CHAPTER EIGHT

Jardin du Luxembourg Park, Rue d’ Assas Entrance, Fauborg Saint Germain-des-Prés, 6^th arrondissement [6ème], Paris, Assumption Day, August 15, 1962

The morning heat was indicative that it was going to be a typical August day in Paris—hot, muggy, and soporific. The city was not in its usual vibrant state, a change that took place every August. Most Parisians had abandoned the capital for the overpacked beaches of the Cote d’Azur or the Atlantic Coast, and the invasion by global tourists was its usual annoyance to the citizens who were obligated to remain for work or due to some sort of infirmity. The tourists exuded noisy enthusiasm, and the people of Paris unlucky enough to have to endure August in the City of Lights and Love exhibited an increase in their usual gloomy dispositions and famous sullenness.

A cloudburst the previous day had transiently dissipated the heavy air and oppressive heat to make the beginning of Assumption Day an almost pleasant one for a retired general. He knew the heat and humidity would retake control by noon; but for the moment, his regular early morning walk was delightful. The veteran of two wars—World Wars I and II—was still in good condition and would have been able to wear his tailored uniform complete with medals if required, a fact that appealed to his rather considerable vanity. His thick crop of hair was silver, but had not a hint of balding; and he had improved the growing topographical wrinkles of his hard face with a little adroit plastic surgery.

His wife had made him a particularly pleasant petit déjeuner—a light meal of fresh baguettes, whole wheat cereal, Greek yogurt, a fresh peach, and café au lait. Enough that he felt invigorated for his meeting with his mistress, but not too much; so, his prowess would be affected. It was proving to be a fine day.

Gen. Étienne Malboeuf was an ardent Catholic, born into the faith and sustained by it during his long years in the colonies and in the European wars. He was on his way to the center of the extensive Jardin du Luxembourg Park for an Assumption Day religious program. The elderly soldier walked briskly across the wide boulevard and into the park, making sure that he was not late. Malboeuf lived a life of military grade rigidity, punctuality, adherence to schedule, and scrupulous compliance with the etiquette of his class. France was a very class-conscious society, and he made no concessions to the growing fashion of breaking down the civilized barriers of the class-stratified society or the ascension of women. He did not have to deign to acknowledge manual workers or other peasants. It was his due owed him for his long service to his country and by the God-given privilege and responsibility of the upper-crust stratum into which he was born.

Malboeuf particularly loved the romantic Fontaine de Médicis—built for Marie de Médicis—a shady and peaceful spot overlooking a pond filled with fish and the statue of the beautiful Marianne, the symbol of the republic as a motherland. She stands for the rallying cry of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and seeing her never failed to ignite a small adrenaline rush. He knew she was modeled after the movie actress, Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot. He had never seen one of the young woman’s films, but she was for him—and millions of other French men and women—the personification of France as the motherland. Gen. Malboeuf thought the iconic figure in the statue looked more like his mistress, Antoinette, who was at the moment sleeping quietly in the pied-a-terre he maintained for her on Rue Vavin. His wife—who was his childhood sweetheart and lifelong heart’s friend—was at home on Rue d’Assas baking bread for the family dinner that evening. He allowed a faint smile to curl his thin lips. Life was good, as it should be in a civilized country.

In the opinion of Gen. Malboeuf, France was the most civilized of all nations, and the 6^th arrondissement was the best neighborhood in the city. There are twenty different arrondissements which spiral out numerically from the center of Paris, starting with the Louvre as 1e. The city is further divided almost exactly in half—north and south—by the Seine into the rive gauche [left bank] and the rive droite [right bank]. As a general rule, those arrondissements closest to the geographic center of the city are the wealthiest, and the suburbs to the west and south of Paris tend to be more affluent than those to the north and east. The 6^th [6ème] is on the left bank—the heart of the rive gauche, Malboeuf would insist—on the vibrant bank of the river. The 6^th and the 7^th A.s rank close to each other in average wealth, and that is considerably higher than the average in France. In fact–but nothing the general would admit–the 7^th A. was the richest in the city.

