“Ahmed died in November. If he’d talked to the cops, they would have had all the time in the world to x-ray the gym walls for a corpse,” Maxime said.
Although his face was still lined with worry, he seemed less overwhelmed than he had been this morning, more in control of his emotions.
“Agreed. But he must have told someone else. What about you? How did things go down at the station?”
He ruffled the hair on the back of his neck. “Yeah, not bad. I saw Chief Debruyne. You were right, it had nothing to do with Alexis Clément.”
“So what did he want?”
“He wanted to talk to me about my father.”
“About what, exactly?”
“I’ll explain, but first, you need to read this.” He set the thick file he had brought in front of me. “Talking to Debruyne made me think about something: What if the death of my father was somehow connected to the murder of Alexis Clément?”
“You’ve lost me.”
Maxime explained. “I think my father was murdered by the same person who’s been sending the anonymous messages.”
“This morning you said that Francis died during a burglary that went wrong.”
“I know, but I didn’t give you all the details, and after what I found out at the police station, I’ve got my doubts.”
He nodded for me to open the dossier.
“Read that and then we’ll talk. I’m going to make myself a coffee. Want one?”
I nodded. Maxime got up and went over to a recess that housed an espresso machine and some cups and saucers.
I immersed myself in the dossier, which comprised press cuttings about the wave of burglaries on the Côte d’Azur in late 2016 and early 2017. There had been about fifty incidents, all in the swanky neighborhoods of Alpes-Maritimes, from Saint-Paul de Vence to Mougins by way of mansions in Cannes and the countryside inland from Nice. The modus operandi was always the same: Four or five guys in balaclavas would burst into the house, spray the family with tear gas, tie them up, and lock them in a room. The gang was armed, violent, and dangerous. They were primarily interested in cash and jewelry. On several occasions they had not hesitated to rough up their victims to get PIN codes for credit cards or the combination to a safe.
The whole area had lived in fear of these home invasions, which had resulted in two deaths, a cleaning woman who died of a heart attack when the gang burst in, and Francis Biancardini. In Aurelia Park alone, the gated community where Maxime’s father had lived, there had been three burglaries. It seemed almost inconceivable; Aurelia Park was one of the most heavily guarded estates on the Côte.
Among the robbery victims were a distant relative of the Saudi royal family and a prominent French art collector, patron, and dignitary. Although the latter had not been home during the incident, the furious gang, frustrated at not being able to find anything salable in the villa, had destroyed the paintings hanging on the walls. What they did not know was that among them was a very valuable work of art: Dig Up the Hatchet, by Sean Lorenz, one of the hottest painters on the market. The destruction of the work had sent shock waves through the contemporary art world, even in America. The New York Times and CNN mentioned the break-in and talked about Aurelia Park, once the flagship estate on the Côte d’Azur, as a dangerous area; in the space of three months, property prices had plummeted by 30 percent. To stem the panic, the regional serious crimes office had set up a dedicated team to track down the burglars.
From this point, the investigation moved quickly—DNA samples, phone tapping, high-level surveillance. In early February, the cops conducted a dawn raid on several homes in a small village on the Italian border and arrested a dozen Macedonian men, some without papers, others known to have been involved in similar crimes. A search of the houses uncovered jewelry, a significant amount of cash, firearms, ammunition, computer equipment, and fake passports. Officers also found balaclavas, knives, and a number of additional stolen items. Five weeks later, they tracked down the head of the gang, who was hiding out in a hotel in Drancy. He had already sold much of the loot in Eastern Europe. The suspects were transferred to Nice, where they were charged and held in custody to await trial. Most of them pleaded guilty to several charges but denied involvement in the raid on Francis’s villa. This was hardly surprising, since a man who admitted to that could be charged with voluntary manslaughter and sent to prison for twenty years.
3.
