“Or in court. I opened a back door into the DST computers and had a quick look around. Then I got the hell out of there before an alarm bell went off. I hope I haven’t left any traces.”
“There’s always a digital trace. Always.”
Fabienne made a face. “I want to marry Roxane, and you know what I’m having to go through. Trouble at work is the absolute last thing I need right now.”
Blanc raised his hands reassuringly. “You’re too clever to get caught.”
“We’ll see,” she muttered gloomily. Then she nodded at the screen. “I was no more than sixty seconds on the DST server. But that was long enough to copy an entry on Marie-Claude Elbaz. One single reference. But I would be amazed if it is the only one. Read that.”
It was a scan of an old document that had been written on a typewriter, a single page under the DST logo, apparently the summary of a long-term investigation. Blanc zoomed in on the scan and read the date: January 5, 1987. There was no title and no details of the sender. It was a pulled-together table of dates in the life of Marie-Claude Elbaz from her birth in 1964 until 1983. There was nothing that Blanc didn’t already know, nothing unusual, until the abrupt last line of her résumé.
At the bottom of this list of harmless entries he found one reference: “ELBAZ, Marie-Claude, urgently sought on suspicion of attempted murder for Action Directe, January 3, 1987, in Saint-Gilles. Current whereabouts unknown.” Then came a file name that somebody had rendered illegible with a black marker.
“Action Directe, that was back in your days.”
“I wasn’t a cop. I was in high school and they were just background noise at the lycée.”
Action Directe. He tried to remember what he had learned about them in the gendarmerie training college: a collection of extreme left-wing activists—anarchists, autonomists, allegedly also Spanish refugees from Franco. The group just suddenly popped up in 1980: arson attacks on the DST’s head office, on the ministry for development, letters claiming responsibility marked with a star. But no bloodshed. Not like the Red Army Faction in West Germany and not at all like the Red Brigades in Italy. Mitterrand had just been elected. The first Socialist president anyone could remember, he brought Communists into his government, an idealist with a vision. It was a period in which Mitterrand secretly offered asylum to extreme left-wingers from Italy, to keep them safe from persecution. The gang with the white star on a black background were treated almost like a legal youth club. Le tout Paris was enraptured by these angry, impetuous revolutionaries. That was until Action Directe began shooting people, especially people from the tiny circle that considered itself le tout Paris.
The first killings were either in 1983 or 1984, Blanc couldn’t remember precisely. But he could remember the uproar when Georges Besse, the chairman of Renault, was murdered in November 1986. It was only when the elite found themselves in the radicals’ firing line that the Mitterrand regime took Action Directe seriously enough to put their faces on wanted posters. A few months after the attack on Besse the cops encountered their leaders at a farm they were using as a hiding place. He told Fabienne about it.
“Marie-Claude Elbaz wasn’t arrested at that farmhouse near Orléans,” she replied. “You can google the terrorists who were. Most of them are now free or dead. It would appear that Elbaz was never arrested.”
“She disappears from the radar screen in 1983 and doesn’t show up again until 1989,” Blanc mused. And all of a sudden the fragments of the story fell together in his mind, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that, once put together, made it obvious where all the other pieces should go. “She’s left wing, radical. Back in 1983 she’s a young girl and after her first arrest at a demonstration she disappears into the underground and links up with Action Directe. It was almost a fashion thing back then, nobody got upset about it and nobody was after her, nobody cared,” he began, expanding his theory, becoming ever more certain of it with every word. “But then she gets her hands dirty—our colleagues from the DST suspect her of involvement in an Action Directe murder. After that, they’re no longer complacent. She’s a wanted woman.”
“But Marie-Claude Elbaz escapes the arrest of the terror group’s leadership in 1987,” Fabienne added.
“She’s still an outlaw, but she keeps her head down until the whole business is all but forgotten. Somebody must have helped her during all that time, must have furnished her with clothes, money, and a roof over her head. Two years after Action Directe is wiped out, all of a sudden she pops up on the Côte d’Azur, as a curator in a provincial museum.”
“Where would she have gotten the credentials and papers? Did she really attend a university somewhere? Nothing is more harmless than that. And then a few years later she returns to Paris.”
