The Awkward Squad

by Sophie Hénaff

  His story had started with a simple accident: a partner was stabbed during an arrest. Fairly routine. While the officer was convalescing, his replacement was injured, too. Occupational hazard. The next one took a bullet and spent three days in a coma. And the last guy had died, thrown off the top floor of a tower block. Any blame on Torrez’s part had been brushed aside each time. He had not been responsible in any way, not even of negligence. But his aura became thicker than pitch: he brought Bad Luck. No one wanted to be on Torrez’s team anymore. No one wanted to touch him; few would even look him in the eye. Except for Capestan, who didn’t give credence to such things.

  “I’m not superstitious,” she said.

  “Oh, you will be,” Valincourt said, in a funereal tone.

  Fomenko nodded in agreement, suppressing the shudder that rippled down the dragon tattoo on his neck, a souvenir of his days as a young man in the army. Nowadays, Fomenko wore a big white mustache that fanned out beneath his nose like a shaggy butterfly. Somehow the mustache didn’t go too badly with the dragon.

  Every time Torrez’s name was uttered, a silence fell over the room for a few moments. Buron filled it.

  “And finally there’s Commandant Louis-Baptiste Lebreton.”

  This time, Capestan sat bolt upright in her chair.

  “The guy from IGS?”

  “The very same,” Buron replied, spreading his arms resignedly. “I know, he didn’t make things easy for you.”

  “No, he wasn’t the most flexible. What’s that fair-play fanatic doing here? IGS isn’t even part of the police judiciare.”

  “A complaint was filed, something about a personality clash at IGS: basically an internal affair at the internal affairs division, and they decided they didn’t need him anymore.”

  “But why the complaint?”

  Lebreton might have been monstrously uncompromising, but no one could accuse him of being shady. The chief shrugged the question aside, feigning ignorance. The other two scanned the cornice of the ceiling, smiling mischievously, and Capestan realized that she would have to make do with the party line.

  “Let us not forget,” Valincourt said coldly, “you are hardly in a position to judge people for behaving aggressively.”

  Capestan took the hit without wincing. It was true: she was not without sin, and she knew it. A ray of sunshine spilled across the room and she could hear the distant reverberation of a pneumatic drill. New squad. New team. All she needed now was her mission.

  “Will we have any cases?”

  “Plenty.”

  Anne Capestan had the feeling that Buron was starting to enjoy himself. It was his little welcome-back joke, a knickknack to mark her brand-new position. After a decade and a half of service, she was back in first year, and this was her initiation ceremony.

  “Following an agreement between police headquarters, the local branch of the police judiciaire and the brigades centrales, you will take on all the unsolved cases from every single squad and commissariat in the region. We have also relieved the archives of any closed cases that still have question marks. They have all been sent to your office.”

  Buron gave a satisfied nod to his colleagues, then continued:

  “The headline is that the Île-de-France police force’s record for solving cases stands at one hundred percent, and yours will be zero percent. One incompetent squad letting down the whole region. It’s all about containment, you see.”

  “I see.”

  “Archives will send the boxes over when you start moving in,” Fomenko said, scratching his dragon. “In September, when you’ve been assigned your premises. We’re fuller than a Roman Catholic school at number 36, so we’ll find you a little spot elsewhere.”

  “If you think you’ve gotten off lightly, then you’re wrong,” Valincourt said, still not moving an inch. “You should know that we’re not expecting any results.”

  Buron made an expansive gesture toward the door: Capestan’s cue to leave. Despite these less than encouraging final words, she had a smile on her face. At least now she had an objective, and she had a start date.

  Sitting at the Café Les Deux Palais, Valincourt and Fomenko were drinking a beer. Fomenko helped himself to a handful of peanuts from the small dish on the table and munched them down purposefully, crunching them between his teeth.

  “What did you make of her, Buron’s protégée—Capestan?”

  Valincourt nudged a single peanut all the way across his beer coaster.

