The Grave Gourmet

by Alexander Campion

  Fleuret poured himself a cup of coffee and dropped a paper packet of sugar into the cup as he tried to open it.

  “Here. Let me do it. Do you want milk as well?” Capucine fished the packet out with the spoon, poured in the contents of a fresh one along with soy milk from a little plastic container.

  The epidermis of Fleuret’s antipathy softened slightly as Capucine stirred.

  “You’re right, I doubt I have any choice. It’s all a matter of record anyway. As it happens, in addition to my high-net-worth clients I also represent a number of French manufacturers of tactical assets and handle the legal side of the commercialization of their products to foreign nations.”

  “By ‘tactical assets’ I’m guessing you mean ‘arms,’ right? Exactly what are we talking about? Airplanes, missiles, assault weapons?”

  “Okay, ‘arms,’ if you prefer. France exports a full range of weaponry: sidearms, airplanes, and everything in between. The bigger the asset, the more complex the contractual agreement. My specialty is missiles, which usually involve elaborate maintenance service contracts, but I’ve done pretty much a full range of deals. The transaction in this case was a sale of missiles to an Asian nation. Upon reflection, I decided that this particular sale was unethical and informed my client that I would not be able to assist them. As a consequence they felt they had no choice but to abandon the transaction and asked me to inform the purchaser. That’s really all there is to it. Obviously, the purchaser was less than thrilled with the news and chose to take it out on the messenger.”

  “I see. Now, who is the ex-client and who was the purchaser?”

  “Lieutenant, that’s irrelevant history. Just before the meeting I received a call from my client informing me that I was no longer on their roster of lawyers and that they had the intention of blackballing me with the other arms distributors. So that’s all a closed chapter of my career.”

  “Maître, I wasn’t asking you about your career, but I do need the names of the seller and the buyer, here.”

  “That, Lieutenant, is client confidential, very definitely so. A few of my transactions are a matter of record and I’m sure you could easily have divined the nature of that side of my practice, which is why I’ve given you the information you already have. But to think I’m going to violate client confidentiality is naive, to say the least. Now, I’m going to have to ask you to leave me to my breakfast or I really will call the nurse.”

  That afternoon she received a call from Fleuret. “I’ve just had your juge d’instruction on the phone, a very irate and unpleasant woman, but a very well-informed one nonetheless. She spent some time quoting to me from legal texts. She’s very knowledgeable about the niceties of the attorney-client privilege, and she succeeded in convincing me that if I don’t make a fully detailed deposition I face a risk of immediate incarceration. I know it’s an imposition, but I wonder if I could ask you to come back to the hospital. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s impossible for me to get to you.”

  Madame d’Agremont’s stock rose significantly in Capucine’s books.

  Fleuret’s story was straightforward. Matra, the automobile, communication, and weapons conglomerate, had negotiated with the Taiwanese government for the sale of a large number of multihead missiles to be used with their 47 French Mirage 2000 fighter jets. Everything had been arranged, even the tricky negotiation of the extension of the existing missile maintenance agreement to the new weapons. All that had been left to resolve was the relatively simple agreement on the price of the missiles themselves. The meeting in the garage had been with the secretary to the Taiwanese minister of defense and, of course, the inevitable bodyguards. The secretary had not wanted to be seen in public, hence the underground venue. Fleuret knew the Taiwanese would be greatly disappointed at the loss of the deal—after all, a Mirage 2000 loaded with French-made multihead missiles would be a big step up from the Russian Su27, which was the top of the current Chinese fleet—but he had hardly expected the violence of their reaction.

  “But why did you change your mind so close to the end of the transaction?”

  “That’s a bit complicated. I think, when all is said and done, it was to honor the memory of Jean-Louis Delage. You see, it was my idea to have dinner that night, but generous soul that he was, he insisted on paying. I wanted Jean-Louis to approve my participating in the deal. Most of my weapons practice had come from his contacts and I wanted to make sure he would not object. It was a sort of moral obligation, if you can understand that.”

