by John Brooke
While the Music Lasts
AN ALIETTE NOUVELLE MYSTERY
JOHN BROOKE
© 2016, John Brooke
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Terry Gallagher/Doowah Design.
Photograph of John Brooke by Anne Laudouar.
Author’s Note: Many of the locations in this novel are fictional, although those familiar with the area may notice more than a passing resemblance to actual places.
We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.
Ann Lamott quote (part 1) from “Ann Lamott shares everything she knows,” Salon.com, April 10, 2015; John Berger quote (part 2) from “Some notes on song: The rhythms of listening,” Harper’s, February, 2015.
Cover art based on Johann Carl Loth’s painting Music Lesson.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brooke, John, 1951-
While the music lasts / John Brooke.
(An Aliette Nouvelle mystery)
Issued also in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-927426-70-8 (paperback).
--ISBN 978-1-927426-71-5 (epub)
I. Title. II. Series: Brooke, John, 1951 August 27- Aliette
Nouvelle mystery.
PS8553.R6542W45 2016 C813’.54 C2015-905906-2
C2015-906000-1
Signature Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon
Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7
www.signature-editions.com
Always for Annie
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART 1
THE MIRI THREAD
• 1 •
A DOG CALLED LENNON
• 2 •
A FLIGHT OF SWALLOWS
• 3 •
PARIS GREEN AND PETTY PEOPLE
• 4 •
A BATTERED BUSKER
• 5 •
LES DEUX FILLES
• 6 •
TWO SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS AND A SMASHED GUITAR
• 7 •
MIRI’S ACOLYTES
• 8 •
DISCRETION
• 9 •
JUST US?
• 10 •
THE LINE WAS NOT SO FINE
• 11 •
POSTER WAR
• 12 •
FIRE IN THE VINES
PART 2
TOWARD THE NIGHT OF MUSIC
• 13 •
CONFLICTED CHORUS
• 14 •
FORENSICS FIRST PASS
• 15 •
A DIRTY LITTLE BUSINESS TRICK
• 16 •
A SENSE OF GUILT
• 17 •
INSTRUCTIVE FINGER
• 18 •
THIN WOMEN
• 19 •
ENTER MARTINE ROGGE
• 20 •
ASSIGNMENTS
• 21 •
FORGET THE FEAR IN YOUR HEART
• 22 •
ANOTHER FAN
• 23 •
SMACKED IN THE SOUL
• 24 •
COMMUNICATING
• 25 •
FALLOUT
• 26 •
ACOUSTICS
• 27 •
INTERROGATING LEINA
• 28 •
TWO VIEWS OF THE HUNTING PARTY
• 29 •
THE NIGHT OF MUSIC
PART 3
AT THE HEART OF THE CURSE OF MISFORTUNE
• 30 •
SUNDAY AT JÉROME’S
• 31 •
COP AT THE WINDOW
• 32 •
ONGOING MANOEUVRES IN THE FIELD
• 33 •
BORDEL
• 34 •
WHEN THE WORLD IS EXACTLY FINE
• 35 •
WHAT RACHELLE KNEW
• 36 •
FAMILY DYNAMICS
• 37 •
BAD COP
• 38 •
FACETIME
• 39 •
DOWNWARD TRENDING
• 40 •
ISABELLE’S LIE
• 41 •
JÉROME’S GUN
• 42 •
ISABELLE’S BIG DAY
• 43 •
AN AWFUL TRUTH
• 44 •
SECOND EYES
• 45 •
TWO JOLIE COPS ON BIKES
• 46 •
THE KILLING GUN
• 47 •
EXPANDING THE WINDOW
• 48 •
PERSONAL REASONS
• 49 •
MOVING THE PAWN
• 50 •
SATURDAY TIMELINES
• 51 •
YOU ASKED FOR A MAN?
• 52 •
THE MOON IN HER FACE
EPILOGUE
NOTES
OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
You are the music while the music lasts.
T. S. Eliot
The Dry Salvages
PROLOGUE
Ten years had passed since the tragedy — a blow to the head that killed his lover, the actress Miriam Monette. He had been released the previous spring. It was on the evening broadcast; they’d caught a preview of that dull, fixed-forward stare. Legally, Luc Malarmé, former frontman and driving creative force behind Ma Malheureuse Pelouse, had paid his debt to society and was just another man faced with the long, slow task of rebuilding his life. But Luc was not just another man, and moral outrage is like an insidious weed. When a friend tried to help Luc get a leg up, the weed grew rampant. The friend was a theatre director in Montreal who was mounting a play and had created a role for Luc — as an on-stage balladeer narrating the thread in song. The shrill reaction to this gesture made it more than a little ironic that it was a play about forgiveness.
Chief Inspector Aliette Nouvelle thought so. ‘Let the man get on with his life!’ she blustered.
