“Without really knowing what I was doing, I responded by touching him with my toes. It was electric. I could feel his soul flow into me.” She fell silent and dropped her sandal again, this time with a loud clack.
“And then?”
“Then? Why, nothing. We sailed home, and I helped Maman make dinner. We made sole à la Bretonne, as I recall. What happened after was what happened after.”
Capucine was mystified. She had no idea why Aude had told her the story. Her only conviction was that her session with Aude was anything but an accident. She wondered how much of a hand Jacques had had in it. Could it possibly have been the reason for his trip to the mas?
“I think I would make a very good juge d’instruction, don’t you?”
Aude expected an answer, but Capucine could think of nothing to say. The awkward silence lasted for several beats.
“What if I told you, Commissaire, the instructions I would give you if you were investigating this case for me?” The dreamy tone had vanished, replaced by an authoritarian one that did sound very juge-like. There was another long pause. Aude pierced Capucine with her eyes.
“I would tell you to impound the boat we were on and have a first-rate forensics team give it a very thorough going-over. Not just the usual quick look, Commissaire, that forensics teams consider adequate, but the kind of search that involves dismantling decks and looking deep. Very deep. Do you understand, Commissaire?”
“I do.” Capucine was tempted to complete her response with a respectful “madame,” but bit it back in the nick of time.
A young man, as golden haired and copper skinned as one of Helios’s acolytes, appeared at the side of the table, smiled, and moved off to wait courteously for the women to finish their conversation.
“I’m afraid I must leave you.” Aude uncoiled from her seat as gracefully as a sea nymph rising from the foam and bent down to kiss Capucine on the cheek. Capucine sensed rather than felt the alabaster flesh against hers, and she heard the merest murmur in her ear.
“Don’t get the wrong impression. I am, and intend to remain, intact until the night of my wedding day.”
Aude and the golden young man vaporized into the shimmering heat of the quai.
CHAPTER 34
Capucine leaned back in the director’s chair and pia-noed the black-painted wooden tabletop for nearly a full minute. The waiter appeared and asked what he could bring her.
“A glass of rosé, if you have it by the glass.”
“Bien sûr, madame.”
Capucine took a sip of the wine and willed the merry-go-round of unanswerable questions to a stop. She drummed the table for a few more seconds, then extracted her iPhone, checked Inès’s number, keyed it into one of the confiscated phones. Inès’s secretary put her right through.
“I had an insight into the Nathalie case.”
“I can only hope it’s an insight that will put you back on the active roster of the PJ. I need you right away. I’ve had a setback. I was thinking you could come to Paris incogn—”
“Inès, listen. This could be important. Can you to get through to the juge d’instruction in charge of the Nathalie case, Liouville—isn’t that his name?—and get him to impound the boat and have a first-rate forensics team give it a very thorough shakedown? It might be useful to have Commissaire Garbe, if he’s still assigned to the case, present. I have a hunch that might produce enough evidence for a court case.”
“I’ll have my secretary send an e-mail. But, frankly, Capucine, it’s a complete waste of time. The silly girl went overboard. What’s to find on the boat? Anyway, it’s bound to have been chartered out again and won’t be back for weeks. We can’t afford to go on a wild-goose chase. No more distractions. I want you back here right away.”
Quietly, calmly, Capucine pressed the red END button. Inès had always been obsessive. Now she had escalated to monomaniacal.
As Capucine drove back to the mas, one of her phones rang. She fished it out of her bag and looked at the screen. Inès. She let the phone fall back into her bag.
At the mas she found that David was still in the village and Alexandre and Magali were side by side, engrossed in the making of an aïoli garni, a dish of cod and boiled vegetables served with aïoli. Capucine chafed at being ignored.
