Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02

by Cay Rademacher

  “The goddamn bull should have just kept grazing in its field,” Marius muttered. But he raised his glass to them. Fabienne and Blanc did the same and they clinked glasses and laughed, and Blanc got the impression that his invitation to dinner might have been an expensive idea but it had also been a good one.

  * * *

  Later, Blanc was sitting alone in his office. He perversely loved neon-lit nighttime offices, where the only trace of his absent colleagues was a whiff of cold cigarette smoke and unwashed clothing. He wallowed simultaneously in a deep sadness and a diffuse sensation of well-being to know that everyone was out there somewhere in the night and he alone sat in here in the bright light. He had driven Fabienne and Marius back to Gadet, where the young computer specialist had leaped onto her Ducati and his partner had climbed into his old Fiat Marea. They had both roared off into the night and Blanc hoped that they had neither crashed into an olive tree nor come across any of their colleagues testing for DUI.

  It was already almost midnight and the thermometer still showed the temperature stuck at 77 degrees. But in comparison with the heat of the afternoon, it was relatively cool. Blanc would have liked to throw open the windows, but then half the mosquitoes in Provence would have swarmed in and sucked his blood dry. Stale air was the price you paid for working at night.

  He wrote up a report on his interviews with Boré and Guillaume, printed out the pages, and put them into the Cohen file. He flipped blankly through the gray-black file, glancing at his own report, Dr. Fontaine Thezan’s autopsy report, the photos of the Camargue road with its gruesome traces of blood. Page by page, almost unnoticeably, but increasingly clearly, the file was metamorphosing from that of an extraordinary fatal accident into a collection of leads on a half-forgotten art theft, from a routine summer incident into a journey into the past. The past …

  There had to be an officer of the Police Nationale in Arles right now also sitting under a neon light with next to nothing to do. It was a good time to ask such a colleague to do something unusual, so unusual that on a normal working day, at a normal time of the day, on a normal hectic shift, it would have been dismissed with a shake of the head. A request like the one Blanc was thinking of would only be heeded in the long night hours and considered as normal as a request for a new lunchroom card.

  “Sous-brigadier Accoce.”

  A smoker’s voice, Blanc thought, introducing himself. A sous-brigadier in the Police Nationale was a rank it took at least twelve years to reach. This man would have seen it all. “I’m investigating an art theft case and would like to take a look at an old Arles police file.”

  “No problem.”

  “It’s a very old file.”

  “No problem.”

  “December 24, 1888.”

  “No problem.”

  “On the morning of that day the police were called to the house of the painter Vincent van Gogh. They found the artist there bleeding from a head wound and…”

  “… a whore waving a part of his ear that the crazy Dutchman had given her a bit earlier as a sort of present. I know all about it. It’s a sort of legend for us cops here in Arles. Every couple of years somebody asks to see the file. Would it be okay if I scan the stuff and email it to you? That way you’ll have it within the hour. There’s nothing going on here.”

  “It’s the damn heat.”

  “You can say that again. Gives people the craziest ideas.”

  Blanc hung up with a smile. Cohen had done some research in Arles. Maybe they’d find something that had interested the journalist in the old files. The photo on Cohen’s hard drive made it clear that he had taken pictures of the old police files. Blanc had no idea if that had had anything to do with Cohen’s death or the old theft, but it hardly mattered. There was another reason to ask for the file, even if he wasn’t exactly going to wave it under anybody’s nose. He would surprise Aveline with it. She might be an art connoisseur, but had she ever held a Van Gogh document in her hand? He would make a present of it to her at their next meeting. Whenever that might be.

  He was shocked out of his reverie by the telephone. It was nearly one in the morning. As soon as he lifted the receiver he realized it wasn’t a call from Arles: a booming bass, two or three men talking in the background, the clinking of glasses.

  “Hello?” Blanc said, but nobody answered. He thought that above the noise he could hear someone breathing. He glanced down at the number on the display: 04. It was local. Then he realized that the call had not been meant for him, but for another extension at the office, an extension that after hours was automatically relayed. The number that had been called was Nkoulou’s.

