Crime Fraiche

by Alexander Campion

  “Maybe we should start from the beginning. Are you French, mademoiselle?” Capucine said.

  The Belle tore a corner of the bread from her sandwich and shredded it into little pieces. After a while she said, “I’m Syrian. I came here with my mother a year and a half ago. I have a student visa and my mother has a tourist visa. I am a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.”

  There was a long silence. Little by little the Belle shredded the entire top of her sandwich.

  “It would be easier if I could tell you the whole story. Would that be all right?” she asked Capucine.

  “Of course. Take your time. There’s no rush.”

  “We are from Halab, what you call Aleppo, in Syria—”

  “That’s part of the French territory, isn’t it?” Isabelle asked of no one in particular.

  “It was given its independence in nineteen forty-four,” David said quietly. Isabelle shot him a stream of deftly aimed daggers with her eyes.

  “We are Jews. My father is a dealer in rare books. I studied art history at the University of Halab and painted under the tutelage of Muhammad Tulaimat, the great Syrian painter, until . . .” She trailed off.

  “Well?” said Isabelle. “Come on. Let’s hear it.”

  “Until I fell in love with a wonderful and beautiful young man. An Arab. I was blissfully happy. In heaven. Then one day the rabbi condemned me publicly and forbade me and my parents to go to the synagogue. Our world came to an end. The whole community rose against us. My father could no longer sell his books. They would whistle at us in the streets. We had no money. I had to leave the university. In the end I decided to come to France. My mother came with me.”

  “And why did you think France would be better?” David asked.

  “There is a large community of Syrian Jews in Paris. My mother and I thought we would be welcomed by them.”

  “And were you?” Isabelle asked, more curious than aggressive.

  “No. Not at all. Somehow, they knew of my infidelity to the faith and would have nothing to do with us. We had also hoped that with me gone the rabbi would reintegrate my father, but he didn’t, and now my poor papa is obliged to work as a janitor. He can’t eat to relieve his hunger, much less send us money.”

  “So how did you live?” Capucine asked.

  “How did we live? We lived in a way that got me here.” She looked at Capucine unblinkingly.

  Isabelle inhaled, preparing to speak. Capucine raised her fingers two inches off the desk in admonition. Isabelle released the breath in a sigh.

  “At first my mother worked as a cleaning woman. It is easy to find that kind of work in Paris, even if you have no papers, as long as you are prepared to work for very little. I helped her when I could and did babysitting and whatever jobs I could find when I wasn’t going to classes at the Beaux-Arts. We lived in a small studio apartment. I can’t say we were happy, but it was a life.

  “Then my mother became ill. We went to many doctors. It is a form of bone cancer. There is a treatment. But it is very expensive and, of course, we have no social coverage for medicine.”

  “I begin to understand,” Capucine said.

  “The first time was an accident. I had gone to the market on the boulevard Raspail, and I wanted to wait until it was time for the market to close. Sometimes you can get food for next to nothing then. The merchants are happy to sell things cheaply instead of throwing them away. We had had nothing for dinner the night before and naturally no breakfast or lunch. I think I fainted. The next thing I knew, I was talking to two Americans. They were extremely kind. I told them I was a student of art. They were professors of philology. They had just purchased a page of a langue d’oïl illuminated manuscript with a representation of an angel forcing a devil to disgorge by playing musical instruments. They told me all about it.”

  The Belle was visibly moved. She opened a plastic bottle of Evian and in her nervousness dropped the blue cap on the floor. She immediately fell to her knees on the floor to retrieve it.

  When she was seated again, she resumed her story. “The iconography was obvious. The angel dominates the devil with her music. It is an illustration of Saint Augustine’s dictum that a prayer sung is prayed twice. They did not know that.

  “It was an impossible moment. I was fainting from hunger but chatting away about medieval illumination as if I was at a cocktail party back in Halab.”

  There was a long pause. The Belle began shredding the other side of her sandwich. This time even Isabelle was reluctant to interrupt.

