Crime Fraiche

by Alexander Campion

  The steers shuffled down the walkway—which became progressively narrower, until the sides almost touched their flanks, gently forcing them to walk single file—and stopped in front of a closed steel door in the wall of the abattoir.

  “Time for you and me to get to work,” Mustafa said. He led Momo through a door in the abattoir building and around to the other side of the steel door that held back the steers.

  “This is the kill floor.” He pulled a lever and the door slowly pivoted open. When the first steer walked in, he shut it again. “We’ll do just one so you see how it works. Then we’ll open the gate and let the rest of them through.”

  Encouraged by Mustafa, who shook another white garbage bag on a stick, the steer ambled slowly through the extension of the chute. A center divider had been built into the floor, inclining gently upward so after a few feet it reached the animal’s brisket. A motorized rubber conveyor belt on the top of the divider lifted the steer a few inches off the ground and moved it forward. When the steer first noticed that it was no longer advancing under its own steam, it glanced around nervously but, looking down, saw the floor just beneath its hooves and calmed immediately, to all appearances enjoying the ride.

  Twenty feet down the line another gate opened, admitted the steer, and closed with a quiet click. The conveyor stopped.

  “Now we move fast,” Mustafa said.

  He pushed a big yellow button on a console, and with a violent hiss of compressed air, two stainless-steel panels closed around the steer’s neck and a third pushed its head up. Mustafa grabbed a round yellow cylinder about the size of a large flashlight hanging on a chain from the ceiling and pressed it against the crown of the steer’s head. There was a sickening thunk and the steer went limp, its head resting on the plate and its body held up by the center divider. The whole thing had taken less than two seconds.

  “Is it dead?” Momo asked.

  Mustafa shook his head, reached down, found a chain, looped it twice around the animal’s hind leg, snapped on a catch, and pushed another button. The steer was lifted into the air and began traversing the room, twitching and writhing slightly, until it went through a door of curtained plastic strips and disappeared.

  Mustafa held up the yellow cylinder in front of Momo’s face and pushed a button. The device jumped and a black tube around the chain writhed. “The stunner. Works with compressed air. A six-inch bolt jumps out and goes into the steer’s head.” He pushed the button again for effect. “Too fast for you to see. Do it right, the steer’s knocked out but still alive. Do it wrong, it’s dead and the blood won’t drain out, or it’s conscious and you get to see a belly dance on a chain.” He laughed cynically.

  “What happens in the next room?” Momo asked.

  “The steer gets turned into steaks. There are a lot of frères in there, bleeding, skinning, and butchering. Those are the guys who make the big money. You have to be here a long time before they let you do that work.”

  Momo felt slightly nauseous. He blamed the Calvados.

  “We need to get started. You work the stunner and put the leg chain on. I’ll work the entry gate and the head restraints. I’ll help you if you get in trouble.” Mustafa pushed the button for the trap to the outside chute, and the steers began ambling in, unsuspecting, at their tranquil bovine pace.

  The day was endless. Momo made a number of mistakes, the consequences of which were unthinkable. Halfway through, the foreman came by and said in his politician’s bellow that Momo was learning all right but would have to work faster. It took almost the whole shift to get through the small herd in the corral. At first Momo thought he would never be able to stomach it and longed for a drink. He bitterly regretted having finished Commissaire Le Tellier’s Calvados the night before. After a while he found he could escape the kill floor by locking his mind on the challenge of sneaking out of the compound to get his hands on a decent bottle of Scotch. That made it almost bearable.