  “Hello?” Blanc called out again into the party noise.

  “Nic?” It was a woman’s voice. “Shut up!” she called out, not talking to him.

  Blanc took a second to put it together. Commandant Nicolas Nkoulou. Nic. A young woman. Her words were stressed too heavily, but lazily, as if her lower jaw was too heavy for the muscles that moved it. Drugs. A few weeks earlier he’d had the unknown woman on the phone when he rang Nkoulou at home. His boss had given him a drubbing the following day.

  “Gendarmerie station Gadet, bonsoir,” he replied, trying to sound as official as possible. He reckoned it was a good idea not to give his name.

  The woman cursed obscenely. “You’re the cop who called me a while back! You sound like some hick from up north. Merde, I wanted to talk to Nic, not some run-of-the-mill cop!”

  “Commandant Nkoulou has left his office.” Then, with just the slightest trace of furtiveness, “Can I take a message?”

  “He should go fuck himself.” She ended the call.

  Blanc put the receiver down. Marius was right, he told himself, our female colleague is the only one who has a normal relationship with women. The guys were all damaged. Or maybe it was just that Fabienne needed a few more years of service with long nights and chaotic investigations. Maybe there would come a time when no woman would put up with her either.

  When the phone unexpectedly rang again, Blanc thought for a second that the unknown woman was going to launch a few swearwords at him again. But this time the number on the display was that of Arles.

  “Sorry, pal. Can’t manage the Van Gogh files tonight.”

  “Something come up?” Blanc asked in astonishment.

  It seemed for a minute or two that Accoce was about to laugh out loud, but had to draw breath instead. “Arles is as quiet as the tomb,” he said. “It’s just that…” Blanc could hear the click of a cigarette lighter and a deep intake of breath. “Eh bien, I hope you won’t consider us complete idiots, but the file has disappeared.”

  Blanc knew there and then that he wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep that night. “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?”

  “Vanished, gone, into thin air, whatever you like. The box file in the archive is on the same shelf as always, but the box is empty. Not one goddamn piece of paper left in it. No report of it being out on loan, no comment, simply nothing. Merde, it would appear that the Arles police force has been robbed.”

  A Woman with a Past

  Blanc spent the few remaining hours of the night at the old kitchen table in his oil mill watching the dim reflections of a clear 25-watt light bulb in his wineglass. A moth was flapping around the light and the thought occurred to him that his brain was acting the same way as the insect. It flew in one circle after the other without ever getting anywhere. Cohen had seen the Van Gogh file and photographed it with his phone, Blanc thought. And, seeing that Cohen, according to Fabienne, had downloaded all the photos that evening to his computer, it had to have been the morning before his death. And, a few hours after the reporter had seen the files and photographed them he had had his guts ripped open. And did that mean Cohen himself had stolen the files? In which case, where were they? Neither Fabienne nor he had found them in his room, but then they hadn’t searched the whole of the Leroux house. And there was no way Blanc was going to get a search warrant to search the
house of the most influential publisher in France for a police file from Arles that was more than a century old. Not even Aveline would grant him that.

  Aveline. Yet one more reason he couldn’t sleep.

  He forced himself to go over the case in his head again. If Cohen had stolen the file, was his death the result of an attack so that the murderer could get his or her hands on it? Or was it punishment for stealing it? But who could have considered the file so valuable that he or she would take such dreadful revenge on the person who had stolen it? Or maybe Cohen had only seen the file at the police station in Arles and photographed its contents there but hadn’t stolen it? Had somebody else made off with it—and then killed the reporter? But why? None of it made sense. Somehow the rosé had disappeared from his glass, the morning light had made the light bulb irrelevant, and Blanc knew no more than he had before.

  He wasn’t exactly in the best of moods as he forced himself to take a shower. And his mood certainly didn’t improve when just as the water got going he heard a crashing sound from outside. He ran out with only a hand towel to cover his loins, fearing that one of the walls of the old house had collapsed. Instead he found himself facing a huge green machine with MANITOU painted on its flanks. It was a sort of combination forklift truck and digger that with its shovel and two enormous steel claws looked like a diesel-driven Tyrannosaurus rex. From up in the driver’s cabin, some ten feet above him, Matthieu Fuligni waved down at him.

