Killer Critique

by Alexander Campion

  The turnout at the Dîner en Blanc seemed even larger this year. A throng of thousands swarmed joyously. The bois was punctuated with shrieks, laughter, and whoops of greeting. The outfits seemed more extravagant: hats were bigger and floppier, dresses were either skimpier or more billowing, and costume jewelry cascaded more copiously. The event had turned into a fashion parade.

  After an interminable search—made all the longer by the need to stop and greet and air kiss every few seconds—Capucine and Alexandre finally found bus D-24. Jacques, sans companion—immaculately turned out in a white linen suit that could have been made only by a Milanese tailor—detached himself from a group happily shouting gossip at each other and latched on to Capucine, theatrically ravishing her with caricature Lothario eyes. He stroked her thigh with an index finger, hiked up the hem of her dress, and hooked a finger under the strap of her holster.

  “Freud would have had a great deal to say about this,” he murmured in her ear, giving the strap a gentle tug.

  Capucine broke free and struck a coquettish pose, showing off her shapely leg. From behind she could hear Alexandre grinding his teeth.

  Capucine’s friend Cécile, in an ankle-length, high-necked, almost diaphanous dress, clearly inspired by a Victorian nightgown, reclined languidly on the steps of the bus side by side with her husband, her arm limply through his. She looked more comfortable in her skin than she had been in months. Théophile sat stiffly upright, a proprietary foot on a large wicker hamper. Despite his reputation as something rather less than an intellectual luminary, he prospered effortlessly at The Société Générale, selling stocks and bonds to his family’s connections. His only interest in life, other than his wife, was wine, a subject in which his expertise—as even Alexandre readily acknowledged—was beyond question.

  Alexandre conferred with Théophile earnestly about his choices for the evening, selected from Théophile’s extensive cave and now secure under his foot. Alexandre clapped Théophile warmly on the back. The oenological success of the dinner was assured.

  Béatrice’s bins and Théophile’s hamper safely loaded in the belly of the bus, the dinner party clambered aboard, cresting on a wave of joviality. The noise level in the bus rose. Even though Capucine didn’t actually know anyone, they all looked like they must have been guests in common at a dinner party or two over the years. Someone passed plastic flutes of champagne. The hilarity escalated.

  As the long line of buses emerged from the Bois and cruised majestically up the avenue de la Grande Armée, pedestrians stopped to gawk and were waved at and toasted jovially by the occupants. Champagne corks popped continually. The buses circled the place de l’Etoile, parking in two circular rows, like covered wagons preparing to stave off an Indian attack. The immense horde of white-clad revelers was disgorged. Organizers appeared and consulted clipboards, orchestrating the placing of tables.

  Not a single blue uniform was in sight, but Capucine knew that the event had been coordinated with the Paris police and a contingent of black-clad CRS riot police, vastly larger than necessary, was tucked into buses on a side street, a knee-jerk official reaction whenever large crowds assembled that had persisted from the somber days of the Revolution.

  Following the instructions of the organizers, Capucine’s party toted their containers, hampers, bridge tables, and folding chairs a hundred feet down the Champs-Elysées to a spot directly in front of the glass façade that had been installed to spruce up the aging Publicis building like a layer of too-thick pancake makeup on the face of a dowager. While they set up camp, the laden, white-uniformed army soldiered cheerfully on in front of them, making its way down the length of the Champs-Elysées. Capucine suspected Alexandre had somehow pulled culinary rank to obtain a spot so close to the Arc de Triomphe. The location turned out to be a mixed blessing. The endless white tide contained legions of friends and acquaintances, a good number of whom stopped for a chat and a sip of champagne.

  Théophile was incensed when the first bottle of champagne he opened was depleted in less than a minute. He had an excited, whispered discussion with Alexandre. Capucine could hear only snatches. “Voyons!” ...” “Deutz Rserve de Famille ...” “A truly extraordinary millésime ...” “... Far worse than throwing pearls before swine ...”

