In an attempt to drive the conversation back to Diapason, Capucine feinted with, “Isn’t there an element of pride in being on the team of one of the most illustrious restaurants in the world?”
“I hardly think of myself on anyone’s team. Labrousse does his job and I do mine. I don’t doubt that he’s an admirable cook. It’s just that…how can I explain it to you?…the food is merely a support for the wine.” He paused with wrinkled brow. “It’s a poor comparison but think of it this way. It’s like the cheese on the bread. The bread must be good, of course, but the important thing is the Reblochon. When I serve, say, an Haut-Brion ’78 I am happy to have one of Labrousse’s little dishes as a backdrop, but of course it’s the wine that triumphs. It’s obvious, no?”
“And do you think Chef Labrousse sees it that way?”
Rolland laughed raucously. “Who knows what these cooks think? Personally, I think their brains must be addled by all that heat and sweat.”
Like a drover coaxing a recalcitrant cow back into the herd Capucine tried repeatedly to prod Rolland into talking about life at Diapason, but he was not to be moved. Only “his” wine mattered. The sole merit of the restaurant was its ability to attract a worthy clientele. The less he knew about the steamy mechanics of food preparation, the happier he was.
After another half an hour of monologue about himself, largely focused on the theme of his current desire to spend six months in Australia to develop a “visceral understanding” of a vignoble that was increasingly becoming worthy of his attention, he suddenly jerked a look at his watch. “Good Lord! Look what time it is. I have to rush back to the restaurant. I’m going to be late. I hope this has been of some use to you. It’s certainly been extremely enjoyable for me.” Rolland, ever the well-mannered guest, beamed and stood up, offering his hand.
Capucine pushed a button under her desk and the door opened quietly as Momo entered wordlessly. “I’m sorry, Monsieur Rolland, but you’re going to be spending the night with us. I’m placing you on garde à vue. You’ll be here at least until tomorrow, possibly longer. Momo, take Monsieur Rolland down to the detention cells.”
“You can’t do this! I have to get dressed for the dinner service. How will the restaurant funct…”
Capucine jutted her chin sharply and Momo placed a meaty hand under his armpit and squeezed just hard enough to shut him up and start him toward the door.
“Don’t worry, I’ll give Chef Labrousse a call and let him make arrangements for the dinner service. Good night, Monsieur Rolland.”
Chapter 34
This time imagining herself into Rivière’s persona was no help at all. Capucine had already felt highly guilty about assigning her brigadiers to pointless make-work duty just so she could have a day off to go shopping and now she was going to put them on something even more crushingly boring.
Once they had shuffled in and coiled into the Police Judiciare’s ubiquitous bent metal chairs, she announced with the forced cheerfulness of a Club Med host, “It’s time we changed tactics. We’re going to do a round-the-clock tail of Guyon’s and Delage’s secretaries. We’ll have some backup but we’re going to have to do most of the tailing ourselves. I know it’s a huge pain in the ass, but I think it’s going to give us our first really solid lead.”
Capucine cringed internally, bracing for the outburst. Astonishingly, all three brigadiers erupted into joyous smiles and high-fived each other with raucous, “Eh bien, voilàs,” and “Enfins!” How unlike the fiscal brigade this all was. It was really true, in La Crim they were only happy if they were out on the street.
When the buzz died down she assigned David and Isabelle to Thérèse Garnier, Guyon’s secretary. “You’ll have backup from the pool but I want you to stay on the subject when she goes to work in the morning, when she goes home, and for at least two hours after her normal bedtime. That’s going to be a long day but we can’t afford to delegate the important hours. Momo and I are going to tail Clotilde Lancrey-Javal. I want to review the setup with you back here tomorrow night at midnight when you hand over to the pool guys but after tomorrow you can go straight home and report in by phone.”
