Boizot’s dizziness returned, and he plunged into a curious artificial sleep.
When he awoke, Elisabeth Plesse was sitting a few feet away from him. She was leafing through the folders that Raïssa Rzaev had been showing her. When she saw that he had opened his eyes, she smiled. “We absolutely do not want to hurt you, Monsieur Boizot, but if I want to save the agency and the future of its employees, I have to find three hundred thousand euros in one month. These records may be the only way.”
Boizot’s headache was getting worse. “But why keep me prisoner?” he said in a low voice.
“Because we don’t want you to throw a wrench into things. We will negotiate the sale of these folders, and then we will set you free.”
Elisabeth Plesse paused when she heard the basement door open.
“Raïssa?” she said.
“Yes, I’m coming!” replied the fat woman as she was coming down the stairs.
“So?”
“The fish is hooked, all we have to do is wait for an answer,” Raïssa said. She turned to Boizot. “Well, well, well, you’re awake?”
Boizot closed his eyes, vaguely noting the insultingly familiar way she was addressing him. As he lost consciousness, his last thought was that he’d never see the light of day again.
Chapter 39
Paul Vendroux sighed. He had been trying to reach Boizot for more than an hour, but had been unsuccessful. Each time, his call went to voice mail. What in the world was the man doing?
In the phone book, he found the number to L’Actualité. A receptionist transferred him to the editorial room. On the sixth ring, he finally got someone on the phone who could help.
“Hello, L’Actualité! Censier speaking.”
“Good morning, this is Paul Vendroux, crime squad. I’d like to talk to Dimitri Boizot.”
“I haven’t seen him yet today. I guess he must be on assignment.”
“Is there anyone who can tell me where he is?”
“I can get the editor, Eric Magnin.”
“Yes, please!”
After enduring thirty seconds of an old Abba song, Vendroux heard Magnin’s voice: “No, ask Lucien, he ought to know! Hello? Magnin here. I’m sorry, I’m listening!”
Vendroux explained what he wanted. As soon as he had finished, Magnin said, “I’m also a little worried. He’s usually here early in the morning, or if he’s headed elsewhere, he always lets us know. He hasn’t done that—we haven’t heard from him—and after what happened last week . . .”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday morning. He had an interview in Saint-Denis. I’ve had no news of him since then.”
“Do you know whom he was interviewing and where?”
“He had to visit some employee at Job-Inter who wanted to show him some supposedly exclusive documents.”
“Do you know the name of this employee?”
“This one was kind of exotic.”
“Raïssa Rzaev, maybe?” Vendroux asked impatiently.
“That could be it.”
“Thank you very much,” said Vendroux, who promptly hung up.
What might Raïssa Rzaev have to say? he asked himself as he opened the Plesse file that lay on a corner of his desk. He found her address and phone number.
Of course, he preferred to visit the City of the Cosmonauts unannounced.
Half an hour later, he knocked on the door of the Job-Inter employee’s apartment. No luck.
He knocked on her next-door neighbor’s door, and the young black man who answered did have one detail for him: he remembered seeing Raïssa the day before around noon with another woman. The two of them had been carrying a long package that was clearly heavy because they had each carried one end of it. Vendroux, increasingly perplexed and worried, then called Sylvie Flaneau and asked her if she had heard from Boizot recently.
“No,” said Sylvie in an anguished voice. “I’ve been leaving messages on his cell phone since yesterday, but I haven’t gotten any response. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I’m currently outside the home of a Job-Inter employee Boizot had an interview with yesterday.”
At that moment, the police officer had an idea. “What about Boizot’s license plate number?” he asked. “Knowing that might help.”
“I know it’s a gray Renault, an older model, and not very well maintained. However, the license plate number, I’m not sure—I just know it ends in 75, obviously. It also contains the letters SF. I remember that because those are my initials.”
Vendroux thanked Sylvie and, after promising to keep her updated, walked around the building’s parking lot. It took only a few minutes to locate Boizot’s car.
