Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02

by Cay Rademacher

  “I think I’ll find a new jogging route from September on,” Blanc said resignedly. His pulse had settled down again. He took a look at the Michelettis. Bruno had an SLR camera in a case attached to his belt.

  “We came out to take photos,” he explained, noticing Blanc glancing at it. “In the dawn light, when the dew is still shining. We won’t give up; we’ll try again tomorrow.”

  “I’d better go back,” Blanc said, “or I’ll be late for work.”

  “Evil never rests,” Sylvie Micheletti replied, and turned in the opposite direction. For a moment or two it seemed as if she was going to use her walking poles as crutches.

  * * *

  Blanc took a rushed shower, had a quick breakfast, and glanced at Fuligni and his men, who were once again attacking his roof with an anarchistic joy, then drove as fast as the 2CV would allow him in the direction of Salon-de-Provence. The car swerved into the big roundabout at the entrance to the town and someone honked at him, whether in annoyance or in congratulation for his rally-style driving, Blanc couldn’t tell. He wanted to get to the hospital early, before Dr. Fontaine Thezan was already at the autopsy table in her smock and rubber gloves.

  When he got there, he turned his cell phone off, pulled out his ID card, and asked until someone finally pointed him in the direction of the staff canteen. The pathologist was sitting alone at a table eating a croissant. “Got a new corpse for me?” she asked in greeting, indicating the seat opposite.

  Blanc sat down, hesitating a moment before he opened his mouth. He looked at the doctor with her narrow face framed by long hair and her intelligent eyes, which were examining him coolly. He hardly knew her, certainly not well enough to place his trust in her. Merde, what was life worth without the occasional risk?

  “I need to ask you to do something you’re not supposed to.”

  “You want me to fetch you drugs from the hospital pharmacy?”

  Blanc stared at her for a moment in silence, not sure whether she was serious or not. “I was thinking more about a few discreet inquiries.”

  “I see, to breach the medical code of privacy.” Fontaine Thezan’s smile was so small it was hard to say if it implied conspiratorial agreement or sarcastic refusal.

  “Possibly,” Blanc admitted. “Look, Doctor, I know medical staff talk to one another: gossip, rumors, anecdotes about patients, interesting cases, things like that. It’s just the way people are. We cops gossip about our criminals, too, more than the law allows. Perhaps your colleagues occasionally mention…” He took a deep breath. “Well, Madame Leroux or maybe Nora Leroux.”

  “The wife and daughter of the famous Paris publisher? What white-coat stories do you want to hear about them? Off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you any about either of them.”

  “I’m not interested in appendix operations, but maybe drugs. Breakdowns. What do I know? Has either of them ever been in therapy? Had treatment? Maybe after an attempted suicide?” His mind went back to the scars on Marie-Claude Leroux’s wrist.

  “Mon Capitaine, I get all the successful suicides. I don’t see the failed attempts. Why are you asking a pathologist to sniff around in psychiatric cases? Don’t you think that’s a bit cheeky?”

  “You’re the only doctor I know down here in the south,” Blanc admitted. “And apart from that”—he sought the right words—“I think you know when it makes sense to stick strictly to the rules. And when it doesn’t.”

  “You’re dangerous,” she replied thoughtfully. “Dangerous to me, and even more dangerous to yourself.”

  “So you won’t do it?” Blanc asked, disappointed.

  “Of course I’ll do it.” For a couple of seconds Fontaine Thezan gave him a warm conspiratorial smile, then she covered the traces with a look of cool irony, a mask as impenetrable as a surgeon’s. “It’s time for me to deal with the day’s first customer,” she declared, dusting off the croissant crumbs from her fingers and getting to her feet. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  * * *

  “There was a call for you,” Corporal Baressi told him when Blanc turned up at the station. “From Paris,” he added in a tone that suggested it wasn’t something that happened every day, and nor was it welcome.

  “Who was it?” Blanc asked, half guessing the answer.

  Baressi looked at the note, taking ages to read his own writing. “Monsieur Vialaron-Allègre. He wanted to know if the funeral was going to be on the agreed date. A relative of yours? Should I be expressing my condolences?”

