Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

  “Any signs that Moréas had been gagged or tied up? That he’d been knocked out? Maybe by a blow to the head?”

  “Given the state of his skin, it’s hard to tell if he’d been tied up any way, but I suspect not. And there’s definitely no sign of a blow to the head, before the Kalashnikov salvo took him out.”

  “So it would appear he had no reason to think he was in danger of being shot. The killer didn’t get close to him. Maybe he didn’t even speak to him, just fired without warning. Then he pours the gas over him, strikes a match—et voilà!”

  “That’s speculation, and that’s your job, not mine, mon Capitaine.”

  * * *

  By the time Blanc got back to the gendarmerie, Tonon still hadn’t turned up. Blanc had fired up the antique computer and begun to compose a report when there was a knock on the door. It was the boss.

  “You need to get over to the juge d’instruction,” Nkoulou said, giving him a frown. He obviously didn’t approve of seeing any of his staff in plain clothes.

  Every criminal case in France had to be overseen by a judge. The police were theoretically just operative assistants who fulfilled the judge’s instructions and sent him or her the results. Theoretically. Blanc had never liked the idea and preferred to have as little as possible to do with the judge’s instructions. But rules were rules. He got up from his seat and asked, “Where do I find the judge?”

  “Normally in the Palace of Justice in Aix-en-Provence. But this judge prefers to work more closely with the gendarmerie when it’s an interesting or complex case, and has an office next to mine.” Nkoulou hesitated for a second, as if uncertain whether or not he should go on. “And by the way, the judge is female,” he eventually managed to say. “She’s supposed to be the best of the lot. If you’d like to follow me? Madame Vialaron-Allègre doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  Blanc stopped in his tracks as if he had hit a wall.

  “Vialaron-Allègre? Like the minister in Paris?”

  “She’s his wife.” For a moment Blanc thought he almost detected a note of sympathy in the commandant’s voice.

  There was a brand-new business card on the door, heavy cardboard with embossed letters: Aveline Vialaron-Allègre, Juge d’instruction, Aix-en-Provence. Blanc knocked and went in. “Madame le juge,” he said, doing his best to sound traditionally formal. “Delighted to meet you.”

  “Really?” she said. “I’m surprised.”

  For some reason or other the captain had expected to be confronted by an imposing matron figure, a real-life version of the old film star Simone Signoret. Instead he found himself looking at a woman in her midthirties, five feet eight inches, slim, with olive skin, dark eyes, short black hair, a long nose, and long fingers. She wasn’t exactly pretty but she was attractive, self-confident, elegant, frosty. Intimidating. Merde, he thought, regretting that he wasn’t in uniform.

  The judge closed a Moleskine notebook and replaced the top on a narrow, old-fashioned fountain pen.

  “Please sit down.”

  Could it be a coincidence, Blanc wondered, his brain turning cartwheels. The minister had sent him to the district where his wife was in charge of police investigations. And he runs into her on his very first case. She’s watching me, he decided, waiting for me to make the first tiny mistake. He pushed me out of the Paris limelight, but that wasn’t enough. He wants to kick my ass out here in the sticks. And his wife is going to help him do it. Just how did I tread on his toes?

  She lit a Gauloise. Left-handed, Blanc registered automatically. She didn’t offer him one. “What have you found out so far, mon Capitaine?” she asked through a cloud of blue smoke.

  All Blanc’s senses were on maximum alert, razor sharp and pumped up with adrenaline. He noted every single hair in the strand that touched her left cheek, the smoke in her voice, the turquoise-colored Hermès scarf negligently thrown over the back of her leather chair, her pianist’s fingers tapping out some unknown melody on the desk, the hint of Chanel No. 5 in the air. Maybe she isn’t aware of the connection between me and her husband, he thought irritably. Then she said, “Well?” and he could hear both impatience and irony in her voice.

  “We have a murder victim, discovered at a garbage dump.”

  “I know that already. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Do you want me to start from the beginning, or should I skip to chapter three?”

