.

  “Whoa, slow down,” Margaux said, looking at Marine, who was flushed and gesticulating with her hands much more than she normally did. “Let’s get that microphone off of you.” She helped Marine pull the wires out of her blouse and took the tape recorder. She turned it on and replayed a few seconds; the sound was perfect. “Well done, Valentina!”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Flamant was standing at the printer when they walked into his office, a large open space shared with dozens of other officers. He waved a paper in the air, and gestured to a desk to his right. Paulik and Verlaque found two spare chairs and brought them to the desk, by which time Flamant was back.

  “Once I started searching on the computer,” Flamant began, flipping through his printouts, “it was easy. Père Fernand Janin has had a busy career.”

  “Did you find any connections with the sister cities?” Paulik asked. “They were the ones who cooked and served the food on Sunday evening, and we’re quite sure now that Père Fernand was the intended victim.”

  Flamant looked confused and Verlaque told him about the Hainsbys’ fight over Cole helping himself to someone else’s food. Flamant pulled out the paper he was looking for and said, “Yes, there are a few connections. Fernand Janin worked in Tunisia for a while.”

  Verlaque and Paulik exchanged looks. “He loves Tunisian food,” Verlaque said. “He kept talking about it on Sunday. I don’t suppose he was in Carthage?”

  “No, Tunis,” Flamant said.

  Paulik pulled out his notebook and read through the names he had written down. “Does the name Mehdi Abdelhak come up anywhere?”

  “That name doesn’t ring a bell,” Flamant answered. “But you’ll want to look over these more closely. I only skimmed the Tunisia stuff, as what comes next is fascinating. I would have called you sooner, but I was engrossed. Janin’s Tunisia stay was uneventful. Unlike his stay in Africa, which is why I called you—”

  “Where in Africa?” Paulik asked.

  “Ethiopia. Which was once a colony of—”

  “Italy,” Verlaque cut in. “What happened there?” He tried to picture the faces of the Italians from Perugia: He was a big guy, bald, and his partner was a small, thin woman with reddish hair. Sort of like Bruno and Hélène Paulik, he mused.

  Flamant read from one of the pieces of paper and showed it to Verlaque and Paulik. “Janin was there ten years ago,” he said. “In a village north of Addis Ababa. He was mobilizing the villagers to protest against multinational groups selling used clothing in Ethiopia. It’s a huge business in Africa; I had no idea.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” Paulik asked. “Don’t they need used clothes in Africa?”

  “Not when there’s local clothing manufacturing, as there was in the village where Janin was a priest.”

  “Used clothes from the West would put them out of business,” Paulik said.

  “Exactly.” Flamant went on, “The used-clothing industry is worth more than three hundred million dollars in sales yearly. The clothes come from the West and are sorted and resold in East Africa. They create jobs for the guys selling clothes in markets but devastate local clothing companies. Janin was working with two small clothing factories, leading protests against one of the local used-clothing importers, called Elite. He was trying to ban all imported used clothes in Africa by 2019.”

  “Will it happen, the ban?” Verlaque asked.

  “Unlikely. There’s too much resistance, especially from the USA, which unloads large quantities of secondhand clothes all over the world.”

  “And you feel so good, donating your used clothes to those charities,
” Paulik said.

  “Yeah,” Flamant agreed. “My girlfriend just cleared our closet last week, and she went out of her way to go to a Catholic charity to drop off our old clothes. We were patting ourselves on the back.”

  “And this Elite company?” Verlaque asked. “What happened?”

  “The workers of the two small factories went on marches, led by Père Janin,” Flamant said. “But one of Père Janin’s followers was a real militant, a bit of a nutter. One night he set fire to the Elite warehouse, and all those cheap T-shirts and old jeans went up in flames.” He passed a photocopy of a newspaper article to them. “The problem was, Elite’s owner, Vito Giraldi, was inside the warehouse that night. His family said he was paranoid—with good reason, it seems—and the smoke and flames were so strong he couldn’t get out. Giraldi died in there.”