  “Feel free to pity me.”

  The minister wanted to know if Cohen’s computer had provided the ammunition he needed to take a potshot at the publisher Leroux, Blanc assumed. He hurried into his office and wrote a very polite, very formal, very noncommittal email to the interior minister. As long as he kept Vialaron-Allègre at a distance, he could continue to investigate the case of the stolen Van Gogh, because the minister wasn’t going to call him off as long as he believed Blanc might find out something about Cohen. I never thought Vialaron-Allègre would turn out to be an ally, Blanc mused.

  He had to find out more about the people who had anything to do with the vanished picture. He went to find Fabienne, but she was on the phone with her girlfriend, Roxane, and it didn’t exactly sound like a pleasant conversation. So he just waved to her, exaggeratedly mouthed the word “Later,” and crept out again. The other seat in his office was empty: Marius had disappeared without leaving a note.

  Blanc planted himself in front of his computer. He decided to start his Internet search with Boré, because he was more prominent than Marie-Claude Leroux or Olivier Guillaume. The more hits on the net, the more dirt on Boré’s clean white jacket, at least that was what he hoped.

  An hour later, however, Blanc wasn’t sure whether he had made any progress or not. Boré hadn’t been kidding about the opinion his learned colleagues had of him, quite the contrary. In several online publications by art historians, Boré was dismissed as a phony and a parvenu, and there were comments on blogs and forums that Boré could have taken libel action over. It would appear that he didn’t consider his detractors all that important because there was no evidence that he had ever launched legal action against any of them. And even though Boré tirelessly turned out catalogs, made speeches, and wrote art stories for Figaro, he never once took the opportunity to take revenge on his critics. No matter what the topic, he wrote about it as if he was the only expert in the world on the subject and it would be a waste of time to even mention any other name.

  Eventually Blanc turned to studying Boré’s own website, which was primarily dedicated to the exhibitions he had organized. In his résumé he referred to the topic of his dissertation, which had gotten him noticed in Paris before he went to the Musée Maly. It was about a letter written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, which Boré had edited and commented on. Blanc didn’t understand, and didn’t really care about, precisely what it was the art historian had actually written. But he noted that Boré was already an expert on Van Gogh before he even set foot over the doorstep of the provincial museum in Saint-Tropez. That could mean everything or nothing. Could it just be a coincidence? And yet … Just one year after an ambitious Van Gogh expert starts work at the museum, an important work by the artist goes missing. In what other museum in the world could a thief have so easily stolen such a valuable work? And wouldn’t you have to be a Van Gogh expert to even know that a poorly guarded picture was hanging in an almost unknown museum above the bay of Saint-Tropez?

  More out of duty than with any real hope of finding a lead, Blanc clicked on a seemingly endless photo gallery of hundreds of pictures showing Boré at the opening of his exhibitions surrounded by celebrities: film directors and actresses standing in front of a Renoir; Boré with industrialists and bankers in front of a Matisse; Boré with the culture minister in front of a Picasso, the culture minister who in turn was surrounded by a huge entourage, as was always the way in Paris—his personal advisers, publicists, b
odyguards, journalists, and more journalists. Behind the culture minister in this three-year-old photo Blanc could clearly make out Ernest Leroux. He seemed to be talking to an elegant woman and was paying no attention at all to Boré, the culture minister, or the photographer. And Boré, at least as far as it appeared in the photo, was paying no attention to the crowd but was focused firmly on the minister and holding out both hands toward the Picasso.

  Blanc enlarged the photo, but there was no sign of Marie-Claude Leroux. Had she been there or not? Had Boré and Monsieur Leroux exchanged a word or two that evening? Boré might or might not have known his former lover’s husband. Marie-Claude Leroux might have seen Boré in Paris on evenings like that, then again she might not have. It was possible that Boré and Marie-Claude Leroux really had lost track of each other in the cosmos that was Paris. But it was also possible that their lives had crossed a lot more often than they admitted.

