A lawyer in robes, some defending counsel or other, popped his head in.
"When can you fit us in, Madame?"
"A quarter of an hour, Maître."
"I have to plead around ten, in the Correctional."
"Well, we’ll have to put it off then, won’t we? Let me know when you are ready." People have to sit on those benches, blowing their nose and staring at the floor, for hours sometimes. One’s counsellor must be present, at interrogations…
"How’s Vera?" asked Colette, smiling. They hadn’t many friends: a PJ cop isn’t all that popular a neighbourhood character. Colette had been a close friend of Vera’s. They’d drifted a bit apart, the way people did sometimes. Castang himself…well, Richard had thought it wasn’t very clever, one of his close collaborators being quite so thick with a female – young, pretty – Judge of Instruction. Colette had had her daughter kidnapped by an oaf. Castang had been on that job. Fact was, they’d come close to what nasty-minded people would call… Least said soonest… Vera’s friendship with Colette, and Colette’s friendship with Henri, got cooled off rather. Well, that was past history.
"Having a baby, more or less any moment." Grinning, proud pa.
"Oh, how lovely. Give her my love. And for goodness sake, keep me in touch. How was I to know? You want me to read these things in the paper? I must rush out and buy something extravagant."
"She’ll love that. Nice of you."
"Well look, Henri, all these people battering at the door. Must get this business settled, and then when you come back next we’ll have a drink, right? She’s not started yet? What a moment!" The big mouth stretching into a grin, a bit rueful.
"Yes, idiotic business this."
"And could steer us both full tip into the shit. Which is why your great friend Commissaire Richard, not really one of mine, entrusts you with this delicate huh, inquiry. And why the Procureur de la République, bless his warm heart, finds that Madame Delavigne, still always known as Little Madame D, is just the right magistrate to examine and instruct, hm, this humhum."
"At least you haven’t been posted to Béthune yet." It is the standard ‘judge’ joke; a sour one and not always a joke. Young, earnest and idealistic magistrates have quite frequently progressive liberal tendencies and left-wing sympathies. They have even – how dare they? – formed a splinter syndicate of judges who sometimes ask quite openly whether the separation of powers is all it might be, and whether the judicial branch doesn’t get leaned on a bit too heavily and obviously by the executive.
Judges are independent, yes, of course. But they get promoted on their ‘marks’ awarded by their seniors. They can’t be sacked. But they can be posted to a hell ship.
Junior judges, just out of school, get posted anyway to a hell ship unless they’re somebody’s cousin. The biggest and best-known punishment squad in France (the Bataillon d’Afrique, the army used to call it) is Béthune, that grim and forbidding mining city in the Pas de Calais near the Belgian border. Something like half the magistrates in Béthune, and it is one of the largest busiest tribunals, are in the ‘wrong’ syndicate. They do naughty things, like ordering the owners of industrial empires to prison for persistent infraction of labour laws. The owners don’t stay long in jug. The Court of Appeal in Douai lets them out within a week. Funnily, the C of A takes around three months to get to business as a rule.
The mention of Béthune is not always greeted with a grin by junior judges of instruction. Colette smiled, but without conviction.
"I wouldn’t much care for it, Henri. A woman, you know; they’ve got you coming as well as going. Suppose I said yes, and we’ll by God make Béthune the best judicial district in France, the example to all the others where people can by heaven see justice done – what would Bernard say?"
Bernard was her husband. Director in a small but dynamic concern making milk products, known as ‘the yoghourt factory.’ A nice man. And she was a loyal wife.
"It’s what I tell Vera all the time. Life is splitting ideals into compromises. Supping with the Devil, long spoon. All cliché, as she says. I’ve no particular wish myself to be Commissaire in a village of five thousand souls in the Massif Central. Where no human eye would ever again behold me. I like this town. Oddly, I like Richard. He’s some six or seven years to go till his pension. He’ll stay here – they don’t want him in Paris. Suppose he made a bad blot, it’d be Nantes for him or Rennes: imagine his face! So he’ll be mighty careful."
Colette was thinking: we’ve grown up all right; he and me both. What a long time ago it all seems.
