The Curse of La Fontaine

by M. L. Longworth

  “He has no motive for wanting his own brother dead!” Roussel shouted.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” Paulik said, opening the door and leaving after adding a quick “Good luck.”

  Verlaque smiled, knowing the good luck was more for dealing with Roussel than dealing with Mamadou Zouma.

  Verlaque and Roussel walked back to room 104. Mamadou had finished eating and had his head on the table, resting on his forearms. Verlaque and Roussel sat back down and Verlaque resumed the interview. “Did you come to Aix then, after you landed in Marseille?”

  Mamadou looked up. “I stayed in Marseille for a couple of months. It was summer and I got an easy gig selling knockoff watches on the beach. At night I’d sleep in a lean-to near the railway tracks. It wasn’t dangerous like in the Cape. You have to hide your stuff from the gypsies, but that’s all.”

  “But you knew that Ludovic de Castelbajac lived in Aix?”

  “No, not straightaway,” Mamadou answered slowly. “After I had been in Marseille for a couple of months, it was easy to find out where he lived. I was shocked. I knew he was French, but I had no idea he lived so close to Marseille.”

  “So you came to Aix?” Roussel asked.

  “Yes, I came nine years ago in the fall,” Mamadou answered. “I got a job in a restaurant right away, the Flunch at the Rotonde. Washing dishes. I became obsessed by Castelbajac. I used to watch his street, and I’d see him come and go. Follow way behind him while he did his shopping on the rue d’Italie. But then he went away—must have been at sea—and the following September a bunch of us at the Flunch lost our jobs because there was a crackdown on employees without papers, so I hitchhiked to Paris. I have a distant cousin there, in Barbès. And slowly, over time, I managed to forget about that sea captain. I stayed in Paris for eight years.”

  “Do you know that the skeleton you found in the garden was his brother?”

  “No, no,” Mamadou said, shaking his head. “I heard that his name was the same, but at first I didn’t know it was his brother.”

  “Good motive,” Roussel said, leaning forward. “You lost your brother, so he has to lose his.”

  Mamadou looked horrified. “What?”

  “Ludovic de Castelbajac is accusing you of murdering his brother,” Verlaque said quietly.

  “That’s crazy! When did he die?”

  “Just before you went up to Paris. In August. What brought you back down to Aix?”

  “I hated Barbès,” Mamadou said. “It was almost worse than the Cape. And it was so cold. People here in the south had been nice to me, and it was warm and life was cheaper. I got the job at Bear’s just after I arrived back in Aix.”

  “Coincidentally around the corner from Ludovic de Castelbajac’s home,” Roussel said. Verlaque couldn’t help but agree with him.

  Mamadou squirmed in his chair and went on. “No. It wasn’t like that. It was a Tuesday when I got here, so I went straight to the big market, hoping a farmer might give me fruit or I could pick through the stuff they throw out. I heard Bear talking with one of the farmers—I buy from her now, for the restaurant, her name is Mme Martin—and he was telling her about his restaurant. I liked Bear straightaway. He was . . .” Mamadou paused, staring at the table, and then found his words. “Confident. And friendly. He had tattoos and yet I could see that Mme Martin really liked him. I followed him back to the restaurant, curious to see it, and after walking around for about an hour to build up my courage I marched in, asking if he had work. I was lucky—his dishwasher had just quit. But it was a coincidence that the restaurant was in the Mazarin. I swear.”

  “Have you been sleeping in the Parc Jourdan this whole time?” Verlaque asked.

  “No. I was sharing an apartment in the Jas de Bouffan with a mechanic and he got engaged, so he left. I couldn’t find another roommate, so I gave it up, thinking I could find a smaller place, but the prices have gone up so much here, even in the Jas—”

  Verlaque nodded. “And what were you doing in the front hall of Ludovic de Castelbajac’s building?”

