Crime Fraiche

by Alexander Campion

  He returned with dented little metal coupes. “Calvados sorbet to clear your palate for the next course, our highly unique little Norman specialty,” he said cynically.

  Marie-Christine burst into tears. “Goddamn this fucking Normandy. I can’t stand another second of it!” She smacked the table with her open palm. At the sound the waiter turned around to see if he was needed, quickly took the measure of the situation, and continued his retreat without making a sound. Even in this worn-out place being a waiter was a responsible enterprise.

  “This is about Philippe Gerlier, isn’t it?” Capucine asked.

  With that deep, quiet tone women adopt in crises, Marie-Christine said, “How on earth could you have possibly known? You weren’t even here.”

  “Had the relationship been going on for long?”

  “Oh my God, I don’t remember. A year, maybe more.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Capucine asked.

  “I do. Of course I do. It’s the only thing I want to do. But what is there to say? It was an addiction. In France we are brought up believing being a woman is all about entrapping our men with our bodies. We must make ourselves beautiful with our endless petits soins, and then we must make ourselves artistes in the bedroom so that we can hold on to them. We believe that’s the only way we can keep the little stallions faithful, don’t we?” Tears welled in her eyes.

  “I suppose so.”

  “But with me it was the exact opposite. My husband could care less what I look like. With any luck we make love once every two months, and he falls sound asleep the second it’s over for him.” She shuddered.

  “When I saw Philippe for the first time, it was like someone hit me on the head. I was all dizzy. It was more than lust. I needed him physically like you need a drug. Have you ever felt that?” Her eyes burned into Capucine’s.

  “Yes, but the feeling was never as sustained as yours.”

  “I know it was nothing more than an infatuation. Everything that happened between us happened in bed. But it was still wonderful.”

  Saying nothing, Capucine raised her eyebrows to encourage her to continue.

  “Please don’t get me wrong. The fact that it was so physical didn’t mean that Philippe wasn’t a wonderful, caring person. He bought me all sorts of presents. He had an eye for lingerie and would always bring me things from La Perla or some other place in Paris. And it wasn’t just me. He was devoted to his poor mother. He was always going to America to visit her. She had some terrible disease—Alzheimer’s, cancer, or something like that—and was having extensive treatment in a clinic in the Midwest. He was so sweet. He always brought back gifts for me when he went to America. Usually from a lingerie place they have there called Victoria’s Secret. They have such naughty things.” She giggled girlishly.

  “It must have been an enormous blow when he died.”

  “I felt like an addict who has been deprived of her source. It was agony. It was terrifying. It was like the bottom had dropped out of my life.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s still just as bad. Worse even. The drug addict gets over it. I can’t.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “It gets worse and worse, every day.”

  “Does Loïc know?”

  “Of course not! He’s such a dear. I could never hurt him. Why should he know? It was just something biological. A physical urge. It had absolutely nothing to do with Loïc. Can’t you understand that?” She was on the edge of hysteria.

  “I might be able to understand. I’m not so sure he would.”

  “That’s why he can never find out. Loïc is my life. He’s so kind and wonderful. I admire him so much. When his father died, the élevage was not doing at all well. Loïc took it over and made it successful again. Of course, I helped a little when I invested my inheritance—which wasn’t all that much, really—but it was Loïc who did it all, new marketing plans, new strains of cattle, new ideas. He made the business what it is today, and we share that.”

  “Does that mean you own shares in the élevage?”

  “No. Loïc owns them all. My investment was in the form of a perpetual short-term loan. I wanted Loïc to feel secure in his ownership of the business, even though we are technically equal partners. Do you see how close that makes us? Philippe was just a physical need. I don’t even see it as an infidelity. If I had started taking something like cocaine and got over it and never told Loïc, that wouldn’t be an infidelity, would it? It would just be a sickness, right?”

  “So did you get over it?”

  Marie-Christine burst into sobs. “No!” She paused. “You’re right. I didn’t. I don’t know what I should do.”

