The Beast of the Camargue

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  He had not caught much, either on the languid sea or in the music of his fathers.

  He only understood when he changed to Wagner and Strauss, to Melchior, Varnay, Rysanek and Flagstad. When he folded away his rods and returned the Zodiac. His other half was far away. For weeks now, Isabelle Mercier had not called on him from the far side of the known world.

  Ingrid Steinert had gone back to Germany for an indefinite stay. Settling her inheritance from her husband was causing her endless problems. She was now the owner of a large stake in Klug-Steinert Metal, which raised the hackles of many of her in-laws. She telephoned the Baron several times. Late in the evening, after spending endless hours in the offices of lawyers and notaries in the four corners of Germany.

  When de Palma emerged from his torpor, he immersed himself in books about the German occupation of Provence. He spent whole days at the Méjanes library in Aix-en-Provence, amid students about to retake failed exams in September, soaking up dissertations, theses and symposium papers.

  Not once did he see the name of Steinert appear. On the other hand he learned how many of the region’s powerful families had consorted themselves with the occupiers after 1942, the year of William Steinert’s birth. But most of the studies remained extremely discreet about the names of those involved and the fortunes amassed during that period.

  It was when he opened a dissertation about the region of Tarascon entitled L’épuration en Provence: 1944–1946 that the Baron came across the names of Steinert and Maurel. The account had been written in 1966 by a Gilbert Sicard, and in his preface the author warned the reader that he would cite no names of witnesses or victims without the express permission of those concerned or of their families.

  … In the months that followed the liberation of Provence, between August 1944 and January 1945, old scores were settled in the region of Les Baux, and in particular in Maussane and Eygalières.

  According to the witnesses we have questioned, the most sordid event took place at a farmhouse called La Balme, where Emile, the eldest son of the Maurel family, was shot dead and his sister Simone had her head shaved … Yet from various statements it would appear that the Maurel family had never collaborated with the occupiers and that this was in fact a settling of differences between powerful inhabitants of the region, fed by old rivalries and jealousy … Etienne, Emile’s younger brother, had even been part of the Vincent Group, a particularly active resistance network commanded by a farmer in Eygalières named Eugène Bérard.

  Henri Bayle, the head of the F.F.I. in Tarascon, claimed that none of his men was mixed up in this affair. At least, this is what emerges from the statement he made to the gendarmerie of Tarascon during the investigations into the case that were carried out in 1952, after a complaint had been lodged by Simone Maurel’s brother, Etienne … As often happened, the case was quickly closed and no charges were made. Cited in the statements and Maurel’s accusation are the names of the region’s most powerful landowners. Henri Bayle declared that he had never heard it said that resistance fighters had shot Emile Maurel. This is confirmed by the records of the F.F.I …

  According to oral testimony, Simone Maurel’s head was shaved in the village square of Eygalières, where she was then exposed to public condemnation. It is easy to imagine the degree of humiliation experienced by a young woman whom people spat upon (statement of a man who witnessed the scene) …

  She was accused of having had a liaison with a German, a certain Karl Steinert, who was neither an army officer nor in the police … According to the same oral sources, nothing was proved, but it seems that Simone Maurel was judged by a kangaroo court made up of the same people who had had her brother shot …

  De Palma made a few notes on his pad. At the foot of the page, he wrote in capital letters: REVENGE.

  France Telecom came up with three Gilbert Sicards, one in Fontvieille, one in Arles and one in Tarascon. De Palma tried them all. The first two were dead ends. When he dialed the Tarascon number, he got an answering machine which informed him that Gilbert Sicard would be away until the beginning of September. He left a message.

  He picked up Bérard’s photo and examined it closely. Once again, he had the impression that a door was slowly closing. That hope was forbidden.

  It was now late August.

  The first of a new wave of gangland killings occurred in the center of Aix: nine 11.43 bullets took the life of François Lomini, one of Morini’s lieutenants. Three days later, it was the turn of Jérôme Lornec, shot down in front of the 421, the nightclub Morini had put him in charge of.

  Jean-Luc Casetti was taken out by three bursts from an Uzi in a bar on avenue de la République, over a glass of pastis.

  Gangland abhors a vacuum.

  24.

  It had been raining all morning. The flagstones leading to Saint-Blaise’s church were gleaming with water and misery. It was twenty-two years to the day since de Palma had last been there.

  And some years since he had returned to Paris.

  He could still picture the white coffin carried by the undertaker’s assistants from Porte de Bagnolet, and the hundreds of bouquets of flowers and naïve drawings from the neighborhood children.

  That day, he had parked his service car, an unmarked R8, in rue des Prairies. Maistre and Marceau were with him, stiff in their too-tight dark suits. Maistre’s straight black hair fell down over the collar of his shirt, giving him the look of a romantic Napoleon. Marceau was curly-headed, his adolescent features marked with sadness and disgust.

  De Palma walked slowly up the steps of Saint-Blaise’s church then stopped in front of the door. He did not enter. A force held him outside. He angled to the left, and climbed the few steps that led to the local graveyard. An old woman was filling a green plastic watering can from a tap in the central alleyway.

