The City of Blood

by Frédérique Molay

  Nico walked over to Pierre Vidal, who was responsible for examining the crime scene. He was putting on a sterile suit so as not to contaminate the pit. His toolbox had everything he needed to gather and preserve the evidence he’d find.

  His assistant, Lieutenant Paco d’Almeida, was snapping shot after shot with his digital camera and jotting down observations in his notebook.

  “You’ll need some help,” Nico said.

  “Professor Queneau’s not going to be pleased,” Vidal replied. “He’s about to retire, and he won’t like being hit with something this big at this point.”

  Nico disagreed but didn’t say anything. Charles Queneau had buried himself in his work—managing the police forensics lab on the Quai de l’Horlage—to ease his grief over his wife’s death. He would take on this new assignment with the same drive that he had brought to every other assignment. That said, Nico thought it would do him good to spend more time with his grandchildren. They would give his life new meaning and purpose.

  “I’ll suggest to the prosecutor that we call in the lab experts,” Nico said. The Code of Criminal Procedure outlined the rules of a preliminary investigation: the prosecutor had to authorize bringing in any new person.

  In France, forensics experts rarely traveled to a crime scene. Police officers, especially those working in the criminal investigation division, were trained to collect evidence. The scientists stayed in the lab, where they used their sophisticated equipment to analyze what the cops brought in.

  “Be careful!” Kriven yelled to Vidal.

  Nearly unrecognizable under his hood and his protective goggles, Pierre Vidal was slipping into the pit. Witnesses were staring wide-eyed: the scene looked like something out of a horror film.

  “No point in taking a pulse. He’s dead,” Kriven said.

  The skull that had rolled across the table, its empty eye sockets peering at Nico, wasn’t about to disagree.

  3

  The arrangement of the body, which was really nothing more than scattered bones and a few bits of mummified flesh, suggested that its owner may have been sitting at the table. A suicidal guest? The victim of an accident? Neither scenario seemed likely; it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that someone had played a nasty trick. The skeleton completed an eccentric vision of an eternal banquet. A macabre mise-en-scène.

  “Not everything is where it was originally,” Professor Charles Queneau said. He had joined the teams at the crime site. “The soil has shifted over the years. Visitors have been walking on the lawn. The gardeners have been doing their jobs too, and then there are moles, rabbits, rats, and such.”

  The forensics officers were kneeling side by side, examining the grass, collecting soil and plant samples, and looking for any seeds or pollen to compare with any trace evidence they might find on a suspect’s shoes or clothes. They isolated pieces of evidence, bagged them, labeled them, and recorded them for analysis later.

  In the pit, a second team had come together around Captain Vidal. The fingerprint experts were working with brushes, powders, and lasers in search of fibers, hairs, and other small biological traces—all potentially useful for DNA identification.

  “They shouldn’t delude themselves. The weather and the years have most likely destroyed any evidence,” Queneau said.

  There was little chance of obtaining interpretable results. Given the media coverage, however, having forensics officers at the scene would placate everyone.

  “There’s hardly anything left of the body. It has putrefied and been devoured by animals,” Professor Queneau said. “Maggots, flies, and beetles have all been at work.”

  “What about his clothes?” Lormes asked. The prosecutor couldn’t stop looking at the pit.

  “They’ve decomposed,” Queneau said. “We’ll look for labels, which are more durable than the clothing itself, and they might give us a clue or a lead. But really, we don’t have much to go on.”

  “There you are!” Michel Cohen shouted. “Samuel Cassian’s just been taken to the hospital.”

  “For shock? Or does he have an underlying heart problem?” Lormes asked.

  “The medic didn’t say. He’s an old man.”

  “Yes. This would upset even a young artist. Cassian’s work has been desecrated in the most horrifying way.”

  The men in white began to take the bones out of the pit to inventory them. They would then put the bones in sealed bags.

  “His shoes are down here too,” Vidal said under his mask. “And there are a few bones inside.”

  “I found a watch!” one of the officers shouted. “On the victim’s left radial bone.”

  Queneau examined it. “An invention of Frenchman Louis Cartier and Hans Wilsdorf of Germany, dating back to 1904.”

  “A quartz watch.”

  “This one hit the market at the end of the sixties, going by the model and the mechanism.”

  “There’s a belt,” Vidal said.

  “Nothing says it belongs to the victim,” Commander Kriven said.

  “Wrap it all up for me,” Nico ordered.

  “And there we have it. All we need to do is find the wallet and ID, and we can confirm that we’ve unearthed Skeletor. Our job is done,” Kriven said, trying to rouse some spirits.

  Louis Roche joined them at the edge of the pit. “Ms. Clavel and Antoine Gazani, the president of the National Institute for Rescue Archaeology, are at your disposal. In case you’re wondering, rescue archaeologists are experts who help developers and others, such as Mr. Cassian, preserve historic items that have been unearthed.”

  Michel Cohen and Lormes decided to supervise the end of the operations at the Prairie du Cercle.

  Nico motioned for Kriven to follow him. They returned to their car and made a U-turn. As they drove along the isolated park road toward the Boulevards des Maréchaux and the northern beltway, the sound of highway traffic rumbled in the distance.

