by Michelle Wan
Julian parked below the cathedral in the only patch of shade they could find and rolled the windows halfway down for the dogs, who remained in the van. They walked up Avenue Daumesnil. Julian helped an elderly woman carry her little wire shopping cart down the steps leading into Rue Porte-de-Graule. Nadia’s building was at the lower end of the narrow road. The skip that had stood in front of it was gone. In its place was a van. A couple of workmen were sitting in the open rear of the van eating their lunch. They paid no attention to Julian and Mara as they entered the house. They appeared to be used to people coming and going.
As they trudged up the spiral staircase, Julian noticed that the minuterie had been overridden. The stair lights were on and stayed on. The men were now working on the second floor. Open doors gave glimpses of newly painted walls, tiles being laid. Somewhere in the back of the house someone was using a power drill. This time there was no rock music coming from the flat at the top of the house.
There was no answer to Julian’s knock, either. He rattled the doorknob. The door swung open.
The flat looked to have been vacated in a hurry. The plastic furniture was scattered and overturned, the wooden crates empty of all belongings, the pans placed to catch rainwater kicked aside, and the mattress on the floor stripped, displaying impressive aureoles of stains.
“They’ve done a bunk,” he said, stating the obvious.
Mara moved quickly through the flat, turning over old newspapers with the toe of her shoe, peering into the sink.
“Ugh.”
Julian looked into the bedroom. The bed there had also been stripped. The dresser drawers hung open and empty.
They went back down.
Julian asked the workmen, “Either of you know where the people who lived at the top went?”
“More like where our skip went,” grumbled one of the men. In its absence, the renovators were dumping rotten planks and torn linoleum in a messy heap on the ground.
The other man, a big blond fellow, his cheeks bulging with food, shrugged. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The hairs on his forearm stood out, white and fuzzy with sawdust.
“They’re gone? Good riddance, if you ask me. Owner probably told them to shift it. They’d have had to get out by next week anyway.”
“Do you know how I can contact the owner?”
Blondie could only give them the name of the firm of architects who had hired them: Chauvin et Fils.
Mara and Julian left.
“How about lunch?” suggested Julian gloomily.
•
At about the same time that Julian and Mara were having lunch, a worker at a dump site outside town spotted a blue and white trainer poking out from a pile of rubble. The shoe looked in good condition, and the worker wondered if it came with a mate. He clambered up the hill of debris. The shoe was an Adidas, almost new. He shook his head. People threw away anything nowadays. It wasn’t like that when he was a kid growing up after the war. You counted every centime, hung on to things until they were of no possible further use. Steadying himself with one hand on the shifting scree, the man reached out with the other to push aside a broken plank to grab the shoe. It resisted his pull. He tugged harder. It came away, revealing a human foot.
•
The story on the eight o’clock news hit Julian like a blow: the body of a young man, identified as Kazim Ismet, nineteen years old, of Brames, had been found at a dump site outside Périgueux. It had lain in a skip, covered by building debris, until the skip had been taken on Monday morning to be emptied. The body, tumbled out with the contents of the skip, might not have been noticed even then, except that an alert worker, spotting a shoe, had become suspicious. Upon investigating the matter, he had made his grisly discovery.
A preliminary report gave the cause of death as a drug overdose, making this the second drug-related death in Périgueux in three weeks. A hypodermic needle had been found with the body. Documentation in a wallet had led to a positive identification by the youth’s father, Osman Ismet. A shaken Osman appeared briefly on the screen. He denied that Kazim had ever taken drugs and blamed bad influences and poor policing for his son’s death. Osman appeared to have shrunk substantially. His words carried the conviction of a deflated balloon. At one point only did he give a glimpse of his old spirit. “Who is protect our children?” he raged. “When they are young, stupid, who protects?” Arms outstretched to the television audience, he communicated his anger and pain to every viewing parent like a knife to the heart.
