The Grave Gourmet

by Alexander Campion

  Capucine erupted in laughter. Rivière looked hurt. “I’m sorry. But the thought of you cast as a Jean-Louis Trintignant was just too much. Anyway, you’re out of luck. They don’t have rooms here.” Rivière looked even more hurt.

  “You know, Capucine, when I first met you, I thought you were super hot but you also looked like the world’s biggest asshole. A useless, stuck-up society girl with attitude. But it turns out you’ve got street sense. I don’t know where the hell you got it, but you definitely do. I like working with you. And it’s not just because of your boobs. If you give me another glass of that wine I might even be tempted to say you’re not half bad.”

  “But still a society girl?”

  “Obviously. Who else would know about the tides in a Normandy yacht basin? Not a poor kid from the projects like me. Seriously, though, I’d like to work with you again someday. You taught me a bunch of stuff I’d never have come across otherwise. Or maybe we could just have a drink sometime if you ever make it down to Bordeaux. We could even have dinner or go away for the weekend.”

  “The feeling is mutual. Absolutely. About the work part. Even the drink.”

  As the shadows began to lengthen the police cutter tugged the sloop over the cut with only inches to spare under its keel. The boat made a slow but tight turn and released the towline as the sloop was halfway through its wider turn behind. The yacht was gently catapulted sideways toward the pier. It slowed to a stop only inches away from the dock. Two waiting black-clad policemen with large embroidered red CRS badges on their shirt fronts expertly made the sloop fast to cleats on the dock. Not one word had been exchanged during the entire exercise. Not one gesture had been anything but relaxed and casual.

  “I don’t know dick about boats, but that was pretty impressive,” Rivière said.

  Next the police boat came up to the pier and was held alongside by two crew with boathooks. A black-clad CRS adjudant stepped off and saluted Capucine and Rivière smartly.

  “I have your detainees, if you’ll sign for them. We’re going to impound the boat. No need to sign for that.”

  “Did they give you any trouble?” Capucine asked.

  “None. They hove-to when we came up, no problem. They seemed a little surprised, that’s all. They didn’t say anything while on board with us.”

  Karine and Martin were led up by a stony-faced CRS, their arms handcuffed in front.

  The four-hour drive back was peaceful, at least for Capucine and Rivière. They chatted contentedly about office gossip, recent promotions, who had good appraisal reviews, who had bad ones. Apparently, Rivière felt flirtation was inappropriate in front of detainees. Given the police argot and endless acronyms, the conversation was incomprehensible to Karine and Martin, silent in the backseat. After a while Karine slept fitfully and Martin gnawed his lip and stared out the window.

  At the Quai des Orfèvres Martin was taken to an interview room and Karine was told she would be released. “But what about Martin?” she asked Capucine. “I can’t just leave him here.”

  “My dear, he’s a suspect in a murder case who just got a whole lot more suspicious. You have no choice.”

  “But why aren’t you holding me? I violated the instructions, too.”

  “You’re not a suspect.”

  In the elevator up to their offices Rivière asked Capucine, “Do you think they’ll be able to tag him?”

  “I don’t think he’ll even be charged. I doubt he has anything to do with the murder. Of course, he had access to the poison through his clients, but neither the timing nor the scenario work. I think Karine would have lied for him, but I don’t think she’d have been solid under questioning and stuck to the precise times unless it had been true. And, most important, I think I have an idea who did do it.”

  “Could’ve fooled me. He looks like just the kind of guy who should go down for something.”

  The genial policeman and the venomous one alternated hammering at Martin all night long. But to no avail. So when Capucine arrived at six in the morning to take over the interrogation she spent no more than half an hour before releasing him and then going to the boulangerie for a croissant for her breakfast. Martin left for home in a taxi, still a suspect, but at least able to sleep in his own bed, or the bed of the person he chose. On the way back from the boulangerie Capucine let herself be invaded by the yeasty, doughy aroma of the croissant and the feeling of peaceful solitude as she walked the empty streets in the snappy morning air. She was beginning to feel happy about the case.