  Finally, she began again. “They took me to their house, fed me, and insisted I spend the night. I had told them some absurd story about an abusive boyfriend. The next morning they went out to the boulangerie for croissants. I called my mother. She was distraught. And starving. She had had nothing to eat for a day and a half. I felt terrible, but I knew what I had to do. I took the page and ran. I knew just the dealer who would buy it. I bought two big bags of groceries and went home with what seemed like enough money in my pocket to live forever.”

  She paused again and resumed work on the destruction of her sandwich.

  “The whole thing seemed preordained. I had never set out to rob anyone. The opportunity was just given. At one point I even thought it was the Higher Being offering me salvation.”

  She laughed cynically. “Of course, the money that was going to last forever only lasted a few weeks. The doctors and pharmacies took care of that. After, it became easy. I bought the right clothes for it. I became skilled. I tried to steal only things I knew people didn’t really want. Some of them seemed to like me so much, they would have given me what I took if I had just asked. I suppose that’s why two of them didn’t report my thefts.” She paused once again. There was no more sandwich to shred.

  “I am going to go to jail now, am I not?” she asked Capucine.

  “That’s for damn sure,” Isabelle said. The Belle ignored her.

  “I’m afraid that’s for the magistrate to decide, but there are definitely extenuating circumstances.”

  “I don’t care about me. It is my mother I worry about. In a month she will no longer have any money for her medications. Then what will she do?”

  The door opened a crack, and the uniformed duty brigadier poked his head in, searched for Capucine with his eyes, found her, and made a gesture with his thumb against his ear and his little finger up to his mouth to signify that she had a telephone call. If he interrupted an interrogation, it was bound to be urgent. And from his expression it looked like it was bad news. Capucine bolted out of the room.

  CHAPTER 45

  The call was from the ER doctor. Actually, the news wasn’t bad at all.

  “Commissaire, your man will be back on the job in a few weeks, maybe less. He has three broken ribs and multiple contusions on his torso, some of them severe enough. It looked to me as if he had been repeatedly kicked by someone wearing boots. What worried us most was that he had two blunt traumas on the back of his head—”

  “Blunt traumas, Doctor?” Capucine asked.

  “From either a blow or from falling. Given their closeness, it seems likely he was hit on the back of the head twice with something heavy. That’s always dangerous because it often results in an epidural hematoma, which is often fatal if not surgically treated immediately. I wasn’t overly concerned, because from the coloration of the contusions, we knew he had received them about fifteen hours prior to reaching us and the symptoms of an epidural hematoma almost invariably peak within six to eight hours. Other than a severe headache, he showed none of the signs. Nevertheless, I had him sent in for a CT scan, which turned out to be perfectly normal.”

  “He’ll really be back up and around in a week or two?”

  “It’s hard holding him down right now,” the doctor said with a laugh. “He’s a remarkably strong and vigorous individual, but I’m going to keep him here for a night just to be on the safe side. He’s very keen to talk to you, but there are two points I would like to call to you
r attention first.”

  Capucine said nothing, and there was an awkward silence on the line.

  “Your officer smelled strongly of beer when he arrived. The initial physical assessment was consistent with alcoholism or very heavy drinking. But there was absolutely no alcohol in his blood. He had not had even one drink the night before. Someone must have poured the beer over his clothes to make it look like he was drunk.”

  “That’s useful to know, Doctor. What was the other thing?”

  “The SAMU unit that picked him up found him propped up against the wall of a holding cell at the Saint-Nicolas gendarmerie with water pumping across the floor at regular intervals. As you can imagine, we deal with the gendarmes very frequently and they are normally extremely conscientious. I was surprised that your man had not been brought here directly, particularly since one of the traumas in his head had a deep laceration that required four stitches. The fact that he was denied medical attention is an egregious breach that merits a complaint. He could easily have died in the cell.”

