The Awkward Squad

by Sophie Hénaff

  “The murderer took her mail—I don’t see any other way around it. If you want my opinion, he didn’t just know the victim, but the two of them took part in some sort of activity together.”

  Before Capestan could say even a word, the lieutenant held up one of his big mitts in surrender:

  “I know, I know, only one thing to do: check to see if there’s a record of anything with the local clubs.”

  The game of darts was finished. Capestan went through to join the team in the kitchen. The doors onto the terrace were wide open, and Lebreton and Rosière were out there smoking. Évrard had her hands clasped around a cup of coffee. Orsini, rigid as a watchtower, was surveying them all. Capestan went over to him and drew him to one side.

  “Capitaine,” she said, “my approach may seem naïve to you, but—”

  “Don’t worry, commissaire,” he cut in. “When it comes to this squad, I am not banking on reporting anything I see to the IGS or the press. I denounce only the corrupt. They may be in prison, they may be in office, but they are never discarded. No offense intended, but the actions of cretinous officers in the naughty corner do not concern me in the slightest.”

  “Well, you’ve been posted here, too,” Capestan said, eager to take a stand against Orsini’s disdain for his colleagues.

  He cordially acknowledged her point, rearranged his navy-blue silk handkerchief, and smiled:

  “I consider my role to be more of a supporting one, commissaire.”

  Capestan nodded her agreement and walked away from the capitaine. That final remark had given her pause, and she moved it to the back of her head to let it simmer away.

  She opened the fridge and poured herself some fruit juice before going out for some air herself. Merlot completed the gathering on the terrace, holding a spoon in one hand and the pot of honey from Torrez in the other. Without any consideration whatsoever for future consumers, he plunged the spoon into the pot and put it directly in his mouth. As he was about to plunge it back, Capestan leapt forward to rescue the honey.

  “That’s a present from Torrez,” she said, fully aware that this might discourage anyone else from touching it.

  Merlot thought about protesting for a second, then brought all his attention to bear on the spoon, which he licked with delight:

  “Honey, my children. Honey! Is it not truly marvelous what nature gives us?”

  Pilou sniffed in agreement, desperate for some to fall.

  “It doesn’t ‘give’ us anything,” Rosière objected, wagging a chubby finger at Merlot. “It takes hundreds of little bees working their asses off for months to build up their supply, only for a human to pop in at the end and steal the whole lot like some goddamn gangster. It’s one wing forward and two wings back for those poor bees. Back they go to square one! Nature ‘giving’ . . . Honestly! We steal it and that’s that! ‘Marvelous,’ pfff . . .”

  Rosière often concluded her diatribes with a melodramatic “pfff.” Merlot carried on smiling, nodding as he admired the spoon, apparently pleased for Rosière to have her say. Merlot loved his life. His ego functioned with eye-watering simplicity: all glory and gain was for him, and everything else was of no consequence whatsoever.

  At the far end of the terrace, Orsini was now removing the dead leaves from the rose-bay. He had supplied the press with a wealth of remarkably detailed information relating to the Riverni case. Capestan had seen it coming, but even so the end result had surpassed her expectations. The perennially chic old-school capitaine filled both hands with leaves before disposing of them in the kitchen trash. Capestan realized that, deep down, she had never been afraid of Orsini. From the start, she had regarded him as a solution, not a threat.

  The commissaire’s thoughts returned to Buron, whose reprimand had gone above and beyond, despite the fact that—as he acknowledged at the start—he hadn’t been at all surprised by her conduct. The directeur knew Orsini, and he knew Capestan even better. As much as she hated to admit it, she became extremely predictable the moment she was backed into a corner. She responded badly to arbitrary bans and did everything she could to bypass them. Buron had known that for a long time. All of a sudden, Capestan became certain that she was being played. Like a fiddle. And she hadn’t kicked up the smallest fuss. Now she needed to find out why.

  An impulse made her turn to Merlot, who had left his spoon lying on one of the deck chairs.