  Chapter 41

  In a cashmere- and lamb’s-wool-blend suit from Lanvin and bespoke John Lobb shoes from an Hermès atelier, Jacques had reached a sartorial apex. He contrasted dramatically with the two other men at the table. One, in a short-sleeved polyester shirt and drooping knit tie, looked every bit like a Doonesbury character. The other’s hair was greasy enough to stick together in clumps. His front teeth were mottled with gray stains. His fingers were so grimy Capucine had been reluctant to shake his hand. Now they both stared bleakly at her across the table.

  “Capucine, as I told you over the phone,” Jacques said crisply, “the director has asked me to act as the liaison officer with the Police Judiciaire to make sure we do not interfere with your murder investigation, which, he has made quite clear, is of the ‘utmost importance.’ This meeting will bring you up to speed as to where we are with Renault.”

  Capucine nodded. So this was Jacques on the job. Astonishingly, he really was efficient and authoritative.

  “Hyppolyte and Armand here are our best cybertechnologists.” He looked at the two men with fondness and a certain amount of tender revulsion, as if they were aged family dogs that had sadly begun to smell a bit and let themselves go on the carpet. “They have just spent three nights at Renault’s R & D department and have found some extraordinary things. Hyppolyte, can you explain this to the lieutenant?”

  Hyppolyte spoke to her as if she were a slightly retarded, but nonetheless charming, ten-year-old. “Lieutenant, we spent two nights in the department checking their computers. Looking for things like worms and viruses and things like that. Viruses are—”

  Jacques interrupted him gently. “I’m sure the lieutenant knows what a virus is. Why don’t you just tell her about what you found?”

  Hyppolyte looked hurt. “We found a very complex worm had been introduced into the system. Actually, it was beautifully written. It worked on the KaZaA application on the LAN’s P2P file-sharing feature.”

  “Sorry, Hyppolyte, you may have to dumb that down a bit after all,” Jacques said.

  “It’s simple. A virus needs a file to live in. A worm lives happily on its own. That makes it much, much harder to detect. This worm simply went into all the files on the network, chose the ones it wanted, sent them out to an e-mail address, and then laid low. It was taught about three or four hundred key words and sent out anything that contained those words.”

  “Did it send out a lot of data?” Capucine asked Hyppolyte.

  “Hang on a minute,” Jacques said, cutting off Hyppolyte. “It seems the focus of the worm’s little vocabulary was something the Typhon team calls the ‘nozzle.’ Do you know anything about that?”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Capucine said. “The disgruntled employee who tipped me off to Project Typhon said it was the bottleneck. ‘No nozzle, no Typhon,’ was the way he put it. And he said they were stuck.”

  “We looked into it ourselves,” Jacques said, “and they still don’t seem to have made much progress with their little nozzle.”

  Hyppolyte pouted like an adolescent, his chin tucked into his throat.

  “I’m sorry, Hyppolyte,” Jacques said, “you were about to explain why almost no data got out.”

  Hyppolyte beamed. “That’s right. You see, all of Project Typhon is on a single LAN except for the nozzle team. They have their own LAN that is not hooked up to anything else. Since the worm wasn’t in the nozzle department LAN, all that got sent out was administra
tive stuff on the nozzle department—you know, salaries and things like that—but nothing technical about the nozzle itself.” Hyppolyte brought himself up short. “Oops, I’m sorry, Lieutenant, do you know what a LAN is?”

  “Yes, a local area network, a group of computers that are networked into each other.”

  “Good for you! Case closed, except for one thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “At first we couldn’t figure out how the worm was introduced. See, they have firewalls up. Quite good firewalls, actually.” Hyppolyte paused politely. “Know what a fire-wall is?”

  Capucine nodded.

