Murder on the Ile Sordou

by M. L. Longworth

  Flamant whistled. “Is Navarre still alive?”

  “Oh yeah,” Martini said. Flamant heard him light a cigarette. “Lives in Paris, and still makes films for TV.”

  Flamant thanked the author and hung up. “Sophie,” he said, turning to one of the junior officers enlisted to help with the research. “Find out what you can about Jean-Louis Navarre, a film director, and possible connections to Alain Denis,” he said. “Does mostly stuff for television.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied, sweeping her jet-black hair away from her face. “I’ll start with newspapers and magazines,” she said. “Should I call him?”

  “Not yet,” Flamant replied. “Let’s first see what we can dig up. We don’t want to alarm him.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Vernacular Architecture

  The steak tartare had been perfectly seasoned—just enough capers and Tabasco—and Jules paid the bill and asked for the receipt, the first time in his life he had ever had an expense account meal. He carefully tucked it inside his Moleskine and left, thanking the waitress and barman, who shouted, “A la prochaine!” Jules grinned at the thought that the barman assumed he was Parisian and worked—or, even more improbable, lived—in this neighborhood. Jules knew, through work gossip, that Judge Verlaque came from mind-boggling wealth—flour mills, Jules had been told—and had grown up in Paris, in this arrondissement. What Jules didn’t know was that the Verlaque family mansion—where the elderly M. and Mme Verlaque still lived—was just around the corner. And they too had been eating that day at the Valois bistro, at the table next to Jules.

  Inside the Ministry of Culture’s temporary entrance a sheet of paper had been taped to the wall listing the divisions and their locations. Jules saw that Historic Monuments was on the second floor, and he walked up the wide stone stairs amid hammering and sawing. A young woman sat at a small glass-topped desk at the top of the stairs and didn’t look up when Jules approached.

  “Excuse me,” Jules said. “Sorry to bother . . .”

  She looked up at him, put her pen down, and crossed her arms.

  “I have an appointment,” he went on. “I’m here to examine the records of a lighthouse, on—”

  “Just a minute,” she cut in. She got up and walked through a wooden door behind her. A few seconds later she came back, and Jules purposely went on where he had left off.

  “Sordou,” he said.

  “Down the hall.” She pointed as a jackhammer started up. “Oh mon dieu,” she moaned, sitting back down.

  “Thank you,” Jules said. He thought of the friendly businessman on the train, and the train conductor who had joked as he punched Jules’s ticket, and the waitress and barman across the street. Here was a girl who had a job that any recent graduate would die for, a job easier and more prestigious than waiting tables or pouring drinks, and yet she was miserable.

  As he passed through a set of new, modern glass doors he met another worker, this one older, and smiling. Perhaps the glass doors insulated her from the construction noise, he thought. She showed him a desk, looked carefully at his police ID, and then minutes later was back with a stack of files and books on the lighthouses of France.

  “I hope you’re not researching all one hundred forty-eight lighthouses in France,” she said, smiling.

  “Oh no,” Jules replied. “Just one. There are that many?”

  “One hundred twenty on mainland France,” she replied. “And nine in Corsica and nineteen in the outre-mer. There used to be a lot more, but one hundred and eighty were destroyed during World War II. . . . Some were rebuilt, others weren’t.”

  “You know a lot about them,” Jules commented.

  “A few years ago we undertook a huge study of our coastal buildings,” she replied. “I was on the committee that did the research. I was lucky to travel around and visit almost all of them, until my second child was born, so I missed out on the Caribbean lighthouses.”

  “Too bad,” Jules replied.

  “Which lighthouse are you interested in?”

  “Sordou,” he replied.

  “Ah, the tall skinny one off the coast of Marseille. I remember it.” She reached into the stack of books and files and pulled out a yellow file folder, and then two books. “Begin with these; the other books won’t be much help. That’s where Alain Denis was just murdered, no?” she then said.