  She raised an eyebrow, inhaled deeply, and nodded. “I’d like to hear you tell it from the beginning.”

  The captain told her about the burnt body, the Kalashnikov cartridges, about Charles Moréas, his neighbor Le Bruchec’s burglary accusations, and the little he knew about the deceased’s miserable little life. “A man with many enemies, but no friends or relatives.”

  “Most murders are committed by friends or relatives.”

  “Not this one.”

  “So what, in your opinion, should we be doing now?”

  “Go through the details of Moréas’s past life. He somehow got involved with someone unscrupulous: A machine-gun murder and incinerated corpse are hardly the result of a tiff. This was a cold-blooded execution, and that suggests the killer was a professional.”

  “Are you sure you have the qualifications for an investigation like this?”

  Blanc was taken aback for a minute. “What leads you to doubt my qualifications?”

  Vialaron-Allègre gave him a long, hard look. “This Moréas is a creature of the Midi. He probably never got beyond the town of Orange in his entire life. And you want to go back through the details of his last thirty years when you’ve only been in Provence for a couple of days?”

  “I haven’t been in the gendarmerie for more than a couple of days.”

  “My husband has told me about your abilities,” she said calmly. “Murders in Provence aren’t exactly your specialty.”

  “I always appreciate the chance to learn on the job.”

  “Parisian arrogance isn’t going to get you very far down here.”

  Blanc took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. The way this conversation was going was intended to derail him. “I shall keep you fully informed of my progress at every step,” he promised. “Feel free to intervene the moment you think I’m going off course.”

  “Très bien,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre replied, stubbing out her cigarette in a chrome ashtray. “I look forward to your next report.” She didn’t shake his hand as he left.

  * * *

  “Mon Capitaine?” Nkoulou caught him coming out and led him into his own office. Blanc made sure he closed the door behind him. He looked down at his boss’s desk and remembered his colleagues’ bet. What woman could put up with such a pedant?

  “I had a call this morning,” the commandant began, “from a local mayor.”

  “Monsieur Lafont from Caillouteaux?”

  “It was a fairly intense conversation.” Nkoulou’s voice was almost shaking. “Your promise that no politicians would bother with this case has proven remarkably short-lived.”

  “Did he try to put pressure on you?”

  “Let’s just say the mayor would be relieved if we could solve this case quickly. Quickly enough for it not to overshadow the laying of the foundation stone for his new médiathèque.”

  “We’re working on it, mon Commandant.”

  Nkoulou drew his lips in a smile that was part scornful, part resigned. “Leave out the plural in that sentence. You’ll be doing most of the work on your own. Lieutenant Tonon hasn’t even turned up yet today.”

  “We’ll get the mayor his murderer before the diggers turn up in Caillouteaux,” Blanc promised. Then he saluted and left the sterile little room.

  * * *

  Half an hour later Tonon turned up, his eyes bloodshot. Not a word about what he’d been up to all morning. Nor was it necessary. Nonetheless, he had brought with him, scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper, a list of all the paintball players he knew. They spent the rest of the day getting hold of them, e
ither at work or at home—mostly at home, as many of them were unemployed. None of them had been at the garbage dump recently.

  It was only that evening when they got back to the gendarmerie, both exhausted, that Tonon opened his mouth to say anything more than the bare minimum. “You need to watch out for this judge,” he warned. “She’s a dragon in pretty makeup.”

  “With good family connections.”

  The lieutenant made a face. “I’d like to know what makes her dote on that slippery clown. She would have done well enough without him. They say she studied in America, was offered a job in the ministry of justice, but preferred to stay here.”

  “How modest of her.”

  “You don’t understand. She’s from here. Midi. You can study in America and be offered a job in Paris—but if you get the chance to stay down here in the south, you take it.”

  “As corrupt as everyone else?”

  “Whatever you do, don’t try to bribe her.” Tonon shook his head. “She’s clean.”

