Capucine could see that they were official procès-verbal forms used for reporting the statements of witnesses.
“These are eleven PVs that my men and I have collected over the past few days. Bellec, Lisette. Martel, Pierre. Seven workers at the Elevage Vienneau. And the parents of Devere, Clément.” He closed the file and pushed it across the desk toward Capucine. None of the reports were longer than a paragraph, and each stated, in the bland, passive voice of officialdom, that the person interviewed had nothing to report. They were useless in a police inquiry.
In view of her experience over the past few days, Capucine was sure that Dallemagne had been energetic in spreading his rumor that she was a secret minion of the fisc far beyond the people he had interviewed. She was equally sure that he had sent copies of his PVs through the gendarmerie hierarchy, effectively scoring points for his zeal in cooperating with an arrogant sister service. As political tactics went, it was brilliant. He’d effectively sabotaged Capucine’s investigation while making himself look as good as he could under the circumstances. Now all he needed was for her investigation to fall flat on its face. Then he would be entirely vindicated.
Stiffly courteous, Dallemagne walked her to the door of the building. “Madame, it was an honor to have been of service to the Police Judiciaire. If I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to let me know.”
As she walked slowly back to the Clio, it was abundantly clear to Capucine that any hope for a solution lay far, far outside the box.
CHAPTER 31
She told herself, and everyone else, that she needed to go to Paris to deal with the mountain of paperwork that must be sitting on her desk and review the progress of her teams on their cases. She said that because she still hadn’t quite made up her mind.
It turned out to be a long day. The pile on her desk was far more mountainous than she had imagined, and three of her teams were stymied. There was also a pile of “dans votre absence” phone message slips as thick as a deck of cards. It was a very long day. At one in the afternoon a uniformed brigadier brought her a croque-monsieur and a quarter-liter carafe of Côtes du Rhône from the café at the corner. She ate half the sandwich and sipped a little of the wine while making changes to the duty roster for the next week. The afternoon wore on. Before she knew it, it was 5:45. Now or never.
She picked up the phone and pushed the speed-dial button labeled MOHAMED BENAROUCHE.
“Do you have a second, Momo?”
“Sure thing, Commissaire.”
Of the three brigadiers she had brought with her from the Crim’, two, David and Isabelle, had blossomed, gradually becoming more rounded officers. Only Momo, now that he was in a neighborhood commissariat where petty crime and domestic disputes were far more prevalent than serious felonies, had flopped like a fish out of water. He was a force of nature, a huge North African, physically bigger than David and Isabelle put together. He always reminded Capucine of a Sig service pistol, big, heavy, square, and lethal. Of the three brigadiers, she was most attached to Momo. After all, he had carried her through her terrible first case, sometimes literally. He was the one who had no ambition in life other than to “get her back,” as he liked to say.
Capucine looked up from her file as Momo’s bulk blotted out the light from the hallway. His smile looked out of place in the surly toughness of his pockmarked Moroccan street fighter’s face.
“ ’Sup?” he asked, somehow managing to sound as respectful as if he had added the required “Madame le Commissaire.”
“It’s going to take some explaining. Shut the door and let’s try some of this Calvados I brought back.” The slammed door cracked like a pistol shot as Momo flicked it shut with his foot.
Momo was a practicing Muslim but far from devout enough to renounce alcohol. Quite the contrary. She still kidded him about the time he nearly blew his cover on a stakeout in the Paris Arab ghetto of Barbès by asking for a beer in a café.
Capucine produced a fat bottle marked “Calvados Boulard, Pays d’Auge, Hors d’Age” and two small tumblers from a desk drawer. She poured them both half an inch. Capucine sipped hers. Momo shot his back in one swallow and pursed his lips in an appreciative frown.
“You don’t get this kind of stuff in the cafés where I go,” he said.
Capucine poured a good two inches in his glass. Now that the niceties were over, it was time for a decent drink.
“I’m working on a funny kind of case. In Normandy. I don’t think I should have taken it on in the first place. But I let my pride get the better of me, and now that I’m officially responsible, it turns out I don’t have the resources to solve it. Does this make any sense?”
