From his seat on the rocks, he tossed his cigarette butt as far as possible. When he was a teenager, ten pounds lighter and still in possession of his hair, he’d imagined a bright future for himself. That vision included writing major stories from the remotest places on the planet and picking up the prettiest girls in Paris—girls who were attracted to his prestige as an adventurous journalist. He had never pictured himself as an average Frenchman, stuck with a traditional family. Maybe in the end he wasn’t made for domestic life . . . but then again, he wasn’t made to live alone either, and since Sandrine, no woman had smiled at him. Apparently, the puppy-dog look no longer did the trick.
The conversation with the judge was tempestuous. Boizot had been summoned to the Le Croisic police station for a hearing, and upon his arrival, he’d been forced to deal with a very upset Brigitte Le Guen.
“Monsieur Boizot, I thought I made it clear in our conversation yesterday that it would be premature to publish a photo of the burglar in the press.”
“Madame Judge, let me clarify something important,” he said. “At the time, it was a question of publishing a photo of someone who was not known. I handed you the photo of a man whose details I also provide, even if they seem false, details I obtained through a little fieldwork. Everything was obtained in the most legal manner.”
Am I pushing it too far? he wondered.
The judge glared at him before nodding slowly, as if she were weighing the journalist’s words.
At her side, the surly clerk sat taking careful notes without looking up.
“Your duty was to inform us of what you had discovered. I could charge you with obstruction of justice, Monsieur Boizot.”
She tried to speak calmly, but Boizot sensed that she was barely containing her anger.
“You know very well, your honor, I didn’t hinder the investigation. Quite the contrary. In fact, what upsets you—and what must upset the prosecutor too, I suppose—is that I obtained all this information very quickly, and on my own. I was able to get results that your team was unable—or unwilling—to achieve.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have the distinct impression that this investigation was not launched as quickly as it might have been.”
“You are making some very serious allegations, bordering on slander, Monsieur Boizot. Be careful, I could charge you with contempt of court.”
Boizot smiled. Threatening him was becoming an obsession of hers. He wasn’t worried, because from Brigitte Le Guen’s tense face and the pen that she nervously twirled, he could tell that he had guessed right.
“Your honor, I do not accuse anyone. I would never do such a thing. You know, I’m on vacation in the region for the first time. I don’t know anyone here, and I’m bringing no bias to the situation. From the facts, however, I felt comfortable running the story. This is clearly a run-of-the-mill burglary, even if it did have tragic consequences. That seems very cut and dry. What’s more, the owner of the home is above all suspicion. It’s an open-and-shut case. Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”
She glared at him again. “You have come to some hasty conclusions. Neither I nor the investigators have the intention of closing the case until everything is clear. How much longer are you in Batz?”
“Three days. I go back to Paris at the end of the week.”
She bid him a curt good-bye, and he returned to his car thinking about the conversation he’d had a little earlier with Captain Tworkowski. Sitting in his office, he seemed friendlier to Boizot than he had the other night. He had even cracked a smile, showing the yellowed teeth of an inveterate smoker. “Monsieur Boizot, please sit down.” Boizot had smiled in turn, but said nothing, preferring to let his companion take the initiative.
“You would have made a good cop,” said Tworkowski.
He was obviously waiting for a response, so Boizot had said, “In Paris, I specialize in legal matters. So I work a lot with the police.”
The man had nodded his bulldog head without saying a word, and then continued: “Sometimes, you usurp their role.” Boizot had shrugged as if to say, “No big deal.”
Then from beneath his drooping eyelids, Tworkowski’s eyes had suddenly lit up. “Don’t shrug it off. With testimony from the owner of Cycl-Ocean, I could have you charged: a fine of fifteen thousand euros and one year in prison.”
Boizot had waved his hand casually, as if to suggest that he wasn’t concerned. Then his eyes fell on a tiny toy cyclist sitting on the desk.
“Who’s that?” he had said, tilting his head in the direction of the figurine with a slight smile.
“Poulidor,” Tworkowski had said. “Don’t you recognize the Mercier jersey?”
“Of course,” he’d said.
For Boizot, Raymond Poulidor stood somewhere on the time line between the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the birth of the computer. However, the comment had struck a chord with Tworkowski.
“My father was a professional racer,” the man said. “He began his career in 1960 on the Mercier team with Poulidor. He was twenty-four years old, his entire future in front of him, but in 1962 he was hit by a drunk driver while training near Vannes. I was five, and I still remember the terrible cry my mother made when they told her the news. That’s mainly why I joined the police force, because I do not support injustice, even when it seems like fate.”
As Boizot sat listening to him, he did a quick mental calculation: if Tworkowski was born in 1957, that made him fifty-seven. He would have easily pegged him as ten years older than that.
“OK, where were we? I would appreciate it, Monsieur Boizot, if you wouldn’t stick your nose in this investigation anymore. An investigation that I intend to lead properly, honestly, as I always do. No special privileges, no favoritism, you can believe me—that is how I operate.”
