Summertime All the Cats Are Bored

by Philippe Georget

  “Surinam was a Dutch colony until it gained independence in the mid-1970s. Afterward there was a long civil war between a conservative guerrilla force and the Castro-inspired dictatorship that had taken power.”

  “What about the Bush Negroes?” Castello asked.

  “They are the descendants of black slaves who had long ago fled into the forest.”

  “You seem to know the country very well,” the superintendent remarked.

  “I carried out several assignments in French Guiana. The Kourou Space Center is not far from the Maroni River, which constitutes the border with Surinam, and the French authorities have always followed the development of the situation in that country with great interest.”

  Pagès turned a blue light on the paper.

  “Apparently there are no fingerprints. Neither on the letter nor on the envelope. On the other hand, the brown stain is in fact blood. I’ll be able to tell you the blood group later today. I’m also going to ask for a DNA analysis, but that will take longer, probably several days.”

  “Have you received the analysis of Ingrid Raven’s DNA?” the superintendent asked.

  It was Lefèvre who answered.

  “We have it. The Dutch police were very efficient.”

  “That’s only a detail, anyway,” Castello said, straightening up. “It’s not the most important thing. Whether it’s the Moluccan Resistance Front or the Surinam Bush Negroes, they’ve set a clear date for meeting their demands.”

  The afternoon was spent in the air-conditioned offices of the police headquarters. On the fourth floor, the bosses were planning strategy for Monday. In connection with Paris and Amsterdam. One floor below, the second-stringers hadn’t dared leave for the weekend. They were finishing up their reports and exchanging information.

  Lambert and Llach had carried out their assignment: they’d traced the paper used by the so-called Moluccan Front to the stationery section of a supermarket in North Perpignan. Thousands of people had bought this paper over the past two weeks. Thus the two inspectors’ success had contributed nothing new to the investigation.

  “Might as well be looking for a tanned tourist on a July afternoon on the beach at Canet,” Sebag lamented.

  “That’s not a Catalan proverb,” Llach noted.

  “No, but it should be!”

  Ménard had examined the headquarters log for the past thirty days and then he’d gone to the departmental gendarmerie’s office to do the same thing. He’d found three cases involving Dutch nationals: a speed-limit violation on National Route 9, a fight in a Saint-Cyprien discotheque, and the theft of a credit card.

  “Hard to connect with the cases that interest us,” Molina commented.

  “At least this limits the scope of our investigations,” Ménard said, turning toward Sebag. “We’re in no danger of seeing the press come up with something we overlooked.”

  Then Molina made his little report.

  “The case in Argelès has hit a dead-end. The gendarmes think they’ve questioned everyone who met Josetta Braun between her arrival in France and her death, and according to them, that already amounts to quite a few people. They questioned the people in the campground where she was staying. They collected dozens of fingerprints, but nothing came of them. No motive, no lead. The gendarmes reminded me that they haven’t made any public statements about the weapon used in the crime and don’t want us to talk about it either.”

  “Why?” Lambert said, surprised.

  “To trip up the murderer if he’s found,” Sebag explained. “Didn’t you learn that at the police academy? It’s especially important when there’s a confession. It’s crucial to make the suspect admit details that only the killer could know. That way, even if the guy goes back on his confession a few days later, he’s stuck. And then it can also enable us to eliminate people who confess to crimes they haven’t committed. But for the most part, it’s the less important information that isn’t made public.”

  “The walker who found her was a retiree, is that right?” Llach asked.

  Molina looked through his notes.

  “Robert Vernier. Sixty-five years old. He lives in Gien, in the Loiret. He’s a widower. For the past twenty years he’s been spending all his vacations in the Oleanders campground, a nice little place, still very family-oriented. The owners know Vernier well and seem to like him. He goes for a walk every morning at dawn. You know the type . . . I swear, the guy is retired and can sleep as late as he wants, but he gets up every morning before the sun rises!”

  Ménard thought this an opportune place for a cultural quotation.

  “Anatole France said: ‘The acme of laziness is to rise at four A.M. to have more time to do nothing.’”

  “The acme of laziness, my ass, but the acme of stupidity, yes!” Molina snorted.

  Sebag didn’t want to allow himself to be distracted by his colleague’s rather facile sallies.

  “What impression did this retiree make on you?”

  “None at all! I wasn‘t able to talk with him. He’s gone home to Gien.”

  “He went home?”

  “Yeah. This affair has completely disoriented him. That’s what his daughter told me. He was traumatized by his discovery of the body. He stopped sleeping and hardly talked any more. He decided to return to his house in the Loiret.

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Since the beginning of the week.”

  “It’s too bad that you weren’t able to talk with him,” Llach said. “It seems that in 80 percent of the cases, it’s the criminal who calls the police to report the crime. And that’s been proven statistically.”

  “Proven statistically, what exactly does that mean?” Molina grumbled. “That’s really the kind of thing that is completely meaningless. Watch out, Joan, your union activity is beginning to rot your brain. It always begins with the vocabulary. One hundred percent of cretins join a labor union some time or other; that’s been statistically proven, too.”