  Roche pointed. “There’s the Halle aux Cuirs. It’s used for rehearsal studios and storage.” Tractor-trailers and other vehicles were parked amid a variety of construction materials.

  “What’s that over there?” Kriven asked.

  “Oh, that’s just the no-man’s-land between the park and the suburb of Pantin. There are always a few oddballs out there, and the beltway hasn’t helped matters. In November 1999, a nineteen-year-old Bulgarian prostitute was found there, stabbed to death with twenty-three knife wounds. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

  Just ahead they could see a fountain with Barbary lions. It was a monument to Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. They parked behind the Pavillon Janvier. Captain Plassard had already requisitioned space in the building, and the officers had begun their interviews. Questioning would soon be moved to police headquarters, where it would go on for several days. This was a massive assembly-line-style undertaking that carried serious risks. Crucial information could be missed. And liars loved to deceive police officers. Nico, Kriven, and Roche walked through the security offices, giving Plassard and the other squad members a nod, and took the elevator to the third floor. Roche knocked on the general director’s door and opened it. He ushered Nico and Kriven in and left without a word.

  The park and other officials, arrayed on a comfortable sofa, got up to welcome them. The décor was modern. Along one wall, bookshelves were lined with beautifully bound volumes. A framed map of the Parc de la Villette had been laid out on the floor.

  “Can I offer you something?” Clavel asked.

  “I’m good, thank you,” Nico said.

  They sat down. Kriven took out his notebook and pen.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, if that suits you.”

  “Of course. A bit after one o’clock—”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” Nico said. “Let’s start with the park.” He pointed to the map.

  The director, an energetic woman, seemed nervous and unsure of what he wanted. Nico wanted to get a sense of the place. Maybe it would help him understand why Samuel
Cassian had chosen it as the burial site for his final banquet.

  “Tell me about La Villette,” he said.

  She lit up and seemed to forget the reason for their meeting.

  “This place is a city within the city. It’s an incredible story…”

  4

  “The park is seeping with history,” Clavel rhapsodized. “La Villette—which means la petite ville, the little city—was once the site of a Gallo-Roman village. It was a fertile area where people made their living on the land. It was also the site of the Montfaucon gallows, which were built to render King Louis IX’s verdicts in the thirteenth century.”

  Kriven grimaced and looked entirely focused on every word the woman was saying. Nico figured he was visualizing the dead men hanging from their ropes, their skin giving off a pestilential odor as they dangled over the pit beneath the scaffold.

  “It was at La Villette that Baron Haussmann decided to create a single location for Paris’s animal markets and slaughterhouses, which Napoleon III inaugurated in 1867. La Villette became the Cité du Sang, the City of Blood.”

  Cows stabbed in the forehead, calves and lambs slit across the throat, pigs bled dry before being roasted, animals hung from metal hooks and carved up—sights and smells as nauseating as those of the Montfaucon gallows. Now the images were flowing through Nico’s overactive brain.

  “Even today, ‘La Villette’ is the name given to a thick and bloody cut of beef served in many Parisian restaurants.”

  “Interesting,” Nico said. He was still managing to keep a smile pasted on his face. The director continued.

  “Faced with the rapid growth of the meat and refrigeration industries at the beginning of the twentieth century, the question of modernizing the abattoirs was raised, and finally, in 1958, Paris’s municipal council voted to rebuild them. It was a catastrophe. The project went over budget and ended up costing several billion francs. It was considered the greatest financial scandal of the Fifth Republic.”

  “If memory serves me, 1974 was when the last cow was slaughtered here, and they finally closed the abattoirs,” Nico said.

  “That’s right. The area became a wasteland—a hundred and thirty-six acres in the heart of a working-class area. Converting the acreage to leisure, cultural, and recreational use with a museum of science, technology, and industry was first proposed during Giscard d’Estaing’s presidency. The Cité de la Musique was added to the plan later. Then, during Francois Miterrand’s presidency, an international competition to find an architect for the park was held. Mitterrand was the one who finally brought the capital’s first urban park to fruition. La Villette becoming one of the city’s cultural highlights was really a kind of accident: it began as just a way to recycle an abandoned piece of land.”

  Nico was intrigued. “André Breton had this saying that I love. ‘The accidents of work are far more beautiful than marriages of convenience.’”

  “Indeed, Chief, it is a fitting quote,” Clavel said. She continued without missing a beat. “La Villette is a perfect example of a beautiful accident. Several projects have garnered acclaim: the Zénith, the Cité des Sciences, the Cité de la Musique, and the Poney Club—a private initiative. By some kind of magic, Bernard Tschumi, the park’s architect, was able to pull together this collection of eclectic creations.”

  “How did he do it?” Nico asked.

  “By laying out the park in a system of points and lines. The architectural follies—those red structures—give rhythm to the park and offer visitors places where they can relax and take in the view. As for the lines, they allow you to cross the park from east to west and from north to south. The promenade takes you around the whole park, twisting like a strip of film tossed on the ground. By following the promenade, you can see the twelve gardens. The park also has two tree-lined prairies, as well as beehives, grapevines, and a French church garden.”