  “Capitaine, may I ask you a favor?” she asked.

  “But of course, my dear girl. At your service.”

  “If any of your contacts has heard anything about a spat between Buron and Riverni, I’d like to hear about it.”

  24

  They had left in the middle of the night. The deserted streets of Paris filed past them. The windows of the apartment buildings were pitch black, and the occasional sound of traffic seemed muffled, as if coming from far away. At a red light, Lebreton had spotted a small group of tipsy thirty-somethings smoking outside a club, spotlit by the neon sign above the entrance. Soon they would be joining the Périphérique, where the Lexus could finally open herself up, like a dog off its leash in a field.

  Lebreton was driving smoothly, savoring the engine’s barely audible purr. The leather seats were as cozy as anything, and the orangey glow from the dashboard cast a soft light on their faces. Pilote was lying peacefully in the back on his fleece-lined blanket, letting out the occasional snore. For once, Rosière hadn’t doused herself in boatloads of Guerlain, and the Lexus’s new-car smell prevailed. Lebreton had prepared a playlist for the journey: a few country classics, some California surf tunes, and a handful of Otis Redding numbers. A soundtrack for a road trip to the coast.

  Rosière had been asleep since they got off at the A11 after Saint-Arnoult, only waking up when they had to slow down for the Roche-sur-Yon toll booth. She stretched and leaned down to grab her handbag, insisting on paying, but Lebreton had been too quick with his card. As he pulled away, she asked a question that she must have been sitting on for a while.

  “Is it true you used to be a RAID negotiator?” she said casually.

  “Yes. For ten years.”

  Ten years that went by in a heartbeat. Lebreton had adored that job. It had been all about action, composure, discipline, and listening. Identifying peaceful solutions in the heat of crazed situations; focusing on the last line of defense—negotiation—before the guys with guns and balaclavas came storming in. Ten years of training, honing his skills, and he had never been bored for a second. The commandant had an instant flashback to the day before, back in their commissariat, where he had noticed that his computer keyboard was missing its A and ENTER buttons.

  Lebreton chose not to expand, so Rosière took the reins:

  “RAID, that’s pretty classy. What took you to IGS?”

  “Nothing took me—it wasn’t my decision.”

  During the recruitment phase, Lebreton had never mentioned his sexual orientation. The rapid-response unit was like testosterone HQ, rife with prejudice, and he had wanted the job. And he had gotten it. After that, his performance had placed him beyond suspicion.

  “Why?” Rosière said, twisting in her seat so she could see him more easily.

  “Do you know what it’s like to be gay in the police force?”

  “For starters, I’m guessing the word ‘gay’ doesn’t come up much . . .”

  Lebreton smiled.

  “Yes, for starters.”

  And then Vincent had arrived on the scene. The years went by and he grew tired of keeping secrets. One morning, on the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin, Lebreton and his boyfriend had bumped into Massard, a RAID commandant. Lebreton had introduced Vincent, making no bones about who he was. At the time, Massard had played the worldly, liberal card, not that they were seeking any reaction at all.

  “When the word got out, I was transferred in two weeks flat. They promoted me to commandant to sweeten the pill.”

  The IGS: the elephant graveyard, the end of the earth, the hole. Lebreton did not
think it was possible to descend any lower. At least, not until Capestan’s squad came along. In the end, however, the work hadn’t been entirely without interest. There was a constant stream of officers mistaking their ID badge for a blank check.

  “Is it true you grilled Capestan while you were there?”

  Prime example, Lebreton thought to himself. Batman syndrome. He kept this to himself, however, and simply turned away. The leaves on the trees at the top of the embankment running alongside the divided highway had turned yellow, while the countryside that appeared in the rearview mirror from time to time was still green.

  “The last time she slipped up, yes,” he confirmed, then turned to Rosière and said: “But I’m not supposed to discuss it, sorry.”

  He thought back to the case. Two children kidnapped by a teacher. It had taken Capestan six months to locate them. When she arrived at the premises, she killed him: simple as that.

