The Curse of La Fontaine
Page 9
Jules Schoelcher knocked on the door and Verlaque waved him in.
“Sorry to disturb,” Schoelcher said, “but we’ve just had a call from a restaurant owner in the Mazarin neighborhood. He’s really shaken up.”
Verlaque took off his reading glasses and looked at Schoelcher. “Sigisbert Valets? Did something happen to him?”
“Yes, that’s the guy, and he’s fine,” Schoelcher replied. “But his dishwasher is in hysterics. He was digging in the garden behind the restaurant over the afternoon break and came across a skeleton.”
“I take it you’re not talking about a cat.”
“Correct, although he did find some of those,” Schoelcher said. “But this one is human.”
Chapter Nine
Five Conversations
V erlaque stood beside Dr. Agnès Cohen as they looked at the shallow grave. The sun shone, and the sounds were a fusion of singing birds, hushed voices from inside the restaurant as police officers took statements from the shaken staff, and the hum of distant traffic. “Homicide, I assume,” Verlaque said, “given the shallow grave.”
“Yes, I’m surprised it took someone this long to uncover it.”
“The chef told me he’s been too busy working on the restaurant to work in the garden,” Verlaque said. “And after the previous owner died the property sat vacant for four years—”
“Succession dispute?”
“Naturally,” Verlaque replied. “Nieces and nephews in this case. I’m told that the restaurant renovations then took two years and the place has been up and running for two years, so that makes this skeleton at least eight years old. But don’t bodies take longer than eight years to decompose?”
The pathologist knelt down with an elbow on her knee and looked at it. “It normally takes ten to twelve years to decompose a body in a temperate climate in average soil . . . but we don’t have a temperate climate here. Especially in 2003 . . . the whole process gets sped up by extreme heat. There are bits of skin and internal organs still intact . . .” She pointed and Verlaque looked but stayed standing. “So seven to eight years might be about right.”
Verlaque reflected that a downtown garden seemed an illogical place to bury a body. And had the victim been killed there, in the garden? Or brought there, already dead? “Sex?” he asked.
“Male,” the doctor quickly answered. “Big bones, and look at the pelvis area.” She pointed again. “Females have a larger subpubic area. Plus his chin is nice and square, and the forehead slants backward, whereas a female has a rounded forehead.”
Verlaque tried not to stare at Agnès Cohen’s own forehead and instead tried to picture Marine’s. But all he could see were Marine’s hazel eyes and freckles.
“His skull doesn’t seem damaged, but I’ll know more once I get him into the lab,” Cohen said as she brushed more dirt off the skeleton.
“You always say that,” Verlaque said, smiling.
The pathologist returned his smile. “I’ll be able to check his teeth against dental records and look at the bones for cracks or fractures that can be traced back to previous injuries. I’m guessing that he once broke his left leg, but it’s hard to tell right now. There’s a new test we can do by extracting mineral samples from the bones and cross-referencing them against various drinking waters found across the globe. My intern is obsessed with it.”
“Perhaps your intern will be able to tell us whether he was an Aixois,” Verlaque said, looking down at the skeleton. He recited the first phrase of Aix’s slogan: “Ville d’eau—”
Dr. Cohen finished it for him, “—Ville d’art, ville de musique. We have too few Cézannes and in my opinion our opera is overpriced, but we do have excellent spring water.” She looked over at the ancient fountain that stood less than a meter from the skeleton. “But this fountain isn’t running, poor old thing.”
• • •
Bear Valets stood in his restaurant, relieved that the investigation team had gone. He turned around and surveyed his dining room: the judge was insistent that La Fontaine would have to stay closed for the time being. “Believe me,” Verlaque had said, smelling the meat stock gently boiling in the kitchen, “this hurts me as much as it hurts you.”
Bear looked over at Mamadou, who was sitting on one of the dining room chairs and had finally managed to stop rocking back and forth. Florian had made Mamadou a cup of hot chocolate, and Bear could hear their conversation, or rather Florian’s monologue, in bits and pieces: “My grandmother’s recipe,” Florian coaxed. “She always swore that any good cook only needs one or two sharp knives, but one day she ordered, out of the blue, a saucier from the La Redoute catalog. We still don’t know why—”
Mamadou gave Florian a puzzled look and Bear bent his head down to hide a grin. Who cares about your grandmother, Florian? But all the same, Bear was touched by his employee’s sensitivity. Mamadou was in shock by the discovery of the skeleton, more than Bear himself. Florian went on, now sitting back in his chair and looking up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head. “She’d use eighty-five percent Lindt chocolate, add some milk, cream, a vanilla pod, and a small amount of sugar, and set the saucier to go. The chocolate would swirl around in there for what seemed like ages. When my family would visit her in her tiny apartment in Poitou, we could smell chocolate in the stairway. My brother and I would run up the last two flights. Do you know what she’d add to it at the end?”
Mamadou sipped the hot chocolate and shook his head back and forth.
“Butter,” Bear whispered to himself, as Florian exclaimed, “Butter!”
