When Momo arrived she beckoned him to the window and whispered almost inaudibly in his ear. “Use my car. Drive him home. Take him up to his apartment. Make sure he steps over the threshold. Then arrest him immediately and bring him back. I’m not through with him.”
Momo did a double take but walked Rolland out the door without comment.
Within an hour Rolland was back in his old cell, untouched since his departure. Capucine had no difficulty imagining his dismay at the evening meal, which would probably consist of a glutinous heap of tasteless, unsalted white beans with a few unidentifiable shreds of meat serving as a backdrop for a glass of tap water drawn from the cold-water sink in his cell.
Capucine again left him to his own devices until the next afternoon, when she had him brought, not to her office, but an interrogation room on the second floor of the Quai. In a Chanel suit and the extravagant mules she had acquired during her antidepression spree Capucine looked jarringly out of place in the depressingly drab room with its cheap felt carpeting, sound-deadening foam wall tiles, and gray Formica table with four—inevitably—bent metal chairs. Even more out of place was the bottle of wine on a small table next to the door.
When Capucine had asked Alexandre to name the wine that would be most likely to attract the attention of a sommelier he had hiked his eyebrows and intoned a bored litany as if it were a Gregorian chant, “lafitelatourmoutonhautbrionmargauxyquempétrus-romanéeeeeaycontiiiieeiieeii.”
“No, no silly, not the obvious ones. I know all of those. I want something outstanding but relatively unknown. And if it works, I might even give you the bottle.”
“Ah. That changes everything.” He thought for a moment. “How about a bottle of La Mouline? It’s a Côte Rôtie. Superb, little known, and almost impossible to get. They only make three hundred cases a year. I saw a bottle of the 1991 the other day for a little under a thousand euros.”
“Perfect. That exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for.”
“What sort of up-market mouse do you expect to catch with such a luxurious cheese?”
“It’s not going to be used as cheese. It’s what they called a ‘stressor’ at the academy interrogation classes. If it works I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow while we’re drinking the damn thing.”
As a uniformed policeman led Rolland into the interrogation room he held back for an instant to stare at the bottle lying in an open wooden box like a dead body at a viewing. Capucine placed him at the table half-facing the bottle, at which he darted frequent nervous glances.
This time around Rolland seemed unable to muster his cocktail-party persona. He breathed audibly through his mouth. The ammoniac jail-cell acridness was more pronounced and was now enhanced by a musky smell of body odor. He was as gray and gaunt as if he had moldered in the depths of a dungeon for decades. Sitting on the corner of his chair he shifted nervously, mute while Capucine drummed her fingers inaudibly on the table. The eternity of a minute passed as Capucine’s little smile ebbed like a parting tide. “Well?” she asked finally.
Rolland paused, twisted on the corner of his chair, gulped, stared at her, then at the bottle, then back at her, and finally, in a small voice that needed to be primed by a cough, said, “Okay, okay, it was me. I confess.”
“Of course you do. Everyone loves catharsis. But to what exactly do you confess? Be specific.”
“It was me bringing the bag into the kitchen. The other man was a, well, an associate.”
“Grégoire,” Capucine said, falling into the first-name and familiar “tu” the police invariably use with the criminal classes. “Why don’t you just get on with it and tell the story instead of being coy. We’ll both get where we’re going much faster that way.”
“Lieutenant, believe me, it’s nothing. It was foolish of me not to tell you from the beginning. But once I had fibbed I had to stick to it. You’ll laugh when I tell you.”
“Out with it, Grégoire.”
“See, I actually do have a little pastime. I like to gamble. It gives me a big thrill that relieves the tension. You wouldn’t think there’s a lot of tension in my job. But there is. Anyway, you know how it is with gambling. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” He stopped, uncertain how to continue.
“When you say you gamble, what do you mean? You buy lottery tickets at the café?”
