One of them came up to Capucine, saluted importantly, and said, “The body’s in the WC back there.” As Capucine followed Dechery in the direction of a door decorated with a garishly painted Kabuki mask of a ferocious warrior, she saw Gaël Tanguy, the novelist, sitting by himself at a corner table. He caught her eye and smiled furtively. Ill kempt and shabbily dressed, he looked decidedly out of place surrounded by golden youths preening in their finery. His neighbors caught the exchange of glances and their looks of derision hardened into outright opprobrium for Tanguy.
Anxious to view the body before Dechery’s experts commandeered the scene with their plastic evidence bags and aluminum fingerprint powder, Capucine ignored Tanguy and pushed on to the toilet.
The room was surprisingly large. The walls and ceiling were jet-black, and the only lighting came from tightly focused halogen lamps recessed in the ceiling, creating pools of brilliant light surrounded by dark shadow. A row of six urinals had been painted to represent the faces of voluptuous blond women with mouths expectantly wide open.
Dechery shook his head in dismay. “I already have enough problems with my prostate without even thinking of coping with something like that.”
Laroque’s body sat, pants on, on the seat in one of the toilet stalls. His head was bent back, his mouth wide open, brilliantly lit by a halogen lamp. Except for the fact that his fly was unzipped and his penis hung out, he might have been sitting in a dentist’s chair, stoically waiting for the drill.
Dechery bent over, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. He peered intently at the victim’s head from all angles and then picked up one of the limp arms, examining the hand closely.
“Why don’t you take my usual little speech—you know, the one about nothing being known until the autopsy, the biological cultures, our magical light exam, yada yada—as read, and I’ll point out what’s plain to see.
“This guy was whacked on the back of the head and then someone forced open his mouth and rammed a Japanese fugu fish down his throat.”
“This is not the time for kidding, Dechery.”
“I’m not kidding. It’s crystal clear. There’s a laceration on the back of the head that bled profusely. That alone would tell us the blow didn’t kill him, but of course, since the SAMU spent a lot of time working on him, he obviously wasn’t deceased. The reason his mouth is open like that is because the SAMU stuck a respirator down his throat and only removed it after he was dead.”
“So what’s this business about a fish?”
“The SAMU pulled it out and left it with one of the Paris flics, who handed it over to me.” He pulled a plastic evidence bag from the side pocket of his jacket and waved it at Capucine. It contained a bug-eyed fish about three inches long, dark gray with white dots on its back and a pasty white belly.
“I thought blowfish were bigger.”
“The ones the Japanese eat are actually a couple of inches longer than this one. But there are at least a hundred and fifty species of Tetraodontidae and this may be a small variety or a juvenile. I’m a forensics expert, not an ichthyologist, but there’s no doubt this is a blowfish. After all, they’re the second most lethal animal around. That’s the sort of thing we know about.”
“So he was killed by the fish’s poison?”
“Of course not. He suffocated. A goldfish would have been just as effective if it had been crammed down his esophagus. It’s pretty clear how it was done.”
Dechery lifted the head and turned it to the left. There was a deep gash. Profuse barely clotted blood thickened the hair on the back of the head.
“If you want my guess, he was taking a pee in the toilet bowl—probably because he couldn’t deal with the artwork on the urinals—and someone whacked him from behind, stunning him or possibly knocking him unconscious. Then his mouth was forced open. Look at the bruising on the cheeks. Someone pinched him on the maxillary line to force the jaw open. When he opened up, the fish was shoved deep into his throat. You can see the bleeding from where the SAMU extracted it.”
“And the fish’s poison wouldn’t have affected him?”
“It’s the liver that contains most of the tetrodotoxin. As you probably know, that’s taken out before the Japanese eat the damn thing. The amount of tetrodotoxin that’s left in the fish is just enough to give a tingling sensation in the lips. Supposed to be a big thrill. But, anyway, you’d have to eat it for it to have any effect. Having it lodged in your throat wouldn’t introduce any toxicity at all.”