At the meeting the next day David and Isabelle were like bouncy puppies. Unbelievably, the day’s tedium had actually invigorated them. It turned out that Thérèse Garnier lived in Fontenay-sous-Bois, a low-income suburb to the east of Paris, with her husband and two small children. She had risen at six, fed her family, taken the RER rapid transit train to the Châtelet station, had been herded for fifteen minutes through a tightly packed tunnel to another RER train, and had been spewed out at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where she had caught a Renault shuttle bus. The trip took an hour and a half and she entered the building at eight forty-five, fifteen minutes before her boss. In the evening she had left at six thirty, reversed the process, reached home a little after eight, fed her family, watched an hour of TV, and had been in bed by ten.
“I tell you, Lieutenant, every time I want to bitch about the job, all I have to do is think about the way women like that live. I’d rather be a nun,” Isabelle said.
“But just think about all the great sex you’d be missing out on,” David said. Seemingly playfully, Isabelle punched him in the arm, but he recoiled sharply and pursed his lips, obviously in pain.
Thérèse’s routine was repeated every day that week. When Saturday arrived Isabelle was proved wrong. The outing, which did in fact include the entire family, was only to the Monoprix at the end of the street. The Garniers didn’t own a car. The level-three wiretap that Madame d’Agremont had authorized revealed nothing more interesting than a Friday-night call from Guyon ordering his secretary to be at work at seven thirty Monday morning to type up a presentation he was going to write over the weekend. Thérèse’s comments to her husband had not been recorded but Capucine had no trouble imagining them.
Capucine had not tailed anyone since the police academy, and even then it had been far from her favorite subject. Becoming invisible just went too much against her grain. Fortunately, Momo revealed a talent for gently prodding her into the thick of the crowd or behind a corner just in the nick of time and the shadowing of Clotilde Lancrey-Javal passed without mishap.
With her increased workload as administrator of the bureaucracy of the office of the president, Clotilde didn’t leave the office until seven thirty at the earliest. In compensation, her transit time was considerably less than her colleague’s. She took the same RER train but changed to the metro at the Odéon in the Latin Quarter for a short ride virtually to her door. The trip rarely took more than half an hour. Of course, the last fifteen minutes on the metro could occasionally be tense. She lived on a small, twisted street that snaked down the side of Montmartre toward the boulevard de Rochechouart, in the heart of Paris’s notorious North African quarter, an area where even the police in uniform were often uneasy.
On the second day of the surveillance, once Clotilde was safely ensconced in her office, Capucine went back to Clotilde’s neighborhood to get a feel for the environment.
“Lieutenant,” Momo had said. “Let’s be careful here. This ain’t one of your vacations in Marrakech.”
Capucine bit off her acid retort and strode purposefully at Momo’s elbow. The streets were jammed with North African men, bored, loitering, strolling, lolling, smoking, jeering at passersby, the detritus of a neighborhood where unemployment for those with papers topped thirty percent and the majority of inhabitants were unemployable illegals. What little French was spoken on the street was drowned in the macaronic singsong of Arab argot. As a couple Momo and Capucine sparked a good deal of interest. Momo was bombarded with comments. The few words that Capucine could understand seemed to indicate a consensus that his choice of a woman not from the bled must result in a very tame time in bed and even worse food. Most of the time Momo just laughed. Once or twice he turned in anger, causing his mocker to vanish in deference to Momo’s bulk.
Clotilde’s building was a nondescript dark, narrow four-story st
ructure built in the late nineteenth century on a plot undoubtedly previously occupied by a small town house. Surprisingly for the neighborhood, a concierge was on her knees scrubbing the tiny tiled foyer with a stiff brush and a green plastic bucket of bleach water. She wore a shapeless housedress, a well-worn lemon-and-white striped apron and ancient carpet slippers. Her face was decorated with faded harquus tattoos on her chin and under her eyes.
Momo whispered in Capucine’s ear. “Boss, let me deal with this woman. She’ll give us a look at the apartment. No problem. Just step away a little and let me handle it.”
He walked over to the kneeling concierge and bent over her threateningly. “Woman, you’ve been bad,” he said in a strong Maghrebian accent. “I’m going to take you in and put you in GAV and keep you under arrest until you talk. You be there long time. Do you understand?!”