  As artlessly as in a TV sitcom, an idea bloomed and her face brightened with a radiant smile. She reached out and took both of Capucine’s hands. “I know what! Do me another favor? Please! Come to dinner tomorrow—with Alexandre, of course. It will just be the four of us. I’ll make sure that awful Bellanger person isn’t there. And you can see how Loïc and I are when we’re together. And then you can tell me what to do. Please, oh please, do come!”

  CHAPTER 23

  Alexandre was in seventh heaven. As he had explained to Capucine, the last time they were at the Vienneaus, he had been torn away from “Loïc’s Ali Baba cavern of cattle kitscheries,��� and now he was making up for lost time. Having exhausted the pleasures of the table behind the sofa, Alexandre had now expanded his horizons to include the whole vastness of the immense sitting room. And he was well rewarded. On a side table he had come across a cow’s hoof skillfully made into a silver inkwell. A little farther on he joyfully discovered a lamp that emerged from the back of a porcelain figurine of a cow. In no time at all he found that pulling the cow’s tail not only turned the lamp on and off but also caused the contraption to emit a melodic mooing sound. As the three other people in the room turned their heads toward the noise, Capucine directed a warning moue at Alexandre. She had recognized the overinflated-balloon look of suppressed mirth, always a danger sign with Alexandre.

  “I see the herd has followed you into the house, Loïc,” Alexandre said.

  Instead of the awkward silence Capucine feared, Marie-Christine giggled happily.

  “This is nothing!” she said. “When we were first married, he wanted to have a prize bull that had just died stuffed and put in the foyer.” She squeezed Vienneau, who beamed and looked at her with deep affection.

  “I still think it’s a great idea,” Vienneau said. “After all, that famous American cowboy put his stuffed horse in his living room and everyone thought it was very endearing.”

  “And his dog as well, sitting alertly by the fireplace for all eternity,” Capucine said.

  Marie-Christine smiled joyfully at the exchange, but somehow her happiness had an unreal quality, as if it had been created chemically.

  At that moment the Vienneaus’ cook made her curious semaphore signal of opening the kitchen door to signify dinner was ready, and the quartet trooped obediently off to the dining room.

  The first course was astonishing in its simplicity, a carpaccio of raw beef sliced so thin it was translucent, seasoned only with salt, pepper, a trickle of excellent olive oil, and a few drops of lemon juice. It was as rich and full tasting as only uncooked beef can be and as unctuous as a slice of poached fish. But the effect was spoiled when Vienneau announced that the meat came from “Moloch, one of the best steers we’ve produced in ages,” and then proceeded to give a lengthy description of the Moloch-in-question’s lineage and astonishing physical conformity to the Charolais standard. Capucine glanced at Alexandre and was dismayed to see he wore the highly artificial stony face that novice poker players affect when they have been dealt three of a kind. He was an inch away from uncontrollable laughter.

  A little later Marie-Christine disappeared into the kitchen to return with a serving dish of tournedos Rossini, an out-of-fashion, overrich recipe involving fillets of beef topped with foie gras, crowned with truffle slices, and splashed with a th
ick sauce of Madeira and Cognac.

  “Moloch redux?” Alexandre asked with exaggerated seriousness.

  “Oh, absolutely. Can’t waste a morsel of a creature like that,” Vienneau said.

  Capucine broke in rapidly. “So when did you two meet?” she asked with cocktail party gaiety.

  “Oh, we’ve been sweethearts since we were students,” Marie-Christine answered.

  “Yes,” Vienneau said, taking over the narrative. This was obviously a subject dear to his heart. “We married the summer after I graduated from HEC.” Capucine had no idea he had gone to such a prestigious business school. “We moved into a much smaller house down the road—my parents lived here in those days—and I started working at the élevage.”

  “I didn’t know the country at all, I’m a Paris girl, really, but I fell in love with it,” Marie-Christine filled in with the perfect timing of a couple of talking heads spooling out the evening news on TV.

