“She isn’t?” Marine cried. “She knew what she was doing, and you…”
“Did too.”
“No, Antoine! You were too young!”
“Old enough to know what I was doing—not really understanding it, but conscious of what was going on between us. And I wasn’t having a bad time. That’s the truth, and the hard thing for me, and probably for you, to understand. I loved her in some weird way.”
“Do you think that you knew what love meant at that age?” Marine asked, taking his hand. “You must have been so confused.”
Verlaque heard his cell phone ring. He ignored it. “I think that a thirteen-year-old does understand love. I know you’re upset, but what I want you to know is that I’ve finally stopped ignoring it. That’s what Sylvie’s photo nudged me to do, and then Soeur Clothilde.”
“What did the nun say?” Marine asked. “Can you tell me?”
“She just had this amazing way of getting me to talk,” Verlaque answered. “By the end I was blabbing on and on, and I even cried.” He quickly put his hand up. “Don’t say anything!”
Marine smiled. “I’m going to have another sip of whiskey,” she said. “Cheers back to you.” She took a sip. “So…did Soeur Clothilde have advice, you know, a course of action you can take, instead of saying the rosary?”
Verlaque laughed. “You know, she didn’t once mention God, or praying. She said I’d have to do all the work.” He sipped some whiskey and turned his body toward Marine’s. “Marine, do you care about my money?”
“No, but I love your car,” she said, laughing. “No, Antoine, I don’t care about your money. I do like the fact that we take great vacations, I’ll admit that, and I love that Venetian painting in your dining room….”
Verlaque smiled. “I do too.”
“But I’d be just as happy with framed posters from IKEA, and sleeping in a tent on vacation.”
Verlaque frowned. “Let’s not get carried away. I hate camping.”
Marine laughed despite herself. “Why do you ask, anyway?”
“No reason in particular,” he answered. “I’m just thinking of what Soeur Clothilde and I talked about.” He reached down and picked up the IKEA catalog. “So let’s pick out some prints,” he said.
“Stop teasing!”
Chapter Twenty-seven
French, and English, Innovation
Ileft two messages last night,” Paulik said. “Sir.”
“I’m sorry,” Verlaque answered. “I was…still a bit queasy from my food poisoning. Was it important?”
Paulik sighed and nodded, pulling out a chair opposite Verlaque. “I think I was chatting about vintage cars with the killer for over two hours last night.”
Verlaque looked at his commissioner in amazement. Paulik recounted his visit to Prodos’s Citroën garage, and that the garage was now cleaned out.
“Even the bust of de Gaulle, you say?” Verlaque said.
“Yep. Now, why would he take that if he wasn’t planning on skipping town or country? You can just drive across borders in Europe now; he could be in the Italian Alps, or hidden in some remote hamlet in Andalucía.”
“But you say that you trusted him, as did Laure Matour, Mlle Durand’s boss.”
“I can be wrong, and have been before,” Paulik said.
Verlaque picked up the phone. “Let’s put out a nationwide search on him, then. I assume he drives a DS? That should stick out like a sore thumb. I know he was a loner, but do you have any contacts for him?”
“Yes,” Paulik answered. “One of the Pertuis policemen who drove by the garage last night said that his brother-in-law had bought a car off Prodos. I got the brother-in-law’s number and left a message late last night.” Paulik pulled his cell phone out of his jacket and set it on the desk. “I wish he’d call back.” He got up and began to pace around the room. His phone rang, and he ran to the desk. “Bingo!” he said, picking the phone up. “Oui?”
“Commissioner? This is Benjamin Talmard. You left a message last night.”
“Yes. I met your brother-in-law last night, the policeman, and he told me that you’re acquainted with André Prodos.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Talmard answered. “Is André in some kind of trouble?”
“No,” Paulik said, lying, “I just need to speak to him about a case we’re working on, but I passed by the garage last night, and it looked cleared out. Do you have any ideas where he might be? He doesn’t have a cell phone, I know that.”
“Ha, André with a cell phone would be hard to imagine,” Talmard answered. “Well, he only closes the garage for one reason, and that’s to attend rallies.”