Rolland sneered. A bit of his bravado had returned. “Hardly. Sometimes I go to casinos for the weekend, sometimes I gamble in Paris. I’m sure the police know that there are a number of private clubs that cater to gambling even if it stretches the law a little. For the gambling to be a thrill the sums have to be important and the atmosphere has to be correct.”
“And what does your innocent little pastime have to do with carting bags around in the middle of the night?”
“I see that, like most women, you disapprove of gambling. But over the years I’ve won more than I’ve lost. How many people have a pastime that costs nothing and actually brings money in? Of course, every now and then your short-term losses are more than you expect. It’s the way it works. But I always get it back. Always. Well, anyway, a while ago it happened that I owed a certain man—I most definitely won’t tell you his name—a bit over fifty thousand euros. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money in the bank, so I did the honorable thing. I sold some of my wine to a marchand to pay him. Not much at all. Just two cases, actually.”
He paused and looked at Capucine, as if for approval. She stared back, expressionless.
“A week later I won big, as of course I knew I would. So I went to an auction at Drouot and bought two cases of the same wines I had sold. In fact, I got lucky and bought them for quite a bit less than I had received from the marchand. Since I certainly wasn’t about to make a profit out of the transaction I also bought a case of a Forts de Latour that we were nearly out of at the restaurant. I gave the wine delivery man from Drouot a huge tip to make a delivery in the middle of the night. Those guys will do anything for a few euros. Voilà! Everyone was a winner. Even my cellar, which got an extra case of a wine for free. Wasn’t it foolish of me not to tell you from the beginning?” Rolland seemed relieved and confident he was restored to Capucine’s good graces.
“Simply put, you’re telling me that in order to finance your gambling losses you steal wine from the cellar at Diapason? Is that it?”
“Hardly stealing!” Rolland looked shocked. “Yes, I sent some of my wine to a dealer but I knew I would replace it in a matter of days. I was careful to select the standard classics that are always on the market. There was no risk. I always recoup my losses quickly. I would never take any chances with my wine.” He gave a comfortable little chuckle of complicity.
“Do you realize, Grégoire, that a theft of this value is considered grand larceny? You could go to prison for over fifteen years. Worse, you’ve betrayed Chef Labrousse’s trust. Hell, you’ve betrayed your profession. You’re a discredit to the restaurant industry. It makes me happy to think of the years you’ll have in jail to think it all over.”
“Lieutenant, now it’s you being childish. I stole nothing. The wine is happily back in my cellar sleeping soundly. If anything has changed it’s that I added a case. That’s hardly a crime.”
For a second it was as if Capucine was back in the financial brigade. Rolland had the same self-satisfied, supercilious smirk plastered on his face that had never failed to enrage Capucine in her former role. It was clear Rolland felt he was fully entitled to his actions. For him it was Capucine, with her Little-Goodie-Two-Shoes morality, who was at fault and had to be handled carefully.
“Lieutenant, seriously, what sort of case do you have? There’s no evidence. The Drouot commis will say he was home in bed. There’s nothing missing from the cellar. There’s just an extra case that I carelessly failed to note down when I bought it. Big deal.” He persisted with his maddening smirk.
Capucine clenched her teeth, her lips compressed into the beginning of a pucker for a long moment as she contemplated le
tting him rot in the cells downstairs for the rest of the month. She could probably get away with it, too. It was just the sort of thing Tallon liked to do. Finally, she sighed and shook her head in disgust.
“All right. You were lucky this time. But it’s not going to be that easy for you. I’m going to give you a choice: either you quit Diapason and leave Paris or I’ll have a chat with Chef Labrousse and make damn sure that he drums you out of the business and destroys your reputation. If you’re a good boy and leave Paris by the end of the week I won’t say a word to Chef Labrousse. He’s suffered enough as it is. But God help you if I ever see you in this town again.”
“Lieutenant, you’re the most charming policeman I’ve ever met, but I really do think you’ve seen too many Westerns.” Rolland walked out of the room as jauntily as when he had first come in four days before. Capucine had a hard time restraining herself from throwing one of the bent chairs at him.