  CHAPTER 34

  Even after a week at the commissariat, Capucine felt she had made only an insignificant dent in the paperwork on her desk. Important things were not getting done because they were still buried six inches deep in the pile. The imperative of getting to the bottom of the stack announced itself with the urgency of a genuine catastrophe. As she worked, the phone rang. She made no effort to pick it up and continued her review of one of her lieutenants’ reports on a claimed wife beating, a particularly brutal one, requiring several stitches. The case was challenging. The woman in question was promiscuous enough to be termed an “amateur prostitute.” The oxymoron irritated Capucine, but she couldn’t think of a better way to put it. The woman had explained that her husband beat her every time he learned of one of her trysts. She’d pointed out that he wasn’t all that quick on the uptake or she would be beaten daily. The lieutenant believed one of the woman’s many lovers was responsible for the assault, not her husband, who had never inflicted serious damage in the past. Still, unless an investigation unearthed evidence to the contrary, it was highly likely a judge would put him behind bars for a few months and he would emerge to the administrative difficulties of a convicted felon. The lieutenant wanted a wiretap installed.

  Capucine uncapped a dented gold Waterman, a present from her grandfather when she had passed her bac at the age of seventeen, which ever since her university days had been kept filled with Waterman Bleu Floride ink in the unshakable belief that it had been the invariable choice of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. She made the occasional tick mark against the telling points that emerged from the cesspool of sordidness of the report and at the bottom noted that she would seek the approval of the juge d’instruction for the wiretap, which seemed entirely warranted.

  The phone had stopped ringing but began again immediately. Capucine muttered an irritated “Oh, là là” and picked it up.

  “I knew you were there, Commissaire,” the brigadier at the front desk said, his smile as fulsome as if he had been in the room. “There’s a woman here—a lady,” he quickly corrected himself, “who wants to see you but doesn’t have an appointment. Should I send her away?”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Madame Vienneau.”

  “Tell her I’ll be right out to get her.”

  Despite herself, Capucine felt awkward seeing Marie-Christine in the commissariat. She had never had a social visitor in her office, not even Alexandre, and she found it difficult to throw off her professional mantle. Her first reflex was to invite Marie-Christine down to the café around the corner for a coffee, which was what she would have done if one of her staff had come to her with a personal problem, but under the circumstances that wouldn’t do at all. Nor could she take her into one of the interrogation rooms for a flimsy cup of vending machine espresso, de rigueur for entertaining informants and other “friends” of the police. Capucine decided there was nothing else for it but to hear out Marie-Christine across her desk.

  Marie-Christine seemed just as ill at ease as Capucine. “I feel terrible about barging in here like this. I know your time is hugely valuable, but I felt awkward asking you to lunch.” She paused and giggled girlishly. “Actually, I wanted to see you running a real police station, wearing your big gun.”

  Obligingly, Capucine stood up and performed a little pirouette, showing off the Sig Sauer in its speed holster in the small of her back and the pair of handcuffs looped over the waistband of her skirt next to it. Capucine said, “I told you when we were driving to Honfleur, it has an appealing S and M look, but it’s pure torture when you have to sit in a car.” They both laughed and the awkward moment was gone.

  “The real reason I wanted to see you was to explain why I did what I did,” Marie-Christine said. “I’m sure all those people down in Saint-Nicolas think I’m a hysterical harpy with her hormones out of control. I don’t care about them. But I do care what you think.”

  Capucine reached across the desk and patted Marie-Christine’s hand. The commissariat was definitely not the place for feminine c
onfidences.

  “You know, lunch wasn’t such a bad idea. I’m actually a bit peckish.”

  “Do you really have the time?”

  Capucine nodded and smiled. She was already on the phone to the front desk.

  “Brigadier, would you call Benoît’s and see if they can squeeze two more in?”

  The real story, as Capucine knew, was going to wait until lunch was winding down.

  The restaurant was one of those mythical Paris places that are wrongly believed not to exist any longer, a true neighborhood bistro with cubbyholes for the patrons’ napkins—changed once a week—and only a small handful of items on the blackboard menu on the wall, where all the customers, with no exceptions, were well known to the owner. There was only one waitress, a corpulent woman whose apron strings disappeared into the folds of her waist, a far bigger bully than anyone’s mother had ever been. As far as the waitress was concerned, there weren’t a handful of items on the menu; there were only two: for men saucisses de Morteau, thick, smoked sausages with little twigs holding the ends shut, on a creamy bed of lentilles du Puy, and for women a fillet of “flétan”—the Parisian generic for any flatfish. No discussion would be brooked. Capucine would very much have enjoyed the saucisses but knew enough Freud to recognize vicarious dieting when she saw it and accepted the inevitable.