  With the gesture of an oriental sage, Alexandre extended his arm, pointing, sending a beaming Théophile off into the Publicis building. Théophile reemerged ten minutes later with two heavy orange shopping bags decorated with bright yellow suns.

  “What a blessing Le Drugstore is. Anything you need available twenty-four hours a day,” Théophile said happily as he pulled ten frosty bottles of Cordon Rouge from his bags and set them in a row on the table. He kissed Cécile on the cheek and breathed a sigh of relief. “Crisis resolved, chérie,” he said to her. “The Deutz must be sipped with concentration. Cherished. Adulated. The Mumm will be just the thing to restore our thirsty copains.”

  For another half an hour the shimmering procession continued past their table in full force. Théophile disappeared into Le Drugstore twice more. A small clutch that seemed to consist mainly of Alexandre’s cronies—mainly food critics and journalists—clustered around their table, drinking far more than their fair share of Théophile’s Cordon Rouge.

  Capucine had only a limited tolerance for congregations of the gentlemen of the press. Their preening and pretentious flaunting of bons mots rankled.

  One of the swarm—a man well into his sixties, with the sad, knowing eyes and the loose facial folds of a shar-pei puppy—greeted Capucine with a kiss on each cheek. Arsène Peroché, the senior food critic for the Nouvel Observateur, a left-leaning weekly that was the darling of the liberal intelligentsia, was one of the handful of Alexandre’s professional colleagues she genuinely appreciated.

  “I must apologize for our little crowd’s intrusion. But don’t worry, I’m about to lead them off into the wilderness and let you get to your dinner. After all, we’re here to work and not to get soused on your champagne,” Peroché said with an endearing lopsided smile.

  Capucine put her hand on his arm. “Please, you’re all more than welcome. You know, you must come to us for dinner very soon. I haven’t seen you in ages. Are you writing a human interest piece tonight, or are you rooting for culinary treasures?”

  “I’m afraid it’s to be a snide human interest piece,” Peroché said with his sad look. “I don’t know how I let myself get roped into these things. The editor wants the theme to be something along the lines of ‘BoBo Two-Dot-Oh—The Second Generation Of Bohemian Bourgeois At Play.’ Makes you cringe, doesn’t it?”

  Capucine laughed.

  “Off I go. I’m going to lead them back to the Etoile. I had so much champagne on the bus, I forgot my camera bag in the overhead rack. Then right down to the Rond Point at the bottom of the avenue, and then back up again on the other side so we don’t miss a single precious morsel of human interest.”

  As Peroché marshaled his colleagues, Alexandre announced to Capucine that he was going to walk with his cronies up to the Etoile but would be back well before they got to the fabled foie gras. Capucine was untroubled by this announcement. Alexandre could always be counted on not to be late for dinner, particularly if it had been prepared by an up-and-coming chef.

  After the clutch of journalists left, the river of humanity flowing past Capucine’s table gradually thinned to a trickle. Most of the tables were now filled, and there was a long, thin line of immaculate white tablecloths and gleaming white outfits on both sides of the Champs-Elysées, stretching all the way down the one and a half miles from the Etoile to the Rond Point.

  A group of late arrivals, three couples in their early twenties, struggled timidly down the avenue with their bridge tables and baskets of food. It was a group that might have emerged from some doctoral class in cybernetics at the Sorbonne. Almost without exception, their eyes were vague behind oversized wire-rim glasses, their hair was badly cut and in need of a generous application of shampo
o, and their clothes baggy over ungainly, rangy frames.

  Recognizing Cécile, the group stopped and greeted her cheerfully. Cécile whooped joyfully. “They’re associates from the firm,” she said to no one in particular and ordered Théophile to give them champagne.

  As they approached, one of them—a young-looking, slight blonde with small, almond-shaped, rimless glasses and two large adolescent acne pimples glowing volcanically from her neck and cheek—hung back from her friends.

  Catching sight of her, Cécile exclaimed, “Honorine. What a surprise! You’re the last person I expected to see here.”

  For a split second Capucine didn’t place the name, even though the face looked vaguely familiar. Then it hit her. This was Cécile’s paramour, or lover, or amante, or whatever the damn word was. She prepared herself for a scene.