Chapter 36
“Fucking tie! What’s the point of being plain clothes if you have to dress like a goddamn clown? Might as well be directing traffic.”
“Momo, calm down,” Capucine said.
“Lieutenant, he nearly killed the whole operation,” Isabelle said. “He went into this burlesque Arab routine that he thinks is funny. If that poor woman hadn’t been stressed out of her gourd she would have smelled a rat.”
“All right, all right, start from the beginning,” Capucine said, acutely conscious that setting up a conference call to listen to the two brigadiers report at the same time on their cell phones had been a big mistake.
“There we were dressed up like the Gestapo…”
“Momo,” Isabelle interrupted, “that’s the Renault security uniform. There’s nothing we could have done about it.” She added for Capucine’s edification, “Monsieur Momo took offense at the Sam Browne belt.”
“All right, guys, enough of this. There you are manning the security checkpoint at the Renault headquarters in Renault security staff uniforms and what exactly happened?”
Isabelle picked up the thread of the narrative. “Okay, Lieutenant, around seven thirty along comes Miss Princess, the Naval Anchor. She tries to walk around the metal detector and Momo starts doing his thing, you know, the sycophantic illiterate North African. ‘So sorry, Madame, you must go through the detector or de boss man, he fire me.’ It almost didn’t work.”
“But it did, didn’t it, dipshit?” Momo pointed out.
“Yes, it did asshole. Lieutenant, she tried to pull rank. She tried to say she was exempted from the security check. She tried to turn around and go back. But in the end we made her open her briefcase.”
“And what was in it?” Capucine asked.
“A folded copy of the Monde, a Fred Vargas paperback thriller, a pack of Marlboro Lights, and a sealed manila envelope about an inch thick.” Isabelle answered self-righteously. “We pretended it was nothing. That we were just looking for stolen laptops. But we hit pay dirt. That’s why we’re calling you.”
As Clotilde walked up the steps of the Marcadet-Poissonniers metro stop into the cool evening Capucine was a few steps behind her. Two brigadiers waited at the top of the stairs while David and two other brigadiers were placed at strategic locations on the path to her door. In her desire to take no chances at all Capucine had planned her surveillance with such textbook precision that the exercise could have been videotaped for training sessions.
One brigadier remained on post at the metro. Capucine followed Clotilde for two short blocks and was smoothly replaced by two other members of the team. Another brigadier was loitering across the street from Clotilde’s door. Anticlimactically she went straight into her building; the lights in her apartment were seen to go on, and after a short pause the blue glow of her television appeared. To all indications she intended to spend a quiet evening in.
Capucine admired the forbearance of her team as they settled into what was likely to be an all-night vigil the way a ship’s crew anesthetizes itself as it sinks into a night watch. They paced quietly, smoking, lost in reverie but still keenly observant, becoming almost invisible in the shadows. Capucine walked to the corner susurrating into her radio, raising the team one by one and positioning them in a broad arc spanning the three blocks in front of the building door.
For Capucine the time passed with agonizing slowness. She stared at the faint blue flicker in the center window and calculated her next moves. She would wait a full two hours after all the lights had gone out before sending the team home and would leave a brigadier in front of the door all night long just in case.
Without warning the front door opened and Clotilde stepped out briskly, still in her work clothes, a copy of the Monde folded under her arm.
Capucine pressed a button on the radio. “Subject moving.”
Clotilde turned left, walking up the steep hill in the direction of the Sacré-Coeur, purposefully, rapidly, as if she were late for an appointment. Capucine followed, fifty feet behind. It was the least expected route. The point officer, lounging a hundred feet up the hill, was Momo. He and Isabelle, who would be easily recognized, had been assigned the positions farthest away from her front door to allow them plenty of time to get out of sight. Capucine pressed the button on her radio again.
“Momo, she’s coming your way.”