I shuddered as I leafed through the press clippings, at once horrified and excited. The remaining documents related to the home invasion and the vicious assault on Francis Biancardini. Maxime’s father had not been merely roughed up; he had been beaten to death. The articles described his grotesquely swollen face, numerous lacerations to his body, and deep cuts left on his wrists by handcuffs. I was beginning to understand what Maxime was getting at. In my mind, I fleshed out a scenario: Ahmed had confessed to someone who had then tracked Francis down and tortured him, perhaps to force him to confess. But confess to what? His role in the death of Alexis Clément? Ours?
I continued reading. Angélique Guibal, a journalist with the Nouvel Observateur, had managed to gain access to the police file. Although her article was primarily focused on the destruction of the Sean Lorenz painting, she mentioned the other break-ins in Aurelia Park. From what she had been able to discover, Francis Biancardini was still alive when his attackers left the villa; he had dragged himself to the window and tried to scrawl a name in blood on the glass. As though he had known his assailants.
The story made my blood run cold. I had been fond of Francis long before he helped us dispose of the body of Alexis Clément. He had always been kind to me. I felt sick at the thought of the horrors he endured in his dying moments.
I looked up from the dossier. “What was stolen in the break-in at your father’s villa?”
“Just one thing, his collection of watches. Though according to the insurance, they were worth upward of three hundred thousand euros.”
I remembered Francis’s obsession with wristwatches, in particular his passion for Patek Philippe. He owned a dozen different models that were the pride of his collection. When I was a teenager, he loved to show them to me and tell me about them, and I inherited something of his passion. I still remembered the 1930s Calatrava, the Grand Complications, and the 1970s Nautilus designed by the legendary Gérald Genta.
A question had been nagging at me since the morning.
“How long had your father been living in Aurelia Park? I always assumed he still lived next door.”
Maxime looked a little embarrassed.
“He had been shuttling between the two for years, even before my mother died. Aurelia Park was his project. He was one of the primary investors in the development early on, and he earmarked one of the most beautiful villas for himself. To be honest, I never wanted to set foot in the fucking place. Even after his death, I let the caretaker clear it out. It was a sort of bachelor pad where he took mistresses or call girls. I even heard he organized orgies there.”
Francis had had a reputation as a womanizer. I knew he openly bragged about his conquests, though I didn’t remember any names. Despite this—and despite myself—I still liked the man. He seemed to me a tortured, neurotic character. I had always felt there was something exaggerated and histrionic about his racist tirades and his macho, antifeminist rants. They seemed completely at odds with his behavior. Most of his laborers hailed from North Africa, and they worshipped him. He was an old-fashioned boss, a little paternalistic, maybe, but they knew they could count on him. As for his attitude toward the female sex, it was my mother who once pointed out that most of the senior figures in his company were in fact women.
A memory resurfaced in my mind, and it was quickly followed by a second.
The first: Hong Kong, 2007. I’m thirty-three. I’ve just published my third novel. My agent has organized a promotional tour of Asia—the French Institute in Hanoi, a bookstore called Le Pigeonnier in Taipei, the prestigious Ewha University i
n Seoul, Parenthèses, the famous French bookshop in Hong Kong. I’m sitting with a journalist in the bar on the twenty-fifth floor of the Mandarin Oriental. Outside the window, the Hong Kong skyline rolls away into the distance, and yet for several minutes, I have been oblivious to the view, staring at a man sitting several tables away. It is Francis Biancardini, though I barely recognize him. He is reading the Wall Street Journal, wearing an elegant tailored suit (spalla con rollino shoulders, Parisian bocca di lupo lapels), and he is clearly fluent enough in English to discuss the relative merits of Japanese and Scotch whiskeys with the waiter. At some point, the journalist realizes that I am no longer listening to her and becomes irritated. I quickly recover; I pretend to think hard and then offer a perceptive response to her question. When I look up again, Francis has disappeared.