  “Why wouldn’t he approve if he had encouraged you to do this sort of work in the first place?”

  “Oh, you just don’t understand Jean-Louis. He was first and foremost a statesman, not an industrialist. He saw the success of Renault, and France itself for that matter, as coming from skillfully concocted international alliances. As you probably know, Matra manufactures a good number of components for Renault and the links between the two companies are well known abroad. Over dinner he told me he was certain that this transaction would put Renault on the Chinese blacklist along with Matra. He thought it was a criminally stupid thing to do just as China’s industrial star was rising. In fact, he was almost irrationally hostile to the whole thing. So hostile that I was sure he was thinking of negotiating some form of alliance with the Chinese the way he already had with the Japanese.”

  “So it was during dinner you agreed you’d drop the deal? I understand it ended quite amicably.”

  “This is the part where I blush. I’m afraid I did give Jean-Louis my word at the table. I really had no choice. You don’t know how single-minded he was when he got going with his international agreements. Besides, he would have gone over my head and bullied the bigwigs at Matra if I didn’t agree. But after the dinner was over, I changed my mind. My fees would have been enormous. I also doubt that the Chinese will be able to maintain their silly attitude toward Taiwan for very much longer. So in spite of my promise to Jean-Louis I kept on with the transaction. But after he was no longer with us, going against Jean-Louis’s wishes seemed an insult to his memory. Something I just couldn’t do. Does that make sense?”

  Just as Capucine was launching into a second round of questions, ones she knew would just be gilding the lily, Karine Bergeron arrived, clucking like a chic mother hen, encumbered with bags and packages, all presumably intended to make Fleuret’s stay in the hospital more bearable. Karine glared at Capucine, obviously unhappy that he was being disturbed in any way. A polite but painfully self-conscious conversation ensued. Capucine felt excluded, somehow at the mercy of her suspects, not the reverse. On her way down in the elevator she ground her teeth and wondered for the hundredth time what Rivière would have done.

  Chapter 29

  Early the next Saturday morning Capucine bundled a very testy Alexandre into the Clio for the forty-five-minute ride to the town of Versailles to attend the baptism of one of her cousins’ first child.

  “I don’t understand why anyone would choose to live in Versailles,” Alexandre whined, “and if they absolutely must, why do they find it necessary to baptize their scrofulous little urchins at the crack of dawn?”

  “They live in Versailles because Marie-Chantal is a bit of a snob and Aurélien doesn’t make very much money in his job selling insurance. It’s less expensive than Paris and Marie-Chantal feels it’s just as chic as the Sixteenth Arrondissement. And I hardly think eleven o’clock counts as the crack of dawn.”

  Capucine was enchanted with the church, a small but delightfully proportioned example of early French baroque architecture complete with an inverted-bowl cupola, delicately carved oak paneling, and a lavishly gilded baptismal font. To her utter amazement Cousin Jacques was standing by the basin, proprietarily resplendent in a Prince of Wales check suit, clearly unwilling to relinquish any of the godparental limelight as he unabashedly upstaged the horse-faced godmother. Dimly Capucine recalled that Jacques had been at boarding school with Aurélien but she had had no idea the unlikely friendship had survi
ved into adulthood.

  As tiny Marie-Aymone’s head was dipped in the chilly holy water, she burst into muted wails that politely ceased the instant Jacques wrapped her in a white lace baptismal shawl that had been in the family for generations. Capucine’s throat caught and her eyes misted as she realized that she had been baptized in the selfsame shawl. Biting her lip was no help at all, and she was forced to conjure up an image of Rivière smirking disdainfully at her before she could regain her tough-girl flic’s demeanor.

  After the ceremony, the forty or so guests were gently herded into the enclosed garden of Marie-Chantal and Loïc’s small stone house. Over the phone Marie-Chantal had explained to Capucine with a titter that the house—which she insisted had been built by one of Louis the XIV’s foremen during the construction of the château—was just too bijou for so many guests and so they were going to have a garden party even though the garden, so sadly, was hardly at its summer best. A small table placed in a corner held two crested silver dishes that offered a meager pile of finger sandwiches, and a rococo silver wine cooler abstemiously proffered four bottles of champagne.