The woman was terrified. “No, no. I no do anything. Why you say that? Don’t take me down. I have to feed my little ones.”
“You have bad person living here. You bad, too. A blanc called Lancrey-Javal. You tell me about her.”
“L’Ancre Naval! She lives under the roof. Go see if you want. I have keys. She not from the bled.”
Momo turned to Capucine. “We’re in. She calls her the Naval Anchor because the name is too complicated for her. Just don’t smile at the woman. She’ll only cooperate if she’s terrified and thinks we’re going to let her rot in GAV for weeks on end, which happens often enough to these people.” Capucine was surprised to see that he hadn’t bothered to show his police ID.
They followed the woman as she shuffled up three flights of shabby but spotless stairs and stopped at a final set so steep it was almost a ladder. Normally this would have led to the dormers, the floor that had been built to contain tiny cubicles for servants, devoid of plumbing except for a single cold-water tap and a hole-in-the-floor “Turkish” toilet in a closet at the end of the hall. But the top of the stairs was blocked by a wooden door painted in brilliant lilac.
“It’s here that she lives, the Ancre Naval.” The concierge extracted a trousseau of keys from her apron, singled one out, and handed the bunch to Momo. “You go look. I stay here. Say nothing.”
The apartment could well have been featured in Madame Figaro. The partitions of the cubicles had been knocked down and the area transformed into a single long loft brightly lit by six windows. The ceiling had been knocked out and the roof beams exposed, stained, and waxed, creating a pleasing feeling of an antique barn. A large double bed covered in pillows was at the far end. The middle consisted of a living room of beige leather furniture clustered around an onyx fireplace. Several large portraits trimmed in ornate gilt frames stretched from floor to ceiling. The area closest to the door was occupied by a brushed stainless steel kitchen area equipped with the latest in German appliances.
“Wow!” Momo said.
“I told you she wasn’t from the bled,” the concierge shouted happily from the bottom of the stairs.
Later that night Capucine and Momo returned to the Quai des Orfèvres after examining the contents of the apartment. Other than the neighborhood, they found nothing that was not consistent with the dwelling of a relatively well-to-do single woman. Capucine, interest piqued, went straight to her office and turned on her computer. In less than an hour she strode into the bridadiers’ office, her eyes alight with the joy of discovery.
“That Naval Anchor apartment gets stranger and stranger.”
“She won it in a lottery?”
“Not even close. There are four separate apartments listed on that floor of that building. One of them is in her name and three others in the names of Jean, Bertrand, and Lisette Moreau. All four have post office mortgages. The values listed are ridiculously low, even for Barbès. What do you make of that?”
“Beats me, Lieutenant. I’m just here for the heavy lifting.”
“Lieutenant, I may have fucked up. Badly,” Momo said, his voice clear enough on the cell phone to be audible to the others in the room. By mid-week the surveillance of Clotilde had revealed nothing of interest. Impatient, Tallon had convoked Capucine to review the case at the end of the day. Capucine had followed Clotilde home on the metro, handed her over to Momo when she went upstairs, and had then come back to the Quai des Orfèvres for the meeting. Half an hour into the session Capucine’s cell phone had vibrated in its irritating way.
“What happened?”
“Well, about an hour after you left the subject comes down with a newspaper under her arm. You know, the Monde, the small one, folded in half, like.”
“Momo, I know the Monde. Go on.”
“So she hangs around, like she doesn’t know where to go. That looked odd. Then she walks down the street and starts poking around the stuff this store has out on the sidewalk. You know, pots and pans, suitcases, djellabas hanging on the wall, all that stuff.”
“I remember the store.”
“Anyway, this Asian guy comes up. Suit. With a Monde under his arm. He starts looking at this junk, too. At one point he brushes up against the subject and apologizes. They don’t talk after that and he just walks off. Looked odd to me. Who in hell reads the Monde in Barbès? I think they switched papers. After the fact it struck me that the Mondes were fatter than they shoulda been.”
