“So then what?” Tirmont asked.
“I threw it out the window after him.”
“No, I meant, did you see him again other than at the paper?”
“Not the way you mean,” Natalie said with barely suppressed rage.
“Maybe it was because I missed him a little. And the bed part, too, I guess.”
She looked at Capucine to see if she understood. Capucine nodded fractionally and raised her eyebrows.
“He was really very good in bed. I have to say that for him. Good and imaginative. He taught me all sorts of new stuff. Like that wonderful thing you do with the whisk—” She caught herself.
“So I’d follow him after he left work. It took me all of two days to figure out what he was up to. The first day he goes to this expensive bar. It was in a narrow street, and I couldn’t hang around looking like I was a street walker, could I? So I followed him again the next day and he winds up right here!”
“Here?” Tirmont asked.
“Not at this very table, obviously. That one over there. So, anyway, he’s with this woman. Older. I don’t know how old, but more than fifty. One of those bourgeois types. Suit. Hermès scarf. Lots of jewelry. Big boobs and a big butt, but old, old, old. I couldn’t quite figure it. They’re sitting there drinking, all stiff and formal-like, and I didn’t really know what the hell was going on. But I sure found out fast. Do you know what they did?”
Capucine shook her head with a sad smile.
“They got up and walked down the rue de Paris to the Hermitage Gantois. I followed them, of course.”
“That’s the most expensive hotel in town,” Tirmont said. “It’s about two hundred yards down that street over there.”
“So here’s the good part. I waited outside exactly ten minutes to let them check in and then used a trick reporters like. I went rushing into the hotel waving this manila envelope full of stuff I was going to check out at home that night. I go up to the desk real panicked like and say to the guy, ‘Can you deliver this immediately to Monsieur Lepoutre. It’s urgent and he forgot it on his desk at the office.’ The guy checks his computer and of course there’s no Lepoutre. So I say, ‘He just checked in right now. He was with a very elegant woman older than he was.’ The guy doesn’t even look at me, but he takes the envelope, bangs the bell on the desk, and this kid runs up in a fancy uniform with a pillbox hat like they had in the twenties. ‘Madame Debruyne, chambre two oh seven’ he says to the bellhop and then looks at me like I’m a piece of shit and goes, ‘Voilà’ meaning, ‘Get the hell out.’ ”
She leaned back in her chair with a gloating, self-satisfied look and drained her beer.
Capucine ordered another round.
“Then what?”
“I ran after the bellhop, told him I had made a mistake and it was the wrong envelope, and went back to the office. It took me all of four minutes to find out who Madame Debruyne is—a certain Camille married to a guy called Matteo Debruyne who is financial director of a company called Sofinor.”
“It’s one of the larger finance houses in Lille. They specialize in complex infrastructure financing,” Tirmont said to Capucine.
“Exactly,” Natalie said. “I checked the company out, as well. It’s very big. So, there, that’s my story. Sleazebag dumped me to fuck a geriatric. Sure makes me feel good.”
There was another awkward pause. The mood had changed, as if storm clouds had arrived unexpectedly. Natalie became evasive, refusing to meet either of the detectives’ gazes. She shuffled her feet under the table and looked at her watch. “It’s nearly seven. I’ve got to get going.”
“Not so fast,” Tirmont said. “We need to hear the rest of the story.”
Capucine shot Tirmont a glance, ordering him to remain silent.
“You must have been devastated,” Capucine said. She put her hand on Natalie’s. “Were you in love with him?”
Natalie’s eyes filmed with liquid. “I ... I don’t know. Maybe.” She paused, snatched her hand from under Capucine’s, banged it on the table. “No! How could I have been in love and done what I did?”
Capucine saw Tirmont filling his lungs to ask a question and shot him another look. There was another long silence.
“Did he deserve it?” Capucine asked.
“Of course he did. He deserved far worse.”
“You called the husband?”
“That would have been vulgar. I sent an anonymous letter. It took me a whole day to get the wording right.”
CHAPTER 26
The Debruynes lived in the pink-bricked and white-iced place Louise-de-Bettignies. One of the most exclusive addresses in Lille, Tirmont had explained, even though it had never been peppered with cannonballs.