Mutely, Julian stared at the television screen. He imagined Betul’s grief. Osman’s anguish was plain to see. Julian was furious with himself that he had delayed searching for the Ismets’ boy, then overwhelmed by an awful sense of guilt. He had promised. A day might have made all the difference.
Mara reached for his hand. “Don’t blame yourself, Julian. You did all you could.”
He shook his head and pulled away. He should have done more. And a hell of a lot sooner. He felt a stress headache coming on. Thumpers, he called them. They started with a pressure behind the eyes that quickly became the assault of a manic percussionist beating a bass drum inside his skull.
She tried to hold him. Her voice reached him distantly. “Listen to me. This is not your fault.”
He stood up. “Leave it, will you?”
“For God’s sake, don’t shut down like this. Talk to me!” She had risen, too, and was following him out of the room.
“Talk?” he turned and almost shouted at her. “That’s my problem, isn’t it? I’m going to have to go to the shop, look Betul and Osman in the face, and say what? How terribly sorry I am that I absolutely fucked up? Frankly, I don’t have the sodding bottle to do it.”
However, Laurent Naudet was another matter. Ignoring his pounding head, Julian did not wait for the gendarme to call him back.
•
Two hours later, Julian and Mara sat in the office of Commissaire Boutot of the Police judiciaire in Périgueux. They had met the Commissaire a few years earlier when Mara was trying to find her missing sister. He was a melancholy man with baggy eyes, a drooping mustache, and a habit of rolling a pencil between his hands. Julian told his story. He repeated Kazim’s exact words. Yes, the boy had mentioned a man named Serge. The recorded message was saved on his répondeur. Yes, he and Mara had gone to Périgueux to find Kazim. Betul Ismet thought her son had been staying with a former classmate, a young woman named Nadia Beaubois. However, the flat had been vacated by the time they arrived. Of the other occupants—an English kid named Peter and a French girl named Brigitte—Julian knew nothing. Mara corroborated what she could of Julian’s statements.
Julian listened to the soft rasping of the pencil rubbing against the dry skin of Commissaire Boutot’s palms and admitted that it was a bit odd that the Ismets had asked someone who was not of their faith, who didn’t even know their son, to find him, to persuade him to come home. He tried to explain the deal he had struck with respect to the importation of Turkish salep, the marketing of Elan, but his words sounded so meaningless in the face of Kazim’s tragic finish that he trailed off and never mentioned orchids again.
The next day, Adjudant Compagnon requested to see them. The brigade commander, a tall, carrot-haired man with pockmarked skin, shook their hands warily but at the same time with an air of suppressed excitement, and invited them to sit down.
“We meet again,” he said, and if his eyes held a memory of a past, harrowing experience involving a mummified baby and other corpses, he made no mention of it. “This case is out of my hands jurisdictionally. However, I’ve asked you here because the Lokum trashing is still unresolved, and there are a few minor details you may be able to help us with since you have some knowledge of the Ismet family.”
Laurent sat nearby, ready to take notes on a laptop.
Oddly enough, Compagnon spent more time talking about Kazim’s death than about the Ismets’ shop. Unusually expansive, the brigade head offered them coffee and was
even willing to give out information. The conclusion drawn by the Périgueux police was that Kazim had died in the early hours of Sunday morning of a self-administered overdose of heroin. He was obviously an intravenous user. His arms were covered in needle marks, and the hypodermic found with him was covered with his prints. The speculation was either that he had shot up in the skip and died there, or that Nadia and company had found him dead in the garret, panicked, and dumped the body and needle there themselves.
“Frankly, I don’t like it.” The adjudant looked like a man scenting a bad odor. “It’s easy to knock off a junkie with a fatal injection and make it appear like an overdose.”
“Are you saying someone killed him?” Mara asked.
Julian stirred uncomfortably beside her. “I think the Ismets have been through enough without having to deal with the proposition that their son was murdered.”