"And how’s Rachel?" he was asking. Rachel… When a child has been stolen, even though not in any real sense ill-treated, is it ever going to be quite the same again? Confidence…
"She’s a big girl now… We’re of one mind, Henri. None of us would want to see this thing get out of bounds."
That’s right. There may be waves, the boat may rock a bit, but see that no water gets into it. Be sure you can count upon the members of the crew. She’s ambitious…and who blames her? For her a test. The Proc is wondering, now that she isn’t really little-Madame-D any longer, whether larger responsibilities could be entrusted…and her marks will depend on how well she handles this. Good – she’ll trouble me less.
"What exactly is it you want done?"
"Want done! Come on Henri, you’re the experienced man at the confidential enquiry. What is it that Richard ‘wants done’? You have the usual powers. If you want any more you must come and ask me, and account rather closely for whatever you propose. It’s obvious that under the cloak of this terrorist pretext you must make a discreet personal investigation, and keep it underground. Nothing to the press, that’s flat. That the whole affair is confidential goes without saying. I’ll phone Commissaire Richard. I imagine that the answer will be found in a vengeance drama, but the man was an adjunct to the Mayor and he’s precious touchy about the dignity of civic office, so you be mighty careful how you go about your witnesses. Any sort of a lead, you’ll communicate your findings to me without delay."
"Understood. You take that up with Richard, my girl."
"I’ll have to ask you to excuse me now, Henri."
Decidedly, he thought, he preferred the Colette of – what was it, six years ago? But that was when they were both young and foolish. Bernard will be putting on weight now; he was always rather thick around the neck. You’ve kept your figure pretty youthful.
FIVE
WELL SAID, OLD MOLE
The weather was important.
Summer – was this summer? The weather experts, most of whom keep pubs, were already announcing with perfect certainty that there hadn’t been any spring, and there wouldn’t be any summer either. No good asking the farmers: they grumbled whatever happened. Rain and sun, sun and rain, very hot and rather cool; everything green, at least, was growing like fury. All leaf, and no fruit? One didn’t know what clothes to put on. Castang had a new summery thing, rather nice: sort of a zipper jacket, sort of gabardine, pale green, with white stripes. "Looks like a pistachio ice-cream," said Richard.
Richard had Massip with him, Massip-the-Fraud, the fiscal and financial expert, whose one virtue in Castang’s eyes was that he made out all their tax declarations. A mole. There was nothing really wrong with Massip: a quiet man who said little. A financial face. One didn’t particularly like him, but there was no earthly reason for disliking him.
"Now that you’re here at last," said Richard.
"Little Madame Delavigne…"
"Yes I know. She’s been on the phone. Pay no attention. The official side of this, Castang, all the mayor-and-corporation stuff, the Prefect insists I handle that myself. And since there’s a good deal of disentangling to be done in his remarkably complicated affairs, cut a long tale short, I’m taking Massip here with me, because if there’s a hole in his budget or whatever, why, there’s no more to be said. Quite an impassioned bit of homicide, and where there are signs of passion, my boy, in this beautiful country
you’re likely to find large sums of money." Richard lit his cigar, which had gone out.
"A character like this, lives…a great deal in public. Limelight…everywhere. All this public; what, no private? No lemonlight anywhere? I’m not going to hog any light, I’m merely there to put a good face on things. Massip does his imitation of a mole in and around the municipal castle: I’m a bit dubious myself about that football club. You, Castang, mole number two, and I enjoin you not to imagine you’re a ferret. So much that is open, noisy superficial. Like the moon, there must be another side to all this. Today’s the funeral, for God’s sake, Castang, go home and get into a dark suit. Mingle. Look like a press person. Nothing fancy, you behave throughout in a normal procedural fashion, you get to know who is who, and why. I don’t have to spell it all out." Castang had forgotten all about the funeral!
"How are things on the terrorist front?"
"Rumours – and rumours is all they are. There’s the usual pile of mysterious denunciation, which Fausta is making into a file for you."