  “Sordou’s great, isn’t it?” Jules said, reaching for one of the books.

  “Lovely island,” she replied, understanding that she was to ask no more questions, and that he was indeed here to investigate the actor’s murder. “Although I prefer other—smaller—lighthouses, ones that fit in more with the vernacular architecture.”

  “Mmm, indeed,” Jules said, having no idea what she meant.

  She flipped through one of the books she had set before Jules and found, almost instantly, the page she was looking for. “See this one,” she said, pointing. “It’s near Toulon. . . . This is the kind of lighthouse I like.”

  Jules bent over and looked at the small color photograph. “I get what you mean. It’s very . . . small, and cute.”

  She laughed. “Yes, it is cute, and it’s built in the same style of the houses and barns in that region.”

  “Oh,” Jules said, filing away the word “vernacular” in his memory bank. “Thanks again for your help,” he said.

  “No problem,” she said. She looked at her watch and then added, “I’d love to help you more, but in ten minutes I have to go downstairs for a meeting with the architects and engineers who are renovating the building. We’re understaffed at the moment . . . holidays and illnesses. . . . Will you be okay on your own?”

  “Oh sure!” Jules said with a wave of his hand.

  For the next two hours Jules plowed through the file, and then the pages on Sordou’s lighthouse from the books he had been given. He wrote down anything he thought important, including these facts:

  the island’s first lighthouse (13 meters high, built in 1326)

  1774 burnt down

  1825 rebuilt, now 40 meters high in cut stone

  1829 it is lit by a new system of kindling with mineral oil

  1881 electrification

  Destroyed 1944 (WWII)

  Rebuilt 1959 by architects Arbus and Crillon, 71 meters high

  1986 automated

  The Buffa family had been guardians since 1868. There were no details given, only birth and death dates, and those only for the male members of the family, possibly because they were given the task of the lighthouse’s upkeep. Prosper’s great-grandfather, Honoré, born 1868, the year the Buffas came to Sordou, died in 1938, aged seventy. Jules noted that the importance of lighthouses during wartime guaranteed that the Buffa men stayed at home. They seemed to live long, healthy lives. Prosper’s grandfather, Pierre, born in 1890, died in 1973. His son, Prosper’s father, another Honoré, born in 1918, died in 1979. And Prosper, still very much alive, was born in 1937. Jules put his pen down and stretched, unsure of how to continue. The helpful librarian wasn’t yet back, but he turned when he heard the glass doors open, and the surly young woman from the front desk appeared.

  “You’re still here?” she asked.

  Jules wasn’t sure if he wanted to reply or not. He knew that she didn’t care one way or another. He finally said, “I’m just about to go. I think I’ve got all the information I can get from these files.” He sighed, and the young girl seemed to relent.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “An event, that may or may not have happened, on an island near Marseille,” he said. Why not? he thought. I’ve got nothing to lose.

  She sat down, making it obvious that she was more interested in Jules Schoelcher’s well-defined arm muscles than in his task.

  “Well, you’re only going to get facts about the architecture of the island here,”
she said. “We’re monuments,” she added.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “For historical events, on an island, you need to go to the Ministry of Ecology and Energy.”

  “Really?” he asked. “What floor are they on?”

  She laughed. “They’re on the twenty-sixth floor, I think.”

  Jules looked at her and then said, “Oh, not in this building I take it.”

  “No,” she replied. “In La Défense.”

  “You’re kidding,” he moaned.

  She looked at her watch. “You have time,” she said. “Walk over to Châtelet and take the RER A. Don’t take the Line 1 metro.”