“Sure. I figured it had to be something like that. You were spending a lot of time in Normandy. Nobody likes apple pie that much.” Momo helped himself to a third shot of the Calvados. He knew perfectly well the whole bottle was intended for him.
“Look, Momo, I need you to do something dangerous for me. I have no right to even think of asking you, and you can refuse if you’re not completely comfortable with the assignment.” Capucine caught herself chirping and noticed that Momo was smiling indulgently, restraining himself from asking her to cut the crap and get on with it.
“Okay, okay, let me explain.”
“Commissaire, I keep telling you, I’m just here for the heavy lifting. Just point me in the right direction and tell me what to do. You don’t have to do no explaining.”
But she did explain at length and told him exactly what she wanted and what risks were involved. When she was done, Momo nodded, downed one more shot of Calvados, and stood up.
“You got it.”
He picked up the bottle, still almost three-quarters full, slid it in his jacket pocket, and clumped out of the office.
CHAPTER 32
It was like nothing he’d ever seen. The fields were as moist and green as the lettuce in fancy supermarkets after the sprayer had gone off. And the cows! Snowy white with pink noses like in a book for little children. The whole setup looked like some TV ad for yogurt, not a place where you were going to sweat and get dirt under your nails. What the hell had Commissaire Le Tellier dreamed up this time?
The endless swelling emerald hills made him sleepy. He nodded with the swaying of the bus, his head sinking lower and lower. A murmur woke him. There it was. A fancy stone archway with the name of the place—Elevage Vienneau—in big iron letters on the top. But the bus kept on going and turned only after half a mile or so, into a deeply potholed, narrow road running beside a crumbling cement wall that had been stained black over the years by the exhaust of passing cars. It pulled up with a loud airbrake fart at an ugly cement gateway. CITÉ OUVRIÈRE—workers’ compound—it said on a faded wooden sign with the paint coming off in chips. Below, black painted iron doors had red rust running down in streaks like drying blood.
Everyone on the bus got off and ducked through a small opening in one of the portals. Inside, the world reverted to the familiar. Two long darkened stucco buildings glared at each other, their tiny windows squinting like gang members squaring off for a street fight. The reedy ululation of popular Arab tunes blaring from multiple boom boxes mingled with the singsongy lilt of high-pitched conversations in French-Arab patois. If it weren’t for the desperate feel of a prison yard, it could have been his childhood home in the Paris projects.
He tramped up three flights of stairs to the room they had told him would be his and opened the door. A man, lying on one of the two beds, reading a newspaper in Arabic, jumped up on the defensive. But when he saw it was only another Maghrebian, and not a blanc with authority, he relaxed and fell back on the bed.
“Salaam aleikom,��� Momo greeted him respectfully.
“Labess,” Momo’s new roommate drawled in reply with studied cool, stretching out to show how laid back he was, while slowly going over Momo from top to bottom. “So, my brother, this is the best job you could find?”
After exchanging names, Momo treated
Mustafa to the epic he had prepared, about finding himself out of work in Paris and having a friend who had a cousin who had a brother-in-law who had once worked at the élevage, and who had given him a name to call, who, wonderfully, had hired him over the phone and told him which train to take. It was a lot less than he had been making in Paris when he had been working but a lot more than when he had not. But he was going to have a roof over his head and his belly was going to be full and he’d have some money to send to his bled in Algeria, right? Momo hoped he hit just the right note of dumb naïveté and hopefulness.
Mustafa snorted and said, “You’ll see what you’ll see,” assuming the role of older cousin, cynical and protective. He watched Momo closely as he unpacked the few dingy secondhand work clothes he had purchased in a dismal back alley of the Marché aux Puces the day before. “Your hands look like they’ve never seen a day’s work, but there’s too much sun in your face for you to have been behind bars in the cabane. So what were you doing before the genius brother-in-law of the cousin of the friend told you to come here, mon frère?”