Luc Malarmé was only a singer, after all. Perhaps he would sing a redemption song.
Magistrate Sergio Regarri thought Luc surely would, suggesting, ‘Who among us is above forgiving?’
In the world of French celebrity Miriam Monette had been the equivalent of royalty. Both her parents had enjoyed long and much-praised careers on stage and sceen. Miri was a princess. When news of Luc’s planned Canadian gig surfaced, her father led the righteous parade, declaring it a travesty that Luc Malarmé should sing again in public. How could he sing with Miri confined to the grave? It confirmed the man’s utter lack of remorse. Miri’s papa appeared on evening télé and said it plainly, ‘I detest him. I cannot forgive him.’ A legion of commentators fell loudly in behind. They said that for Luc Malarmé to sing again on stage would render his sin null and void. A politician in Canada who stood for family values intervened. Decreeing that all right-thinking Canadians agreed, the minister in charge of culture made sure Luc’s work
visa was revoked.
Paris buzzed and snarked and roiled…
Watching from the south of France one warm evening in early autumn, a disgusted Aliette remarked, ‘How lucky for Canada to have such morally decisive leadership. Poor sheep.’
‘And couldn’t we use some here?’ Sergio replied, laconic, ironic, but not cynical.
Dear Sergio could not allow himself to be cynical and hope to do a decent job.
For a cop, it’s harder. Aliette supposed she could understand Miri’s aggrieved papa. And she had agreed with the feminist side of the debate the sad incident had sparked during the trial some ten years before. There may have been mitigating circumstances, but there was no excuse.
But the backlash of bitterness disappointed her. Nine years in prison is not nothing.
In November a popular Senegalese band invited Luc to come and sing with them.
Which incited yet more angst and accusation in the salons and studios of Paris.
Luc Malarmé had come down before Christmas, to his retreat on a ridge between Prades and Berlou. They’d started seeing him around town that winter. It was hard to miss that boyish face, the tousled hair that kept him looking barely over twenty even after nine years in a prison cell. He was indeed well practised in the art of gazing straight ahead. Luc Malarmé now existed in a netherworld of shame, permanently stained by his violent act. Most citizens of Saint-Brin stared but kept their distance as he unassumingly took his turn in line at the post office, the bank, the butcher’s, or at the Sunday market, that most public moment in the course of a week, when you saw everyone, at least in passing. They were curious to see such a man so close, and so ordinary. Aliette stared too. Impossible not to.
Others were more than curious. They were the ones who found him unforgivable.
It was the way they sized him up, openly judgmental, as if he were a melon past its prime.
There’s a cheap image for you — a cheap image for a small, mean-minded sentiment.
But apt for a Sunday morning in early March. Aliette and Sergio were selecting tomatoes. Luc Malarmé was directly across the lane, at a fruit vendor’s, standing in a shaft of spring sunlight that had found its way through the covering of plane tree foliage. He was choosing a cantaloupe, appraising each piece of fruit with a touch once magical on a keyboard, a guitar string, working notes from his haunting flute. The Midi sun was truly warm that day and you might have thought that simple fact might be reflected in a fruit vendor’s eyes. But, no… Aliette watched the woman edging closer, peering, angry in advance, as if sure that Luc Malarmé would grab one of her wares and run, a pathetic petty thief. The sheer meanness in that woman’s face left the inspector boggled. ‘He looks so utterly alone,’ she murmured.
‘Everyone looks lonely when they’re shopping.’
Sergio’s off-the-cuff profundities were one of the many reasons Aliette had stayed with him for coming on three years. Today, purposely or otherwise, he’d missed her point. ‘I mean in the world. No one will go near him… How can that woman go to mass?’
‘She doesn’t. She comes here to sell her fruit.’
‘It’s a disgrace.’
‘Invite him for a drink. Take him out of pity.’
‘I’m sure he doesn’t want anyone’s pity.’
‘Everyone does, in their own way.’
Sergio got back to the business of selecting fare for their Sunday lunch. He chose another tomato and added it to the basket on the inspector’s arm. Then three more with quick resolve. Some radishes, lettuce, cucumbers. Aliette edged along beside her judge. Gawking? Luc Malarmé was more intriguing than her lover’s feel for fresh produce.
He was now bent over a crate of peaches, apparently oblivious to the resentment telegraphed from the fruit vendor’s damning eyes. But a veteran cop is hard-wired to the concept of intent and Aliette was deciding never to buy another piece of fruit from that awful woman when Sergio leaned close, advising, ‘You have to let people live their lives. He’ll sort it out. It’s not like he’s without resources.’
Of course he was not without resources. Luc Malarmé was rich. His band had been the biggest French music phenomenon since Johnny Hallyday. Nine years in jail and all the related legal costs would not come near to depleting that man’s stash of music industry gold.
