A Bouquet of Rue

by Wendy Hornsby

  Jean-Paul was just finishing a phone call when I came up beside him, gasping for breath but managing to hold my mobile with the camera’s video function aimed at the action.

  The woman with custody of the cello looked down at the captive and demanded, “What have you done with Ophelia Fouchet?”

  “Who?” he said, looking puzzled. “What?”

  “The missing girl,” the woman repeated. “This is her cello. What did you do with the girl?”

  “I don’t know about a girl.” He had an accent I couldn’t place, but he understood French well enough. “I found that thing in the woods and I’m taking it to sell at the Saturday brocante in Garches. I can get good money for it, so give it back.”

  The bearded man began to struggle in earnest when the first wails of police sirens pierced the morning quiet. Glaring at his captors, desperate to get free, he pleaded, “Keep the damn thing. It’s yours. Just let me go. You have no right.”

  A little blue-and-white Renault, full lights and sirens, rolled over the low curb of a parking lot near the kiddie playground and bounced across the grass toward us. Two other cars followed.

  “Merde, merde, merde, let me go!” he seethed.

  But the captors held fast until two very young officers of the law took the poor guy into custody, snapping handcuffs around his skinny wrists and wrestling him to lie on his stomach. Out of the second of the backup cars emerged our Detective Fleur Delisle and her partner, Detective Lajoie. When she spotted us in the crowd, me with my phone camera taping, she rolled her eyes and shook her head, but she smiled. She walked straight to Jean-Paul to hear the story, but he sent her to the woman with the cello.

  Statements were taken, and the cello was tagged as evidence and placed in the backseat of one of the blue-and-whites by an officer wearing Latex gloves. And through it all, Delisle and Lajoie grilled the bearded man who insisted, over and over, that he had found the cello in the undergrowth when he was looking for a place to spend the night. He kept it because he thought he could sell it at the flea market.

  The big question was, in which patch of woods did he find the cello?

  Officers thanked the walkers and runners, took their names, and sent them on their way. But Delisle asked Jean-Paul and me to stay; she had something to say. She also asked me to turn off the video.

  We walked a few yards away from the clutch of police guarding the still-unidentified bearded man and stood where Delisle could keep an eye on her colleagues.

  “I had a call late last night,” she said. “Someone from the investigative branch of the national vehicle registration office had a report for me on a request for help identifying vehicles captured by a CCTV camera. Funny thing is, I don’t remember sending any footage to them for identification. The really odd thing is that when I have asked for help from that office in the past, the report has taken weeks, if not months, to get back to me. And here we are, not even twenty-four hours after Madame MacGowen had her very helpful video engineer collect a bit of footage that I am given a confirmed identification on four of the vehicles and a sincere apology from the investigator for his inability to identify the others. An immediate report and an apology? Unheard of. How do you think that came about?”

  Jean-Paul shrugged. I said, “It helps to know people.”

  “Merde,” she said, and laughed. After doing her best to shift to stern-cop mode, she said, “We’re going to walk that guy back to the place he says he found the cello. I would say, don’t follow us, but I know that would be wasted effort. One of you would probably call in a chopper to film the whole thing. So, come along if you must. Just try to stay out of the way.”

  “Since we’re invited to the party, Jean-Paul,” I said, taking his arm, “we should attend.”

  “Bien sûr,” he said. “But why, Detective?”

  “Our chances of finding something among the bushes is fairly slim. But if we do, short of the child’s remains, I might need some help getting quick reports out of what can be the vast forests of the bureaucracy I work in so that we can go forward with an investigation. Now that Ophelia’s beloved cello has turned up, everything is different.”

  “One more thing,” I said. “Did you have a chance to look at the note I sent you last night?”

  “About a car that seemed to have some interest in Mademoiselle Fouchet? Oui. I sent an identification request to my new friend at vehicle investigation. Let’s see how quickly he answers this time.” Then she waved us toward the parade of police who, under the direction of Detective Lajoie, escorted the bearded prisoner across the meadow toward the woods on the far side. With a little bow, she said, “Shall we?”