It was locked. He did not try to get inside, but decided to return to the apartment instead. After picking the lock on the front door, he quickly searched the premises, but didn’t find anything.
Where could have Raïssa Rzaev have taken Boizot, and who had helped her?
Leaving the apartment, he questioned the woman’s young neighbor again.
“Oh, the lady with Madame Rzaev? She was tall, slender, in her thirties, and rather pretty,” he said.
This description immediately made Vendroux think of Elisabeth Plesse, but if she had been the one helping Raïssa Rzaev carry a bulky package the day before, why?
He pulled the notebook he always carried with him from the pocket of his jacket and, after flipping to the page on which he had written Elisabeth Plesse’s number, called the woman on his cell phone.
She picked up on the second ring, sounding surprised. “Hello?”
“Madame Plesse? Paul Vendroux, crime squad. I’d like to stop by and see you again. I have some additional questions to ask you about the burglary in Saint-Cloud. Is it possible to swing by?”
“Uh, yes, of course. When would you like to stop in?”
The officer discerned hesitation in her voice.
“Right now, if possible.”
“No, I’m sorry, it’s not. I’m not home at the moment; I’m at my house in the country.”
“In Saint-Géry?” Vendroux asked.
“No, no, closer to Paris, in Val d’Oise, but you could stop by tomorrow if you’d like.”
Vendroux pretended to accept and even agreed to set up a time for the next day, but as soon as he was off the phone, he called the crime squad to have someone look up the address of the Plesses’ place in Val d’Oise.
In a few minutes, he had the information he had requested: the house in question was located in La Frette-sur-Seine.
Vendroux returned to Quai des Orfèvres, gave the division head a quick rundown of the situation, and obtained permission to visit the house in La Frette. Two colleagues came along.
In La Frette, they discovered an old gingerbread Victorian house, a little removed from the others, which overlooked the Seine.
“Let’s go,” said Vendroux.
They rang once, then twice, without receiving any answer. However, a car was parked almost directly in front of the house, a Range Rover, which Vendroux swore belonged to Madame Plesse.
He motioned to one of his colleagues to circle the perimeter of the house, and using a master key, which opened even the most recalcitrant locks, he began to pick the front door.
Strangely, the house seemed empty, and the police had almost decided to head back, but then they heard a kind of squeaking coming from the basement. Quietly, they descended the stairs only to stumble upon Raïssa Rzaev and Elisabeth Plesse interrogating Dimitri Boizot, who seemed to be in pretty bad shape.
When he awoke, the first thing Boizot saw was Sylvie’s face. She was leaning over him as he lay on a sofa in an unfamiliar living room. In and around the house, everyone seemed preoccupied. Boizot turned and recognized Vendroux, who was busy searching the place with his colleagues.
>
He felt drained and dirty, but he found the strength to smile shyly at Sylvie. “How did you find me?”
“You’ll have to ask your friend Vendroux about that. It was his idea to pay a visit to this house. It belongs to Elisabeth Plesse.”
Boizot nodded. “I feel like that was a close call. I’m sure these two crazy ladies wouldn’t have thought twice about killing me once they got what they wanted.”
Sylvie smiled and gently kissed his forehead. “Oh, come on! Don’t be so dramatic!”
Epilogue
A generous sun warmed the late-afternoon air. It was the last Sunday of summer vacation, the day before everyone returned to work, and Boizot rested while watching his mother finish setting the table in her Vernouillet garden. He could tell she loved having her family around her. For his part, he couldn’t wait to see Sylvie, who was finishing up work at the bakery and planned to join them later. Still, the delay was for the best: Boizot needed time to think about how to phrase the news. What he was going to tell her about her brother was not exactly something she would like.
Before long, everyone was sitting down for drinks. Anne-Catherine called out to Boizot, “Go on, don’t leave us hanging! Tell us everything!”