  “It’s Tuesday, Monsieur Blanc,” he called out. “We have a date.”

  Behind the Manitou a dented white truck piled high with glowing red tiles drove into the yard. Two builders sitting in the cabin gave him a bored glance. None of the three men who had just arrived seemed to think it in the slightest unusual to be met by a bewildered customer outside his house wearing nothing more than a hand towel. Blanc gave them an embarrassed wave.

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” he lied.

  “We’re going to go up on the Manitou platform and take down all the damaged tuiles,” Fuligni explained. “That’ll only take a couple of hours. We might even have time enough to lay a few of the new ones.”

  “What if it rains?”

  “Pas de souci,” Fuligni called back. “Then your shower water will come from an even greater height.”

  * * *

  Back at the station later, Blanc told his two colleagues about the disappearance of the file in Arles. He didn’t mention the call for Nkoulou he had intercepted. “I’m going to see Leroux again,” he told them. “I’m going to give him the results of Dr. Thezan’s autopsy, including the traces of cocaine in Cohen’s hair roots. Leroux will think I’ve come to see him personally rather than call him because of his reporter’s drug abuse history. He’ll even be grateful to me for doing so. But what I really want is to get into his house again, to see if I can spot the goddamn file. It might even still be in Cohen’s room or somewhere else in the mas.”

  “Sounds like a crazy idea to me,” Marius replied in a jovial mood. “If the two of us were to turn up at Leroux’s place with a story like that, it would be even less credible. So it’s better you go down to the Camargue on your own.”

  “I’d come with you,” Fabienne said, “but I’ve got an appointment with my lawyer.”

  “About the wedding?” Blanc asked.

  She nodded. “Sometimes even Facebook isn’t enough. Roxane and I are taking legal advice. It may be that we will have to start proceedings against our own mayor.”

  Marius groaned. “If you do that, the Front National will give you both honorary membership—that’s just the sort of publicity those bastards want.”

  “I don’t know how the Front does it. Either you kowtow to them or you fight them, in which case you end up looking like a connard. But, merde, I’m a cop. If I can’t enforce the law, who can?”

  “When you get back from the legal eagle, grab Cohen’s laptop and phone, you need to crack the access code,” Blanc told her.

  Fabienne forced a smile. “At least that’ll relieve me from the stress. I should be thankful to Cohen’s killer.”

  “You can pay your thanks down at the meat counter in the supermarket,” Marius muttered. “His murderer’s already chopped up in the freezer.”

  “Just forget the bull, will you?” Blanc sighed.

  As neither of his companions were accompanying him, Blanc didn’t take the patrol car. Instead he rolled back the roof of the 2CV and trundled at up to 40 mph through the Camargue. It was like being on a vacation while working. Tell that to his colleagues in Paris. His ex-colleagues. On his right he spotted a dozen dark shapes some fifty yards from the road. What was it the bull breeder Ferréol had called a herd? Manade. The dark-colored cattle were trotting slowly through the marsh. Bulls or cows? The grass was so tall that Blanc couldn’t see the lower parts of their bodies and didn’t know enough to be able to tell their gender from the shape of their heads and backs. The animals looked pretty big to him. The horns curved inward in the shape of a lyre. There was no fence between them and the road, and not a gardian to be seen. He wondered briefly how long his steam horse would withstand an attack by a bull. The cattle strolled across the plain as majestically as water buffaloes in Africa. They didn’t even glance at him, even when his old car screeched as he turned to take the track up to the Leroux house.

  The white Toyota hybrid and the VW Polo were parked outside the house. Madame Leroux was at home with her daughter, Nora, Blanc reckoned. Maybe that was for the best. He would be able not just to look for an old file but also to discreetly put a few questions to the lady of the house about a museum in Saint-Tropez and a Van Gogh that had gone missing.