“Car rallies?”
“Citroën rallies.”
“Is there one on right now?” Paulik asked. He doubted that Prodos was at a car rally; more likely he was hiding somewhere.
“I remember reading about a September rally in a recent DS fan-club newsletter,” Talmard answered. “I’ll try to put my hands on it.”
“Do you remember where it’s being held?”
“Not near here,” Talmard said. “Otherwise I would have gone. I’m thinking it was somewhere in the middle of France.”
“That would be fantastic if you could find out where and when, M. Talmard. A million thanks.”
Paulik had just hung up when Jules Schoelcher and Roger Caromb knocked and entered.
“What have you guys come up with?” Verlaque asked. “Anything connecting the three women? Deliverymen? Artisans?”
“Nothing, Judge,” Schoelcher answered. “Grocery stores don’t deliver that far out of Aix; Mlle Montmory had a La Redoute delivery in July, but Mlle Durand and Mme d’Arras have never ordered from the catalog; Mme d’Arras had a plumber fix a leaky faucet in April, but Mlle Durand has never had a workman in the house. Mlle Montmory had a plumber in, but it wasn’t the same guy, and she wasn’t even home when he came, she was getting her tonsils out….”
“UPS?” Paulik asked.
“Nothing,” Roger Caromb quickly replied. “We checked them, and FedEx.”
Verlaque looked at Caromb and wished he didn’t chew gum, especially while working; his grandmother Emmeline had taught him that it was a disgusting habit, and he always thought of it that way.
Paulik’s cell phone rang, and he lunged across the desk and grabbed it. “Oui? M. Talmard?”
“Yes,” Talmard answered. “And lucky for you I found the newsletter before my wife recycled it. The rally is this weekend, in the Aubrac.” He read to Paulik the rally’s location and hours. “It officially opens this evening, but André probably went early to set up his stand.”
“Thank you so much,” Paulik said, hanging up. He looked at Verlaque and said, “There’s a Citroën rally that begins tonight, in the Aubrac, near Laguiole.”
Verlaque nodded and tried to think of Laguiole not as the place where Michel Bras’s three-star restaurant was located, but instead where he would probably have to make an arrest. “Well, let’s hope he’s there.”
Officers Schoelcher and Caromb looked at each other with puzzled expressions, and Paulik explained his suspicion of André Prodos. “You guys stay here, and we’ll call you from the Aubrac once we know something.”
“And if Prodos is at the car rally,” Schoelcher said, “are you assuming he’s innocent?”
“Stop asking such wise questions,” Verlaque said, smiling. “Isn’t it obvious we haven’t thought that far ahead?”
“Let’s go,” Paulik said. “It’s about a six-hour drive, I’m guessing. Merde.”
“We’re lucky it isn’t in Brittany,” Verlaque said, grabbing his jacket. “That’s a twelve-hour drive.”
The drive on the Autoroute du Soleil was a pleasant one; the vacationers had gone home, and both men were able to enjoy the views of olive orchards framed by a bright-blue sky. At Montpellier they exited and got onto a highway heading north, toward Millau, and its famous viaduct that spans the Tarn River. “Have you seen the bridge yet?” Pa
ulik asked his boss, who was driving.
“No, I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t,” Verlaque replied, turning down the jazz CD so that they could talk. “We keep meaning to go.” Verlaque smiled as he realized that he had changed his “I” to “we.” He hoped it would be like that from now on—he and Marine. We.
“So do we,” Paulik said. “Léa would really like to see it too; one of her classmates did a school project about it.” He added, “Some Englishman designed it,” rolling his eyes in mock disgust; he knew little of Verlaque’s family, but he did know that his grandmother had been English, and that the Verlaque wealth came from the family’s flour mills, sold years ago to a multinational food group.
“Norman Foster,” Verlaque answered.
“Funny sending an English architect to build a French bridge.”
“No more funny than the French sending their math scholars to work in London’s banks,” Verlaque said. “But if it makes you feel better, I think that the engineer was French. In any case, we’re one big planet now.”
