Billionaire’s body found in marshland in the Camargue
The body of William Steinert, 57, has been found by a scientist in the nature reserve of La Capelière, in the Camargue. The man, a wealthy German industrialist, lived for most of the year in his farmhouse near Maussane. His love for the land of Mistral and Daudet …
De Palma folded La Provence in four and tossed it irritably onto the living room table.
The article about Steinert was brief and said nothing particularly precise; neither the gendarmes nor Marceau had given any information to the local news hound.
A photograph to the left of the article showed Steinert amid a jungle of milling machines and lathes. The caption read:
In the 1960s, William Steinert became one of the top German machine-tool magnates.
De Palma rubbed his chin and glanced at the photograph. His morning stubble was itchy and an unpleasant taste of coffee clung to his palate. He went into the bathroom and examined himself in the mirror. The wrinkles around his face seemed to have been dug deeper by a malicious designer who had pressed hard with his pen during the night.
He cleaned his teeth, gargled for a long time then spent a quarter of an hour in a scalding shower.
At 10 a.m., he got a call from Ingrid Steinert. She asked him to come and see her as soon as possible, but he dodged her invitation by claiming a doctor’s appointment. That would give him time to wait and see what the results of the autopsy turned up.
He put on some jeans and his last clean T-shirt, and telephoned Yvan Clergue, his contact among Marseille’s most powerful financiers.
“Michel, my old mate, how are you?”
“Not so good. I still get these damned pains in the head.”
As usual, his friend was in a hurry. He went straight to the point.
“How can I help you, Michel?”
“How about lunch? We could …”
“I’ll stop you right there. I’m off to Tokyo in an hour’s time.”
“I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Go ahead. I’m on my own, my secretary’s out.”
“Do you know a man called William Steinert?”
“He was in La Provence this morning. Of course I know him.”
“Joking apart, do you know anything about him?”
“A big wheel, a real captain of industry—‘they don’t make his sort any more.’ But as far as he was concerned, business was secondary. Just to pay the rent, as it were. What mattered to him was creativity. I’m just giving you an idea of his personality. He was rich, and when I say rich I mean immensely rich. A family fortune and so on and so forth. But he wasn’t at all into being a celebrity or being stuck in a rich man’s ghetto.”
De Palma rummaged for his notepad and pen.
“I met him once, maybe twice. I can’t remember exactly. He was a true enthusiast. Not the sort of person you often meet in our field. People said that he was capable of talking to you for hours on end about something quite different from what you came to see him for.”
“What was he doing here in Provence? Business?”
“Not at all! At least not to my knowledge. I think he had a farmhouse, but I’m not sure where.”
“Near Maussane.”
“Maybe. In industry, he was highly respected. He was primarily an engineer, the sort who was able to roll up his sleeves and literally go back to the drawing board …”
“What I don’t understand is why the two of you met.”
“I was waiting for that. Here I am, talking to you about the poetry of industry, and you stay the copper right to the end! O.K., to put it briefly, I was contacted by some financier colleagues to look into starting up a leisure park. That was two years ago. They wanted to open a sort of Provençal-style Disneyland. If I remember correctly, the people involved were the Tarascon town hall, the département, region, local villages and so on and so forth … But it never got further than the planning stage.”
“And so?”
“And so Steinert was involved … I don’t know why exactly, but he was involved. Anyway, when they organized a drinks party over a model for the park, he came along. But when it came to the subject in hand, he was rather cold, hostile even.”
“Hostile?”
“These are only hazy memories, but I think he was against the idea.”
“So why go to this party?”
“That’s just what I’m wondering about now …”
De Palma clamped the receiver between cheek and shoulder and poured himself some coffee.
“I see. And what happened then?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t really know. I heard that they then started prospecting around the Camargue. But I didn’t get involved because it was a real hornets’ nest.”
“Why do you say that?”
“As if you didn’t know. Imagine a huge leisure park in the middle of Provence, then imagine all the wolves coming out of the woods!”
“Yes, I see. Can you give me any names?”
Clergue was about to speak, then fell silent. De Palma could hear his secretary’s voice before his friend placed his hand over the receiver.
“No, I can’t help you any more there! Look at the local authorities I mentioned. Especially in Marseille. There aren’t that many politicians over there. They’re all from the same family, if you get my drift.”
“Loud and clear. Thanks, my friend. Next time, lunch is on me.”
“No problem, Michel. Ciao.”
Clergue had said “all from the same family,” which translated as “freemasons.” There was nothing unusual about local businessmen or politicians belonging to the masons. De Palma had even found a hammer, a Masonic artifact, on Steinert’s desk.