  He passed in front of Brasillach the Collaborator’s tomb and was amazed to find it in perfect condition. Isabelle’s sepulcher lay one lot further on. Some fresh flowers had been laid there, presumably that very morning. There was a plaque with the photo of the girl. She was smiling.

  Beside her name, there were also the names of her parents: her father who had died eight years later, and her mother a year after that.

  He put down the bunch of violets that he had bought at the florist’s on rue Belgrand. He wanted to say a prayer, but he did not know any for the dead. The old woman came over to him.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “She was a pretty little thing, wasn’t she?”

  De Palma bent down and straightened the violets, which had slipped down onto the granite.

  “She always winked back when people looked at her,” he said, standing up. “A little smile in the corner of her mouth and a wink.”

  “Are you a family member?”

  “You could say that.”

  A few drops of rain splashed on the tombstone, making a dry slapping sound. De Palma looked up. Heavy clouds were advancing from the east ring road toward Porte de Bagnolet.

  “And the police never caught the one who did it!”

  “No, never.”

  “If you want my opinion, they can’t have looked very hard.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Are you really a family member?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I see.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because that’s where they should have looked. In her family.”

  In a flash, de Palma pictured again the long nights spent going through statements. Everything had gone through the mill. The slightest testimony. The smallest clue. All the forensic evidence had been gathered, but in those days the police scientists new nothing about biological sampling.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “No, I’m from Marseille.”

  “I didn’t know they knew people from Marseille.”


  “You don’t always know everything about everybody.”

  His face clouded over, and she realized that she was intruding. He was thinking about Marceau, his old teammate in Paris who had ended up in trouble. He did not blame him. He alone knew that Marceau had been a decent man right up till the end, despite the corruption, despite the tortured soul. Marceau had been an excellent marksman; he had won prizes. He could have killed de Palma three times. But he had not done so, no doubt in memory of Isabelle and this tragedy which had bound them together forever.

  De Palma took a long look at Isabelle’s face stuck there on the marble of her grave. She looked so like Ingrid that he felt shaken to his very roots. Isabelle and Ingrid, years apart. Almost a lifetime.

  A violent pain shot across his forehead and spread out in his skull. He massaged his temples until the migraine abated.

  Because that’s where they should have looked. In her family. He repeated the sentence to himself several times.

  The old woman had disappeared at the far side of the cemetery, toward rue des Prairies.

  He turned on his heels and walked back down rue de Bagnolet.

  At the Saint-Michel terminus, a few steps away from police headquarters, he ordered a beer and telephoned Judge Brivet. A secretary answered and told him to call back. He gave her his number, name and rank. She promised to pass on his message.

  Nowadays, Gilbert Brivet worked in the financial section in Paris. Twenty years before he had had the duty—a crushing one for a young magistrate—of dealing with the Mercier investigation. De Palma wanted to have a word with him, one old hand to another. Brivet must have almost reached retirement age.

  The Baron had just ordered a second beer when his mobile rang.

  “Michel? Gilbert here. How are you?”

  “Fine, fine, and you?”

  “Up to my neck in it as usual. But I can’t complain. Can we meet?”

  “That’s why I called you.”

  “Jesus, Michel, it’s good to hear from you!”

  “Same here.”

  “Let’s meet up at Les Chauffeurs, how about that?”

  “It still exists?”

  “Etienne’s gone. He doesn’t run the restaurant any more, but it’s still really nice. And, this evening, there shouldn’t be too many people.”

  Gilbert Brivet still looked like a choirboy. At over fifty, he had kept his youthful features despite his graying hair and life’s little dramas. He was neither married nor divorced: no woman would stay with this eternal adolescent caught in the corridors of power.

  From his student past, he had retained the manner of a scholar who knows everything about anything, capable of listing all the records he had ever listened to and the hundred of detective novels he had devoured. Although the hard knocks of destiny had given him a rather weatherbeaten appearance, which only added to his charm. As a magistrate he was fearsome and feared, one of the few who could make the political microcosm tremble with his accusations and sly leaks to the press.

  When the Baron appeared in the doorway of Les Chauffeurs, Brivet stood up, almost knocking over the bottle of red wine in front of him.

  “Well, well, well, Michel. What a turn-up!”

  “Good evening, Judge.”

  Brivet still had the same deep comma-shaped furrow that divided his forehead in half when he was happy or worried.

  “While I was waiting, I did my sums. The two of us go back nearly twenty-five years now.”

  “The Americans were leaving Vietnam. I remember it as if it was yesterday. With Maistre, we introduced you to a certain Marcel Gouffé. It was 8:45 and the end of his time in custody. He had admitted everything, the murder of his wife and the rest. During his questioning, we also watched shots of the chopper over the American embassy in Saigon. Yes, just like yesterday, my man!”

  “Back then, you, Maistre and Marceau were a team of aces. What’s become of them?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Marceau is dead.”

  “Shit. But how was I supposed to know?”