The second: It’s spring 1990. I’m fifteen. I’m studying French for my baccalauréat. I’m alone in the house—my parents are on vacation in Spain with my brother and sister. I enjoy the solitude. I spend all day buried in the books on the syllabus: Les liaisons dangereuses, L’éducation sentimentale, Aurélien…every book leads to another book, every discovery urges me to explore the music, the art, and the ideas of the period. Late one morning, I collect the mail and notice that the mailman has accidentally included a letter addressed to Francis. I decide to bring it to him. Since there is no fence between the two houses, I go around the back and walk across the lawn. One of the French doors is standing open. Without calling out, I walk into the living room, intending to simply leave the letter on a table. Suddenly, I see Francis sitting in an armchair. He hasn’t heard me over the Schubert impromptu playing on the stereo (curious in itself in a house more accustomed to Michel Sardou and Johnny Hallyday). Even more improbably, Francis is reading. And it is not just any book. I can see the cover reflected in the window: Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar. I am stunned. Francis likes to boast that, aside from the sex scenes in Gérard de Villiers’s racy spy novels, he doesn’t read. He openly rails against the arty types and intellectuals living in their ivory towers while he has been breaking his back working on building sites since the age of fourteen. I tiptoe out of the room, my mind swirling with questions. I have often seen morons try to pass themselves off as intelligent, but this is the first time I have seen an intelligent man try to pass himself off as a moron.
4.
“Papa! Papa!”
I was roused from my memories by shouts. From the far end of the lawn, Emma and Louise were running toward us with my mother trailing behind. Instinctively, I snapped shut the dossier and the horrors it contained.
As the little girls clambered over their father, my mother said, “I’ll leave the girls with you. I’m going to buy some more apricots at Vergers de Provence.”
She waved the keys to the Mini Cooper that I’d left on the hall stand when I arrived. “I’ll take your car, Thomas. Maxime’s car is blocking mine.”
“That’s okay, Annabelle, I’ll move it.”
“No, no, don’t worry. I need to pop by the shopping center and I’m already running late.”
She turned to me and said pointedly, “And this way, Thomas can’t sneak off like a thief or turn his nose up at my apricot tart.”
“But I need to go somewhere. I need my car!”
“You can take mine. The keys are in the ignition.”
Without giving me time to protest, my mother turned on her heel. My phone started to vibrate. Unknown number. I hesitated, then took the call. It was Claude Angevin, former editor of Nice-Matin and Stéphane Pianelli’s mentor.
He was a nice enough guy but impossible to shut up. He told me that he had moved to Portugal, to the Douro, and then spent at least five minutes trying to sell me on the wonders of the region. Eventually I steered him back to the Vinca Rockwell case and tried to get a sense of what he thought of the official story.
“I think it’s horseshit, but we’ll never be able to prove different.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Call it a hunch. I always thought that everyone—the cops, the press, the families—missed something in the investigation. Actually, to be honest, I think the whole investigation was flawed.”
“In what way?”
“From the start, we missed out on something crucial. I’m not talking about details here, I’m talking about something big. Something no one noticed. And we all ended up heading down the wrong path. Do you get what I’m saying?”
Although what he was saying was vague, I did understand, and I agreed with him.
“Stéphane told me you wanted to know who took the prom photo,” he said.
“Yeah—do you know?”
“Claro que sei! It was one of the parents, Yves Dalanegra.”
The name rang a faint bell. Angevin refreshed my memory.
“I looked him up. He was the father of Florence and Olivia Dalanegra.”
I vaguely remembered Florence, a sporty girl who had been half a head taller than me. We had been in the same year for the baccalauréat. She took mostly science subjects and I was studying literature, but we were in the same PE class. I probably even played with her on the coed handball team. But I had no memory of her father.
“He was the one who offered us the photo back in ’93, after we published the first article about Vinca and Alexis Clément. We were happy to buy the rights. We ended up using it a lot.”
“Did someone at Nice-Matin crop the photo?”
“No—at least, not as far as I remember. I think we published exactly what we were given.”
“Have you any idea where Yves Dalanegra lives these days?”