Oddly enough, what intrigued him the most about all this was Steinert’s attitude during the drinks party to launch the project. Clergue had said cold and hostile. But that did not square with the image he had of the German billionaire. He tried to piece together a scenario based on the few elements at his disposal, but nothing fitted.
At 11:30 a.m., he arrived at the front desk of the archives of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce. The director, an indolent forty-something, welcomed him by looking at his watch.
“Do you have a reference number or something?”
“No, but I do have this.”
The Baron produced his police identity card.
“That hardly solves the problem of the reference. But I’ll see what I can do.”
Michel watched him disappear behind the shelves. The air conditioning was cool and through the building’s large windows you could see La Bourse shopping mall and the remains of ancient Massalia.
The archivist returned with a spiral-bound folder of forty pages.
“Here you are. That’s all I can find for now. The rest of it is closed because it’s industrial property. I don’t even really have the right to give you this,” he added, waggling the folder.
“Listen, my friend, I can always come back with a warrant from the judge. But I wouldn’t want to bother him about such a trifling matter. All I want to do is check a couple of things.”
De Palma removed the brochure from the archivist’s grip.
The Big South
The first leisure park where culture is a pleasure
The title was printed over a series of photographs of white beaches, Camargue landscapes at sunrise, and historic sites, overprinted with the outline of the castle of Tarascon, a portrait of Taven the witch, and a depiction of the Tarasque that took up a good part of the image.
De Palma glanced through the first pages, which were mainly taken up with words of introduction from each of the politicians involved in the project: the presidents of the departmental and regional councils, the mayors of Maussane, Tarascon, Arles …
On the second page, the authors had written a note outlining their plan and their ambitions to found “an alternative” to Disneyland:
… The accent will be placed on ludic and cultural activities that will plunge the visitor interactively and transgenerationally into the heritage of Provence, and more generally into the cultures of the lands of the northern Mediterranean.
As regards Provence, we have selected certain strong cultural markers: a reconstruction of Le Guen’s cave (a prehistoric site beneath the sea), Greek remains, Roman antiquities, literature (Mistral, Daudet …), and, of course, various aspects of the particularly rich legendary heritage of Provence: the Golden Goat, Taven the Witch and the Tarasque seem to us to be especially interesting subjects for the creation of a theme park …
With this in mind, a study will be carried out so as to select the mascot for The Big South. So far, Taven the Witch and the Tarasque have been chosen as focal points for activities in the park.
The company in charge of the feasibility study was S.O.D.E.G.I.M. (Société d’étude et de gestion immobilière), whose C.E.O. was a Philippe Borland. De Palma jotted down his name and his company’s on his notepad. Then he flicked through the rest of the brochure, skipping the details of the financial set-up, since they were too complicated to be analyzed rapidly.
On page 21, he came across a more detailed description of the ludic and cultural activities: they had planned a legendary journey, rather like a ghost train, with a reconstruction of Taven the Witch’s den, a rather complicated merry-go-round consecrated to the Tarasque, and presented as the linchpin of the show; and a crisscrossing of roller-coasters with a “super splash” in a pool set in the middle of the park.
On his notepad, de Palma wrote in block capitals: TARASQUE. Then he looked for what interested him most: the planned site for the project. The idea was to set it up in a triangle between Maussane, Les Baux and Fontvieille. Just where Steinert owned land. A lot of land.
On the next page, there was a surveyor’s plan and map showing the various holdings. De Palma pointed at the photocopier behind the counter.
“Could you copy this page for me?”
“Sorry, sir, but that isn’t allowed.”
“Look, one more time, we won’t quarrel, you’ll just copy it for me and no one will be any the wiser. After that I’ll leave you in peace.”
The archivist glanced at his watch, then placed page 29 on the Xerox glass.
At 12 p.m., the Baron double-parked his Alfa Romeo in front of a kebab shop on avenue de la République. He ordered a doner and chips, with cream sauce, tomatoes, onions and lettuce. His mobile rang.
“Michel? It’s Marceau. The autopsy leaves no room for doubt: death by drowning.”
“He drowned!”
“Yeah. They’ve been at it since seven this morning, and it’s just what I expected.”
“Who performed it?”
“Mattei, as usual.”
De Palma trusted Mattei’s verdicts completely.
“I think the case will be closed any time now,” Marceau said, “and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s no evidence at all.”
“There are your footprints!”
“Are you joking? Are you expecting me to go down on my knees in front of the prosecutor and tell him that I’ve found some traces of boot-marks in the dry mud in the Camargue? Wake up, Michel!”
“Did you get molds made?”
“Yes, this morning. There’s a team of technicians on hand. So it will be the last time we have to drag our feet over to that stinking place!”