  Annoyed, Llach took refuge in silence. Ménard put an end to the argument.

  “In any event, if the gendarmes compared the prints of everyone who was nearby with the ones found on the stone, there’s no point in wasting our time on vague hypotheses. What about you, Gilles, do you have anything new this morning?”

  “Yes. Marc Savoy’s yellow sport coupe is the car against which Anneke Verbrucke was jammed.”

  “This business with the car is curious,” Ménard commented.

  “I think so, too . . . ”

  Molina put an end to their cogitations.

  “Well, I see that we’ve done a lot right here today. I propose that we move around a bit. How about a beer at the Carlit?”

  His proposal was adopted unanimously. Or almost. Ménard didn’t commit himself but went along with the others.

  On their return, the inspectors had the unpleasant surprise of seeing themselves summoned for a last meeting with the bosses.

  “Damn,” Molina commented, expressing the general view.

  The bosses were already in the meeting room. They went around the table asking everyone to sum up the results of his investigations.

  “What good does it do to make reports,” Llach grumbled.

  “It maintains your spelling and vocabulary,” Jacques told him in a low voice.

  The atmosphere in the room was not very different from that in a middle school class before summer vacation. At the Carlit bar, Molina’s round had been followed by another paid for by the owner in recognition of the devotion of French policemen who didn’t hesitate to work on weekends to provide better protection for their fellow citizens.

  “Raynaud and Moreno aren’t here,” Castello explained. “They had to go to Prades and then up to Font-Romeu to meet with two persons whose initials are B.W.”

  Molina had a quite different interpretation of their
absence, which he whispered to his closest neighbors, Llach and Sebag.

  “Those two are not as stupid as we are. They did their interrogations by telephone and stayed home in comfort.”

  Castello ignored his men’s unruliness.

  “For the moment, the BWs are leading nowhere. Raynaud and Moreno have met with about fifty of them. There are still a few they haven’t yet been able to contact. For now, we’ve decided to omit a good dozen Wangs, Chinese and Vietnamese nationals. Pagès has just told me about an important result: the blood found on this morning’s envelope belongs to the B-positive group. A rather rare group. It’s not Ingrid Raven’s group.”

  “So is it the attacker’s then?” Ménard asked hopefully.

  “I don’t know, but let’s not dream too much,” Castello answered.

  The superintendent paused. His eyes landed on Sebag.

  “Regarding this morning’s message,” he went on, “I wanted to tell you that it in no way changes our approach. Instead, it confirms it. The reference to the Bush Negroes seems to us just as fanciful as the allusion to the Moluccan Front, but it reaffirms the link with Holland, the former colonizer of Surinam. Holland is more than ever a lead that we can’t ignore.”

  The superintendent seemed to hesitate. He turned toward Lefèvre and then looked back at Sebag.

  “We have another . . . , uh, connection that we can’t avoid. This second message was addressed to the same person as the first. I suppose you’ve reflected on this aspect of our case, Gilles.”

  Sebag suspected that the question would rapidly be taken up again.

  “I still have no explanation,” he sighed.

  “Cyril, you’ve also followed this, uh, connection. You haven’t found anything conclusive, either?”

  “First of all, and in order to forestall any misunderstanding, I would like to state that at no point has Gilles Sebag been considered a suspect.”

  A murmur was heard in the ranks of the inspectors. Some verbal precautions turn out to be more humiliating than insults.

  “I have investigated and it is true that I have found nothing conclusive. Will you allow me, Gilles, to sum up briefly for your colleagues?”

  “Go ahead,” Sebag said, reluctantly. “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Fine. So you were born in Versailles and grew up in the suburbs of Paris, in Essonne, to be more precise . . . ”

  Llach brusquely interrupted him.

  “As the union representative, I am categorically opposed to a colleague’s private life being discussed in this type of meeting.”

  “Gilles has given his permission,” Lefèvre retorted.

  “You really didn’t leave him any choice.”

  “Up to now, I don’t think I’ve revealed any personal secrets.

  “Precisely! I prefer to step in before you do.”

  Llach addressed himself to Castello.

  “Superintendent, I repeat that I’m opposed to any poking around in a colleague’s private life. This is not the place for that. Either you have discovered something useful for the investigation and you talk to us about that precise point. Or you haven’t found anything and the discussion stops there.”

  All the inspectors applauded Llach’s declarations. A revolt was brewing.

  “All right, gentlemen, we’ll stop there for the moment,” Castello said. “I hear your protest . . . ”

  “Our opposition,” Llach clarified.

  “I hear your . . . opposition, and I’m willing to take it into account this time. Nonetheless, it is important to understand why Gilles was chosen as the contact person. We can’t afford to neglect a lead.”

  Ménard asked for the floor.

  “Things may be simpler than we think. It’s true that the attacker or attackers are addressing their demands to Gilles, but that’s all. Nothing in the text of the letters seems to concern him. No one seems to be settling an account or anything else with him. He’s not a target, merely a privileged interlocutor.”

  Castello made a gesture to invite Ménard to develop his idea.