Capucine nodded.
“Also, there’s abundant evidence he suffocated. Look at the blue color of the lips.”
Dechery picked up one of the victim’s arms and pointed to the cuticles.
“See these blue half-moons at the base of the nails? That’s a symptom of prolonged oxygen starvation.”
“Prolonged?”
“He suffocated slowly. Some air must have gone past the fish but not much. At a guess, I’d say he was suffocating for a good half an hour before the SAMU got the fish out and the respirator in. Probably my last choice of a way to die.”
They both fell silent as they conjured up visions of Laroque’s agony.
“I need to get to work,” Dechery said. “You know the drill. It’s all guesswork until we do our stuff.”
“I want to check one thing first. Lend me a pair of your gloves.”
Dechery pulled a pair of latex gloves from a cardboard dispenser in his kit and handed them to Capucine, who snapped them on.
The victim’s jacket was held shut by the middle button. She opened it and examined the inside pockets. Next she slid her gloved fingers into the outside breast pocket, then the side pockets, and finally patted down the sides of his pants. Shaking her head, she pulled the gloves off and handed them back to Dechery.
“Checking to see if his wallet was taken?”
“No, I was looking for a pen. He doesn’t seem to have one. When you do the full inventory can you call me if there’s a writing implement of any kind?”
“Sure. Would it be okay if we got rolling or do you want to have a peek at his underwear to check the brand?”
Capucine stood up, wondering why forensics experts were invariably so ill-tempered.
Breathlessly, Isabelle rushed into the WC. “Sorry it took me so long to get here,” she said without explanation.
“No problem. While I finish up I want you to go back to the dining room and move Tanguy away from the other customers. I don’t want him swapping stories with them.”
“Tanguy?”
“Didn’t you see him sitting right by the door?”
Isabelle shook her head.
Both women rushed out of the men’s room, elbowing the arriving forensics experts aside.
Tanguy’s table was empty and it took no more than a glance to determine he was nowhere in the room.
CHAPTER 32
Capucine sprinted for the elevator with Isabelle in her backwash. She tapped the DOWN button and glowered intently at its red glow as if she could suck the elevator up with her willpower.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have stationed one of the Paris uniforms at the door and told him specifically not to let anyone out. Tanguy probably noticed no one was looking and just walked away.” Capucine jabbed impatiently at the button.
“That doesn’t help,” Isabelle said.
“Of course it does.” The elevator door began to open. “See.”
Momo stood impassively inside the elevator car. Capucine and Isabelle stormed in. Capucine stabbed repeatedly at the RDC button for the ground floor. Scowling at the button, she explained the situation to Momo.
“Gaël Tanguy was at the restaurant when the murder happened. The Paris flics let him slip out when I was in the WC, examining the body.”
Momo emitted a low growl of commiseration.
A uniformed Paris police officer stood hunched over at the street door of the restaurant, lost in the vagaries he had taught himself over the years to numb the boredom of end
less guard duty where nothing ever happened. As the three detectives rushed up to him, he turned toward them sluggishly.
“Did you see a man leave the restaurant about five minutes ago?” Isabelle asked.
“I saw a guy, yeah. So?”
Isabelle snorted. “And you didn’t think to stop him?”
“No one told me to stop anyone,” the officer said dolefully.
“And what did he do when he left?” Capucine asked.
“He walked to the corner and hailed a cab.” The second part of the answer—“What the fuck did you think he would have done, flap his wings and fly off? ”—although left unsaid, was so lightly suppressed it hung in the air, clearly visible to his three interlocutors.
“Did you get the cab’s number?” Capucine asked.
The policeman looked at her, his eyes slightly widened in disbelief at the stupidity of the question. “It was a Taxi Bleu. I wasn’t told to write down the license plate of every passing car.”
