William Steinert was buried early the next morning.
Ingrid had made it known that her husband had always wanted his funeral to be as private as possible: family members, a few people who had frequented the farmhouse, and no one else.
A very simple farewell ceremony was conducted among the olive trees, with Steinert’s body facing the Alpilles. Madame Steinert did not weep, and looked very dignified in a black silk dress with her hair tied back.
She read out a beautiful text which she had written for her husband the day before: a few simple words, which summed up their shared life, the year that they had loved each other, and then their rather solitary existence in Provence which he had made his second fatherland.
“Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden,
Einen bessern findst du nit,
Er ging an meiner Seite
In gleichem Schritt und Tritt.”*
No one noticed the tiny black figure, sitting on a bump of windswept rock. It was Bérard, the solitary shepherd in the middle of the hills and burned trees.
The old man, his head bare, had not taken out his flock that morning and was murmuring some verses by a distant relation, the Master of Maillane:
“O belli Santo, segnouresso
De la planura d’amresso,
Clafissès, quand vous plais, de pèis nòsti fielat;
Mai à la foulo pecadouiro
Qu’à vostro porto se doulouiro,
O blànqui flour de la sansouiro,
S’es de pas que ié fau, de pas emplissès-la.”*
Steinert’s body was then taken to the cemetery of Eygalières, where the industrialist would now sleep beside his father.
As the cortege passed in front of the chapel of Sainte-Sixte, at the entrance to the village, it halted for a minute. This was Mme. Steinert’s decision. She remembered that the first thing her husband had spoken to her about, when they had first met in Munich, was this simple chapel which had since become a symbol of Provence for tourists.
He had said: “Sometimes, I feel as if I had been born there. I don’t know why, but I really feel at home … I belong to that land.”
The procession then set off down the avenue lined with Florentine cypresses which led to the graveyard.
De Palma hung back, beside a plane tree a good ten meters from the Steinert burial vault. He watched as the little crowd gathered and he mentally photographed as many faces as possible. He looked for resemblances to the figure who had fired at him, and noticed that about a dozen people had similar builds.
There were a few village elders, who never missed a burial while awaiting their own. They stayed for a few moments, then vanished behind the tombstones.
The mayor of Eygalières also attended. He shook a few hands, then offered his condolences to the widow. They exchanged a few words and, from his expression, de Palma deduced that he knew her well. So Simian had lied to him.
Behind her stood two men, as stiff as church candles, whom de Palma had noticed at the farmhouse. One was about forty, and the other twenty-something; they were both Provençal, at first glance country people who were ill at ease in their black suits. The two of them looked as though they were on guard duty behind their mistress. They seemed so alike that de Palma would have sworn that they were father and son. The elder of them stared hard at the policeman, as you do at an intruder, or someone whose face and appearance you want to remember.
The close family, from Germany, stood in front of her. From the photographs he had seen, the detective recognized Karl, the younger brother, and his wife. To his right, stood the second brother, plus a few friends or cousins. He looked at them intently. Their grief was sincere, and he eliminated the family hypothesis completely. Nobody here could help him in any part of his investigation.
A prayer in German rose up, like a murmur from between the graves. He had the impression that the stones around him were shivering.
The prayer came to an end. The family and close friends formed a line to say a last farewell to William Steinert. De Palma waited for the widow to be alone before offering his condolences.
“That’s curious,” she said in a thin voice. “You look sad as well.”
He did not answer and gazed into the blue of her eyes, washed pale with grief.
“Death always affects me. And today more than ever.”
He waited for her reaction, and that of the two men behind her, but she seemed not to have heard.
“Come to the house. The custom is to get together and eat something in memory of the dead.”
“I can’t. I have to go back to Marseille this morning.”
De Palma went over to the grave and stared at Steinert’s coffin. He picked up a handful of earth and threw it down. As it fell on the pale oak, it set off a hollow echo.
He had just glimpsed the truth behind this murder, which he had so far refused to see.
*
At 3:50 p.m., the Baron’s telephone flashed up a number withheld.
“Good day, my man. Can we meet?”
He recognized Paul Brissonne’s voice.
“Whenever you want.”
Brissonne sounded slightly strained, as though out of breath.
“As usual, then?”