De Palma tried to concentrate. The case was going to be out of the police’s hands before long. He was torn between his desire to believe in the forensic scientist’s conclusions and his own instincts.
“I’m going back to the commissariat to see what’s going on. How about you, Michel?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go and see Ingrid Steinert, a courtesy call.”
“Did she call you this morning?”
“Yes.”
“So, see you later. I hope she won’t stir things up for us. She’ll have to accept that there’s nothing more that I can do.”
After the Fairy Pines, the air shimmered as if emerging from a wood stove; the trees were cracking under the blaze of the sun.
De Palma looked at the photocopy of the surveyor’s plan from the Chamber of Commerce. He climbed a hillock that overlooked the whole of the valley, then orientated the chart.
To the east lay La Balme farmhouse, its buildings rippling in the noon day sun. Then, standing out against the pure blue sky, the white lines of the chalk hills of the Alpilles contrasted with the brown, scrub-covered mounds and rust-red slopes that led to the legendary cliffs and viewpoints.
The Baron turned south, in the direction of the Camargue, and observed the plain. He selected a few landmarks from the map and noticed that, broadly speaking, the planned site for the park occupied what Mme. Steinert had called the “Downlands”: woods of little agricultural interest, close to the main roads and far enough away from La Balme farmhouse so as not to disturb the billionaire’s seclusion.
Why had Clergue mentioned Steinert’s hostility?
It was one of those places soaked in history, where people have been living since time began, fragile sites which have become retreats for billionaires and snobs of all descriptions, loaded with money and pride. The smallest plot of land could fetch a fortune. So de Palma supposed that an amusement park, which was bound to attract a lower-class clientele, would not have appealed to most of the people who had chosen to live in this luxurious ghetto.
Along the road between Aix and Tarascon, thousands of cypresses were swaying heavily in the thick air. De Palma thought he could hear the din of Marius’s Roman legions.
Then his mind went back to William Steinert, a man from the north and its winters of snow and grayness, a descendant of the very Teutons who Marius had cut to ribbons not far from the Via Domitia.
Steinert was the sort of billionaire that Michel would have liked to have known. He himself knew next to nothing about the Provence next door to his native Marseille, nothing except for a familiarity with its murder cases, the memory of a school trip to Saint Rémy Museum on the far side of the Alpilles, and the name of Marius, the savior of Rome who gave independence to Marsiho, here at the foot of these modest peaks.
The name of Marius had long dwelled in the Baron’s imagination; he could still clearly remember his primary school teacher showing him the image of the soldier’s trophies, engraved in the stone of Saint Rémy.
The promoters of the future park must have thought of making Marius into one of the heroes of their tourist amusements. And they had already chosen the Tarasque of Tarascon as the mascot of “The Big South.” As he got back into his Giulietta, it seemed to de Palma that this was not such a bad business idea. He could imagine shelves full of cuddly Tarasques in the stores as souvenirs … the Tarasque and the Tarasquettes … two thousand years of oral tradition transformed into bar codes. He also sensed that this monster of the marshes had not cropped up in this investigation by chance. Everyone was interested in it, and this was starting to worry him.
Mme. Steinert was alone on the patio. He felt he was looking again at Isabelle Mercier, as she had been in the Super 8 films that her father had loaned to the police.
She did not stand up when he closed his car door and gave her a clumsy wave.
“At least you’ll believe me now,” she called out, in a tinny voice.
“I’m really sorry.”
She lowered her head, her face disappearing behind the golden veil of her hair.
“The hardest thing of all was seeing him, recognizing him even when he was—what is the word? Verstümmelt! Completely disfigured… It was … Unerträglich, unbearable.”
She jerked her head back to toss her hair over her shoulders and spoke without emotion, as though she were reciting a text, focusing as she did so on a piece of Provençal cloth that presumably came from one of her new collections.
“I’ve been trying to wipe that image since this morning …”
“If you’d like me to leave,” de Palma murmured, “I can always come back tomorrow, or another day …”
“Stay, take a seat. I’ve sent everyone home today. Even the three ‘thugs’ as you call them, who take care of my safety. I didn’t want to see anyone. Except for you. How odd.”
She gazed at the Baron. Her eyes, usually azure, had turned turquoise, making them look hugely empty. He coughed so as to avoid having to say anything.
“Have you heard the results of the autopsy?” she said, without taking her eyes off him.
“Yes, and I think they can be trusted. The forensic surgeon is the best I know. No doubt about it.”
“And you? What do you think?”
De Palma sat down in front of her.
“I think there’s no reason to look any further. It was just an accident. A stupid one, as all accidents are. If he had been murdered, the pathologists would have found something.”
She kept on gazing at him, but her expression had changed. It had become familiar, even teasing.