Paulik sighed. “I was just talking with Hélène about that,” he said. “The globalization of vineyards. The wealthy Bordelais vineyard owners buying vineyards in Argentina, pricing out the local vintners, and the Chinese and Americans buying ours.”
Verlaque slowed down to pass through the tollbooth, and they stopped talking as the viaduct came into view. “Oh mon dieu,” Paulik finally said. “God save the queen.”
Verlaque pulled over at a lookout point, and they both jumped out of the car. The wind howled around them, and streaks of flat clouds raced by in the blue sky. The white bridge was majestic. “It looks like a series of sailboats,” Verlaque said, “floating across the valley.” He took photos with his cell phone as Paulik stood, hands on his hips, staring.
Paulik counted the tall, slender piers holding up the bridge. “Seven columns,” he said, pointing. “Look at that great detail: there’s a narrow opening in the column that splits it in two but then closes up again above the road deck.”
“I had no idea it would be this breathtaking,” Verlaque said. “It’s so elegant—a perfect union of engineering and design.”
“And French and English,” Paulik added, smiling.
They stood on the viewers’ platform for ten minutes, saying nothing. Both were oblivious to cars coming and going out of the parking lot, to the chatter of tourists and the clicking of cameras. Verlaque looked at the bridge, a lightweight masterpiece of construction, floating between two limestone plateaus that were covered in green scrubland. The Tarn River flowed far below, and a smaller, earlier bridge crossed the river just above its banks. Compared with the viaduct, it looked like a toy bridge. “When I see something this beautiful,” Verlaque said, “made by man, I feel that all is well with the world.”
Paulik nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said, watching the clouds race by, not far above the bridge’s tallest mast. “Especially given our work.”
Verlaque looked sideways at his commissioner and thought of Soeur Clothilde’s words: “We must all do something to make the world more beautiful.” “I think I could stay here all day,” he said. “But we’d better hit the road.”
“Yeah, I know,” Paulik said. “I’m definitely bringing the girls here.”
Verlaque smiled at his expression “the girls.” “You’re lucky, Bruno.”
Paulik pretended he hadn’t heard, and used getting back into Verlaque’s minuscule Porsche as an excuse not to answer. What could he say?
As Verlaque pulled back onto the road, Paulik looked at the Michelin map. “We get off this road at exit number forty-two,” he said, “then head east on the N88 for about twenty-four kilometers, then head north on the D28 toward Laguiole. Talmard told me that the rally should be well marked, and he said if we don’t see any signs toward it we should just follow the Citroëns.” He set the map on his knees, ready to take in the view from the bridge. “Spectacular,” he said, leaning his head against the window and looking at the valley below.
“Look at that,” Verlaque said, pointing ahead of him. “Two cars up, there’s an old Citroën.”
Paulik looked ahead and then over his shoulder. “There’s a whole slew behind us, sir.”
“We won’t need to watch for signs.”
The closer they got to Laguiole, the more Citroëns they saw. From the license plates they could tell where the owners of all the cars lived; since they were coming from the south, most were French, but both men were surprised at the number of Italian, Spanish, and even Portuguese fans on their way to the rally. Just before Laguiole, the Citroëns began turning left, onto a small road that led to Montpeyroux, and Verlaque followed suit. “Judging from the number of cars, they must have rented a huge farm field,” he said. A teenager wearing a red Citroën jacket waved them into a parking lot, and Verlaque parked the car amid thousands of Citroëns of every color, model, and year imaginable. When they got out of the car, a gray-haired man, also wearing a red Citroën jacket, with a matching baseball cap, got out of his DS 19 convertible and said in English, “Wrong rally, mate.”
Verlaque locked his car door and gave the man a forced smile. “Isn’t this the antique Porsche rally?” he asked in English. “Oh dear.”
“Just joking with you,” the man went on. “You’ll become a convert, you’ll see. Have a good day!”
Verlaque lifted his hand in a vague salute.
“Was he teasing us?” Paulik said.
“Yes,” Verlaque said, walking around the long, sleek convertible. “They really are strange-looking cars,” he said. “Beautifully sleek.”