  • • •

  Jules had never been on the RER trains that ran beneath Paris; as he looked at his watch—it was just after 4 p.m.—he was thankful that this particular train was fast. He had also never been to the newly constructed business center to the west of Paris, La Défense. He had seen photographs of it, of course, and had seen, standing in the middle of the Champs-Elysées with his parents, a hazy Grande Arche floating in the distance. The Grande Arche contained the ministry he was now racing to, and at 4:25 he was walking out of the train station and across a windy plaza that seemed to Jules to be something belonging more in a futuristic city than in centuries-old Paris. The rain had thankfully stopped, as he couldn’t imagine an umbrella staying open in this windy square.

  He crossed the plaza as quickly as he could, his head bent down just enough to break the wind but not so much that he would bump into anyone. His stomach was taut; he knew he should have called first, or looked up the hours of the Ministry of Ecology (and Energy!), but he hadn’t had time and had wanted to escape what had become a leering stare from the young assistant at the Ministry of Culture. He went through the Grande Arche’s front doors and ran to the information desk.

  “Hello,” he stammered out. “I’m hoping to visit the Ministry of Ecology and Energy.”

  “You could,” the information officer, a middle-aged man with incredibly greasy hair, replied. “But not today.”

  Jules rested his elbows on the counter that separated him and the man. “Are they already closed?” he asked.

  “They’re always closed to the public on Wednesday afternoons,” he replied. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m from the Aix-en-Provence police,” Jules explained.

  The man opened his hands. “Even if you were the Président de la République, they wouldn’t let you in.”

  “Thanks,” Jules said. He turned to leave and then said, “Surely they’d let the president in?”

  “Well,” the man said, chewing on a pencil end. “I guess.”

  • • •

  Jules slumped over on his RER seat, checking his phone messages while there was a bit of Internet. There was only one, from Magali: “Have fun in the capital! OXOX, M.” Fun, yeah. The only thing he had accomplished was to find out a few facts and figures about the date of the lighthouse, and Prosper Buffa’s birth date. He looked at his watch; it was just a little before 5 p.m.; he seemed to remember seeing that the Ministry of Culture was open until 5:30 p.m. If he ran he could make it back and perhaps be able to ask help from the friendly librarian before she went home. He kicked himself for not asking for her name and direct phone number. He remembered that she had visited Sordou, and he realized he should have asked her more questions about its history; perhaps this Prosper character had been chatty? On the other hand, he could just head straight to the Gare de Lyon and have a beer while waiting for his train. Jules looked at his watch again and jumped off at Châtelet, ran west along Rue Berger, backtracking on the path he had taken just an hour ago to get to La Défense. He walked into the ministry’s temporary entrance at 5:25 p.m. and paused at the bottom of the stairs until he caught his breath. The construction workers had gone home, and the building was now as quiet as it had been noisy at 2 p.m. When he got to the top of the stairs the assistant was standing at her desk, putting a small umbrella in a cloth bag.

  “Not you again,” she said. “We’re closed.”

  Jules walked up to her so quickly that she stepped back, stumbling, and bumped into her swivel chair. He reached into his jacket pocket and flashed his badge in her face, about three inches from her nose. “Police business!” he yelled. “And now, I’m going back into the Monuments office.” In fact, this is what he imagined doing. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, no matter how many times he had rehearsed it while on the RER. Instead, he showed her his badge, said nothing, and then quietly walked toward the library, not looking back.

  He walked over to the impressive glass doors and swung them open, walking quickly into the carpeted library. The lights were still on, and he called out, “Hello?”

  “Over here, at my desk,” the librarian answered from behind a small bookcase. She held her hand up and waved.

  “Hello again,” she said, smiling. “I thought you might have still been here after I finished my meeting.”

  “I went on a wild-goose chase.”

  “Where to?”

  “La Défense,” he answered. “The young woman at the entry told me I should be doing my research at the Ministry of Ecology and Energy.”

  “What? That would be useful if you were looking for information on birds, or the rock formations of the islands. Besides, they’re closed on Wednesday afternoons.”

  Jules mustered up a smile. “I know.”

  “What do you need to know?” she asked. “I didn’t want to ask before, but I think you’re looking for something more than the history of the lighthouse. Something about Alain Denis and Sordou.”