  Before he could use the bronze door knocker, the door opened. Marie-Claude greeted him with an open smile, only for it to fade the moment she realized who it was standing in front of her. “Pardon,” she muttered, “I thought that…” She pushed her hair back from her face. She was wearing a summer skirt and an old, plain light green blouse that made her look as if she had just stepped out of an Italian film from the 1950s.

  “I’m sorry you’re disappointed to see me,” Blanc replied.

  She laughed and waved her left hand around as if chasing some insect away. Blanc tried to ignore the scar on her wrist. “I saw your car approaching from the kitchen window,” she explained, somewhat embarrassedly. “And for a moment I thought someone was coming to visit my daughter. Maybe a young man who might be,” she hesitated briefly, “different from the friends she’s had so far. A student maybe, an intellectual or an artist. For a moment I could see myself, in my last year at the lycée with the friends I had back then. I ran to the door before I could see who was in it. But come in nonetheless.”

  Marie-Claude led him into an elegantly laid-out living room that was pleasantly cool. Nora was nowhere to be seen, but from somewhere in the building the heavy bass thumping of house music could be felt rather than heard. Blanc tried to look around as nonchalantly as possible to see if he could glimpse the old file while rattling off the story he had prepared about the autopsy report, the cocaine traces in Cohen’s hair roots, his own discretion.

  “Would you like a glass of iced tea?” his hostess asked calmly.

  “You aren’t surprised by the pathologist’s report?”

  “Albert took coke? So what? Everybody knew that. If you were to lay out all the cocaine that Parisian politicians and journalists take, you could make a line the length of the Champs-Élysées. My iced tea is homemade, not that awful stuff you get from Géant Casino supermarket.”

  “In that case I’d welcome a glass,” Blanc replied. He didn’t like iced tea whether it came from a supermarket or not, but his hostess disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, giving him the chance to take a better look around: a white sofa, as thin and hard as a folded futon bed, ten different issues of L’Événement on a little white-lacquered table, an iPad with its touch screen dark, a closed notebook and next to it a pencil the end of which had been chewed. A wobbly old desk with thre
e drawers that he quickly flicked through. Nothing. On an old wooden trunk, black as oil, stood glasses and a few bottles of pastis and whiskey, behind some family photos and a shining bronze seated Buddha. Hanging on the wall was a large, framed black-and-white photo of some Asian-looking men in round straw hats. Blanc took a closer look: the Asians were standing up to their ankles in water, one of them holding a plant in his fist and smiling. China, Blanc thought to himself, then in the background of the photo he spotted a dark object: a Camargue bull.

  “It was taken back in 1942,” said Marie-Claude, who had crept back in so silently that Blanc hadn’t heard her. She was holding in her hands two glasses containing an orange-colored liquid. “Your iced tea, mon Capitaine. I found the photo at a flea market and had it framed.”

  “Chinese in the Camargue?”

  “Vietnamese.”

  “In the middle of the war? How did they get here? Did the Germans allow it?”

  She laughed. “They were here before the Germans, if only by a few weeks. Bad luck for the Vietnamese, good luck for us. They brought the rice back.”

  Her passion, Blanc thought. Let her talk. That’ll make her more relaxed and less suspicious. For when you ask the questions to come.

  “They were already planting rice in the Camargue back in the Middle Ages. Under Henri VI it was practically a legal obligation,” she continued. “But by the nineteenth century nobody was interested anymore and the fields went to seed. When the Second World War broke out, the government brought in twenty thousand workers from the colonies in Indochina, many of them against their will. They arrived in Marseille in 1940 and were supposed to be sent to work in arms factories. But the Wehrmacht got there faster than the government could have dreamed. What was to be done with the Vietnamese? They couldn’t send them back as no French ship would have made it to Indochina. Then a few farmers in the Camargue had the idea to put those workers who had grown rice in Indochina to work on their fields, which had lain fallow for years. The Vietnamese spent two years digging water ditches, hard graft with their bare hands. They brought in their first harvest in 1942. This photo documented the event.”