“You don’t believe a word you’ve just said, but I’m not blaming you. Not at all. It’s simply some problems between different police authorities, and hierarchies, something like that, that are worrying you or holding you back. But you know full well that my husband didn’t drown in fifty centimeters of water, or was it eighty …”
“You know, sometimes …”
“My husband was the best swimmer in his year at the engineering school in Munich. He was one meter ninety tall.”
De Palma lowered his gaze and allowed a silence to settle between them.
The facts were there and he could not deny them. No one could deny them.
The sky gleamed like blue silk. It suddenly seemed to him that the stink of the swamp was sticking to his skin like a wet shirt, along with a smell of fish sauce and rotting seaweed.
He looked back up toward her.
The wind had blown a lock of her hair over the corner of her mouth, just where he had noticed two beauty spots. She looked dreamy, as though asking herself questions before providing the answers.
“You know, we’d been out of love for ages …” she said, drawing out her words. “Not long after our wedding, he started to become strange. He read peculiar books, and had passions not readily shared with a young woman. He was much older than me. Our marriage was a mistake that I made, but I still had enormous affection for him. And respect, too. Immense respect … it’s more a friend I’ve lost than a husband.”
She pointed toward the property then glanced around, as though trying to take it all in in a single sweep.
“It’s for him that I’m going to stay here, and that I won’t touch anything for now. His soul is still here. At night, I can sense him roving around the buildings and up there on the hills. He loved the hills so much. Have you read Wuthering Heights?”
“Heathcliff and Cathy …”
“It was his favorite novel. He could talk about it for hours … hours on end.”
De Palma felt as if he had just been bled dry. At that moment, he no longer knew who he was exactly, or what he was supposed to be doing there. Some dark force held him close to this woman.
She stood up and went into the kitchen, then returned with two bottles of apple juice and a jug of cold water on an olive-wood tray.
“I’m being a terrible hostess. You must be thirsty?”
“A little, I must admit.”
“Have you eaten?”
“No, but I don’t want to abuse your hospitality.”
“You’re a strange man, M. de Palma. It’s as if you’re afraid of me, or else you mistrust me. I’m a woman like any other woman. All I’m doing is fighting to know the truth about my husband’s death. And it will be known, believe me.”
“Indeed,” said de Palma, feeling vexed.
“Don’t get angry.”
He swallowed his glass of apple juice and poured himself another at once. Ingrid watched him, missing none of his gestures, which duly increased his irritation.
“I must explain something very important to you if you want to understand my husband.”
She breathed deeply, her chest swelling as if she wanted to draw out of herself something that had been weighing on her for far too many years.
“You must understand that my husband’s father was here, during the German occupation.”
She stared at the swaying lines of olive trees, as though memories that were not her own had come to haunt her.
“And when I say he was here,” she went on, tapping the table with the nail of her index finger, “I mean here, in this farmhouse.”
She fell silent for a moment. A warm breeze, scented with pine and scrub, blew down from the Alpilles and subsided beneath the huge plane trees.
“It was my father-in-law who dug up the sarcophagus you saw over there. And many other things, too. I suppose that you must now be beginning to understand the particular associations that connected my husband with this place. I want you to understand that he was not like the other rich residents who live around here!”
The questions clamored at de Palma. What role had William Steinert’s father played during the war? If he was in the Nazi party … Why had he, a great industrialist, buried himself in this hole?
She guessed what he was thinking, and did not wait to be asked.
“At the start, the industrialist wasn’t him. It was his elder brother, who died during the Dresden bombing in 1945. As there were only two children, my father-in-law took over the business. But he was no manager. He had trained to be an archaeologist and got his doctorate in 1939. In the spring of that year, just before war broke out.”
“But … how did he end up here?”
“The Nazis sent him to this region because during the two years before war broke out, he’d spent his winters here, studying old stones.”
“So it was him who carried out the dig in the ‘Downlands.’ Then, in 1939, he was obviously forced to leave France. But soon afterward the Nazis sent him back. It must have been good propaganda for them. And let me tell you that he was clearly very well received by the people in the village since he came back on a number of occasions after the war. One of the few Boches not to be seen as the devil incarnate.”
“When did he die?”
“In 1980. He was seventy-six. He’s buried in a discreet grave in the cemetery of Eygalières.”
She sat up in her chair and poured herself a glass of water. Her expression seemed less stern. De Palma noticed that the vengeful expression he had observed on arriving at the farmhouse had vanished. The color of her eyes had changed again.