  “Then came the hard years.” Vienneau had the microphone again.

  Capucine glanced nervously at Alexandre. He had a very low tolerance for this sort of hyperbole, but he seemed interested enough.

  Capucine smiled and raised an eyebrow to encourage Vienneau. “You see,” he continued, “what I told you the other day, you know, about the one-legged great-great-grandfather and all that, is really just the PR version. Of course, the élevage actually has been in the family for generations, but it was never all that big, and the business I inherited from my father was in serious financial trouble. My father had let it run down. I had to improve both the quality and the profit margins.”

  “Sounds like a tall order,” Alexandre said. “Excellence and cost control sound mutually exclusive.”

  “Loïc is a genius,” Marie-Christine said. “He turned the business around in no time at all.” She blew a kiss across the table to her husband. “He can do anything.”

  “Getting the élevage back on its feet was the easy part. The hard part came when we started to become successful. I had to expand the herd, and then I needed to acquire a fleet of refrigerated trucks to make deliveries. That involved building relations with banks and the financial community. It was a whole new world for the élevage. And without Marie-Christine it never would have happened.” Vienneau gave his wife an adoring look and blew her back a kiss.

  For a second Capucine thought all this Hallmark gushiness would prompt a comment from Alexandre, but his interest continued apparently unabated. “Weren’t you risking your quality by growing too fast?”

  “Ah ha! Ever the journalist. That was the challenge, but we had no choice. The other prestigious élevages were growing and were getting big enough to be able to squeeze us out by cutting prices, so we had to grow to remain viable. But, as it happened, we actually improved our quality,” Vienneau said proudly, spearing a hefty chunk of Moloch with his fork.

  Alexandre smiled. “Your beef is the benchmark, no doubt about that,” he said. “There can’t be many top restaurants in France that don’t buy from you.”

  “Are you planning on having children?” Marie-Christine asked Capucine.

  “I had Chef Jean-Basile Labrousse on the phone from New York just the other day, and he was telling me how much he missed your beef,” Alexandre continued.

  “Very definitely. Actually, I think the time may not be too far away,” Capucine said with a secretive smile. “And you?”

  “We still supply Diapason, his old Paris restaurant.”

  “I’d love to. Particularly now. But we can’t. It’s very sad.”

  “How does he like New York? I saw that the New York Times gave four stars to Aubade, his new restaurant,” Vienneau said.

  “He loves everything about it, but he misses Paris enormously. He said he’s lost without your beef. Apparently, American beef has excellent flavor, but it lacks—what did he call it?—some ghastly term, oh yes, ‘mouthfeel.’ ”

  “Loïc doesn’t want any?”

  “He does, but he can’t. It’s his low sperm count.”

  “I know it sounds like a sexual act, but we use the term in the industry here, too. American beef has poor mouthfeel because it’s shot too full of growth hormones. It does wonders for the cattle in small doses, but we can’t use it, because it’s strictly forbidden by the European Community. Our tenderness comes from Normandy grass, not chemicals.”

  “Actually, that’s a huge secret,” Marie-Christine went on. “Loïc doesn’t want anyone to know. He thinks it would hurt the élevage. Damage the reputation of the bulls or something. Men can be so funny.”

  “For once the EC restrictions are rooted in good sense. Those hormones have appalling side effects.”

  “What about adoption?”

  “I’d love to, but Loïc won’t commit. He doesn’t even listen when I talk about it. Would you like to adopt a child, dear?”

  “Of course, my love, anything you want, anything at all. Just have them send me the bill,” Vienneau said, without breaking stride in his rebuttal of Alexandre’s defense of the European Community’s food regulations.

  CHAPTER 24

  Capucine slapped her napkin on the table in irritation. Breakfast had become frankly impossible. She might just as well eat tablets of chocolate in her room and avoid all the aggravation. Once again Gauvin had sidled up with his conspiratorial whisper, “Madame la Comtesse, it’s the police!” This time he had been so melodramatic, she almost believed he might have a blue roadster pulled up at the back of the château for her escape.