  Honorine looked like she might bolt. Cécile grabbed her by the elbow and led her up to Théophile, who automatically handed her a glass of champagne. “Look who’s here, Théo chéri,” Cécile said. “Do you remember Honorine Lecanu? You know, she’s the star at the firm I’m always telling you about.”

  Théophile, immersed in the process of meticulously opening three bottles of Bordeaux so they could breathe, barely glanced up, quickly returning his attention to the underside of a cork. Honorine shuffled her feet, hurt by the imagined rebuff, and looked at Cécile for support. Cécile glanced hopefully at Capucine, as if she could somehow smooth over the situation. For a long moment there was complete silence at the table, punctuated twice by the gentle popping of corks. A sense of inexplicable awkwardness spread through the group like a thick green gas. Only Théophile was spared.

  It took the cool breeze of Alexandre’s exuberant return to blow the mood away and restore joviality.

  As Honorine and her friends resumed their trek down the Champs-Elysées, Capucine felt another stab of frustration. Here was an important witness—even, technically, a possible suspect—and Capucine was being held at such length from the case that not only had she never interviewed Honorine, but even recognizing her was a rusty process.

  “What an eventful little sortie that turned into!” Alexandre said. “You’ll never guess what we saw.” He gratefully accepted a flute of Deutz from Théophile.

  “Well, there we were, walking past the buses, and in one of them the most beautiful pair of legs began waving rhythmically in the window. Of course, we stopped to admire. In a few seconds the waving stopped and Sybille Charbonnier—it really was her—appeared in the window.”

  “The movie star?” Théophile asked. “The one with all that curly dark hair and those luscious ...” He caught himself and glanced guiltily at Cécile. Capucine was amazed he had any interests at all other than wine.

  “She winked at us. And gave us all a delightful smile. And then”—Alexandre paused dramatically to take a sip of champagne—“her beau’s head appeared, and he waved at us, too.”

  “Distinguished-looking older fellow with well-brushed white hair?” Capucine asked.

  “The very man, except that his hair was in a bit of disarray.” Alexandre chuckled. “Now, there’s a couple who will figure largely in the gossip columns of tomorrow’s press.”

  “Let’s eat,” Jacques said with a leer. “All this salacious gossip makes my appetite perk right up!”

  Alexandre frowned at the double entendre.

  Théophile inflated and took over center stage. “Capucine told me we were going to start with an extraordinary lobe of foie gras. So I brought some bottles of Château Climens—the year two thousand, of course.” He turned to Cécile. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Théophile persisted in the belief that his wife was as passionate about wine as he was. “It’s from Barsac, of course, even though it says Sauternes on the bottle. To my mind the mechanical balance between the acid and the unctuous is absolutely perfect, possibly rivaling even Yquem’s—”

  Capucine cut him off with a loud “Voilà!” as she produced the foie gras. Cécile smiled in gratitude.

  There was a dismayed silence as the industrial starkness of the foie gras was revealed. But when it was served, even with an amateurish dribbling of the sauce, it was as superb as at the restaurant. For a long moment the dish overwhelmed the table. The surrounding crowd, the traffic on the avenue, even the rising yellow and roseate hues of the early evening, all faded into the distant background as the flavor soared up to its crescendo. They spent a good half an hour eating two helpings while talking of little else.

  “This is quite a revelation,” Alexandre said. “I need to take that young woman even more seriously. This is going to be quite a meal. What’s next?”

  “Capucine has already told me,” Théophile said. “And finding the right wine was quite a challenge. In the end I picked a Château Chasse-Spleen, the two thousand again, naturally.” He turned to Cécile. “It’s a Moulis, of course, and there’s an interesting little controversy over whether the name comes from Baudelaire or Lord Byron. In my op—”

  Capucine cut him off again by reading from the little card that had come with the food. This time the smiles of gratitude came from the entire table.

  “This is called ‘la poularde de Marcel Meunier’ and is a pan-roasted fattened hen—presumably raised by this Monsieur Meunier—served with blue lobster tail, green asparagus, morels, and a lobster reduction.”