  Blanc thought of her husband, who had put him out to pasture after he had successfully solved a corruption case, and wondered if the Vialaron-Allègres really couldn’t be bought. “If she works down here and her husband is in Paris, then they can hardly see one another often. That means…”

  “The minister takes the TGV high-speed train from Paris to Aix-en-Provence every Friday night and his good lady meets him at the station. They have a nice house here. In Caillouteaux.”

  “Merde.”

  “And every now and then he stays over until Monday and visits a few local gendarmerie stations. Unannounced.”

  “Merde.”

  “A few weeks ago there was an issue with an officer and he got posted to Lorraine.”

  “Merde.”

  “Madame le juge thinks most gendarmerie officers are idiots. Maybe you can change her mind.” But it didn’t sound like Tonon would bet on it.

  “I’m just getting to know her,” Blanc muttered, climbing out of the patrol car.

  * * *

  When he got back to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée a few minutes later, there was a dented dark blue Peugeot 504 next to his front gate. Blanc braked, looking at the old Peugeot with a professionally suspicious eye. Behind the wheel sat a man of about fifty or so, who waved at him and squeezed his dumpy body out of the driver’s seat. His close-cropped hair was turning from black to gray and years in the sun had made his skin as wrinkled as an antique leather couch. His black eyes gleamed under bushy brows. A farmer, Blanc reckoned. A woman of about the same age got out of the passenger side: thin as a rake, high cheekbones, gray hair tied back into a ponytail that reached halfway down her back. Hardly a farmer’s wife, the captain told himself. He was curious.

  He shook the man’s iron-hard, calloused hand, and the woman’s pianist’s hand. “Micheletti,” the man introduced himself. “You live in the old mill?”

  Blanc nodded and gave his name. Micheletti laughed and said:

  “Then call us Sylvie and Bruno. We’re practically neighbors.” He had a voice that growled like the engine of an antique American limo, but there was no reek of tobacco. An ex-smoker, Blanc decided, then caught himself: You don’t have to be a policeman all the time.

  “We saw a light on last night,” Sylvie said, “for the first time in years. We’re glad to see somebody living in the old oil mill again.”

  The narrow route départementale on which Blanc’s house stood wound its way through Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée. On the other side of the Touloubre, two other roads led off, both so unimportant that neither had a name. The one that led off to the right meandered some three hundred yards into the forest before coming to an end outside an old farmhouse. The other one had an asphalt surface and led to the left along the crest of the hill, flanked by old stone houses, tall and narrow, clinging to the back of the hill like a series of ancient towers placed against one another to form a wall. Beyond them the asphalt surface stopped, and the road degenerated into a dusty path leading into the pinewoods. Micheletti pointed down it. “If you go a bit farther down that way you’ll come to our place. Our land comes all the way down until it touches yours. That makes us neighbors.”

  “We run a winery,” Sylvie explained. “Domaine de Bernard.”

  Blanc had only ever seen a winery on a postcard: endless rows of grapevines in Bordeaux or Champagne, with châteaux or stately homes in the background. “A vineyard out here in the forest?” he said dubiously.

  Bruno laughed. “You’ll see for yourself. We’ll invite you over.” He fumbled in the car’s glove box and brought out a crumpled business card with an impressive coat of arms on it. “That’s our telephone number.”

  The captain pulled out his notebook, ripped out a page, and scribbled his own cell phone number on it. “I haven’t got a landline yet,” he apologized.

  “That could take a while to sort out.”

  Blanc didn’t quite know how much he ought to tell them about himself. He kept to the bare minimum. But neither Bruno nor Sylvie seemed either hesitant or overly curious when he said he was a gendarme. No questions about his family, no comments about his job. He got the feeling they were both simply glad to have a new neighbor. As they trundled off in the Peugeot he waved after them. Winemakers. That didn’t sound bad, though it would be better if he knew anything about wine.