  “He came into the restaurant last week with another man. They came in at lunch and were threatening Bear, saying they were trying to close his restaurant. I had managed to forget about the sea captain and then there he was, trying to ruin the life of another person who had been so kind to me. I knew where he lived, and one day a woman left his building and I could see that the front door hadn’t latched properly, so I slipped in—”

  “You do a lot of slipping in,” Roussel said. “Slipping onto boats, slipping into apartment buildings.”

  Mamadou continued as if he hadn’t heard Roussel. “I was just going to talk to him. Okay, maybe I even had the idea that I’d threaten him, tell him to stop bugging Bear or I’d tell everyone—you the police, the newspapers—about what he did out at sea, to us, but also to the Earth.”

  “What do you mean?” Verlaque asked.

  “When I was hiding in that tool trunk I overheard two of the sailors complaining. One of them was Filipino, but the other wasn’t, so they spoke in broken English, which I can understand from my days in South Africa. They talked about how the captain ordered them almost every day to dump engine oil and sludge into the sea. The one guy said, ‘I’m no tree hugger, but even I have a hard time doing that.’ But I didn’t know what floor of the building the captain lived on, so I went through the mail, hoping one of the envelopes addressed to him would say which floor, as the buzzers outside did not, and the apartment doors didn’t have name plaques.”

  “The mail was out, easy to get at?” Roussel asked.

  “Yes, on a fancy table in the hallway,” Mamadou replied.

  “It’s like that at my place, too,” Verlaque added. “We don’t have mailboxes.” He remembered that he had meant to speak to the other tenants in his building to get their okay to have someone fix their front door. Like Castelbajac’s, it only latched properly every other time.

  “And you weren’t going to hurt him?” Roussel asked.

  “I didn’t have a knife on me, did I?” Mamadou said, holding out his arms.

  Verlaque noted that for Mamadou a weapon of choice would be a knife, and Grégory de Castelbajac had been pushed.

  “I’m missing the dinner rush,” Mamadou said quietly, looking down at the table.

  “You can go,” Verlaque said. “Tell Bear where you were and that I’ll be calling him. And you need to stay in Aix. I’m going to arrange for a Catholic hostel for you to stay in until you find an apartment. I want to talk to you more, especially about the Esmérelda.”

  Mamadou nodded and got up. “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’m very sorry about your brother,” Verlaque said.

  Roussel sighed.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Blowup

  I know I often say that I need a drink,” Verlaque said as he hugged Marine, “but tonight I really do need one. A double.”

  “Coming right up,” Marine said. “And I’ll have one, too. I got into a huge argument with the dean today. She basically said that the other professors don’t like me spending so much time with the students, that I was babying them.” She threw her hands into the air and walked toward the kitchen. “Two rums coming up. Oh, by the way, I invited Sylvie over this evening. I hope that’s okay. I should have checked with you first.”

  “That’s fine,” Verlaque said, taking off his tie and laying it on the back of a chair. “She can cheer us both up.”

  He sat down in his favorite club chair and rested his head on its back, closing his eyes. He couldn’t get the image of Mamadou and Vianney lying in the dinghy, their faces pointing out to the storm and crashing waves, out of his head. He looked up when Marine came in, carrying two glasses of golden rum. She was wearing long white cotton pants that flared at the bottom, with high-heeled espadrilles, and a sleeveless dark green silk shirt. “You’re lovel
y,” he said, sitting up and taking a glass. “Maybe your students come to you for help because you’re so beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” Marine said, laughing and taking a sip of her rum. “As if they don’t come to me for my wisdom!”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Verlaque said. “Your beauty is a bonus—”

  The buzzer rang and Marine got up to buzz Sylvie in. They could hear the front door bang shut, and they started laughing when Sylvie began swearing at the third floor. “Have you guys ever thought of putting in an elevator?” she asked as she walked through the front door, which Marine had left ajar.

  “Not enough room in the stairwell,” Verlaque called out, turning so that he could see her. Marine gave Sylvie the bise and Verlaque got up and did the same.

