But this was merely a front. De Palma knew how deeply violence affected him and how he had to work on himself so as not to look troubled. He knew about Marceau’s real need to regain his inner calm.
They paid and strolled off again through the night toward the Rhône.
“Still, there were a couple of things that bothered me just now.”
Marceau was speaking in a monotone.
“There were traces of footsteps. Tomorrow I’ll go and take molds with a boy from the lab. They lead from the hut and head straight to the place where Steinert was found. I don’t know why, but they looked really odd to me … The kind of thing that looks as though it can’t have got there by chance.”
“Why do you say that? Lots of people visit the place.”
“Yes, but not the edge of a stinking marsh!”
“You mentioned a hut …”
“Yes, it’s just nearby. That’s where the spade was found.”
“What spade?”
“The gendarmes think it was Steinert’s, but they’re not sure. Anyway, that’s not hugely important, or not for the moment.”
Lit by the town lights, King René’s Castle stood out as an imposing white mass in the darkness of the night. At the foot of the ramparts, some kids were playing football.
“We’ll have to wait till tomorrow to get a clearer idea. Did Ingrid Steinert phone you?”
“Yes, just now.”
“Well?”
De Palma breathed out long and hard to drive off the enveloping heat. The ball came to rest at his feet. He kicked it back and heard a distant thank you.
“It was as if she felt nothing and wanted to declare war on the entire world, she is so utterly convinced that her husband was murdered.”
“For now, apart from a few footprints, it looks like a drowning. We’ll see after the autopsy tomorrow.”
“It’s funny all the same …”
“You find this funny?”
“The shepherd I told you about … he said that La Balme farmhouse was cursed.”
“If you start believing all the stories told by old peasants in Provence, you won’t get very far. They’re all completely crazy out there.”
There was a hint of hostility in Marceau’s voice, mixed with a growing curiosity which he was failing to conceal.
“We’ll go and see later, if the autopsy doesn’t last too long. What’s more, I’m going to have to see the director of the reserve, Christophe Texeira. He’s the one who found the body.”
Marceau shook his head, as though trying to chase away an unpleasant mental picture.
“Then I’ll try and find out a bit more about our William.”
“How?”
“For once, I might be in luck. I’ve got an old school friend who didn’t go the same way as me. He had a brilliant university career and ended up as a big businessman round here. Sometimes, when I need to find out about the local rich kids, I go and see him. He knows a thing or two.”
Marceau headed off again toward the Rhône. From afar, in the direction of Saint Martha’s church, T.V. sets could be heard, filling the air with the last programs of the evening.
“You’d better wait for the results of the autopsy before doing anything, Michel. In my opinion, the forensic surgeon is going to say that he drowned in forty centimeters of water and the prosecutor will close the case.”
Marceau was staring at the wall of the house across the street. He seemed hypnotized by a rectangle of light and the murmur of the street.
“It sounds like you’re dying to close this café.”
“If we keep on delving, we’ll come up with a pile of shit. Just wait for the press to get hold of the story, and you’ll see.”
“The press is in the know already, Jean-Claude, you must realize that.”
“How the hell should I know that?”
The Baron gestured vaguely. It crossed his mind that it might well be Marceau himself who had tipped off a local Tarascon hack about this disappearance.
*
When he got back into his car, at about 1 a.m., summer lightning was brightening the darkness. De Palma looked for a C.D. in the glove compartment and realized once again that he had forgotten his discs.
Wearily, he pressed his temples between his fingers to ease a nascent headache.
8.
Billionaire’s body found in marshland in the Camargue
The body of William Steinert, 57, has been found by a scientist in the nature reserve of La Capelière, in the Camargue. The man, a wealthy German industrialist, lived for most of the year in his farmhouse near Maussane. His love for the land of Mistral and Daudet …
De Palma folded La Provence in four and tossed it irritably onto the living room table.
The article about Steinert was brief and said nothing particularly precise; neither the gendarmes nor Marceau had given any information to the local news hound.
A photograph to the left of the article showed Steinert amid a jungle of milling machines and lathes. The caption read:
In the 1960s, William Steinert became one of the top German machine-tool magnates.
De Palma rubbed his chin and glanced at the photograph. His morning stubble was itchy and an unpleasant taste of coffee clung to his palate. He went into the bathroom and examined himself in the mirror. The wrinkles around his face seemed to have been dug deeper by a malicious designer who had pressed hard with his pen during the night.
He cleaned his teeth, gargled for a long time then spent a quarter of an hour in a scalding shower.
At 10 a.m., he got a call from Ingrid Steinert. She asked him to come and see her as soon as possible, but he dodged her invitation by claiming a doctor’s appointment. That would give him time to wait and see what the results of the autopsy turned up.
He put on some jeans and his last clean T-shirt, and telephoned Yvan Clergue, his contact among Marseille’s most powerful financiers.
“Michel, my old mate, how are you?”
“Not so good. I still get these damned pains in the head.”