  “What kind of fallout was there?” Paulik asked.

  “Fernand Janin came back to France a few months later,” Flamant said. “He was in a church in Paris, then got transferred down here. And Elite, without its founder, folded.”

  “Plus it lost all of its inventory that night, one would assume,” Verlaque suggested. “Elite was an Italian company, I take it, given the founder’s name.”

  “But they weren’t from Perugia,” Flamant said. He picked up one of the pieces of paper and read from it. “Bari, down in Puglia.”

  Paulik checked his notebook. “Matteo Ricci is the name of the guy running the Perugia stand.”

  “And his partner?” Verlaque asked.

  Paulik read aloud, “Vittoria Romano.”

  “No direct connection, it seems,” Flamant said. “But I thought it was interesting.”

  “It certainly gives someone a motive to try to kill Père Fernand,” Paulik said. “Although it was hardly his fault that some loony set fire to the warehouse.”

  “We just have to find out whose motive it was,” Verlaque said. “Good work, Flamant.” He looked at the floor for a few seconds and then asked, “Is it possible that Matteo Ricci is using a fake name?”

  “I thought of that, too,” Flamant said. “So I called the city worker in charge of booking the Christmas stands. She told me that the stand renters have to provide their passports and fill out a whole bunch of paperwork and permits. She checks their references, too. They are especially careful because of the threat of terrorist attacks. When I suggested someone could slip through the cracks using an alias, I thought she was going to bite my head off.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a city worker,” Verlaque said, laughing.

  * * *

  Verlaque sat at his desk, writing down a list of possible restaurants he could take Mme Girard to for her good-bye lunch. Much to his relief, and as expected, she rejected the suggestion of an office party and accepted his offer to lunch. The problem was, none of the restaurants in Aix seemed fitting for such a grand lady. Aix’s only Michelin-starred restaurant had just closed, the chef having retired. Avignon and Les Baux-de-Provence were too far away—what would they talk about for more than an hour in the car? That left Marseille—and its famed three-star restaurant on the sea. He looked in his wallet and couldn’t find their business card so he looked them up on the computer. He found the website quickly, with its sparkling photographs of the white mansion surrounded by emerald-green water, and the young chef with shoulder-length hair who recently took over the reins from his father. The restaurant had been a family affair for almost a century, the old man’s grandmother having been a Marseillaise cabaret singer at the turn of the twentieth century. Verlaque looked at the current chef, who was handsome enough to be an actor, and mused at how much things had changed in the restaurant business. Good looks were so important now. He shook his head back and forth when he noticed the chef’s tattoos running up and down his forearms. It seemed that even handsome young men now had body art. He picked up the phone and dialed the number listed on the website. While he was on hold he stared at the photograph on the screen, trying to make out why the chef had thought it so important that he had to drill with permanent ink an image of it on his arms. Verlaque had recently wondered the same thing here in Aix, fascinated—or repulsed—by someone’s tattoos, but he couldn’t remember where. In a café? The restaurant employee came back online and he was able to reserve for the following Friday. He hung up and remembered who and where it was—the Italian woman at the Sister City stand. He remembered her name, too: Vittoria Romano. Beautiful name.

  He looked at the clock; it was almost time to leave, and now he couldn’t get the image of the tattooed Vittoria Romano out of his head. The only link she had with Père Fernand was the fact that she was Italian, as was the warehouse owner in Ethiopia. His phone rang and he picked it up. “Oui, Verlaque ici.”

  “Judge Verlaque,” said a high-pitched male voice on the other end. “It’s Collot at the lab. We’ve tested the paint scratches on the BMW with the bicycle involved in the hit-and-run north of Aix.”

  “And?”

  “Perfect match, sir.”

  “Excellent,” Verlaque said. “The BMW driver, where is he now?”

  “Alexandre Mareschi is in interview room two, sir.”