  Sylvie handed him a wine bottle, wrapped in tissue paper. “A killer Burgundy,” she said. “At least that’s what the wine guys on the rue des Cordeliers said. It’s from Santenay.”

  “That will be perfect with the roast pork,” Marine said, taking the bottle.

  Sylvie laughed. “Antoine, you’ve been usurped as the wine expert in the house. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Verlaque said. “Would you like a glass of rum? White wine?”

  “Wine, thanks,” Sylvie said. “I had a few run-ins with rum when I was in art school.”

  He laughed, and Marine came in and set a bowl of olives and a plate of sliced chorizo down on the coffee table. Sylvie leaned over and put one of the thin slices of chorizo in her mouth. “Have you guys noticed that chorizo can either be amazingly good—like this one—or really, really bad?”

  “Absolutely,” Verlaque said. “The grocery-store stuff is too fatty. We buy ours at the butcher’s, who slices it wafer-thin.”

  “It was the butcher who gave me the recipe for tonight’s roast,” Marine announced. “He said to wrap it in cabbage leaves to keep it moist. But it won’t be ready for another hour or so.”

  “We’re so lucky,” Verlaque said suddenly. “To have all of this.” He motioned around the room with his head.

  Marine and Sylvie looked at him.

  “Today I heard the most horrific story,” he went on, “of two brothers from Togo. They were stowaways on a merchant ship and were found out. The captain and crew forced them at knifepoint into a dinghy during a storm . . .”

  “Oh my God,” Marine said.

  “Marine, the captain was Ludovic de Castelbajac, the eldest son,” Verlaque said. “And the castaway was Mamadou.”

  “Mamadou?” Marine asked in disbelief.

  He said, “Yes. And his brother died after the ordeal.”

  “That’s awful,” Sylvie said.

  “Wait a minute—” Marine said. She looked at Sylvie and said, “Remember our lunch when Thomas Roche came into La Fontaine with that military-looking guy?”

  “Who was terrified of Mamadou!” Sylvie said.

  “That’s him,” Verlaque confirmed. “And Mamadou was caught today in Castelbajac’s front hall. He claims he was just going to talk to Castelbajac.”

  “I’ll bet,” Sylvie said, snorting.

  “Castelbajac has accused Mamadou of killing his brother Grégory,” he said. “But he has zero proof, so I let Mamadou go.”

  “There’s a motive, though,” Marine said.

  Sylvie said, “This whole story reminds me of Eric’s photos—”

  Verlaque and Marine looked at Sylvie. “Go on,” he said.

  “Eric Cassely and I went to the Beaux Arts together,” Sylvie said. “He’s a photographer in Marseille, and he just won an award for a series of photos he took of the merchant-ship life. The photos were amazingly beautiful, and the sailors’ stories so heartbreakingly sad. Eric did a lecture on the opening night. I remember him saying that more than two thousand stowaways are caught each year. Those are the lucky ones; many die because they’ve chosen a dangerous hiding spot, like inside shipping containers that look cozy but are fumigated, or they’re crushed by anchors. And many are forced onto rafts out to sea, like the dishwasher.”

  “Why not just hand the stowaways in at the next port?” Marine asked.

  Sylvie took a big sip of wine and continued. “That’s what used to happen, but European immigration laws have tightened and now port authorities give hefty fines to ships arriving with people whose names are not on the ship’s manifest. The fines can be as high as fifty thousand euros and even more if the cargo is delayed.”

  “And so it costs nothing to force them overboard,” Marine said.

  Sylvie said, “Well, Eric explained it as kind of a catch-22. Captains are prohibited from keeping stowaways on board but are fined if they bring them to shore.”

  “There must be a solution,” Marine said.

  “No country wants to take responsibility,” Verlaque said. “I’ve read that the seas are like the Wild West.”

  Sylvie continued. “My favorite photos was a series of portraits of guys who had spent all their savings to get to this one ship only to find it had been abandoned, with no captain or owners about. They didn’t have enough money to get home, so they stayed on board, waiting for news, then slowly starved and fell into depression. That boat ended up in Marseille, after changing owners a couple of times, and while at sea it managed to avoid the port authorities.”