  Capucine wondered at what point in the evening Capitaine Dallemagne realized Momo was one of her men.

  “Anyway, here he is. Remember that the shot of morphine he received when he was admitted is still far from metabolized.”

  “Commissaire, I’m sorry. I fucked up,” Momo said in a voice far more quiet and gentle than usual.

  “Don’t be stupid. How are you feeling?”

  “Not too bad. They gave me a shot that actually makes me feel great. If I could get a drink of something, I’d be feeling perfect.” Momo attempted a laugh but cut it off so sharply, Capucine guessed his head still hurt considerably.

  “How did it happen?”

  “I took a night off. I’d been back twice to the accounting office and thought it would do my cover some good to be seen out with the buds, sucking up mint tea at the local rebeu hangout. On my way out some fucker hit me on the back of the head. Then two of them kicked the shit out of me. It was the last goddamn thing I was expecting.”

  “Do you have any idea who did it?”

  “Yeah, you kind of take notice when guys are kicking the crap out of you. The master of ceremonies was Martel, the foreman who acts like he’s in charge of the élevage. Remember him? The other two, I don’t know their names, but I could pick them out. Count on that.”

  “And you had an ankle gun, it seems, even though I told you not to.”

  “Yeah, but did I use it? You try that sometime, lying there doing nothing, letting some assholes use you as a football, when you can blow them away easy as spitting.”

  Capucine was abashed. “You did an exemplary job, Momo.”

  “I didn’t. I fucked up.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I did. I went back through the accounting office twice and didn’t find anything worthwhile. The problem is that they just keep too much stuff. They have records of everything. It ’ud take years to comb through all that crap.”

  Just then the duty officer came in with a thin file labeled “Mizrahi, Miriam,” containing the order to transfer the Belle to Paris’s central holding cells pending a hearing with the juge d’instruction. There was a yellow sticky note stuck on the blue dun cover in Isabelle’s spiky hand, saying that she was typing out the Belle’s confession and would get her to sign it before she was sent off.

  “Allô, allô, Commissaire?”

  “Sorry, Momo. I was just signing something.”

  “So I was saying we’re not going to find nothing in that accounting office. What I want to do is get ahold of my little playmates from last night and have a cozy chat with them. They tried hard to make it look like your basic blancs beating up an immigrant for stealing their jobs, but it sure felt like there was something else behind it. I want to find out what.”

  “Out of the question. You’re going to spend the night in the hospital, and then you’re going to come back to Paris and take two weeks’ medical leave.”

  “But what about the case?”

  Momo’s desire to get right back to work astonished Capucine and deepened her feeling of guilt. There had been no need to keep him undercover so long. The one lesson she could never seem to learn was that le mieux est l’ennemi du bien—better is the enemy of good.

  “Allô, Commissaire. Are you there? What are we going to do about the case?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Thanks to you, it’s completely buttoned up.”

  CHAPTER 46

  When it was all over, the one thing Capucine had learned was that street-savvy cops need streets to be savvy.

  The problems started almost immediately. Early in the morning Capucine sent two plainclothes brigadiers, held to be peerless at stakeout work, to cover the suspect in the village.

  At noon they called to say the job was impossible. The suspect’s house stood isolated on a dirt road in the outskirts of the village. The first time they drove by and slowed down to take a look, someone peeped out from behind a curtain. There was so little traffic on the road, the suspect’s wife must have thought she had a visitor. They were sure that if they drove by a second time, she would become seriously suspicious. Then they had attempted approaching the house from an abandoned field across the street but decided the brambles were impenetrable.

  Irritated, Capucine ordered one of the brigadiers to post himself on the terrace of the café in the village square and spot the suspect on his way home. The other brigadier was to take up a position behind a tree on the edge of the field—even if it meant ripping his jeans—and observe the house.