  “It was in all the papers. A month ago.”

  “Fuck. I was on holiday in Africa.”

  “It wasn’t a happy end …”

  The Baron took a menu from their waiter.

  “He’d gone wrong, you know. He was up to his ears in dodgy deals. Not a pretty story.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  “Yes, quite. They killed him. But not in a decent way. Very indecent, in fact.”

  Gilbert Brivet laid his pale eyes on the Baron, who was studying the menu. He weighed him up, as though trying to gauge the force of the knocks that his friend had received and those he had returned.

  “What you’re telling me is awful, Michel. He often used to come and see me. In fact, every time he came through Paris. He always called and we would meet up.”

  “He shot at me.”

  “What?”

  “Three times. He shot at me three times.”

  The Baron pronounced this last sentence rather like a suspect in custody, releasing some of the guilt that was weighing down on him.

  “Hang on there, you’re telling me that Jean-Claude Marceau took a shot at you … But …”

  “You heard right.”

  “Fuck.”

  The Baron ordered a veal cutlet in a cream sauce with fries, just as he had done during all his years with the Paris police. He raised his eyes, and could almost see Marceau and Maistre in front of him. Marceau with his long locks and mustache like the singer Georges Moustaki, his idol at the time. Marceau who had been a socialist despite it all, a master at stakeouts, and capable of orchestrating an interrogation as if it was a dialogue scripted by Godard.

  “It’s odd to see you again like this, Michel. You turn up out of the blue, with your news of death … It makes me…”

  Brivet’s eyes misted over with misery and nostalgia. He trembled on his seat, like a young tree bracing its strongest branches against the north wind.

  “But now you’re with the finance squad, you’re out of all that!”

  “Yes, I am. But sometimes I miss the old days. I’m sorry we don’t see more of each other.”

  “That’s my fault. I got married. Then I wanted to forget about Paris and my old life.”

  “I think we’ve all been running away from the same thing.”

  De Palma ordered two pastis.

  “I visited her grave this afternoon.”

  Brivet placed his elbows on the table and laid his chin on his interlaced fingers.

  “And I wondered if …”

  “Stop, Michel. There’s no point going back over that now. Life just played us one of its rotten tricks that evening. On you, Maistre, Marceau and me. And as rotten tricks go …”

  Brivet closed his eyes.

  “If you only knew how many times I’ve played that thing over in my mind: usually it’s not me who’s on duty that night, usually I don’t deal with cases like that. Jesus, it’s the first time, and I’m too young. And instead of calling in an old hand to help me out, I decide to play magistrate …”

  He gulped his pastis, put his glass on the table and spun the ice around for a moment.

  “That’s all you can say about the matter. We were there when we should have been somewhere else.”

  “True. But the worst of it is that after that—well I’ve seen my share of cold meat, believe me. But, I don’t know why, I’ve never been able to get her out of my head.”

  The Baron trained his eye on his friend, who kept his own eyes fixed on the ice cubes he was still swirling in his glass.

  “I went to check out the exhibits.”

  “And?”

  “They’re still there. In the courts, they throw nothing away, odd as it might seem. I wondered if we might be able to get something out of the D.N.A.”

  The Baron gestured to the waiter for two more glasses of pastis.

  “That will be difficult! Both for the tests and f
or the comparisons. The boys in the genetic labs are a pain in the ass.”

  The magistrate’s face was sad, his eyes humid.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I’m no longer involved in that kind of case and I never need them. In finance, all we deal with are figures.”

  “But I can ask for comparisons to be made.”

  “Even if you’re not officially on the case any more?”

  “Hang on, am I a cop or aren’t I? All we have to do is justify opening the case again.”

  “But that’s the problem. Plus there’s the fact that the bastard probably isn’t even on record.”

  “Who knows? More and more are getting caught like that.”

  “Hmm,” said Brivet, sipping his pastis.

  The magistrate concentrated on the menu for some time. The waiter came over. The Baron looked at his friend, who was hiding behind a list of dishes, prices and culinary descriptions.

  “I’ll have the same as you, the veal cutlet.”

  “It’s funny. They haven’t changed the menu.”

  “No, when the old boy left, they decided to keep the same style. And they were right. The place is packed every night.”

  “I have the impression that it’s still the same tablecloths …”

  “They repainted the walls once. But with the same color. As for the tablecloths, I think it’s nostalgia making you see things as before.”

  “After that we used to go to Le Bus …”

  “If only they’d known about that at court!”

  “They knew, of course they did.”

  “We once bumped into a lawyer there. Just once. Their sort didn’t go to Le Bus because it was full of druggies. They preferred more upmarket joints.”

  “Yes, Le Bus was full of gangsters … And boys from your home town too.”

  The Baron turned his palms up toward the ceiling.

  “And we didn’t smoke only tobacco!”

  The two cutlets arrived at the same time. The Baron stared at his fries swimming in cream.

  “In fact, why on earth did we start eating here?” Brivet asked.

  “It was my cousin who recommended the place. It was the last real wine and coal merchant in Paris. That’s why.”