Momo launched into the backstory of his epic: he had worked in his cousin’s tiny convenience store in the Twentieth Arrondissement. “That job was the best, mon pote,” Momo said with carefully constructed earnestness. “I got to run the till because I can speak French. So no hard work. Just sitting on a stool all day. I’m sure going to miss that.”
“You’re not wrong there,” the roommate said with a cynical twist of his mouth.
Just as Momo was prepared to embroider his epic, he was cut off by a warbling wail, just like the air-raid sirens in black-and-white World War II war movies.
“La bouffe—dinner!” announced the roommate. “It’s shit, but you get to eat as much as you want. They’ll lose money with you,” he laughed admiringly.
During the meal Momo discovered that the workforce consisted of two distinct groups, Maghrebians and Turks. The Turks were in a distinct minority and sat by themselves in a tight enclave in a corner of the long-tabled refectory. A clear sign of the dominance of the Maghrebians, the meal was North African, a thin lamb tagine poured over mounds of couscous. By the time dinner was over, Momo’s reintegration into the world of his childhood was complete. He found himself thinking in Arabic and was no longer irritated by the constant touching and prodding. He even bridled at the colonial arrogance of the French, feeding their former subjects mutton, even as they worked on a beef ranch, in the mistaken belief that was all Arabs ate.
After the meal Mustafa, ever the protective big brother, invited Momo to go with his new pals to an Arab café a few streets from the workers’ gate. Momo begged off. Mint tea in a seedy bistro was not going to do it for him that night. What it was going to take was a whole lot of cigarettes and booze, two things his fellow workers sure as hell were not going to take kindly to.
Back in the room, he squeezed his shoulders through the narrow window and leaned out, confident that he would be undisturbed for at least a couple of hours and, with the room light out, was invisible from the courtyard. He lit a cigarette and cupped it in his hand, relishing the rush as the smoke went as deep into his lungs as he could get it. The one thing you really learned in the police was how to smoke on a stakeout without being seen. Leaving the cigarette on the sill, he squirmed back in, extracted Commissaire Le Tellier’s now half-full bottle of Calvados from his bag, put it on the little ledge, and twisted his torso back out the window. Who else would have given him a bottle of really good stuff?
It was hard to think of her as a bigwig commissaire. What the hell was she up to this time? He didn’t mind long nights, he didn’t mind getting shot at, but he really minded not having a friend to talk to. He pulled the cork, lifted the bottle, swallowed twice, grimaced, and waited for the alcohol to join the nicotine in a sinuous belly dance. The cool air felt good. The world took a quarter turn. He felt good too. He was doing something he should be doing. Something worthwhile. A sense of peace descended over him like a warm blanket.
He knew he was going to be able to sleep.
Of course, sleep raised another little problem. Commissaire Le Tellier had told him he couldn’t take his tricolor police card with him. That made sense. It was likely enough that someone would go through his stuff. But she also told him not to take a piece. Sure. Why not just leave his dick at home, too? He took the last swig of Calvados in the bottle and jiggled his left foot, relishing the feel of the gun holstered to his ankle. He had paid for the Smith and Wesson 340PD out of his own pocket, and the damn thing had cost close to a month’s salary. And then he had shelled out another bucketful of cash for the rubber grip with the laser aimer. All he had to do was squeeze the grip a little and a red laser dot would tell him where the bullet would hit. Good thing, too, because one shot was all he was going to get. It was a real bastard of a gun. It fired a .357 Magnum, and the scandium alloy frame and titanium barrel were so light, the recoil felt like a truck had slammed into your hand.
He’d had enough to drink to find the thought of him kneeling next to Mustafa for morning prayer, heads on the floor, unshod, as the Qur’an required, with his 340PD strapped to his ankle, hugely funny.
Momo flopped on the bed belly down, pulled the holster off his ankle with a loud Velcro scratch, put it under his pillow, clunked the empty bottle of Calvados in his bag, shot it under the bed, and passed out.