  Her confidence still high, Capucine set out. The watchword for Police Judiciaire operations was overkill: always take two or three times as many troops as you think you could possibly need. She rode in the first car—a large white police-modified Citroën C8 hatchback—along with a uniformed brigadier-major, her right-hand man in directing the operation, a driver, and another brigadier. Two patrol cars followed, one with four brigadiers and the other with three. In all, ten police officers decked out in body armor. “That should do it,” she had said to herself as they left. Still, if she included herself and the two already in the village, that made thirteen, hopefully not an unlucky number.

  In a few minutes the cortège left Paris and began the steep climb at Mantes-la-Jolie, with its magnificent vista of the Seine snaking off into the distance. The view loosened the driver’s tongue.

  “Say, Commissaire, I didn’t know we could do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Drive out of Paris and go arrest someone.”

  The brigadier-major was not to be excluded. “We sure as hell can. The Police Judiciaire has jurisdiction throughout France. Right, Commissaire?”

  “Definitely.” Capucine loved chatting with her men but for once was unwilling to be drawn out of her thoughts. The two officers in the front seat fell silent and watched the dark of the night rise from the valley and blacken the sky, no doubt thinking about the action that lay ahead or maybe the dinners they were missing at home.

  During the hour’s ride, the brigadier-major received frequent cell phone calls from the two officers in the village. The suspect had been seen crossing the village square at 7:39, heading in the direction of his house. The officer in the thicket did not pick him up and thought there might be a shortcut that led directly to his back door. At 7:53 he reported seeing the blue light of the TV appear in the front window of the house. The officer was sure the suspect had arrived home and was sitting in his socks in front of the tube. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. Still, Capucine was uneasy.

  An hour later the little motorcade turned off the autoroute at the La-Trinité-de-Thouberville exit onto the D913 departmental road and proceeded north. In fifteen minutes they saw a white rectangular sign announcing that they were in the village limits of Saint-Nicolas-de-Bliquetuit. It was exactly 9:02.

  The three vehicles slowly crossed the village square. Two of them pulled over in a side street while the tail car continue
d on.

  In four minutes the radio crackled and announced, “En place.” The brigadier-major replied with a crisp “Bien reçu.” The three men in the last car had taken up their position behind the suspect’s house.

  Capucine’s C8 and the patrol car squeezed through the tortuous, too-tight streets, then raced through the outlying roads and stopped in front of a small, ugly one-story house that had been built against a hillock. The front of the unfinished cinder-block basement was above ground—contrasting sharply with the carefully painted white façade of the main floor—as if the architect hoped that one day the hillock would somehow ooze forward to cover it. Clones of the same eyesore had been progressively desecrating the French countryside since the 1950s.

  The brigadier-major turned in his seat and looked inquiringly at Capucine, who nodded. He squeezed the microphone and said, “On y va.” The occupants of both cars slipped silently out into the night. Capucine and the brigadier-major mounted the steps to the front door, drew their weapons, and took positions at either side. The six uniformed officers formed a semicircle in the little front yard, their Sigs drawn. Capucine was embarrassed by the ridiculous display of force just to arrest one man, but that was what regulations called for.

  The brigadier-major hammered loudly on the front door and called out a stentorian “Police!”

  A loud, flinty clang, as if a heavy sledgehammer had struck rock, punctuated the interjection, and a hole appeared in the door above their heads. The second shot hit while the echo of the first was still ringing, ripping a large wooden shard from the central panel. A switch flicked and time slowed almost to a standstill.

  Even though it was obvious the shots were coming from an assault weapon or a high-powered hunting rifle in the field across the road, both Capucine and the brigadier-major were seized with the instinctive illusion that they came from inside, and moved away from the door.

  The third shot hit the thigh of an officer standing in the front yard, throwing him backward, as if his legs had been kicked out from under him. He writhed wordlessly in the gravel, clutching his wound. In the intense quiet after the detonations, his scrabbling seemed unnaturally loud. Bright red arterial blood spurted through his fingers, making a large stain in the fresh white pebbles. It had all been blindingly fast, three seconds at most.