  Alexandre was aghast. “Here I am, hauled all the way out to the very marchland of French culture and when I arrive it turns out I’m to be denied even basic human sustenance.” With alarm Capucine recognized this as the preamble to one of Alexandre’s lectures and could easily imagine him searching out the priest to make wittily acerbic comments about Jesus’ self-proliferating loaves and fishes for the multitude. Still, she fully shared his dismay. Two or three miniscule sandwiches and a few sips of champagne did seem well beyond parsimonious under the circumstances, particularly as her stomach was beginning to growl.

  From behind Capucine heard a familiar mocking voice directed at Alexandre. “Fear not, dear cousin. I took the liberty of booking a table for the three of us at a lovely restaurant with a charming view of the chateau’s famed royal vegetable gardens. Since this little hostelry sports a Michelin star, your day may yet be saved,” Jacques said.

  Capucine cringed again. Alexandre had always been—completely foolishly, of course—a little jealous of Jacques, but, to her surprise, Alexandre warmly grasped Jacques’ hand and, without even a trace of irony, said, “Cousin, you are a ray of sunshine in my bleak day.”

  “Well, then,” said Jacques, “let’s not stand on the order of our going; let’s just get rolling. If I hear one more iteration of ‘Jaaaaaques’ in that god-awful Neuilly-Auteuil-Passy lockjaw or have to kiss one more wrinkled, geriatric hand I may find myself teaching this branch of the family a few words they don’t know,” Jacques said, leaning back languidly against an ancient wooden door in the stone wall, which gave way under his weight with a loud cinematic creak. The three slipped out and made for the Clio.

  The Relais du Potager du Roi’s long suit was its panoramic view of the royal kitchen gardens, which had been painstakingly restored to the original ornate checkerboard and populated with fruits and vegetables guaranteed to be identical to those present in Louis XV’s day. Happily, despite the restaurant’s pronounced vegetarian bent, in deference to the French veneration of protein, game held pride of place on the menu. Capucine opted for partridge, Jacques for pheasant, and Alexandre for French grouse, which he delightedly explained was now almost impossible to find.

  By the time the birds were nearly consumed—the shot delicately removed from mouths and placed on the sides of plates with a satisfying little ping—and a second bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges was uncorked, Capucine felt the day might turn out to be a success after all.

  Jacques put his hand under the table and squeezed Capucine’s leg just above the knee. Alexandre’s face tightened.

  “So, cousin,” Jacques asked with a knowing smile, “how goes your famous case? I read your report on the Trag agent who was impersonating one of our people. What a jolly time you must have had catching him.”

  “All in a day’s work,” Capucine said, removing Jacques’ hand. “Actually, we have a suspect, but I can’t make myself believe he had anything to do with the murder. Other than that, I’m dry.”

  Jacques produced his little Cheshire grin and put his hand back on Capucine’s leg. “I would have thought you’d be up to your eyeballs in international intrigue by now.”

  The bubble of Capucine’s contentment burst. “Jacques, are you keeping something back from me? Tell me right now!”

  Jacques giggled and pinched Capucine’s kneecap, making her squirm and Alexandre frown. “Little cousin, you love to think I’m hiding secrets from you. I think it’s because your id is begging you to offer me sexual favors for them.” Capucine was obliged to calm Alexandre with one of her most severe looks.

  “Actually,” Jacques continued, “there are no secrets, just pure logic. Didn’t you ever ask yourself how Trag just happened to know about Project Typhon?”

  “Of course. It seems they just guessed Renault would be working on improving gas mileage and used Delage’s death as an opportunity to plant a spy.”

  “That’s exactly what they did. But you never stopped to think there might be other Trags at work, did you?”

  “There can’t possibly be other firms like Trag, can there?”

  “Good Lord, there are any number of private firms, most much smaller, of course. And then there are all the national intelligence services who can be even better than Trag and twice as unscrupulous even though their employees earn far less. I’m willing to bet Renault is like a big steaming cow pie alive with industrious little beetles tunneling in and out.”