  “Should we look at the wedding photos before dinner?” Marine asked. As Sylvie had said, the sailors’ stories were heartbreaking, and she felt guilty for changing the subject. But she doubted that Mamadou’s story of the ship was related to Grégory de Castelbajac’s murder; Grégory could hardly have been mistaken for his much-older sea captain brother. And she knew that if they didn’t sit down together that evening to choose photos, it would be months before they could do it again.

  “Volontiers,” Verlaque said, reaching over and putting the album in the middle of the coffee table where they could all see it. Marine took in a relieved breath of air, seeing that he felt the same.

  “I must say,” Sylvie said, opening the album, “Régis did a bang-up job on the photos.” She turned to the first page, a portrait in black-and-white of Marine and Antoine, slightly smiling—more bemused than anything—with the Baroque church in the background. “Okay-looking couple, I guess,” Sylvie said, turning the page. “I love this shot.” She said pointed to the photograph of Marine adjusting her lipstick.

  Verlaque looked at it, then said “Pardon,” and picked up the album so that he could see it better.

  “Can you get it any closer?” Sylvie teased.

  After a few seconds he smiled and set the album down so that Sylvie could turn the next page. “There will be more choices once we get to the reception photos,” she said. “But I love this one of your mom scowling, Marine.”

  They laughed and again Verlaque picked up the album and brought it up to his nose. “You need a new prescription,” Marine said.

  “He looks so much like . . . ,” he mumbled.

  “Who?” Marine asked. “Who looks like whom?”

  Verlaque looked up at the ceiling and then closed his eyes. Sylvie and Marine exchanged glances. He opened his eyes and snapped his fingers. “Mais oui . . .”

  “Antoine, what the—?” Marine asked. She picked up the album and looked at the photograph. “Who am I looking at?”

  “The man watching my father and Rebecca get their photo taken,” Verlaque said, pointing. “He’s standing at the left edge of the photo, smoking, beside the bougainvillea that climbs up the church wall. He was in your lipstick photo, too.”

  “He’s just some village local,” Sylvie suggested.

  “Yes, and I just finally figured out who he is,” Verlaque said. “He’s the waiter from the restaurant, Marine. The one we always joke looks like a young Robert De Niro.”

  Marine looked at the photograph. “Are you sure?” She looked again,
then made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Yes, you’re right. He’s grown a beard now. I didn’t recognize him.”

  “It’s one of those scruffy beards,” Verlaque said. “Patchy.” He rubbed his eyes and Marine stared at him.

  “What’s wrong, Antoine?” she asked.

  “Yannis Malongo,” Verlaque said. “He’s the brother of Kévin—”

  “The guy who claimed he was innocent, then killed himself in jail,” Sylvie cut in. “Sorry, I read about it in La Provence in a café this morning.”

  Marine shook then straightened her back. “Does the waiter remind you of Yannis Malongo? What’s the connection?”

  “The beard,” Verlaque said. “Yannis has grown the same kind of half-assed beard, and I didn’t recognize him. I’ve bumped into him at least twice in town in the past few days.” He put the album down and walked across the room, standing with his body against the wall so that he could look out the window without being seen.

  “Why are you looking out the window?” Marine asked. “Is Yannis there?”

  Sylvie began biting her nails while she stared at Verlaque.

  “No, of course not. But he followed me up the street the other night,” he replied. “I knew I recognized him, but it was dark and he walked by me too quickly.”

  Marine picked up the album and looked again. “That De Niro look, with the beard . . . ,” she said. “Now it’s giving me déjà vu as well.”

  “You two are giving me the creeps,” Sylvie said.

  “Now I know who the waiter reminds me of,” Marine said. “That guy who helped me open the front door downstairs the other night, when I had my arms full of groceries.” She looked over at her husband, who had now moved away from the window and sat back down on the sofa, putting his arm around her.