  “And the ‘marriages of convenience’?” Nico asked, despite himself.

  “The conservatory and the museum, for example, combine to make the Cité de la Musique. And there’s the Philharmonie de Paris with its fantastic concert hall.”

  “So it was in this park that Samuel Cassian decided to bury his life-sized tableau-piège?” Nico said.

  “Yes, Cassian was an exceptionally famous artist. And when he decided to bury his final ‘banquet-performance’—which is the appropriate term—thirty years ago, the government saw a unique opportunity to raise the park’s profile even higher, both culturally and scientifically.”

  “Why the Prairie du Cercle?” Nico asked.

  “The story goes that Samuel Cassian met with Tschumi and Jacques Langier, the minister of culture. Two sites were suggested. To the south were the buildings paying homage to the former market where animals were fawned over and auctioned off, and to the north, near the Géode and the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, next to the abattoirs, was where animals were slaughtered. This was the dangerous world of the butchers, who were nicknamed the murderers of La Villette.”

  The room went quiet. Nico was thinking about Cassian’s decision. He imagined him putting a decisive finger on the map.

  Nico turned to Gazani, who was also a university professor and director of an archaeological lab at the National Center for Scientific Research.

  “Is that when the National Institute of Rescue Archaeology came in?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” the man replied quietly. “Our organization didn’t exist before 2002.”

  “What’s rescue archaeology?” Kriven asked.

  “Some archaeologists focus on preserving and protecting sites crucial to our heritage. In France, this area of archaeology took hold in 1997, in Rodez, when a developer caused a scandal by destroying some Roman ruins. These days, when a developer happens upon a significant site during planning or construction, rescue archaeologists are called in to make sure the site and its artifacts are protected. You probably don’t know this, but there’s something of interest along any highway in France, and every couple of acres, there’s a one in four chance of discovering something.”

  “Are you saying the institute wasn’t involved in Cassian’s project from the start?” Nico asked.

  “No, it was the archaeological department of the City of Paris. They immediately understood that this would be the first excavation of modern art. It was an unprecedented opportunity. And when disinterment came around, I wanted the institute involved at all costs.”

  “Why was it so important for you?”

  “We wanted to find out what remained of this banquet after three decades. Then we could measure the discrepancy between memory and reality. Of the 120 attendees, several claimed that the pit was parallel to the Canal de l’Ourcq, while others insisted that it was perpendicular. Several recalled wooden tables; others, plastic. There wasn’t even a consensus on who attended. This just goes to show you how fallible memories can be. But you probably know that all too well, considering your line of work.”

  The archaeologist seemed to enjoy having a captive audience and went on. “There was also the sociological angle. Did you know that there’s an archaeology of banquets? Gallic banquets, for example, are my specialty. This project would allow us to consider the customs and table manners of the eighties’ artistic elite. Every guest at this banquet had to bring his own silverware and other personal items, understanding that they would traverse several decades. In the end, most of them came with camping utensils and items from flea markets. We even found a used toothbrush.”

  “Along with a body,” Kriven interjected.

  Everyone turned and looked at him.

  “Yes, well, there was that, wasn’t there?” the archaeologist said, clearing his throat. “A quite unexpected find.”

  Seeing that Kriven had put the man on the defensive, Nico intervened. “Go on, professor. Anything about the banquet could be a lead or help us identify the body found in the pit.”

  “Despite their crude utensils, these guests were well-mannered. Th
ey arranged their forks and knives correctly on the plate when they were done eating. And the scraps help us understand human society. We call it garbage archaeology. The new realists stole the idea. They focused on everyday objects and their future. Samuel Cassian was one of these artists. He was intensely aware of ecology and the massive waste of our consumerist society. César Baldaccini, with his crushed cars, also comes to mind. Ultimately, the whole experience raises another question: Can an artist’s approach and technique survive beyond their time?”

  “I understand that he wanted to end that artistic chapter in his life. Do you know if he had a personal reason for burying this final banquet?” Nico asked.

  “Some sociologists have claimed that it was about burying the illusions of the once-trendy Left. Relations between François Mitterrand and the artistic milieu, which he supported in the very early eighties, had turned chilly. His campaign promises were wiped out by austerity measures. The franc kept on being devalued, and the Socialist party was declining in the polls. As for me, I haven’t made up my mind. Cassian has talked about his father’s slaying. He was a Romanian Jew who was gunned down by the Nazis when Cassian was a child and tossed into a long pit similar to the one he dug in the Prairie du Cercle. But can we ever really know an artist’s motivations?”

  “He might not be fully aware of them himself,” Nico said. “Who’s in charge of the dig?”

  “The Society for the Disinterment of the Tableau-Piège, created by Samuel Cassian,” said Clavel. “It’s an interdisciplinary group of archaeologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, artists, writers, filmmakers, and journalists. The University of Paris, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the National Center for Scientific Research, and”—she gestured toward Gazani—“the institute are all involved.”

  “The tables were buried in a trench five feet deep and 130 feet long,” the archaeologist said. “Thirty feet or so have been exhumed so far.”