“Well, actually, the case could be summed up in a few words,” he said. “It’s the tragic story of a pact between two deranged upstarts and how it all went wrong, first for others and then for them. It all began in June 1993. At that time, Palonnier employed three geologists to oversee prospecting in Africa: Lionel Perdiou, Ernest Lullier, and Frédéric Fréjean. All three were graduates of the National School of Geology in Nancy. Perdiou and Lullier had known each other for at least twelve years; they had been classmates at school in Nancy and had hit it off. Fréjean, on the other hand, was ten years their senior and knew them only in a professional capacity. In June 1993, the three of them met in a region called Lehili located along the Congolese border with Uganda and Rwanda—at the time, it was still Zaire. Palonnier had sent them to search for new deposits of coltan.”
Simon raised his hand like a first grader, wearing a mischievous smile. “What’s coltan?”
Boizot grinned at his brother. “You know, that’s a good question, Simon. I’m not an expert, but I did a little research and found out that coltan is a radioactive mineral that produces tantalum, a highly sought-after metal with applications in IT and, more recently, cell phones—but that’s not relevant. Where was I? The three men were in Gaondo, a small village in the region that they used as a base to travel around the area. They had been there for about a week when a telegram arrived for Lullier from one of his good friends at Palonnier. The telegram contained news that was still confidential: in September 1993, a new director of the Exploration and Development Department would be appointed, and the lucky winner was none other than their travel companion Fréjean! Lullier, furious, went to find Perdiou, showed him the telegram, and they decided then and there to eliminate Fréjean.
Why? Because a few years earlier, Perdiou and Lullier had made a sort of secret pact. Perdiou, who had always dreamed of a successful career in politics, had proposed to do everything in his power to promote Lullier’s career at Palonnier, with a goal of making Lullier CEO of the company. In exchange, Lullier promised to support Perdiou’s political career by any means available to him, including financial—at that time, he was already earning millions through shady deals brokered at Palonnier’s expense.
In theory, their plan was solid. In practice, it turned out to be a little more difficult: Perdiou did not skyrocket through the ranks; instead, he had to start at the bottom as a municipal councilperson in Paris and work his way up. Lullier, for his part, had anticipated returning from Africa to replace the current departmental director, who was old and on his way out.”
“Hence his disillusionment after he heard Fréjean was getting the job instead,” said Anne-Catherine as she put her glass of chardonnay down.
“Exactly! Enraged, Lullier hatched a very clever plan: kill Fréjean and toss his weighted-down body into the Obowé River. Perdiou and he would then claim that Fréjean had fallen into the water while they were out boating in their free time. Indeed, Fréjean’s murder was believed to be a tragic accident, and upon their return to France, Lullier was appointed the directorship he had so coveted. As for Perdiou, he was briefly in the hot seat because his relationship with Fréjean was notoriously bad, and the Fréjean family accused him of not doing enough to save him. Perdiou was nearly fired, but Lullier saved him. Fate, however, had other things in store: a few days after the murder, Fréjean’s body, bearing clear signs of his being shot, washed up along the shores of a village downstream called Kalongwi. A French physician named Gilbert Lemeunier, then fifty-five, lived in the village.”
Boizot paused to take a sip of wine.
A few minutes later, he finished the tale of the itinerant file, which, after passing from Nadine Lemeunier to Jean-Michel Flaneau, had wound up in Charles Plesse’s hands before finding its way to Raïssa Rzaev.
“There is one question that I would like to ask,” said Simon. “How did Jean-Michel Flaneau know at the time what he was looking at when he opened the file?”
“Because he was used to seeing Frédéric Fréjean’s face every morning: Lullier, perfect cynic that he is, had mounted a large photo of Fréjean in the lobby in ‘tribute’ to a colleague who had ‘died too soon.’ Can you imagine? The nerve! So, recognizing the face of the colleague who had ‘died too soon,’ Jean-Michel Flaneau dug a little deeper into the case, and I guess after doing some research, he realized the truth. The file was obviously worth a fortune to him. For years, he blackmailed Lullier and Perdiou in exchange for monthly payments that doubled his salary. This explains his rather ‘comfortable’ lifestyle.”