A white van with blue and red stripes pulled up with its blue light flashing and its siren wailing its deafening pan-pom-pan-pom. As it screeched to a stop, the driver turned off the siren, leaving them in the sudden, deafening quiet. The van disgorged a half dozen uniformed Police Judiciaire officers.
Capucine flipped open her phone, hit the speed-dial button for her brigade, and began spewing out a volley of instructions.
Putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she said, “Isabelle, get back up there with these guys, and get this fucking show back on the rails. Depositions from the victim’s companions. Who saw what. Names and addresses ...”
“Durand, this is Commissaire Le Tellier. Patch me through to Taxi Bleu... .”
“Momo, go get the Twingo. We’re going to pick him up... .”
“Taxi Bleu, this is Commissaire Le Tellier of the Police Judiciaire. One of your cabs just picked up someone on the quai de la Mégisserie. I need to know where it’s headed.”
Momo drove up and tapped the horn of the Twingo. As Capucine opened the passenger door, Momo indicated the back of the car with his head. Two bulletproof vests, a Beretta Model 12 submachine gun, and a bag of spare clips lay on the backseat. Capucine was about to make a comment about excessive zeal but realized the equipment, which Momo must have taken out of the van, was required by police procedure when apprehending a fugitive suspect. Momo looked at her, his broad face expressionless as ever except for an almost unnoticeable upturn of his lips.
As the Twingo pulled away from the curb, Capucine continued her multiple staccato dialogues over the cell phone. Finally she snapped it shut.
“The cab just pulled up at the Restaurant Drouant in the rue Gaillon in the Second. We need to get there fast. I asked for a backup squad car but I want to get there first.”
“No problem,” Momo said, the first words he had spoken that evening.
After a short but bucketing ride that required Capucine to hold on to the handle above the passenger door with both hands, Momo double-parked in front of the restaurant. A valet parking attendant approached but disappeared when he saw Momo emerge from the car with the submachine gun.
They both donned their vests, Velcroed them shut, and walked into Drouant’s elegant oak-paneled foyer. The hostess, a trim woman in her late forties, her dark blond hair meticulously coiffed in a bun, recoiled at the sight of the two armored police officers.
“Did a man in a checked shirt just come in here?” Capucine asked.
Wide eyed, the woman stammered, “Y ... yes. A very shy man. He was looking for a friend.”
Capucine and Momo pushed past her into the main dining room. At the sight of them the patrons fell silent, slowly turning toward them like cows facing the wind in a pasture. It was obvious at a glance that Tanguy was not there.
“Upstairs,” Capucine said.
The hostess stood in the middle of the foyer, fretting.
“Are there dinners going on in any of the private dining rooms?”
“No. Not tonight.”
Momo and Capucine, pistol drawn and machine gun at the ready, crept up the famous staircase, familiar from TV news shots of the Goncourt committee descending gravely to announce that year’s winner of the country’s top literary award.
The floor above them was dark. If Tanguy was armed, Momo and Capucine were at a dangerous disadvantage, facing an invisible opponent while silhouetted by the backlight from the main floor.
Momo put out an arm, blocking Capucine, and inched soundlessly up the stairs in front of her. Capucine knew better than to try to argue with him.
They reached the second floor and stood immobile, flanking the staircase, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the faint penumbra of street glow coming from under the closed dining room doors.
It took a full three minutes for their pupils to dilate fully. Seven oak doors were visible. Five bore small brass plaques—Capucine assumed these were the private dining rooms—two had larger square plaques, certainly the men’s and ladies’ toilets.
Wordlessly, they began opening the doors one by one, Capucine hugging the wall, pistol raised, while Momo inched the heavy oak door open with his foot, pointing the machine gun on extended arms. To their sensitized eyes the luminescence coming through the windows was more than ample.
The first four rooms were empty. As Momo eased the door to the fifth open, the brass rectangle was readable, SALLE GONCOURT. An immobile pyramidal lump in the middle of the large circular table stood out, black against the window’s glow.