  She picked up the receiver in the cloakroom, fully expecting to hear a breathless Isabelle. Instead, a crisp male voice asked her if she was Commissaire Le Tellier and, on hearing an affirmative answer, asked with icy politeness if she would be good enough to hold for Commissaire Pelletier. The phone went silent with that leaden deadness that foretells a long wait. It didn’t seem that the DCPJ’s largesse ran to upbeat little tunes to keep the caller on hold entertained.

  Capucine was so sure the call would be bad news that she let the odors of the cloakroom act like a time machine, sucking her back through a vortex into her childhood. The active reagents seemed to be the sweet wax of Barbour jackets, the even sweeter banana smell of the compound used to jag out shotgun barrels, and an indefinable amalgam of wet wool and leaf mold, overlaid with a soupçon of overripe Camembert, which she traced to a line of venerable wellies standing rigidly at attention against the wall. She was transported to a time when she must have been twelve or thirteen and Jacques had chased her into the cloakroom, screeching, tickling her ribs, pushing her into the coats, and . . .

  “Allô. Allô? Capu. Capu! Can you hear me?”

  “Damien. Sorry, I put the phone down.”

  “No, I apologize for making you wait. I’m having one of those days. Look, as you insisted, I presented your request to the staffing committee yesterday afternoon. They reacted exactly as I thought they would with the usual crap, keep the gendarmerie motivated, no squabbling among services, blah, blah, blah.” He fell silent. She could hear someone speaking to him in the background.

  “Listen, Capu, stay on the line. It’s going to take me only a few seconds to deal with this.” The phone fell back into its tomblike silence.

  Well, that was definitely that, Capucine said to herself. So much for Jacques’s influence. She was tempted to hang up and let Pelletier call her when he had more time, but as she thought about it, a loden cape she remembered wearing when she was in her teens seized her attention. She had loved the way it swallowed her up until she cast it back like a comic book superhero. She slipped it off its hanger and draped it over her shoulders. She realized that the archaic oak hanger must have swung from the cast-iron bar for at least a hundred years and probably a lot more. She was tempted to spend the rest of her days in the cloakroom. Maybe Gauvin could install a cot.

  “Capu, Capu! Are you there! Merde! Allô. Allô!”

  “Sorry, I’m here.”

  “Where was I? Yes, right. Well, they decided you have ‘s
pecial insights,’ ”—he gave the words heavy ironic emphasis—“into the two cases we discussed. So they’ve been taken away from the gendarmerie and assigned to you. Voilà.” He paused. “What else?” She could hear him shuffling papers. “Oh yes, the local gendarmerie is to lend you whatever assistance you need, and an order to that effect is being sent to them. But it’s important you ‘liaise cooperatively with them,’ ” he said with more leaden emphasis. “Which means, don’t piss the gendarmes off too much, because the DCPJ doesn’t want to hear any complaints, okay? What else? Ah yes, your vacation has been canceled effective, effective . . .” Capucine could hear the crackle of papers again. “Effective last Monday. Voilà. That’s it.”

  “What about the first case?” Capucine asked.

  “The first case?” Pelletier asked. She heard papers rattling once more. “The guy who got hit with bird shot while shooting birds? There’s no way in hell that’s not just a plain-vanilla shooting accident. I didn’t even put it on the agenda. Now, listen, Capu, completely off the record, I have a bone to pick with you.

  “Let me translate what ‘special insights’ mean in DCPJ jargon. It means you pulled a string. Capu, I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t want to know, but it doesn’t make me proud of you. You used to impress the shit out of me on the commissaire’s course because your integrity set the tone for the way real flics were supposed to act. Shit, it wasn’t just me. You impressed us all. And then you go and do this. I don’t know what you’re up to, but you’re acting like a corrupt politician, not a cop.” He hung up on her. It suddenly felt oppressively hot in the cloakroom. Capucine tore off the cape and bolted into the hallway.