“O.K., five o’clock.”
De Palma thought for a moment about the boys from Aix. For some time now, they had been involved in all the deals from Nice to Marseille, including all of the small towns in between.
The man who ruled this empire was obese, a huge tub of lard: Marc Morini, a.k.a. Le Grand. He was a vicious thug de Palma had watched climbing since the end of the 1980s.
Le Grand had done time, just four years for pimping, and had escaped by the skin of his teeth from the killers of the Marseille clan as he emerged one night from The Funk House, a nightclub in Aix.
That was in 1995. The Brigade Criminelle had counted 69 bullet holes in the crime boss’s car, mainly double zeroes, 9 mm rounds and the inevitable 11.43s.
Le Grand had had the presence of mind to lie flat in his Merco Coupé and drive blind before piling into the car of a tipsy student girl. In fact, he owed his life to his lieutenant, who had opened fire to cause a diversion before taking a burst from an Uzi in the chest.
When Laurent Le Gulvinec, the brigade’s commander, had caught up with Le Grand in the pine forest, panting and with blood pouring from his forearm, the sun was rising over the steaming countryside.
The gang boss had stared at the cop like a child scared by the dark. He had pissed himself. This was a story that did the rounds of the dark corridors of the Brigade Criminelle for some time: “Le Grand had pissed his pants.” But the story had gradually faded from memory as the pisser had risen in the ranks of the underworld. Nowadays, in criminal circles, not even the police dared to speak of it.
So there was nothing surprising about Marc Morini taking an interest in plans for an amusement park. He had put money into the new opportunities in Marseille: theme bars, rum dives, karaoke joints blazing with neon, techno clubs … So he was not about to go back to bourgeois jazz haunts in the center of Aix. So it was natural that he wanted to expand a little, and the Provence of Mistral must have seemed to him to be the best investment in the world. Especially because Morini was a local boy, born in Tarascon and jailed for the first time in Arles.
De Palma took the sun-bleached R.N. 568. The road was littered with vegetable crates and melon packaging, left there by greengrocers’ vans and blown by the wind.
On the horizon, the tarmac shimmered in the light laden with benzene and carbon monoxide. The huge storage tanks of the oil terminal were barely visible.
Paul Brissonne was sitting on a cube of limestone facing the wall of Crinas, in the only scrap of shade in old Marseille: the Centre Bourse, at the feet of the huge commercial exchange designed by some Vauban of the age of money. It vaguely resembled an enormous concrete hand with some fingers missing, laid on the four remaining walls of the Greek Phocea, Lacydon’s old port. Now, the harbor lay between lawns browned by the sun and dog piss, not to mention turds and litter.
Beside Brissonne, an old Algerian was reading the latest edition of Al Watan, a sandal dangling off the tip of his foot.
The gangster was starting to feel that he wouldn’t mind taking advantage of the air-conditioning in the Centre Bourse, if he had not been armed to the teeth.
The Baron’s hand slapped his shoulder.
“Good day, Paulo. So you’re contemplating the marvels of Greek Massalia?”
“This was a wasteland when I was a kid. But now, Jesus, it stinks of dog’s piss …”
“Who knows, maybe it stank like that in Greek cities!”
“Let’s go for a stroll.”
They took a few steps across the huge paving stones of the Phocean roadway then came to a halt beside the harbor.
“Le Grand doesn’t take kindly to you sticking your nose into Mme. Steinert’s business, but he says that it wasn’t him who sent round the boy with the silencer. It’s not one of his guys. That’s for sure.”
“Can you arrange a meeting between me and ‘Piss-pants’?”
“Who?”
“Piss-pants. That’s what we used to call him at headquarters. Because, one fine morning, a friend of ours from the brigade found him in some woods near Aix with his pants wet.”
Brissonne glanced round him.
“Don’t fuck with him, Baron, because he could really take you for a ride, one of these days. Cop or not, Le Grand couldn’t give a toss.”
“All I want is a meeting.”
“Every day, he goes to the Café des Deux Mondes, on place de l’Hôtel de Ville …”
“Thanks, Paulo.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You’re the big man, Paulo, not him.”
When Brissonne looked up, de Palma had already vanished behind the Crinas wall.