Bear thought of Jane and Judith, who’d also make hot chocolate, usually laced with grappa, for the team on a rainy day. “They’re really aren’t many rainy days in London,” Judith would try to argue, looking out the giant windows at the river and the sky. “It’s just gray, that’s all.”
José, a sous chef from Seville, would loudly snort.
Bear now missed that London gray: the color of slate, or silver, or even sometimes mauve. Today he found the Provençal blue sky oppressive.
• • •
Gaëlle Dreyfus sat in the duke’s well-appointed sitting room, surrounded by first-edition books and mediocre oil paintings of stiff, unsmiling ancestors. She held the porcelain saucer up in the air so that she could read underneath it.
“Do you approve?” the duke asked, walking in from the kitchen carrying a silver tray with a teapot on it. It was Manuel’s afternoon off.
“Oh yes,” Gaëlle answered, smiling, and in no way embarrassed to have been caught trying to determine the origin of his china. In fact, she thought the colors of the flowers too garish, but she was about to drink out of a Meissen porcelain cup, made in Germany, she was almost sure, in 1790, and it took her breath away.
“They were my late wife’s favorites,” the duke said, pouring out the tea. “I personally find the colors too loud, as you probably do.”
“Yes . . . ,” she slowly replied. “But to think that when this set was made, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were still alive.”
“For another three years,” the duke said, sitting down. “Our beloved fountain stopped the day they were killed. I read it in the historical records, which I have here on my bookshelves. It’s well documented.”
Gaëlle leaned forward. “You’re kidding me.”
“I wouldn’t tease you, dear Gaëlle.” The way he said “dear” made her body tingle in a way it hadn’t done in more than a decade. But she couldn’t decide what was more exciting: being charmed by a handsome and wealthy nobleman or drinking out of a cup that was more than two hundred years old. The duke asked, “Do you believe in the fountain’s curse?”
“Oh yes.”
“Funny, I wouldn’t have thought the Jews were as superstitious as we Catholics.”
“I was raised agnostic,” Gaëlle replied. “My father was Jewish, but nonpracticin
g, and my mother was Catholic but stopped going to Mass when her parents disowned her after she announced her engagement. So there you go; I come by my superstitions, and dislike of organized religion, naturally.” She picked up her cup and examined its delicate paintwork, not wanting to stare into his blue eyes, which she decided were beautiful.
“And so it won’t surprise you if I tell you that the fountain has once again stopped,” the duke said. He leaned forward. “Because of the murder, no doubt,” he added.
“Murder?” she asked, looking up. “Who says?”
“Well . . . of course it was murder,” the duke stammered. “My manservant, Manuel, says the whole rue d’Italie is talking about the skeleton. Buried in a shallow grave. Seven or eight years ago. You didn’t hear anything?”
“I heard about the skeleton, of course.”
“No, I mean seven or eight years ago. Someone digging?”
Gaëlle looked at the duke and noticed that his blue eyes had turned gray. “That’s a long time ago. I hardly remember. And Mme Germain was always making noise back there, with her cats and her tin can collection.” She added, quite unnecessarily, “Béatrice was a packrat.”
“I had forgotten about all those cats,” he said, leaning back.
“And you didn’t see or hear anything?” Gaëlle asked. “An argument? Someone calling for help?” She felt more and more guilty since the discovery of the skeleton. Someone had been murdered and buried, and none of them had heard anything.
“Not from here, that would be quite unlikely.”
“Upstairs?” She pushed on.
The duke nodded. “Perhaps from the third floor, where Manuel has his apartment. Yes . . .” He now seemed lost in thought.
“Well, no doubt the police will be coming around to ask us all these questions,” Gaëlle said. She suddenly felt relieved. The professionals would take the investigation in hand, an answer would be found, and they could all get back to their dull lives.
• • •
And the antiques dealer was right: in the days that followed, the police—Bruno Paulik, Sophie Goulin, and Jules Schoelcher— interviewed the residents whose apartments and businesses gave onto the shared garden. No one had seen or heard anything unusual. Some could barely remember Béatrice Germain.
“She only died eight years ago,” Sophie Goulin told her husband one evening after they had tucked their two small sons into bed. “Isn’t that sad? People’s memories vary, too. Some people remember very specific things about her: a blue apron or her battered white running shoes. Are they right? Or is their memory failing them? Or are they convincing themselves that that’s what she wore? Others remember nothing at all.”
“At any rate, the old lady was no longer around, right? When the murder took place?”
Sophie nodded. “The only thing the residents can agree on is that Mme Germain made a lot of noise in the garden.”
“So if they heard noise that night, they didn’t think anything of it.”
“Exactly,” Sophie said, sighing, “even though Mme Germain was no longer alive. That’s what’s so sad. They had forgotten she was dead.”
Her husband tilted his head. “You could look at it in a more positive light,” he said. “Mme Germain had been such a presence in the neighborhood that if the neighbors had heard a commotion that awful night, they assumed it was her. She was still around, in their minds. I think that’s touching.”
• • •
“I ran into Bear today,” Marine said. “He was sitting in a café, looking glum.”