As usual, his friend was in a hurry. He went straight to the point.
“How can I help you, Michel?”
“How about lunch? We could …”
“I’ll stop you right there. I’m off to Tokyo in an hour’s time.”
“I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Go ahead. I’m on my own, my secretary’s out.”
“Do you know a man called William Steinert?”
“He was in La Provence this morning. Of course I know him.”
“Joking apart, do you know anything about him?”
“A big wheel, a real captain of industry—‘they don’t make his sort any more.’ But as far as he was concerned, business was secondary. Just to pay the rent, as it were. What mattered to him was creativity. I’m just giving you an idea of his personality. He was rich, and when I say rich I mean immensely rich. A family fortune and so on and so forth. But he wasn’t at all into being a celebrity or being stuck in a rich man’s ghetto.”
De Palma rummaged for his notepad and pen.
“I met him once, maybe twice. I can’t remember exactly. He was a true enthusiast. Not the sort of person you often meet in our field. People said that he was capable of talking to you for hours on end about something quite different from what you came to see him for.”
“What was he doing here in Provence? Business?”
“Not at all! At least not to my knowledge. I think he had a farmhouse, but I’m not sure where.”
“Near Maussane.”
“Maybe. In industry, he was highly respected. He was primarily an engineer, the sort who was able to roll up his sleeves and literally go back to the drawing board …”
“What I don’t understand is why the two of you met.”
“I was waiting for that. Here I am, talking to you about the poetry of industry, and you stay the copper right to the end! O.K., to put it briefly, I was contacted by some financier colleagues to look
into starting up a leisure park. That was two years ago. They wanted to open a sort of Provençal-style Disneyland. If I remember correctly, the people involved were the Tarascon town hall, the département, region, local villages and so on and so forth … But it never got further than the planning stage.”
“And so?”
“And so Steinert was involved … I don’t know why exactly, but he was involved. Anyway, when they organized a drinks party over a model for the park, he came along. But when it came to the subject in hand, he was rather cold, hostile even.”
“Hostile?”
“These are only hazy memories, but I think he was against the idea.”
“So why go to this party?”
“That’s just what I’m wondering about now …”
De Palma clamped the receiver between cheek and shoulder and poured himself some coffee.
“I see. And what happened then?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t really know. I heard that they then started prospecting around the Camargue. But I didn’t get involved because it was a real hornets’ nest.”
“Why do you say that?”
“As if you didn’t know. Imagine a huge leisure park in the middle of Provence, then imagine all the wolves coming out of the woods!”
“Yes, I see. Can you give me any names?”
Clergue was about to speak, then fell silent. De Palma could hear his secretary’s voice before his friend placed his hand over the receiver.
“No, I can’t help you any more there! Look at the local authorities I mentioned. Especially in Marseille. There aren’t that many politicians over there. They’re all from the same family, if you get my drift.”
“Loud and clear. Thanks, my friend. Next time, lunch is on me.”
“No problem, Michel. Ciao.”
Clergue had said “all from the same family,” which translated as “freemasons.” There was nothing unusual about local businessmen or politicians belonging to the masons. De Palma had even found a hammer, a Masonic artifact, on Steinert’s desk.
Oddly enough, what intrigued him the most about all this was Steinert’s attitude during the drinks party to launch the project. Clergue had said cold and hostile. But that did not square with the image he had of the German billionaire. He tried to piece together a scenario based on the few elements at his disposal, but nothing fitted.
At 11:30 a.m., he arrived at the front desk of the archives of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce. The director, an indolent forty-something, welcomed him by looking at his watch.
“Do you have a reference number or something?”
“No, but I do have this.”
The Baron produced his police identity card.
“That hardly solves the problem of the reference. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Michel watched him disappear behind the shelves. The air conditioning was cool and through the building’s large windows you could see La Bourse shopping mall and the remains of ancient Massalia.
The archivist returned with a spiral-bound folder of forty pages.
“Here you are. That’s all I can find for now. The rest of it is closed because it’s industrial property. I don’t even really have the right to give you this,” he added, waggling the folder.
“Listen, my friend, I can always come back with a warrant from the judge. But I wouldn’t want to bother him about such a trifling matter. All I want to do is check a couple of things.”
De Palma removed the brochure from the archivist’s grip.
The Big South
The first leisure park where culture is a pleasure
The title was printed over a series of photographs of white beaches, Camargue landscapes at sunrise, and historic sites, overprinted with the outline of the castle of Tarascon, a portrait of Taven the witch, and a depiction of the Tarasque that took up a good part of the image.
De Palma glanced through the first pages, which were mainly taken up with words of introduction from each of the politicians involved in the project: the presidents of the departmental and regional councils, the mayors of Maussane, Tarascon, Arles …
On the second page, the authors had written a note outlining their plan and their ambitions to found “an alternative” to Disneyland:
… The accent will be placed on ludic and cultural activities that will plunge the visitor interactively and transgenerationally into the heritage of Provence, and more generally into the cultures of the lands of the northern Mediterranean.