  “OK, then. Their firewalls are excellent, certainly good enough to prevent the introduction of this worm through the Internet. It contained a tremendous amount of code, you know. We were stumped. Then Jacques here told us that they had had an unauthorized visitor. So that was it. You know what he must have done?”

  “What?” Capucine asked.

  “He must have had the worm on a USB flashdrive. These things are fabulous.” Hyppolyte produced a small metal lozenge shorter than his thumb. “This little gizmo slips into the computer’s USB port and it can upload or download anything up to a couple of gigs faster than you can sing the first stanza of the “Marseillaise.” They’re all over the place now. You can even get them on Swiss Army knives. I’ll bet he just asked to go to the john, walked by a computer at an empty desk, and did the deed.”

  “But do you know who planted the worm?”

  Jacques raised his eyebrows in mock astonishment. “You persist in thinking you’re dealing with the DST. Actually, it wasn’t all that difficult. I figured that part out myself. After all, we had the e-mail address the data was sent to. I had an excellent idea of who it might be, of course. So I called one of my American spook chums. Our little community is very palsy, you know, especially when our bosses aren’t looking. They had to do a bit of research, which took them all of several minutes. It was a private e-mail address registered to the child of a Trag employee. Yes, that’s right: Trag.”

  “That bastard,” Capucine said, slapping the table in anger. “That two-faced bastard!”

  “Well, it’s been put paid to. The worm is gone and I believe the director himself will be speaking to the CIA tomorrow so that someone there will have a word with these Trag people. I really think we’ve seen the last of them,” Jacques said.

  “And what about the envelopes in the ladies’ room?” Capucine asked.

  “That’s a whole other kettle of worms,” Jacques said. “These two gentlemen’s time is precious. We’ll let them go, and then I can take you out to lunch and fill you in on that part of it.”

  The restaurant turned out to be an authentic example of a Paris institution that had only recently been wrested back from the path toward extinction: the traditional bistro. Just when it had looked like those tobacco-darkened rooms ringing with boisterous chatter would be replaced by more sophisticated, “modern” formats it suddenly had become chic for vanguard chefs—with restaurant critics like Alexandre riding point on the movement—to open one or even two. Capucine had no illusions; they were doing it to flaunt their virtuosity, or to underscore their deep ties to authenticity, or more likely just to make a few more euros. But still, bistros were definitely back, even if they were copies. This one, however, was the real thing, staffed for the last hundred and fifty years by broad-beamed men in broad, starched aprons for whom lunch was clearly a three-hour affair, preferably topped off with one or more glasses of Calvados.

  “This is your hangout?” Capucine asked her cousin.

  “Not every day, but often enough. Ever been before?”

  “No. But it’s one of Alexandre’s favorite places. I doubt they’ll be happy to see me have my usual salad and half bottle of Badoit.”

  “Cousine, you haven’t changed a scintilla since we were kids. Do I look like I’m troubled by cellulite?” He opened his double-breasted jacket to show off his ballet dancer’s torso.

  “And I thought I only had to put up with force feeding from Alexandre. Fair enough. You order and I won’t comment. Just tell me about what else you found at Renault.”

  But it wasn’t to be that quick. There was the sacrosanct litany of menu and wine list to be dealt with first. The meal of wild boar fillets preceded by a blood sausage terrine left Capucine with little hope of afternoon productivity. As the sommelier retreated to his lair with his order Capucine turned to her cousin. “All right, out with it. I need compensation for the three thousand calories you’re shoveling down my gullet.”

  “Ah, gratitude! Where is thy radiant face? All right, the director asked two or three of our best operatives to review the situation. They concluded this secretary you picked up is the conduit for at least one, and maybe more, ‘hidden assets,’ to use the phrase.”

  “Do they think it’s also Trag?”

  “Almost certainly not. Their guess is that this is someone else entirely. They also feel that given the potential importance of this Typhon it’s also possible that there are even more espionage activities going on that haven’t been detected yet.”

