He opened the door. To his great surprise, his partner, Jacques Molina, was already there.
“Well, you must have fallen out of bed today,” Sebag said as he hung his jacket on the back of his chair.
“People say hello when they’re polite,” Molina replied.
“Hello when they’re polite.”
“You’re not in great shape today. For you, the end of vacation is like a huge hangover . . . ”
“A little, yes. I was expecting it to be hard, but I think it’s even worse.”
“Fortunately, you were gone only a week . . . Would you like some coffee?”
Sebag couldn’t repress a shiver of disgust. He loved coffee, real coffee, not the murky stuff you could get for forty centimes from the machine in the police headquarters cafeteria.
“No, thanks. Going back to work is already a torture; I don’t want to add a poisoning to it.”
“Whatever you say.”
Molina rose from his chair.
“I’m going to get some, I need it.”
“Do we have a meeting with the chief this morning?”
Every Monday, Superintendent Castello met with the group to review the ongoing cases.
“No, he cancelled it. I think that when things are quiet these Monday meetings bore him as much as they do us.”
Molina left the room while Sebag booted his computer. The machine woke up slowly, sounding more like a 1930s locomotive than a third-millennium IT device. From the top drawer of his desk, Sebag took out three photos that brightened his professional universe. He set them down one by one: Claire’s sunny face against the blue background of the swimming pool, Sévérine smiling as she blew out her thirteen birthday candles, and, finally, his son Léo proudly sitting on his shiny new scooter. Gilles thought of Mathieu’s accident and felt a pain in the pit of his stomach. Not Léo, never Léo . . . He was mad at himself for not having been able to resist his wife’s and his son’s wheedling. He’d ended up giving his consent and Léo had been riding that engine of death for the past year.
The computer had finished booting up. Sebag decided not to look at his e-mail. A week’s vacation . . . There would be too many messages, memos, copies of reports, union tracts, ads, and maybe a few personal notes. He knew that if he dove into all that, telling himself “just for five minutes,” he wouldn’t surface for at least half an hour. So he went directly to the headquarters data bank. A password, a click on the “accidents” button, and he easily found Mathieu’s case. He looked for the signature at the bottom of the document. Lieutenant Cardona. The head of the accident section himself. A surly cop who was not always very conscientious. That was both good and bad news. Although he might hope to discover something his colleague had missed, Sebag also knew he was going to get into trouble. Too bad. For Sévérine, he was prepared to do anything.
He was beginning to read the report when Molina suddenly burst into the office.
“Stop playing on the computer and put on your jacket,” he said breathlessly. “We’ve got work to do.”
Sebag looked up. Molina was heading toward his own desk.
“A body, in an apartment in Moulin-à-Vent, Place de Montbolo. Discovered this morning by a neighbor woman.”
He grabbed a bottle of cologne and squirted it under his shirt.
“The guy’s been dead for at least three days. He was found because of the smell.”
Sebag picked up a package of tissues, took out two or three, and put a few drops of lavender scent on them.
“I’m ready,” he said as he started printing Mathieu’s file. “A natural death, a suicide, or a homicide, do they have any idea?”
“According to the ambulance crew, there was blood all over the walls and the victim had a very clear wound to the back of the head.”
Sebag got up.
“I see. There are, in fact, more natural ways to die. And suicide is unlikely, unless he was a contortionist.”
“Especially since the victim, a certain Bernard Martinez, was handcuffed to a chair.”
“Okay, that reduces the hypotheses further.”
The printer started spitting out the first pages. Sebag put on his jacket, telling himself that today he probably wouldn’t have any time to devote to Mathieu’s accident, and that he ought to take the file home to mull it over that evening after dinner. A great way to spend his first day back on the job.
“The smell is unbearable.”
The face of Thierry Lambert, a young cop with the Perpignan police, was as white as a toilet bowl in a luxury hotel.
“And yet you are bearing it,” Molina replied. “That means you’re learning the job.”
Sebag and Molina had joined Lambert in the apartment on the Place de Montbolo. The three policemen were waiting in the hall, observing from a distance the members of the forensic team, who had put on their coveralls and were working around the body in the living room. Sebag shook his perfumed tissue in front of his face and succeeded in driving away for a few moments the bittersweet aroma of death. Having been the first to get there, Lambert had been able to get a quick view of the scene.
“He’s a rather old man, I’d say at least seventy. But part of his face is gone. The bullet did a lot of damage when it came out.”
“It was probably about money,” Molina suggested. “Burglars who wanted to make the victim tell them where he hid his nest egg.”
“But why would they have killed him?” Lambert asked.
“Because he refused to talk, or because he could have identified them.”
“You think so?” The young cop was indignant. “The bastards! I hope we can catch them fast.”
Sebag was half-listening as he contemplated the dark hallway. Faded wallpaper, black-and-white photos, a worn mauve carpet, and a gilt pedestal table with a telephone on it. In addition to the door open on the living room, the hall led to three others.