Fausta! Now there was a Frenchwoman ravishingly beautiful, except that she wasn’t French: half-Italian. Immense eyes. When she was tired, and she was always overworked, they started to blink in a nervous tic. This, in a young woman less intelligent, might have been thought a cheap effort at being sexy: it wasn’t. Fausta was a decidedly puritanical girl: not that one blamed her really, with those looks. Her hair came down to her thin flat behind, both were kept exceptionally clean and the hair shone. Perhaps the behind shone, nobody had ever seen it. Fausta, as secretary (private) to the Divisional Commissaire was a very public figure, and an intensely private person.
Fausta was like Etienne Marcel. Everything was known about her public persona: nothing whatever about the private life.
A dossier could not be begun till after the funeral. Maigret always went to funerals: so did Castang; it was probably the only point of resemblance between him and the best-known fictional cop in the whole world, whom every French cop has cursed heartily upon occasion.
In the office he kept a ‘circumstance’ suit, for calling on bourgeois folk who wouldn’t employ some scruff in jeans: also for funerals. So he didn’t have to go home to change.
The local newspaper puts death notices in little boxes. If you think the dead person, meaning yourself, important you can with payment increase the size of the boxes.
A couple of the boxes were half-pages. With small boxes added, one had nearly three pages. They’d done Etienne Marcel proud.
The family: there was a great deal of family and Castang, who had to talk to them all, groaned inwardly. Father, Mother, Wife. Two sons, one daughter. Innumerable in-laws. Lots of children.
The Municipality: Mayor and Corporation struck and stricken to its innermost. It doesn’t he thought really have an innermost except in death notices but there it comes out very strong.
The Sporting-Club and the Football Association. The Harmony-Group ‘Concordia’. The Majorette-Group ‘Rhythm’: young girls in short skirts and high boots, who hi-step and twirl batons, in strange hats like pre-war Belgian gendarmes; a phenomenon copied from America. The Management – and Personnel – of the brasserie ‘Crown of France’: the pub. The Friends of the Opera, and the choir-boys, classifiable as what Vera, born a hundred kilometres from Vienna, called the Sing-Verein.
The Association of Dealers in Liquid Refreshments, called in French the Lemonaders. The Guild of the Artisans. The Syndicate of Les Commerçants du Centre.
Und so weiter.
Everybody’s deepfelt loss and sorrowing regret: not a single one of them, according to Richard, that wasn’t delighted to see the back of the bugger. Richard knew everything; it was his business to know everything.
"To hear everything," he corrected. "Make the knowing your business please. To speak nothing but good of the dead is a precept people pay lip service to, and I’m wondering what I mean by lip. Man cannot live without myth, or so say the anthropologists." What has Richard been reading?
"You mean what made Sammy run?"
"Come back when you know who Rosebud is," said Richard looking out of the window, where it was raining again.
The funeral was as good a place to start as any. See who all those people are: hang identities on them. The man was a politician, lived in a whirl of multiple activities. What were the areas of sincerity, if any? Where did the man put his heart? He was trying to remember who Rosebud was – wasn’t it finally a child’s sled – when Maryvonne arrived.
Women in the police divided into easily recognisable categories. Nothing racist about this remark; so did the men. Tall or short, they’re all sado-masochists, as Richard said gloomily.
Agricultural, with massive rears; lesbian with massive shoulders; cavaliers with massive hands and feet, and you’re by God the horse. Maryvonne did not fit into a category and this was nice. Very little was known about her; also nice. Very professional; lots of energy and concentration on her job. A bit under thirty, unmarried. She had perhaps love-affairs, but not with anybody in the department. Thinnish, average height, a neat build. Her tests showed her well-coordinated physically – she ran and climbed well and was a goodish shot, and a fair squash player – and mentally agile. Marked by the shrink, bless him, a well-integrated personality.
She had a bunch of blonde hair, reddish but not so as to be called carrotty, greenish eyes not too close together, a sharp nose, a good figure. Given to sweaters that came to shallow points in front, and Richard, who liked her, spoke of Maryvonne’s unsuccessful breasts, but with no wish to be nasty.
She’d been posted to him a couple of months back with good school marks.
"What was the idea, becoming a cop?" Richard asked, tilting his chair back and wedging a foot against the desk.