Monsieur Debruyne, who could be no more than a year or two away from retirement, answered the door when they rang at nine thirty that night. He wore a dark gray flannel double-breasted suit that accentuated his large belly. When the detectives showed their ID wallets, he turned without a word and led them into a living room crammed oppressively with fussy antiques.
Camille Debruyne sat on a silk upholstered Louis XVI settee, wearing a formal beige dress, a double string of pearls, and alligator shoes with two-inch heels. Her red-rimmed eyes intensified a sense of carnality that was at odds with her matronly outfit. Even though she was fifteen pounds over the current canon of beauty, Boucher would have snapped her up as a model. Like a seed pod about to pop, she was ready to explode in erotic passion at the slightest touch. Although she was probably into her fifties, she could have passed for being in her forties, or even less in younger clothes.
It was obvious the couple had been deep in discussion.
“The police,” Debruyne announced tonelessly to his wife.
Camille burst loudly into tears.
“We need to ask you some questions about the death of a man called Didier Rocher. Did either of you know him?” Tirmont asked loudly over her sobs.
“Please sit down, Officers,” Debruyne said, pulling two elaborately gilt chairs closer to the coffee table. He shot a now-see-what-you’ve-done look at his wife and sat at the opposite end of the sofa from her.
“Yes,” Debruyne said, “my wife was a friend of Monsieur Rocher. We were just discussing their acquaintance when you arrived.”
Camille Debruyne began to sob again. This time soundlessly. Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped on her lap. She made no effort to blot them.
“Would you care to share that discussion with us?” Capucine asked.
For the first time Debruyne was unsettled. He avoided Capucine’s gaze.
“My wife is upset at Monsieur Rocher’s death,” he said in a low voice. “We were discussing the nature of her affection for him. I doubt that would be of much interest to you.”
“Do you own a shotgun, Monsieur Debruyne?” Tirmont asked.
“Of course. What Frenchman doesn’t? Would you like to see it?”
“Please.”
The very fine English gun was disassembled into its two component parts and stored in an elegant leather case. Tirmont extracted the barrel component and scrunched up his face to peer through the tubes with one eye. Then he removed the stock-and-lock component from the case, examined it carefully, and fitted the gun together with a loud snap. The room was deathly still. Meditatively, he caressed the side of the lock with his finger. Surely it was Capucine’s imagination, but the smell of oil seemed to fill the room.
“When did you use this last?” he asked.
“Oh, in the fall, I suppose. I have a friend who has a pheasant shoot in Wallonia. We go once or twice in the season, don’t we, dear?”
Camille Debruyne could not take her eyes from the gun.
Tirmont smiled and said pleasantly, one hunter to another, “Belgian pheasant are one of the great attractions of the North, aren’t they?”
Debruyne did not reply.
“You take very good care of your gun, monsieur, but I’m afraid you use too much oil. Eventually, it will gu
m up the action. Although this oil,” he said, rubbing his thumb against the tip of his index finger, “feels quite fresh.” Tirmont glanced at Capucine, requesting permission to continue.
“Thank you, Monsieur Debruyne,” Capucine said briskly. “This has been very helpful. It’s enough for tonight. Of course, you understand we’ll have to continue our discussion tomorrow.” She turned to Camille and said, “Madame, mes excuses. It was unpardonable of us to intrude so late.”
As they walked back to Tirmont’s car, he asked, “You didn’t want to arrest him tonight?”
“No. He has some things to settle with his wife, and he’ll confess more freely once he’s done that. We’ll pick him up in the morning.”
“And you don’t think he’ll bolt?”
“He’s the sort of man who is incapable of traveling without his credit cards. If he ran we’d have him in half a day at the most. And, anyway, you’re going to post men around the building all night, aren’t you?”
Tirmont laughed.
Capucine spent the night in an inexpensive Novotel that had no room service. She had skipped dinner and, with only the TGV sandwich in her stomach, was famished. She filled a white cardboard bucket with ice from a machine down the hall and gleefully attacked the minibar, putting four cubes of ice in the bathroom glass, followed by two mignonettes of vodka. Then she proceeded systematically to consume the entire comestible contents of the bar, starting with the chips and nuts and winding up with the chocolate. When the feed was finally over, she was nauseous but still felt hungry and marveled at how that was possible.