  “Thank you, Officer.” Verlaque hung up and walked out of his office, appreciating the formality used by Officer Collot, whom he had never met. Mme Girard was gone for the day, her desk cleared, as usual, of all paper and debris. He looked down at the framed photograph of her three smiling children and thought of Marine’s comment the other evening about perfect childhoods. In his opinion, the chances of a perfect childhood greatly diminished with the arrival of each new child in the family. Having three was a risky business. His parents had even messed up two. How was that possible? He thought of himself and Séb as children. They hadn’t been demanding; all they wanted was love and affection and a certain number of stories at night. And good food, on his part. Séb didn’t care one way or the other. Why had that been so difficult for his wealthy, well-educated parents? He continued through the empty office and suddenly felt his forehead begin to sweat. He sat down in an empty chair, holding his head in his hands with his elbows on his knees. He took a few deep breaths, trying to wipe certain images out of his head. Instead, he thought of Marine, her grin, her freckles, her long narrow fingers, one of them that wore his grandmother’s Cartier engagement ring. He got up and patted his forehead with a tissue that he took from a box on Mme Girard’s desk, and then looked at his watch. It was almost 6:00; the Christmas stands would be closing soon, and he was still consumed by thoughts of Vittoria Romano’s tattoos. He called Marine as he walked down the stairs and asked if she wouldn’t mind going to the Italians to buy some cheese, and if, by chance, she got a look at the woman’s forearm tattoos, that would be great. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “It’s just a hunch.” She agreed but she sounded flustered and slightly annoyed at his request. He hung up just as he got to interview room two.

  “Bonsoir,” he said as he opened the door, more to the waiting police officer than to Mareschi, who sat back in a chair with his arms folded. The police officer nodded and Verlaque sat down across from his favorite clothing salesman.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” Verlaque began, “as it’s almost dinnertime. The red paint on your black BMW matches the red paint of an expensive road bike that was hit north of Puyricard.” He saw Mareschi’s shoulders fall and his face crumple. Up until now Mareschi had thought he was here because of a traffic violation. “Why would you hit a cyclist? Why Damien Petit, a young man whom you’ve probably never met?”

  “I have never met him.”

  “So why run him off the road?”

  “He owes me money.”

  Verlaque asked, “How does he owe you money if you’ve never met him?”

  “His partner owes me money.”

  “You should speak of Cole Hainsby in the past tense; he’s dead.” Verlaque thought he could see fear in the young
man’s dark eyes.

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Really? It’s a very good motive. How much money did they borrow from you?”

  “Sixty thousand euros.”

  Verlaque whistled and sat back. “That’s a lot of cash for a store clerk to have.”

  Mareschi stared at the table and said nothing.

  Verlaque tried again. “Who was lending the money, exactly?” The young man stayed silent. “Do you want to add murder to your rap? It’s already impressive—”

  “We didn’t murder Hainsby!”

  “We?”

  “We heard that the American keeled over at the church after being poisoned. We didn’t do it! He owed us money!”

  “So you tried to kill his partner, too?” Verlaque asked. “To give others a warning? Or just to make amends.”

  “No! We just wanted our sixty thousand back. How would we get it back if they were dead?”

  “How does a nice guy like Cole Hainsby find out about guys like you?” Mareschi didn’t answer, but Verlaque figured it was through Alain Sorba. He pictured Cole Hainsby going to Sorba for advice. “Where were you last Sunday afternoon?” he asked.

  “Nowhere near the cathedral,” Mareschi answered. “And I can prove it. The three of us, me, Jean-Paul, and Michel, went for lunch in Marseille—the Miramar, you can check, we left around four o’clock—then we drove back up here to the casino. We played cards there until late at night.”

  Verlaque nodded; he’d have someone call Aix’s gambling joint and check.

  “And I wasn’t trying to kill Petit the other day,” Mareschi offered. “I was just reminding him . . .”

  “Reminding him not to get involved with guys like you?”

  “Hey! Jean-Paul is always saying that it’s guys like us who help others out. That’s why they come to us, whining about needing money.”