"I liked it and thought I’d be good at it."
"Ideals?"
"Some I suppose, or so I should hope."
"Ambitious?"
"Yes, very. I don’t want to sound cynical about it."
"What’s your conception of this job?"
"Doing what I’m told is the textbook answer, I suppose, but if I can get given any responsibilities then I want to take hold of them."
"Okay," said Richard, more pleased than he showed. She’d passed Fausta too, a stiffer test. She hadn’t done much yet but paperwork, which she did with a humourless attention to precise detail.
"We’re going to this funeral," said Castang, using a rag on his shoes, which were always kept polished. "You look all right. I want you to find out who everybody is. I suggest you mingle. You can be press if you like: there’ll be quite a lot and nobody will ask for cards."
"Everybody is a crowd, isn’t it?"
"That’s exactly the point. Not the professional civic mourners. Family in particular. As far as possible, friends. Several hundred people wearing expressions of circumstance, and I’m wondering whether any when asked why they’ve come will say ‘I knew him, I liked him, I’ll miss him’."
"All right," she said, sounding neither pleased nor bored. "I’d better buck up then, to get a good place."
"See you at the graveside," unsmilingly.
The church was brimful: the French love a good funeral and feel that by going to one from time to time they accomplish their religious duties. Candles, incense, flowers: we are Catholic after all despite anticlerical sentiments. Prayers come, sounding odd and as though made-up-as-they-went-along to anybody old enough to remember the antique patined words of the Latin ritual. A few phrases familiar since all time, memories buried but never quite effaced, as though in the voice of one’s very first teacher at primary school. De profundis clamavi ad te, Dominum. Domine exaudi vocem meam. A solid good old-fashioned funeral; no nonsense about cremation, or any of that no-flowers-or-wreaths-please: there were staggering amounts of flowers.
The mayor made a long and flowery exordium in his level, practised voice. Difficult to associate with the man seen yesterday, ruffled and edgy, using the stately and elegant proportions
of his private office in the Hotel de Ville to recover his own stately elegance.
"Who’s this?"
"I’m associating Inspector Castang with myself in this inquiry. It promises to be complex," said Richard colourlessly, "and it’s as well to be ready to cover a widish field."
"As long as discretion is absolute, you understand me: absolute."
The man was showing under the Mayor. He paced about, stared at things without seeing them.
"Marcel of all people. Why on earth?…terrorists – this meaningless striking with an extreme of violence against the most arbitrarily chosen…What protection can one possibly have?…It might just as easily have been myself."
He sat down abruptly at his desk.
"Marcel…Damn the man. This is very distasteful. It’s no secret that I’ve been intending not to stand again, at the next election. I’m getting on and all the rest of it – bullshit mostly; I’m seventy-two and fitter than most who’re half that. I’ll make no bones about it: I don’t mind saying, recently I’ve been in two minds about going back on that decision…
"Damn the fellow, he was after my job. And he hadn’t the capacity, he hadn’t the brains. No kind of an administrator, no proper base."
He tapped his hand irritably on the wood.
"Whatever people say I haven’t gone about fabricating a crown Prince. The succession is open, when I do go, and I’ll be very glad to go. I’ve kept myself a free hand on this condition, that I have not sought to favourise an eventual successor…"
The Mayor came to himself suddenly.
"I’m saying ridiculous things. You’ll understand, Richard, one is shaken. Seeing the man dead like that in the street, shot to pieces with his blood all over him… Poor Etienne… Good God, it could just as well have been me. From now on we’re going to have some security precautions round here, Richard."
Yes, there were quite a lot of plainclothes cops swelling the ranks of the mourners, glancing about a good deal. It really resembled a state funeral for a cop shot in the line of duty: one quite expected the Minister to step forward and lay a medal on the coffin; posthumous citation to the Order of the Nation. Makes a bit more of a pension to the widow. Widow – not much to be seen of her; conventionally heavily veiled, and supported by a numerous tribe. He could see Maryvonne flitting busily about, talking to an obvious journalist he himself recognised – fat biddy from France-Soir. What would she be? – Human interest story for a German magazine?
Castang’s City Page 3