“What do you think?” Lambert asked.
“Me? For the moment, nothing. I haven’t seen anything, so I don’t think anything.”
He went up to the photos. They all showed the same white-walled city by the sea.
“Just as prudent as ever,” Molina said, disapprovingly. “You don’t commit yourself.”
Sebag shrugged.
“I avoid forming ideas as soon as I arrive on the scene of a crime. The more ideas you have, the more blinders. A cop should be wary of his imagination.”
“Did you write that down, Thierry?” Molina joked. “That was Lieutenant Sebag’s lesson number one.”
Gilles shook his lavender-perfumed tissue again.
“Lesson number two: a good cop is a sponge. He has to imbue himself with his environment.”
He clasped his hands in front of his belly and then raised them to chest level. Then he slowly spread his arms to describe the arc of a circle.
“You keep quiet, you observe, you listen, you look, you sniff. Calmly. And you note down everything. It will be useful later on.”
With a gesture, he stopped Lambert, who was already getting ready to follow his recommendations to the letter.
“When I say ‘sniff,’ that’s just a figure of speech. Take it easy today. I don’t want to have your breakfast all over my shirt.”
While Molina was laughing, Sebag opened the other doors: a bedroom, a toilet, and a washroom. He spotted two toothbrushes on the shelf over the sink. He turned to Lambert.
“I thought Mr. Martinez lived alone.”
“That’s what the neighbor lady told me when I got here.”
“Don’t you want to go back and talk to her again and get her statement, to find out a little more about the victim? And then you could also question the other neighbors. When we got here, there were at least a dozen curious people standing around on the landing, might as well take advantage of that.”
“O.K., n
o problem.”
Delighted to escape the olfactory torment, Lambert already had his hand on the handle of the entry door when he froze.
“By the way, I didn’t tell you: there was a word on the door.”
“Which door?” Sebag asked.
“The living room door.”
“This one?” Sebag pointed to the open door.
“Yeah . . . or rather on the other side, otherwise you’d be able to see it.”
“And what was the word?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t read it?”
“Well, yeah, I did. There were only three letters. But I didn’t understand it. It must not have been French.”
Sebag wasn’t sure he understood.
“A three-letter word . . . written on a note attached to the door?”
“No, written on the door itself, big letters in black paint.”
“Paint? What was the word?”
“I don’t know, I tell you, it wasn’t French . . . ”
“But just three letters—you must be able to remember it!”
“Hey, I didn’t pay attention. It ended in ‘s,’ I think.”
Sebag heard Molina chuckling behind him.
“Is it serious?” Lambert asked worriedly.
“For the investigation, no, we’ll look into it later, but for you, it’s serious: not being able to memorize a three-letter word.”
“I know a three-letter word you can easily remember,” Molina broke in. “There are two s’s in it but they come at the end.”
“O.K., I get it. I’m not an . . . ”
Lambert suddenly interrupted himself, stared at his amused colleagues, and went out, slamming the door behind him.
“I think you made him mad,” Sebag observed.
“That’s also part of learning the job. The problem is that he immediately forgets what he’s learned.”
Molina looked at his watch and groaned.
“They’ve been in there for more than an hour. It seems like every time they take longer to do stupid stuff: all that time to put a few pubic hairs in a test tube.”
“That’s a fine image of our trade: it’s always nice to feel appreciated!”
Dressed in his traditional white coveralls, Jean Pagès, the head of the Perpignan forensic police, had suddenly appeared in the hallway. He looked at Molina with unconcealed contempt. Sebag tried to defuse the nascent conflict.
“You know Jacques, he’s old-school.”
“Yes, I know,” Pagès grumbled, “the school of strong-arm interrogations and miscarriages of justice.”
“A good whack on the head with a phone book often produces more evidence than your DNA samples,” Molina instantly replied. He liked to play the role of the obtuse cop.
Sebag cut him short.
“Have you finished? Can we go in now?”
“Yes, we’re done. Now we’re going to tackle the other rooms. I hope you haven’t messed things up in there.”
“I had a look but didn’t go in,” Sebag answered.
“If that Neanderthal there stayed in the hall, I’m okay.”
Sebag pushed Molina into the living room before he could reply. The smell of dead flesh grew stronger. It didn’t bother Elsa Moulin, Pagès’s assistant; she had put away her instruments and was beginning to take photos.
“You know, you look beautiful dressed like that,” Molina said, running his fingers over the cap that covered the young woman’s hair. “I find this outfit more and more exciting. You’ll have to invite me to dinner at your place some night or lend it to me for one of my girlfriends . . . ”
Elsa Moulin pulled her mask down over her chin and stuck her tongue out at him before retorting:
“I’ll lend it to you whenever you want!”