  Every ten yards or so, the bearded man, who said his name was Voycich, would point to a spot and one of the uniforms would venture into the copse and, finding nothing, emerge brushing leaves and twigs from his or her hair and clothes. With each false alarm, Lajoie grew more cranky and sweaty.

  “I had a little wine,” Voycich said when Lajoie accused him of leading them on un ballet d’absurdités, meaning, Jean-Paul informed me, a wild-goose chase. “And it was dark. There’s lots of trees around here, you know. Besides, it was a little while ago.”

  I ventured to ask. “When?”

  “When? Good question,” he said. “I didn’t mark the day on my calendar.”

  “Try to remember,” Delisle said.

  “I don’t know. A few days? Four, five, six?”

  The day began to warm. As the sun moved higher over the open meadow it felt more like summer than late spring. Delisle, shielding her eyes as she looked down the long line of dense woods, muttered to her partner, “Let’s run the asshole in; this exercise is useless. If the girl has been here for six days, we’d smell her.”

  Lajoie wrinkled his nose. “Yep. Time to go.”

  “No, wait!” Voycich nodded to a crosshatch of broken twigs at the edge of the lawn a few yards along. “That’s the place. I remember now. See, I left some stuff in there so I made a marker so I could find it again.”

  “A miracle,” Lajoie smirked as he gestured for a uniform to go in for a look. “The heat has loosened a memory.”

  A few moments later, the officer in the thicket called out, “Detective, you better see this.”

  Lajoie turned to Delisle. “Who do you suppose he’s talking to? Detective you or detective me?”

  She chuckled. “As you outrank me, old man, I’m guessing it’s me.”

  He laughed, a low guttural Hah! Delisle threw him a narrow-eyed glare before she parted some branches and edged her way into the brush. We could hear her thrashing about, then some muffled conversation with the officer who was already in there before they both worked their way out into the sunlight again. Delisle, wearing Latex gloves, held a backpack by its straps.

  “That’s my stuff,” Voycich said.

  Delisle pulled out a binder full of sheet music. Catching his eye, she said, “Your stuff?”

  “Now it is, sure,” he said, defiant. “I found it. It’s mine.”

  “Why’d you leave the cello case behind?” she asked him. “Those things cost a lot of money.”

  That bit of news seemed to surprise him, but he recovered to say, “It’s red. You think people wouldn’t notice me walking around with a big red case?”

  She laughed. “You think people won’t notice a bum walking around with a cello, red or not? Take him in,” she said to the uniforms hanging onto Voycich by the elbows. “Get him processed, and for God’s sake get him a shower. But secure his clothes for the lab, oui?”

  “What do you want on the charge sheet, Detective?”

  “Let’s start with theft of property valued at more than a thousand euros, vagrancy, no documents of legal residency, and shitting in a public space.”

  Lajoie was on his phone, calling for a crime scene team, watching the pair of uniforms fast-walking Voycich to a car. Again, Delisle, with a bob of her head, moved Jean-Paul and me a few yards away. After a glance at her partner, she said, “I have a f
avor to ask the TV girl.”

  “I can’t imagine,” I said, expecting her to tell us to stay the hell away. Instead she asked me to make a short film for her.

  “I told you last night that the directeur is having all the secondary school kids assemble in the gym this afternoon to talk about bullying. She asked me to speak to them, voice of authority or something. Scare tactic. I tried to shift it onto Lajoie, but my commandant made it an order. Me talking to kids is a bad idea because I know how it will go down. The first little asshole who throws shade at me, I’ll go off on him. It’ll get ugly.” She shook her head. “This generation with their faces in their phones all the time, I think if I can show them a video, maybe it’ll be okay.”

  “What’s on this video?”

  “First I want them to see what they did to Nabi. And then I want them to feel bad about it.”

  “That second part,” I said. “Any idea how to accomplish that?”

  “Short of hauling them all in and letting them know what it’s like to sit in a jail cell, or beating the crap out of them, no.”