  Eventually he found a place far enough from the great wall of rock that he had a signal on his phone. He sat down on a wooden chair in the evening heat and tried making the calls he needed to get a landline installed. For the next half hour he followed instructions from computer voices to enter numbers, hash keys, or stars on his keyboard, until eventually he gave up without ever having spoken to a human being. He’d try again tomorrow. Maybe.

  For the very first time he went up the stairs in his house. The old staircase was badly worn. Upstairs there were three bright rooms—the last of them had to have been the one he remembered from his childhood as where the light played tricks on the walls. All the walls were papered, a brown-green floral pattern; furniture from the seventies lay around, plastic and veneer, all the drawers empty. Nails hung on the walls with lighter patches of wallpaper beneath them—somebody had obviously cleared out the place of all the pictures. Masterpieces hanging on these walls? Gold and jewelry hidden somewhere? Looking at the depressing pattern, Blanc seriously doubted it. The only thing even remotely good-looking was under his feet: The ancient floorboards had been painted a faded white chalky color. He ripped off a strip of wallpaper, revealing old ochre plaster that had been waxed over, he reckoned. All he had to do was throw out the furniture, rip off the wallpaper, clean and restore the floor (and the walls and the ceilings), scrape out the grouting in the old window frames and replace it, clean the windows, rewire the place, replace the damaged tiles on the roof—and in maybe a hundred years or so he would finally feel more or less at home here.

  By now it had cooled down a little. Blanc shrugged his shoulders and began lugging the cupboards, chests of drawers, and bedsteads from the first floor downstairs and out the door. By the time he spotted the first bat, several hours later, the top floor had been emptied of furniture. He had pulled wallpaper from the walls and left it on the floor of the first room, used his shoe to remove a couple of scorpions frightened out of cracks in the walls and thrown them outside. He could feel the muscles in his arms and shoulders begin to ache; his hands were scratched and bruised and he was so thirsty his lips had gone numb. He felt great.

  But as he slowly ate and drank, his self-satisfaction gradually evaporated. He was thinking of the charred corpse and wondering what he might have missed. Was there something in Moréas’s criminal past that he could have overlooked? Anything in his run-down little home? Anything in what Le Bruchec, Rheinbach, or the mayor had said? Something … there was something he should have noticed. It was something that had never happened to him before. Maybe the minister was right when he exiled him from Paris. The Vialaron-Allègres. One an ambitious politician
who had sent him down here, the other the incorruptible judge in charge of his first case on arrival. This cozy little couple have got me in their clutches. Just when I’m not exactly on top of the game.

  A Row Down at the Harbor

  When Blanc went to start up the Espace the next morning, the only sound from the engine was like a pebble dancing in a metal bucket.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Down by the gate there was an old blue Alpine with its engine ticking over. It had to be vintage. Probably worth a fortune. “Fancy giving me a tow?” he called out to the driver.

  The man turned into his driveway: He was in his midfifties, average height, bald, with glasses. “That happens all the time with older Espace models,” he said, sliding out of his sports seat. He shook Blanc’s hand. “Jean-François Riou. We live just over there.” He pointed to a house plastered in pale pink on the road leading up the hill.

  A few more days like this and I’ll know everybody in the village, Blanc thought to himself. In Paris he had never even heard his neighbor’s voice. When they passed in the stairwell, they greeted each other with nothing but a nod. Down here in the south, people talked to one another freely—indeed it was hard to stop them.

  He introduced himself in return. “Should I just tip it into the Touloubre?” he asked.

  Riou shook his head. “May I?” He opened the hood and bent over the engine.

  “You a mechanic?”

  “Engineer. I work for Airbus Helicopters in Marignane. But in my spare time I like messing around with cars.” He pulled a tool kit out of the Alpine’s tiny trunk and began fiddling around with screwdrivers and wrenches in the guts of the Espace. “The killer with these is that as soon as one part gets fixed, the next goes. Appalling build quality.”

  Barely ten minutes later Riou turned the key in the ignition—and the old minivan growled into life. Blanc stared at him in amazement. “It started on the first try. It’s never done that!”