The living room was about three hundred square feet in area and was separated from the kitchen by a bar. A French door led to a sunny balcony. In the middle of the room stood a table covered with a red-and-white checkered cloth. There were four chairs; two were still in place at the table, while the corpse was on the third and the fourth faced it. It wasn’t hard to guess that the murderer had sat there to look at his victim. Or to talk with him.
“Can you sum up briefly for us?” Sebag asked the young woman. “Molina annoyed your boss.”
Elsa Moulin went up to the body. It was attached to the chair by the chain on the handcuffs. What remained of the head leaned toward the right shoulder. She pointed to the wound at the back of the head.
“The bullet went in there and came out in the middle of the face.”
She raised the body’s head. It no longer had a nose and had lost part of the right cheek.
“A bullet fired at point-blank range?” Molina asked.
“Not entirely.”
She indicated a pillow wrapped up in a plastic sack.
“The killer used it to muffle the sound of the shot.”
“And that was all it took?” Moulin said, astonished.
“It seems so, since no one reported it to us.”
“What was the time of death, in your opinion?” Sebag asked Elsa.
“The putrefaction of the body has already begun. I’d say five, maybe six days ago.”
“Do you realize what that means?” Molina said. “Six days without anybody looking in on him, that’s really incredible. When I was young, that wouldn’t have been possible, but nowadays, damn it, it’s all about selfishness and indifference. What a society we live in . . . Shit!”
Sebag let his partner express an anger that seemed to him as pertinent as it was pointless. It was one thing to use angry words and display noble feelings, and another to put them into action. Sebag had never heard Molina talk about his neighbors except to complain about them. He himself had always limited his relations with those around him to a minimum, and if something serious were to happen in one of the two houses next to his, he wasn’t sure he’d notice it. So why spill your bile if you aren’t capable of changing your own behavior? What shocked Sebag most in today’s France was not indifference or selfishness, it was that so many people were more eager to tell others what to do than to set an example.
“Five days, maybe six,” he repeated out loud. “It’s not going to be easy to get reliable witnesses.”
“The medical examiner will be more precise. The temperature in the apartment being more or less constant, he’ll be able tell you the time of death within a few hours.”
Sebag was delighted to hear that good news.
“How old do you think the victim is?”
“Seventy-eight.”
The two inspectors couldn’t hide their surprise. Elsa Moulin grinned at them. She nodded toward a chest of drawers.
“In the drawer on the left you’ll find all the documents you need. Identity card, driver’s license, social security card, tax return, and so on.”
Sebag went up to the body. A little old man, apparently harmless, dressed in a dirty, tattered dressing gown that gaped open to reveal an undershirt from which a few little white hairs emerged.
“According to his papers, the victim’s name was Bernard Martinez,” Elsa went on. “He was born in Algiers in 1934.”
Algiers . . . Of course. The white-walled city in the photos.
“But the most interesting thing is here,” she said, walking over to the door to the living room.
She shut the door and Sebag saw the notorious word written in black paint, the three letters that Lambert hadn’t been able to remember. “What a fool that guy is!” he said to himself.
Even though they weren’t separated by periods, the letters formed not a word but an acronym. And there was nothing foreign about it. Without having any particular knowledge of history, Sebag was very familiar with this acronym. It designated an organization that had shaken the streets of
Algiers fifty years earlier and sown terror among the Arab population.
OAS.
OAS, as in Organisation armée secrète.1
The letters painted on the door were a kind of death sentence. Molina went over and saw them as well. He gave a long whistle before exploding:
“Fuck!”
CHAPTER 4
Superintendent Castello raised his hand to call for silence. His carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee could not conceal the satisfied smile on his lips. Despite the recent changes imposed on his office by the top brass, the chief of the Perpignan police still cared more about people than about statistics: nothing got him revved up more than gathering his “cops” around him to work on an important case. When he learned about the murder in Moulin-à-Vent, he’d immediately mobilized his whole team. Seven men in all. That same morning Llach and Ménard had had to give up their current cases to help Sebag, Molina, and Lambert. But earlier it had not been possible to contact Raynaud and Moreno, the two inseparable partners, and they had just joined the other members of the team in the meeting room at police headquarters.
It was time to assess the results of the first day of the investigation.
Castello handed out the report that Sebag and Molina had just written, along with Jean Pagès’s analysis.
“The victim’s name is Bernard Martinez,” Castello informed them all. “He’s a Pied-Noir,2 born in Algeria in 1934. He came to France in 1962 and settled in Pyrénées-Orientales, where he worked as a winegrower. Since he retired, he’s been living in an apartment in the Moulin-à-Vent neighborhood. So far as we know, he’s a run-of-the-mill retiree. But first let’s look at the facts. Jean, please get straight to the point: give us your conclusions. We can find the details in your analysis.”
He tapped the pile of papers on the table.
“And congratulations on your rapidity. As usual, it’s perfect!”
Autumn, All the Cats Return Page 2