The 6th was beginning to change from its earlier character as the meeting place for bohemian artists and intellectuals into a more upscale neighborhood of trendy new boutiques, high-priced modern art galleries, exciting, even daring, new restaurants, and quiet pied-a-terres; nearly twenty percent of apartments are secondary residences—enough to raise an amused eyebrow among French sophisticates. The Latin Quarter is part of the 6^th. Being one of the old school Frenchmen, the general still preferred the older and more famous cafes such as Brasserie Lipp, Cafe Flore, and Les Deux Magots. Nouveau rich and sophisticated buyers and younger residents had begun to supplant the previously seen famous artists and writers such as George Sand, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Charm was replacing the solid old buildings and narrow and interesting streets, leaving a mix of the new and the historic architecture. The Musée de Cluny remained as the best museum dedicated to the arts of the Middle Ages—again, in Gen. Malboeuf’s educated opinion. Its Gothic architecture had resisted all the modern changes, a fact that pleased the old general greatly.

Gen. Malboeuf paused for a moment for a brief rest. He extracted a Gitanes Brunes from its classic black, blue, and white colored box with the fetchingly obscure picture of a gypsy, all part of the vibrant French culture he had loved for so long. He had always been a small man, but once had been erect and imperious. Now—to his chagrin—he was small, bony, and bent with arthritis. He wore skin creases that gave evidence to the pain the crippling joint disease caused him. His once desert-bronzed face now had an unpleasant sallow complexion which intensified the loss of the soft tissues and gave him an appearance of a man who was all of his seventy-four years and more, and a man whose sojourn among the upper echelon Frenchmen he admired so greatly was nearing its end. He hated the fact that his once full head of hair which the women around him prized now consisted of little more than a few wispy white feathers. He had to wear a beret or one of his army uniform caps whenever he went out in public. He had the Frankish nose—once part of the hauteur he knew his face conveyed in those halcyon years—but that was about all that was left of his once forceful and authoritative demeanor. As he held the brown cigarette to his lips, his gnarled fingers shook, an observation that pained him.

He entered the park and gave a brief but heartfelt salute to the row of tricoleurs lining the avenue. The Jardin du Luxembourg is a favorite garden oasis and rendezvous spot for Parisians, and the general always enjoyed his walks through the park with his mistress. The beautiful and peaceful gardens were designed in the formal French style featuring broad avenues lined with precisely planted trees and trimmed hedges, immaculate lawns, statues, and fountains, including the ever-popular octagonal pool full of toy sailboats. He gave a smile at the children of well-to-do families playing with their boats. Overlooking the Luxembourg gardens was the grand Palais du Luxembourg, built in the seventeenth century to remind its first owner Marie de Médicis, widow of Henri IV, of her native Florence, Italy.

Bowing to the fact that his glory days were behind him, he turned to walk to the center of the park where—for a brief moment—he would be selected out for praise for his service and reminded of what he once was. He glanced around, admiring the garden and thinking that Paris architecture was stable—quite homogenous—in its beige tones and beautiful even though many of the buildings could do with a good sandblast cleaning. He made a mental note that there was something a bit unusual in the garden. Whereas ordinarily, visibly armed police were a noticeable presence throughout the city—particularly in urban areas and where crowds gather such as he was seeing in the Jardin du Luxembourg Park on auspicious occasions such as this Assumption Day—he could not recall seeing even one today. They regularly exercised their right to stop any person and demand to see documents of identity. It was a bit odd that he was not seeing the gendarmerie. It was not worth more than a bored shrug.

Witnesses differed considerably about what happened next. They all agreed that Gen. Malboeuf was shot to death—shot in the back. The number of shots varied from one to six; the location of the entry wounds varied from the back of his head to as low as his waistband; and the description of the murderer—or murderers—could have incriminated half the men in Paris. Some reported a black man, probably one of those lowlife immigrants from Morocco. Others described a man in a gray morning suit wearing a large fedora. The man seemed to have been a provincial to some, a Parisian to others; to some, tall, to others, short, and to one witness, a cripple with a pronounced limp. More than half of the many witnesses described a lone killer; but two persons told investigating officers that there had been two killers, each firing a handgun. One older woman was sure she saw three killers. There was even a report that the killer had been a tall blond woman.

No one made the slightest effort to apprehend the culprit. There were an assortment of excuses, but no really valid reasons other than that they did not want to get involved, or that they were no physical match for the assailant, or that they were not close enough to be of any use.