“By which time nobody remembers Action Directe anymore. Where nobody is willing to admit that once upon a time they had idealized a group of murderers and more or less publicly tolerated their existence. Where nobody says a word about left-wing terrorism, at least not officially. Where Marie-Claude Elbaz from the provinces becomes Marie-Claude Leroux from Paris, the wife of the most influential publisher in the capital. Even though her husband is a celebrity, she avoids the spotlight. She’s never seen on TV, never turns up at receptions, but prefers to concentrate on rice in the Camargue. And nobody in the little circle of power in Paris knows anything about her past?” Blanc asked in conclusion, looking at Fabienne for a response.
She smiled and shook her head. Her eyes sparkled as if ready for a battle. “Nonsense. I bet they all know about it—the ministers, the managers, the journalists—they all have an idea about Marie-Claude’s involvement with Action Directe. Her husband knows. Cohen knew. Think about that draft letter on the reporter’s computer where he says he and Leroux know somebody with a secret. But nobody wants to be reminded of Action Directe. Her former lover Boré more or less knows about it. Even a creature like Guillaume somehow found out, maybe through the gossip at the museum. He told us to our faces that Marie-Claude Elbaz had somebody’s life on her conscience. But nobody except for this troll takes it seriously, nobody talks about it, nobody has published a single line accusing her, nobody has tried to take her to court. That’s why you can’t find anything online. Even the DST has buried its files so deep that you can only get to them via a risky hack. And even then there’s only a single document that doesn’t give us that much information. It’s as if Marie-Claude Elbaz had a child when she was a teenager and gave it away to an orphanage: everybody knows about it but out of politeness acts as if the child had never existed.”
“Except that it’s not an unwanted child they’re covering up, it’s another murder.”
“A murder that took place in Saint-Gilles. Strange, isn’t it? Is it just a coincidence that Guillaume was drawn there? And that Cohen noted down the place name? We need to find out who it was that Action Directe killed there. I’ll look into it.”
“Show me Cohen’s laptop again,” Blanc said.
Fabienne pulled the computer out of a desk drawer and held it up. Blanc opened Cohen’s draft letter to his publisher. “There,” he mumbled. “We’ve risked more for her than just money. And you and I both know someone who back then took on a lot more. Do you think that could be a hint that Cohen was remembering something from the past that everybody else in Paris wanted to forget? What do you think a reporter means when he refers to something like that?”
“That he’s intending to do a story on it,” Fabienne replied thoughtfully.
“A story that Leroux with his newly rekindled political ambitions would find extremely inopportune.”
“And a story that could put his wife in jail for the rest of her life. No statute of limitation applies to murder.”
“A story that would also be an embarrassment to le tout Paris because they’d all of a sudden have to deal with their own past. All of a sudden they’d have to ask themselves why they’d raved about a few guys running around with bombs and guns as if they were resistance fighte
rs.”
“Perhaps that old ear slicer Van Gogh had nothing at all to do with somebody setting a fighting bull onto Cohen,” Fabienne said.
“I’m enjoying this more and more,” Blanc told her.
“I’m not,” Fabienne said in a whisper. “It’s hot as hell out there, but suddenly I’ve got a chill running down my back.”
* * *
The phone was ringing in Blanc’s office as he walked back in. Marius didn’t stir; Blanc lifted the receiver. It took him a moment to recognize the voice. Paulette Aybalen. His neighbor had never called him before and he was simultaneously flattered and alarmed.
“Pardon for bothering you,” she began rather embarrassedly. “Can you get off a bit earlier than usual today?”
“Why?” Blanc felt absurdly like a fourteen-year-old being smiled at by a girl of the same age at school. But only for a second.
“Because Fuligni and his men are turning your house into a convertible.”
“Pas de souci,” he muttered, after putting down the receiver. He had been looking forward to contemplating Marie-Claude Elbaz’s past, working out what it meant for his case, thinking up new strategies and lines of investigation. But to do that he needed a clear head, and there was no way he could be reflective when less than a couple of miles away his house was being turned into an uninhabitable ruin.