  “It was self-defense, wasn’t it?” Rosière insisted.

  “Indeed.”

  If you can call it self-defense when the guy is standing fifteen feet away armed with a pen, and Capestan shoots him three times, right in the heart. Not exactly where you aim if you’re planning to immobilize a suspect. Capestan maintained that she had been unable to adjust her line of fire. Coming from an Olympic silver medal markswoman, that was verging on the unreasonable. Lebreton still couldn’t believe the top brass had let it slide.

  “Then what happened after the IGS? How did you end up with us?”

  Pilou started gnawing at the armrest, causing her mistress to raise an authoritative finger. The dog calmed down, stopped, let out a powerful yawn that finished with a satisfied squeak, then made a half turn and went back to sleep. Dawn was gradually lighting up the inside of the car, and with it came an urge for coffee. The orange sun blazed through the back window, streaming down the road in a straight line. Lebreton felt like he was riding down the freeway, and he was longing for a bit of silence for company.

  “Well?” Rosière said with the persistence of a hammer drill.

  The capitaine, with her honest warmth and uncomplicated energy, was in the mood for exchanging secrets, and Lebreton could not shake her off without hurting her. He veered into the fast lane to overtake two trucks.

  “Vincent’s death was a shock,” he said blankly. “But two weeks after the funeral, I was back at work.”

  Lebreton remembered how he felt wandering aimlessly along the corridors, unable to find his office in the confusion. Colleagues patted him on the back sympathetically, commiserating as far as they deemed necessary.

  “I couldn’t concentrate, so I went to the divisionnaire to request some unpaid leave.”

  “And he said no?”

  “He said that it would be a big inconvenience for him.”

  Lebreton had mentioned bereavement leave. Damien, who had lost his wife the year before, had taken a much-needed break, four months, to straighten himself out. The divisionnaire was aghast and said: “You can’t honestly make that comparison!”

  A billion explanations would not have been enough to open that brute’s heart. Lebreton had had his fill: enough self-justification, enough toeing the party line. If even the officers in charge of cleaning up the police were guilty of discrimination, then something needed to be done.

  “So?” Rosière said, keen as ever for the next installment.

  “I filed a complaint on grounds of discrimination. I took it right to the top, both at police headquarters and the Ministry of the Interior.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “Nothing, of course. Internal affairs was hardly going to investigate internal affairs.”

  “Your divisionnaire got away with it just like that?”

  Taking his eyes off the road just for a moment, Lebreton aimed a wry smile at his copilot:

  “Which of us is sitting next to you in the car?”

  The sign indicating the road into Les Sables-d’Olonne put an end to the conversation. Lebreton and Rosière wound down their windows in perfect synchronization, and a gust of humid, salty air came rushing into the car. The dog sat up in the back and moaned impatiently. Rosière held her hand outside and splayed her fingers to feel the breeze, while Pilote dug his claws into the armrest and tried to clamber up front to reach the window and catch that promising smell of seaweed. It was 8:00 a.m., too early to turn up at the shipbuilder’s, but perfect for a coffee break by the sea.

  Lebreton passed through the barrier to the outdoor parking lot at the fishing port and slid the Lexus into a diagonal space, applying the hand brake and cutting the engine. Before getting out, Rosière returned to Capestan: something kept bothering her about the stray bullet.

  “Her partner wasn’t there to cover her . . . Maybe she got the jitters?”

  “In our squad, she chose to team up with Torrez. Torrez,” he said, to ram home his point. “Capestan’s not afraid of anything.”

  25

  Capestan was afraid of everything. After showering and dressing, she went back to the bedroom to close the windows that she had flung open to air the place out, then drew back the duvet, taking care to remove the revolver from under the pillow. She had placed it there the night before; she placed it there every night. It was her old spare gun, now simply her gun, thanks to the administration confiscating her Smith & Wesson. She could no longer sleep without it. She felt Paris lying in wait for her behind the door, and she needed her piece like others need sleeping pills. Her job had broken her. It was a career she had chosen out of preference rather than sheer bravado, a way of disrupting the neatly mapped-out trajectory for young girls: further education, then an appropriate husband. Enthusiasm and a sense of duty had taken her far, but compassion and emotiveness had pushed her into a corner. And Capestan had been afraid ever since. Not that she had become deflated: losing her self-respect would have meant the end. She was better at containing her fear than her fury, fully aware that they were two sides of the same coin.