“Ah,” Compagnon rose to the challenge like a leaping trout. “But let’s look at it logically. Kazim’s pals find him dead. If their intention was simply to distance themselves, wouldn’t they have been better off leaving the body in the garret and simply taking off? It might have been days before the renovators worked their way up to the top level of the building. By putting Kazim in the skip, which was emptied on Monday morning, they ensured his body would be discovered quickly.”
He went on to point out that tracing the body back to the address on Rue Porte-de-Graule had been simple. Only two skips had been emptied that day, and the renovators had been easily able to identify the surrounding debris. Anonymity could not have been the objective. A health card had been found with the body. Plus thirty euros and change. Scum like Nadia would have taken the cash. Whoever was responsible for putting Kazim in the skip hadn’t panicked and wasn’t interested in money. That person wanted Kazim’s death to be discovered and had been making a statement.
“Well, is anyone trying to find Nadia?” Julian asked. “Or Peter or Brigitte? What do they have to say? And what about Kazim’s bike? He had a red Honda Bol d’Or.”
Compagnon shook his head. “The owner of the building has been questioned. He admits giving Nadia free accommodation in return for her acting as a kind of caretaker. He was probably taking unreported rent off her. But apart from that, he claims to know nothing about her and doesn’t know where she’s gone. I think we can rely on the police in Périgueux to round up her and her pals. We will also let them look for the missing moto. I and my men have more important work to do.”
By this, Compagnon gave them to understand that Julian had provided him with the first promising link leading back to Rocco Luca: Kazim had been running from a man named Serge before he died. Serge Taussat was a known associate of Luca. Kazim was a user and probably a small-time pusher who had worked for Luca. Maybe he had tried to hold out on the Ton. Et voilà. It was a typical drug scenario. It also explained the trashing of Kazim’s parents’ shop, which could now be interpreted as a warning. Everything was falling into place, and the Brames Gendarmerie was bang in the epicenter of the action. Luca lived in the jurisdiction of Brames. Kazim’s body may have been discovered on the outskirts of Périgueux, but the roots of the case were right here, beginning with the vandalism of Lokum. Jacques Compagnon virtually hugged himself. The cheeky rhyming housebreaker was almost forgotten, if not forgiven.
• 21 •
The femme de ménage from hell, as Julian had taken to calling her, was now leaving notes. She put them on the dining table where they could be plainly seen the moment one entered the front room. Previous missives had read: “There is a stain on small table from something wet left on it.” And, “Ask him to buy more Destop! Downstairs drain is plugged again!”
Madame Audebert’s direction that he should buy the French equivalent of Liquid Plumber clearly stated whom she held responsible for the frequent slow evacuation of the bathroom basin.
That day Julian was the first back, tired from an afternoon’s hard labor planting a hedge with only the aid of Bernard, the Chez Nous weekend waiter, as his digger. The sight of yet another of those odious slips of paper irritated him beyond belief. He wanted to tear it up, burn it, stamp on it, and yet he felt compelled to read it: “Vacuum not working because of sock (man’s) under bed.”
The vacuum had been left, also prominently in view, in the middle of the room.
He gathered that the vacuum had sucked up a sock (his) that had jammed the works. He was cursing and struggling to extricate the sock from the power head when Mara came in.
“What’s wrong with the vacuum?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. In the next breath, he burst out resentfully, “Can’t you tell her to stop leaving those bloody notes?”
“How else is she to communicate with us if we’re not here?”
“It’s how she does it that’s offensive.”
“Well, if you’d only make some effort to be a bit less messy, maybe all this unpleasantness could be avoided.”
“Look here, don’t you think all this behavior modification for the cleaning woman is a bit over the top?” He had hold of the sock now and ripped it violently from the roller. “Frankly, it smacks of middle-class angst to me.”
Mara stalked out of the room. Julian, ashamed of his outburst, stood up, threw the sock on the floor, and went after her.
“I’m sorry.” He took her in his arms. She pressed into him.
“No, I’m sorry. I know you’re still getting over Kazim.”
They held on to each other as if they were both treading water in a deep and treacherous sea.