  “I don’t know. Pretty, I suppose.”

  Fomenko burst out laughing, then straightened his mustache:

  “Yeah, you can’t miss that! No, I meant in professional terms. Be honest, what do you make of this squad?”

  “It’s a farce,” Valincourt said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  3

  Paris, September 3, 2012

  Jeans, flat shoes, lightweight sweater, and trench coat: Anne Capestan was back in her police officer’s outfit, and she was clutching the keys to her new commissariat. She was imagining that twenty of the forty might show up. If one in two could see the point in this squad, then it would be worth the effort.

  Capestan, feeling eager and full of hope, strode past the gushing Fontaine des Innocents at a lively pace. The owner of a sports shop was winding up the graffiti-covered metal shutter, and the smell of fried fast-food was lingering in the cool morning air. Capestan turned to face number 3, rue des Innocents. It was not a commissariat—in fact there was nothing to suggest any link to the police at all. It was just an apartment building. And she did not have the door code. She sighed and went into the café on the corner to ask the owner. B8498. The commissaire converted it into a mnemonic to memorize it: Boat, Orwell (for 1984), World Cup (for 1998, the only year France had won).

  A barely legible “5” on a crumpled label on the bunch of keys indicated the floor number. Capestan summoned the elevator and went to the top. No chance of an official-looking ground-floor space with windows, neon lights, and passersby. They had been hidden away in the attic, with no sign or intercom on the street outside. The door on the landing opened up onto a vast, dilapidated, but well-lit apartment. The premises might have been short on prestige, but they had at least some charm.

  The previous day, after the electricians and telephone people had finished, the movers had come to set the whole place up. Buron had told her not to worry: HQ would take care of everything.

  As she entered, Capestan spotted an iron desk that was pockmarked with rust. Opposite it, a green Formica table was leaning crookedly despite the beer coasters shoved under the shortest leg, while the last two desks consisted of black melamine shelves perched on rickety trestles. They were not merely clearing out the police officers: they were clearing out the furniture, too. You could not accuse the scheme of inconsistency.

  The parquet floor was dotted with holes of various sizes, and the walls were browner than a smoker’s lungs, but the room was spacious and had large windows that looked over the square and offered an uninterrupted view beyond the old garden at Les Halles toward the towering Église Saint-Eustache, which jostled for space with the cranes that dominated the perpetual construction sites.

  Navigating around a knackered old armchair, Capestan noticed a fireplace that had not been bricked over and seemed to be in working order. Could come in handy. The commissaire was about to continue her tour when she heard the elevator. She glanced at her watch: 8:00 a.m. on the dot.

  A man wiped his hiking boots on the doormat and knocked at the half-open door. His thick black hair seemed to follow its own peculiar logic and, despite its still being early, his cheeks were already flecked with salt-and-pepper stubble. He stepped into the room and introduced himself, his hands in the pockets of his sheepskin coat.

  “Morning. Lieutenant Torrez.”

  Torrez. So the bringer of bad luck was the first to roll up. He did not look as if he wanted to take his hand out of his pocket, and Capestan wondered whether he was afraid she might refuse to sh
ake it, or if he was just a bit oafish. Unsure either way, she decided to dodge the issue by not offering her own, instead throwing him a toothy smile that flashed like a white flag, full of peaceful intent.

  “Good morning, lieutenant. I’m Commissaire Anne Capestan, head of the squad.”

  “Yes. Hello. Where’s my desk?” he said with a vague attempt at politeness.

  “Wherever you like. First come, first served . . .”

  “Can I take the tour, then?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She watched as he headed straight to the room at the back.

  Torrez was five feet seven of solid muscle. If the black cat thing was true, then he fell into the puma category. Compact and thickset. Before washing up here, he had worked at the third brigade territoriale of the second arrondissement. Perhaps he’ll have some good local restaurant tips, Capestan thought. In the distance, she saw him open the last door at the end of the corridor, nod, and turn to her.