Blanc checked Marius’s pulse once more and then hurried out of the office, past Baressi, out of the station, and into his steam horse. He would happily have given a few euros for a faster car, a helicopter even! He hammered the 2CV around the bends in the road until the shock absorbers groaned. By the time he reached his old oil mill he was imagining himself as the lead character in a hilarious family comedy. Hilarious for the audience because the lead character was stumbling from one catastrophe to the next.
The Manitou was jacked up outside the house and Fuligni’s workers were loading the last tuiles from his roof down on a pallet. The oak beams of the roof looked like the ribs of a prehistoric animal skeleton against the blue sky. Lots of new ocher-colored tuiles were piled up in layers in the dust next to the huge machine. None of them were on the roof. Matthieu Fuligni was directing the work from the cabin of the Manitou, talking at the same time to Paulette Aybalen, who had climbed up to him and was waving her cell phone. Sylvie and Bruno Micheletti were leaning against their old Peugeot 504, parked in the shade of a plane tree. In the back sat three children Blanc had never come across before. They were staring at the displays on their iPods and didn’t see him coming. On the other bank of the Touloubre, Serge Douchy was sitting on his tractor cursing. But above the noise of his diesel engine and the roar of the building machine, nobody could hear anything and nobody paid him any attention.
“Pas de souci,” Fuligni called out when he noticed Blanc coming toward him.
“What’s going on here?” Blanc asked. It was straight from a TV script. Any minute now the next catastrophe would hit him.
“You’ve got woodworm in the beams,” Fuligni replied happily.
Blanc went pale.
“We’ll deal with it,” the builder replied. “We just need to get a few buckets of Xylophene. We paint the beams with it and voilà, for the next ten years not a single one of the little beasts will even think of sinking its teeth into your roof.”
“Sounds as if it’s seriously poisonous.”
“You could commit genocide with it. But within twenty-four hours all of it that hasn’t sunk deep into the wood will have vaporized. Then we can put the new tuiles on.”
“My house is going to have to go topless for a day.”
“Just twenty-four hours, Monsieur Blanc. Or forty-eight. It’s not going to rain. Pas de souci.”
Paulette had climbed down from the Manitou and laid a hand calmingly on his arm. “He’s right,” she reassured Blanc. “You can’t have woodworm in the roof beams. It’ll all be over in a day or two. It’ll be sunny for at least the next week. We’re not in the north, you know.”
“And when I’m out at work, anybody passing by can just climb over the walls and empty the place.”
“The cops come by more regularly now in Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée,” she replied with a smile.
The Michelettis came up. They had dragged the kids from the backseat of the car, more or less by force. Two teenagers and a girl of elementary-school age stood staring at the bare roof beams once they realized what was going on.
“Léo, Julie, and Anouk.” Sylvie Micheletti introduced them. “Our kids. They could lend you one of their tents. Or you can come and stay with us at the winery. We have spare rooms.”
Blanc wanted to decline both options gracefully until he saw the kids looking at him expectantly. “I’ll take a tent,” he said. “Just in case.”
He was rewarded with a smile from all three. Léo, the oldest, went over to the Peugeot and opened the trunk. “For you, Monsieur,” he announced proudly and handed him one of those flat-packed extremely modern backpacker tents that you could put up with a single pull but never properly fold back up again. “I could put the tent up in my bedroom,” Blanc said indecisively, “or maybe it would be better to spend the night outside the house in case one of the rotten beams falls on my head.”
“The larger branches of your plane tree also need to be cut back or they’ll come down of their own accord,” Fuligni added calmly.
Before Blanc could say anything in reply, his Nokia rang. The number on the display was one he knew by heart, Aveline’s cell phone.
“Maybe we could meet up today? Your place?”
Blanc took a few steps away before answering in a whisper: “My house looks like the scene of a terrorist attack.” His mind was racing. His lover almost certainly had mysterious preferences he was unaware of, but he was fairly certain that an hour making love in a ruin was not among them. “How much time do you have?” he asked her.
“I don’t have to be in the Palais de Justice in Aix-en-Provence until tomorrow morning. I’m free all afternoon.” Then, after a brief pause, “And all night.”
“In that case, let’s meet in Saint-Gilles,” he suggested. “We can meet outside the church in two hours’ time, look around the town, find a restaurant, and book a hotel room.”