  I checked my phone for the time: 7:50. “This assembly is at two?”

  She nodded. “Two this afternoon.”

  “A five-minute video? Ten?”

  “Twenty minutes?”

  “There isn’t time to pull together twenty minutes.”

  “But you’ll give me something?”

  “I’ll do my best. But no promises that it will be pretty.”

  “Très cool. I’ll drive you home now so you can get right on it.”

  We left Detective Lajoie telling war stories to two uniformed officers while they stood watch over the patch of woods until the forensic science team showed up. The drive home took all of five minutes.

  Jean-Paul and I walked into a house full of string music.

  “Debussy,” Jean-Paul said as he went in search of the source. We found Ari and Nabi in my office busily assembling furniture. Already, they had the work table finished and had set my new computer on top. Ari was putting together the stool my father made when I was a kid wanting to help in his woodshop, and Nabi was at work on the open storage shelves that would go against the side wall. Nabi, with his ruined face, turned when he heard us and gave us a smile and a cheerful wave.

  The music streamed from a laptop set up on one end of the work table with auxiliary speakers attached. Jean-Paul asked Nabi, “What is the piece?”

  “String Quartet in G minor, Opus Ten,” the boy said. “My father loved Debussy, that’s why I chose that piece to play for the holiday concert.”

  I looked at the computer monitor, four young musicians in formal concert dress, on a stage. There was a dark-haired young woman mostly hidden behind a cello, and Nabi in first chair. A mental lightbulb popped on; suddenly I had a soundtrack for ­Delisle’s video. I said, “Good, your holiday concert is on You Tube.”

  He frowned. “No. The holiday concert is on the teacher’s webpage, but it isn’t on You Tube.”

  I looked at the video’s address at the top of the screen and pointed. “Then this isn’t the holiday concert?”

  “That?” He put down his Allen wrench and came across the room looking very somber. “No. That is my father when he was a student at the conservatory in Edinburgh, where he studied violin. One of his classmates posted that old video as a tribute when he heard Papa died. I like to hear him play.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Can you download your holiday concert?” When he hesitated, I added, “On my desktop?”

  With a shrug, after I unlocked my computer’s access, he did. I restarted his father’s performance and paused it. The piece began again, but this time it was Nabi sitting at first chair and Ophelia who was half-hidden behind the cello. There were some differences in tempo and phrasing, but here was the son, playing his father’s favorite composer.

  “Nabi,” I said. “Will you please go put on a clean shirt with a collar, preferably not white, and comb your hair? Where’s your grandmother?”

  “Cleaning Ari’s house.”

  Ari gave an embarrassed little smile and shrug. I guessed he didn’t have much choice in the matter.

  “I may need her later. But for now, Nabi, scoot. Meet you back here in ten minutes. Make it fifteen,” I said. “Jean-Paul, I’m claiming first shower.”

  I was back downstairs, showered, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, wet hair pulled into a ponytail, and putting a charged battery pack into a video camera when Nabi came in from the terrace looking freshly scrubbed and quite stylish, if one could see past the discolorations and lumps on his poor face. I took Dad’s stool and a tripod into the salon and searched for a spot that had the right light and background to shoot a conversation with the kid. It took several tries before I found it. With Nabi in position on my dad’s stool, camera screwed onto the tripod, I shot a few test frames, added a lamp on the floor behind him to give his image more separation from the wood-paneled wall behind him, and adjusted the camera angle. The room was tall and swallowed sound, so I hooked him up to a small digital voice recorder. The setup was primitive. The sound and the images would not be perfectly synchronized, but it would have to do. There wasn’t time to get Guido over with more sophisticated equipment. Besides that, I had my partner busy getting equipment ready to film the assembly at the school; Detective Delisle said she would settle arrangements with the directeur.

  “This won’t take long, Nabi,” I said when all was ready. “I’m going to ask you a few questions. Answer them as you wish but aim for brevity and incorporate the question into your answer. Don’t worry about messing up because I’ll edit out the goofs. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said with a shrug. “But what are we doing?”