  There was a murmur of appreciation and approval.

  As Capucine began to unpack the container and Théophile poured wine with great concentration, a faint commotion was heard from the Etoile. Was it just merrymakers whooping, or was there the note of a girl screaming? Capucine fell silent, cocking her ears, analyzing the noise, instinctively placing her hand over her crotch, preparing to grab her firearm. Jacques was equally alert but couldn’t resist smirking at her gesture and giving a knowing wink.

  The tumult at the top of the avenue increased in volume. Someone yelled, “A l’aide! Police! Police!” Capucine got up and ran up the hill.

  When she reached the Etoile, a large knot of people had gathered around one of the buses, talking loudly to each other, spilling out into the roundabout, slowing traffic. Angry motorists vented their rage with their horns. Four uniformed Paris police officers approached at a rapid, self-important walk from the opposite direction. In the distance Capucine could hear the faint double note of the pan-pon of police sirens coming up the avenue de la Grande Armée.

  Capucine pushed through the crowd. The epicenter seemed to be in the tight alleyway created by two buses parked in parallel. Gawkers peered in from either end. A dark lump lay half under one of the buses.

  The four Paris police officers appeared behind Capucine and ordered her away. She produced her tricolor police card. They saluted smartly. She ordered two to stand at either end of the corridor between the buses and the other two to clear the Etoile of people and restore the flow of traffic. They moved off readily. Traffic control held no secrets from them.

  Capucine inched down the narrow space. The buses were so close to each other that the area was shrouded in deep twilight. In the exact middle of the alleyway, a man lay prone half under one of the buses, his head and face hidden by the chassis. The body was completely immobile. She knelt down and felt the carotid for a pulse. Nothing.

  With two hands she gently turned the head toward her. It was a grotesque parody of an African headhunter’s trophy about to be shrunk in hot sand. The cheeks billowed out, horribly distended. The lips had been pulled tight over an open jaw and sutured shut with white string. The mouth had obviously been crammed to the bursting point with something. Clumps of green leaves protruded from between the sutured lips. The eyes bulged, lifeless, beginning to glaze like a bad fish’s. A cord had bitten deeply into the neck, leaving a blackened depression.

  In the half-light recognition came slowly but surely. It was Peroché. Without any doubt whatsoever.

  CHAPTER 19

  By the time Capucine arrived home, it was nearly one in the morning. It had been a
long night.

  After her examination of the body she had immediately called her brigade and given orders for Isabelle, David, and Momo to be found, wherever they were, and sent to the crime scene, along with a contingent of uniformed officers and the forensic unit.

  As she’d waited for the troops to arrive, she had called Tallon’s cell phone to give her report. They had a long conversation, frequently punctuated by Tallon’s salty invective. When she had announced that a van of Paris police had arrived, Tallon had said, “Bon sang, get off the phone and deal with them before they destroy your crime scene. We’ll finish this discussion in my office in the morning.”

  The van had disgorged eight uniformed officers with the cloth badges of the Paris police on their arms. She had flashed her card and had directed them to get the names and addresses of the people who had been gawking when she arrived and to cordon off both buses. A broad yellow tape marked POLICE—ZONE INTERDITE had been hastily wrapped twice around the two buses with the enthusiastic zeal of a child wrapping an oversize Christmas present.

  The driver of the bus farther from the curb had arrived on the scene and was outraged at being denied access by the officer guarding the front of the buses. The driver’s wallet was in the jacket hanging on the back of his seat, and he needed it to have a bite in a café. Sullenly obdurate, the officer asked for the driver’s papiers. In a rage, the driver explained with mordant irony that his national identity card was in his wallet in his jacket on the bus, which he had not been allowed to get. Just as Capucine was about to step in to quash the escalating confrontation between irresistible and unmovable, the local Paris police commissaire and one of his lieutenants arrived—imposing in blue uniforms dripping with silver trim—in a midsize Renault police car, self-importantly announcing itself with an arrogant pam-pom-pam-pom.