“Of course, I’d rather you didn’t mention all this to anyone. It’s unter dem Siegel des Verschwiegenheit, a well-kept secret in these parts, and no one mentions Karl Steinert. When my husband bought the lot in the graveyard, he had his father’s remains transferred there with the greatest discretion. He had the necessary money. So I’m counting on your discretion too.”
She placed her hand delicately on de Palma’s forearm; instinctively, he laid his hand on hers.
*
For the past three days, Rey hadn’t drunk a drop of water or had anything to eat.
For three days, he had been in a black hole, left there by the man he had taken at first for a policeman. The only thing Rey had managed to keep was a vague notion of time. In his prison, he could feel the variations of temperature when the sun rose or set.
That was all he knew about the outside world.
Despite the darkness, his eyes were burning in their sockets. His tongue was thick and hard with thirst, and his hands were shaking.
The day before, when he had had his first visions, he had thought he had come down with a fever. Then the visions had gone, the same way they had come. It must have been his thirst playing tricks.
First, he had seen his mother, with her nasty little eyes, saying to him in her sour voice: “Your father won’t come back, your father won’t come back … son of a bitch.”
Then he had walked down a long corridor leading to a round room. In the center was an armchair with its back to him. He knew this room well. A hand as dry as dead wood emerged from the chair and beckoned him to come over. He approached slowly, with fear in his guts, his mouth twisted in disgust, before walking around it. Father Morand was sitting there, his weak neck propped up on a mauve cushion and twisted like a loin of veal. The man of God stared at him with his wicked eyes: “Come and kiss me, my son. Only you can kiss like that … Nearer, yes, like that …”
He had woken up and chased away this image of his boarding school with a blast of insults bellowed into the night. He had howled like an animal for some time, then his howling had dwindled into a groan, from which two syllables occasionally emerged: “Pa … Pa.”
Then sleep had overtaken him by surprise, suddenly, as if an invisible hand in the shadows had injected him with morphine.
The final image that he had retained of the outside world was of a hut with a thatched roof, in the middle of a marsh. He was incapable of saying where it was.
The man had taken off the blindfold near some rushes, then made him walk on, with a .45 dug in his back. They had crossed the reed bed along an unseen path before emerging onto a dry marsh, with stars of salt spangling its mud. On the far side, he had made out a hut, half concealed by some poplars and ash trees.
And then, there had been a heavy blow on his head. Everything had wavered and turned white, just like when he used to shoot up.
After that, he had found himself in darkness and had felt round the cellar where he was being kept prisoner, like a mole sniffing out the nooks and crannies of its little underground world. He had also yelled out.
How long now? He was no longer sure. But he could remember yelling during the first two days. No one had come. He had heard nothing, and it was this utter silence that was now driving him crazy. He could cope with the darkness, but this almost total absence of sound was unsettling him and affecting him physically.
The temperature was rising. Soon his body was going to be covered with a layer of salt water, that seeped out inexorably from every pore of his exhausted skin, and his thirst would grow even more unbearable. He wondered how many days he had left to live: two, or maybe three.
Maybe less.
From what he had read about survival, Rey knew that you couldn’t last long without water. He knew that madness would take hold of him and not let go until his body had dried up like a corpse in the sun.
He had counted the days. Tomorrow it would be Tuesday, July 29. The festival of Saint Martha.
He almost smiled. It brought back old memories. The snapshots of his childhood and the pleasures of his life as a man before it had all fallen apart and he had ended up underground.
He scratched his face several times as if to punish himself for all his errors.
The mayor of Eygalières was still on duty when de Palma requested an appointment with him from his secretary, a chubby brunette with false nails that turned the tips of her fingers into claws.
“And you are Monsieur …?”
“O.K., I think he’ll see you when he’s through. He shouldn’t be long.”
The Baron walked over to a revolving display decked with brochures about the town and browsed through some of them.
“Has M. Simian been mayor for long?”
The secretary looked up from her register and gave him a challenging look.
“This is his fifth term of office, and I think he’ll be standing again.”
“So he’s popular here!”
“Very,” she said nodding her head and whistling. “He gets re-elected every time, with a landslide.”
“Is he right or left wing?”
The secretary swayed her hand.
“In the center, more like. But officially the right, the U.M.P.”
The office door opened. The mayor was a small man, balding, with bifocal glasses perched on the tip of his nose. He held out his hand to de Palma and looked him straight in the eye.
“My secretary tells me that you’re a journalist?”
“Yes, I’m freelance. At the moment I’m working with Villages magazine, we’re doing a report about the mayors of small towns in Provence which have become the country retreats of the rich.”
“Then you’ve come to the right place! But I must point out that the rich people you’re talking about are extremely discreet, and rely on me to maintain that discretion.”
“Don’t worry, that’s not what it’s about.”