“Then what happened?”
“The subject just goes back upstairs. I know I fucked up. I should have tailed the Asian guy, but I didn’t want to leave the subject without orders.”
“You did the right thing, Momo. I should have been with you. It sounds like a drop, all right. Stay with the subject. I’ll be back there in half an hour.”
Capucine looked at Tallon pointedly. “Seems like Clotilde Lancrey-Javal just passed something to someone on the street. Momo couldn’t follow him because I wasn’t there to back him up.”
Tallon beamed. “Don’t worry about that. Put more people on her surveillance. Upgrade the priority level on her wiretaps. Get going. Things are looking up.”
Chapter 35
Capucine let Rolland sulk in his cell until late in the afternoon of the next day before bringing him up to her office. Despite his wrinkled suit in which he had obviously slept for two nights, it was the same affable Rolland who still gave every indication of being on a social call.
“Monsieur Rolland, pleasant as our conversation was the other day, we really didn’t spend as much time talking about the restaurant as I would have liked. I gather that there’s no love lost between you and the kitchen staff but, nevertheless, Diapason is your place of business. A man has been found dead, people come and go in the middle of the night dragging heavy bags: obviously there must be a good deal of discussion about these things.”
“If there is, it isn’t with me. I’ve already told you, Président Delage was not a devotee of wine. He possessed the rudiments, of course, but preferred ordering safe, solid, costly but dull wines of no particular interest. There was no pleasure in conferring with him. I’m sure his death was a tragedy, but not for me.”
“And the mysterious visit in the middle of the night?”
“I know even less about that. Who can say? Some sort of produce delivery, no doubt. As I’m sure you’ve been told, Jean-Basile Labrousse is famous, or shall I say infamous, for ordering his produce in minute quantities from small farms all over France. There are deliveries all the time. Obviously, avoiding the wholesale distributors is a good thing. I myself mistrust the large marchands de vin and buy a good deal of my wine locally direct from the châteaux. But there are limits. Apparently the kitchen is continually in fear of having to withdraw a dish from the menu in the middle of the service, which would just not do in a three-star restaurant, particularly if the wine I had chosen for that dish had already been uncorked.”
“But there is the question of the key. Would a farmer, if that’s who it was, be given a key?”
Rolland laughed. “Madame, I couldn’t care less who has keys or who makes deliveries. My wine cellar has a steel door as solid
as a safe’s. It has to meet the insurance company specifications. As long as they can’t get into it—and they certainly can’t—I don’t give a damn who traipses around the restaurant, day or night.”
Capucine looked at him sharply. “Who has keys to the cellar?”
“Just Labrousse and myself.” Rolland paused and stared at the floor. “But I don’t allow anyone in there without my being present.” He raised his head and his eyes traversed the room slowly like the twin barrels of a shotgun until they stared hard into Capucine’s. “You can’t imagine how painful it is for me to think of my aide sommelier pawing my bottles without my supervision.”
“Oh, I’m quite sure he’s been perfectly trained by you and is a credit to the restaurant.”
“Lieutenant, how long is this going to go on for? Are you going to allow me to work tonight?”
“Not tonight, no. Let’s hope we can make more progress tomorrow.” Capucine stood up as Momo arrived and turned her back on Rolland. Without a word Momo escorted him from the room.
The next day Capucine again waited until after lunch to send for him. Even though Rolland was now haggard and his suit frankly scruffy, smelling faintly of urine and industrial disinfectant, he still hung on valiantly to the shreds of his affable tone. Capucine continued their discussion, hardly an interrogation, into the late afternoon. Rolland reiterated his utter lack of interest in pastimes that didn’t involve enology and his disdain for the pedestrian domain of food preparation. At precisely four o’clock Capucine stopped the conversation short and conspicuously pushed the button that summoned Momo.
“Your forty-eight hours of garde à vue are up. I’m going to have you driven home. You’re in no condition to be on the streets.”
The Grave Gourmet Page 16