•
It was a slow night at Chez Nous, and Mado and Paul, with the aid of Bernard, had a relatively easy time of it for a change. Julian, Mara, and Loulou arrived together, greeted the room with the customary “messieurs,” “dames” as they came in, and took their usual table. The dogs settled down, hopeful of handouts.
Paul came out to greet them. “The usual apéros? What do you want for starters?”
Mara and Loulou chose the baked oysters, Julian the lamb’s sweetbreads.
“So, I hear that kid Kazim died of an overdose,” Paul said to Julian, waiting pen in hand for their main course orders.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” said Julian. “I’ll have the rabbit pie.”
“That’s how the lads in Périgueux are treating it,” said Loulou. “But our good friend Jacques Compagnon thinks Kazim was pushing for Ton-and-a-Half, and he called in the kid’s account. It would explain why Kazim was running away. And why his parents’ store was trashed.” He broke off to inquire, “The blanquette of veal. Is the meat local?”
“Old Michaud down the road.”
“Ça va.”
Paul wrote: 1 rabbit, 1 blanquette. He grinned. “Speaking of blanquettes, see that anglais over there?” He thumbed over his shoulder at a hefty Brit wearing a Newcastle United sweatshirt. “He told me he went to a store to buy what he calls a ‘blanket.’ They told him to try a restaurant. So he went to a restaurant, and when he asked for a blanket there, they told him they didn’t do veal. You get it?”
Julian closed his eyes.
Mara said, “I’ll have the roast pheasant with chestnuts.”
“Trouble is,” Loulou went on, sniffing the air appreciatively as Bernard hurried by with a platter of potato croquettes, “a death like that leaves no trademark. A lethal dose of l’héro, then paf! Lights out, and no one’s the wiser.”
“Bastards.” Julian was moved to speak up. “He was just a kid. And what about Betul and Osman? If Luca really is behind it, their lives could be in danger, too.”
“It’s what you get for messing around with drugs,” rumbled Paul.
Mara, anticipating sticky ground, turned to Loulou. “Anything new on the rhyming burglar? I spoke with Sébastien Arnaud today. Assurimax will have to pay up. They doubt the police will be able to trace Prudence’s things.”
“Ah, ça!” the ex-flic drew his shoulders around his ears and held his hands palms up in a true Gall
ic shrug.
Paul sniggered, “I’ll bet old Compagnon’s sitting on tacks waiting for the next jingle. I’m no literary man myself, but I like the poetic touch. The Tweedledee one was really good. You have to hand it to him, the mec is smart. He’s laughing in everyone’s face and getting away with it. They’ll never catch him.”
Loulou semaphored his disagreement with a stubby forefinger. “Non, non, non, mon ami!” he exclaimed. “That, in my experience, is why they will catch him. Our burglar is laughing, as you say. He feels sure enough of himself to play games with the police. But it will be what trips him up, ultimately. In all my years as a policeman, I have found that the criminal who’s too sure of himself inevitably gives himself away, and I have learned that there is one infallible way of spotting him.”
Loulou’s eyes danced as he paused, making them wait for it.
“What?” they all demanded.
“The walk,” declared Loulou, slapping both palms on the table. “It is in the walk, my friends. When a guilty person thinks he or she is about to escape undetected, watch how he walks, not coming toward you but going away from you. It is what I call the guilty waggle.”
“The guilty what?” queried Mado, coming out from the kitchen for a brief break. She exchanged embraces all around.
“The guilty waggle,” Loulou reprised. “A certain hastening of the steps, the buttocks tucked under just so.” He wriggled in his seat to demonstrate. “An almost—how to describe it?—conceited swagger of the hips that says, ha ha, you have not caught me out. All the same, I must hurry off before you do.”
“That’s just your excuse for watching bums,” snorted Paul.
Mado rolled her eyes. She turned to Mara. “I came to ask you how your neighbor is, the one whose wife died. I ran into the nurse, Jacqueline Godet, the other day.” She paused. “Is it true you’re making his meals?”