Momo stepped through a rickety glass door into a minuscule café. The façade was of dirty glass down to the shin level allowing a full view of the room inside, no bigger than ten feet by fifteen, packed with men, many in flowing djellabas with kufis perched on the backs of their heads, sitting on benches drinking mint tea in ornate gilt glasses or espressos from thimble-sized cups. The crowded room was completely free of the odor of bodies or cigarette smoke. Momo positioned himself at the end of the bar farthest from the door and asked for a mint tea. He could still see the narrow street from his vantage point but was confident he would be imperceptible among the other North Africans. Without thinking he had almost asked for a beer, which he would have relished, but realized in the nick of time that he was in a deeply religious part of the quartier and a request for alcohol would have earned him a stern reprimand from the barman and probably cries of “shame” from some of the patrons. There was even a chance of an uproar and his being thrown out of the café.
Directly opposite, Clotilde walked up to a short Asian man in a suit and accosted him angrily. The man seemed evasive and attempted to walk by her, making a pantomime show of embarrassment. As if in exasperation she thrust her Monde at him, turned on her heel, and stalked irately back down the hill. The man wheeled and walked in the opposite direction slowly, as if he were continuing a leisurely stroll. A few seconds later Capucine arrived, walking up the sidewalk following the Asian while whispering animatedly into her radio. Momo threw some coins on the bar and walked out after her. In his rush he took no notice of the number of men who shuffled out after him. At the corner the Asian man paused as if uncertain which way to go.
In the next street a loudspeaker suddenly blared out a wailing melismatic chant, the recorded voice of the muezzin rising hauntingly. “Allahu kbar, allahu kbar, ash’hadu n l ilaha ill-allah,” it began and continued on.
The street filled with men. All silent. Most carrying rolled-up rugs. The urgency in the air was palpable.
The Asian man turned to the left and walked into a narrow street, a tight fit for even one car, now as thronged as the metro at rush hour. The loudspeaker, which was in the middle of the block, blared again, much more loudly. “Al- lahu kbar, allahu kbar, ash’hadu n l ilaha ill-allah,” with the muezzin sounding more stern and commanding. Quickly the men slipped off their shoes and pointed babouches, jockeyed them with their toes into neat rows against the building walls, formed into a tight phalanx, shoulder pressed against shoulder, began the prayer, and then dropped as a single man to their knees on rugs that had been spread out on the cobblestones. The Asian was halfway down the block on the sidewalk, inching down the street crabwise, back to the wall, squeezing past t
he kneeling men, clearly unnerved by the spectacle. At the next chant from the loudspeaker the men in the street pitched forward, foreheads hard down on the rugs, posteriors high in the air, palms flat on the ground beside their faces. The distances between the rows had been so well learned by endless repetition that heads were less than an inch away from feet in the row in front. The street was a tightly woven carpet of humanity. The recorded muezzin chanted on through his hidden loudspeaker. The prostrate men in the street chanted in response.
Capucine started forward in pursuit. Momo arrived breathlessly and seized her upper arm.
“Lieutenant, it’s the Salat-ul-Isha, the night prayer. We cannot intrude.”
Capucine tried to pull her arm away. “What we can’t do is let him get away.” Momo tightened his grip.
“No. Blancs are not welcome at the prayer. And if they discover we are flics, there will be an incident.”
The Asian man reached the bottom of the street, turned the corner, and vanished.
Chapter 37
“All right, where’s the subject?” Capucine barked.
“She just walked back into her building.” David’s voice crackled over the radio.
“David, stay put. I’ll be right there. The rest of you can go back to the Quai.”
In a few minutes Capucine arrived a little breathlessly at David’s side. “We lost the pickup. We’re going up and see what we can worm out of the subject. We walk in, show our cards, you say nothing. Got it?”
“Lieutenant, don’t we need a warrant? It’s after nine o’clock.”
“What we need is not to dither around here. What you guys need is to stop telling me what to do. Let’s get up there.”
Clotilde came to the door in her stockinged feet but still in her street clothes, a half-empty glass of wine in her hand. She had been crying hard. The mascara had run down her cheeks in two straight lines, giving her a pathetic Marcel Marceau look.
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