She poured herself another drink—this time gin, since there was no more vodka—and dialed the apartment in Paris. Her only meager consolation for spending the night away from Alexandre was the freedom to drink her alcohol so cold it made her teeth hurt, a practice Alexandre condemned as an American solecism to be strictly avoided.
Alexandre picked up at the first ring. “I can hear ice tinkling. You must be celebrating your arrest.”
“We’re making the arrest in the morning. He’s having his last evening with his wife, who is the one who really should be behind bars. It’s one of these heavy Northern stories filled with depression, beer, brown bread, and dishes gluey with cheese. I’m not celebrating. I’m drowning my sorrows.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’ll be there for dinner. You’d better make me something specially nice. All I’ve had to eat today is a TGV sandwich and the contents of my minibar.”
“Good Lord!” Alexandre was genuinely appalled. “The next time you leave Paris, I’m going to send you off with a proper picnic basket. Tomorrow night I have a restaurant to review, but I’ll leave you something worthy of your return in the oven.”
The announcement that Alexandre would not be at home when she got back, on top of the contents of the minibar, made Capucine toss and turn for most of the night.
Tirmont and a wrinkled and unmade-up Capucine collected Debruyne as he left his building to go to work in the morning.
“Monsieur, I thought we would finish our discussion at the Police Judiciaire brigade, if you don’t mind,” Capucine said.
“I expected nothing less, Commissaire. ”
It was over in forty-five minutes. Debruyne had prepared himself. He handed over Natalie Duchamps’s anonymous letter and told his story. He had had a private detective follow his wife. When the detective confirmed the liaison, Debruyne had ordered him to tail Rocher continuously. After Rocher’s first solitary meal at Le St. Jacques de Lorraine, the detective had gone to see the general manager, ostensibly about organizing a conference at the hotel, and had learned about Rocher’s three dinners to write a review. On the fatal night the detective had followed Rocher and Camille to the Hermitage Gantois, where they stayed until seven. He had reported by cell phone to Debruyne, who had instructed him to stick with Rocher. Debruyne had had dinner with his wife at home, had dismissed the detective by phone, and had driven out to Le St. Jacques de Lorraine.
At the inn, Debruyne had parked his Mercedes 500 in the lot behind the hotel and had waited behind the bush for Rocher to come out. As he emerged, Debruyne had shouted out an epithet—“I just couldn’t shoot a man in the back,” he had explained—and had let him have both barrels as he turned. He had then walked to his car, the shotgun broken open over his arm as if walking home from a bird shoot, and had calmly driven back to Lille.
“One of the happiest hours of my life.”
If the confession had gushed forth like the bubbling waters of a cool rocky mountain brook, the paperwork certainly didn’t. It was not until late afternoon that the police file was complete and Debruyne was sent off to Séquedin Prison to await his trial and thence to return to serve out his sentence, which was unlikely to be very long—two years at the most, with a release halfway through for good behavior—since even in the North courts took a very Latin view of crimes of romantic passion.
On the six-thirty TGV back to Paris Capucine smiled to herself over Tirmont’s scorn of the naïveté of the amateur criminal. If Debruyne had blown his wife’s lover’s head off when they were actually in bed together at the Hermitage Gantois, a skilled lawyer—and Debruyne had the money to hire the best—would have had no trouble at all convincing the court to exonerate him completely and he would undoubtedly have even received the court’s apology for his pretrial detention. And witnessing the act would have put the fear of God into his wife for the rest of her days.
Capucine knew Tirmont was wrong. She was convinced Debruyne was sitting peacefully in his cell, master of his life, smiling contentedly, a Sisyphus following a very small stone down a very small hill.
CHAPTER 27
Capucine’s wry pleasure with the Lille case volatilized as the train surged smoothly southward. All that remained of what had seemed like an anachronistic comedy of manners was the image of the victim’s grisly mutilated head. As she stared out the window with unfocused eyes, the rocketing scenery an impressionist oil in greens and browns, the ruined head became Alexandre’s.