“Naturally,” Verlaque said, twirling his pasta against the edge of his bowl. “The restaurant has been closed for a week. That’s gotta sting. Did you put chili flakes in this? It’s great.”
She put her fork down and sighed.
“Quoi?” Verlaque asked.
“You’re not being very sympathetic.”
“What can I do, Marine? A skeleton was found on his property.”
“I know, I know.”
“I spoke to Arnaud, by the way, about buying us groceries. The food will get delivered to my place, as Arnaud has my keys.”
“Ah,” Marine said. “Which means we’ll be eating dinners at your place.”
“Do you mind?”
“No,” she said. “We’re married, so it’s my place, too.”
He smiled. “I’m glad you think so.”
Marine looked around her dining room, which opened onto an even bigger living room. Verlaque saw his wife looking around her apartment and said, “This has always been too much space for you.”
“I knew that when I bought it,” she answered. “But I loved the location, and I could afford it then. I couldn’t now.”
As he continued to eat his pasta—pancetta, pine nuts, olive oil, and arugula around fresh linguine—Marine twisted in her chair and looked behind her, toward the living room. “It’s the perfect size,” she mused.
Verlaque took a big gulp of Italian red wine and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Don’t even think of it.”
“It’s a brilliant idea and you know it.”
He laughed, putting his napkin down. “It would be total chaos, not to mention it would get me into trouble. A skeleton of a murdered victim has been found on a chef’s property, which makes him a suspect—”
“Bear was a kid in London eight years ago.”
“Okay, but I’m involved in the investigation, and you’re proposing to open your apartment to Bear to resume his restaurant business. Right?”
Marine beamed. “It’s big enough here, and my kitchen is in okay shape, and we don’t need two apartments. Why not help Bear out?”
“I’ve already told you why,” Verlaque said. “And you’re a law professor, so you know how tangled up this could become.”
She smiled, not sure how much longer she even cared to be a professor. She briefly closed her eyes and imagined her apartment as a restaurant. She imagined they might squeeze in twelve, perhaps fifteen diners. Wine storage might be a problem, but maybe Bear could rent a wine fridge and set it up in the back corner of her office? Or he could bring over enough wine for a night by hand? Or in a wheelbarrow? She only had four burners and one oven, but she had seen industrial-grade single burners for sale in a restaurant-supply shop in Marseille she had once visited with a friend. They were heavy-duty gas burners, not at all like the rickety camping stoves her parents had used to make coffee on their roadside picnics. And, best of all, her downstairs neighbors were away for two months, visiting their daughter in Nantes who had just given birth to their first grandchild. Marine poured more wine and happily dug into her pasta.
Chapter Ten
Snooping Around for Bones
There is no more beautiful life than that of a carefree man; Lack of care is a truly painless evil,’” Frère Joël said as he set down his coffee cup. It was a cold morning, and the duke had suggested they have coffee inside, not in the garden. Manuel had baked a lemon loaf and the young friar hoped he would be offered a second piece.
“Euripides?” the duke asked.
“Sophocles.”
“Ah oui, Sophocles, bien sûr,” the duke said. “In the Renaissance, when one retired one withdrew to discover what life was all about. To contemplate. It was considered part of a well-managed life.”
“The great Stoic Seneca urged his fellow Romans to retire in order to—and I’ll use one of our modern expressions here—to find themselves.”
The duke laughed—he was hardly the kind of man who would go to India, or on a retreat, to “find himself.” But he knew what Joël meant, and he was impressed with his classical knowledge. He was mad at himself for having mistaken a Sophocles quote for Euripides. “Yes, the Romans withdrew from their period of civic business, not only to find themselves”—here he smiled, then went on—“but also to prepare for their next stage. Death.”
The duke got up and began pacing the room. “And now we, poor sods of the twenty-first century, live longer. We have even more time to prepare for dying.”
The duke was in a particularly blue mood, and the pragmatic friar wanted to steer the conversation away from death. Why worry about death if it may be—in the duke’s case—years away? The duke hadn’t given him any more details of his illness or the doctor’s prognosis. But before Frère Joël could change the conversation, the duke blurted out, “You’ve heard about the skeleton?”
“Ah, that explains all this talk about death,” Frère Joël said, setting his coffee cup down. “Yes, we did.”
“What do your colleagues think?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, who is it?” the duke asked, still walking around the room.
The friar looked up, surprised. “I haven’t thought about that.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve only just arrived in Aix . . .”
In fact, Frère Joël had heard Père Jean-Luc speaking with one of the other priests, Père Guillaume, in hushed tones, about this very subject, and a name had been whispered, but he didn’t want to say anything to the duke. They could very well be wrong, or he may have misunderstood. He looked around at the oil paintings—relatives, he presumed—admiring them. The duke watched the friar and wanted to say how mediocre the paintings were—the artists had been incapable of revealing character or personality traits. Each female and male sitter resembled the next, a blur of chubby, rosy-cheeked, boring oafs. “You have so many memories in this room,” Frère Joël said. “Family portraits, travel mementos—” He reached over and stroked a long wooden cane that was leaning against the bookshelf.
“African,” the duke said. “It’s a dancing cane used in ceremonies.”