  He tried again to search for traces of Marie-Claude Leroux and also as Marie-Claude Elbaz. He checked on the police computer system. He put her name into Google. Nothing that he hadn’t already come across the first time. Nothing.

  “Merde,” he muttered. “That’s just it: nothing.”

  * * *

  Blanc jumped at the sound of the telephone. The number that came up on the display was vaguely familiar, but he only recognized it when he heard the voice on the other end of the line: that of a very young woman, sober this time, even a little shy. “Please don’t give me away,” she began without giving her name. “About the night before last, I mean. It was the night before last, wasn’t it? Or last night? And it was you who picked up the phone, wasn’t it?”

  “The hick from up north, that’s right,” Blanc confirmed.

  “Did you tell Nic … Monsieur Nkoulou? That I called, I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Heavy intake of breath. Maybe she’s gasping with relief, Blanc mused, or she’s sighing heavily, or she’s trying to stop herself from laughing. “He doesn’t like me to call him at the police station.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “He’s so terribly stuffy.” The unknown woman was speaking faster now, more fluently, as if she was desperate to explain something. “You see, his parents were illegal immigrants to France. That’s why he hates everything that isn’t one thousand percent according to the rules. It’s a father complex, know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely, Mademoiselle,” Blanc assured her, without understanding any of it.

  “So you won’t say anything to Monsieur Nkoulou?” she asked him again.

  “I won’t say a word about your call. In any case, it was the night before last.”

  “Ah … bien. The night before last. Then it’s time I got out of here. Time I ate something. You’re a treasure.”

  Blanc stared at the display, cleared now. He could hear the dial tone coming from the receiver. He tried in vain to imagine a face to match the voice. A party girl? A junkie? Rich? Poor? White? Black? It was all the harder for him to imagine Commandant Nkoulou with this faceless woman. A wife? Lover? Relative?

  “Was the phone sex good?”

  He whipped around. Fabienne was standing in the door frame giving him a sarcastic look. “You’re holding the receiver in your hand as if it’s a phallic symbol.”

  “I’m holding it in my hand as if I’m about to strangle it.”

  “Thirty seconds ago I wanted to strangle the telephone receiver, too.”

  “Quarrel with Roxane?”

  “Close enough. I’m getting angry with our lawyer, but Roxane wants to give her another chance. I’m slowly beginning to wonder if it’s worth battling our way through a court to get our right to marry.… But in the end we more or less agreed. How was your phone call?”

  “Bad phone sex,” Blanc replied, carefully replacing the receiver. “I’ve got a job for you.”

  “When you don’t get anywhere with Google, I’m your next call.” She nodded toward the computer monitor.

  “I’m glad to have you.” He pointed at the list of hits for Marie-Claude Leroux/Marie-Claude Elbaz. “I haven’t just googled her, I’ve been through the usual police databases, too, and all the other official databases I could get into: the Foreign Ministry, she might have traveled to some non-European country and needed a visa. The Education and Culture Ministry, she had been a student, otherwise she’d never have gotten the job as a curator at the Musée Maly. The prefectures, the town hall records of her home in Lorraine, Paris, where she allegedly studied, and Saint-Tropez, where she got her job at the museum. Take a look through all that and see if there’s something I’ve missed,” he said in encouragement.

  She clicked through the results, Blanc sitting patiently next to her. “Marie-Claude is a fine citizen,” she noted.

  “That’s what I thought at first.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about here.”

  “That’s just it!” Blanc exclaimed triumphantly. “Nothing! There are hundreds of entries, just like you might find for most fine citizens. But when you look through all of it you’ll see that there is not one single entry for the years between 1983, when Marie-Claude Elbaz was briefly arrested at a left-wing demonstration, and 1989, when she took up her job at the Musée Maly. Which high school did she graduate from and at what university did she study? Social Security has no record of her paying any contribution during this period and there is no trace of any address. No employer to be found. She didn’t get married, didn’t have a child, didn’t attract the attention of a cop, didn’t make any application to public services, was never treated in a hospital.”