  “I’ll take this one,” he called out.

  He closed the door behind him, and that was the end of that.

  Little matter: at least now they were two.

  A telephone rang and Capestan looked around the room for it, scrambling around the various devices that were almost as eclectic as the furniture. Eventually she picked up a gray handset that was lying on the floor by the window. Buron’s voice greeted her from the other end of the line:

  “Capestan, morning. Just calling to let you know you have another recruit. You’ll know her when she arrives—wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  The chief seemed to be enjoying himself. At least one of them was having fun. After hanging up, Capestan switched the gray handset for an antique Bakelite job, dropping it on a zinc-top desk that she hoped would be serviceable after a wipe. She also scooped up a large lamp with a cream shade and a scuffed cherrywood base that had been lurking next to the photocopier, then took some wipes out of her bag along with a six-inch golden Eiffel Tower. It came from a souvenir vendor on the embankment: a present to herself on the day of her posting in the capital. She added her big red-leather planner and a black Bic ballpoint, and there it was—her office. Her desk was lined up at an angle between the window and the fireplace. Forty of them in the apartment was going to be a squeeze, but they would get by.

  Capestan went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It was a vast room equipped with a lopsided fridge, an old gas stove, and a low pine cabinet, the sort you would usually only expect to see in a chalet kitchenette. The cabinet was empty: not a glass in sight. Capestan wondered for a moment if there was even any water. She headed toward the French windows, which opened onto a terrace where some yellowing ivy was climbing a plastic trellis, cracking the building’s brickwork.

  In a corner, a sizable terra-cotta pot contained a heap of dried-out compost, but there was no sign of a plant. The sky was blue, and she paused for a moment to listen to the bustle of Paris below.

  When she came back into the living room, Lebreton, the former IGS commandant, had arrived and was busy settling in behind the black melamine desk. His tall frame was bent double as he tried to open one of the boxes of files with an Opinel folding pocket knife. He was going about his task with customary calmness. Lebreton was as unswayable in his actions as he was in his opinions. Capestan could not help recalling the relentless, rigorous nature of his questioning. If the disciplinary panel had followed his recommendations, she would never have been reinstated. In Lebreton’s eyes, she was an animal; as far as she was concerned, he was an obsessive nitpicker.

  “Good morning, commissaire,” he said, barely looking up before resuming his attentions to the cardboard box.

  “Good morning, commandant,” Capestan said.

  A deafening silence fell over the room.

  Now they were three.

  Capestan went to fetch a box of her own.

  Each with their own stack of cardboard boxes, Capestan and Lebreton spent the next two hours going through files with a fine-tooth comb. Every box was a veritable treasure chest of burglaries, ATM scams, smash-and-grab thefts, or the selling of counterfeit goods, and Capestan was seriously beginning to question the magnitude of their mission.

  Their reading was suddenly interrupted by a ringing voice. They froze, pencils suspended in midair, as an almost spherical woman of around fifty appeared in the doorway. Her diamanté-encrusted cell phone was taking an absolute pounding.

  “Well, you can go to hell, dickhead!” she screamed, her face bright red. “I write what I want! And do you want to know why? Because I’m not going to let some pint-size, pen-pushing stuffed suit tell me which way to piss!”

  Capestan and Lebreton stared at her in amazement.

  The fury smiled at them cordially, then turned away before erupting again:

  “Lawyer or no lawyer, I don’t give a damn. If you want to throw me under the bus, then fine. I’ve got nothing to lose. But if you want my advice, that wouldn’t be your best move. Remember, if I want your prick of a lawyer to get piles in the next episode, he’ll get piles in the next episode. That moron can make his own bed.”

  She hung up abruptly.

  “Good morning,” said the woman. “Capitaine Eva Rosière.”

  “Hello,” Capestan replied, shaking the outstretched hand and introducing herself, still a little wide eyed at her entrance.