Simian walked round his desk, sat down in his chair and opened his arms to invite de Palma to take a seat too.
“So? I’m listening.”
“We’re trying to see how it works out for the local people, those who want to stay here and can’t afford a single patch of land any more. How do they cope?”
“For me that’s a constant problem. I am a farmer’s son myself, and my father used to be mayor of Eygalières … what I mean is that we’ve seen how things have changed. I must admit that there’s not much the town hall can do. Land is bought and sold at the prices agreed on by the various parties. It’s the law of the market.”
“But you could issue some decrees about how the land is to be used, or something like that?”
“Yes, but that wouldn’t change the property prices.”
The mayor discoursed on various aspects of the problem. De Palma simply took notes while waiting to get to the heart of the matter. The man in front of him was clearly a wild old bird, an expert at sounding sincere.
“Have you heard anything about plans for a leisure park in the region?”
“Not a thing. Who told you about that?”
“Someone who said they worked for S.O.D.E.G.I.M., I can’t remember their name.”
“Never heard of it. You must be misinformed.”
The Baron searched through his notebook.
“Here it is: Philippe Borland … he’s the chairman of S.O.D.E.G.I.M.”
The mayor twisted his mouth to express his ignorance. Then he stood up and walked over to the map of the district on the wall.
“We have zones that can or cannot be built on, for various reasons, as you know. I try to keep a harmony between the residential areas and the more traditional rural environment. And I must tell you that it’s a peculiarly difficult balancing act.”
He pointed at various plots of land and circled his finger around them.
“The people who live here have considerable means …”
“By the way, one of your residents has just passed on! Did you see the papers?”
“William Steinert? Yes, I read about him. It’s sad.”
“Did you know him?”
The mayor’s attitude changed. Clearly the question upset him.
“We had very little to do with him. He was very discreet. Like all the big landowners we have here.”
Anne Moracchini had discovered in police records that William Steinert had been questioned about the illegal funding of the local right-wing party, though the case had subsequently been dropped. But it did mean that Steinert must have known the mayor of Eygalières, as well as the other politicians in the area.
“A colleague told me that he owned half the district.”
“Half would be an exaggeration. Let’s just say that he owned a lot of land.”
“Indeed,” de Palma said, looking at the map. He placed his index finger on the Downlands. “And what’s this zone here?”
The mayor took off his glasses and nibbled one of the side-pieces.
“It’s called the Downlands. It’s woodland. We need a bit of greenery.”
“An old boy in the village told me that there are Greek or Roman remains there. Is that true?”
“No, it’s not! That’s just an old story, nothing more.”
“And can this land be built on?”
“I … I’d have to check the zoning regulations. There might be some available plots there. I can’t remember. You know, our district is quite large!”
Simian put his glasses back on and looked at his watch.
“There is a small problem, Monsieur Simian … you tell me that you’ve never heard of S.O.D.E.G.I.M., but I know that you were contacted by this development company, just over a year ago …”
The mayor went back to his desk and tapped his nose several times.
“Indeed. I did hear about that project. But, as you surely must realize, the town hall of Eygalières cannot take part in a … an amusement park. You should go and see the people in Maussane. The land is there, in fact.”
“But it would be a good thing for the district, wouldn’t it?”
The mayor looked once more at his watch and stood up, his hands pressed on his desk.
“I’m sorry, M. de Palma, but I have a meeting with the intermunicipal steering committee. I shall have to leave you.”
The dark waters of the Rhône merged with the night. From Beaucaire bridge, beyond King René’s Castle, the restless tips of the trees sketched out a shadowy silhouette.
De Palma left his Giulietta in the castle car park. Before going out into the darkness, he waited for a municipal police patrol to disappear behind the church of Saint Martha. He walked for some time through the streets of Tarascon, drinking in the atmosphere of the old town center with its inevitable pots of flowers at each corner and its paving stones polished by the tourists’ heels.
When he was just a few meters away from the theater, he stopped and listened to the sounds of the evening. Most of the inhabitants were at home in front of the evening’s film or talk show.
A few tourists were still wandering around. Two of them, apparently Dutch, were standing in front of the baroque façade of the theater. A salvo of flashes lit the darkness.
He waited for a while, pretending to read the theater’s program: they were performing Mireille with some star unknown to him.
As soon as the tourists had vanished into the humid night, he walked toward the door of Steinert’s building. He gave a last glance around, then climbed up the drainpipe that ran down from a neighboring house.
Trying to make as little noise as possible, he arrived on a terrace roof made of old tiles and crouched down for a moment to get his breath back. His temples were pounding and he wiped his forehead with a nervous gesture. He was thirsty; like a carpet slipper in your mouth, as Maistre put it.