  “But Typhon is top secret. How could it attract that many people?”

  “Project Typhon may be a secret but the fact that Renault is working on gas catalysis is an obvious truism. You see, technological leaps invariably turn out to be a race between a number of competitors and Renault is such a strong technical player it will obviously be in the race.”

  “I don’t get it,” Capucine said.

  “I see his point,” Alexandre said. “Let me try to explain. When most major scientific and technological discoveries are made it always seems that any number of different people in different places are working on exactly the same thing at the same time. For example, we like to think that only Santos Dumont and the Wright brothers had a monopoly on cooking up the airplane. But no one ever talks about Karl Jatho or Traian Vuia or Jacob Elle-hammer, who all flew airplanes in different countries at about the same time. The point is that when technology is ready to pop, it pops all over the place like ripe pieces of fruit dropping off a tree.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Capucine said.

  “Look, cousine, it’s the same thing with this gasoline catalyst,” Jacques said, “people are working on it all over the world. It’s ready to drop off the tree, as dear cousin Alexandre says. Its time has come.”

  “And what does all this theorizing about the nature of technological discovery have to do with the case?” Capucine asked.

  “Remember my cow-dung heap?”

  “How could I forget? Such a charming metaphor to use at lunch.”

  “You see, it’s not just the number of beetles crawling in and out, it’s the fact that there are different kinds.”

  “I suspected the metaphor would get even more delightful. Let’s hear it.”

  “Industrial spies come in two basic types: moles and hackers. Moles look like trusted employees and spirit information out. Hackers burrow in from the outside and bleed information out of your computer systems. You were confronted with such a rare type it’s almost never seen: a scam artist. They’re so unusual you should have pickled the one you caught in formaldehyde and put him on your desk.”

  “That’s exactly what Commissaire Principal Tallon wanted to do.”

  Capucine removed Jacques’ hand from her leg and placed it firmly on the table with a loud thunk. “It took a while, but the penny finally dropped.”

  Chapter 30

  At ten the next morning—heeding her mother’s dictum that it was not proper
to make phone calls before ten in the morning or after nine in the evening—Capucine called Florian Guyon to announce she would be stopping by his apartment that evening to ask him some questions. Guyon sputtered, both at the early hour of the call and at the Sunday invasion of his home, but finally agreed to see her.

  He received her with a coolness that verged on ill grace and led her almost reluctantly to the living room. Capucine suppressed a grimace. The entire space—walls, floor, and ceiling—had been painted in the same stark, relentlessly gleaming, high-gloss institutional white that looked like it had come from a hospital supply outlet. A monstrous kinetic sculpture dominated the room, looming from a towering white pedestal. It had countless shiny stainless-steel parts that plunged, rotated, swiveled back and forth, and spun hypnotically within other parts, clanking and clattering noisily as if the machine had been carelessly assembled and was about to come apart.

  “I didn’t think there were any Kanamgires outside of museums,” Capucine said over the din. “I understand he’s very particular where his work goes.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought a police officer would recognize his work,” Guyon replied with obvious delight. “I knew him when we were students. I was very fortunate that he allowed me to purchase one of his earlier pieces. The motion is precisely ordered by a tiny computer hidden inside. It is both unstoppable and unfathomable. That is its message. It’s an inspiration to me.”

  “You’re lucky to have it, Monsieur Guyon. Sit down. We need to talk.” Capucine noticed she had raised her voice in an unthinking shout the way she did when speaking into a cell phone with a bad connection.

  “I trust the subject is important enough to merit the invasion of my home in this manner,” Guyon said. The tone was such that he could just as easily have been attempting levity or showing bad temper.

  “Monsieur Guyon,” Capucine said loudly over the background noise of the sculpture, “when we last spoke you told me that you found it natural that the DGSE send an agent to interview you and inspect Project Typhon. I had the impression that you were almost expecting someone from the DGSE. Why was that? Had you asked for assistance?”