Capucine sat at the kitchen table and served herself another glass of rosé. While she diced garlic, Magali regaled Alexandre with a long shaggy-dog tale about the wayward daughter of one of her neighbors. The girl was notorious in the village as a Marie-couche-toi-là—a strumpet—but her parents refused to admit the fact. The daughter’s favorite tactic was to retire after lunch for a nap, close her bedroom door, and slip out the ground-floor window to an assignation with her lover of the week. Even though her escape was in full view of the neighbors, the parents were so solicitous that if anyone stopped by, they were shushed into whispers, lest they wake the poor girl.
Magali delivered the tagline to the story in Provençal. Alexandre laughed uproariously. Capucine didn’t understand a word. Her pique rose another notch. She went to the refrigerator for another glass of rosé, vexed that Alexandre hadn’t divined her intent and served her before she had risen. She heard one of her cell phones ringing in her bag in the living room and delighted in ignoring it.
Lunch passed uneventfully. David shared village gossip. The aïoli garni was much praised, proclaimed by David to be the only truly authentic version. The dishes cleared, David returned to the village. Alexandre announced his intention of a short nap and looked hopefully at Capucine, who, still irritated at the imagined slight over the glass of rosé, returned a glassy-eyed stare. Crestfallen, Alexandre retreated to their room.
Thoroughly vexed, Capucine walked into the hills, kicking every sizable stone she came across, ruining a brand-new pair of Zanotti flats in the process. She charged up the steep slope of one of the tallest hills in the area. At the top she bent over, clutching her knees, fighting for breath. The effort broke her pique. She sat down in the grass, grabbed a bunch of wild thyme, crushed the spiny leaves, brought her fist to her nose, and told herself how foolish she was being.
Inès was Inès, the eternal aggressor-victim whose life had always existed, and always would, exclusively between the two poles of her beleaguered self and whomever she was currently hunting. But even if Capucine couldn’t afford the risk of going to Paris, she could provide Inès with counsel. Behaving like a hormonal teenager wasn’t going to help anyone.
She loped down the hillside, bounded back to the mas, snatched up one of her phones, and dialed Inès’s number. The secretary stated crisply that Madame le Juge could not be deranged.
Capucine forbade herself to pout. She went to her room, smiled at Alexandre, who was snoring on the bed, then replaced her clothes with a bikini bottom and T-shirt. At the pool, she pulled off the shirt in a cross-armed feminine gesture, then slid into the sun-heated water. After performing a flip, she crossed the pool underwater. As she broke through to the surface, she could hear one of her phones ringing in her bag. She swam back with a strong breaststroke, retrieved the phone with dripping fingers.
“Capucine, you’re more difficult to reach than the president of the republic,” Inès said. “I spoke to Commissaire Garbe. It took him only a few minutes to find out that the boat has been chartered to someone who is on a cruise to Majorca and will be back in Port Grimaud in two days. He’ll have officers at the dock, waiting to impound it.
“Garbe had important news. It seems a body was found on Isola Piana, a deserted, rocky island off the northeast coast of Sardinia, wedged in between the rocks. There are grounds to think it might be Nathalie. The body’s been flown to Cagliari for examination. It’s in an advanced state of decomposition, but there were no bullet wounds and the preliminary investigation suggests death by drowning.”
Inès paused for a reaction. Capucine said nothing, hanging on to the side of the pool with her elbows, forming a small puddle.
“Commissaire Garbe is being sent d
own to view the body tomorrow, and I want you to go with him. I’ve already cleared this with the DGPJ, who have agreed to your participation on the Tottinguer case. The DGPJ took it for granted that this discovery exonerates you from the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing, which, they hastened to underscore, they had never suspected you of in the first place.” Inès snorted a laugh.
“Capucine, this is excellent news for us. I want you to fly back from Cagliari as soon as you can and get right to work on Tottinguer. We’ve wasted far too much time.”
At the mention of Tottinguer, Capucine bridled. The news had not registered. It was one of those statements that could not be assimilated immediately, like “It turns out it’s not cancer, after all.” So much so that she did not fully accept that her world had been restored until she was sitting next to Garbe on an Alitalia flight to Rome, which would connect to a Cagliari flight.