Capucine felt trapped in the train. She couldn’t eat a full dinner so early in the evening. She couldn’t face the aseptic metallic bar. She had no book to read. She had only her thoughts, and they were unwelcome travel companions. If the TGV going north had been propelled by a rocket, on the way back it was pulled by a leaky steam engine.
Capucine cursed herself for her thirty-six-hour abdication. She had known from the beginning that the Lille case was a digression. Tirmont would have taken at most a day or two longer to solve the crime, and if she had stayed in Paris she might have made some progress on her own case. And she certainly wouldn’t have let Alexandre go out to a restaurant on his own. There was no doubt about it. A minute away from Paris was a minute wasted. She execrated the train for its slowness.
As these thoughts festered, the horizon filled with dark, looming clouds. Capucine’s heart lifted, welcoming the catharsis of a violent storm. The first squall broke as the TGV entered the outskirts of Paris. By the time it eased into the Gare du Nord at seven thirty-two, precisely on time once again, rain drummed on the train car’s roof so loudly, they might be in the tropics. Still, the storm only distracted; it brought no relief.
In the seconds it took her to sprint to the Twingo, Capucine was soaked to the skin. The realization that she would have to fieldstrip and oil her Sig Sauer the minute she got home took her over the top. She kicked the front tire of her diminutive car and howled in dismay and frustration.
The empty apartment mocked her. She peeled off her sopping clothes and shapeless shoes and left them in a soggy pile by the front door. She dropped the holstered Sig on top, a brown cherry capping a bitter sundae—let the damn thing rust—and made for the shower.
Twenty minutes later, her face rosy from the heat of the blow-dryer, she emerged from the bedroom in a pair of ancient jeans and an extra-large T-shirt with a wine merchant’s logo so faded it might have been a ghostly advertisement from a previous c
entury on the side of a building deep in the Marais. Her desire for Alexandre was so intense it made her stomach ache.
In the kitchen she found an opened bottle of Ott rosé in the door of the refrigerator, poured herself a glass, and remembered Alexandre’s promise to leave her something delicious in the oven. Sure enough, he had made her a Comté and artichoke-heart quiche, which was still lukewarm. She returned to the refrigerator and discovered he had also made her an endive, escarole, and frisée salad and had left a jam jar next to it filled with a lemony vinaigrette punctuated by suspended motes of finely chopped tarragon.
She took her plate of quiche and salad along with the glass of wine into the living room. The first bite of quiche moved her profoundly. It wasn’t just that he had known exactly what she would have wanted, it was that the quiche was a perfect emanation of Alexandre. It was almost as if he was in the room, looking over her shoulder, watching her eat. The link was so powerful, consuming the quiche and salad bordered on the sexual. Where the hell was he? Merde. It was only a quarter to nine. She imagined him sitting in a restaurant, she had no idea where, scowling critically at his meal before forming his opinion. Maybe he’d be home by ten.
The quiche and salad consumed, Capucine continued to glance at her watch every five minutes while she snapped through the pages of a small pile of Marie Claires and Vogues on the coffee table, simultaneously flipping through the endless cable channels on the television. The inchoate bites of disjointed information escalated her malaise. Angrily, she turned off the TV and dropped the remote on top of the disorderly pile of magazines on the floor.
She poured herself a good measure of vodka, added three ice cubes—happily imagining Alexandre scowling at her philistinism—and picked up her copy of Gaël Tanguy’s The Nature of Possessives.
It was true the man could write. The verisimilitude of Tanguy’s vistas of pockmarked mud stretching without relief to a horizon where a brown sky met a black earth was compelling enough to suck her out of her funk and into his. But the magic carpet of narrative transfer plummeted when Capucine came to a graphic scene in which the android protagonist, with its sparking circuit boards, sought desperately to become a living creature in a fumbled fornication with one of the decaying half-dead animals, incanting, “Coito, ergo sum,” which she guessed meant “I copulate, therefore I am.” Capucine was so revolted she threw the book at a wall.
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