“Welcome Commissaire Le Tellier and friend,” Tanguy said.
As they moved closer, wide-legged, arms at the ready, they could see that he was sitting cross-legged in a lotus position in the exact center of the table.
“I apologize if I caused you any inconvenience. But sitting in that restaurant, being judged—and condemned—by philistines, was too much for me. I needed to come here, where I have already been judged, and found not wanting.”
His head swiveled around the table, nodding at each seat, naming the committee of ten great French authors, “Françoise Chandernagor, Tahar Ben Jelloun ...” finally arriving at “... Bernard Pivot and Didier Decoin,” whose names were just readable on little brass rectangles on the backs of their chairs.
“How I would have liked to be the proverbial fly on the wall,” Tanguy said. “Which of them praised me? Who attacked me? Did any of them really make sense of my book? And the burning question of the evening: will their bloody gong goad me to new heights or will it destroy me?”
Capucine holstered her pistol. “Monsieur Tanguy, je suis désolée, but fleeing a murder scene, particularly when you are such an obvious suspect, is a rather serious crime. I’m afraid I’m going to have to take you into custody.”
Tanguy shrugged his shoulders.
“Were you spying on the bourgeoisie again?” Capucine asked. “Is that what you were doing there?”
A pan-pom-pan-pom wailed in the distance as the backup squad car Capucine had ordered approached.
“Do you know about Mary’s room?” Tanguy asked.
This was hardly the moment for Saint-Germain cocktail chatter but she might as well listen to him while they were waiting for her men.
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“It’s a logical construct that was intended to demolish physicalism. You know, the notion that existence is ultimately purely physical.”
“So?”
“So, Mary is an extremely learned scientist. She holds six PhDs. Actually, she’s also a luscious blonde with enormous boobs—”
“That part sounds excessively physicalist to me right there.”
“You’re right. She’s plain, pimply, and flat chested. I was embellishing. But she really does have four PhDs. You can’t take those away from her.”
“On with it.”
“All right, all right. So for reasons we don’t know, Mary is held prisoner in a room entirely decorated in black and white. She has a black-and-white television and, of course, an extensive lib
rary that is all black and white because the covers of the books have been removed. She is an expert in the human nervous system and knows all there is to know about sight. Still with me?”
“Just get on with it, Tanguy.”
“So, if, for example, she reads something about the bright red poppies in the field, she knows all about the wavelength that produces red on the retina. In fact, she has an absolutely perfect theoretical understanding of the color red.”
“I hope that makes up for her poor complexion and flat chest.”
“It does. Yes, it does. One day she discovers the door to her cell is open and walks out. And what do you suppose she sees?”
“Epiphenomenal qualia?” Capucine asked. Even in the half-light she could see Tanguy’s lower jaw descend a half inch.
“We read Frank Jackson at Sciences Po. Let me cut to the chase. You’re trying to tell me that you’re an un-pimpled Mary and you were in that restaurant tonight to take a bain de bourgeoise to see if the real world has any more substance than the world you see in your Mary’s room of a head. Is that it?”
Tanguy nodded, at a loss for words.
“So tell me, Monsieur Tanguy, was your qualia really enhanced? That’s really the burning question of the evening. What exactly did you see?”
“I ... I had no idea you felt so strongly about this sort of thing.”
“I do. I’m allergic to bullshit. It’s one of the many reasons I joined the police.”
The room quietly filled with uniformed officers, all in bullet-proof jackets, all carrying machine guns.
Tanguy looked down at the table, pouting slightly. “Well, it’s important to me. My books are all about qualia.”
“Before these gentlemen take you off to our own version of Mary’s room, I really need to know what you saw this evening.”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I sat in my corner, watching the people, eating my meal, which was really more bizarre than good. And all of a sudden the room filled with police officers hovering around the WC. I thought the toilet must have overflowed or something horrible like that. And the next thing I saw was that everyone was looking down their noses at me and hating me. So I just left.”
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