  Eva Rosière. Buron’s surprise, no doubt. She had spent years working at police headquarters at 36, quai des Orfèvres before discovering her true calling as a writer. Much to everyone’s surprise, in under five years her detective novels had sold millions of copies and been translated into ten languages. Like any self-respecting police officer, she held lawyers in minimal esteem, lampooning them at every opportunity and drawing unashamed inspiration from the great and the good at the public prosecutor’s office in Paris. She never took too much trouble to disguise the identities of anyone she did not like. At first, the legal eagles had taken it silently on the chin: self-recognition was as good as a confession; better to keep a low profile than cause a stir. But then a production company made contact with her, and she took an extended sabbatical from the police to embark on her next big adventure, namely creating a prime-time TV show. Ever since, Laura Flames: Detective has been essential viewing on Thursday evenings, broadcast on thirty-odd channels around the world.

  At number 36, this sudden shoot to stardom ruffled a few feathers. If former policemen Olivier Marchal or Franck Mancuso want to go in search of fame in screenwriting, then fine. But for a woman—from the backwaters of Saint-Étienne, to make things even worse—to be blessed with a big brain and a vocal pen . . . it did not sit too well with the head honchos in Paris. Once she had made her fortune, Rosière had curiously applied to resume her duties as a police officer, without taking a step back from her screenwriting activities. And the police had been obliged to accept.

  But what was permissible on the page soon became hard to swallow on the screen, what with its broader audience. She starting rubbing her police judiciaire colleagues the wrong way by flaunting her millions, and soon the top brass got fed up, too. The digs that started off as harmless banter started puncturing egos: you tend to be less forgiving of people when you envy them.

  And so when the television series kicked off with stellar ratings, a veritable cabal formed as the administration set about trying to gag the artist. The fact that Rosière had washed up there today showed that round one had gone to the management. As for Capestan, she was glued to the series—she found it funny and, contrary to all the fuss, perfectly lighthearted.

  Rosière smiled at Capestan, then looked hungrily over at Lebreton. Athletic frame, bright eyes, delicate yet manly features . . . there was no denying he was a fine specimen. The only thing marring his Hollywood good looks was a deep, vertical line running down his right cheek, like the seam of a pillow. Well accustomed to such close inspections, Lebreton leaned forward in a friendly manner and offered Rosière his hand.

  “I’ve got t
wo delivery men waiting downstairs with my Empire desk,” the new arrival announced. “Where can I put it?”

  “Okay, then . . .”

  Rosière spun on her heel, surveying the layout of the apartment.

  “How about I sub it in for this piece of crap, would that work?” the capitaine said, gesturing toward the other makeshift trestle table in the corner.

  “That would work.”

  At 6:00 p.m., Capestan found herself standing in the entrance like a hostess who had been snubbed by her guests. She had busted a gut to memorize forty CVs, only to be left with three people, with no guarantee that they would show up the following day. She was not planning on forcing them, anyway. For each of them, landing in this squad was a punishment: the end of the road.

  As if echoing the commissaire’s silent sense of defeat, Torrez crossed the room without so much as a glance at his colleagues. Rosière and Lebreton shuddered with a mixture of surprise and superstition as he went by. Capestan paused, then decided on a no-nonsense approach to gauge the other officers’ commitment levels.

  “Well, I’m planning on being here tomorrow,” she said to the lieutenant. “But don’t feel under any obligation yourselves.”

  With such a depleted team, the “yourselves” hardly meant a great deal anyway.

  “I get paid to do 8:00 a.m. to midday, then 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.,” Torrez said, unfazed and nodding his mule-like head. He tapped his watch, then added: “See you tomorrow.”

  Then he left, closing the door behind him. Capestan turned toward Rosière and Lebreton, waiting to see their reaction.

  “We’ll only be stuck here for a couple of months,” Rosière said. “I’m not going to be stupid enough to let them fire me for abandoning my post.”

  She tugged at her charm necklace, fiddling with the various pendants dangling from it, mainly patron saint medallions.