As regards Provence, we have selected certain strong cultural markers: a reconstruction of Le Guen’s cave (a prehistoric site beneath the sea), Greek remains, Roman antiquities, literature (Mistral, Daudet …), and, of course, various aspects of the particularly rich legendary heritage of Provence: the Golden Goat, Taven the Witch and the Tarasque seem to us to be especially interesting subjects for the creation of a theme park …
With this in mind, a study will be carried out so as to select the mascot for The Big South. So far, Taven the Witch and the Tarasque have been chosen as focal points for activities in the park.
The company in charge of the feasibility study was S.O.D.E.G.I.M. (Société d’étude et de gestion immobilière), whose C.E.O. was a Philippe Borland. De Palma jotted down his name and his company’s on his notepad. Then he flicked through the rest of the brochure, skipping the details of the financial set-up, since they were too complicated to be analyzed rapidly.
On page 21, he came across a more detailed description of the ludic and cultural activities: they had planned a legendary journey, rather like a ghost train, with a reconstruction of Taven the Witch’s den, a rather complicated merry-go-round consecrated to the Tarasque, and presented as the linchpin of the show; and a crisscrossing of roller-coasters with a “super splash” in a pool set in the middle of the park.
On his notepad, de Palma wrote in block capitals: TARASQUE. Then he looked for what interested him most: the planned site for the project. The idea was to set it up in a triangle between Maussane, Les Baux and Fontvieille. Just where Steinert owned land. A lot of land.
On the next page, there was a surveyor’s plan and map showing the various holdings. De Palma pointed at the photocopier behind the counter.
“Could you copy this page for me?”
“Sorry, sir, but that isn’t allowed.”
“Look, one more time, we won’t quarrel, you’ll just copy it for me and no one will be any the wiser. After that I’ll leave you in peace.”
The archivist glanced at his watch, then placed page 29 on the Xerox glass.
At 12 p.m., the Baron double-parked his Alfa Romeo in front of a kebab shop on avenue de la République. He ordered a doner and chips, with cream sauce, tomatoes, onions and lettuce. His mobile rang.
“Michel? It’s Marceau. The autopsy leaves no room for doubt: death by drowning.”
“He drowned!”
“Yeah. They’ve been at it since seven this morning, and it’s just what I expected.”
“Who performed it?”
“Mattei, as usual.”
De Palma trusted Mattei’s verdicts completely.
“I think the case will be closed any time now,” Marceau said, “and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s no evidence at all.”
“There are your footprints!”
“Are you joking? Are you expecting me to go down on my knees in front of the prosecutor and tell him that I’ve found some traces of boot-marks in the dry mud in the Camargue? Wake up, Michel!”
“Did you get molds made?”
“Yes, this morning. There’s a team of technicians on hand. So it will be the last time we have to drag our feet over to that stinking place!”
De Palma tried to concentrate. The case was going to be out of the police’s hands before long. He was torn between his desire to believe in the forensic scientist’s conclusions and his own instincts.
“I’m going back to the commissariat to see what’s going on. How about you, Michel?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go and see Ingrid Steinert, a courtesy call.”
“Did she call you this morning?”
“Yes.”
“So, see you later. I hope she won’t stir things up for us. She’ll have to accept that there’s nothing more that I can do.”
After the Fairy Pines, the air shimmered as if emerging from a wood stove; the trees were cracking under the blaze of the sun.
De Palma looked at the photocopy of the surveyor’s plan from the Chamber of Commerce. He climbed a hillock that overlooked the whole of the valley, then orientated the chart.
To the east lay La Balme farmhouse, its buildings rippling in the noon day sun. Then, standing out against the pure blue sky, the white lines of the chalk hills of the Alpilles contrasted with the brown, scrub-covered mounds and rust-red slopes that led to the legendary cliffs and viewpoints.
The Baron turned south, in the direction of the Camargue, and observed the plain. He selected a few landmarks from the map and noticed that, broadly speaking, the planned site for the park occupied what Mme. Steinert had called the “Downlands”: woods of little agricultural interest, close to the main roads and far enough away from La Balme farmhouse so as not to disturb the billionaire’s seclusion.
Why had Clergue mentioned Steinert’s hostility?
It was one of those places soaked in history, where people have been living since time began, fragile sites which have become retreats for billionaires and snobs of all descriptions, loaded with money and pride. The smallest plot of land could fetch a fortune. So de Palma supposed that an amusement park, which was bound to attract a lower-class clientele, would not have appealed to most of the people who had chosen to live in this luxurious ghetto.
Along the road between Aix and Tarascon, thousands of cypresses were swaying heavily in the thick air. De Palma thought he could hear the din of Marius’s Roman legions.
Then his mind went back to William Steinert, a man from the north and its winters of snow and grayness, a descendant of the very Teutons who Marius had cut to ribbons not far from the Via Domitia.
The Beast of the Camargue Page 10