Garbe was one of those old-style flics with a salt-and-pepper crew cut and crow’s-feet from squinting and looking tough. He was furious he had not been allowed to bring his Manurhin revolver on the plane, and scowled, touching his empty left armpit every few minutes. His face softened slightly when the meal arrived. He tore off the plastic wrapper and prodded the slice of pâté with his plastic knife. He put a small bit in his mouth.
“Buerk. This tastes like cat food. Or at least what I imagine cat food tastes like.”
Still, he made quick work of the pâté and attacked the main course, a miniscule plastic bowl of what could well have been bœuf bourguignon in an airline caterer’s imagination.
“And now the dog food,” grumbled Garbe. “You know, Le Tellier, it’s a goddamn good thing I only have four months, one week, and two days left before they put me out to pasture. The bullshit is getting too much for me.” He finished his meal and eyed Capucine’s untouched tray.
“Le Tellier, you’re really not going to eat that?” he asked, already switching trays.
In Cagliari they were picked up by two uniformed carabinieri. They squeezed into the backseat of a sit-up-and-beg Fiat police car and rocketed through palm-lined streets, the blaring siren importantly proclaiming that two exalted French police officers had come all the way from Paris on an extremely urgent mission.
The Cagliari morgue resembled every other morgue Capucine had seen: air-conditioning blasting lip-blueing cold, floor-to-ceiling rows of three-by-three-foot stainless-steel doors, toxic miasma of disinfectant. A morgue attendant in a white lab coat checked the names on their IDs against a list on a clipboard, then saluted smartly. Capucine felt herself settle a little deeper back into her skin.
After double-checking his clipboard, the technician stepped up to a door at waist level and pulled out a cantilevered rack supporting a corpse. The body, which had spent two weeks alternately washed by waves and baking in the sun, was in such an advanced stage of decomposition, it was unrecognizable. The eye sockets were empty—no doubt plucked clean by birds—and the flesh was so desiccated, the face looked like an African tribal mask.
The body had been slit open with the standard autopsy Y-shaped incision, and the organs removed. The top of the cranium had been sawed off, presumably to remove the brain, and then replaced. A loose flap of scalp dangled over the partially visible cranium. The hair color seemed to be more or less the russet brown of Nathalie’s hair, and although it was difficult to gauge, the length also seemed to be the same.
A second technician, exuding the authority of someone in charge, came in, looked mournfully at the cadaver, consulted a file.
In fluent but heavily accented French he said, “The autopsy revealed death by drowning. All the signs were there. There was even still a good quantity of water in the lungs. We were asked to make sure she had not been shot, and I can say there is absolutely no question of that. There’s not much else of interest. She had eaten a full dinner about six or seven hours before death. There was only a minimal quantity of alcohol in the blood. There was a trace of semen in the vagina, indicating she had had sexual intercourse earlier in the day. There were also unhealed minute tears in the external sphincter of the rectum, indicating she had had sex there recently, most probably the same day.”
He looked at the body with basset hound eyes.
“I doubt a reliable physical identification is possible given the state of decomposition. I have prepared a tissue sample for you to take back and give your forensics unit. I understand that the woman’s clothes and soiled laundry were sent to France, along with all the evidence the Italian police had obtained. Your forensics people should have no trouble making a DNA link if this person is in fact the victim. I also had our dental expert write a description of the teeth, which could be decisive if you are able to find a dentist who treated her.”
As he spoke, Capucine flexed her knees and lowered herself until her eyes were at the level of the corpse’s hands.
“I’m virtually sure this is the ring she wore.”
On the wedding ring finger of the left hand the corpse wore a ring comprised of three interwoven bands. Capucine had noticed it on the boat. The ring was in the style of the popular Cartier wedding band, except that instead of being made of three different colors of gold, this one was made with three different steel alloys. Of course, now the ring looked very different. Two of the bands were oxidized, one bright orange and the other tarnish black. Only the third band, which seemed to be made of stainless steel, had remained unchanged, even though it was duller than Capucine remembered.