  “Maybe we should look for something in Gilles’s recent past. Maybe Gilles simply met the attacker a few days ago, did something for him or made a good impression on him in some matter, and that was enough.”

  “Maybe he also wanted to confuse us,” Llach suggested. “Or even stir up ill-feeling among us.”

  “If that was his goal, he succeeded,” Molina snickered.

  Sebag hadn’t brought his notebook. He swiped a piece of paper from Molina and borrowed his pen. The two ideas seemed to him interesting. Especially Llach’s. While thinking about the attack on Anneke, he’d already wondered whether all the oddities he’d noticed weren’t voluntary. But following that idea led to accepting the hypothesis of a connection among the three cases, which he’d refused to make up to that point. He drew a large question mark on his piece of paper.

  “All these suppositions are attractive,” Lefèvre commented. “But their main defect is that they advance us hardly at all. If we are looking for a strong connection between Gilles and the attackers, it’s in the hope of getting a lead we can follow. And if we now assume that it’s a big smoke-screen intended to lead us astray, we might as well give up that lead.”

  “And why shouldn’t we?” Molina said provocatively.

  “There is no question of doing that,” Castello said. “On the contrary, we have to continue our investigations. François Ménard’s idea seems to me interesting: we should also look into Gilles’s very recent past. The key may be somewhere in the last few days: between Ingrid’s disappearance and the first letter.”

  Molina snorted noisily.

  “Well, if we have to question all the people Gilles may have met in the past two weeks . . . ”

  He turned toward his colleague.

  “I hope you didn’t go to a concert or a rugby game; otherwise we’ll still be working on it at Christmas. We might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “O un pallagosti moreno en la platja de Canet,” Llach said, winking at Sebag.

  He consented to translate for those who knew no Catalan.

  “It’s an old proverb here in Catalonia. It means: ‘You might as well be looking for a tanned grasshopper on the beach at Canet.’ ‘Grasshopper’ is a polite term that we use among ourselves to refer to tourists!”

  CHAPTER 21

  What are you going to have?”

  “I think I’ll have the soup for starters, and then a grilled sole. What about you?”

  “A salad, followed by lamb chops with pasta.”

  Gilles and Claire put the menu down on the corner of the table. A fan was blowing hot air around over their heads. There were no free tables left in the restaurant.

  “A good thing we thought to make a reservation,” Claire pointed out.

  “For once!”

  It had been a very athletic day. Leaving home at dawn, they’d parked their car near the hamlet of Lavall in a narrow valley in the Albères mountains, a range of peaks that extends the Pyrenees as far as the Mediterranean. It had taken them two hours to climb to the Tower of Massane at an altitude of 2,600 feet. Leaning against the pale, cool stone of the medieval tower, they’d eaten a snack while enjoying the view. To the north, the sandy coast of Roussillon stretched its sea ponds as far as Cap Leucate. The plain was silent; it seemed to be still asleep. To the east, the morning sun was making the Mediterranean sparkle and buried the rocky coast in a flood of light.

  They’d continued their hike as far as the Roc de la Canal Grossa, a peak on the Spanish border. The south coast of Catalonia could be seen as far as the Cap de Creus. After a light picnic, it took them three hours to make the descent back down to the car.

  The restaurant was small and the waiter had to watch his hips and shoulders to avoid bumping into the diners. Street signs and old shop s
igns decorated the walls. Antique lanterns attached to the ceiling shed a soft white light on the guests, completing an atmosphere marked by a strange urban melancholy.

  “Doesn’t it seem a little odd to be here, just the two of us, like we used to be?” Claire asked.

  Gilles hesitated. Maybe this was the time for questions and answers.

  “I have the impression that you don’t much like this new freedom without children,” she went on. “I like it! There’s no reason to hurry home, we can follow our inspiration, decide to go to a movie, for instance, if we feel like it.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Ten P.M. It’s already too late for a movie.”

  “Another time, then. But we could still go dancing in a discotheque, if we wanted.”

  “If we wanted, yes . . . ”

  Claire gently stroked his cheek with her hand. His skin was soft but he hadn’t shaved since morning, and his whiskers scraped her fingers. She liked this sound composed of a mixture of tenderness and roughness.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t drag you there against your will. I know you hate the ‘nightclub’ atmosphere. I don’t like it much myself during the summer.”

  “Do you think there are too many people there as well?”

  “Too many young people, especially; they make me feel old.”

  “Old? You’re joking, I hope. You still look so young . . . ”

  Gilles had noticed a touch of sadness in his wife’s tone. It was the first time she’d let on that she was upset by the idea that she would soon turn forty.

  “You see, you added the word ‘still.’”

  Claire was wearing a white T-shirt that showed off her tan. Gilles took her hand and lifted it to his lips.

  “Excuse me, that isn’t what I meant. Youth has nothing to do with beauty. Why would you want to look young when maturity suits you so well? I think you’re growing more beautiful every day.”

  “You’re just saying that because you see me with your forty-year-old’s eyes.”

  “So? Who do you want to please? Boys? Your students, maybe?”