  “Maybe she was in jail?” Fabienne suggested.

  “She was never sentenced. No record of any time in jail. No accusations against her, no summons as a witness.”

  “She was abroad. Maybe she just went backpacking round the world? That was the thing to do back in the eighties. Or maybe she met a foreigner and went to live in his country?”

  Blanc shook his head. “Marie-Claude Elbaz never applied for a passport, never paid a visit to any embassy or consulate. Back in 1983 even within the European Union you needed a residence permit or a work permit. She could never have lived abroad somewhere without leaving a trace, at least not legally.”

  “Hmmm.” Fabienne seemed to have completely forgotten her phone call with Roxane and was staring at the screen as she spoke.

  Blanc smiled. “So what I want to know is if there really is no digital trace of Marie-Claude Elbaz in those years. Or if I’ve just been too dim to find it.”

  “You’re too dim,” Fabienne replied and got up. “I’m going to lock myself away in my office. I’ll call you when I find something. There’s always a trace.”

  * * *

  A short while later there was a knock on Blanc’s door. For a second he hoped that Fabienne had already found something, but the hope vanished when he told himself she wouldn’t knock on the door: she would just charge in. Instead of Fabienne it was the slightly overweight Marlboro-smoking colleague whose name he could never quite remember.

  “Barressi called me,” she announced with more than a touch of schadenfreude. “He’s on duty downstairs. He says Tonon is with him, but he’s in no condition to even get up the steps.”

  Blanc swallowed a curse, ran past the woman, and headed downstairs. Marius had dropped onto the hard wooden bench for visitors next to Barressi’s counter. He was wearing a rumpled shirt and a pair of jeans that were dirty down the front.

  He was snoring and a line of dribble hung from the right corner of his mouth. Close up to him it was not a good idea to breathe through the nose. “Into my office!” Blanc ordered. “Before Commandant Nkoulou opens his door.”

  “The boss already knows,” his female colleague answered indifferently. “Ever since the incident, Marius has just let himself go. You might think he was trying to get fired. And that not long before he’s due to take his pension. The guy’s nuts. He should get a sick note.” She grabbed Marius with a p
racticed, surprisingly strong grip so that Blanc, taking his arm on the other side, found it not as hard as he had expected to haul him up the stairs. On the way up he wondered what she had meant by “the incident.” Everybody in the Gadet gendarmerie station seemed to know, everybody except him. For a long time Blanc had believed his colleagues were referring to the time many years ago when during an arrest Marius had fired his service pistol too hastily and wounded another officer. But from the various hints he had since gathered that it had to be something else—something Marius had done shortly before Blanc had been transferred to Gadet from Paris. But even Fabienne refused to say a word.

  They dragged Marius’s massive frame along the hallway, squeezed him into his chair, and left him there, slumped and unconscious.

  “Merci beaucoup,” Blanc muttered.

  “I’ll be interested to see how long you put up with him. Should I leave the door open on the way out?” When she saw Blanc’s face, his colleague gave a throaty smoker’s laugh. “Just a joke,” she reassured him, and pulled the door shut.

  Blanc opened the neck of Marius’s shirt and felt for the pulse in his neck. He’s just drunk, he told himself. He hasn’t had a stroke or heart attack. Would he be able to get him out of the station later? Or would it be better if Marius slept it off here? He was still debating the pros and cons of either alternative when the phone rang. It was an internal call. Fabienne.

  “I’ve found something about your girlfriend.” Blanc was amazed to hear her whispering. “I think you’d better come to my office.”

  Action Directe

  Blanc threw a last glance at his unconscious colleague, checking that he wasn’t about to slide out of his chair, before hurrying into the young second lieutenant’s office. Fabienne tapped the screen of her laptop. “There’s always a trace,” she said.

  He had expected that she would be triumphant in giving him the news, but instead she was looking at him seriously. “I found something on the DST server.”

  Blanc sat down. The domestic intelligence agency. No cop was allowed onto their server without special permission. “We’re both going to end up in Lorraine,” he whispered.