  Only when coffee had been reached—cheese was not even offered, and the reluctantly proposed dessert to be shared had been declined—did Marie-Christine unburden her soul.

  “I really adore Loïc,” Marie-Christine said earnestly. “I love him with all my heart. Our two lives have grown into one. You won’t believe it, but we met at Castel. I never thought true romance could be found in a discotheque. He was with someone he didn’t like, and I was with a girlfriend because I had just been dumped and was trying to get drunk to forget about it. Somehow we just found ourselves dancing together. When I woke up with him the next morning, I realized how lucky I was. He was older than the boys I had been going out with and was strong and gave direction and purpose to my life, which had gone completely adrift.

  “He had just inherited the élevage and it was in a complete mess. His father had been senile and had been interested only in his crazy breeding theories. Sales had fallen way off, and the élevage was losing money hand over fist. It was a nightmare for Loïc. He was working so hard, he needed to spend his weekends in Paris, getting away and blowing off steam.

  “Of course, we fell in love right away and developed a routine. He would come to Paris every weekend and stay at my apartment. I couldn’t go to Saint-Nicolas, because there’s no hotel and it would have been completely out of the question for me to sleep at his house. Can you imagine !” Marie-Christine giggled.

  “But I would drive down for the day pretty often and came to know the ins and outs of the élevage. Loïc quickly got bored with coming to Paris. His heart was really in the country. He proposed to me and I accepted in a flash.”

  She stopped and took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong way. Remember I told you that I inherited a good bit of money when my father died several years before and I had invested it in the élevage? What that meant was that I bullied my trust officers into investing, but I guess that amounts to the same thing,” she said with a giggle.

  “It’s important you understand that when we started going out, Loïc had no idea I had any money. I really do think he fell in love with me that first night at Castel. Anyway, it all worked out for the best. The élevage took off again. It was really spectacular. I don’t know how Loïc did it. He invested in some new bulls—his father’s experiments had seriously weakened the herd—expanded some of the buildings, came up with an advertising campaign, and the next thing we knew, we were heralded as one of the leaders of the new generation of French agriculturists and were making buckets of money. . . .” Marie-Christine’s voice trailed off.

  “So what happened?” Capucine asked. The restaurant was almost empty, and the kitchen staff was setting the tables for the evening service, but she knew they would not be disturbed.

  Marie-Christine snapped herself back into the conversation. “I’ll tell you about that in a minute, but I want to tell you about the money part first. It’s because of that that I’m in the mess I’m in now.

  “Lazard Frères has always managed my trust, and they’re very strict about it. When we got married, their lawyer insisted that the marriage contract be under the provision for separation of assets, so each partner’s property would remain his and only the property acquired after the marriage would be considered joint. Do you know how that works?”

  Capucine laughed. “When I started out in the police, I worked in fiscal fraud. I know a whole lot more about that stuff than I’d like to.”

  “Well, the Lazard man told me that the money I was lending the élevage was probably more than the place was worth. Remember, it was nearly bankrupt at that point. He said that if we ever divorced, I could wind up as the majority owner even if Loïc had paid my trust fund back later. It annoyed me to think they were preparing for my eventual divorce, but I guess that’s part of their job.

  “That’s my problem. I can’t control what Lazard does. If I ever divorced Loïc, I’m afraid he would lose the élevage. Is that right? You know all about these things.”

  “I haven’t seen the numbers, but it’s certainly possible.”

  “That would be like cutting his right arm off. You just can’t do that to a man. Can you understand that?”

  “So you do want a divorce.”