It was late in the day when Boizot returned to the rocks overlooking the ocean and smoked a cigarette while watching the sunset. An hour earlier, he had sent an article based on his investigation of Perdiou’s neighborhood to Drichon. It had included a few comments about Lionel Perdiou from the inhabitants of Batz: he’d been described as “nice” and “very discreet.” It was just local color. A bit like what his colleagues from the area were probably looking for now that it was clear Perdiou was gone. The man had packed his bags and left for good, Boizot was convinced.
With Perdiou’s closest neighbor, however, he had come up empty: Dr. Prédault, he had learned from the neighborhood cheese seller, was on vacation until August fifteenth, and the villa on the other side of Perdiou’s along the main road was also unoccupied. That meant one thing: in the wee hours of Monday morning, Boizot was the only one who could have heard those two gunshots fired ten minutes apart.
With a flick of his fingers, Boizot sent his cigarette flying into a crevasse filled with water. He felt strangely good, as if his mind, detached from his body, were floating several feet above his head and giving him an extraordinary feeling of freedom.
He turned around and saw, parked in the twilight along the shoulder, the cars of his colleagues from Ouest-France and Presse-Océan still camped out in front of Perdiou’s home.
He smiled. Normally, he was the one who would have been in one of those cars, struggling to pass the time. But today, for once, luck was smiling on him.
At that precise moment, his phone rang.
Chapter 10
Every morning, Raïssa Rzaev arrived at Saint-Cloud at 7:55. Every morning, she had to endure an hour and a half on public transport as she traveled from the Cosmonaut City in Saint-Denis to Quai Marcel Dassault. It was like running an obstacle course. But she did not have enough money saved to buy a car, even a used one. And in any case, she did not have her driver’s license.
From her purse, she pulled the small key that unlocked the metal grate over the entrance to Job-Inter, inserted it in the lock, and then lifted the grate, panting. At
five foot five and over two hundred pounds, she found physical exertion very difficult.
She pushed back the strand of dark curly hair that had fallen into her eyes and opened the door to the agency.
A new day was starting, but this one would not be like the rest of them.
As soon as she entered, she sensed that something was not right. Nervous, she walked around the office and immediately noticed that the rear door that led from the garden into the office of poor Monsieur Plesse had been broken.
Worse, the door was not completely closed, and it was this fact that worried her. Fearful, she walked over to the door, glanced into the garden, then tried to close the door, but it was a lost cause. The lock was busted and would have to be replaced.
Back in the office, Raïssa opened the drawers and cabinets. She saw that everything had been rifled through yet somehow put back in place. The nocturnal visitors had gone through everything with a fine-tooth comb, but had taken care not to leave a mess. They must have gone about it methodically.
Raïssa Rzaev instinctively clutched her purse close to her as if it would be stolen. From the quay traffic echoed, relatively light at the end of July.
She sat down at her desk, suddenly feeling as exhausted as if she had just run a hundred yards. She put her head in her hands and tried to calm down.
But the events of the last few days had put her in a mental state bordering on depression. She was on the verge of bursting into tears when the doorbell rang. She looked up and saw Marina walk in. She noted, in spite of everything, that for once she was dressed with a certain self-restraint.
“What’s wrong?” asked the young woman as she closed the door behind her.
“You’ll never guess,” said Raïssa as she watched the woman come toward her, envying her slim, sporty figure without wanting to admit it. “The agency was robbed last night,” she said quickly.
Strangely, Marina’s face, which had suddenly tensed, seemed to relax. “Oh?” she said as she leaned over to greet her colleague with a bisou on each cheek.
“Don’t you realize?” said Raïssa Rzaev. “It’s only three days after poor Monsieur Plesse . . . oh, and on the day of his funeral. We are cursed!”
Marina stood in front of her desk, as if she were unable to decide whether to take a seat. “Anything stolen?”
“I don’t think so. I had a quick look around, but I don’t think that anything has disappeared.”
And she explained to her colleague her discovery that morning.
“Have you called the police, Madame?” asked Marina, who even after three months did not feel comfortable calling her colleague—who was old enough to be her mother—by her first name.
“Not yet. There’s no rush. The agency is closed for the morning, and besides, we’ll be leaving for the funeral in an hour. We can call it in later. I just don’t understand why fate seems against us.”
Marina gave her a dubious look. “Let’s not get carried away. It’s probably just a coincidence, some local youths who thought that they could get some quick cash. They must have been very disappointed. Right?”
Raïssa nodded halfheartedly. “You’re probably right. But it’s going to be another huge shock for Madame Plesse. I will speak to her later, after the ceremony.”
The two women fell silent. Raïssa turned on her computer. Before heading to the cemetery, she wanted to put a few files in order. But she could not manage to concentrate. She kept thinking about the previous night’s break-in. “It’s weird,” she said. “They broke down the door like a bunch of savages, but once inside, they went to great lengths not to disturb anything. It was as if they were looking for something specific, like papers, for example.”
Marina coughed. “Do you have news for us?”
“About the future of the agency?”
The girl nodded.