  “Oh, sorry.” I looked around from behind the camera. “We’re making a little video to show at your school’s assembly this afternoon.”

  He paled, seemed panicked. “Why?”

  “Because Detective Delisle is afraid of what she’ll say to your classmates so she’s letting you do the talking.”

  “But what do I say?”

  “Just answer my questions and try to relax. Don’t think about your audience; teenagers, like lions, can smell fear, so stay calm.”

  He laughed. There was a nervous edge to it, but he laughed.

  We started. First question: Tell us about your music and about your father’s. From there, a few questions about his family and their tragic passage from Afghanistan, then school, his friendship with Ophelia, the last time he saw Ophelia, and his goals. A few times, I fed him lines to repeat, simplifications of answers he had given. With one small break for water, we finished filming in about thirty minutes. After that, Nabi was released with a warning not to wrinkle the shirt in case we needed to reshoot something. I sent Ari to the rue Jacob apartment to fetch Guido and his equipment and deliver them to the school. Jean-Paul’s assignment was to find out what media projection equipment was available to us at the school gym where the students would assemble. With everyone off to handle their delegated tasks I holed up in my office, alone, with the door closed. When Jean-Paul had an answer, he braved opening the door enough to tell me that if we brought the video on a USB memory stick or could download it from the cloud, the school would be able to project it onto a giant screen. That made my life a little easier.

  Using the bits and pieces I had, I was able to cobble together what I thought was an adequate little video. At noon, I texted Delisle with suggestions for follow-up remarks after the video played. Ari was back after delivering Guido and equipment to the school gym. I asked him, Jean-Paul, Nabi, and Diba to take a look at the rough. There was still a little time, a very little time, to make changes if anything bothered them. Each person had a suggestion or two. Some were impossible, some were doable, some helped make the video better. At one-thirty, when Jean-Paul and I headed to the school, I had a USB memory stick in my pocket, backed up on the cloud, for a video piece that I hoped would help Delisle get her message across to Nabi’s classmates. />
  Guido was all set up in the gym when we arrived, with one camera aimed at the speaker’s podium, and the second behind the podium and off to the side, facing the empty bleachers. He would man the podium camera and turn the other one over to me.

  At two o’clock, the music of Nabi’s father, Aarash Ahmad, blasted over speakers in the lycée’s gymnasium, competing with the racket students made as they thundered into seats on the metal bleachers. The tribute video of the father, captured playing in a string quartet nearly twenty years earlier filled the pair of giant screens that dropped from the ceiling. The caption running under the image, not perfectly centered, I admit, read edinburgh royal conservatory of the arts. I had allotted twelve minutes of concert time for the students to settle into their seats before the gym lights dimmed and a headshot of Aarash Ahmad that I found online appeared superimposed over the quartet on stage, his name captioned, and the date twenty years earlier. Nabi, in voiceover, said, “The greatest gift my father gave me was his love for music. He began teaching me violin when I was three.”

  The father’s image faded into a recent headshot of Nabi taken for his conservatory applications, the father’s name fading as the son’s emerged. The quartet in the background now, and the music, came from the video of the school’s holiday concert that Nabi downloaded for me from the orchestra teacher’s homepage. The resemblance of the son to the father, both of them sitting in first chair, was striking. And so was their music. When the students recognized their classmates on the screen, and saw Nabi, there was a low murmuring throughout the huge room. The Debussy faded, Nabi said. “I made a solemn promise to my father that I would never abandon my violin study.”

  The music remained in the background, the concert stage faded and Nabi, sitting on a stool that morning in Jean-Paul’s salon, daylight showing off his massive shiner in all its colorful glory, filled the screen. There was an audible gasp. The camera angle shifted slightly, and Nabi talked about his family being targeted by the Taliban because his father had studied in Europe and because he was a teacher, and that was why they fled. He did not describe the nightmare crossing of the Mediterranean, except to say that their boat went down and all of his family, mother, father, two sisters, and a brother, were lost. Now there were only Nabi, his grandmother, and memories.