‘But he’s starving for forgiveness,’ she countered.
‘Alors, what do you suggest?’
‘I don’t know… Do we not forgive the sinner who has paid the price?’ A question based on the words of our Saviour and hundreds of years of legal philosophy, not to mention her mother’s pithy admonishments that always went straight to her heart and stayed there.
Sergio shrugged — he was only an Instructing Judge. He gently freed the basket from her arm and presented it to the vegetable vendor to be sorted, weighed and priced.
Aliette heard a voice behind her utter, sotto voce, ‘It’s wrong, so smug, to come walking back into the world like that, glorying in the fact of himself, like nothing happened. Poor Miri. If he weren’t so rich he’d be rotting in his jail cell. We’d not have to see this in our town!’
Where did these people get their ideas? How could anyone be smug after nine years inside?
And the hateful fruit vendor had no problem accepting his money…
Aliette watched him, bags in hand, head bowed, alone as he moved off through the market.
It was as if he had come to test them.
PART 1
THE MIRI THREAD
Earth is forgiveness school. I believe that’s why they brought us here, then left us without any owner’s manual.
Ann Lamott
• 1 •
A DOG CALLED LENNON
Saint-Brin, population about 10,000, was in the lap of a Midi valley. Wine was its principal resource, and while the valley was indisputably picturesque and some of the wines superb, the town was only ordinaire. Two butchers, three bakers, one SuperU, one smaller grocery, two gas stations, two pharmacies (same owner), two doctors (no dentist), three restaurants in a row, one national bank in competition with the banking arm of the post office, one church, one newsagent.
Offices of the Police Judiciaire were on the second floor of the mairie. Chief Inspector Nouvelle’s looked out at the Great War memorial, grey and obscure with its fading names, standing at the confluence of stone paths lined with benches winding through the public garden. Some days the view was peaceful, even charming. Other days the inspector had to remind herself that this was what she had chosen. She could have been part of the major Divisional restructuring and run her affairs from an office in the city of Béziers, forty minutes south. She could have eaten lunch with Sergio each day. But this spacious, often chilly room in a generic Third Empire provincial administrative building was at the heart of her assigned territory, and, three years prior, newly transferred, still sorting through the personal fallout of a failed relationship in the north, an office here had seemed both operationally logical and emotionally necessary. Her new Divisional bosses in Montpellier had reviewed the numbers related to the cost of office space for her and her team and said, ‘Fine, carry on in the old commissariat, Inspector.’ So long as she coped with the constant commuting into the city, it balanced out and it was all the same to them. Yes, her choice. She hadn’t known Sergio then.
In summer she was unequivocally glad to be here in this busy, if muted, town, while the city sweated and stank, and where byzantine streets meant wearying traffic bedlam.
Leave Saint-Brin? The thought had occurred, but it always got lost in the flow of days.
It was April, consistently warm now. The public gardens below were doing well, the season of unconditional love for her town and the life that came with it was hoving into view. Aliette had not laid eyes on Luc Malarmé since that Sunday in the market back in March. Or thought about him. She had ranted at Sergio about her fellow
citizens’ lack of charity toward another popular god fallen low, then moved on from that dismaying moment. Presiding over a sprawling rural territory encompassing almost fifty towns and hundreds of villages and hamlets kept her too busy to brood.
And so: ‘Oui?’ turning from her window, responding to a timid knock, she was nonplussed to find the disgraced star standing at her office door. Unescorted, looking lost and shambling in dirty blue jeans, a ragged grey training jersey displaying an American logo, and needing a haircut. But healthy — he had been getting air and sun. He must have wandered up the stairs. Aliette deduced that staff secretary Mathilde Lahi and her counterparts downstairs were all still at their lunch.
‘Is this the police?’
‘Police Judiciaire,’ she stammered, suddenly face to face with the famously boyish presence. She stood, extended a hand across her desk. ‘Chief Inspector Nouvelle. How can I help you?’
He stepped forward and shook it. ‘My name is Luc —’
‘I know your name.’
Said too hastily, it got a grimace — a delicate place touched too quickly, indiscreetly.
A pained look revealed another layer. He was taller than he always seemed, more substantial, and obviously no longer the boyish presence his name automatically invoked. He was a man in his forties and starting to show it: hints of jowls forming, some burst capillaries under his eyes, touches of grey at his temples hiding under the swirling curls.
But he recovered in a blink and moved closer. A not-so-shy gleam in those green eyes, a slight twitch of his fleshy lips forming the beginnings of a hopeful smile; the illusion fell back into place, enigmatic and attractive. Aliette felt something automatic move inside her.
Not sure what exactly, but one felt one cared. Her eyes adjusted, her psyche tried to.