“No. I haven’t spoken to Madame Plesse yet. It’s a little tricky, you know.”
“Yes, of course. But on the other hand, if she intends to close up shop now that her husband is dead, I’d like to know. Jobs aren’t easy to find right now.”
Raïssa Rzaev made a face but didn’t respond. Deep down, she understood the concern of her young colleague, but she could not help but find the woman’s self-interest a bit indecent when poor Monsieur Plesse had not even been buried yet.
Chapter 11
Seated at the table in the dining room, Boizot quickly wrote down all the details of the curious conversation he had just had.
His phone had rung earlier, when he’d been outside near the sea. When he’d picked up, he’d heard a man’s voice, seemingly young and somewhat pleasant, on the other end. “Monsieur Boizot? I am sorry to disturb you while you are on vacation, but I just read your article in L’Actualité, and I’m very conflicted. Could I speak to you now, or would you prefer me to call back later?”
“No, no, go ahead. I’m sitting near the beach and enjoying the evening. Why are you conflicted, Monsieur?”
“Corneau, Ludovic Corneau. Sorry, I didn’t think to introduce myself, but I am so disturbed by what I just read that I can’t quite think straight.”
“And what is it that shocked you so much in my article, Monsieur Corneau?”
A few seconds of silence at the other end, then: “It’s not so much your article, Monsieur Boizot, but its connection with another incident. Let me explain.”
“Yes, of course, go ahead!” Boizot said warily, suddenly concerned this man might just be wasting his time.
Working at a newspaper, a person got accustomed to crazy phone calls. People who just needed to talk, and who mistook journalists for shrinks.
“Well, if you looked on page thirteen of L’Actualité earlier today, you would have seen a short write-up of a burglary committed around two on Monday morning. That is, of course, exactly the same time as the burglary in Batz-sur-Mer. But this burglary took place in Paris. And in this case, it was the owner of the apartment who was killed by the burglars. As it turns out, I knew the victim. His name was Charles Plesse, and I knew him from childhood. We went to high school together.”
“I’m sorry, but what does that have to do with the article I wrote today?”
Boizot stood up, pressing the device to his ear as he walked toward the villa. This Corneau guy was starting to annoy him.
“I’m getting to it, Monsieur Boizot. Would you believe that in high school, Charles and I were in a group of four inseparable friends who for obvious reasons were known as the Four Musketeers. The names of the other two guys in our group were Jean-Michel Flaneau and Sylvain Gercourt. But here’s why I’m so troubled: we invented a character named Marcel Orphelin, just like the burglar in Batz.”
Boizot stopped at the side of the road, let a Dutch caravan drive by, and then ran across.
“And in your article,” continued Corneau, “you cast doubt on whether this Marcel Orphelin is a real individual. You seemed to suggest that the name might be an alias. And let me conclude by adding that when I took a closer look at the photo you published of this man, I thought he might actually be, in reality, Jean-Michel Flaneau, one of my old high-school friends. One of the Musketeers, I mean. You see what I’m getting at.”
By now, Boizot no longer had the desire to hang up. Now, what this guy was telling him seemed completely fascinating.
“That’s very interesting, Monsieur Corneau. You say that it might be your friend. I take it you’re not entirely certain?”
Silence at the other end of the line. A silence that lasted so long that Boizot asked, “Are you still there?”
“Yes, yes, sorry. But when I tell you the next bit, you’re really going to think I’m crazy.”
“Wait, Monsieur Corneau. Before continuing, first tell me more about this character dubbed Marcel Orphelin and why you invented him.”
“Well, it was sort of a code name, an identity each one o
f us could assume when necessary. Marcel was the friend who reassured your parents on the telephone when you wanted permission to go out. You understand?”
“I think so. You created a responsible friend whom you described as a chaperone for yourselves, and your parents were supposed to believe that he really existed. How did you come up with that idea?”
“I don’t remember anymore, but what I remember is that we chose his name, Orphelin, out of irony: he was an orphan because he did not exist. It also seemed odd enough. We didn’t want to run the risk of being asked by our parents someday, ‘Say, that Marcel Orphelin, he’s not related to the Orphelins from Fontainebleau by chance, is he?’ ”
“Not bad,” Boizot said, approving. “How old were you at the time?”
“Seventeen.”
“And today?”
“Thirty-six.”
Still holding the phone to his ear, Boizot pushed open the gate to the villa and sat down in a chair on the patio.
“Monsieur Corneau, why do you think that I will take you for a fool?”
At the other end of the line, he heard a chuckle. “I told you I thought I recognized my friend Flaneau in the photo printed in the newspaper and described as an image of the mysterious Marcel Orphelin. But that can’t be. Flaneau died last year in a car accident.”
It was three o’clock in the morning, but Boizot couldn’t sleep. Lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, he kept going over all the elements of the case. Finally, he concluded it was no use to stay in bed. He jumped up, dressed quickly, and moments later was in his car driving away from the villa.
Mortal Ambitions (A Dimitri Boizot Investigation Book 1) Page 5