  Jules leaned forward. “The current lighthouse guardian, Prosper Buffa, hinted that Alain Denis was around Sordou in the late 1950s,” he said. “Did you meet this Prosper? From what I understand, he speaks in riddles.”

  “What a character,” she said, slapping the desk. “I remember him.”

  “Did M. Buffa show you around the lighthouse, and Sordou?”

  “Yes, he did,” she replied. She leaned in and whispered, “And do you think he’s linked to Alain Denis’s death?”

  “Perhaps,” Jules said, lying. How do I know?

  “You don’t think that that poor old soul M. Buffa did it, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied, lying again. “But he’s difficult to get information out of, as you know. Did he ever tell you stories, of the lighthouse?”

  “He was strange, that’s for sure,” she said. “My name is Anne-Sophie, by the way.”

  “Jules.” They shook hands.

  “He rattled off lots of facts about the lighthouse,” she said, sitting back now. “And we had a nice sandwich lunch that I had prepared in Marseille . . . and he told me about all of the buried ships around the island.”

  “Jacques Cousteau kind of stuff.”

  “Exactly,” she answered. “The underwater ships are protected by the Ministry of Ecology and Energy, by the way. Back at La Défense.”

  Jules laughed.

  Anne-Sophie went on, “And he did talk about deaths, strangely enough. His mother who died young, a younger brother who died of the flu, like his mother, fishermen going out to sea and never returning, storms . . . and a drowning.”

  “Drowning?” Jules asked.

  She bit her lip, concentrating. “M. Buffa was about twenty when it happened,” she said, sitting forward and getting flushed. “Yes, I remember now, because he was playing with me, the old flirt, and said that at the time of the drowning he was as old as I was, even though at the time I was well over thirty, and he knew it.” She paused and then went on, “He was saddened by it, and he said there were two girls who died . . . no, wait a minute . . . a girl and an older woman.”

  Jules thought to himself that Prosper would have been twenty in 1957. “And that’s all he said?” he asked. “No mention of Alain Deni
s?”

  “Oh no, he didn’t mention any names. My assistant had finished taking some measurements and photos, and our boat had arrived,” she said. “So we said goodbye, and he told me to come back anytime, and he winked.”

  “Do you have records of deaths, on the islands, here in the library?” Jules asked.

  “Not here,” she answered. “Do you think there’s a connection?”

  Jules shrugged. “Never leave a stone unturned.”

  “Archives,” she said, pointing to the ceiling. “Upstairs.”

  Jules looked at his watch; it was almost 6 p.m. “Ils sont déjà fermés, non?”

  Anne-Sophie opened her desk drawer and pulled out a set of keys, jangling them.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Bill’s Business

  “Général Le Favre looks like he just stepped out of the Franco-Algerian War,” Marine said, breaking a bit of baguette and dabbing it on a plate where she had poured pungent green olive oil.

  “He did,” Verlaque answered. “He was a young officer stationed in Algiers; he was decorated various times, each medal for some act of bravery or another.”

  “Same thing in Vietnam,” Paulik added. “I heard he once went into the jungle driving a helicopter that he had taken, without permission, from a French military base; he went deep into enemy territory to pick up some wounded soldiers who were stranded.”

  “Did he get them out?” Marine asked.

  “Yes, just barely,” Paulik replied. “They were shot at. As soon as he landed the helicopter, it basically fell into pieces. He’s been retired for years, but they can’t keep him away from police headquarters. He’s an eccentric . . . lives by himself in some cabanon in the calanque Callelongue.” Once fishermens’ cabins, cabanons dotted Marseille’s coast, especially on the fjord-like calanques; the one-room stone huts now sold for a small fortune. Because of this, Veraque whistled. He had dreamed of owning one for years, but despite his wealth he didn’t have what it took to buy one: family connections in Marseille.