“I thought they were space-age when I was a kid,” Paulik said. He turned around and tried to see beyond the parking lot. “Let’s just follow the crowds. There must be a main pavilion here, where we can look up the list of stands.”
“And we can get a bite to eat,” Verlaque said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost three p.m.” He could hear his stomach rumbling and smelled a barbecue.
Once out of the parking lot, they walked along a dirt road lined with Citroëns on display. They walked slowly, falling in step with the crowd, mostly male and over fifty, who stopped at almost every car to speak to its owner, take pictures, or peer under the hood or inside. “Let’s try not to ogle the cars too much,” Verlaque said, craning his neck to see a 1940s Citroën that, judging by the plates, had just been driven down from Belgium.
They moved, stopping and starting again with the flow of the crowd, for almost twenty minutes, and still could not see the main pavilion. “This is like being in a bad dream,” Paulik said, “as if we’re never going to get there.”
“Or eat.” Verlaque looked over at the commissioner, who said nothing. “I guess we can eat later,” he continued. “We should find André Prodos first.”
“If he’s here.”
Five minutes later, they were at the main pavilion, a long, flat-ceilinged hangar. Inside were older-model Citroëns, and rarer ones: tin-sided vans, racing cars, a camping van, even a red double-decker bus from pre–World War II London. The hall’s acoustics weren’t made to handle a thousand car fans, or an accordion player, and Verlaque resisted the temptation to cover his ears. A loudspeaker announced events; the grand opening ceremony would begin at 6:00 p.m., with speeches followed by an apéritif. “Let’s get out of here before that begins,” Verlaque said to Paulik. The commissioner agreed; speeches at this kind of event could go on for hours.
They followed red signs to an information booth, where fortunately there was just one man in line ahead of them. “I can only suggest that you try farther afield for a hotel room,” the information host said. “Millau, perhaps. The hotels and bed-and-breakfasts in Laguiole have been booked for months by the rally participants.” Verlaque looked at Paulik and raised his eyebrows. “I guess we’ll be driving back in the dark,” Paulik said.
The hotel-less man walked away in disgust, and Verlaque moved up to the desk. “Do you have a map of the stands?” he asked. “We�
��re looking for André Prodos’s stand; he has a garage in Provence.”
The host looked at Verlaque bleary-eyed. “Never heard of him,” he said, passing a sheet of paper across the desk at Verlaque. “Here’s the plan. There are more than one hundred stands. Good luck.”
Verlaque looked at the map. “They’re not labeled,” he said.
“That’s correct,” the host said. “We didn’t get the list of stand renters to the printers in time. C’est la vie!”
“Vive la France,” Verlaque mumbled as he went back to where Paulik was looking at a Citroën ambulance that had been used in World War II. “I have an unlabeled map. We have to do the whole tour of every stand. Some are in here,” he said, looking at the map, “and some are outside.”
“Let’s split up,” Paulik suggested. “And call each other by cell phone if we find him. His garage is called Citroën Prodos, and he looks like a schoolteacher—tall and lanky, with little round glasses and a receding hairline.”
“I’ll start outside,” Verlaque said. “See you soon, I hope.”
They separated, and Verlaque headed straight for the barbecue stand. There was a crowd in front of him, and he could smell spicy merguez sausages being grilled. When he had advanced to second in line, his cell phone rang. “Oui, Bruno?” he asked, just as he got to the head of the line.
“I found him,” Paulik replied.
Verlaque looked at the man barbecuing. “Be right back,” he said.
“These are the last ones I’m grilling this afternoon,” the cook said.
“Oh well,” Verlaque said. “My loss.”
He walked quickly back into the hangar, and Paulik sent a text message: “Third stand north of the information booth.” He saw Paulik standing at the back of a crowd gathered around the Citroën Prodos stand. “We were practically on top of his stand when we were at the information booth,” Paulik whispered. “He’s putting on a real show.” Both men watched and listened as Prodos showed off the two-toned black-and-white DS that had been on hoists in his garage. The shy introvert that Paulik had spoken to was a natural showman before a crowd.
Death in the Vines: A Verlaque and Bonnet Provençal Mystery Page 23