  “I don’t know what I want. Loïc is wonderful, kind and understanding, just like the father I always wanted, and I love him. Well, I don’t have to tell you. Alexandre is so much older than you are. Being with Loïc is not like having a real husband. The bed part is such a chore.” She leaned over, put her hand on top of Capucine’s, and said in a rush, “He never wants to do it and then after three or four months he panics because we haven’t and then he takes one of those awful blue pills and we have to sit around for an hour trying to think of something to say waiting for it to kick in. Sometimes it winds up working, and sometimes it doesn’t. And all the trying, my God. It’s just so horrible. Poor you, I’m sure you have to go through the same thing.”

  Capucine was sorely tempted to tell her that that was not at all the way it happened with Alexandre, quite the contrary in fact. But, diplomatically, she merely nodded encouragingly.

  “What are you going to do?” Capucine asked.

  “Who knows,” she sighed. “I told you all about Philippe when we were in Honfleur. I used to think it was just him. But I’ve discovered my physical needs are much more important than I ever imagined.” She paused and gave Capucine an appraising look, deciding if she could embark on the next stage of confidences.

  “I’ve found someone else, an old school friend. It’s platonic—I mean, we’re not in love or anything like that—but we spend a lot of time in bed. I feel so much better in my skin. I feel like a woman again and not a daughter. I love all the things he makes me do in bed. He’s even more adventuresome than Philippe—”

  “What about Loïc?” Capucine asked. She had nothing against sexual confidences but was not about to take time off from her commissariat to listen to them.

  “What am I supposed to do? Go back to Loïc and have affairs on the side? I couldn’t stand that. Divorce him? I couldn’t stand that, either. I thought you’d point me in the right direction.” She burst into uncontrollable sobs.

  The waitress stared at them unconcernedly. If it had been she crying her eyes out, Capucine hoped the woman would have had the sense to bring a plate heaped with sausages and lentils.

  CHAPTER 35

  Friday evening found a reluctant Capucine back at Maulévrier. Even though she was in the same village as Momo, abandoning her desk at the commissariat paradoxically felt like a dereliction of her duty to him.

  Oncle Aymerie’s ebullience aggravated her sense of guilt. He bubbled over with the news of a p
rodigious ferret shoot planned for the next morning. Ferreting was a pursuit—she couldn’t bring herself to consider it a sport—particularly distasteful to Capucine, a highly cruel and unfair manifestation of the paysan’s endless, imaginary war against the harmless, endearing rabbit.

  The logistics of the thing were simple enough. Ferrets were sent down into a large rabbit warren, and the terrified little bunnies dashed out of the profusion of holes either to find themselves trapped in purse nets or shot in the back by hunters with shotguns. The main virtue of the exercise appeared to be to affirm the reality of social symbiosis in country life. Keeping ferrets was the purview of the laboring classes, while wielding shotguns was presumed to be the domain of the leisured. The partnership was further cemented by the perceived gain to the farmers, who saw a measurable decrease in the ranks of their enemy, while the “nobs” always enjoyed any excuse for a day out with their guns to kill something or other. Both sides of the equation received dividends of burlap bags stuffed with rabbit carcasses, which were duly transformed into endless varieties of stews and pâtés.

  This was to be the annual incursion into a particularly infamous warren at the base of a venerable tree known, no one knew why, as le Chêne de l’Evêque—the Bishop’s Oak. The warren in question was viewed as the Roland Garros of ferreting, as extensive as the Vietcong’s tunnels, snaking out in all directions, harboring uncountable legions of furry, legumicidal rodents.

  Capucine was dismayed that Alexandre had been infected by Oncle Aymerie’s exuberance and the two of them had succeeded in exciting Jacques’s normally soaring high spirits to even greater altitudes.

  Early the next morning Capucine was awakened by Alexandre, looking for all the world like a Gallic version of a P. G. Wodehouse character in his father’s baggy plus fours.