Grégoire Laurent De Vincent had a wife—Claire—and eleven children. He came from a family of twelve children, and all of his siblings had demonstrated a nearly equal degree of fecundity. The huge extended family lived in what amounted to a compound, no nuclear family further away than a city block. It was not that Grégoire did not like or love his large noisy family—which invaded his privacy at will and with regularity—but being a contemplative man by nature, he longed for moments of peace and quiet. His profession demanded that he be able to think undisturbed when he was involved in a case, and he was highly respected for his ability to sift the wheat from the chaff of a case and find the kernel of truth that led to solving even very complicated and emotionally charged cases. He had chosen exactly the right profession for himself for several reasons: he was indomitable and indefatigable in his pursuit of the truth, and he loved the chance to get away from the hordes of relatives from time to time.

Life was good for France and for Grégoire. France had emerged from World War II in the 1960s, and the work of rebuilding the country physically and the nation’s national identity through the French Fifth Republic was well underway under President Charles de Gaulle, elected in 1958. Under the leadership of the famous general, France was making progress to regain its status as a great power. Senior civil servants like Grégoire and his family had been able to move into better housing and neighborhoods in the early 1960s as the middle class numbers and its economy began to expand.

Grégoire was an enquêteur [plainclothes detective] in the Sûreté Nationale, Préfecture of Police of Paris—an agency of the national government of France. He had been assigned to the homicide division for the past twenty-two years and enjoyed his job immensely—especially the part where he got to see murderers he had arrested sweat in court. Grégoire was relieved when the call came from Place Louis Lépine, at 1 rue de Lutèce—police headquarters—that he was to report to the Jardin du Luxembourg in Saint Germain-des-Prés to head up a sensitive murder investigation. He took pains not to show his enthusiasm for the assignment and its promise of taking him away from the cacophony and chaos of the family gathering to celebrate Assumption Day.

“Alas, ma légitime,” he said to his long-suffering wife, suppressing a smile of relief, “but I am called to work—a serious murder.”

“They are all serious, mon amour; and they all seem to occur during big family gatherings,” she responded with her usual affectionate resignation.

He smiled sheepishly and went to change into his suit and tie.

Inspector De Vincent arrived first at the Rue d’Assas/Rue Vavin entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg Park and stood for five minutes impatiently twiddling his thumbs as he waited for his favorite investigative partner to show up.

A dyspneic old Peugeot driven by Gendarmerie Research Unit Lieutenant Sylvain Piétri coughed its way to a stop at the intersection; and the frail, tiny, academic-appearing officer stepped out and gave a small wave to De Vincent. The two men could not have been more different in appearance and manner. Piétri was wiry, energetic to the point of seeming frantic, and never appeared in public out of his gendarme uniform. He was deferential to De Vincent who technically outranked him even though they worked for different services. He had a dark complexion, close-set eyes, and aquiline nose that hinted at a Moorish genealogy. He spoke with a stammer that continually caused him embarrassment, which is why he seldom talked to anyone except Inspector De Vincent, and why he jealously guarded his out-of-the-public-scrutiny research job.

De Vincent was a ponderous man—obese, rotund, jolly—unable to find a suit that fit or shoes that could hold a shine—but underneath that untidy exterior, he was a quiet and slow-moving thinker. Piétri supplied the raw information, and De Vincent made sense of it. The inspector’s tie had stains from meals enjoyed months ago. He had a pudgy, ruddy face, the joviality of which belied the great intelligence behind it. Many a criminal and his or her attorney were shocked at what happened to them when they underestimated the slovenly and none-too-bright appearing Sûreté officer who surprised them by delivering a rapier-sharp synopsis of the case against the criminal in his clipped, cultured, and precise, Parisian Sorbonne accent.

“I hope you have more information about this case than I do, mon ami,” said De Vincent by way of greeting.

“Only a little—some research I picked up in a hurry at headquarters before I raced to meet you at the scene.”

De Vincent raised one eyebrow and looked askance at his longtime, and almost always, late friend. They both knew that the chronic tardiness stemmed from the inadequacy of Piétri’s decrepit but beloved little car. They shared a brief comradely laugh.

De Vincent led the way towards the presumed crime scene, if the teeming crowd of onlookers was any indicator.