“We’ll take two separate rooms. I’ll book them.” Aveline hung up. She hadn’t even asked why he had picked that place in particular for them to meet.
“Important call?” Paulette Aybalen said casually as Blanc slipped the Nokia back into his pocket and came back over to the Manitou.
“Yes,” he said. For a second or two he wanted to add a rider such as “An important official business call,” but he was reluctant to lie. But given that he could hardly tell the truth, he gave her an apologetic smile and then nodded to Fuligni. “Do whatever you have to.”
“By the time we’ve finished you won’t have to worry about any future damage to your roof,” the builder promised him.
“If it’s not too late already, that is,” Blanc muttered.
His affair with Aveline was insane. Sooner or later it would all come out. And what would happen then? He said good-bye to the Michelettis with a wave and to Paulette with a kiss on both cheeks. For a second he held her by the arm and realized that what he was now planning to do was even more hopeless than what he had already done. What he ought to be doing was staying here, watching the crazy workmen, clearing out the oil mill, and asking Paulette to stay with him a little longer. Instead, he went into the house, amazed to find out how bright it was without the roof. He fetched a toiletry bag and a few pieces of clothing, packed them into a sports bag, and went out again. Even in the steam horse he would make it to Saint-Gilles on time.
* * *
En route, his Nokia buzzed: a long text message from Fabienne: I’ve managed to hack the first of Cohen’s computer’s encrypted files. They include a few blurry images of the Van Gogh documents from Arles. I think he took them with his cell phone in the police archive. Proof that he went to Arles. And an indication
that he was NOT the thief: if he had intended to steal the documents, he wouldn’t have bothered to photograph them first, would he? I’m now looking at MCE, Action Directe, and Saint-Gilles. It’s a pity you aren’t here to pat me on the back, I could do with some praise. Where are you anyway? Kisses.
Blanc went to answer while driving, but he had barely typed three letters before he almost crashed into an oncoming truck. So he pulled over to the side and typed, Merci. Can’t you feel the pat on the back? I’m following up on a suspicion. See you tomorrow in Gadet.
The 2CV groaned as Blanc drove it over a narrow hump-backed bridge across the Rhône. The river here had been channeled into a straight bed. The water was ink-blue; the warm westerly wind raised tiny waves that glimmered like glass sickles in the sunshine. Passing over the bridge that led to Saint-Gilles, he glimpsed through the side window a long row of houseboats moored to the stone quay, beyond which stood the flat façades of houses of an indefinable age, their bright plaster peeling away in various stages of damp decay. A confusion of jet-black electricity and phone lines hanging dangerously low from their poles led into the buildings. It looked like a village in the third world. There were no pedestrians to be seen on the quay, just a few elderly mountain bikers who had just gotten off their bikes and were wandering up and down with stiff legs. In contrast the road was quite busy. Blanc was honked at frequently because his 2CV couldn’t go fast enough. He took the main street into the town center. A storefront on his left was decorated in red, white, and blue; it was the local headquarters of the Front National. Blanc finally remembered when he had first heard the name of the little town. Even years ago the Front had gotten more votes here than anywhere else in France. So many that, while he was still working in Paris, newspaper reporters and television teams had turned up down here. Paris! Don’t even think about it. Merde.
He parked the 2CV on an irregularly shaped square underneath the massive medieval stone wall that held the old town as if in a fist. Blanc wondered if Saint-Gilles was really such a good place for a lovers’ secret tryst. He walked through a narrow gate that was so claustrophobic he involuntarily ducked. Two alleys. Heat. Nobody to be seen. A rusted sign on the church. Blanc took just a few steps in the direction it suggested, then stopped. The alleyway opened out onto a small, dull square, which was more accurately an old street intersection blocked off to cars by metal barriers. No trees, no shade, no cafés. But opposite him was a staircase as big as that for the entrance to a soccer stadium. It led up to an ancient church, huge and curiously unfinished-looking: a massive façade in front of a gashed, undecorated nave. There was an ugly tower on the right-hand side, its lower half narrower than the upper, a denial in stone of gravity and proportion. On the left was just a stump as if some giant sickle had sliced off a tower just above the ground, then three entrance doors beneath curved archways in the façade, like a stage set for eternity.
Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02 Page 16