  Earlier that morning she had decided to examine the Sauzelle case out of doors, to see whether the ins and outs would seem any different in the fresh air. The sun was faint but it was shining nonetheless, and she settled for a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Facing the pond, she had split her time between rereading the various facts and observing the procession of passersby.

  She had called the land registry office on her cell phone, followed by the Issy-les-Moulineaux town hall, and finally the Issy-Val-de-Seine property group to follow up on the Bernard Argan lead—the developer that Naulin had mentioned. She had found out that the contracts for the alternative media site had been signed a month before Marie Sauzelle’s murder. So at the time of the crime, Argan had no reason to apply any pressure: one more suspect they could cross off the list.

  With her mind at peace from the calm of the park, Capestan headed down boulevard Saint-Michel, reflecting on the fine scent of autumn as she passed under the horse chestnuts. She reached the quai above the Seine and admired Notre-Dame to her right, so magnificently authoritative, passing judgment on all the souls of Paris.

  On the other side of the quai, she saw a dog sitting at the foot of a pedestal. It was a Rottweiler. Capestan didn’t have anything in particular against Rottweilers, but she was glad that Rosière had gone for the Pilote format. As always, the commissaire looked up at the owner to see if he resembled his dog. He was sitting with his legs hanging over the wall, and no question he looked even less friendly than his dog. The man patted the stone patch next to him to encourage the animal to join him, but it was afraid and refused to jump: it didn’t know what emptiness lay behind the wall. The Rottweiler folded back its ears, tail between its legs, but the owner insisted, yanking the leash and shouting at it to jump. A wave of fury pinned Capestan to the spot. The dog was scared to death—the guy needed to back off with his vicious commands. Capestan couldn’t cross because the lights were green and the cars were flying past. The animal was lying flat on the ground now, and the stumpy owner h
ad come down from his perch to stand over it in a menacing fashion. The commissaire could see him screaming at the poor thing, and he looked like he was about to hit it. Capestan was ready to explode with anger. It felt as if she had a hundred hornets buzzing around her head, and a red mist started blurring her vision. She paced around the pavement as the cars rushed past, glaring up at the light. She was going to cross the road, grab the bastard’s head, and smash it against the wall until he stopped yelling at his dog. She could already hear the bone crunching against the stone, so in her mind she moderated the force of the impact, but only by a touch. A primal, apelike aggression was pumping through her veins, and she responded to its beat. Suddenly the cars all stopped and the pedestrian crossing opened up before her. On the other side, the Rottweiler had managed to jump up and was sitting there with its tongue hanging out, appreciating the respite. Next to it, the scumbag owner was lighting a cigarette. Capestan was breathing heavily as she crossed the road. An irrepressible anger was still pricking at her temples, goading her on to kill the bastard. His dog had not died today, but maybe it would tomorrow. The commissaire’s sense of reason was hammering away at her skull, begging her to unclench her fists: the emergency was over; you don’t kill for that. She was not allowed to kill. The message forced its way through and prudence seeped back into her pores. Capestan swerved abruptly, redoubling her pace toward the bridge and the office beyond.

  It was getting worse and worse. Now even dogs were sending her to the edge. Before long she’d be unable to face up to the ordeals that came with police work. Like skin that becomes allergic following exposure, instead of toughening over time, she was softening; her defenses were crumbling, and she was becoming entirely susceptible. Soon she would be totally unfit, as savage as the scumbag back there. As she walked along, she rolled her entire being into a corner of her subconscious in an effort to calm down.

  Fury. Killing a man but saving a dog.

  Capestan stopped on the bridge.