Slowly, he stood up. No one could have seen him.
He crept forward like a cat, being careful not to disturb the terracotta tiles. After a few meters, he arrived below the window of Steinert’s office. The hardest part was still to come. He had to hand himself upward, open the window, get a foothold and find his way inside.
For the first time in his life, he paid homage to the skills of the Groupe d’Intervention of the national police force. He decided to proceed a stage at a time.
He leaped up, gripped on with one hand and opened the shutters with the other. Then he slumped back onto the roof, exhausted by his efforts.
Now for the window. During his visit with Mme. Steinert, he had wedged it open with a piece of paper folded in four, so there should be no problems.
He waited to get his breath back, braced himself again, slid one elbow over the sill, then the second, and pushed the doors open with a sudden jerk of his head, making them bang against the inner walls of the office. The noise alerted a neighborhood dog, which started howling into the night.
With a single leap, de Palma vanished into Steinert’s office and then closed the shutters and window behind him.
Once inside, he flopped into the armchair and gathered his wits. His shirt was soaked with sweat and stuck to his back. He had scratched his forearm against the roughcast on the wall and cut one of his fingers while climbing up the drainpipe. It was nothing to be proud of.
Gently, he slipped on his surgeon’s gloves, took out his Maglite and, without moving from the chair, played the beam methodically around the room, meter by meter.
Nothing had been touched, or at least nothing that he had mentally photographed during his first visit. There was still that dominant fragrance of fine tobacco, tinged with honey; presumably a special pipe blend.
De Palma got out his notebook and jotted down this detail, then went into the library to examine each shelf thoroughly.
Among the dozens of books about the occult sciences, his attention was drawn to some files that were yellow with age, bound in thick cardboard and tied up with blue ribbons. He took down three of them and laid them on the central table.
He opened the first folder. One by one, he turned over the pages, which were covered by a very fine, very regular handwriting with occasional sketches of vases appended with captions.
Some of the captions were in French: Massaliots, Mouriès, canopic jar, aquamanila … and after each one there was a date: 525, 480 …
The second file also dealt with vases from Mouriès, while the third was about bronzes and contained a large number of drawings.
He went back into the office and checked all of the surfaces that might hold fingerprints. Nothing. Which meant that someone had wiped everything off after their visit.
“Not very smart,” he thought to himself. It was better to wear gloves rather than clean everything up. This was an amateur job … They should have realized that a place like this should at least contain its owner’s dabs.
He returned to the library and checked the other surfaces. Nothing. The only conclusion he could draw from all this was that someone skilled enough to open a reinforced door had then wiped the whole place behind him. Why?
“Unless the person in question had the keys,” he thought. “That would be quite a different story …”
Going back into the office, he sat down in Steinert’s chair and leaned back. A migraine was on its way, no doubt triggered by the exertions he had just made. He massaged his temples for some time and at last took in the scale of what he had done.
But, in fact, it was not the first time that he had broken into someone’s place, and presumably not the last. He closed his eyes as though to evade his guilty conscience.
When he opened them again, he at once saw three objects on Steinert’s desk: a white feather, the ebony and ivory hammer and a large pen of the Omas brand. This rarity lay beside a pile of notes, photographs of sculptures and reproductions of ancient engravings. He picked up the pen and turned it round under his eyes. Not a single fingerprint on this either.
“Things are looking more professional,” he mumbled. To make sure, he dismantled the bakelite handle of a drawer with his Swiss army knife and checked inside. Nothing. The cleaner had clearly not missed a thing.
“Someone came here, certainly several times … then came back to remove all the fingerprints and any clues he might have left behind. Someone who doesn’t want to be traced …”
De Palma picked up the hammer and tapped it several times on his palm. “But it’s not necessarily Steinert’s murderer.” He put it back and began to examine the papers, which had to be Steinert’s. They were written in perfect French:
The oldest and most horrible representation of terror is a man-eating monster, called the Tarasque by the Provençals.
There are countless depictions of the Tarasque in paintings, sculptures and drawings: the most impressive example is without doubt the 140-centimeter sculpture in the Musée Lapidaire in Avignon.
It is an expression of what the Salluvii, or more precisely the Cavari, found most terrifying.
The Tarasque is depicted holding two severed bearded heads in its lion’s claws, while devouring a human torso in its mouth. It would seem that the Greeks, who were widely present in the region of Tarascon, were inspired to make such a representation of horror by various barbarian customs: head hunting etc. For these Greeks, it would also seem that the civilized world stopped at the summit of the Alpilles …
The British scholar Moore saw in it the murderous aspect of the gods and compared the Tarasque to other man-eating monsters that can be found in Ireland and throughout Northern Europe (cf. Crom, the idol struck down by Saint Patrick).