“And since he was prudent,” Anne-Catherine interjected, “he made sure to keep the original file in a safe place, in the home of a former high-school classmate, Charles Plesse.”
“Exactly! What Jean-Michel Flaneau didn’t know was that he should have been even more wary of his old friend than of Lullier, because Plesse, who always needed money and whose company was not very successful, one day decided that he wanted to usurp Jean-Michel Flaneau as blackmailer. Only he first had to make his friend disappear. This was done last year with the help of Franck Héron. Once Flaneau was out of the picture, Plesse asked Héron to change his appearance by bleaching his hair blond and getting a perm—all part of his plan to get Héron to assume a new identity that would confound Lullier and Perdiou, who at first had been hugely relieved to learn of Jean-Michel Flaneau’s death, but then panicked when they found themselves face-to-face with a strange man who called himself Marcel Orphelin and had in his possession the infamous file.”
“So this Orphelin became their new target, then, eh?” said Boizot’s father.
“Yes, but wait, that’s not all: it was then that Lullier had what he thought was a genius idea. After managing to establish a connection between Orphelin and Plesse thanks to his chief of security, José Léonard, he imagined a scenario in which he could get rid of both men and recover the compromising file. He had Orphelin come to Lionel Perdiou’s villa in Batz, supposedly to give him a million euros in exchange for the file, a final transaction that was meant to put an end to the matter. But Plesse had his doubts, and Orphelin was supposed to call him at one o’clock in the morning once he had the million euros in hand and had explained to Perdiou where to retrieve the file.
He had every reason to be wary, because while Perdiou was killing Héron and staging a fake robbery in Batz, José Léonard and an accomplice were shooting Plesse in Paris.
“And this,” Boizot concluded, “is where I come in. If I had not written an article on the burglary, which led me to discover Héron’s fake identity, Corneau would never have phoned me, and it is likely that the connection between the two events would never have been established.”
“Yes,” said
Simon. “But the file was still nowhere to be found?”
“That’s right. In fact, Plesse had entrusted it, along with other less damning documents on Lullier’s past dealings in Africa, to Raïssa Rzaev. He thought that no one would ever suspect her. He knew that she lived alone and imagined that even if she did look through the papers, she wouldn’t understand anything. But after I visited her at the agency, she started to think; and when she went to see Elisabeth Plesse to discuss the future of the agency, she mentioned the file. The widow—no fool herself—immediately understood the importance of the documents.”
He finished his drink and sighed: “Frankly, I wonder what would have happened if Paul Vendroux, my buddy on the crime squad, hadn’t put two and two together.”
“Best not to think about it,” said Anne-Catherine by way of conclusion.
Boizot nodded and stretched in his chair.
“And Perdiou’s suicide in all this?” Simon interjected.
“Apparently, he cracked when he realized that his accomplice, Lullier, was determined to clean house: once Lullier went through with Geneviève Murelle’s murder and attempted to murder me, Perdiou realized that his partner in crime had reached the point of no return.”
“Speaking of Geneviève Murelle’s murder, how did Lullier find out that she intended to reveal everything to you?” asked Anne-Catherine.
“That’s the horrible irony in all this: the evening of her death, Geneviève Murelle had called one of her friends, Gabriel Cano, who also works at Palonnier, to ask his advice about the file. This Cano in question, an ambitious type, couldn’t have betrayed her any quicker—he warned Lullier of the situation as he left his friend’s apartment. He hoped to make himself look good to the future CEO and ensure a rapid promotion, but all he managed to do was make Lullier understand that he had to get rid of his secretary at all costs. He sent his security chief over to do the dirty work—and the man even called me in the middle of the night so that all fingers would point to me if there was any suspicion of foul play.”
Mortal Ambitions (A Dimitri Boizot Investigation Book 1) Page 23