“Yeah, I just dug up the information. Give me your e-mail and I’ll send it to you, but prepare yourself for a surprise.”
I gave him my e-mail address and thanked him for his help. Angevin asked me to keep in touch if I made any headway in my investigation.
“Vinca Rockwell isn’t someone you can just forget,” he said.
By the time I hung up, the coffee that Maxime had made was ice cold. I got up to make another cup. Once Maxime was sure the girls were occupied, he joined me by the coffee machine.
“You still haven’t told me why Debruyne wanted you to come to the police station.”
“He wanted me to identify something linked to the death of my father.”
“Don’t be so damned coy. Identify what, exactly?”
“Last Wednesday night, there was a high wind off the coast. The tide brought in a lot of seaweed and other junk. The day before yesterday, a public-health team was sent down to clean up the beach.”
Staring vaguely at his daughters, he took a sip of coffee.
“On Salis Beach, one of them found a canvas bag washed up by the tide. You’ll never guess what was inside.”
I shook my head.
“My father’s watches, the whole collection.”
I tried to take in the magnitude of this revelation.
The Macedonians had had nothing to do with the death of Francis. There had been no burglary. Whoever had murdered Francis had been clever enough to use the wave of home invasions to cover up the crime; he’d taken the collection of watches to make it look like a burglary and then tossed them into the sea to get rid of the evidence in case there was a search.
I shot Maxime a look and both of us turned back to the girls. I felt a cold shiver course through me. Whoever was tracking us was a cunning, determined enemy, not—as I had assumed—a blackmailer or someone trying to frighten us.
We were dealing with a murderer.
A killer prepared to stop at nothing in his quest for revenge.
Different
from Other Boys
I put the top down on my mother’s convertible, and, surrounded by the azure sky and the lush scrubland, I drove inland. The view was pastoral, the weather was calm—the complete opposite of how I felt.
I was terrified, yes, but excited too, almost elated. Though I dared not admit it even to myself, for the first time in t
wenty-five years I had a flicker of hope: I was utterly convinced that Vinca was alive, that I would track her down, and that, once I did so, my life would again have meaning and gaiety, and the guilt I had been dragging around for years would finally fade away.
Not only would I discover the truth about the Vinca Rockwell affair; I would emerge from my investigation revitalized, maybe even happy. I really believed that I would free Vinca from the mysterious prison where she languished, and she in turn would free me from the pain and suffering of my lost decades.
In the early days, I had searched tirelessly for Vinca. Then, as the years passed, I waited for her to find me. But I never gave up, because I had an ace up my sleeve that only I knew about. Another memory. Not concrete evidence, perhaps, but a firm conviction. One that, in a court of law, can destroy a life or give it new impetus.
* * *
It had happened some years earlier. In 2010, between Christmas and New Year’s, New York was brought to a shuddering halt by a blizzard, one of the worst the city had ever seen. The airports were closed, all flights canceled, and for three days, Manhattan was buried under a mantle of snow and ice. On December 28, when the storm passed, the sun emerged and the whole city shimmered. At about midday, I left my apartment and strolled toward Washington Square. On the west side of the park, where the chess players gathered, I agreed to a game with Sergei, an elderly Russian who’d beaten me twice before, winning twenty bucks each time. I sat down at the stone table determined to take my revenge.
I remembered the moment perfectly. I was just about to take his bishop, and as I picked up my knight, I looked up and it was as though I had been stabbed through the heart.
There was Vinca, sitting on a bench not more than fifteen meters away.
She was reading a book, her legs crossed, holding a Starbucks cup. She looked radiant. More fulfilled, more gentle than she had ever been at school. She was wearing stonewashed jeans, a suede jacket, a thick scarf, and a woolen cap. Despite the cap, I could tell that her hair was shorter and no longer had red highlights. I rubbed my eyes. The book she was reading was one of mine. As I was about to call out, she looked up. For a second, our eyes met, and—
The Reunion Page 12