CHAPTER 33
Mercifully, even though it was essentially a Maghrebian meal, coffee figured prominently in the refectory breakfast. Momo passed on everything else—the mint tea, the white yogurt with puddles of acidy whey, the sliced country bread, the slightly rancid butter, the runny red jam—and concentrated on getting as much coffee, black and very sugary, into his system as quickly as he could. It didn’t help much with his headache. If he had been in his apartment, a shot of Cognac and a couple of cigarettes would have done the trick, but as things were, he had to make do with the coffee.
Just as he thought he might be beginning to feel better, a big blanc came into the refectory, moving a lot of air, as they said. He was not as big as Momo, but almost. He looked around, singled out Momo, and strode up to the table.
“Benarouche,” he boomed with the false friendliness of a small-town politician canvassing for votes in a supermarket. “All rested up? Your bed as soft as could be? Ready for some hard work? You bet you are,” he said, clapping Momo on the back.
He pulled out a chair with his foot, spun it around, and sat with his arms crossed over the back. Conversations ceased in a radius of twenty feet.
“My name is Martel. I’m your foreman.”
Momo mumbled, “Oui, monsieur,” with all the subservience the situation seemed to require.
Martel nodded, eying Momo in cold appraisal.
“I’m going to put you on the kill floor. Big guy like you can be useful there. You’re going to back up your roommate for the first week, until you get the hang of it, and then you’re going to be on your own. Think you can handle that?”
Just as Momo muttered another “Oui, monsieur,” Martel barked out an earsplitting “Mustafa!” Momo’s headache shot up several notches and began to throb aggressively.
Mustafa trotted up eagerly, his cool-guy demeanor of the previous night volatilized.
“Mustafa, Mohamed here is going to be on your detail. Show him the ropes. I want him to learn fast. Someone his size is just what we need to deal with the skittery ones that hold up the line. You come see me on Friday and report on how he’s doing. Got it?”
Before the “Oui, monsieur” was half said, Martel marched out purposefully, looking neither left nor right.
Ten minutes later Mustafa led Momo toward a large iron-fenced corral. The morning’s encounter had made him chatty. “I learned the work of the abattoir in a much smaller place than this. Every day there was a fuckup. The corral was too small and the chute was a piece of crap. The steers were always bucking and trying to get out. Here you could fall asleep doing the job. You’ll like it, if yo
u have a strong stomach.”
About a hundred brilliant white steers stood with the massive placidity of bovines, half dozing in the early morning sunshine, flicking at flies with their ears. Two workers leaned against the railing, chatting quietly. As Momo and Mustafa came up, they exchanged a lackadaisical “Labess.”
“This all there is today?” Mustafa asked.
“Not too many made the weight for slaughter. It’s going to be a day at the beach.” The hand laughed happily.
“Let’s get going. They want Momo to see how the corral works before he goes inside,” Mustafa said.
One of the men walked over to a circular pen at a corner of the corral. With its two partitions attached to a post in the center, it looked like a giant revolving door. He pushed one of the partitions through a quarter turn, creating an opening to the corral. The other man, still at the rail at the opposite end, produced a two-foot length of broomstick with some shreds of a white plastic garbage bag tied to the end. He climbed up on the fence and waved his makeshift flag back and forth slowly. Without showing any real fear, the steers edged slowly away. In a few seconds, ten of them had eased into the pie-shaped open section in the circular pen. The first man pushed the partition slowly back, shutting the steers in, and rotated the other partition, revealing the entrance into a long, funnel-shaped cement walled walkway.
Very quietly, in a coaxing tone, the hand encouraged the steers. “Allez, allez,” he said in French, making encouraging flapping gestures with his hands.
Mustafa laughed. “Don’t let the blanc catch you talking to the cattle in Arabic. They don’t like that. It makes the meat taste rotten.” They all laughed uproariously.
The steers complacently walked around the semicircle and entered the walkway. The hand pushed a gate shut behind them.
“See?” said Mustafa. “They’re happy. They think they’ve turned around and are going back where they came from. In that other place I was, we’d have the bull prods out already and we’d all be yelling and banging the rails. We’d have a good fuckup in the making.”
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