  “And is there any chance of finding these other moles?”

  “Very doubtful; nothing is harder to find than a mole. They are only vulnerable when they try to pass information. If threatened, they just disappear.”

  “So Typhon’s a lost cause?”

  “My dear sweet cousine, don’t be such a fatalist. Relax. Have some more of this Minervois. It becomes a different wine when it’s allowed to breathe. Is the boar hearty enough for you? It’s beginning to get chilly out there.” Jacques thumped his nonexistent belly.

  “Oh, Jacques, do shut up. You know how worried I am about this case.”

  “Sorry. The director is going to take action. Actually, he was pretty forceful about it. He wants the whole project handed over to the government and moved to a military installation as soon as possible. That would mean that the security level would increase enormously and that all the personnel would have to go through the most rigorous military security clearance procedures. It would be like flushing a toilet to clear everything out. Not only would anything that even looked like a mole be found but if they were working on something that belonged to the military they’d get a serious jail sentence instead of just a scolding, which is all they face now.”

  “So Renault will have to give up the project?”

  “They wouldn’t give up anything. They would merely subcontract to their largest shareholder, the government. Honor would be saved. And once the thing was ready to go into production it might even be handed back to them. Anyway, they don’t really have any choice. To all intents and purposes they are still a government company. So it definitely is going to happen, but there’s a big but. And I don’t mean yours.” Jacques shrieked in childish laughter.

  “Jacques, please. You’re not ten anymore.”

  “That’s why I get to put this yummy lunch on my expense account and don’t have to ask Daddy to pay. You’re not finishing your boar? The director has asked me to tell you that nothing will happen until the murderer is found. Let me put it this way. I don’t want this to go back to your people, but it has been impressed upon the director that finding the murderer is actually more important in the upper echelons of government than bringing off Typhon. Can you believe that? It may be that they don’t really believe that cheap gas is feasible, but I personally suspect that a senior official getting murdered in Diapason is just too close to home for comfort. It’s the sort of thing that just can’t be permitted.” He allowed himself a purely cynical and definitely adult laugh.

  “You’re becoming a true politician.”

  “So I’m told. Anyhow, here’s my official message. The DGSE is not going to appear to intervene until you—by which I mean the PJ, of course—come home with the croissants, as it were, as long as that happens in a reasonable time frame.”

  “And how long is that?”

  “More a question of days th
an weeks, little cousin. Personally I think it’s absolutely shocking that under the circumstances you elect to spend the afternoon flirting with golden youths while overeating and overdrinking at the poor downtrodden taxpayer’s expense. Shouldn’t you be out there herding up suspects with a cattle prod or whatever it is you people do?”

  “Jacques, I absolutely loathe you,” Capucine said as she walked out of the restaurant. Very stealthily Jacques slid her order of boar, almost untouched, onto his plate.

  Chapter 42

  A week later Capucine received a call. “Petite cousine, I’m standing at attention itching and horribly uncomfortable in full dress uniform wearing all my medals because this is an official communiqué from on high. There is a troop of buglers behind me at the ready to sound a clarion. Attention! Are you prepared?”

  “Jacques, dear, I don’t have time to be teased by you. I’m in the middle of a case, as you fully well know.”

  “Actually, cousine, I am calling about your case. There have been developments.”

  “I’m all ears, then.”

  “You remember last week I told you the director was keen on having that project taken away from Renault and handed over to the military, who could keep a proper lid on it? But he had had instructions that your investigation was the top priority?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Well, it seems that we may have misread the atmosphere of the upper echelons. You see, prior to Delage’s death my masters’ masters really didn’t know much about the Renault project. Actually, no one had heard about it at all. But it’s big news now. Typhon’s potential has suddenly dawned on them. And there was less than unmitigated pleasure at what was viewed as free access readily granted to any and all foreign spies. Am I being comprehensible?”