“It might be helpful if we could take the ring back to Paris with us,” Garbe said. “With your tissue sample we should be able to make a positive identification in a few days. The forensics people already have a DNA profile, which they were able to establish from vaginal discharge in some of her underwear that hadn’t been laundered.”
The entire session had taken twenty minutes. In the squad car back to the airport, Garbe stared straight ahead, indifferent to the sights.
“You think it’s her?” he asked Capucine.
“Virtually certain. The ring, the hair color, the body morphology. Yes, I’m almost positive.”
Garbe nodded and said nothing.
That was the last comment he made until the meal arrived on the Alitalia flight to Milan, a soggy-looking veal scaloppine and an unappetizing mass of spaghetti in a chemically crimson marinara sauce.
“These Italians understand airline food. Now, this is what I call cooking.”
Capucine could not help thinking that Nathalie would undoubtedly have liked it, too.
CHAPTER 35
Capucine arrived at her brigade at six thirty the next morning, a good hour before normal. Only the skeleton night shift was on duty. The uniformed officer at the reception desk saluted her without enthusiasm and glanced at his roster sheet.
“You weren’t supposed to be back until next Monday, Commissaire. Don’t tell me you got bored on holiday?”
The officers at their desks didn’t look up as she walked to her office. Her desk was swept clean except for three pink message slips recording personal calls. Her one captain and three lieutenants apparently had had no problem running the brigade in her absence. A sense of alienation rose in Capucine’s stomach like bile. She roved around the brigade, chatting with the officers as they arrived for duty. They were happy enough to see her, greeting a colleague or boss who had returned from vacation, but there was no urgency in their greeting. She was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any problem desperately awaiting her return or any sense of a weakly helmed bark awaiting her steady hand. Worse even, they all seemed oblivious to the calvary she had just been through.
When she returned from a particularly long lap, Capucine was delighted to find Isabelle and Momo in her office.
“We heard you were back,” Momo said. “Isabelle thought you’d want a report first thing.”
Capucine looked at him. She had an odd sensation of the diametric opposite of déjà vu—jamais vu—if that was what it was called. It was as if, familiar as all this
was, she had never seen it before.
Attempting to punch through the distancing screen, she put her legs on the table, a gesture that had characterized her meetings with her hard-core brigadiers for years. True to form, Isabelle admired her legs, but the effect was spoiled since there was no David to comment on her Stuart Weitzman studded ballet flats.
Capucine tuned in to Isabelle’s monotone reading of her report.
“Neighbors and concierge declined to comment on subject. Local merchants know subject well and are forthcoming on subject’s personal specifics. . . .”
Isabelle looked up, checking that Capucine had seized the nuance. Caught up in her enthusiasm, Isabelle abandoned her report.
“You know how it works in these fat-cat neighborhoods like the Sixteenth, right? The merchants force the patrons to cultivate them. You’re not going to get the choicest cut of beef or the freshest fish if you don’t cross their palms with non-tax-reportable silver, right? These guys like to come across as being all feudal and forelock tugging, but they actually have it in for the richies. And they don’t miss a trick.”
Isabelle paused for effect.
“It seems our Mrs. Rich–Lacy Pants gets beaten up pretty regularly. The butcher I spoke to—who thinks he’s one beautiful, macho dude and God’s gift to women, by the way—said that at least once a week she shows up with bruises on her cheek that come from slaps. Like, he’s a butcher and should know, right? And then sometimes she comes in with enormous sunglasses, and he figures she’s had a whaling, you know, closed-fist punching and all.”
Isabelle paused, then went on.
“The other commerçants told me pretty much the same thing, except they weren’t as expert with . . . with . . .”
“Meat,” Momo said.
Isabelle’s eyes shot him a flow of daggers.
Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery) Page 21