According to art historians, this tradition seems to have been initially Italian, essentially Etruscan, and then Greek. It can thus be supposed that the monster followed the routes of colonization. In my opinion, the myth’s origin lies in the sedentarisation of mankind during the Neolithic period.
Previously, the natural world that surrounded hunter-gatherers was magical (cf. the depictions in painted caves). With the emergence of notions of ownership, the Neolithic farmers began to experience fears of the future: worries about drought, or extreme weather … They answered the questions that tormented them by inventing gods and monsters … These forces of chaos could be tamed only by being depicted, and no doubt by being offered human sacrifices to satisfy their appetite …
The text ran on for another three pages. He set it down and glanced at the photographs. There was an old picture of a flagon with the caption: “Bronze from Durenberg, Austria, with monster devouring a human head.” There were also amateur shots of the papier-mâché Tarasque that the inhabitants of Tarascon paraded in the streets during the town’s festivities, and a picture of a stone monster eating a man, reproductions of other sculptures on the same theme … after that he found ten sheets of paper, the first of which was headed in the right-hand corner by a title written in black felt-pen:
Heracles, the civilizing hero of Provence.
Then some notes:
His life was a series of senseless murders … [There followed a list of massacres carried out by Heracles]. In the Crau, he stoned to death the monster Albion (personification of the Albigues of Upper Provence) and Lusis (eponym of the Ligures). BUT [word underlined in red] a civilizing aspect:
—he forbade human sacrifice
—by killing the thousand-armed Lysis, he overcame the dangers of the Rhône, thus making it navigable
—he taught weaving
—he taught house building
—he taught how to organize a city
—etc. …
Cf. the release of the cosmic cattle [two words underlined in red]. The guardian corresponds to the forces of chaos, the cattle to life … By freeing the red, divine kine from Geryon’s control, Heracles effects a change in his nature: he abandons brute force and becomes a civilizing hero … WORLD HARMONY.
And, at the foot of the page:
See the digs in Maussane and Mouriès. Especially, Art strt/37-10B and Art strt/38-11A.
Finally, written in large letters he read:
DOWNLANDS.
De Palma lingered for a while over that last sentence. It presumably indicated two library reference numbers—the last thing Steinert had noted before his death. He noted them carefully, and beside them wrote the names of the Tarasque and Heracles and underlined them twice.
It was two in the morning. He decided to search William Steinert’s den with a fine-tooth comb, like a forensic scientist. This took him longer than he expected, but he was careful to miss nothing.
At three thirty, he leaned out of the window, checked that no one could see him and let himself slide down the wall until his elbows were resting on the sill.
Just as he was about to brace himself to close the first shutter, he heard a faint metallic click that he recognized immediately. It was the safety catch being taken off an automatic, somewhere in the darkness.
In an instant, he turned round and saw a figure on the opposite pavement taking aim at him. He only just had time to drop down onto the roof before he heard the “plop” of a silencer. Intense pain held him pinned to the tiles. Instinctively, he curled up in the darkness to get out of the sniper’s sight.
His entire body was shaking, each of his muscles twitching uncontrollably. This was not the first time that he had been fired at, but it still took some time to collect himself.
Then he analyzed the situation.
Someone had just shot him.
Using an automatic with a silencer.
The bullet had hit his right shoulder, that was all.
The person knew where he was.
The person must have followed him from La Balme farmhouse, or even before.
Perhaps he’d had orders to follow him.
He touched his wound and found that the bullet had just left a shallow graze. He took out a paper handkerchief and pressed it onto the gash. He closed his eyes as his fingers made contact with the sticky blood.
This was the second time in less than a year that someone had tried to kill him.
“It’s amateur work …” he said to himself. “The guy’s a bastard, but not a professional one. Otherwise he would have waited for me to come down the drainpipe and taken me out without any problem.”
He let fifteen minutes go by and listened to the night. All he could hear was a T.V. set somewhere up above him and some more distant music.
A car drove by. He went over to the edge of the roof and looked down into the street, his face pressed against the tiles. It was empty.
Suddenly, loud voices and laughter echoed off the walls; apparently a group of young people were leaving a party in the building across the street. De Palma made the most of the situation and threw himself down onto the pavement, his Bodyguard pressed against his chest.
When he hit the ground, he rolled over to take cover behind a delivery van, just as he had learned during his commando training course in the army. Then he stood up, pretended to be getting out of the van and stayed as close as possible to the group …
An hour later, he parked on a lay-by on the R.N. 568 in the middle of the vast plain of La Crau. His hands gripping the wheel, he stared into space. Far, very far in the distance glowed the flames of Fossur-Mer.