“Tell me,” he said as they picked their way through the milling hordes of the curious, “what do we know at this point?”

Victim is … or once was, famous. Name is Étienne Malboeuf. Does that have a ring in your memory, Grégoire?”

The inspector thought a moment. “Army?”

“Retired. He was a Général de division who led French troops into the final battle in Berlin along with the Americans. He and his unit received the Croix de guerre with palm during the battle that put an end to Hitler and almost all of his defenders.”

“He got a great deal of fame and reward from De Gaulle, I recall.”

“True, but there were some Frenchmen who considered him to have been overly ruthless during that engagement.”

“Ah, yes,” De Vincent said, finally making the connection. “As I recall, he was fighting Hitler’s elite 33^rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS, not so?”

“Indeed … the all-French unit.”

“A strange bunch, and I can see how they or their families might hold a grudge. Good work, Sylvain. It will be worth looking into.”

The two men were now inside the perimeter being manned by the gendarmerie. The retired general’s body lay face down on the grass a few meters from where the Assumption Day speakers’ table was sitting. Several people—including several old men—were openly crying. A few waved small red, white, and blue French flags.

A uniformed Sûreté lieutenant intern greeted them and commenced to tell the two detectives what was known about the crime.

“I am sorry to report,” the one-striper said, “we have little to go on. The victim entered the park to take part in the Assumption Day festivities. There was a gathering crowd; so, no one noticed the murderer or murderers slip up behind him and fire three shots into our victim’s back, killing him instantly. I say three shots because that is the number of entrance wounds I can see without disturbing the body. Witnesses—if you can call them that—seem not to have seen nor heard the shooters or the shots.”

“So, this is the usual gathering of deaf and blind people, eh, Lieutenant?” De Vincent said with a tinge of anger in his voice.

“Yes, sir. That would appear to be the case. Or–more accurately–it is a gathering of Parisians—hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”

De Vincent and Piétri nodded their understanding with resignation. It was ever so when Parisian police talked to people crowded around a crime scene. Like New Yorkers, they did not want to get involved.

“Have you herded the closest witnesses into a guarded area, Lieutenant?”

“Of course, Monsieur Inspecteur,” the lieutenant said and clicked his heels.

He did not smile at his almost mock militaristic response, but the two more serious officers did.

“Of course you did … and merci. Anything else to contribute?”

“I did get to speak to a few older people who knew him. He was a bit stiff, but not really unfriendly. Kept to himself. He was … how should I say it ... something of a racist and not even courteous to women—a man of the old school, definitely the old school.”

“Any friends?”

“None that I could find.”

“Enemies?”

“No one would say; but I gather he was not popular; but probably no one around the neighborhood disliked him enough to put three bullets in his back.”

“Relatives?”

“A wife … lives at 47 Rue d’Assas. Neither I nor my staff have had a chance to meet with her yet.”

“Meaning you left the unpleasant task of informing the widow of what happened to her husband to me.”

“Not intentionally, Monsieur; but we have only been on the scene for about half an hour.”

He shrugged—a Parisian junior officer shrug.

De Vincent understood. It was why he was paid so much more than the junior lieutenant.

“All right then. Sylvain, please evaluate the scene and the body. Accompany the general to the morgue and learn everything you can about the man, the bullets, anything in his pockets. I suppose for completeness sake we should rule in or rule out a robbery. Lieutenant-intern, please do the preliminary fact-finding on all witnesses, and that includes anyone anywhere near this crime. No one gets to leave until you have your information; and Lieutenant Piétri and I have had a chance to determine who stays, who leaves, and who gets a ride to 1 rue de Lutèce. Understood?”

“Perfectly.”

The three men went their separate ways. The 6th arrondissement is ideal for walking. Inspector De Vincent liked the hint of the past as his feet worked their way over cobblestone streets. It was an active day, and business was thriving. In the years following World War II, philosophers, movie makers, artists, writers, and musicians met in the Saint Germain-des-Prés cafés, establishing the neighborhood as a center of intellectual thought. The 6^th was full of good local bakeries and patisseries, fruit and vegetable shops, butchers, cheese shops, and small supermarkets, all of which were full of customers. Nonetheless, it only took Inspector De Vincent ten minutes to walk to the front stoop of 47 Rue d’Assas.